Rehabilitation

Welcome to the Rehabilitation Center area of our website, as the only professional football Chiropractors in Southend, this is an area we are passionate about and it's very rare that anyone gets out of our clinic without a structured exercise program and lifestyle advice!

First though what exactly is rehabilitation?

"Rehabilitation is the process of assisting someone to improve and recover lost function after an event, illness or injury that has caused functional limitations".

For spinal rehabilitation to be successful, you need four key components:

1. Structure.

2. You need a clearly defined goal to work towards.

3. You need to work at a level that is challenging and a "bit hard".

4. Once you have achieved your goal, most importantly, you need to maintain it.

If you are missing even one of these key components then what you are doing is not rehabilitation, you are pfaffing around and you have little hope of making any realistic long term improvement.

Rehabilitation is not handing out a few simple exercises or laying on your back with your knees bent and rocking side to side. Rehabilitation is not giving out a booklet on low back pain and sending you away. Rehabilitation is not gardening, it is not going for a swim or a once a week Pilate's class followed by a coffee.

To reduce specific episodes of low back pain the focus needs to be spinal endurance (this is an excellent but very technical study highlighting the complexity of rehabilitation) with a specific structured program targeting key spinal muscles tailored to your needs and it needs to be done daily. By the same token it need not be too time consuming, ideally only a few minutes a day to maximise compliance.

Here is another excellent but technical study outlining the complexity of factors as to why back pain occurs.

Flexibility is important to help get you over an episode of pain but it has little impact in the long-term if you want to reduce the frequency, severity and duration of future episodes of low back pain. You need to have base line endurance tests assessed for deficiencies then have targets set, reassessed, set new targets, reassessed, you get the picture...

This is what we do, this is what we are good at.