At this point, I have seen many of Response Physical Therapy’s patients and most of the patients I saw today, with the exception of an evaluation patient, were patients I have seen before. Today we had quite a few patients that needed to work in the performance room in the facility. Jeffrey took one patient, who had broken their tibia and fibula close to the ankle and dislocated their ankle, to the performance room so we would have more room for some of the exercises Jeffrey had planned. In the performance room, Jeffrey had the patient running, jump roping, skipping, and doing calf raises. Activities like jump roping and skipping were to help loosen the ankle and improve some flexibility while still taking on some weight. Calf raises were strengthening exercises which are necessary ass typically, after an injury, there tends to be some muscle atrophy and you want to regain all that muscle and more than that you want to build more muscle so that it can support the location of previous injury. Later in the day, Jeffrey took another patient into the performance room. The goal with this patient was to improve the strength of their hip flexors to reduce pain in the hips. Many of this patient’s exercises were strength and balance related. In the performance room there are stretchy cables attached to the floor and you can attach the other end to your waist. Jeffrey had the patient attach one end to his waist then had him walk forward until there was tension in the cable. He did many exercises with the cable were the patient would shuffle side to side or move up and back and the tension helped to work his hips. The final patient that day, a patient of Dan’s, also used the performance room. This patient was far out from an ACL surgery and was running. There were lots of hamstring, quad, and hip flexor targeting exercises for this patient to do: side-steps with a theraband, bridges while moving the feet in and out from under you, pistol squats, etc. The patient also used the sled in the performance room to push 90 lbs back and forth multiple times to continue building up strength.
