Zone of Care
Where you are. Where you are going. Where you wish to go.
Who and what conditions we work with and where we’re going to get you.
In my professional life, I have had the opportunity to work with a wide variety of physical performance abilities and conditions. As a matter of fact, I worked specifically with the extreme ends of the ability spectrum.
In the beginning of my career, I worked with college, professional, Olympic, and high school athletes. About 10 years later, I found myself working with the disabled.
The spectrum of physical ability is represented below.
Spectrum of physical ability.
As you can see, the lower ability is the disabled conditions on the botom. Conditions of this nature need very special care.
On the top are those who are super-abled in their physical abilities such as competitive athletes.
What is in the middle?
Everyone else is in the middle. We can see where Physical Therapists work with the temporarily disabled due to injury.
Chronic health conditions are slight disabilities (lower performance) that statistically lead to lower quality and quantity of life.
When we have to work to restore health, we refer to this as Medical Exercise (as we’ll use medical assessments as our improvement measurement) or Restorative Training as our goal is to ‘restore’ the body to a level that is absent of disease…Chronic Pain is one of these.
Functional Ability.
Functional Ability is the physical competency to handle whatever physical demands may be from daily life.
Lift a refrigerator up the stairs while moving. Swim to save a drowning victim. Take the dogs for a walk and keep them from running into the street after a squirrel. Chase after the kids.
Functional Capacity Training (or just functional training) is borrowed from occupational therapy and workplace wellness as the measurement to improve in relation to expected everyday activity.
Overtraining and Under-Training?
Life is always training our bodies. Either in a positive or a negative way.
We get chronic pain and other conditions from undertraining our bodies by sitting in cars or offices or by just being less than active than our ancestors.
We may get chronic pain and injuries from overtraining by working over our capacity for work or in a way that is not truly conducive to the body’s design.
This is very common in athletics as we are pushing those abilities to the max in an uncontrolled way.
One other problem occurs when underactivity in the office is mixed with overactivity on the bike, on the trail, on the mat, or in the gym with nothing to develop the body properly in between. This is a recipe for chronic pain and injury….and no more fun!!!
The RootHealth Zone.
When I made RootHealth, the idea was to work on keeping recreational athletes, fitness enthusiasts, go getters, eager beavers, and adventurers ‘in the game’ and able to compete and stay active.
We also want those who are under-training to stay as ‘abled’ and performing as well as possible without chronic pain or other health issues.
The best way to get this outcome without extra-ordinary amounts of time and effort is with focused prescriptive training programs.
Since I knew this ‘Zone of Care’ was only available in an ‘athletic performance’ (usually academic or professional) environments, I wanted to offer it to you.
Our method implements Restorative and Functional Training to move someone from a point of chronic pain and other conditions to a strong functional body and ability to be active. FOR A LIFETIME!!!