Chiropractor for Sports Injuries in Perth

What is a sports injury?

A sports injury is any damage to muscles, tendons, ligaments, joints or bones that happens through sport, training or exercise.

Sports injuries come in two kinds: the sudden ones, and the ones that build up. People often tell us about:

• Sharp pain from a twist, fall or tackle
• A joint that feels unstable or gives way
• Swelling or bruising
• Pain that builds through a season of training
• Stiffness the day after sport that takes longer to settle each time
• The same injury coming back in the same spot
• Back or neck pain from golf, tennis, cycling or the gym

Why it happens

Sports injuries take one of two paths: the sudden injury, and the one that's built up over time.

A sudden injury is mostly physiology. Something has been strained or torn, and it needs time to heal. How long depends on which tissue it is:

• Muscles have a rich blood supply, so they tend to heal fastest. A mild strain often settles within a few weeks.
• Tendons connect muscle to bone. They have less blood supply, so they heal more slowly. Even a mild tendon injury usually takes several weeks.
• Ligaments connect bone to bone. They're your anchors. Stretch or tear one, and recovery is often around three months, sometimes longer.

The injury that builds up over time

The second path is the one that really captures my attention. Nothing dramatic happened. It just wore out. And the question I want answered is why. Common contributors include:

• A twist in the pelvis or a stiff lower back changing how you load your legs
• A sudden jump in training after time off
• A week at a desk, then a big weekend of sport
• Weakness or imbalance from one side to the other
• Poor recovery: sleep, warm-ups and rest days
• An old injury that never fully settled

The real cost: you

Sport isn't just exercise. It's your team, your mates, your headspace. It's the Saturday morning run that clears your head, and the round of golf where the real conversations happen.

When you're injured, you lose all of that. You watch from the sideline. You miss the end of the season. You lose fitness you worked hard for, and a bit of who you are.

A note from Geoff

If it's a fresh tendon or muscle injury that just needs to heal, I'll tell you, and guide you to the right help, whether that's a physio or our massage therapists. Michelle and Chikako both offer sports and remedial massage, and Michelle also offers dry needling and cupping, to help you rehab it.

The long-term injuries are the ones I love to investigate. For runners and sports players especially, a twist in the pelvis is like driving a car with the wheels out of alignment. You can get to the shops and back without noticing a thing. But do the drive to Albany and back enough times, and the tyres start to wear unevenly. Then the suspension. Then the chassis. In your body, you feel it first in the soft parts: the tendons, muscles and joints that are taking the extra load.

So I start with gait analysis and the full-body picture: how you walk, run, land and balance, and how your pelvis, lower back, hips, knees and feet work together. Then we work on the areas actually driving the problem, and build exercises around the sport you play. That's the Vitality Method.

I really enjoy working with sports people. They're not just trying to get away from pain. They're moving towards something: performance, a goal, being able to do more. It's an exciting world to be part of.

Try this right now

Stand side-on to a mirror, near something you can hold for safety. Do five slow single-leg squats on your left leg, then your right. Does your knee dive inwards? Does your hip drop, or your body lean to one side? Is one leg clearly harder?

Side-to-side differences like these often explain why an injury keeps coming back.

How we assess sports injuries

We start with your sport and your story: how it happened, your training load, past injuries, and what you want to get back to.

Then we examine the injured area and the whole chain around it, including a gait analysis of how you walk and run, plus movement, strength and balance tests. We screen for anything that needs imaging, a sports doctor or a specialist, such as a suspected fracture or a full tear.

What your plan will include

Here's exactly what happens when you come to Vitality with a sports injury:

• A detailed consultation and clinical assessment
• Gait analysis: how you walk, run and land
• Digital X-rays if clinically required, bulk billed with a valid Medicare card
• Specific adjustments to assess whether change is possible for you
• If change is possible, and it's what you want, a care plan built around you and your lifestyle
• Sport-specific exercises and a step-by-step return-to-sport plan
• Sports or remedial massage, dry needling or cupping with our massage therapists, if you'd like it
• Advice on training load, warm-ups and recovery

My promise to you

Recovery varies a lot with the injury, your body and your sport. I won't promise a timeframe or a return date.

What I do promise is a proper look at why the injury happened, clear steps back to your sport, and a referral to a physio, sports doctor or for imaging when that's the right call.