How can upper body strength affect learning?

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 three, lesson three. And today we're going to be continuing with the topic of Strengthening your limbs. And we're going to be taking a closer look at how upper body strength kind of affects your learning. So, we'll begin with a little introduction, then we'll take a closer look at that topic. And then we will move on to an activity where we will look at something called a wall push and a palm push. So you don't need any equipment for these activities. You just need to perhaps be near a wall for the wall push and you may need some help from a parent or carer so if you'd like to get yourself 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 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 let's let's just begin the lesson by just recapping of why is your muscle strength important? So your muscles control your ability to do everyday activities such as reaching, pulling and pushing. When we're specifically thinking about our upper limb and having a strong upper body can improve your flexibility, mobility and range of movement. So having that initial strength can help with all those things. It also helps keep you healthy and reduces the chance of injuries as your strong muscles, protect your joints and keep them stable. So what has that all got to do with learning. So you need your upper body strength to carry, manipulate and stabilise yourself, and for hand dexterity and fine motor skills. So really your upper body is in things like schoolwork is really important for handwriting. If you don't have good strength, you might get more tired easily and be uncomfortable and then you might lose concentration on the task. So if you don't have that initial strength there, then tiring more easily might be an issue for you. So if you've got that good underlying strength, then you will be able to focus on an activity and complete those skills more easily. And having this strength will help with coordination of movement that's needed for activities. So I've already said handwriting, drawing any activities where you're using your upper limb, and your hands. So when we're talking about using our upper limb, and how important it can be for focusing on learning, I thought it be good just to try this activity because it activates the muscles in your shoulder girdle. So all the muscles that will be involved if you're doing a task using your arms or your upper limbs, so it's just some pushing games and they're activities to activate your shoulder girdle. So the first one is called a Palm push. So you're going to push your palms into each other with your elbows up and out to the side and hold for about 5 to 10 seconds. And the second is a Wall push, you're going to pretend the wall is falling down, and you've got to push to keep it up and you're going to hold again to the same between 5 to 10 seconds. So I'd like you to try these activities to activate your shoulder girdle muscles before doing an activity such as handwriting or some drawing, so you could do a comparison you could start off just doing that activity without doing these exercises and then perhaps try a few repetitions of these and then maybe get the same activity you try and see if you notice any difference once you've activated those muscles. Okay, so I'll just do a little demonstration of a video now. And you can then pause and have a go yourself and then remember to restart afterwards to join again. I'm now going to demonstrate to you an activity called palm push which is an activity I'd like you to try before you do an upper limb activities, something where you may be using your hand to do some writing or some drawing. And it's just to activate the muscles in your arms and your shoulder girdle which can help when you're then doing an activity. Okay, so I'll just demonstrate and then you can have a go yourself. So you're going to get your hands and you're going to lift your elbows up to this kind of position here. And you're then going to press your palms together, like this. So when you're doing it, you should really feel I'm putting quite a lot of force through my hands, but I can also feel the muscles in my shoulders working and you can almost feel some activity in these muscles here across the front of your chest. So don't worry if you can't bring your arms all the way up. But ideally, if you can have your arms in this kind of position, so you're pushing our hands against each other, and if you do need some help to get your hands in that position, you might just want to ask a parent or carer to help get you in that position first. Or you could do it resting on a table if you need some support with your elbows and you can push into your hands, okay. Now I will show you how to do the wall push. So it works in a similar way to the palm push where you're pushing against each palm but here you're pushing against the wall. So you want to imagine that the wall is falling down. And that you're pushing as hard as you can to keep up. And what's that is going to do is activate all these muscles in your shoulders. So I'll just demonstrate now. So I'm going to have my back to you. So you want to have your hands around this kind of height, and you want to be pushing into the wall. So I'll just turn away so that you can see what I'm doing, like this. And you want to try and hold that so your pushing against the wall for between about 5 and 10 seconds and then come back off and you can repeat that a few times. And then you can go away and try an activity where you're using your upper limb. So you might want to do some writing or some drawing and just see if you notice a difference. And if it affects your level of concentration when you've activated those muscles in your shoulder. Okay, so go and give that one a try. I'll now demonstrate an extension to the activity. So you can do a wall push but you can use a ball. So I've got two different balls to show you. And you can start off, so you're going to be pushing the ball against the wall. And you can do it from the floor all the way up and then along, so I'll do it fast with the small ball, I've got a plati style ball here, and then you can I can show you with a larger ball. So you're going to come from down here. And you're going to be pushing the ball all the way up the wall like this. And then you might want to take the ball across, and then bring the ball back and then back down. And you can do it with a larger ball. So I'll show you with this Swiss ball so you can come up. You got to keep the push the pressure on so that the ball doesn't fall. So you got to have a level of activity in your arms to keep the ball there and then back and then back down. So that's just an extension of the activity and you can give that one a try as well. I'm just going to talk you through some ways to extend and simplify that I demonstrated in the video. So to make it more challenging, you could hold the push for longer. So that's both in the palm push, and also the wall push, when you're activating that muscle contraction, you can hold it for slightly longer in that push position. So you could try that to begin with, then here are a couple of extensions that you can do as well, you could do a ball on the wall exercise, so you would have seen me in the video, using a small plati style ball, you can use a football or any kind of beach ball or bouncy ball that you've got. And you're just going to walk the ball up from the floor and then along the wall. So you're keeping the resistance on while you're walking the ball so you're using a bit of your muscle strength and also building up a bit of muscle endurance. The second one was called a partner push. So the same idea as your palm push that you had together, but instead of doing it to each of your palms, you'll be doing it with both your hands against a partner. So you could either do this to the parent or carer or a sibling. And if you're able to, you could stand facing each other and push into your palms, you could also do it in a seated position, I just want to say as well, and the idea behind it, you can sort of play a game, "Who will move first?". So you're kind of seeing who's got more strength, or you can increase the amount of push that you do or you can decrease it so you can have a little play around with that. Then to simplify the activity, you can decrease the number of times you repeat the exercise. So with the palm push, and with the wall push, maybe start off doing it once, trying it a few more times and see if you can build that up over a period of time. And you can also do the palm push with some support. So push your palms into each other as you would for the palm push but you perhaps need a little bit of support. Or you might need some help keeping your elbows up in that position. So maybe ask a parent or carer to help you under your elbows, and then you can activate the palm push, and maybe try, aim for between 5 and 10 seconds. So go and give those a try if you pause the video now and then you can rejoin afterwards. That now brings us to the end of our lesson. So thank you for joining me today. I hope you found that useful, and you gave those activities a try. And if you needed to, there were options for you to simplify or if you wanted more of a challenge those were there for you too. Please join me again next time for lesson four and unit three, where we will still be continuing looking at strengthening your limbs and I will be starting to give you some exercises to try for your upper body strength. So all that leads me to say now is take care. Have a great day and I will see you soon. Goodbye!

How can upper body strength affect learning?

How can upper body strength affect learning?

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