Progressing Strength with Gym Equipment Exercises

While many exercises for the knee, hip, and ankle are helpful for improving strength, gym equipment exercises, especially barbell exercises, help condition the body to handle higher amounts of stress through important movement patterns. These types of exercises are essential for patients who are returning to demanding sports or work activity.

That’s why MedBridge has added dozens of new exercises that use gym equipment to our HEP Builder. Physical Therapists and Athletic Trainers can use these exercises to take a patient’s program a step beyond traditional clinic exercises or offer a challenge to patients and clients who need or want to perform at a higher level.

In this article, we’ll show you how to find these new gym equipment exercises and recommend some programs you can create. 

Finding Gym Equipment Exercises in the MedBridge HEP Builder

To find Pediatric Speech and Language videos and handouts,

1. Navigate to the HEP Builder by selecting Patient Engagement, then select Home Exercise Program.
2. From the filters on the left side, select Equipment.
3. Scroll through the equipment filters and select Gym Equipment.
4. Available exercises will appear in the center of the screen. You can sort these by most recent, most sent, and more. 
5. Select the Add Button to add a resource to your program, or drag and drop it into the program builder on the right side.

Gym Equipment Home Exercise Programs 

Gym equipment exercises fit well into a comprehensive exercise program that includes strength, mobility, stability, and plyometric training. You can add gym equipment exercises early in a strength and conditioning program, beginning with low weight exercises (as light as a stick in some cases). Then, as your patient improves their strength, you can gradually progress to heavier loads. 

Athletic trainers work regularly with athletes returning to sport after an injury, but also work with clients who may be preparing to improve their athletic fitness for the first time and need to build a base of whole-body strength. The MedBridge HEP Builder includes exercises at each of these levels, allowing you to create and update programs no matter what level of difficulty your patient needs.

That means that when you want to add squats, deadlifts, dumbbell or cable exercises into your patient’s program, you don’t have to send them to YouTube anymore. You can seamlessly transition from lower-intensity rehab exercises to full-on gym training on the same trustworthy platform.

If you don’t have access to the MedBridge HEP Builder, it’s easy to gain access. If you're already a MedBridge subscriber, you can upgrade today. If you're not a subscriber, learn how you can join the thousands of clinicians already using MedBridge.