It’s February, spring is right around the corner (or so Punxsutawney Phil says), and it’ll soon be time to hit the golf course. It’s tempting to just go straight to the driving range or first tee, because that’s the part of any sport that you love –– the playing part. Instead, consider first taking care of your body to set yourself up for a successful season. A body in pain can never perform at an optimal level, so what can you do to keep yourself injury-free this season?

With ski season here, most people create a checklist to make sure all their gear is ready to go. Edges are sharpened, boards are waxed, goggle lenses are replaced, and you're ready for the first good snow of the season. With all the attention we pay to the material goods of the sport, we tend to forget about our bodies' readiness to hit the slopes.

Many people walk into our physical therapy office with injuries from sports or exercise classes where they participate in activities that are too advanced for them. A main example of this is when people participate in High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) exercises. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think that HIIT is a great form of exercise. There’s actually very few forms of exercise I don’t approve of. The exercise isn’t the problem, it’s the individual’s preparedness for it. Do they have the prerequisite strength and motor control for those fast paced movements.

“I think I just need some stretches.”‍This is a comment I hear all the time when people come in for an evaluation. When I ask, “What stretches have you been doing?” They typically describe or show me a collection of stretches they’ve been doing for weeks, months or years. My follow up question is: “Do those stretches seem to help your condition?” Most people express uncertainty when presented with this question. They feel like their stretches help but they’re curious why, if they’re helping, their condition continues to worsen.

As any triathlete knows, riding a Time Trial (TT) bike is not the most comfortable position to maintain for 5, 10, 56, 112 miles or more. First and foremost, please get a good fit from a highly regarded certified bike fitter. Fitters can get certified through a variety of organizations such as: International Bike Fitting Institute, Retul, Wobble-Naught, FIST, etc. It is easy to get lost in a sea of bike fitters, so find a fitter affiliated with a local tri club or cycling team where you can ask around about the fitters expertise & experience. Creating a team of a PT, coach, and bike fitter is the ideal scenario for injury prevention.

Whether it’s on social media or in other forms of advertising, you’re bombarded with appealing figures of individuals with ripped abs. You assume they’re healthy. I’ve treated many of these individuals and I can assure you, many of them are not healthy. Not at all.

Have you ever come off the court and thought “wow my elbow feels tight”? Or you finished your match and noticed your elbow was sore when you grabbed your bag. Or maybe you took a shot and felt a jolt on the outside of your elbow.

It’s fall in Atlanta, and it’s time to get back out on the tennis court. How are you feeling? Do you feel strong and well prepared? Are you excited to help your teammates work toward another championship? Or are you crossing your fingers that the tennis elbow from last season stays away? Gingerly testing out your knee that feels fine until you try to run? Hoping your sticky shoulder doesn’t impact your serve?

As a swimmer, this is my best kept secret. Swimming is a unique sport due to the environment in which you’re in. This makes rehabbing a swimmer fairly unique. When I work with athletes, their primary goals are to return to sport and enhance performance. But most sports are on land. Nothing can really replicate swimming out of the water; and so fully reconditioning a swimmer would often be challenging. To reproduce similar forces, leverage, and buoyancy that water applies to a joint has always been difficult. That’s until I discovered Redcord.

So I have talked to several friends and colleagues about Activcore. It is quite easy for them to see that the most apparent differences between Activcore and your conventional physical therapy are: 1) longer treatment session duration, and 2) use of the Redcord suspension system. However, I would vehemently assert that having more one-on-one time with the client does not simply lead to an opportunity to perform a greater number of sets and reps of each exercise. Rather it provides a more focused, client-centered approach that involves greater attention to detail and a more intimate understanding of each person’s needs.