Strengthening your core in standing (Part 1)

Physical therapy

﻿Hi there, my name is Sophie Brazier. I'm a children's physiotherapist. Thank you for joining me today. We are on unit two of core strengthening, and today, we are going to be looking in lesson 10 at core strengthening in a standing position. To begin with, we'll have a little recap of what is core strength and then we'll finish with an activity that will look at core strength in a standing position. And the activity we're going to look at today is called a pine tree. So you don't need any equipment for this activity, you just need yourself, and if you're doing it on the floor, you might need a mat. If you'd like help from a parent or carer, perhaps you'd like to ask them now. So if you'd like to get ready, we can then 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 will we 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. I'm going to start today's lesson with recapping on why is your core strength important? So remember that coordination of your core muscles is needed with just enough contraction at exactly the right time and in the right sequence. So for this complicated process to happen, well the core strength needs to be there in the first place. And you need core strength because it needs to be activated to make sure that your head and trunk are steady, and so you can move in a better way and more freely. And today's activity we will look at will really concentrate on this because we're going to be looking at a pine tree activity, and also I'll show you some breathing exercises to do. So let's recap on this flow chart. So if you have a strong and stable core, it can help prevent injury. A strong and stable core can help protect your body. So your whole body, but in particular, the area around your trunk, so it can protect your spine. So if you have a good, strong core, it can also help your posture. And remember that posture and core go together. So if you've got a good, strong core, that can help with your posture. And if you've good, strong posture habits, that can also help with your core. And having those things working well can help reduce and also prevent back pain. Okay, let's try an activity now. So this is an exercise in standing and it's called a pine tree. You might have tried this before and it can be a nice calming activity as well because we'll work a little bit on your breathing. So what i want you to do is in standing, I want you to have your feet close together but make sure that you're balanced, and they should be pointing forwards. I want you to bring the palms of your hands together in front of you and bend your knees. Then you're going to take a deep breath in as you raise your arms above you head, keeping steady with your knees bent. And then let your breath out, and you need to grow tall, straightening your legs, keeping your palms together stretched above your head. And I'd like you to hold the position. So I'll now demonstrate in a video and I'll talk you through in more detail how to do this exercise. And then after that, I'll show you some ways that you can make it easier or perhaps challenge yourself a little bit. So when you've watched me demonstrate, if you pause the video and then restart afterwards, you can join back in. So here is my starting position. I put my palms together, I get ready, I bend my knees, and then I'm now going to take my hands above my head to make my pine tree shape, and then I'm going to slowly grow tall like a tree, and you can hold that position and then bring your palms back down. So I'll talk you through it again. You're going to put your palms together, you're going to bend your knees. So here you need to be using your tummy muscles when you grow tall to keep that core strong. So you're going to push up and make a nice tree shape and then return to the middle. I'm now going to talk you through how to incorporate a little breathing exercise into the pine tree. So what you can find is that sometimes using your breath can really help when you use your abdominal muscles, so your core area. So the way I'd like you to start is, when you have your palms together, you take a deep breath in. So you'll see now you're going to take a deep breath in, and as you bend your knees, you're going to keep holding that breath and you're going to come up. And as you come up and you use your tummy muscles, I want you to breathe out. So we can just watch that again. So you're going to take a deep breath in when you bend your knees, and then as you come up and you grow tall, you're going to breathe out your mouth as you come up. So it can be a nice activity to really slow your breathing down and just help you concentrate on that stability around your tummy area. So here, I'm showing you a way of how to extend into a moving pine tree. So you get into the position the same way as I've just shown you, and you've got your palms up, and then when you get to the top and you're nice and tall, you can create some movement. So you start bending slowly to each side. This can be a really nice movement for a bit of an extension of the activity, and also just working those tummy muscles a bit more. For here, I'm doing the same activity, but I'm doing it in a slightly varied way. So I am showing you how to do this down on your knees. So if you find the standing position a little bit tricky, you can always come down onto your knees and you might be a bit more stable. So here, the same thing applies. You can either bring your hands into a position where you just put them above your head, or you'll see here that I am doing a pine tree in high kneeling, and I am swaying my arms. And then I bring them back to the middle, and you can just make it even easier by perhaps just doing a side twist but with your arms together. So you put your hands palm-to-palm and bring them together. And I am raising my hands up above my head to make the tree shape, and then I bring them back down. You can also incorporate some breathing exercises into this activity. Okay, great, I hope you gave that a try. Now here, I'm going to talk you through some ways to either extend or simplify that activity. You can make it more challenging by, once you've grown tall, your pine tree can blow sideways in the wind. So you can keep your palms together and bend your trunk. I showed you this in the demonstration. You can also increase the amount of time doing the exercise. So you could perhaps start off with a small amount of time and practise it a few times and build this up as you find it easier and you get better at it. To simplify, so you can also make it easier by just balancing tall in high kneeling. So you can come onto your knees and balance tall. I also demonstrated this in the video. You can move in the wind sideways in high kneeling with palms together, so that might be a nice progression as well. So it's just a shorter tree and it means a tree when you're on your knees and high kneeling, you'll just have a little more stability and maybe you'll build up to working towards the full pine tree. And as I've said before, you can also decrease the amount of time doing the exercise and just doing it really, really slowly and then, if you find that easy, maybe over a period of a week you could try the pine tree again. Give those ideas a try. So pause the video now, see how you get on, and then press Start afterwards. How did you get on with the pine tree activity? I really like that exercise because it can really help ground you and it can really help you with your breathing as well. And it also just really calms your mind, so it can be quite a nice activity to do just in half kneeling or you could even practise those breathing techniques in sitting. So thank you for joining me. I hope to see you again soon, and please join me again for lesson 11 where we will still be talking about core strengthening and I will show you another exercise in a standing position, and it'll be an exercise looking at step standing so we'll be introducing a bit of balance work with a partner. So have a great day and I will see you soon. Take care, bye.

Strengthening your core in standing (Part 1)

Strengthening your core in standing (Part 1)

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