Therapeutic Exercise: How It Helps Relieve Pain

Therapeutic exercise has been known to help relieve pain. You might think that when something hurts, you’re not supposed to move it. But unlike regular exercises, the activities in therapeutic exercises were designed to help people with certain medical conditions or injuries.

Types Of Therapeutic Exercises

Therapeutic exercise consists of specific exercises that are used for correcting specific problems. Depending on your condition, your physical therapist will provide you with a customized exercise program. These therapeutic exercises are usually grouped into four main categories which are:

  1. Flexibility Exercises - This type of exercise consists of gentle stretching techniques to help improve mobility and range of motion. It's usually implemented with people who lost mobility on their limbs.
  2. Strengthening Exercises - As the name implies, strengthening exercises are utilized to improve muscle strength. This is especially useful for people who became weaker physically due to recent surgery or injury.
  3. Endurance Exercises - The exercises for this type are done repetitively for a certain period. It aims to improve the endurance of your muscles. However, you may need to undergo strengthening exercises first because you need to have a certain level of muscle power to perform endurance exercises.
  4. Balance and Coordination Exercises - This type of therapeutic exercise aims to improve balance and posture. This is usually needed for people who lost their ability to walk, stand, or run.

How Therapeutic Exercises Provide Pain Relief

Therapeutic exercises have a lot of benefits. This includes helping recover from stroke or sports-related injuries, controlling weight, and strengthening the bones and muscles. But one of its best benefits is pain relief.

As mentioned above, when people are in pain, their instinct tells them to refrain from moving and just rest. Although rest is important in recuperation, inaction can lead your muscles to stiffen and thus increasing pain.

Therapeutic exercise not only helps strengthen your muscles but also your natural ability to handle pain. When we do physical activities, our bodies release neurotransmitters such as endorphins and serotonin.

Endorphins serve as your body’s natural analgesic. They interact with the receptors in your brain which reduces your perception of pain. In other words, they help relieve pain and stress.

Serotonin contributes to the feeling of happiness and wellbeing. It helps improve your sleeping patterns, emotions, and appetite. Serotonin is one of the reasons why you feel “happy” after exercising or doing physical activities.

Although therapeutic exercises are full of benefits, a proper program for your certain condition is needed. A licensed physical therapist would be able to provide you the proper exercise program which includes the right exercises, pacing, and amount of practice. The reason for this is too little exercise would not be effective at all, but too much can aggravate your symptoms.

At The Right Spinal Clinic, we have a team of healthcare experts that performs non-invasive physical therapies and treatments. Get in touch with our licensed physical therapists and have them assess your condition accurately so they can create a customized therapeutic exercise program for your specific conditions.

Schedule an appointment with us by filling out our online form or by calling us at (813) 392 2164.