Week 9 Open Post

 

I'm revisiting my week 4 open post that was about different areas of specialization within physical therapy. Recently, I've been thinking about what area I would want to go into if I chose to specialize. When I first did the post and looked into the different areas I liked all of them. I find all of those areas interesting and I think I would be happy going into any of them. Then I started thinking about it more in terms of narrowing it down or trying to find one specific area that I REALLY find interesting. If there was one area that I would really like to specialize in I think it would have to be sports physical therapy.

 

As an athlete, I've been around so many injuries and I've known so many people to have injuries that have required physical therapy for practically my entire life. It's an area that I can relate to the most and it's an area that I'm passionate about. After deciding that if I were to specialize I would possibly want it to be in sports physical therapy, I looked a little bit more into what sports physical therapists deal with.

 

Main areas of sports physical therapy are:

Prevention

Evaluation

Treatment and Rehabilitation

Performance Enhancement

Education

Research

 

Sports PT's work with athletes to help prevent any injuries from happening. Especially if they are high level athletes, an injury would have a large affect on the players preformance and possibly the preformance of the team. In the case of an injury physical therapists come up with pre-participation screening, equipment recommendations, and cardiovascular fitness programs to help get the athlete back in the game faster and healthier.

 

A patient needs to be evaluated before they can return to the game after they've been injured. It's a physical therapists job to evaluate the athlete to make sure they are 100% to go back safely.

 

Treatment and rehab is the core of sports physical therapy. This is where physical therapists will work along side doctors to help athletes and come up with some kind of program that will best fit what they need in terms of being treated during their rehab stage.  

 

The basis of enhancing the preformance of an athlete is acutally evaluation. A physical therapist can determine an athletes strengths and weaknesses through different evaluations of body systems. After the evaluations, the physical therapist can get a feel for what the athlete needs to work on to improve and they make a fitness plan to target those areas.

 

Outside of different hands on things that a physical therapist does, they also focus on educating athletes and people involved with them about managing an injury and what they can do to prevent it. Physical therapists also teach other physical therapists that are in the sports field. As well as education, sports physical therapists research and find different ways to help athletes. It's a process of trying research and applying the research into real life to see if it works for the athlete.

 

 

 

 

 

 

CITATIONS

 

"What is Sports Physical Therapy?" About SPTS. Sports Physical Therapy Section, 2012. Web. 20 Mar 2014.