When we talk about clinical physiotherapy and about feeling good again in your daily life, we usually think of the treatment table, massages, dry needling, exercises… but we rarely look at what’s happening outside the session: how you eat, how much you sleep, how much water you drink, how much real energy your body has to repair itself.
And even if it’s not always said out loud, all of that has a huge impact on how you respond to treatment and how long your improvement lasts.
If you’ve got this far, this is probably not your first experience with pain. Maybe you have a back that complains every few days, a shoulder that never quite feels right, knees that protest when you go up the stairs, or a tendinopathy that shows up every time you try to get back into exercise.
You go to the clinic, you get better, but after a while you notice your body sending the same signals again. And that’s when the question appears: “Am I doing something wrong?”
The goal of this guide is not to put more pressure on you, or to talk about impossible diets, or turn you into a nutrition expert.
What we want is to show you, in simple words, how small changes in what you eat, drink and how you rest can help clinical physiotherapy work better, help you tolerate your exercises better and, above all, reduce the chances of going back, again and again, to the same pain.
Beyond the treatment table: what we mean by clinical physiotherapy today
For many years, the typical image of physiotherapy has been “I go in, they do something to me, and I leave”. However, when we talk about modern clinical physiotherapy, we mean something broader: understanding why it hurts, how your body moves, what load it carries each day… and also in what context that body is living.
Because it’s not the same to treat someone who sleeps well, eats reasonably and has some room to rest, as it is to treat someone who lives on coffee, quick bites and broken nights.
At Fisio Physio Clinic Salinas we work with three pillars that always go together:
manual therapy (what we do with our hands), therapeutic exercise (what you do with your body) and education in habits (what happens in all the hours when you’re not at the clinic).
Within those habits, without creating “diets” or replacing the work of a nutritionist when one is needed, we can guide you in basic decisions that directly influence your recovery.
The reality is simple: if your body shows up empty of fuel and without repair materials, clinical physiotherapy has to work against the current.
If, on the other hand, you give your body a basic context of energy, nutrients, water and rest, the very same treatment usually goes further, and you notice that you leave the session with more capacity to move forward.
Your body needs materials and energy to repair itself
Let’s really simplify this: every time you do a therapeutic exercise, move in a different way or start working on strength or mobility, your body has to adapt.
That means repairing fibres, reorganising tissue, modulating inflammation and learning new movement patterns. None of that happens “by magic” or just because someone has touched or stretched you: you need energy and you need raw material.
When you eat on the run, grabbing whatever is around, with lots of ultra-processed food and very little protein, your body does what it can, but it shows: it’s harder to stay consistent with your exercises, you get tired sooner, the next day you feel wiped out and any overload takes longer to calm down.
The same happens when you sleep badly and too little: your nervous system is more sensitive, your perception of pain goes up and recovery becomes slower.
This is not about eating perfectly or always sleeping eight hours like in a hotel. It’s about understanding that your body is not a machine that gets fixed just with one clinical physiotherapy session.
What you do in all the other thousands of minutes in the week also matters. And the good news is that you don’t need to turn your life upside down to start noticing changes.
Protein, fats and carbohydrates: organising your plate without “being on a diet”
This is where many people freeze. They start hearing about “macronutrients”, percentages, charts… and they switch off. Let’s make it much simpler. You don’t need a spreadsheet; you need clear ideas you can actually use in your real week.
Protein as your daily repair material
Think of protein as the building material for your muscles and tissues. Every time you do strength work in a session, or you do exercises for that shoulder, knee or back, you’re asking your body to reorganise. If it doesn’t have enough material, it can still do it, but at a slower and poorer pace.
Easy protein sources that usually fit well into a busy life can be, for example: skyr or Greek-style yoghurt, eggs, legumes (chickpeas, lentils, beans), chicken or turkey, tinned tuna or mackerel, cottage cheese or fresh cheese, tofu or plant-based options if you don’t eat animal products.
It’s not about eating “only that”, but about making sure that in most of your meals there is “something with protein” that reminds your body it has resources to repair.
When we work with you in clinical physiotherapy and we see that your body responds better to exercise, very often, among other things, there is a little more attention to this kind of detail in the background.
Healthy fats: small decisions that add up
Fats have a terrible reputation, but in reality they’re essential. The key is not “fats yes or fats no”, but where they come from.
It’s very different if your fats come mostly from fried foods, pastries and processed products, or if you more often include extra virgin olive oil, natural or lightly roasted nuts, avocado, seeds or oily fish.
You don’t need to start weighing almonds. It’s enough to make small changes: dress your food with good oil, add a handful of nuts mid-morning, swap some of the cured meats for fish or for less processed options.
These details, over time, help your body manage inflammation better and feel less “loaded”.
Quality carbohydrates: adapting your fuel to your day
Carbohydrates are the body’s quick fuel. The problem is usually not the carbohydrate itself, but the combination of “a lot, very refined and with no brake”.
It can be more helpful if most of your carbohydrates come from foods like potatoes, rice, wholegrain pasta and bread, oats, fruit, legumes… and if you adjust the portion a little depending on the kind of day you’re having.
A day when you barely move, full of sitting in meetings, probably doesn’t need the same portion as a day when you have a clinical physiotherapy session, you train and you spend many hours on your feet.
You don’t need to count anything: just look for a plate that includes some vegetables, a source of protein, some healthy fat and the carbohydrate you need depending on your activity. With that simple idea, you’re already way ahead of “whatever I grab from the vending machine”.
