Is Lack Of Mobility In Your Back Messing With Your Life?
As your body grows older, the back muscles can tighten up creating stiffness, discomfort, and eventually pain. This can happen while sitting while standing or moving through daily life. There are several reasons for this, but the key is NOT ENOUGH MOTION. You need to MOVE your body to NOT LOSE your mobility and flexibility.
Mobility has to do with the range of motion of your joints. Flexibility has to do with how much your muscles can stretch and bend.
If your job involves sitting at a desk all day or glued to a computer screen, you can sit still for hours engrossed in meetings, projects, and ideas that have nothing to do with moving your body. You don’t even think about it until a twang or pang draws your attention out of the meeting and onto the twang or pang. When you do this day after day, week after week, your ability to move becomes more and more limited, You grow stiffer and tighter and you can do less and less.
So, instead, you can do something: MOVE. Get up and grab another cup of water, coffee, or tea, walk downstairs to the other bathroom, step outside and check out how the grass is growing (if you live somewhere besides Los Angeles where we can’t water right now). Just MOVE.
If you have a standing desk this can help. But you still need to MOVE your body regularly. Hourly. Take steps in place. Walk around while talking on the phone. Put your printer in another room so you need to walk there to collect documents. Roll your shoulders. Swing your arms around in between meetings. Twist your torso side to side between zoom calls. MOVE.
How do you remind yourself? Set a timer on your phone or watch. A sticky note on your computer or your forehead. You CAN do something about it.
There are a thousand and one things you can do to change it. But let’s start with two simple exercises you can do daily to build up both core strength, spine mobility, and back flexibility. Click each for instructions and tips on how to do them properly.
This exercise opens the hip joint (the front of the hip), while your deep core muscles stabilize your pelvis building core and lower back strength. You will lengthen your lower back muscles and force increasing demand on your abdominals as you move.
This is a variation of the Half Roll Back.
This exercise trains you to articulate (one vertebra at a time) through the spine, forcing your deep abdominals to support you. The rotation engages your oblique muscles for stabilization. Its work!
Pilates exercises are designed to strengthen while you stretch, so you create flexibility and power like a cat, not bulk up your muscles like a weightlifter or a bear.
