Good morning friends! It has been so nice to get my life back in order over the past few days. I have worked out almost every day since Wanderlust 108, and made a promise to myself that today would be a recovery day. Recovery days are so important to allow the body to properly repair itself. So I am thinking a 30 minute brisk walk around the neighborhood and a good stretch session will be exactly what the doctor ordered. If you keep breaking your muscles down with intense exercise without proper recovery, the chances of injury and muscular imbalances becomes much higher.
Flexibility is one of the most important components of fitness, and guess what? It is often overlooked. If you are a group fitness person like I am, you may see some people skip the post-sweat cool down, and that is one of the worst things you can do for your body. Trainers develop their workouts in three components:
The Warm-Up helps to increase flexibility, mobility, core temperature and active muscles required for dynamic movement. The warm up should correlate to the movement you will be engaging in throughout class.
The Workout After an adequate warm up you should be ready to take on whatever movement your teacher has ready for you to torch calories and work on the other components of fitness such as muscular strength and endurance as well as cardioresipratory endurance that should lead to decreased BMI or body mass index.
The Cool Down is basically your ‘reset’ button. The cool down should help stretch all the major muscle groups that you crushed during your workout. This will help to lengthen the muscles and lead to less soreness. Your cool down is the time where you can use your breath to bring your heart rate down and re-alignt your head, neck and spine! So please, unless you have to, try not to leave class before the cool down is complete. Our goal is to leave you feeling better than when you came in! Not broken down for the rest of your day.
Photo by Judy Walker Photography
Why You Should Stretch
If you have time for any form of fitness in your day…it should be stretching. As Americans we spend more time crouching down to look at our phone and computer screens than we do being physically active. So here are a few reasons to find even FIVE minutes to stretch today.
1-Decreases muscle stiffness and increases range of motion: basically you are giving your hips, knees, shoulders and ankles a longer shelf life!
2-Reduced Risk of Injury: Think of your muscles like a piece of chewing gum; the more you massage it the more flexible it becomes. If you really work on your flexibility, you also decrease your risk of injury during explosive or more dynamic forms of exercise. If your favorite type of exercise is playing a sport, flexibility is key to engaging without injury.
3-Improves Posture: As I stated above, the time spent on our screens increases the strain in our neck and and upper back or thoracic spine. Your grandma told you to practice good posture, and she is right! Try getting into a crab position right not by laying on your back, knees up feet planted hip distance apart, hands planted with fingers turned back at 6 0’clock. Lift and your hips up, press through the heels of your hands, open the chest and release the head back and say Ahhhhhh. Hold for about 10 seconds and lower. Repeat about 5 times for some serious chest, hip and shoulder opening.
4-Decreases Stress and Tension in the body: Plain and simple; a well stretched body holds less tension thus makes you feel less stressed and more relaxed. Start to get into the habit of stretching fist thing in the morning and the last thing you do before you go to bed.
5-Decreases Risk of Lower Back Pain: Low back pain is probably the most common type of pain in anyone 30+, am I right? By increasing flexibility in the major muscle groups of the legs (quadriceps,hip flexors, hamstrings and glutes) that are attached to the lumbo-pelvic region (low back/pelvis) helps to relieve stress on lower back.
*** Bonus: Increased flexibility makes sexy time more fun: If the above five reasons weren’t enough then this one should be! Enjoy the increased blood flow to your nether region and you and your partner may be able to master parts of the Kama Sutra you never thought possible.
The list goes on and on! I came on today for a quick post, but wanted to really hammer home why stretching is so important! If you are very tight grab a towel, resistance band or yoga strap for a little bit of assistance.
Try this stretch routine today, and let me know how you feel after.
