4 Tips for Keeping Yourself Mobile and Pain-Free
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Whatever your particular goals are in life, and whatever your preferred pastimes and specific circumstances are, it goes without saying that you will want to be as mobile, and pain-free as possible.
Unfortunately, however, all sorts of chronic aches, pains, and mobility issues, are becoming increasingly more common – largely as a result of various lifestyle factors that have intensified over the last few decades, but that can often be changed and dealt with pretty quickly.
Suffering from a condition such as sciatic nerve pain is not good by any means, and can make it difficult for you to live life the way you want to, get around easily, experience a high degree of well-being in your day-to-day existence, and so on.
Certain health conditions that are associated with chronic pain and mobility limitation will naturally require serious professional intervention. A lot of the time, though, there are things that you can do, yourself, to help the situation.
Here are a few lifestyle tips for keeping yourself mobile and pain-free.
Do regular strength training – not too much, not too little
Strength training is often associated with bodybuilders and power lifters, and isn't necessarily universally respected in the fitness and wellness communities.
It's pretty common, for example, to see people in certain holistic health communities who place a major emphasis on the importance of things like yoga, but who have no interest at all in doing dead lifts, swinging a kettlebell around, or hitting a few sets on the bench press.
As a matter of fact, though, strength training is one of the best things you can do for your overall mobility, and in order to remain pain-free. It's just a matter of getting the balance right, and not overdoing things.
When you are engaged in a regular strength training routine, you are forcing your muscles to contract as strongly as they can. This works wonders for circulating blood, lymph fluid, and more. It also creates positive metabolic changes at the cellular level, that can be truly in their own right.
Regular strength training, of course, also strengthens the different muscle groups in your body, and a well-structured routine will help to ensure that all the different muscle groups are properly counterbalanced, so that you aren't going to experience strain on your joints and tendons due to some muscles pulling harder than others.
You should structure your strength training workouts so that you finish each workout feeling strong, energized, and enthusiastic. If you finish each strength training workout feeling completely broken and exhausted, on the other hand, it's likely that you're doing more harm than good, and can even be contributing to chronic degenerative issues that could directly lead to ongoing pain and loss of mobility.
For the same reason, it's important that your strength training sessions should be spaced apart at decent intervals, with adequate rest in between.
Limit the amount of time you spend sitting down each day – look into things like standing desks
You've probably heard that sitting down for long periods of time each day isn't exactly good for you. Recent research on the subject has found that too much time spent sitting down on a daily basis significantly contributes to your risk of cardiovascular issues, illness in general, and death from all causes.
Of course, spending a lot of time seated is also pretty terrible for your posture, and can cause certain muscle groups to tighten and shorten, thereby pulling your body into unnatural and harmful positions, trapping nerves, and causing chronic pain and mobility issues as a result.
It seems that we, as human beings, aren't really physically built to spend a lot of time sitting down without experiencing negative consequences. Instead, it seems like we are built to spend most of our time on our feet, moving around.
Standing desks have become very popular in the last few years, and allow office workers to do their work standing up – or else, to alternate between periods of sitting and standing throughout the day.
If you spend a significant amount of your time sitting down, looking into things like standing desks could really help to improve your posture, stretch out and strengthen muscle groups that need it, and significantly increase your mobility, and reduce chronic pain at the same time.
Establish a daily routine for physical relaxation
We all naturally pick up different types of aches and pains over the course of any given day. Maybe you just woke up on the wrong side of the bed, with a crick in your neck. Or, maybe you were carrying something heavy at work, and you had a spasm in a muscle in your back.
Then again, maybe you do spend a large proportion of your time sitting down each day, and you've got all the assorted niggling aches, pains, and areas of tightness that go along with that.
If you're not careful, you can easily hold onto physical tension for quite a long while, and it can cause you a lot of trouble as the days, weeks, and months go by.
It's important, therefore, to establish a daily routine for physical relaxation, that helps you to genuinely release tension, stretch your muscles out, and just feel better across the board.
Your daily physical relaxation routine should be specific to you and it should be something that you enjoy. As a general rule, however, it might be a good idea for it to include a hot bath (with Epsom salts), a yoga or other stretching routine, and maybe a massage, if there's anyone available to provide it.
Eat a wholesome and nutritious diet
The food you eat naturally has a lot to do with how you feel, both physically, and mentally.
By chronically restricting your calories, in order to lose weight, for example, it's entirely possible that you might end up experiencing tissue breakdown and chronic aches and pains throughout your body, simply as a result of not giving your body the fuel and materials it needs to rebuild and strengthen itself.
Studies done on chronically calorie-restricted individuals – such as the Minnesota Starvation Experiment – demonstrates this pretty clearly.
Even if you are eating enough food, however, you may still be missing out on essential nutrients, and contributing to chronic inflammation in the body, due to consuming a diet high in processed foods.
Eat a wholesome and nutritious diet, based on whole, unprocessed foods, and you'll be in a much better situation.
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Check out my book Milo’s Meals: A Healthy Recipe Guide for The Picky Toddler available on Amazon in convenient eBook and paperback!
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