There is nothing worse than getting injured and sitting out for many games and perhaps the season. Preparation is the number one thing you can do to prevent injury. However, seeking out a physical therapist has many benefits besides rehabilitation. Their primary objectives are to recover, educate, and enhance the ability to move generally in daily life and sports. Let’s discuss some physical therapy benefits that will help get you back in the game.

7 Benefits of Physical Therapy

1. Prevent Surgery

Surgery can be avoided if you treat the warning signs of injury. Immobility, poor flexibility, tension, and pain are some indicators you need treatment. An injury is most likely to occur when you apply force to a muscle that is not functioning correctly. Or to a joint that has lost alignment.

If you see the PT at the time of the issue, they can nip it in the bud and save you from severe injury needing surgery.

2. Restore Posture and Alignment

Alignment and good posture are the foundation for functional movement. And when they are not correct, they produce movement compensation. Compensation is like a spare tire. You can only temporarily use it before the tire breaks and flattens. PT can fix the compensation by restoring alignment and posture to help rebalance and stabilize your body to move well, avoiding injury.

Just like a check-up with the doctor, your alignment needs one with the PT.

3. Improve Flexibility

Sitting too much in the classroom, traveling on a plane or in a car, or sitting at your desk for 4-8 hours daily is terrible for your flexibility. Not just flexibility, but these things affect mobility and alignment too! However, flexibility is one way to restore proper and effective movement to avoid injury. Stretching is essential, but if you don’t know what you are doing, you cause more harm than result.

PT can show you how to stretch correctly. Truthfully, there is more to stretching than just stretching a muscle. And they can show which muscles you need to stretch and how.

4. Restore Mobility and Range of Motion

Movement limitations, sooner or later, will create pain and injury. Many times, tension, inflexibility, and poor joint mobility are unconscious. So, when you try to move in a way you think you can, you can hurt yourself. Through a series of exercises, a PT can help improve your mobility by stretching, strengthening, and balancing specific muscles to increase your mobility or restore it.

PTs have a process to do it, not just move your joint around and around. That is how injury happens.

5. Joint and Muscle Balancing

How you move and what you do in life often cause the joints to lose balance, alignment, and stability. For example, consider strength training. People frequently enter the gym and start squatting all the time, forgetting the hamstring is a muscle too. Therefore, movement and range of motion diminish, affecting joint alignment. To balance the body, muscles need to have flexibility and strength. If one is greater than the other, it creates too much tension in a joint or muscle that restricts motion unbalancing the joint. Balance is the solution and essential to maximizing movement.

PTs have strategies that can restore balance and avoid injury.

6. Your Position

In life, you sit and stand. However, as an athlete, you place your body in various positions. As a result, knowing how to position yourself and move properly is critical. A physical therapist can help you move correctly by sequencing your movement through the neuromuscular system by analyzing your posture and alignment. This control generates the appropriate movement patterns. In addition, you must appropriately engage the right muscles, joints, and tendons to move correctly.

An excellent physical therapist will start educating you about your position because it takes thousands of repetitions to change the neuromuscular function and control.

7. Neuromuscular System

And once you have a position, you may train your neuromuscular system. Focusing on neuromuscular control refers to being able to function and move well. And when you move correctly, you avoid injury, inflexibility, misalignment, imbalanced muscular tension, and strain. And it is at this time, improving your movement strength and speed is more effective and injury free.

A PT will do slow movements, so muscles and joints activate synchronously or simultaneously. Once you can do it slowly, then you can add speed.

Benefits for Athletic Performance

Physical therapy benefits include helping you find your weaknesses, strengths, and imbalances—possibly more than a strength trainer can.

Your weakness is the limiting factor; that is the difference between injury or the locked door enhancing your performance.

Your strength can be the way to improving your performance or the path to imbalance.

Imbalance is the way to discover an injury.

Without a PT assessment, it is difficult to know what to do. A great PT will do a functional assessment to see how you move and understand your weakness, strength, and imbalance.

Many NFL teams do functional movement assessments pre-season. If the athlete does not pass, they do not practice. Therefore, evaluating a player’s performance before they get on the field and finding issues and compensations are crucial before the season begins. These issues can simply be corrected and prevented from getting worse and leading to an injury.

When to Seek a Physical Therapist

Don’t wait, prevent! Feel something, say something. If you feel some tension or slight pains for more than a few days, see the PT. Often seeing a physical therapist is like a psychic they can tell you if it is an eccentric, isometric, or concentric issue. Or if there is a stability or balance issue in a joint.

Attending and resolving your pain and tension will prevent you from sitting on the bench. Symptoms of pain, tension, or tightness are much easier to fix than when it becomes an injury.

For additional articles on physical therapy benefits, CLICK HERE!