When you're involved in sports, you take a certain risk on your body. Knee injuries can be common and some of them require surgery. You've recently injured your knee in a sports-related accident and you want to get back on your feet quickly.
While rest and taking it easy helps to reduce the inflammation and pain resulting from a knee injury, over time the muscles and tendons in your knee begin to stiffen. To get full mobility back in you knee and feel healthy and like yourself again, discover how physical therapy can help.
You strengthen weakened components
Any time you injure your body, the healing process involves repairing the weakened areas that have been compromised. This includes nerves, tendons, cartilage, and muscles, particularly when involving a moving part like the knee. Sports injury physical therapy is specially designed to strengthen your weakened knee so you can support your own body weight sooner and gain better mobility in healthy ways.
The key is to take it slow and go to every rehabilitative appointment. At first, going to physical therapy for your knee injury will be hard as you challenge your body to do the simplest tasks, but over time the exercises become easier as your knee gets stronger.
You gain more natural mobility
The longer you rest your knee, the healthier it becomes following your knee injury. This may be especially true if you had to get surgery to repair severe damage to your knee. Unfortunately, remaining sedentary can have its drawbacks in allowing your knee to become stiff and hard to move.
If you want to get back to sports, you have to regain as much mobility in your knee as possible. Where sports injury physical therapy is beneficial in this area is this: you learn how to stretch and bend your knee in healthy ways that won't compromise the healing process. You will slowly but surely regain muscle control and tendon movement that you would not gain otherwise.
Never try to do more than your body can handle, especially if certain movements bring you more pain and inflammation in your knee. Always do your knee exercises as instructed by your licensed physical therapist. Doing more than your knee can handle actually puts you at risk of making your injury worse. It will take time, but before long you will see the benefits of this type of therapy for getting use of your injured knee again.