How to Maintain Your Body
A one-stop guide for assessing aches, pains, and postural issues, maintaining the parts of your body that need it, and improving general movement skill and performance.
The hardships of life and age break us all eventually, grinding us down to nubs. Some people accept it, complaining to their spouses, children, or coworkers about how bad they have it. But others, like you and I, dear reader, fight against it.
This article should give you a rough overview of how to maintain your body, in ways that prevent the aches and pains and inflexibilities of life from taking over. I’m gonna walk you through the generalities of it and point you to places where you can get actual published routines to help you out. In the end, my hope is that you will have a personalized maintenance plan of activities you can do on most days to keep your body working in top shape. A physical tune-up, if you will.
Talk to Your Doctor First
Ok, before we go any further, you should always discuss these things with your doctor. Make sure you’re cleared to exercise, and that any pains or problems you have are not related to some diagnosable issue that needs treatment from a medical professional. The internet is not your doctor and cannot examine you personally, so take precautions.
What Needs a Tune-Up?
The most important question that everyone should be asking is “What are the parts of the body that need to be maintained?” The answer is different from person to person. In order to figure out what you need, we’ll need to go through some assessments. Each section below has a short list of questions that should help you determine if you could benefit from the corrections that follow.
Joints
Joints don’t have nutrient flow like soft tissues do. There’s nothing that pumps in and out to lubricate and help heal them. You have to do that yourself, through motion. Moving your joints spreads synovial fluid, like butter over bread, and helps to keep your body moving well.
Assessment: Do you have joints that are achy and stiff in the morning or after long periods of sitting? Anything that cracks and pops but feels better after some movement?
Correction: Seven years ago I wrote a program called Molding Mobility for /r/Fitness, which quickly goes over a series of exercises that move your joints through as much range of motion as they should be able to handle. Nowadays, I find it to be too wordy — joint mobility work isn’t actually that complex. I’ll summarize the whole thing here:
For each joint, slowly and deliberately move through as much range of motion as you have. Work in circles, twists, bends, side-to-side motions, or anything else you can think of. Find the stiff, achy motions and play with them.
Give each motion a count of ten, then move on to the next joint. Spend more time on the parts that ache or bother you the most.
Start at the neck, then move to fingers, wrists, elbows, and shoulders before working the spine, then the hips, knees, ankles, and finally toes. Move from head to toe.
Move fluidly and don’t rush, push, or grind through it. The goal not to grunt through the whole process quickly, but to oil each hinge well and push the limits of comfortable movement.
Nearly everyone can benefit from following this process in the morning before you start your day. Spend 5–10 minutes when you get out of bed, or even in the shower. It helps to prepare yourself for the day and has an added benefit of getting your blood flowing just a bit.
Shoulders & Upper Back
The human body is plastic — it deforms based on our actions, and what we do most. And the modern human spends a lot of time hunched forward, with hands in front of them — at a desk, at meals, with a laptop or mobile device, reading a book, crocheting, and much much more.
So your body adapts. It pulls the shoulders and head forward, resulting in what’s knows as a kyphosis or a “kyphotic posture”, but what was called a “dowager’s hump” in days of yore.
Assessment: Are your shoulders rounded forward, giving you a slight hunch-backed look? Do your upper back and neck area feel tight a lot?
Correction: This type of issue is an imbalance between the chest and upper back musculature — the chest is overactive and strong compared to the inhibited, weaker upper back. To correct this, we work to strengthen those inhibited muscles and to stretch/relax the overactive muscles:
Stretch the chest and front of the shoulder with the use of a wall or door frame.
Strengthen the upper back with banded pulling exercises like pull-aparts or face pulls.
Avoid too much strength work for the chest — working an overactive muscle is not what you want at this stage. Make sure your strength training includes pulling exercises that focus on the upper back — like inverted rows, pullups, or chest rows.
