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Strengthening exercises
There’s scientific evidence to back up the health benefits of strengthening for people with RSI/OOS. “Strengthening exercises, particularly for eccentric strengthening, have been advocated as a treatment for tendon overuse conditions since the early 1980s. Clinical studies point to the efficacy of eccentric strengthening regimens.” (Khan, Cook, Bonar, Harcourt and Astrom, 1999).
Strengthening exercise should be combined with aerobic exercise as part of your treatment regime
Three benefits of strengthening exercise
When you exercise your muscles regularly:
- Muscle fibres increase in diameter and number
- Muscle fibres react faster and in greater number to messages from your nerves
- The number of capillaries increase by 20% after a few months of training, bringing more blood flow to your muscles
However, there are times when strengthening exercise is not recommended:
- When your condition is acute.
- When your normal daily life is taxing you to the limit.
However, at these times you can still benefit from:
- Aerobic exercise
- Strengthening exercises for the lower body
- Core strength exercises, such as Pilates
- Gentle stretches
It’s vital that you are supervised for a strengthening program, at least in the early stages. This is because correct technique is essential and you can easily forget how to do an exercise properly when you have a number of new exercises to learn.
Taking care of yourself with strengthening exercise
It’s essential you don’t injure yourself when you start a strengthening program. You need to have an assessment from a qualified instructor or therapist and you need to be supervised, at least in the early stages of a program.
Some ideas for making sure you take care of yourself are:
- Start with no weights
- Talk to the gym supervisor about any pain
- Do repetitions slowly and evenly (not in a way that is shaky, fast or inaccurate)
- Distinguish between good pain - pain that is just normal muscle fatigue and lasts less than 2 hours - and bad pain.
- Break up exercises into fewer repetitions, eg. not 30 reps in one go but 10 repetitions each time, 10 minutes apart, three times
- Use aerobic exercise to warm up before commencing strengthening exercise – this is essential
- Be assertive about what you can and can’t do
- Give it a try for a fixed period
- Try hydrotherapy in warm water
Complementary Therapies
For lots of information and personal stories on how complementary therapies can help your RSI, order our Information Kit.
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