PHYSICAL THERAPY | MOVEMENT COACHING

Movement is essential to life and any restriction to movement affects our health.  Movement is learned and the brain has the capacity to learn and change throughout our lifespan. Improving the quality of your movement directly improves the quality of your life by reducing pain or enhancing your movement options. Movement coaching includes activities to stretch or strengthen your muscles but also incorporates body awareness training, balance, vision and vestibular training, breathing and relaxation techniques, eye hand coordination, reaction time and more to make you a better athlete in the sport of your life. 

Movement coaching can help If you are aging and concerned about injury prevention, mobility conservation, or brain fitness. Movement coaching can help athletes looking to solve a movement problem in their sport or refine and enhance their movement skills. Movement coaching can help those with chronic pain or neurologically related movement challenges to maintain a healthy relationship to movement and develop personal ways of moving that are comfortable and repeatable enough for them to remain active in their life.

Photo:  Chris Malacarne Photography | chrismalacarne.com

The biomedical model of pain focuses on tissues and tissue injury.  This model seeks to find and correct the anatomical or biological fault. Once identified and “fixed” it is expected that pain and disability will be resolved. However, clinical experience and pain research have shown that this is not always the case. Some people have little pain despite significant tissue injury, while others have continued pain despite the healing of tissues from an injury (the testing says it’s healed but pain persists).  

The Bio-psycho-social model proposes that pain is a personal experience that emerges from a dynamic interplay between biological (anatomy, physiology), psychological (thoughts, feelings, emotions), and social (work, culture, religion) factors. This model includes a greater understanding of how the nervous system processes injury, disease, pain, threat and emotion. The brain takes in information from the senses and determines the threat it poses. Pain is produced by the brain when the brain concludes there is a danger. Pain is an output from the brain. This does not mean that the pain is “in your head”. . Pain is complex.  Pain is an individual experience.  All pain is real.

At Recovery Through Movement, I use Pain Neuroscience Education as part of the therapeutic process when appropriate. Education is therapy. Education is medicine.  No single treatment, movement, or practice can eliminate all pain, for all people, at all times. Therefore, we will emphasize your function, your self-care skills, your movement program, and knowledge of pain neuroscience to help you reduce your pain, reduce the suffering from pain, and improve your quality of life.  Knowing pain is closer to no pain. No pain is all gain. 

Photo:  Chris Malacarne Photography | chrismalacarne.com