Why do patients struggle with their medicines?

This is a fascinating study that has real implications for fitness and strength regime programming.

read this fascinating study

“Why do patients struggle with their medicines?—A phenomenological hermeneutical study of how patients experience medicines in their everyday lives”

Read more: Why do patients struggle with their medicines?

Check out the full study here

Findings from this study highlight five main themes where participants experience medicines as: 1) life-saving and indispensable, 2) normal and a daily routine, 3) confusing and concerning, 4) unsuitable without adjustment, and 5) intrusive and unwelcome. These results can be the basis for mutually agreed prescribing through a co-creative approach that aims at enhancing open and honest dialogues between patients and healthcare professionals in partnership about medicines.

The conclusion was “In conclusion, the results from this study indicate the need for a co-creation of a treatment plan in partnership between patients and healthcare providers when prescribing medicines. This research can be seen as a call to action for researchers who focus on improving medicine-taking to recognise the importance of the patients’ lived experiences of medicine-taking and how this may impact on their actual medicine-taking”

This has impolications in the strength and fitness arena! programmes must be built in partnership with the client!

The couch can make you fit.

No matter how badly or poorly you have run, jogged, or staggered  20 meters plus,  there will always be a fitness motivator screaming “good job, you lapped the guy on the couch”

Its sort of true, but  at the same time they lapped everyone doing a static exercise: they lapped the  person doing pull ups, deadlifts, the olympic lifts, bicep curls and hundreds of other stationary exercises: they lapped the guy doing burpees and tuck jumps, they  lapped everyone on a concept 2 rower or an assault bike.

During fits of depression, or good old fashioned laziness, it super easy to crawl onto a couch and crash out. This means that deciding to get up, change, walk out the door and start jogging can be a super barrier.

I remember lying on the couch staring at the floor being unable to roll off and do one push up.

To build new habits and behaviours, they really need to be modelled on existing habits and behaviours. It’s very difficult to abandon bad behaviours, so its best to use them if you can.

If it’s a racing certainty that you will throw yourself onto the couch in the next few hours, connecting the couch with exercise could be the most effective exercise improvement you can make. This is crucial if you find yourself locked down.

As a quick example I’ll  use  the curl up abdominal exercise. Its fairly easy to change from a couch slump

slumping on the couch

into something fairly near a therapeutic curl up!

do the therapeutic curl up on the couch

Over the next few months, I’ll be showing you how you can get fit on your couch. moving from a slump into an effective exercise.

Obviously this is a great stand alone (lie alone) exercise.  You don’t have to get on the couch to do it!

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