Benefits Of Sports Therapy

In this episode we have a guest, Kyle, a sports therapist from KS Sports Therapy in Plymouth. We discuss sports injuries, managing pain and the benefits of sports therapy.

In future episodes, we will answer your questions and look more deeply at the affects of pain on our mental health. Feel free to send in questions to:
info@horizonplymouth.co.uk

Learn more about Kyle here: https://www.kssportstherapy.com/

Transcript

Hello and welcome back to Therapy Guy today

we're going to be talking sports therapy.

We're going to be talking about

managing injuries, that sort of thing.

I've got guest in with me today and it's

Kyle from KS Sports Therapy here in Plymouth.

We've got a few questions that we've got

to ask him before I start, I'll let

him introduce himself to you guys.

Hi, everyone.

My name is Kyle Simpson, and like Alan

said, I own KS Therapy in Plymouth.

I just want to say thanks for having me on

today, Alan, and I'm looking forward to talking to you.

Okay, great.

It's fantastic you being here.

So we're going to get right into the call. That's okay.

We're going to start asking you some questions.

All right?

So the first one I've got for you is,

why did you actually get into sports therapy yourself?

So, initially, sports therapy was like the last thing

I wanted to do when I was a kid.

I was boxing, so I wanted

to become, obviously, a world champion.

Once I realised that wasn't planning out because I

wasn't that good, I wanted to become a lawyer,

so that's what I was doing in sixth form.

So I didn't really do anything sporty whilst I

was in sixth form in terms of my education.

But when I went to this university fair, I

really sort of fell in love with law.

So I just basically went to the Marjon Stand.

Picked any sporting course I could do.

And then when it came round to it.

When it came round to obviously picking

the course I wanted to do.

Once I got all my grade, due to the boxing

and I kept getting injured. So I thought.

I may as well learn how to be

a physio or sports therapist to fix myself.

And about a month into the course, I really

just started to enjoy it and I just decided

that's where I'm going to put my efforts.

So, quite luckily, I just fell into it. It's hard here.

It's mad

Sometimes these things come about really

without any sort of plan.

I've spoken on previous podcasts about myself

and my own journey, but it's fantastic.

I've heard lots of great things.

Lots of people obviously recommend you, what you

do for them, but I'd be interested to

hear some stuff about what you actually do

at your clinic and what people you see.

What's the most common injury that

you deal with in your clinic?

Yes, the most common injury, we tend

to get a lower back pain.

I think that's to do with sort

of the Westernised society of the amount.

We sit down a lot.

That is remedied every now and then in

offices where we have stand up desks, but

still the majority of officers have sit down

desks or sorry, like just normal seated desks.

So people are spending long hours sat down, which

is causing a lot of lower back pain.

And I'd say second to that would probably be shoulder

injuries from I see a lot of clients who do

CrossFit and there's a lot of high reps in CrossFit.

And while the technique can be good, it's still quite

a lot of loads to go through your shoulder joint.

So I'd say the most common is probably

lower back, closely followed by shoulder injuries.

Okay, I get a sense of the most common.

One I would have thought would have been back pain.

I think everyone sort of experienced it at some

point, some sort of back injury or whatever.

It depends on, I suppose you're coming to it, isn't it?

If you've got boxing, it's going to be different

than what maybe a football would come to.

Yeah, exactly.

And that's one of the best things about my

job, is I see like a myriad of different

people, but I suppose that certain sports have certain

work ethics attached to them and CrossFit being one

where everyone tries to work extremely hard.

So we tend to see a lot of CrossFit, but

yeah, let me say we see a lot of boxers.

Footballers would get, like, people

with the general public.

And I've even got a few

people training for the Olympics.

Obviously, if it goes ahead this year, fingers crossed.

If I was to come to your clinic yes.

So say I've got a knee injury or

back injury or something else, what is the

sort of treatment that you would give?

What is your philosophy around the sort of

treatment that you'd give to a client? Yes.

So for anyone that comes in to see us initially,

we do an injury diagnosis because obviously we want to

know what it is we actually need to fix.

And then from there, we will implement

a number of different treatments, whether that's

sport's massage, exercise description, habit correction, k,

taping, anything around that kind of environment.

But it all works around the principle that

injury equals load being greater than capacity.

And what this basically means is that everyone's

body has a certain capacity to the amount

of load that it can withstand.

And when we exceed this capacity, we get injured.

Or to put it simply, when we do

more than we can handle, we get injured.

It's all about increasing your body's tolerance

or capacity so you can do more

and significantly reduce injury risk.

Okay, so I've had a few sports massages before. Yes.

For me, they can't be painful. Yes.

It's a common thing, I hear.

But it is worth that pain, isn't it,

to go through that, because it all depends

on the type of injury you've got.

But also, do you give out exercises and things

like that to do for people to do? Yeah.

So just to touch on the sports massage thing,

we try not to make it too painful.

Obviously, there is that they

are known for being painful.

It basically needs to be as painful as

it needs to be to elicit a response.

Every treatment we do, we try to provide the

body a stimulus that the body can adapt to

and then become stronger as a result.

So this is typically done with exercises and looking

at all the research exercises like the Gold standards

for any kind of physical therapy, whether it be

sports therapy, physiotherapy or anything in that arena, this

is simply because exercise gives the body stimulus to

adapt to and as a result it becomes stronger.

And one of the main reasons we do

sports massaging clinic is obviously we will prescribe

exercises, but we're not going to treat the

whole session as a personal training session.

So we will do a sports massage to help

loosen up and free up the body so then

to prepare to do exercises later on. Okay.

