Back injuries are one of the most common injuries that the general population experience. These injuries include anything from lower back injuries, pain in between the shoulder blades, and neck strains. Nagging neck and back pain can be debilitating and cause lack of production in our everyday activities. Back pain can be distracting and disruptive when we are living out our days at our place of work, spending time with friends and family, or performing some of our cherished hobbies we like to perform in our free time.
Why have back pain hold you back form shooting some hoops with your kids, your favorite sewing project or even reading?
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to have a day at work and which we are pain free and feel strong in our back shoulders and neck?
And maybe we should also be able to lend a helping hand to our friends and family when they need to move something around the house or they need some help with another task?
Having sufficient strength and ensuring that your body is strong enough and durable enough to be able to perform these activities are critically important to being able to fulfill these events that we cherish so much in our everyday human interactions with our job, socially, and for ourselves.
Some of a few easy-to-remember techniques that we coach our Personal Training clients here in Napa are to align a few parts of the body to limit the amount of hunching in their posture. Here are a few easy to follow instructions on lining your body up and ensuring that you have proper spinal alignment to reduce the likelihood of injury occurring when standing and sitting:
1. Start by making sure that your armpits are lined up over your hips. Make sure that you are not hunched forward, or your lower back is creating an arch.
2. Pull your shoulder blades back and open up the area between your shoulders and your armpits. Kind of like you’re showing someone your name tag if you had one on.
3. Line your ears up with your armpits by pulling your head back a little bit. You can think of this as making sure that you are making proper eye contact with the person in front of you or visualizing your forehead being parallel with a wall in front of you.
These techniques may not seem like much. However, we find that in today’s society being desk jockeys, sitting in cars all the time, and sitting in meetings, we forget about these very simple principles to ensure that our posture is an alignment. Neglecting to pull our shoulder blades back, stacking our armpits over our hips, and making sure that our ears are lined up with armpits, the body turns into a hunch like position and the muscles of spinal stabilization suffer what we call underuse injuries. One of the leading causes of back injuries today is due to the underuse and atrophy of some very important muscles of spinal stabilization.
So if you can take away anything after reading this article and you have been sitting for over 30 minutes, stand up! Practice these three simple techniques. Performing these three basic structural corrections will make a world of difference throughout your day and for the rest of your life.
When our clients come to us on how to improve their Life Time Fitness, we need to approach it from various angles. If you are curious about how to more effectively focus on your Life Time Fitness goals and how to implement some of these tools listed, please feel free to reach out to Napa Tenacious Fitness at napatenacious@gmail.com or give us a ring at 707-287-2727.
