Sports Physical Therapy

About Sports Physical Therapy

Sports physical therapy helps athletes and physically active people rehabilitate their injuries and enhance their performance, so they can return safely to sports or activities with fully restored pain-free function.

Sometimes, sports medicine physical therapy follows surgery, helping the athlete to regain confidence and restore functional mobility. The sports physical therapists at NYDNRehab use advanced technologies to monitor our patients’ progress, to ensure that each athlete is sufficiently rehabilitated to safely return to play.

Dr. Lev Kalika

Clinical director & DC RMSK

About Sports Medicine Specialist Dr. Lev Kalika

Dr. Lev Kalika is one of NYC’s most authoritative sports medicine doctors. He has trained under some of the world’s most eminent names in sports medicine, including Dr. Pavel Kolar of the Czech School of Rehabilitation, and Dr. Christopher Powers, an expert in treatment and prevention of running and jumping injuries. Dr. Kalika is certified in a variety of therapeutic techniques, and has extensive training in diagnostic ultrasonography.

All therapists at NYDNRehab are trained and certified in two or more specialized therapeutic methods. Together, we combine our years of experience and expertise to help our athletes and physically active patients restore optimal function and reach new levels of performance, while reducing their risk of injury. For the best sports physical therapy in New York, choose NYDNRehab.

What Sets NYDNRehab Sports
Physical Therapy Apart from
Conventional Athletic Rehab?

Athletic injuries are an inherent and accepted risk of participating in intense and competitive physical activity. Because athletes and fitness enthusiasts want to return to full activity as soon as possible, getting an accurate diagnosis and top-quality treatment is critical.

Sadly, conventional physical therapy for sports injuries often falls short, following one-size-fits-all approaches and generalized return-to-play timelines that set the athlete up for reinjury and premature retirement.

What Sets Sports Physical Therapy Apart from Conventional Athletic Rehab?

At NYDNRehab, we treat every athlete and every injury on a personalized basis. We never use cookie-cutter approaches or antiquated timelines that fail to fully prepare the athlete for return to play.

We go beyond treating pain and strengthening damaged tissues. Using our advanced diagnostic tools, we assess the athlete from head to toe, to identify motor deficiencies, biomechanical errors and imbalances that may contribute to or increase the risk of injury.

We draw on our extensive array of high-tech equipment and software to rehabilitate the athlete using evidence based scientific approaches and quantitative data, precisely measuring progress at every stage of rehab.

Once tissues have healed and strength has been restored, we keep going, using artificial intelligence and virtual reality feedback training to restore neuromotor pathways, retraining the brain and muscles for optimal coordinated muscle recruitment.

We don’t send our athletes back into competition until we are satisfied that they have regained or exceeded their pre-injury performance levels and can return to play with confidence. Our advanced training methodologies allow for faster return to play with lower risk of reinjury.

Causes of Athletic Injuries

Sports injuries often arise from acute trauma, happening in a split second while the athlete is in motion. However, there are many other ways that athletes can become injured.

Overuse injuries from inadequate recovery strategies
Biomechanical errors that cause damage over time
Injuries from pivoting on a loaded joint
Sport-specific asymmetrical loading patterns that cause
imbalances over time

Sudden increases in training load or volume
Collisions with another athlete or obstacle
Inadequate warmup before intense exercise
Old injuries that were never properly rehabbed that
create inefficient compensation patterns

Restoring Mechanical Integrity is Key to
Performance Recovery

The integrity of your body’s structures and their capacity to align and interact at optimal levels is dependent on tension generated from your muscles and fascia. Your skeleton provides a structural framework for your entire organism, but without tension produced by muscles and fascia pulling against rigid bones, you would collapse in a motionless heap.

However, tension generated by soft tissues is not enough to achieve optimal movement integrity — myofascial tension must be tuned and balanced by strong and elastic tissues that glide freely among other structures. When the capacity of muscles and fascia to stretch, contract and glide is impeded, imbalances arise that undermine movement mechanics, causing pain and dysfunction.

