How We Help Clients Achieve Their Physical Therapy Goals
4 Steps to Achieving Your Goals for Physical Therapy
When a client meets us for their first physical therapy session, one of the most common questions is, how do we help them achieve their physical therapy goals? Especially if you are considering physical therapy for the first time, it’s likely that you’ll be curious about this, too.
Whether you’re recovering from injury, managing chronic pain, or wishing to improve your athletic performance, physical therapy can help. But it’s not solely about exercising and manipulating your body. It’s about setting goals, personalizing training, managing your expectations, and developing trust with your physical therapist.
In this article, Physical Therapist Dr. Gary Wang walks you through the skeleton of the four steps to achieve the goal of physical therapy.
Step #1: Set Goals for Physical Therapy
The first step to achieving your fitness goals is to set them. However, deciding what goals you wish to achieve is different from understanding why you wish to achieve them. And it’s this that makes your goals unique to you.
At Reload, we focus on listening to and understanding your story. We want to know where you’re coming from, what your end goal is, and what your current situation is. We want to understand what you’re dealing with right now, and how your daily routines might impact you. All of this knowledge is vital when tailoring treatment and creating a program that’s personal to your specific circumstances.
In most healthcare practices, the system is increasingly focused on reimbursements, time, and profit. The result is that patients have less time to share their stories. This is where we provide one of our most significant differences. We value your time above ours.
It’s common to spend up to two hours in our initial consultation with a client, just listening to their story. By doing this, we gain invaluable insight into what you’ve done, what’s worked and what didn’t work, and your goals. When we prioritize you in the conversation, then we can create a program that is more likely to succeed.
After listening to your story, we can see how you’re moving and learn about what you can and cannot currently do. This is what helps us to fill in any missing pieces.
It is listening to you that gives us the right to help you. We’ve never heard your story. Without this in-depth knowledge, what gives us the right to advise you on what is specific to your needs and goals? The understanding we gain from listening ─ really listening – to you and understanding your big picture is what allows us to do so much more than simply offer the generic advice that you’ll receive everywhere else.
Step #2: Adjust the training experience to meet the personal goal of physical therapy
Now having a clear understanding of your personal goals for physical therapy, we can tailor your training experience to meet your needs and preferences.
Our goal is to provide you with the whole spectrum of training and experience that we have in our team. This way, we can offer you a range of training options. If you come to us and tell us that you never want to do a squat, then we’ll respect that. We’ll find other ways to get you to where you want to be.
For example, a runner and a dancer with different goals will need different exercises to fit those goals and their persona. Even though these exercises might not match the traditional exercises associated with fitness training, we can show how they are helpful.
This is a long hop away from trainers or therapists that focus on exercises that they enjoy doing themselves. If you’ve ever had personal training or with a trainer who is in love with kettlebells or sprinting or bodyweight exercises, you’ll understand what we mean – that’s pretty much all you’ll be doing.
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution. A good physical therapist or personal trainer respects your goals and your personality. They will personalize a training program to what is right for you, and not to what they want to do ─ even if it means trying something new.
Step #3: Managing expectations when getting started
Now that we’ve established your personal goals and created a tailored program for you. What next?
It’s crucial to understand the demands of an activity or exercise. This starts with us. We spend a lot of time learning about every exercise or activity that we incorporate into a training program before doing so. Because the better we are at understanding what goes into achieving your goal, the better we are at working with you.
Let’s give you an example. Let’s say your goal is to improve your sprinting or jumping ability. Or to play tennis with your friends. If we’ve never done those activities before, we don’t know the demands they place on your body (and mind). We need to be able to dissect the activity and understand all the pieces that go into it. And by doing this, we can help you set and achieve realistic goals.
For example, before we can say that you’re ready to play tennis, you’ve got to demonstrate that you possess all the qualities necessary. We’re not going to put you into a situation and merely hope that everything will work out fine. This is also the approach we take when setting exercises – if we’re not certain you can do that exercise, we won’t ask you to do it.
So, we break physical therapy goals into smaller pieces. Short-term goals and markers to hit before we have the big-picture goal within reach. When we send a client back to playing a sport or doing an activity they love, we know that they are capable of doing it. We know they can run, sprint, cut, jump, take contact… whatever is needed.
This approach, of building on and managing expectations, is crucial to achieving your goals for physical therapy safely and efficiently.
Step #4: Establishing and maintaining trust with clients
Even before you meet your physical therapist or personal trainer here at Reload, we’re working for you. The first contact is to have a call with our Director of Physical Therapy. You’ll be asked questions that cover things like:
What it is you’re dealing with
Your personal situation and circumstances
Your goals and interests
On this call, we learn a little about your personality and the type of person you would most like to work with.
All this information is crucial. It gives us a meaningful insight into who here has the experience and personal qualities to work best with you. That’s critical because it’s crucial to getting you to your goals.
For example, if you’re a dancer, and your goal is to return to dancing, we have therapists and trainers with a dancing background. Similarly, if your goal is to get back to powerlifting or training clients, or you just wanted to learn more, we have certain therapists and coaches who fit that bill.
This fit of trainer or therapist to the client delivers a more successful and rewarding experience for clients. You’ll be working with someone who actually understands your sport or activity, and not simply the pain aspect or the physical therapy or personal training part. And right there is what helps to build the trust that is so key to your progress.
You’ll also discover that we encourage and support all our colleagues here. We spend a lot of time learning from educators and teachers ourselves, and we put what we learn into action personally before passing on new techniques or exercises to you.
Even though we’re learning from someone already at the top of the food chain in terms of experience and wisdom, we take everything they tell us with a grain of salt. We want to know how it feels. We want to understand how it feels to power lift, sprint, work on multidirectional speed, or train for a kettlebell certification.
When we feel all this ourselves, it makes us more qualified coaches and teachers to our clients, especially when they’re dealing with pain. It’s something that sets us apart. Something that can give you confidence in us, and develop the trust that is essential for us to help you achieve your physical therapy goals.
Where do you start with your physical therapy goals?
Achieving your personal physical therapy goals is a journey that involves first setting those goals, and tailoring a program to meet your needs. It’s crucial to manage expectations and to work with a physical therapist and/or personal trainer who has your trust.
It all starts with learning about you, prioritizing your needs and goals, and developing a plan around you. The very first step is to schedule an appointment so that we can discover your story – the foundation of achieving your goals for physical therapy.
