What is Physical Therapy

What is Physical Therapy?

Physical Therapy works on movement and balance activities, such as rolling, crawling, sitting, walking, running and jumping. Physical Therapists help the child to maneuver throughout their community, classroom or playground.

Physical Therapy addresses strength, endurance, body alignment and positioning, gross motor skills, sensory integration, motor planning, posture, muscle tone, coordination, and balance.

Pediatric Physical Therapy focuses on helping your child reach their developmental milestones for motor skills and sensory processing. Physical Therapy can also address safety awareness, body and environmental awareness.

What are gross motor skills?

Gross motor abilities have an influence on everyday functions. For Gross motor skills are generalized body movements requiring the large muscles in the body. A solid strong core and foundation is required to move with coordination and to later achieve fine motor control needed for self-care.
Gross motor skills are those skills required for sitting, standing, walking, running and jumping. In order to have good gross motor skills, a person must also have good neural communication coordinating the right and left side of the body, as well as hand-eye coordination.
Developing a strong neural foundation needed to coordinate the body starts in early development from head to toe, and from midline orientation to distal control of the extremities. This is one of the reasons that babies organize their oral motor skills before developing other more complex skills.
Having good gross motor skills (or adaptations) are crucial to a child’s ability to move, but also to play and physically play with other children and access their classroom/playground. Gross Motor Skills impact a child’s ability to maintain appropriate sitting posture will affect their ability to participate in fine motor skills, and attend to class instruction, which then impacts on their academic learning. Good endurance allows a child to cope with a full day of school (sitting upright at a desk, moving between classrooms, carrying a heavy school bag). Without fair gross motor skills, a child will struggle with many day-to-day tasks such as eating, packing away their toys, and getting onto and off the toilet.

What are Balance and Coordination Skills?

Balance is the ability to maintain a controlled body position during task performance, whether it is sitting at a table, walking the balance beam or stepping up onto a curb. To function effectively across environments and tasks, we need the ability to maintain controlled positions during both static (still) and dynamic (moving) activities.
Static balance is the ability to hold a stationary position with control (e.g. “Freeze” or “statue” games). Dynamic balance is the ability to remain balanced while engaged in movement (e.g. running or bike riding).

Age appropriate balance and coordination allows the child to be involved in the sports participation with a reasonable degree of success as it aids fluid body movement for physical skill performance. The involvement in sport is helpful in maintaining self-regulation for daily tasks as well as developing a social network and achieving a sense of belonging in a community or social setting. It also helps children develop and maintain appropriate controlled body movement during task performance which, when effective, limits the energy required and minimizes fatigue.
With good balance and coordination there is less likelihood of injury as the child is likely to have appropriate postural responses when needed (e.g. putting hands out to protect themselves when they fall off their bike). The physical attributes of balance and coordination also allow appropriate posture for table top tasks and subsequent success at fine motor tasks.

What are Strength and Endurance?

In general terms, muscle strength is how strong the child is and muscular endurance is how long the child’s muscles can work.

Muscular strength is the ability to exert force against resistance. Exerting force may or may not mean there is movement of the joints or body. It might be that you carry an object in front of you and you contract your biceps, but there is no movement as your arms are neither raising or lowering. This is called an isometric contraction. When the muscles contract and there is movement at a joint, such as a bicep curl, this is called an isotonic contraction.

Muscular endurance is the ability of a muscle or group of muscles to exert force repeatedly. Muscular endurance is similar to muscular strength in that strength is required to initiate movements, but it is the muscle’s endurance capacity that enables it to continue for multiple efforts.

Strength and endurance are important to enable children to perform everyday functions such as fine motor skills (e.g. holding a pencil appropriately, cleaning teeth) and gross motor skills (e.g. carrying heavy school bags, walking, running, skipping, playground skills such as climbing, and sporting skills such as catching, throwing and hitting a ball with a bat). Muscular endurance helps maintain proper posture all day long.
Improving strength and endurance contributes to a higher metabolism, which increases caloric use both while at work and rest, which in turn reduces the risk of obesity. Another important benefit to note is that when a child has good strength, they are more likely to have stronger tendons, ligaments and general joint health which reduces the risk of serious injury.

A Child May have a need for Physical Therapy if they:

• Fall easily, trip often or can’t ‘recover’ quickly from being off balance.
• Move stiffly and lack fluid body movement (e.g. run like a ‘robot’).
• Avoid physical activity (e.g. playground use, sports participation).
• Are late to reach developmental milestones (e.g. crawling and walking).
• Are slower than their peers to master physical skills (e.g. bike riding, swimming or tree climbing).
• Are less skillful than their peers in refined sports participation (e.g. team sports).
• Push harder, move faster or invade the personal space of others more than they intend to.
• Are fearful of new physical games (e.g. swings) or scared of heights that do not faze their peers.
• Have difficulty getting dressed standing up (e.g. they need to sit down to get put pants as they lose their balance standing on one leg).
• Have trouble navigating some environments (e.g. steps, curbs, uneven ground).
• Tire more quickly than their peers or need to take regular short rest periods during physical activity.

Activities you can do with your child now at home:

Tummy Time (It’s never too late)
Allow sensory play. Let kids get dirty.
Allow for safe “rough play”, such as swinging and wrestling
Get down on their level playing with them.
Go to the local park and play.
Roll, sit, crawl, walk, run on a variety of surfaces. Hard top, grass, sand, etc.
Put pillows on the floor and walk or stand still on them.
Enroll your child in age appropriate sports
Look below for activities per age and do those activities.

What is Torticollis – How can a Physical Therapist help? CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION:

What is Bilateral Coordination/Integration? How can a Physical Therapist help? CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION:

What is sensory processing? How can a Physical Therapist help? CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION: