Aide Training

Here at Hayashida and Associates Physical Therapy, we are extremely passionate about the profession and the care that you receive while you are here with us.  With this push for excellence, we also like to ensure that our staff is capable to providing the same quality of care as your therapist.    Physical Therapy aides are screened prior to hiring and evaluated on their desire to pursuit a career in health care.  This measure enables the physical therapist to assist in the development of the necessary skills towards becoming a physical therapist, strength and conditioning coach, or personal trainer. During their time at Hayashida and Associates, these individuals are pushed to continue towards and many achieve additional certifications in the strength and conditioning industry.  Just as the your therapist stays sharp with their evidence based practice, by attending seminars, labs instruction, teaching and reading literature, we believe that growth within our staff is important as well.  During their time at each clinic, aides are all continually trained in rehabilitative exercises and proper mechanics to ensure that the patient is able to strength the targeted area and reproduce the exercises with their home programs.   Multiple training sessions are made available so that the aides can assist us with your care

Written By: Riley O'Hagan, PT, DPT, OCS, CSCS

Outsource Your New Year’s Resolutions

You may sit there and read the title of today’s blog post and question, “That would be easy, send my New Year’s Resolution overseas and have someone else worry about it”.  But there is another meaning to outsourcing your resolutions.  When we make resolutions for ourselves we often make foolish ones such as, lose 60 lbs in 1 month, workout 7 days a week when you have never worked out before, or stop eating chocolate.  Although these resolutions may be helpful for your health they may be too ambitious or not change what you really want to change.  So it is time to outsource!  Ask your friends and family to pick resolutions for you.

Your loved ones will be able to give you ideas in a constructive way. “The idea is that when your friends and family point out where you might need to improve, it's more likely to have an impact on you than your own ideas do.”  The key for the friend, or you, if you are the one giving the advice for a resolution is to start with a positive one instead of just listing harsh criticisms.  The other nice part of outsourcing is the person who gives you the resolution acts as a second pair of eyes to make sure you are on the right track.

Ref: http://lifehacker.com/5871534/outsource-your-new-years-resolutions-to-make-them-stick
Ref: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204552304577114722549353752.html
Img: http://engage.networkdepot.com/Portals/154468/images/outsource%20button-resized-600.jpg

How to Make a New Year's Resolution

Do you know that almost half of all Americans make resolutions for the New Year?  Did you also know that only about 10% of these resolutions are successful?  So before we talk about different resolutions that would be good for your health and habits we first need to discuss how to make a resolution that you will stick to.  Luckily there are some scientific findings that can greatly help keep your resolutions.

1. Don’t make too many resolutions at once – “In an experiment conducted at Stanford, one group of students was given a two digit number to memorize while the other group was given a seven digit number. Afterwards, they were asked to walk down a hallway while holding that number in memory and presented with the option to eat a slice of cake or fruit salad at the end. It turns out that the seven digit memorizers were nearly twice as likely to choose cake over the fruit salad. It was as though memorizing the extra numbers took up ‘good decision making' space in their brain.”  The moral of the study is make one resolution that you can work on so you do not get distracted or spread yourself too thin.

2. Set a specific goal – “In health behavior change and maintenance studies, the effects of setting specific, difficult goals leads to higher performance when compared with no goals or vague, non-quantitative goals, such as "do your best.”  For example do not just make a goal of ‘eat better” or ‘lose weight.’  Instead you should make a goal that has a lot of detail such as ‘lose 10 pounds by April 15th

3. Tell Friends, Family and/or Coworkers about your goals. – “An experiment conducted on the effects of social support at the workplace concluded that weak social support often leads to elevated levels of heart rate and cortisol, which are indicators of anxiety and stress.”  Having the support during your time of change can greatly decrease the stress and help you achieve your goals.  This is the basis behind support groups of any manner (i.e. AA, Anxiety, etc).

We have only outlined a couple ways to make sure that you can make goals that work for you.  Also an idea on how to keep that goal as the year wears on.  Look out for our next post regarding further helpful hints and ideas regarding New Year’s resolutions.

Ref: http://lifehacker.com/5871955/the-science-behind-new-years-resolutions-and-how-to-use-it-to-achieve-yours

IMG: http://tomsworkbench.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/New-Years-Resolution-629x395.jpg