Best Ways to Recover Quickly from a Hamstring Injury: Combining Physical Therapy and Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT)

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Are you struggling with a hamstring injury and looking for an effective way to heal faster and get back to your normal activities? You are in luck because in this blog, I'm going to explain how the combination of Physical Therapy and Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT) can help you recover from hamstring injuries more quickly and effectively.

If you don’t know who I am, I'm Dr. Jason Han, CEO & Co-Founder of HealthFit Physical Therapy & Chiropractic. As a sports clinical specialist with years of experience in professional sports and helping people just like you recover from hamstring injuries, I've seen how powerful the combination of physical therapy and HBOT can be.

Why Hamstring Injuries Are Common and Challenging

Hamstring injuries are very common, especially among athletes and active individuals. They can occur during activities that involve sprinting, jumping, sudden stops and starts while changing direction, and even kicking. I worked in professional soccer for several years, so I’ve seen a number of these injuries while either sprinting at top speed down the field, taking those first steps to accelerate chasing after an opponent, or stretching your leg out for a ball that was beyond the player's reach.

These injuries can be particularly challenging to recover from because you use the hamstring muscles a lot more than you realize. As you well know, a hamstring strain can really affect your ability to walk, run, bend forward, and perform everyday activities. A slow recovery can be frustrating and keep you from doing the things you love. That's why it's important to find effective ways to heal faster and prevent future injuries.

What is Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy?

So let’s ask the question… what exactly is HBOT? Let's keep it simple. HBOT involves sitting in a special chamber where you breathe enhanced levels of oxygen. The chamber is pressurized, similar to the feeling of being in an airplane. This high pressure helps your body absorb more oxygen, which promotes healing and boosts overall health. At HealthFit, we have state-of-the-art hyperbaric chambers to help our clients feel better and recover faster.

The Role of Physical Therapy in Hamstring Injury Recovery

Assessment and Diagnosis

An expert physical therapist will assess your injury to determine its severity and develop a personalized treatment plan. A proper evaluation not only looks at the hamstring itself but all the contributing factors that may have gotten you here in the first place.

Some questions to consider:

  1. What past injuries have you had? One of the biggest predictors of an injury is a past injury. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had an athlete tell me they’ve had a past history of low back pain, knee difficulties, or recurring ankle sprains. If you’ve never truly healed from these past ailments, chances are you have underlying compensations that lead to the current hamstring injury you are suffering from.

  2. What was your training routine or game schedule leading up to the injury? These are important parts of the puzzle because we can start to piece together if you were underloaded or overloaded to begin with. If you were underloaded, you didn’t build enough muscle resilience to handle the activity you were putting yourself through. If you were overloaded, such as playing multiple games in a week that is out of your norm, the body and hamstring just gave up. This is very analogous to the straw that broke the camel's back.

Your personalized rehab plan may include exercises to improve flexibility, mobility, strength, and range of motion not only in your hamstring but all the surrounding areas as well.

Hands-on Therapy

Techniques such as manual therapy, joint mobilization, and stretching can help reduce pain and improve mobility. These methods are designed to promote healing, enhance muscle tissue pliability, create fluid joint motion, reduce scar tissue formation, and even prevent re-injury. It’s really about facilitating your body’s confidence that it is okay to move again. Often after an injury, there’s a lot of hesitancy because you fear causing more pain or making things worse.

Exercise and Rehabilitation

A key component of physical therapy is a structured exercise program tailored to your specific needs.

  1. Strengthening the Hamstring: A graded progression is key because the last thing you want to do is have a re-injury. Typically, we would start with isometric exercises where you are strengthening without moving too much. This would progress to more active exercises, including shortening contractions and elongating muscle contractions. Last but not least, if you want to get back to more powerful movements like running, cutting, and jumping, the exercises need to involve more dynamic and ballistic muscle contractions. This ensures the hamstring can withstand a lot of force within a short period.

  2. Addressing Underlying Causes: More often than not, there is an associated core stability problem, hip mobility and strength impairment, and a foot/ankle problem. Improving all these components in a comprehensive program can help advance your mediocre rehab to a great result, ensuring a smooth and effective recovery.

How HBOT Enhances Physical Therapy for Hamstring Injuries

Now, let's talk about how HBOT works in your body to enhance the effects of physical therapy for hamstring injuries. When you breathe pure oxygen in the chamber, it helps your blood carry more oxygen to your tissues.

Reducing Inflammation

HBOT helps reduce inflammation in your injured hamstring. As you have experienced, that feeling of fullness in the back of your leg after you strained your hamstring is a bunch of inflammation. Less inflammation means less pain and faster healing. By reducing swelling and inflammation, HBOT allows your physical therapy sessions to be more effective, as your muscles and tissues are in a better state to respond to treatment.

There are several situations where, on paper, the athlete is many weeks out from injury and should be technically “healed.” This is not always the case because the athlete is still feeling pain, exhibiting difficulty performing certain exercises, or functionally unable to sprint at top speed. Excessive inflammation might be the reason, and HBOT can really help.

Promoting Tissue Repair

The extra oxygen from HBOT promotes faster tissue repair and regeneration. This means your hamstring can heal more quickly and effectively. Enhanced oxygen delivery supports the body's natural healing processes, making your recovery more efficient and complete.

Boosting Energy Levels

With more oxygen, your cells produce more energy. This increased energy can help you stay active and perform your physical therapy exercises more effectively. Feeling more energetic allows you to engage more fully in your rehab exercises, leading to better outcomes.

Improving Overall Recovery

The combination of physical therapy and HBOT addresses both the physical and cellular aspects of healing. This comprehensive approach ensures a more complete and faster recovery. By working together, these therapies provide a synergistic effect that maximizes the benefits of each, leading to quicker and more robust healing.

Benefits of Combining Physical Therapy and HBOT

Combining physical therapy with HBOT offers several benefits for hamstring injury recovery:

  1. Faster Healing: The combined approach helps you heal faster and get back to your normal activities sooner.

  2. Better Outcomes: You’re likely to experience less pain and better overall function as your injury heals more completely.

  3. Reduced Risk of Re-Injury: Strengthening and rehabbing your hamstring with physical therapy, along with the enhanced healing effects of HBOT, reduces the risk of future injuries.

  4. Enhanced Well-Being: This comprehensive approach not only helps your hamstring heal but also improves your overall health and well-being.

Conclusion

At HealthFit, we're here to help you feel your best. If you're struggling with a hamstring injury and looking for an effective way to recover, consider combining physical therapy with HBOT. Thank you for reading this blog. If you have any questions or would like to schedule a discovery visit or an initial evaluation, please visit our website or give us a call. Your recovery and overall health are important to us. We look forward to helping you achieve a faster and more effective recovery with the combination of physical therapy and HBOT.

Remember, you deserve to heal quickly and get back to all the activities you love. We hope to see you soon!