Health blog Category: physical therapy
The Importance of Strength in Athletes
Why Strength is Important
For athletes being stronger will help them experience a significant decrease in potential for injury. It will also allow them to experience an overall greater ease of activity and movement with everything they do. Typically, there will be no immediate effect to having weakness in a particular muscle in your body. The effects are usually more long term in the sense that “weakness” or lack of proper strength in an area, results in excess friction on the bones in the joint, excessive wear and tear on tendons and cartilage around a joint, and more.
Setting up a Strengthening Program
This all starts with knowing what muscles to work and how to work them correctly.
Read full blogEliminating Back Discomfort
Being plagued by discomfort, the inability to sleep, experiencing stiffness, or having difficulty with activities that we love, are often indicators of back injuries. Often back pain is a signal of issues up and down the chain. Your spine connects your upper body and your lower body so it is important that we seek out the proper care as soon as possible to prevent other issues and to improve our quality of life.
Common Causes of Back Pain or Discomfort:
- Poor Posture
- Weak Core Muscles
- Poor Mechanics
- Weak Gluteal Muscles
- Degeneration
The ‘Trickle-Down’ Effect
Like many conditions, when we have pain or discomfort in one area of the body, if we don’t handle it, it can start impacting another area of the body.
Read full blogThe Solution to Foot and Ankle Pain
Foot and ankle problems make daily, functional activities such as standing, walking and using stairs difficult. In addition to the daily functions mentioned above, it can also mean they have trouble going from a seated position to a standing one without pain. Even taking just a few steps can be painful due to muscle tightness and joint stiffness.
Plantar Fasciitis
One particular foot condition we treat is plantar fasciitis. To start, what is your plantar fascia?
Read full blogDesk Jobs and Neck Discomfort
Many of us have sedentary jobs at a desk and/or using mobile technology for day to day communications. It’s so easy for us to slip into a poor posture when we’re mindlessly reading emails or sending texts. The problem is that these poor postures are therefore creating more complaints of neck discomfort.
Neck pain is no longer an ‘adult issue.’ At Loudoun Sports Therapy Center, we also see a lot of young people complaining of neck discomfort, headaches, trouble standing up and other painful issues in these upper body areas.
Forward Head Posture
Think about this: for every inch that your head is tilted forward, there is twice the amount of pressure being placed through your spine.
Read full blogImproving Balance and Reducing Injuries
Balance is what gives us the ability to walk on two legs and perform our daily routines. Our sense of balance changes over the course of our entire lives. Balance and the vestibular system develop as we grow from a baby all the way through adulthood, and then declines as we get older.
Most people don’t know their balance is not optimum until they suffer a sports injury, trip and fall, or lose their balance in the shower.
Shoulder Overuse Injuries
The shoulder is a very mobile joint due to its ball and socket design which gives it a large range of movement. So…it needs to be stabilized by all the muscles and ligaments that surround the joint. Many factors can result in these muscles and ligaments being over worked including:
- Weakness
- Fatigue or muscle endurance limitations
- Over training
- Poor technique with stroke (especially freestyle)
- Tightness
Over time injuries such as swimmer’s shoulder, rotator cuff impingement, and tendinitis occur.
Read full blogWhat REALLY is Sciatica?
Have you ever heard of sciatica? It’s quite for a patient to come into the clinic saying they are suffering from sciatica. However, in most cases, this is NOT actually what’s going on with them.
The term sciatica tends to be thrown around and not many people have a true understanding what it is and what is actually causing their symptoms. If you were to google your symptoms:
- pain that goes down my leg to my feet
- numbness in the leg
- tingling in my leg
Dr.
Read full blogNatural Ways to Beat Joint Pain
Our joints rely on the ability to move properly, have adequate muscle support and to be well-lubricated. When any of these points suffer, increased pressure is created in the joint causing the cartilage to rub together. This can lead to our joint cartilage wearing down and arthritis.
Joint pain debilitates millions of people annually and can play a significant role in our ability to perform normal everyday tasks. If we understand the mechanics of our joints, there are several things we can do to help our body move faster and without pain.
Importance of the Core
Our core is our whole body’s support system. It helps stabilize and transfer forces from the upper body to the lower body. The core is made up of more than just our abs- as most people think of a six pack when they hear core or ab strength.
Your core consists of:
- Transverse abdomens
- Obliques
- Rectus abdominis.
- The diaphragm
- Multifid
- Hip musculature
- Pelvic floor
What Happens When Your Core is Weak
When your core is not strong you are more prone to injury, as the core is incorporated in almost every movement.
Read full blogAnkle Instability
10,000 steps is the Center for Disease Control & Prevention recommended step count for a day. While we are all shooting to hit those 10,000 steps in 24 hours, it’s quite likely that one of us will stumble, miss a step/curb or trip.
Those missteps can be a result of:
- Wearing high heels
- Incorrectly sized shoes
- Inconsistent walking surfaces
- Or even something as simple as ankle instability.
People often make the comment “What did you even trip over?” when there actually wasn’t anything in their direct path that caused their misstep.
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