After receiving manual therapy to a specific area of your body to help alleviate acute or chronic pain. Your body would potentially have gained a new sense of freedom to move. This extra range of motion allows for oxygen and nutrients to flow into the once restricted tissues to help them regenerate. Allowing these tissues to expand and decompress can help you physiologically, but also psychologically.
The mechanism of how your injury started could be due to a number of reasons. Maybe there was an impact or maybe it’s how you’ve been performing a repetitive task that caused the tissue damage. The mechanism of the injury is important to know, but it’s also important to know how your body will compensate following the injury. Your body will always try and do what you ask it to. The way the body gets there may not be the most efficient or safest way. These compensations create a shape change within your body’s structure including bones and connective tissues.
The manual therapy sessions help decompress and even compress particular areas of your body to alleviate these compensation patterns.
To help make these changes stick we need to think about how you move your body against gravity. Standing up from lying down on the treatment table, your body needs to adjust to this new sense of movement. You will actually be walking and performing your daily tasks differently. The problem is, you don’t always stay in this alignment. It’s easy to fall back into the compensation patterns used before. With this, your pain or discomfort can return.
We can help these treatment changes stick for a longer period of time, by using specific exercises that create a certain shape to your body to reverse your compensation patterns. Performing these exercises on a regular basis reset your position and help improve posture.
Being more active by exercising has many positive health benefits, but sometimes we need to be more specific to the individual. We all have different structures and movement capabilities, therefore it’s important to exercise that way. The reality of following a generic exercise programme is, what works for one person may not work for another. If the individual’s physical structure hasn’t been accounted for. It may lead to frustration and confusion or even make the situation worse.
For more information on what exercises to perform to help with your pain or discomfort.
Please contact Ben
