As the title suggests, we will be looking more closely at the impact of injury, both amongst the recreational and avid sportsperson. The topic of injury fits perfectly with the summer season, as the warmer weather attracts the masses to get outdoors and be active. This is not to say that the cold winter nights don’t provoke their fair share of ‘niggles’.
Emma Dunnett explains:
Being active is great for us; mind, body and soul – depending on how deeply you want to think about your evening stroll, weekend cricket match or midday tennis lesson. We know from the abundance of literature that being active kick-starts our happy hormones, dopamine, and those are the exact hormones which make you click the tab ‘Sign Me Up’ on the next local marathon.
All of this is great, however, what happens if injury comes knocking at the door? How do we navigate an injury and how do we plan to get through it and out the other side? Contrary to an ideal world of getting ‘around’ an injury, we should instead go through it, and this is where seeking expert advice is recommended. This is a great time to add that not all injuries will set you back by several weeks or months, most injuries simply need some expert guidance and direction, and a sprinkle of dedication.
To come back to the title, injury is a learning curve.
Going through the process of injury is tough, both physically and mentally, but fundamentally injury is the body’s way of sending us an important message. Most often, as physiotherapists, we see injuries stem from an increased load in training; either the intensity, frequency or duration, and if this load gets too high, the most vulnerable, or overloaded area of the body will respond with injury. (We will explore the topic of training load and tolerance in more detail in another blog).
When injury occurs, our focus naturally drifts to what is involved in recovery, how long will it take to recover and, for example, when will we be back training for that marathon as aforementioned. There can be a lot to learn from injury, starting with the signal from our body identifying that our training load is too high for one reason or another. Injury allows us the opportunity to identify areas of vulnerability in the body, or more nicely put, areas that need more love and attention.
Seeing injury in this respect is not simple and doesn’t make the challenge of tackling injury any easier, however, we now have first-hand knowledge of where we need to focus more time, work and energy and this can form part of our new training regime. Simply put, injury is the mirror into the body’s mind. It’s there to protect us and we can learn a lot from what it tells us through our recovery journey.
Back to the experts. This journey doesn’t have to be faced alone. There is plenty of support out there and we at Six Physio would be delighted to work together with you to tackle any injury problems you may have. Injury recovery is much easier when you have support to pave the way back to training and can be a great tool for you to learn more about your body, how is functions under the natural pressures/impacts of activity and what you can be doing long term to prevent such injuries from reoccurring.
