How Osteopathy Helps
Sports Injuries — And Prevents Future Ones
Brussels has a surprisingly active sporting community. The Forest of Soignes attracts thousands of runners and cyclists. The Bois de la Cambre fills with parkrunners every Saturday morning. There are football clubs, tennis clubs, CrossFit boxes, and rowing clubs spread across the city — and a steady flow of their members through my door.
Sports injuries are one of the most common reasons people seek osteopathic care. But the relationship between osteopathy and sport goes beyond simply fixing what's broken — it's about understanding the mechanical patterns that lead to injury in the first place, and correcting them before they cause another one.
What osteopathy actually does for sports injuries
The short answer is: it addresses the structural factors that both cause and maintain injury. This sounds vague, so let me be more specific.
Most sports injuries aren't random. They happen at predictable locations — the runner's knee, the cyclist's hip, the swimmer's shoulder — because the forces involved in repetitive athletic movement tend to concentrate at points of structural weakness or restriction. A tight hip flexor doesn't just cause hip pain; it alters the mechanics of every stride you take, changing the load distribution across the knee, ankle, and lower back. Treat the knee without addressing the hip and the injury keeps returning.
Osteopathic treatment looks at the whole kinetic chain — not just where you hurt, but why that specific location is taking excessive load. Treatment combines joint mobilisation, soft tissue work, and targeted release of restrictions upstream and downstream of the injury site.
Common sports injuries treated with osteopathy
Runner's Knee (Patellofemoral Pain / ITBS)
Almost always driven by hip abductor weakness and restriction in the iliotibial band, combined with altered foot strike mechanics. Treatment focuses on hip and lumbar mobility, soft tissue release of the TFL and ITB, and correction of the pelvic mechanics that drive the pattern.
Tennis Elbow (Lateral Epicondylitis)
Despite the name, often not primarily a local elbow problem. Restrictions in the cervical spine, shoulder, and thoracic outlet frequently contribute to the loading pattern. Treating only the elbow typically produces limited results; addressing the full upper kinetic chain is more effective.
Cyclist's Hip / Lower Back Pain
The cycling position places the hip flexors in sustained shortening and compresses the lumbar spine. Hip flexor tightness, sacroiliac restriction, and thoracic stiffness are the typical culprits — all addressable with osteopathic treatment, and ideally combined with a professional bike fit.
Swimmer's Shoulder
The overhead demands of swimming require excellent thoracic extension and shoulder blade mobility. When the thoracic spine is stiff — as it often is in desk workers who also swim — the shoulder compensates by impinging the rotator cuff. Restoring thoracic mobility often dramatically reduces shoulder symptoms.
Groin & Hip Flexor Strains
Common in football and court sports. Often involve the adductors and iliopsoas. Beyond the acute tissue injury, these typically involve pelvic asymmetry and sacroiliac restriction that predispose the athlete to re-injury without treatment.
Achilles & Plantar Fasciopathy
Lower limb tendinopathies rarely exist in isolation. Restricted ankle dorsiflexion, tight calf complex, and altered foot biomechanics all contribute. Osteopathic work on the foot, ankle, and calf combined with appropriate loading guidance achieves better outcomes than either in isolation.
Prevention: the case for regular maintenance
This is something elite athletes understand intuitively but recreational athletes often resist until they're injured. Regular osteopathic treatment — even when you're not in pain — serves a genuine preventative function.
Athletic movement places repetitive asymmetric stress on the body. Over time, small compensatory patterns accumulate — the pelvis tilts slightly, one hip becomes less mobile than the other, a rib restriction develops from a minor contact injury that seemed to resolve. None of these are painful in themselves. But they silently alter your movement mechanics, and eventually something gives way under the accumulated load.
Many of my regular sports patients come every 6–8 weeks for a maintenance session. The session typically takes 30–45 minutes, addresses whatever restrictions have developed since the last visit, and keeps them training consistently without significant interruption. The cost of a maintenance session is a fraction of the cost — in time, money, and frustration — of treating a full injury after the fact.
When to seek treatment
A useful rule of thumb: if pain is affecting your training, altering your technique, or persisting for more than 2 weeks, it warrants assessment. Sports injuries rarely resolve fully on their own once they've settled into a pattern, and the longer they persist, the more compensatory changes accumulate elsewhere in the body.
You don't need to be in severe pain to book an appointment. Early intervention is almost always quicker and cheaper than waiting until you can't train at all.
Injured, or trying to stay that way?
Whether you're dealing with an acute injury or want to keep performing at your best, I can help. No referral needed — book online in under a minute.
📅 Book Online Now