The month of October makes most people think of pumpkin spice lattes, vibrant leaves, and Halloween costumes. But here at Premier Orthopaedics, we have something else we keep an eye out for, too, because it's also the time of year known as National Spine Health...
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At Home Physical Therapy for a Sports Injury
Physical therapy is a way to treat your sports injury by strengthening the muscle and increasing its flexibility using repetitive exercises. This method will relieve your pain and increase your mobility without surgery.
Physical therapy sessions usually occur one to three times per week for one to three months, depending on the severity of your injury. However, if you do not see a doctor or if you’re continuing your therapy after the allotted time with your physical therapist, you can do your exercises at home to treat your injury.
Physical therapy can be an effective treatment to the following common sports injuries:
- Foot and ankle pain
- Frozen shoulder
- Knee pain
- Neck pain
- Overuse injuries
- Shoulder pain
- Strains/sprains
- Tendonitis
When doing your physical therapy exercises, it’s important to keep a few things in mind to make your treatment as effective as possible. Follow these tips and help your injury heal in the comfort of your own home:
Make a Schedule
One key component of physical therapy is maintaining a regular schedule of when you perform the exercises in order to continuously strengthen the muscle. Be sure to stick with the number of exercises and repetitions you’ve chosen to do per day or per week. If you skip sessions, your treatment won’t be as effective.
Create a Space
Since you aren’t going to a physical therapy office, create a space in your home to do your exercises. If necessary, keep a yoga mat or exercise ball in this area and get in the habit of utilizing it. This will also help you to be more serious about doing your repetitions.
Pain
The benefit of going to physical therapy with a physician is that they are sure of how far to push you when exercising your muscles. This is something you want to be extremely careful of in order to reduce the risk of reinjuring yourself. It’s important that you learn how to differentiate between good pain and bad pain. Usually, slight pain is good. This typically means you’re stretching soft tissues so it becomes more flexible. However, if you’re in extreme pain and discomfort, you could be making your injury worse.
Progress
Physical therapists suggest that you increase your repetitions or add another set of repetitions when the exercise is becoming easy. The point of physical therapy is to slowly increase exercises to the point where you’re challenging your muscle to become stronger, but not so much that you’re pushing it too hard.
If you’re looking for an effective way to treat your injury, you may want to give at-home physical therapy a try. Since physical therapy consists of repetitive exercises, it’s common to be sore afterwards. Taking ibuprofen before your physical therapy can help to relieve some of the pain. Applying ice to the injury could also reduce painful inflammation.
While these exercises can be beneficial, it’s in your best interest to see a doctor if you have a serious injury. He or she will be able to determine the best course of action to treat it.
