As One Australia - Exercise Physiologists

As One Australia - Exercise Physiologists AS ONE Australia provides specialised neurological exercise physiology for people living with spinal cord injury, stroke, MS, autism and related conditions.

We offer in-home rehabilitation in Melbourne and structured online programs worldwide.

29/05/2026

A 2025 study just showed what 12 weeks of the right kind of movement does to an autistic child’s brain. It will change what you ask for at your next plan review. 🧠

Most families navigating autism are pointed toward behavioural therapy first. And that has its place. But the 2025 research is making something else clear: the right physical activity works on motor coordination, sensory processing, AND social interaction at the same time.

The study (Scientific Reports, June 2025): 🔹 40 children with autism, aged 6–12 🔹 Half did a 12-week sensory integration sports program 🔹 Half did standard physical activity 🔹 Result: the sensory sports group showed clinically significant improvements in both motor coordination AND social responsiveness.

Confirmed in a 2025 meta-analysis (Frontiers in Psychiatry) reviewing 16 RCTs and 1,300+ children with autism. Consistent across countries, ages, and severity levels.

Why it works: Swinging. Jumping. Balancing. Pushing. Pulling. These movements give the nervous system organised, predictable input. The brain begins processing the world more efficiently. Less overwhelm. Better regulation. Calmer behaviour.

Not before the movement. Because of it.

⚠️ One important caveat: generic sport doesn’t produce these results. A program designed around your child’s specific sensory profile, their triggers, tolerances, and nervous system, is what drives the change.

For NDIS families: if your child’s plan has Capacity Building goals around development, independence, or community participation, a sensory-informed exercise program delivered by an EP may already be fundable. Right now. No new plan review required.

📌 SAVE this for your next plan conversation. 📤 SHARE with an autism parent who hasn’t been told this exists. 🏷️ TAG a support coordinator or therapist who works with autism families.

26/05/2026

Heat makes MS symptoms flare. That’s true. Avoiding exercise because of it is making MS worse. That’s also true. 🌡️

👉🏻 If you have MS and you’ve stopped moving because the heat triggers your symptoms, you’re not wrong about the heat. You’re right. The response has a name: Uhthoff’s phenomenon, when body temperature rises even slightly, damaged nerve fibres conduct less efficiently and symptoms temporarily worsen.

The key word is temporarily.

➡️ The symptoms come back down. The damage from avoiding exercise altogether doesn’t.

What the research actually shows 👇

A 2024 meta-analysis (84 studies, 3,700+ people with MS) found structured exercise:
🔹 Reduced fatigue
🔹 Improved walking ability
🔹 Improved quality of life

🔥 The heat response did not cancel those benefits. It just means the program needs to be designed around it, not abandoned because of it.

Clinical strategies that exist (and most people with MS have never heard of):
✅ Pre-cooling before sessions
✅ Water-based exercise
✅ Air-conditioned environments
✅ Early morning timing
✅ Dose calibrated to your individual fatigue threshold

🤔 The hard truth: people with MS who stop moving because of heat sensitivity are the ones who deteriorate fastest. Muscle loss. Cardiovascular decline. Worsening fatigue. Inactivity in MS causes more long-term damage than carefully prescribed exercise in the heat ever will.

👍🏽 You don’t need to push through symptoms. You need a program built for your nervous system.

📌 SAVE this for the next flare day. 📤 SHARE with someone who has MS and has stopped moving. 🏷️ TAG a family member or coordinator who needs to see this.

24/05/2026

If someone you love with a disability is sedentary most of the day, this is what it’s doing to their body. 🚨

📖 Research shows people with physical disabilities can spend up to 20 hours a day sedentary. That isn’t a lifestyle choice. It’s a quiet medical emergency happening in homes across Australia, and the system is largely silent about it.

What 20 hours of sitting actually does 👇

🔹 Cardiovascular risk. SCI participants face 2–3x higher cardiovascular disease risk than the general population (Journal of Spinal Cord Medicine). Prolonged sitting accelerates it.

