Tag Archives: stretch

Warming Up

Ensuring your body is properly warmed up is very essential to your activities.

Very often this involves stretching, but can also include shaking of limbs or a nice walk to get the blood flowing.

So, the idea is that by warming up, the muscles get used a little bit, get stretched a little bit, and the blood gets properly circulating into the muscles to ensure they can handle the activities.

Let’s try something.

When you wake up in the morning, try to reach down and touch your toes. Now, after half a day of doing your regular activities, try to touch your toes again.

Notice how after having some warm up time during the day, your muscles are now much more flexible and ready to bend in various directions?

This is because your muscles have had some sort of a warm up time to let them loosen up from the activities.

Now, think of going from rather mild exercise of your day to day activities, into a fun activity like soccer. Your muscles still aren’t as limber as they should be, so you will want to warm them up even further.

This is why many coaches will make their team run circles around the field before a soccer match, or around the ice rink to properly get the limbs warmed up, get the blood flowing, and the heart pumping!

If you do this, you will be helping your body reduce muscle pulls, and ensuring the muscles repair as quickly as possible after strenuous activities.

NOTE: I would even suggest a proper warm up for any task that you do all day, especially manual labor jobs, but even including office desk jobs where you’re sitting still all day.

Stretching

1 Reply

Stretching is one of the most important things a person can do for their well being. It ensures that your muscles get the proper oxygen to handle the strenuous activities of daily activities or a exercise routine, as well as loosens them up so when you are making your fast turn arounds during a game of basketball, you wont pull a muscle.

Below you will find a few charts of some great stretches that will help you limber up. For me, especially when I’m doing the short spurts, I focus particularly on the areas that I’ll be exercising. After that, I also like to focus on the surrounding areas, because those muscles can also get effected by the exercise.

Remember, more stretches the better. It even is good just during the day, even if you’re not exercising and just sitting still, to do some stretches because it will get the blood flowing and energize you.

A few tips about proper stretching tactics.

Whatever you do, don’t bounce. Pull the limb, and hold it for 10 seconds (or longer) and then let go.
After your exercizing, be careful to not pull the muscle to hard, for it’s now loose and you can easily over extend it and really hurt yourself. Lighter stretches at this time.
More stretching the better. Before, after, during. Anytime.
Keep in mind that most activities, even if you’re only lifting weights for your bicepts, you’re also working your back muscles, tricepts, butt, and stomach. Stretch them all!

Good luck and have fun!

Short Spurts

1 Reply

There are many schools of thought about how to exercise. Depending on your lifestyle, various fun activities will fit in, others won’t feel as comfortable, but it’s up to you to decide which ones work best for you.

I’ve been trying to focus on the short, relatively frequent exercises. This works best if I’m trying to focus, and in one place for a long time, like on my computer for the evening.

NOTE: This does not mean immediately get up from 5hrs of sitting idle to do 75 pushups in a row and go back for another 5hrs of idle sitting. No. Don’t do that. We’ve all heard of the person who goes out to shovel their driveway and has a heart attack or breaks their back because of the immediate strain. No, this isn’t good.

What this means, is that every 30 min to 1.5hrs or so, the motivated one gets up, loosens limbs with a nice stretch, grabs some rubber bands for a routine, or sits on the Swiss ball (exercise ball) and does some sit-ups. Even lift the bar or dumbbells for a rep or two.

After you finish this, you will feel your heart rate up, maybe even break a little sweat. This is good. This is what you want. You do want this feeling more than less, but any is better than none.

Keep in mind it is important when you’re doing this type of workout, your body is not completely warmed up, so one shouldn’t attempt to push their body to the max it can do, straining every muscle in the body.

Since your body isn’t totally warm, the motivated one will quickly find that this causes uncomfortable strain on muscles, or even pull muscles.

Another way to avoid this is to add a little more time to the beginning of the routine to do a longer warm up, really getting the muscles loose.

Ideally, however, as well as doing these short spurts, the fit person should look to get their blood pumping for at least 20 min at a time, at least once a day. This really isn’t long: a walk around to the park, 2 routines in the gym or 1 routine of yoga will all give you 20 min of exercise to keep you strong. Now go get em!