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Types Of Therapeutic Exercise And How They Are Used To Promote Healing

By Coleen Torres


When a person sustains an injury from playing sports, an accident or any other reason, he or she may need to undergo physical therapy to restore normal movement to the body. Part of this approach involves the use of therapeutic exercise to help the patient regain balance, strength, flexibility, and range of motion and alleviate pain.

The injured person will visit a physical therapist who will take a medical background from him or her and evaluate the ability to move in various ways. Based on this, the therapist will put together a customized therapy schedule of increasingly challenging exercises to help eliminate pain, and restore normal endurance, flexibility, and strength.

A combination of different exercises are implemented in a physical therapy program, these are classified by the nature of the movement and how it affects the body. With passive exercise, the muscles don't have to do any work, manual or mechanical force is applied externally, which helps restore normal movement to the joints. Whereas with active exercises, the cooperation of the muscles is needed, either alone or with assistance, this not only improves motion of joints, but also strengthens neuromuscular control.

There are other type of activities designed to build endurance and strength in damaged muscles. Once the patient has progressed to the point where he or she can safely carry out range-of-motion and flexibility exercises, it's time to begin strength and endurance training. Gradually increasing resistance is added steadily so the body can respond by naturally gaining strength in the tendon, ligaments, muscles, and bones.

Strength training moves are categorized as either dynamic or static. The latter are movements that don't require articulation of the joints, which means the length of muscle fibers is not affected and muscular tension and resistance are in a state of equilibrium. The angle of static moves is what contributes to strength development, performing them using multiple angles and holding each move for several seconds is most effective.

Dynamic exercises differs in that it does involve movement of the joints and muscles, in particular concentric and eccentric movement, which refers to a repeated shortening and lengthening of the muscle fibers that produces force and develops strength. This type of exercise can be grouped into isotonic, isokinetic, variable-resistance, and manual movements.

An isotonic movement is one that applies an external force to the muscle which alters the angle of the joint, lengthening the muscular fibers. Some common examples of this are many weight machines, free weights, and ankle weights. Training equipment for variable-resistance movements are built to impose correct joint alignment and apply resistance relative to force, or the therapist may do this manually as well, deliberately placing the muscles in range-of-motion extremes that will limit the force produced.

An isokinetic exercise is performed at a fixed speed and the resistance is equal to the force exerted by the muscle. There are machines built to provide movement of this kind, which match the force to the user's degree of muscle resistance, and can be adjusted in terms of velocity, concentric and eccentric action.




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