Course Information

Course Name:

Guiding Paths: Helping Kids with Toe Walking Get on the Typical Gait Express

Course Description:

This live course provides extensive review on the importance of early movement patterns and how it affects 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 and can result in toe walking.

This course highlights how we can address these compensations to effectively treat toe walking 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, and rewrite toe walking strategies and get them back on track towards a more energy efficient gait.

Througchout 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 excessive pronation to create a course of 4–5 hours.

Course/learner objective:

- 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

- Recognize red flags for toe walking in development

- Classify types of toe walking in children and design an appropriate orthotic treatment plan to help address primary deficits, create new movement patterns, and drive further development

- Be able to recommend orthotic intervention for children with Type 1 or mild toe walking

- Be able to recommend orthotic intervention for children with Type 2 or moderate toe walking

- Be able to recommend orthotic intervention for children with Type 3 or severe toe walking

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: Rewrite It! (90 min)

- 40 min -- Presentation and case study on the red flags of toe walking

- 5 min -- Case study

- 10 min -- Presentation on orthotic recommendations for toe walking

- 35 min -- Case study review and discussion

- 15 min -- Close / Questions and Answers