35 Stretches To Stretch Out From Head To Toe

35 Stretches To Stretch Out From Head To Toe

To keep your body healthy and strong, you need to correct the imbalances caused by sitting all day at a desk and performing repetitive movements.

To correct these imbalances and truly help prevent and alleviate injuries, you can’t just simply go and workout. You can’t just simply lift weight and expect to get stronger.

Because even if you have seemingly perfect form, you may not be activating and using the correct muscles to lift the weight – and this could lead to injury instead of you getting stronger and fitter.

In order to make sure you are using the correct muscles when you lift, you must implement all four training elements – foam rolling, stretching, activation and strength training – in your workout routine.

You can’t simply skip to strength training and expect your body to work correctly and remain injury-free.

Before you start your workout and your strength training routine, you must first start to work on restoring your flexibility and joint mobility by foam rolling tight areas. When you foam roll, you help release knots so that muscles can become loose and ready to work.

By starting your workout program with foam rolling, you can start restoring muscles to their proper length-tension relationships. When muscles are at their proper length tension relationship, they can contract properly allowing us to lift more weight and engage the correct muscles to do the work.

Also, by loosening up knots, you can help improve your joint mobility. When a muscle is tight and shortened, it can change how your joint operates. It can limit your range of motion around a joint, leading to improper movement patterns and compensations

But foam rolling alone won’t restore your flexibility and joint mobility.

Once you’ve foam rolled to start getting the tight, overactive muscles loose, you then need to stretch to help elongate shortened muscles.

Below are 35 Stretches that stretch everything from your feet to your neck and wrists. These moves will help you improve your flexibility and mobility so that you can move better and feel better.

And then once you’ve stretched out using a few of these moves, make sure to get those underactive muscles working with some activation exercises before you move onto your strength training!

(more…)

Dynamic Stretches For Runners

Dynamic Stretches For Runners

Especially since most of us sit all day hunched over a computer screen we need to stretch and open up before we workout. We need to do Dynamic Stretches.

Dynamic Stretches are stretches in which you work through a range of motion. They aren’t stretches that you hold. You are moving and allowing everything to warm up as you improve your joint mobility.

These stretches help open up our posture and return our body to proper alignment after sitting all day, which helps us prevent injury when we workout.

However, all too often, people skip their warm up and go straight into their workout, especially when they are going for a run. They figure they will “warm up as they go.”

But it doesn’t work that way.

Without correcting some of the dysfunction we create from sitting all day and warming up our joints through a proper range of motion, we can’t run as fast and we risk getting injured.

Below are 10 Dynamic Stretches for Runners that will help you prevent injury and get your body ready to run so that you can run faster with better form! (more…)