How Flexibility Can Transform Your Health Journey
When people embark on the journey of building a healthy lifestyle, flexibility is often overlooked. When motivation strikes, most people dive right into an ambitious and strict workout regime and diet.
This can give you a great head start to develop really good habits, but can quickly lead to burnout, or worse- injury.
One thing that you should build into your lifestyle is flexibility. And I mean that both physically and in the abstract sense!
Let’s Talk Physical Benefits
Increasing your flexibility helps:
protect your joints,
increases blood flow to your muscles,
increases your range of motion,
helps prevent injury,
improves your posture
and so much more!
All of these things I listed will naturally decrease as you age. Getting into a practice of tending to your flexibility will eventually pay off with much less pain and far greater ease of movement.
If you are starting fresh at a more mature age, it’s never too late to start stretching!
Another hidden benefit of working on your flexibility is that the slow and controlled movement slows your breathing and helps you calm down. A regular routine can reduce your overall stress and even help you sleep better!
Exercises like static stretching or yoga are perfect for helping you to achieve greater flexibility, and are accessible no matter how much time and money you have to spend.
You don't need any special memberships or equipment to start practicing, and in fact, there are some excellent free resources available to get started.
Find a routine you like (try YouTube!) and try to add just ten minutes a few times a week and build up from there.
Now, Let’s Get Abstract
Practicing flexibility should extend far beyond the physical sense of the word “practice.”
Remember that rigid and inflexible routine we talked about?
You know, the one that often leads to burn out and injury?
You don’t need me to tell you that life and our routines tend to be very dynamic. One week you feel like you have all the time and energy in the world, and the next you feel like you barely have time to eat between meetings (or whatever it is that keeps you busy.)
Having flexibility in your routine can help you to create longevity with building healthy habits and a better lifestyle.
When you set up an inflexible routine for yourself, you often end up with an all or nothing mindset.
For example, imagine it’s Wednesday and you have plans to go to the gym after work. Instead, your afternoon meeting runs late, you run into traffic, and your mom calls with some gossip about your aunt Susan and you talk for an hour.
At this point, one of two things usually happens: you go to the gym anyway and give up an hour of sleep to fit it all in; or you blow it off and order $50 worth of Chinese takeout which you consume in front of the T.V.
Now imagine adding in some flexibility to this hectic Wednesday. Instead of stressing about your gym session, take the call with your mom on a walk through your neighborhood, or opt to do a 30 minute YouTube workout instead.
The overarching goal is just to get your body moving, and it doesn’t have to be perfect to improve your health and your mood.
We simply cannot predict or prevent all of the curveballs that life throws at us. Getting into a practice of flexibility with the ebbs and flows of life will help you to be more resilient, and to create healthy habits that last.
So now I ask: how can you invite more flexibility into your life?
