Physical therapy

Physical therapy, something which is with me since I was 6 months old. I have literally love - hate relationship with a movement.

Here is a "short" overview of my experience with physical therapies.

Vojta's method

Method which is used to stimulate brain by pressing on the particular neurological nods on the body. By this the brain creates new neurological pathways to improve movement, muscle tone and makes the brain mature, especially for pre-maturely born infants. My take on it: While it works and without this I wouldn't be as mobile as I am, it sucks. It is painful, you need to do it often during the day - recommended is 5x. Good luck with that of course, because whoever had a newborn and tried to establish routine with feeding, changing nappies and lack of sleep. Adding one more important, unpleasant thing to your day and repeat it 5 times = sucks. Kudos to every parent ( hi mum) who managed to do that.

Just moving

I was lucky I have only one year younger brother so whatever he did, I did. I learned biking only because it annoyed me, that he didn't need a side wheels and I still had them. My parents have two children and they bought me a bike too. I can imagine, not all parents would do it for the disabled child. My cousins were playing with me outside and they somehow dragged me up to a 2 meter mural ( I was like 6, they were 8) and we screamed at our mothers so proud that I made it up, but we didn't know how I am going to get down. I think my aunt almost fainted when she saw us from balcony and my mother for sure did some ninja tricks, because she was down in no time. I was climbing everything like every other child around me. I believe strongly, that what advanced my physical progress, was the fact, that I was with children who could do more than I did and if you don't disrupt dynamics in the group of children, at the end of the day, everyone finds a way to play.

Dancing and singing

People often don't recognise that singing is quite a difficult physical exercise. To do it right, you need to learn how to work with your vocal cords, diaphragm, have good posture, breath correctly. It's wonderful tool to clear up your head, because you need to focus on so many other things, that there is just no space for bullshit. Dancing obviously improves posture and it's exercise which is just amazing for me, because I am massive fun of make up and sweat together. When I need to sweat I want to look good while sweating.

Gym and trainer

Here I made a mistake. When I joined gym, I was in probably worst shape of my life from how my health deteriorated in UK. I thought like as before I just do things as others and things get fixed. Wrong, I hired a trainer, he gave me exercises, but I was not getting better the pains I had were getting worse. At the end of the day I stopped this experiment. I didn't do much for many years.I should have gone with someone who had some idea what cerebral palsy is.

Yoga

Experiment with yoga was good, because it helped me to a certain extent, the pains I was having were diminishing, but not really disappearing. I was going to classes 4-5 times a week. Very time consuming. After a year I hit a threshold beyond which I wasn't improving. I described that I didn't like the fluctuation of the yoga teachers in the studio I was going to, so I stopped.

The Happy Body

I wrote about this method before in the article: Go and meet your heroes . I like it a lot. It has everything: Exercise, which is doable and not time consuming. Recommendations on diet, teaches you how to rest. In the rest department that's where I was continuously failing and it made it difficult to stick to the diet. However the whole concept is great and I believe I was in the best physical shape since returning from UK, while I did the happy body concept. ..

Spine exercises

I've noticed that I was not addressing a inflexibility in my lower back, so I found these exercises: Spinal hygiene. It did improve flexibility of my back, tension and pain in my back disappeared. However with the Happy Body and Spinal hygiene my daily exercise routine was almost 1.5 hours. I kept this kind of schedule for almost 2 years.... until..

I did nothing

After I burnt out, I stopped EVERYTHING. One reason why I got a dog was to have a motivation to go out of bed and walk a little. For past two years, the only exercise I did was walking my dog. Even thought it's often averaging on 10K steps per day, it's not enough movement or it's not the right movement for my cerebral palsy. I still had pains.

Meckenzie method

I went to professional physiotherapist who is wonderful Martin ?ó? -Marven.sk I believe he is the most kind and knowledgable physiotherapist I've ever met. The exercises he recommended helped me a lot. The downside however is that although they are not complicated, you need to repeat them few times a day and for my burnt out mind, that was too complex to do. I do them occasionally which frankly is not enough....

Lymph

Although this spring I am getting better again, it was still not enough and the pains were horrible this past winter. I had saved the website of Perry Nickelston for years: Stopchaisingpain.com is great resource to learn about the lymph and scar tissue and how these things affect our movement or inhibition of it. I am just scratching a surface with it. Finally with arrival of TV into my home, I am doing this short exercise for over a week: Morning body flow.. Surprisingly after only a week I've noticed less tension in my body and less pain overall. No I didn't become ballerina. I do feel better and more at ease. And it's SHORT and only once a day !

This is the list of only few main things I've tried over my life. I receive unsolicited advise quite often on what I should try, do or develop.

The ugly picture below shows how my "home gym" looks like. Every single thing from above list I did for at least a year. Most of them for years.

Where I am going with this ? If you see someone having a problem and they don't ask you for advice. Assume, they know what they are doing.