Get your body moving this holiday
CHARLOTTE MARSH, from Pilates in Derbyshire, with some tips on how to avoid back pain over the festive season
I’M sure you’ve got your kitchen recipes down to a tee for the big day – but have you ever considered how the following things are a bit of a recipe for disaster?
l Cold weather making you tense up a little, maybe rounding your shoulders forward in particular?
l Time off work and a change of routine, maybe longer lieins, not making it to workout classes?
l More travelling, long car journeys, maybe slumping into car seats and your back aching?
l Wet weather usually means heavier footwear and sturdy boots, and party season usually means high heels, leading to achey feet
l Lots of sitting on squishy sofas visiting relatives, maybe hips starting to tighten up, feeling stressed as you try to keep the peace?
I teach Pilates and usually find that people stiffen up a lot more during the two week Christmas holiday compared to the six week summer break.
During the summer, we’re generally more active; walking to explore places on holiday, gardening, enjoying warm weather, going barefoot on a beach or around the house, maybe spending more time playing with kids/grandkids outside.
So here are some basic tips to think about adding more mini movements throughout the Christmas holidays to keep your body from stiffening up.
1 Find ways to play more inside! Twister might be a bit extreme for some, but think about typical party games that get the body moving.
Rig up a limbo string between two chairs, or hang some Christmas party ring biscuits onto a string and see who can finish theirs first, indoor bowling using water or pop bottles, or go the old fashioned route and tear a strip away from a cereal box and see who can pick it up off from the floor without using their hands
2 Sit less! Get up every 30 minutes. A recent medical report is responsible for the tag line “sitting is the new smoking”. Some shocking statistics were presented including that 10 years in a sitting job increases colon cancer by 40% and exercise for 30 minutes will NOT eliminate the risk of heart disease and heart ageing if you work a seven-hour a day sitting job.
So reducing sitting and sedentary behaviour is crucial if you want to reduce risks of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, bone loss, inflammation.
We literally need to move our cells to prevent inflammation building up. So aim to move after 20 minutes or at the very most 45 minutes.
Use the excuse of fetching a drink, ideally walk at a fast pace for two minutes or up and down a flight of stairs to get your rested hip flexors and muscles in your backside moving again.
3 Foot rolling; in Winter, we typically opt for clumpier footwear like sturdy boots as well as high heels for women and the party season, these can lead to immobile feet.
Try using a tennis ball under the sole of your foot and simple roll out the soft tissue of your feet, a selfadministered foot massage!
In Pilates we always start with some footwork as your feet are often neglected and they work hard for you all day being the foundation of every movement you make. Correcting issues with the feet can often alleviate knee and hip pain.
4 Breathing: stand in front of a mirror and watch yourself take a deep breath, do your shoulders rise right up towards your ears? Now place one hand on your chest and one hand on your belly, breathe again, see if you can make your hands move with your breathing. You can progress this by aiming to send your next in breath toward the back of the ribs, really thinking about expanding 360 degrees around your chest. Many of us breath in such a shallow way, if you can improve your breathing, you may feel quite a release around your spine.
5 Wrap your presents on an ironing board! Save your back and bring your wrapping task up to a more comfortable level – no more prolonged leaning over. 6 Fresh air; we’ve all heard that fresh air is good for us, but why? We live amid beautiful countryside and have easy access to it.
Fresh and clean air is good for digestion by helping to calm your body down and find its parasympathetic nervous system. It can improve blood pressure and your heart rate. It can make you happier, increasing oxygen levels help to stimulate serotonin, part of your feelgood mechanism.
Clean air will help clean your lungs, you may notice muscles relax in fresh air, your nose will run, you may even start coughing as the body realises it can clear out toxins more easily.
7 Queuing; lots of standing in lines Christmas shopping? Use that time! Try a few shoulder shrugs to keep the tension at bay, or drop one hip and the the other to loosen uo around the pelvis.
Or if you don’t mind people staring at you, try a few calf raises while you’re there! You’ll get a bit of mobility through your feet and if you land your heels with a bit of impact, that will incorporate some bone loading into your waiting time.
8 Stressing out? Endless To-do lists? Do you ever notice that you grip the muscles of your backside? When you hold tension in your gluteal muscles, you also hold tension in the smaller, deeper muscles, piriformis and obturator internus, these link into your pelvic floor (this applies to men and women). If you are constantly holding a muscle in tension it will tire and then when you DO need its support, you may find you’re lacking in strength.
Weak pelvic floor muscles are often thought of as a normal part of life because symptoms are so common – one in three women report urinary leakage – but this is NOT normal, please seek help.
Learn to relax long-suffering glute muscles and see how your pelvic floor is effected. An easy way to do this is to perform a squat holding on to door handles, create length in the upper back, shoulders and pelvic floor, once you’re at the lower position, breathe and try to let the breath reach as low down as possible.
9 Headaches or Neck pain? Might be the alcohol! It could also be related to how you reach your head and your chin slightly forward away from the top of your spine.
Your neck is designed to remain upright, keeping the weight of your skull in an ideal line from the top of your head through your body and down to your feet. Even a slight forward angle of only 15 degrees – often seen my mobile phone users and young kids wearing very heavy ruck sacks – more than doubles the force upon your neck which can lead to spinal curvature.
Imagine your head is the top of a lollipop and your spine is the lollipop stick, glide your whole head backwards, lengthening the back of your neck, to replace it on top of your “stick” and sign up for some Pilates to help you strengthen the muscles you need to keep it there.
10 Sit differently - If you can’t avoid sitting then try to sit differently to spare your spine. Try to Floor-sit...if you’re playing a board game, think about where to play.
Try to sit on the floor and you’ll find you move about a bit more than you would were you to use a chair, as you move you’ll be freeing up your hips.
If you have a long car journey to do, also think about your head position and try to avoid slumping into the bucket seat shape of many car seats.
Using rolled-up towels to reposition yourself can help, there is a video on the Pilates In Derbyshire Facebook page.
People stiffen up more during the Christmas holiday compared to the summer break Charlotte Marsh