Welcome to ABR International
Contact : +34644919805 | manuel@abrhispano.com
Mark Driscoll, ABR researcher, MBA, presented the results of a 3-year-study on ABR technique to the American Academy for Cerebral Palsy and Developmental Medicine, in September 2014 in San Diego and to the 1st Asia-Oceanian Congress for NeuroRehabilitation, in Seoul, South Korea in September 2015.
Driscoll, M., and Blyum, L., (2014) Results of a 3 year prospective cohort study investigating the influence of home-based therapy on cerebral palsy patients GMFCS types 4 and 5.
You are interested in ABR, but still wondering if it is suitable for your child? Want to know what ABR can do for him/her? Inquire from home! Thanks to the magic of technology, it is possible for us to come into your home, have a look at your child, conduct a 30 minutes pre-assessment and talk ‘live’ about ABR possibilities in his/her specific case.
Get all your questions answered without leaving your home…
Book your pre-assessment today!
We have started sharing ABR family testimonials on our ABR Facebook page… a great way connect with families that are experiencing ABR with their child first hand! You will also find before/after images demonstrating the progress ABR brings!
Cerebral palsy, genetic conditions, and rare diseases affecting a child’s development are difficult diagnoses.
The central question is – how can we achieve an Easier And Happier Life Despite The Difficult Diagnosis for a child and for the entire family?
With so many apparent problems in movement, eating, sleeping, and learning you can’t chase them all at once – you need TO PRIORITIZE and choose what is A SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT QUALITY THAT IMPACTS A CHILD’S LIFE THE MOST – NOW AND FOR YEARS TO COME?
THERE IS ONLY ONE OBVIOUS ANSWER!
You need a comfortable, steady, relaxed, confident – in other words EASY SITTING for everything that makes up 95% OF EVERYDAY LIFE: eating, drinking, walking outside, having eye contact, communicating, learning, playing, etc.
At the same time if your child has EASY SITTING it very much GUARANTEES ESSENTIAL THRIVING AND EVERYDAY CARE –easy resting, easy sleeping, easy washing and bathing, easy transfers to and from the chair, the car, the bed, etc.
And not only that EASY SITTING is a necessary STEPPING STONE TOWARDS MORE AMBITIOUS GOALS – standing, crawling, walking, riding … IF SITTING IS A HARD WORK FOR YOUR CHILD THAT REQUIRES EFFORT AND ATTENTION … THE MORE AMBITIOUS FUNCTIONS ARE VERY UNLIKELY TO EMERGE – no matter how much training and therapies you do.
And now it’s time for a hard truth:
If your child’s sitting is not easy and effortless but effortful or slouched … it’s not really a true sitting.
If your child’s sitting depends on the happy mood, on the muscular effort, on the good sleep, on the good meal, or on any other “Ifs” – it’s NOT EASY, and … IT DOESN’T COUNT…
SITTING IS NOT ‘A SKILL’ – IT’S BUILT-IN AUTOMATIC PROPERTY that relies on the built-in bodily anatomy, capacity, and intelligence – IT SHOULD BE MIND-FREE AND WORK-FREE
ONLY THEN IT COUNTS AS TRUE SITTING, AND ONLY THE TRUE SITTING OPENS UP MUCH EASIER AND HAPPIER LIFE where the child is free to explore, communicate, and have personal space.
EASY SITTING = TRUE SITTING
UNFORTUNATELY, MOST OF THE PARENTS AND THERAPISTS GET THIS WRONG!
They spend countless hours of training on trying to build sitting as a skill – with lots of clever strategies, encouragement, cheering, and clapping for the short-lived and very effortful ‘successes’, which don’t stay and often disappear after an illness, or vacation, or a growth spurt.
FORTUNATELY, THERE ARE NEW TOOLS AND STRATEGIES THAT ALLOW YOU TO START BUILDING A TRUE EASY SITTING FOR MODERATELY AND EVEN SEVERELY AFFECTED CHILDREN OF GMFCS LEVELS III, IV, V
We are excited to introduce the easiest and most economical way to start ABR for parents of children with the most diverse conditions all around the world. From Cerebral Palsy to genetic conditions or rare diseases.
