A few years ago, I had the honor of delivering a 12 week wellness seminar series to a hip company called ZEFR located on one of the most iconic streets in the USA, Abbott Kinney in Venice Beach, California.
Our first month kicked off with movement education. I was not there to provide ergonomic chairs or even stand up desks, my intention was to spread awareness, inspire practice, and make people’s bodies and minds stronger to do ANYTHING.
We all have lives outside of work. No matter how much you love your work you probably love adventures, playing with your kids, getting an adrenaline rush from climbing a mountain, surfing waves, or snowboarding on a powder day just as much, if not more.
You see, no matter if you have the best ergonomic equipment you can’t override the fact that body is designed for movement; not to be fixed in one position for an extended period of time, especially under stress and disconnected from bodily sensation. The last thing you want is to not be able go on an awesome adventure and do things you love to do because of that old overuse injury you got from working at the computer.
Our lifestyles and our technology has grown leaps and bounds in the past 100 years, but our physiology has not changed much in the last 200,000 years.
Just as you cannot out exercise a bad diet, you can’t out sit lack of neurological drive to parts of the body. You need movement…not only movement, not just stretching, but ACTIVATION.
You need neurological drive- connection from brain to body in order to have control over that part of your body. If you stop talking to a part of your body via the language of force (activation) due to lack of use you lose it. When that area is not doing its job other parts of the body have to pick up the slack and it’s a domino effect of aches and pains.
It is much easier to maintain ranges of motion than restore them.
I often hear that people are stretching, but still in pain and not getting anywhere with creating lasting changes in their range of motion or they get injured and re-injure the same part of their body over and over again. More often than not muscles such as tight hips and tight hamstrings aren’t tight because they are too strong, but because they are too weak.
When you learn how to fire dormant muscles versus just cranking on them in stretches you enhance neurological drive and you will find flexibility comes along with strength meaning you can move dynamically.
Dynamic movement = a dynamic life.
Change your focus from aiming to get flexible to becoming mobile. Mobility is the balance between strength and flexibility. Joint health improves, tissues become more resilient and resistance to injury, and you feel better to do the things you love to do.
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