Let's talk about two important elements that should form part of your workout routines:
Mobility work
Stretching
Why?
It’s tempting to spend every minute in the gym (or whatever activity you prefer) trying to get the most out of your time there. But does “the most” mean crushing yourself, sweating your butt off, and leaving no room for recovery?
This isn’t effective.
Not giving your body enough time to recover leads to compromised immune systems, frequent injuries, and nagging fatigue.
The best recovery happens when you are active in gentle and restorative ways. Resting doesn’t mean laying on the couch all day!
How do you recover? Two words: Mobility and Stretching.
Mobility
Mobility training aims to accomplish one main goal: to increase the active range of motion within a joint, or group of joints. This helps to facilitate joint health and function during physical activity; even when performing everyday tasks.
We’d go as far as saying that a mobile body is the single most important physical attribute for any adult, of any age or fitness level.
Why? Because it’s almost always the first thing that slips from our grasps as we age. Gains in mobility are often made in smaller increments, and slowly over time. Don’t let that time frame fool you, though.
In 6-12 months of mobility training, you can improve and even reverse years of accumulated muscle tension throughout your entire body.
To read more about mobility work, click here.
And click here for an article which includes a short mobility/ flexibility routine which can make for a great addition to your workout routine.
Stretching
Stretching is a great way to unwind after a long day of work, of sitting too much, and being in a poor posture. And if you’ve done a physical activity, all the more reason to stretch well.
For most people, a stretch workout may consist of 1-2, maybe 3 stretches — each held for 30 … more like 15 seconds. It’s much better than not stretching at all, but not nearly enough to offset all the sitting we do throughout the day.
The reality for most adults is that it’s going to take a lot more than “a few sets of 30 seconds” to undo all that tightness.
Some people may need to dedicate an entire workout to stretching and flexibility.
What stretching does is it helps to get the muscle tissue back to its normal length. For example, too much sitting makes the muscles around our hips - the glutes & the hip flexors in particular - tight. And we need to “reset” it at the bare minimum. Otherwise, it shows up as pain at a later point of time and we don't want that!
Click here for our detailed article on Stretching to learn more, which also includes links to our articles with demo videos of various stretches.
(Photo by Alexander Mils on Unsplash)