Taping is often used in addition to treatment from your Physiotherapist for stability by restricting movement of injured joints, soft tissue compression to reduce swelling and support anatomical structures.
It is also used by athletes to help prevent re-injury.
Your Biokineticist can strap you to help enhance performance. There are various types of tape that your Physiotherapist will use dependent on the reason for the taping.
Common types of tape
Our Physiotherapists use
Rigid tape to improve stability of a joint. This is often accompanied by a hypoallergenic tape under the rigid and an elastic tape on top to keep the rigid in place. Think knee strapping on a rugby player. This is used for stability and to prevent re-injury.
Kinesio tape is an improved type of elastic tape that stretches in one direction. It is used to help alleviate pain and promote soft tissue healing. Some of the proposed uses of K-tape include facilitating proprioception, reducing muscle fatigue, facilitating muscle activation, reducing delayed-onset muscle soreness, pain relief, reducing oedema, and improving lymphatic drainage and blood flow.
Dynamic tape which is a relatively new form of taping that uses multi-directional stretch to alter movement patterns by providing support without limiting the range of movement of a joint. The aim of Dynamic tape is to reduce the load on the muscles, tendons, ligaments, or other associated structures. The tape helps to mechanically resist or assist the movement by generating the force externally thus helping to protect and control the amount of load the injured, overloaded, or weak tissue.
