Read the transcript for this video:
Good morning and welcome to your Weekly Cup of Joe. My name is Joe King. I'm the owner of Physical Therapy Advantage in North Aurora. Coming to you from my home, we are recording the second video of a three-part video for winter preparation. We talked about snow shoveling last week, this week we're going to talk about walking on ice safely or slick surfaces safely. Lots of different methods out there. There's going to be a link below that will walk you through this as well, some video to help you out. But one of the biggest things that you can do is slow yourself down, take your time, you're going to decrease your strides. So one of the things you want tp try to do is use rubber sole shoes that have some traction on it; that'd be great.
The other thing is, you can get some extra traction here. I use sometimes yak tracks. There're some metal wrapped around some rubberized pieces that you can just slip over your shoe and they'll cover it, and so it gives you a little extra traction. That's always beneficial to do as well, technique wise. Penguins have it correct and I'm going to talk to you here, show you a little bit. I'm going to go down just a little bit more here. So typically you want to spread your feet out a little bit, the shoulder width, maybe a little bit more than shoulder width apart. You're going to turn your feet out just a little bit, you're not going to have your hands in your pockets, so you want to have gloves on so your hands are going to be out. They may be out of the way from your body, maybe even back just a little bit, but just at least out.
Big thing's going to be is you want to not take a big of a stride. Like I said, slow yourself down, and instead of typically walking with your foot out in front of you and angling and having your heel strike, heel hit first, your back, your foot hit first. You want to keep your center of gravity over the top of your foot and hit flat footed all the time. That's why you're not striding out as much. So it's almost like a shuffle, like a penguin, and that's where they have it, and that's how they do it very well. So you're just going to walk and keep through, and then I'll turn around here for you, feet flat on the ice, hitting slowly, walking not as big of a stride so you're not having that angled force where there's a chance of the feet falling back or feet slipping out and you falling backwards. Well, body weight is directly over the top of you. Smaller steps, little wider base of support. your arms are out for a little balance, and if you happen to fall, you can brace yourself. So, like I said, there's going to be a link at the bottom here for the video and everything.
Do you have any questions about that or if you happen to have an accident on the ice and you need to talk to us about maybe what happened, and if you need to come in and get checked out, please don't hesitate to do so. Call us at the clinic at (630) 892-8003 And we'll see you next week for our third part of the Winter Preparation three-part series. Have a great week. Take care. Bye.