One of the most common questions I get asked is “How often should I be doing that for” when it comes to exercise prescription & it causes me to casually bang my head on the table for a few seconds before composing myself for a moderated answer. Although we may think it this isn’t societies fault as we live in a cause and effect pharmaceutical based world. Firstly we get sick or injured & realise we need to get better quickly as it isn’t convenient to not be running on all cylinders (although that’s mainly due to our health not being our number one priority!). So we purchase medication that we take for a week as directed which make us feel like we remember feeling at the start of that week. Therefore we go back to “Normality” and thus the habits that caused us to get sick & injured in the first place. So no wonder when exercise gets lumped in with sickness or injury that society goes “well I only need to take the Pharmaceutical Dosage”.
Exercise As A Drug
I am by no means bagging on medication as it may seem as I definitely discuss its use in treating certain physiological conditions. What I am bagging though is the notion that its not important for exercise to be habitual when it comes to injury rehabilitation and subsequent prevention. There is a reason that people continue to present with similar injuries and illnesses to physiotherapy/chiropractic/doctors clinics year in and year out & unfortunately we as practitioners contribute to this. We focus in on the micro; the short game which is often get in, get better then get out so the person sitting in the waiting room looking at their clock can get their exercise prescription. All too often we are in the business of making people feel better – not truely getting them better. This leads us to treating exercise like a drug.
Listen To The Verve
The trick for us as practitioners and what you should expect as autonomous health consumers is to treat rehab & pre-hab as habitual notions. How many times a day is it good for us to brush our teeth, have a shower, eat a meal…their is no definitive science behind it but we do all of these things at least once per day as it always makes us feel better when we do (and for some reason our significant other doesn’t love the musky creation of wine and garlic). These things are habitual and engrained in us from when we are young as our parents knew it was in our best interest. Exercise for pain relief used to be this way as we had no mechanical mode of transport, no desks and no computers to do the “heavy lifting”. So just like brushing your teeth think about performing exercise whether you are injured or not at least once a day – chances are it will also increase your chances of getting a kiss at the end of the night!
Help From The Bench
The main hep today comes from the great websites that provided the pictures in this blog – mainly The Natural Society! Oh and of course who could forget the Verve – Hey the Drugs don’t work they just make you sweat a lot when you lace up the shoes again.
BryceFinck.com 