Exercise is a medicine that can prevent or treat many disabling or fatal diseases. Exercise is becoming more widely used to prevent and treat the diseases that are most prevalent in the United States: coronary artery disease, stroke, high blood pressure, diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, high cholesterol, obesity, depression, cancer, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Exercise is a powerful therapy.
The health rewards of exercise extend far beyond its benefits for specific diseases. Exercise enhances self-image, elevates mood, reduces stress, improves appearance, increases energy, and gives the feeling of well-being. It also reinforces other positive life-style changes, such as healthier eating habits and smoking cessation and stimulates creative thinking. Truly, the ability of exercise to restore function to organs, muscles, joints, and bones is not shared by any drugs or surgery.
Recognizing the incredible and far-reaching benefits of regular exercise and a healthy lifestyle, sports medicine specialists look for ways to help you become more active or keep up with your regular exercise routines.
Exercise and Healthy Lifestyle Services
- Identify how much you’re already exercising and counsel regarding some changes you could make – We use questions and intake forms to assess your current exercise habits. We recommend you meet the minimum exercise recommendations for a healthy lifestyle of at least 30 minutes of moderately vigorous exercise every day. This can be done in one sitting or spread out throughout the day. For weight loss, the amount of exercise needs to increase to 60 minutes per day.
- Help you become more physically active or return you as quickly and safely as possible to your activities – Our doctors and athletic trainers, therapists, and exercise physiologists work together to design home-based exercise programs when appropriate to help you heal and either get back to full activity or start becoming more physically active.
- Utilize various forms of exercise – Our home-based exercise programs often start with specific range-of-motion (flexibility) and strengthening (resistance) exercises to address the specific problem for which you came to the doctor. Once you’re able, we emphasize adding conditioning (aerobic) exercise to improve your overall health and continue healing. We’re big fans of many forms of exercise, including yoga and pilates, as well as higher intensity things like crossfit and endurance racing.
- Relieve your pain and suffering – we know that pain is one of the major reasons patients feel like they can’t exercise. However, we also know that there is almost always a way to exercise if you’re motivated and given the proper guidance. We’ll work hard to safely treat your pain and identify the most effective methods of treatment to get you exercising as soon as possible.
- Overcome barriers to exercise, such as time – we’ll discuss ideas and solutions to this and any other barrier you have to exercise and provide encouragement.
- Minimize your costs – most of the exercise routines we prescribed can be done at home with minimal expense (for example, you may need to purchase a very inexpensive resistance band or a yoga ball). If you already have access to a gym, pool, or other fitness facility, we’ll work with what you’ve got to design a meaningful exercise program.
Advanced Services for Exercise and Healthy Lifestyle
Some of our sports medicine physicians work in LiVe Well Centers, where your overall health is evaluated and treated through lifestyle changes, including exercise, diet, sleep, and behavior. These are amazing facilities that provide testing, education, and even facilities to exercise right there in the clinic. For further details, check out the Salt Lake LiVe Well Center website.
Some of our sports medicine physicians also provide exercise and sports performance services if your exercise goals involve training, participating, or even competing in various sporting events. The Salt Lake Clinic offers performance testing and services for running, cycling and general fitness, and the Bountiful clinic offers these services for runners.