Recently, I have spoken to a couple of new clients and their personal trainers were diagnosing them or telling them they can help with your back pain or knee pain. Seriously one personal trainer telling a patient they have sciatica?? They were being told they needed to strengthen their hip flexors.
Others are saying you need to improve your back flexion (bending forward), or hamstring flexibility, and others telling you have a weak core and need to strengthen your core and that is why you are suffering from back pain.
Stop the madness!!
There are so great personal trainers out there and the great ones will refer you to someone great to help solve a problem they can not help you with. They will not tell you they can help fix your back pain or knee pain or what ever pain you are having.
Just like I cannot perform surgery, it is out of my scope of my practice and I have to refer my clients to orthopedic surgeons when I can not longer help them. Or when I come across a health condition that basic core concepts are not helping, I have doctors who I refer to in order to get this patient help.
Here’s the deal, personal trainers or other fitness instructors have no evaluation skills. They do not learn this in schooling or classes. They can have a great understanding of movement or weakness, but what if some other area is causing their problem. Remember I always say where the site of pain is often is not where the source of the pain is located.
For example, I have been working with a patient who was having neck pain. But after understanding that she has had lower back hip and shoulder pain as well for years. Her whole left side of her body was not moving correctly, and she has been compensating for years to just stay active.
As improved her neck pain we realized her shoulder was not moving correctly and this was leading to her neck pain. I could have stopped there, but we found her thoracic spine was not moving which was causing her shoulder to wing out. The body is connected and works together. Once we worked on her thoracic spine her shoulder dropped into place and the recruitment of her muscles improved.
It was not a purely strength issue. You could have stretched or strengthened the shoulder in all different areas and you still would have had problems. You could have done soft tissue to release the tightness, but it your pain comes back because you are treating the symptoms. It was the evaluation process that lead me to figure these things out. It was the questions I was asking uncovering where the root cause of the problem could be. It was the movement and objective assessment that lead my evaluation process.
I can also say that some personal trainers or fitness instructors can do a better job than some physical therapists. But these instructors are also eagerly trying to find other providers who can help their clients.
If you are frustrated that you are not improving in your neck pain, or back pain, or knee pain. You are fearful of not being able to be active with your family, or participate in family or friends fun due to fatigue and pain, then maybe we need to sit down and have a conversation. If you know someone who is suffering from pain and fearful of losing their mobility, please share this with them. We can have a FREE conversation with them to see if we can help them. We want to make sure before you spend any money with us. You have absolutely nothing to lose.
CLICK HERE is you would like to set up a time to TALK TO A PHYSICAL THERAPIST. We have limited spots weekly for this, so do not delay. Here at mPower Physical Therapy in Dallas, we have helped many of patients avoid surgery, stay away from injections or medications.
Again CLICK HERE to talk to a Physical Therapist!
