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Tag: Strategy

The 6 Functional Exercises Tested During a Movement Assessment

A mistake in exercise programming that our team encounters is a heavy emphasis on variety in exercise, instead of movement pattern mastery. Our team does not focus on an endless array of exercises. The focus is on building depth in foundational movement patterns. These patterns make up every movement you perform when lifting. If these foundational movements are missing, advanced exercises will be wasted on poor form. You need to own the basic movements first. During the movement assessment, the 6 foundational movement patterns are assessed with 6 functional exercises from each movement pattern category. The movement assessment is where our strength coaches determine what may cause issues in your program: accountability, rehab standard, location/time, coaching need, and comfort level. The 6 functional exercises help our coaches determine your coaching need, if you have a tissue capacity issue (rehab standard), your comfort level with free weights, and what is the

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The 8 Reasons All HHP Clients Go Through a Movement Assessment

The Smith Performance Center team wants to be the best in the world at helping clients who want to maintain an active lifestyle. If you search the internet, this seems like a simple problem to solve. Just do this exercise or make sure to have protein after a workout. Problem solved.  This has not been our experience.  There is an entire area of research devoted to what behaviors keep people moving and what makes them stop. Keeping people active is not simple and there are numerous reasons why a person will stop. The purpose of the movement assessment is to figure out issues that will stop you from moving. There are clues in your history, how you move, how you hurt, and how you think that will help guide us. Here are the 8 reasons we do the movement assessment: Figure out what may lead to failure Determine the right

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The 5 Patient Responses That Should Impact Your Physical Therapist’s Strategy

In a session, the first rule as a practitioner is to make sure we do not lie to ourselves about what’s happening, and lying to ourselves is the easiest thing to do. We can lie to ourselves when we make errors in reasoning due to a plethora of cognitive pitfalls like confirmation or optimism bias, overconfidence, or mistaken availability heuristics. This can ruin the chances of a great outcome if I only search for facts that confirm my dominant theory, or if I want the patient to have a great response so I ignore portions of the medical history that would lead me to a think of worse prognosis. These cognitive errors ‘help’ me to lie to myself. One solution is to get very clear on what the patient is reporting. There are only 5 patient responses in the session: great, good, bad, terrible, and no response. Certain pathologies readily

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

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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5 Rehab Mistakes and How to Solve Them

The majority of our patients have been treated somewhere else first without improvement. When we review their case, similar process mistakes happen over and over again. Lack of diagnosis (Mistake #1) or telling a patient to just stop the activity that hurts (Mistake #4) leads to more problems and eventually to a life of inactivity. Our passion as a company is to keep moving for a lifetime and the number one reason people stop or don’t even start an active lifestyle is pain and injury. Understanding these common mistakes can help you become a better consumer of rehab services and get better faster with longer-lasting results. The end result is the ability to do the day you want. The 5 rehab mistakes and their solutions The mistakes below are strategic errors: Mistake #1: Not Defining The Problem And Possible Problems Causing Pain Mistake #2: Confusing a Single Treatment as the Solution Mistake

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Trigger Management Plan in Physical Therapy

Trigger Management: Why physical therapy exercises are not enough to get you better?

What is a Trigger? We use the term trigger as a catch-all term for the activities and movements during the day that makes symptoms worse.  Trigger investigation is critical because they are the bane of feeling better. ​ The term, trigger, is an event that causes something else to happen.   You trigger the headache when you look over your shoulder. You trigger back pain when you move from sitting to standing. You trigger the shoulder pain when you reach for the shelf.   Sounds simple?  Unfortunately, determining all of the triggers to your symptoms is as difficult as it is important.   We obsess about triggers and draw boxes and lines going all over! Why do we obsess on trigger management instead of building a huge list of physical therapy exercises? Imagine this scenario.  I am hitting a nail into the wall. Instead of hitting the nail, I manage

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