So how do we use our self-check in Connect Therapy? ……………And why all the fuss ?

Self-check exercises help you guide your progress.

It’s for both of us . In ConnectTherapy, Self-check exercises help you guide your progress and for us to see if your physio treatment – hands on or exercises – are working to correct any movement patterns / imbalances, with the focus of finding the best way to work towards your goals.

Your self-check is a movement or exercise that reflects how your body organises itself during that particular task.

Let’s say it’s a squat.

You do the movement and we both feel for objective things like pelvis rotation or visually we look at if your knee rolls in PLUS, you learn to also feel for the effort of the movement. We then re-check this same movement after your treatment to feel and look for any changes.

If the self-check gets harder in effort or visually the knee rolling increases, we know that whatever exercise or physio technique we did was not helping your patterning for the task of your squat. It doesn’t necessarily mean we stop or make big changes, but it does tell us information about how next to proceed with your treatment session.

So……Why is this important?

A few super important reasons, and it’s what makes our sessions at Radiant Pilates unique, so we can ensure your sessions and home exercises are tailor made to you and your goals.

 We use your self-check to then help us guide our treatment session, PLUS it guides our order for your exercise plan.

For instance, you present with knee pain and we see on your squat that not only is it hard work, but you also have a block in your R ankle, you rotate to the L and your ribs shift to the L about half way into the squat. We then treat your ankle block and your squat feel better, you no longer rotate but now you feel some L shoulder blade pain.

We then follow that up with assessment and find the spinal segment and rib in question and treat that. Now your squat is still better than we started, pelvis is moving well but your R foot has stiffened slightly.

This tells us a few things, but definitely shows us that the order of your home exercises needs to incorporate some foot and rib control exercises to help your knee pain – and while we would do further tests and re-tests in clinic – it also tells us for instance that isolated glut work to help the ‘rolling in of your knees’ is probably NOT the fastest way to correct your knee pain during a squat movement.

 This doesn’t mean we would strengthen the gluts (your butt muscles), what it would mean is that we would choose a specific exercise that targets your movement strategy for your squat. This may look like some foot releases followed immediately with some thorax stretches and then to tie it all together using some TheraBand overhead reaches with calf raises.

= We may not get to gluts for a few sessions until your patterns are looking better and then we can move the above exercises into ‘drills’ to do before a more functional and loaded exercise. Again, tailoring everything back to what your goal is = in this case to reduce your knee pain during a squat so you can garden and ride your bike pain free.

Self -checks =

targeted treatment.

You can read more about ‘What is ConnectTherapy?’ in my other article and this has links to Dr LJ Lee’s website for more detailed information.