Fitness without pain! Now that sounds like a good idea. I figure you can call yourself an athlete whether you run three times a week in the neighborhood or are training for a marathon. Sometimes I wonder if the word athlete is synonymous with pain. Athletes over 50 are not strangers to injuries or to physical therapists, but their first exposure to a therapy based program is usually after they have injured themselves.
If you are serious about sports or fitness, you have very likely had a trainer at one time or the other. You want to get stronger and fitter faster. Nevertheless, if you are the person levering your body out of a chair or you are the one hobbling down the hall, you have a sports related injury.
I actually love exercising and have been a fitness buff for 20 or 30 years now, but I am always the one complaining of pain in one or more of my extremities. Sometimes I envy my couch-potato co-workers and friends. With my history it isn’t any wonder that the article by Kevin Helliker (The Wall Street Journal: September 28, 2010) caught my eye. It was called “Getting in shape but without the pain,” and it discussed how more and more older people are hiring a Physical Therapist before they get injured, rather than signing on with a personal trainer.
A Physical Therapist, especially one tuned into sports injuries, focuses on preserving, restoring and improving function. A Physical Therapist is trained to identify barriers to exercise and to building programs around personal physical limitations. After receiving a fitness program from a Physical Therapist, most people will hire a personal trainer to help them implement it.
Half of the people who start an exercise program drop it after a few months, partially because of fear, partly because of discomfort, and partly because of lack of confidence. You can feel confident that a Physical Therapist will develop an efficient and well balanced program for you. Seeing a therapist before you hurt yourself is a novel idea. The Therapist can assess and often reveal muscle imbalances and inefficient movement patterns that often set you up for an injury. They can then provide a regime that will correct these problems before honing in on endurance, balance, strength training, and weight control.
Proactive programs are most likely not covered by your insurance, but if you are tired of always being in pain the cost might certainly be worthwhile.
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Posted by: excessive sweating | February 08, 2011 at 11:45 AM
I'm 47 and many times I've injured myself working out. I've seen orthopedic doctors repeatedly and keep getting diagnosed wiht tendinitis (bicep, tricep, patella, hamstring, achilles). My doctor never wrote a prescription for physical therapy (always says rest and ibuprofin), so how can I find a Physical Therapist that will do a proactive program? I just want to be less accident prone in the gym. I spend more time rehabilitating myself than exercising. Since my tendons never heal 100%, I'll repeatedly re-injure the same tendons over and over again (which take longer to heal each time). Now the pain is chronic. I don't even push myself that hard in the gym and injure so easily. Many times I want to give up because it's not worth all that pain and injury. It's really frustrating because I really want to get fit without getting injured. The only activity where I haven't injured myself is swimming (except once when I got a concussion after hitting the edge of the pool doing the backstroke). Am I a hopeless case?
Posted by: Tom | March 13, 2011 at 08:37 AM