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Allen Engle | Active Adult PT

@allenengle.pt

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Helping adults 30+ stay strong, mobile & active for life
📍Clinic Director at @therapysouth_gadsden
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Our greatest gift is being your parents. Engle family of 3 ❤️ taken in Labor and Delivery Brookwood by @allenengle.pt

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3 months ago

If you’re popping your neck, your back and your hips all day, you don’t have a popping problem 👇

Nothing is going back into place when you do it. That pop is a gas cavity forming in the joint fluid, same as your knuckles. And in the research, whether or not someone got an audible pop during a manipulation didn’t predict whether they actually got better.

Here’s the part nobody says: a joint only pops if it already has room to move. So the spot you can always get is the loose one. The stiff areas, usually your mid-back and your hips, never budge, and that one loose spot keeps covering for them. That’s a clinical read, not a trial, but it lines up with what I see every week.

What actually helps: the same motion slower and more often instead of one hard twist. Ten seated rotations each way. Leaning back over a chair or foam roller for the mid-back. Half kneeling or 90/90 rotations for the hips, because a stiff hip hands all the rotation to your low back.

And no, you’re not giving yourself arthritis. 18% of lifelong knuckle crackers had hand arthritis. Of the people who never cracked, 21% had it (deWeber, JABFM 2011). Same number, and the crackers were a touch lower.

The one I’d actually stop is cranking on your own neck.

Free physical therapy programs are in my bio, sorted by body part. taken in Vestavia Hills, Alabama by @allenengle.pt

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2 days ago

Your knee X-ray describes a gap, not your future.

“Bone on bone” is shorthand for the space between your bones getting smaller on an X-ray. That space narrows in a lot of knees with age, and plenty of them never hurt.

So the picture can’t tell you how far you’ll be walking next year. What you do about your knee decides that.

Next time you hear it, ask the follow-up most people skip: what can I do about it this week? If the only answers are a shot or surgery, you haven’t heard the whole plan.

If you’ve been told you’re bone on bone, comment KNEEOA (one word, no spaces) and I’ll send you my free guide to the best practices for knee arthritis 👇 taken in Vestavia Hills, Alabama by @allenengle.pt

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4 days ago

Knee arthritis is not the end of the road. Here’s what actually matters:

1. Arthritis is not your knee wearing out from use. It’s a whole-joint condition involving cartilage, bone, the joint lining, and the muscles around it. “Wear and tear” makes it sound like you spent your knee, and that phrase has talked more people out of moving than almost anything else in my clinic.

2. How bad it looks on the X-ray and how bad it feels have a loose relationship at best. Severe imaging with minimal pain is common, and so is the opposite. A diagnosis on a report doesn’t tell you what your next ten years look like.

3. Most people improve with conservative care. Exercise is first-line treatment in every major guideline, ahead of injections and ahead of surgery, and stronger quads reliably mean less pain and better function even when the imaging never changes.

4. If your symptoms are severe and conservative care has genuinely been given a real shot, a replacement is a good option and there’s no shame in it. The honest version is this: it’s a decision you make when quality of life demands it, not the moment someone says the word arthritis.

5. There’s real value in pushing that decision down the road when you can. Implants don’t last forever, and a second surgery is a harder road than the first. Every year you buy with strength is a year you don’t spend on a replacement clock.

Free evidence-based knee program built around cartilage and joint health. Link in bio 🔗 taken in Vestavia Hills, Alabama by @allenengle.pt

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a month ago

74% of people still report something two and a half years after an ankle sprain: pain, swelling, weakness, or just not trusting the ankle. Not because the tissue didn’t heal. It did. What doesn’t come back on its own is position sense, so the “you’re rolling” signal gets to your brain late and you’re already on the ground.

Test it tonight, both sides. Single leg balance with your eyes closed for 30 seconds. Then single leg heel raises to fatigue. Most people are five or more short on the bad side and have never checked.

Then train it. Five minutes of balance work daily, progressing from eyes open to eyes closed to a couch cushion. Calf and outside-ankle strength three days a week. Then hopping before you go back to whatever rolled it.

Eight weeks of home balance work after a sprain dropped the one year re-sprain rate from 33% to 22% (Hupperets, BMJ 2009). No equipment, no clinic.

Save this if you’re actually going to run the test tonight. Free physical therapy programs are in my bio, sorted by body part. taken in Vestavia Hills, Alabama by @allenengle.pt

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10 days ago

When your back pain stalls out- general advice only gets your back so far.

The last stretch is usually specific to you. Stiff hips, glutes that aren’t pulling their weight, hours in the same chair. None of that shows up on a scan, and it’s hard to spot on yourself.

Sometimes your physician has a role too, calming things down enough that you can actually start moving.

So if you’ve been doing the right general things and you’ve stalled, that’s usually the sign it’s time for someone to watch you move.

For the parts you can do on your own, comment LUMBAR and I’ll send you my free low back guide 👇 taken in Vestavia Hills, Alabama by @allenengle.pt

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15 days ago

Your posture didn’t make those muscles weak:

1. The story is that sitting hunched stretched them out and left them weak, and that isn’t how muscle works. Muscles don’t become weak from spending time in a lengthened position. They become weak from not being asked to produce force, which is a different problem with a different solution.

