At Optimum Performance in Surrey, we have a strong ethos, that is that we listen to the potential physical and mental effects of injury in a person.
Whether you are an upcoming athlete, a casual walker or someone looking to improve their health and fitness, at Optimum Performance we can empathise with how a setback such as an injury can negatively impact your mindset, motivation, and faith that you are doing the right thing.
Some steps that we try to implement when diagnosing and assessing our patients is firstly understanding the patient’s lifestyle leading up to the injury. This is because it helps the physio to understand perhaps why the injury occurred. Often, a sport injury can cause patients to blame themselves or criticise their own ability; by establishing a cause we can help our patients at Optimum Performance to remove that sense of blame.
It is important to our physios at Optimum Performance to understand why an injury has occurred, not just what the injury is, because then we can help our patients with a treatment plan moving forward. Some ways Optimum Performance can help our patients to move forward with their injury are:
- Create a strengthening programme together to help stabilise the injured area and to come back even stronger than before
- Highlight areas that could cause re injury, for example doing too much training on Astroturf/hard ground can cause impact/repetitive strain injury
- Refining your training so that you feel more independent and knowledgeable, for example understanding the importance of exercising all areas of the body and recovery of your body
- Putting our patients in touch with other professionals, for example a personal trainer, to help them with their journey to recovery.
At Optimum Performance we find great success in listening to our patient’s physical pain but also mental pain. We think this success comes from our patients feeling fully listened to, we therefore create a safe space for them to come to. This is extremely important and often overlooked; for many people, exercise and sport is their life, it may be a big form of stress relief, alone time, or their main source of income, but none the less it can be a vital mechanism for people to be able to function daily. We understand this at Optimum Performance. If our patient feels listened to on the deeper level, they will be more willing to listen to our physios advice and their chance of re-Injuring will be decreased because they feel more trusting in the advice they have been given.