How to achieve exceptional health and fitness goals when living with chronic pain?

Happy New Year to All!

We are back for what we hope to be a massive 2020 for our Programs4Pain at Core Physiotherapy & Exercise Centres.

Today we are going to cover off on exactly how to smash your health and fitness goals for the year even when living with chronic pain – and how to avoid deviating off track in the early stages of getting going.

The reason we are doing this is because I’m sure you’d all agree that at this time of year we are fresh from a whole bunch of festive cheer, which has caused a heap of us to put on weight and likely fall out of our exercise routines.

As such, it’s possible we don’t feel we are at our best and have been vowing various New Year resolutions – usually most focused on health and fitness goals.

As we get back into routine it’s vital we have a plan to meet these goals – without running your race too early and getting injured, or simply letting the “busyness of life” take over. This is especially the case if you suffer from long-standing aches and pains.

Perhaps you are wondering how do you get started without making your aches and pains worse – pains that you may even have been noticing more since trying to get back on track?

What we now know is that for addressing chronic aches and pains in our body:

Massage feels great – but doesn’t help us long term to overcome long-standing problems.
The latest therapeutic machines which promise to cure you after “x” number of treatments at “y” amount of dollars often have little evidence of success and won’t live up to the hype they were pitched with, or the expectation from such a financial outlay.
Simply doing exercise for the sake of exercising lacks purpose and wont get you your best results.

So what is there to do then?

The answer is simple – “grading” your exercise and activity levels in a smarter manner. With chronic underlying pains this concept involves three important considerations:

Planning – Thinking about the different components of your health and fitnes goals and slowly stepping up each and every aspect. For example, If you have previously only ever done strength training in a gym but are considering more high intensity exercise then thinking about what that means for preperation, nutrition, hydration and post-workout routines is vital. Having a balanced program that addresses strength, cardiovacular and flexibility components to ensure an overall balance will best help to build your health and fitness levels – with the least likelihood of “hiccups”.
Pacing – The most common cause of flare-ups from chronic, underyling aches and pains comes from poor pacing skills – and people doing exercise routines that they aren’t ready for or haven’t previously attempted. If you’ve had a significant amount of time off your body will be de-conditioned and regardless of what you were doing before the break you need to be “cautious”and not “crazy” with your training, and resist the temptation to go too hard too soon. Just because we feel motivated or that we “must lose weight now”, doesn’t mean our body’s ready to “play ball”. Walk before you run and you’re most likely to pull up better than if you sprint from the start.
Recovery – Adequate rest between exercise session types is essential for our body’s nervous and muscular systems to recover and adapt before we re-attemp more progressive exercises and “step things up”. 48 hours between same exercise types (i.e. strength of HIIT training) is a good starting point to abide by.

So there you have it – the solution for how to achieve exceptional health and fitness goals when living with chronic pain, without veering off track when first getting going.

Want more info? For all of our Core community we want to make 2020 the year to knock those long-standing niggles on the head and hit your goals!

Take advantage of our New Year Fitness solution here https://buff.ly/2S7N6Tn.

Otherwise feel free to comment below or email us directly at info@corehealthcare.com.au

Best for 2020!!

Team Core