Check out these great exercises to help you feel your best!
/Our Favorite Neck Exercise!
We wanted to go over one of the most commonly used exercises in our office, something we call chin retractions. It's something we use to get motion at the base of the neck, or kind of the area where the collar of your shirt would set.
It looks a little bit like pulling your chin back into a double chin position, but what we are really trying to accomplish is motion at the base of the neck.
Simple At-Home Hip Mobility
We wanted to go over another exercise that we use pretty commonly. We call these hip CARs. CAR stands for controlled articular rotation, which means we're really going to try and isolate motion, at a specific joint.
Typically this exercise starts by standing next to a wall with the goal of taking the hip through the full range of motion while keeping the pelvis still.
Easy Hip Flexor Stretch!
At Carolina Active Health, it’s common to see tight hip flexors when people walk into the office. There are really basic, simple hip-flexor stretches that can make a huge difference in your mobility.
There are really two parts of the hip flexor. One is the Iliopsoas muscle and the other is Rectus Femoris. For these stretches, we are able to isolate the two. The first step is to get on one knee. You’re going to focus on tucking your tailbone forward like you’re rocking the bottom of your pelvis forward. We don't need to create a ton of motion forward, but if you lock that tailbone forward, you’ll isolate Iliopsoas. To add more to the stretch, shift your weight forward as well. Finally, you can reach your arm on the same side as your back leg up and across your body to activate the rest of the muscle.
The Rectus Femoris muscle, which is one of the quads, is on the front of your leg. All you have to do is bend your back knee and we'll get a little bit more of a stretch. It helps to place your back foot on a bench behind you. The same sacrum tuck idea applies, and you'll feel a little bit more of a stretch into your quad.
Simple At-Home Shoulder Mobility
We are going to go over shoulder CARs today and just as a reminder “CAR” stands for controlled articular rotations. The idea is to express as much range of motion as possible within that joint.
An important thing to remember while performing these exercises is to make sure the motion is coming from your shoulder and not from anywhere else in your body. Common compensations you'll see would be bending the elbow, and raising the shoulder.