As footy finals season heats up, the adrenaline kicks in and the pressure is on, elite players put their bodies on the line in the quest for supremacy. It’s riveting stuff but I do pray every time I watch a game of footy that nobody gets a concussion.

A concussion is a form of traumatic brain injury. From kids playing at school to the elderly falling at home, concussion is a very real risk across the lifespan that can have devastating effects. In particular, I find that that younger people are more prone to developing post concussion syndrome and even second impact syndrome.

If seven years is anything to go by, it’s the fact that seeing 6 patients a day, 5 days a week, 40 weeks a year means I would have had 8400 exercise programs to learn something from.

That means I practically eat, sleep and dream of exercise programs. If exercise were a drug, I would be your shady crack dealer, handing them out to unsuspecting ladies with walkers left right and centre.

But how do we make our exercises more addictive?

Well, here are 7 great ways to make that happen.

Few of us stop to understand fully what is involved in walking, an activity we often take for granted, until something goes wrong. In people with a neurological condition, returning to normal walking can be a challenging task. All too often people learn to use compensatory muscle groups and strategies in an attempt to create efficient forward movement.

Walking is primarily governed by powerful actions of 3 main muscle groups. But first, you must understand the following graphic:

The body is a complex creature with millions and millions of connections that come from the brain and spread throughout the nervous system. These connections that follow tracts or pathways carry signals for sensation, movement and the body’s automatic systems like blood pressure control and digestion.

Balance involves the ongoing interaction between seeing, feeling and orientation in space, and is underpinned by the visual, somatosensory and vestibular systems. Having some understanding of neurology and its systems is important for the rehabilitation of balance, because this cannot be treated with typical strength training principles.

In this 3 part series, you will learn about what the vestibular system actually is, what questions are important to ask during assessment and lastly how you actually recover from it.

Have you ever hit your funny bone? In actual fact, the funny bone is not a bone at all but the ulnar nerve, which supplies about a quarter of the muscles in your arm. But what happens if it is more serious than that?

First, a quick lesson on human physiology.

What is a nerve?

A nerve is a cord like structure that is made up bundles of conductive tissue that forms the peripheral nervous system. Before they branch off from the brain and spinal cord to become nerves, they are called tracts.

Nerves are organised very much like a big fat sushi roll.

Mental imagery has received much attention in the scientific literature because it’s been shown to be helpful in neurological and pain rehabilitation.

It seems simple doesn’t it? That we must first be able to conceptualise and plan what the task is like before we know how we should go about doing it.

Did you know that despite the brain being 2% of the mass of the body, it uses 25% of the available oxygen supply?

And did you know that if joined up all the arteries in the brain end to end that it is more than 160,000km long?

That’s a lot of distance to look after, and many places where the arteries could either block up or bleed through, resulting in what we know as stroke.

One of the best ways to look after our blood vessels is by looking after our insides. One key part is diet, and the other is aerobic exercise.

Now that you are avoiding the most common balance retraining pitfalls, I would like to share with you my 6 novel ways of helping people improving their balance.

The main principle of doing this right is always start with a level you can achieve with minimal difficulty. From here, you can challenge the parameters of speed, load, attentional demands, movement complexity and availability of environmental support.

So here are 6 novel ways (in no particular order) to train your balance and why: