THE SCIENCE
YOUR BASELINE
Everyone has a unique range of physical activity that is safe for their body. Injury prevention, sustained peak performance, and athletic longevity are achieved by maximizing this Zone of Safe Performance.
When you train and compete, your body absorbs a physical load, at a variable degree of intensity, over a period of time. Sprinters or powerlifters support a large load for a short amount of time, whereas the body of a marathoner or a yogi withstands lower intensity stress over a longer period of time.
When you push yourself to new levels of athletic achievement, you often leave your Zone of Safe Performance. When this happens too frequently or too drastically, you can damage your tissue, entering the Zone of Injury.
How Injury
AFFECTS YOUR BASELINE
When you’re injured, your baseline Zone of Safe Performance actually starts to shrink. This happens fast! Muscles start to shut down and you start to compensate. As a result, even after the injured tissue heals, athletic activities that were safe before you were injured are often not achievable without re-injury.
Growing
YOUR BASELINE
Many recovery methods only restore a fraction of your former capacity. These treatment approaches require you to modify your activities to your new, diminished Zone of Safe Performance. At Sporting Medicine, our treatment algorithm is designed to grow your Zone of Safe Performance beyond its original state with science and innovation. This is neuromuscular retraining.
THE TREATMENT ALGORITHM
1) Reset your tissue biology.
Injury and stress change your body’s biological environment. Simply strengthening your muscles won’t produce results until you treat inflammation or damage at a cellular level. First, we address your biology, whether you simply need an over-the-counter medication or if tissue injury has progressed to the point you need to consider an orthobiologic injection.
2) Decrease biomechanical overload.
Tissue damage and sports injuries result from muscle imbalance and poor distribution of your physical load. However, some muscles, even when strengthened, remain underutilized, because your brain doesn’t adequately activate them. Neuromuscular retraining rewires your brain, teaching you to control those dormant muscles. This balanced distribution of your physical load decreases your risk of injury.
3) Increase physical function.
When your biology gets a reset and your muscles can properly distribute load, you increase your capacity to manage heavier loads, for longer periods of time, at higher intensity levels.