What to Expect At Your First Physical Therapy Session With Reload
The Before, During, and After of Our Personalized Approach
“Even before a client comes in, we’re already gathering information about how we can best help them and what their history is.”
Yep, it may seem surprising and, for many who have experienced the traditional approach to physical therapy, even unbelievable ─ but our work with you begins before we even meet. We’ll speak on the phone and start to figure out what’s going on with you – what you’ve experienced in the past, what you’ve tried, and what your fitness goals are. This initial conversation helps our director of physical therapy or director of fitness to match you to the appropriate physical therapist or personal trainer.
But this isn’t the only way in which our approach to your health and fitness differs from the approach taken by many physical therapy clinics and personal training providers.
In this article, and with the help of Dr. Gary Wang, Physical Therapist here at Reload, we discuss how we begin to shape your long-term fitness in our first session with you, answering questions that include:
How long is the first physical therapy appointment?
What is involved in a physical therapy initial evaluation?
What to expect at first physical therapy appointments?
The physical therapy initial evaluation
“In the first session, the therapist meets with the client. This might be one-on-one, or with someone shadowing,” says Gary. “We always feel that more eyes are better. Plus, the other therapist learns from it and gains some experience from watching someone else work.”
During the first session, you can expect the therapist to go over your history and learn exactly what brought you to us in the first place. The therapist will go even deeper into your medical and injury history, to learn what may be related to your current situation.
We’ll also break down and debunk some myths surrounding physical therapy. And we’ll help you get into perspective what you should be able to achieve with effective physical therapy and personal training.
For example, you may have the impression – or have even been told – that you need surgery because of a specific condition or that an image taken shows you have a tear or herniated disc, or some other condition.
“When we debunk the myths first, we set an expectation that the condition isn’t as bad as it sounds – and we can show why there is hope,” says Gary.
Understanding pain and exercise difficulty
It’s crucial that we fully understand the challenges a client faces while doing certain activities or simply during the course of their daily lives. One way we do this is to present you with exercises to do. However, for these to be effective tools in understanding how difficult or painful they are for you, we need you to categorize them effectively.
So, you can expect us to explain to you how to categorize the difficulty of any exercise. The goal, of course, is to get to a point where an exercise is not so easy that it is wasting your time but, simultaneously, does not push you beyond your personal pain threshold.
“If you understand how challenging an exercise must be to create positive adaptations, then you already have a better starting point,” Gary explains.
The other thing is teaching you about pain. If we present you with an exercise that gives you a lot of pain, that’s counterproductive. At the same time, you mustn’t worry if you feel a little bit of pain during an exercise or activity.
“We use a traffic light analogy,” says Gary. “A green light – well you can drive right through it. A zero to three pain, which means it is safe to exercise.
“A yellow light… if you see this while driving, you’ll start to slow down and proceed with caution and figure out what’s going on and if it’s safe to proceed. So we’ll look at things like if the weight is too heavy, or your form is off, or you’re tired and need a little longer to rest, and so on.
“In yellow, it’s safe to train but we can modify and make it even better for you.”
And the red light?
“A sharp, stabbing pain, or a threatening pain, are the things we want to stay away from,” Gary continues.
“If you gave this scale in your mind, you can make better judgments about what exercises or activities are good for you – even outside of your physical therapy sessions. This helps you decide whether, for example, an activity or exercise you’re doing at home, with a level two or three pain, is an exercise that is on the table for you.”
Our job is to find the most efficient and effective exercises that will carry you toward your goals – and part of our job is to know how they will carry over to your progress.
You’ll find that we spend around 30 to 45 minutes discussing all of the above. It may seem like a lot of talking, but our experience is that this is critical to developing a successful exercise program.
Now, this length of time that we sit down talking with you is likely to be alien to you: when was the last time you got to actually talk through your problems and challenges in such detail with your healthcare provider or current physical therapist?
Moving on ─ the comprehensive physical evaluation
Of course, we also need to assess you physically. We’ll spend 30 to 45 minutes looking at your movement.
“We need to see where your current baseline movements are. We’ll learn what hurts and what doesn’t. Then we’ll figure out exercises that aren’t too easy nor too hard. It’s about getting you to start to challenge yourself, be more active, and build some strength,” says Gary.
The session debrief
The intensity and length of this first session are more than most people will have experienced in another physical therapy clinic. So, at the end of the session, we also take time to debrief. Our job here is to make sure that you have taken in all the information that we have shared with you.
These few minutes are a little like a cool-down – time for you to breathe, gather your thoughts, and give us a summary of what you have learned, what you found most useful, and, of course, to ask any questions you might have.
We don’t stop there – the follow-up
“Even after the session, we check in the next day to see how you feel. We want to know if you feel better, worse, or the same. This is valuable information, and helps us determine if we did too much or too little,” says Gary. “Then we’ll go over the exercises that we want you to start with.”
So, that’s a flavor of what you can expect from your first session with Reload. A big-picture summary. There are a lot of steps before, during, and after the session, but hopefully, it gives you an idea of how we start – which is how we follow: constant communication and a holistic, highly personalized approach that puts you at the center of everything we do.
Isn’t it time to benefit from the Reload approach to your health and fitness?
Book an appointment with us to start with a comprehensive 90-minute body evaluation.