I've always got lots of advantage from having done and

I got back to planes were a lot quicker.

Yes, taking part in physical exercise a lot quicker.

After seeing a sports service like myself, a lot of

our work overlap and we were speaking sort of off

mike about that because obviously I see a lot of

people with mental health problems issues surround pain management and

I often recommend that they speak to someone, an expert

in the field like yourself.

I see a lot of clients that sort of men and

women, a 50 50 split the people that I see.

What about yourself?

What sort of clients do you have coming through?

Is there a certain age group, is there

a certain gender or anything else that happens?

Yeah, I'd say in terms of age groups

and genders, it's relatively mixed and relatively balanced.

We get a lot of sporting people, obviously we've

marketed ourselves as sports therapists, but we see people

who have never been to the gym in their

life, which is fine because we just obviously want

to fix injuries, particularly injuries that are musculoskeletal based.

But yes, we have members of the general

public and we also, like we said, we've

got clients who are professional athletes, recreational athletes,

people who are again training for the Olympics.

So everyone's body has to follow

the same laws of physics.

So everyone can get injured and everyone gets in

pain and no one likes being in that.

So we see basically quite a myriad out of people.

What would you say is the best

outcomes that you see in your job?

The best thing about my job is the fact that

we just take people out of pain and pain is

such an interesting topic and like you say, our jobs

have quite a lot of crossover because pain is not

a physical phenomenon, it's a mental phenomenon.

It's made in the brain.

Don't get me wrong, you can have physical causes for

that, but ultimately pain is made in the brain.

Like I always say to my clients that the proof that

pain is made in the brain is that a surgeon can

put you under general anaesthetic, cut you open, crack the reinstate

your heart out, operate on it, put it back in, and

the only time you feel like a mortgage of pain is

when you are walking back up again.

So the best thing about our job

is explaining what pain is to people.

And when you're injured, sometimes people can go

into a cycle of getting injured, resting, not

training enough, and then that affects their mental

health, because then sometimes exercises, people exercise, I'm

sure you hear it a lot.

They don't just exercise for physical need,

they exercise for their own stress relief,

for their own mental health.

So to really improve people's mental health is

one of the best things I do.

And obviously, getting them back to exercises and

then training them, basically training people to not

need me or to need me very minimally.

I like to give people, teach them about pain,

teach them training principles so they don't need to

come see me all the time and they can

usually make smart decisions themselves, which I know you

do a lot with your clients as well.

As you say, there's lots of cross.

We both have the same work ethic, there are

same principles where we're trying to give people the

skills that they need to actually move on and

do what they want to do.

One of the big things I wanted to ask

you about today, because I know you've been doing

this a lot, you've been working with one of

your clients just recently who's had some specific treatment

for back injury and obviously you've been doing really

well, I've noticed you've worked on.

Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Yeah, so I just got off the phone with

him on the way here because I wanted to

cheque in with him and see how he's doing.

So he had stem cell therapy in Harley Street, I

believe, in London, and it was free stand injections into

three of his lumbar discs, which were arthritic.

And the person we're talking about, he was 25 when

he got these injections done, which is very young to

have arthritis of any kind, particularly in the lumbar spine.

But this is the first stem cell treatment of its

kind in the UK, so it's quite exciting and it's

a privilege to be working a bit and to be

selected to carry out the physical therapy for it.

But it's great because when I initially saw him

and up until the point of his stem cell

surgery, he's been in pain for six years and

quite severe pain, debilitating pain, which has caused him

all manner of physical and mental health problems.

And now, since this stem cell surgery and the subsequent

physical therapy that we've done with him in my clinic,

and also taking him into the gym to carry out

exercises to strengthen up, he's reported being pain free for

the first time in six years.

Now, this isn't to say it's all

going to be a linear improvement.

There are going to be times where it sustains a

bit more pain, but at the moment, just to get

an occasional pain free day is great, let alone I'm

having reporting many consecutive days of being pain free.

That's something I'm very excited about.

And that's another great thing about the job.

You get to just do new things all the time because

the field in both areas of executives are ever evolving.

Pressure.

I know what you've been doing lately,

I'm keeping eye on your work.

Yes, I've been watching the progress you've been

making and like I said, I'll be heard

lots of great things about myself.

If I wanted to get in touch with yourself for some

advice or maybe some guidance or come and see you for

three months, how would I get in contact with yourself?

Yeah, so there's plenty of ways, obviously, primarily

through our website, which is Ksportstherapy.com, but we're

also on Facebook and Instagram, as Ksportstherapy and

all of our contact details on there.

So you can just send us a message on even one of

our social media platforms, give us a phone call and our number

can be found on any of those areas as well.

And once we do that, we can convert a little bit about

your injury and if we feel like we can help you, which

we most probably will be able to, we can get you booked

in and get you on the road to recovery. Yeah.

I know it's been quite quick tonight.

The questions on your phone.

But really what I wanted to do is give people

a flavour of who you are in the work that

you do and then I hopefully people ask questions and

maybe you'd be willing to come back and answer some

of those questions and anyone pose me any questions or

they want some more advice or guidance.

Maybe you can come back at a

different episode and give some more feedback.

Can you satisfy? Yeah, definitely.

I'd love to come back again.

It's always great to talk to people who are experts

in their own respective fields and if anyone has got

any questions, if you can, let Alan now and I'll

come back on another podcast and try to answer them

as best I can for you. Great.

Well, I really appreciate you coming in today.

Kyle it's been a pleasure talking to you.

Thanks a lot.

Thanks for listening and hopefully everybody.

I'll see you next time.

Thanks for today.

Thanks to the Therapy Guy.