Sport Rehabilitation helps people suffering from pain, injury, or illness involving the musculoskeletal system. Rehab helps people of all ages to maintain their health and fitness, recover from and prevent injury, and reduce pain using exercise, movement, and manual-based therapeutic interventions.
7 Principles of Sports Rehabilitation
1: Avoid aggravation. It is important not to aggravate the injury during the rehabilitation process. Therapeutic exercise, if administered incorrectly or without good judgment, has the potential to exacerbate the injury, that is, make it worse.
2: Timing. The therapeutic exercise portion of the rehabilitation program should begin as soon as possible—that is, as soon as it can occur without causing aggravation. The sooner patients can begin the exercise portion of the rehabilitation program, the sooner they can return to full activity. Following injury, rest is sometimes necessary, but too much rest can actually be detrimental to recovery.
3: Compliance. Without a compliant patient, the rehabilitation program will not be successful. To ensure compliance, there must be open communication with the patient, explaining the content of the program and the expected course of rehabilitation.
4: Individualization. Each person responds differently to an injury and to the subsequent rehabilitation program. Even though an injury may seem the same in type and severity as another, undetectable differences can change an individual’s response to it. Individual physiological and chemical differences profoundly affect a patient’s specific responses to an injury.
5: Specific sequencing. A therapeutic exercise program should follow a specific sequence of events. This specific sequence is determined by the body’s physiological healing response.
6: Intensity. The intensity level of the therapeutic exercise program must challenge the patient and the injured area but, at the same time, must not cause aggravation. Knowing when to increase intensity without overtaxing the injury requires observation of the patient’s response and consideration of the healing process.
7: Total patient. It is important for the unaffected areas of the body to stay finely tuned. This means keeping the cardiovascular system at a preinjury level and maintaining range of motion, strength, coordination, and muscle endurance of the uninjured limbs and joints. The whole body must be the focus of the rehabilitation program, not just the injured area. Providing the patient with a program to keep the uninvolved areas in peak condition, rather than just rehabilitating the injured area, will help to better prepare the patient physically and psychologically for when the injured area is completely rehabilitated.