I’ve never liked stretching even though I know it’s super important.
It’s boring, uncomfortable, and easy to avoid. But I know from experience that it’s critical to staying mobile and avoiding injury.
Like my fitness and diet, I wanted to do the right thing but it needed to be super simple and easy. It had to be something that I couldn’t make an excuse to miss.
If it was long, hard, or complicated I know 100% that I would not follow it.
Once I’d opened myself up to this, I started to focus in on the bare minimum I needed to do to stay mobile.
You can spend hours doing yoga, pilates, and stretching. That’s great but I didn’t have time for that.
For me it boiled down to one key thing:
- Keeping my hamstrings flexible.
Because I spend a lot of time sitting down at a desk in an office and running is my main form of exercise, I would find my hamstrings tightening up.
Once they tighten up, the tension would go into my back, up to my shoulders and neck.
I would aggravate this by bending down a to pick stuff up.
So I focused my energy on how I could improve mobility in my hamstrings and back.
The answer ended up being super simple. And I have yoga to thank for it.
The simplest and most important stretch for me is to hang down as if I’m trying to touch by toes.
Standing up, I would reach up into the sky with my hands as far as I can go, and then gently bring my hands and arms down as if I’m trying to touch my toes.
I keep my legs straight but with soft knees (i.e. not locked out). Shoulder width apart.
Then I just hang in that position. I breath slowly and deeply in, and out. I do that ten times and I find myself folding further and further to my toes and the floor (if I haven’t already touched my toes…sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t).
This stretches out my back and hamstrings. The best thing about it is that it requires almost no effort as I am using gravity to create the stretch.
It takes no more than 60 seconds and can be done in any part of my day. I most typically do it in the morning, immediately after I’ve put the kettle on whilst I’m standing in my kitchen.
The other time would be at the end of the day just before I eat my evening meal.
Do I do it every day? Of course not. But I reckon I stretch 3 to 4 days a week. It’s not necessarily the same day I do my exercise. But it might be. To me, it doesn’t matter.
I do it when I feel like it or it’s easy to do. That’s the most important thing to me.
What I’m aiming to do is create long term mobility. Rather than to be a bit more flexible on any one day.
Of course there are loads of other stretches I could do…
But I’m all about doing the minimum I need to stay mobile. And this is the one for me.
For completeness, I sometimes throw in a quad (thigh) stretch. This is my balancer to the hamstring stretch.
I do the standard quad stretch I’ve seen people do since I was a little kid. I balance on one leg and hold my ankle or foot behind me (as if I want my heal to touch my bum).
I probably hold it for 30 seconds each leg. Not pulling hard. Just nice and relaxed.
If I do these stretches, my back and hamstrings stay loose and it stops me from stiffening up.
If I neglect this, over time I tighten and I put myself at risk of pulling a muscle. I’ve done my back a couple of times by not looking after my mobility. It can take weeks for me to recover properly.
One other thing that I’ve learned…and you will have heard it all before.
Always bending my legs when lifting anything, no matter how light or heavy.
This learning came from watching toddlers. They almost never bend down using their back, whether picking something up, or looking at something on the ground.
They nearly always bend their legs and squat to pick something up or inspect it more closely.
My thought was that young kids are naturally biomechanically efficient. And it made me realise that as an adult I was nearly always bending my back unless I was picking up something heavy.
This was putting much more stress through my back and muscles than I’d realised.
So now I always aim to bend my legs for anything that would normally require me to lean down. So I’m squatting rather than bending my back.
Now this did feel a little odd initially,
But since I stopped bending my back, and started bending my legs as a routine, it has massively improved my mobility and actually feels way more natural as a movement.
Protecting and developing my mobility has been a small but key part to my ongoing ability to exercise and stay in shape. And I have no doubt it will become even more important as I get older.
