Functional Exercise Prescription

Book excerpt: In Functional Exercise Prescription, Eyal Lederman presents a revolutionary new approach for exercise prescription that uses the individual's own movement repertoire. The book demonstrates how daily activities (the life gym) can be amplified to provide the necessary movement challenges to support movement rehabilitation in many musculoskeletal and pain conditions. Hence, all activities can become remedial without the need to prescribe unfamiliar exercise; in other words, 'how to exercise without exercise' or 'how to rehabilitate without exercise'. People recover from most musculoskeletal and pain conditions through three key processes: repair, adaptation, and alleviation of symptoms. The author explains how to identify the individual's recovery process and how to select the appropriate daily or sporting activities, and, how they can be modified to support recovery. Functional Exercise Prescription is a dramatic departure from the traditional strength and conditioning models that have been used for rehabilitation. The book explores the limitation of these models and explains how they can be replaced by functional daily activities ('functioncise'). It provides the practitioner with practical tools to construct a tailor-made plan for each individual to help expedite and optimize their recovery. Most rehabilitation can be constructed from a small familiar set of daily or sports activities. All human physical activity is exercise. Life is your gym.