Do you like sports? Are you into one? Are you a big fan? If YES then you might find Sports Physical Therapy as a hot choice for a career.
Sports Physical Therapy is among the fastest-growing specialty areas in physical therapy. Widely know as Sports Medicine, sports physical therapy has been an age-long practicum for human athletes. Competitors’ sports therapists ranging from football to gymnastics have utilized a variety of approaches to help maintain physical fitness and to assist in the recovery process of their athlete-patients when an injury occurs to a joint, muscle, ligament, or tendon. But did you know that the earliest sports physical therapy practitioners are professional athletes themselves?
Being a great athlete requires knowing how to take care of your body. That’s how sports med developed. Athletes attended to their physical health as well as to those of their teammates. Today, sports physical therapy has evolved into a distinctive specialty as it now focuses on the effects of any form of exercise or physical activity aside from basic prevention or enhancement of physical performance to help injured athletes recover.
The field has grown expansively as more and more people in general, not just athletes start to become aware of their health as reflected in their fit bodies. The role of the sports therapists has become more and more important as they are called upon to help people achieve optimal health and peak physical performance by designing fitness activities, exercise programs for schools and health clubs, and special conditioning programs, while also teaching people, in general, some special knowledge and skills on injury prevention and strength, endurance, or agility training.
The Sports Medicine term for Sports Physical Therapy is in fact not secluded to the treatment of only athletes. Sports Physical Therapy is a treatment of anyone involved in physical exercise. Sports physical therapy is more accurately defined as healthcare for anyone who plays sports as well as those who perform the exercise. This means that sports physical therapy, aside from its primary focus on acute/chronic injury prevention, also includes management of medical problems caused by exercise, treatment of chronic disease with exercise, and even specific exercise needs for children or women.
Aside from hospitals and clinics, sports physical therapists also work for community health centers, consulting groups, nursing homes, rehabilitation centers, private sports medicine clinics, fitness centers, sports facilities, organizations for the handicapped, government health agencies, home health agencies, and schools, including high schools and colleges. Many sports physical therapy practitioners are also technically self-employed in private practice even though they work in much the same way and setting. But forget that you can work privately for a ‘Beckham’ – you’re making more people fit!
