INJURY PREVENTION

SPORTS INJURY - PREVENTION IS THE BEST CURE

As I started to write this article, a doubt crept into my mind. Perhaps I am preaching to an audience already converted to the concept of injury prevention. In some respects this may be true, as a simple Google search under ‘sports injury prevention’ yielded some sixteen million results. It’s a lot, yes, but when you compare it to seventy-nine million results under ‘sports injury’ and over ninety-three million for ‘sports medicine’, it’s easy to see where the emphasis is.

By Julian Baker, director and principal instructor, European College of Bowen Studies

Seemingly most - if not all - sports injury prevention focuses primarily and quite sensibly on areas of training. These include using the right shoe, building in rest days, strength training, warm up and down and so on. Other specialist areas might focus on the health and safety aspects of a sport, particularly in contact sports.

Yet there is seemingly little or no focus on the role of the therapist in what I like to refer to as ‘pre-management’ of sporting injuries. This seems to me to be a missed opportunity because the therapist always assumes the role of a fire fighter, being employed in emergencies and not generally considered to be part of the global fitness regime of the athlete.

Considering that only 50% of sports injuries are in new areas, it means that a good number of clients present with prob- lems that were never fully resolved at the time of the original injury (1). It also means that many athletes are leaving themselves at risk of further injury and training lay-offs.

www.sportex.net

There is a point at which an injured ath- lete is a sign of failure and bad manage- ment. John Smith plays five a side on a Sunday. He has poor flexibility levels, drinks too much and doesn’t take any other exercise during the week before throwing himself at a ball for two hours once a week. We can be safe in the knowl- edge that before long, John is going to land on our doorstep for his back/ham- strings/knees to be addressed, a scenario with which we are all too familiar.

However, even the elite athlete can be the subject of poor management and lack of therapeutic care. This can be in several areas, all of which build up to create and perpetuate problems:

■ Improper handling of original injury.’ Rushed or inappropriate treatment. ’The treatment is localised to the injury site.

■ The injury is treated too often with no treatment recovery time built in.

■ The athlete is returned to training and competition too soon with insufficient rehab and specific post injury training.

■ Lack of a culture of ongoing preventative care. Athlete/coach too focussed on results and not focussed on fitness and flexibility levels and injury prevention.

These are all issues which pervade the highest level of sport in the UK and which can create a culture where injury is equated to failure on the part of the athlete and where, therefore, an athlete may not even mention an injury to the practitioner. Although many elite athletes will have access to generalised sports massage on a regular basis, the treatment of specific risk areas relating to their sport or history is very rare.

A programme whereby the athlete is treated like a formula one racing car is needed. In these environments, the car is designed, cared for and tuned on a constant basis and it would ill behove any racing team to wait until the car breaks down before any maintenance work is carried out.

This is where a therapy more recently arrived in the UK is trying to change hearts and minds. The Bowen Technique has been taught in the UK only since 1993, yet is already making a big impact across the field of physical therapy. It has become very popular with chartered phys- iotherapists, existing complementary therapists and some sports injury techni- cians.

Simple to learn and practise, it can be 9