Loaded mobility is crucial to improving flexibility‼️When I see clients who are in a ton of pain, we start with unloaded mobility. This helps decrease pain and guarding of the muscles. However, if your eventual goal is to improve your mobility, then you need to add some load. This allows the muscles to increase their movement as well as their strength to handle different positions. Simply adding a band is a great place to start with loaded mobility, so give this one a try!
🛑 Let’s cut the nonsense when it comes to exercise! If you are a casual runner training for a short race or just running for fun, IG is a terrible place. You will see incredible gatekeeping from health and fitness professionals. They will tell you not to run unless you spend 20 minutes “activating” your muscles and performing complicated exercises. The vast majority of people do not need these things if they are just running a couple of miles around the neighborhood. If you are a parent (like me) and/or someone who works long hours (guilty as charged) don’t worry about the 25 year old PT telling you to warm up with 10 simple exercises. The bigger problem I see is people not performing any sort of regular activity. The issue is not a lack of a proper warmup, it is people not being active enough. If you only have 30 minutes to run, then spend 5 minutes walking and gradually ramping up your pace. You should notice your breathing increase a bit while warming up, that means you are in a good spot. At the end of the day, it’s really boring for IG physical therapists to post something like this. The complicated mobility exercise that takes 5 minutes to set up is sexier, but it hurts people in the long term. If you want to run, you should start running. If something hurts, reach out and let’s figure it out. Otherwise enjoy the sunshine and get outside ☀️
Try this simple exercise for neck pain‼️ Our muscles in the back of our neck can often get tight from sitting for a long time. This exercise reverses that position to provide a gentle stretch and relaxation for the tight muscles. Try it for a couple of sets of 10 and see if you feel any better!
Don’t make this mistake with neck pain‼️ If your solution to neck pain is constantly stretching your neck then you may actually be making things worse. Often, I see clients with hypermobile necks who keep aggressively stretching to try and find relief. This actually makes things worse! Your neck pain may be coming from your upper back being stiff. If that area does not move well, it can cause your neck to move more to compensate. Stretching the already flexible neck can often exacerbate the pain. The exercise I show in this video is a great one to try if you have neck pain, but you should be evaluated by a good physical therapist to determine the root cause of your pain. Sometimes neck pain comes from your neck and other times it comes from your back. Find a PT who will do a thorough evaluation and give you a personalized, targeted treatment plan to help you feel better!
🗣️🗣️ Fix your lunges. Lunges are great exercises but many people struggle to actually perform them “correctly”. Each exercise will look different for each person, but there are some fundamental goals with lunges including working on mobility of the back hip. Most people struggle with hip extension and continually sliding forward in your lunges exacerbates that problem. Try to drop straight down when you lunge and you will feel some tightness in the front of your back hip. That should be the limiting factor with how deep you lunge. Good strength training exercises can help with mobility and this is a perfect example. There is nothing wrong with sliding your weight and front knee forward when you lunge, but I often see people who exclusively live in that movement pattern. They squat similarly, and their knee ends up taking all of the load. If you work on dropping straight down in conjunction with learning to load your hips and glutes you will improve your strength quickly. It’s also the quickest way to decrease knee pain with lunges in my experience! Share this with someone who is always complaining about knee pain with lunges‼️
We have been seeing some CrossFit athletes at Eclipse Wellness lately and wanted to highlight some basic injury prevention techniques. The two most commonly injured areas in CrossFit are the low back and the shoulder. This blog post highlights some simple assessments we perform for those areas to determine if an athlete has limitations. We believe in educating our clients as well as the general public to help prevent injuries. If you have any questions then please reach out. We want to help the Northern Virginia community learn and grow! Share this with anyone that would benefit from reading! Check it out here - https://www.eclipsewellnessnova.com/post/physical-therapy-for-crossfit-athletes-in-sterling-va
