There is a certain level of movement ability that everyone has to have in order to be healthy, active, and pain free. Daily activities like getting in and out of bed, walking, going up steps, picking something up from the floor, brushing your hair, and getting up from a chair all require you to be able to move. To do recreational and sporting activities you need an even higher degree of movement, strength and endurance.

Just like a car needs to be driven and have routine maintenance to keep running, our bodies need to be moved and stressed in the right way to stay healthy and pain free. If joints are not moved, muscles aren’t stressed, and bones are not loaded, we get stiff, weak, and lose our ability to move without pain and tolerate the demands of life. Stiffness, weakness, and an inability to tolerate loading contributes to things like joint and muscle pain, arthritis, and osteoporosis.

So the first question is how do we maintain our ability to move without pain as well as our ability to perform daily and recreational activities?

The answer is we use a regular exercise routine that is personalized. This allows us to consistently practice movements needed for everyday life and fix individual movement dysfunctions.

Unfortunately, just being active in your day to day life, or getting the right number of steps per day, or doing activities like yoga is not the answer. While these are good things and can be help some aspects of health, they most likely won’t be comprehensive enough or individualized to what you truly need. The right kind of exercise needs to help with maintaining strength, cardiovascular health, and our bodies ability to tolerate stress. It also needs to focus on preventing muscle tightness, keeping muscle tissue healthy, and preventing pain from occurring. And it needs to be changed and adapted from time to time based on what your body needs.

The second question is if you have pain or an injury that prevents you from moving and exercising what do you do?

In the majority of cases, a person’s pain or injury is a direct result of poor movement, strength, and their ability to tolerate loading. So to fix the cause of this pain we need to restore proper and pain free movement, then build functional strength.

Most often someone that specializes in movement and treating pain will evaluate your movement and perform a combination of manual and movement based therapies to first relieve your pain and restore proper movement. When pain is gone or at least controlled and movement is at an acceptable level, treatment focuses on building strength and progressively loading your body to maximize function. Then once again an individualized and comprehensive exercise program is used to help you stay healthy, active, and pain free.

We are programmed to go to the doctor once a year for an annual physical and go to the dentist 2 times a year for cleanings. Even though we go to the dentist 2 times a year we know it’s important to brush our teeth and floss on our own.

Your doctor probably does annual blood work to monitor things like cholesterol and tells you to exercise and eat better to maintain a healthy weight. But they don’t evaluate your movement or give you the tools needed to exercise effectively.

We know it’s important to maintain our ability to move but often we either don’t know how, assume it will happen on its own, or are given the wrong information.

If you have pain, want to lose weight, build strength, improve flexibility, or want to stay healthy and active schedule a FREE discovery session with one of our movement experts.

To schedule call us at 614-392-2792

Let us know if you have any questions!,