ABR’s Easy Sitting Online Course offers an incredible opportunity to improve the effortless sitting capacity of children with disabilities worldwide.
With access to the latest developments in ABR techniques and based on our Easy Rehabilitation Principle, it offers access to the 10 key ABR exercises that will unlock the 5 main points that define an Easy Sitting.
We’ve chosen a classic sculpture to illustrate the timeless properties of an Easy Sitting that we, healthy people, take for granted so naturally that we don’t even think about it… but the gifted artists have the ability to capture those hidden ‘Easy’ qualities of Sitting without long explanations – just through the sense of harmony and effortlessness.
For only $399 or 375 Euros, this Online Course offers LIFETIME VALUE. It is designed to empower families, caregivers, and professionals with practical ABR techniques and exercises, paving the way to improve the natural Easy Sitting capacities of your child.
You learn once, you pay once and then you have a tool to use for years to come whether your child is 1, 11, or 21 years old! With this Online Course, you get an exercise program that can accompany you throughout your child’s life.
Lifelong exercise? Why is it necessary?
That’s the nature of a difficult diagnosis. Unfortunately, your child lost a lot at the start of their life – whether during the pregnancy or at birth. That’s why for as long as your child keeps growing – unfavorable structural transformations of muscles, ligaments, bones, fascia, and the changes of proportions related to imbalanced growth that would be challenging and eroding the Ease of Sitting – loosening the sitting surface grip, restricting counterbalancing, affecting neck stabilization, blocking the spinal undulations, increasing the pelvic twists…
The Easy Sitting program is designed to offset those negative tendencies that would creep in with child’s growth because of the difficult diagnosis.
Consider it a super-special fitness program that you need to do as regular exercises – similar to a healthy person needing exercise to stay fit and offset the negatives of modern work and lifestyle.
We recommend 100 hours of work per year (or 100 minutes per week) to make a significant impact on your child’s quality of sitting.
As an additional benefit for the Easy Sitting course students we will teach you how to track your child’s progress using simple photo tests that you can do with your phone camera.
How is that possible?
But isn’t every case is individual? How can you prescribe a program without seeing my child’s unique body structure and movement abilities? How can you be sure that the same program will benefit a person at 1, 11, or 21 years old?
Well, the answer is in the name EASY SITTING.
To use the famous saying: All difficulties are unique, but the essentials of Easiness are the same.
Your child ALWAYS needs a better sitting grip, better counterbalancing, better upper stabilization, better spinal wave undulations, and better pelvic twist neutralization …
EASY SITTING COURSE has all these essentials covered!
EVERY CHILD WITH A MODERATE POSTURE AND MOVEMENT DISABILITY (GMFCS Levels III and IV) can benefit from ABR’s Easy Sitting Online Course in a most direct and straightforward way.
Easy Sitting course is especially recommended for babies and toddlers with difficult diagnoses, and later on for pre-adolescents and in the period of growth. However, even for young adults, Easy Sitting is extremely beneficial to offset the challenges and difficulties accumulated over the years.
Dear ABR families.
We have just finished a 2 weeks ABR Course in Hungary.
Here we have met many ABR families which children with Cerebral Palsy had gone through COVID-19 and recovered extraordinarily well.
Which was the key? Their continuous ABR work!
Our focus on the respiratory mechanics and the strengthening of the fascia net throughout the body has proven ABR can help your child not only to thrive and flourish, improving the quality and ease of live, but also, to go through these challenging times!
Leonid Blyum talks about this in the following video
Our ABR Online Programs are the right tool for you if you want your child to be happier, stronger and have an easier life.
Dear Friends,
Maximizing the respiratory capacity of your child is one of the most important things you should be focusing on times of elevated risks.
