13 Tips to keep up with your Home Exercise Program (HEP)

Why does it seem to be so hard for most of us to make the time to do those darn exercises!

Our lives are busy and it can be difficult to add prescribed home exercises into our day - I can be as guilty as anyone at times. Perhaps, exercising is not a daily habit for you. Maybe it’s that you may not feel they’re important to do, or know why they were given to you.

Home exercises are the best way to maintain and further progress after your Physiotherapy sessions. For this reason, I am giving away my best tips on how to incorporate HEP more easily into your routine!

In no particular order:

1) Understand the “why”

Your Physiotherapist or other Rehab professional should have taken the time to comment on why the exercises they’ve suggested are important to your body specifically. If you don’t understand or can’t remember then ask them the next time you see them for a reminder.

2) Make sure they represent a personally meaningful goal to you

How important is it to get back to your favourite activities? reduce pain? get stronger or move better? feel ‘normal’ again?

If you don’t want it bad enough it is understandably hard to get motivated to work towards it. Remember what you’re trying to accomplish.

3) Use a daily/weekly exercise log or calendar

You can find a couple examples on my resources page!

I, personally, thrive off lists. Being able to cross off or check off items from my list gives me immense satisfaction!

4) Set up a consistent area for exercising

This might be your bedroom, living room, home gym, or other space. Bring any equipment you might need to this space, such as

• bands

• weights

• foam roller

• lacrosse ball

• etc.

Make it convenient to do and that’s half the battle won already!

5) Visual cues

Print out the HEP or save the exercises on your laptop, tablet, or phone. Again, ease of access and visual reminders can make any habit easier to initiate and maintain.

6) Reminders

Use a calendar, phone, sticky note, or other tool that you use everyday to remind yourself to fit them in!

7) Get others to do them with you!

It can be motivating to have your partner, sibling, children, parents, or friend(s) join in on the exercises. As long as they’re capable of exercising safely your exercises will likely benefit them too!

This also can create accountability. As members of nearly any type of group, we don’t want to let others down by not showing up and, by extension, make their exercise participation harder to commit to.

8) Make them time efficient

I regularly prescribe strengthening or mobility exercises as a Circuit:

• eg. complete 10 repetitions or all 3-5 exercises in order, and repeat this order 3 times.

Circuit training makes your workout more cardio- or endurance-focused by keeping your heart rate elevated for a longer duration.

When a program is designed in this way it reduces the amount of total rest time and typically avoids over-fatiguing the same muscle group by having exercises of different, but complimentary, muscles be your rest breaks.

9) Make sure the program is realistic

Professional athletes have the resources and motivation to commit a lot of time and energy to their injury rehab, which is why they often return in optimal timelines from injury.

As much as I would love my patients to do hours of rehab exercises every day it often isn’t realistic because of our life events: work, home chores, caring for family, etc. Regularly completed exercises help the vast majority of injuries heal and body tissues adapt to meet the demands of their physical activities. It can be easy to get disheartened and off-track with your exercise routine if you expect yourself to get the HEP done more than is realistic.

10) Get them done in the AM

Always try to get your HEP done in the morning, particularly before you leave the house, if you can. Exercise and stretching can be a great way to ‘shake off’ the stiffness/tightness that we can feel after sleeping. Further, if you happen to forget to get them done in the morning then at least you have more opportunities in the day to do them so you don’t feel like you missed a whole day.

11) Some is better than nothing

Certain exercises can be challenging or produce some discomfort. It’s helpful to know that even doing a little (eg. half as many reps or sets) is better than doing nothing.

Life gets busy and it’s normal to miss the odd workout or two. Just remember, the more consistent you can be the quicker you’ll notice the results.

12) Incorporate them into your regular daily/weekly routines

*My most effective suggestion is to combine your new HEP routine into other routines you regularly keep.

This could be your morning or bedtime routines: Maybe you begin your day like this: put on your house coat, use the toilet, brush your teeth and finish in the bathroom, put on your clothes and make-up, make breakfast, and then start the rest of your day.

Try interjecting one or a couple exercises throughout this regular routine so that they become an equally important component of the routine.

13) Follow up with your Rehab professional regularly

Use appointments as a motivator to show just how invested you are in helping yourself get better. Your Physio will be able to progress you further during the session if you put in the work too.

Follow ups can also be a chance to review exercises, ask about progressions (if too easy) or regressions (if too difficult/painful), and make them more personally meaningful to you (see tip #2).

Home or gym exercises are only effective if they are completed consistently.

You got this!

- Thanks for reading and keep looking for more posts in the future on other ‘hot topics’ in the world of Physiotherapy and Physical Rehabilitation!