Asha De­Fre­itas-Mose­ley

From my days at uni­ver­si­ty, I learned that an ath­lete car­ries him/her­self unique­ly and in a way that is rel­a­tive to the cul­ture and en­vi­ron­ment of his/her sport whether foot­baller, vol­ley­baller, golfer, run­ner etc.

When an ath­lete comes in for their ini­tial eval­u­a­tion with me for their in­jury, I not on­ly get to know the de­tails of their in­jury but I slip in op­por­tu­ni­ties to bet­ter un­der­stand the per­son­al­i­ty and tem­pera­ment of the in­di­vid­ual with whom I hope to be work­ing. Un­der­stand­ing these el­e­ments helps to frame an ap­proach in dis­pens­ing their plan for re­cov­ery thus af­ford­ing me a bet­ter chance at a smooth, com­plete re­cov­ery.

The first thing I take note of is whether the in­di­vid­ual is part of a team sport or an in­di­vid­ual sport. An in­di­vid­ual's char­ac­ter is what lends him/her to be more of an in­di­vid­ual play­er or a team play­er. Of course, this is not a "catch all" in­ter­pre­ta­tion to un­der­stand­ing the in­di­vid­ual as there are self­ish and/or cocky team sport ath­letes as there are team-ori­ent­ed in­di­vid­ual sport ath­letes.

How­ev­er, it is one way to build a very ba­sic pro­file on what can be ex­pect­ed while work­ing with the in­di­vid­ual through their time of in­jury, a time when most peo­ple tend to be quite frag­ile. The key is to keep them ac­tive in some way while they may need to stay away from their sport of choice tem­porar­i­ly.

Re­gard­less of their aca­d­e­m­ic back­ground, an ath­lete's ob­ses­sion with their sport will usu­al­ly put that ath­lete in a po­si­tion to teach a ther­a­pist op­er­at­ing in a clin­i­cal set­ting more about their sport while they work to­geth­er. The ath­let­ic train­er/ther­a­pist who works specif­i­cal­ly with a sport has a greater like­li­hood of de­vel­op­ing a more in-depth un­der­stand­ing of the in­tri­cate na­ture of a par­tic­u­lar sport, be­yond just the re­ha­bil­i­ta­tive and train­ing as­pect of it.

As I have said in columns be­fore, in cop­ing with an in­jury an ath­lete goes through many men­tal stages of re­cov­ery, just as the body goes through dif­fer­ent phys­i­cal phas­es of heal­ing. Be­tween the ther­a­pist and ath­lete, there must be a sense of trust and faith in each oth­er. The client must have some mea­sure of con­fi­dence in the ther­a­pist's abil­i­ty to lead him/her to full re­cov­ery while the ther­a­pist is as­sured of the client's com­mit­ment to re­cov­ery.

Al­though some cas­es may be more com­pli­cat­ed than oth­ers, ef­fec­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion and a sol­id sports med­i­cine team ap­proach helps to main­tain a sense of con­trol. This re­as­sur­ance helps main­tain that con­fi­dence while al­low­ing the ath­lete to stay fo­cused on his/her re­cov­ery.

The men­tal for­ti­tude of re­cov­er­ing from in­jury is not to be un­der­es­ti­mat­ed, re­gard­less of age or sta­tus. Whether an in­di­vid­ual is aim­ing for pro­fes­sion­al glo­ry or just try­ing to stay healthy, the lim­i­ta­tions brought about by in­jury can be a point of men­tal con­flict for a com­pet­i­tive or health con­scious per­son alike.

While the stakes for a pro­fes­sion­al ath­lete will be weighed dif­fer­ent­ly for a health en­thu­si­ast, for each per­son the bur­den ex­ists and it has moved many a per­son to tears dur­ing their re­hab ses­sion when they see them­selves be­ing chal­lenged to do what may ap­pear to be a fun­da­men­tal and quite sim­ple re­ha­bil­i­ta­tive ex­er­cise.

Cel­e­brat­ing mile­stones in their re­cov­ery is some­thing to be recog­nised and cel­e­brat­ed even if on­ly with words of praise. To be hon­est, some­times a ther­a­pist too feels a sense of pride and ac­com­plish­ment think­ing that he/she may have played a small part in the jour­ney to­wards get­ting to that point. For both par­ties it is sym­bol­ic of hav­ing got­ten an­oth­er step or two clos­er to re­turn­ing to full ac­tiv­i­ty or maybe just re­sum­ing train­ing again.

The unique ad­van­tage that ex­ists most times when work­ing with mem­bers of the ac­tive pop­u­la­tion is that they are very well aware of their bod­ies. They know when some­thing does not feel right from mild tight­ness in a par­tic­u­lar area to recog­nis­ing when "pain" has be­come "dis­com­fort." This, how­ev­er, is age rel­a­tive. With the younger ado­les­cent ath­lete (14 years and be­low) a bit more time is need­ed to get the rel­e­vant feed­back that will some­times come not just through words but ac­tions, as­sess­ing them dur­ing their re­hab ses­sion.

Ath­letes/en­thu­si­asts who spend a sig­nif­i­cant amount of time be­ing su­per­vised by their ther­a­pist di­rect­ly, feel like they are con­stant­ly pro­gress­ing. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion comes in many forms dur­ing a ses­sion and it is on­ly if the ther­a­pist is around to ob­serve them all that they are able to ad­dress the de­fi­cien­cies, con­cerns or ques­tions of what should be their first pri­or­i­ty, their client.

Asha De Fre­itas-Mose­ley is a cer­ti­fied ath­let­ic train­er with the Na­tion­al Ath­let­ic Train­ers' As­so­ci­a­tion of the USA. She has over ten years of ex­pe­ri­ence work­ing with ath­letes and oth­er mem­bers of the ac­tive pop­u­la­tion, re­ha­bil­i­tat­ing and re­turn­ing them from in­jury to full play. She can be reached at #17 Hen­ry Pierre Street, St James. Tel: 221-4237.

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