Why do we give you homework? (& why you have to do it)
If you’ve been in Physical Therapy before, you’ve absolutely been given homework to do. Depending on where you went, maybe the exercises were challenging, or maybe they didn’t feel like they did much at all. (Hopefully you could tell that they were helping you reach your goals, but more on that later.)
I feel like a lot of times, a PT will give someone homework without really explaining why it was important, so I wanted to talk about why we give you exercises to do at home, and why you should actually do them.
The fact of the matter is, we aren’t miracle workers. I really wish we were. I wish we could wave a magic wand and magically fix your pain, but we can’t. We’re here to guide you on the best things that you can do to get back to doing the things that are important to you. This may include treatments like soft-tissue mobilization, dry needling, electrical stimulation, and more, but it’s also going to include exercises. The thing is, doing exercises once or twice a week for 20-30 minutes isn’t going to fix the problem. Here’s where your homework comes in.
Think about it this way. This pain you’ve been having probably didn’t start overnight. It’s probably been bugging you for awhile, and it’s probably the culmination of overuse, compensations, muscle imbalances, etcetera. SO, you can’t expect it to go away overnight, or by just going to PT once or twice a week.
We don’t give you exercises to do at home because we want to add more things to your already busy schedule (because who isn’t already crazy busy?), but because we genuinely want you to get better and to be able to do all of the activities that are important to you.
When we put together an exercise program for you at Trailhead, it’s not some canned response where every person that comes in with back pain gets the same 3 exercises. We take into account where you are currently at and what your goals are/what you want to get back to, and we create the best plan we can to get you from A to B. You’ll always hear me ask new patients how long they have to do their exercises each day, so I make sure I’m not giving them more than they can handle.
We’re a team working towards one goal - yours! Whatever activities you want to get back to are the things we want to! So we give you exercises so that you can get there faster. So please, go do your exercises, it’ll be worth it!
And if you’re doing PT somewhere where your exercises are never being progressed or they don’t seem to be helping you reach your goals, it might be time to find a new PT!
