Photo by Engin Akyurt from Pexels
Most of us in the modern world spend too much time sitting around - at work, in the car, watching a movie or your favorite show. And while certain positions might be comfortable for a time, eventually you ache from it, feel creaky and stiff when you stand up. This only gets worse with age. Or when youâre locked inside during a pandemic.
I like to call these creaky bits âsqueaky wheelsâ. Your body is complaining, and as the saying goes, you need to grease those wheels to stop the complaints. What follows is a series of exercises to help undo the damages from long periods in weird, static postures.
When, How Many, How Long?
All of the exercises below follow the same pattern: do them when you have a few free moments, repeat around 10 times or as many times as you need to grease your squeaky wheels, and do each one deliberately and under control.
The last point deserves a small bit of discussion. Iâm sure weâve all seem people doing something like a pushup with a floppy torso, peeling their stomach off the floor and then sticking their butt way in the air like their body was more noodle than bone. Thatâs how you perform something without control. A strict pushup looks like this, not like this.
Strive to do things with strict control. Donât rush through it - take as long as you need. If you donât, youâre losing most of the benefits and would be better off just doing nothing.
Training Wheels
Novices to exercise might have difficulty performing some of the more complex movements in the following sections, so start with these:
I think my favorite exercise for greasing up the lower body is the bathak, or âhindu squatâ. Normally when strength training, you always squat flat footed, but in this case, the squat is done on the ball of the foot. This movement benefits the hips, knees, and ankles, and can even raise your heart rate a little if you do enough of them.
The upper back and shoulders suffer a lot due to being hunched over devices. To loosen them up, weâll use this kneeling rotation exercise. Keep the abs tense to restrict most of the movement to the upper part of your spine. Breath out when the ribcage is most compressed (the bottom of the movement) and in when you expand it.
Finally, in homage to the first bullet, weâll add in a dand, or âhindu pushupâ, but done from the knees (see the first exercise in that video). This is a good preliminary exercise that will open up the shoulders and upper body a lot in preparation for taking off the Training Wheels.
Two Wheels
If youâre beyond the Training Wheels stage, or it isnât doing enough for you, itâs time to pull those wheels off:
Start off with a couple of Training Wheel hindu squats before moving into bootstrap squats. The key here is to really focus on the end positions - trying to stretch the hamstrings as much as you can when the hips are high, and trying to get a good, wide, and upright squat posture at the bottom.
Next weâre going to move into a spiderman lunge with reach, optionally with an added overhead reach. Like the previous twist, keep your abs tense and breath with the expansion and compression of your ribs. Alternate from side to side so that if youâre aiming to do 10 reps, youâll end up doing 5 on the left and 5 on the right.
Weâre gonna go back to that hindu pushup for our last movement, but will be off of the knees. Here is another video showing both the Training Wheels and the full hindu pushup you should be doing here. As with everything else, start with a few from the knees as needed.
Unicycle
For folks that generally feel good with the Two Wheel phase and want to take their movement to new heights, itâs time to add some flourish to the thing:
For the lower body portion here, weâre gonna use an overhead squat with a stick, a pipe, or even a barbell or weight plate if youâre sufficiently strong. This isnât about strength, though. You need focus on positioning and posture at all times and really slow the movement down. If you need to, perform a few bootstrap squats from the Two Wheel section to open the hips before you start.
Taking the spiderman lunge a step further, we want to include a transition to a yoga crab pose. This movement is complex, but the coordination required is part of the challenge here. Itâs ok to break the movement down at first, doing a few reps of the spiderman lunge before adding in only a few transitions to the crab. Remember to work slow, and stop if you start to feel fatigue. These movements should be refreshing, not exhausting.
Weâll continue to work with the hindu pushup to divebomber pushups here. These are simply hindu pushups that reverse the motion once complete. There is a tendency to not take these seriously or slowly enough at first, resulting in some weird torquing of the shoulder joint - if youâre ending up with shoulder pain, itâs probably this. Slow it down and go easy.
Bringing it Together
Iâve tried to present a series of three progressive exercises to help loosen up a body spent sitting all day - a squat, a twist, and a pushup. Ideally, youâre only move on to the next stage when youâre confident in all three of the movements for your level, but you can progress individual exercises or hold certain ones back if you desire.
Do one, two, or all three of these exercises several times throughout the day - maybe when you get up for a coffee break, or go get lunch. Do them when you wake up and before you go to bed. The goal here isnât to fatigue you or to burn fat or any such thing - the goal here is to move with regularity to help improve they way you move in everyday life.
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