Your Guide to Exercise While Injured
Many people avoid fitness and exercise because they’re afraid of getting hurt, or they just don't know where to start or what to do. However, when you're injured, exercise and movement are among the most effective forms of treatment. Rehab exercises don't have to be boring. They can be healthy, sustainable, and a fun way to recuperate from an injury and live a healthier life.
Our approach to rehab at Lake Effect Chiropractic focuses on kinesiology, which is the study of human movement and activity, to ensure that your muscles and joints maintain proper joint movement through their full ranges of motion. No two bodies are exactly alike, which is why our rehab is individually tailored to you and your body.
The key to injury, rehabilitation, and prevention aren't simply stretching or strengthening the muscles. It's to reinforce stability. Exercise doesn't require intense equipment or long hours confined to a gym. Exercise and rehab can be skillfully performed within our office setting with progressions and instructions for you to become confident in the exercises.
How do therapeutic exercises work?
Tight muscles, stiff joints, and muscle weakness are how the body communicates that something isn’t working as well as it should. If you've ever felt muscle cramps, restricted joint ranges of motion, or achiness after poor posture, there's a chance your body has learned to compensate for that injury or prolonged position.
Although it's initially helpful, your body uses secondary muscles to overcome the loss of this healthy primary motor function. This compensation causes muscle fatigue and excessive strain on a muscle that's not doing its intended job. This change becomes cumulative when sustained over time, which then leads to further injury.
Stretching isn't always the answer. Often, tight muscles are due to unstable joints, and that loss of stability isn't resolved by more foam rolling or additional stretches. The goal of rehab exercise is to help strengthen muscles. Those strengthened muscles become more effective at their primary jobs, allowing the other compensatory muscles to heal and resume their own normal function.
The result of rehab is a patient who feels stronger, sleeps more deeply, and feels more flexible with better motion in the affected area. Soft tissue techniques like therapeutic exercise and rehab are specialties at Lake Effect Chiropractic.
So who can benefit from these exercises?
Our office uses rehab exercises for many patients, with many reasons for coming into the office. A common reason is to recover from an injury either sustained at work, from sports or even from regular everyday life activities.
The Long-Term Fix
Therapeutic exercises help patients get back to feeling normal and staying that way. We don't want you returning with the same injury. Exercises are really important to perform because the muscles are like the brain. We can have a memory like riding a bike, throwing a ball, or running fast. Even if it's been a long time since doing that activity, we remember how to do it.
Reprogramming a muscle after an injury is necessary even if the initial injury is healed. Muscles retain some of that dysfunction from the injury. This results in long-term compensation patterns. Inflammation, scar tissue, fascial changes, muscle adhesions, and joint restriction, can be addressed with therapeutic exercises, which are important to get a full recovery.
Rehab exercises are not a one size fits all approach. It is a non-invasive therapy that focuses on improving motion patterns and promoting healing for your body's individual needs This includes your strengths, weaknesses, ranges of motion, and injuries.
Different exercises are prescribed throughout your course of care, depending on where you are through that process of healing. Your exercises may change once you get to a certain point in care.
Are Rehab Exercises Appropriate for Me?
In many instances, exercises are versatile and an essential form of movement.
In fact, people have been exercising since they learned to crawl and walk.
Exercises are a very effective treatment for back pain, neck pain, knee pain, elbow pain, shoulder pain, nerve entrapments, and many other skeletal musculoskeletal conditions.
During the initial appointment, our doctors will discuss your unique needs and create a treatment plan that's specific to you. So if you're in the Tri-Cities area and you're interested in learning more about rehab or exercise, give us a call.
We'd love to speak to you about our team and what we have to offer and determine if rehab exercises are right for you. Give us a call today at (989) 686-6808! We look forward to hearing from you soon.
