Kaizen Physiotherapy Health Centre- Building Capacity
Kaizen Physiotherapy Health Centre is now open in Glanmire adjacent to the new Garda station. The centre provides a complete healthcare approach for clients under the one roof, with a primary goal based around building capacity. So, what does this mean?
Demands versus Capacity
Every time you do an activity, whether it is getting up from a chair or running a marathon, you are placing a demand on your body. If your body does not have enough capacity to manage and carry out this demand you are more likely to get injured. For example, if you don’t have enough strength and endurance built up in your leg muscles, trying to run long distances may result in injuries or soreness in your legs. Or if your thigh muscles are a little tired, weak or inactive, getting up from sitting throughout the day might place too much demand on your knees and may result in pain or injury to your knee joint. I like to think of the Demand versus Capacity issue like a balancing scale.
When you have a good balance between the demands you are placing on the tissues and the tissues capacity to cope with these demands then you are more likely to have nice healthy tissues and less likely to get injured.
However, when the demands on the tissues exceeds the capacity of the tissues, that is more likely to result in soreness or even damaged tissues. What is the solution? One option could be to temporarily lower the demands placed on the body (maybe not possible all the time) and then build capacity up in the body tissues. If you build capacity, you can then gradually increase the demands placed on the body and get back to doing what you want to do.
Now, there are many factors that contribute to capacity that can’t be changed (e.g., age, past medical history, genetics), but changeable factors include strength, endurance, power, flexibility, diet, and life stressors. Targeting these factors can make a huge difference to the capacity of the tissues and go a long way to redressing any imbalances in demands versus capacity in our activities of daily living.
