Hey everybody. Dr. Cobb here. I wanted to shoot a quick video regarding the upcoming Fall Prevention and Fall Preparation course because I’m out here actually doing a little bit of training in the garage, as you can see on this cool mat. We’ve been getting a lot of questions about this course, so I’m gonna quickly answer a few, give you one drill and then hopefully we’ll see you there.
Number one question. Why why’d you do this course and what is it gonna be like? Well, very simply, like everything in Z-Health, this course was built because I was super frustrated with what was available. Over the last probably six years, I think I’ve taken 10 or 12 different professional fall prevention courses because I was interested, what are we teaching people falling?
When you look at the morbidity or mortality, statistics is an enormous problem. And what I found generally was that across most professional organizations, the quality of the courses was, in my opinion, quite poor. They were very much slanted toward people living in assisted living. They didn’t deal with athletes, they didn’t deal with young people. They didn’t say, Hey, here is a progression beginning from the most compromised individual all the way up through a relatively high level athlete. How do we teach them to fall? How do we teach ’em to fall purposefully? And how do we teach them to deal with reactive balance challenges? So thankfully, over the last decade as well, the research on this has exploded. we can now look at different areas of the brain, the frontal lobe, the cerebellum, looking at dual tasking issues, all these different things we now have information on that makes Z-Health a fantastic blend of information with what you already know from our courses to say, Hey, how do we actually prevent and prepare people for falling?
So I’m really excited to share this with you. It’s gonna be a great course. We’re doing it live and live streamed because there’s gonna be a lot of physical movement and a lot of physical practice. It will be a normal kind of lecture process. However, the amount of lecture is gonna be minimized because I really want us all focused on building our own awareness and skills.
You can only take people so far if you’ve never done the work yourself. And when it comes to fall prevention and dealing with the fear of falling, this is an essential piece. So I’m hoping that a bunch of people will be able to join us live. We’re about half full there, and like I said, we’re expecting between 400, 500 people on the live stream. I’m super excited about that ’cause I know a few people at least are gonna take this information and run with it and create brand new careers out of just dealing with falls because it is that detailed.
Part of this., you’re gonna get a whole curriculum of how do I begin progressing people through different awareness exercises and movement exercises and visual and vestibular all the way up to falling and rolling. I’m really excited to share that with you ’cause I’ve been working on that for almost 20 years. Anyway, I said all of that. I said I wanted to share with you a quick drill.
So let’s get started with the drill. And these are awareness drills that we’re gonna begin with. I wanna make sure that you understand that your brain has different strategies for dealing with a loss of balance. So we’re gonna work on the following clock. You’re standing in the middle of the clock. I want you to begin rocking forward, rocking back, 12 to six, three to nine, whatever. And as you’re rocking, I eventually want you to displace your body enough that you have to take a step and catch yourself. Do that all the way around. Next drill. You’re now going to try to not force that step by utilizing ankles. Alright, so now I’m gonna rock out as far as I can, and before I take that step,
I’m gonna try to solve my balance problem utilizing what is called an ankle strategy. When you look into the research literature, you’re gonna see a lot about ankle strategies and hip strategies, and those change as we age, which means that we need to make sure that we are competent with both. So how do I use that? Well, you might figure out that you have to tighten the ankles, use a little bit of plantar flexion, but then if you go backwards, it’s a different ankle strategy. So you need to explore your ankle strategies for effective fall prevention.
Third round. You’re now gonna start rocking forward, and as the ankle strategy starts to fail, you’re gonna shift to the hip strategy. You’re gonna start using your hips to try to bring yourself back to standing.
Now, obviously, at some point in the real world, that’s not gonna work. You have to step, you have to go down to the ground. So you have to have progressions for all of those things, and we’re gonna be dealing with all of that. But it all begins initially with finding out more about your own body and what you’re currently capable of and what strategies you have mastered and which ones need work.
All right, so this is just a little intro to the Fall Prevention and Preparation course. I hope to see you there and as I said, just like everything else in Z-Health, we are incredibly excited to have finally the opportunity to share this with you.
