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Tag: pain management

Physical Therapy Tucson

The 10 Strategy Mistakes of Repetitive Injury When Exercising

Craig Smith December 14, 2023

Do you want to get back to exercise but keep on getting hurt? The merry-go-round misery of a repeatedly injured exerciser is a common complaint at Smith Performance Center. When someone shows up, our physical therapists listen to a series of injuries that seem to occur every time they get into a workout routine. The exerciser finishes rehab and heads back to their respective sport. The first few days go well, but inevitably the same problem comes back. In our clients’ minds, their body has lost the ability to stay healthy. They believe age is driving the problem, or the joints are shot. They think the activity they choose to do is too vigorous and must be replaced.  These are not the problem.   The cycle of repetitive injury is a strategic mistake. Returning to activity with a strategy We believe in a process called the SPC Phases. A phase at

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Smith Performance Center Tucson

The 7 Home Plan Mistakes Ruining Your Progress in Physical Therapy

Craig Smith November 27, 2023

Not all home plans are made the same. Home plans are therapeutic exercise lists that undergird your journey in physical therapy. Unfortunately, home plans can stall your progress. This happens for a variety of reasons –  the home plan becomes an afterthought to your care, the physical therapist is overloaded with clients, the overuse of assistants, or too much of an emphasis on what is done to you by the practitioner versus what you can learn to do yourself.   We see each of these situations when reviewing the histories of new clients with long-term injuries. The home plan is a critical component of your rehab plan in physical therapy. Our team regularly helps new clients who have been doing the same home plan from physical therapy for years which is not helping. This includes obvious mistakes like stretching an irritated nerve, overloading a painful joint with weight-bearing exercise, or making

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Optimizing Your Strength Training: The Role of Open Clinics at Smith Performance Center

Craig Smith November 17, 2023

At Smith Performance Center (SPC), our primary aim is to facilitate a healthy and active lifestyle for all our members. One of the tools we employ to overcome potential barriers to consistent exercise is the utilization of open clinics, which play a crucial role in addressing pain and injuries. An open clinic session lasts for 15 minutes and serves four primary purposes: The genesis of the open clinic concept dates back to January 2018 at Smith Performance Center. Initially conceived as a space for members to report new injuries, discomfort, or movement issues, these sessions soon became integral to our strength training approach. On the first weekend, our physical therapist triaged six people.  Now after five thousand sessions, we recognize their significance in supporting a healthy lifestyle. Why do open clinics matter? Injury prevention, often a cornerstone in healthcare and fitness, presents challenges.  Being active inherently involves a degree of

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Smith Performance Center Tucson

7 Key Reasons Why the Home Plan Is Vital for Success in Physical Therapy

Craig Smith November 17, 2023

The significance of the home plan often gets overshadowed by in-session treatment.  At Smith Performance Center, our physical therapy sessions are one hour per week with your therapist. You are responsible for the other 167 hours. Due to this, the home plan is a vital component of your physical therapy journey, capable of either propelling your progress or impeding it. It’s not uncommon for our team to encounter new clients who’ve stuck to the same ineffective home plan for years, making errors like stretching an irritated nerve, overloading painful joints, or handling an extensive plan that goes largely undone. These missteps tend to patients undervaluing the home plan. However, the home plan stands as a linchpin for your success. We want to explain the 7 key reasons why the home plan is vital for success in physical therapy. Ensuring We Target the Right Problem There are instances where immediate relief

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Total Knee Case Study: Why You Need A Structured Rehab Process

Craig Smith September 29, 2023

A structured rehab process that ultimately targets a full return to activity is missing in healthcare. Patients struggling with pain are treated as if they are all the same. We believe there are common, big problems to address, but there is a high degree of uncertainty with every patient presentation. Even when a patient has the same diagnosis they can have different triggers, different contributing factors, different behaviors, and drastically different needs in the rehab process. This is true when patients have the same surgery by the same surgeon.   Let me use an example with a straightforward rehab plan; post-total knee replacement.   The Painful Total Knee Replacement Peter Pain had a total knee replacement.  He has always been active and handles pain well but this replacement has been horrible. First, he fell behind on medication post-surgery because he hated the way the drugs made his stomach feel. The second day

