Exercise prescription

Exercise prescription is a specific plan of fitness-related activities designed to help you move toward rehabilitation or other goals. It’s commonly used in physiotherapy to recover, manage and prevent injury or chronic conditions. While guidance and supervision is provided, exercise programs require you to take an active role in working toward your specific objectives.

Who can give you an exercise prescription?

Physiotherapists, kinesiologists and other clinicians can develop an exercise prescription for you.

The types of exercise in your prescription may include some or all of the following activities:

• Aerobic: to improve body composition and cardiorespiratory fitness
• Muscle-strengthening: to improve muscular strength and endurance
• Stretching: to improve mobility and flexible (i.e. range of motion)
• Neuromuscular: to improve balance, agility and proprioception (body awareness)

Your exercise prescription may also include sport-specific training, resistance training and core stabilization exercises.

Your therapist will not only prescribe what exercises to do in your program but also how to do them, with specific instructions on elements such as:

• Workload or speed
• Duration
• Frequency
• Intensity, measured through target heart rates (THR) and estimated rate of perceived exertion (RPE)
• Necessary precautions (i.e. movements to avoid, supportive equipment or devices to use, etc.)

Exercise in general comes with a wide range of benefits. It can improve your:

• Immune function
• Bone density
• Cholesterol levels
• Blood sugar levels
• Circulation
• Blood pressure
• Cognitive functioning
• Mental health
• Strength
• Flexibility
• Balance
• Endurance

Exercise can also decrease stress, inflammation and pain.

When you get an exercise prescription, you have all of those benefits plus an environment that optimizes both the safety and effectiveness of your workouts. You can be confident about the time and energy you’re putting into your exercise program, knowing you’ve learned fitness routines that are right for you. Your therapist will keep you safe but also make sure you don’t plateau.

If you have a shoulder injury or have developed a shoulder condition—such as rotator cuff tears, dislocations or frozen shoulder—your physiotherapist may include the pendulum or Codman exercise in your prescribed program.

This exercise copies the movement of a clock pendulum, using gravity and momentum for a passive range of motion in the joint, avoiding muscle contraction. There are different variations of this exercise that are conducted while standing, lying down and using weights. The exercise promotes healing without straining newly repaired tissue in the area.

Your physiotherapist will teach you the movements, giving specific instructions on how long and how many times to repeat each variation. They will make sure you’re doing the exercise correctly, reducing your chances of re-injury. Once you get comfortable with the movements, your therapist can provide ways to make the exercise more challenging, so you keep moving your recovery forward.