Physical Therapy

I thought I'd mention some things about my physical therapy in hopes they'll be helpful to others. I'm in physical therapy because of a bad fall I experienced October 5th. I started physical therapy Dec. 30th and have been going twice a week (except for a 2-week break when I was traveling for work). Many of the exercises I've been doing would, I suspect, be helpful to skaters in general.

The two areas I'm working are my left ankle and my left rotator cuff (shoulder). For the ankle I've been doing a number of exercises:

• Balancing on my left foot, standing on a trampoline, I throw and catch a 2-lb. medicine ball.
  
• I use a weight machine to do "resistive walking", walking against the pull of the weights. This is trivial going backward or forward, but going sidewise (no crossovers allowed) it's quite tiring, especially when pushing off with my left foot/ankle.
  
• I use a Theraband (stretchy thing) tied around my ankle and pull toward/against the resistance at 6 points of the circle (12,2,4,6,8,10). This is a GREAT exercise to strengthen your ankle.
  
• I pull against the Theraband tied around my good foot while balancing on my bad left foot.
  

For my shoulder I mostly concentrate on keeping my shoulder blades more squeezed together. My therapist says that I tend to hold my shoulders forward, which means that the arm doesn't want to stay back in the socket as it should. She thinks that even without the fall I would have eventually had some aches and pains because of this, so in a way it's a good thing. She's been working with me to strengthen the muscles around/below my shoulder blades (don't remember what they are called) so I use them more and put less pressure on the other muscles in my shoulder. For skating this should help me to have a better check when turning CCW, so it's a good thing. For turning/checking CW I will need to remember not to hunch my shoulders.

My therapist has also pointed out that I tend to drop my head/look down, which probably goes with my hunched shoulders but is certainly bad for skating. I'll have to work on all this. The good news is that once again skating is going to be good for my overall health by encouraging/helping me to correct these problems.