Your day to day activities will impact your pain relief.
Why this matters:
A one hour session with a physical therapist, massage therapist, chiropractor, or anyone else helping you with your pain only accounts for 4% of a 24 hour period. This percentage decreases as the time between exercise/stretching sessions increase. Although these activities can be helpful for your pain, you need to look at what you’re doing on a daily basis that could be contributing or helping your pain.
Recently, at the gym, I was talking with a patient of mine, and they said that they felt great when stretching and mobilizing their body. However, if they stopped doing it, their body started to hurt. Is she supposed to be doing these activities every day for the rest of her life? She did share with me that she was using a standing desk. So I unpacked that a little more. It turned out that she had two monitors, and the main monitor she looks at was to the right of her, so she had to constantly look over her shoulder to do work.
I simply suggested that she change her work station so she can see the screen head on. Simple. Yet, extremely effective. Her daily pain went away and she no longer had to do her daily stretches because it was modifying her daily activities which allowed her to be pain free in the long run.
Action steps:
Look at your day. Map it out on an hour by hour basis. Figure out what activities or positions are triggering your pain. Ask yourself, “what can I do to change this up?” Then make those changes. It can be as simple as switching up your work station so you are sitting less, standing more, or twisting less. You’ll be surprised by how this works.
Share with me your modifications through this email and I’ll be happy to celebrate with you.
