 Hello, my beautiful internet friends. Welcome back to my channel. Thanks for joining me today for a lesson in walking. Don't worry, that'd be way too boring. I'm not actually gonna teach you how to walk, but I am gonna teach you how I learn to walk. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day and they asked me what I actually meant, and I realized I've never really taken the time to explain it, because I say learning to walk, and I think most people assume that that means just getting used to my prosthetic leg and working out the soreness and maybe building up some muscle strength and all that, but that's actually not what I mean. There is a right way and a not super right way to walk. So today I'm gonna explain what I mean when I say I'm learning to walk again as a new amputee. It's a little bit more complicated than one might think. Also, if you feel like doing me a favor as we dive into this video, if you would hit like on this video, it helps it get out to more subscribers. I know that it sounds like I'm just asking for likes for my own narcissistic desires, and yes, that's absolutely, I mean no, that's not the case at all, but it actually does help the YouTube algorithm and it helps my videos, so if you wanna do that, that'd be fantastic. So when I still had my ankle, I didn't yet have sunshine, my prosthetic leg here. I didn't walk very well. I had a fused ankle, which means they cut the joint out of my ankle and screwed my leg to my foot, and the cool thing is that our bodies learn to compensate. Our bodies figure things out or incredibly resilient as human beings, both physically, mentally, and emotionally. Human beings, generally speaking, are designed to have two ankles. So considering the fact that one of those joints was gone, that did cause some issues with my overall body and linemen. So on good days, it might look like I was walking normally, but my body was still compensating. So for the last 15 years, I haven't been walking right. If I look at video of myself walking before my amputation, I can very clearly see it, but my ankle was always out to the side, which means that my knee was always at a funny angle, which means that my hip was at a funny angle, which means that everything in my body was rotated just a little bit, and there were a lot of other little things that I did to make it so that I could walk more comfortably. And I've realized that I've carried some of those habits into now, even though that that ankle is gone. I'll be walking and I'll notice that my prosthetic ankle is turned out to my right, just like it used to be when I had my fused ankle, even though there's absolutely no reason for that. It's just my body remembering it. When I first got my prosthetic and I took a little walk around my neighborhood with my husband, he was very encouraging, but he was like, you just don't look like you're walking right. He tries to be diplomatic about it, but I mean, he's from New York, so he ends up being pretty straightforward. He was like, you look like you're walking wrong. You just don't look like you're walking right. And so I spent a lot of time thinking about walking and watching videos about how to actually walk. The majority of people on planet Earth never think about walking. It's something that we learn a little, and we usually do it up until close to when we pass away. However, I have the unique opportunity to really ponder how a body moves and how I take a step. This is one of the reasons why physical therapy can be really, really important because we end up adjusting to avoid pain because we like to take the path of least resistance as humans, that's what we do. But that path of least resistance can often cause a lot of issues down the road. Like for instance, how I learned to walk to avoid ankle pain ended up causing further issues up my body and my neck. It exacerbated the neck pain that I had because I was always walking just a little bit off. So I got my prosthetic leg. I realized I wasn't walking right and I wanted to do something figured out. So I actually spent an afternoon very slowly, very, very slowly walking around my neighborhood on crutches trying to figure out how I was walking. Like have you ever spent time really thinking about precisely how you put one foot in front of the other? At what point are you pushing off of your toes? At what point are you bending your ankle? Where, like how far does your knee extend out? Does it hyper extend all the way back when you're pushing off? When do your glute muscles, I mean your butt. When does that come into play? How much should it come into play? These were all questions I started really asking myself and I think I'm doing a decent job of walking, especially when I think about it. It hasn't become second nature yet. So demonstration time. This is what it looked like as I began to learn how to walk and it's still what it looks like on days when I'm not really paying attention to it or when I'm in a little bit of pain. Dance floor. Without thinking about it, this is about what it looked like. So I don't know how easy it is to see if I wasn't thinking about it. I ended up taking almost half steps. I looked a little bit hobbled. It was like I was swinging my leg out from my hip almost. My knee doesn't feel fantastic. As you guys know, I've had some issues with it and so it was like I was trying to protect my knee too by not really extending it too far. Everything was very tight. Everything was very compressed. And the funny thing is it felt natural as in it's what my body automatically did and that's not gonna look the same for everyone. Everyone else is gonna end up protecting themselves and