Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Discover The Different Forms Of Therapeutic Exercise And How They Encourage Healing

By Coleen Torres


Injuries can occur for a number of reasons, such as from playing sports or being involved in an accident. When the soft tissues of the body are injured, it can result in impairment of normal movement, which may be painful and limited. Physical therapy is often needed to put the patient back on the road to recovery, and this usually involved the practice of therapeutic exercise as a means to restore strength, balance, flexibility, and range of motion.

The patient's movement abilities will be assessed and his or her medical history will be taken by the physical therapist. Based on this information, a personalized training plan of specific exercises will be devised to present the patient with increasing physical challenges that will promote healing. The first step is to overcome pain, and then continuing on to regain bodily endurance, flexibility, and strength.

Physical therapy exercises are classified according to the nature of the movement involved and the impact it has on the muscles and joints. Passive exercises help restore normal movement in joints and require little to no work from the muscles as the force is applied to them, either manually or from a continuous passive motion unit or similar mechanical device. In contrast, active exercise calls for muscular involvement, with or without assistance, in a manner which improves joint movement and neuromuscular control.

After the patient has demonstrated that he or she is capable of safely completing flexibility and range of motion activities, it is time to move on to strength and endurance training. Resistance is gradually increased, which has the effect of strengthening muscle and connective tissues which have damaged, naturally improving strength.

Exercises for regaining strength are generally grouped as either static or dynamic. The former are those which do not involve joint movement, with the length of the muscle fibers remaining the same since the resistance and tension are equal, rather it is the angle they are performed at which makes the difference and helps the patient increase strength, so using varied angles in practice and holding each movement for several seconds is recommended.

Dynamic exercises imply movement on the part of the joints and muscles and may be further categorized into manual, variable-resistance, isokinetic, and isotonic movements. These types of activities result in the concentric and eccentric, or lengthening and shortening of muscles which generate force during movement. The repeated stretching of the muscle-tendon bundles increases tensile strength.

Variable-resistance and manual resistance exercises work based on the principle that the muscles produce a limited force when the joints are positioned in extremes of the range of motion. The main difference is that the latter involves the therapist manually applying resistance, and the former relies on the use of a machine that accounts for proper joint alignment and applies resistance relative to force. With isotonic movement, the muscles are lengthened by external force which imposes a change on the joint's angle, this is seen with many weight machines, ankle weights, and free weights.

Isokinetic exercises are carried out with a fixed speed and equal muscle force and resistance. Machines to generate this type of movement deliver force to match the user's level of muscle resistance and often have adjustable settings in terms of concentric and eccentric actions with varying velocities.




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