ELITE
PHYSIOS
SPORTS
REHAB
Want the knowledge of someone who’s worked in professional sport as a sports rehab physio lead? No worries, our very own world-cup winning physio Jo McGilchrist was successful in applying for a masters in Sports Injury Rehab with the English Institute of Sport. She worked with GB Taekwando to improve their management of hip injuries and later became the sports rehab physio lead at premiership rugby club Gloucester rugby. Here she looked after short and long-term injured players as well as players that had had surgery. See what the players' have to say here.
Can’t figure out why you can’t get back to the level you want or why you continue to re-injure? Know you need to do hamstring exercises to prevent tears but can’t figure out which ones to do? Is your deficit strength, capacity or rate of force development? Do you need to do concentric, eccentric or isometric exercises through inner, mid or outer range? Sports rehab can be a bit of a minefield but with the wealth of knowledge and experience Jo brings she simplifies it beautifully and will get you rehabbing through the stages and back to your sport.
Sports rehab should be individual to you and your injury. Start too high and you compensate and reinforce poor movement patterns. Stay too low and you’ll never progress your control and stability to that required for your sporting level.
Think you’re ‘too broken’? Jo loves a challenge. She lists her greatest sports rehab achievement as rehabbing a player who became injured whilst on international duty. He had had more than a year of rehab and two surgeries of which the latter was deemed to ‘have failed’ when he presented to Jo.
Jo says that ‘as I had had multiple shoulder injuries as an international athlete including one which put me out for a year I could really empathise with the player. We started off slow and after 3-4 months he was back on the pitch playing premiership rugby week in, week out, I was like a proud mother but that’s what’s achievable when you get sports rehab right’.