Why Strong? Which Exercises will be Life-changing for the ASD Population
You have perhaps 1-2 days and maybe 45-60 minutes with your athlete each week. What will make the best use of their fitness/adapted PE time? In short, the answer is strength.
What are the most common terms you hear associated with autism/neurodiversities and movement? Low tone, poor gait patterning, and motor control issues come to mind. The underlying issues here have 3 components;
- Neuromuscular inhibition
- Kinesthetic awareness
- Delayed motor planning
To improve on any of these we need to take into account the full?PAC Profile??of each individual. It's not as though we need to have a completely different set of exercises per program, rather understanding?how?we need to implement specific movements. For example, we want to include squats and carries into just about every program. We know that both exercises will be challenging for our athletes, and the level of challenge will vary based on those 3 issues listed above.
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Focusing on strength exercises will have an enormous benefit for your athletes. 'Focus' refers to these exercises taking up the majority of time and practice during a session. This is not to suggest that mobility and endurance do not have a place, they certainly do, however developing greater strength and control in squatting, pressing, pulling, and carrying is going to enhance movement quality elsewhere.?
Individualization of strength exercises is more about finding the right level of progression/regression than pulling from 38 different exercises. When we're teaching a squatting pattern, starting with a bilateral (both feet on the ground, shoulder-width apart) version is going to make the most sense. It is the most stable variation of the movement.?
So we start with the bilateral squat, knowing this is going to be the pre-requisite for more advanced exercises. Many,?many?of our athletes are going to need a regressed or simplified variation of the squat. Fine fine. We can elevate the platform (less range of motion) and/or add upper body support with a band (both of these techniques are part of the Level 1 Certification).?
Strength exercises, quite oddly, are often left out of fitness/APE programming for the ASD/ND population, yet they provide some of the greatest benefit in generalizing to everyday activities and injury prevention.
https://youtu.be/h3rU1FviXpg