Therapeutic Exercise and Whole Body Vibration - Highlands Ranch Colorado

What is Therapeutic Exercise?

Therapeutic exercise is a cornerstone of chiropractic care, designed to restore optimal physical function, reduce pain, and prevent future injuries. It involves a personalized program of movements and activities specifically chosen to address your individual needs and conditions. Unlike general exercise, therapeutic exercise is targeted and aims to correct specific muscular imbalances, improve joint mobility, enhance strength, and promote better posture.

Why is Therapeutic Exercise Important?

While chiropractic adjustments help to restore proper joint alignment, therapeutic exercises work in conjunction to stabilize and strengthen the surrounding muscles and connective tissues. This comprehensive approach helps to:

• Reduce Pain: By strengthening weakened muscles and improving flexibility, therapeutic exercises can alleviate stress on painful areas and reduce inflammation.
• Improve Function: Restoring normal movement patterns and increasing range of motion allows you to perform daily activities with greater ease and less discomfort.
• Prevent Re-injury: Building strength and stability around vulnerable joints helps to protect them from future strain and injury.
• Correct Posture: Targeted exercises can help to retrain muscles that support proper posture, reducing the likelihood of pain and discomfort associated with poor alignment.
• Enhance Recovery: Active participation in your recovery through therapeutic exercise speeds up the healing process and promotes long-term wellness.

Benefits –

• Increasing muscle strength, power, and endurance – The use of Whole Body Vibration (WBV) has been shown in various studies to result in increased muscle activation during exercise compared to doing the same exercise without vibration. In particular, WBV has a significant effect on dynamic strength, isometric strength, and functional measures of strength such as jumping height and sit-to-stand movements.
• Improving balance and mobility – A review of 16 studies on the use of vibration in older adults found that vibration training can help restore knee muscle isometric strength, muscle power, and balance control.
• Building stronger bones – Multiple studies have found that vibration can be used as a tool for addressing bone loss and osteoporosis. For example, a 2018 literature review concluded that WBV training is an effective method to address symptoms of decreased bone mineral density in the spine and neck in older women.
• Pain reduction – Multiple studies have found that vibration training may support overall physical well-being. For example, one double-blind study found that using vibration for 5 minutes a day resulted in significantly lower pain scores in patients recovering from rotator cuff reconstruction after 6 weeks compared to those who did not receive vibration.
• Increased range of motion – Studies on athletes have found that the use of vibration training can increase range of motion without decreasing strength of muscle contraction, decrease stiffness in limbs, and increase the number of muscle units recruited during exercise.
• Restored mobility for patients with neurological disorders – Disorders like cerebral palsy and Parkinson’s disease are characterized by loss of mobility, muscle stiffness (spasticity), and difficulty controlling movements. Some studies have found that vibration may ease spasticity, improve gait, and increase mobility overall in patients with various neurological disorders.