If you are not doing as much walking around as you would like to after suffering a stroke or being in hospital then it doesn’t take long for your body to become de-conditioned and your muscles to lose some of their strength.
Any neurological condition such as cerebral palsy, stroke, spinal cord injury, multiple sclerosis or Parkinson’s will affect the ability of muscles to activate strongly and consistently and in a co-ordinated way.
One good simple way of strengthening your legs is just to practice standing up and then sitting down and then standing up again. If you make this a habit so that when you stand up in the mornings you incorporate three to five repetitions of simply sitting down again and then standing up, this is a convenient and easy way to get all the leg muscles working.
As we get older we tend to use the arms of chairs more to help us get from sitting into standing.
This is normal. However, if you have had a stroke then often one arm will become accustomed to pushing on the arm of the chair and the body then becomes twisted towards that side so that more weight is put on that leg, the stronger leg, and less on the other leg which has been more affected by the stroke.
It is important to have the feet fairly level and about hip width apart and this will help to give both legs the opportunity to take equal weight so that they both get the benefit from the sitting to standing to sitting exercise.
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