Services
Car accident and whiplash recovery is best accomplished by providing key information to support early injury recovery! This is an area I specialize in, bringing 25+ years of experience to promote a safe, logical, and progressive care plan. I can work in concert with your physician and other care providers to ensure the best outcome for you. Treatment plans always include calming down acutely injured tissues, providing instruction on how to position in bed or a chair to reduce headaches, concussion syndrome symptoms, and to minimize further stress on injured sites. Unfortunately, many people with this injury wind up with prolonged healing times due to an overly aggressive start to treatment and/or a lack of critical information that supports early injury recovery. Specific ideas to modify painful activities of daily living and work also assist in the critical “relative-rest” that is needed for a full and speedy recovery. Providing highly specific instruction in the effective application of modalities such as cold, heat, taping or bracing can also greatly support early recovery, allowing us to eventually progress into gentle therapeutic exercises for a full return to life’s activities and pleasures.
Personal Training with your goals in mind. Whether you want strengthening to prepare for a hiking or rock climbing trip or just to feel better in your body, a good program starts with listening to your goals, then creating a program that fits into your lifestyle habits. The best program is the program that gets done! Muscles strength and length, joint range of motion, heart rate and blood pressure are some metrics included in your portfolio of starting points, along with your specific and measurable goals.
Performance Enhancement is an aspect of personal training that begins with an in-depth assessment of muscles, joints, reaction time, and power needed for your specific sport or activity. For example, a weak turn on the ski slopes may be more due to weakness in deep hip muscles rather than what appears to be knee weakness.
Functional Assessments look at large global movements to discern where faulty patterns are occurring. These assessments involve performing several functional movements such as squats, stepping up or down various heights, reaching overhead, pushing or pulling objects. The use of mirrors, videos, auditory and tactile cues can be used to enhance feedback. If faulty patterns are identified, activities and exercises are prescribed to correct those patterns.
Movement Re-patterning replaces faulty movement habits. These habits can be a “chicken or the egg” scenario, with faulty movement patterns leading to pain, or pain leading to faulty movement patterns. Either way, the goal is to provide options for corrective re-patterning. This is accomplished using tactile, visual and auditory cues to restore efficient pain-free motion for optimal function. It often also includes developing an appropriate base for core strength or range of motion, so that you can re-pattern efficiently.
Soft tissue massage and joint mobilizations are important tools in both assessing and treating injury and movement dysfunction. This is an integral part of my toolbox to return you to peak function. This may involve a focused area, or broader areas of the body, depending on your specific concerns and type of injury. Specific interventions may include myofascial release, soft tissue work combined with very specific motions to help restore pain free motion, joint glides, craniosacral therapy, Swedish or cross friction massage, the use of tools or “Augmented” soft tissue mobilization and strain counter-strain techniques. Instructions in some of these techniques may be possible for you to do independently, between our treatments, with the use of tools or your own hands.
Injury treatment and prevention programs consist of a thorough evaluation to properly identify injured tissue, then diagnose and properly treat the injury. This involves looking at how you move globally, then more specifically at the injury site. When a client understands their specific injury it decreases anxiety surrounding pain, putting the client in control. This creates the best partnership for healing. Treatment may consist of soft tissue work, manual therapies to help restore joint position, and kinesiotaping, as needed, to temporarily hold restored joint position until the body can do it independently. Treatment always includes very specific therapeutic exercise or activity prescription to retrain the body’s ability to move without pain and speed recovery. An understanding of what your core is and how to appropriately access that core is essential. Treatment can include the use of adaptive tools, when necessary, exercise to strengthen weakened areas and stretching to allow for unrestricted motion. Movement instruction is always based on sound body mechanics as this helps prevent further recurrence of injury. I also include cross training suggestions to improve overall performance and function for long term health.
Balance enhancement and fall prevention is essential to healthy maturity. Programs are designed for an individual’s specific areas of balance challenge to maximize results. Balance challenge areas often consist of lack of flexibility or weakness at key joints and re-training of the nervous system’s reaction times and balance strategies. Programs are designed to counter specific issues and give a client the confidence and skills they need to arise independently from the floor.
