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Physio works
What do you do here at The Movement Works?
As physios,we basically deal with any musculoskeletal problems, which could be related to the neck, wrist, hand, lower back, knee... There's a lot of aspects to our profession. My specialism is in sports physio, so I work with athletes from all different sporting professions.
There's also neuro physio here as well, so we work with people who have suffered strokes, Parkinson's, that kind of thing as well.
With such a wide range of sports played so enthusiastically in the area, you must see a wide range of injuries. What injuries are common to which sport?
Every sport varies in its injuries. I've worked a lot with cricketers,who suffer a lot of lower back problems, so you work a lot on core stability issues. For bowlers, they have a lot of shoulder problems. They might not have any pain but want to enhance their performance, so you have to do a lot of work on muscle control around the shoulders so they can be very precise in their delivery and control.
With rugby players it varies depending on the player's position.Again, a lot of lower back problems means core stability work throughout all of the positions. Shoulder problems are common, as are shoulder problems and neck problems especially in the forwards. Because it's a collision sport, you're also getting a lot of soft tissue injuries, bumps, bruises and the like which you have to deal with on top of that.
Cyclists often have problems related to muscle imbalance around the lower back, hip area. It's from the position they're in on the bike and the range of movement they have on the bike.
With runners, it's typical to have lower back pain and often knee pain. The knee pain can come from muscle control around the pelvis and hip which often refers on down to a biomechanical problem at the knee.
You have an innovative means of injury potential screening here. Can you explain more about that?
What we use is a screening protocol called Performance Stability, which Sarah Mottram, who runs the Movement Works,wrote with Mark Comerford in Australia. It can be used for anybody, from athletes to the general public. It screens your movement control from top to bottom, head to toe, both at what we call low-load - which is more about motor control and co-ordination - and high load, which is under load.
It takes about an hour and a half to complete that screening and it's done without pain.You can screen top to bottom which might highlight areas where there is some uncontrolled movement or a weak link, which could potentially cause an injury. So then you can go and work on that weakness, so a rugby player could work on something preseason so during the season, they hopefully avoid the problem ever occurring and avoid injury.
That's a very new thing, there are very few protocols out there in the country or the world like that. It's a good starting point for any athletes that come in, then we rehab those weak links to make them stronger.
It's a series of tests looking at movements, seeing how they can control their movements with the right muscles. We chart everything and compile a summary looking at which joint or whatever is the problem, and what direction can't be controlled. But it also shows your strengths, as well as those weaknesses.
