A quick check-in with a local PT could be the difference between spending your season rehabbing or remaining out on the field in competition.

Enter Brian Prax, owner of Prax Physical Therapy at 185 Powderhorn Lane, who has used the small town setting of Jackson to keep young athletes informed. Prax uses his close ties with coaches and instructors around the valley to arrange seminars with athletic programs, geared toward educating youth athletes on the importance of injury prevention from a young age.

A Minnesota native, Prax spent his early years as a traveling physical therapist, visiting adventure towns across the West for short stints at a time. During his time in Jackson, Prax was particularly struck by local athletes’ growth mentality.

“One of the main reasons I stayed in Jackson was the type of patients I was able to treat here compared to anyone else,” he said. “People here are really motivated to get better.”

While the majority of athletes who seek out his help are in search of a physical remedy to get back on the field, Prax typically saves some time to educate them on how they can prevent injuries from occurring in the first place.

“There’s a little bit of a misconception, especially when you’re looking at youth athletes and physical therapy, because a lot of people blur the line [between] athletic training,” Prax said. “Unfortunately, physical therapy mostly works once an injury occurs. We work with the pathology, the injured state, while with high school or middle school and younger athletics, there’s such a big focus on the preventative side of things.

“Our primary role is getting people from the injured state back to the uninjured state so they can play, function and live their life injury free.”

So how can young athletes stay out ahead of an injury? Expressing early discomfort is a key first step, regardless of the severity, Prax said. Adolescents are much more likely to remain quiet about their pains, as they often haven’t experienced that type of discomfort before and are unsure what is usual and what isn’t for their body.

When in doubt it’s important to get checked out to make sure.

When a youth athlete comes to his practice, Prax not only performs a physical evaluation to create a treatment plan but also examines what happened, how it happened and how the athlete can change his or her routine to ensure a lasting career of athletic pursuits.

“So much of what we do in physical therapy happens not in the clinic,” he said. “If people only came to the clinic and I treated them ... they left and did nothing different in their lifestyle after that, most people wouldn’t get better.

“One of the biggest, most important tools in outpatient orthopedics is having people do the right things and avoid the wrong things for the time that they’re not in the clinic.”

Bones, muscles and tendons continue to develop well into one’s teenage years; it’s important to get out ahead of a nagging injury, so a one-time incident doesn’t create additional problems down the line.

“There’s a lot more potential for some of those injuries in younger athletes to turn into a chronic scenario for the rest of their lives, or something that won’t heal entirely,” Prax said.

The PT industry is on the rise too, and the resources available to providers are drastically different from what existed just a handful of years ago. Prax believes the field will continue to grow as new studies are released.

“As a profession we’re still in the phase of growing significantly over time in both the diagnostic tools that we have, as well as the ways in which we can treat things more effectively with the new research that keeps coming out, and the new treatment techniques that we have to address the problems.”

“It’s constantly evolving,” he said. “It feels like we’re nowhere near the golden age of physical therapy.”

In a valley full of athletes, there is also a plethora of private physical therapy practices including Excel Physical Therapy, Teton Physical Therapy, All Body Therapy, Four Pines Physical Therapy, Peak Physical Therapy and Medicine Wheel Wellness. There’s also PT at St. John’s Health.