How An Athlete Can Ensure They Rarely Get Pain or Injury

I am constantly amazed to see elite athletes being reported as unable to compete because of injury, or injuring themselves during competition, and even sometimes suffering an ongoing problem over many weeks or years, such as back pain. Or the time it takes them to be over a hamstring tear.

A person who manages their body in the right way need never get injured other than direct trauma injury from a hit. None of this tearing hamstrings, or calf’s, getting back spasms, hip or knee soreness, or any ongoing problem that athletes these days seem to carry with them constantly. Certainly not to the degree that it stops them from competing anyway.

When I say a person who looks after their body, I am referring to the right combination of diet, supplements, bodywork and exercise to make sure their body is strong, healthy and balanced to perform at their best. This involves a good diet and nutrition program, enough sleep, and regular expert bodywork from someone who knows enough about the body to remove the cause of a potential injury before it has a chance to happen.

The important thing about the body is it is basically a mechanical structure operating under load from the weight of gravity, just like any other finely tuned and balanced piece of equipment. The parts need to move in a smooth co-ordinated, integrated way, in the correct alignment and without restriction, so as not to cause friction. When the body isn’t running like this, the forces generated by any movement, especially training, cause pressure to end up in the wrong places such overloading a weight bearing joint.

A skilled therapist, such as someone practicing SLM Bodywork correctly, is trained to be able to read and assess a body’s muscle system and mechanics, and treat it to ensure it always stays balanced. This is achieved by deep specific bodywork that ensures the body is moving with every muscle functioning correctly.

Muscles support the body’s structures and movement and they don’t deteriorate and become dysfunctional overnight or without good reason. When a therapist has the ‘hands on’ skills to be able to see and feel things going wrong, they are able to correct them long before an injury happens or even the persons whose body it is, realises there is something wrong.

The first stage of injury is the build-up of muscle tension that restricts circulation and function of an area. Once a muscle loses its ability to contract and relax properly (becomes dysfunctional) it will start to tighten up and causes other muscles to compensate for the strength and movement it no longer provides. This causes the body to become unbalanced starting with any of the 200 or so important muscles.

Injuries are not from a single event, they build-up in the body over time. The single event that triggers them is just the final straw in the build-up. If the body’s structure and balance is good, then the single event wouldn’t cause an injury and would happen and pass without incident.

Haven’t you seen an athlete or sports person hurt them-selves causing you to cringe? You expect them to be writhing around the ground in pain yet they just get up and shrug it off, then the same thing happens to another player and they are carried off in a stretcher with a bad injury.

The carried off athlete’s body had a problem waiting to happen, whereas the one who shrugged it off didn’t.

A properly trained and skilled therapist can ensure an athlete’s body is that of the second person and eliminate problems in the body before they build-up to the point of becoming an injury.

A trainer, (probably the most common choice of elite athletes and teams for injury prevention), invariably uses a stretching and exercise program for this purpose but that will fail to pick up and eliminate the cause of a potential injury. It may delay the injury coming, but eventually it will happen. A therapist who treats the body like it’s a sum of parts rather than as one integrated system, will also struggle to detect and eliminate the potential for injury.

The full body treatment method used by SLM Bodywork therapists is unique and rare, even in elite professional sports, and that is one of the main reasons even the best athletes break down and miss competition because of unnecessary injuries. It is also why when they get an injury, it takes so long for them to recover from it. Because the treatment they get from conventional methods like Physiotherapy, Chiropractic and massage are not a full body, integrated, hands on treatment that is able to identify muscle dysfunction and imbalances which are responsible for setting up an injury in the first place.

The reality is, most injury’s suffered by elite athletes should never happen, but when they do, treatment should still be able to clear them up within 1 to 3 weeks maximum. Injuries such as a pubis synthesis or groin strain, hamstring tear, strained ankle ligaments, back injury, hip, neck or shoulder injury, corked muscle, thigh strain or knee pain are all easily fixable in that time using the right treatment method.

The reality is most athletes don’t get the right treatment and they continue to break down from time to time and spend far too long recovering. When an athlete is in the full time care of an experienced SLM therapist most injuries (especially muscle strains, tears and cramping) are highly unlikely to ever occur unless there is significant impact/ trauma involved.

If you’re an elite or professional athlete and suffer from injuries or a body that doesn’t work the way it should or use to, you need to demand better from the people looking after you or look for a therapist trained and experienced in the SLM Bodywork system to see how much better your body can be.

Because an athlete pushes their body to extreme limits physically, their muscle system needs to be precisely tuned and balanced all the time to avoid muscle dysfunction and injury. If anyone tries to tell you that injuries are a part of sports and unavoidable, don’t believe them, what they are unable to do is their limitations as a therapist or trainer, not everyone else’s.

To find your nearest SLM Therapist go here.

Author: Steve Lockhart Google