Restoring Mechanical Integrity is Key to Performance Recovery

Tensegrity describes a state of optimal mechanical function, where joints are perfectly aligned and move freely through their functional range of motion, while at the same time being stabilized and supported by tension generated from healthy myofascial tissue. Compression is the enemy of tensegrity, preventing interdependent tissues, organs and structures from moving and gliding in harmony.

Loss of tensegrity, aka dystensegrity, is mostly mechanical in nature – the myofascial network is designed to mediate load transfer and distribute force loads among muscles, ligaments, bones and viscera during physical activity. However, unhealthy cells from poor nutrition, inadequate hydration, prescription drugs and environmental toxins can also undermine myofascial tensegrity.

Myofascial tensegrity cannot be accurately assessed via a clinical exam, or with X-ray or MRI. Only diagnostic ultrasonography can give us real-time imaging of the myofascia in motion, in real time. Ultrasound lets us detect and measure fascia densifications and adhesions that contribute to dystensegrity. Sonoelastography gives us capabilities for measuring tension within myofascial tissues.

Physical activity is essential to achieving and sustaining balanced myofascial tension, and athletes and physically active people rely on tensegrity for peak performance.

But physical training alone is not enough to achieve tensegrity.

Healthy myofascia depends on a number of factors, including:

Full-spectrum nutrition that provides building blocks for healthy tissues.
Adequate hydration – the myofascia and visceral organs require water for optimal health.
Hormonal balance — hormones are chemical messengers that play a crucial role in governing muscle integrity. For example, a poorly functioning thyroid can impact the tensegrity of your connective tissues.
Healthy gut microbiome — your gut is often referred to as your second brain, affecting the absorption of vital nutrients and impacting the function of your autonomic nervous system. An unhealthy gut may also host harmful parasites that cause a broad range of diseases, including cancers.
Spiritual wellbeing — all life is connected, and all living entities strive to achieve balance within their respective ecosystems, and in harmony with other beings. When you are angry, tense, anxious or stressed, you internalize pressure that manifests as physical pain and dysfunction. Internalized stress affects the cells’ capacity for intracellular and extracellular ion exchange that fosters the electrical balance of cells and enables tissue healing.

Aging and harmful lifestyle behaviors profoundly impact tensegrity.

Reduced physical activity and loss of lean muscle tissue (sarcopenia) cause the metabolism to slow and systems to malfunction.
Reduced blood volume and diminished blood perfusion restrict the delivery of oxygen and nutrients to cells.
Nutrient deficiencies limit your capacity for tissue repair and regeneration.
Pharmaceuticals alter your body chemistry and affect tissues in myriad ways that impede tensegrity. For example, statin drugs prescribed to control cholesterol have neuromuscular adverse effects that include cramps, myalgia, weakness, immune-mediated necrotizing myopathy, and rhabdomyolysis.
Systemic inflammation arises from stress, poor nutrition, physical inactivity and inadequate sleep, undermining cellular function and creating metabolic disorders.
Environmental toxins from air, water, processed foods, household and institutional cleaning solutions, and personal grooming products wreak havoc throughout your brain and body, potentially causing cancers and neurodegenerative diseases.

At NYDNRehab, we treat the whole patient, not just their symptoms. When the body is in an unhealthy state, tissue healing is impeded, and physical therapy can only achieve suboptimal results. For athletic populations, addressing all the factors that undermine tensegrity is essential for injury rehabilitation and restoring peak performance.

Our holistic and personalized approach to patient care addresses the many issues that undermine tensegrity. Our high-resolution diagnostic ultrasound equipment gives us crystal-clear images of your myofascia in motion. Our regenerative technologies provide us with the tools we need to restore baseline health, so we can effectively treat your injuries, pain and dysfunction, and restore fluid pain-free movement.

Accurate Diagnosis is Critical to Successful Rehab

Many athletic injuries are misdiagnosed or underdiagnosed, leading to ineffective treatment and disappointing outcomes. Many times, the athlete suffers from more than one injury, but doctors focus on the predominant symptoms without looking for additional problems.

