If you are suffering from any injury that prevents you from practicing your favorite sport or even walking correctly because you are in pain, then you have to seek some type of rehab. Without it, you may make things worse fast and you may be triggering even more damage to your body without even knowing it. If you don’t address your injury correctly you may quickly end up with more pain due to an imbalance in your body or a correction you may make involuntarily to reduce pain.
Consider for instance a bad knee injury – if you have a bad knee due to a sport’s injury and you don’t treat it correctly, then with time the pain may disappear by itself and you think you are good. However, during the injury’s “natural healing process” you may put more pressure on the other leg in order to reduce the pain in the injured knee. If you carry yourself in this way for an extended period of time, which is likely when healing from the injury, you may unknowingly develop back problems down the road. Not only that, but when you don’t use your injured knee for a while you will end up losing muscle mass on that leg and increasing muscle mass on the other. In addition, continuous hopping can develop bad posture, which in turn leads to lower back pain and neck pain.
For knee injuries there are a few types of rehab one can do. They include physical therapy, massage, acupuncture, and Pilates. Pilates offers a great alternative because if taught and performed correctly it can produce fast results not only on the injured part of your body but overall as well.
In general, Pilates focuses on enhancing posture and assisting you to preserve an excellent body position while walking, running, sitting at a computer, driving your car, and performing any sports and activity imaginable. It even helps one sitting correctly on the couch while watching TV! A better overall posture decreases the likelihood of developing pain in the first place. Better posture means that the likelihood to seek back pain relief is minimal.
The goal of Pilates is to improve the body overall strength and flexibility. Once the whole body is stronger, it will perform much better in any activity. Runners will run better, cyclist will pedal stronger, athletes will improve their performance. Better posture will also increase self confidence under any circumstance. Ultimately, when one feels better, he performs better.
The correct approach to Pilates should be to focus on improving body strength while paying attention to and identifying and correcting problematic postural and movement patterns that can cause pain. Pilates should be a fun exercise and Pilates instructors should make sure that when their clients leave the studio they feel re-invigorated, stronger and healthier.
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