Laurie's Blogs.

Have you had this happen to you?  You think you’re on the right track. You are gradually progressing your exercise sessions, but you don’t want to injure your patient… so you don’t prescribe “anything too crazy”!  But your patient isn’t getting stronger, isn’t building muscle, isn’t changing period!  What’s up?

Well, the first thing to do is to look within.  Ask yourself if you are truly progressing your patient enough to make a difference.  A recent ‘human’ blog - http://breakingmuscle.com/fitness/the-main-reason-you-arent-getting-any-stronger - brings up the point, that doing the same thing will not yield different results.  If you want to be stronger, build muscle, or lose fat, you need to achieve ‘adaptation’… which means you need to put in a stimulus to which the body needs to adapt.  Following an adequate stimulus, the response should be fatigue.  The afore mentioned blog states: “Following fatigue is a period of recovery, then overcompensation. Overcompensation is the adaptation that we seek. If the body is not exposed to the stimulus for an extended period of time, we experience de-training.”  So, in order to build, change, grow, (or shrink), we need to progressively overload the body.

Progressive overload uses four key areas to increase stress through training:

Volume - Reps x Sets x Load

Intensity - Percentage of max effort

Frequency - How often we train

Time - How long we train for each session

If you increase any of these, the workout is harder and produces a stimulus for the body to adapt to.  If you are prescribing exercises, take into account these factors in order to increase the results you are seeing in your patients!!!

But if that doesn’t work, then think outside the box.  From a training perspective – Cardio does not build muscle… so get the dog out of the Under Water Treadmill and into Boot Camp.  From a medication perspective - Gabapentin may inhibit muscle building, as can long term anti-inflammatories.  From a nutritional stand point – not consuming enough protein or being dehydrated could inhibit muscle building.  From a physical perspective – Might there be a disc causing compression on the spinal cord, perhaps in the neck or the lumbosacral junction, or a joint dysfunction causing pain (i.e. rib, thoracic spine, or SIJ)? From a social-psycho perspective – Stress can cause an increase in cortisol and cause fat storage.  From a medical conditions perspective – Might the dog have Cushing’s or Addison’s Disease, early signs of Degenerative Myelopathy, Lyme disease, Diabetes, Heart failure, Renal Failure, Cancer?  And are there other odd symptoms that just don’t fit with a typical XYZ case and how it should be progressing?

And lastly, if you have put your brain to work on all of these reasons why your patient might not be building muscle, there also seems to be a cohort of patients that just need to return to ‘being a dog’ and given break from a structured rehab program (i.e. the 5-months post op CCL patient who is causing you to pull your hair out)!  In these cases, give them a ‘rehab break’ to just be a dog for a month and then check back in!

I hope this gets your wheels spinning or makes you think of certain canine patients over your career.  There’s always so many things to think about!

Until next time!!  Cheers!   Laurie