Sports Injuries?
Often, we meet people after they have had visits to various traditional medical professionals and physical therapy options. None of it seems to help them and may even be causing more pain. We understand that you want to figure out what is wrong and get back to your activities!
Situational pain is hard for traditional professionals to figure out. Diagnostics are done in a static environment and hardly mimic the situations which are challenging you. They also miss the important interactions between head, body and sensory systems (vision and vestibular/balance) that could be affecting your pain or inability to be as active as you once were.
But don’t despair. It can change and we can help you be pain free and active once more.
How We Help
Our approach is different in that we look at the details of how you function. We look at the entire body, not just the trouble spots to verify the positional alignments that work well, and those that may be causing pain. Video of odd transition points can help pinpoint what is creating painful compensations. It is not uncommon to find that a runner has pain because their shoulder is out of alignment and it is causing severe stress on their gait.
Another under-appreciated functional interaction is the intersection of movement with vision and balance. This especially creates stress when a head injury has occurred.
Some of the common events we also find complicating recovery are:
- Prior injuries, surgeries, fractures
- Falls, bike spills, or auto accident impacts
- Overuse injuries from asymmetrical training
- Head injuries
Next Steps
Your bones, muscles, joints, eyes, and brain all work together to regulate your body’s movement. We help by linking all the parts of your body together to coordinate well with balance and vision so you can move the way your body was designed to move before any injuries, surgeries, or traumas. Then we pinpoint the exact way you move with your specific activity or sport to see if there are any challenges throughout your entire body that may be impacting your essential movements.
If all of this resonates with you, here are the next steps:
- Schedule your first appointment at a time that fits with your life. Our entire team is great at sports injuries, however we may recommend you switch to a team member with more expertise in your sport after the first visit or two.
- Read about what to expect in the first visit.
- Complete the intake information.
- Take a breath!
Often the pain from your injury is better in one to two sessions. Concussions may benefit from additional sessions because of the intricacies in sensory system integration with movement. To further complicate things, most athletes remember more than a few injuries that led to the pattern of compensation. We will discuss the follow up plan with you after your first session.
“What I appreciate about the Bridging® approach is that the body is all connected. I may have knee pain, but it might not be the cause but rather the symptom of something else.”  Katie O (41)
Read more about how Kinetic Konnections is a part of keeping Katie, an elite level athlete, prepared for the riggers of her sport.
Client Stories
A hockey player came in following a concussion bad enough to force him to be out of school for several days. Although he was beginning to feel better, we found his processing speed in written work was not at the speed needed for high school. We discovered that after he took a puck to the jaw, the quick reaction backward of his head disrupted all the coordination between head and core including breathing, vision and balance. These are all details that the sports med doctors do not traditionally assess. His sleep was not easy either. After just a couple of sessions, all was better. Now he checks in with us between seasons for tune up work to reset any of his functional movements that may have been impacted during the season.
A young pitcher with an upcoming college showcase event had a sore shoulder from a long season and cross-training stress. We had two goals once we identified his challenges —generally getting all the movements centered in a growing teen for maximum balance and coordination, and figuring out what was causing the stress in the pitching arm. Limited wrist rotation was causing him to over-rotate his shoulder; a few sessions later he has participated in showcase events and has offers from several schools.
A paddle tennis player fell and broke her wrist. After the cast come off and physical therapy was completed it still didn’t feel good. At a friend’s urging she made an appointment. We found two sets of un-addressed compensations that were prohibiting her from fully healing—impact to the shoulder from the fall, and compensation in the core and shoulder that developed while the cast was on. A couple of sessions cleared the compensations and got the upper body structurally reset to work like new.