Strength and conditioning

It is improving a person’s physical fitness, strength, power and technique through resistance training, cardiovascular activity and sport-specific drills.

You may have been given some specific exercises and advice by your physiotherapist to develop your strength and conditioning. This can help you to rehabilitate after an injury, manage a long term condition such as ongoing back pain, or help you recover after an operation. Please follow the advice and guidance given by your physiotherapist.

• Improve bone strength.
• Improve muscle size.
• Improve muscle strength and power.
• Improve mental wellbeing.
• Improve sleep.
• Injury prevention.
• Better recovery after injury.
• Manage/improve pain.
• Enhance performance.
• Improve cardiovascular health.
• Improve nerve function.

Specificity: the type of exercise has to be specific to the goal of training e.g. lifting heavier weights to get stronger.

Individuality: the exercises need to take into account your levels of pain and include your goals, as well as involve things you enjoy.

Progression: to reach your goals and help you be able to do the things you want to do, your exercises should be changed and/or developed throughout your rehab.

Overload: as you continue to exercise, you will get fitter and stronger. As this happens, it is important that the exercises are made harder for you, to ensure that you continue to progress.

Reversibility: if you stop doing your exercises, you will start to lose the strength and fitness that you have gained.

Recovery: it is important to have rest days to allow your body and mind to recover between sessions.

The principles of individual exercises can be remembered by the acronym FITT.

Frequency: how often the exercise should be done.

Intensity: how challenging the exercise should be e.g. lifting more weight, quicker speed.

Time: how long the exercise should be performed for.

Type: what kind of exercise needs to be done on a given day e.g. strength, cardiovascular, balance.

When you are exercising to improve strength, the research tells us that you get the most benefit when you are putting in a lot of effort. If it’s too easy, you won’t get stronger.

So, you could try doing:

3 sets of 8 to 12 repetitions OR 3 sets of 3 to 5 repetitions

Both will work if you are putting in a lot of effort.

Remember that by the time you get to the last repetition of the exercise, you should be feeling as though you need to stop. If not, consider doing more repetitions OR increasing the weight.

It can take 6 to 8 weeks to notice an improvement in muscle strength. It can take 12 to 26 weeks to notice an increase in muscle size with strength exercises.