Sit Too Much. Try This Sequence

For most of us, we do a quite a bit of sitting in our day. I am no different. We're answering emails, in meetings, and working on various projects. All this sitting can make our hips feel stiff and become less mobile.

If we put ourselves in the same shape (read: sitting) for many hours in a day, our body makes adaptations so that shape becomes easier. That doesn’t mean that that shape is good for our bodies, but our body doesn’t really know that. All it knows is it’s trying to find a way to not work so hard to perform that shape. Our bodies are really smart and efficient that way.

Lack of mobility sets in because our bodies have stopped using certain ranges of motion. We often think of this lack of mobility happening because the muscles get ‘short and tight’, but they can also end up weak from a lack of use. This weakness limits our range of motion as a way of protecting ourself from injury.

Let's look at this as an example:

If we wake up in the morning and sit for the comment to work. Then sit all day at a desk and for the commute home and then sit in the evening for a few more hours. The day involves a lot of sitting and our knees never really bend past 90 degrees. After many years of doing this, our bodies have now laid down stiff collagen to make it easier for our knees to stop bending past 90º, which is probably fine until you want to squat deeper than 90º.

If you find that you are doing a bunch of sitting or just feel that your hips are right give the sequence below a try to help feel a bit more limbered up. I like this sequence because it’s a nice bit of every thing. Some soft tissue work, some static stretching, some mobility work and some active flexibility exercises to start to strengthen some of those weak muscles. The sequence won’t fix all the issues, but it will help.