Ankle Sprain are the most common acute injury in tennis players. It can lead to significant time lost to injury and long-term disability. If poorly managed, this can lead to re-injury, muscular atrophy, increased stiffness, and reduced competitive capacity. Some may sprain their ankles outside of the tennis court. This may be when walking down stairs, on uneven ground, or by a misstep. Thousands of ankles are sprained daily.

Most people think their sprains are inconsequential, but mismanagement may predispose ankle instability or a missed fracture injury. You need to consult a healthcare professional if there is ankle swelling, pain with fingertip pressure, or difficulty standing or walking. Prevention strategies are proven to reduce the likelihood of acute injury. Appropriate progressive strength & conditioning, balance & proprioception, agility, and cardiovascular training can improve endurance, power, and coordination during play.

Manual therapy can help reduce muscle stiffness and fatigue accumulated in training and competitive play. This helps optimize rest and recovery for athletes. After an injury, optimizing tissue repair and recovery through structured rest, exercise prescription, and manual therapy will reduce overall time spent off-court and improve performance when returning to sport.

Tennis Elbow

Should you have surgery, or conservative treatment?

Although with excellent results, evidence currently demonstrates no additional benefit of surgical excision of degenerative tendon over and above placebo (e.g. incision and exposure of tendon). Manual therapy intervention accelerates your rehabilitation.

Manipulative techniques performed by a trained professional allows for better and faster recovery of the affected tendon. Specific manual procedures improve the tendon and muscle’s capacity to stretch and strengthen. Graded exercise therapy is beneficial in improving outcomes. Most tendinopathies respond brilliantly to progressive, resistance-based training. The intensity of exercise depends on symptom acuity and whether swelling is present. Through incremental training, your tendon will increase its tensile strength, elasticity, and capacity to see you through your matches.

Our therapists @ The Body Group can help.
Physiotherapy can help manage your pain, improve your strength and flexibility. We can provide a variety of treatments and help you understand your problem. We may recommend a series of exercise that help reduce your elbow strain, improve tendon healing, to accelerate your return-to-play.
Osteopaths assess the functional biomechanics of your upper limb and their interrelationships. We ascertain the structural integrity of the joints, ligaments, tendons, and muscles surrounding the injury. Our comprehensive treatment will help optimize your movement efficiency and recovery.

Improve your performance. Up your game.

Book your appointments at The Body Group for Treatments & Assessments.

Look at the difference in these two pictures, taken seconds apart. Observe the way the tissue changes in the face and neck. In the first photo, you see a face ageing as gravity pulls down the soft tissue that has no support structure, resulting in jowls, while in the second photo the soft tissue is balanced on the facial bone structure, helping to redefine the loose jaw line.

Slouching when sitting also causes the abdominal organs to push forward, simply because when you slouch, your rib cage and pelvis are closer together and the intestines have to move out – in some cases onto our laps.

A hunched back and shoulders also cause us to look older because this kind of condition is often associated with elderly people who have heart or lung disease.

Sadly, we are now seeing younger and younger people coming to us with poor posture. Contributing factors include heavy school bags and sitting with the hips too low while doing homework on a laptop or other device. I recently saw a girl under the age of 8 who had both scoliosis and a rib hump due to her poor sitting posture while watching YouTube cartoons much of the day.

Poor posture causes many changes that occur from the inside, including :

• • Compression of the spinal cord (the largest bundle of nerves in the body)
  • Forward head posture, which decreases blood flow to the brain, contributing to brain fog
  • Headaches
  • Arthritic changes in the joints of the entire spine
  • Shearing of the vertebrae, so that one vertebra starts to slide forward of the one below it (spondylosis)
  • Compression of the roots of the nerves that run from the spinal cord to all areas of the body, resulting in loss of muscle strength, loss of sensation and impaired bodily functions
  • Compression of the blood vessels and nerves in front of the shoulders and in the armpit areas. This can create thoracic inlet and outlet dysfunction (i.e. arm and hand weakness, or symptoms such as burning, tingling, numbness and pins and needles).
  • Poor digestion and elimination
  • Back and neck pain and loss of motion

For more information on what happens to your body when you slouch, and also how to find the correct chair and custom adjust it for your particular needs, please read the article on Sitting Posture.

Our therapists are available to assist you with:

• • Spinal alignment assessment and treatment
  • Advice on how to modify your work station or home environment
  • A stretching and strengthening programme for all levels of fitness
  • Treatments using Physiotherapy, Osteopathy, Active Isolated Stretching (AIS), joint mobilisation, and various types of massage, from releasing muscle spasms to restructuring your alignment

Contact us at +852 2167 7305 or email info@thebodygroup.com.

When clients don’t seem to be recovering well from injuries, and even those clients who come to me with chronic pain from excessive seated posture, the first questions I ask are about the quality and – more importantly – consistency of rest. We all know that the fitness industry is booming in Hong Kong with boutique gyms opening seemingly on every corner. These facilities offer cutting edge techniques and all the latest supplements. Sure it will cost you plenty, but you will be fast tracked to success, right? We all wish it worked this way. Working hard and being consistent, tracking results and paying a close eye to nutrition is paramount but when it comes to making gains and reaching ultimate potential the most important “vitamin” or “supplement” that’s lacking can’t be bought or sold. If you are not meeting your goals in the gym or field, or not recovering from injuries or hard training, it’s likely that your lack of zzzzzz’s is to blame.

This is not a lecture, it’s a reminder. Your body responds to strength training by repairing the damaged tissues and adapting the nervous system to respond to heavier loads or increased duration of exercise. It can’t do this during the day when you are being taxed in many different ways. The bridge between the nervous system and the endocrine system is the hypothalamus, a small almond-sized structure in the brain that links these two systems via the pituitary gland. This area is negatively impacted when sleep is disrupted, affecting hormones and important neurotransmitters alike. Growth hormone for example is essential to our health. It is the prime catalyst for tissue healing and growth and also helps to lower cortisol levels, a primary stress hormone that, when elevated, breaks down proteins and slows the overall immune response that is needed to rebuild tissue and support the health of the nervous system. Cortisol can also interfere with insulin sensitivity which, when lowered, causes the body to store fat – often in the areas where we don’t want it.

You can see from this how vital growth hormone is. You also need to be aware that the majority of it is released at night. So again, the possible benefit of all the best personal trainers, physios, and world class nutritional products will be minimised if you don’t take the time to get 8 to 9 hours of good, restful sleep per night on a consistent basis.

Given that good sleep is so vital to our health, let’s review some simple pointers:

• Establish a sleep-wake schedule and stick to it like glue, on weekends too if possible.
• Remember to get regular exposure to sunlight; this ensures better production of melatonin later in the day.
• Exercise early in the day if possible. Intensive exercise and exercising late in the day will stimulate the nervous system and be counterproductive to falling asleep.
• Avoid both inactivity and over sleeping if at all possible. Getting the body into a regular routine will train the body to rest when it needs to do so.
• Use supplements such as highly absorbable magnesium and tryptophan, or eat a small amount of gluten free, low glycemic carbohydrate to boost serotonin levels.
• Avoid excessive or even moderate alcohol consumption and be cautious with caffeine intake.
• And don’t forget to manage stress with techniques such as meditation, acupuncture, or my personal favorite: a session of Active Isolated Stretching. Stretching is shown to promote relaxation and reduce cortisol levels.