Something happened!
You slipped, tripped, lifted something a little funny or maybe just woke up sore and in pain. You went online and saw that it should get better with some rest.
So what should you do?
“I guess I just need to rest” you might say, but what does rest look like?
Lying in bed? Sitting on the couch? Passing on that hike you had planned? A total body cast?
The answer is usually every physios favorite saying: “it depends!”.
The truth of the matter is the degree of rest you need can vary depending on what you’ve injured and how severe the injury is.
The severity of your injury and how much protection it requires is something you can discuss with your doctor or physiotherapist, who will take you through an assessment and fill you in on what might provoke your particular injury. Once you’ve worked out what the issue is and what tends to set it off, that’s when you can start to discuss how much rest it will need.
Complete and total rest is seldomly required. In fact, complete and total rest is often quite harmful to our health in many ways. This is why even in the hospitals, physios are working hard to keep people moving and active safely even following major surgeries and accidents.
In most cases, we strive for something called relative rest. Compared to your usual loading of the injured area, we typically advise people to decrease the amount of stress in the injured area temporarily. So how do we do that? That’s where the fun comes in! we can provide supportive bracing, reduce the duration or intensity of activities, find alternative movements to replace the painful ones temporarily or we can change the range of movement that your activities take you through. All of those are examples of the concept of “relative rest”.
So the next time your back is feeling a little spicy or the knee is acting up, talk to your physio and see what type of plan you can devise together to keep you moving and active in a pain free and happy manner while your body recovers! It can be as simple as swapping your 5k run for a bike ride to let the angry knee offload a little or phoning a friend to turn the pickle ball game into a doubles game instead of singles, so you don’t have as much court to cover. As always, the goal of physio should be to keep you doing what you love as much as possible!
Call us today at either of our two locations: Poseidon (204.927.2660) or Pembina (204.925.1030),
or book online at: https://booking.medeohealth.com/panamrehab OR https://patient.medeohealth.com/booking/physiotherapy-pembina