When people hear of football, rugby and other sports, a fair few will associate sports with injury, or recall the time they could have turned professional if it wasn’t for a devastating injury. When you watch football, after a collision, a team of physios and other members of the medical staff rush onto the pitch with their duffel bags filled with medical equipment.

From a physio’s perspective, we are the bridge between the medical doctors and personal training, facilitating everything from and in-between. We are required to have a medical background, such as anatomy, the healing phases of different connective tissue, therapeutic modalities and treatments, as well as knowledge about physical activity: how to apply the medical knowledge to real-world scenarios with the equipment we are given.

I’ll give you a brief example:

Picture this: you are in the middle of a match when your knee twists awkwardly beneath you. Within minutes it swells up, and your gut tells you this is bad. You cannot carry on, so you hobble off the pitch.

You go to see a doctor, who prescribes painkillers and anti-inflammatories, and refers you to physiotherapy. This is where we come in. A physiotherapist’s job is not just to assess the injury; it starts with listening to your story and what happened, and asking questions to get a clearer picture first. We may then guide you through some basic movements, assess your balance, strength and pain levels, and carry out special tests to confirm, or rule out, the cause.

We also have to communicate our findings and our thought process clearly with you, to keep the dialogue open and stop you from guessing or becoming even more worried. From there, treatment could range from controlling the swelling first, to reducing pain levels, to relaxing muscles that are guarding as a protective mechanism. It is also about calming your nerves and reassuring you that things are going to be fine.

After that, physiotherapy should mainly be about tailoring an exercise programme around your needs: neuromuscular control, balance, proprioception, agility, muscle strength and psychological readiness, pushing you to a reasonable limit each session.

But the journey doesn’t end there. Even after you get back to the sport you love, physio visits revolve around screening, your feedback on how your injury is coping and how you feel, and how we can work on prevention and stability, so that we can minimise the chance of going through all of this again.

Now you have a brief picture of the physio’s perspective, and of the client across the table. Of course, there are a lot of nuances in between, but you can see how a physio shouldn’t just make you lie down on the table for the entire session. It should be interactive, with mutual feedback, and progressive.

If you want to get the best out of your sessions, understand what is going on every step of the way, and be given honest, straightforward feedback and reassurance, then this is the place for you.

References

Himani, Sah, N.K.P., Trivedi, A. and Kanhaiyya (2025) ‘Role of physiotherapy in sports injury prevention and recovery: a comprehensive review’, International Journal of Modern Science and Research Technology, 3(10). Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/396717975_Role_of_Physiotherapy_in_Sports_Injury_Prevention (Accessed: 15 October 2026).