Would you love to perform your daily activities without worrying about pain or fatigue?
How about still having energy left over for your favorite recreational or social activities?
The key to achieving these things is regular exercise and movement. However, we’ve heard it a million times . . .
“You want me to do what . . . it hurts too bad to move!”
But, our bodies are designed for smooth, pain free movement.
If you are stuck in the viscous cycle of pain and inactivity, this may seem impossible. Let me help by giving you 7 ways starting a daily movement practice can improve your pain.
1. Improve Sleep Quality
Good sleep habits start with a healthy dose of movement during the day. Quality rest improves your bodies ability to cope with pain. During sleep, your body also releases growth hormone. This helps heal and repair muscle and connective tissue damage that can be the cause of pain.
2. Release Muscle Tension
Movement increases blood flow and deepens breathing to move tension out of the muscles. Work on taking deep breaths with your luges expanding as you inhale. This maximizes the amount of oxygen that is transported to your muscles.
3. Achieve Mental Clarity
Movement and light exercise is a form of moving meditation. It brings focus to the present moment and reorganizes our thought processes. A positive mindset is shown to greatly improve quality of life in individuals with pain.
4. Strengthen Muscles
The more you move, the stronger your muscles that surround your joints become. This stability takes the strain off of healing tissue. Muscular strength also helps prevent repeated injury of a joint.
5. Produce Happy Hormones
Exercise increases endorphin production, your bodies natural “pain killers”. These neurotransmitters block the perception of pain and create a general feeling of well being. In particular, increasing serotonin improves mood, reduces pain, and regulates sleep cycles.
6. Stabilize Inflammatory Hormones
Persistent inflammation is a main cause of many pain symptoms. Hormones play a large role in your bodies inflammatory response. In research studies, movement reduces multiple inflammatory hormones. In addition, unstable hormones such as estrogen interfere with endorphin production.
7. Calms the Nervous System
The stress of pain overwhelms our nervous system causing our nerves to become over excited. In cases of chronic pain (often with neck, back, head aches, or pelvic pain) the actual tissue injury may heal but the nerve pathways remain over stimulated. Rhythmic movements and breathing, calm these signals and give the body a feeling of relaxation.
Movement Prescription
In studies, people with pain report an increased quality of life after increasing their daily movement. Start with just 10 minutes a day and increase as your pain levels improve.
It’s important to choose activities you enjoy so you begin to look forward to this time. Also, be sure your movement activities provide a good variety of aerobic, strength, and flexibility exercises to improve your overall fitness.
Does movement with pain still seem too daunting?
If you are overweight, have joint pain, or are fearful a physical therapy mobility program is a safe environment to begin. You will work muscles and joints to gradually build strength, balance and fitness. You will also restore confidence in your ability to move without exacerbating
pain or causing re injury.
At Peak Potential Physiotherapy & Wellness, we address pain and movement through manual therapy techniques, functional movement screens, and a variety of therapeutic tools. If you have completed a physical therapy program and still don’t feel confident in moving onto an exercise regimen on your own, you may benefit from medically guided personal training.
In this setting, a physical therapist and personal trainer work together to identify your movement weakness and guide you toward optimal fitness. This graded approach to exercise takes into account any and all medical illness and past injuries that may hinder your progress. In the clinic, we are able to consistently monitor and reassess to trouble shoot problems and prevent re injury.
Click HERE to speak with a physical therapist to see if one of our programs would help you toward restoring fluid, pain free movement necessary to live the full, active life you desire.
