Tricks and tips with the front wheeled walker

Hi, my name is Bridget Stewart I am a physical therapist at the PWR!Gym, and I am going to show you some tricks and tips with the front wheeled walker. So, with this walker I’ll show you some things here first. It has two wheels in the front and no wheels in the back, sometimes you can see people using tennis balls to kind to help it travel a little bit better with less friction from the ground. When we are using this, we want to make sure that it is fitted properly, you can see your physical therapist about this. What you also want to remember is you need to PWR! up when you are using this, so making sure that we're squeezing those shoulder blades, squeezing those glutes to keep that walker close to our feet at all times. When we are walking forward, we can walk normally with it, just going forward, just like that. When we are going backward, however, it might help to pick it up and keep it close to our body. So, let's go over that a little bit, you can take your steps back, bring it close to your body, take some steps back, bring it close. Also, when we are going to sit in this chair, what we like to do is we like to turn with our walker with it, so let's go over turning. If I’m going to turn to the left, make sure you bring the walker to the left first, then step your feet, walker, then your feet and again just like that. Let’s sit-in the chair. So, we will actually go past the chair a little bit, then we are going to need to do a right turn, bring the walker, turn it, bring the walker, turn it, make sure our legs are lined up with the legs of the chair, so we sit in the middle of it and then go ahead and reach back we never want to sit down with our hands on the walker so make sure we’re reaching back for the chair and then sitting down. Same kind of thing when we are standing up, we want to have our hands on the chair, we want to do that nice nose over toes stand and then reach for the walker to walk. Hope this was helpful, if you have more questions about it come on over to the PWR!Gym and a physical therapist can answer ten for you. Have a great one.

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