As the summer sports season comes to an end, you may begin to notice you feel a little bit different after games compared to at the start of the season. You might be a little more sore, sleep a bit longer, need more time to warm up, or be managing some nagging injuries. This isn’t because you’re becoming less fit, but rather because you’re accumulating more and more fatigue throughout the season. As a result, your strategies for training and recovery may need to change in order to ensure you’re well enough to perform right to the end of the season.

Have you ever left a therapy appointment knowing your diagnosis, but still not really understanding what it meant? Research consistently supports patient education as a key part of the assessment and rehab process. But a good explanation of your injury should leave you with less confusion, not more information.

Load management and gradual progression can feel a little abstract sometimes. One analogy I often use with patients is the difference between building calluses and developing blisters.

Athletes, professional organizations, and everyday active people are always looking for ways to prevent injuries, and why not? Injuries hurt, interrupt training, and take you away from the sports and activities you enjoy. For teams and organizations, injuries can also mean reduced performance and financial loss. Because of this, there’s constant attention on injury prevention strategies, from training methods to recovery tools. But can injuries truly be prevented? Yes, but no. Unfortunately, you can do everything right and still get injured.

2025 was the year I decided to get back into running seriously. I had run cross country all through my younger and teenage years, but stopped due to university. There were a couple of times when I tried to get back into running, but it never felt great. Reflecting back, I realized I had been approaching my return to running all wrong. I learned that I needed to be consistent if I wanted to feel better running. Once I applied that, everything about running started to feel easier.

When people think about recovery from training or rehab, they usually think about what they need to add. Some of the common things I see are stretching, foam rolling or other myofascial release tools, massage guns, saunas, ice baths, or even recovery sessions consisting of low-intensity exercises. The goal always seems to be flushing things out or speeding up healing. But if your recovery routine is built around tools, you’re probably missing the point. You don’t need more recovery tools - you need better habits.

Evidence-based practice (EBP) is a term that gets used a lot in healthcare and rehab, but what does it actually mean? It’s often described as the integration of best available research, clinical expertise, and patient values. While all three are important, they aren’t truly equal or separate in practice. A more useful way to understand evidence-based practice is as a funnel — where research provides the starting point, clinical reasoning refines it, and the patient ultimately determines what is appropriate.

In rehab, we often label movement as “too much” or “not enough”, but how do we actually know when that’s true and relevant? If you’ve ever had an injury assessment, you might have heard terms like “over-pronation” or “under-pronation.” Maybe you have too much knee valgus when you squat, your low back is hypo-mobile, your pelvis is out of alignment, or maybe it’s poor posture. The problem with many of these descriptors is that they’re largely subjective - no therapist can actually measure joint movement simply by watching you. These terms are often used to explain pain or injury, but the relationship between movement and pain is far less clear than many people assume.

Baseball and softball are growing in numbers and visibility in Ireland, especially at the recreational level. Injuries can and still do occur, but sports medicine is understandably built around hurling, Gaelic football and rugby. Throwing in baseball and softball is different. The forces are different. The long-term adaptations are different. Therefore the rehab has to be different too. If you throw, you need someone who understands throwers. Treating a thrower like a general shoulder is misguided.

When explaining why injuries occur, I often refer to the Biopsychosocial Model of pain (BPS). The BPS is a holistic model suggesting that health and well-being result from the interconnection and interaction between biological, psychological, and social factors, rather than a single cause.