Want to live your life pain free and without injuries? What should you focus on? It’s not the exercises, it’s the stretching!
Stretching is one of the most beneficial things you can do for your body.
How often do you stretch?
Every day, once a week, once a month, or can you not even remember when that last time you stretched was?
Stretching is part of playing the long game – it’s hard because it isn’t always comfortable and the pay off isn’t immediate. It’s all about being patient and giving it time.
WHY DO I NEED TO STRETCH?
Living without pain seems like a pretty good thing right? Being able to make progress with your fitness for longer is a nice idea isn’t it? Keeping your joints and muscles feeling younger for longer sounds attractive doesn’t it?
We know that everyone’s body is designed to do incredible things – and the Greek philosopher Socrates once said,
“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”
Over the past hundred years, people have become more sedentary and the knock on effect is that more and more people accept that it’s okay to live in chronic pain brought on by not moving around enough.
Regular stretching helps us regain the ranges of motion that each of us are designed to have. Your body has only adapted to do the things that you most commonly ask it to do – which may be sitting on the sofa and not moving your joints through a full range of motion. How many young children and toddlers complain of being stiff – they don’t because they are always moving and haven’t had time to build up a series of bad habits like not stretching their body as they barrel around.
Fantastic demonstrations of mobility such as Cirque du Soleil acrobats don’t just happen by accident – these people train long hours over many years to be able to bend themselves in phenomenal ways.
Stretching can help prevent injury
You’ve got to use it or lose it – surely you’ve heard this before, and it rings particularly true when it comes to your body and what it is capable of.
Regularly spending time stretching helps our bodies keep circulation going to our muscles and joints. Regularly stretching can help you prevent little niggles building up into serious injuries.
We know how rewarding it is to see people come to us in pain and then spend time working with us and Arca Physiotherapy to return to moving around without pain or discomfort.
We are lucky at Second City because we have an established physiotherapy practice inside the gym so no member is ever far from being able to work with a legitimate expert.
Even those members who aren’t in pain regularly increase their rate of progress once they commit to doing a bit more mobility work than they were doing before.
There is so much value in stretching and moving your body, and most of us have no idea just what our bodies are capable of.
Because we really believe in the power of adding mobility work to everyone’s weekly health and fitness prescription we have dedicated mobility classes at Second City!
Book a FREE No Sweat Intro with us to find out how you start to get your body moving.