Sports Physiotherapy

The first session is mostly questions and assessment, not treatment. We want to know what you play, what position, how many sessions a week, what the injury felt like when it happened, and what you were doing in the weeks before it, because a hamstring that goes in round three after a light pre-season is a different problem to one that goes in round eighteen.

Then we assess. That means looking at how the injured area moves and loads, but also at what's happening above and below it. A knee that keeps flaring up under load is often a hip and ankle story as much as a knee one.

You leave with a clear explanation of what we found, what we think caused it, a realistic sense of how long it's likely to take, and what has to happen before you're back playing.

Most of the frustrating sports injuries we see aren't mysteries. They're the predictable result of a load the tissue wasn't ready for, a movement pattern that puts stress somewhere it shouldn't go, or a previous injury that was rested rather than rehabilitated.

Your program is built to change that, and it progresses on what you can do rather than how many weeks have passed. Early on that might be settling pain and keeping you moving. Later it's loading the injured tissue deliberately and progressively, then rebuilding the specific qualities your sport demands: sprinting, changing direction, jumping and landing, kicking, contact. We call those three stages The Well Motion Recovery Path™: Reset, Rebuild, Return.

This isn't just a preference for being thorough. In a two-year study following people back into pivoting sport after knee reconstruction, those who passed a set of strength and hopping targets before returning had a reinjury rate of 5.6%, compared with 38.2% among those who returned without meeting them ¹. Same surgery, same sports: the difference was whether the decision to return was made on measurable criteria or on something less specific.

The last stage is the one most commonly skipped: doing those things at full intensity, under fatigue, before you're cleared. Returning to play when you feel fine at 70% is how re-injury happens.

Returning to sport after a reconstruction is its own process, measured in months rather than weeks, and it has stages that can't be compressed. After an ACL reconstruction in particular, the gap between "the knee feels good" and "the knee is ready for competitive change of direction" is wide, and closing it is most of the work.

Time matters here too, alongside the criteria. In the same two-year cohort, the reinjury rate fell by roughly half for every additional month that return to sport was delayed, up to about nine months after surgery ¹. That's a hard thing to hear at month five when the knee feels good, which is why we're specific about the targets you need to hit before each progression and don't leave it to how you feel on the day.

We run that alongside your surgeon's protocol, not in competition with it. Our post-surgical rehabilitation page covers the broader recovery process after an operation.

Compression therapy (the inflatable boots or sleeves that squeeze the limb in a repeating cycle) has become a fixture in gyms and clubrooms. We use it, and we'll tell you plainly what the evidence supports.

A 2024 review pooling 17 studies found lower-limb intermittent pneumatic compression (IPC) had a trivial-to-small benefit for muscle function, a trivial-to-moderate effect on pain and soreness, and a highly variable effect on markers of muscle damage, concluding it mainly helps with how sore you feel, with most protocols running about 20 to 30 minutes ². A 2025 review went further, finding moderate-certainty evidence that it did not reduce muscle soreness at 24 hours after exercise ³. So the evidence is mixed, and we'd rather tell you that than sell it harder than it deserves.

Which lands here: worth using, pleasant, and reasonable to include between heavy sessions or in a congested fixture period. Not a treatment for an injury, and not a substitute for the loading work that gets you back playing.

You can book at Engadine, Mount Annan, Narellan or Appin. We also see patients across the Sutherland Shire, where a lot of our sports work happens close to the clubs and ovals people train at.