Group Exercise in Stroke Survivors: A Review

When somebody has had a stroke, group exercise interventions can be used to keep improving their fitness, strength, activity levels, balance and the way they walk and move. However, we don’t know very much about how good these group fitness interventions are at improving these things.

So, we have done a review of existing group exercise interventions for stroke survivors. The review aims to find out how effective they are in improving fitness and activity levels in stroke survivors.
We found that improvements are short-term and less obvious six months after the intervention is over. We think that future research should consider consistency in measuring improvements in stroke survivors who take part in group exercise interventions. This is because if it is measured properly, we can make better conclusions about how useful these exercise interventions really are.
The review was conducted by staff at the University of Sheffield:
Mr Gavin Church (Physiotherapist)
Dr Jack Parker (Research Fellow)
Miss Lauren Powell (Research Associate)
Professor Sue Mawson (Professor of Health Service Research)
The work has been published and can be found here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031940619300112?via%3Dihub
If you want to find out more, you can contact the corresponding author, Miss Lauren Powell: l.a.powell@sheffield.ac.uk