Do Healthcare Practitioners Always Recommend Exercises?

Exercises are a large part of healthcare system in this country. Most clinicians will recommend stretching and/or strengthening exercises to do at home in between or after a course of treatment and some professions will practice solely exercised based care. But does that mean you need to recommend them to be a good clinician? Or flip that, does it mean you’re a bad clinician if you don’t?

We at peak believe handing out exercises to stretch or strengthen a tissue to be a waste of time when looking to achieve a long-term health goal. Well, initially we do anyway.

Stretching exercises are a short-term fix, especially for pain. Stretching a muscle is all well and good and may even give you relief, but the likelihood is that muscle will become tight again very soon and need more stretching to be done to it. We prefer to get to the root cause of WHY the muscle is tight in the first place and correct that. Much like fixing a crack instead of papering over it.

Strengthening exercises are much the same. ‘Muscle imbalances’ should not occur if the body is functioning correctly. Rather than pumping a weak muscle over and over again to make it bigger, we prefer allowing the muscles in your body to activate successfully first by switching on its full neurological supply.

Once we’ve got all that out of the way, targeted exercises can be fantastic accompaniment to care but before that they’re not required.