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Physical Therapy is insufficiently stressful to provoke an adaptive response. The stress/recovery/adaptation cycle is not taught as the foundational concept in PT, and our approach to rehab actually works while PT -- as practiced in the US by <99% of clinics -- is so bad that I consider it to be a form of medical fraud. IOW, if you get better while in PT, you just healed up. So, my suggestion is that Physical Therapy be approached from the same perspective as training, i.e. a program of progressively increasing resistance be actually applied to PT patients, as opposed to mere lip-service in this direction. Further, PT needs to revisit the concept of Specificity, and evaluate its role in the design of rehab protocols.
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I think part of the problem is that many PT's, especially outside of the sports area of practice, lack the confidence or training to instruct patients in the basic lifts that are so functionally relevant. This is part of the reason I'm trying to get a good foundation now so I can progress patients to a meaningful level of strength. Thanks for your insight.
Rip is right on in terms of the current preparation of PTs at the graduate level in the U.S. Gophole, your observation is also correct. As has been discussed here many times before, the basic problem is that PTs are not trained to apply the Stress, Recovery, Adaptation model in any meaningful way with any progressively loadable, multi-joint movements. As such, they do not know how to go about programming or even teaching these basic movements to people. The standard PT curriculum prepares students to pass their state's licensing exam and not much else. The very few PTs who know how to teach people to squat, press, and pull learned how to do it on their own through practical experience gained by being under the bar themselves.