Why Exercise Forms Part of Your Treatment

Exercise will in most cases form an essential part of your Physiotherapy treatment programme. The reason we prescribe you exercise is not to take up more of your valuable time, but to use these exercises to assist us in bringing about pain relief as well as restoring movement, strength and function to the injured part of the body.

There is a vast amount of research supporting the benefit of exercise, and as Physiotherapists we would not be doing our job properly if we did not use this wealth of knowledge to your benefit.

As Chartered Physiotherapists, we have been trained in the use of exercise as a medical treatment and are able to compile a programme of very specific, tailored exercises to suit you as an individual with an injury that is specific to you.

There are times when general ‘fitness’ type exercises like yoga and Pilates are fine, but then there are times for example if you have an acute bout of back pain, when a very specific graded exercise programme is needed.

For an exercise programme to be effective, it needs to be performed with very careful attention to technique otherwise it could have the opposite effect and potentially aggravate the injury and delay healing. This is why we make such a fuss about ONLY doing the exercises we prescribe and doing them well because we want you to get better as quickly as possible.

As good as our exercise programme might be, it does require some compliance and participation on your part in order to achieve the best results.

We do understand that there will be obstacles to exercise, one of the main ones being time! For this reason we try to keep the number of exercises to a minimum, usually no more that three at a time. We try to keep them simple and easy to perform while helping you understand why you are doing them in the first place. We also believe that spending 10 minutes a day doing a small selection of exercises well is better than being overloaded with many exercises and being asked to do them 3 times per day. This would be enough to put most of us off exercise before we have even started. Not to mention those feelings of guilt when your Physiotherapist asks you if you have been doing your exercises and you know haven't.

At the end of that day, our aim is to get you better as quickly as possible and to as far as possible stay pain free and moving well. Therapeutic exercise is a very effective way to help us achieve this and is a worthy component to most Physiotherapy treatment programmes.

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by Simon.