Real-Time Ultrasound Retraining
With real-time ultrasound you can identify which muscles you need to work, practice contacting them and ensure that when you are exercising you are not prolonging the problem by overworking the wrong muscles. Our physiotherapists can help you within a normal treatment session using our real-time ultrasound machine.
Your deep core muscles are needed to provide support and control the movements of the lower spine and pelvis. As they are deep in the body, below other muscles, it is difficult to see or feel when you work them. This is where real-time ultrasound helps. The muscle layers and their contractions can be seen by you and your physiotherapist on a monitor as you contract and relax them and you can then see if you are performing the contraction correctly or not. Once you know how a correct contraction feels you can practice the exercises at home.
This is important because the deep muscles in your back and abdomen often turn off with pain. The problem is that they often do not automatically turn on again when the pain has gone, leading to lack of support and a recurrence of the pain.
The other main use of real-time ultrasound is to improve use of the pelvic floor muscles. We can ensure that you are not using muscles to push the floor down, making the problem worse, but are lifting up from the pelvic floor. Tamsen is our physiotherapist to help you with this.