Staying physically active can help treat most ailments, leaving you feeling younger, healthier, and stronger. Many people appreciate the numerous health benefits of including exercise in their daily regimen. One of the most commonly prescribed types of physical exercise by health professionals is therapeutic exercise.
Therapeutic exercise can help people with medical conditions, injuries, and illnesses that hinder their ability to function and move normally. Chiropractors like oaklandspinenj.com can perform different maneuvers on you to help restore mobility to joints, alleviate pain, and treat a host of other conditions. The physical exercises include physiotherapy, activator methods, Pettibon Therapy, and many other techniques designed to help you return to your peak physical condition. Here are some top benefits of therapeutic exercises:
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Reduce Physical Pain
One of the greatest benefits of therapeutic exercise is helping reduce or eliminate pain. Therapeutic exercises like resistance exercise play a vital role in helping cure any pain in your muscles. Through joint and soft tissue mobilization, therapeutic exercises help restore the normal functioning of your muscles and joints, relieving pain and preventing it from returning.
Therapeutic exercises help promote the release of endorphins in the body, your body’s natural pain killers, helping alleviate pain. Your body also releases endocannabinoids that help your body relax and calm down. If your chronic pain results from an inflammation exerting pressure on receptor endings, this exercise can help drain the excess fluid and reduce the pain.
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Improve Lung Function
Another benefit of therapeutic exercise is that it can help strengthen your respiratory muscles through breathing exercises, improving lung function and making breathing a lot easier. According to the American Lung Association, exercise helps the body’s oxygen uptake and circulation to different parts. That makes therapeutic exercise vital in improving lung and heart health.
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Improve Your Balance and Prevent Falls
Your bones and muscles coordinate with one another to help you stay upright every time you sit or stand. Proper coordination between your skeletal and muscular systems enables you to balance your body and coordinate your limbs, enabling you to walk safely. If you have a balance problem, therapeutic exercise can help improve your balance, reducing your risk for potentially harmful falls.
Improved body balance also lets you enjoy your favorite activities and hobbies that you couldn’t due to poor balance. Your therapist can prescribe different types of balance and coordination exercises and perform specific techniques that can instantly restore proper vestibular function and alleviate symptoms of vertigo or dizziness.
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Improve Joint Function and Flexibility
Another great way therapeutic exercises can benefit you is by improving your muscle and joint function and flexibility. This is especially important for people with joint problems, such as osteoarthritis. Through different stretching techniques coupled with heat therapy, you can effectively loosen tight tendons and muscles.
Weak and lax soft tissues can cause severe pain and dysfunctional joints, limiting your movement. Therapeutic exercises can help strengthen the supporting muscles to better support the joints. This can help reduce the excess pressure and cure pain symptoms. Combining therapeutic exercise with treatments like prolotherapy can help stabilize your joints, regenerate injured soft tissues, and relieve pain symptoms. Stretching exercises help increase the production of synovial fluid that lubricates your joints, reducing friction during movement and also increasing joint flexibility.
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Manage Age-Related Issues
As you get older, your bones tend to become more brittle and start developing various health conditions that affect your function. Therapeutic exercises can help you better manage age-related conditions like osteoporosis and arthritis and recover from joint replacement. This exercise can help strengthen your muscles, whether they were weakened by an illness, injury, or old age. Stronger muscles help promote strong and healthy bones and protect your skeletal system. This improves your ability to perform day-to-day activities and perform movements that you couldn’t in the past, helping you stay independent at old age.
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Recovering Quicker
Quicker recovery from an injury or surgical procedure is another significant benefit of therapeutic exercise. After a surgical procedure, your therapist can create a rehabilitation program that includes several different therapy exercises, including strength and range of motion exercises. These exercises are designed to address your specific needs, helping you recover faster. Your therapist will also prescribe therapeutic exercises that improve your movement and help you learn to walk a lot quicker after surgery. This helps you remain active and reduce your risk of falling and getting injured while recovering.
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Preventing Injuries
Apart from helping you recover from injuries faster, therapeutic exercise can also benefit you by preventing the injuries from happening altogether. Engaging in sporting activities increases your risk for different types of injuries. For instance, if you’re a distance runner, you’re more likely to get stress fractures. Your therapist can develop a prevention exercise program, involving a combination of exercises you can do before going into the field to ensure you stay safe while playing.
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Avoiding Surgery
Besides helping you recover from an injury, therapeutic exercises can help you avoid surgery. Having surgery increases your risk of contracting infections, developing blood clots, and other complications. The recovery times can also be quite long. However, you can easily avoid all these surgery-related complications by exercising. Pre-surgery therapeutic exercise helps relieve acute and chronic pain and helps with arthritis, fractures, strains, tendinitis, and sprains, helping you avoid surgery altogether. This helps you save time, money, and energy on surgery. If it’s unavoidable, therapeutic exercise can help you recover faster after surgery.
Endnote
Therapeutic exercise can help people of all ages, whether you have an illness and feel weak or already in good health and active. As you’ve seen, therapeutic exercises offer many benefits, from helping alleviate body pain and reduce anxiety and depression to stabilizing joints, strengthening muscles, and improving lung function.
If you’re looking to return to your optimal level of physical activity, your physical therapist can develop a custom therapeutic exercise program specifically for your unique needs. That includes different targeted exercises to improve your flexibility, strength, endurance, and overall health.
