Our exercise routines always consider how the core of your body acts as the power generator for your entire body. This is true even for movements of your neck, shoulders, arms, hands, legs or feet. No matter what the action, you need a strong stable core to be able to transfer energy to your extremities. See “Involving Your Core” on page 13.
Our exercise routines also address the development of your elastic power or the ability of your muscles, ligaments, tendons, and fascia to store and release energy. The ability of your soft tissues to store and release energy is dependent upon the quality of your soft tissues. Low-quality tissues are full of adhesions, scar tissues, and knots. These tissues do not store or release energy efficiently. High-quality tissues can move easily through their full range of motion, are not restricted or adhesed, are capable of long periods of endurance, and are not easily injured. One of the primary goals of our exercise routines is to provide you with a means for improving your overall tissue quality. See “Principle 2: Good Tissue Quality = Good Performance” on page 9.
Aerobic warm-ups are an integral component of all of our programs. It doesn’t matter if we are dealing with a jaw, neck, shoulder, back, or leg injury; aerobic training is essential. By developing your aerobic system you increase your circulatory function and your ability to produce energy on demand. Aerobic exercise does this by increasing the density of capillaries in your muscles, and the density of mitochondria (your personal energy factories) in your cells. See “Benefits of Cardiovascular Exercises” on page 40.
And finally, one of our primary goals is to give you effective strategies for increasing strength without further injuring yourself. The exercise routines we provide in these books are similar to ones that we provide to our patients. These routines have been successfully tested and improved over time, and will help you to strengthen your body in a gentle and progressive manner.
I hope you stick to the routines, enjoy this book, and benefit from your improved health. I am sure you will achieve great results.
All the best in health!
Dr. Brian Abelson
Rehabilitation vs. Athletic Training
A Kinetic Chain Perspective
Exercise protocols and training methods should be quite different when you are rehabilitating an injury to bring your body up to a functional level of activity vs. when you are striving to improve athletic performance on an already well-trained, uninjured body. After all, the goals and capabilities of the trainee are quite different within the two levels of training.
Unfortunately, most standard exercise programs do not differentiate between the two goals, and tend to apply the same exercise routines in both situations. Moving too fast, with an unprepared body, into athletic or performance training is a sure recipe for injury and disaster.
The objective of our Release Your Kinetic Chain series of exercise books is to provide exercises that help you resolve injuries in specific areas of your body, and that prepare your body for the more difficult performance-based workouts. These books provide a step-by-step, methodical process, that requires patience, and time on your part.
Let’s take a few minutes to understand the difference between these two types of programs – Rehabilitative and Athletic Training.
About Rehabilitative Exercise Routines
Rehabilitation programs focus upon returning your body to a state of full function without further injuring yourself in the process. Our primary objective with our rehabilitation programs is to resolve your injury, increase neurological and motor control, build strength, and increase flexibility while restoring function.
Only after you have rehabilitated completely from an injury, and have restored good muscle endurance and motor control (neurological control) should you consider applying athletic performance strategies to your training.
Rehabilitation training is not just for resolving existing injuries, it is also a critical preliminary step for preparing your body to accept and benefit from advanced conditioning and performance training. If you have not been physically active for a period of time, it is essential that you start with the Beginner sections of this book. As you work your way through the exercise levels, you will be tuning and preparing your body for more advanced performance-based exercises.
Rehabilitaton requires patience and time! Remember, your body needs time to heal from your injuries. Many people, in their enthusiasm to reach their goal, make their injuries worse by not giving their body sufficient time to heal. So take the time to properly prepare your body for athletic level training.
What we provide in these books are guidelines for gently tuning your body without causing undue stress, injury, or pain! But it is your responsibility to listen to your body, understand its signals, and adjust your routines accordingly.
The following rules are a few fundamental principles that you should keep in mind as you work through your rehabilitative routines:
Principle 1: No Pain...All Gain! - page 3.
Principle 2: Develop your Power - page 4.
Principle 3: Build your Aerobic Base - page 6.
Principle 1: No Pain...All Gain!
Rehabilitation (unlike athletic training) requires that you perform your exercises within a completely pain-free zone; essentially a zone of safety.
Exercising in a manner that causes pain develops abnormal neuromuscular patterns that may lead to further injury.
Conventional rehabilitation strategies commonly do not succeed because they do not address the underlying neuromuscular problems. They are often designed to make you work through your pain (as in work-hardening programs). This only causes you to create or reinforce the abnormal motor responses which in turn continues to keep you in pain.
In addition, if you work through pain caused by tissue damage you run the risk of central sensitization. This is a nervous system process which causes you to become more sensitive to pain. The only way to break this pattern is to perform your exercises in a pain-free zone.
We commonly have patients come to our clinic who have exercised through their pain for years! They are always amazed at how, by exercising within a pain-free zone, we were able to help them break their pain-cycle in just a few short weeks.
What works will vary from person to person so listen to your body and adjust the routines accordingly.
Bottom line:
Never work through injury pain.
If you have an injury, and the exercise hurts during certain motions, or if you feel pain when resting, then restrict the range of motion of the exercise to lie within your pain-free