In this post we discuss the reason your injury rehab is failing and how to fix it using an illustrative case study.
Nearly everyone I meet who is having trouble recovering from pain and injury has one thing in common:
Their application of exercise is poor.
Now of course this isn’t their fault. In most cases they’ve simply been given an exercise with minimal instructions and sent home.
Most people forget what they should be doing by the time they get to their front door.
Often an exercise which has failed to produce any positive effect, when carried out with care and attention, begins to shift the needle.
Case study
Take Lea for example. No stranger to the gym, she’d nevertheless been struggling with a stubborn case of shoulder impingement.
Her shoulder was so painful she had trouble putting on a jacket. Even relaxing in the evening was problematic as certain positions provoked pain.
Over the period of a year she’d visited countless physios in the search for a solution.
Nearly all of them had given her the same exercise, a shoulder external rotation exercise with a band.
The assessment
The first thing I noticed when assessing her was that she had very little external shoulder rotation, despite working on this motion for over a year.
We adapted that same exercise so it matched her current capabilities and she was able to complete it without pain.
She started to feel better within days.
Progress continues
Next we moved to other limited movements at her shoulder. In particular her ability to upwardly rotate her scapula (shoulder blade). This is necessary for pain-free overhead movements.
During each session we made sure she was feeling the exercises in the muscles that were performing the work and felt no pain.
With this approach Lea has continued to make progress and now knows exactly how to apply exercise to keep her shoulder strong and free of pain.
Perhaps you can now see how crucial the application of exercise is?
One year of performing an exercise with zero effect v one session executing it in the right way.
Incredible no?
Summary
I would argue the application of exercise is where nearly every rehab programme falls flat.
It’s both what you do and how you do it that makes the difference between feeling better, or continuing to suffer with pain.