When should neuromuscular reeducation be started after an injury or illness occurs?

Question

Dr. Mitchell Tanner, PT, DPT, CSCS · Answer

When should neuromuscular re-education be started after an injury or illness occurs? So, really you want to get started as soon as possible, barring that there are no limitations with movement or active range of motion. You really want to start sooner rather than later to minimize the effects of muscle atrophy and strength loss. You also want to maximize that recovery timeline, getting back strong as fast as you can.

Dr. Sandra Harrell, PT, DPT, MS · Answer

It's probably best to start neuromuscular re-education pretty quickly after an injury or illness, simply because you're essentially teaching your nervous system how to adapt to the changes, as well as you're just training your musculoskeletal system or neuromuscular system how to perform certain techniques, and then you build on that by increasing resistance, intensity, frequency.

Kate Edwards, PT, DPT, OCS · Answer

Hey everyone, Kate Edwards here. The question is when should neuromuscular re-education be started after an injury or illness occurs? And it depends on the injury or the illness, but very soon after. So neuromuscular re-education can often be used as the basis of other exercises. It can also be in every single exercise that we do, but there are certain exercises that we can do early on that are a lot more about that kind of brain, muscular brain-body connection that aren't focused on maybe the strength and power as much as some of the exercises later. So when should we start it? As soon as you are cleared to start it.

Nick Hadinger · Answer

We would want to start doing neuromuscular re-education exercises pretty much immediately after an injury or an illness and particularly after a post-operative injury. We definitely want to start doing things like quad activation, glute activation, all that stuff kind of falls under that neuromuscular re-ed category. But the biggest reason to start early is to start to avoid some compensation patterns because that's where we start to see some secondary injuries come up. We see it a lot of times with swimmers. They have a shoulder injury that kind of morphs itself into a neck injury, and now they've got some kind of constant migraines. Maybe they get some pain along the scapular border, and some of that is because they start moving differently. And so if we can catch that and really hone in on retraining the movement and keeping it quality, then we can kind of avoid some of those secondary issues.

Cheryl Alden, PT · Answer

When should neuromuscular re-education be started after an injury or an illness occurs? Immediately or as soon as possible because we want to make sure that the body doesn't start developing compensatory patterns which could lead to other problems down the line. So after injury or an issue sometimes the muscles stop working as well as they could and other muscles start taking over a little bit leading to some compensatory movement patterns. So as soon or as soon as possible after an injury you want to try to start that neuromuscular re-education just to make sure that the body doesn't start developing bad habits which could lead to injury down the line as well.

Sue Falsone · Answer

When should neuromuscular re-education be started after an injury or illness occurs? Well, I think the answer to that is as soon as possible, but the bigger answer, or the biggest question I should say, is the exact definition of neuromuscular re-education as it relates to the specific injury you're talking about. So neuromuscular re-ed can mean a lot of different things, whether it's muscle activation, kind of psychomotor control, balance, those sorts of things, activation of other exercises. All of those things could be considered neuromuscular re-education. And so depending on the injury, you may be able to start that within 24 hours or some type of neuromuscular re-ed education exercises. With larger injuries, you may have bigger things that you need to deal with, whether it is stability, wound care, safety and stabilization, those sorts of things, may be more of a priority depending on the type of injury you're dealing with. So my very general answer to that would be as soon as possible, but keeping in mind larger injuries may have bigger priorities, and you might have to wait a little while on the neuromuscular re-education piece.

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"When should neuromuscular reeducation be started after an injury or illness occurs?"