Do Athletes need Physical Therapy?

These days children and adults are interested in sports and physical activity. Everyone who is sets goals for fitness can be considered as athletes. It is very common nowadays for adults to motivate their children to pursue a sport for fun or as a profession due to the increase in awareness.

However, many people get confused with a crucial question, i.e. “Where do we start?”. Answer to this is, “Start by building a strong base”.

What do we mean by building a strong base and why are athletes supposed to know this?

It basically means building a strong foundation of skills, training, nutrition and psychology. However, let’s just limit the scope to athletes training program and its elements only. 

A lot of professional athletes have helped us understand the most important factor in any sporting career is the inclusion of PHYSICAL THERAPY.

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What is Physical Therapy for athletes?

Physical therapy helps athletes, coaches and instructors to understand minute details of our body. Which helps you improve your performance and overall health. Physical Therapy benefit you (athletes) performance in the following ways:-

Postural Assessment and Realignment:

In order to attain high performance in any sport, we need to have a good postural. A good posture helps athletes to perform at the best and have enhanced results. This is a very important factor that have been helping many elite players to perform at the best throughout their career. 

Helps Understand Muscle Imbalances in athletes:

Physical therapy have been helping athletes and coaches with the information on muscle imbalances, range of motion and much more.

Rest and Recovery:

Any sport requires  years of hard work and dedication to reach to the highest level of your potential. However, this affects your body a lot. Increased fatigue levels, tiredness and/or delayed recovery from injuries are some of the common symptoms that you will notice. Physical therapy helps you include rest and recovery during your training sessions in order to help you increase your endurance and strength at the same time.

Physical Therapy as an injury prevention tool for athletes:

We are sure you have heard of the term “Warm UP” and “Cool Down”. We often hear everyone talking about its importance for athletes. But what does it really mean?

Its a very simply concept, if our body is not warmed up then we wont be able to perform at full potential when needed. Similarly, during a “Cool Down” our body needs rest after intense workout so that we recover.

However, the secret in this process lies in its importance as an injury prevention tool. An athlete is ready for any physical activity only by warm ups. Warming up helps athletes in raising the body temperature, increasing joint mobility and increased flexibility.

After workouts, our body demands a proper cool down. A cool down session helps in muscle recovery, increased range of motion etc.

This discipline have helped a lot of athletes to stay away from injury.