Is your rehab program targeting the right muscles?
Imagine you're tuning a musical instrument. To produce beautiful music, each string must be adjusted precisely. Now, apply that same attention to detail to your exercise routine.
Yesterday, I was training a client on a leg curl machine. This machine targets your knee flexor muscles, hamstrings, calves, and more. During the session, my client reached a challenging point and remarked, "Wow, this takes so much concentration to keep doing it correctly."
She was right. To ensure she was challenging the target muscles, she had to resist her body’s natural tendency to compensate by using other muscles and joints. In this case, her body wanted to tilt the pelvis forward, which would shift the effort to her back extensors (lower back muscles) instead of her knee flexors (hamstrings and calves).
If she had let her body compensate, she wouldn’t have effectively strengthened her knee flexors. Instead, she would have inadvertently strengthened her back extensors (lower back muscles) and reinforced an incorrect movement pattern.
Think of it like tuning an instrument: if you don’t adjust each string correctly, the music will be off-key. Similarly, if you don’t perform exercises correctly, you won’t strengthen the intended muscles, and so your current issue will not get resolved.
When exercising, especially for health and pain management, it’s crucial to ask yourself two questions:
1. Why am I doing it?
2. What do I want out of this exercise?
If your goal is to strengthen the target muscles to stay strong and pain-free, it’s essential to focus and concentrate on doing the exercise correctly. Choose the correct way, not the convenient way.
Remember, if you're using exercise to manage pain or resolve aches, execution matters. Just like tuning an instrument, the right technique makes all the difference.
