Sports Therapy?
Sports Therapy is a hands-on approach to treating pain, injury and the physical restrictions that can stop you moving the way you want to.
And despite the name, you don't have to be an athlete to benefit from it.
At Think Panther, treatment combines assessment, manual therapy and rehabilitation, with a strong emphasis on hands-on treatment. Depending on what we find, this may include:
Sports & Deep Tissue Massage
Hands-on soft tissue techniques used to work with muscles and areas that feel tight, sore or restricted.
Functional Soft Tissue Transformation (FSTT)
Combines soft tissue treatment with movement, allowing us to work with muscles and tissues in positions that better reflect how you actually use your body.
Dry Needling
Uses fine needles in specific areas of muscle and soft tissue to help manage pain, sensitivity and restriction.
Joint Mobilisations & Manipulations
Hands-on techniques used, where appropriate, to help improve movement in joints that feel stiff or restricted.
The treatment we choose depends on you — what hurts, how you move and what you need your body to do.
Hands-on treatment can help reduce symptoms and create an opportunity for better movement. We can then build on those changes through movement, exercise and rehabilitation.
Applied Functional Science ?
Applied Functional Science® (AFS) is a way of understanding how your body moves in the real world.
Developed by the Gray Institute®, it looks beyond individual muscles and joints to consider how the whole body works together — taking into account gravity, momentum, ground reaction force, chain reaction biomechanics and, most importantly, what you actually need your body to do.
Rather than only assessing you lying on a treatment table or looking at movements in isolation, AFS allows us to explore your movement in standing, walking, running, reaching, rotating, lifting or whatever is relevant to you.
The idea is simple: your body is an integrated system.
A restriction or problem in one area can influence movement somewhere else. A painful knee, for example, doesn’t automatically mean the knee is the whole problem. How your foot interacts with the ground, how your hip moves, or how your pelvis and trunk rotate may all contribute to what is happening.
AFS gives us a framework for exploring those relationships through movement. We can tweak things such as direction, range, speed and position and see how your body responds. That helps us find movements you struggle with — but just as importantly, the movements you already do well.
From there, treatment and exercise can be built around you, rather than forcing you into a generic idea of how everybody is supposed to move.