SPORTS ACUPUNCTURE & REPETITIVE STRAIN INJURIES (RSI) IN BONDI JUNCTION SYDNEY

As an athlete or an active person, the last thing you want is a sporting injury to keep you from doing what you love. There are many different types of injuries that can get in the way of sport and day to day life, such as:

 

• Tennis elbow (lateral epicondylitis)

• Golfer’s elbow (medial epicondylitis)

• Achilles tendinopathy

• Plantar fasciitis

• Rotator cuff tears

• Shoulder bursitis

• Knee meniscus tears

• Patella tendinopathy

• Hip bursitis

• Various muscle strains and tears

• Various ligament sprains

• Post concussion syndrome

 

Just to name a few. For some, surgery may have been necessary to repair damaged structures, and now you’re recovering from surgery. For others, you may not even play a sport or be very active but have ended up with a repetitive strain injury. For example, it’s not uncommon for people like desk workers, tradies or hairdressers who have never picked up a tennis racquet, to develop tennis elbow (lateral epicondylitis).

 

Whatever your injury, you want to be able to recover quickly and get back to normal exercise and activity as soon as possible. You also probably want to avoid reinjuring yourself in the same way in the future.

 

Proper rest and rehabilitative exercises are going to be an important part of recovery, but rest alone is rarely enough, and doing the rehab exercises effectively can be difficult due to pain and muscular imbalances around the injury. Having treatment to help reduce inflammation, improve circulation, reduce pain, increase range of motion and restore muscle function can go a long way in speeding up recovery. Hello acupuncture…

 

How do we use acupuncture for sport injuries and RSI?

 

Your body has an amazing ability to heal, repair and adapt from injuries, so an acupuncturist’s job is to identify how best to help the body do what it needs to. Most of this comes down to regulating circulation and restoring muscle function to the surrounding areas. 

 

The beauty of acupuncture for painful injuries is that we can avoid treating the injured area directly in the early stages by using “distal acupuncture” (points distant to the affected area). You may have experienced where you’ve had massage or other treatment to the area only to find that it aggravates your pain and inflammation initially. We like to avoid that where we can.

 

As your injury heals, we may also include “local acupuncture” (treatment points in the affected area) to help address tissue adhesions that are still present. For certain injuries, this may involve electro acupuncture to help more strongly stimulate healing of connective tissue and address muscle inhibition.

 

At Acupuncture Grove in Bondi Junction Sydney, we tailor acupuncture for sporting and repetitive strain injuries specifically to you. Typically if it’s going to be helpful for you, we will know very early on within the first 4-6 treatments (often earlier). That doesn’t mean that it will be completely better in that time, but you should feel some early signs of relief or improvement from the acupuncture if it’s going to help. Once we know how you’re responding to the acupuncture, we’ll then work out a treatment plan for you that will include rehab exercises where appropriate. The ultimate goal is to get you back to sport or regular activity without the need of acupuncture anymore, or to keep it as something you do for maintenance.

 

Chinese herbal medicine may also be a useful adjunct when working with injuries. It’s the same idea as acupuncture, we use it for a period to help address certain imbalances, but as you improve, we aim to get to a point where it’s no longer necessary. If it’s something that we feel will help you along, we’ll discuss it as part of the treatment plan. 

 

If you would like to try acupuncture for a sporting or repetitive strain injury with Acupuncture Grove in Sydney’s Bondi Junction, please book online here or contact us with any questions.