🔹 Adults with cerebral palsy face substantially elevated cardiovascular, metabolic, and respiratory risk, with low physical activity now identified as a primary driver (2024 research). Described as one of the most urgent overlooked issues in adult CP care.

🔹 Muscle atrophy begins within 72 hours of immobilisation. For someone sedentary daily, this isn’t a risk. It’s an ongoing process. Transfers get harder. Falls get more likely. Independence quietly erodes.

🔹 Bone density loss. Without weight-bearing, disuse osteoporosis sets in. Fractures in people with disabilities are rarely minor, they often trigger permanent functional decline.

👉🏻 The fix isn’t 2 hours of daily exercise. Research consistently shows that modest, structured, clinically designed increases in movement produce measurable improvements. The dose doesn’t have to be large. It has to be consistent and prescribed correctly.

📌 SAVE this for your next conversation with a GP or coordinator. 📤 SHARE with a family who needs to see this. 🏷️ TAG someone who cares for a loved one with a disability.

Follow for weekly content on what disability health actually looks like.

22/05/2026

Depression affects up to 50% of people with spinal cord injury. ~30% of stroke survivors. 20–40% of people with MS. And the intervention with one of the strongest evidence bases? It isn’t a pill. 🧠

👉🏻 Every year, millions of prescriptions are written for antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication. For many people, they’re life-changing, and that’s not in dispute.

🤯 But there’s another intervention that a 2026 global review described as one of the most powerful ways to ease depression and anxiety, and most doctors still aren’t prescribing it.

It’s structured exercise. And the evidence is now impossible to ignore.

What the 2026 research showed:
🔹A review of 57 pooled studies, ~58,000 participants found aerobic exercise produced large effect sizes in reducing depression — comparable to, and in some analyses exceeding, antidepressant medication.
🔹The researchers concluded exercise deserves to be treated as a frontline intervention for mild–moderate depression. Not an afterthought.

Why it works (the biology, briefly): ✅ Stimulates BDNF, the brain protein behind neuronal growth and repair ✅

Why this matters even more for our community: For people with disabilities and neurological conditions, the benefits go further. Structured exercise consistently improves self-efficacy, the belief in your own capacity to do things, and self-efficacy is one of the strongest predictors of long-term independence, community participation, and quality of life.

Exercise doesn’t just improve mood. It changes how people see what’s possible for them.

📌 SAVE this for the next conversation with your GP, neurologist, or coordinator. 📤 SHARE with someone who’s been told their options are “medication or nothing.” 🏷️ TAG a family member, participant, or clinician who needs this.

Love seeing how simple a functional home setup can be! 🏠 Just a reminder to always prioritize those safety checks on sli...
21/05/2026

Love seeing how simple a functional home setup can be! 🏠

Just a reminder to always prioritize those safety checks on slide 5. ➡️ lock the door and inspect your gear before every session.

✅ Happy training!

High quadriplegia. Standing at home. Minimal equipment. Here’s what most people don’t realise is possible. 👇When familie...
18/05/2026

High quadriplegia. Standing at home. Minimal equipment. Here’s what most people don’t realise is possible. 👇

When families hear “high quadriplegia,” the picture in their head often shrinks to what can’t happen. Standing usually isn’t on the list. It should be.

👉🏻 With the right setup, the right professional guidance, and a confident carer or family member in the room, standing practice at home becomes achievable, no clinic, no commute, no hospital-grade equipment costing tens of thousands.

Swipe through to see how the pieces fit together 🔁

🔹 The setup. A high quadriplegia client, his carer, and our Exercise Physiologist. Standing safely at home with a simple support frame.

🔹 Why standing matters. Improved circulation. Bone health. Functional movement. Reduced sitting load. Standing isn’t symbolic, it’s clinical maintenance for the body.

🔹 Simple setup, real consistency. Minimal equipment, when used correctly, drives meaningful progress. The goal is a routine the family can repeat between EP sessions, not just during them.

🔹Train the carer, support the client. Our EP coaches the carer and family on how to assist safely at the hips, knees, and torso. That training is what turns one supervised session into ongoing practice all week.

