Top 3 Exercises for Peripheral Neuropathy

Call 423-777-4974 to learn more or click: https://www.summit-therapy.com/appoin...

Hey, it’s Kevin Kostka here with Summit Physical Therapy. When I’m in the clinic, I’m always asked several times a day what are the top exercises to do for specific diagnosis. So today what I want to talk about is my top exercises for someone suffering with Peripheral Neuropathy. There’re basically three things that we’re trying to accomplish here. One, we’re trying to get the nerve gliding well, the second goal we are trying to accomplish is to improve circulation in the foot intrinsic muscles and finally general strengthening exercise for the lower leg. So, I’ve got _______ here with me and he’s going to help demonstrate these three specific exercises. The first exercise you’re going to do it a nerve glide/nerve floss is what we call it in clinic. Basically, you can see ______ shoes are off, and you are going to point your toe downward as far as possible and you can hold position for about 10 seconds and then you will point your toes back toward our nose and hold for about 10 seconds. Then the other move I want you to do is roll your foot inward to hold for 10 seconds and then roll your foot outward for 10 seconds. The key on this exercise is to make sure that you don’t roll your knee outward and keep it straight up toward the ceiling. That is a great exercise for that nerve gliding I was talking about earlier. The next one we call the towel scrunch. So, basically if you do this on a slick floor it’s much easier, but you want to attempt to scrunch the towel with your feet. This allows blood flow to increase in the foot intrinsic muscles, which are just tiny muscles that support the foot. You are going to repeat this a total of 5 times. So, just scrunch up the towel using your toes and progress using weights on the towel as you get stronger. Okay, the last exercise is really good for strengthening the calf muscle. You’ve probably seen it before, but you are simply going to raise up on your toes and lift your heel up as high as you can for about 3-5 seconds and then slowly lower. When you are doing this exercise, you want to do 10 repetitions, give yourself about a ten second break each set and repeat that exercise for 3 sets. Those are your top 3 exercises for PN so I hope that helps. I look forward to seeing you are the Workshop.