In addition, many practitioners lack the expertise or access to technology required to accurately diagnose and objectively measure critical performance parameters.

At NYDNRehab, we believe that what cannot be measured cannot be effectively treated. Our NYC clinic features some of the most technologically advanced diagnostic tools in the world.

Our diagnostic toolbox includes:

Ultra high-resolution research-grade ultrasonography to visualize injured tissues in real time, with the athlete in motion

Sonoelastography, to assess soft tissue damage and monitor the healing process

Superior microvascular imaging (SMI) to detect microscopic blood vessels that signal cell neogenesis

3D Gait and running analysis to identify mechanical gait errors

Surface electromyography (SEMG) to analyze muscle coordination and firing patterns

Force plate technology to assess weight distribution and ground reaction forces

3D infrared cameras to assess joint kinematics

Blood Flow Restriction Training (BFR)

Our team of sports medicine specialists recognize common sport-specific biomechanical errors that lead to injury. At NYDNRehab, our goal is to restore optimal motor patterns for peak performance. We treat the whole athlete, not just the injury.

We Test Performance Parameters Before, During and After Rehab

We pull out all the stops to make sure our athletes return to sport in peak condition. Some of our assessment tools include:

Sports and Motion Analysis Tests

Running analysis
Muscle activation analysis
Lower extremity stability
Postural stability
Neuromechanical analysis
Strength and power analysis
Mobility analysis

Sport-Specific Testing

3D running analysis
Bike fitting
Golf skills analysis
Throwing analysis
Jumping analysis

State-of-the-Art Return to Sport and Injury Prevention Testing

Our High-Tech Training Equipment Yields Optimal Results

Our patients with sports injuries are treated with the latest research-based approaches and advanced technologies for athletic rehabilitation. Proper rehabilitation not only ensures better performance, but provides a safeguard against future injuries.

Athletic injuries often cause compensation strategies that become habitual over time. This can lead to inefficient muscle recruitment patterns, asymmetrical muscle tension, and loss of confidence in the injured limb. In effect, the brain “forgets” how to recruit, coordinate and fire muscles in the most efficient way.

At NYDNRehab, we use real-time feedback retraining to restore optimal neuromotor pathways between the brain and body. Our advanced technologies enable us to build strength, agility and confidence, to reduce the risk of injury upon return to play. Our rehabilitative protocols are progressive, offering greater challenges as the injury heals and rehab approaches its end goal.

Our High-Tech Training Equipment Yields Optimal Results

Our individualized approach to sports medicine physical therapy means that every athlete gets personalized treatment, based on objective data and according to the athlete’s specific needs. At NYDNRehab, we treat the athlete, not just the injury.

Our state-of-the-art treatment methodologies and technologies include

Blood flow restriction therapy with the Mad-Up BFR device
Kineo Intelligent Load AI-assisted muscle testing and retraining
Proteus Motion 3D collinear resistance
DD Robotech AI testing and real-time feedback retraining
Surface electromyography (SEMG)
3D gait and running analysis and 3D biofeedback training
Force plate jump and rate of force development analysis and retraining
SEBT (star excursion banner testing) for state-of-the-art motion and kinematic analysis of postural stability and retraining
Myolux ankle stability and proprioception testing and retraining
3D motion capture video analysis
Sonoelastography (muscle and tendon stiffness/elasticity analysis)
DNS (dynamic neuromuscular stabilization)
AIM (anatomy in motion)
FMS (functional movement systems)
ISM (integrated system model)
Contextual rehab

Heal Fast and Fully with
Regenerative Technologies

The human body has its own innate healing mechanisms, but it sometimes needs a nudge to accelerate the healing process. Regenerative technologies help to jump-start healing by stimulating tissue repair at the cellular level. Our outpatient regenerative therapies expedite recovery with minimal discomfort for the patient.

Focused Shockwave Therapy

Focused Extracorporeal Shock Wave Therapy (ESWT)

Focused ESWT is used as a regenerative treatment for damaged tendon, muscle and bone tissue. This technology produces high frequency sound waves to stimulate the body’s own reparative mechanisms. It is especially effective for chronic degenerative tendon disorders and myofascial pain syndrome.

