Whether you’re a weekend warrior, a professional athlete or a grandmother, it’s common to experience a dull ache or pain near or at a joint sometime during your lifetime. For some, the culprit is a pulled muscle or perhaps a sports injury. For others, the issue isn’t an injury but a repetitive use problem known as tendonitis.
In this blog, the providers at Cardio Metabolic Institute explain what tendonitis is and describe how physical therapy promotes healing and gets you back to feeling more like yourself again.
A great place to start this topic is to describe what tendons are and why they’re important. Tendons are the fibrous, thick bands of tissue that connect muscles to bones.
Tendons are composed of collagen, which gives them a stretchy and cushiony characteristic. This quality enables tendons to serve as the body’s natural shock absorbers, protecting the body’s 650-plus muscles by cushioning impact when your body moves.
Stress and strain as well as natural aging can compromise a tendon’s ability to protect muscles, resulting in tendonitis. Typically, patients suffering from tendonitis experience a dull ache near the joint as well as swelling and inflammation.
Many people learn about physical therapy when doing rehabilitation after surgery or experiencing trauma from an accident. Because physical therapy is based on the premise that targeted exercises promote healing, it comes with numerous benefits.
By its very nature, physical therapy is all about restoring function. Our physical therapists are highly trained health care professionals whose sole purpose is to develop treatment plans to help their patients move more freely, manage or reduce pain, restore function, and prevent disability.
Issues like tendonitis ultimately curtail range of motion in particular joints or muscles, resulting in conditions like frozen shoulder. A physical therapist initially uses diagnostic tools like a goniometer to evaluate how much you can move a joint and then develops a treatment plan that includes exercises to enhance or completely restore your range of motion.
One of the great benefits of physical therapy is that while you’re doing those targeted exercises to address your specific problem, you’re making the surrounding muscles stronger, more flexible, and more agile, too. This is particularly crucial in preventing falls.
When your body is healthy and working optimally, it moves freely without pain or discomfort. Pain and discomfort often signal that something isn’t working correctly. But when you develop strength through physical therapy, you make your muscles, ligaments, tendons, or joints less vulnerable to stress and strain, reducing your risk for injuries.
While benefits like restoring function and range of motion, increasing core strength, and reducing strain are all great, the fact that physical therapy can make all of this happen without using medication is particularly appealing to many patients. In fact, one study noted that 78% of the patients surveyed said they preferred non-drug alternatives for treating their pain.
The fact that physical therapy is not a one-size-fits-all treatment modality is also a key benefit. After all, two patients may be suffering from the same condition like neck tendonitis, but the condition manifests differently for each patient.
Our highly trained physical therapists at our Somerset office take great care in thoroughly assessing your condition and dialing in a specific treatment plan that works best for your needs.
An often overlooked benefit of physical therapy is that patients play a central role in their road to recovery. When a patient partners with a physical therapist, they’re doing exercises during in-office sessions or at home instead of sitting on the sidelines and hoping for the best.
If you have tendonitis and want to know if physical therapy is right for you, contact Cardio Metabolic Institute at our Somerset location. Click the “Book online” button or call us today. For your convenience, our physical therapists and physicians at our Somerset office work under the same roof, providing superior coordinated care.
