Return to Sport.
Return to sport athletes don’t just want to return to daily living, they need to return to high intensity, explosive movements, gruelling schedules and often high level competition.
Therefore injured athletes require more than just a rehab program. The return to sport program is designed to ensure that once the athlete's injury has healed and regained basic strength and ROM, appropriate training progressions are prescribed to ensure the athlete can return to training and competition. This process requires stringent return to sport testing and a multidisciplinary and individualised approach to ensure the athlete returns at a fitness level equal to or better than before the injury occurred. Our expert coaches work alongside our on-site physiotherapist or the athlete’s own practitioner to ensure they are progressing in the most effective manner.
This program transitions perfectly into our athlete development program, once the athlete is deemed fit to return to play sport.
Program includes.
Needs Analysis Questionnaire.
This questionnaire will be sent to you once you purchase the Return To Sport program and will take up to 10-minutes to complete. It is a detailed questionnaire designed to help our expert coaches understand your injury, needs and goals, training experience, injury history, rehab training to date and any other relevant information we may need to help us create your program.
Assessment & Screening.
This testing guides your programming, helping the coach to ascertain any areas of weakness that you may need to develop. The testing session involves a range of tests and presents a snapshot of your overall athletic capability. Every test will be targeted to you, your injury and your relevant sport, however the majority of athletes will be tested on the following:
Quality of movement
Joint range of motion
Maximum & reactive strength (explosiveness)
Lower and upper body power
Running Technique
Individualised rehab program.
Once you have completed your assessment session and questionnaire your coach will spend a considerable amount of time constructing your individualised rehab program. Your program will be completely unique to you and your injury, needs, goals and sport. We will also work closely with your physiotherapist or our onsite rehab experts to ensure your program ticks all of the right boxes. We believe that too many injured athletes get cleared to play sport early without having reached the relevant benchmarks for their sport. Also, many athletes will only focus their rehabilitation training on their injury, rather than continuing to develop other areas that may make them a better all-round athlete. We believe an injury is an opportunity for an athlete to learn more about their bodies, for example why they may have got injured in the first place and how they can be a better athlete in the future.
The return to sport program includes a minimum 12- week gym, conditioning and return to running program. You will complete your gym program in small group sessions and will have access to the gym during gym hours for extra conditioning work if it is programmed.
Your program will be accessed through our online programming software TeamBuildr, which you can access through the TeamBuildr application on your phone or tablet.
Orientation sessions.
The orientation sessions are one-on-one sessions with one of our expert coaches and will take you through your program to ensure you are performing each exercise correctly and understand the purpose and progression of each exercise. These sessions will be roughly every 12-weeks.
Small group sessions.
The linchpin to the Geelong Athlete Centre is the small group sessions. These sessions are capped at 6 athletes per coach and are similar to supervised gym sessions, where you will be completing your own gym program with coach supervision. These sessions typically run M-F 6-11:30am & 3:30-7:15pm and on Saturdays 8-10:15am.
We believe that strength coaching is crucial to an athlete’s success, however not everyone can afford one-on-one coaching, so these small groups make high quality performance training more affordable. There is also the bonus of training amongst other athletes, which aids in creating an inspiring and motivating culture, particularly for injured athletes when the rehab process is often lonely.
