Where Does An Exercise-Based Approach To Healthcare Fit With Modern Pain Science?

- Pain is a multifactorial experience from the brain in response to a threat. It’s supposed to help and inspire us to take action to remove ourselves from the threat.
- Our role as health and fitness professionals is obviously to decrease that threat and help people.
- What we need to do is help people understand pain to try and reduce the threat, and that’s where we can work on what people think through better pain education as well as work on what people can do to work towards what they can't do.
- One of the processes that we teach in the MAT Level 1 course is being able to identify what people can do through a strategic framework of assessments and 10 movement variables so we can progress towards what our patients and clients can't do.
- This is another form of Graded Exposure, gradually increasing the tolerance of our patients and clients to certain pain, movements or situations and is particularly applicable in chronic pain cases.
- Over time this approach builds other important elements of movement (building their capacity, movement skill, balance, control, variability, variety of movement they can perform, etc.)
- When our patients and clients have good flexibility, range of motion, strength, endurance, power, balance, and confidence in performing lots of movements then there is no threat, and if there is no threat then there is no pain.

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