Health blog Category: strengthening
Healing Our Shoulder With Physical Therapy
What Causes Shoulder Injuries?
Most shoulder pain occurs following repetitive movements. These movements cause wear and tear that breaks down your rotator cuff tendons. Activities such as raking leaves and shoveling are common culprits that send people to seek medical attention for shoulder pain. In addition, injuries that involve lifting can also cause increased pain in the shoulders.
What Is The Rotator Cuff?
The rotator cuff is made up of four small muscles that control movement and provide stability of the shoulder joint.
Our Feet Could be Causing Our Back Pain
You know that old song, ‘the knee bone is connected to the hip bone?’ That catchy tune has a lot of truth to it and explains what is called the biomechanical chain. For many people, simply standing or walking for more than 20 minutes means their back starts aching. This can be due to a whole host of factors, but believe it or not, your feet and ankles can be a culprit.
When we walk, our hips, knees, ankles and feet rotate in opposite directions to act as shock absorbers.
How Strengthening Programs can Help You
Typically there will be no immediate effect to you not having the proper strength in a particular muscle in your body. The effects are usually more long term in the sense that “weakness” or lack of proper strength in an area results in excess friction on the bones in the joint, excessive wear and tear on tendons and cartilage around a joint, and more. This is why things like tendonitis get started. Let’s look at shoulder tendonitis as an example.
Read full blogSedentary Lifestyles Affect Your Neck
Neck problems are becoming more common due to our sedentary lifestyles. How often do you use computers and phones throughout the day? Now think about your posture whenever you use these devices. Chances are, there’s probably room for improvement there.
Posture plays a large role in maintaining neck health and limits your chance of developing problems that can negatively affect your daily activities. Issues with your neck are commonly associated with pain, headaches, and general stiffness.
How to Cure Shoulder Discomfort
If you have shoulder impingement some discomfort you may experience include:
- Restricted ranges of motion
- Muscle weakness
- Pain when raising your arms, sleeping, or with overhead movements.
It is important to get this condition treated as soon as possible when symptoms are present, to avoid more significant injuries such as rotator cuff tears.
Shoulder impingement syndrome is a condition that occurs when the rotator-cuff tendons, ligaments, and bursa in the shoulder are pinched or compressed, resulting in pain and impaired movements.
How shoulder impingement occurs:
- Repetitive overhead movements, such as golfing, throwing, or swimming, or frequent overhead reaching and lifting
- Should injuries such as a fall or contact injury
- Poor posture and muscular weakness
- Joint tightness or structural abnormalities
- Osteoarthritis
Physical therapy is a great way to address these impairments and restore function if you suffer from shoulder impingement.
Ways that physical therapy can help with shoulder discomfort:
- Pain management
- Manual Therapy
- These techniques may include joint mobilizations, soft tissue massage, passive range-of-motion, and stretching.
- Range of Motion Exercises
- Strengthening Exercises
- Patient Education
- Patients will be educated on proper posture and mechanics that will decrease shoulder impingement.
- Function
- Patients will be educated and instructed on proper mechanics of specific functional activities such as throwing of lifting an object on a shelf.
Do not wait until your shoulder problems get worse to get treated.
Read full blogLow Back Pain and How it Affects Us
Low back pain is very prevalent in our society and can greatly limit our ability to carry out daily tasks. Many of us have complained at one point or another about stiffness, or radiating pain in to the buttock/legs or into the mid back. These are both indicators of low back pain affecting us.
The pain can range anywhere from a mild nagging pain to a severe pain that will greatly limit your mobility.
Proper Treatment for ACL Injuries
Following an awkward landing or a sudden change in direction, the popping sensation in your knee is often followed by severe pain with weight bearing, loss of range of motion and swelling of the knee. The injury may indicate an ACL injury, which can certainly sideline you from returning to your sport for months, sometimes even years. However, surgery is not always necessary depending on the severity of the injury you sustained.
Whether or not surgery is indicated depends upon several factors, including the patient’s activity level, the degree of the ACL tear, instability symptoms and physical demands of the patient.
Read full blogThe Power of “Good Strength”
What does the word ‘strength’ really mean?
The word itself actually has three distinct pieces to it. Each piece is just as important as the other and all three must come into play in order for a muscle to have what is considered “good strength”.
- How much weight can you lift? This means how much force a muscle can produce in one moment of time. For example, do you have the strength to lift that bag of groceries, bag of mulch, or get yourself up or down the stairs?
Strengthening Weak Shoulders
Repetitive overuse of muscles in your shoulders can lead to irritation of tendons. Some examples of common repetitive activities include:
- Gardening
- Yard work
- Throwing a baseball with your kids
- Carrying or lifting things
Shoulder irritation and discomfort can also be a result of falls, forceful contact with a person or object, or other sports related injuries.
Protecting and strengthening your shoulders:
- Keep your shoulder aligned: The number one reason for injury and pain in your shoulders is from poor posture.
Don’t Let Your Hands Live in Discomfort
Inflammation, swelling, and other discomfort in your hands and wrists can make doing everyday things not only difficult, but painful. Your hands are required for everything you do; cooking, cleaning, writing, typing, grabbing things, and the list goes on. At Loudoun Sports Therapy Center there are a couple of things we often see in hands and wrists.
Here are the three common issues we see:
- Carpal Tunnel Syndrome: This syndrome is a result of the compression of a nerve as it goes through the wrist.