Video: Leg & lower limb strengthening (Part 3)

﻿Hello there. My name is Sophie Brazier. I'm a children's physiotherapist. Thank you for joining me today for our lesson. So we are on unit three and this is lesson 13, and we are looking at strengthening your limbs and today we will continue looking at your lower limb strength and I will give you a recap of strength. We'll have a look at why it is important. And then we will look at an activity in some detail and you can have a go at the activity. So the activity today will be marching on the spot. So you might have tried this activity before, or know what I'm talking about, but what I'll do is I'll give you an idea of the activity to try, and then there'll be some options for you to extend or to simplify the activity. So hopefully there'll be options there for everybody. You don't need any equipment for this activity today, but you may need some help from a parent or carer. So if you'd like to get yourself ready, then we can make a start. I would just like to give you a little message from our team. We as therapists have tried to think of the best way to continue to support children, young people and their families. So you may be watching this as a child by yourself, or you might be with a parent or carer. We will be exploring topic areas that we regularly provide advice and support on across all ages and abilities. And each lesson we will aim to give you some ideas and activities that can be carried out either at home or in school. You may already have specific programmes that you're using or advice that has been given to you by your child's school or therapist. So please make sure that you're using any information I'm giving you alongside anything you already have. And if you do have any questions or would like help tailoring this to their needs, then please make sure you get in contact with your local therapy service. So before we look at the activity, I think it's good to go over what muscle strength is. So your muscle strength is how strong you are. It's needed for gross motor skills, and it's also needed for those more dynamic gross motor skills while you're moving and it's good for keeping you healthy. So let's look at that again. How strong you are, remember that your muscles work in pairs and there are different types of muscle contractions, and also the amount of force you can produce in one contraction is your muscle strength and something called muscle endurance is how many times you can keep repeating those contractions. So that also links in with your stamina, which we will be looking at in unit six. So needed for gross motor skills. So these things are things like getting in and out of bed, balancing to put your clothes and shoes on, on and off a chair. So standing up and sitting down, and maybe when you're in a more static position standing to brush your teeth. And then if you think about skills where you're moving a little bit more and you're changing your position, so your muscles have got to work in a slightly different way. These are things like going up and down stairs, walking around in different environments, so home and school, and so things like running and jumping and the last point may, good for keeping you healthy. So remember about reducing the risk of injury. If you've got those good, strong muscles around the joint, then that will keep your joint nice and stable. And why is your muscle strength important? So your muscles control your ability to do everyday activities. So things like standing, walking, climbing and descending, so this might be going up and down stairs or maybe up and down a hill, balancing and moving through different standing sitting and floor positions and having a strong lower body can improve your flexibility, mobility range of movement and balance. So remember if you've got muscle strength, it doesn't mean that all those things are going to be perfect, but you're having good muscle strength can contribute to those things and can improve all those things. And it also keeps you healthy and reduces the chance of injuring yourself. Because if you've got those strong muscles around the joint, then you're keeping those joints stable, so your risk of injury will be lower. So the activity I'd like you to do now is marching on the spot. So this activity starts to bring in a little bit of balance and coordination, and we will be looking at that topic in unit five. So I'd like you to stand with your feet directly below your hip, so you're stable and balanced. I'd like you to lift up one knee and then down and then follow it with the other slowly. So do this in a controlled way so you're beginning to march. Try this for about 30 seconds to start with, and then repeat. An idea is that you could try it to some music, to help keep your rhythm. It's up to you. So now I'll demonstrate the activity and talk you through it. Then if you pause the video, you can have a go yourself, and then if you restart, I'll go through some ways of how to simplify or extend the activity. So you can see I've got my feet a good distance apart, and I'm starting to lift one leg up and down and followed by the other. So I start off and at rhythmical marching pattern, and here I'm turning to the side so you can see what I'm doing from a slightly different angle and then keeping my arms rested down by my side to begin with, so, just as you start getting used to the rhythm, then you can swing your arms. So what I'm doing here is when I lift one leg, I'm swinging my opposite arm. So it becomes almost like a little pattern and then you can start moving while you're marching, so here you're bringing a little bit of dynamic activity to your muscles and I'm walking forwards and I'm also marching backwards. So this might be a way to extend the activity slightly if you feel comfortable, once you've tried marching on the spot. If you'd like a way to simplify the activity, I suggest trying this on a chair. So here I'm doing it on a stool. So you could do it on a similar thing. And I am lifting my knees to start the marching and then here, I'm bringing in some arm movement. So there is an idea of how to simplify the activity and it might be what you need if you find the standing marching a little bit challenging to begin with. So I'm now going to talk you through some ways of how to change the exercise slightly. So to extend it and make it more challenging, you can increase the speed of your marching as he saw me doing in the video there, but make sure you do this once you've got the technique of marching just slowly on the spot first, then as you saw, you can adding your arms and more whole body involvement. So here you can coordinate your arms in a rhythmical pattern like I was doing in the video, you could also lift your knees higher. So perhaps start off with smaller knee lifts and then increase the lifts to get a bigger marching pattern. So this last suggestion here really is only if you've managed the other ones and been doing it for a while. You could perhaps add in some small ankle weights and I would start off slowly with about 500 grammes to begin with. So this idea is to just continue to build up some strength in your lower limbs by increasing the resistance, but only by small amount to begin with. But if you have any worries or concerns, please make sure that you ask your physiotherapist before you start doing this. To simplify the activity, you can decrease the speed. So keep the speed really low, like you started off with and try doing the exercise for a shorter amount of time, so maybe try for 30 seconds to begin with, have a rest, try marching again for 30 seconds and have a rest and maybe choose an amount of time, say a few days and you can build that up and try the knee lifts in a seated position as I showed there. So if you wanted to try this activity and you perhaps need a bit of support and you're finding standing difficult, you could do it in some of your seating or on a chair or on a stool. So give all those ideas a try, pause the video, have a go, and then join me afterwards. How did he get on with the marching activity? I hope you were able to use the extent or simplify options if you needed them. So we have now reached the end of our lesson. So thanks for joining me. And I hope you found that was useful and you've got some good ideas and activities to try. Please join me next time where it will be our last lesson in the unit. So we will be on unit three, lesson 14 and what we will be doing is we will have a summary of the whole unit and we will look a little bit more at another lower limb strengthening exercise and we will do some sets of stands. So then you will have some ideas of lots of exercises to try and you can find ones that best suit you. So have a great rest of your day. I look forward to seeing you again soon and please take care. Goodbye.

Lesson summary: Leg & lower limb strengthening (Part 3)

In this lesson we will be recapping lower body strength and why it is important, with a third activity for lower body & leg strengthening.

Leg & lower limb strengthening (Part 3)

Video

Lesson summary: Leg & lower limb strengthening (Part 3)

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