What To Do If You Feel You Do Not Have Enough Time In A Session

Throughout my work in the mentorship program there is one thing in particular I hear over and over again. A therapist feels rushed. They don’t believe they can get the results they need in the time they are given.

If this sounds like you, don’t worry. Today I’ll tell you exactly what to do if you feel you don’t have enough time in a session.

t’s perfectly normal to feel like you don’t have enough time. I felt exactly that way when I was just starting out. I had to take a long hard look at what I was doing to figure out why I felt this way. What did I find? Well, the source of that rushed feeling is due to a lack of structure…

What do I mean by structure? Well it is essentially how your assessment, treatment and rehab all flow into one another. It is that simple.

Your subjective assessment and objective assessment should flow easily but a lot of therapists find that hard. They ask questions in a robotic form the way they were trained at university. This is all well and good but really, if you ask a question you should be able to make sense of the answer. 

Throughout my work with Huddersfield Giants we would have students visit. As an exercise I would get them to assess a lumbar spine patient. All I would see is rushed questions, tests and assessments. They would leap straight from toe touching to another test without really making sense of the movement.

To avoid exactly this issue you have to ask yourself, when you ask someone to move do you have an understanding of why you are doing it? Do you have a hypothesis you’re trying to prove or disprove?

Once you get that flow from the subjective assessment, you’ll ask questions to gain an understanding of the person, you’ll gain an understanding movement and of motor adaptations that you may expect to see in the objective assessment. Then when it comes to the objective assessment, there are no surprises and it all will all make sense.

For example, say a patient is guarding a part of the body when asked to do certain movements. They’re not happy to load a certain part of the body. How does that make sense of the subjective assessment? Once you have a rationale for every movement and an understanding of how everything links together, then you won’t have to do every single test you know of. Only then will you save time.

The biggest trap I fell into as a young therapist was treating adaptations. I treated without asking myself the fundamental question of why? Why is this all happening? What information are you trying to get and how will that work for you in your treatment?

With structure, comes a deeper understanding and clarity on everything you are doing. This will then save you time.

You need to make sense of the subjective assessment, find peripheral tissues that are contributing to the pain experience and then find the reason why these tissues are contributing in the first place. Once you do that, you can use the patient’s story and begin to undo these adaptations. And that is where magical things happen.

The next time you feel rushed, just take a step back and ask yourself, why am asking the patient to perform this movement? Am I doing this out of habit? Or do I actually understand what I’m looking for? 

The biggest issue any therapist faces is being overwhelmed. That feeling will soon put a stop to getting those long-lasting results. So take a step back, keep it simple and you’ll be surprised how quickly things begin to make sense.

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