Developing gross motor function

Physical therapy

﻿Hello, 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 3 of strengthening your limbs, and this is lesson 10 on developing gross motor function. So in the last couple of lessons, we've looked more closely at your lower limb and we've looked at what is lower limb muscle strength, and then we've had a look at why it is important. So this now leads us in nicely to looking at gross motor function and how having that underlying muscle strength can help with gross motor function. So, first of all, I'll explain a little bit more about what gross motor function is. And then we will look an activity that will help develop some of those skills. And you will not need any equipment for this activity, but you may need some help from a parent or carer. And there might be an option where you need to hold onto a chair or a stool. So if you'd like to get those things ready and ask for some help, then I will let you do that, and then we can start our lesson. 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 a little bit more at what gross motor function is, I'd like to recap on why is lower body muscle strength important? So your muscles control your ability in your lower limbs to do everyday activities such as standing, walking, climbing or descending. So going up or down for example, stairs or perhaps a hill, balancing and moving through different standing, sitting and floor positions. So having a strong lower body can improve your flexibility, mobility, range of movement and your balance. It also keeps you healthy and can reduce the risk of injury because your muscles protect your joints. So if you've got strong muscles around the joints, the joints will be much more stable, so less risk of injury. How does this help gross motor function? Let's look a little bit more of what gross motor function is. So gross motor function are skills that need whole body movement with good muscle strength that I've started on the top there, because that is what we're talking about in the unit, Motor Planning. So this is how you prepare for your movement and how you plan your movement. Postural control and muscle tone. So postural control is your body's ability to maintain an upright position. So within your muscles every day, you have to have a level of readiness in your muscles that keeps your body in that upright position. If you didn't have any muscle tone, you would be quite floppy. Or some times you can have muscle tone that is a little bit lower, or sometimes you can have muscle tone that may be a little bit higher. But your underlying muscle tone is your muscle's readiness for action. So proprioception and body awareness. That long word Proprioception, basically means it's your body's awareness of where you are in space, or if you think about you break it down a little bit more, it's where your limbs are in relation to the rest of your body. So when you're moving, it's all to do with your perception of your movement and how aware you are of how you're moving and how your body is moving. Balance and coordination, so this, we will look at it a little bit more in unit 5. So if you want to find out more about this topic, then please watch that unit, and sensory processing. This is how we perceive information that we're receiving from our senses. And it's really important that we have that muscle strength there because muscle strength plays a really important part in all those things working well together to be able to plan and execute your movement. And for all those higher skills to happen, your underlying muscle strength is essential. So really your muscle strength is needed because some of those things can't really happen unless you have muscle strength there in the first place. And if you've got all those things, then you will have good motor function. Now let's have a look at a activity that involves quite of these skills. So high kneeling, and you're going to be walking forwards. So for the activity, you need to position yourself on the floor in high kneeling, and you're going to walk forward on your knees, and you're going to try by keeping your hands off the floor and not holding onto anything. And I want you to try and keep your back straight and look forward. And I'd like you to walk on your knees for 10 steps forwards. So here, there's quite a few of those elements happening. You need to be able to plan your movement, you need to be able to balance in the upright position, you need to be able to hold yourself in that position with your muscle strength. So if you think back to the previous slide, lots of those elements are needed for this activity. So I will now demonstrate on a video and there will be some options of how to simplify or extend the activity. So if you have a look at the video, then if you pause the video and rejoin me afterwards, and I'll talk you through the options again. So here I am demonstrating the kneeling position and I'm walking forward on my knees, and I'm just getting up to turn around there, and I'm doing the same going back. So I'm using all those muscles to keep my balance. And I'm using the strength in my legs to keep me up in that position. And here, I'm demonstrating an example of going backwards in the same position. And again I'm turning around, and I'm using slightly different muscle groups here to then walk in high kneeling but walk backwards. And then here is another extension of the activity where I'm walking sideways. So I'm almost seeing like a sidestep and high kneeling. So here I'm working on the muscles on the outside of my leg when I step to the side. Then here I have got an object in my hand. So I got a small ball that I'm holding up in front of me. So here I am extending the activity again by testing my balance because I've got to hold something out in front of me, and then here, I'm doing the same activity, but I'm taking the steps to the side in high kneeling. Now, if you'd like to simplify the activity, you can start off in a position down. So your bottom is on your heels, and then you can come up into a high kneeling position. So this might just be enough for you. Just practising coming from a kneeling down position, to a high kneeling position. Or maybe, you need a little bit of help when you come up into high kneeling and you can use a stool in front of you just to help you get your balance, and then maybe bring your arms off to just test your balance. So again, I come up into high kneeling, I'm taking my hands off momentarily and coming back down. So if you give those a try, pause the video, have a go, and then you can rejoin me afterwards and I'll talk you through some of those options again. So as you saw in the video, there were some ways to maybe simplify or extend the activity. I'll just talk through them now as they're written down here, and you can pause the video if you want to look through them. So to extend the activity, you can make it more challenging by increasing the speed. So you can walk forwards and maybe increase the speed. You could even have a little race or a competition with someone. But make sure that you're careful when you do it. You could do your high kneeling and walking sideways, and you could also do it backwards which I showed you in the video. You could also increase the amount of time that you do this activity for. So you could perhaps try it for 30 seconds, have a break and increase the amount of time doing it and see how you manage. You could also hold an object with both your hands as I demonstrated in the video. So let's think about simplifying it and making a little bit easier for you. So to do this, you can decrease the number of times you repeat the exercise. So perhaps you start off. If you're doing the full exercise, you just try it for a few seconds to begin with, and then maybe you could have a break and then repeat it, and then build up so perhaps 30 seconds and increase that. you could also hold onto support like a wall. So you could do it next to a wall and walk alongside it. Or if you're doing the sideways one, you could have the wall in front of you, or I've suggested here holding someone's hand, but make sure that you're not pulling up on someone when you do that. And that you're very careful when you're doing that as well. And as I showed you in the video, you can try balancing in high kneeling. So you could hold onto a stool as I had or a chair, and you could move from your heels into high kneeling and back to your heels. And that can be a really nice starter just to work on your balance in high kneeling. And then once you've got that confidence, you could perhaps move on to trying the walking in high kneeling. So it gives some of those options to try. And then please join me again once you've done those. Good for you, if you gave the activity a try. I think it's really nice to be able to simplify an activity, and then you can build it up and work on your confidence in doing the activity. So remember to take it at what pace works best for you and the level that works for you. And if you find it too difficult, remember to use the options of where you can simplify an activity. So thank you for joining me today for lesson 10. Please join me next time for lesson 11 where will you be continuing with strengthening your limbs, and we will still be looking at your lower limb. And I will give you another idea of an activity to try. So all that leads me to say now, is thank you for joining me, have a great rest of your day, and I look forward to seeing you again soon. Take care, goodbye.

Developing gross motor function

Developing gross motor function

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