April 3, 1948 was born Valentin Ivanovich Dikul. The circus artist, doomed after a trauma to life in a wheelchair, returned to the playpen. And returned to normal life, thousands of patients. Recently, a legendary man celebrated his sixtieth birthday.

... For the boy who fled to the chapel from the orphanage, the circus was all the joy in life. Here he learned acrobatics and eventually became a "trapeze artist". At the age of fifteen, he began to perform dangerous tricks on the trapeze. And one day everything broke off - during the performance the steel crossbeam. Air gymnast fell from a height of 13 meters.

Valentin Dikul had more than 10 fractures, including a fracture of the spine, the body was half paralyzed. The words of the doctors sounded like a verdict: "Compression fracture of the spine in the lumbar region and craniocerebral trauma. The remaining life is in a wheelchair ".

"If I were thirty then," Valentin Dikul wrote in his book, "I probably would not be able to psychologically step over the notion of" impossible ". But I was about half as old as I was, and by nature I remained an orphanage, and fate did not give us anything for nothing ".

From that day on, Dikul worked in the ward to exhaustion - he raised everything he could reach, read the medical literature that his friends brought.

Doctors persuaded him to stop wasting his strength, but he continued to work in weightlifting. Everyday hard work has borne fruit - Valentin Dikul again began to walk! But his main goal was to return to the arena. In the arsenal of Dikul there were several techniques and adaptations developed by him, and after a while he not only returned to the circus, but also received his program number.

Doctors who heard that their former patient appears in the circus in the "acrobatic motorcyclist" did not at first believe, but people with similar problems were drawn to Dikul. Several Valentine worked with his patients in between the performances, and in 1988 he was confirmed as the director of the All-Union Rehabilitation Center for patients with spinal cord injuries and the consequences of cerebral palsy.

For more than twenty years Dikul has been teaching his system. He knows that it is possible to force the muscles to remember the movements and train the damaged muscles so that they can again become operational. "I can tell you how to do the exercises, but without the patient's desire, my words will not bring success. Even if my equipment was made of gold, a person would never go after an injury if he did not have confidence. It is necessary to work daily with devotion and discipline and this can take many years. But having achieved success, you can say: "I did it! I can go! "The basic rule of" health from Dikul "reads:" Life is movement! ". It was known before me, he emphasizes, and believes that one should not be in a routine in which many are mired. Active life and active rest is necessary.

sportzal. com.