keeping your knee still, and rotating your foot around your ankle (yaw and roll are the relevant axes) -- activates the muscles of the arch of your foot, in ways that I at least find surprising and discombobulating, but which also make it actually possible for bits of my anatomy other than my joints to act as shock absorbers.
For my particular flavour of bendy, that rotation tends to deliver a distinct clunk which I suspect is something subluxing and reseating itself, at times on every rotation.
it's much less work to just let my toes drift outward and my arches flatten and my knees go back -- to let my joints take the strain, instead of activating my muscles and having them stabilise and shock-absorb and such. It's what I do automatically! It doesn't require me to pay attention!
*noddy nod* it's a physical lock rather than an active muscular 'lock', that's really more of a continuously varying movement about the theoretical straight-legged / balanced position. Think of a Segway that's on and actively balancing on its two wheels vs off and resting against the wall.
and it puts a lot more wear and stress on my joints
You occasionally see people who've completely destroyed their normal knee ROM by repeately hyper-extending it that way, mostly due to post-polio, but I've seen one or two people who were so clearly Marfanoid in appearance that it was likely hypermobility.
Because my bendiness is worst in my hips, I've a tendency to walk stiff-legged and slightly on my toes, which minimises hip movement, but does tend to keep everything pointing in a line, but also means I need to be careful of hyper-extending.
(And if things are really bad I've occasionally caught myself rotating foot and knee 90 degrees off centre-line, taking both joints out of the equation in favour of a sort of peg-legged rocking over my heel. This is really not good as it's stressing the joints at 90 degrees to the way they're meant to take loads).
no subject
For my particular flavour of bendy, that rotation tends to deliver a distinct clunk which I suspect is something subluxing and reseating itself, at times on every rotation.
*noddy nod* it's a physical lock rather than an active muscular 'lock', that's really more of a continuously varying movement about the theoretical straight-legged / balanced position. Think of a Segway that's on and actively balancing on its two wheels vs off and resting against the wall.
You occasionally see people who've completely destroyed their normal knee ROM by repeately hyper-extending it that way, mostly due to post-polio, but I've seen one or two people who were so clearly Marfanoid in appearance that it was likely hypermobility.
Because my bendiness is worst in my hips, I've a tendency to walk stiff-legged and slightly on my toes, which minimises hip movement, but does tend to keep everything pointing in a line, but also means I need to be careful of hyper-extending.
(And if things are really bad I've occasionally caught myself rotating foot and knee 90 degrees off centre-line, taking both joints out of the equation in favour of a sort of peg-legged rocking over my heel. This is really not good as it's stressing the joints at 90 degrees to the way they're meant to take loads).