Training Frail Older clients

[Austin Baraki]

There are always psychosocial factors like this that can present additional challenges/barriers, yes.

[Bak2ThaBasix]

Is it difficult to get them to be more active in your experience? I feel as though the mindset of

"i'm to old for this s**t" -Danny Glover

would be a limiting factor when treating these individuals.

[Austin Baraki]

I think strength training combined with more "specific" practice of their daily tasks -- for example, practicing going up or down stairs -- would be our favored approach.

"Older populations" are not categorically frail, of course. But there is a subset of the older population that is quite frail -- I see these sorts of individuals in the clinical and hospital every day.

[Bak2ThaBasix]

TLR

In clients/patients with high risk of falling, do you specifically program "balance" work for them?

I was reading
Effects of Different Exercise Interventions on Risk of Falls, Gait Ability, and Balance in Physically Frail Older Adults: A Systematic Review

This got me jumping around the google machine and I had a few observations. The first being that it was surprising to me how often the words "frail" and "elderly" (or some variation) were paired together. Are older populations really as frail as we think? I mean how often do you see the phrase "frail middle aged man" but I digress.

I understand that with age and lack of activity comes a substantial loss of cross sectional muscle mass, so would simply implementing a program to increase overall strength and muscle help with the balance or should the balance aspect be a focus on-top of the strength and conditioning?

I was going to add that this was me assuming if there was no underlying tendinopathy but as with the assumption that elders are frail I assume that elder populations who were previously not active have some sort of pain or injury.