Living Injury and Pain Free

Living Without Pain

Whether you are performing a squat, taking a sideways leap, or throwing a punch, every activity generates a huge amount of force from the hips, and a strong core will allow you to seamlessly move from one movement to another, with great power.Each core session will include the Pelvic Hip Bridge Hold and Single Leg Glute Thrusts because most people have very poor low back musculature, tight hip flexors and gluteal musculature from sitting all day which can lead to low back injuries and much more. Not to mention the tight hip flexors that come with it.This routine will be aiming to rebuild you’re posterior back, hip muscles while you recover and postural correction.

Postural Correction is key in keeping yourself injury free.One of the MANY side effects of poor posture is nerve constriction. As the spine changes in shape, the resulting movements or misplaced vertebra alignment which will potentially put pressure on spinal nerves.This can be the cause of much back and neck pain, so correcting your rounded shoulder posture is also key.Next, poor posture can cause your lower back to overwork throughout the day. As you slouch, the back extensor and flexor muscles MUST work harder to keep your spine stable and safe. Adding unnecessary work on these muscles throughout the day will cause them to tighten and become tired. I can go on and on, but some of the other issues are digestive issues (restriction of the intestines by squeezing over on them), tension headaches, poor breathing.All of this causes too much unnecessary stress on the body, and as we know… stress kills.

STRETCHING FOR PAIN AND INJURY PREVENTION:

Stretching is the least utilized tool for growth and injury prevention. In fact, it’s likely one of the most dismissed parts of any exercise program, even for professional athletes. You probably don’t stretch every day, do you?The vast majority of today’s population has a laundry list of postural imbalances that are holding them back from living pain-free, normal lives.This has a lot to do with our posture when looking at phones and computers, repetitive movements, and a huge lack of exercise.Even if you aren’t an athlete, or even a part time gym goer for that matter, EVERYONE needs to be stretching daily. Many things effect a person’s flexibility such as gender, genetics, tissue elasticity, structural make up of your joints, the surrounding muscle groups, injuries, age, movement patters, and many more variables.

Understand that most injures happen in 4 stages:

1. The person has some sort of muscle imbalance. A muscle imbalance can begin to be triggered by many different triggers, such as poor posture, poor technique while training (Often not training in a full range of motion), poor core strength, lack of neural ability to communicate and synchronize muscles and repetitive movement patterns (often at work or in a sport) just to name a few.Personally, I have a large imbalance in my back from my left Latimus dorsi to the right, due to being a left handed shot when I played hockey.It overly developed my left lat, and left anterior deltoid! Now I must work to correct it.Once someone has an imbalance, it then leads to poor posture:
2. A muscle imbalance will then lead to poor posture.In the last section I used the example of a tight trapezius muscle in the back leading to one shoulder being lifted slightly higher, which would likely be noticeably seen pulling the neck to one side when doing pressing movements.This, is poor posture, especially while performing an exercise. This postural imbalance will then lead too;
3. Improper movement pattern.Take for example a person who squats, but you notice that they chronically point their feet out unnaturally when they squat.This is called “out-toeing”, a common improper movement pattern.This has a cost!Now that the feet are pointed outwards, the bones that make up the shin (Tibia and fibula) and the femur too rotate outwards as well.Are you begin to see how this won’t end up well?Remember, the body works as a system, a chain of reactions.Eventually, this can lead to knee pain and unnecessary strain on the low back, leading to altered joint mechanics, which is followed by our body changing its muscle recruitment patterns. Now all thatit takes is for one thing to go wrong and BOOM;
4. You become injured. Now you have to be checked into hours and hours of expensive physiotherapy and countless other therapies for pain relief. And all of this started from #1: a muscle imbalance.

Are you going to implement some daily exercises into your routine?  Are you going to stretch more?  As far as we know, we only live once, and will only ever have one vessel in which to carry ourselves in.  So take good care of it!  Go get yourself checked out by a health professional, and see what you can improve on!

Team RIVALUS Trainer

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