How to Increase Your Body Flexibility and Mobility

The flexibility and mobility of your body, muscles and joints has a great influence over your health and daily activities. There are times when you feel your body heavy or you have cramps and aches affecting certain muscles. When you bend to pick something up you feel pain in the middle of your body, when you turn to look back you also feel pain, you neck hurts, you can’t handle a rapid walking pace. You get tired fast. All very unpleasant experiences.

In time your muscles must be kept healthy and flexible through physical exercises. The muscles around your joints must be in shape and be able to sustain you when you push yourself exercising. They also give you all the support you need all the time, especially when the only force acting on you is gravity. Your flexibility starts to decrease as you age. To maintain it or even improve your flexibility you have to exercise your muscles by doing stretching exercises. If you don’t you can get injured while performing physical activities.

You don’t have to do superhuman efforts to ensure your body is flexible. Just a couple of exercises are enough if you do then frequently. But if you have a very active life you need to do more flexibility exercises. The results of your trainings can be improved by increasing your flexibility and mobility using stretching.

Before and after every workout your body needs a short session of stretching. Before starting the workout you can use stretching to warm-up. Afterwards you can do some light stretching exercises to relax yourself. For warming up you should do dynamic stretching exercises. For relaxing you should do static stretching exercises. Doing static stretching before the workout will kill your desire to work out because of all the muscle relaxation you would feel.

Regardless of what stretching exercises you choose to do you must inhale and exhale all the time. You mustn’t hold your breath when you feel discomfort or pain. That way your body will gain all the health benefits of stretching.

Read more about Dynamic Stretching Is Great For Warming Up and Static Stretching For Relaxation.