Guiding Paths: Finding the Best Routes to Manage Excessive Pronation

This live course provides extensive review on the importance of early movement patterns and how they affect postural control, gait, and other upright motor skills. Patients with low muscle tone, high muscle tone, and sensory dysfunction often develop compensations in early movement patterns. These compensations negatively affect alignment, muscle activation patterns, and motor skills moving forward.

This course highlights what these compensations are and how we can address them within the population subsets of hypotonia, hypertonia, and sensory dysfunction with dynamic orthotic solutions. The objectives of the orthotic interventions presented are to drive better postural control, improve alignment and muscle activation, help create new movement strategies, and improve gross motor acquisition, especially when patients have excessive pronation that is symptomatic.

Throughout the program, learners will participate in large group discussions of in-depth case studies. These case studies will prepare the learner to evaluate and assess for orthotic solutions.

NOTE: This course can be combined with our Guiding Paths course on toe walking to create a course of 4–5 hours.

Learner Objectives:

- Identify early compensations for kids with hypermobility, sensory dysfunction, and high tone

- Recognize the impact on early movement patterns in later quality of upright gross motor skills

- Understand how to address early compensations with early intervention through therapy and orthotic solutions to improve postural control development

- Identify excessive pronation in children with both high and low tone and design an appropriate orthotic treatment plan to help address primary deficits, create new movement patterns, and drive further development

- Differentiate variations of SMOs and benefits of each one

- Recognize the benefits of Indy 2 Stage AFO

Outline: (3 Hours)

- 5 min -- Intro

Part 1: Move It! (70 min)

- 30 min -- Presentation on early movement patterns, postural control, and gait

- 30 min -- Case study review and discussion

- 10 min -- Break

Part 2: Activate It! (90 min)

- 30 min -- Presentation on typical gait development, excessive low tone pronation and its consequences

- 20 min -- Presentation on dynamic orthotic solutions and case studies

- 5 min -- Presentation on open heel modification and case study

- 10 min -- Presentation on excessive high tone pronation

- 25 min -- Case study review and discussion

- 15 min -- Close / Questions and Answers