Headway: 300 Club Results

Once more, with feeling

A project to test the theory that 300 repetitions results in improved performance has come to an end. And the results are in. By Billy Mann

The Occupational Therapy project at Headway East London I posted about a while back has now finished. To recap, Club 300 as we cheekily called it, brought together four members of Headway East London, each of whom wanted to gain some improvement in the execution of an everyday task. Two members wanted to improve their handwriting, another wanted to cut up food on a plate more confidently, and I tasked myself with the mission impossible of walking without a stick while holding a cup of water in my weaker left hand.

If you want detailed information on the results of this exercise, the OT in charge was Natasha Lockyer. I cannot discuss how others performed, but to finish the analysis, the tests we performed at the start were repeated at the end and the change recorded. At the start, I had walked a given distance (not sure what it was) holding a cup in my left hand filled to near the top with water in 46 seconds, and I spilled around 10ml in the process. At the end, I walked the same distance in 18 seconds and spilled no water. Get me, eh? Top of the world, Ma.

In my daily executions of these 300 steps, I determined to make the task more difficult as my performance improved. This, I am afraid to say, has fallen by the wayside in favour of basking in the success of spilling no water. Still, I do continue to perform the routine every day (or thereabouts) and continue to notice a difference. I shall report on my progress as and when something of interest happens, and I will ask Natasha if a re-run of the test in, say, 6 months is possible. Only then will I be able to declare Club 300 a giant leap for mankind.

Headway: 300 Club opens

Repeat when necessary

Learning to carry a cup in my left hand, while walking. It's not as easy as you think, says Billy Mann

This is the third week of an Upper Limb OT project I am following devised by Natasha Lockyer at Headway East London. The idea is based on research that has indicated that 300 is a magic number of repetitions post brain injury to deliver meaningful brain change. So, if you perform a given routine activity at 300 repetitions daily, in this case for 6 weeks, lasting improvement in the execution of that task will result.

This sounded plausible to me, so I said I would give it a crack. We have called the group Club 300 for a bit of a laugh. One member of the group is practising cutting food (ie, Theraputty) to develop the fine motoring of her right hand. Two others are working on handwriting. My task is to walk 300 steps daily with no walking stick and a cup of water in my left hand. 

This is a sort of continuation of therapy I was introduced to at a 3-week intensive Upper Limb clinic I attended at London’s National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery earlier this year. I think it is probably a statement of the obvious that this regime got off to a stuttering start. Having made some initial measurements as a benchmark against which progress can later be recorded, I set about repeatedly walking back and forth with a cup of water in my left hand. 

The movements, as Headway East London staffer Anne noted, were comically robotic. I managed to tip water all over myself on several occasions and came away from the session with a very wet pair of quite expensive shoes. Slowly, however, and with Anne’s help, I started to improve. The main problem for me was one of focus. My concentration flitted from the cup of water to the uneven paving in front of me. With practice, and via a not entirely unexpected echo of the ‘cognitive distraction’ I have described before, I found the best results (ie, not much water spilled) by fixing my attention on a distant object (in this case, a wall) and humming a tune while walking.

As they say in court reports, the case continues. Watch this space.