Why I Love That My Clinic Is Right Next to the Beach
People's Physiotherapy, if you've been here, is literally less than a hundred metres from the sand. And the longer I've worked here, the more I've realised it's actually doing something for how well treatment lasts. It comes down to one thing most people never think about:
What you do straight after your appointment matters almost as much as the appointment itself
Do you think about what you do after a physio appointment?
Here's what I mean. Say you're on the table and I've just released a bunch of tight, overworked muscles. Your body's feeling loose, calm, good. Then you get up, get in the car, drive back to the office, sit down at your desk and start smashing through emails. Within twenty minutes, your body's back doing exactly what it was doing before you walked in. Same position, same stress, same holding patterns. Just like the muscle memory that helps you ride a bike after years away from one, the muscle memory of sitting down starts to return. And it dilutes the whole session.
It's the same story if we spend the session strengthening a muscle, and then you go sit in traffic for forty minutes. Your body never gets the chance to actually learn the new pattern.
Bodies are smart. They learn, they adapt to whatever you ask of them, again and again. But that learning needs to integrate into movement. No movement after the change, no integration.
Where the beach comes in
You could think about what you do after treatment as a way of getting the maximum effect out of your physio session. This is where the beach comes in.
What I've been noticing is that a lot of my patients, because the beach is just over the road, end up going for a walk on it straight after their treatment. One patient even walks from Avoca across the sand to get here. It's almost quicker than driving.
Here's what happens in your body when that happens. Say your hips and back are tight, and we've spent the session loosening them up. When they're tight, it's hard to properly activate your quads, your glutes, your hamstrings, your core. But once they're loose and moving well, that beach walk does something. Your hips start rotating, your arms are swinging, you get this beautiful rotation through your spine, your knees bend, your glutes fire. All of that is training a completely different movement pattern to the one that brought you to me in the first place.
So it's not just cementing the treatment in. It's actually working on some of the reasons the problem showed up to begin with. Which means the effect lasts a lot longer than it otherwise would.
You don't need a beach
So next time you finish a session, whether it's with me or anyone else, have a think about what you do straight after. You might not have a beach across the road, but honestly, even just walking around the block would do wonders.
If you're on the Central Coast and want to feel what a beachside session (and the walk after) actually does for your body, book in at People's Physiotherapy in North Avoca — we're the ones less than a hundred metres from the sand.