By: Claudia van Rooyen (Yoga Instructor) and Dr Michelle Beech Cloete (MTech Chiropractic, UJ)
Mobility and range of motion can be greatly affected by the loss of flexibility. Loss of flexibility can increase your chances of injury with time.
How do we combat this? Maintaining flexibility through stretching results when joints move unrestricted and pain free through its normal ranges of motion. This causes the soft tissues such as muscles to lengthen, align and restore back to its normal length. Due to the aging process, our muscles tend to become shorter and stiffer. It is thus crucial to keep the body moving regardless of our body size or age.
Pretzel dilemma
Pursuing flexibility doesn’t necessarily mean that this would require you to become a contortionist where you find yourself in a pretzel pose hoping you’ll remember how to untangle your body afterwards. It is about giving your body the chance to live pain free through normal everyday movement and minimizing the chances of sustaining injuries throughout our lives.
Stretching is a vital part in achieving flexibility and muscle health. However, it is crucial to ensure that your body’s skeletal alignment is correct as this can hinder sufficient stretching, cause injury or cause further damage to a current injury when stretching into an area that is misaligned. Why suffer through the pain, when a simple adjustment can make all the difference in your exercise regime?
Chiropractors assist in optimal muscle health and flexibility through bone adjustments to relieve the pressure on joints and improve blood circulation to muscles. This allows the body to gain mobility without pain by first addressing the misalignments on a skeletal level to gain the full benefits of stretching and movement.
Move…. Move…Move!
As we have established it is important to keep the body moving, mobile and happy. Motion is lotion! Some ways you can assist your body in maintaining healthy joints and lengthened, flexible muscles are by participating in stretching exercises such as yoga and Pilates. Yoga and Pilates exercises educate the body by combining movement with specific breathing techniques to have oxygen move sufficiently throughout the body, specifically targeting muscles that would generally be overlooked in modern day cardio and strength training programs.
It is important to work on muscles that are often overlooked as these muscles support other structures of the body as well. Once they are neglected they end up affecting larger muscle groups which in turn creates poor mobility performance, increases your chance of sustaining injuries and can even prolong rehabilitating injuries.
