“Those who don’t make time for exercise, will have to make time for illness.”

Strength Based Rehab

“The act of restoring someone to former privileges through strength based exercise.”

Health is more than meets the eye.

There is a growing body of evidence and experts that now believe the strongest determinant of one’s health and longevity is how healthy muscles are. There are other influencing factors, but nothing as potent as “Muscle Health”. Due to the fact that we all lose muscle mass as we age (especially after our 20’s), it’s our job as humans to learn how to preserve or increase it.

Muscles are an organ of longevity, we want to avoid being under muscled especially as we approach our 40’s & 50’s. The loss of muscle tissue has been linked to many of the modern illness or issues we see nowadays. Whether it’s injury resistance, movement/joint/bone health, weight gain, hormone regulation, optimal healing, blood pressure issues, cognition, and/or blood sugar control, all have been linked to the loss of muscle mass. Our job is to keep all of our muscles strong, alive, metabolically fit, and neurologically functioning.

From our perspective, we have seen hundreds, if not thousands, of people get better, and feel better, by lifting weights once a week. Whether it is with us; in a clinically controlled supervised setting, or on your own, everyone simply feels better. They experience health (mental or physical) improvements, function enhancements, or they recover faster from pain and/or injury.

Proper strength based exercise works. It can make a huge difference. The best part is, if you know what you’re doing it doesn’t require much of a time commitment and it can be very safe. There are a lot of nuances with exercise prescription and many subtle details can be overlooked. We often over simplify just to get you started but this can sometimes set you up for failure. Having a physiotherapist in your corner can help you navigate the pit falls of the “how to” with strength training. Physiotherapy can really accelerate the learning curve and keep exercise safe…… as it should be.

At Catalyst we believe that one of the biggest investments in your health is to partake in strength based exercise.

However, it is not the conventional or typical way people envision strength training and physiotherapy, for example, a sheet of exercises and a band, or in class where you chase heart rate, perform calisthenics and/or lift barbells. There is nothing wrong with those exercises, and at times they can be a great place to start, but you deserve the best. To us, the best approach is supervised (at least initially), one on one, individually prescribed using state of the art exercises and machines targeting a specific goal (s).

Our Five Step Approach

1. Screen -

Your Health & Movement Capacity:

Physiotherapists can assess orthopedic issues that you may have, as well as get a sense of how prepared or fragile your body is for exercise. We can identify structural or functional impairments and tailor the exercise to match your orthopedic needs.

Everyone has a unique structure (muscle - joint - neuro - skeleton) that is shaped differently. Depending on how you have lived your life and the types of injures you have sustained can drastically affect how things function. We can look over your active and passive range of motion, your muscle(s) actions and functions. Each exercise should match your body structure correctly. This prevents you from sustaining an injury (gradually or immediately) while simultaneously allowing you to achieve the benefits of exercise.

We can also track and measure any movement performance or health goal you have with standardized tests.

2. Teach -

Learn the Principles of High Intensity Strength Exercise (HISE)

Similar to medications, we treat strength-based exercise with a dose-response relationship. From a big picture perspective, we walk you through how to use exercise to improve your health, fitness and longevity. We can teach you how to workout at home or with us in our clinically controlled gym.

We strive to teach you a sustainable lifelong behaviour that you can practice anywhere. We lean heavily on the principles and framework of HISE. These principles can help you avoid the most common barriers to starting exercise and maintaining it.

The most common barriers are:

i. Not enough time to exercise.

ii. Not wanting to get injured.

iii. Not training effectively enough to reach goals.

3. Stress Strategically -

We plan, set-up, chart, and supervise your entire exercise session.

Exercise is a stress on your body and needs to be applied correctly to be a good stress. We can design the appropriate level to correctly stimulate your body to achieve your health goals.

From afar, all exercise looks basic and may look the same, yet subtle changes in how you perform it can drastically alter the outcomes. Not everyone wants bigger or stronger muscles (although a great goal), some need additional energy or enhancements in their hormonal health, or even to gain flexibility or stability. We prepare, set up and help you apply the stress of exercise to your body. We supervise and guide you through the entire process. Generally, your workout will bias a particular stress or stimulus. Never in isolation but we can lean more towards either a:

i. Strength & Hypertrophy (increase in strength & muscle size) workout.

ii. Metabolic (enhance internal muscle energy utilization) workout.

iii. Neurologic (improving motor control) workout.

4. Recover -

Recoverability is very individual.

Everyone repairs and recovers back to baseline at different rates. It is a matter of time (a close second to nutrition and sleep) and just letting your body rest (relatively).

The journey or process of strength - based exercise is a personal endeavour. Many factors can influence how well you will recover. Not every day or week will be perfect or the same. Monitoring your stress, sleep, nutrition, exercise and sport interactions are key. Training with proper intensity along with adjusting and monitoring the stimulus to fatigue ratio is crucial. Just as low intensity can be unproductive, so can excessive intensity, either in the form of volume (too many exercises, repetitions, done too often) or excessive fatigue (feeling run into the ground). This is commonly referred to as over training and over reaching. Your recoverability is complex and a mixture of watching:

i. Local Fatigue Factors: The internal recovery processes. These include muscle, tendon, ligament, cartilage, and bone repair that all have their own timeframes.

ii. Extrinsic Fatigue Factors: General central nervous system, hormonal, cardiovascular fatigue processes.

iii.Performance: Are you able to do what you need to? Play your sport? Succeed in your occupation or duties? Function day to day the way you want to.