There should be no suffering in amateur sports. How to train without pain

Professional sport is a physically demanding activity. Experienced athletes are accustomed to working at their best to perform at their best. Sometimes there are disruptions in this intense pace, caused by injuries and pain, followed by a long recovery period. And we can say that athletes are prepared for this: they are regularly seen by doctors, undergo periodic examinations and work out their training plan down to the last detail.

Another thing is when discomfort and alarming symptoms are brought by amateur sports. In this case, it is necessary to seek help from a specialist. We talked to Kirill Mazalsky, medical director, osteopath, neurologist and founder of OSTEO POLY CLINIC, about how to choose the right physical activity for yourself and what you need to do to stay healthy.

About professional sports: making the right choice and saving energy

– Kirill, what does osteopathy do in general?

– It deals with functional disorders in the human body. If a person has no head, osteopathy will not put it back in place. We talk about functional disorders – this is anything that is damaged without changing the structure. Most often such disorders are related to the loss of balance within the body: physical, psychological, biochemical. Also with the help of osteopathy healthy movement skills are formed.

– And in what cases a person needs to turn specifically to a doctor of osteopathy?

– If a person was born, this is a sufficient reason to see an osteopath. The processes of pregnancy and childbirth are traumatic. During childbirth, babies are functionally traumatized in one way or another, and some can be traumatized structurally as well. If we are talking about the field of osteopathy, almost all children who have undergone childbirth should be examined by an osteopath and, if necessary, treated.

– If we talk about sports, what problems from your field do professional athletes face?

– Sports are traumatic by default. Any kind, except maybe chess or cyber sports.
The main problem is incompetence: coaches or doctors who don’t know how to work with athletes, keeping them at a high level of fitness without harming them. Or the wrong choice of physical activity. A teenager or a child should be investigated by a specialist to understand what kind of load he is inclined to: is he a sprinter or a stayer, is his psychotype suitable for teamwork. Only after that it is possible to think in what sport direction to move.

– What kind of injuries do you most often come to you with?

– Adaptation failure due to the fact that at the moment of the beginning of training the beginners were biomechanically unbalanced. These are problems with the musculoskeletal apparatus, such as scoliosis or joint problems. Every day we load an area with unbalanced biomechanics, we get more energy reserves to compensate for the existing disorders. Then the house of cards collapses and many people have to quit the sport. So the first challenge we face is to bring the basic design of the body architecture to a lower energy consumption. For example, when we stand on one leg, we use more energy than when we stand on two legs. We need to, figuratively speaking, put a person from one leg to two. To build lines and center of gravity in such a way that no extra energy is spent, and we can use the saved energy to improve sports performance.

– Is it impossible for an athlete to take care of saving this energy on his own? Are there any methods?

– There are, but the question arises: is it possible to lift oneself by the hair? Most often in working with the body you need an external point of support against which it can be balanced. To some extent, we can cope on our own, but self-care is most often not possible to correctly diagnose and prescribe treatment. More often than not, this leads to unpleasant consequences. Because pain is a defense mechanism. If we eliminate it with painkillers, we do not solve the problem of its occurrence. Pain is always a very important signal, and I would not advise to miss the stage of diagnosis.

– From an osteopathic point of view, what is the safest surface for running?

– There are high-tech surfaces that compensate for the shock and landing of the foot – they are complex polymers. Asphalt is absolutely not a surface I would advise running on. Level ground is, in my opinion, a good compromise option.

– Now let’s imagine that for some reason sport is contraindicated for a person. Either he is physically unable to exercise, or he has a serious illness that puts a cross even on going to the gym. What to do to keep healthy and keep your muscles toned?

– In my opinion, there are virtually no health conditions that would completely exclude exercise. For example, utilizing our mirror neurons works great, so even sports television includes us in the process of exercising. Or, if one area of the body is off, we can train the opposite area and use mirrors to make the brain think the sick side is acting up and start to repair it faster.

Different types of self-weight exercises are available to most people. In the recovery phase after injuries, even severe ones, you can give a small load, gradually increasing it and increasing the amplitude of movement, coming to motor balance. Also, most people can walk – it is a great form of physical activity.

– What if, on the contrary, someone can’t?

– Breathing exercises work wonderfully. And passive exercises, which are performed either by a trainer or other specialized specialist.

About the health of the body: personal feelings and a comprehensive approach

– Speaking of professional athletes, can they be healthy at all, if they approach the exercises correctly, will be observed by an osteopath and other specialists? Can professional sports not be traumatizing to health at all?

– I think one of the main goals of all those who make money from professional sports is to not get injured. For this purpose there should be competent specialists at the stage of selection in childhood to understand what sport to give the child to. Then you need constant monitoring, taking into account that children go through puberty. It is necessary to monitor what happens to a young person who takes on heavy loads. It is necessary to find out whether he can cope with them psychologically. The next stage is the transition to more professional training. Here the level of traumatism increases, and we need to know how long a person recovers, how to conserve energy by compensating for biomechanical disorders.

It is important that recovery from injuries should be comprehensive. It should comply with modern technologies, methodology and involve physical rehabilitation specialists. In Russia, there is practically no alternative to osteopaths, whose understanding of biomechanics is at a very high level.

– And how do you even realize that the muscles, spine, and nervous system are healthy? Can a person detect it by feeling?

– Feelings and comparisons are the two main stories to understand something. How I feel today in the process of training and after physical activity, how – in a month, in six months. That’s self-analysis. We like some kind of activity, we do it, and after a while we see how it affects us: positively or negatively. Did we achieve our goals, did we increase muscle mass, agility, speed. Progress in the training process is not difficult to track, but the second important point is how much we suffer from overload during training. We are, first of all, talking about well-being: vigor, feeling of satisfaction, fatigue. Suffering in amateur sport should not be.

And osteopathy, if we draw a line, for a professional athlete increases resourcefulness by optimizing the work of biomechanical systems, smoothly and accurately introduces into the training process.

– How does she do it? The osteopath is not present at the trainings.

– We can assess the movement of a person in the office. I’ll draw you a nice picture. For example, there’s a line test that assesses pelvic position from the iliac bones. Let’s draw a crooked person, one. Next, the greater trochanters of the femurs – two, the knee joints – three, the gluteal folds – four, the shoulder girdle – five. In this case we see a biomechanical disorder due to the fact that we have an asymmetrical position of the pelvic bones for some reason. It could be an ascending dysfunction related to the foot, the knee, or it could be a descending dysfunction due to a bite, neck condition, or vision.

There are some people who are always doing something and know everything about themselves. And there are those who, after reaching a certain age, realize that “hmm, I’m not happy with myself.” And they kill themselves in training, followed by the collapse of compensatory mechanisms. Those who come to us are looking for the reason: what prevents them from training effectively, why do injuries recur and what can be done about it? Those who understand the systematic approach. After all, even a small change changes the whole system.