..A skateboard, bike, or roller blades?
These are great gift ideas that encourage your children to be outside and active instead of playing computer games. Physical activity is vital to a child’s healthy development. In 2003 a survey by the Australian Bureau of Statistics found 66% of children aged 5-14 years had undertaken the active leisure activities of bike riding, skateboarding or rollerblading in a 2 week period prior to the survey.
Although these wheeled activities are lots of fun, they all carry the risk of injury.
There are many things parents and children can do to limit this risk.
- Parents can select safe places to ride.
- Ensure protective gear, relevant to the activity, is worn e.g. helmets, elbow and knee pads, wrist guards. Wrist guards have been shown to decrease the chance of a wrist fracture.
- Wear closed shoes.
- Empty pockets of all hard and sharp objects.
- Warm up and cool down.
- Learn basic skills first. How to stop, slow down and turn.
- Complicated tricks require careful practice in a safe, controlled environment.
One final warning, adults can also get injured. It is easy to think you are as young and capable as your kids. Remember, just because you used to be able to do a perfect 180 on your skateboard, doesn’t mean that you still can.
Have a Merry Christmas and stay safe.
An important part of the road to recovery is to know what you want to achieve. While we (the therapists at Advantage Healthcare and Physiotherapy) will do everything in our power to get you back up and running, our outcomes are ALWAYS better when our patients have goals and are motivated to achieve them.
Goals can be simply created using the S.M.A.R.T method. This stands for
- Specific: “I want to get better” Is a bit too vague. Try describing exactly what is you want to achieve. Perhaps: “I want to be able to return to work/be able to walk without pain”
- Measureable: How will you determine that you have reached your goal, or how far off you were? It’s always handy to have a measureable component such as “I want to be able to briskly walk for 40 minutes without pain”
- Attainable/Realistic: If you set an unrealistic goal, you are likely to set yourself up for failure. It’s unfair to you and your practitioner if you set goals that just aren’t attainable. For example “I want to return to men’s open rugby at age 52 after 30 years of no exercise and bad knees”. While it’s nice to aim high, aiming too high can be demotivating and leave you feeling unsatisfied.
- Time-bound: when do you want to achieve this by? Common weight loss goals are centred around 12 weeks. This is a short enough time frame to keep motivated, but long enough to see some really amazing changes.
The last thing you need to do with goal setting is make an action plan! What small steps are YOU going to do to reach your goal? How are you going to keep yourself accountable? Setting daily reminders for exercises set by your practitioner will result in a better outcome for you. It puts you in control of your health and well-being, and keep you moving longer!
Most of us are somehow affected by Cancer, may be it is you personally or someone close to you going through treatment. Often you wish you could do something but you just don’t know what to do.
Massage is a wonderful therapy that can help at any stage of the journey. Massage helps the patient to feel nurtured and supported. Gentle techniques will encourage circulation to boost energy and speed up recovery and support the immune system, it will help the body process the waste produced by the Chemotherapy.
Some years ago there was a fear that massage would spread cancer cells around the lymphatic system and cause the cancer to Metastasize. Haematologist Dr David Joske of SolarisCare in WA, who is currently researching massage and cancer in NSW, states that “ There is no research to support concerns that massage might spread cancer.”
Some massage therapists may refuse treatment to those undergoing cancer treatment or who are in remission. There is honestly no reason for this. There is no research to back up this outdated thought process. Current studies state that light, gentle relaxation massage is safe in all stages of Cancer.
The personal contact and care provided in the treatment space is more important than rejecting someone who is already experiencing despair and feeling at loss, as a result of losing hair, being unwell and feeling “different”.
Massage is not going to move the cancer throughout the body by stimulating circulation and lymphatic flow, any more than going for a light jog or a long walk is. Having a treatment that is client centred on positive health and wellbeing is so important when undergoing medical treatment that is focused on the cancer.
It is important to let your therapist know
- Where you are experiencing pain
- If there are any open wounds or radiation sites or bone infection etc. that are too painful to touch.
- Medications including Chemotherapy, Blood thinners Etc
Your therapist needs to take these into account to create your ideal treatment.