You finished physical therapy for a shoulder, a knee or a back. You feel good. Now you want to train properly, and the trainer at the big box gym hands you a clipboard with a box marked “injuries” and a pen. That box is where most of what your therapist learned about you goes to disappear.
Personal training with a therapist who knows your injury history works differently. The person writing your program has already seen how your joint moves, where it complains, and how far it came. This post explains what that looks like in practice, using the story Newsmax anchor Shannon Cake told on our Pain 2 Power radio show about rehabbing a torn rotator cuff with us and training on Dave’s program along the way.
By The First Rehabilitation Team · Reviewed by Dr. Dave Kashuba, Ph.D.
What personal training with a therapist who knows your injury history means
Our wellness program sits inside the clinic at 733 US Highway 1 in North Palm Beach. It runs one-on-one personal training, post-rehab exercise, small group classes, senior functional fitness and sports performance work. The service page describes the personal training simply: one-on-one sessions designed around your goals, your history, and any conditions we have treated together.
That last clause is the whole point. If you did your physical, occupational or hand therapy with us, the team already has the chart. They know which side was injured, whether there was a surgery, what your range of motion looked like on day one and on your last visit, and which exercises flared it up. Nobody has to reconstruct that from a form you filled in at a front counter.
It also changes who you are talking to. A general fitness trainer may be excellent at programming, but a rotator cuff that was torn eight months ago is a medical history, and reading it well is a clinical skill. Dr. Dave Kashuba, Ph.D., OTR, who founded the clinic in 1991, has spent his career on exactly that overlap.
Why this is different from a referral to a gym
Plenty of clinics finish your plan of care, hand you a printout and wish you well. That printout matters, and every patient here leaves with a written home exercise program. The difference with training in the same building is continuity. If your shoulder starts talking back on a Thursday, the people who treated it are down the hall, not across town at another practice that has never seen you.
From rotator cuff rehab to a 25 minute workout: one patient’s path
Shannon Cake hosts News Now on Newsmax 2 and spent decades as an investigative reporter in West Palm Beach. On Episode 19 of Pain 2 Power she described how she ended up in our clinic. “I had torn my rotator cuff and was there as a patient,” she said. “Dave was great and pushed me in all the right ways. He and his team both.”
While she was rehabbing, the team also put her through a full workout, the program she knew as the Captain Kerry workout after another longtime patient, Captain Kerry Titheradge of Bravo’s Below Deck. She liked it enough to report on it for television. She was no stranger to exercise either. She taught aerobics in college to help pay the bills and had done one set intensity training back when she had more time for gyms.
Her summary of what made it work was practical. “You can do this in about 25 minutes with consistency if you do it the way you’ve laid out,” she said. “Just go in and be really focused and concerted and move quickly, even between your sets.”
Whose workout is it, anyway
Dave wanted one thing clear on air. The program carries Captain Kerry’s name in some circles, but it is Dave’s. “I studied this for 35 years, putting together a program,” he said, built on neuromuscular work and on what exercise does for pain. Captain Kerry does Dave’s workout. Mike McGann, his co-host, compared the mix-up to Hydrox and Oreo.
The joke has a serious point under it. A program built by someone who has spent decades treating injuries is designed with the injured joint in mind from the start, rather than having safety bolted on afterwards.
Why your injury history changes the program
Two people can walk into the same gym wanting the same thing, a stronger upper body, and need completely different programs. One had a rotator cuff tear. The other had nothing wrong at all. If they both start with heavy overhead pressing, only one of them is going to have a good month.
Knowing the history lets a therapist trained in rehab make specific calls. Which lifts to delay. Which to swap for a cable or band version. How fast to add load. Which soreness is normal training soreness and which looks like the old problem coming back. That last judgment is the one a clipboard can’t make.
Age adds to it. Shannon made the point herself on the show: strength work is probably more important for someone her age, and it is the part she has to squeeze into the nooks and crannies of the day. Our guide to strength training after 60 goes into why that matters for balance and falls.
Questions to ask before you start training after an injury
Whoever you train with, these are fair questions to put to them in the first session:
- Have you read my therapy notes, or are you working from what I tell you today?
- Which movements are off the table for now, and what will I do instead?
- How will we decide when to add weight to the injured side?
- What kind of pain means stop, and who do I call if it happens?
- If something flares up, can I be re-evaluated without starting over somewhere new?
If the answers are vague, that tells you something. Inside our clinic, the last question answers itself, because the therapists who can re-evaluate you work in the same building.
Fitting strength into a schedule that starts at 4:30 AM
Most people who stop training after rehab don’t stop because of the shoulder. They stop because life fills the space. Shannon’s day starts at about 4:30, her first editorial meeting is at 5:30, and she is on the air by 9. So she does the work first. “If you’re gonna get your workout in, do it first thing in the morning,” she said, because “it’s the hour of the day that gets least interrupted.”
Her version is 30 minutes on a bike, a couple of glasses of water, and strength fitted in wherever it goes. Some days she grabs one of her two teenage boys and they lift together. Some days it is 20 or 30 push-ups and some sit-ups. She was frank that it is not always tidy: sometimes it gets interrupted and sometimes it doesn’t happen at all.
Short sessions, done consistently
That frankness is useful. A 25 minute session you actually do beats an hour-long plan you abandon in March. Mike put it bluntly on the same episode: “It’s not a matter of not having enough time. It’s a matter of what’s a priority.” His examples were doom scrolling and unboxing videos. Most of us could find 25 minutes in that pile.
A good trainer who knows your history builds the program around the time you really have, not the time you wish you had. Short, focused sessions with little rest between sets are what Shannon liked about Dave’s format. They are easy to fit in, and that is what keeps people coming back.
Post rehab exercise that picks up where therapy left off
Here is how the wellness program describes its pieces. None of it replaces a plan of care while you still need skilled therapy.
| Part of the program | How the service page describes it |
|---|---|
| Personal training | One-on-one sessions designed around your goals, history, and conditions we have treated together |
| Post-rehab exercise | Structured programs that bridge therapy and independence |
| Sports performance | Strength, mobility and conditioning for active adults and athletes |
| Group fitness classes | Small, supportive classes that make consistency enjoyable |
| Senior functional fitness | Balance, strength and mobility focused on independence and fall prevention |
| Lifestyle and injury prevention | Long-term management and movement coaching |
Your own plan comes out of a conversation with the team, and if you are still mid-treatment, your therapist decides when you are ready to cross over.
We wrote separately about your gym program after physical therapy ends, including the band program Dave sends home with patients. This post is about the step after that, when you want a person in the room.
Training in North Palm Beach, a short drive from Juno Beach and Palm Beach Gardens
The clinic is on US-1 in North Palm Beach, close to Juno Beach, Palm Beach Gardens, Lake Park and Jupiter. A lot of the people who train with us did their therapy here first, and the convenience of staying put is a big part of why they keep going. The same parking lot, the same front desk, and a team that remembers you. Dave, as Shannon put it, knows your kids’ names.
It also helps with what we see most often after discharge. Patients coming off post-surgical rehabilitation are the ones most at risk of losing range of motion in the months that follow. Patients with a history of shoulder pain, like Shannon, need overhead work brought back in carefully rather than all at once.
What this doesn’t replace
A training session isn’t an evaluation. If something new starts hurting, swells, wakes you up at night, or simply won’t settle, stop training it and get it looked at. In Florida you can usually start a physical therapy evaluation without a referral.
The money side is separate too. The wellness gym does not take insurance and is a different program from Medicare-covered therapy. Our Medicare guide explains where therapy coverage stops. Memberships, prices and schedules are a front desk conversation, and the wellness and gym FAQ covers the common questions. We are not going to guess at numbers here.
If you want to hear Shannon tell the story in her own words, the full episode is on the Pain 2 Power podcast page, and we wrote it up in our recap of her episode.
Start with a conversation
If you finished therapy with us, ask the front desk about personal training the next time you are in. If you did your rehab somewhere else, or you never had any and something is holding you back, an evaluation is the right first step. Either way, call 561-624-4263 or request an evaluation, and we will help you work out what makes sense.
This article is general information, not medical advice. Every situation is different, so please consult a qualified professional about yours.