Men’s Health Week

In the theme of men looking after themselves, as a sub species, blokes are a nightmare for it. Often it can be a busy lifestyle where ‘me time’ is just non-existent or it could be that diagnosis makes a problem, something real that has to be dealt with.  Many men are ‘happy’ to limp along in life proudly not taking pain killers whilst actually being in pain.

As I say to many patients, if you are going to paint a fence – use fence paint – if you are in pain, yes you guessed it.

So with the above in mind Ade has kindly allowed us to use him as a case study.

Having watched the recent hip problems video he decided to get in touch.  Whilst not in disabling pain, he recognised that his lifestyle was now being affected and the previous plan of giving it a stiff ignoring was becoming less effective.

During the initial consultation it became obvious that this problem had been left to stew for some time and had caused some modifications to movements so was causing problems in other parts of the body.  Now this wasn’t a teeth sucking moment and a delivery of ‘this is going to be expensive to sort out’.  More it was time to get our heads together and devise a plan to maximise recovery, with a very close eye on the rapidly improving weather and the end of lockdown.

This part was in fact quite easy, as Ade had opened his eyes on where he was heading versus where he needed to be, so agreed to any level of hard work, this in fact can be a problem as more is not always needed in the early stages of rehab.

So with clear goals set and a map to recovery it was time for some isolation exercises to really weed out the muscles which were not only a bit lazy but some had packed their bags and were residing in Marbella.  This is often an eye-opening moment, especially for people who fall into the fit and active bracket, as the results are there for them to see and feel themselves.

By the end of the session Ade was feeling physically improved but more importantly had made that mental step of actively seeking progress so left with a spring in his step and a small amount of homework.

A week later, Ade was a different person and having done a week of low level activation exercises was ready for some hard work.  This is a really important facet of rehab, not only that it needs to be tailored to the individual but has to be at the right level for progress to be made.  This was quite a hard week as most of the exercises are unmasking deficiencies so initially feel disproportionately hard.  The positive flip side to this is they quickly become easy as the body adapts.

So after a sweaty and at times frustrating session Ade was on his way with a slightly more challenging set of homework in hand, cursing the day he said the exercises were too easy.

Then, up to date with this week, Ade was ready to break out into the gym area, which often feels like a promotion getting out of the treatment room.  He has quickly built up a new awareness of how he moves and was able to give me a good report of how the week had been.  This weeks exercises area mixture of control and stability mixed with some good old fashion strength.  This again is important as the exercises have to be meaningful to the person committing time to doing them.

Ade is now well on his way to achieving his goals in time for the summer.

A point to note is that Ade is quite a high level, multi sport patient.  His recovery plan has been set accordingly.  Every one is treated here as an individual on initial assessment so please do not worry if your life goals are not highly active.  The rehab plan is based on what you want to do not what we want you to do.  So if you have a niggle which is not resolving, or even if you just feel like you need a MOT before starting exercise, give us a call, tweet, message, email or just bang on the door.

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