Lumen Autumn 2025 - Flipbook - Page 12
Fighting against frailty
“The most important thing to come out of the pilot study
was the improvements these people had made after the trial had
finished including better balance, physical performance and
mobility, reducing their risk of frailty.”
At the Adelaide University Judo Club in Thebarton, 12 people
move in synchronisation with grace and control. It’s not an
uncommon sight; it is an active sport after all. But these
participants were all introduced to judo through a trial
designed to help them age safely.
Funding through The Hospital Research Foundation
Group enabled an extension of the program and more study
participants to further explore the benefits of judo and its safe
landing techniques.
Dr Agathe Daria Jadczak is a Research Fellow and Exercise
Scientist with the Adelaide G-TRAC Centre, based at the Basil
Hetzel Institute, Woodville. “We were first approached in 2019 by
Adelaide University Judo Club coaches Meera Verma and Michael
Headland,” she says.
“We’ve just had so much interest from the community in this,
groups across the State want to learn more. And we’re even training
allied health professionals working in aged care in these skills to
extend their capabilities of what we can do with older people in
terms of falls and safe landing,” Dr Jadczak says.
“They’d been doing judo their whole lives and were starting to
notice their friends and relatives were having falls and getting
hurt. In the sport of judo, safe landing techniques are crucial to
minimise harm and injury from falling and so they’ve developed
a safe landing program for older adults based on their extensive
experience and skills. They came to us with the idea that teaching
safe landing to older adults could be a good research program with
the potential to make a huge difference.”
“All the safe landing techniques are slowed down and taught in
micro progression, so the participants can take those skills and use
them in the event of a fall. By teaching safer landings, we not only
want to decrease the number of falls, but also minimise the impact
and harm from falling, thus improving the quality of life in
older people.”
Jean Stacey, 73, Dr Alana Hansen, 69, and Helen Slater, 81,
signed up to the first pilot trial.
There are awareness campaigns around fall prevention, or how
to get up, Dr Jadczak explains, but a scoping review of previous
research literature found a gap around how to fall safely and how
to minimise harm and injury from falls in older adults.
“I realised I could count 12 falls I’d had in a year without
even thinking about it,” Helen, a University of Adelaide graduate
(B Ed, 1986), says. “So, I joined a falls prevention group through
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