What physical therapy treats, and what it can miss
Physical therapy is a well-established approach to rehabilitating and treating injuries, deformities, and disease through massage, heat application, and exercise. A licensed physical therapist carefully evaluates a patient's condition before building a program suited to correct the specific problem, then guides the patient through it step by step while tracking progress.
The gap tends to show up after treatment ends. Once a correction is complete, patients typically return to their usual activities, and without realizing it, often slip back into the very habits that caused the problem in the first place. Without a change in those habits, the same issue tends to resurface.
Where Foundation Training comes from
Even doctors aren't immune to this pattern. Dr. Eric Goodman, a chiropractic physician troubled by his own chronic back pain, developed a program called Foundation Training to treat, correct, rehabilitate, and, most importantly, prevent his problem from recurring. At its core, Foundation Training is about strengthening, not just working the muscles, but working them properly, and doing so consistently.
Combining physical therapy sessions with Foundation Training has proven successful at preventing the recurrence of the most common problems we treat, and the approach has since found its way into a range of fitness and treatment programs. This is the forward-thinking approach: it doesn't just address pain and difficulty in the moment, it educates patients on the everyday habits that keep problems from coming back.
How a session incorporating Foundation Training is structured
Drawing on what patients can typically expect from physical therapy, a session generally includes three parts. Warm-up exercises, like stretching and walking, properly prepare the body for more rigid work and prevent strain or further damage. Pain relief exercises, including massage and heat application, manage pain and difficulty before a patient moves into more demanding work. Strengthening exercises, which may use machines, resistance tools, or weights, target the core muscles in sets scaled to the intensity a therapist recommends.
Putting it into practice
We incorporate Foundation Training into physical therapy by re-assessing the exercises included in each session and gradually adding activities that correct improper habits. Consider a market worker who regularly carries heavy loads of produce and develops back pain from improper lifting posture: Foundation Training starts by correcting the proper way to sit, stand, lift, and walk.
We don't just treat and correct the problem, we work to make sure it stays treated and corrected, going back to basics and reevaluating how a patient moves through everyday activities.