Physical Therapy
Gross Motor Skills
Synopsis of Gross Motor:
This area focuses on the acquisition of skills that are important to ensure proper control and coordination of large muscles to support posture, mobility, balance, and whole-body movement. These skills are essential for ensuring mobility and participation in all activities of daily living.
Areas Addressed with Gross Motor Skills:
- Head and trunk control
- Maintaining sitting and standing
- Independent sitting, rolling, and standing
- Moving within and between environments (e.g., crawling, walking, running, climbing)
- Weight shifting and coordinating bilateral movements
- Balance and coordination
- Adapting movement for play, self-care, and safety demands
- Transfers for daily living needs (ex: bed, chair, toilet, etc.)
- Activity tolerance and/or endurance
Strength, Stability, and Coordination
Synopsis of Strength, Stability, and Coordination: It is important to improve upon these 3 big areas because they directly impact a person's ability to safely and independently move through their world.
Areas Addressed with Strength, Stability, and Coordination:
- Improving Strength: Improving skills in this area will help your child do their job at home, school, or in the community—lifting, pushing, pulling, and supporting their own body against gravity. Limited strength tends to cause people to fatigue easily, rely on others for help, or avoid certain activities due to feeling it is hard or unsafe
- Improving Stability: Stabilizing the spine and core (trunk, hips, and shoulders) is important for the body to stay steady and controlled. Creating good stability helps with sitting without slouching, standing without wobbling, reaching without falling, and moving well between positions. If stability is reduced, it can lead to falls, poor posture, and the need for more support to complete daily activities
- Improving Coordination: Again, this refers to how children can get their arms and legs to work together, allowing the body’s muscle groups to work together in the right order and at the right time. Improving coordination skills improves the person’s ability to step over obstacles, stay steady on their feet, move quickly and safely, etc. When reduced, discoordination movements may lead to awkward, rushed, and unsteady skills, which may have a huge impact on independence with activities of daily living
Body Awareness, Motor Planning, and Sensory-Motor Integration
Synopsis of Body Awareness, Motor Planning, and Sensory-Motor Integration: These areas are key to address because it helps children move with purpose, understand their bodies, and respond appropriately to their environments. During play, every child needs to understand where their body is and how it feels, how to move, and how big those movements need to be!
Areas Addressed with Body Awareness, Motor Planning, and Sensory-Motor Integration:
- Improving Body Awareness: Each child's ability to know where their body is in space and how it moves through space without having to look is critical to independence. Their awareness and knowledge will help them learn how their body parts work together, how close they are to other people/items, and how much force they are using. These skills support good sitting, moving, dressing, and playing safely
- Improving Motor Planning: The brain and the muscles plan every time it is time to move! The ability to think, organize, and carry out movement helps a child to figure out what step to take to complete a task like climbing on playground equipment. Children with motor planning difficulties typically know what they want to do, but their brain and muscles struggle to communicate with each other, causing them to need extra time, practice, or modeling to complete those movements successfully
- Improving Sensory-Motor Integration: Our brain takes information from the environment through the senses (touch, vision, balance, etc.) and uses it to guide movement. Children learn how to adjust their movements based on their feelings and experiences. Examples may include walking on uneven surfaces, how they coordinated movement during play activities, etc. When their sensory-motor integration is challenging, they tend to seem to avoid certain movement tasks, require increased movements, or demonstrate trouble adjusting their bodies to different environments to complete activities independently
Other Areas Addressed in Physical Therapy:
- Orthopedic support
- General or sports injury recovery
- Adaptive equipment (wheelchairs, gait trainers, orthotics, mobility supports, etc.)
- Post-Surgical rehabilitation
- Family education
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