Pacing is probably the active ingredient in rehab exercise

The pacing of therapeutic exercise for an injury may be more of an active ingredient than any specific exercise. A methodical rehabilitative exercise program is a fine way to facilitate the load management that many people neglect — just fewer and tamer spikes.

But it’s the exercise that tends to get the credit! That is, people often assume that exercise works due to biomechanically “corrective” properties, e.g. “I worked hard to get my glutes activating properly, and that’s why my knee pain finally improved.”

But it’s much more likely that it was just the measured, structured leg activity keeping things in the Goldilocks zone for a while.

Citation needed? Certainly! But there is none. This idea is speculative by necessity, but it is informed by a whole bunch of science, and all the evidence pointing away from structuralism as a theme in injury and pain treatment, and away from the clinical validity of corrective exercise. And yet therapeutic exercise does often seem helpful, and this might well be why.