The Importance of Post-Rehab Personal Training
Combining Physical Therapy and Personal Training to Achieve Your Fitness Goals
If you have ever attended traditional physical therapy for the relief of chronic pain or treatment of an injury, the chances are that you’ve experienced TENS (transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) units or ultrasound for the area that is being treated.
The traditional approach involves heat and a lot of gentle exercises, typically for 10 to 15 minutes. Your therapist will then manually massage, stretch, and mobilize you for another 10 or 15 minutes.
You might then move on to some easy exercises, such as warming up on a bike. You will then be ‘delivered’ to a tech or aide who will guide you on follow-up exercises.
But the problem is that the therapists aren’t always able to give you the time and attention you really need. It’s a treatment and training cycle that is designed to move you along as quickly as possible.
It’s all about profit, and little about you as a human. An approach that may work to relieve pain in the beginning, but does little to prepare you for returning to your usual activities. It involves offloading the body, removing what hurts, doing gentle exercises until the pain eases, and then discharging you.
A couple of weeks later, when you have returned to work, for example, the pain flares up again. You’re back to square one.
If this sounds familiar to you, then your experience as a patient is reflected in Dr. Gary Wang’s experience as a practitioner in traditional physical therapy.
“I’ve worked in a traditional setting. I’ve shadowed, and I’ve done clinical internships and rotations in a lot of settings,” says Gary. “It’s kind of like a conveyor belt, where the therapist wants to give as much attention and care as they can, but because of the setting that we’re set up in, we don’t have the luxury to do so.”
Many of the traditional physical therapy is ‘passive’ treatments that may feel good in the moment, but no long term results. Here at Reload, we focus on helping you progress your program week to week, learn how to help yourself, and personal training that deliver long-term results and improvements in fitness, as Gary explains in this article.
The continuum of physical therapy
One of the key differentiators between our approach and traditional physical therapy is that we don’t always provide manual care in stretching or other modalities unless it’s necessary. Instead, our goal is to teach you how to take care of yourself as much as possible in the time you have with us. And remember, that time is more than you’ll have with most other therapists.
We’ll help you to learn:
What to do
What not to do
What weights to use
How to start
How to progress in each specific exercise
If an exercise is too hard for you, we’ll teach you how to regress it – exercises should be challenging but not irritating.
Where we want to get you to, and then maintain you, is what we call the sweet spot of post-rehab personal training. It’s crucial that we design exercises and programs that are hard enough to make you better, but not so hard or intense that they make your condition flare up or worsen.
This is the continuum of physical therapy we are in, sitting between conventional physical therapy and personal/performance training. Our goal is to discover the parts that are missing, and then get you back to the sport or activity you wish to perform.
Do people commonly move from physical therapy to personal training?
Often, people who are experiencing pain come to us and say something like, “My goal is to not have back pain. I don’t care about anything else. I just don’t want to have pain.” But this isn’t the whole story. It’s not really their focus. There’s always more to it. For example, the real goal is:
To have less back pain because they want to play with the grandkids
Relief from shoulder pain because they want to throw a football with their kids
To regain their identity as a dancer with freedom from knee pain
These are only a few examples. Your real fitness goals are unique and personal to you.
Understanding your short-term goals is our starting point. Your long-term goals are where the personal training comes in.
For instance, you might now tell us that you want to run five miles. It’s what you used to do and want to get back to. This is where we transition from physical therapy to personal training to performance training. It’s where we bring our whole team to support you and help you achieve your goals.
This is why our clients trust us
We’ve found that clients stick with us, and the value we provide is a big reason for this. We know that if physical therapy is viewed as a chore, you’re less likely to continue with it. You’ll find excuses to avoid it – and you won’t get better.
We approach every session like a consultation. We’re on your fitness journey with you – and your goals are our goals for you.
Every session we spend together, we want to teach you something. The more you learn from us, the better it is for you. We want you to learn a little more about how to progress your health and fitness to a point where it becomes part of your lifestyle every time we meet – whether in person or virtually.
Of course, we want you to feel better in the short term, but that is not the end of the story. We call it healthy longevity, and it doesn’t stop when your pain is gone. Our role is to support your goals, whatever age you are and whatever your general fitness is. It might be getting back to playing pro-sports. It could be that you’re in your 60s,70s, or 80s and want to return to or continue running, hiking, or playing tennis.
We also understand that you may experience setbacks. We want to equip you with the tools and mindset to be prepared for them and to overcome these. You may have played too much tennis recently or didn’t get enough recovery time.
Your journey to fitness shouldn’t be too different from a commute to work. A setback is like a stoplight. It’s annoying. But it’s not going to stop you from achieving your objective of getting to work.
When you’re properly prepared for the journey, you’ll be prepared for any roadblocks or obstacles that come your way. Start your fitness journey today: schedule an appointment for a 90-minute body evaluation.
