Shutting down the Injured Athlete.

This week I have had two instances with patients contemplating continuing participation in their sports while they are injured.

WHAT?

Me: So your telling me that your daughter is a swimmer, with a shoulder injury, she is getting physical therapy 3 times per week for 4 weeks and its not getting better?  

Sounds about right.

Certain injuries need rest. In this swimmer's case she has been only participating in swimming, year round with no rest, no cross training what-so-ever, and she is 14.  And the parent asks me if she should stop cold turkey.

COLD TURKEY???? You stop smoking cold turkey! you stop drinking cold turkey!!

If you do not let the body heal, what are you expecting to happen.

It is possible to train through certain injuries and I am very conservative with shutting down an athlete which means I rarely do shut down an athlete.

Injuries are great learning experience for athletes because they learn to strengthen other weak areas while their injury heals.

I see this often with runners that live in the sagittal plane and perform almost no cross training in the other two planes (Coronal and Axial).  These are the patients with hip pain and knee pain with no traumatic event.  Running requires stability in all planes.  If your a runner and your not getting faster or you can not increase your mileage it is most likely that you have instability in one or all of these planes.

Personally when I took  my cycling from 30 miles per day to 90+ miles per day my upper back and arms were on fire and in pain.  By strengthening my axial and coronal planes I was able to resolve all my upper back issues.

This is not rocket science. If your core is weak and you have limited functional stability you will break down.

Now if your a runner, your going to need dynamic core stability work and I also advise trail running.  Uneven surfaces provide lots of proprioceptive (awareness of where you are in space) information and activation of stability tissues.

If you have any questions or if you want to start some dynamic core stability call or text me,
917-748-2902.

P.S.
Its Sunday and I am getting this done in between patients so I may have some grammatical errors.