Ines
I do not wear thigh bands because they make me sit in a more feminine style. I like to think that I do that anyway, though indeed my partner certainly thinks they do actually improve my posture when sitting. (She bloody would lol). I must ask her what she thinks of the way I sit when the connecting cable is unlocked.
When I first wanted to try the thigh bands on a continual basis, I rather wanted them locked together. As soon as I tried, the first obvious issue was that I could no longer negotiate the stairs and while I could hobble around some, I might as well have been wearing six-inch stilettos. 🤣 I should note here that I once broke my ankle in three-inch heels! High heels and I have never been friends!
Angela was sympathetic to my base problem, that of frustration which drove me to have these ridiculous episodes of trying to bypass my belt (which the thigh bands make impossible). Of course, her solution was for me to just stop wearing the belt - see my other thread for why I didn’t want to do that. I thought the thigh bands might help especially since I had just retired.
Angela was still concerned about the risk of fall though, so she went through the exercise of measuring my normal walking stride and then experimented with lengthening and shortening the connecting chain (later a connecting cable), determining how it affected my walking. She settled on a stride that was two cm less than she considered normal. I noticed it, but it wasn’t an issue. I have been that way now pretty much for two years.
But last week, because of the medical issues that were recently raised in this thread, we decided to see if my natural stride had changed. It had, but only by about 1 cm which I am not sure is statistically significant. Possibly this is related to the fact that when we hike or I walk on uneven ground (out in the woods etc.) or in icy conditions, the connecting cable is unlocked, so perhaps I get enough practice walking normally and not much has happened. But Angela still locks the cable when we come home, and it is normally kept locked when we walk around town or do the shopping etc. And at night, the bands are padlocked together.
I suspect that thigh bands are easier for me than anyone else here – I think I may be the only one who freely chooses to wear them. If I were younger, I would probably be more against them, not least because they would have stopped me wearing jeans etc. Of course, if someone else made me wear them you wouldn’t see me for the dust I raised hurrying to the nearest set of tin shears! 🤣
