The Need for Movement Variability and Strength
A common excuse you hear someone say when they get injured is, “I’m getting old”. Let me tell you, I don’t buy it. While it is true that more injuries occur in people over the age of 25. I think the biggest reason for that is people often do the same things for years, without actively focusing on building good mobility habits to negate aging aches and pains.
When you’re young you are typically more active. You move daily and you have movement variation regularly. After high school gym class, you are no longer forced to move. College comes and goes with the number of hours spent sitting ever increasing, reaching an all-time high when your career starts! This is where old age and pain really start to corelate.
As free time becomes limited, we want to do our best to stay active with what precious spare time we have. At this point, we typically have two extremes. The overachiever who trains a ton with one sport (triathlon or running around here), and you have a sedentary, career focused person who doesn’t make time for exercise. Somewhere in the middle lies most of us, running, yoga, spin classes, HIIT classes etc. are sprinkled throughout the week. Sadly, these occasional classes may not be enough to eliminate aging aches and pains
Sedentary and the middle of the road people typically just need more movement and strength of any kind to avoid aging aches and pains. While movement is better than a sedentary lifestyle, you’re not exempt just because you spend long hours exercising. Ironman athletes are active 10-20hrs a week and only move straight ahead. Marathon runners spend hours moving straight ahead. Even though you are active, you are at risk for injury!
Life requires recruitment of certain muscles to achieve postures and movement. As you go through life, old age and pain coincide as we typically recruit the same muscles to hold the same postures and the same movements. This pattern of recruitment gets worn into the motor cortex of the brain, leading to chronically overused muscles, “sleepy” or underutilized muscles, and compensation patterns.
No matter where you live on that spectrum, YOU NEED MORE MOVEMENT VARIABILITY AND STRENGTH if you want to avoid aging related aches and pains!
Integrating a short but comprehensive activation, strength, and movement routine will help in all aspects of life - most importantly - Your injury risk will be lower.
Isolate your weakness. For most of us, the biggest weakness is core and hip strength and stability. With a 10 minute routine that consists of 4-6 activation exercises, you can do so much to maintain a basic level of strength and stability helping to keep you healthy! Once you activate, you can add in a few strength exercises to throw into your gym routine to increase capacity and strength.
For the athletes who are already spending hours perfecting one motion or sport, try throwing in some simple strength exercises that get you out of the same plane of movement. Runners and triathletes - try adding in some lateral agility or side lunges.
Old age and pain don’t necessarily have to be the outcome. If you’re wondering where to start, come in for an appointment and we can design a quick 10-minute plan for you, with the goal to eliminate your biggest weakness and counteract aging related aches and pains.