🔹Professional guidance matters. Home-based. Adaptive. Neurologically focused. This is what good clinical exercise physiology looks like when it’s delivered properly in someone’s living room.

🔹Want support like this? DM us. Whether you’re a participant, family member, or coordinator with someone in mind, we’d love to talk.

🚨 The bigger message for the families and coordinators reading this:

➡️ What’s possible at home is almost always more than people are told. “Too complex,” “too high-needs,” “needs a clinical setting”, these are often equipment answers to a clinical reasoning question. The right Exercise Physiologist, working alongside a trained carer, changes the conversation entirely.

❤️ This is what we do. Every week. In real homes. With real families.

Don't get it wrong. The wrong professional for your situation can cost months of progress. 🛑In Australia, both Personal ...
15/05/2026

Don't get it wrong. The wrong professional for your situation can cost months of progress. 🛑

In Australia, both Personal Trainers and Accredited Exercise Physiologists can work with people with disabilities. Both can be funded under the NDIS. But they are not the same profession, and choosing the wrong one for the wrong reason is one of the most common, and most costly, decisions families and support coordinators make.

Here's what almost nobody explains in plain language 👇 Swipe through the 10 slides to get the full picture.

🎓 Qualifications
Personal Trainer → Cert III & IV in Fitness. Can be done in under 6 months.
Accredited Exercise Physiologist → minimum 4-year university degree + 500 hours of supervised clinical placement + ESSA accreditation.

🏥 Recognition
PTs are governed by Fitness Australia / AusActive.
AEPs are recognised allied health professionals, same tier as physiotherapists and occupational therapists.

🧠 Clinical scope
A PT can absolutely work with someone with a disability, and many do it well. But their training does not cover clinical pathophysiology. They are not trained in how MS affects thermoregulation, how a spinal cord injury alters cardiovascular response or causes autonomic dysreflexia, or how a brain injury shifts fatigue threshold.
An AEP is.

💰 NDIS Funding
Both can be funded. But Exercise Physiology sits under Capacity Building as a formal allied health support with its own line item codes recognised in the NDIS Pricing Arrangements & Price Limits. Personal Training can also be funded, but requires stronger documentation to justify it meets disability-related goals. The bar for approval is simply higher.
🤝 The smartest plans use both.

The AEP sets the clinical foundation, assessment, evidence-based programming, NDIS reporting. The PT supports ongoing sessions once the program is stable. Not a competition. A continuum of care. Understanding that builds a better support team around the participant.

📌 SAVE this post so you have it for your next plan review.

📤 SHARE it with your Support Coordinator, so they have plain-English language for their next referral conversation.

12/05/2026

💡If anyone has told you stroke recovery stops at 6 months, the science has moved on without them.

👉🏻 This is one of the most outdated beliefs in neurological rehabilitation, and it’s still shaping how families plan, how supports get funded, and how stroke survivors are told to “manage expectations.”

Here’s what the current research actually says 👇

🧠 Neuroplasticity does not have a hard 6-month cut-off. The brain’s ability to rewire, form new connections, and recruit healthy regions to take over lost functions continues across the lifespan, when the right conditions are in place.

🧠 What “the right conditions” actually means: Repetition. Intensity. Task-specific training. The brain rewires in response to high volumes of meaningful, goal-directed movement. The more a skill is practised, the stronger the neural pathway becomes. This isn’t motivational language. It’s neuroscience.

🧠 The real reason most survivors “plateau”: A 2025 meta-analysis on home-based exercise after stroke found many survivors attend as little as one therapy session per week post-discharge. At that frequency, the brain isn’t plateauing, it’s not getting the signal it needs to keep rewiring.

🧠 The research is unambiguous: Interventions like Constraint-Induced Movement Therapy (deliberately restricting the unaffected limb to force use of the impaired side) have shown clinically significant motor recovery years after a stroke. Not months. Years.

🤔 What this means for your family: “Plateau” is often a frequency problem, not a biology problem. A structured, clinically designed exercise program, progressive, personalised, repetition-rich, targeting the specific deficits left by the stroke, is what drives recovery past the 6-month mark.

