Your physical therapist uses a variety of mediums and activities to facilitate your recovery. Bread dough is an unconventional but useful material that your therapist may use to rehabilitate an injured foot, improve your balance or strength, or help restore limited hand functioning. Understanding the purpose behind these bread dough activities will aid you in finding value in activities that may appear unrelated to daily life without explanation.
Foot and Toe Exercises
Bread dough is similar to a common therapy medium, Theraputty, which is used for muscle strengthening. After a stroke or other brain injury event, you may demonstrate significantly weaker strength and decreased range of motion in either one or both feet. Completing toe and foot exercises with your foot immersed in bread dough, such as bending and extending your toes while sitting, provides you the opportunity to strengthen weak muscles, which will help to improve your balance and ambulation.
Balance Activities
Beyond merely strengthening your feet, bread dough can be used to improve your balance. Because dough is a compliant, unstable surface to stand on, it will challenge your balance considerably. Your therapist may instruct you to stand in the dough on both feet, one foot or while closing your eyes. By increasing the amount of time for which you can maintain your balance while standing on the bread dough, those ankle and foot muscles that are recruited to maintain your balance will be strengthened. Additionally, the time necessary for your nerves to react to a loss of balance will decrease, which can be correlated with a decreased risk of fall.
Strengthening Activities
By wrapping a bread dough ball tightly with plastic wrap, your therapist can create a weighted ball useful for activities similar to those conducted with a medicine ball. Standing on a trampoline on one or both feet while your therapist tosses the ball with you will strengthen your ankle muscles and decrease your balance reaction time. Similarly, using the dough ball while completing trunk exercises can improve your trunk strength and help rehabilitate your back after an injury.
Hand Therapy
Your physical therapist may treat your hand after an injury, such as a severe fracture or tendon rupture, that has impaired your strength and range of motion. Because the hand movements are so complex and involve many joints in most cases, your therapist may have you manipulate the dough in functional ways. For example, your therapist may have you form the bread dough into a snake shape or small balls to strengthen hand muscles, knead the dough to increase wrist strength, or roll out the dough with a rolling pin to increase overall arm and hand strength.
