We all know that exercise is important – for improving cardiovascular health, bone health, regulating weight and for our mental wellbeing, as well as being a great social activity! Physiotherapists will often (if not always) prescribe some form of exercise to help alleviate pain and help return you to doing what you love.
So if we know exercise is important, why do we have such difficulty adhering to it? Why does it feel like such a chore? How many times have you been to see the Physio and told them that you’ve done your exercise programme, when really you’ve found it difficult to fit in?! (we’ve all been there!)
Often it depends on where you are in life at the moment, what you’ve got going on, and ultimately whether you believe the exercises you’ve been given to do are going to actually help you.
If you’ve got a lot going on – new job, new baby, family life taking over – then your exercises may come quite low on your priorities. That doesn’t mean they’re not important, it’s just that they’re last on the list of things to do. But that’s ok. Sometimes we have to focus on the other ‘life stuff’ first and feel in control before we can prioritise our exercises. Ultimately, the reason you’re in pain is unlikely to be solved by doing one exercise – pain is impacted not only by the structural components, but by how we’re feeling, our emotions, our stress levels, our beliefs… If you are at a particularly busy stage of life then sometimes the best form of treatment is simply to give yourself time to ‘be’ and then come back to your exercises when you can.
Now coming back to whether you believe the exercises you’ve been given to do are actually going to help… hopefully, if I’ve done my job right (!) then you will understand why the exercises will help you, how often you should be doing them, how long it will take to see an improvement, and how these will feed into the next stage of the rehabilitation process that gets you back to doing what makes you ‘you’.
Ultimately, you have to enjoy the exercise. There’s no point me advising you to go the gym if you HATE the gym! As then it’ll become lower on the priorities again. There’s no one size fits all. Just because I teach Pilates, doesn’t mean that Pilates is for everyone.
The best form of exercise really is… the one that you enjoy! Whether it’s for the social factor, the environment of being outdoors in the fresh air, or having that hour to switch off from the world – whatever get’s the endorphins going. If you can’t do that exercise at the moment due to pain or injury then we modify, we adjust, and we always are working towards getting you back to what you love.
