Have you done PT before and didn’t get results you wanted? Or maybe you were feeling better but then a few months later your issue just came right back?
Many people will just come to the conclusion that their body wasn’t made to feel or move better. Or they just decide to stop doing the things they love to do altogether. Let me tell you truthfully, that’s a load of bowl, and you probably just had bad PT.
It’s not surprising, and something we see with many of our patients who have done PT elsewhere. They were seeing improvements initially, but that progress was let out, and they were also stuck doing the same routine in Physical Therapy OVER AND OVER for weeks. That’s just lazy and ineffective. If you want real lasting results your PT needs to adapt with you. As you improve, so should your exercises.
Our body is a constantly changing and adapting organism that will respond to the inputs you give it. Often times, the exercises you start with in PT can show some benefit because they are targeting areas that need work. Might be a tight muscle that needs immobilized, or a weak muscle that needs strengthened or stabilized. Regardless, it’s a good initial approach, but then the progress stops. You feel like you hit a wall. So what are you to do now?
Do you just continue all the same things and hopefully it continues to improve? To get you pain-free and remain pain-free, you must continue to progress the therapy exercises in a way that matches the demands of your day-to-day life and training. But most PT doesn’t get to that point. They know how to rehab 70 year-old Doris off the street whose main exercise is getting up off the couch and walking up and down her stairs a couple times.
We get phone calls on a weekly basis from people that have been to physical therapy at one of the big box clinics and were unhappy with their experience overall, because it felt so repetitive and cookie cutter. It’s no surprise that they saw very little to no improvement in their condition. We see this especially in active adult adults that like to lift weights, run, or just train hard in general. The demands they are placing on their body far outweigh the benefit that these simple movements are getting them.
Real progress takes a real personalized approach. And if you can’t get a personalized approach with someone that is able to spend some real time figuring out how YOU move, what YOUR restrictions are, and what YOUR body needs to heal and recover, you need to seek out someplace that does.