Maintain Independence – Strength to roll & get up from Floor or Bed

Letting a few of you know how best to do movements. If you can't move too well or you've got an area of your body that doesn't move too well, the best thing for you to do is do more of what you can't do well as long as there's no pain. So if I found that I wasn't able to get up off the floor or I couldn't get out of bed too well, a little while ago working as a nurse on night shift, I had a client come and tell me he could barely get out of bed himself.

So what was my thoughts to do with him? I actually sat him down on the floor, and I actually got him back to bed and got him to get in and out of bed. And then I said, by the way, how do you get up off the floor?

Do you do that? Okay. And he was saying to me that he struggled to do that as well.

So we'd have a bit of a training set. So whatever you find hard to do is what you should do. So if you find it hard to get up out of bed, or you find it hard to get up off a couch, or find it hard to get up off the floor, that should be your homework every day to do that.

It's whatever you find is hard you should do because those are the muscles obviously that you're weaker with and you don't do so well with. So what I'm doing is a challenge with some of my ladies at the moment in my strength training classes. I have a bar, a pull up bar, and we have no assistance with that.

So I don't have any bands underneath to help people. There's a bit of a shake on my hand, excuse the shake. So I don't have a band on there to help people pull themselves up, but they do a small jump and they see what they can do.

In the space of a few weeks, these girls have improved no end. So now when they get on this bar, they are pulling themselves up really, really well. And that's been over about three weeks, two times a week that I've gotten the girls for about 30 seconds at a time.

And maybe they might do it for three times, 30 seconds, they'll pull themselves up on the pull up bar and they're actually getting quite strong. So my girls are now able to pull themselves up quite well on a pull up bar with no assistance. So I just want to show you really briefly, I'm going to get my assistant Simone to hold the phone for me while I just show, if you find it hard to get up on a couch, just the steps you can take, because you may not do it all at once, but you may do small bits at a time until it becomes a fluid movement, but you may break it down into steps.

So let's pretend I'm somebody that maybe is a bit infirm. Maybe I've had a stroke a little while back and I'm still getting myself moving and how to do things. So I'm going to hand the phone to Simone and she's going to film me.

Suddenly, you have gone through a whole series of steps that have helped your body become stronger and being able to get out of bed that little bit easier. So anything that you find hard, a lot of ladies find upper body strength things hard. So things like being able to do chin-ups on a chin-up bar, being able to lie on the floor and do push-ups on one's toes.

Quite a few people are really scared, girls, and I know. But you get them to do a few of these and get them to do them more and more. You get better and better at it until you get to the point where, woohoo, look what I can do today that three or four months ago, I could not do it all.

My body just could not do it. But you get yourself stronger and stronger. What you don't want to do is work through pain.

So never work through pain, not good. It means that things aren't working how they should. So maybe other muscles are coming into play that are never meant to be used for that movement.

But if you don't have pain, this is the best thing you can do. And the other thing I think is an essential move throughout life. I hope my coat's not getting over my microphone.