Pain to Peak Performance
My first introduction to Chiropractic care was when I was about 10 years old. I was practicing aerial cartwheels in my basement, falling, and then getting rib pain. My mom, having had a great experience with a Chiropractor, decided to take me to her Chiropractor. Although my treatment was very different than is the standard of care today, what really brought me there was pain. With care evolving so much over the past few decades, Chiropractors now offer more rehabilitative exercise and healing modalities. This allows them to help with so much more than pain-focussed care. Chiropractors will always be someone there to support through musculoskeletal pain, but we can also help maintain your function, and improve your performance. With care from Made To Move being holistic, evidence-informed, and individual, we help get you out of pain, and back to doing the physical activities that you love. We have a high level of experience with professional dance, acrobatics, and long distance running (armature). Whether you are early in your healing journey, or you are working on your next personal best, we are here to help you improve efficiency and outcomes.
As mentioned, most people book their first appointment when they are in pain. Although this is not a requirement, this is often the case. Injury can look like acute pain cause by a fall or accident. Injury can be pain, swelling, restriction. Pain might be a flare-up from the past, or may be a chronic issue that has been been present for over a decade. Whether you have injured your ankle or your neck, when in this phase you want to focus on reduction of pain, healing modalities, and maintenance of mobility. A full history and physical examination helps get to the root cause of your condition with a proper, working diagnosis. A combination of hands on manual therapy, modality, and active exercise is often offered through a patient-centred model. There is no threshold that warrants care, you can be seen and helped with your pain no matter how intense or frequent your pain may be.
What happens when your pain begins to disappear? You continue to grow more confident as your function returns to where it was before your injury began. Now what? This is a phase that is more about maintaining what you have built so far. Appointments begin to spread out more as we progress your rehabilitative exercises further, challenging your stability, strength, and mobility. You maintain your progress through continued manual therapy, and deal with any bumps in your improvement with one-on-one care. Sometimes appointments may be more spread apart or more close together, depending on your own personal journey. Often this is where patients may discontinue care. Think of this like stopping your medication as soon as you feel better. Most medications recommend completing the prescription, so think of your rehab and manual therapy appointments like a prescription as well. Think of maintenance not as coasting, but as building and strengthening your foundation for movement and physical health.
Finally, when you are able to do all of your activities of daily living pain free, and you are not hesitating when doing old motor patterns that used to cause pain, you are pretty much finished with the maintenance phase of care. There are no hard and fast lines to delineate between phases, but this is where most patients are graduated to performance focused plans. This is where we optimal your movement. We continue to add mobility and stability where needed, but we are unlocking your potential in this phase. You are continuing to strengthen and prevent future injury. You are now training to elevate your physical performance. Think of all the physical activities and hobbies you would love to see yourself doing. These are what we focus on. We help you recover from training sessions or performance opportunities. We continue to assess for subtle imbalances, and target treatment on both recovery and neuromuscular training. This is where you move from stabilizing your ankle after an inversion ankle sprain to improving cutting, jump height, and coordination.
If this last section focusing on performance sounds up your alley, you don’t actually have to wait to get injured to start this process of care eventually leading to high performance focussed treatment. We are here to help you with pain, or performance at any point in your journey as an athlete or non-athlete. Oftentimes we push through pain or we ignore our inner desires to try a new activity or sport. Whether you are brand new, injured, or an old pro, let us know what your goals are and we will support you in achieving these. Our relationship with movement and physical health is rarely linear, so having a support system including a team of manual therapists truly makes the difference.
Don’t wait for pain to reach out to our team. Seeing a chiropractor or a massage therapist has value in every phase of the athletic journey. We know what it’s like to start from scratch and to refine high level performance. We have been there as athletes and artists ourselves, both professionally and recreationally.
For more information on our rehab for dancers, gymnasts, and runners, or how our performance focused chiropractic care and recovery focused laser and acupuncture can help you. We regularly treat athletes, former athletes, and future athletes, and we love helping you keep moving.
