AS I’VE said before, I see a really wide range of clients in both my roles as a physio and personal trainer.

This is especially true when it comes to physio patients.

Recently I’ve been seeing a lot of people who exercise regularly and not necessarily with acute injuries.

These are people who exercise a number of times a week, often take part in sport and almost all come with little niggles that are causing pain, or they are finding they can’t move as well as they expect to.

Not horrendous pain that keeps them awake or requires pain relief, but bad enough to bother them, or stop them fully participating in their normal exercise. They often ignore these niggles and restricted movements for months before they’ll seek some treatment.

So what are the issues that are affecting these normally active people? Well more often than not it’s small issues that over time have developed to cause pain, discomfort and restrictions.

This can be anything from a muscle that’s not working quite as well as it should, a group of muscles that have become overly tight because of repeated activity or because the person in question is lopsided.

Lopsided? Yeah lopsided!

Most of us aren’t quite symmetrical, go look at yourself in the mirror and I guarantee that nine out of 10 of you will be leaning to one side. There are lots of reasons we become lopsided and until it causes us a problem most of us have no idea.

So surely the answer is to do less exercise and be less active? I can hear the sceptics and the exercise phobics saying.

Well, you wouldn’t expect me to agree with that surely?

No the solution is to identify the problem that is causing the issue and then deal with it.

Too many of us move habitually, we don’t think about our movement and the long-term effect that it has. Many of us who do exercise on a regular basis don’t think about maintenance.

I include myself in that as well, I wait till something is hurting before I deal with it, when I am fully aware and capable of how I can prevent the problem even arising.

Whether you are exercising regularly or not, we could all do with thinking about how we move.

With a lot of these clients I see, we assess how they move, identify the weak areas, the tight areas and work out how to get them moving properly. Then I send them away to work on these things.

There is a lot of personal responsibility involved, unless they want to see me every day which would become VERY expensive.

And long term outcomes? On the whole very good, we more often than not improve mobility, reduce or eliminate pain and return to normal activity levels.

So if you are finding you are losing range or feeling pain, get it sorted or seen to or the long-term effects can be painful.