Mick Hughes:
Sports & Exercise Physiotherapist
M. Sports Physio, B. Physio, B.Ex. Sci.

After spending the last few posts on ACL and PFJ injuries, I am now going to turn my attention to low back pain in the active teenage athlete. It has been documented that between 26% - 50% of the entire pediatric population will experience low back pain by the age of 15 (1). The rise in incidence has been linked to either increased sedentary activity, or higher levels of organised sporting activity compared to previous generations. With organised sport, injuries unfortunately

Since I was on the topic of ACL injuries in the adolescent female last week, I thought I might broaden my scope a little and cover some more ground on ACL injury. This time I'm going to look more generally at the rates of ACL injury, how many people actually return back to sport after an ACL reconstruction (ACLR), patello-femoral joint (PFJ) pain during rehabilitation, and some return to sport (RTS) outcome measures that should a "non-negotiable" when deciding on return to pl

Earlier this week I shared a link to a recent paper about generalised knee pain in adolescents. It highlighted the fact that we need to be doing more to help improve pain, quality of life and general health & well-being in this age group. If you missed it, the research found that 56% of 15-19 year-olds still had knee pain, 2 years after initial reporting their symptoms (1). The above-mentioned paper covered all knee pain conditions, so what I wanted to do is present some spec

I was talking to a colleague a few weeks ago, who works with volleyball players, and he was telling me that a “positive pain” culture exists with his athletes and the coaching staff. He commented that most members of the team and coaching staff believed that if the athletes didn’t have patella tendon pain, they were not training or playing hard enough. I do completely understand that some injuries will occur despite best attempts to minimise them, but it’s really disappointin

I often tell my patients presenting with a hamstring injury, “If you’re going to hurt one thing in your body, you might as well hurt your hamstring”. I often get a bewildered look in return, but the fact is, there is such a large body of research published, and currently being published, on hamstring injuries that we can now treat and manage these injuries much better than ever before. A major reason for this large body of research is that they are very common in sports that

So I'm going to temporarily turn my attention from ACL injuries, to resistance training in runners. Or specifically, lack thereof. The reason why I'm doing it is because I'm going to lose it, if I have to hear one more time; "Why do I always get knee pain when I run? I get massages often, and I stretch and foam roll my ITB/calf/hamstrings everyday". To be a runner and have knee pain, ITB pain, "shin splints" or achilles tendon pain, it is no longer acceptable, and to be perfe

This question is one that I get asked often by patients who are planning surgery after rupturing their ACL. Unfortunately for my patients, I don’t have an answer that makes them feel warm and fuzzy on the inside. My usual response is a long thoughtful sigh, followed by “How long is a piece of string?”. I also follow that up with the sobering statistic that 80% of ACL reconstruction (ACLR) patients return to some form of sport, 65% return to the same sporting level and only 55