Hydration and sleep: two “treatments” that don’t come in a pill
Many patients arrive at the clinic feeling “rusty”, heavy, with headaches or recurring cramps, and when we start talking about water and sleep, they stop and think. It’s not a coincidence.
Mild but constant dehydration is not going to tear a muscle, but it can increase your feeling of fatigue, favour muscle discomfort and worsen how you perceive pain.
Sometimes, things as simple as keeping a bottle of water near you during the day, remembering to take small sips and not letting hours go by without drinking make a noticeable difference in how you handle the rest of the day… and your clinical physiotherapy session.
Sleep works in a similar way. We know there are stages in life (young children, shift work, stressful periods) where sleeping “perfectly” is pure fiction.
But within that reality, there’s usually room for small improvements: trying to keep a roughly stable schedule, avoiding screens right before bed, creating a small routine that tells your body “it’s time to slow down now”.
When you sleep a bit better, your nervous system is less irritable, your body repairs tissue more efficiently and the exercises we do together are easier to tolerate.
Realistic ideas for people with very little time
All of this sounds great, but you’re probably thinking: “Okay… and how am I supposed to do this with my lifestyle?”. This is where we come down from theory to real kitchens and real diaries.
Imagine, for example, that you start with just two very simple tweaks in your week:
That breakfast always includes some protein (a yoghurt with some fruit and a handful of nuts, an omelette, a small sandwich with fresh cheese and tomato).
And that you always carry something “half decent” in your bag or in the car for when you get hungry: a handful of nuts, a piece of fruit, a small, better-built sandwich than what you’d grab from a machine.
It’s not perfect, but it’s much better than getting home starving and clearing out the cupboards in one go.
If you eat out, maybe you can keep your usual kind of plate but change small things: ask for wholegrain rice or pasta when possible, add a portion of vegetables, choose a slightly better protein source and leave fried food as something more occasional.
We’re not talking about a radical transformation here, but about turning the steering wheel a few degrees in the direction of “I’m going to recover better”.
When we work with you at Fisio Physio Clinic Salinas, we often don’t start by talking about a “nutrition plan”, but about this: two or three concrete decisions we can review at the next session and see how they felt for you.
Recover better today to relapse less tomorrow
One of the key points we usually explain in clinical physiotherapy is the idea of preventing relapses. The goal is not just for you to hurt less today, but for your body to change enough on the inside so you’re not back at the same point every few months.
If, on the one hand, we work on strength, mobility and motor control with well-planned exercises, and on the other hand your body has the energy and nutrients it needs, the chances of those changes becoming more permanent go up.
It’s not magic: a tendon that is trained and fed a little better usually tolerates more load over time. A back that does strength work, that moves and that doesn’t live permanently in a mix of stress, lack of sleep and poor food tends to complain less.
That doesn’t mean that “eating well cures everything” or that if you improve your habits you’ll never feel pain again. It means that you’re giving your clinical physiotherapy treatment a much more favourable context, and you step out of that loop of: I get injured, I improve a bit, I go back to how I was, I relapse, I get frustrated.
Every small gesture in favour of your recovery is another token that falls on your side of the scale.
How we integrate these habits into clinical physiotherapy at Fisio Physio Clinic Salinas
All of this makes sense when it becomes something concrete for you. At Fisio Physio Clinic Salinas we don’t expect you to arrive with everything sorted; on the contrary, part of our job is to help you put the pieces in order.
In the first assessment, we don’t just look at where it hurts and what scans you have, but also at what a normal day in your life looks like:
- What time you get up.
- How many hours you spend sitting or standing.
- How you usually eat.
- How you’re sleeping.
- How much energy you say you have at the end of the day.
With all of that, clinical physiotherapy stops being something isolated and becomes part of a strategy adapted to your reality.
During the sessions, we gradually introduce recommendations that make sense for you.
We’re not going to ask someone who always eats out to weigh their food, just as we can’t give the same sleep advice to someone on rotating shifts as to someone with a fixed office schedule.
Our goal is to find that point where the exercises we prescribe, the manual therapy we do and these small habit changes all point in the same direction.
In follow-up sessions, we don’t just ask “Does it hurt less?”, but also:
- “How are you feeling in terms of energy?”
- “Have you been able to put into practice what we talked about with food or rest?”
- “What has been easy and what hasn’t?”
By adjusting these details, clinical physiotherapy becomes something measurable, progressive and much more effective.
Would you like your recovery to be more than just “coming in to be fixed”?
If you’ve been feeling for a while that you always end up in the same place, it might be time to approach your case in a more complete way.
This is not about changing your life overnight or becoming a perfect example of healthy habits. It’s about giving your body, step by step, a bit more margin to respond to what we ask of it in the clinic.
At Fisio Physio Clinic Salinas we can assess with you what’s going on in terms of movement, strength and tissue, and at the same time look at which small adjustments in your day-to-day life might make a real difference to your recovery.
By combining manual therapy, therapeutic exercise and education in habits, it’s much easier to design a measurable plan that fits your real life, not some ideal life that nobody has.
If you recognise yourself in these lines, if you feel that your body never quite recovers or that your aches and pains have become part of the landscape, it might be a good moment for us to talk.
A good assessment is often the first step for clinical physiotherapy to stop being “something you do when you can’t cope anymore” and become a real tool to look after your body every day.