Your experiences and how you handle these stressors can move your body into a sympathetic (fight or flight) or parasympathetic (relax and recover) state. Relationships, school, work, and training are all examples of stressors. Stress is how your body responds to events in your life. Those factors aside, what can often get overlooked is the very real part that mental and emotional stress can play in an athlete’s well-being. Recent workload, fitness level, nutrition, amount of sleep, mental stress, environmental changes, and many, many other factors can all play a huge role in the breakdown of tissue. Injuries are much more complex than “this body part is inefficient, therefore this other area suffers”. We began weaning him off the exercises that were part of his normal “spine care” routine, and after a few visits his strength was back to normal and his pain was significantly reduced. He replied, “Pretty much all the time”.Īt that point, I talked to him about how his fracture had healed and explained that any future core strengthening should come from his strength program. I asked him how often he is thinking about protecting his spine. When he discussed what he is doing at home, he explained the exercises doctors gave him in the past. His fracture has now been healed for some time, yet he is still having pain with baseball activities.ĭuring his exam, he demonstrated good mobility with some remaining weaknesses. He was always diligent about completing his home exercise program and listened to his doctor’s instructions.įor much of his high school life, this athlete was told that he kept getting injured because of weakness in his core and hips, along with having poor thoracic flexibility. I recently worked with an athlete who had been to physical therapy on and off for the last several years with multiple lumbar stress fractures. However, the psychological impact this can have on a person is often ignored-and it is an impact that is often more severe for an athlete trying to allow their body to perform at peak levels. In a short-sighted way, this makes perfect sense, and this model has helped many athletes. ![]() Traditionally, the standard of care has been to identify areas on the body that are not moving optimally, assign blame to those areas as the reason an athlete got hurt, and then “fix” those areas. What we tell athletes under that care can have long term psychological effects that present themselves in physical manifestations. At some point in their careers, many baseball players have to spend time under the care of a medical provider.
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