3 Daily Habits for LESS Pain & Stiffness (for 50+)

There are some non-obvious daily habits that almost no one knows about that can significantly improve your pain and mobility if you're over 50 and in today's video I'm going to reveal what three of those things are. If you don't know who I am my name is Will Harlow and I'm the over 50s specialist physio here at HD Physio in Farnham and today I'm going to be revealing three non-obvious daily habits that are going to improve your pain and mobility. So what I could do in this video if I wanted to be obvious is I could list the things that are proven to improve pain and mobility that almost everyone knows about. Things like taking seven to ten thousand steps every day, things like not being obese, not smoking, keeping a healthy diet, eating plenty of protein, eating lots of different food sources, making sure that you keep your muscles strong and making sure that you keep your joints supple and mobile. But those things are pretty obvious so my goal for today's video is to give you three things that I don't meet many people who are already doing so you can start doing them because I feel these three little habits give amazing bang for your So the first non-obvious habit that can improve pain and mobility in over 50s is to work on thoracic extension. Now let me explain what I mean by thoracic extension. So this is the human spine here and the middle section here the middle 12 vertebra we call the thoracic vertebra. So you have your neck the cervical vertebra then the next section down the next 12 down are the thoracic vertebra and then your lumbar vertebra are at the bottom and if you look at the spine from this angle you can see that there's a natural curve in the thoracic spine. We call this a typhosis okay and this is natural we all have this kind of s shape if you look at it from the side on. Now this s shape puts our thoracic spine into what we call flexion which is a forward position like this and when we talk about extension what extension is is the opposite so extension is leaning back. So when we spend most of our time sitting or when we walk with our spine slightly rounded or when we work on our computers or when we look down on our phones all of these things involve thoracic flexion. Now the problem with being in thoracic flexion for a long long long time is that we will eventually lose the ability to extend at the thoracic spine. Now this can cause problems in a few ways one way it can cause a problem is that you can put excess stress on the lumbar spine because the only thing that can allow you to lean back then if you've lost the ability to do it here is to lean back using your lumbar spine which can put more stress here. The other thing it can do is it can cause neck pain and the reason it causes neck pain is because if you're in a thoracically flexed position like this and you can't extend through your thoracic spine then the only way you look forward is by lifting your neck like this and what this does is it puts quite a lot of stress on the joints at the back of the neck and it can be a leading contributor to neck pain. Now the other place the thoracic spine is really important for is the shoulders okay your shoulders via the shoulder blade they have a kind of joint to the thoracic spine which means that if our thoracic spine is in a flexed position that really restricts our shoulder range of motion it also makes problems like impingement and rotator cuff issues more likely just because of change in the panics and a bad thoracic spine or a thoracic spine that can't extend can be a leading cause of shoulder symptoms as well. So working on thoracic extension is vital for preventing neck pain, shoulder pain and some cases of lower back pain too. So you might be thinking well how do I work on thoracic extension? I'm going to show you one great exercise. So now I'm going to show you how to improve your thoracic extension which is this kind of movement with a simple daily exercise and it's one that I use myself every day. So to make this work what we ideally need is a foam roller which is like a tough cylinder of foam. These are really cheap and easy to get but if you can't get one you can use a towel which is quite a large towel and you wrap it up like a cylinder to kind of simulate a foam roller. Now because my foam roller's got spikes on it I am going to use a towel just to cover it because the spikes aren't really ideal but I don't have any of the flat ones in stock at the moment so I'm just going to pop my towel over it like this and ideally we want to be doing this on your bed if you struggle to get up and down from the floor although you can do it on the floor if you're okay getting up and down because it's best to have a firm surface. So let's have a look at the exercise. So what I want to do is put the foam roller flat on the ground or the bed and then I want to lie on top of it so that my shoulder blades are around the level of the foam roller and then I'm just going to put my hands behind my head just to support my neck. Now the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to tuck my lower spine down into the floor or the bed just to make sure it's not my lower spine my lumbar spine that's doing the work. Now the exercise is very simple we're going to keep our head supported and our neck relaxed and we're just going to allow our spine to bend backwards over the foam roller. Now I can feel stiffness as I start to get to about there and I haven't done this exercise today so I'm quite stiff in my thoracic spine just because I've been sitting for most of the day. So what you would do is you come back over it until you find some stiffness you can have a little bit of a gentle rot into it and then come back to normal and each time you come back you probably just want to shift the place that the foam roller is about an inch up or down so you'll feel this is completely different depending on where you have the foam roller. We want to maintain that lower spine into the bed or as close to the bed as we can and it should feel like you hit a restriction quite