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Hi, I'm Dr. Molly with Your Goals Physical Therapy. I speak to hundreds of people every month and a common theme is that people don't like to, or don't do squats because they feel that their knees are bad, meaning their knees hurt while they're doing squats. This is very alarming because squats are very important. So I thought I would go over and explain one, why your knees hurt while you're squatting. Then two, why it's important to work on getting through that pain, like figuring out what's causing the pain and then getting to where squats are not painful.
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Hi, I'm Dr. Molly with Your Goals Physical Therapy and in passing I was talking with somebody who asked me if plantar fasciitis would just go away on its own. Apparently this poor woman has been suffering from having her feet hurt for several months going into some years. She, like many people with plantar fasciitis, has her ups and downs. Sometimes it's just like a mild ache every day. And then some days it feels so sharp she can't walk on her own feet. She has a lot of problems walking in the morning. Those first couple steps really feel like she's walking on eggshells but then she starts to get a rhythm going and she's okay after that for a few hours. When she sits for long periods at her desk, it feels like she has to start all over again, since those couple of steps are painful before she can get things moving again.
She has been to her doctor who sent her to a podiatrist, and they gave her cortisone injections that helped for a while. Then slowly over time that plantar fasciitis came back. So then she tried some really expensive orthotics and that was annoying because they only fit in sneakers. After doing some research, she found another place that has really nice inserts that fits in any shoe you choose. So she was a little bit happier, but she still has this pain that just keeps coming back over time. She was wondering how you get rid of it. She'd done physical therapy before where they had her do towel crunches and some ankle motion. But She said “I didn't really see a point, and so I didn't keep going.” She said “I do all the stretches they tell me. I’ve tried really hard to get rid of this, but it's just not going away. And I just want to know if eventually it will finally just work itself out.” Hi, I'm Dr. Molly with Your Goals Physical Therapy. I spent a lot of my time helping people recover from back injuries, either from an injury that happened just the other day, or maybe it's been problems that they've had for a very long time. And there are a few similar parts of many people’s stories. Or another way of saying that is there are things that they're doing throughout their day, that adds stress to their back. These actions are things they have done for years and are not even thinking about. And honestly, they’re not even thinking about them because ultimately during the activity, it doesn't normally hurt.
That’s right, it doesn't normally hurt their back while they're doing these things. And so they don't realize that they're stressing their back out until eventually their back gets so tired and overused that these motions start to cause a lot of pain. Now for some people they have been dealing with some sort of back pain for years. I wanted to talk about just three things that you are doing every day without thinking about it that’s adding extra stress to your back. Hi, I'm Dr. Molly with Your Goals Physical Therapy, have you ever coughed or sneezed and had sudden low back pain? You are not alone. It happens more often than you would think. Of course it’s very disconcerting when this happens. How scary it has to be that you just sneezed and now your low back hurts. And for people the pain is so severe that it's hard to move afterwards. It can be hard to catch your breath. No matter the intensity of the pain, it was just so shocking that a lot of people ended up at the doctor's office. How on earth could coughing or sneezing cause your back to hurt this much?
I want to explain how that happens. I want to explain what is going on in your back that would allow simply coughing to create that much pain. For an illustration, let's talk about what happened with my daughter the other day. Hi, I'm Dr. Molly with Your Goals Physical Therapy. The other day, I was at the gym that I work out of, and I overheard a conversation between a personal trainer and their client. It went a little bit like this.
Client: “So you know that I have hip problems. And so I can't really train this area. I need to avoid working out anything directly related to this hip. Um, in fact, even being on this bike is making me a little uncomfortable.” The client was sitting on a recumbent bike which is a stationary bike where your feet are out in front of you. That's why my little physical therapy ear perked up because a recumbent bike is low stress activity for somebody with a hip issue. This interaction made me think about how many people that I know personally and professionally that have left physical therapy, still believing that their joints or their body parts are just junk. They are left thinking that there's no goods coming out of that body part and that they have to avoid using it at all costs. They ended up limiting all the things that they want to do in their life. |
WE HELP ACTIVE ADULTS OVERCOME THEIR ACHES AND PAINS TO GET THEM BACK TO THEIR FAVORITE ACTIVITIES WITHOUT MEDICATION, INJECTIONS OR SURGERIES.
Dr. Molly McDonald
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