Injury Prevention
Active rehab therapy to fix instability and pain with strength and mobility exercises
Injury Prevention at Forza Physio
Injury prevention is an effort to prevent or reduce the likelihood of sustaining a physical injury. There are a variety of interventions that can be used to achieve this, such as education, changes to equipment , rule modifications to sport and training, physiotherapy assessment and athletic testing, as well as exercise and load management.
There are three tiers of injury prevention:
Primary prevention is aiming to prevent the likelihood of the first injury from happening.
An example of Primary prevention is implementing a warm up protocol that focuses on motor control, balance and strengthening exercises. There are many established programs that help to decrease the chance of injury in sport like the FIFA 11+ in soccer athletes and the OSTRC program for throwing athletes.
Secondary prevention is reducing the impact of the injury once it has already occurred, meaning stopping it from getting worse.
An example of secondary prevention would be a thorough physiotherapy assessment to identify areas of limited range of motion, decreased strength, asymmetries between limbs, rate of force development as well as obtaining an understanding of past injury history. You would want to follow this up with an individualized program to address such deficiencies.
Tertiary prevention aims to prevent a future injury after the first injury took place.
An example of tertiary prevention is to wait nine months minimum to return to sport after ACL reconstruction as we know this decreases the risk of a subsequent ACL tear.
Is Injury Prevention Testing For You?
Injury can occur at all levels of sport and activity, including:
Manual labour jobs
Recreational sports
Running
Weight Lifting
Yoga
Gardening and House Work
Injury risk is multifactorial and there are both intrinsic and extrinsic factors at play. Examples of intrinsic factors are: age, sex, skill level, physical fitness, previous injury, anatomical factors, body composition, psychology. Some extrinsic factors are equipment and environment. Some of these risk factors are modifiable while others are not. It is unrealistic to prevent all injuries so get out there, be active and enjoy sport and recreation. There are so many benefits to sport and recreation as well as prevention of disease and an increased life expectancy.
Visit our clinic and connect with one of our Physiotherapists to get some baseline testing done and understand your injury risk in your sport. We will create an individual or team approach to protecting your health and optimizing your performance at the same time!