No one enjoys pain and certainly one of the primary aims of physio treatment is to decrease its impact. However, what isn’t spoken about as much is the journey towards how to keep your condition managed long-term. With many musculoskeletal conditions the pain will decrease and disappear before you’ve completed your therapy. By analogy, if you compared your body to a car, you may have no observable discomforts when you are driving on a smooth road if you had issues with suspension and shock absorption but these may present if you had to access off-road or experienced potholes. Your body needs to be able to manage load with the kind of forces that you will experience in everyday life. If you build coordination and strength then when your body is exposed to these loads then injury risk is lessened as well as pain experience.

How do you know you’ve done enough? By exposing yourself to the thing that you need to do that may have been a problem once. But this time with renewed strength, coordination, and confidence as you’ve done the work with physio.

People who approach treatment this way tend to need less treatment as they don’t go through recurrent episodes of pain over the years. It can also prevent many unwanted issues from developing. As it has been said “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”.