If you are like most people, you probably aren’t fond of stretching every day. Everyone tells you that it’s good for you, has a lot of benefits, etc. but you’ve never committed to it for long enough to truly make a difference. Plus you may just simply think it looks funny. Going forward, however, you should change your habits and adapt stretching into your routine.
The problems associated with neglecting stretching every day can affect you in many different ways. During our normal daily routines, it is likely that we aren’t doing things that are beneficial for our body physically. The average Malaysian spends 13 hours a day sitting while working and completing miscellaneous tasks, in addition to the 8 or so hours that they sleep each night. A heavy sedentary lifestyle can bring many challenges and disadvantages to an otherwise healthy body.
Sedentary lifestyles have been linked to developing bad posture. Surprisingly, a bad posture does a lot more damage to the human body than one may expect. Bad postures can affect the way other people perceive you, deepen your possible depression, cut off circulation, and eventually increase your risk of experiencing a premature death.
Another consequence of living a sedentary lifestyle is having reduced mobility. During the day, we simply don’t put our bodies in enough unique positions to truly loosen up and warm up our muscles. This type of neglect can cause problems during specific forms of exercise, or simply just make it harder to complete everyday tasks such as bending down to pick up things or reaching for things in hard to reach spots.
Luckily, years of neglect can be mostly washed away by adopting a stretching routine into your daily schedule. It doesn’t even need to take all day, either. Proper stretching can be achieved by just doing it for ten minutes a day. That is such a short time period that it can be done in the morning before work, during a work break, or even right before you start your workout. For best results, you should stretch in addition to a weightlifting routine and continue to stretch on your rest days as well.The benefits of stretching don’t have to be confined to just making you more limber. Stretching can also aid you in your efforts to become stronger.