Physical therapy and personal training are converging around a common goal: they want you to move better. The change is driven by the shared insight that full body movement is as important as individual muscles and joints. The result is a major change in how your health and fitness should look.
Movement Is Large And Complex
Everyday human movement like walking, bending, carrying, standing, etc. are large and complex, involving many muscles and groups of muscles. Until relatively recently, physical therapists and personal trainers often focused on improving pieces of those systems, i.e. individual muscles and joints. Now they want to put more emphasis on the big movements themselves.
From Small To Big Movements
“Physical therapy began as an effort to help two groups of people. Veterans injured in World War II and people who had suffered from polio. We were looking for muscle weaknesses and joint range of motion deficits and developing protocols for treating those specific issues,” says Dr. Michael Johnson, Assistant Professor of Rehabilitation and Regenerative Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center. But, he continues, “we are now at a point where we realize that when it comes to musculoskeletal problems, we need to appreciate and understand how people move on a full body scale. We know, for example, that there are knee problems that are influenced by the hip or ankle, or that the shoulder can be affected by the thoracic spine.” As a result, physical therapy is evolving to include more emphasis on the role of these larger systems.
Personal training has experienced a similar shift in approach. Exercise, particularly weight training, was popularized largely by the body-building scene, which is a joint by joint, muscle by muscle approach to exercise. Professionals in fitness have come to realize that this type of training doesn’t help people learn to move in an integrated, full body way. As Joseph Lipsky, a personal trainer in New York City and student of Physical Therapy at Columbia University explains: “For the general population, there is a trend in the direction of full body movement. That makes a lot of sense because that is how life is. We don’t do isolated movement patterns in the real world. We squat, we bend, we reach overhead, we play sports. In light of that, working on full body movement really makes a more fit, resilient person.”
Putting It Into Practice
Both physical therapists and personal trainers are moving to implement this new way of thinking more broadly into their practices. “We need patients to understand that there is a big picture, so we need to put that information out there.” Dr. Johnson says. Joseph Lipsky sees the same happing in the personal fitness world. “When you work out, the goal shouldn’t be to get good at the gym. It should be to be good outside the gym. Don’t squat just to squat. Do it to learn that movement so that you can be a better mover in your regular day.”