After a winter in the Floridian sun, you may be preparing to head back to your home state for the spring and summer, or planning your next vacation which is a very exciting time!
However, you’re struggling with chronic pain and you’re worried about how it’s going to impact you while you’re traveling.
Some things that may be crossing your mind when traveling with chronic pain could be how much pain the seats on a flight might cause you or how will sitting for a long period of time affect you.
These are all questions that we come across all the time in our clinic that we answer for patients, so we thought we’d share with you some tips and tricks for traveling with chronic pain to make your journey more comfortable.
How To Make Your Journey More Comfortable Traveling With Chronic Pain
Stay Active On Your Journey
If you’re traveling long distances in a car or on a flight it can be near impossible to move around while you’re traveling.
However, it is vital that you get up from your seat and keep moving while you’re traveling with chronic pain so that you don’t feel as though your joints are seizing up or your buttocks and hips don’t start hurting from being sat for too long.
If you’re traveling in a car, you should aim to plan regular breaks at rest stops along your journey to allow you to get out of the car and walk around to loosen up stiff joints and get your body moving.
If you’re traveling by plane, you could get up and walk up and down the middle aisle every couple of hours when it’s safe to do so.
Bring Cushions Or Padding
When traveling with chronic pain it’s important to make sure you have plenty of padding to make your seat more comfortable.
As we all know, traveling by public transport such as buses, boats or planes can be very uncomfortable with unadjustable and hard seats.
Bringing padding for your hips and buttocks in particular can prevent any pain you may experience and you can also adjust your padding throughout your journey to cushion the areas that hurt.
Correct Sitting Position
As mentioned above, seats can be painful and uncomfortable, but a potential way to prevent chronic pain when traveling is to make sure you’re in the correct seated position.
What we mean by this is your posture. Keeping your shoulders, hips, and neck in line without slouching over or leaning to one side could make the difference between an enjoyable journey or a chronic pain nightmare!
Maintain Low Impact Exercise
Although you may be on vacation, it’s still important to maintain a low level of exercise if you can.
This is more of a preventative step to ensure you’re in the best shape to travel when you need to, it’s especially important to keep your joints flexible, your muscles loose and your body feeling healthy.
The best low-impact exercises you could try are swimming (a huge bonus if the place you’re staying has a pool!) and walking as you can easily tie one of these into your vacation activities.
Are You Travel Ready?
If you’ve read this far, you may be wondering if you’re fully ready to travel with chronic pain, or you may be hesitant to book your next trip because you don’t feel confident.
If this sounds like you, we have the ideal solution to get you ready for your vacation. Right now we’re offering a travel-ready assessment where you can come into the clinic and get a full assessment to give you the all-clear and set your mind at ease!
During your travel-ready assessment, you can also ask one of our expert physical therapists all the questions you have and get the answers you really need to go ahead and book that vacation!
You can arrange your travel-ready assessment by filling in our simple web form, or if you prefer to talk over the telephone you can call us at (941) 226-2605 and we will be happy to arrange your visit!
Other Helpful Links For People Suffering From Chronic Pain…
Alternatively, if you feel you aren’t ready to come into our clinic just yet, here’s some more free information to help you manage your chronic pain at home.
Grab your copy of our free downloadable reports – free neck pain report – free back pain report – free knee pain report
Read our other chronic pain blogs – Headache Remedies: How To Get Long-Term Relief and How To Relieve Stress To Manage Pain
Follow us on social media – Manual Physical Therapy and Conceirge Services Facebook Page or Manual Concierge PT Instagram
Joann Pung
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