DIY Injury Rehab? Here’s Why You Should See a Professional Instead

DIY Injury Rehab? Here’s Why You Should See a Professional Instead

One of the things I love about the age of social media and easy access to online information and resources is that the general public can get a lot of information about sports injury rehab online. It’s common at my local 24/7 gym to see people doing a lot of fairly niche prehab and rehab exercises, working on mobility and stability in a way that people just didn’t do before.

Potentially they’ve been given these exercises by their local chiro or physio, but there’s a high chance that they’ve been inspired by a video they’ve seen on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube Shorts. I’m all for people getting educated and empowered to improve their health, including getting stuck into rehab work to address pain or injury. But there’s also a risk to DIY exercise rehab.

Here are five reasons why you should reconsider doing your own rehab and work with a professional instead:

One: You Need an Accurate Diagnosis First

Doing a random collection of exercises for your painful area without first having a diagnosis is like throwing a bunch of cake ingredients at a wall and hoping you end up with a wedding cake.

In certain cases, what might present as lower back pain, hip pain, or shoulder blade pain could actually be coming from a completely different cause, such as referred pain from a visceral or organ structure. This definitely won’t get better with rehab.

Some injuries can be made worse by stretching, even if it feels good temporarily. Other problems need to be loaded very gently in the beginning, even if it seems like you can do more.

Two: Exercise Specificity

While rehab exercises might seem simple on the surface, the rationale behind prescribing a certain exercise can be very complicated and often nuanced depending on the pain or injury.

From improving tissue flexibility, joint mobility, control and stability, muscle strength, tendon stiffness, whilst considering pain tolerance and sensitivity, there’s a lot of factors to consider.

Exercise selection, intensity, frequency, dosage, and what’s an acceptable response to the rehab will vary a lot depending on the exact problem you have going on.

Three: Response to Rehab

Often, when it comes to rehab exercise, an important thing to consider is the response of your symptoms to the rehab. We may start a patient off with a form of mobility or low-level loading, and if their condition changes positively in terms of a reduction in pain or an improvement in our outcome measures, we would progress to the next stage of rehab as per the treatment plan.

So there’s a bit of art to not only knowing what you should be doing exercise-wise, but knowing whether or not it’s improving or making a meaningful change to your injury.

Four: When & How to Progress

Similar to the above point, rehab needs to be properly mapped out in terms of starting at manageable levels and progressing to more appropriately load the injury.

For example, with a lumbar disc injury, which is a common cause of lower back pain, we would want to see someone’s range of motion improve in terms of their ability to bend forwards.

So we would generally start off with some pain-relieving exercises and some gentle mobility through the lumbar spine. Once we see an improvement in their movement on assessment, we would progress to some loading exercises.

Five: Accountability

I’ve had patients in the past ask for me to give them all the exercises that they need to recover from their injury in one session. Whilst this may sound like a great practical way to save costs on treatment by getting everything you need in the one appointment and not having to come back for further visits, it is also completely unrealistic and not going to be suitable for 90% of problems we see in the clinic.

Generally, what we experience is that people need accountability, the importance of what they’re doing, what the exercises are aiming to achieve in terms of the injury, and how this relates to the goals that they’re looking to achieve.

The reality is that most people will simply forget or stop doing their rehab if it’s been more than a couple of weeks since an appointment.

Need help navigating your exercise rehab to recover from pain or injury?

Fortunately, our team of chiropractors based in Perth have expertise regarding sports injury rehab. Contact us or book online today to get started on your journey away from pain and injury.

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