Start by spending 3–5 days a week on these exercises, done after your joint mobility practice. Increase or decrease the days as begin to see and feel results. Start with the stretches — 2 or 3 holds at 10–20 seconds each should be sufficient. Then perform pull-aparts and/or face pulls, aiming for 50-100 reps in as many sets as it takes. Repeat if you want, but don’t work beyond light fatigue.
Hips & Lower Back
Much like the upper back and shoulders, the hips and lower back will also adapt to make seated life easier — and we as a species spend a lot of time sitting in chairs.
Assessment: Do you spend a lot of your time sitting? Does the waist of your pants tilt toward the ground when viewed from the side? Do you have back lower back pain when you stand for too long?
Correction: This type of adaptation is called “anterior pelvic tilt” or “lordosis.” The hip flexor muscles of the thighs are overactive and tight, while the glutes and abdominals are inhibited and weak. Again, we need to work to strengthen the inhibited muscles and stretch/relax the overactive ones.
Stretch the hip flexors at the front of the thigh either when kneeling or standing. Some people may also benefit from stretching the inner thighs and hip rotators.
Strengthen the glutes with glute bridges and work to improve core stability with exercises that don’t involve bending at the waist — planks and hollow holds are the ticket here.
Avoid any abdominal work that moves the thighs closer to the stomach for now — it’s easy to involve the hip flexors in those movements and we don’t want to keep working overactive muscles. Make sure your strength training includes lots of “hip hinge” work that improves the ability to extend the hips, like deadlifts, power cleans, hip thrusts, or kettlebell swings.
Just like correcting the shoulders, start by spending 3–5 days a week doing these exercises, after joint mobility work. Increase or decrease the days based on results. Begin with stretches — the same 2 or 3 holds at 10–20 seconds each. Then perform 10–20 reps of any glute bridge variation you’re feeling that day. Finally, hold either a plank or hollow position for 20–60 seconds. Repeat if you want, but don’t work beyond slight fatigue.
Gait
The human body is normally meant to walk around, but due to a lot of seated work, walking on nice flat surfaces, little running, and other factors, simply moving around can become difficult for some of us.
Assessment: Do your hips, knees, or ankles bother you when walking too long or while running? Do your feet point outward or inward a bit more than other people? Do you sway or lose balance when walking?
Correction: There are a lot of factors that are part of natural human locomotion, and the previous three corrections all have a direct impact on gait. Yet still pain during locomotion or balance issues may be present.
The leg, and most of the human body, is a connected chain — the arch of the foot, the ankles, knees, and hips are all connected, and problems with any one of them can appear to be problems elsewhere. Often times, inflexibility or lack of strength in the ankles can manifest knee, hip, or lower back pain; while issues with hip or lower back strength can produce balance issues or irregular gait. We’ll address both of these issues here:
Ankle strength and flexibility can be addressed with a number of foot drills that are often used in track programs. Take about 30–40 steps using each foot orientation.
To improve hip strength related to balance, the right exercise here is a unweighted single leg deadlift with a focus on maintaining level hips and not twisting or needing to shift through the motion. Keep it slow and steady, aiming for 10 solid reps on each side.
Do these drills after any other corrections. Aim to do 30–40 steps with each orientation of the foot drills, and 5–10 reps for each side of the single leg deadlift.
Beyond these drills, you should be getting a solid 10–20 minutes of walking in every day, focusing on a steady stride, with feet pointed roughly forward, and no swaying of the hips.
Performance and Movement Quality
The previous items largely covered “problems” you might have. Things that ache, or are abnormal. But there’s more we can do if we want to take that step from existing pain free over to actually physically thriving.
The following three areas of assessment are physical skills that every healthy person should be able to do. If you cannot do any of them, it says a lot about your physical health and longevity.
With each of these assessments, the skill is the test — performing the test and trying to get to an ideal is how you improve at it. As such, the true “correction” here will be to repeat the test slowly, fluidly, and deliberately. You don’t need to work to exhaustion — this is practice, not a workout.
