How to Make Your Home Exercise Programs More Time Friendly
Physical therapy works best when we all work together! A home exercise program is an essential piece of a physical therapy rehabilitation program and fundamental to your recovery. Patients who stick with their prescribed home exercises have a significantly higher rate of success in achieving their goals and increasing physical function. Those who fail to complete their program have a higher risk of re-injury and a much longer recovery time.
Our experienced physical therapists can design a program based on your treatment needs, your time, and your equipment, but they can’t be there to make sure you put in the work. The truth is that many patients fail to complete their home exercise programs. One of the main reasons is time. People have busy lives and lots of things to do. They either forget to do their exercises or can’t find a way to fit them into their daily schedule. Here are some tips on how you can make your home exercise program more time friendly.
Keep Exercises Simple
Home exercise doesn’t have to involve much of your time or lots of expensive gym equipment. It just has to benefit you and help you reach your recovery goals. Our top-rated physical therapist can help you put together an exercise plan with the equipment and time that you have. You might not need any equipment at all and might benefit from using only your body weight when you exercise. If you’re rehabbing a leg injury, focus on a leg routine that meets your expectations and fits into your availability. Patients tend to stick with a routine that includes 2 exercises over one that has 4 or more. If the routine has too many exercises and takes too long, use the most helpful exercises and cut the rest.
Seek Motivation
A home exercise program should be meaningful and functional, but if you aren’t motivated to do it, it won’t matter. After all, nobody is there to push you. A physical therapist should design a program that motivates you to do it every day. You have to know why you’re doing it and set goals that you can reach. A component of motivation is self-efficacy, or your belief in your own capability to achieve a task that will produce a targeted result.
Motivation is your reason for doing something. If you want to get back to jogging without pain after a badly sprained ankle, every exercise should be geared toward meeting that goal.
Diversify Your Exercises
You might find a few good exercises that you really like and are beneficial to your recovery, but you don’t have enough time to do all of them every day. The good news is that you don’t have to do them all every day. Break up your exercises, so they fit into your schedule yet still give you the benefit you’re looking for. You might even find that you’re getting bored or tired of doing the same exercises every day. Nothing can kill motivation faster than doing the exact same thing over and over again. Splitting your exercise routines up on different days not only makes your routines more time friendly, but it also helps with your motivation.
Use Compound Exercises
Another way to save you time and allow you to hit your exercise targets is to work multiple muscle groups in the same exercise. You can incorporate simple exercises such as push ups that work your chest, shoulder, rotator cuff, and triceps at the same time. Two other major compound exercises are squats and deadlifts. You don’t need any fancy gym equipment to do compound exercises, which makes them perfect for a home exercise program. Many times, especially when in physical therapy, all you need is your body weight, dumbbells, or some inexpensive resistance bands.
Make Every Rep Count
When you don’t have a lot of time, you should make every rep count. If you’re just going through the motions to get through your exercise routine, you’re likely wasting your time and not seeing the results you want. When it comes to any exercise program, it’s not as much about the quantity as the quality of the workout. If you only have 10 minutes to do your exercises every day, make every one of those minutes count. That’s better than lazily going through your routine in 30 minutes.
Trust The Best Physical Therapist In Franklin, TN
A home exercise program to recover from a musculoskeletal pain condition takes time and consistency. There’s no getting around doing the work. These simple tips can help you stay focused and motivated, help you fit a quality exercise program into the time you have, and help you achieve the goals you’re looking for.