Read how we designed a therapy session around our client’s love of baking.
The aim of hand therapy and upper limb therapy is to give our clients their independence and enable them to perform daily tasks and activities that are meaningful to them. Julie, our OT Assistant, visited a client this week to work on improving her co-ordination and function, which in the future may allow her to enjoy baking and cooking with her family.
She currently has limited active movement, so we start off with a warm-up involving passive movement only. The warm-up has many benefits and prepares her for the session ahead. It maximises blood flow around the limbs, activates the sensory signals to her brain, and increases the synovial fluid around her joints. It also helps to reduce tone/stiffness by stretching out the muscle fibres.
Once fully warmed-up they moved onto the therapy. This week they focused on practising some of the tasks involved in baking, such as kneading dough, rolling out pastry and cutting out cases for tarts.
Before she introduced the equipment, Julie held up her hands and asked the client try pulling them forward and pushing them away. In doing this she was able to gauge how much control the client has of her upper limbs and support the pushing and pulling action whilst the client familiarised her muscles with the pulling/pushing motion.
The next task was bread making. This involved our client pressing her hands into the playdough to mimic the action of kneading bread dough, whilst activating the muscles in her palms and fingers.
With muscles activated and motions practiced, it was time to introduce the tools used in baking. This involved the extra challenge of ‘grasp’. They worked on grasping the rolling pin and rolling it forward and backwards to roll out the pastry [playdough], and used a cookie cutter to cut the ‘pastry’ into tart shaped cases.
From start to finish it was wonderful to see our client fully engaged in the activities and growing in confidence with each achievement. What better reward for a job well done than a chocolate treat to round off the therapy session.