He’s a typical tourist who is also an early bird for the winter season in Salalah. Back in Oman for his third visit, this year was a little different as Uli Bruderlin got surprised by the Luban tropical storm. He was amazed at how the storm has created lots of photo opportunities. A small conversation with him and his wife opened up a discussion not just about his passion for photography, but about his goal in life, nutrition, and health.
Uli is a physiotherapist by profession but his passion for his subject and the urge to help others have taken him to not only start his own rehabilitation centre with his wife but went on to invent a machine to test individual’s coordination called Perturmed.
Bruderlin is also an author but despite being a multi-hyphenated individual with his career, he has an important message to convey and that is ‘understand coordination training.’ Uli wanted to tell parents in particular that today, children’s coordination skills could be at par with a present agile 60-year-old just because kids do not play outdoors or walk or climb trees.
“We know a lot about endurance, flexibility, strengthening and fast training amongst others but actually we know nothing about coordination training and when we become older all of them go down,” said Bruderlin.
He added, “What we cannot do right now is measure coordination and that’s what my wife and I are trying to achieve. We need to find out how many each person has in terms of coordination skills.”
He explained, “The machine I invented is a platform and has four magnets underneath it. It is a magnetic field and you can cross from one direction to the other as if you are on the road and being pushed down. It is easy to regain your posture or position if you are a young person but if you are an older person, it is not easy to take that step. We can analyse how much coordination you have and how much the person needs.”
Despite losing coordination as one ages, Bruderlin said that there is good news however as the body can be trained to regain it. But not quite so with children if they are not influenced. “Because of today’s fast development, children who are ten years old have the coordination system of a 70-year-old. I do not want to know what would be their coordination system when they are 60. This is the reason why I wanted to take coordination training,” Uli said.
“In Europe, years ago, people had to work hard and walk. Now we are only sitting and eating. For example, in some countries, the majority of the children need spectacles because they are always sitting in the room and the eyes are not getting any light. Therefore they need glasses. This has also been noticed in Asia,” he noted.
“Years ago, when I was a child, we were [always] outdoors. we would climb trees but children now are just sitting and watching their smartphones. They don’t run,” he said.
He was however happy children being active in Salalah.
“I saw children here in Salalah play alongside the road and even swimming in a hole that has just been filled with rainwater from the storm Luban,” he shared.
Asked what message he would like to convey to the children of today and their parents, Uli paused for a few seconds and said, “Go to nature… Don’t watch nature on television. But go to nature.”
Asked also if children can learn to make a difference in their coordination system, the coordination expert said, “You can develop them — their coordination skills by training them. But how will you tell them? Because the young parents do not notice it. We have this same situation when it comes to nutrition. We tried for 30 years to make a change but it has been impossible.”
He went on, “It is very difficult. How can you explain to the children to go to the forest and climb trees because parents are just afraid. In Germany, the children do not walk even one km to the school. The parents drive them to school. There is no reason for them to walk. When they finish school the parents are waiting in a car. It is nearly the same in most countries. The parents are also afraid something would happen on the road with the car or a bike or the bus. Schools have about three hours per week for physical education. That is not enough. Many schools do not have sports teachers. We need to have more sports activities for them.”
Briderlin has been practicing his profession for 42 years and he was written two books in the German language — one on physiotherapy and the second book on “How to avoid arthritis pain.”
Just before we left, Uli put us through a coordination test and explained why it is important to check on ourselves. For details of this story, very soon we will be uploading a video on the subject on our social media @omanobserver.
Stories by LAKSHMI KOTHANETH
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