If you have ever played sports or you train/ exercise frequently, it’s highly likely you have had some sort of soft tissue injury (muscles, ligaments, tendons). From my own personal experience, this is usually followed up with the thought “I’ll just rest for a week or two and it will be fine”.
You go back to playing sports or exercising and all seems well. The soft tissue pain has subsided and you’re feeling pretty good. Then it reoccurs out of nowhere, followed up with the thought process “Ok, I need to fix this now so I can exercise/ play sport”.
You find a practitioner to help you fix this pain. You get treatment on the area and you’re given some exercises to strengthen the area.
Take two. You go back to playing sports or exercising and all seems well. The soft tissue pain has subsided and you’re feeling pretty good. Then it recurs AGAIN out of nowhere, followed up with the thought process “But I did all my rehab exercises! How has this happened again? Maybe it’s more serious”. Maybe it is, but most likely, it isn’t.
Let’s rethink your rehab.
? NOTHING WORKS IN ISOLATION
It is often overlooked as to why the injury occurred in the first place.
If you were running and you tweaked your hamstring or if you simply changed direction and tore your knee ligaments, you had underlying issues for this to happen that were unbeknownst. If this is not addressed, you will become more and more ‘injury prone’.
Impact injuries happen and are a part of life. But the repetitive niggles and strains can be unravelled. Even major injuries requiring surgery, when rehabbed taking into account how the rest of the body interacts as a collective unit will have a much lower chance of reoccurrence when compared to treating that area as an isolated part.
? Mobilise the joints
If a joint does not have access to its full range of motion, then it is impossible for the muscle to have its full function (be able to fully lengthen and contract).
Try this…
Bend your elbow and flex your biceps ?
Keeping your elbow flexed at a 90 degree angle, completely relax your biceps….
Go on, keep trying…
Ok, so it’s impossible. Your elbow joint needs to extend for you to be able to relax your biceps completely.
Keeping this in mind, a hamstring strain/ tear could be affected by an ankle/ knee/ hip joint with limited movement.
? Everything orbits your centre (or your brains ? perceived centre)
A big missing ingredient from rehab programs that I see, is the understanding of your centre of mass and how we should distribute our weight in different movements.
Let’s say you have rolled your right ankle and damaged the ligaments and tendons. You’re going to limp, so the brain will tell the body to put more weight through the left foot.
This is going to change the bodies posture and patterns. You may or may not have completed a rehab program after this, but learning how to fully weight bear over the right foot again is essential.
If you do not, you will overload the left leg, eventually leading to wear and tear injuries. Every time you try to load the right foot, the brain will push you further towards the left foot.
I often see clients who’ve been given a lot of good exercises but have no awareness of how their body should shift its mass or where to when they stand on one leg. They end up doing the correct exercises, incorrectly through no fault of their own.
? The body moves in three planes
Sagittal plane – forwards + backwards. Up + down.
Frontal plane – Side to Side. Across and Away.
Transverse plane – Rotational.
Let’s use the adductors in this example. The adductors, also known as the inner thighs or groins are a collective set of muscles attaching the pelvis to the femur (thigh bone).
Tight adductors and adductor strains are a very common injury in multi-direction sports.
Common sense would suggest (going off their name) that the adductors play a role in adduction and the opposing movement, abduction. Both movements belong to the frontal plane patterns.
However, if we look more closely at the relationship between the muscles and joints/ bones they attach to, you will see that they do more than just play a part in frontal plane movements.
Some of the adductor muscles attach to the front of the pelvis and some attach to the back of the pelvis, one of the group attaches to both.
This tells us that they are in play when the pelvis moves forwards or backwards (sagittal plane) and rotates (transverse plane).
This is a recurring theme across lots of the muscle groups within the body, so when we are rehabbing we need to be training in all three planes of movement to strengthen the patterns to put a stop to reoccurring niggles and injuries in those areas.
? Asses don’t guess
When you book an initial consultation with The MAP Movement, you will be taken through a comprehensive postural and movement assessment addressing the relationships between all of the joints and how they affect one and other in movement taking into account previous injuries, centre of mass, joint mobility and the three planes of motion.
We can then use these findings to create a holistic blueprint that is perfectly tailored for you, that treats the route cause of your pain and not just your symptoms, getting you back to exercise and sport, and keeping you there.
To get started, click the here to access my calendar and select a date and time that works best for you.
