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Tag: trigger 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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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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The 7 Tissues to Consider When Progressing Activity After Physical Therapy

Craig Smith September 18, 2023

The Rehab Standard is an SPC concept that defines when a client has a higher exercise capacity than tissue capacity.   When your tissue capacity is lower than the exercise capacity, the focus of the workout is not how hard you worked out.  It is not how much you sweat or how good of a muscle burn you got. The focus is on the healing tissue and that is was not overloaded, irritated, or provoked.  A violation of the rehab standard can present as pain after the workout or the next day, even if there was no pain during the workout. The key is to focus on tissue capacity in the exercise selection, intensity, volume and the type of tissue injured. We want to look at this last one, the type of tissue injured, in relation to activity progression following an injury. The 7 Tissues to Consider When Progressing Activity Improving

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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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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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Smith Performance Center Tucson

Shoulder Pain Everything Hurts

Craig Smith September 7, 2020

  Why is everything hurting?   “I feel threatened by my shoulder. How can EVERYTHING hurt?” This is an actual quote from a patient with chronic shoulder pain. We see patients who are surprised by how debilitating intense shoulder pain can be.  They struggle to reach for objects overhead, behind them, or to the side.  They struggle with putting on clothes and getting dressed. They struggle with self-care activities like grooming and bathing.  They struggle with seemingly minor household activities: cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc.  They struggle to find a position they can even be comfortable in. Their shoulder pain affects how they sleep.  They start to complain of shoulder pain causing neck pain, upper back pain, or pain down the arm. They cannot work out due to pain. Sometimes, even something like walking causes shoulder pain.  Their activity is drastically constrained. When symptoms are this intense for a prolonged period

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Physical Therapy Tucson

Physical Therapy Solutions for Shoulder Pain

Craig Smith September 4, 2020

Why should I go to Physical Therapy Solutions at Smith Performance Center for my shoulder injury instead of another clinic? Physical therapy at Smith Performance Center is not a cookie cutter, one size fits all type of operation. Depending on what problem you have, the ‘right’ service might be different. Our process, called the SPC Difference, uses physical therapy in 3 distinct services: PT Solutions – One on One Physical Therapy Sessions using SPC Methodology PT Movement – Group Physical Therapy Sessions using Task Based Protocol for recurrent, chronic, or post surgical injuries Health and Human Performance – Long term strength and movement programming your own coach including injury surveillance, early injury detection, and treatment integration Physical Therapy Solutions  The shoulder is the most mobile joint in the body, and is relied on heavily during daily activities. It has many different structures which can cause pain, and it can be

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Smith Performance Center Tucson

What is Telehealth?

Craig Smith March 19, 2020

Telehealth in Physical Therapy   The Technical Definition The official definition of telehealth is as follows: “Telehealth is defined as the use of electronic information and telecommunication technologies to support long-distance clinical health care, patient and professional health-related education, public health, and health administration. Technologies include video conferencing, the internet…”. To take the technology further, telehealth is an umbrella term for a variety of services (education, administration, public health, healthcare) delivered electronically through telecommunications. Healthcare services delivered through video conferencing and internet services are called telemedicine. Telemedicine is the term used to describe clinical care rendered through video conferencing, the internet, and other electronic means. Telemedicine is one specific component of telehealth and is the primary service we are putting systems in place to provide. ​  We will use the term telemedicine and telehealth interchangeably on our website and in this article. For our purposes, the distinction is unnecessary. ​Our

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