How sitting is making you a tight arse
Our glutes are our biggest muscle group and excessive sitting can make them weak and feel tight. This can cause lower back pain, hip pain and knee pain. Additionally, exercise can make the glutes tight. By strengthening weak glute muscles and rolling tight ones, we can help our hips move better, feel better and restore our ranges of motion.
Feeing tired? Having trouble sleeping? Exercise could be the answer.
In Australia, a study found sleep difficulties, including issues falling asleep, issues staying asleep, lack of sleep, daytime fatigue and irritability, was found in 20-35% of people.
This is a significant public health concern and insufficient sleep can have come severe consequences.
Recent trials have found exercise is associated with improved sleep quality, longer sleep times, more efficient sleep and a reduced time to fall asleep.
So, if you are feeling tired or having trouble sleeping, after checking with your health professional, perhaps try getting your sweat on. It may just help you get the sleep you need and crave.
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.
Foot, ankle, knee or back pain? Perhaps your calves are the culprit
Like many important things in your body, your calves probably aren’t something you think about very often. They just do their thing. That thing is very important…
They stop you falling on your face!
They do this all day and they do it from the bottom of your body which makes their job so much harder.
So it is not wonder that a lot of us develop tight calves.
And because of their position, tight calves can affect weight distribution and pressure on other areas of the body which can also affect the foot, ankle, knee, hips and back.