Exercise has become the primary treatment strategy for healing after injury because it helps restore movement and function, alleviate pain, and can prevent future injuries from happening. But, when you stop seeing your therapist, should you continue your rehab exercises forever? In this article, we explore the benefits of continuing rehab exercises after treatment and when you might better move onto something else.
What Are the Benefits of Continuing Your Home Rehab Exercises?
Maintaining Your Recovery After Rehabilitation Therapy:
One of the biggest advantages of continuing your post-rehab exercises can be that it sustains the recovery you achieved during your treatment sessions with your therapist. The key factor here is that consistently practicing your exercises helps you keep the progress you achieved in therapy and could reduce the risk of recurring symptoms later.
This is very important if you have a degenerative or other chronic condition that makes things harder to do or to manage pain when you neglect your daily exercise program. In this case, exercises will often target strengthening, flexibility, and balance, all of which contribute to maintaining your ability to move safely and freely.
Reducing Injury Risk with Your Exercise Program:
One of the biggest risks of a future injury is if you have already had an injury in the past. This is why maintaining your exercise program can prevent future injuries. If you are returning to playing sports or other physical activities, you are at an even higher risk of a re-injury. Maintaining, or even improving, your fitness can help guard against any more interruptions.
Improving Your Fatigue Resistance for Injury Prevention:
Even when the pain may have gone away after your treatments end, many people will still not be back to 100%. In these cases, your home exercise program is very important to complete your recovery so that you can take advantage of the health benefits described above.
Although there are few certainties in healthcare, we do know that there is no perfect exercise, and nothing lasts forever. People who fall into this category after treatments are finished should still follow-up with their therapist for exercise program updates to keep improving their health and performance.
Lifestyle Integration:
For many people, completing a plan of care for an injury helps to motivate you to keep those good habits going, which brings along a lot of other health benefits as well.
Making your post-treatment home exercises part of a new active lifestyle is an excellent approach to staying well and healthy. Making daily exercise part of your lifestyle not only reduces your risk of a future injury but has also been tied to reducing the risks of longer-term cardiovascular and cognitive health. Integrating these exercises into daily life improves self-discipline and a sense of empowerment for your health.
Reasons to Discontinue Your Rehab Exercises:
You may be surprised to read a therapist actually tell you that sometimes it is a good idea to stop your exercises! Well, not exactly but here are some points that you should think about so you can keep the progress you worked so hard to achieve.
Resolution of Symptoms:
If your injury or condition has fully recovered – that is your pain is gone, and you have full mobility and are not reminded of your injury during your activities, you probably aren’t getting anything more from your rehab exercises. Complete recovery also means that you can focus on activities and sports without your attention being split between movement and hurting yourself. If you are still consciously holding yourself back because of a fear of reinjury, it’s probably too early to let go of your exercise program.
Lack of Motivation or Compliance:
Staying fit is not easy, otherwise everyone would be! Consistency is the hardest thing to maintain after treatments are completed, especially when your exercises never change. It’s common for people to lose motivation, allow other priorities to take over, or find difficulty integrating exercises into their daily routines. However, this can also eat away the benefits gained from your treatment sessions, leading to some of the problems we already spoke about above.
The good news is that there are always other exercises that can help maintain your progress and help to keep your interest. Many of my clients check-in with me monthly for a review and program update, that helps them keep improving. They also tell me it’s easier to stay motivated because I’ll be checking their “home” work! Since these sessions are also available virtually, clients find them very convenient and easy to incorporate into their schedules.
Another unique solution that we have created here at the Orthopaedic Therapy Clinic is our highly-reviewed Healthy Back Program, which is a membership to our online exercise service where people can follow an instructor through a safe and effective workout to help you stay stable and healthy. Healthy Back features workouts at many different levels that challenge you while also providing an essential mix of variety to keep your motivation strong as well!
Creating New Goals or Priorities:
For most people, recovery is a journey, not a destination. With consistent progress, your goals and priorities should evolve. While we always recommend a safe approach to progress your fitness and health, the best outcome for all of our clients is to move past the rehab stage of recovery and into fitness and performance enhancement, such as different forms of physical activity that better align with their interests and objectives.
Conclusion:
There are a lot of good reasons to keep doing your rehab exercise after your treatment sessions are finished. But they must be balanced against priorities that include personal factors such as demographics, goals, motivation, and the nature of the injury or condition. While no one would argue against the benefits of exercise for sustained recovery, preventative maintenance, strength and endurance, and wellness, there are times when sticking to your exercise program may need a rethink. Make sure that you assess your ongoing needs, consult with your therapist as needed, and do your best to make an informed decision before switching anything up or making any significant changes. This provides the best way to optimize your post-rehabilitation outcomes and promote your long-term health and well-being.