Extracorporeal Magnetic Transduction Therapy (EMTT)

EMTT is a fairly new technology that transmits high energy magnetic pulses to targeted tissues. The magnetic waves synchronize with the body’s own magnetic fields, causing a disturbance that triggers a regenerative response. EMTT waves can penetrate deep tissues up to 18 cm beneath the skin’s surface, to target difficult-to-reach tendons, muscles, bones and nerves.

Electromagnetic Transduction Therapy (EMTT)

Extracorporeal Pulse Activation Technology (EPAT)

EPAT, also known as defocused shock wave therapy, uses acoustic pressure waves to enhance blood circulation to targeted tissues. This speeds up the delivery of oxygen and nutrients to damaged tissues and stimulates cellular metabolism, to accelerate the healing process.

High Energy Inductive Therapy (HEIT)

HEIT uses electromagnetic fields to penetrate cells, tissues, organs and bones, to reactivate the electrochemical function of cells and cell membranes. HEIT generates a magnetic field 600 times stronger than the field of a normal magnet, to stimulate healing of nerves, muscles and blood vessels.

HIGH ENERGY INDUCTIVE THERAPY (HEIT)

INDIBA CT9 Radiofrequency Device

Our INDIBA Tecar therapy machine converts electrical current into a stable radio frequency current of 448 kHz, designed to increase and stabilize the exchange of ions in damaged cells, evoking a regenerative response that accelerates healing. INDIBA can be used to successfully treat joint and muscle disorders, low-back pain, sports injuries, surgical incisions and various pain syndromes. Another therapeutic effect of INDIBA is extreme and prolonged cellular hyperthermia. Due to this effect, INDIBA therapy combined with manual therapy and soft tissue tissue manipulation enables instantaneous release to occur, significantly shortening the number and duration of physical therapy sessions. What is normally accomplished in two months of physical therapy can be accomplished in 3-4 sessions with INDIBA.

Ultrasound Guided Dry Needling

Myofascial trigger points often contribute to lower back pain. Dry needling is an outpatient procedure that inserts non-medicated needles into the trigger point to evoke a twitch response, releasing the trigger point and immediately relieving pain. Ultrasound guidance eliminates the need for multiple insertions, reducing pain and discomfort for the patient.

Ultrasound Guided Injection
Therapies

Injection therapies use natural/neutral solutions that stimulate cellular repair by either nourishing or irritating the targeted cells. Guidance by ultrasound ensures that the injected substances hit their mark, for maximum effectiveness.

Platelet Rich Plasma (PRP)

PRP therapy uses a sample of the patient’s own whole blood, which is spun in a centrifuge to extract a high concentration of platelets. When injected into damaged tissues, PRP initiates tissue repair by releasing biologically active factors such as growth factors, cytokines, lysosomes and adhesion proteins. The injected solution stimulates the synthesis of new connective tissues and blood vessels. PRP can help to jump-start healing in chronic injuries and accelerate repair in acute injuries.

Proliferation Therapy, aka Prolotherapy

Prolotherapy uses a biologically neutral solution, often containing dextrose, saline or lidocaine. The solution irritates the affected connective tissue, stimulating the body’s own natural healing mechanisms to encourage growth of new normal ligament or tendon fibers.

If you want the most accurate diagnosis and very best treatment for your athletic injuries, contact NYDNRehab and get back in the game.

We Use State-of-the-Art Motion Analysis to Detect Invisible Motor Deficits

Our methodologies are based on groundbreaking motion analysis technologies that allow us to identify and quantify multiple functional deficits, including:

Reactive strength
Proprioception
Eccentric control
Balance
Force production
Ground reactive forces

Tendon elasticity
Sensory-motor control
Reweighing
Repositioning
Neuro-cognitive processing

Our C.A.R.E.N system (Computer Assisted Rehab Environment) immerses patients in a virtual reality environment while their motion is captured by 12 infrared cameras that provide 360º real-time feedback. Used for both diagnosis and