What is Sports Therapy?

Sports therapy is a type of physical therapy that focuses on injury prevention as well as the assessment, treatment, and rehabilitation of soft tissue injuries. It utilises a combination of soft tissue therapies (including sports massage), stretches, and targeted exercises, to achieve positive and beneficial outcomes.

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Who Can Benefit From Sports Therapy?

It isn’t only elite athletes who benefit from sports therapy treatments. The muscular system within every human body is working constantly to maintain posture and create movement. Effectively, we are all athletes of varying degrees, engaging in movement and physical activity throughout every day. This inevitably can lead to aches, pains, injury and dysfunction, and sports therapy can help to keep all bodies in optimal condition. As well as aiding the recovery from injury, it can also provide the following benefits:

• Relief from muscle tension
• Improved range of movement in joints
• Increased flexibility
• Recovery from physical activity, training sessions and events
• A general sense of health and well-being

Sessions may involve the assessment of posture, gait and movement, range of motion at joints and muscle length, to fully assess the most appropriate and effective treatment plan to aid your recovery from injury or dysfunction, and to help you to regain your optimum level of functional ability and fitness.

For individuals involved in regular sporting and physical activity, treatment sessions can help to prevent injury, optimise performance, and improve recovery from training and events, as well as treat any sporting soft tissue injuries sustained.)

What is Exercise Therapy?

Exercise therapy is the use of sport, exercise, and fitness activities to help to maintain or improve movement for those individuals with disabilities and dysfunction’s that affect gross motor skills. Through fun and challenging activities, muscle strength, trunk control, balance, co-ordination and general fitness and well-being are targeted.

Exercise therapy is not designed to replace physiotherapy sessions which individuals have been referred to by a medical professional, but instead they are designed to complement them. Where an individual is receiving regular physiotherapy, I will always try to work with their physiotherapist to ensure that we are working towards the same goals.

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Who Can Benefit From Exercise Therapy?

People of all ages can benefit from Exercise Therapy.

For parents of children with disabilities, it can be somewhat difficult to know what activities are suitable for their children to get involved in, and often parents refrain from letting their children take part in many activities.

It is important for all parents to remember that despite any physical challenges that their children may have, they are first and foremost children, who like every other child, will want to play, have fun and be physically active. The more we can encourage and facilitate this, the greater all aspects of the child’s development will be, physically, cognitively, and emotionally.

Exercise Therapy can be beneficial to children and young people with conditions such as Dyspraxia, Cerebral Palsy and Muscular Dystrophy and can help to maintain or improve muscle strength,balance, co-ordination, emotional and mental health, and cardiovascular fitness.

Fun activities are structured to encourage and facilitate targeted movements to encourage children of all ages and abilities to engage in, and enjoy, physical activity.

As children with physical disabilities become teenagers, it is important for them to start taking greater responsibility for their own physical therapy. Exercise Therapy is a great way to help them to develop a lifelong love of physical activity. By participating regularly in sport, gym sessions and physical activity it will ensure that they continue to maintain their muscular strength, mobility, and movement throughout their adult life. Exercise Therapy sessions aim to support and encourage teenagers to discover and trial new sports and activities to find what they enjoy and to continue to support them to take part in those activities, whether that be supervising and coaching them to train safely and effectively within a gym environment or, providing the opportunity for them to take part in sporting activities or events.

Adults who develop conditions such as Parkinson’s Disease can benefit greatly from Exercise Therapy to help to maintain their gross and fine motor skills. Participating in physical activity and achieving goals through Exercise Therapy, not only provides huge physical benefits, but also provides great mental and emotional benefits for individuals as they overcome challenges throughout the sessions.

Exercise Therapy sessions can be provided on a 1-1 basis or within a small group environment.