Growing up I always knew I wanted a career helping others. I wasn’t sure what that career would be though, until I had my first major injury at soccer at eleven years old. I injured my low back while sprinting for the ball. My injury shocked my parents, because according to them, back pain was strictly reserved for older people who were going through the “normal” aging process. Statements like these always confused me.
So on I went to physiotherapy for my back pain, where I met a really great physiotherapist. We did some treatment, she gave me some exercises, and I was back on my way with soccer. And that was the end of the story, right?
Unfortunately, no it wasn’t. This back pain became a staple for me for the next two decades. On the bright side, I had such a lovely experience at physiotherapy that I decided that I also wanted to be a physiotherapist.
Injuries seemed to be a normal part of playing soccer. I watched teammates go down with ankle injuries, ACL (a ligament in the knee) ruptures, concussions, broken collarbones, etc. It felt like it was only a matter of time before my turn would be up. I had a few ankle injuries, some knee pain and my recurring back pain, none of which kept me away from soccer for too long. However, at the age of 17 I tore my right hip flexor at a shooting practice.
That injury kept me out of soccer for 3 months, which felt like agony. But what was worse is it felt like all of my injuries were starting to accumulate. Each injury was starting to be worse than the last, and worst of all, it felt like there was nothing that I could do to stop it. I assumed that I would have these injuries with me for the rest of my life. Since my focus was to be a physiotherapist, I knew that I needed a working body to be able to do my physical job, so I decided to stop playing high-level soccer at the age of 20. I did continue to play recreational soccer, even though my hip flexor and low back continued to give me issues.
People all around me would speak of their old injuries still plaguing them, and how this is seen as normal as we age, but I didn’t want that for me. I was only in my early twenties! I tried to find answers to my pain by seeing various practitioners, but I would get a lot of very general advice, like go stretch your hip flexors. This left me feeling very confused, because stretching my hip flexors always seemed to make my pain worse. I was left with so many questions:
- Was I stretching the wrong muscle? If yes, which muscle was I supposed to stretch?
- Should I be strength training a certain muscle or muscles, if yes, which one(s)?
- Or am I just “broken” because I don’t fit the generic advice?
The scientist in me wasn’t ready to give up though, because I knew that there had to be some sort of way to figure out what my body specifically needed. I just wasn’t sure where to look.
After graduating physiotherapy school, a friend told me about this course, where you sometimes look away from the site of pain to find the origin of it. This all sounded pretty intriguing to me, so I decided to enrol in NeuroKinetic Therapy (NKT). To say that NKT completely changed my life is an understatement. It has completely changed the way I practice and the way that I think about the human body.
The goal of NKT is to figure out where the root cause of the pain lies. Since everybody is different, NKT is an assessment tool used to figure out which muscles (or other structures) are overworking in your body and which muscles are under working. I finally found my tool to help me discover which muscles to stretch and which muscles to strengthen. No more generic exercise advice. I found the method that allowed me cater to and specifically address each and every person’s unique needs. Additionally, NKT is a great tool for prevention of pain. By finding our overworking and under working structures early, we prevent more muscle compensations from forming and start on our releasing and strengthening exercises to reduce the risk of injury.
Despite calling it quits on my soccer career way too early, I am very grateful for everything that I went through. My experiences allowed me to challenge the norm. Now this is my thinking:
- I do not believe that experiencing pain every day is normal.
- Growing older does not inevitability mean pain.
- Self-inflected injuries in sports can be prevented.
Physiotherapy sessions are so exciting, because we are like detectives trying to solve a mystery. Each person comes in with their own set of unique muscle patterns, previous injuries, and experiences. So we get to have fun discovering the body and figuring out what is going on. My goal is help anyone I can in achieving a pain free day-to-day life, while also ensuring no one ever has to feel like they need to retire early from their sport.