2. They’re usually not weak in the way people assume. They’re under-endured. Those muscles are being asked to hold your shoulder blades in position for hours at a time, and endurance is the quality that runs out, not raw strength.

3. Tired and tight feel identical. A muscle working a sixteen hour shift aches and feels tense by the afternoon, and it gets interpreted as a muscle that’s been stretched out and gone slack. Same sensation, opposite explanation, and only one of them points you somewhere useful.

4. Pulling your shoulders back all day makes it worse. Holding a corrected position is active muscular work piled on top of muscles that were already fatigued. People are told to do this as a fix and it frequently creates more of what they were trying to escape.

5. Load them and let them get strong. Rowing with real weight, progressed over weeks, plus mid-back mobility where it’s limited. Six to eight weeks changes how your afternoons feel. Those muscles never needed better posture. They needed something to push against.

Free evidence-based program for postural and load-related mid-back pain. Link in bio 🔗 taken in Vestavia Hills, Alabama by @allenengle.pt

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13 days ago

You don’t have to play tennis to have tennis elbow 👇

Two changes that cost nothing: grip palm up with your elbow bent when you can, and make everything you hold fatter. Then keep using the arm. Resting it for weeks doesn’t make the tendon stronger, it just lowers the bar for what hurts.

Then load it on purpose. Isometric wrist extension holds to start, then slow loaded wrist extension three days a week, plus grip and shoulder work. 8 to 12 weeks before you judge it.

On the cortisone question: 96% were recovered or much improved at a year without a shot, 83% with one, and it came back for 54% of the injection group versus 12% (Coombes, JAMA 2013). Six good weeks, then you pay for them.

Free physical therapy programs are in my bio, sorted by body part. taken in Vestavia Hills, Alabama by @allenengle.pt

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12 days ago

Pain down your leg doesn’t automatically mean a pinched nerve.

It’s one of the most common assumptions, and it makes sense. Anything that travels down a leg feels like it has to be a nerve.

But a lot of the time it’s referred pain from structures in the low back, with no nerve compressed at all. And what helps depends on which one you’ve actually got.

So pay attention to the pattern. What makes it travel further, and what pulls it back toward your back. That tells you a lot.

Comment LUMBAR and I’ll send you my free low back guide to help you get started 👇 taken in Vestavia Hills, Alabama by @allenengle.pt

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18 days ago

5 things I wish you knew about biceps tendon pain:

1. That deep ache at the front of your shoulder is often the biceps tendon, not your rotator cuff. The long head runs up through a groove at the top of your arm bone and into the joint itself, which is why it hurts in a spot people usually point at with one finger. It’s specific, it’s tender to press on, and it’s frequently missed.

2. It flares with the things that load it directly. Curls, front raises, pressing, reaching overhead, and anything that means holding weight out in front of you. If your pain shows up with those and not with reaching behind your back, that pattern is telling you something.

3. It rarely acts alone. The biceps tendon sits right next to the rotator cuff and shares the same tight space, so irritation in one usually means the other is involved. That’s the reason treating just the sore spot tends to fail. The tendon is the loudest part of a bigger picture.

4. Tendons don’t respond to rest the way people expect. They remodel in response to load, so calming it down and then doing nothing gives you a tendon that feels better right up until you ask it for something. Isometric holds early, then progressive loading, is what actually changes the tissue.

5. This gets better, and it’s usually faster than people fear. The catch is that the front of the shoulder is often overloaded because the back of it isn’t contributing, so rotator cuff and shoulder blade strength matter as much as anything you do for the tendon itself. If a pop was followed by a bulge in your upper arm, get that looked at. Otherwise you’re dealing with an irritated tendon and a strength gap, and both of those are workable.

Free evidence-based program for anterior shoulder overload. Link in bio 🔗 taken in Vestavia Hills, Alabama by @allenengle.pt

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a month ago

Your hip bursitis is probably not bursitis 👇

The usual culprit is the gluteal tendons where they attach to that bony point, not an inflamed bursa (which is why the injection keeps wearing off). Tendon problem, different plan.

Two things to change tonight that cost nothing: pillow between your knees when you sleep, and keep the top leg supported if you’re on the good side. Then stop parking your weight on one hip when you stand. Those positions squeeze the tendon against the bone and you’re in them for hours a day without realizing it.

Then it’s loading. Abduction isometrics to start, 30 to 45 seconds, progressing to single leg work over months (education plus exercise beat the injection 79% to 58% at one year in the research).

Free physical therapy programs are in my bio, sorted by body part. taken in Vestavia Hills, Alabama by @allenengle.pt

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14 days ago

Trying conservative care first costs you nothing.

That’s the fear underneath wanting to see a back surgeon first. That waiting will make things worse, or make surgery harder later. It doesn’t.

But it does have to be a real attempt. Not a few days of stretching and then giving up. Consistent rehab that progresses over weeks.

And if it genuinely doesn’t work, surgery is still right there. You haven’t lost anything by trying.

If you want to give conservative care a real try, comment LUMBAR and I’ll send you my free low back guide 👇 taken in Vestavia Hills, Alabama by @allenengle.pt

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17 days ago