Have you had on-going hip pain or hip surgery? Has your mother or father had a hip replacement at an early age? Worried about getting early hip arthritis? If so, this information will be useful to you.
Did you know we can test your hip muscle strength using a hand-held electronic dynamometer to indicate which muscles need strengthening to help reduce your pain, rehabilitated you from surgery or reduce your risk of recurrence of hip pain or injury.
A hand-held dynamometer is an electronic device held on your skin while you resist a movement. It gives a read-out of force output that can be interpreted by your physio or exercise physiologist.
The force values for one limb can be compared to the other limb and thanks to a number of more recent research studies, we now have an idea of what “normal” strength ratios should be between muscle groups. Notably we have this information for uninjured hips, swimmers and baseballers shoulders.
A recent study by an Australian-based physio (Kemp et al, 2013) has found this dynamometer testing to have good inter-therapist reliability, that-is, if one of our physio’s were to test you one day, another therapist could test you the next day with the same results.
This means you can be sure that any testing we perform on you in the clinic will provide useful information in helping guide your management- whether that be following surgery, if you are experiencing on-going pain or even if you are worried about following in the footsteps of a parent that may have had an early-age joint replacement.
Next time you visit us, make sure you ask your Physio whether dynamometry strength testing may be useful to you.
Book online or call us on 07 5500 6470
