Stretching and Foam Rolling

Healthy blood circulation is an absolute must for healthy tissues. Strong and steady blow flow allows for constant exchange of nutrients and waste at the cellular level, and also promotes healthy flow of fluid through your lymphatic system, a key component of your immune system.

Where there is shoulder pain due to impingement, frozen shoulder, or subacromial bursitis, an often overlooked root cause is a tight shoulder capsule.

What is your shoulder capsule?

There are many potential causes of hip pain and stiffness, and as anyone who has experienced significant trouble with a hip joint will tell you, inability to walk or even sit cross-legged without pain is a real killer of quality of life.

For over sixteen years now, I've been recommending two basic stretches to the vast majority of my clients. Stretches to help keep the soft tissues in the lower and mid back regions flexible and well supplied with healthy blood flow.

If I could choose just one exercise to do regularly to prevent low back pain, it would be the yoga pose that you see below. This simple pose - often called a form of "Warrior Pose" - combines two actions that I have found to be critical for preventing chronic low back pain. Read more »

In showing how to use a ball and foam roller to massage the inner hip area, I neglected to illustrate static stretches for the inner thigh and groin regions.

As you age, all of your ligaments and tendons become more susceptible to injury. This is just a fact of life. Once you stop growing, you start degenerating; all you can control is the rate at which you degenerate.

One of the most effective ways to slow down the rate at which you experience degeneration is to regularly stretch your muscles and tendons. Stretching these tissues helps prevent scar tissue buildup and promotes healthy exchange of nutrients and waste products via steady blood circulation.

If you embrace the adage about an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure, you'll want to review the following information about your pelvic region, including four simple stretches that, if performed daily, may spare you many of the strains, sprains, and aches that are often attributed to aging.

There's no question that it's healthy to engage in exercise and activities that create and maintain muscle mass. Beyond warding off osteoporosis, regular exercise that builds up and sustains muscle can significantly decrease risk of diabetes type 2, as skeletal muscle acts as a storage reservoir for excess sugar that makes its way into your bloodstream. Put another way, the more skeletal muscle mass you maintain, the greater capacity your body has to prevent diabetes and other types of cardiovascular disease.

If you experience intermittent neck pain and/or stiffness, you may benefit from a simple routine of stretching and strengthening the dozens of skeletal muscles and ligaments that line your neck.

The most important requirement for healthy ligaments and muscles is steady blood flow to these tissues. And stretching the ligaments and muscles that line your neck is the most effective way to promote and maintain a rich supply of blood in this region. Read more »