Creating a life without physical pain – Part 3/3

STRETCHING FOR PAIN AND INJURY PREVENTION:

Stretching is probably the least utilized tool for muscle growth and injury prevention. In fact, it’s likely one of the most dismissed parts of any exercise program, even for professional athletes.  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 – which means that living and complaining about pain and problems is becoming the norm.  THIS ISN’T HOW WE WERE DESIGNED TO LIVE.  This has a lot to do with our posture when looking at phones and computers, repetitive movements, and a 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, or at MINIMUM 2-3X per week. 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. But it important to understand that most injures most commonly 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. 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 that it takes is for one thing to go wrong and BOOM, you’re injured. 
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 habits into your routine? Are you going to stretch more?  

All of these factors are incredible for the long-term maintenance of good health.  However, sometimes we push things a little too far in the gym, in a sport, or are simply experiencing the effects of not taking good enough care of our body.  That is when sometimes you’ll need a little something to help with the process.  Magnesium, one of active ingredients in DripFit, has been closely linked to helping reduce pain.

Magnesium for Pain Relief: 

https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/complementary-medicine/201009/magnesium-pain-relief

Magnesium in the Central Nervous System:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK507245/

Magnesium as an alternate or adjunct for opioids for migraine and chronic pain:

https://www.cadth.ca/sites/default/files/pdf/htis/2017/RC0873%20Magnesium%20for%20Pain%20Final.pdf

So lather up in your DripFit, straighten up, make time to get bendy, and make this the week that you set new habits for life long success!

Team DripFit