The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that children as young as six years old should be engaging in at least 60 minutes a physical activity each day. Unfortunately only 3% of children in United States meet these recommended guidelines for physical activity. There’re many different ways to engage in physical activity, but at Adaptive Exercise we focus on teaching structured exercise. This approach to exercise autism therapy helps teach children, adolescents, and adults on the autism spectrum how to exercise and move properly. We do this primarily through resistance training, as well as stretching and cardiovascular training. Well our personal training autism therapy sessions focus on structured exercise, the skills learned can translate into your child’s play outside of exercise sessions. Children who do not know how to move efficiently or lack physical strength may avoid engaging in regular physical activity. By improving their strength and teaching these individuals how to move functionally, they are more equipped to engage an exercise under own, play sports or participate in a number of other outdoor physical activities.
The majority of our personal training sessions based on resistance training, specifically functional movement training. Resistance training is usually thought of in terms of lifting weights in the gym. There are actually a number of different ways one can engage in resistance training that do not require traditional weights or gyms. Equipment used in our exercise autism therapy, may look different from the equipment you would see in traditional fitness center. Much of our equipment is sand based, in order to be able to provide the safest resistance training. Equipment like sand bells, medicine balls, sand bags, sand kettle bells and resistance bands. This equipment is not only safe under the supervision of our personal trainers, but it can be used to teaching number of functional movements that can benefit individuals in their activities of daily living. In many ways the sand-based exercise equipment is more versatile than the traditional metal and rubber weights. Sand based equipment can be used to teach exercises at higher speeds and more variations of movement. Personal trainers can also teach unique exercises with this type equipment, exercises like slams and throws. These types of exercises are not only functional, but fun. Teaching a novice athlete how to engage in resistance training is more fun for both the trainer and the client when they’re enjoying the exercises.
Stretching is the important component of our exercise autism therapy at Adaptive Exercise. Each exercise session whether it be one-on-one or a group exercise session, begins and ends with stretching. Prior to beginning work out our trainers will prompt clients through a short dynamic warm-up. During the dynamic warm-up athletes will perform movements similar to the ones performed in their exercise session, but at a lower intensity no weight. The dynamic warm-up prior to beginning exercise is important to ensure safe exercise practice. Each exercise autism therapy session also ends with a brief cooldown. The cool down consist of static or stationary stretches. Many of these stretches are taken from the practice of yoga. By beginning and ending each exercise session with a warm-up and cooldown, the chances of injury are reduced.
Cardiovascular training can be one of the most difficult areas for personal training for many people on autism spectrum. This form of exercise is the most likely to result in weight-loss, but not all clients are ready to engage in this form of exercise. Our personal trainers are focused on providing the most effective exercise autism therapy, while following the safest forms of practice. If the client is not ready to engage in cardiovascular exercise training, they must first learn more basic exercise techniques. By learning these more basic exercise techniques in building of repertoire of exercises, the trainer later adapt the programming to Provide more cardiovascular benefit. One way to do this is through high intensity interval training.
All these different forms of exercise provide different benefits to clients. Determining which mode of exercise or modes will be the most beneficial is based off of current fitness levels, ability and goals. A child who has extremely low muscle tone and no prior history of exercising, will have programming much different from a more experienced athlete who is looking to improve their performance in sports. This is why creating individualized programming through our personalized exercise plans is so important. Whatever the program looks like safety is of the utmost importance.
Many different ways that our trainers take precautions to provide the safest and effective personal training. The warm-up and cool down in each session is just one of the ways we create a safe personal training environment. The personalize exercise plan, that is based off of your child’s specific abilities and fitness level through the assessment period, helps the trainers know the safest weight and movements to focus on. Progressing a client to using heavy weights too quickly can lead to bad stress on the body for injury. Likewise, having a child perform movements that they cannot do with proper form consistently, can lead injury. Even if an individual possesses the strength to do exercises with heavier weights, if they’re not displaying proper form, the trainer must first work to correct the movement. This is something that I’ve noticed in gyms for all people. People who are trying to lift heavy weights even though they do not have the technique to do so. I think a lot of this comes from our preconceived notions of fitness. Many people are going into the gym to lose weight, gain muscle and look like the people they see on TV and in exercise media. I’ll see individuals going straight to the bench press and loading on weights, but when they go to perform the movement they’re not performing properly. People measure themselves through in proper lifting or exercise techniques may be causing more harm to themselves, than good. At Adaptive Exercise we emphasize teaching proper lifting techniques and exercise techniques from the get-go.