Leg & lower limb strengthening (Part 4)

Physical therapy

﻿Hi there, my name is Sophie Brazier. I'm a children's physiotherapist. Thank you for joining me for our lesson today. We are on unit three and this is lesson 14. This is the last lesson in the unit, so well done if you've watched all 14 lessons and I hope you've found them useful. So for this final lesson, we will be beginning with a recap of a little bit about upper body and lower body strength, so your whole body strength. Then we will be focusing on a lower limb activity as we have been doing for the last few lessons. And the activity we're going to look at and finish with is a sit to stand activity. So you can kind of do this activity anywhere and you will just need a chair, or you could do it from a sofa or a stool. So if you need some help from a parent or carer, you might want to ask them now, and then we can begin 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. Let's just go over a final recap of what muscle strength is. So remember the four points, it's how strong you are, and within that, you've got different types of muscle contractions, and remember that your muscles work in pairs. Also, muscle strength is needed for fine motor skills. So these are things like handwriting, doing up buttons and zips, so really using your hands, and those activities where you need a little bit more intricate detail. And also, muscle strength is needed for gross motor skills. So these are things like walking around, either home or school, and also running, ball skills where you're throwing and catching and also carrying things. So really, muscle strength is needed in everyday activities. And your muscle strength is good and needed for keeping you healthy because it reduces the risk of injury. So why is if we think about the whole body and whole body muscle strength important? So it controls your ability to do everyday activities, so using your upper and your lower body in different ways. So muscle strength can improve your flexibility, mobility, your range of movement, and your balance, and it can also help develop your gross motor and your fine motor skills. It keeps you healthy, and the reason why it does this is because it reduces the risk of injury. So if you've got that strong muscle and above and below the joints, then your joints will be nice and stable, so you're at less risk of getting an injury. So let's recap, how does this help gross motor function? So gross motor function are skills that need whole body movement with good muscle strength, and I've starred it because that's what we're talking about specifically here, postural control and muscle tone, balance and coordination, which we'll be looking at in unit five, and motor planning, so this is how you plan your movement, proprioception and body awareness, so this is where your body is in space and having that awareness of where your body is, and sensory processing, so how you perceive different sensory input. So all these things help improve your gross motor function from when you're little and when you're growing up, but your muscle strength is really important to this skill. So if you've got good muscle strength, this can help contribute to your overall gross motor function. So the last activity I'd like you to try in this unit of lesson 14 is an activity where I'm going to ask you to do some sit to stands. So the starting position is you seated on a chair with your knees and hips at about 90 degrees. So you can do it on a chair or a stool or whatever surface that you feel comfortable doing it on where your knees and hips could be at that position. Your feet should be a comfortable distance apart, so when you stand up you're balanced, so they shouldn't be too close together or too far apart. And I'd like you to start the activity by moving from this sit position to a stand position. So move from sit to stand using your leg muscles, not your arms, if you're able, so try not to put your arms down on the surface to push yourself up for this activity. And then I want you to slowly lower back down to the sitting position and try to repeat this 10 times. So I will get you to pause the video now, so you can complete the activity. And then if you restart again, I'll go through some options of how to extend or simplify the activity. So now I'm demonstrating the sit to stand activity. So I am doing it from a footstool. You could do it from a sofa or from a chair. You just want to have your hips and knees at around 90 degrees and your feet flat on the floor. And a nice way to think about it is if you bring your nose over your toes, so you bring your body forwards to come up into an upright position. And here I am doing about 10 repetitions of just simple up and down. And then here I am now changing it a little bit, instead of my arms by my side, I'm putting my arms crossed over in front of me, just to challenge my balance a little bit. And now make it a little bit harder, I've got my arms out in front of me as I come up. So that could be a little activity to challenge yourself a little bit. And here, I am really slowing the movement down. So I'm doing a controlled sit to stand. And before I sit down, I'm almost hovering. So it's like I'm doing a mini squat and then I come down. So you're really controlling the movement. So that can be a little bit more of a challenge as well. Now here, I have taken a little bit of height away from the footstool, so it's a slightly lower position for me to have to get up from. So that can also be a bit more of a challenge from a lower seated position. Then if you need a little bit of help to get up, you could place your hands either side of your body, and you can really use your hands to push yourself up into standing. That can also be quite a good way to simplify the activity. So you saw me demonstrating there the activity of sit to stand. Let's just talk through some of the options to extend or simplify it. So you can make it more challenging by crossing or holding your arms out in front of you when you come up. So you would have seen me showing you that in the demonstration. You can slow the lowering part down, so you control the movement more. So that makes it a little bit more challenging rather than just dropping down to the seated position. You can increase the number of times you repeat the exercise and the length of time that you do it for. So here, you could perhaps start off with 10 repetitions and build it up by two at a time, or you could then break it down into say 10, have a small break, do another 10, have a small break and do another 10, so you build up to 30 repetitions. And as a way to extend it even further, you can try doing it off a lower seat to make it more of a challenge so you've got to use those muscles more to come up into that standing position. And a way to simplify the activity, you could also make it easier by using your hands to come up into standing. So I demonstrated on the video using my hands to push off the seat to come up into standing. You can do a smaller number. So decrease the number that you do of the sit to stands and also do the exercise for less time. And you might also want to ask a parent or carer to help you come up to initiate the movement. So they could either do this from behind, just giving you a little, gentle push to initiate the movement. I wouldn't suggest them holding your arms to pull you up because then there might be a tendency for them to pull you, rather than you use your leg muscles. So have a go at those options, pause the video now while you do that and then restart afterwards to join back in. Okay, we have now come to the end of our lesson. So well done for completing the activity if you gave the sit to stand activity a try. So we have reached end of the unit. This was lesson 14 of unit three, and we've now come to the end of the unit on strengthening your limbs. So thank you very much for joining me, and I hope you found this unit useful and you've learned some new things, and it's given you some ideas of activities and exercises to try. And please remember the options of simplifying and extending the activities. Please join me next time for unit four where we will be looking at stretching and moving. So all that leaves me to say now is please take care, have a great rest of your day, and I will see you soon, goodbye.

Leg & lower limb strengthening (Part 4)

Leg & lower limb strengthening (Part 4)

These resources will be removed by the end of the Spring Term 2026.

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