If you’ve experienced and injury or pain in your feet or lower limbs when playing sport or exercising, a sports podiatrist should be your first port of call. As the feet are complex structures and the reasons for these injuries can vary significantly, it’s important to work with a specialist, like a sports podiatrist.

A sports podiatrist will usually categorise your injury as being either an acute or chronic injury:

Acute Injuries:

Are more recent injuries that have typically occurred in the last 3-4 days.

These injuries usually occur as a result of a particular movement, incident, collision or trauma.

Common acute sports injuries that can affect your feet and lower limbs include ankle sprains, torn achilles, or calf strain.

An acute injury will require specific short-term treatments as the body undergoes an inflammatory process when an injury has recently occurred.

Chronic injuries:

Chronic injuries have a different starting point to acute injuries and build up gradually over time through repeated movements. However, if an acute injury is not treated, it can become a chronic injury.

Sports and activities that regularly involve repeated actions, like bowling in cricket, throwing in basketball or the sudden stopping in netball, can cause chronic injuries. This is because often, these movements are unnatural and can put a great amount of strain on the body.

The repetition of the movement can result in gradual damage and injury to body parts, which can create a chronic injury.

To ensure we treat a chronic injury correctly, we focus on understanding what movements have led to the injury, the structures that have been damaged, and what we can do to help those structures get better.

• Achilles tendinosis
• Ankle sprains
• Knee pain
• Muscle strains and tendinosis
• Plantar fasciitis
• Shin splints/MTSS
• Stress fractures
• Turf toe

These are only some of the injuries and conditions we can help you with at Hurst Podiatry, Melbourne.

The way we treat your sports injury will depend on the kind of injury you have and how it occurred.

Some of the common treatment options our podiatry team uses include:

• Custom rehab programs
• Shockwave treatment
• Trigger point dry needling
• Moon boot fitting
• Orthotic therapy
• Footwear advice
• K laser therapy

These are just some of the ways sports injuries can be treated. To treat your injury we will work closely with you to not only understand your injury but to find the best treatment solution that is going to provide you with the best long-term results.

Not all podiatrists have the necessary experience, equipment and training required to treat sports injuries, however, here at Hurst Podiatry, it is one of our passions.

We take pride in ensuring our training and knowledge is regularly updated to ensure we’re using the best and latest treatment techniques and we also use state of the art equipment to treat sports injuries.

Our extensive knowledge and experience means that we can work with you to create a tailored recovery plan to ensure your road to recovery is the best one for you.

So, whether you have a new or longstanding sports and/or exercise related injury, we can help you get moving again at Hurst Podiatry. Book by calling us on 03 5901 2216 or online here.