Physical Therapy “Ask Me Anything” from the Experts at SPARK Physiotherapy

Written by Alex Edelson

I’ve always been active. Movement is how I release anxiety and tension in my body and it’s a part of my identity. In 2017 I started powerlifting five times a week. One day I felt stiffness and pain in my left lower back. I couldn’t walk or sit without severe discomfort. There wasn’t a centralized location, source, or cause, so I began seeking hip and spine specialists. Over the next three years, I searched for answers with doctors and physical therapists as these “muscle spasms” interfered with my life.

Everyone I saw had a different opinion and no solution. They treated me depending on their speciality and what they had seen in the past. The phrase, “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” is significant when it comes to finding the right treatment for you. The hip and spine specialists used injections, and the physical therapists prescribed strengthening and stretching. I  hoped for some improvement but nothing seemed to work. 

There’s a happy ending to this story though. 

When I felt like giving up, I met the folks at Spark Physiotherapy, a patient-centered, physical therapy and personal training practice run by Executive Director and Physical Therapist Carlos J. Berio, and his team of Performance Physical Therapists, Kristen Lattimore, DPT and Matt Szymanski, DPT. 

Carlos J. Berio is among the most highly trained sports fitness physical therapy professionals in the D.C. Metro region. He uses his training in physical therapy to help his clients become pain-free and reach their maximum performance.

Kristen Lattimore optimizes patient performance, quality of life, and health and fitness. As a performance physical therapist and track and field specialist, she helps patients regain strength and mobility, and perform at the top of their game to reach their goals.

Matt Szymanski is SPARK’s newest Performance Physical Therapist. He specializes in being able to bridge the gap from rehab to return to activity, assisting patients through the full continuum of care.

The team spent 30 minutes listening to my history and conducting a thorough movement assessment. The culprit was an overworked quadratus lumborum (QL) muscle.

Yeah, you had trouble pronouncing it just now and that’s okay, and so did I.

The QL is one of the deepest muscles of the posterior abdominal wall, often mistakenly referred to as one of the muscles of the back. This muscle runs down either side of your low back, from the top of your pelvis, all the way to your bottom rib. 

I am such a strong believer in Physical Therapy (PT) and the power of healing that comes from movement and strength, so I want to share the gift of PT with my fellow millennials. To make this possible, I sat down and talked with the Spark Physiotherapy team to demystify the modality and shed light on its effectiveness. Check out my interview below! Enjoy!!

Matt Szymanski graduated from the University of Connecticut’s DPT program in 2021. His interest in fitness, performance, and rehabilitation developed during his time as a CrossFit coach, which he has been doing since 2015.

Alex for YMyHealth: Why do most millennials come to see you for and what are the best ways to prevent injuries?

A: Matt Szymanski

I think low back pain is probably at the top of the list. We tend to see it with people who are either trying something new that they’ve never done and trying to be physical in a way that they have never been. They are going from nothing to something A LOT. 

I don’t want to give preventative exercises necessarily, but I’ll say that preventive or corrective wise, the thing that we tend to see works the best is just learning how to use your body more efficiently for the activity that you’ve chosen.

If someone comes into Spark and their back hurts because they don’t understand how to move their body in the most optimal way for the demand of the sports they do, they’re going to start getting something worked up. We want to clean up these high-level movement patterns in a way that makes sense for the person.

Kristen Lattimore is originally from North Carolina where she received her Bachelor’s in Sports and Exercise Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She then went on to receive her Doctorate of Physical Therapy degree from East Carolina University.

A: Kristen Lattimore

Millennials have grown up with everyone’s life highlights right in their face. So when someone does a tough mudder, they’re like, ‘Wow, that person did a tough mudder and they got a ribbon and celebrated with a beer. That looks fun. If they can do it, so can I.’ The issue with that is you didn’t see the eight weeks of training before the race, the injuries, and the rehab after. All you saw was the fun stuff in a snapshot. This creates a pressure or rush to create social credibility. If millennials want to do things like this, it’s important to think about the ways to train your body beforehand. Rushing into anything is the key to injury.

A: Carlos Berio

In a perfect world, It would be great for everyone to constantly be maintaining their physical versatility, but that is not realistic. Millennials that can focus every minute of their day on the right rest, nutrition, movements, strengthening and recovery are a slim slice of the population. 

What we want is to empower our patients to stay healthy enough to move their bodies and maintain the versatility of their day to day. And for us, that’s an important differentiator. It’s not necessarily how we do it, but the ability to mix in all of what we consider the seven main planes of movement in the combination that make them useful. 

Alex for YMyHealth: Millennials experience daily aches and pains in their lives but what type of pain warrants seeking out treatment?

Carlos Berio earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Kinesiology from the University of Maryland at College Park and subsequently earned his Master’s Degree in Clinical Exercise Physiology from George Washington University. His education is rounded out by a Doctoral Degree in Physical Therapy.

A: Carlos Berio

I think more can be done actively in physical medicine to give the health seeking public a better relationship with pain, or at least introduce the idea to them that pain by itself should not be debilitating but a source of information. If they have the right relationship with these sensations that they call pain, they might say to themselves, “You know what, that hurts, but it isn’t stopping me.” 

If we think like this, these little aches that come around don’t derail everyone. And then you can say, “Is this something I have to be concerned about? Can I wait four more days to see if this goes away?” 

And in the case of our millennial clients, it’s great because many of them come, have something worked on and get fixed sort of rapidly, and we provide education regarding where the pain comes from and how to work with it through exercises and various self- treatment. After they leave and experience the first sign of pain, they have a plan. 

Alex for YMyHealth: If I get injured, how do I know if physical therapy is right for me? Can physical therapy be an alternative to surgery?

A: Kristen Lattimore

First of all, you have to make sure that someone takes a thorough look at how you move. We have too many people that come in and say, ‘No one ever put their hands on me, or  watched me move, or no one sat and listened to me talk about my problem’ You have to take multiple factors into consideration; the holistic patient experience, before you understand the best way to begin treating them. If you base treatment off of one x-ray or what worked for someone else with similar injuries, you are not creating effective or specific treatments for their unique situation. 

If you haven’t had an experience like this, I would recommend finding a PT that can give you a more specialized one-on-one treatment. If after a month of strengthening imbalances and weaknesses you don’t improve, you’re either in the wrong place or the PT is approaching it incorrectly. 

Until you’ve had a patient-centered experience, I wouldn’t consider surgery. If you’ve had patient-centered PT care and you’re outside the normal healing time for tissue (six to eight weeks), you can assess surgery, but those have to be prerequisites in my mind before you’re going to go down that path. Surgery is never as good as our original parts, especially as a millennial. You’re never going to get what you think you are. A knee replacement never feels like your original knee. It never feels exactly right. So that’s a pretty permanent thing and the last option in our minds.

Conclusion:

I solved my QL injury through a lot of trial and error. Your journey may look different from mine, but I truly believe that learning proper movements from PT professionals is the key to longevity and injury prevention.

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