The first of the month of the year is underway. One of the most popular fitness trends every new year is weight loss. Refining dietary habits and ensuring to fill the activity rings on your preferred wearable fitness tracking technology are great tactics to help lose weight. However, with all of these numbers and devices that we have to keep track of, sometimes we forget about how our body feels. Newly motivated individuals diligently achieve 10,000 steps per day and make it to the gym to burn extra calories. Before you know it, your body is sore and pain-like symptoms can demotivate us just as fast as we hopped on the fitness band wagon. Grinding through pain and soreness from previous injuries or from a current exercise routine is never fun. Living with pain can make our days less productive and make us grumpy. Therefore, along with all the exercise, calories to burn, and steps we are motivated to achieve this new year, about it would benefit us by focusing decreasing pain as a key point of focus this year. Prevention of pain and decreasing the likelihood of future injuries is a commonly forgotten critical success factor that can yield another year of success.
Posture is commonly the last thing we think about. Our posture is affected by long hours at our desk, standing too long, sitting in the car as we commute, and the almighty cell phone that we tilt our heads down to stair at a million times a day. These commonly forgotten positions contribute to pain in the neck, shoulder blades, low back, hips, knees, and ankles. These detrimental effects of poor posture can lead to pinched nerves in the neck and shoulder, sciatica in the hips, and arthritic bone-on-bone contact throughout the body.
An easy solution to counteract the effects of sub optimal posture is to frequently remind yourself to sit and stand upright. Try to view yourself from a 3rd person standpoint and picture your body from a side profile. Visualize your ears on the side of your head, the side of your arm, and the sides of your legs. Now imagine an imaginary line traced perfectly through the center of this side profile image of your body. This line should bisect the middle of your head, past the ear, through the middle of the arm pit, along the rib care, to the hips, and continue through the center of the thigh to the heel bone in your foot. This is great practice to organize your body in alignment to have sufficient posture. Maintaining proper stacking of the body will reinforce the bones of the body to be in alignment to protect against the painful symptoms caused by poor posture.
As we work hard in our professions and our family lives, age gradually progresses. Along with father time moving forward, our bones, muscles, and joints start to deteriorate. However, along with good posture, these symptoms of deterioration over time can be significantly slowed down so we can enjoy our lives to the fullest. To decrease the compounding effects age and poor posture have on the body, adhering to a form of strength and conditioning regularly each week will fend off future pain. Committing to group fitness classes, Yoga, Pilates, or private personal training sessions in Napa offer conditioning for the body to reinforce the muscles, bones, and ligaments to hold up strong for years to come. During these exercise sessions, it is critically important to exercise larger muscle groups surrounding the shoulder joint, shoulder blades, core and hips. Ensuring to exercise the larger muscles will reinforce the bones from grinding on each other and veer us away from pain caused by muscle weakness.
Take pain reduction and injury prevention seriously this new year. With pain, we won’t be able to get our 10,000 steps in or burn 2,000 calories every day. We all have a lot to look forward to. So why not take care of our body so we embrace these experiences to the fullest? Remember to focus your efforts on pain reduction and injury prevention to have a happy and productive 2020.
Sean McCawley, the founder and owner of Napa Tenacious Fitness in Napa, CA, welcomes questions and comments. Reach him at 707-287-2727, napatenacious@gmail.com or visit the website napatenaciousfitness.com.
