Physical Therapy: 5 Reasons Dancers Should Ditch It
Are you a dancer who is stuck in the never-ending cycle of chronic pain, injury, and physical therapy? Learn the 5 reasons so many dancers are ditching physical therapy for postural alignment therapy.
Pain And Injury Do Not Have To Be Chronic For Dancers: Discover Postural Alignment Therapy
When it comes to chronic issues, is physical therapy the best treatment for dancers?
Or is it time to look elsewhere for effective recovery, performance, and longevity treatments?
Physical therapy is not the best way to train, recover, strengthen, stretch, or ensure longevity in your dancing career.
There is a better method. Meet Postural alignment therapy.
As a professional dancer, I was in and out of physical therapy for the past 20 years. I can personally attest to the cyclical nature of chronic pain, injury, and physical therapy.
Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be this way!
Postural alignment therapy saved my body and my dance career. Now I’ve made it my mission to share my secrets with every dancer I can find, so that my own story of recovery and longevity can be your story.
5, 6, 7, 8!
What Is Postural Alignment Therapy?
Postural alignment therapy is a method that uses scientifically backed, targeted exercises and stretches to address each individual’s unique postural misalignments.
Your body is analyzed from head to toe in order to diagnose areas of misalignment. These misalignments are then corrected with highly specialized stretching and strengthening routines.
No two routines are the same. Every series of exercises is custom built for your unique body.
TAKE BACK CONTROL OF YOUR RECOVERY
Ever feel like you your body is breaking down and you can't keep up?
Our Recover For Dancers resource gives you 3 fast and effective exercises to help you recovery quickly. Less time recovering means more time dancing!
How Postural Alignment Therapy Helped Me As A Professional Dancer
Everything you desire and need to be the best dancer you can be — strength, stamina, flexibility, and resilience—can be found in postural alignment therapy.
So, having your entire musculoskeletal system (bones, muscles, and nerves) working in harmony and without restriction is the secret to your success and longevity as a dancer.
After 20 years of on and off physical therapy, I desperately needed something else. I was overwhelmed with injuries, and considering back surgery. I needed to find a non-invasive, non-surgical alternative to physical therapy.
Amazingly, since discovering postural alignment therapy, I have:
- Healed from decades-old chronic injuries
- Gained more strength than I have ever had
- Increased my stamina
- Found my center of balance
- Experienced lasting flexibility I have NEVER had (even in my teens and 20’s!
Most importantly, I learned the reality that being able to dance forever at the highest level has everything to do with posture.
TAKE BACK CONTROL OF YOUR RECOVERY
Ever feel like you your body is breaking down and you can't keep up?
Our Recover For Dancers resource gives you 3 fast and effective exercises to help you recovery quickly. Less time recovering means more time dancing!
The 5 Reasons Dancers Should Ditch Physical Therapy
So now, let’s take a look at the five main reasons to ditch PT when it comes to your chronic injury and pain recovery, performance improvements, and longevity.
1. Physical Therapy Treats Your Symptoms
Firstly, let’s talk about the focus of PT treatment. The focus of physical therapy treatment is on your symptoms and where you feel pain. The treatment is usually acute and site specific.
For instance, if you go to PT with a swollen knee, your PT will spend their time and effort working directly on your knee.
To be clear, I believe that PT is absolutely necessary and good post surgery or for rehabbing a serious injury. However, I do not believe it is the answer to chronic pain, chronic injuries, or to the physical limitations that you want to overcome as a dancer
As long as the focus in physical therapy is on where you are feeling pain and not why you are feeling pain, you will never break the cycle and fully recover from chronic issues.
Focusing On Symptoms Is A Distraction From The Underlying Problem(s)
This all comes down to problem solving by looking at the big picture.
If you’re always looking through a magnifying glass at your symptoms, you’ll miss the story the whole body is telling you. You can’t truly solve a problem if you don’t take a step back and know what caused the problem in the first place.
For example, when I went to PT with an ankle sprain, that was what they worked on. They ignored the shoulder pain and lack of mobility, which actually had everything to do with my ankle injury!
Postural alignment therapy showed me the full story. My shoulders were actually the cause of my ankle issues!
To summarize, severe pain and symptoms distract you from looking at your body as a whole, causing you to lose sight of the big picture. Every part of your body is playing a part.
Postural Alignment Therapy Treats The Source
Unlike physical therapy, postural alignment therapy approaches the body as a whole.
Postural alignment therapy takes a step back and looks at the interconnectedness of each part of the body, instead of zeroing in on where you have pain, swelling or symptoms.
The goal is to find and treat the source of what is causing your pain or symptom. The location of the symptom or pain itself is not the most important part of the equation.
If you find the ’cause’, there you will find and fix the ‘effect’.
The Human Body Is Interconnected
Imagine your body as a series of chain links.
Each link is connected. So, wiggling the top link moves every link below it. None of the links can be moved in isolation. Likewise, no part of the body moves in isolation.
