Read the transcript for this video:

Good morning. Welcome to your Weekly Cup of Joe. My name is Joe King. I'm the owner of Physical Therapy Advantage North Aurora. I'm coming from a home today. We had our first hard frost last night; we have our first potential snowfall coming up. So wanted to do a three-part series on winter preparation to help keep you safe and maybe keep you out of the physical therapy clinic this winter, but just some safety issues and safety preparation for the winter.

So, first thing is we're going to talk about snow shoveling. One of the biggest things that can happen over the winter is you can hurt your back or hurt yourself, snow shoveling. So we have two types of snow shovels, you have a straight handled one and you have what they have, now, the ergonomic kind of a crooked bend one. It's kind of a preference to you, your choice. There's going to be a link below to talk to you about snow shovel preference and how to choose the right snow shovel. Roughly, they should be about chest height. So I'm going to show you a demonstration of this one. It's a little higher, a little lower. Probably should have something in the middle but going to use this. So the big thing with snow shoveling is obviously using your legs. We don't want to use our arms and our back ,and twist. So good body mechanics, good lifting mechanics. So you want to basically be able to bend down and shovel.

So you want to really be able to push that snow, you want to bend down, lift with your legs, and get that good body mechanic lift here. So that snow you get underneath it, you want to bend down, you want to reach, lift closer with your hand closer to shovel itself, the pit out there and lift up. And then the bigger thing is you don't want to just twist your body and throw, you want to bend down, lift, step, and turn and throw or bend, lift, step forward and throw. Turn and step. You always want to step to wherever you're throwing to, you don't want to just twist your body. And please don't sit here and just bend over on your back and just shoving. If The snow gets really deep, you may have to take smaller sections, smaller pieces of it, smaller, load folds,

Carve it out and go. So be really smart about it if you can. If anything happens or if you have other questions about shoveling or hurting your back with shoveling or legs or whatever it is, please don't hesitate to give us a call at (630) 892-8003. We'll be able to talk to you, help you out, demonstrate whatever needs to be done. There is going to be two more. The following two weeks after this, there'll be a second one on walking, and then there'll be a third one on basically like a first aid kit, what you should have, a safety kit in your car and stuff like that --preparation wise. So have a great week and we'll see you next week for your Weekly Cup of Joe. Bye.