Strandhälsan and Pilates

After a couple of months back in Sweden it was time to meet my former colleges in Qatar. Kristian and Maria Vikström live in Halmstad, but Kristian works at Strandhälsan in Falkenberg, owned partially by Lotta Peltoarvo - our administrative boss in Qatar. What a lovely reunion it was.

Since we live and breath our work, I just had to transform it into a learning visit as well. Strandhälsan isn't like any other rehab clinic. They work hard to get the patients active to make the rehab more efficient, and create a natural way for the patients to move forward from healthcare to wellness, in order to retain the patients health, wellbeing, function and prevent future injury and illness.
There are training groups to fit people at all levels. The oldest participant is well over 90 years! It was a very inspiring and rewarding visit. 

However, there was a specific angle with this visit: Lotta told me earlier how they work with a medical pilates that they are very happy with och helps a lot of patients. Pilates is something I've been quite curious of and it's been on my learning-list for some time. So I just had to take this opportunity to try it and learn some about it. One of their physiotherapists, Jenny, got educated in this in Australia, and works a lot with the pilates as rehab. It fits everyone who needs to train their stability in different joints. With the pilates machines (there are several of them: Called Reformer, Trapeze table and Wunda chair amongst others) you get functional full body exercise and at the same time proper stability training. My body felt great doing these exercises. The machine we used was the Reformer.

Jenny started off doing some tests based on my flaws, finding my weaknesses and the problems they lead to at times. Based on that we started off doing som core-stability exercises on the mat to check if it's the right orientation. After that test again, if positive result we continue the same way, and it was the right kind of exercises. There after we started trying exercises on the Reformer. In approximately one hour we'd spoken about my body's ailments, we did the tests och tried which kind of exercises I'll respond positively to, trained the core, my groin, a strain in my Hamstring and a weakness in my shoulder. Not bad at all. We did some extra stuff so I could try on some different exercises as well. 

I'm definitely interested in learning more about this, and in the future invest more in pilates now that I've felt how effective the training is. Maybe Jenny can agree to an interview as well for a deeper description of this form om training. I'll definitely try to persuade her... :)


Stay healthy!