Rehabilitative Exercise

Rehabilitative exercise is the breadcrumb trail from where you are now back to a more natural and efficient way of moving your body.

Movement is complicated. The sheer number of dynamic processes that take place even during the simplest of movements is mind boggling. Rehabilitative exercise aims to set the complexity, number of focal points, and overall difficulty of a movement pattern to the proper amount for your specific case. This allows your body to be challenged enough to adapt, but not overloaded; which shuts down the learning process.

Why are you treating my neck when I have shoulder pain?

Typically, when you go to a provider to resolve pain, the first thing they do is treat the area of your body that is bothering you. This is logical and makes rational sense, however, the overwhelming majority of people who come to see me for treatment have already been to a (sometimes staggering) number of practitioners with little to no relief. So perhaps it's time to revise the plan and look at things in a different way.

The body is a massively interconnected whole, and it's important to assess and treat globally, rather than playing whack-a-mole with symptoms as they pop up. What's crucial to resolving pain is understanding the difference between the site of pain and the source of pain. We all have compensations in our human movement as a result of injury, repetitive postures, and general life experience, and these compensations cause certain parts of our body to be stressed more than others. These compensations, while helpful and necessary in the short term, can grow into dysfunctions that are at the root of chronic pain. A good treatment deals with both the site of pain and the source of pain, allowing you to distribute force through your body in a more efficient way.

Why does my pain come back?

Tools like acupuncture and manual therapy are great for breaking a dysfunctional cycle. They may even completely remove your pain for a period of time. However, if the underlying issue is a movement dysfunction causing certain areas of the body to be stressed more than others, it is likely only a matter of time before pain returns.

Medical treatment can be an action that interrupts a painful cycle, however, rehabilitative exercise is the action that receives, re-patterns, and solidifies the changes created by the treatment. It is an essential part becoming (and remaining) pain-free.