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Welcome to the Postural Restoration Community! This is where you will read the latest industry news, hear about upcoming events, find helpful deadline reminders, and view a plethora of additional resources regarding our techniques and curriculum. The great part about it is--not only can you can view the entries we post, you can also post about the things that matter to you. Did you find an interesting article about a technique you learned in one of your courses? Do you have a patient case study you want to share with other professionals? Simply click "Submit an Entry" and follow the easy steps towards getting your information published in the PRI Community!

Blog Posts in March 2021

Neal Hallinan, CSCS, LMT, PRT will join Jennifer Smart and Ron Hruska as a presenter at this year's 12th Annual Interdisciplinary Integration Symposium. Neal has a unique understanding of the science of PRI, through his first hand experience as both a patient and a Postural Restoration Trained (PRT) provider, working with clients both locally in the NYC area and from the across the world. Although his first career began in the IT field, he sought out to find something he was truly passionate about, which was movement. Years of nagging pain led him to discover that movement could be healing. During a period of time spent living in Brazil, Neal first recognized the freedom of movement that many people living there expressed through dance. As the introduction and interest in this art of expression grew, Neal spent considerable time learning the steps and sequences of various styles of dance and fell in love with the influences of rhythm, percussion and beats that were included.

Neal began his journey with PRI in 2013, when he completed the three primary home study courses. He then went on to take many secondary and tertiary courses over the next several years, and continues to be very active within our Institute. "This was it" Neal recalls, as he had finally found answers to the patterns and positions he had noticed over time in his own body. He recalls his own personal journey changing when he could fully appreciate grounding and true sensory integration for the first time and discusses how in today's virtual world he tries to help his clients achieve the same level of sensory awareness through the use of PRI-based principles and techniques. Neal's interest in latin dance motion and so many other forms of rhythmic movement provided a natural fit to this years Symposium, focusing Basal Ganglia Disease and the management of kinesia paradoxica.

Learn more about Neal's upcoming presentations below, and also check out the most recent podcast episode where Neal, along with Ron Hruska discuss how these presentations will tie into movement disorders. 

Inhibiting Inhibitions: Rediscovering Your Innate Alternating Rhythms Through Dance
-Neal Hallinan, CSCS, LMT, PRT

Dance is a fantastic way to get back in touch with the natural alternating rhythms of your body. This presentation will discuss the challenges of learning and teaching dance, how to find "the beat", and overcoming the inhibitions that hold us back. Please have space available for learning some foundational dance steps.
 

"How Do You Initiate Rhythmic Movement Provided by The Body For the Feet To Move?"
-Neal Hallinan, CSCS, LMT, PRT
Learning to dance traditionally starts with the feet. That's the easy part. Obtaining fluidity of movement requires integrated use of the thorax, arms, and head to produce a particular "style". I will introduce common elements of styling including: spinning/turning, contra-body motion, arm movement, and Cuban/Latin motion.

Posted March 23, 2021 at 12:44PM

Jennifer Smart, DPT, PRC is one of three speakers for this year's 12th Annual Interdisciplinary Integration Symposium. This symposium topic came together as a result of the extraordinary work she has been doing with those managing Parkinson’s Disease in her community, and the engaging discussions she has had with Ron over the past couple years. Jen is a clinician at heart, but also one who is current with the research and medical advancements that have been made for those experiencing extrapyramidal symptoms.


Her growing interest in Parkinson’s Disease began around 2015 when her best friend was diagnosed. This was the year she completed the PRC credentialing program, and shortly after neurologist, Dr. Jay Alberts, published research showing how, when a person with PD rides on the back of a tandem that is being pedaled at a cadence of 80-90 RPM, a variety of their PD symptoms decrease. After dissecting the research, Jen bought a tandem bike, and her and her friend rode for over an hour 3 times a week at the specified cadence. Others with PD heard what they were doing, and she ended up getting several tandem bikes and set them up on stationary trainers at a local gym, where she coordinated having members of the local cycling community ride on the front to set the cadence while people with PD rode on the back. “Park’n Ride” was officially started as a non-profit in January 2015.


Based on the success of this cycling program, Jen has become a regional expert on Parkinson’s Disease, where individuals have moved to her small coastal town of Oriental, North Carolina after their diagnosis. She became certified in LSVT BIG, Parkinson’s Wellness and Recovery (PWR!) and Rock Steady Boxing, which are all evidence-based, Parkinson’s-specific programs. Jen has attended the Parkinson’s World Congress and has even volunteered for a week with Becky Farley, PT, PhD who developed LSVT BIG and PWR. In 2017, Jen received a grant from the National Parkinson’s Foundation to organize and run a two-day event, called the Parkinson’s Exercise Program (PEP) Retreat, which was designed to help both patients and medical providers better understand how to use exercise as an evidence-based treatment for PD.


