Sports Injury

Sports injuries include damage to the joints, bones, and connective tissues that make up your musculoskeletal system, due to physical activity. The most common types of sports injuries injuries are:

Acute injuries

Ligament sprains, strained muscles, broken bones, and torn cartilage are all common types of acute sports injuries. Meniscal, anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), and medial collateral ligament (MCL) tears affect the knees, rotator cuff tears affect your shoulder, and labral tears can occur in your shoulder or hip.

Repetitive strain injuries

Repetitive strain injuries tend to occur when you make the same movement many times over months or years. Medial epicondylitis (golfer’s elbow) and lateral epicondylitis (tennis elbow) are examples of tendon injuries that develop from repeatedly swinging a golf club or tennis racquet.

The kinds of sports injuries that might affect you depend on the type of sport you play. For example, acute fractures of the lower extremities (leg, knee, ankle, and foot) are more common in fast-paced, close-contact games like football, ice skating, and hockey. If you use your arms a great deal as you would when playing baseball or practicing gymnastics, shoulder injuries like rotator cuff tears and dislocations are more likely.

When exercising and playing sports regularly, a proper warm-up before and a cool-down afterwards is vital to preventing injuries. These protect your muscles, tendons, ligaments, and joints and help prevent injuries down the line. Additionally, massage and icing of sore muscles are valuable tools in injury prevention and full workout recovery.

And of course, monitoring yourself and watching out for your body is one of the most important things you can do to prevent injuries. Don’t push yourself beyond your limits, lift more than is comfortable, or try to shrug off pain. This can turn ordinary soreness into an injury, or turn minor injuries into major problems. Listen to your body, and take the rest and care you need.

Physical therapy is key to recovery from a sports injury. The Town Center Orthopaedics team has state-of-the-art physical therapy facilities on-site that offer elite services for all types of sports injury.

Some patients might also require orthotics, splint, brace, and medication to reduce pain and inflammation during the healing process. While most types of sports injury respond well to these conservative treatments and are always important in recovery from a sports injury, some patients require further intervention.

Town Center Orthopaedics uses advanced techniques and the latest, cutting-edge treatments to help you get back to playing sports as soon as possible. These include:

Regenerative medicine

Regenerative medicine uses naturally occurring human cells from your body or donated tissues to help damaged tissues repair themselves. Types of regenerative medicine available at Town Center Orthopaedics include platelet-rich plasma (PRP), Lipogems adipose tissue therapy, and Renu amniotic stem cell therapy.

Steroid injections

Inflammation in your spine, joints, and connective tissues is sometimes difficult to treat. Steroid injections contain medication that has a powerful anti-inflammatory effect, which can make a significant difference for pain management.

Surgery

Sometimes a sports injury affects tissues that don’t heal very well, such as the cruciate ligaments and meniscus in your knees. When injuries like these don’t respond to conservative treatments, you might need surgery to repair the damage. The highly skilled surgeons at Town Center Orthopaedics perform minimally invasive arthroscopy on joints, repairing injuries like ACL tears using tendon grafts.