Exercising Same Muscles Everyday

I could be wrong, but I'd venture to say your comparing apples to oranges.

 

Your buddy isn't lacking the muscle / physical strength to move his leg, but rather because of his back injury / spinal cord injury. I'm tempted to say training the assigned movements help regain function and mobility by neuromuscular reeducation (reinforcing motor patterns and nerve tracts)--not by training a movement for strength and muscle growth.

 

Of course if his paralysis isn't recent than muscle atrophy is another issue.

 

PT is a pretty diverse profession, so don't take this as a blanket statement.

 

Hopefully Josh stumbles across this as he seems to be very well informed in such subjects--unlike me.

One way of expressing this is it's a matter of fatigue management.

PT exercises aren't very fatiguing as a rule so there is no problem repeating them. Hard training is fatiguing, you can see that when you train too much or too often. Your performance will go down.

It may be the exercises are difficult for him due to them being painful, that would mean that he has very little ability to exert his muscles which means less fatigue. The exercises will get blood flowing though and that promotes healing.

Also as mentioned above, neurological rehabilitation is an important aspect of PT.

Now it might be the PT has overestimated the mans capacity as well.

I would also keep in mind that the whole not training the same muscles every day methodology came from the body building crowd, which is what most of main stream fitness ideas are based off of. Coaches guys train 4 hours a day, often rigorously and definitely stress the same muscles daily. Lots of martial artists, dancers and circus performers are the same.

My Chinese ma coach always said "if you miss one day, you need 3 days to catch up".

People tend to call this method "grease the groove", keeping in mind that these people aren't working to total destruction of the muscles, often because their goals aren't hypertrophy, and as such total destruction isn't needed.

As mentioned too, you'll notice almost all of the people who train this way require strength and high levels of neuro muscular coordination.

im wondering if someone here can explain this to me:

most things ive read say not to train the same muscles everyday, and that if you do this, muscles dont have a chance to heal, and so they get injured.

however, in physical therapy, patients are often told to do a set of exercises daily. for example, i know a guy who had a back injury which left one of his legs temporarily paralyzed. he was out of the hospital and showed me a sheet that his doctor gave him. it had about 10 exercises that he was supposed to do, repeating each 2-5 times, once or twice a day. the exercises were things like: lie on your back and rotate your knees side to side. or, lie down, lift your knees to your chest.

at first i thought, well, ya, he is supposed to do them everyday, but they are easy enough, so his muscles dont really need that much time to recover. but then i thought, yes - but, these exercises are actually not really very easy for him to do, considering he is, 1) a man in his 60s, and 2) has a fairly serious injury to his back. in other words, the amount of effort it takes a healthy person to do an l-sit is probably comparable to the amount of effort it takes this guy to bring his knees up to his chest.

so, what am i missing here? why is it recommended to do the same exercise everyday or even twice a day when recovering from an injury, but if you're healthy to wait several days in between?

thanks