Fitness Friday: Physical therapists assist clients with athletic injury prevention.
It has been awhile since I have written about exercise. Immersed in sexual health training, I have focused my media presence on sexuality education and counseling. However, I am, most formally, a doctor of physical therapy. As a physical therapist (PT), my passion is pre and post rehab, community-level client care, with a fitness and wellness lens. I coach clients in reaching a fitness or movement goal following a traditional stint in rehab, as many folks are uncertain of what they can do and how to continue their progress after therapy has ended.
I also work with clients to prevent injury by fitness screening, posture assessments, and functional movement evaluation. Many don’t recognize that physical therapists can play a critical role in injury prevention, largely, I suspect, because insurance won’t pay for it, making clients less likely to pursue the cash-based, skilled-exercise, injury-prevention option. With the rise in boutique gyms though that offer intensive exercise that clients might not be ready for physically regardless of their ego’s desire, fitness screening and injury prevention considerations are a must. Just because a body can do a movement, doesn’t mean that movement is being done in a safe way that prevents injury1,
For example, a recent study found that 85% of pole dancers had pole related injuries (!!!)2, with the chance of injury increasing with less experience with pole dancing, higher training volumes, and a previous injury. A PT could have helped here via program design to reduce the likelihood of over-training, checking posture and lines of gravity in different movements to minimize the stress on joints, strength and flexibility training where needed to support person specific needs, and cross training (for global strength and to prevent over training).
Personal trainers can help, but they don’t have the same intensive anatomical and functional movement training that physical therapists bring to their clients. PTs can adapt programs to make them person-specific with their client screening skills – tweaking form and load, for example, to meet the person and their medical background/injury history/diagnosis/ability/size, not to force the person to meet an exercise that doesn’t work for them. PTs are also well-versed in recovery modalities – sleep hygiene, stress management, basic nutrition, all of which support athletic clients in their tissue recovery and injury prevention.
Together, PTs assist with injury prevention through client screening, basic nutrition, recovery strategies, and program design. If you are a mover or athlete, please consider working with a PT to maximize your fitness while preventing injury.
Interested in working with me?, I am a recreational aerialist, obstacle course race lover, regular exerciser, a yoga practitioner and teacher, PT, and CHEK practitioner (an amazing personal training certification program) – I am skilled at working with a variety of bodies and have personal experience with intensive exercise. See my scheduling link here: https://calendly.com/ignitewellbeing-naperville
Thanks for reading! Best of luck with your exercise goals!
Citations & Notes:
- As a PT and regular exerciser, I see this often at the gym. The competitive nature of gyms can push people to try for a movement that their body can’t support. While that might not result in an injury in the moment, performing activities that your body can’t support can make a person more prone to injury. Major asterik here – movements have ideals, based around physics, line of gravity, etc. and bodies often fail to meet those ideals. So it is a balance here – saying someone can’t do something because they can’t do it well, or safely, ,or xyz, is patronizing and possibly ableist, context depending. The point here is to find a way to support the person’s body to best approximate their goals and to make sure the client is risk aware if there are concerns about their movement readiness.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8742019/pdf/41598_2021_Article_4000.pdf The Circus Doc, Emily Scherb, first made me aware of this article
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The above content is written by Dr. Allison Mitch, PT (DPT), RYT500; sex-positive/affirming, trauma-informed sexuality counselor and educator (she/her/they/them); copyright protected, please cite accordingly. The graphics are mine.
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