The Health of Movement Recognising Movement Choices in Individuals for Long-Term Health
Overview:
This work explores an aspect of the health of a person’s movement and examines how they coordinate movement around different joints in the body.
How we move can be influenced in the short term, for example by a pain episode, and in the long term, for example by recurrent pain episodes or long-term disability.
This thesis will present how to assess movement patterns and how the results can help therapists design specific movement education for individuals.
Evidence to support this strategy will be presented and how resulting engagement proposals may influence a person’s long-term health, pain, recurrence of problems and improvements to their ability to take part in activities and so improve quality of life.
Aims and Objectives:
The aim of this work is to present assessment and retraining strategies to explore how people coordinate movement of different joints, which we know change with pain and long-term disability.
This will help therapists design movement education programmes targeted to people with pain and problems with physical activities.
Objectives
- Evidence to support the use of assessment and retraining of movement patterns to reduce pain and improve quality of life.
- To enable therapists to design movement education to improve coordination in people with pain and activity limitations
Key Findings:
- Theoretical concept for assessing and restoring the health of movement
- Aspects of anatomy and neurophysiological function to support methods of assessment and retraining
- Assessment of loss of movement choices (LMC) using cognitive movement control tests to inform retraining
- Cognitive movement retraining/movement coaching, a person-centred clinical reasoning framework to design individual tailored programmes to restore LMC
Results have demonstrated: i) good inter-rater and excellent intra-rater reliability for the assessment tool; ii) testing for LMC can inform retraining and cognitive movement retraining can change biomechanical and neurophysiological measures; and iii) novel findings of morphologically distinct subdivisions of serratus anterior.
This thesis recommends the assessment of movement coordination strategies (MCS) to guide retraining to improve the health of movement. Theoretical concepts presented and research conducted have provided evidence for proof-of-concept and validity and reliability of assessment procedures.
Outputs: