Simple distinction most athletes get wrong. PT treats the injury after it happens. Prehab prevents it from happening. Here's how to know which one you actually need.
Simple distinction: physical therapy treats the injury after it happens. Prehab prevents the injury from happening. Both use similar tools — mobility work, corrective exercise, manual therapy. They're deployed at different times, and mixing them up costs athletes months.
If you're currently in pain, currently limited, currently diagnosed with something — book physical therapy. That's a licensed medical specialty. You need the diagnostic work and the insurance-approved treatment path. A trainer isn't a substitute here, no matter how good.
If you're healthy but training hard, worried about the injury coming, or coming off a resolved injury and wanting to make sure it stays resolved — that's prehab. And that's what a good trainer or LMT delivers, ideally the same person who's programming your training so the two conversations stay connected.
The most common mistake I see: athletes finish PT and stop all corrective work. Three months later the same injury comes back because the tissue quality was restored but the movement pattern that caused it wasn't retrained. Prehab is what makes PT stick.
The other mistake: waiting for pain to book anything. Prehab three months before a season stops the injury that would have ended the season. That's not aspirational — it's just how the math works. A ten-minute daily investment is exponentially cheaper than a six-week rehab cycle.
Want this kind of thinking applied to your training?
This is what working with Tey looks like.