Medical Exercise Therapy - a complete active rehabilitation approach from Scandinavia. The ”bread and butter”
in physiotherapy and rehabilitation.
Medical Exercise Therapy (MET) is an active rehabilitation system based on more than 30 years of clinical
experience and research. The MET approach offers the latest in active rehabilitation and teaches
course participants how to apply local and global exercises.
Through active graded exercises, patients can be put directly into an exercise program aimed
at treating pain and decreased motion, increasing endurance and strength, as well as improving
activities of daily living. The system accommodates for treating athletes and ordinary
patients with acute or chronic pain. Emphasis is put on optimal grading to increase the
tolerance for loading and to normalize muscle imbalance and coordination.
Medical Exercise Therapy provides guidelines for how to use active exercises as a
cognitive behavioral approach to change patients´ pain behavior. MET also provides a
better understanding of how to use graded exercises to treat straight forward organic
dysfunctions such as supraspinatus tendinitis, sciatica, hip arthrosis, and patellofemoral pain.
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The Medical Exercise Therapy approach has its own defined criteria. Included in the criteria
is the minimum time that the patient exercises. This time is set at one hour. During this hour
most patients, who are in an early phase of the treatment, are able to do seven to nine different
graded exercises, at three sets of thirty repetitions, up to a total of one thousand repetititions.
The high number of repetitions are aimed at treating the pain experience and to increase range of motion.
The MET criteria also states that the physiotherapist must be present in the exercise
room to supervise, support and motivate the patient and to regrade the exercises according to the
patient´s symptoms, needs and expectations.
MET can also be conducted as a group therapy where up to five patients are exercising together in a group
setting. However, each patient may have different diagnoses and therefore an individually
designed exercise program for his/her movement dysfunction. The assessment of the patient is the
basis for choosing and grading relevant exercises.
Oddvar Holten, a Norwegian physiotherapist and manipulative therapist, developed MET during the
early 1960s. From the early 1990s, Tom Arild Torstensen, who is also a physiotherapist and
manipulative therapist, took over the Holten Institute in Oslo and has further developed the
MET concept. Medical Exercise Therapy is today a household name in all Scandinavian countries,
most other European countries and North America.
At Naas Physiotherapy Clinic our Rehabilitation Gym provides the perfect setting for Medical Exercise Therapy