Joint Mobility |
Fitness With Joe Toledo, Ohio |
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Your Full-time Fitness & Preventative Health-care Professional | ||
You have a choice in life. You can sputter and stumble and creak your way along in a process of painful, slow decline or you can take charge of your health and become a role model of a healthy and happy human being.
And there is no better way to insure a long, pain free life than performing the right daily combination of joint mobility and strength flexibility exercises.
First, what is the difference between Joint Mobility and Muscle flexibility Training?
Joint mobility is not the same thing as muscle flexibility. When doing mobility drills, you generally will not feel much of a stretch, which is fine. A muscle does not always have to be stretched to put a joint through its full range of motion. For example, you will achieve complete hip flexion if you stand upright and bring your knee towards your chest. Not much of a stretch, right? To stretch one of the muscles that oppose hip flexion, the hamstring, you will have to raise your leg with your knee straight or nearly straight. You will not succeed in touching your chest or stomach with your knee: your hamstring will tighten up and stop you long before that. So muscle stretching will not deliver well-oiled joints. Your hinges need a differently type of workout from your muscles.Years and mileage pile calcium deposits on your joints and promote connective tissue growth in all the wrong places. Your youthful well- oiled hinges come to a grinding halt.
Three stages of joint health. First is 100% healthy joint, usually found in a young person. 20 reps per joint will suffice for prevention until you are thirty.
The second state usually hits by the time you are forty, give or take a few years. The joints have salt deposits and they speak up with aches and limited range of movement. Not all the time though. Sometimes symptoms disappear for years only to resurface again. Reps per joint must be cranked up to 50-100 per joint. Especially for your spine.
The third state is when the joints ache constantly and actively interfere with your work and life. X-rays show changes, the most common being bone spurs growing between vertebrae. Bad posture, poor body mechanics at work, and lack of joint movement are to blame.
The only way to prevent age related joint problems is through exercise. If you already hit the third state do 200-300 full range movements per damaged joint and 100 for the ones that are waiting their turn.
Ease into joint mobility training. Start with ten movements and add ten a week. An even more gradual schedule is to add five a week for the first month and then start adding ten reps a week until target number is reached.
Move fast but not at the expense of the range of motion! And get some cardio benefits in the process. But make sure to slow down for the last 10 reps and really get a stretch.
A more conservative approach to mobility training is to make slow circles with your joints, starting with small amplitude and working up to the joint's max range of movement.
Mobility drills are ideally performed every morning. You will not only do your joints a favor, but will get rid of stiffness as well. You get rusty whenever your proprioceptors- the sensors that give your body information about its position in space, its speed of movement, etc- do not get any new input for a while. When nothing happens, your nervous system is not sure what to expect from the environment and tightens up your muscles-just in case. That's why you feel like the Tin Man in the morning or after any long period of in activity.
Movement wakes up your proprioceptors, the nervous system chills out and you limber up. Increased impulsation from the proprioceptors also tunes up the nervous system for the whole day.
There are about 100 joints in your body. You are about to learn how to keep them running smoothly. Enjoy!
Morning Recharge Mobility, Cardio, and Strength Drills.
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| www.fitnesswithjoe.com Email: joe.sparks@toast.net 29101 Hufford Road Perrysburg, OH 43551 419.874.2911 |
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