Monday, March 21, 2011

porch swing as stroke rehab

Now that the snow is melting and the swing becoming exposed again I can do this when I come home from work.
A couple of years ago we had a garage sale so there was lots of sitting around. We have a porch swing installed in our arbor which was just the right height for my feet to reach the ground. So I used that to hold my foot down on the ground and use my hamstring muscles to pull the swing forward and then let it back. At times I had to use my good leg to help holding it down. This mimcs what my PT tried to do with me way back when I was still in the hospital. He put my foot on a wheeled board and had me trying to pull it toward me. At the time I didn't have those muscles working at all. Later the idea changed to sitting on a chair with wheels and trying to move the chair forward by contracting my hamstrings. This didn't work because the chair was on a rug and my muscles needed an extremely light weight to work with. The swing right now is just the right resistance.
If I can get this working better, it will help in walking when you lift your foot up behind you. This is one of my ideas, breaking down movements into tiny pieces and figuring out how to do them. Eventually it will be to put them together into functional movement. This goes totally against what your therapists are taught, which is to work on complete functional movements. So ask your therapist what to do.

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