Sports medicine is a specialized branch of healthcare that focuses on the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation of injuries that were caused by sports and physical activities. Sports medicine professionals work closely with athletes to create strategies that can help promote their rapid recovery and resilience, allowing them to bounce back from any so called injury rehabilitation.
If you have heard of ACL tears, shin splints, meniscus tears, you might wonder how athletes can come back from those gory sounding injuries and put forth a high performance again. Stay tuned as we take a look at how sports medicine has been moving forward and how it’s helped athletes recover faster and stay on top of their game.
Techniques That Help Athletes Recover Faster
Research will show you that there are several recovery methods and techniques that can help improve your performance and keep recovery at its peak. Some of the proven methods are:
- Hydrotherapy: Hydrotherapy methods cover every form of temperature water treatment. Iced water baths are getting a lot more popular on social media for many reasons, but there are three major forms of water therapy. They are cold water immersion, hot water immersion, and contrast water therapy. Cold water therapy, which is the one gaining massive popularity, is gaining attention because it has been shown to reduce muscle soreness and improve athlete recovery by promoting blood flow and reducing inflammation.
- Active Recovery: Low-intensity exercises like jogging or cycling help a great deal in clearing lactate from the muscles. It is used many times by major athletes for recovery. One of the most popular active recovery methods is swimming, where a study showed that the running performance of a set of triathletes who were divided into groups of passive recovery, and active recovery by swimming. The participants in the study that use the active recovery method of swimming performed better than the passive trial subjects.
- Massage Therapy: The benefits of a proper massage therapy are many. Elite athletes usually incorporate massage in their recovery phase. It can help reduce muscle tension and swelling, thereby increasing recovery time effectively. Massage also helps athletes break down scar tissue. This way, you get to improve range of motion and flexibility which is very important for overall recovery. Another major reason why athletes love massage is because they help remove muscle stiffness and soreness that often occurs a day or two after intense exercise.
- Compression Garments: Compression clothing has proven to be very effective in reducing swelling and muscle soreness by improving blood flow for athletes that are going through a recovery phase. A study in 2019 showed that compression garments lowered the time for body muscle recovery in German handball players. In the study, a set of athletes were instructed to wear compression garments for 24 hours and they then alternated between 12-hour breaks and 12 hour periods of wearing the garment for a total of 96 hours.
Cutting-Edge Treatments and Innovations of the Century
The advancements in sport medicine in the 21st century have redefined what we previously referred to as athlete care. Some of these innovations include:
- Regenerative Medicine: Stem Cell therapy and tissue engineering are rapidly becoming the forefronts of healing damaged tissues in athletes. Regenerative medicine causes injuries to repair faster at a cellular level allowing athletes performance recovery happen more quickly.
- Advanced Imaging Technologies: New improvements in the area of high-resolution MRI and portable ultrasound provide a detailed view of an athlete’s musculoskeletal health, thereby detecting subtle injuries that traditional methods might miss. You can get a more accurate diagnosis and tailored sports injury treatment plan this way.
- Wearable Technology: Smart wearables like the very popular iwatch are equipped with sensors that monitor vital signs, movement patterns, and biochemical markers in real-time. You can usually get data on all these vital signs when you download app designed for it.This data allows players to experience a more personalized training regime by analyzing an athlete’s physical condition continuously and in an automated fashion.
- Telemedicine: Athletes can now receive medical consultations remotely, either over an audio call or a video one. This allows anybody, athlete or not, to access care and monitor their health status effectively without having to go for in-person visit.
Conclusion
We have mentioned some of the ways which sports medicine has greatly improved recovery time for athletes. Sports medicine will continue to revolutionize athlete care in many ways which will cause athletes to recover faster and perform at their peak.
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