Jokes about bad backs make them sound like inevitable parts of aging, but back pain is treatable with the right approach, and physical therapy is often the key to regaining range of movement and rebuilding back strength. While it is often used in conjunction with other therapies for conditions like chronic pain, PT can also help you rebuild strength and regain flexibility after an injury.
How PT Can Strengthen Your Back
When you find physical therapy Redmond, the nearby location makes it easy for you to go as often as needed to address your back strength issues. Therapists will work with you at each appointment to assess your progress and to design a series of exercises that builds strength in the right muscle groups. This helps prevent muscle imbalances from developing while treating any that already exist. When you have every muscle group doing its own work instead of relying on a few to compensate for the others, your overall strength increases even if your strongest muscle group plateaus.
Over time, strength-building exercises for the back and feedback about your form can help you make overall gains, too. The role of the physical therapist in the situation is to give you those tools in sessions so that you can then take the exercises home and continue making progress.
How PT Can Increase Your Flexibility
Addressing muscle imbalances and improving muscle strength can also help with flexibility. By building up muscles consistently across all the right muscle groups, you can avoid over-building any of them in ways that make it hard to bend in certain ways. The supporting and stabilizing muscles that often need to be strengthened when you go to physical therapy Portland for your back are also usually key muscles for stretching and flexibility, too.
In addition to the flexibility gains you can make by addressing muscle imbalances, the right PT routine will also build your knowledge of healthy stretching and flexibility exercises you can use to directly support your flexibility gains and take them to the next level. Just like maintaining muscle strength, maintaining your range of motion in your joints requires regular exercise, especially as you grow older.
Advice Built Around Your Needs
Physical therapy uses an anatomically balanced approach to building strength and flexibility in your back, which is what sets it apart from physical training more generally. Therapists seek to help you have the healthiest balance of strength across all your muscle groups and to reach a normal range of motion, which is also a distinctly different goal from training for superior strength or athletic ability. That means physical therapy is also more individualized than even the most personalized gym training, which can’t benefit from the information in your medical records directly.
While many people know that PT is an important part of injury recovery, not as many realize that it can be a big part of maintaining your strength and range of motion as you age, too. If you have noticed decreased flexibility, waning back and core strength, or back pain after exertion, it’s time to get on the web and search for physical therapy near me. Talking to a professional about your needs can give you the information you need to move ahead, so seek it out.
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