How Activity-Based Therapy Enhances Patient Recovery Outcomes

Whether you are recovering from a spinal cord injury, a stroke, or neurological damage, activity-based therapy is a treatment you need to consider. What is activity-based therapy? How does it go beyond the physical therapy you may receive at a more traditional center? Where can you find an activity-based therapy center to help you recover from your illness or injury? We are going to address the answers to those questions for you today.

What Is Activity-Based Therapy?

Activity-based therapy (ABT) does exactly what it sounds like. The treatment focuses on moderate to intense levels of activity. While therapy often focuses on finding new ways of doing things within the constraints of your injury. Activity-based therapy tries to push beyond those limits and restore function. 

Rather than merely compensating for lost muscle function, the idea behind ABT is that your body still needs exercise. That starts with the muscles and limbs that you can currently activate. Some of the goals include increasing muscle strength, improving endurance, and restoring function.

A key element of ABT is the intensity of the workouts. Whereas traditional physical therapy usually involves slow and controlled movements, ABT leans toward cardio. There is also a focus on balance training and strength training as well. However, this is going to be a much more extreme workout. 

Rather than exercising for half an hour or an hour at a time, patients may commit to being active for two or three hours per day. The more you put into this form of therapy, the more you will get out of it. So let’s take a look at some of the benefits of activity-based therapy.

The Benefits of Activity-Based Therapy 

Exercise is going to have positive benefits for anyone. However, when it comes to a patient who is living with paralysis, the benefits can become even more pronounced. Here are some of the reasons that activity-based therapy is so valuable. 

• Muscle strength – Strengthening functional muscles can help you to perform tasks for yourself and maintain a greater degree of independence. 
• Heart and respiratory function – Moderate activity has benefits for both the heart and lungs. That is important for healing as well as for your immune system. 
• Weight – Weight gain can increase health issues for those who are living with paralysis. Exercise can help you to maintain a healthy body weight. 
• Balance – Strengthening your muscles can help to improve your balance and increase your endurance levels. 
• Decreased spasticity – When the muscles remain in a contracted state, this is called spasticity. It occurs due to nerve damage. However, ABT can help to improve the function of the brain and spinal cord, resulting in decreased spasticity. 
• Neural patterns – The goal of ABT is to activate the body’s ability to regenerate spontaneously when it comes to the central nervous system. However, researchers have discovered that this is more likely to happen if a patient is actively performing patterned activities. 

While those benefits sound great, you may wonder how you can do things that require activity (such as walking on a treadmill) while paralyzed. To some degree, the answer depends on the activity-based therapy center that you choose. 

How to Jumpstart the Neural Patterns to Get You Moving Again 

If you can’t activate specific muscles on your own, there are a number of technologies that can help. One of these is functional electrical stimulation. Electrical currents stimulate the non-functional muscles much in the way exercise would. The goal is to see if the body will pick up where the currents leave off and restore some conscious function via neural repairs.

The other option is a locomotion therapy device like the Lokomat. This is an exoskeleton that the therapist can strap to your legs. The exoskeleton then walks on a treadmill in a natural pattern. The hope is that your body will recognize the pattern and restore the neural patterns required. Even if it doesn’t, you still get to strengthen muscles that would otherwise go unused. Maintaining your strength is a must, and it can help you with balance and gait, even if you can only restore enough function to get around with a walker or another assistance device. 

Finding the Right Activity-Based Therapy Center 

If you live in Southern Florida, iAM ABLE offers all of the traditional and activity-based therapies that you want. From electric stimulation to use of the Lokomat, our physical therapists have the right tools to maximize your results. In fact, ABT may be able to help patients years after their injury or neuro damage occurred (although the sooner you seek care, the better the outcome will be).

Pushing yourself a little harder today may result in more independence a month or a year from now. Preparing yourself mentally for the journey of rehabilitation is a big part of the battle. That is why we have developed the eBook entitled, 7 Unbelievable Important Steps to Take to Thrive after Paralysis. We encourage anyone who is living with paralysis, whether you live near our facility or not, to read it. 

Becoming paralyzed is undoubtedly a life-changing experience. However, accepting your new reality and learning to control it can be crucial when it comes to restoring your quality of life. You don’t have to limit yourself to survival. You can thrive and continue to enjoy your life. We hope our book and our facility can help as many people as possible to reach those objectives.

Grab our free e-book 7 Unbelievably Important Steps to Take to THRIVE after Paralysis by clicking the image below.