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.
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.
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.