In our world, there’s a lot of catch phrases that we use as an industry to get the attention of consumers. A few of these phrases are “prehab” or “rehab” that people are prescribed typically by a movement professional such as a Physical Therapist, Chiropractor, or Personal Trainer. If you’re unfamiliar with the term prehab, it’s just a fun spin off of the term rehab which is an exercise that is done to aid in helping whatever is considered to be the root cause of an injury.

There are a couple of things to discuss when it comes to this. The first is to point out that as much as we would like to be able to tell someone the reason for their injury the truth is that injuries are typically multi-factorial and come from damage over time, before it was even clear to someone that damage was occurring (outside of an acute injury like whiplash from a car accident, or a torn ACL from a errant slide tackle etc…). These factors include our genetic pre-dispositions, nutrition, daily requirements (specifically those that require repetition), previous injury, current illnesses and much more!

With that said, our goal with “rehab” is to give someone exercises that match their necessary load requirements to be able to strengthen where their specific weaknesses lie. There are two main factors research has shown to affect injury predictability and that is strength, and previous injury. Previous injury making it more likely for an injury to occur, and strength making an injury less likely. Since rehab is specific to each person, we then get into the lingo….