Staying in shape and dedicating enough time for physical exercise often diminishes as people devote more time to careers and families. Children spend hours outside riding bicycles and playing with friends. This helps kick-start development of their muscular and cardiopulmonary systems and constant exercise maintains it.
Maintaining that high level of fitness gets harder as people age and have less time to dedicate to their fitness. This also means it can take longer to heal from injuries as adults than when young.
So, what can be done if you’re already out of shape, and then you have to deal with healing an injury on top of it? It might be time to seek out an exercise or physical therapist to get that body back into shape.
Exercise Therapy Plan for Injuries
It’s easy to overdo exercise at the start of any new regimen, but overdoing it or using poor form can compound an existing injury. It’s best done under the watchful eye of a trained physical therapist, who will custom-tailor an exercise plan to gradually recover a level of fitness pre-injury.
If your lifestyle was completely sedentary before the injury, you’ll need to work closely with your trainer to create a workable plan to start physical exercise. Once the exercise program is implemented, it gets easier to keep it up than it was to start from scratch.
Exercise Therapy Benefits
An exercise therapist offers exercises that can be done in your home, with or without equipment. Maintaining an exercise program can dramatically improve your fitness level and how you feel.
Increased Motor or Sensory Function
Exercise therapy can help you move more smoothly and improve your range of motion. It helps prevent recurrences of injuries and keeps muscles from stiffening. As the body ages, it loses muscle mass and various muscles begin to atrophy. This can lead to less-fluid motion and possible injury. When an injury occurs in atrophied muscles, recovery time takes that much longer.
Increased Independence
The ability to lift a heavy box – or to step on a stool and retrieve a box from a high shelf – can be a daunting task if you’re not in shape. By following an exercise therapy plan on a regular basis, you can gain independence to do simple tasks, in addition to simple conditioning. It can give you confidence in yourself to remain independent and not have to ask for help to move something that weighs a few pounds.
Reduction of Medication
The need for topical pain ointments, muscle relaxers, or pain relief pills can be reduced or possibly done away with if you regularly follow an exercise therapy plan, which increases strength, flexibility, and overall health. Reducing medication can also lower your chances of a bad drug interaction if you take medications for other reasons.
Reduction of Hospital Visits
The ability to overcome a minor strain or sprain with exercise therapy means fewer trips to the ER. This in itself can lower your stress level, because no one wants to see the big medical bills that inevitably come later from a hospital visit.
Increased Overall Health
Maintaining a level of fitness with exercise therapy bolsters overall general health, with positive effects on anxiety and depression. It also helps stave off the onset of countless other diseases and can slow the effects of aging.
Warm Up and Cool Down
Remember to always warm up your muscles before engaging in any sort of physical activity – especially if exercise is new for you or years have passed since you last exercised. Injuries are often caused by pulled muscles from not warming up. Be sure to also allow your body time to cool down at its own pace at the end of each workout. An exercise therapist will give you guidance on the best ways to warm up and cool down.
Exercise Therapy Clinic in Oklahoma
If you have been a victim of an accident – whether hurt in a car, on the job, or from any other type of injury – our team of doctors and physical therapists at The Brooks Clinic can help you repair your physical well-being with an exercise therapy plan.
Our specialists are experienced in treating all types of traumatic injuries, no matter how they happened. A one-stop shop for all your rehabilitation needs, The Brooks Clinic treats patients both in and out of shape.
Call The Brooks Clinic at (405) 400-0877 or use our online form to request an appointment with one of our doctors or physical therapists.
