As we age, we generally experience a progressive decline in the ability to use our arms and hands for normal daily activities such as using cutlery to cut food, brushing our teeth and buttoning up a shirt (Shumway-Cook & Woollacott, 2016). The ability to complete everyday activities with our upper […]
Walking is regulated and coordinated through complex control mechanisms within the human sensory motor system, allowing individuals to adapt to both internal and external challenges and perturbations (Full et al., 2002). During this regulation to achieve stable walking, natural fluctuations (i.e. movement variability) are present between strides in both the […]
Resistance training is a type of physical exercise used in rehabilitation, sports, and recreational settings to increase muscle force and mass. Significant increases in muscle mass usually occur after weeks of resistance training, but strength improvements can occur after just a few training sessions (Calder et al., 2007). These initial […]
Our ability to sense the position of our body, known as proprioception, is fundamental for controlling how we move and interact during daily activities (Proske and Gandevia, 2012). People who have persistent pain (i.e., pain that lasts for more than three months) find it difficult to sense the position of […]
Intensive care beds, which cater for critically ill patients, are predicted to represent >30% of all future hospital beds. Around a third of critically ill patients require mechanical ventilation to help them breathe. While a lifesaving intervention, mechanical ventilation increases breathing and heart related complications, decreases quality of life, and […]
Single limb resistance training improves strength not only in the trained limb, but also in similar muscles of the untrained limb. The increase in strength in the untrained limb, commonly known as ‘cross-education’, is due to a strengthening of connections within the brain and spinal cord (Farthing and Zehr, 2014). […]
The loss of passive joint range of motion (i.e. contracture) is common in stroke and other neurological conditions. More than half of people with stroke or spinal cord injury will develop at least one contracture (Diong et al., 2012; Kwah et al., 2012). Contracture impairs physical function and can cause […]
For decades, there has been a consensus amongst scientists and practitioners that one of the ways people become stronger after resistance training is that their muscles become bigger. This increase in muscle size is termed muscle hypertrophy. Over the past 3 years, however, Jeremy Loenneke’s research group at the University […]
Pain is one of the most troubling impairments of Parkinson’s disease, with up to 85% of people affected (Broen et al., 2012). While exercise has many benefits in assisting people with Parkinson’s disease to optimise their health, balance, strength and mobility, there is limited research exploring the benefits of exercise […]
In stroke-induced hemiparesis, muscles such as the plantar flexors undergo dramatic alterations that involve both physical shortening (decrease in fascicle length) and viscoelastic loss of extensibility (Kwah et al., 2012). This muscle disorder has been termed spastic myopathy (Gracies, 2015) and is commonly treated with stretching techniques. However, the effectiveness […]
