Want to get the most out of your physio sessions? Here are some top tips to ensure that you do!

There is nothing quite like a new year’s resolution to get you starting something. That’s really the easy bit, the tough bit is keeping it up. You’re likely feeling fat and unfit after a festive season of excess, and whilst it is good to indulge ourselves now and again, let’s be honest if you carry on with that trajectory, you’re likely to have more than a few kilos by this time next year, you might even pick up a few illnesses and long term issues along the way too. Remember that low fitness kills more people than smoking, diabetes and obesity combined and that physical inactivity is associated with a higher risk for severe Covid19. If it’s not just your body you are worried about Google ‘Scholarly articles about the psychological benefits of exercise’ and you will find literally thousands of articles talking about combatting stress, decrease in suicidal thoughts, improved self-esteem, academic improvements in children, improved mood and quality of life etc etc. Exercise really is medicine.

This study aimed to look at injuries in rugby union over 2 seasons in both male and female amateur rugby players.

The most common injuries in men and women were concussion and ankle ligament sprains, and ACL injuries causing the most playing time lost.

THE REALLY INTERESTING BIT: 83% of non-contact injuries for women happened in the last quarter of the game…

Spinal stress fractures, Severe’s Disease, Osgood Schlatter’s Disease amongst other things are the scourge of every young cricketing team. With my background in academy cricket physio and national pathway cricket, I now find myself working in private practice based at a cricket ground and so still see a lot of young cricketers, and the stories really haven’t changed that much. School, club and county are all competing for time with the kids, and parents either feel pressured or are doing the pressurising of the kids to do all of the training and matches laid on by all of the entities. Coupled with the fact that children no longer play in seasons, a perfect storm begins to brew.

In this really interesting study in the International Journal of Sports Physiotherapy, male and female basketball players aged 14-18 were compared for overall strength, strength ratios between quads and hamstrings, and flexibility.

Ever wondered why some pains just don’t go away? Where does pain come from? Are you imagining the pain?

I’d like to challenge you to think more locally, support small business and keep the money in Derby’s economy! If you’d like to have these fitness professionals available to you at the end of this pandemic, then you need to support them through the pandemic.

Remember you get so much more from someone who knows you, knows your injuries, looks out to see if you’re training, advises you, supports you and encourages you.

There is a huge amount of talk about deaths from Covid and numbers of people catching Covid, but very little about people recovering from Covid. In the UK 15% of people who caught Covid in April were dying, now that figure stands at approximately 3%

We’ve been doing our online consultations for a week now and the feedback from patients has been great. It might not be the same as having hands on therapy which gives you the temporary pain relief and mobility to do your exercises, but the video consultations allow us to give you exercises for what equipment you have in the home, allow us to see your new desk set up, review your current exercises, progress them, add new ones in for the crazy online exercise programmes everyone has been doing at home and to put your mind at ease about whatever you are experiencing.

I hope you have all been watching England thrashing South Africa over the last few weeks in the cricket (breaks my poor little South African heart!!). I was lucky enough to work full time in cricket for seven years (as Derbyshire County Cricket Club’s men’s physio and the BLACKCAPS (New Zealand’s International men’s team) physio, and since my time of being fully involved in one of my favourite sports, I am still fortunate enough to treat a lot of cricketers.