ConnectTherapy™ & The Thoracic Ring Approach™
What is connectTherapy?
ConnectTherapy is an innovative whole-body, holistic physiotherapy approach developed by Dr Linda-Joy Lee. It acknowledges the body as an interconnected whole and provides a structured approach to identifying, understanding and treating the root cause of your injury.
At Move Mountains Physio, our physiotherapists are experts in ConnectTherapy having done years of additional training, and even having the privilege of working at the ConnectTherapy headquarters (Dr Lee’s own clinic) in Vancouver, Canada from 2017-2018.
There are 2 key features of how we use ConnectTherapy to treat your injury at Move Mountains Physio:
Find, understand and treat the “driver”.
Retrain the muscle imbalances that have been created by the presence of your driver (this keeps it fixed!).
What is a driver?
Your driver is the “secret criminal” that your body is compensating for and which creates your loud painful “victim” injury. Sometimes you won’t even know there’s a problem at the driver, but everywhere else is getting irritated because the driver is “underworking” and your other areas are “overworking”.
A good example is hip pain caused by a foot driver (foot not working properly). If you have an ankle injury that doesn’t rehab back to normal you may not be weight-bearing equally on both feet. If this happens, it’s quite common to start experiencing pain in the back or opposite hip some months later. You could be doing all the right rehab and strength work for the back or hip pain, but until you fully rehabilitate the old ankle injury and restore equal weight-bearing to both feet, the back or hip pain is not going to resolve. By treating the driver as well as your local irritated tissues, we can take the stress off the injured tissue from within your body enabling it to heal quickly.
How has my driver created muscle imbalance?
The way we move and train determines the dominant muscles in our body. When we have a driver effecting how we move, over time it will change our dominant muscle strength and balance (e.g. without good ankle flexibility in a squat we can’t activate the glutes, so they will become weaker compared to the quads). If we treat your driver but don’t retrain the muscle balance, your old dominant muscles will keep you moving in the same bad pattern created by your driver and bring back your driver and your pain. Rebalancing your muscles is also what we call restoring your normal biomechanics, and is the key component to effectively treating chronic and recurring injuries and decreasing your risk of future injury.
What is the thoracic ring approach?
The thorax is the ribcage. Historically, health professionals have seen it as an inherently stable collections of ribs, vertebrae and ligaments which we “mobilised” to get more movement. The Thoracic Ring Approach was developed by Dr LJ Lee and identifies the importance of how (not just how much) the ribcage moves (i.e. the biomechanics of the ribcage). The ribcage is up to 20% of the length of the body and when it doesn’t move the way it is supposed to it will frequently become a driver, leading to pain in other parts of the body such as the knees, hips, lower back and arms.
At Move Mountains Physio we are experts in ConnectTherapy and The Thoracic Ring Approach. If you want to try something different, a more holistic type of physiotherapy book an appointment either online or in our Jindabyne physiotherapy clinic.
Or, if you’re still not sure, book a free 15 minute online consult to discuss your injury and how our treatment approach can alleviate your pain.