Therefore, if the entire body is interconnected, why not consider the whole when looking to solve a chronic problem?
The only way to cure your pain, limitations, weaknesses, and injuries is to analyze and treat the entire body.
No Injury Is Isolated
No injury happens in isolation. My back injury was not a random accident. In fact, it was an accident waiting to happen.
My postural alignment analysis showed me the pieces of the puzzle needed to understand what led to my back injury. Misaligned shoulders, coupled with a dysfunctional right ankle and twisted hips, were the catalysts for my injury.
For six years, I fought with that back injury everyday. But postural alignment therapy healed my pain. That back injury, and the misalignments that caused it, are gone for good!
The body needs to be treated WHOLEistically in order to fully heal and recover.
2. Physical Therapy Requires A Medical Professional
Physical therapy requires a medical professional holding a doctorate.
Contrarily, postural alignment therapy believes that no one knows your body better than you do—not even the doctors. With that in mind, you are empowered to take control of your own healing and conditioning.
You don’t need to be reliant on anyone else. The less you need the expertise of others, the more you can control your own destiny.
A Broadway dancer's quick comeback
One time, one of my sweet clients in Wicked sent me a 911 text.
She sat down, pulled her knee into her chest to tie her shoe, and suddenly couldn’t move. Her back had completely spasmed.
Understandably, she was scared and confused that something so simple could take her out in a moment. After all, it’s safe to say that tying a shoe ranks as an easier task than performing 8 shows weekly in heels on a raked stage!
Have you ever had something like this happen to you?
I have. It’s awful and terrifying.
And, the worst part of experiencing sudden injury isn’t the pain. It’s the fear of not knowing why the injury happened in the first place. That, as well as not knowing how long it will take to fully recover, or whether you’ll even be able to fully recover.
Understanding The Source Of Your Pain Removes Fear
For my client, the fear of the unknown was eliminated when she understood why her back went out.
As so often happens, the act that caused the pain was not the culprit. My client tying her shoe was not the problem.
Her back spasm happened because of her misaligned pelvis and her body’s inability to function correctly.
She drew the connection of her misalignments to her pain. Understanding what caused her back spasm gave her peace. She knew how she was going to fix it, and she knew what she needed to do to make sure it didn’t happen again.
My client was back on Broadway within a few days of doing the HPA routine exercises and stretches I recommended to her.
TAKE BACK CONTROL OF YOUR RECOVERY
Ever feel like you your body is breaking down and you can't keep up?
Our Recover For Dancers resource gives you 3 fast and effective exercises to help you recovery quickly. Less time recovering means more time dancing!
Postural Alignment Therapy Is Self Treatment
I’m sharing her story here in order to demonstrate how you can self-treat yourself without needing to run to the doctor or physical therapist (unless it’s a serious injury).
It doesn’t take a medical professional to identify the postural deviations that are causing your pain, injuries, weaknesses, and limitations. And, rarely does it take a medical professional to fix them.
When you understand how your body was created to function and move, all of a sudden, you can take your healing into your own hands—no medical degree required.
Among the many goals at Pain Free With Heidi, one of the most important is to empower dancers. We want you to become self-sufficient in your recovery, strengthening, flexibility, and longevity. We do NOT want you to remain reliant on advanced therapies, machines, and modalities.
Your ability to take control of your recovery, performance, and longevity lie in your hands—not in the hands of your doctors and physical therapists.
Most of the treatments I found effective (while still in PT) were the ones that either required a medical professional or expensive machines.
But do we really need all that fancy and expensive equipment?
Or is it possible to get lasting results from the comfort of your home?
Typical treatments, such as dry needling, massage, cupping, eSTIM machines, and pilates reformers either require another person or expensive equipment.
Not only that, if you did get a pilates reformer in your NYC apartment, you would have to sell your bed and sleep on that!
Postural Alignment Therapy Requires Zero Equipment
Postural alignment therapy is “on demand”. You have the control to use it whenever you want, wherever you need. All you need is your own bodyweight, and some basic items found around your house (like a pillow, belt, ottoman, or chair).
Is it possible that scientific advancement and fancy equipment are not what dancers need to find success in their own bodies? Yes, it is!
To reiterate: recovery, strength, flexibility, and longevity lie in going back to these basics:
- How was the human body originally created and designed to move and function?
- What happens when the body deviates from the way it was designed to operate?
- If it does deviate, how do you return the body back to its original design?
So often, going back to the basics is all we really need. The human body already has everything it needs to self-heal, strengthen, and remain resilient.
You don’t need outside help to get lasting and effective results. When you align the body through postural alignment therapy, it will thrive.
4. Physical Therapy Treatment Starts After Injury Has Already Occurred
Physical therapy is what I call a reactive therapy.
By this, I mean that treatment begins once the damage is done and you are already injured. Seeking out PT happens as a reaction to your pain or injury—not as a prevention. Rarely do you ever (or does insurance allow you to) do physical therapy for preventative treatment or care.
