The Difference Between Sports and Regular PT

This is a question we get a lot: "What's the difference between what a sports physical therapist does and what a standard outpatient orthopedic physical therapist does?"

Because I've been asked this a lot lately, I've put a lot of thought into it. And I think the best way to describe it is in the tactics and the frameworks that we use within the clinic.

For example, when I look at an injury, I really look at two different things: I look at the actual area of the injury and then the body as a whole. Let's say you have an Achilles tendon injury. What I do is I'm going to take a look at that Achilles tendon and figure out a very specific strength and conditioning rehab program for that Achilles tendon. And then I'm also going to find a very specific program for your holistic training (aka a strength and conditioning program that avoids loading that injured area).

Many times, what we see is that folks get injured and then they just do the rehab, but they aren't doing anything else because they don't know that they can do those things. And then because of that, they lose strength in other areas of the body. They lose cardiovascular fitness and endurance. They lose general overall strength and even see a reduction in bone mineral density.

Our goal as sports physical therapists is to find everything that someone can do to keep them as active as possible while also respecting the healing time of the injured structure. Then, provide them with a program that specifically addresses that problem and scales their strength and range of motion over time.

This sounds pretty simple in practice when I write it out, but you wouldn't believe how common it is for me to see people who have a knee injury and I ask them what they've been doing, they say nothing because my knee has been injured. But there's so much stuff that person could be doing. They could be doing hip strengthening, strengthening of the opposite leg (the uninjured side), they can be doing core strength endurance and cardio. There are plenty of forms of cardio people can do even with knee pain.

In fact, latest research shows that improving cardiovascular fitness or maintaining cardiovascular fitness can help to improve healing times and ability to recover from injury.

This is why we take this so seriously - because we want to maximize every portion of rehab and give everyone the best chance that they could possibly have to get back to 100% and beyond.

Another difference is in some of our methods. For example, I just saw someone today who has knee pain from playing basketball and I did a full in-depth evaluation of the knee and found that this was primarily due to patellar tendinopathy. I tested his quad strength using our Tindeq quad strength testing device, which is a dynamometer, which gives us objective strength data rather than "can you just push into my hand and I see how strong you are" subjectively.

We found significant quadriceps weakness and a significant asymmetry from side to side that was leading to some of this knee pain. This gives us very clear guidance on what to address and also tells us if we are or are not making progress because I can go back and test this in four weeks and see that he has or has not gained strength.

This is very important when working with athletes because it gives us objective ways to get people back to activity and sport without guessing.

In the end, we can be much more confident when returning back to activity or sport.