Have No Fear in the New Year with Physical Therapy!

It's a new year and I am recommitting to this blog. I think there is so much we can talk about in the world of performance and physical therapy, especially as it relates to sports or weekend warriors (my favorite kind of people). So I am going to bring in more information, more regularly, and hopefully someone can relate. And if not, it helps me keep my brain sharp and always learning (which I LOVE to do - wishing I could be a student without the homework forever!)

My thoughts for this blog post ties in with New Years. I am not a resolution maker, but I am a goal setter. I have big dreams and I have started writing them down to help myself stay on track. I know not everything is going to go perfectly. There are going to be days that nothing goes right, or I feel like I am treading water instead of completing laps (hello most of last year and starting a business in a town where no one knows me as a physical therapist!). This can be really frustrating, and sometimes I just want to do nothing because if you don't try, you can't fail, and that seems less scary.

I'm bringing this up because the same thing can happen in recovery from an injury. When something brings you pain, the tendency is to stop doing the thing that brings you the pain completely. So if it hurts to bend down and touch your toes, most people will stop doing that motion. After stopping that motion for a certain amount of time, fear of that motion can develop. And if you finally decide to try that motion after say 1 month of not bending forward, it will likely be stiff and maybe a little painful because your body adapts to what it is put through, and you haven't been putting your body through any bending.

Now, say it wasn't just a motion, like bending, but instead you hurt yourself in a basketball game. You tried to cut and turn and you tore your ACL (a ligament in your knee that helps keep your joint stable). It can be very scary to get back into the game because what if it happens again?

As physical therapists, we work on these factors of fear and slowly introduce movements in a safe and pain-free (or mostly pain-free depending on the situation) to alleviate your fear. We make you feel comfortable with bending half way, then 2/3 of the way, then all the way to the floor by decreasing the pain that stopped you in the first place. We make you feel comfortable running and cutting by slowly progressing your strength, mobility, and direction of movements so that your knee can tolerate any move you make and any force you put through it.

On a similar note, recovery from an injury or surgery is also not always linear. We picture this graph with a straight line going straight up as a "perfect recovery." I'm here to break the news to you, there is no perfect recovery. Most of the time the beginning of a recovery process is smooth and you may make gains pretty quickly, then that slows down. Maybe you go backwards for a day or two just because that's how the healing process works sometimes, or maybe you go back a significant amount because you did too much too soon, or maybe you're scared to move forward and you plateau for a minute. This is the reality. The graph looks more like a roller coaster, still trending upwards, but there are hills and valleys, and even some loops that you have to navigate along the way. The illustration here, by Adam Meakins puts this very clearly (and where I got this graph description because it helps to have a visual and to know that this is normal). It is good to see this because having a bad day can be scary - fearing that you messed up a lot of hard work, or that you won't get back to normal because you're going "backwards." Even though it can be frustrating and scary, it is NORMAL!

To sum up here, we all get scared of things. And it is human nature to avoid the things that make us scared. Whether that be writing a blog and having the fear of writing things that other people will read (yes, I know that's silly but I feel what I feel), or weather that be the fear of returning to the sport or activity you love for fear of reinjury (or hopefully not for the fear of injury because you're "old" - another blog on this coming soon), your body can overcome. And we can help with that at Dash! Don't be afraid to bend forward and touch your toes, don't be afraid to hike with your dog, don't be afraid to get back into playing basketball with your friends. We will give you the tools you need to have the mobility and strength required to tackle all your goals. Let's all be that 85 year old still playing basketball!