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MO🌈 Let’s talk about turtle braces! 🐢
Does your child have tight calf muscles or toe walk due to high tone and spasticity? Muscle tightness can lead to deviations in movement and poor alignment🦶
🤔 Why is this not ideal?
If a child has increased tightness in their calf muscles, it means that they don’t have optimal range of motion through their ankles.
➡️ This leads to a cycle of poor postural alignment and compensations in their movement that not only affects their walking and standing, but also functional transitions (like moving from the floor to standing)! Often, tight muscles can cause discomfort, particularly as the child grows.
We can use turtle braces to provide a prolonged stretch through the calf muscles, improving range of movement in the ankle joint! 🤩
While serial casting is often an option to target this, the cast is typically irremovable at home for 6 weeks and this may not be tolerated by some children. A great alternative are turtle braces. They can achieve similar results and can be removed (and put back on) as needed with a simple zip. This provides greater opportunities to incorporate it into your child’s daily routine. For example, you could pop the turtle brace on during your child’s car ride to school, and then take it off once you’ve arrived! 🚘 This allows for a more comfortable adjustment period (as your child wears it for longer and longer each time)!
💁♀️ Another massive perk of turtle braces is that they can be remoulded multiple times and adjusted to the child’s needs. Our therapists can remould these turtle braces in our clinic to slowly increase the range of the stretch as your child improves and grows. This means that we can make modifications such as slowly providing a bigger stretch in a graded way.
⭐️ In this video, we have tailored and moulded this ankle turtle brace based on Layla’s needs. For Layla, her toes point inwards. In order to correct this, we ordered a size up so that we had enough material to cover her forefoot and keep her toes in a more straightened position stretching the tight structures in her foot!
#mobikids #paediatrictherapy #turtlebrace #prolongedstretch #paediatricdisability
@mobikidsau