But, the easiest fires to put out are the ones that never start!
Don’t wait to get hurt to start treatment on your precious instrument!
If you align your body now, you can stumble, fall, get dropped from a lift, and confidently ask your body to do all kinds of crazy things, knowing it can take it.
While the physical body does have some natural limitations, an aligned body can take exponentially more of a beating than a misaligned one. And, it will recover exponentially faster.
TAKE BACK CONTROL OF YOUR RECOVERY
Ever feel like you your body is breaking down and you can't keep up?
Our Recover For Dancers resource gives you 3 fast and effective exercises to help you recovery quickly. Less time recovering means more time dancing!
Postural Alignment Therapy Helps To Avoid Injury
Dancing less or marking through class or shows is NOT the way to avoid getting injured.
However, preventing injury does require that you make sure you are dancing on a solid foundation. Meaning, with a body that has all 8 main joints (shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles) aligned.
Postural alignment therapy positions your body and joints in a way that allows and facilitates the maximum amount of self-healing and durability.
The more properly aligned your body is, the more resilient it will be.
When misaligned, the body is forced to improvise, and will compensate in ways that make you vulnerable to injury.
Here, check out my little wooden friend below. Each joint is a blue dot and the purple lines show how all of the joints make 90˚ right angles when they are stacked correctly!
This alignment (pictured above) is the key to recovery and the prevention of new pain and injury. Postural alignment therapy gives you the best chance at fully avoiding injury and extending your dance career.
Nothing happens to one part of the body without the rest being affected. So, when only part of the body is treated, the relief will only ever be temporary.
I encourage you to dig deeper than the surface pain, symptom, or injury at hand. By doing this, you will graduate from relief to recovery
Why A US Coast Guard Ditched His Free PT For Postural Alignment Therapy
I recently began working with a brave man in his late 30’s who serves in the US Coast Guard. He was suffering from debilitating back pain, despite staying active and in shape.
His back pain was drastically affecting every part of his life. He was desperate for change.
After mediocre results from PT, he gave me a call.
He said to me, “I feel better during physical therapy, and only for about an hour. After that, I’m right back to where I started. Honestly, sometimes PT doesn’t do anything or even makes me feel worse.”
In a short amount of time, he couldn’t believe the results he was getting from the HPA Program.
TAKE BACK CONTROL OF YOUR RECOVERY
Ever feel like you your body is breaking down and you can't keep up?
Our Recover For Dancers resource gives you 3 fast and effective exercises to help you recovery quickly. Less time recovering means more time dancing!
His relief was always temporary because his physical therapy wasn’t considering the rest of his body. It wasn’t addressing his whole musculoskeletal system (bones, muscles, and nerves). Simply, his physical therapy completely missed the postural misalignments that were causing his extreme back pain.
After being known at work as “the guy with the terrible back pain,” his fellow soldiers couldn’t believe their eyes or ears after Craig’s transformation.
Since then, I have had other US Coast Guard soldiers reaching out to begin the HPA program.
Postural Alignment Therapy Gives Lasting Results
In all honesty, I saw more change and improvements in my first 6 months of postural alignment therapy than I did in 20 years of physical therapy.
After 20 years of PT for the SAME ankle issues, I felt beyond helpless and frustrated. I had had enough of temporary relief and marginal recovery. I wanted my issues solved, not just kept at bay.
The HPA Method that uses the 50 year old science of postural alignment therapy is about solving problems, not just granting relief.
Of course relief is a great bi-product of successful treatment, but actually solving the underlying problem is the real answer to long-term and lasting healing.
Don’t believe the lie that pain and injury are inevitable for us dancers—they are not!
In Conclusion: Dancers Should Ditch Physical Therapy For Postural Alignment Therapy
Five Main Differences Between Physical Therapy And Postural Alignment Therapy
Physical Therapy
- Treatment at the site of the pain or symptom.
- Expert medical professionals needed.
- Expensive and professional-use-only equipment and machines.
- Treatment after an injury has already occurred.
- Temporary relief.
Postural Alignment Therapy
- Treatment at the source of what is causing the pain or symptom.
- Self-treatment that can be done anywhere.
- Zero equipment besides things you already have in your house (ie: pillow, chair, and yoga strap or belt).
- Consistent preventative therapy.
- Lasting results.
Unfortunately, your physical therapy is doomed to remain a cyclical, temporary fix to your chronic pain and injuries due to the site-specific nature of treatment.
Thankfully, however, postural alignment therapy considers and treats your whole body—all the time!
It leaves no stone unturned by targeting your entire musculoskeletal system (bones, muscles, and nerves).
As a result, it grants you a straight path to the ability to fully recover, strengthen, stretch, and ensure a long and healthy dance career.
You were born to move and designed to dance—for forever.
5, 6, 7, 8!
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