If there was a way to benefit from significant discounts off your physiotherapy treatment costs, you would make the most of it, right?!
Well, NOW there is!
Every time you are active, you create tension and potential tightness in the muscles that are involved in the activity. The activity need only be of a moderate intensity. It could be walking to work or swimming. Any activity counts. Regarding the muscles that are involved in the said activity – they can be involved directly such as the biceps muscle in a biceps curl or more remotely such as the lower back muscles when you are walking. Either way, in a microscopic amount, the muscles that are involved in the activity are surely yet slowly ageing. Eventually, without effective management, they will require some level of intervention, probably from a physiotherapist. This intervention may include soft tissue techniques or appropriate loading techniques depending on the level of tension in the associated muscles.
As a general guide, let us assume that your muscles are in perfect condition prior to beginning any activity. By the end of the activity, those very same muscles will be in a different state. This is the very reason for the ‘warm down’ section of every planned, programmed work out you have ever participated in.
This is the reason that everybody knows that ‘stretching’ or even massage is such a good thing. This warm down section is responsible for returning the muscle back to the condition that it was in prior to the activity being performed.
Why, then, do only a very few enlightened people recognise that a spot of gardening on a sunny afternoon falls into the category of a workout and, as such, requires a warm down section?
If you are planning to be active, then you should also plan to compensate for the after-effects of that activity or it will, one day, all add up and catch up with you. After a workout or activity, The Moballise Physiotherapy Clinic recommend spending the equivalent of 20% of the duration focussing on returning the involved muscles back to their pre-activity state. This will give your body the best chance of staying in optimum condition for any future activity demands.
If, then, you invest a further 20% of your activity time into compensating for the after-effects of that activity then you WILL save yourself some of the future cost of the inevitable physiotherapy treatment and, hopefully, avoid visiting the physiotherapist at all!
Remember: If you let your body down NOW, you can hardly blame it for letting YOU down in the future!