THIS is why traditional physical therapy didn't work for you!

Patient holding little pink dumbbells.

It's a tale as old as time (unfortunately.)

You go to physical therapy for months, and you feel slightly better, but you can't seem to get back to running or cycling or your sport of choice without re-injury.

I've heard so many people tell me this before starting with OliveRunning, and I've been there myself!

Before I became a PT I had my fair share of injuries that I didn’t think I could bounce back from - persistent hip pain, a quad muscle strain and a twinge in my ankle that scared the shoes of me!!! (I thought I was going to have to stop running forever.)

But now I’m thankfully on the other side of chronic issues. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely still get injuries - I just know how to be smart about them and rehab them correctly.

And I hear this a lot - “PT just doesn’t work for me.” So I wanted to dive into why that could be the case.

Let’s talk about 3 common reasons why traditional PT fails a lot of people.

I will start with some reassurance: even if you've had your injury for years and have tried rehab to no avail, you more than likely can get back to running!

You read that right!!! If you have a tendon issue, an ACL tear, painful joints or even a bone stress injury, you are 99.9% probably able to get back to your sport  - with the right rehab.

If you’re wondering why PT hasn’t worked for you in the past, you have to take a good honest look at what happened at PT.

1. First off, if you’re not doing your exercises, that is why PT isn’t working for you. It’s a hard truth, but PT isn’t a commodity that you buy and can expect results from merely by purchasing. You truly have to put in hard work.

And honestly, I don’t know about you, but most of the things I’m proud of in life I’ve worked really hard for. The things I half-assed or got lucky to achieve are not things I look back at with the most fond-ness.

2. Second, If your PT only gave you a massage, exercises on a table or maybe some standing exercises with bands, that is why PT isn’t working for you.

I can’t stress this enough, your PT exercises need to look like running.

With rehab for any injury, your exercises should mimic what you’re trying to get back to. At the beginning, if your injury is acute, you may be starting with exercises on the ground or table.

After a surgery, you may just be activating muscles by isolating them, or doing isometrics and not moving your joints. These are all necessary and helpful. But eventually, your exercises should progress so that you’re standing (if that’s the position you eventually want to be in, during your real life daily activities.)

And, of course, these lying down exercises can still be a part of a good rehab program as you progress, but they should not be all of your program.

This nods towards the principle of specificity.

You don’t just wake up one day saying you want to run a marathon, and then get there by doing glute bridges. You get better at running by running more. By the same token, you don’t heal the muscles you use for running by resting them. You have to use them actively.

3. Third, your exercises need to overload your capacity.

Running is a repetitive motion. The same load on each of your feet, for hundreds of repetitions in one go.

If you get an injury while running, it’s because some part of your body didn’t have the capacity for that repetitive motion at that specific time.

Note that this does not mean running is bad for you “because of the pounding on your knees” (lots of research shows runners actually have decreased risk of arthritis and decreased knee pain compared to nonactive individuals.)

So if your body wasn’t ready for the load of running, it’s not going to be able to accept that load until you teach it to. A bodybuilder doesn’t lift 300lb without working up to it. If you think of the cumulative load of running 3 miles as, say, 100lb of a heavy lift, you need to teach your running-specific muscles to handle that load.

The best way to do that is by using weights to get those muscles activated and pushing load in a controlled environment (no potholes, no rapid motions at first) and then progressing to add those rapid motions in a controlled manor (ie plyometric exercises), all while adding running little by little back into your routine.

So as a recap!!!

3 reasons why PT might not be working for you, and how to fix them:

1. Problem: You’re not doing your exercise.

   Solution: You know what to do!!

2. Problem: You’re only doing exercises lying down at PT.

   Solution: Get a PT who specializes in running, or at least is aware of what muscles are used during running and how to load them specifically.

3. Problem: You’re underloading your muscles, joints, ligaments, bones, tendons, etc.

   Solution: Have a PT who knows how to progress you with your loading safely and effectively.

So if you haven’t had success with your rehab in the past, please reach out to me! OliveRunning’s mission is to provide the most evidence-based, progressive and specific rehab possible, tailored specifically to your needs. A cornerstone of my program is weekly check-ins, to give you accountability. And beyond that, it’s my life passion to work for you in this specialized way!

You've got this - the road is waiting for you!