Sports Injuries

What sports injuries are

A sports injury is tissue damage from athletic or recreational activity, and it falls into one of two categories: acute injuries with a clear moment of onset (a rolled ankle, a hamstring strain on a sprint, a shoulder injury from a fall) and overuse injuries that build gradually from repeated load (running pain that creeps in over weeks, a shoulder that stops feeling right after months of training). The distinction matters because it determines treatment — acute injuries need staged tissue healing and a careful return to load, while overuse injuries need a load-vs-capacity correction more than they need rest.

What’s actually going on

Sports injuries fall into two broad buckets, and the distinction matters for how we treat them.

Acute injuries happen at a specific moment — a rolled ankle, a hamstring strain on a sprint, a shoulder injury from a fall. There’s a clear “this is when it happened” memory.

Overuse injuries build gradually. There’s no specific incident — just an awareness that running has gotten more painful over the last few weeks, or that a shoulder has stopped feeling right after months of training. These almost always involve a mismatch between load (how much, how often, how intensely) and capacity (what the tissue is currently ready to handle).

Most overuse injuries are preventable in hindsight. The body usually gives early warning — a slight ache, a quick-fading discomfort during warm-up — before things tip into a real injury. Catching them at that stage is much faster to address than after they’ve fully developed.

When to see someone

For acute injuries, the timing rules are practical:

• Same day to 48 hours: Significant swelling, inability to bear weight, suspicion of fracture — go to your family doctor or emergency for screening first. We’re happy to be part of the rehab plan once that’s been ruled out.
• First week: Any injury that hasn’t substantially settled — come in. Early assessment and graded movement do more for outcomes than just resting.
• Beyond a week: Anything that’s still bothering you, or that’s affecting how you train or move.

For overuse injuries, the rule is even simpler: earlier is faster. The longer you train through a brewing problem, the more compensations stack up and the longer the unwinding takes.

How we treat them

Sport-injury care almost always combines hands-on work and a structured loading plan:

• Assessment. What got injured, how it’s behaving, what’s compensating, and where the underlying capacity gap is.
• Chiropractic care for any joint involvement, particularly in the spine and pelvis when lower-extremity injuries have started shifting how you move.
• Soft-tissue work — ART and Graston Technique® — for muscle, tendon, and fascial involvement. Particularly useful for runners with ITB syndrome, plantar fasciitis, Achilles tendinopathy, or post-injury fascial restrictions.
• Registered massage therapy — both for treatment and for ongoing recovery support during heavy training cycles.
• Exercise rehabilitation — the core of any sport-injury plan. Progressive loading that rebuilds the specific capacity that was missing.
• Custom orthotics when foot mechanics are clearly contributing.

We work with athletes across the spectrum — competitive triathletes, weekend hockey players, masters skiers, recreational runners, and parents trying to keep up with kids on bikes.

Returning to your sport

The biggest predictor of re-injury isn’t the original injury — it’s how the return-to-sport phase is managed. Most re-injuries happen because someone went back to full activity too quickly, before the tissue had rebuilt the capacity it needed.

A good return-to-sport plan looks like:

1. Pain-free range of motion in the affected area
2. Equal strength to the uninjured side (or to a sensible baseline)
3. Sport-specific loading that progressively reintroduces the demands of the actual activity
4. A graded return to volume and intensity — not “I felt fine on a 5K, so I’ll do a marathon next weekend”

That whole arc usually takes a few weeks beyond the point where the injury “feels better.” The patience pays off.

Related reading

• Silver Star injuries: what we see, what to do, and when to come in — knee, shoulder, wrist, and head injuries from the local hill, and the practical first-72-hours plan.
• What I tell golfers in the first month of the Okanagan season — the back, hip, elbow, and shoulder patterns that put golfers in the clinic every spring.
• What we tell our pickleball patients (you know who you are) — knees, Achilles, and elbows from playing five days a week.