Six months out, confession time. Which physio exercises did you actually keep doing?

#1pbike60(Joined Feb 2025 · 36 posts)November 9, 2025, 10:24 am

Six months since my op this week, so, confession booth.

My sheet had nine exercises on it. For the first six weeks I did all nine, twice a day, like a monk, ticked them off on the fridge chart and everything. Somewhere around month three the chart came down and if I'm honest I'm now down to three: the glute bridges, the single leg stands while the kettle's on, and cycling, which I refuse to count as exercise because it's just my life back.

Feeling vaguely guilty about the other six. So, fellow graduates, be honest. What survived from your sheet past the first couple of months? And did anyone actually keep the clamshells going, or are those universally the first casualty?

#2moira1963(Joined Oct 2025 · 8 posts)November 9, 2025, 2:51 pm

Kept precisely none of the sheet, kept the dog. Forty minutes of walking a day, hills included, and I told my physio at discharge and she was fine with it for me. The dog does not allow rest days, which is more than the fridge chart ever managed.

#3gardeninggwen(Joined Jan 2025 · 29 posts)November 10, 2025, 8:19 am

The clamshells were absolutely my first casualty, day one of being unsupervised. Something about lying on the floor mid-morning like a hinged mollusc, no.

What survived, a year and a half on: bridges, because I do them in bed before getting up, and the standing hip abductions, because I do them at the counter while the kettle boils. That was the trick for me, gluing each exercise to something that already happens every day. The exercises that needed a mat, a spare half hour and a good mood are the ones that died. The ones bolted onto the kettle are still alive.

The garden is the other half of my physio, though I notice squatting down to weed got graded as "functional strengthening" by my physio, which is the nicest thing anyone's called my weeding.

#4Ms Priya RamanSurgical moderator(Joined Oct 2024 · 91 posts)November 11, 2025, 9:44 am

As the person professionally obliged to defend the clamshell, I'll offer this thread two thoughts.

First, what you're all describing matches the adherence research: programme completion falls away steeply after the supervised phase, and the exercises that persist are the ones anchored to daily routine, exactly as gardeninggwen has engineered. From where I sit, an imperfect routine still happening at month six is worth more than a perfect one abandoned in March. The strength and balance work is doing long-horizon jobs, protecting the joint, and more importantly protecting you from the falls that threaten it, so something surviving matters more than everything surviving. What each exercise on the standard sheets is actually for is set out in the hip replacement exercise guide.

Second, the caveat this forum will hear from me every time: which exercises are droppable is not a general question. A sheet is written for a particular hip, approach, and starting strength, and the sensible move for anyone six months out and down to three exercises is a short review with their own physiotherapist, who can usually condense the programme into something honest rather than watch it shrink by neglect. They renegotiate programmes weekly; yours would not be the strangest request.

#5trev_lefthip(Joined Jul 2025 · 13 posts)December 2, 2025, 5:28 pm

Sit-to-stands off the bottom stair, ten of them, every time the adverts come on. Started as a joke with my grandson keeping count and it's outlasted everything else on the sheet. That and I never let anyone bring the milk in for me anymore. Small, but it's mine.