Guidelines for Navigating Pain During Physical Therapy
Pain can be confusing during the rehabilitation process, especially if you have seen other providers. There are some providers who preach “no pain no gain,” and some physical therapists even take pride in pushing their patients to the brink of their pain tolerance.
That’s not how we do things at EVOLVE Flagstaff. In general, we want to reduce pain, and we want the recovery process to be comfortable, encouraging, and perhaps even exciting as you see improvement. For most injuries, pushing into pain simply doesn’t make logical sense. If you have a bruise, even if you want to push on it, you know that you are not doing yourself any favors by constantly poking it. The same is true for most injuries.
The importance of triggers in injury recovery
At EVOLVE Flagstaff, one of the most important but often under-appreciated concepts that we review with every physical therapy patient is what we call “Pain Triggers.” Pain triggers are movements, positions, or activities that place force or load on a painful or injured body structure.
EVOLVE Strong February Workout Programming
Hard to believe that January is almost behind us! The first few months of the year always seem to fly by. But, let’s harness the motivation we’ve seen the past few weeks, and get after another month of excellent workouts!
In February, we are going to build on the foundation we developed in January, and aim for several specific adaptations across the month
Basic Runner's Resistance Training Program
This article outlines a basic and minimal equipment, yet extremely effective, full body strength program. It is just two days per week, and uses equipment that can be purchased for $30 or less.
EVOLVE STRONG WORKOUT DESIGN GUIDING PRINCIPLES
Something I say often is that it is actually quite easy to create a hard workout, but much more difficult to create an appropriately challenging workout, within the context of a broader program design, consistently over time. Doing 45 minutes of burpees would be unbelievably hard, but also probably not effective for anything other than mental toughness. So, while we definitely want our EVOLVE Strong workouts to be challenging, we don’t want them to just be hard for the sake of hard.
Instead, we want our EVOLVE Strong classes to be effective, and to be unique in a way that fills a gap in today’s group fitness environment. In this article, I want to break down our guiding principles and thought process behind our workout design, and give an example from January 2022.
What is the difference between physical therapy and personalized program design services at EVOLVE Flagstaff?
We found by creating bolder lines between physical therapy and strength training that we have been able to improve what we value most: results for you. By doing this, we’ve found that we are able to support you with the plan, tools, resources, and education that are best for you right now. We still maintain a comprehensive, long term focus, but we are able to take that journey one step at a time, in the right order, with fewer wrong turns.