Physio-Pilates, more commonly known as Clinical Pilates, is a Pilates-based exercise-focussed rehabilitation treatment and is based on a thorough Physiotherapy assessment and tailored specifically to your injury needs and rehab goals.
Read on for 3 reasons why and when this type of therapy might be the right next step in your rehabilitation process:
1. You Have been Doing Your Physio Exercises or Regular Pilates Practice But Still Struggle With the Same Weaknesses and Inefficient Movement Patterns.
Clinical Pilates provides a framework for isolated strengthening. Our Bodies Are Smart. I took a biology class in the last year of my Kinesiology degree many years ago that involved learning about the ways that animals locomote or move. It was amazing! There are physics equations that one can use to figure out how an animal would get from A to B and they were all based on energy conservation and efficiency.
The thing is, we forget that we humans are the same. Our bodies go straight for the strong, go-to muscles that we are used to using in order to conserve energy and tend to avoid the small, stability ones that may have been inhibited or weak from injury, disuse or poor movement strategies.
Pilates-based rehab provides the opportunity to slow down a movement, break it apart into pieces, and isolate the small muscles that don’t tend activate when we are moving more quickly and habitually through exercise and life.
2. You Have Become Dependent on Manual Therapy, Adjustments and Needling.
Manual therapy (such as joint mobilizations, adjustments and massage) and IMS/dry needling are great tools for healing and rehabilitation and can positively affect our nervous, skeletal and muscular systems immensely. However, if these are the only tools we utilize to address pain and injury, we risk not addressing the underlying cause of our injury or problem and end up not moving on to a more autonomous stage in the rehabilitation process.
Pilates-based rehabilitation provides the opportunity for you to learn how to move better in both life, play and sport. It teaches you how to live differently in your body. It also gives you the tools and skills to start helping yourself, rather than being dependent on your health practitioners to fix your flare-ups or pain.
This can be huge for clients. The ability to help ourselves and contribute to our own healing process can promote feelings of hopefulness, especially with long-standing injuries that have been unresponsive to treatment or chronic pain.
3. You have discovered that your injuries and pain stem from being hyermobile in your joints rather than truly “stiff” (even though you feel tight all the time!).
Our traditional Physiotherapy and Chiropractic treatments tend to be better at treating stiffnesses in joints, but not so great at treating movement issues in joints that lack the proprioceptive ability(or joint position sense) to move through their range in a smooth, controlled manner. The result? Lots of chronically sore clients who can’t figure out why they need treatment so often instead of healing from their pain and injuries.
Teaching a joint how to move properly through effective engagement of stability muscles can provide the opportunity for our body to build the control and strength it needs to re-stabilize and not constantly “slip out” of place.
Lastly, Clinical Pilates is fun! We get fantastic feedback from our clients that they feel better than they have in years of treatment and feel relief both immediately after as well as in the days following the sessions.
Interested in trying Physio-Pilates out?
Set up an initial session with one of our Clinical-Pilates trained Physiotherapists to explore whether it is the right treatment avenue for you.
More questions? Feel free to email us through the contact page on our website and I will get back to you as soon as I can.
By: Katrina Sovio
Registered Physiotherapist
Trained in Clinical-Pilates