Transcript: Optimising Function
The following transcript is taken from Track 02 of the ‘Strength for Life’ CD, entitled ‘Working with Muscles’.
This interview was recorded for the foundation of our message of an effective approach to aging and physical strength for life.
Key: JB = James Blacker, DH = David Heard.
JB: Since then you’ve been working on the NRCP as founder and Chief Executive since then. In the last ten years you must have developed some magnificent understandings of how muscles work?
DH: Well indeed. The whole prospect of working with a paralysed person, by definition, excludes certain musculature, or would tend to. One of the things that was staggering about Dikoul’s approach was that they work even paralysed muscles, even if the work is passive, and what I mean by that is if you imagine a therapist moving your limb, your arm for example, for you, that is passive exercise – the idea of getting the muscle to contract, shrink, and then extend, stretch – that may be done passively, but there is still a therapeutic benefit in there. And the therapeutic benefit is you’re flushing the muscles with blood, you’re keeping the joints mobile. So what Dikoul’s regime sought to do was to isolate even the tiniest muscles and work on those muscles, with the view that if we can regain some kind of strength, even at a very low level, what we would in normal terms call a low level, we could over a compound period, develop ultimately enough movement to regain function.
