Physiotherapy
What is Physiotherapy?
Physiotherapists working in sport are primarily concerned with three issues. These are:
- Injury Prevention. The EIS Physiotherapists will work with both your own personal coach as well as your strength and conditioning specialist to identify areas of physical weakness that can be targeted to prevent injury.
- High quality injury assessment and diagnosis
- Individually tailored injury rehabilitation programmes geared to making as swift a return to your sport as possible so that you may maximise your athletic potential.
Should you need to see an EIS physiotherapist you can be assured that you will be seen by someone who has a large amount of sports injury experience and is committed to keeping up to date with all the recent advances in sports injury assessment and rehabilitation. Expect your appointment to last approximately one hour. The physiotherapist will be more than happy for your parents to sit in and listen during the appointment so please invite them and your coach (if you wish) to attend. This time will be split into about twenty minutes to talk to you about your injury for example why it came on (changes in training techniques and equipment); what has happened since the injury; any treatment that you may have had; any previous injuries as well as some questions related to your general health.
Following this the physiotherapist will actually perform a physical examination on you, assessing movement, strength and balance as well as some specific tests depending on which part of the body you have injured. This examination is made much easier if you wear shorts if you have a leg injury or a T-shirt if you have an arm injury. After the examination the physiotherapist should explain to you what has gone wrong and will then spend a further ten minutes or so demonstrating some basic exercises and advice on how to resolve your problem.
You should expect to leave the appointment understanding what has happened and what you need to do to improve. If you are confused please ask.
The type of treatment and rehabilitation that you receive from your physiotherapist is entirely dependent upon the type of injury that you have. You may be asked to come back to see the physiotherapist on several occasions for follow up treatment to your injury. All EIS physiotherapists (with your consent) will also always liaise with your coach, sports doctor and strength and conditioning coach to ensure that your rehabilitation program is allied as closely as possible to the type of training you are participating in at the time of injury.
The EIS structure has regional bases with physiotherapists in each of the nine regions. All medical records are now stored on a system known as Injury Zone. This ensures that should you need to move to another region for training or competition and require attention from a physiotherapist they will be able to access information on any previous treatment that you have had.