Exercise prescription is one of the things that sets us apart from other healthcare professionals. That’s why it’s extra peculiar as to why PT school curriculums don’t have more emphasis on therapeutic exercise. Can you imagine if surgeons were just left to learn surgery “on the job” during their clinical rotations? Some of you did have a ther ex course, heck, maybe even a CSCS elective. You are one of the lucky ones.

When you do gather up enough unique exercises for your own eclectic toolbox, the next step is to deploy those exercises in a purposeful manner. The worst thing you can do is prescribe an exercise for a “shotgun” approach because the patient could have done that by themselves using YouTube.

The wonderful thing about individualizing each patient is the nuances associated with the exercises you prescribe them. My pediatric professor always said: “if you’ve seen a patient with cerebral palsy, then you’ve seen one patient with cerebral palsy”. This applies to the orthopedic population as well. For the sake of this post: once you’ve seen a patient with cervical radiculopathy, then you’ve seen one patient with cervical radiculopathy.

As a manual therapist, I take pride in mobilizing the correct, specific segments that requires mobilization. I have started to incorporate this specificity into my exercise prescription and thus inspired this blog post. Below is a video covering the subtleties involved with the sidelying thoracic rotation exercise. I have always used it as a general mobility exercise, but realized that some patients benefit more from it than others.