At Perfect Balance Clinic, we help many professional athletes with their sports injury and performance needs. We have an exceptional team of practitioners with specialisms in Osteopathy, Physiotherapy, Sports Massage, Sports Therapy and Podiatry to help provide you with a bespoke, tailored service. Just like Joey Duck, one of our clients who kindly let us use the video on the right, says, “being the best is about having the right team of people behind you”.
We like to think that we provide a very different service for athletes. Many athletes visit their physiotherapist when things go wrong with the hope of being fixed. We look for the cause of the injuries before they happen to determine and help predict the onset, so avoiding unnecessary time off the track or field. We make sure that we feed back to you about what is going on with your body to cause the injury and help you to overcome this and return to full fitness.
Below are listed some common FAQs and complaints sportspeople often ask before coming to see us. If you need any advice, don’t hesitate to contact us.
We pride ourselves on the personalised assessment protocol that we use at the clinic. Our process means that we are able to get to the cause of your injury or disappointing performance from a biomechanical perspective.
This means that no stone is left unturned. We can use in-depth video analysis and movement screening to allow us to get inside your injury and see what is causing the issue. Our process is a team effort, which means that you get the best from all of us, as well as the ability to sample the wealth of experience we have to offer.
You may also receive a biomechanical report, which you are free to take back to your coach, or use it to continue to work with our team to move forwards. We advise regular reviews throughout your season to make sure you get the best out of us and ensure good results!
97% of all of our clients feel an improvement after their first session. We pride ourselves on our ability to make a change quickly with our unique and highly effective approach to sports injuries. This means that you can quickly get to the bottom of what’s causing your pain, receive treatment for this, and leave feeling much better and ready to get back to peak fitness.
We are also honest so, if like the 3% of people that we referred back to their GP, we can't help you immediately, we will tell you. By sending you to the right place to deal with your sports-specific problem, we ensure a speedy recovery. It wouldn't be right to say 100% of our clients feel better from what we do but, actually, our ability to know what we can and can't treat ensures you are safe and in the right place to recover from your sports injury, so you are ready to train or compete again.
Humans have slow vision. The human eye can only separate a maximum of 10–12 images per second. There are even some suggestions amongst scientists that events lasting less than 0.25 seconds cannot usually be seen clearly, if at all. Although coaches are irreplaceable in analysing athletes’ techniques, often the coach's eye cannot extract all the necessary details in a live sporting situation.
Ask yourself, is my injury the result of something that my coach cannot see?
Video cameras create the illusion of motion by ‘tricking’ the human eye. Video cameras play 25 flashing still pictures each second. As the eye cannot separate those pictures, we get the feeling of continuous movement. The use of a video camera is a very effective tool to help you to improve sporting technique and detect why your injury is happening. Our Quintic™ Video Analysis software enables video capture at 25, 50, 100 and 250 frames per second (fps). At 100fps, each still image is 10 milliseconds apart, capable of capturing even the fastest of human movement. In addition to just one video camera, we have the capability of capturing up to four live video images, simultaneously, should we need to.
More and more athletes, coaches and scientists are using video feedback as a coaching aid. Quintic™ Video Analysis can very quickly help you as a professional athlete to understand the basic fundamentals of a specific movement, and where this breaks down. Providing you with immediate performance feedback via our video software is a very powerful analysis tool, and a great way to prevent injuries. The images could be used to assist your coach in their task, as your performance can be repeated after an event and slowed down during critical phases.
By comparing performances of your previous movements, or even other athletes, our software enables you to compare video images via the computer screen. Differences between techniques can be identified (competition versus training) and this information made available immediately to the athlete. We find that the information gathered from this process is useful in highlighting dysfunctional areas and enhancing athletic performance.
It is important that we use the information gained during the video consultation process to formulate a corrective exercise programme. This will often, in more cases than not, mean that you will receive professional advice on rehabilitation, tips on how to improve your athletic performance and information on how to stay injury free.
We work with corrective exercise specialists, strength and conditioning specialists and, on occasion, with coaches to help an athlete regain their former physical balance and power. An individual 'sport-specific' training programme can be put together to help with any problems – from complex rehabilitation to improving strength and performance.
We sometimes see athletes whose club Physiotherapist cannot help, and we like the challenge of dealing with these complex cases. Nothing with regards professional sports at a high level is easy, and that goes for the injuries also, but we like to provide as much help as possible.
By creating a metabolic profile of the athlete through GI (stool samples) and hormonal testing (blood biochemistry), it is possible to improve performance and help the healing process, where perhaps drugs and injections may not have helped before. Once a profile is created, a suitable short-, medium- and long-term programme is implemented for the athlete to follow; this may include dietary changes and advice on nutritional supplementation.
All our elite sports professionals’ details are treated with the strictest confidentiality. We take this very seriously. You will need to explicitly give your club written consent to be able to contact us for access to health records should they need to.
Our elite athletes have different needs from members of the public. Whilst they are still human, the forces and physical demands placed on their bodies during sport can be super human. We always take exceptional care, pay attention to detail, and make sure we are extremely thorough to isolate the problem areas.