The role of the Joint and Muscle flexibility in Injury Prevention and injury rehabilitation is immense. Suppleness is much overlooked in today’s growing pursuit of aerobic fitness.  We get the balance wrong and our muscles and joints can subsequently develop problems.  We can cause mis-alignments in different areas of our skeleton when flexibility slides.  Muscle length can becomes dysfunctional and shorten and joint movement can lessen if we don’t practice flexibility on a regular basis.  Any lack of flexibility is a critical flaw and sets the scene for a long road when trying to rehabilitate from injury.  In the non-injured person, we may not notice that we are losing flexibility over-time – we seem to be functioning well and don’t realise that we are slowly losing the ability of certain muscles to fully stretch.  Our bodies seem to be operating the way they always have, or in some cases you may be noticing certain movements are becoming a little stiff.  Behind the scenes, muscles may be shortening, directly negatively affecting other muscle groups, leading to a vicious and a roller-coaster impact effect on joint mobility and ultimately affecting performance.  Across the broad population this is happening at some level.  Ultimately this under diagnosed ad in many cases, deliberately overlooked slide into inflexibility culminates in unnecessary injuries in the athlete/sports person and in the less active individual aches and pains begin to appear like “cracks and fissures” in a poorly engineered building.

What can we do?  The good news is that no matter who you are, whether you are a non-active person or a sports person in pre, mid or post season, you can reverse flexibility dysfunctions.  The first step is to have a postured and flexibility assessment, to determine problem areas and establish re-enforced patterns.  It’s imperative that you have this done professionally by a “Chartered Physiotherapist”.  Once the areas of poor joint movement or muscle length problems are diagnosed, a specific tailor made programme will be prescribed for your exact needs.  The programme will involve postural re-education for all joints, flexibility initiatives to restore and improve normal muscle length and sustained positions to negate underlying injury factors.  Together these various approaches will culminate in a more dynamic functional skeleton, a muscular network that provokes less aches and pains and in the sportsperson, an opportunity to keep unnecessary injuries at bay and to gain the wonderful side-effect of enhanced performance.

Therese Ryan, Eibhlis Cooney and Emma Callanan operate in Thurles and Templemore.   They are all Chartered Physiotherapists.  They are trained to assess and to diagnose postural dysfunctions leading to flexibility derangements and are qualified to implement specific home exercise programmes to correct imbalances.

For all appointments phone Jackie/Maggie on 0504-26090

“Always Ensure Your Physiotherapist is Chartered”