If you’re in pain, you want to get out of pain ASAP. I get it. Doesn’t matter whether that pain is arthritis, degenerative disc disease, some kind of shoulder injury, or something else. You want it to stop hurting yesterday.
The problem is that you’ve already spent a ton of time and money on rehab methods that either haven’t worked well for you, or haven’t worked completely, like:
- Massage
- Chiropractic
- Ultrasound
- Stretching
- Physiotherapy
…and others.
You might even have a special dedicated “rehab day”, where in one day, you hit up a bunch of different practitioners, like a chiropractor, massage therapist and acupuncturist.
Not to say they’re not effective – just that they’re not complete.
I’ve written extensively about our clients who’ve been in pain, and been able to get out of pain in a relatively short period of time, like:
- Valerie, who stopped using her cane and pain meds in 3 months
- Stellis, who eliminated her knee pain in 8 sessions, at age 82
- Jaime, who eliminated chronic pain after 5 years of failed attempts
- Pat, who was able to avoid a hip replacement surgery
…and others.
Although their programs were different, the overall principles were the same. Now, we have a special program for people who want to get out of pain quickly – even if nothing else has worked. That program is called “Rapid Rehab.” In this article, I’ll distill the commandments of active rehab. And if you want personalized help with your own pain, you can see if you qualify for that program by just filling out the application form on our home page.
Commandment #1: Thou Shalt Be an Active Participant in Your Own Rehabilitation
If you’re in pain, you’ve probably tried a bunch of passive therapies, like chiropractic, massage, and others.
While they’re good, and important (I have a couple chiropractors and massage therapists that I refer my clients to), they’re not complete.
It’s pretty well established that whatever the injury is (of even if it’s degeneration, like arthritis), you get better, faster, longer-lasting results if you’re an active participant in your own rehabilitation. That means exercise.
But not just any exercise. Rather, it needs to be targeted exercise for your own issue.
When you’re exercising, your nervous system learns something about your body. What does it learn?
- Which motions are pain-free
- Which range of motion hurts, and which doesn’t
- Ways to work around the injury/degeneration
…and more.
Learning is a key step towards recovery, because you’re involving your brain. After all, no brain, no gain.
What does your nervous system learn when you’re being passively worked on? Nothing.
The message you’re sending your nervous system is that someone else is in charge of your pain. But what if you learned that by doing a certain exercise, you could decrease/eliminate your pain for a few hours? You’d want to do more of it, wouldn’t you? And you’d feel more empowered, because you’re in charge.
Thus, being an active participant in your own rehabilitation (as opposed to a passive passenger) speeds up your recovery, and the changes last longer.
Commandment #2: Thou Shalt Practice Frequently
Our clients who become our greatest success stories “practice” the exercises we do with them outside of their sessions with us.
In other words, if a client is seeing us 2-4 times per week, that’s a lot of time when they’re not seeing us. So if they can reinforce what we do in the “gym” (whether it’s an actual gym, or if it’s a client that’s seeing us online, and exercising in their home gym), with exercise outside of their time with us, it works that much better.
Frequently, they’ll see us, and we have a nice, long session where we can get stuff done. But when they’re on their own, they may not have an hour a day to get a session in. So we’ll condense is to the 2-10 minutes of exercise that are highest priority for them to do on their own.
And they repeat that multiple times throughout the day.
The nice thing is that the more diligent they are with their practice, the faster they recover. And the faster they recover, the less rehab exercise they need to do.
Let’s say that they needed to do a certain exercise 8 times per day (it might just be a 30-second exercise). Once that exercise has started to work, they might decrease the frequency to 3-4 times per day after 3-14 days. Then only 1-2 times per day after another few days/weeks, and eventually, not at all.
So frequency is king when it comes to getting out of long-standing pain.
Commandment #3: Thou Shalt Notice Progress
Very often, when someone is caught in a chronic pain cycle, they pay attention to small details of their body’s deterioration.
Awareness of deterioration, but without an action plan to get out of it leads to more deterioration.
Fortunately, the opposite is true as well. Awareness of progress leads to more progress (assuming you’re doing something deliberate to cause progress).
Ideally, the progress is in your main concern: pain. But sometimes, pain takes a bit longer to get rid of than we’d like, so we like to use proxy markers that are early signs that pain relief is not far away.
What are those proxy markers?
- That you can do an exercise with more weight/resistance
- That you can do an exercise for more reps
- That you can do an exercise with greater pain-free range of motion
- That you can hold a certain position longer before the pain kicks in
- That you can move faster before the pain kicks in
…and others.
Of course, we want those improvements to carry over into decreases in pain, so we keep our eyes on the prize. We’ll ask our client which motions/positions cause pain, and test those motions/positions both at the beginning of a session, and at the end. We want to see a decrease in pain in a matter of a single session. That decrease may not last long-term, which is why we reinforce it outside of their sessions with us.
Sometimes, we’ll even have clients formally write down what they like about their body, and what they’re experiencing physically that’s positive. They’ll do that on a daily basis. We did that with Jacqui, who improved her strength by 40%, despite fibromyalgia.
Commandment #4: Thou Shalt Aim for Progress Every 2-3 Sessions
As I mentioned in the previous commandment, we want to see improvements every single session.
The challenge is that frequently, chronic pain is multi-factorial. It’s no longer just 1 thing that causes their pain, but a number of things.
So we may see progress in the span of a single workout. But it won’t be a complete resolution, necessarily.
However, if we go for 2-3 workouts without seeing any progress in pain, we know that we’ve likely addressed that issue, and we should move on to a different issue that’s contributing to the pain, and we knock them down one by one.
But our overall mentality is to look for pain decreases every 2-3 workouts. If we haven’t seen that in 2-3 workouts, we move on to a different approach.
Commandment #5: Thou Shalt Assess and Re-assess
If you’ve been reading my articles for any length of time, you know that assessment is at the core of our methodology. Why? Because:
- It gives us precision with our approach. We can narrow down which exercises are likely to be the most effective, the fastest.
- Speed: we want to see fast progress
- Certainty: it lets us know as close to 100% as possible if we’re on the right track
So we have a bunch of different assessments that we use to figure out what to do with clients. Both formal assessments, like musculoskeletal testing, but also less formal assessments, that we use right in-session. An example of an informal assessment I’ll often use with clients who have knee arthritis is ask them to sit on a chair and rate their knee pain on the way down. Then stand up, and rate their pain on the way up.
Every month or so, I’ll repeat the musculoskeletal assessment, to see what changed, and what else we need to work on.
If you want help with your joint pain and/or injuries, you can see whether or not you qualify for the rapid rehab program by just filling out the application on our home page.
