Whether you are a professional athlete or a fitness enthusiast, your physical therapist will advise you to halt your workout program for a specific period when you get injured or after surgery. This is the standard practice in physical therapy because engaging in exercises when injured will only exacerbate the injury.
However, Pilates isn’t part of the prohibited exercises in this case. Therefore, you can combine Pilates with cold therapy to improve healing. This article explains the effectiveness of combining cold therapy with Pilates.
What’s Pilates?
Pilates is a mind-body exercise invented in the early 20th century by a German physical therapist Joseph Pilates. Since then, this exercise has become popular worldwide and has become part of the physical culture of exercising because of its ability to alleviate illnesses. Evidence shows that Pilates helps alleviate common physical disorders like lower back pain.
Effectiveness of Combining Pilates with Cold Therapy
Although there has been a huge debate around the effectiveness of Pilates in alleviating illnesses, everyone agrees that this exercise is quite helpful in physical therapy. It’s doing a great job of body sculpting, even though it wasn’t the primary objective of developing the exercise. According to Pilates, he discovered the exercise while attempting to develop a system of movements (formerly referred to as Contrology) to improve his balance.
The exercise is based on exercising the entire body for better form and strength. It works all muscles, including the tiny and complex muscles. Many physical therapists advise their clients to combine cold therapy with Pilates for faster and more effective results.
Some patients who have used this combination as their healing strategy have reported significant improvement within a short time, even eliminating the need for surgery. So, instead of just using cold therapy to take care of your injury, you can incorporate simple movement patterns and compensations in Pilates. This body-mind exercise becomes more effective if the injury affects part of your structure.
But you need to see a doctor for a thorough analysis of the injury to determine if the structural problem requires medical treatment apart from physical therapy. Pilates offers a better healing effect because it enables you to find proper alignment without the pull or impact of gravity.