Resisted Single Leg Balance and Reach with Progression

Resisted Single Leg Balance and Reach with Progression is an innovative lower-body exercise designed to develop balance, coordination, and strength. This single-leg dynamic exercise builds upon the traditional single-leg balance and reach training by adding a resistance exercise component. The exercise begins with the athlete standing on one foot while holding dumbbells on both hands, while the other foot is propped on an aerobic step. The athlete then performs an alternating forward reaching motion with the arms and one foot at

Transcript

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This is Brent coming at you with another
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one of our collaboration videos, to bring
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you a progression of the single leg excursion, or the single leg balance and
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excursion. I think I mentioned it previously as the single leg balance and
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excursion of death, which makes a progression of this seem even more
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sadistic. I'm going to have my friend Rob come out and help me demonstrate, he is
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responsible for this sadistic progression. I want you guys to know PT
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for many years, certified orthopedic manual therapist, and faculty himself
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for the Maitland workshops, he decided to add resistance to this exercise. So, how
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you are going to get this started is you need something to resist you
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laterally. Alright the idea is to stimulate activity of your gluteus
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medius, so when you're setting up this resistance you want to make sure so that
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somebody can in fact stand on a single leg and maintain a neutral pelvis.
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Alright so just a real quick test before we go through all the postural cues, he
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can in fact maintain a neutral pelvis, I can feel his gluteus medius firing
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against the resistance we have pulling him that way. All right so let's go ahead
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and start over and get the setup. I'm going to make sure his upper
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body posture is good, head back, chin tucked, shoulders down and back.
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I'm going to go ahead and have him bring his feet together, make sure they're
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pointing forward. Now I know usually our kinetic chain checkpoints are hip width,
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but he's about to stand on one leg. Now the big cues for this exercise
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are not something we always pay attention to I think, but are extremely
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important in this particular progression. I want to make sure that he can press
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the first MTP, that's the ball behind his big toe, into the floor while maintaining
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the arch in his foot, that's his medial longitudinal arch, that's the inside arch
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of your foot. So can you press that big toe in but still maintain the arch of
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your foot, good. This whole exercise is going to be predicated on the fact that
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he can maintain single leg balance while maintaining that arch, squeezing his
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glute medius, he can squeeze his cheeks like he's got a dollar bill
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between them, and then draw his TVA, there you go. Now go
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ahead and lift this foot off the ground, and we can see that already this is a
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hard exercise you really don't even have to go any further. This alone just the
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challenge of that resistance, maintaining that arch, keeping your glute medius
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firing drawing in your TVA, this is very very challenging, but we're going to go
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ahead and progress it anyway, because at some point you're going to want to
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progress, and it's kind of fun to abuse Rob. So what you are going to do is
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you can go ahead and start doing your excursions. Now your excursions are going
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to be through sagittal, frontal, transverse, just as we've done before.
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Make sure you limit excursion, make sure you limit distance to as far as they can
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reach while maintaining the arch in their foot, that's it that's all you get;
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this isn't about reach as far as you can until your whole body collapses. The
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first thing somebody's going to want to do is go flat foot on you, and then reach
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really far, but that's that's already cheating it's already compensating. So
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make sure you keep a very very watchful eye, on the medial arch of that
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foot. Let's go a little frontal plane good. Now when I go frontal plane
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I do like to do a little abduction with extension, so he's going out and just a
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couple inches back for me. What I'm trying to promote is gluteus medius
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activation on the side, not TFL, a lot of people like to go abduction and flexion
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which is gearing up the TFL which is a short overactive structure in a lot of
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our postural dysfunction. The transverse plane stuff, now I like to teach this as
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the intention to move in the transverse plane, that is this leg is going to move
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in the transverse plane where he tries to keep his pelvis facing forward, his
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ASIS should be facing that way. Very, very challenging progression. You can see Rob
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is wearing out, this isn't actually our first take either so poor Rob is getting
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beaten down today, but you see these progressions, you see how you can add
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this resistance. One thing that Rob also brought up which I thought was
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awesome is he uses this in his practice, as a way to start integrating the
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gluteus medius back into our gait pattern. So once you have this resistance, once
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you know this person can balance on a single leg, you can actually have them
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work on stance phase with their right leg, while working through their
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swing phase on the left side. So they can go from a toe-off position,
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you're not actually doing toe off, but toe off position, and then we actually
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talked about you could go to heel strike. He likes to go back sometimes to
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just almost like an excursion activity, and just do a toe touch. I think either
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way would be acceptable depending on what functional impairment you're
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working on within their gait pattern, but but you do a few reps of that after
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you've done all this wonderful balance work to kind of set up that gluteus
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medius firing, to try to set up better mechanics in the foot, and I think you
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guys are going to see some huge improvements in the way people not only
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walk, but this would be a great warm-up activity for running. All of your
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athletes out there who have that lower leg dysfunction. I hope you enjoy
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that exercise. Rob once again thank you for all of the tips. I really appreciate