Canine rehabilitation is a process that takes place both in the clinic but also, and very importantly, in the home. The clinic sessions themselves are a chance for us to evaluate your dog and then provide appropriate physio and hydro treatment. However, what happens in between sessions is vital for the success of any rehab case. This part of the rehab involves appropriate home management, including the amount and type of exercise, adjustments around the home to make it a safe and accessible environment, and ensuring your dog maintains a healthy weight.
Often it also involves a therapeutic exercise programme, set by us for you to carry out at home with your dog, and designed specifically with your dog’s particular challenges and compromises in mind. The exercises help re-engage functional movement patterns and improve body awareness, posture and limb loading. They also address and help to stimulate muscle groups which might have been affected by pathology. Carrying out these exercises can be a great bonding experience for you and your dog and make a huge difference to the progression and success of any rehab or conditioning programme. However, these exercises need to be carried out carefully and correctly, in order to reap the benefits. Memorising exactly what the exercises are, and how to train them safely, can be a challenge. This is particularly true in our Covid world, where many owners are still not present with their dogs for the treatment sessions, so the opportunity to demonstrate and practice exercises in clinic can be limited.
In collaboration with our colleagues at Canine Rebalance and Flexidog Therapy, we are hugely proud to be able to bring to our clients “Conditioning your Canine”, an online platform developed to assist with this key element of the rehab process and to make working through your dog’s conditioning exercises fun, safe and effective. We can register our owners with their own portal where they can log on and view their bespoke exercise programme in video format. Each video shows the equipment required, the key areas of the body that will be working and has a scoring system to help show how challenging the exercise is. The task is demonstrated and then broken down in to stages with helpful training tips and things to look out for. Via their portal, owners can also access the Foundations document, which provides a wealth of information to help get the most out of the home exercise programme.
We are very excited to be able to provide this additional resource to our owner clients as part of the service provided at Bach Canine Rehab. And we hope you and your dog will enjoy it too!
