APEX PWR | Physical Therapy Feature
In May, Scottland Telesa won the 6A boys shot put title at the OSAA state championships at Hayward Field with a personal best of 59 feet, 9 and three quarter inches, roughly six feet better than the year before. He also placed fourth in the discus. Last fall he was named the Northwest Oregon Conference 5A Special District 2 Lineman of the Year and picked up all-state honors on the line for Aloha.
This summer he is in our clinic working through a low back strain, and in our weight room getting ready for his senior football season.
That combination is the whole point of this article. Scottland is doing physical therapy and sports performance training at the same time, in the same building, with the same staff talking to each other. For a football athlete six weeks out from training camp, that is the difference between arriving ready and arriving hopeful.
Low back rehabilitation and return to sport work at APEX PWR in Tigard, Oregon.
Football asks the lumbar spine to do three difficult things at once, repeatedly, against resistance: extend, rotate, and absorb compression. A lineman does it from a crouched start position on nearly every snap, with another athlete of similar size arriving at speed.
The literature reflects that. A review of treatment options for low back pain in athletes reports that prevalence among football linemen may run as high as 50 percent. Broader NCAA injury surveillance data places men's football among the sports with the highest rates of lumbar spine injury of any collegiate sport.
Age does not protect against it either. A recent narrative review in Orthopedic Reviews put reported back pain incidence in adolescent athletes at 21 percent, with prevalence estimates ranging from 37 to 66 percent, most commonly in the lumbar region. High school football athletes are squarely inside that population.
These figures describe the published research base on football and low back pain. They are not APEX outcome data.
Shot put and offensive line work look nothing alike from the stands. Mechanically they overlap almost completely. Both start from a loaded, flexed position. Both drive force from the ground through the hips, transfer it across the trunk, and deliver it through the upper body into an object or an opponent. Both reward the athlete who can produce and tolerate very high force in a fraction of a second.
The low back sits in the middle of that chain. When hip mobility, trunk stiffness, or posterior chain strength falls short anywhere along it, the lumbar spine absorbs what the rest of the system could not handle. That is true for a thrower in May and for a lineman in October, which is why an athlete who competes in both can carry the same issue across two seasons without ever getting an offseason.
Our physical therapy is strength based and built around return to sport. Pain relief is the first checkpoint rather than the finish line. The goal is an athlete who can take contact, hold a block, and finish a fourth quarter without the issue coming back.
A low back strain is usually a symptom of a load the athlete could not distribute. The evaluation looks at hip range of motion, trunk control under fatigue, posterior chain strength, and how the athlete moves in the positions their sport demands. Treating only the painful area leaves the cause in place.
Extended rest tends to slow return rather than speed it. Positions, ranges, and loads get adjusted so the athlete keeps building everywhere the injury allows while the involved tissue tolerates progressively more work each week. Most of our football athletes continue their strength and performance training throughout rehab.
Symptom-free at rest is a low bar for a football player. The progression moves through loaded hinging and squatting, then rotational and anti-rotational work, then sprinting, change of direction, and finally the collision demands of the position. Each stage has to hold before the next one opens.
Discharge from physical therapy is a transition rather than an ending. Athletes move into football performance testing and training so the strength and movement quality built in rehab keeps developing through the season instead of fading.
Training camp compresses more work into a few weeks than most athletes see at any other point in the year. Volume climbs, contact returns, two-a-days appear, and heat adds another stressor on top. An athlete carrying an unresolved back issue into that environment is managing it under the hardest possible conditions, with a game schedule arriving right behind.
The NCAA five-season study on back injuries in college football is the relevant warning here. Its authors describe back injuries as frequently leading to persistent pain and reinjury. An episode that gets partially managed in August has a real chance of becoming a season-long problem by October.
Four to six weeks of lead time changes the conversation. There is room to resolve symptoms, rebuild loading tolerance, and run an athlete through football performance testing so both the athlete and the coaching staff know where they actually stand before the first practice.
One-on-one sports physical therapy for football athletes in Tigard, Oregon, plus football performance testing and training under the same roof. August comes fast.
Football Performance Testing & Training Book Physical TherapyMost football athletes in the Portland metro have to run two relationships: a clinic for the injury and a gym for the training. Those two rarely talk. The athlete ends up translating between them, and the handoff back to sport is where things tend to break down.
At APEX, the sports physical therapy team and the performance staff work in the same facility and share the same athlete. A lineman rehabbing a back can train his upper body, his conditioning, and his lower body within tolerance on the same day he does his physical therapy session. When he clears, he walks into semi-private sports performance training with staff who already know his history, which is a meaningful way to decrease injury risk on the far side of a return.
APEX PWR is at 11105 SW Greenburg Rd in Tigard, central to the Westside metro. Athletes from Beaverton and Aloha reach us in roughly 10 to 15 minutes, and we work with athletes across the Beaverton School District as well as Tigard, Tualatin, Hillsboro, Lake Oswego, and West Linn programs. For Portland athletes in the Southwest and West Hills, we are accessible along I-5 or Barbur Boulevard.
Whether an athlete needs sports physical therapy for a current injury or football performance testing and training to get ready for camp, the entry point is a conversation about where they are right now.
Get the back sorted and the numbers measured before the volume arrives. Sports physical therapy and football performance testing in Tigard, Oregon.
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