By stretching just a little bit every day, you can develop a routine that will help keep your entire body loose and limber. But in addition to improving your flexibility, you’ll actually be improving your life by promoting better health and wellness.
How exactly can having a flexible body actually improve other areas of your health? Continue reading to learn more.
Improve Your Strength and Balance
When your body is flexible, you’re able to balance better and you’re also able to increase your strength, especially if you’re already an active individual. Many martial artists, for example, take the time to stretch their bodies in order to improve range of motion and put more power behind their self-defense moves.
Improve Your Posture
Another way that flexibility can help you in your everyday life is by allowing you to naturally enjoy better posture, whether you’re sitting or standing. Poor posture can lead to stiff muscles and aches, and it’s also unattractive. By standing up tall and straight, you’ll feel and look more confident. Having a flexible spine and abdominals is one of the best ways to improve your posture, so stretch for a few minutes each day if this is an area of your life that you’d like to improve.
Prevent Injuries
Having more flexibility throughout your body can also help prevent injuries. This is important for everyone, including athletes and active individuals, because even mundane everyday movements can result in injuries.
Flexibility can help prevent disc and muscle strains that can happen when you turn over in your bed or even when you get out of bed. Everyday tasks at work that have you reaching and lifting can also injure your shoulders, but you can prevent these problems if your joints are more flexible. And you can even prevent backaches that would otherwise occur as a result of standing up after sitting for a long period of time, going down or up a flight of stairs, or bending over and lifting something off the floor.
Stretch the Right Way
Make sure that your body is properly aligned whenever you stretch, and never overstretch or push yourself beyond your limits, as this can also result in injuries. If you are uncertain of what stretches you should do, you can ask a personal trainer, purchase a home stretching DVD, take a yoga class, or speak with a doctor.
Maintaining Flexibility
The key to maintaining flexibility is doing stretching exercises regularly. If you fail to do so, your body will stiffen up right away again, even if you are naturally quite flexible to begin with. Take about 10 minutes out of every day to perform your favourite stretches. These may include stretches that are focused on lengthening your back, opening up the chest and shoulders, or stretching out the thighs and hips.
You can also visit a spa regularly and receive treatments and massages that will help keep your muscles loose and limber. Spas that use the highest quality equipment, such as therapy couches by therapyessentials.co.uk, are a great option.