Performance Spectrum
Contact Information
For more information, contact the Sports Physical Therapy Clinic at (608) 263-4765.
Video
The UW Health Sports Medicine Center offers Performance Spectrum, a group rehabilitation program for athletes with lower extremity injuries. Performance Spectrum incorporates biomechanical movement patterns into the training and rehabilitation of athletes.
The program provides athletes an opportunity to work on functional conditioning and sport-specific drills in preparation for returning to sport activities. The goal of the class is to not only rehabilitate the injury, but also provide the necessary tools to maintain general fitness, strength, flexibility, movement and sports skill.
Athletes in this program work with others who have sustained similar injuries, providing the camaraderie and motivation needed to successfully progress through a rehabilitation program. The class is primarily designed for patients who have had ACL reconstruction, but is beneficial for most lower extremity injuries.
Phases
The Performance Spectrum program includes four progressive phases:
- Phase I: Return to the basics. The key to bridging the gap between rehabilitation and sports application is to return to basic fundamental movement skills. This begins with postural awareness exercises, balance activities, proprioceptive challenges, coordination activities and basic functional strengthening drills. These activities are used as building blocks for more advanced and complex sports movements. Lack of these skills may result in deficits in movement pattern and movement response. Athletes in this phase of rehabilitation must have already addressed the physiological responses of pain, swelling, range of motion and basic strength during the early phases of healing.
- Phase II: Restore biomotor patterns (intermediate). As athletes relearn to control their strength and coordination, they then need to apply their coordination to simple biomotor tasks such as running, jumping, hopping, skipping, leaping and catching before advanced athletic movements can be achieved. Activities in this second phase progressively become more complex by adding components of speed, impact and change of center of gravity components, and by combining more than one movement and more than one direction or plane of movement. They will also continue to work to rebuild their strength.
- Phase III: Retrain (advanced). As athletes demonstrate that they are efficient with simple biomechanical locomotor and non- locomotor patterns, rehabilitation can be more specialized to the individual sport. They are retrained in agility, plyometrics, speed and power exercises at a progressively higher level of performance intensity based on each athlete's capabilities.
- Phase IV: Return to sports. As they enter this phase of rehabilitation, athletes are efficient in basic fundamental movements and can demonstrate appropriate levels of athletic fitness, such as cardiovascular conditioning, flexibility, muscular strength, muscular endurance and body fat percentage. Their return to sports preparation will consist of the specific movement and skill requirements of their chosen sport. Despite the sport specificity, it is our philosophy that all athletes are given the preparation to be adaptable to a diverse repertoire of sports challenges rather than any specific task.