By Sean Emery
We’ve all been there. Crammed in a car for hours on end in an effort to visit family or go on a vacation. Road trips happen, and every time they do we get out of the car feeling like garbage. We likely eat like crap, drink wayyy too much caffeine to stay away (and worst of all!) we neglect our mobility homework!
Luckily for us, Old Cityzen Sarah is on little road trip of her own and we’ll use her a case study of how to mitigate the effects of the road.
While Sarah’s road trip has her spending 8 hours a day hunched over the beautiful beast pictured above, the lessons we can learn from her moto-trip will work for traveling via planes, trains, and all sorts of automobiles.
First off, we need to establish some sort of baseline. As humans we were designed to stand and to move. When you’re standing the muscles in your body are working to keep you upright. The muscles are all stretched out and our body is open. Compare standing to sitting. When we sit our hips are closed, our knees are closed, we’re usually hunched over with internally rotated shoulders and bent arms. Literally everything is in a worse position. Take a look at this chart from StandUpKids.org
So when we’re forced to sit all day (in a car, plane, motorcycle, etc…) we need to reverse the effects of the position we spent a ton of time in.
Back to Sarah. Let’s take a look at what position a person might be in riding a bike, and what we can do to reverse the effects:
Now that we’ve determine what’s been “out of place” let’s work to fix each item:
Hips are closed, so let’s open them: 4 mins per side: Couch Stretch. Then 2 mins of VooDoo on each leg.
The pelvis is tugging at the low back, let’s get a lax ball and stretch it out to loosen things up: Low Back Mobility – 10 mins total.
The upper back, the shoulders, and the neck are all out of position. Luckily the same tool and get in all the spots we need. Let’s go back to the lax ball and get into the shoulder, the t-spine. I think 5 mins per side should make a difference.
Everything together is about 30ish mins of mobility. The bottom line is that when we spend all day in a crappy position, we need to spend time restoring our bodies to good positions.
Sarah – send us some pictures! Everyone else, what are your bad positions and how to you plan on restoring them??