In her own words, “What I have taken away from all of this training, from working extensively with this population, and from the currently exploding literature regarding the benefits of specific exercise programs for PD, is that, perhaps unknowingly, the components that make each of these treatment techniques so effective, are the components that are based on the science of PRI. People with PD, just like all of us, need to be able to rhythmically alternate, but their disease, or somewhere along their journey towards developing this disease, this ability to rhythmically alternate was compromised so they needed to develop involuntary tics, muscle spasms, tremors, restless legs, dystonia and/or postural changes to help them to get to the other side, to help them to alternate. This is now the message that I am trying to get across in both the prevention and treatment of Parkinson’s, and so many other, syndromes or diseases.


Learn more about Jen’s upcoming presentations at our 12th Annual Interdisciplinary Integration below.


Practical Implication of Intervention and Management of Patients Who Have Been Diagnosed with Basal Ganglia Disease
-Jennifer Smart, DPT, PRC
The first half of this presentation will review a variety of diseases involving basal ganglia dysfunction, examining both their common and uniquely different motor and non-motor manifestations, while exploring not only the current and experimental pharmacological, surgical and physical treatment techniques that are being employed to treat them, but also the underlying reasoning behind each of these interventions.  The second half of the presentation will focus more on a variety of evidence-based physical treatment programs, compiling the common effective visual, auditory, postural and respiratory components from each physical activity program. Emphasis will be placed on assessing how each technique addresses the temporal, lateralization and pressure regulatory deficits seen in people who have been diagnosed with Basal Ganglia Diseases (in order to unlock, through oscillatory function, the axial skeletal system from the appendicular skeletal system in an attempt to better balance the autonomic nervous system with the central nervous system).

A Clinical Perspective on Geocentricism, Lateralized Linkages, Sleep, Timing and Weight Shifting
-Jennifer Smart, DPT, PRC

The research states that the Basal Ganglia is involved in the perception of time, but what does that clinically mean? It means that a person with a Basal Ganglia disease, such as Parkinson’s, does not know how to navigate through space since such movement is inextricably linked to time, not only for understanding when to move but also at what speed (since speed is distance per unit of time) but also for knowing where they are (“five minutes from home”) and how to integrate all their moving parts. For example, knowing when to supinate and for how long to experience appropriate weight shifting in order to avoid over lateralization relies on timing.  This presentation is going to discuss clinical ways to address the various issues involved with timing deficits, through visual, auditory, positional, and respiratory cuing, in people with Basal Ganglia deficits.

Clinical Case Study Presentations
-Jennifer Smart, DPT, PRC

This presentation will be a discussion of the treatment and management of several patients who have been diagnosed with Basal Ganglia Disease, either Parkinson’s Disease or Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP). A few of the cases were ones in which Jennifer Smart had the opportunity to collaborate with Ron Hruska. Management discussion will include group exercise application, in addition to individual rehabilitation considerations.


   

Posted March 17, 2021 at 1:38PM
Categories: Courses

The Midwest started warming up to a balmy 22 degrees on the way to reaching almost above freezing on Saturday morning for the first Postural Respiration Live/Live Stream course this year. There were seven live attendees some of whom drove over 5 hours on slick and icy roads to take their first Postural Respiration course while almost 40 others from all over the country, and even internationally from Slovenia, attended this course. Ron and I had a discussion the day before I taught and it was a real inspiration to be able to emphasize to the new students the concepts of not just rib movement and diaphragm function but the importance of pressure and flow inside a chest wall and how that not only affects position and posture but every system in the human body. We spend a lot of time on the orthopedic consequences of neurologic patterns in this course but it is what is inside the chest wall in terms of how we direct air into chambers and how that affects whether ribs move up or move down, and torsos left or right as a critical element of Postural Respiration and all PRI courses. The Posterior Mediastinum has become more of an emphasis than ever before along with the role of the first rib in initiating the lifting of the rest of the ribs below it during respiration. This class really got the relationship between the right apical chest wall and the left posterior mediastinum with the role of how important inhibition to these chambers of the chest wall is.

One of the non manual techniques we focused on was the Standing Serratus Squat and the importance of learning how to perform it. This is one of PRI's more difficult positions to competently perform and that there are often precursors, especially with reaching and squatting techniques, to help facilitate this most important technique. Just because it is challenging to perform doesn't mean that students shouldn't master it and then teach their patients. This is one of many techniques that help strengthen an individual's diaphragm and give them a "sense", which was one of the key words of the weekend, of thier ribcage moving backwards!

And for forward locomotion, that is, to move forward, one most move a ribcage back! Questions came in fast and furious which is a delight for instructors since it helps to gauge where the attendees are in their understanding and to reinforce and repeat concepts that are needed to provide a good foundation to understand this course well enough to begin to apply. The students in this course were helping teach Postural Respiration by their re-states and questions with energy and enthusiasm. Shout out Meghann Vanslager and Jennifer Bacon who drove from Kansas then had a 5 hour drive home with work the next day! Thanks to Ian Katanec for being on a 9 hour time difference in Slovenia and everyone else that spent their weekend with us as over half of the attendees that were either brand new to PRI or first time attending Postural Respiration. Most of all, thanks to RJ Hruska who was my wingman performing audio and visual expertise with changing camera angles for lab and keeping things going smoothly during these virtual attendance times.

Posted March 3, 2021 at 3:07PM
Categories: Courses Techniques Science

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