hello again everyone welcome back to our channel for those of you that are new here I'm Craig
and I'm a t4 complete paraplegic which means that I'm paralyzed from the
chest down now because I don't have any use of my core muscles I have a lot of
difficulty moving around and balancing so one of the first things I had to
learn in rehab was how to sit up in bed and how to move around so if you are
newly injured and you're quite a high level spinal cord injury this one's fo ryou
so to start with how do you sit up in the bed well the number one easiest
way to sit up in the bed is to pull off the environment around you this is
particularly true if you're still in the hospital bed as there's some lovely
rails you can pull off you simply grab the rail and pull yourself up but how do
you do this if there's nothing else to pull off so how do you sit up when
there's nothing to pull off well the technique involves driving your elbows
into the ground as a way to sit yourself up however if you just drive your elbows in
and try and sit up I find that just lifts my stomach up and it doesn't get
me sitting up at all so what you also need to do is brace your hands off of
something now this can be anything it could be an item of clothing it could be
behind your back it could be behind your bum it doesn't matter what it is so for
example if I just grab onto the edge of my trousers here and drive my elbows in
that gets me up a lot further I then shift my always back and that gets me
into a nice stable position from this position it's easy you just use your
hands one at a time and push yourself all the way up so if you're able to sit
up on the side of the bed then you might be wanting to know what's the easiest
way to get your legs up onto the bed and also off the bed again afterwards so in
rehab the method I was taught was to lean forward grab your leg and lift and
pass it on like that and then try and do the same with the
other now if you've not got much balance this is quite difficult and actually
takes quite a lot of arm strength
so through trial and error I've found my own way which works a lot better so we
start back down what you want to aim to do is to lift your knees up to your
chest and then let gravity help you roll backwards and once you're back with your
knees on your chest it's quite easy to then put your legs down onto the bed the
easiest way I found to lift my knees up together if you try and do both at the
same time without the core you're just gonna fall forwards so what you want to
do is put your hand just below your knee one at a time lift this one up and then
once the first one's up I dig my elbow into the bed and the second one comes a
lot more easily like so and then once I'm on the bed I can straighten my legs
out and put them down where I want them so over here I'm now on my side so if I
want to sit up from here I just dig my elbow into the bed push myself up so
for me that is an a lot easier way of getting my legs up onto the bed so how do
you go about rolling over in the bed so the first way I was taught involves
using your arms like this and you're gonna throw them over rocking back and
forth many times as you need to start with and use that to roll you over like
this so although this works in reality this isn't very practical unless you've
got a massive bed to yourself and you've not a risk of hitting anything what I
find a lot easier is to use the technique we just used to sit yourself
up and then once you're sitting up it's very easy just to fall one way and push
yourself over so how do you move around the bed well you've got to lift yourself
up and then use your head as a bit of a counterweight so if you want to go backwards
move your head forwards if you want to go to the side move your head the
opposite way like this
now how do you get off the bed so much in the same way that I used the rolling
technique to get on I'm going to use the same way to get off so I'm going to try
and bring my knees up to my chest I'm gonna fall onto this elbow and then
shift my legs the way I want them to go and let them roll on the nice way nice
thing about doing it this way is you're pretty much sitting up straight away so
you don't have to do the sit up as well so I hope you found that useful if you're a
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feel free to leave them down below and I'll do my best to get back to you thank
you for watching and we'll see you in the next one bye