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7 Tools to overcome invisible triggers stalling your rehab progress

Craig Smith June 22, 2023

An invisible trigger is a problem that can stop you from fully healing. An invisible trigger is an action or activity that does not seem to be causing your injury to worsen but is actually causing your injury to remain and not heal properly. During the course of treatment, our team comes across this problem frequently when a patient will seem to stop progressing in their rehab plan. This problem presents most often during the symptom stabilization and the activity progression phases.  The physical therapist will see an improvement in symptoms during a session, but then progress is lost when the patient tries to manage the symptoms on their own. During activity progression, there is often an interaction between the activity being progressed and normal daily activities. Do you have this problem? If you say yes to the following, an invisible trigger is not being addressed. Pain keeps returning when

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The 5 Components of Invisible Triggers That Cause Your Rehab Progress to Stall

Craig Smith June 14, 2023

You keep getting close to feeling good but then fall back into an injury because of a common, but often unrecognized issue – invisible triggers. An invisible trigger is an action or activity that does not seem to be causing your injury to worsen but is actually causing your injury to remain and not heal. If you slammed your finger into a door, you would know the door caused your pain.  Continuing to slam your finger in the door will cause the finger pain to remain. In contrast, an invisible trigger is not as clear as slamming your finger in a door. Patients have an easier time eliminating obvious triggers. This does not happen with invisible triggers. An example would be low back pain triggered by an interaction between two activities: running followed by a bout of sitting. When we investigate running by itself, there is no problem. We repeat

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Four Reasons Why Patient Forms Help Improve Your Care During Your Rehab Process

Craig Smith June 6, 2023

‘Not all relevant outcomes can be assessed with a device, a laboratory test, a physical finding or some other data gathering independent of the patient’s perception and voice.’ -Kroenke, Monahan, and Kean 2016 We want to share with you how filling out patient forms is not only useful to our team but also critical for receiving the best care. In the ranking of where you want to spend your time, completing forms for a medical visit is just above a tooth extraction. The act is mind-numbing. Partially due to the perceived lack of benefit and partially because you know the healthcare provider isn’t using it. They will even ask the same questions that were already answered in the form.  Our team would like to change your mind on this by showing how we use your forms to impact your care – the why, how, and when. There are three clear

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5 Treatment Options to Reduce Knee Pain without Surgery, Injections, or Drugs

Craig Smith January 30, 2023

We treat intractable knee pain on a daily basis. Our process is called the PT Solutions Treatment Hierarchy. The treatment hierarchy allows our team to support the diagnosis, reduce pain, and create a clear home plan. Building a treatment framework is a critical component of the plan and it changes based on the key sign, the structural diagnosis, and the trigger management plan.  For example, a person with an anterior horn meniscus lesion, we would first normalize painful end range extension of the knee.  Once passive extension is pain free, we would start to load their leg with the activity that normally hurts, providing them an exercise like terminal knee extension with the band that will keep their knee extension pain free.  Finally we would dig through all of their daily activities that cause symptoms like fast walking or going downhill and stop them from doing it to allow healing.

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Smith Performance Center Tucson

How Long till My Rotator Cuff Pain Improves?

Craig Smith September 8, 2020

Prognosis and Outcomes in Physical Therapy One of the key differences in our practice compared to normal, insurance-based physical therapy is how we schedule our sessions.  We normally do a session once every week or two weeks. This developed as a result of our focus on the home plan including trigger management.  The second reason was how we started to use braces, tape, and training aids.     How do the anatomy and function of the rotator cuff impact physical therapy? What is my rotator cuff injury? How long till my rotator cuff injury is better?   Prognosis with a Rotator Cuff Injury In the first two parts of this series, we looked at the background information about the structure and function of the rotator cuff, the common types of Rotator Cuff injuries that lead to pain, and how to figure out what it is. With this final article, we would

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