Manual Therapy

What is Manual Therapy?

Manual therapy is Physical Therapy applied through our hands and AMPT specializes in this! We use our hands to locate, interpret and heal your injured tissues. Our hands are generally able to feel your pain before you do! We develop an intuition for your personalized needs through what our hands tell us and this requires advanced training. This quickly gets you back to what you enjoy doing best - experiencing life!

Our expert Australian training allows us to quickly alleviate a variety of symptoms - pain, headaches, numbness, stiffness, weakness and “clicks and clunks”. We incorporate many techniques to achieve this - deep soft tissue massage, joint mobilizations and manipulations, therapist assisted exercises and stretching, core strength, specific joint stabilizations and nerve mobilizations that help regenerate nerves, reduce pain perception and “reformat” the nerve pathways that carry pain to the brain to a healthier state!
At AMPT we are the experts in manual therapy!

Joint Mobilizations & Manipulations

Joint mobilizations and manipulations are slow or high speed movements that are applied with our hands to your joints. You can liken it to “Massaging” a joint and the results are immediate - reduced pain, stiffness and inflammation; decreased joint wear and tear; improvements in disc nutrition and the brain’s  ability to safely perceive and move that joint. The bottom line is better movement and improved function!  

Soft-Tissue Mobilization

Injuries generally result in some degree of soft-tissue change in which the muscles can become inflamed and thickened after the injury. If not addressed correctly, painful knots called tender and trigger points can develop. These can cause pain to be referred into other areas.
It is essential to manually mobilize this soft tissue (e.g. muscle) to resolve inflammation and prevent and break up these scar tissues and trigger points. AMPT has hand crafted its own unique massage tools which  easily “Iron-out” these deep, thickened knots in your muscles to reduce your pain and improve your function!

Nerve Mobilizations and Nerve Regeneration Techniques

AMPT reduces pain by utilizing modern pain science theories to isolate and move the nerves along their journey through muscles and tissue. The nerves are freed up - like moving dental floss through the teeth - which greatly enhances their regenerative abilities.
Nerve mobilization effects can be likened to “reformatting” the nerve by improving circulation, changing the chemical properties of the nerve and the health of the tissue that the nerve supplies. Nerve mobilizations provide great benefits to conditions like carpal tunnel syndrome and many other nerve disorders that cause pain, tingling, numbness, weakness, incoordination and are essential following any spinal or nerve surgery.

Australian Manual Physical Therapy Approach

This is a very comprehensive manual therapy approach, that involves complex clinical reasoning to obtain a thorough understanding of your condition to get you better. It is very specific to each patient’s particular needs and progresses based on a continual reassessment of the patient’s responses to treatment. This is also commonly known as the “Maitland Approach” after the esteemed South Australian physiotherapist Geoffrey Maitland and forms the worldwide basis for advanced manual physical therapy.

Specific Exercises

Research has shown that the best benefits are gained when manual therapy and specific exercises are incorporated together into the treatment program. We teach highly specific exercises that progress as the patient does. These include core strengthening, muscle imbalance corrections and joint control techniques that stabilize the joints and greatly improve outcomes and patient compliance.

For more information on our highly skilled manual physical therapists, or to schedule an appointment, call today.

As always, please ask your doctor about your referral to AMPT.