Hi! I'm Ali. I'm one of the physios from treatmyachilles.com. We're an online
physiotherapy service for people with Achilles tendon problems; this could be from tears,
ruptures, or from Achilles tendinopathies, which includes words like tendinitis and tendinosis.
We offer an assessment and then a bespoke rehabilitation program to follow your needs
to get you back to your goals. This video is talking very quickly about how you can
start to progress your exercises, and one of the ways to do that is by adding weight,
and how practically you can do that in a home environment. One of the most common questions
I get from patients is when they can start to do calf raises – so, raising up onto their tiptoes
and raising back down again – how they can make them more difficult. Now, this is something you
would need advice on, because you may be ready to do this, or you may not be ready to do this. So,
these are for the people that have been told by a medical professional that you're ready to
progress these exercises on, have been given a certain number of exercises to do, so, the sets,
how much rest to have and how many repetitions to do. So, the repetitions is the total number,
the sets is what groups of those numbers to do, and then what rest in between those groups. So,
once you have that information and you've been told to add weight,
what is a really practical way of doing that? Well, you've got a few options. One: you may
have some dumbbells or a kettlebell or anything, light hand weights, around your house already,
or you may not have any access to any equipment. What you would want to do is start by
following the guidance from your healthcare professional as to what number of kilos to start
with or pounds to start with and then think about how you're going to place that around your body.
A good way is simply holding a dumbbell or a weight in your hand. If that's not practical,
a really useful way is to get a backpack or a rucksack – something that you can keep loaded,
so, not something you use every single day. Put in the number of pounds or kilos that you need,
and then that backpack can go on your back. If you start to get to a point where that weight
is quite significant and it's quite difficult to get that backpack on, you can then start to
spread the load. So, you might have some weight in the back and then some weight on the front in
a different rucksack, or on the back and in your hand, or a selection of all three of those things.
Keeping that bag pre-loaded at the weight that you want
is an easy, practical way to get these exercises done. During rehabilitation for Achilles tendon,
it takes weeks to months to start to get strength changes within our body, and again,
your physiotherapist or medical practitioner should be able to guide you, because those sets,
those repetitions, those type of exercises you're doing should be changing as you get
better and progressively your tendon gets more robust or stronger, so you can do more things.
So, over that period of time, it's about trying to get these exercises in a habit.
And this habit, again, could be daily, could be two or three times a week, again, depends on the
advice from your practitioner for your individual reason. But if you've got a bag pre-loaded with
the weight that you need, it then makes life easy just to pick it up and swing it on.
Attaching your exercises to a habit, so, something you do already, could be,
‘I keep the bag in my living room. So, when I watch the news, I can swing my bag on, and I can
do those exercises at the same time.’ Or you might keep that weight near your kettle, because you
like to boil the kettle to make yourself a hot drink and cook, and you could do those exercises
in that kitchen – somewhere that allows you to have that normal lifestyle that you would do,
but gives you a bit of a memory boost to say, ‘Yes I haven't done the exercises yet,
and it's easy because I have this weight to hand.’ Thank you very much for listening. Take care! Bye!