Helping yourself

I read a great Gray Cook quote courtesy of Bret Contreras and ties in well with the link I put up on Facebook the other week from Eric Cressey regarding some drills to help work on improving mobility.

“When someone’s back hurts they don’t want to blame their lifestyle, fitness level, or daily patterns. Instead, they want to blame their back pain on starting the lawn mower last week, which, in reality, is probably just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Human beings live under the philosophy of, “I have a snowball and I have to throw it at someone.” No one wants to take responsibility.”

The ability to improve you’re body in terms of how stiff or sore you are is in reality in your own hands. The first step is often seeing somebody like myself but I am really just a facilitator in the process. The time you spend seeing any manual/physical therapist is really a chance to learn about how your body moves, about what it is capable of and what you can do about it but you are only spending 1 hour doing this and have another 167, minus when you’re sleeping,  during the week in which you can be doing things. To make the most of the money you’re spending you need to use a couple of the other 167 hours to help with the process.

We should all have the same ability to move, barring injuries, as when we were children/teenagers but we rarely spend enough time moving in order for this to be the case.  We don’t spend much if any time in the full squat position, something children do naturally, we struggle to be able to get our arms overhead without various compensatory movements. Even being able to stand correctly can’t be accomplished due to issues around the hips, thoracic spine and abdominal musculature. None of this needs to be the case but it does require effort on your part inorder to correct it. A few minutes each day is all that is required and it can be done in front of the TV so there’s no excuse for not doing it.

The plus side of doing the movements/exercises any therapist may give you is that, done regularly, they will help you feel better and move better. I’m not going to lie to you the process of undoing the years of abuse we routinely subject ourselves to before we finally get hurt badly enough to do something about it is often a long one but it only gets longer the more we put off taking the “journey”. On the upside it is rarely long before you start seeing progress which will inevitably spur you on to persevere.

So check out the link to Eric’s video above and as they say in the Nike ads…”Just do it”