Featuring the article "24 Sneaky Ways to Move More- Increase your Physical Activity", I want to share a few ways I keep moving through the day. I hope you find these useful.
1. Ankle exercises- These are easy to do anywhere. Many people have weak ankles, tight calfs and or plantar fasciitis (heal pain). These exercises will strengthen and loosen the lower leg area.
-Instruction- while walking slow or sitting, flex your ankles/heal in and out. This is called supination and pronation. The muscles involved in these movements are rarely given attention. Strengthening them will reduce your chance of injury or ankle pain. Other movements are walking on your heals and toes. Again these movements give (stabilizer) muscles much needed attention for strengthening and stretching.
2. Core Engagement/ Hip Tuck- Throughout the day most of us don't even think about our core. When you have idle time or anytime really give your core a little attention and engage it! Most of us slouch our shoulders, curve our mid back and hike our hips back. Sitting like this day after day weakens our spine and core muscles, causing pain and damage to our structure. By engaging our core through the day, we pay more attention to our posture so that we can have less pain and more function through our senior years. A vast majority of all injuries root from a weak core, so by doing this through the day we avoid other injuries. You can do this while sitting, driving, walking, running...
- Instruction- tuck your hips, pull the floor of your pelvis up, breath all the way out and then some, you will feel those muscles after doing this for a while. Do 10 tuck sets throughout the day, invent your own routine.
3. Neck strength- through the day we lean our head forward. Our head is 8lbs and every inch forward it adds another 8lbs to our spinal column. This is why a lot of us have neck and should pain/ tension. To counter act this we need to strengthen the neck. A lot of us over stretch and "pop" our neck. In a lot of cases this is weakening the neck and making the issue worse.
- Instruction- when sitting in the car with a head rest or on the couch, press you head back for 5-10 seconds, 5-10 times in a sitting.
4. Move your legs and balance- when standing in line or waiting for something, move your legs; high knees, butt kicks, side extensions. Also you can balance on the toes of one foot and rotate the other leg. All these will strengthen and stretch the legs and core.
It might not seem like much, but in the long run if you get in the habit of doing these exercises it could make a huge difference in fitness and injury prevention.
If you have other specific pains or problems email me nicktotheplus@gmail.com and let's figure it out! I would also love to help you navigate marathon training and or off season for triathlon! Let's train to the PLUS
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