A sports injury can sometimes not only limit your ability to do the things you love but also interfere with your daily life as well. Surgery is sometimes the necessary remedy for restoring an orthopedic injury, but sometimes physical therapy can be the answer by itself. Regardless, if you've been advised by your physician to complete treatment in physical therapy, here's how doing so will help you gain mobility and improve the prognosis of your sports injury.

The Basics

With or without surgery, physical therapy is a primary avenue to take to restore usage of a muscle or system and aid in the reduction in pain through exercising, stretching, and manual therapy. With an initial evaluation, your physical therapist considers your doctor's prescription, takes measurements, and uses previous diagnostics to decide what treatment options are best for your level of mobility, strength, and pain.

Low-weight, high-repetition movements and stretches will be given to you to perform both at the therapy clinic and at home. And manual techniques like massage therapy may be applied at the site of injury in order to break up scar tissue, reduce pain, and improve blood flow. The repetitive and low-resistance physical movements help you restore your strength and mobility and improve oxygenation to your muscles, and this aids in cellular regeneration, all while activating muscles in a way that doesn't jeopardize your injury further. Your therapist may also employ hydrotherapy, ultrasound, electrical stimulation, or infrared technologies on your injury as well.

A Concerted and Holistic Approach to a Better You

The aim of these basic techniques seeks to exploit the innate strengths of your body at healing itself, all while minimizing or eliminating altogether the detrimental effects of inflammation and cellular scar-tissue adhesions. With the right training and attention, a sports injury in therapy could not only be restored to normal function but could potentially gain flexibility and strength.

In general, the approach in physical therapy uses these different natural modalities, both alone and in concert, to help introduce flexibility, blood flow, and cellular regeneration to the site of injury. But neighboring muscles and skeletal systems can be affected by a more localized injury, and if therapeutic attention isn't given, you may start to get injured in these other areas as well. So a therapist recognizes, through your progress and measurements taken during sessions, when to target groups of muscles that could be compromised both now and later from a more specific injury.

Make an appointment with an office such as Advanced Physical Therapy to start physical therapy and healing.