What is Prehabilitation?

And could it help you?

People usually seek osteopathic help when they are injured or in pain, however Prehabilitation is a form of physical or corrective exercise therapy that aims to prevent injuries occurring. If you are unlucky enough to have suffered injury the same strategies are used reduce recovery time and get you back to fitness. This is achieved by maintaining or restoring balance throughout the body’s muscular system.

Imagine one of your joints as a bike wheel, if all the spokes are tensioned properly then the wheel is works well. If one of the spokes becomes loose you may not notice straight away but as it loosens more, more spokes start to loosen and the wheel is unstable and doesn’t function well. The same happens when the muscles in your body become tight and weak after you exercise, it creates imbalance in that area. You may not notice anything to begin with but after continued training you might notice stiffness around joints. There are many muscles that support the correct function of complex joints and the stiffness around these joints is caused when muscles overcompensate for the tightened and weak muscles.

You can see examples of this happening throughout the body.

Shoulder movement involves a very complex interacting series of joints and requires a lot of fine tuning to function properly. Our often poor posture, leaning over workstations, slumped in sofas etc. messes up this fine balance up leading to painful and sometimes difficult to treat shoulder pain.

There is a great deal of impact on the lower back when exercising, when everything is working well the back can cope but when the muscles supporting the back become tight and weak pain may occur. When running every time your foot hits the ground you place 2.5 time your body weight through your knee and with the average runner doing 2000 foot strikes per mile you can see how a small imbalance can become a big problem!

 

The good news is that a skilled practitioner can spot these imbalances early using various orthopaedic tests and palpation of the affected area. Then using a combination of manual therapy and exercise prescription the practitioner can help you re-dress the balance in your musculoskeletal system.

Keep an eye out for future blogs, I will be writing a series of articles to help you with common areas where these issues occur. They will be articles about the hip and pelvis, the shoulder, the knee and low back. Please feel free to comment or make suggestions of any topics you would like me to cover in respect of musculoskeletal injury and I will be happy to look into it.

Please feel free to use our contact form to address any specific topics or questions you have, or pop down and meet the team in the Wellbeing Centre.

Mark Bussetti