What to expect in a Physiotherapy session
05.10.2025 Dheep Kalsi
Preparing for physiotherapy sessions for your dogs and cats is usually quite different from preparing for a physiotherapy session for yourself! Our blog this week explores how to prepare for a physiotherapy session and what to expect on the day to help you feel more prepared for your pets upcoming appointment.
The first session usually involves a series of questions to get a background about your pet and what the issue / injury being treated is. We always request a full medical history from your vets but it’s great to hear from you as to what has happened, why you need us and if there have been any vet visits since we have been sent the history so that we get the full picture.
The questions are super easy so you don’t have to study for them! But we usually do ask if your pet has any allergies or is on medication so knowing this information is a good way to prepare for this portion of the session. In follow up appointments we will ask less, questions will be more around if there have been any changes since the last session so keep a note of any vet visits, treatment plan changes from them or changes you have noticed with your animal yourself.
Next we conduct an assessment of your animal. This involves watching how they walk, move, sit, stand, lie and turn around in circles. We do this before touching your animal so that we can have an idea as to where the sore spots may be and look at how they are affecting your animals movement. Once we complete our visual assessment, we move on to where we palpate the joints and muscles in your animals body to assess for any issues. Some pets take to this really well loving the fuss but some pets can be a bit wary of a stranger coming into their safe space and poking their sore spots! We usually recommend if your pet is a little bit more worried, to let us know beforehand as we can tailor our physical exam to their needs. We do not have to be hands on, it helps our assessment if we can be, but we have treated many a pet without touching them. Treats and rewards are also great to use to help reinforce that the touch is a positive experience rather than a negative one so bringing something they like really helps.
Once we have gotten familiarised with your pet and them with us, we will discuss with you what we have found and how we plan to treat this. The order can vary depending on how comfortable your animal is with us but we usually start with electrotherapies, before moving onto massage and finally exercises!
Electrotherapies can include red light therapy such as LASER, or other therapies such as pulsed magnetic field therapy, NMES/TENS. Our massage techniques vary depending on what your pet needs but we have a range of techniques to choose from! Like all of our treatment, our exercises are tailored to what your animal needs – now this means that they have usually had a pretty hard gym session and are fairly tired by the end of their hard work. We always recommend to let them rest after a physio session to make sure that they have time to recover. You can still take them out on a short walk the same day but you do not need to repeat their exercises at home. We will also give you lots of information on what you can do at home in between sessions for example using heat to ease with soreness or raising their food bowl to help with muscle engagement.
Planning for physiotherapy sessions aren’t too hard – on the whole you’ll need a nice space (whether this be in your house or in clinic), a comfy place for them to lie down and most importantly tasty, high value treats!