By utilizing the ABR Fascia Body Gel, you will achieve better “velcro” connections skin to muscle, facilitating the flexibility and elasticity on the breathing mechanics (ribcage, diaphragm, shoulders, spine…)
ABR Fascia Body Gel is an important catalyst of your home program that helps you to achieve better and faster results in your child’s progress through home training by addressing both mechanical and thixotropic properties of extracellular matrix (ECM)/ Fascia at the same time!
Order your ABR Fascia Body Gel before June 30th to get a 31% discount and shipping included in America
Respiratory Alertness for Cerebral Palsy children !
This is banality and kind of obvious. But now a lot of parents are afraid to go out at all and self-isolate themselves with cerebral palsy kids into their apartments — that’s a BIG mistake!
Everyone knows that fresh air is very important for children with cerebral palsy. But when you are scared and there is quarantine – many parents tend to ‘play it safe’ and to keep cerebral palsy kids at home until ‘normal times’.
In fact, it’s the opposite — keeping the respiratory system alert and stimulated through exposure to fresh air, pressure, and temperature gradients — is most important now — at the times of higher risks.
Leonid Blyum
Keeping Cerebral Palsy kids fit during quarantine!
THE TRANSFERS TO- AND FROM- THE WHEELCHAIR ARE EXCELLENT TOTAL-BODY, GENERAL FITNESS EXERCISES FOR CEREBRAL PALSY CHILDREN!
Their entire body is involved, heart rate increases, respiratory effort rises, postural adjustment muscles react, etc.
In the ‘normal times’ your wheel-chaired child with cerebral palsy gets the transfers to- and from- the wheelchair quite often — probably, around 20 times/ day (going to school, at school, at home, at therapies, at outside walks, etc.)
But when you are quarantined at home due to coronavirus, you have very few incentives to do so.
Especially, when it feels like hard work for you.
Please prepare yourself well and try to do at least 10 full transfers/ day.
Doing 20 transfers is even better!
Keep up your child’s general fitness!
Leonid Blyum
Coronavirus Confinement Response – An Open Letter to the ABR Families.
The message to all of you Super Moms … (and some Super Dads as well…)
Quarantined at home? – Try turning confinement stress into opportunity:
Your chance to really meet your child – at close and personal scale.
Dear Friends,
Within 2 weeks the European, American and Australian world as we knew it – busy streets, plentiful services, open borders, easy travels, etc. – has collapsed. Hopefully, it’s a temporary shutdown and things will recover once the peak of the coronavirus pandemic is over.
All around Europe – Austria, Finland, Hungary, Spain, France, etc. — families are now confined to homes with very little opportunity to go out. America, Australia and many other countries are heading the same way. Schools, swimming pools, therapy centers are all closed for an indefinite period of time. That’s a big disruption and suddenly life might feel very strange.
Each and every family of children with cerebral palsy that I know has always been super busy – waking up early and finishing late, always having a feeling of not having enough hours in a day to complete all the activities scheduled. And now … everything stops… For the first few days, it might feel like a welcome relief – an unexpected break in a hamster wheel pace of life (if it wasn’t for the doomsday news that is on 24 hours). But then – it might get difficult to adjust. Humans are creatures of habit – it is very difficult for us to change our rhythms, so things could become stressful.
Depending on your family situation – there are two scenarios.
For some of you – the time stops. There is nowhere to go, and nothing to do outside – just being stuck at home with some domestic chores to do.
For some of you – it’s a commotion. Suddenly there are kids at home, who need to be home-schooled and entertained; there is a remote work to deliver; there is your significant other in the house into whom you suddenly bump every other minute instead of only seeing each other briefly in the evening. You need to cook and to wash and to clean etc. Understood!
But please, try not to jump from one hamster wheel to another! From the external life’s daily race to the internal rush, hassle, and urgency with even greater intensity.
Stop for a while! Relax – don’t try to be a super mom, an octopus, and a control freak at the same time. Let things go …
Figure out your priorities! The system’s strength is defined by its’ weakest link.
In the time of external health threat – your child with cerebral palsy has to become a number one priority. Everything else is temporary … If your kids will do so-so studies for 2-3 weeks at school – what’s the big deal? They will catch up when schools resume. This half-vacation will make no difference to their future.
