When is rehabilitation useful?
When you can’t do a movement easily because of:
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a condition (such as osteoarthritis)
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surgery
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an injury
What is Osteopathic Neuromuscular Rehabilitation?
It is a painless form of rehabilitation that uses exercises developed from specific challenges you face in your daily life to encourage movements/activities that are lacking.
We call exercises or specific movements from specific activities or sports that are outside your everyday movement extra-functional. It’s difficult and sometimes impossible to use movements learned from extra-functional exercises in daily life, i.e. if you just lift weights to build up a muscle, it’s difficult to learn to do this movement in your daily life.
Osteopathic neuromuscular rehabilitation uses only functional movement to make the rehabilitation more effective.
“Functional rehabilitation [i.e. Osteopathic neuromuscular rehabilitation] is defined as the process of helping a person to recover their movement capacity by using their own movement repertoire (whenever possible). Hence, for a person who has motor losses at the knee and is unable to walk or run, the rehabilitation will be in walking, then running, jumping and stair-climbing, etc. If this person plays tennis, this activity will also be used in the rehabilitation programme. However rehabilitation is likely to be less effective if the remedial movement patterns or tasks are outside the individual’s experience (extra-functional). For example, it would be less helpful for a tennis player with a leg injury to be given rehabilitative exercise such as football, or leg presses in the gym or leg exercise lying on the floor.”
Lederman, E. (2010). Neuromuscular Rehabilitation in Manual and Physical Therapies: Principles to Practice, Elsevier Science Health Science Division.