People most commonly think of exercise as a means for weight loss. Others think of exercise as a way of building muscle restraint. Well exercise can most certainly lead to both of these results, most people do not think of exercise as a necessity for human health. Our personal training at Adaptive Exercise is autism therapy. Therapy is defined as treatment intended to relieve or heal the disorder. In the case of Autism Spectrum Disorder, some associated symptoms that affect a large number of the population are low muscle tone, obesity, and poor motor movements. Exercise autism therapy can help relieve or eliminate many of these symptoms. Yet for some reason this form of autism therapy is not as mainstream as speech pathology, ABA therapy, occupational and physical therapy. People were not designed to be sedentary beings, as our lifestyles have changed from the time of hunter gatherers, our bodies have not fully evolved to fit our new lifestyles.
The rates of obesity and being overweight have risen to a level of some referring to this as an epidemic. These rates are even more apparent within the autism population. These higher rates of obesity in being overweight are affecting children, adolescents and adults on autism spectrum. There’re many different reasons for this, but one is most certainly lack of physical activity and exercise. There is not as many fitness related options available to people with autism who has significant support needs. Our exercise autism therapy is specifically designed for people with autism, to offer them whatever level of support they need to successfully engage in an exercise program. Exercise can contribute to weight loss, but there’re many other factors as well. Factors like medication, nutrition and genetics. Well exercise cannot make up for all the other outside variables, it is certainly a step in the right direction. When you move more you burn more calories, and when you burn more calories than you consume you lose weight. Children and adolescents with autism we’re not engaging in physical activity or exercise regularly, are most likely not going to be burning as many calories as they’re consuming. Adaptive Exercise is not a weight loss company, but we do know that by not engaging in exercise you increase the risk of becoming overweight or obese, as well as a number of other negative health related conditions.
I first became aware of the rates of low muscle tone affecting people with autism while working as a speech language pathologist assistant. Low muscle tone made articulating certain words themselves more difficult. I was reminded of this limitation what working as an ABA therapist. Low muscle tone made completing what appeared to be simple everyday tasks more challenging for these individuals. Exercise autism therapy, can contribute to strength and muscle gain. Resistance training can improve muscle tone through repetition of movement and exercise progression. By carefully designing a resistance training program for a child with autism, a personal trainer can target muscle groups to strengthen and grow. A child with low muscle tone may struggle to bend down and tie their shoes, so a trainer can work on building lower body strength and stability so that this task is more easily accomplished. Just like a bodybuilder achieves hypertrophy through the repetition of exercises, our athletes build muscle through were repetitive resistance training. This is most likely on a much smaller scale, but is this same phenomenon.
Poor motor movements are commonly associated with children with low muscle tone, but a child with more developed musculature can still suffer from poor motor movements. Exercise can help correct these motor planning issues. Because our exercise autism therapy is built upon the philosophy of functional movement training, we develop programs to teach or correct movement. Functional movement training entails movements we every perform in our everyday lives, like pushing, pulling, rotating, single leg movements and bending and lifting. The exercises selected are not progressed until the individual has showed that they can perform this movement properly and independently. There’re many different strategies we use to accomplish this. Progressing the intensity of an exercise prior to displaying mastery of the movement can lead to injury or bad stress on the body.
Not every individual with autism struggles with weight gain, obesity, low muscle tone, or poor motor movements, but these are real issues are affecting the large number of people on spectrum. Whether they suffer from any of these ailments are not exercise can still be beneficial for anyone with or without autism. This doesn’t mean that everyone needs to be engaging in vigorous exercise or weight lifting. Even moderate exercise has been shown to offer many of the same benefits. By completely avoiding exercise you are increasing the chances of your child struggling with these ailments. People are not meant to be sedentary, many of the health challenges that arise later in life can be avoided through regular exercise.
Many other fields and services available for people with autism address similar challenges. Exercise is not meant to take place of any of these other therapies, but it should be used in conjunction. The more we are working to address these issues the better therapeutic results we’ll see. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend the children engage insane form of physical activity for 60 minutes each day. Their commercials in public service announcements to remind people of these recommendations, but still most children are not hitting these numbers. Parents will allocate large amounts of time and money to helping their child perform better in school, but are not putting the same amount of effort into helping their children become more active. I believe this is mostly because exercise is not seen as a necessity, it Is seen more as a leisure or choice. Engaging in regular exercise cannot only benefit your child’s physical and mental health, but can improve their level of independence, academic and social performance. So if you’re looking to best support your child in their development, make sure that they are getting that physical activity that everyone needs.