Rehabilitation: Celebrating Your Body's Abilities

The word "rehabilitation" has developed a mundane and tedious feeling to it. When prescribed rehabilitation exercises as part of their treatment some patients sigh, some patients frown, and others smile and nod but they already know they aren't going to do the exercises.

Why has active care developed such a negative and boring element to it? As someone who has gone through numerous rounds of rehabilitation for different physical injuries myself, I admit that rehabilitation can feel like a chore.  Doing x reps and x sets of some sort of exercise can feel almost robotic in the way we are moving our bodies. But what if we were to approach rehabilitation more dynamically with real, functional movements that are more applicable in our lives? What if we were to view rehabilitation as a celebration of what our body is physically able to do? 

Functional rehabilitation is an important part of recovery, no matter what way you look at it. In order to be able to physically do what we want to do, we must strengthen and train our body to be able to tolerate movements that are involved in that activity. If the body isn't able to tolerate certain movements, then the goal of functional rehabilitation turns to modifying movements to place less stress on the body. Some parts of functional rehabilitation can be painful or uncomfortable, but understand that this can be the natural process of building tolerance in the body.

Let's look at an example of how changing our mindset can make a vast difference in how we feel about rehabilitation:

An individual has low back pain when performing the cat-camel exercise but they are still able to do it. Instead of focusing in on the pain, focus in on the fact that that person is physically able to do the exercise. Their body is capable! Now let's pretend that another individual with low back pain does the cat-camel exercise and has no pain. This is just as incredible because that likely means that their body is capable of even more intricate movements. 

Approaching rehabilitation with the mindset that it is a celebration of what your body is capable of is very empowering. It sets us up with the "I can do it" feeling rather than the "this is so boring" feeling. It sheds light on how incredibly adaptable and resilient the body is to physical injury and that with a little bit of work you can get it back to being able to do what you want to do!