Prehabilitation

Prehabilitation is essentially preventative training to stop a problem before it occurs. Strength and conditioning coaches and physiotherapists have been employing prehabilitation strategies to help prevent injuries for years. With the increased popularity of HIIT (high intensity interval training) styled workouts and training methods, prehabilitation is now something every 'gym-junkie' needs to know about and understand.

A successful prehabilitation program helps an individual to:

- Achieve normal static and dynamic posture
- Corrects muscle length imbalance, joint alignment and improves flexibility
- Normalise core stability (upper vs lower, right vs left)
- Boost movement pattern efficiency; and
- Enhance proprioception, which is the ability for your mind to sense the position of different joints in relation to the rest of the body

There are three essential phases required when writing a good prehabilitation plan, which are;

1) Analysis - analysis of the individual's posture, joint alignment, flexibility, muscle control, biomechanics of movement, core stability and movement patterns.
2) Risk Assessment - Understanding of the risks involved with the physical activities the individual participates in.
3) Lifestyle - Consideration of other specifics such as lifestyle factors is necessary when developing a prehabilitation program, for example, is the individual a mother of an infant, who requires lifting and needs to be carried?

Following and applying the above 3 steps, enables you to better understand your body and begin to develop a personalised prehabilitation program, developed to prevent future injuries. I will be posting information and basic prehabilitation exercises and movements on FIT.ed, to assist you to build your knowledge, develop your own prehabilitation program, and potentially avoid injury.

* If you are currently suffering from injury or chronic pain FIT.ed recommend that you seek medical advice from a medical professional.