Find Relief for Persistent Aches and Pains With These 3 Tips

Looking for Relief? Physical Therapy Can Help

There’s something oddly satisfying about waking up the morning after a hard workout with a dull ache in your muscles.

But when that dull ache moves into your joints and starts showing up every day, that satisfaction quickly turns to frustration.

The answer isn’t to reach for anti-inflammatory medication or simply ignore the aches and pains in your joints: it’s to talk to your physical therapist.

If these three reasons to consider physical therapy for joint pain aren’t enough to convince you, call our office to find out more.

1. Physical Therapy Can Help You Find Relief the Natural Way

Whether it happens in your muscles or your joints, your body’s pain receptors are there to alert you to a potential problem.

Whether it’s a lack of fluid in the joint, damage to soft tissue like tendons or ligaments, or muscle strain or fatigue, pain signals are designed to keep you from doing permanent damage to your body. Yet people have a tendency to treat pain as an inconvenience rather than a problem.

If pain is your first warning sign that something needs to be fixed, getting to the root cause of that pain becomes a priority.

Fortunately, a physical therapist is a specialist not only in human anatomy, but in how the body moves. They can uncover the cause of your pain through diagnostic testing and prescribe a series of therapies to address it.

2. Physical Therapy Can Decrease the Need for Surgery

Most people associate physical therapy with surgery. While it is a vital part of recovery after nearly every surgical procedure, that’s not the only role physical therapy plays in healing.

In fact, with very few exceptions, physical therapy can help you resolve most joint pain without ever going under the knife.

In some cases, physical therapy has been shown to be as effective as surgery for treating certain types of joint pain, offering relief without the anxiety and complications of an operation.

3. Physical Therapy Can Help You Move With Ease

There are times when rest is the right course of action for acute joint pain, especially if there’s an injury involved. But targeted exercise, recommended by a physical therapist, can also help relieve joint pain and stiffness.

Exercise doesn’t just improve your overall health and fitness; it also strengthens the muscles around your joints, giving them more support.

Physical therapy can also help protect your bone density, give you more energy, help you sleep, and help you maintain a healthy weight, all of which play a role in joint pain.

A 2005 study found that losing just one pound can eliminate four pounds of pressure on your knees. Even modest weight loss, five to ten pounds, can relieve as much as 20 to 40 pounds of pressure on your joints. A physical therapist can help you keep moving safely while you recover from aches and pains in your joints.

Find Relief With Passive and Active Therapies

Once your physical therapist has isolated the underlying cause of your chronic joint pain, we can prescribe techniques to help you start feeling and moving more like yourself again.

Physical therapy for joint pain may start with passive exercises, in which we move the affected joint for you to increase its pain-free range of motion.

Exercises that reduce the amount of weight on the joints can also help. For instance, we may recommend swimming or water walking as a way to exercise the hips and knees without forcing them to bear your full weight.

Other types of exercise can help you overcome joint pain while improving joint function. Strengthening exercises reinforce the muscles and connective tissue that support the joint. Corrective exercises and neuromuscular re-education can help you maintain a straighter, more symmetrical posture.

Last but not least, physical therapy offers a variety of helpful treatments beyond exercise. We may treat your joint pain with heat, ice, and manual therapies such as massage, just to name a few.

Ready to Get Started on the Path Toward Relief?

Don’t let aches and pains in your joints keep you from living the life you want.

Call Zone Physical Therapy today to schedule your appointment with our physical therapist and find out how physical therapy can help you live a pain-free life.