Movement Rehabilitation

Our unique movement rehabilitation programme can help.

Your body is constantly adapting to what you are doing now and what has happened in the past, sometimes it gets into bad habits that affect your ability to move correctly. These, if persistent, become learnt and therefore become ‘normalised’. These unhealthy adaptations have the ability to place abnormal strains, on a day-to-day basis, on your joints and muscles which become painful and never fully recover as expected as long as this ‘compensation’ exists.

If your problem persists with treatment, doesn’t ever get totally better, or flairs up from time to time, a movement control problem could be the cause.

Common signs of an underlying movement problem are:

• Chronic pain problems that have to be constantly managed by treatment
• Injuries that return every time you become more active
• Niggling aches and pains that never properly go away
• Problems with sitting, standing and walking for as long as you want
• Stiff and painful movements, especially first thing in the morning or getting out of a chair
• Feeling ‘old before your time’ or degenerative joint problems
• Recurrent and persistent sporting injuries
• Below par sporting performance

Good movement feels good, looks good and is highly efficient allowing you to move with grace and ease, releasing your muscular system to achieve its full potential, improving your posture and creating free mobility of your joints – protecting them from premature wear. It should form the baseline for any activity but modern life can often erode this significantly

By using screening systems, we make sure that you can do the basics, firstly without pain and then well enough before increasing your activity levels. With consistent monitoring and the most up to date methods, we progressively re-educate your nervous system to move properly before allowing you to advance your activity level to where you want it to be. By using the same process as you did when learning how to move as a child we can help you restore healthy, easy pain free movement again.

How we learn to move

During the first two years of life we develop the basics of movement – to roll over, sit, crawl, squat and walk. All of these fundamental movement patterns emerge without any instruction whatsoever. Our development is driven by constantly challenging the nervous system and neuroscience has shown that as we grow we develop movement like a language.

We progressively learn by constructing the basic building blocks and developing them for more complex movements.

This requires progressively highly complex, learnt communication and coordination (motor control) between the brain, nervous system and the muscles and joints. This “sensorimotor” system allows us to move effortlessly and automatically without any conscious thought. Just like children do!

Modern life often places unnatural demands on our bodies that we have to adapt to and one or more of these fundamental patterns may become ‘corrupted’ and not work as efficiently as they should or even worse we become too sedentary, these patterns are never used properly and so we ‘forget’ how to move properly. This creates abnormal stresses on our joints, muscles and nerves that can become painful. Dysfunctional movement patterns that have become habitual rarely change unless specifically addressed

The Current Exercise Rehabilitation Dilemma

Strangely, most rehabilitation approaches show little or no regard for the nervous system or how we develop our movement in the first place. This should always form the foundation of the rehabilitation pyramid.

Rehabilitation traditionally focuses on individual muscles, measuring flexibility and strength (Performance), with the aim of stretching tight muscles and strengthening weak muscles to establish good individual joint strength and mobility. However, this is not how your brain works or how we learnt to move as infants and will not change faulty movement. Often strength and fitness are built upon these faulty patterns that have neither been identified nor corrected creating a ‘top heavy’ pyramid.

This often leads to postural changes, abnormal loading, inappropriate healing, poor efficiency and recurrence of pain or injury.

But WE do things differently.

We recognise that babies do not do strength training, planks or sit ups to learn movement and therefore best way to restore your movement is to compare your patterns with how they were originally built and then help you to correct any faults that we find. We do this by using the following process:

• We assess your baseline movement patterns, with a screen, which are rated and ranked to identify faults and to establish the order in which they need to be addressed and corrected
• We identify and remove all counterproductive exercise or activity
• We develop a specific exercise framework to retrain your brain to correct the faulty movement patterns by using favourable exercise options
• Once improvement is noted in the abnormal pattern we repeat the screen to identify the next priority and correct this until you have achieved your goals.

By resetting the most basic pattern it is possible to see other patterns change without specifically working on them. This corrects and enhances your movement control so creating a strong foundation to your rehabilitation pyramid enabling you to safely return to higher levels of activity. This can usually be done within 4-6 weeks but does depend on your individual circumstances.

Why movement rehabilitation is right for you

As we focus on developmental movement patterns and motor control, incorporating the latest neuro science, our specialist movement coaches can identify the most basic faults in your movement patterns and can use corrective exercises to re-educate the nervous system to correct these and establish better motor control. This eliminates abnormal stress on muscles, joints, discs, nerves and connective tissue, improving efficiency and allowing proper healing.

We can thus achieve your corrective exercise goals:

• To resolve or reduce measurable dysfunction within fundamental movement to a minimum accepted level
• To reduce pain and restore normal activity
• To reduce the risk of further pain
• To make you more independent and make this sustainable
• To make you healthier and happier

We eliminate the weak links to create the solid foundations needed to work at higher levels safely and efficiently, ensuring that you move well and keep moving well to enjoy pain-free and efficient movement whatever your age or ability.

If you want to book a movement rehabilitation assessment or would like to speak with one of our specialist exercise coaches to see how we can help you just ring us on 01273 725667