Tight Lats - The connection between your arms, shoulders and spine.
The ‘lats’ are one of the largest muscles in your back and helps protect and stabilize the spine while giving your back and shoulder strength.
Because they attached to the shoulder, the shoulder blades, the arm, the ribs and the spine, tight lats can affect our posture, our back and our shoulders causing back pain, neck pain and shoulder pain.
The Benefits of Green Exercise
When compared to exercising indoors, exercising in nature has been found to generate feelings of positive engagement, greater feelings of revitalisation, reduced tension, decreased anger and depression and increased energy.
One of the more amazing findings was that for improvements in self-esteem and mood, the greatest improvement occurred in the first 5 minutes…yes FIVE MINUTES! This suggests that the effects are almost immediate.
So ditch the gym or yoga studio and try an outdoor class
Combine the benefits of exercise or yoga with being outdoors. Join a group and socialise, too
Neck and shoulder pain from staring at your phone? It could be tight traps.
Hours of looking down at laptops, tablets and smartphones shortens and weakens our traps and can cause neck-aches, shoulder-aches and headaches. Strengthening our traps using shoulder and neck mobility exercises, releasing tension using trigger balls and foam rollers and lengthening them using yoga can help relieve the stress and tension in our neck and shoulders.
The Autonomic Nervous System: The body's accelerator and brake
The Sympathetic Nervous System is our accelerator and was originally responsible for reacting to threats such as lions. These threats were often temporary and the reaction to fight or flight was only needed for short amounts of time. However, the nervous system treats today’s modern threats of stress the same way leaving us with our accelerator left jammed on. This can cause many health issues such as sleep problems, memory issues, anxiety and depression. Exercise, yoga and meditation have all been found to reduce stress by releasing the accelerator and applying the brakes.
Mobility vs Flexibility. What’s the Difference?
A lot of people use the terms ‘flexibility’ and ‘mobility’ interchangeably.
However, they are not exactly the same thing.
You can actually be very flexible but not very mobile at all.