Bill Daniels works with Chris, an older client with a history of falls, to improve left-leg balance using heat, a reflex hammer tap on the Achilles tendon, and visual cues. The stacked stimulus approach targets the spinal cord, brain cortex, and visual system at once, and Chris shows noticeably better stability after the intervention.
Hi, I'm Bill from Beyond Fitness Online. Today, I want to answer a question that I get all the time, and that question is, what is a personal training session like with you? So, in these next few videos, I want to show you a couple of different things that I do aside from the traditional exercises. What I'm actually going to do in this first video here is I'm going to show you I'm working with my client, Chris. Now, he's an older gentleman who has had a fall. He's had an injury in his leg. He has had sciatica. So he's had a history of problems, and it has greatly affected his ability to balance. Now, we all know as we get into our older years too that it's really important to be able to have good balance. So that's one of the things I work on with him. Now, what I do is more than just having him try to stand on one leg. As you'll see in this video, that's really challenging for him at first. So then we offer different kinds of stimulus and understanding how all those stimulus hit the brain and how it will influence your balance is really important. So you'll see here that I use temperature on one leg. I use a reflex hammer on another leg. I have him do an eye exercise and you'll see the results right here.
All right, so I'm working with Chris. We want to work on his left leg balance because that's going to tie into a lot of the exercises that we do.
He's had trouble with balancing on his left leg due to a history of injury and other problems with that leg, and I know this already from talking to him about his history and working with him a little bit. So what I'm going to show you is how to improve that.
So initially, let's get an initial test and see how your left leg is when you balance on that. So go ahead and put your right leg up on the chair.
Okay.
So we're going to go into a split squat stance. So getting that foot up there, you can see a lot of shakiness. You can see his upper body moving quite a bit. So that's a challenge for you. Scale of 1 to 10, how hard is that?
Well, it is— I have to concentrate on this so that I can stand without falling.
Yeah.
Whereas in the right leg, if I do that, I don't have to do that.
Yeah, so there's a difference from left leg to right leg.
Yes.
Okay, so what I'm going to have you do is I'm going to have you turn around and put your left leg up on the chair. I'm going to use my reflex hammer and my little heat pad, and I'm going to try to stimulate several different things at once here. I'm also going to have Chris keep a nice tall posture with his head straight but his eyes looking to his left. Okay, and while he's doing that, I'm going to apply pressure— the heat to this leg while I hit the reflex in the Achilles right here.
So a lot of things are happening here.
I'm stimulating the spinal cord essentially with the reflex hammer in the Achilles, right in the area where his sciatic nerve comes out. I'm applying stimulus to his cortex. Um, top of the brain on this side of the body by applying heat over here and also doubling that up by having him look over there at the light switch. And all of this is combined to help with the stability in his left side.
So it's a stacked stimulus.
Once we get this going and his balance is better, then we can start to exercise. In ways like, on these one-legged stances. Alright, so come on out of there and let's go back to balancing on that left leg and let's see if it's improved.
Yes, it's a lot better.
Way more stable. There's not any shaking.
Nothing.
And you feel way more confident there?
Yes.
Yes.
Alright, good.
So that's what we do is we start to figure out the stimulus that works. for the particular part of the brain that's going to help. And now from here, we can use that as a warm-up, and from here we go into exercises where he's standing on one leg, whether that be a split squat, lunge, or any kind of exercise where we're standing on one leg. Overall, it helps his balance long term.
I hope you found that interesting. I love to do this kind of stuff with people. It makes a big difference, and often very quickly. So if you haven't already, please subscribe to my channel. I'm going to show you more videos like this in the future. And if you have any comments or questions, leave them below. I'm happy to answer them all. And if you want more information, check out my website at www.beyondfitnessonline.com. And until next time, live healthy.
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