Improve Your Performance by Balancing Out
Why Being out of Balance is a Big Deal? We all favor one side. We open doors, write and grab stuff with the same hand. Looking at the sports we do, most of them all focus on one arm. For example baseball, tennis and basketball all require more work to be done on one side. It is important to have some imbalance in the body in order to have peak performance but at a point, the imbalance ends up being a big deal. It can lead to a decrease in performance, risk of injury and prolonged recovery from an injury.
Rick Kaselj
What You Can Do to Balance Yourself Out? There is a lot that you can do to try to balance yourselves out in order to keep performing at your best and injury free. Let me go through three exercises that you can do, anywhere, that will get you on track to being balanced out.
Reaching to the Side Stretch
A big problem when it relates to muscle imbalances is latissimus dorsi (lat) tightness. It is your major mid back muscle. Often times it will tighten up and pull on the shoulder and lower back. We need to loosen it out in order to stay balanced.
You can stretch out the lats by standing and taking your right arm and reaching over your head while your left hand is reaching down. You should feel a stretch in the muscle between your right shoulder and right hip. Make sure to hold the stretch for 30 seconds and then switch legs and arms. Then reach with the left arm over your head to your right side.
Rotating Out Your Mid Back
A big issue is poor movement in the mid back. This leads to greater stress on the shoulder and lower back. We need to do what we can to keep rotation in the middle of our back in order to stay balanced.
We can do this by sitting down and using our hands to grab our shoulders. You have the right hand on the right shoulder and the left hand on the left shoulder. Making sure you are sitting tall and rotate as far as you can to one side. You stop at the furthest point for two seconds and then rotate to the other side. You do this 5 times each side.
This is an exercise you can do anywhere, even at work. It will help loosen up your mid back.
Hip Flexor Stretcher with a Twist
With all of us sitting so much, our hip flexors end up tightening up. This has an effect our pelvis, lower back and shoulder. The hip flexor is something we need to target in order to stay balanced. We need to loosens up the hip flexor in a forward and back direction but also in a twisting direction. We can do this with this exercise.
You go into a split stance position which is one foot in front and the other foot behind. Make sure your abdominal area is tight, contract the seat in the leg that is behind you and move your hips forward. You should feel a light stretch in the front of your hips. Now rotate your shoulders towards the leg that is in front. This will intensify the stretch in the back leg. Hold the stretch for 30
Balancing Out is Good to Do
Balance gives you the edge on performance!
All of us are a little out of balanced but if we get too much out of balanced it will affect how we perform and increase our risk to injury. There are simple things you can do to battle against getting too much out of balanced and now you have three exercises that you could do to help you out. Going over them one more time. There was the reaching over the top stretch, sitting and rotating the shoulders and finally the hip flexor with a twist stretch. If you are feeling a little stiff, seen your performance drop, have little aches or an injury that just won’t go away, make sure to give these exercises a go to get you back on track and balanced out.
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