adjusting in different ways. But if no one had really pointed it out to me, I meant I've kept walking that way and then ended up developing other kinds of small issues because of it. And also, you're just not using energy efficiently. As I thought about it and as I learned a little bit more about walking properly, I guess you could call it, I started realizing I have to really push with my butt muscles. I have to really flex my glutes. It sounds funny to say, especially because I don't have a calf anymore. I've gotta engage the muscles in the remaining leg that I have, like a lot. I have to think about bending my knee. If I don't think about bending my knee as I bring it back to swing it through, I end up catching my foot, like catching my toes on the ground and tripping. I'm not extending it far enough. Without thinking about it, I don't let my knee extend. When you're walking, when you take a step forward, your knee is almost fully extended back, right? It's almost locked out and I wasn't coming close to that without thinking about it, actually processing through what I need to do to walk. I realized, okay, I need to actually trust my leg. I need to put my knee out there all the way and then move forward over it. And it's amazing how much more energy I could put into that. I could walk a lot faster. I could walk farther that way. Something I did from day one, I think this is only natural when you're learning to walk again, is I kept looking at my feet. I was always looking down. And it was a night and day difference when my prosthetists told me to look up. Like do not look at your feet when you're walking. Look eye level, look something else. Look at anything but your own feet. And your body starts to automatically kind of come up and you adjust a little bit. As an amputee, I obviously can't flex my toes. I can't move my ankle. And so it's been a process of learning how to engage the rest of my muscles the right way to, words are hard, to compensate for that. The rest of your body matters when you're walking too. I think about like keeping my abs tight, not like I'm like flexing all day when I'm walking, but just keeping my core kind of engaged and my shoulders back and my neck kind of relaxed when I'm walking. And it's a lot to think about when I'm walking which is probably part of the reason why it's so exhausting right now. But it's getting a little bit more natural and the more I think about it, the more my muscles will start to remember that the right way to walk. As I was walking on my fused ankle that was in pain and I was adjusting to it, I knew that I was causing alignment issues but there also wasn't really anything that I could do to stop it because I didn't really have any other options. But now that I have a prosthetic leg, I want to do everything that I can do to make sure that I'm learning to walk correctly so I don't run into alignment issues. I think this can happen to any of us if you have some kind of old sports injury. Like maybe you hurt your knee when you were a teenager and it still bothers you and you end up adjusting and tightening up your body in certain ways to protect it because we don't think about walking and because our bodies are so amazing and adjusting to things automatically to allow us to still do things, sometimes we end up with unhealthy adjustments so we can still get through our daily activities and so I'm nowhere near no we're close to perfect when it comes to walking. I'm quite a ways from that. In fact, I don't think I'll ever reach it. I'm not really shooting for perfect but I am learning and I think it's looking better. It's been an interesting experiment to think about every step I'm taking and I'm thinking less about every step I'm taking. But hey, if you want to have some fun, some afternoon when you're out for a walk, really think about the muscles that you're engaging when you take every step, regardless of if you're an amputee or an able-bodied person or a fill in the blank. It's kind of interesting to think about how incredible our bodies are and what's being used as we move. Maybe that's just me. I think it's pretty cool. So I'm gonna continue to learn how to walk. I'm gonna go back to physical therapy because I started it and then life got busy and I sacrificed it, which was not a smart thing to do. Feel free to recommend me in the comment section. I'm gonna continue with that, continue learning to walk the right way, continue getting stronger, continue towards that 5K in March, which I have planned and I think will be pretty possible, but I'm gonna have to keep working pretty hard for it. But yeah, that is how I'm learning to walk. Let me know if you ever had to think about walking before, if you've ever had to put conscious thought into it or if this is a thought that's just never crossed your mind before. I'd love to hear in the comment section down below. If you liked this video, if you enjoyed it, I would love it if you would hit like on this video and subscribe on the channel. If you would like to see more of me in your feed in the future, if you didn't, well, I appreciate you making it this far in the video and don't do any of those things. If you didn't like it. Thanks for watching, guys. Thank you to my patrons for making these videos possible. I truly appreciate you and all that you enable me to do. To each and every one of you watching, thank you so much for spending a few minutes out of your day here with me today. I appreciate it. I love you guys. I'm thinking of you and I'll see you in the next video. Bye guys. Could it be the morning of the spring when the seamless child has thought to the same? Have you heard from the sky?