How We Can Get You Through Your Sports Injury and Beyond

There’s nothing quite as frustrating as getting injured whilst playing sport.

It takes you away from doing what you love, from helping yourself or your team win games, and from getting that adrenaline rush from competing week after week.

Even worse than that, is having the same injuries come back week after week, month after month.

There are many factors that cause recurring injuries, whether it be returning to play too soon, or failing to strengthen the vulnerable structures beyond their pre-injury capacity.

This is where our expertise comes in – to help you navigate through all your past and current injuries to performance and beyond, creating a lasting resilience that will carry you through many seasons to come.

I love this process so much that I created a video called “Train Like an Athlete”. In this, you can watch as I describe the process we take and explain how you can navigate the process of making your body bullet-proof.

So, how do we guide you through this process?

Regardless of whether you have a new injured or just want to bulletproof yourself, we will always start with our RELIEVE phase. This phase is first and foremost about an accurate diagnosis.

To determine how long you’ll need away from the sport (if any!), and exactly how you can rehabilitate your injury back to 110% we need to start here.

This will involve various physical tests, gathering a detailed history, and potentially referring for imaging or a specialist opinion if necessary.

Sports injuries – whether it be soft tissue or bone and joint structures, require an accurate diagnosis, as what might seem like a minor difference in severity can have further implications on how we progress.

In the RELIEVE phase, we’ll educate you about what you need to do to ensure appropriate tissue healing and pain relief. This might involve some manual therapy, taping, or therapeutic exercise at the affected area.

However, this is also the time to ensure we can minimise any global deconditioning. We’ll help you learn how to keep your body fit and modify training so that you don’t go back a step. We’ll create a program to load the kinetic chain and uninjured areas or provide you with some of our Mat Pilates or Viva Strong classes that are appropriate to help you cross-train. Rehab can be the perfect time to focus on areas that you might be otherwise be neglecting. So, we might set you up with one of our Therapeutic Yoga sessions so you can spend the extra time nourishing your body.

Lastly, we will outline a clear plan to return you to performance.

Then we progress to the RESTORE phase, and this is where the magic happens.

In this phase, we continue to progress loading your injured area in non-provocative ways such as through isometric activation. As always, this is specific to you and your injury. Once your pain is improving and depending on healing timelines, the restore phase is where we will progress you to working on exercises “through range”. We’ll work on building strength in all directions – both when your muscles are shortening and when they are lengthening (what we call eccentric training). We might start to re-introduce return-to-sport specifics – such as plyometrics.

We also discuss and unpack your biomechanical findings from the assessment to pick up gaps so we determine any underlying cause of your injury. From there, we work out what tools we can use that will work best to prevent it from happening again. It might involve looking for strength deficits, postural weakness, stiffness or hypermobility of your joints – and creating a program or getting you into our classes to help you become a well-rounded athlete.

The last stage, and my personal favourite, is the PERFORM PHASE.

This is when we will start to add load to all of the foundations that we’ve been building over the relieve and restore phases.

Together we’ll discuss the key requirements of your sport so you can come powerful and robust.

We want you to return to sport better than you were before your injury – so we’ll work on whatever is required. That might be agility, brute strength, coordination, speed, the sky’s the limit.

Creating a bespoke perform program is what will allow you to reduce your reliance on the relieve process and improve your performance two-fold, whilst preventing injuries.

Have a look at this video which will give you a further glimpse into how I can teach you to train like the athlete that you are.

It’s easy to feel like everything feels great, so you can return to sport as you were. But, it’s the ongoing perform phase that truly keeps you playing to the best of your ability.

If you’re not sure where to start, we can get a comprehensive assessment and start treatment for you when you book a Sports Injury Assessment where we’ll look at your biomechanics, assess your injury in detail (including its strength and resilience) and lay out a detailed recovery plan.

If you’ve just injured yourself and are struggling to know what to do or even if you need help, we also have a FREE 15-minute Sports Clinic Triage, where I’ll help triage your injury and start the process of getting you on the road to recovery.

Wherever you are in your journey, we can work with you to manage your body and achieve your goals.

You might be injury-free but want to boost your performance and resilience, or you might have just sustained an injury and are desperate to get back into it. Book an appointment here today to get into it!

And if you’re looking to just get started from home, we have a full-on-demand platform with information videos and full-length classes to help you Relieve, Restore and Perform on the Viva Hub.