Why Stretching IS So Important

Most people understand that to live a healthy life, you need to eat accordingly, and train with enough intensity to match your goals, whether that is to gain weight or lose weight. What a lot of people seem to miss though, is the importance of stretching properly. The first thing that jumps out to me when people don’t stretch enough is the amount of pain they live through on a daily life.

Tight chest muscles will pull your shoulders forwards and put pressure on your neck, which will lead to tensions headaches. These don’t necessarily even occur from training these muscles too much – the most common cause of them that I see is people sitting in front of a computer, or book, for work all day.

Tight hip flexors and hamstrings will pull your hips out of position (in a number of ways!), leading to lower back pain, which is one of the most common ailments around the world (although, admittedly, not all back pain is caused by muscle imbalances, and can be the result of injury, or simply carrying too much weight around the mid-section). Again, this isn’t always the result of overtraining these particular muscles; sitting down will cause both muscle groups to shorten up, and as a result get tighter.

Both of these things, when related to the tightness of the respective muscles, can be fixed relatively fast, as long as the appropriate stretches are done regularly. The two best stretches for getting the shoulder sitting back in a more neutral position are the Pec Major and Pec Minor Stretches (See video – https://youtu.be/h9CrO1VRzoY ; Keep this open while reading the blog!)

For the hips, an easy way to reduce the amount of tightness is the runners stretch (See Video again!) This allows you to stretch the hip flexors out without stressing the rest of the body. For the hamstrings, the classic hamstring stretch always works well, along with a few slight variations. The best position to start off with this one is with a slight bend in the knee of the leg you are stretching. This will reduce the amount of nerve pain that you will feel behind the knee, and allow you to get a better stretch (1 more time to the video!)

These are just 2 areas of the body that can get tight, and not even from exercise; almost every muscle in your body will eventually get tighter and tighter just through daily activities, which is why it is important to always be stretching to maintain a balance in the muscles and joints of your body! If you have trouble stretching properly, a great way to help is having a Personal Trainer do the stretching for you! To book in a session now, contact us at http://newstartpt.com.au/contact-us/