Injury Prevention
What is Injury Prevention?
Let’s start with what is injury prevention. Injury prevention is just as it sounds! It is about putting things in place to do regularly to help stop your body getting a major injury. Basically, stopping the injury before it happens.
Let’s be honest there are two types of people, people that look after their body regularly with some type of treatment like physio, chiro, massage, kinesiology etc and then there is people that just go see someone when they are injured. Which one are you?
Injuries most likely build up over time…
Unless you roll your ankle from a sport or break a bone, injuries are most likely to build up over time, for example when you do your back. Your back didn’t just go from bending down and picking up that pen, you back muscles have most likely been tight for a long time and that one instance has just been the last straw.
We do see a lot of people on a regular monthly basis and they have realised to stop saying ‘I am all good today’, because as soon we start treating them they are like ‘oh wow I didn’t realise that was tight’. Remember just because you are not in pain doesn’t mean your muscles are not tight.
Our lifestyles and working environment are so intense these days and so repetitive we need to be looking after our bodies, so it doesn’t lead to injury. If for example you have an office job and sit at your desk all day, think about your posture……… Do you sit straight every single day of every single hour of every single minute? Probably not so how much strain does that take on your lower back, upper back and neck? A LOT! If you don’t look after those muscles on a regular basis to help keep them mobile you could be at home one day bend down and pick something up and then you back goes and you are in a lot of pain and cant move.
Think of it like this….
You put your car in for a service why don’t you put your body in for a service?
This is where maintenance comes in. If you start your journey with looking after your muscles or even with an injury at the start you want to see your health professional as many times as possible at the start to get your body back on track. Then after that your health professional should indicate to you on how often you should see them. It could be every 2 weeks, every 3 weeks, every 4 weeks etc… It just all depends on what your life and work environment is like. It is also up to you to listen to your body, the more treatment you get the more aware of your body you should become, you will also know how often you should get treatment.
Your health professional just wants to look after you and your body, so have faith in them that they know what they’re doing and they know how to help you.
I hope this has made you think about preventing an injury before it happens. Start getting maintenance to your body and you will start to see those injuries reduce!
