Is Your Exercise/Stretching Helping or Hurting?

Hello everyone,

I wanted to take the time to discuss the matter of your exercise/stretching regimen. A lot of my patients come in to see me regarding their pain and tell me that they have an exercise or stretching routine - fantastic!.....BUT here's the thing:

My job is to help you feel better and to keep you that way. To do that, I assess your movement and together we figure out what movement consistently causes you your pain. This is our "test".

Then, I help you regain that mobility (or strength; depends on what you need) through an exercise or manual therapy and then we reassess with our "test" movement. If you perform the "test" again and it no longer hurts, AWESOME! We are one step closer to pain-free movement. Next, my job is to give you a home exercise to allow you to INDEPENDENTLY maintain that mobility so you don't reproduce that pain anymore.

So, to summarize, I did 3 main things- ASSESS - TREAT - REASSESS:

1) I evaluated you and ASSESSED a movement that reproduced your pain (i.e. ouch, it hurts to bend to the right!)
2) We found motion or specific exercise that felt good or was therapeutic
3) We REASSESS step 1  (did step 2 make it better? worse? Or the same?)

Based on how you feel after step 3, you either have a green light to do that exercise at home because it helped you move with less or no pain. Or, you just found an exercise that made it worse and you don't want to do that again!

I challenge you to do this. Your exercise/stretch is a form of your own treatment. I love when my patients find exercises to help, however, if you are doing an entire exercise regimen outside of my care, we really don't know if that is hindering your recovery. I will be more than happy to help you modify some of your exercises, too!

Have a wonderful day!

Dr. Adrienne