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Why Every Athlete Needs a Sports Medicine Expert on Their Team

There’s nothing an athlete dreads more than a sidelining injury that forces them into an unwelcome timeout. Unfortunately, most athletic pursuits place added stresses on your body, which means you have to take extra care to avoid injury, or re-injury after you’ve been hurt.

At Western Orthopaedics, many members of our experienced team of orthopaedic specialists are athletes themselves and understand the importance of an active lifestyle. Through our sports medicine services, we not only focus on injury prevention and healing, we also team up with patients to improve their performance.

Here’s a look at why every athlete needs a sports medicine expert on their team.

Injury prevention

One of the primary objectives of our sports medicine services is to help our active patients avoid injury in the first place. There are many ways you can injure yourself playing sports, but one of the areas that we can influence are repetitive stress injuries.

Repetitive stress injuries develop over time and often start out small enough. Perhaps you feel a dull ache in your wrist after a game of tennis or your knees are sore after a run. These are signs that the tissues in your joints are overstressed, and they may be developing small tears.

These small tears weaken the integrity of the tissue, leaving you vulnerable to far bigger tears or ruptures that can take months, or even years, to heal.

Through our sports medicine practice, we help you identify areas of stress and find ways to strengthen that area or work around it.

Healing from an injury

The second role a sports medicine specialist plays is to help you heal as quickly and as strongly as possible, so that you can get back to your active lifestyle. Athletes often push themselves too soon and their risks for re-injury (which can be much worse the second time around) are high.

With our guidance, we ensure that your damaged tissues heal properly, and we customize a treatment plan that meets your goals when it comes to returning to activity. Using every resource available, including physical therapy, regenerative medicine, arthroscopy, and joint injections, our goal is the same as yours, but with an eye on the bigger picture. In other words, we want to see you active again, but only when your body is ready, and our job is to get your body ready.

Improving performance

While injury prevention and healing are certainly important when it comes to sports medicine, what many people don’t realize is that we can also help you to improve your performance.

After thoroughly evaluating your body for the sport you want to pursue, we can suggest ways to improve your performance that also serve to prevent injury. For example, if you’re a daily runner, custom orthotics may be able to help your body go the distance by providing support where you need it most. 

Through targeted exercises, bracing, orthotics, and other techniques, we can help your body not only withstand the rigors of your activity of choice, but also help you excel in that activity.

If you’d like to learn more about our sports medicine services, contact one of our offices in Arvada or Denver, Colorado, to schedule a consultation.

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