On the opposite – if you stop being a perfectionist mom, and let some other things in the household loose – you might be surprised with the power of self-organization. The moment you let go on the control reins – you might as well face a lot less of the kids with “Mo-o-m?!” question and you might as well discover that your spouse is somehow capable of taking care of himself, without being instructed what to do. (By the way, if you are reading this and internally arguing – “I am not a perfectionist. Just look at my kitchen, my wardrobe, my kids…” – then you ARE the one! )
This sudden stoppage of external time and the reduction of your world into a much smaller physical space is a massive opportunity.
It is the opportunity for you to change your gaze direction and your zoom settings. You can slow down; you can switch off the external activities and you can zoom in closer on understanding your child’s natural intentions, rhythms, and creativities.
Stop the rush! Don’t try to replace the absence of external rush with winding yourself up internally, and applying your zoom to the signs of the previously ‘hidden’ household mess.
Please reduce your self-elected duties – cleaning, cooking, schooling, giving orders to yourself and to the others, etc. Chill!
This quarantine and confinement is a once in a lifetime opportunity –try NOT to do what you always do, and what you have always been doing through your ‘Super Mom’ life – but please start teaching yourself the slow time for everything: sleeping, feeding, napping, doing nothing, etc.
You need this time to study your SPECIAL child, to become a closer and better friend to your this special person by observing the finer nuances of how your child feels, reacts, moves and adjusts in their postures, positions, transitions, activities, expressions, intentions, explorations and so on.
If you can do that, if you can slow your time down, if you can resist the urge to do all kinds of ‘home stuff’ – that’s a huge step, for which you deserve massive respect.
I know it is not easy… yet it is worth it!
You have the chance to peel off the external shell of expectations, schedules, instructions, tasks, etc. that the external professionals have been giving you ever since your son or daughter was born. You were on a roll and in a rush … but have you have really learned to feel and to observe your own child?? By just slowing down, and becoming a loving but impartial observer who is free from any expectations and judgments? By becoming a person who watches and listens, whilst trying to see and to hear – what your child’s body and expressions really have to say.
But now, with your time slowed down and your physical space has shrunken – you face yet another challenge – in order to be able not just to observe your child but also to absorb and to understand how she is responding and why he is making this specific muscle tone and movement choices – you need guidance.
Let me ask you a direct question – how many of you have re-watched your ABR assessment and techniques/ exercises videos after finishing your course?
Unfortunately, for most of you, it is a rhetorical question. You’ve been too busy doing things and too tired when not doing things to find the time to really dive into the learning treasure chest that ABR Assessment is.
I speak about this without false modesty – my assessments cover 30-40 topics at once, each of them illustrated and explained. How many of those have you really retained and understood in depth?
It’s your life and your child – you’d benefit immensely by really doing the over-learning and watching both the videos and the assessment photos several times. Most of you have the ability to watch the multiyear sequences and to compare. I do encourage you to do so – this is really the perfect time!
But watching and learning is just the first step. Because even bigger and more important step is to get your exercise program intensity scaled up.
You are at home – so this is a perfect opportunity! When we meet we always talk about the time deficit that you face and limited time available for ABR exercises. Well, now it is a great opportunity to get more… much more!
So this is my heartfelt request to you – try using this special time wisely.
Open your hands, eyes, and your senses to your child – free yourself from expectations, just try to feel what your child really wants, feels, prefers… What are their natural rhythms undisturbed by schools and other external turbulences?
And, of course, ABR exercise is a perfect win-win combination – you can explore and feel, and yet deliver and invest in your child’s health at the same time!
P.S. Meanwhile, if you have any questions about the ways that ABR can help you with improving your child’s health defenses during the coronavirus health threat – please write to us: a special email address: coronavirusalert@abreurope.com
Wholeheartedly!
Leonid Blyum
ABR Founder and Principal Researcher
Locked in Southern Spain since March 16,
without being able to return home to Cyprus
for an indefinite period of time
