When I meet new people and they find out I’m a physical therapist, they nearly always work up to a story of a previous injury that is starting to affect their day to day life. Then, I hear ‘what are some stretches I can do to make it go away?’ If only the answer could be that simple! I typically respond that a full evaluation is necessary to get the root cause of their symptoms. It’s like asking a physician you just met “what medicine should I take when my abdomen hurts?”. It’s kind of a silly example because we all want you to feel better, but your symptoms could be due to a thousand reasons and a deeper dive is needed to get at the proper treatment for your ailment. When I then ask why haven’t they gone to physical therapy I often hear “I know all the exercises from being a gym rat over the years” and “I can do them all on my own”. Which leads to the misconception that all physical therapy involves lying on a hot pack and doing mindless exercises that you can easily find on the internet. My response to that is: physical therapy has so much more to offer than that.
Physical therapy as a profession has changed dramatically over the past 40 years (drastically over the past 20). It has progressed from a more passive approach of ultrasound, e-stim, and hot/cold packs to active with the utilization of manual therapy and movement analysis. But what does manual therapy mean? Manual therapy can be described as any technique that is a hands-on, skilled approach to diagnose and treat orthopedic injuries by implementing graded pressure/force and movement to mobilize/manipulate joints, soft tissue, fascia, and elevate awareness of dysfunctional areas.
At Forward Performance Sports Physical Therapy we implement a variety of manual therapy techniques to get our patients better faster. Here are just a few your physical therapist may use during a treatment session:
- Spinal and Extremity Manipulations: A highly-specialized skill where the PT manipulates extremities and spinal joints to assist in the treatment and management of low back pain, neck pain, and headache/migraine. It also can contribute to the recovery from spinal pain when assessment reveals a referral pattern into the legs or arms.
- Dry Needling: the use of a sterile and flexible acupuncture needle to target taut bands of skeletal muscle know as “trigger points” at the associated segment in the spine or local musculoskeletal system to reduce pain, increase range of motion and flexibility, improve blood flow, and enhance healing.
- Cupping: Use of cups for myofascial decompression to reduce pain, increase blood flow/circulation and lymphatic drainage, promote movement, and bring awareness of dysfunctional problem areas.
- Athletic/Dynamic Cupping: similar to above but with the use of cups during dynamic movement especially in areas of restricted mobility to increase awareness of problem areas and promote healing. For example, a person may have limited motion in their lumbar and thoracic spine and feels improvement in symptoms with forward bending. The use of cups along the lumbar musculature during repeated child’s pose or forward flexion may benefit the patient by enhancing relief with movement through improved awareness of the dysfunctional area.
- Instrument Assisted Soft Tissue Mobilization (IASTM) or scraping: is the use of specialized tools designed to mobilize soft tissue (muscles, tendons, connective tissue, and fascia) causing movement restrictions, the break down of scar tissue, decrease pain, and the facilitation of healing.
Manual therapy preps your body to work in the most optimal biomechanical environment and then when paired with a specific exercise program tailored to your goals is when you will get long lasting results. Ultimately the goal of physical therapy is for you to rely less and less on your physical therapist with the ending result of you being able to treat yourself long term. At first you may require a lot of manual therapy but as your sessions progress, you get stronger and your body is able to maintain the gains from previous sessions. Come see for yourself on how manual therapy can benefit you! Book your initial evaluation today!