Getting Up
The ability to get up when you’re on the floor is one of the best predictors of physical health. While the study uses a very specific test, they found this skill closely correlated to all-cause mortality. And with falls being a leading cause of injury and death among the elderly, it is one of the biggest skills that can improve your longevity.
Assessment: Can you easily lay down on the floor and stand back up? Can you do it 10 times in a row without gasping for air? Can you do it smoothly when lying on your stomach or your back?
Assuming you can do this painlessly, what limits you will be one of three things — either you’re not flexible enough to move the best way possible, or you’re not strong enough enough to do it smoothly, or you don’t have the cardiovascular health to do it without panting. Regardless of what the limiter is, you will need to practice getting up off the floor to improve.
Dan John (see also) has an excellent training progression to work this skill that he calls it the “Get Back Up” exercise. The long and short of it is that you get down on the floor in a different position, then stand back up. Crazy, right? But let’s put a little focus on it
Going Further: Dan John’s book Can You Go? is an excellent resource for this level of assessment. It is targeted more towards coaches and trainers, but is an easy read for most people.
Squatting
Squatting is one of the most important movement patterns that modern people lose due to sitting in chairs most of their life. Babies and those outside of modern convenience squat flawlessly as a resting posture.
Assessment: With your bare feet flat on the ground, pointing roughly forward, can you squat down so that the top of your hips are below the top of your knee? That’s only half of it! Can you repeat the same thing with your arms overhead? Make sure your arms and shins are roughly parallel with each other and your knees don’t cave in.
This movement pattern addresses mobility restrictions in the ankles, hips, abdominals, thoracic spine, and shoulders and because of this it is one of the more important physical assessments used by the National Academy of Sports Medicine.
It’s important that you pay attention to aches and pains here. Some people have knee problems or lower back problems that are exacerbated by squatting. Unfortunately, there are injuries that can prevent us from ever fully reclaiming this movement pattern. Focus on what you can do without pain.
Going Further: Daniel MacLean has a book called Body Mechanic which focuses strictly on the overhead squat for weightlifting. Even if you’re not a weightlifter, the overhead squat is one of the most useful strength training exercises imaginable.
Crawling
Crawling is the first way we learn how to move around. We start with rolling, and then move to crawling. But the longer we walk, the worse we get with the skill of crawling. In a sense, crawling is the first strength and coordination training we ever undertake, building up the physical fitness we need to begin walking, jumping, and running.
Assessment: With your hands and feet on the ground, and hips at about shoulder level, can you bear crawl for twenty-five steps?
Crawling requires sufficient core and shoulder stability to prevent you from twisting and falling over, and it requires coordination between the upper and lower limbs. Additionally, for a lot of us, it will also require some flexibility we’ve lost, particularly in the wrists, ankles, and hips.
Going Further: Tim Andersen has a whole series of books focused on his Original Strength concept — that is, that crawling and rolling are fundamental movement patterns that affect our physical performance. He even has a book targeted directly to advancing physical performance.
Additional References and Follow Ups
This is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s my personal advice I think works for most people. But there are plenty of ways to go about learning these things on your own.
The concept of joint mobility I originally learned from Pavel Tsatsouline in his book Super Joints, and it’s worth reading if it’s an avenue you wish to go down. There’s much more in the book than I’ve covered here.
Stretching and flexibility is near and dear to my heart, and anyone else interested could benefit from reading Stretching Scientifically by Thomas Kurz for the basic principles, and Sport Stretch by Michael J. Alter for a thorough dictionary of stretches and what sports they’d most apply to.
Beyond these recommendations, there are three published programs out there that are highly regarded, and meet all the criteria I have for programs that would slot into the concept of body maintenance. If you want to go further and are looking for more regimented programs, you can’t go wrong with these:
The Simplistic Mobility Method by Tom Morrison
Elements by GMB
5 Minute Flow by Max Shank
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