➡️ A walk around the block isn’t that. A generic home program rarely is either.

This is what families aren’t being told to ask for. ❤️

🔁 Share this with a stroke family. With the daughter caring for her dad. With the husband who’s been told “this is as good as it gets.” It’s almost never as good as it gets.

Follow for weekly research-based content on stroke, neuro rehab, and wha

11/05/2026

No surgery. No drug. Just electricity, the right exercise program, and legs that weren’t supposed to move are moving. ⚡

💡People with complete spinal cord injuries, the diagnosis that historically meant no signal getting through, ever, are showing recovery of movement in 2025 research. This isn’t hype. It’s published, peer-reviewed, and reshaping how SCI rehabilitation is being approached globally.

Two studies, one bigger picture:

🔹 A 2025 study in Nature combined intensive, task-specific training with closed-loop vagus nerve stimulation, a small implant that fires electrical signals at the exact moment a successful movement happens. Significant results in people with chronic incomplete cervical SCI.

🔹 A 2025 paper in National Science Review went further. No surgery. No implant. A non-invasive spinal stimulation approach produced immediate recovery of locomotor function in people with clinically complete injuries.

🤔 Why it works: The spinal cord below an injury isn’t dead. It’s dormant. Circuits are still there, just not receiving the signals they need to fire. Stimulation wakes them up. Training rebuilds the connection. The mechanism has a name: activity-dependent neuroplasticity.

🚨The part the headlines miss: Stimulation alone does not produce recovery. The training around it does.

📖In the Nature study, every participant received a personalised set of 6–9 exercises, individually designed for their impairment. Not generic. Not “have a go.” Precise. Progressive. Clinically driven.

➡️ What this means for you right now: The implants aren’t widely available in Australia yet. But the principles behind them, task-specific training, repetition, progressive nervous system overload, are the foundations of good SCI exercise physiology happening today.

You don’t need the technology to apply the science. You need the right program. 🔁

📍 Tag a Support Coordinator, family member, or someone in the SCI community who needs to know the story isn’t over.

Follow for weekly evidence-based content on neuro rehab, SCI research, and what exercise physiology can actually do.

09/05/2026

Cells from inside your nose. Implanted in your spine. A world-first trial just started on the Gold Coast. 🧬

➡️ For decades, the medical answer for spinal cord injury was the same sentence: paralysis is permanent. Full stop.

That sentence is now being challenged, with evidence, in Australia.

🤔 What’s happening: Griffith University, in partnership with Gold Coast University Hospital, has launched a world-first human clinical trial using cells from a patient’s own nose to repair a damaged spinal cord. The trial commenced August 2025, led by Professor James St John at the Clem Jones Centre for Neurobiology and Stem Cell Research, off the back of more than two decades of research.

The science, simply:
🔹 Inside your nose are olfactory ensheathing cells, one of the very few nerve cells in the body that regenerate throughout your entire life
🔹These cells have a unique ability to reconnect and repair damaged nerve pathways
🔹In the trial, the cells are taken from the patient’s own nose, no rejection risk
🔹They’re used to build what Professor St John calls a nerve bridge, about the size of a small worm
🔹That bridge is implanted at the spinal cord injury site to reconnect severed pathways

Why this trial matters: Preclinical results in animal models have already shown the bridges are effective at repairing SCI. The human trial is a blinded, randomised controlled study, the gold standard of clinical research, which means the results will carry global weight.

Here’s what you need to hear from someone working in this space every day:

Research like this does not replace rehabilitation. It works alongside it.

The science on neuroplasticity, the spinal cord’s ability to rewire, is unambiguous. Movement, load-bearing, and structured exercise physiology are some of the most powerful tools we have right now, today, while trials like this unfold over the next decade.

We do not wait for a cure to start moving. Every standing minute, every weight-bearing rep, every nervous system stimulus is preserving the body that future treatments will work on.

Follow for weekly evidence-based content on neurological rehab and what exercise physiolo

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