Do you always need physical therapy after hip replacement surgery?

Physical Therapy for Hip Replacement

The answer, for many people, is yes. After all, you decided to have a hip replacement to reduce your hip pain. You may also have been looking for a way to increase your ability to walk. 

However, not doing physical therapy after a hip replacement can take away many of the benefits this procedure can offer. It won’t allow you to address underlying issues. You may even develop new issues like scar tissue at the surgery site. Working with a physical therapy specialist after your hip replacement surgery can help you avoid these and other difficulties, and it can also offer you several important benefits. 

Three benefits that post-hip replacement physical therapy can offer

Physical therapists are schooled in the human musculoskeletal system, which includes the hip joint. They can use this knowledge combined with information gathered from a hip evaluation to create a beneficial physical therapy plan. 

A few of the benefits that such a post-hip replacement physical therapy plan can offer include: 

  1. Reducing post-operative pain — Anytime your tissues are cut or damaged, you feel some level of pain. This is especially true after a surgical procedure. Pain can be a sign of healing, but it can also hold back your recovery. Your physical therapist can use techniques like dry needling to help reduce your post-surgical pain. A study of hip pain sufferers reveals that dry needling helped decrease patients’ worst level of pain by 52.5 points. 
  1. Building up muscle strength — Strong muscles are vital to healthy joints. Yet weak muscles are often an underlying issue for people with hip problems that require surgery. This problem can be even worse after surgery. Therapeutic exercises can be used by your physical therapist to boost hip muscle strength. One study found that hip replacement patients who used therapeutic exercises had significant strength increases. Specifically, these patients had: 
  • 47.8% boosts in their hip extensor strength
  • 41.2% increases in their hip abductor strength 
  • 24.4% improvements in their hip flexor strength 
  1. Increased hip function — Boosting hip function and your ability to do normal daily activities is a common goal of hip replacements. Physical therapists can help make this goal a reality. One therapy category that can help them increase your hip function is manual therapy. Medical researchers reveal that a hip replacement patient who had manual therapy had a 44-point increase in hip function scores. 

Find effective post-hip replacement physical therapy at SSOR

You can find a physical therapy team that can help you recover effectively after a hip replacement at SSOR. Our team can evaluate your hip before and after surgery. This allows us to identify underlying issues that could affect the procedure or your recovery. 

Additionally, we can help you prepare for your surgery with pre-surgical rehab. Then, our physical therapists can create a personalized recovery plan to fit your post-surgical needs. We even offer at-home care and virtual therapy that can help you do some of your recovery therapy from home. 

Contact us today for more information about how we can help you before and after surgery or to schedule an initial appointment.