ENJOY the feeling of release that comes from lengthening and elongating your muscles.
Welcome to one of life’s great pleasures. Stretching is for everyone, young and old, from all walks of life.
You do not have to be a contortionist, professional athlete, or even in good shape to experience its joys and benefits.
Stretching can help you to feel better and even to look better. Stretching can enhance your day-to-day activities, whether by improving your performance at sports, or just by making reaching up to a that high shelf a little bit easier.
Defining Stretching
Stretching can truly transform your life. It is a simple and instantly gratifying form of physical release that can energize you in the morning or relax you at night. Stretching is as crucial to the proper functioning of the body as oxygen. By making stretching an integral part of your lifestyle, you will reap its many benefits.
Maintain and improve your flexibility with regular stretching. It will help to keep your muscles and joints mobile and prevent aches and pains as you get older.
Regular, controlled stretching improves mobility, corrects bad posture, reduces the risk of injury, relieves pain, and even counteracts the effects of aging.
Stretching relaxes the body; helps reduce stress levels, and con help to boost self-esteem. Everyone, regardless of age or fitness level, can benefit from stretching.
Stretching – An Essential component of fitness
Along with cardiovascular exercise (which raises your heart rate) and resistance training (lifting weights), stretching is an essential component of a complete fitness regime, yet it is often the most neglected.
People either perceive it as too easy and, as a result, unnecessary, or too difficult, believing that only the very flexible actually benefit from stretching.
Is It Like Yoga?
Many people think of yoga or Pilates when they think of stretching. Yoga’s original goal was to increase flexibility for the positions of meditation. Pilates is often called moving yoga, but the main goals are torso strength and control. Both yoga and Pilates follow a strict form and require expert instruction to avoid injury.
Stretching is different, in that it is simple. It aims to align the body, improve posture, and encourage better mechanical movement of the joints, which reduces wear and tear on them. Put simply, stretching helps the body to work harmoniously. Stretching affects more than the 602 muscles of the body. When you stretch muscles, you also mobilize joints, elongate skin, and affect connective tissue, nerves, tendons, and sometimes ligaments.
Why We MUST Stretch
Stretching improves flexibility and energizes the body, but it is also important for good posture over our lifetimes, the constant downward pull of gravity and the dehydrating effects of aging cause us gradually to hunch our shoulders and-more alarmingly- to shrink. Regular stretching can help you achieve an upright and energetic posture and a vital, healthy, and pain-free body.
As we grow older, our bodily tissues become leathery. After years of being right-or left- handed and performing regular activities such as sitting and driving, we start to stiffen into the positions we have assumed through the years. The effect is to leave you sagging, hunched over, and too tired to carry on. However, you do not have to live with this result
You can counteract the effects of gravity and aging on the body and achieve your ideal posture with a stretching program that balances muscular irregularities.
