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

By Coleen Torres


When a person sustains an injury from playing sports, an accident or any other reason, he or she may need to undergo physical therapy to restore normal movement to the body. Part of this approach involves the use of therapeutic exercise to help the patient regain balance, strength, flexibility, and range of motion and alleviate pain.

The injured person will visit a physical therapist who will take a medical background from him or her and evaluate the ability to move in various ways. Based on this, the therapist will put together a customized therapy schedule of increasingly challenging exercises to help eliminate pain, and restore normal endurance, flexibility, and strength.

Exercises in a physical therapy program are classified by the type of movement and its effect on the body. Passive exercise applies an external force to the affected muscles, often by way of a mechanical device such as a continuous passive motion unit or manually by the therapist, these help to restore normal motions to the joints. Active exercises are those which require the patient to the work the muscles at least somewhat, possibly with assistance at first, and help improve neuromuscular control and joint movement.

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.

Strength training moves are categorized as either dynamic or static. The latter are movements that don't require articulation of the joints, which means the length of muscle fibers is not affected and muscular tension and resistance are in a state of equilibrium. The angle of static moves is what contributes to strength development, performing them using multiple angles and holding each move for several seconds is most effective.

Dynamic exercises differs in that it does involve movement of the joints and muscles, in particular concentric and eccentric movement, which refers to a repeated shortening and lengthening of the muscle fibers that produces force and develops strength. This type of exercise can be grouped into isotonic, isokinetic, variable-resistance, and manual movements.

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.

An isokinetic exercise is performed at a fixed speed and the resistance is equal to the force exerted by the muscle. There are machines built to provide movement of this kind, which match the force to the user's degree of muscle resistance, and can be adjusted in terms of velocity, concentric and eccentric action.




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