Whether you struggle with chronic pain, recovery from an injury, or just want to focus on injury prevention and improving your health and fitness, incorporating kinesiotherapy into your daily routine can be the key to helping you reach your goals and improve your quality of life. This is because unlike traditionally better-known fields such as physical therapy, kinesiotherapy is a diverse field that focuses on overall physical fitness, which means kinesiotherapy techniques can have a broad impact on your overall health. Below are 5 ways that doing a little bit of kinesiotherapy every day can save you a lot of trouble.
Recover after an Injury
Kinesiotherapy as a discipline was originally founded in 1946 to help sick and injured veterans returning from World War II to be able to go back to their active duty positions. At the time, this new field was named Corrective Therapy, but the name was changed to Kinesiotherapy in 1987 to reflect the emphasis on healing through movement (coming from the Greek word kinesis meaning movement).
Using kinesiotherapy exercises to help you recover from an injury can save you a lot of trouble because our bodies are meant to move. When you give into the temptation to not move your body the way it wants to after an injury, your range of motion can end up permanently restricted. A kinesiotherapy professional can teach you the right way to move your body to encourage recovery and avoid re-injuring yourself. Once you learn the right exercises, you can do them on your own every day.
Manage Chronic Pain
Due to the holistic nature of kinesiotherapy, these exercises can also be used to treat chronic pain not related to injuries. This is not only because it focuses on the body as a whole, but also because kinesiotherapy professionals can choose from a variety of therapeutic exercises: aquatic therapy, stretching and flexibility, resistance bands and free weights, machines, etc. No matter the modality of the exercise, the body just feels better when it’s moving.
Multiple studies bear this out as well, from researchers using aquatic rehabilitation to manage symptoms of sickle cell anemia to using isometric exercises and stretches to treat osteoarthritis. It naturally follows that you can incorporate kinesiotherapy into your daily life to treat chronic pain from a variety of illnesses. Kinesiotherapy, then, could save you a lot of trouble and expense that would otherwise be spent on doctor’s visits and pain medication.
Prevent Injury
Whether or not you have been injured in the past, preventing injury is always a priority. This is because it takes less energy and expense to prevent an injury than it does to treat one. Fortunately, the same exercises employed by kinesiotherapy to rehabilitate injuries can also be used as preventative therapy, saving you a lot of trouble in the form of pain, immobility, and costly treatments.
For example, once you’ve learned how to use proper form on a variety of exercises on a Marcy Diamond Elite Smith Machine during kinesiotherapy sessions to recover from a shoulder injury, you can then use what you have learned to improve your upper body strength once you have fully recovered. Using the same exercises with the proper form will help you prevent the injury from reoccurring.
Improve Fitness
Kinesiotherapy isn’t just limited to injury recovery and prevention and pain management, however. You can also use the exercises to improve your overall fitness because that is exactly what kinesiotherapy is: exercise. Even though technically it is considered therapeutic exercise, it can still improve your physical fitness. This is because one of the cornerstones of physical fitness is muscular strength and flexibility in order to improve mobility, which are the areas that kinesiotherapy targets.
Improving your fitness, of course, means you have more energy as you go through your day because you feel stronger and more mobile. In addition to reducing your risk of injury, improving your fitness also boosts your immune system and reduces your risk of getting sick. In other words, more kinesiotherapy means fewer sick days.
Improve Your Mental Health
A side benefit of doing kinesiotherapy exercises every day is it keeps your body moving, which can also have a number of benefits on your mental health. First of all, it boosts your self-esteem. When you realize how amazing and powerful your body is and how much strength potential you have, you feel better about yourself, which boosts your mood. Dedicating yourself to doing your exercises every day also increases your discipline and sense of resolve.
Kinesiotherapy exercises are also relaxing. Getting your body active helps you to let go of the stresses of your day and focus your attention on what is happening with your body, promoting meditation and reducing anxiety. Feeling more positive about yourself and letting go of those negative emotions have a cumulative effect of improving your sleep. Not only do you feel better when you are doing your exercises every day, you also have a lot more energy.
As you can see, just a little bit of kinesiotherapy every day can benefit your life and save you a lot of trouble in some unexpected ways. From improving your physical and mental health to reducing your risk of injury and illness, kinesiotherapy is worth taking the time and effort. Your body and your mind will thank you.