At Spectrum Physiotherapy Newmarket, we help athletes and active people recover from sports injuries and return to the activities they love, safely and with less chance of getting hurt again. Our sports rehabilitation is led by Paul Parikh, PT, PhD, a former team physiotherapist for the NHL’s Detroit Red Wings. Every patient receives one-on-one care and a treatment plan built around their injury, their sport and their goals.
Our goal isn’t just to reduce pain. Before you return to training or competition, we confirm you’re ready using a combination of strength testing, hop and agility testing, and a graded return-to-training plan.
Sports injuries don’t just affect professional athletes. They happen to runners, gym members, weekend warriors, youth athletes, and anyone living an active lifestyle. Repetitive strain, overtraining, sudden movements, and awkward landings can lead to knee, shoulder, ankle, and muscle injuries that don’t heal properly without the right treatment.
A personalized rehabilitation plan helps restore movement, rebuild strength, and prevent the injury from coming back. Whether you want to return to competitive play or simply enjoy a pain-free workout or morning jog, our physiotherapists will create a program tailored specifically to your goals and activity level.
Getting a sports injury assessed early can help prevent ongoing pain and repeat injuries, and may shorten your recovery.
How We Decide When You’re Ready to Return to Sport
Feeling better isn’t the same as being ready. Pain often settles before strength, control and confidence fully return, and going back too early is a common reason injuries come back. That’s why we use objective testing, not just the calendar or how you feel, to guide your return.
Your return-to-sport plan combines three things:
- Strength testing: We measure the strength you’ve rebuilt, comparing your injured side with your uninjured side where appropriate.
- Hop and agility testing: Single-leg hops, landing control and change-of-direction drills show how your body handles the fast, explosive movements your sport demands.
- A graded return-to-training plan: You progress step by step, from rehab exercises to sport-specific drills, then to practice and finally full competition.
We look at the results of all three together to decide, with you, when you’re ready to return to play.
Why it matters: research supports this approach. In a well-known study of athletes returning to sport after ACL reconstruction, about 38% of those who returned without passing return-to-sport testing reinjured their knee, compared with about 6% of those who passed (Grindem et al., British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2016).
