So when injury strikes, do not pick and choose your exercises. We have designed our exercise routines to take you through these phases while addressing the needs of your entire kinetic chain. These programs will help you strengthen and heal – not just the initial area of pain, but also all the surrounding supportive soft-tissues in that structure’s kinetic chain.
Do these exercises when you find your hands and arms becoming stiff and restricted, to restore the mobility and function of your muscles and joints. Do the stretches whenever you are spending long hours in front of a computer keyboard! And do the strengthening exercises to resolve or prevent injuries, and improve your performance in all your activities.
During all injury recovery phases, soft-tissue manipulation such as Active Release Techniques or Massage Therapy can be very effective in reducing muscle spasms, reducing swelling, decreasing nerve compression, and reducing pain.
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 to 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 6.
Principle 2: Develop your Power - page 7.
Principle 3: Build your Aerobic Base - page 9.
Principle 1: No Pain...All Gain!
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.
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.
If you truly want to rehabilitate your injuries you must work within a pain-free zone. This is quite different from training to improve your performance in which you may have to endure some degree of muscle pain (not injury pain) to improve strength and endurance.
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 range. In addition, avoid the exercises that currently cause you pain, until your body is ready for them.
What works will vary from person to person so listen to your body and adjust our routines accordingly.
Principle 2: Develop your Power
Power (within your body) is about the production and transfer of force through your entire body. Power is also a function of how well you can recruit your nervous system to control muscular action.
The more efficient your nervous system, the more power you will have. The more power you have, the easier it is to perform your activities and exercises without injury.
Power is not the same as strength; power is about maximum efficiency without effort. (Strength requires a lot of effort and energy.) The more power you have, the less energy you will need to expend to perform a task, which equates to having more energy available to heal and grow your body.
Power generation is also directly related to the quality of your soft tissues (muscles, ligaments, tendons, etc.). The quality of your soft tissues determines how well you can store and release energy.
Think of your soft tissues as being like cords of elastic rubber (or perhaps a telephone cord) that can stretch (storing energy) and contract (releasing energy). In a healthy state, your muscles contract and release instantaneously, storing and releasing energy with changes in body motion.
So what happens when a rubber cord gets knots tied in