How To Go Through A Back Pain Rehab Properly?
With back pain, 9 times out of 10 we hear people frequenting YouTube and Google to find exercises and stretches. If you know when to push and when to hold off during rehabilitation, this is when you’re really going to get the best results.
What stage are you at of rehabilitation? The stage you’re at is going to determine whereabouts you start with rehabilitation.
If you’re struggling to walk about the house, you’re going to be in the first phase of rehabilitation, the skill and relief based exercises. These exercises are going to help improve your mobility, learning to engage the core and also to give you the right exercises that will give you relief.
Strengthening based exercises. If you feel good enough to do some exercises but you decide because you feel ok that you’re going to do the strengthening multiple times per day – this isn’t the best way to progress. You need overload on the muscles but you also need good rest and nutrition to make progress.
In the Phase 3 section of the strengthening where you’re adding resistance, you’ll be doing these around 3 times a week in order to progress rather than every day.
What type of person are you?
A – Cautious
B – Impatient
The overly cautious person may struggle to progress because they may think they need to be at a certain pain level in order to do more exercises.
The impatient person may feel they want to be better yesterday, so overly push forward with the exercises to push too hard too soon.
Our acronym T.R.E.A.T can help you to push forwards in progress safely. First up, Test. Test a new or increased activity but with nothing else in the day being different to normal, so it’s a controlled experiment. Rest: the next day don’t do the same activity again if you’re feeling good. Do your normal day-to-day and take the day to see how you’re feeling. Evaluate: see how the test went and what you can learn. This should be a fair evaluation based on how you usually feel. If you feel sore in the morning, do you usually feel sore every morning? Were you a little more stiff to begin with but then after you got moving around, did you feel the same as normal?
Adjust: if necessary, look at the activity you’ve done and see if you could potentially do a little more or that you needed to have done a little less – be honest with yourself and look at the situation practically. Test: test the activity again and repeat the process.
