If you’re tuning in to the NBA right now, you might see LeBron James playing a regular-season game. LeBron James, known for being the Chosen One after Michael Jordan, has been playing at a superstar level for almost 18 years now. His accolades alone for the first third of his career are enough for any average NBA player to make it to the Basketball Hall of Fame — let alone his overall statistics and achievements through the years.
LeBron James is good at basketball. He is essentially a basketball god. However, it is an open secret amongst the basketball players in the league that he is spending more than a million dollars a year treating his body. Genetics, along with the most advanced and most modern sports therapy, are showing the results of what we know as LeBron James — the Final boss in the NBA.
Modern sports therapy has come a long way. Physical therapy for sports, for example, originates back to a Swedish man named Per Henrik Ling in 1813. It initially combined massage and exercise as a post stretching technique applied for sore muscles. By the time the First World war emerged, the medical field had multiple departments dedicated to the rehabilitation and reconstruction of wounded soldiers.
Many lives were restored because of this. It entered into public acceptance as a legitimate treatment method after a few decades of peer study. While before its emergence, various methods were employed to treat the injured, it officially became a recognized science only in the 20th century.
Physical therapy nowadays is pretty much a preventive type of therapy. Whilst ages ago, physical therapy can only apply to injuries and post-bodily trauma healing, now it involves preventive treatment for muscle, ligament, joint, and tissue tears.
As we step forward into the realm of the 21st century, one must wonder: what are the modern sports therapy that we have today? Can we be able to receive the therapy an NBA Superstar like LeBron James does to his body?
Healing Exercises
Exercising involves tearing down the muscle over and over again. Almost all trainers emphasize the importance of rest and sleep to rebuild the muscle that was torn down to rebuild the muscle leaner and stronger. A nutrition course for personal trainers combined with a healing exercise post-workout is now readily available and always recommended for even the common people or average joes. While such is all the rage in the 90s for athletes, these treatments are almost done now for every professional competitor.
Every time the body is pushed to the brink of exhaustion, its parts get closer and closer to damage. Healing exercises and stretches bring the body and its muscles back to a relaxed state. Almost all professional and licensed physical therapies recommend assisted exercises after any workout to prevent lasting damage.
Electrical Stimulation
Stimulating the muscle group most affected by the injury is now made affordable more than ever, thanks to modern advancements in technology. Almost all physical therapy clinics have electrical stimulation therapy readily available for those with severe injuries. Muscle and nerve fibers can be cut in the event of trauma to the body.
Electrical stimulation to lightly agitate the muscles and nerves to coerce a response is the modern way to treat grave injuries in the long term. Due to the trauma, the number of electrical synapses that your brain can send to the injured part of the body can be severed. Electrical stimulation helps the signal to cross that bridge repeatedly and repair that so-called bridge back to how it was.
Hyperbaric Oxygen Chambers
Thanks to modern technology, hyperbaric oxygen chambers, the one most used by LeBron James, can be used at home by anyone. Hyperbaric chambers are essentially sleeping bags that have an oxygen machine attached right next to them. A hyperbaric oxygen chamber increases the amount of oxygen your body intakes which, in turn, reduces the swelling your body does after an extreme workout. Due to the higher amount of oxygen in the blood, your muscles being oxygen-starved, and eventual muscle death is prevented.
LeBron James, a multi-time champion, is a great fan of the hyperbaric oxygen chamber and credits it for his body’s recovery. It speeds up the healing process he needs every after a regular-season game. Because of the increased amounts of time in a week that he needs to battle it out, he needs to be instantly recovered.
Modern treatment, thanks to the ingenuity of the ones who came before us, is now available for everyone to enjoy. As modern medicine continues its search to find the most optimal way to treat the human body, breakthroughs in physical therapy are becoming close.