quickly if you're doing this correctly. You can see that I can't get my head anywhere near the bed because I'm only using my thoracic spine. If I was to cheat and use my lumbar spine I could get there straight away but that's not the correct way to do it. You want to keep the lumbar spine flat and just use the mid back. Now this might feel a bit jabby it might feel a bit pokey when you're doing it but that's normal that's what we should feel because for most people our thoracic spine has lost a lot of extension so if you feel it's uncomfortable don't be surprised. For most people I recommend doing about two minutes of work on this every day and it's amazing what a difference that makes for your neck, your shoulder, your lower back and your mid back as well. Now the second non-obvious daily habit that can improve pain and mobility in over 50s is to stretch the calves. Now your calf muscles are the ones that live below the knee at the back of the lower leg and the reason the calves are very important is because they have significant effects on the function of the knee and they have significant effects on the function of the ankle and the foot as well. So your calf is a double jointed muscle which means it crosses over two joints of the body. It crosses over the back of your knee okay the calf doesn't just stop at the top of the shin it actually attaches to the femur which is your thigh bone so it crosses over the knee and it also crosses over your ankle so this is your foot here your calf comes all the way down here and it attaches onto your heel bone so it crosses over your ankle joint too. If you have a tight calf which is incredibly common in people over 50 it compresses the knee joint and it also puts strain on the ankle joint as well and because the ankle or the heel bone almost acts like a fulcrum if your tight calf pulls up on the heel bone that also puts stress on the foot so it can put stress on all three of these areas of the body when the calves get tight. Thankfully there's a very easy way to correct it it just takes a couple of repetitions each day and a lot of consistency and you can improve all of these areas. So let's have a look at the daily habit I recommend to improve your calf flexibility. So I'm going to show you from a few different angles. The first angle I'm going to show you how to do this from is facing this way and it helps to have a wall or a door or something to put your weight on. So what you're going to do is you're going to put the leg to be stretched at the back with the heel on the floor and the other leg in front and you're going to put your hand on something that you can lean against. You're going to keep this back leg nice and straight and then you bend that front knee slowly until you feel a stretch at the back of the calf. You want to keep your heel down and you want to make sure that the arch in your foot on the back leg isn't collapsing inwards. You want to keep it up and then when you've got that stretch you hold it for 30 seconds. I'm going to show you a couple of different angles so this way we would put the heel on the floor like this keep the back leg straight and then bend forward as well and then the third non-obvious daily habit for seniors to improve their mobility and pain is to practice getting up off the floor and you should be doing this every single day. Now if you look at nursing homes tell me right now what is something that about 95 percent of the people in a nursing home have in common. Now other than the fact that most of them are old the other thing is that pretty much none of them can get up from the floor unaided. Now this is a huge problem and this is a massive reason why people end up in nursing homes in the first place. It's because they keep falling at home and they have no way of getting up off the floor. The benefits to practicing this every day include things like improved strength, improved mobility of your joints and improved flexibility of your muscles as well and that tends to all lead to less pain and you'll have more confidence to do things because you know you can rescue yourself if something goes wrong. So let's have a look at how I recommend people do this. There's a very important set way that you should do it and we're going to show you incrementally how to get up from the floor. Obviously not everyone's going to be able to get up right from the floor to begin with so I'm going to show you how to do it step by step so eventually you can. Now getting up and down from the floor can undoubtedly be a really tricky thing for many people to do. I'm going to show you a few different ways to practice this that will work even if you can't currently get right up and right down on the floor. So if that's you what I want you to do is start off standing and you're going to stand with a nice sturdy chair facing you like this and all I want you to practice doing is having two hands on the chair and then gently lowering down on one knee like this and once you're there you're then going to practice coming back up to stand. So you would go down like this down on one knee try and do it slowly and in a controlled way and then up like this again and once you've done a few of those you're going to swap and do the other side. This is such good practice for strength and mobility in your lower legs and in your back as well and you want to do it as slowly and as controlled as possible. If you've mastered this after several weeks of practice then feel free to go to the next stage. The next stage of this practice would be to start on the floor sitting and you might want to start like this with your legs out in front of you. If you can sit with your legs crossed you can practice that as well. So basically you want to put yourself into a sitting position on the floor with a chair in front of you like this and the next thing you're going to do once you're in this position is you're going to try and arrange yourself so that you can use the chair to get up. So that might mean tucking a leg under you and swiveling over onto your knee and then turning to face the chair and then standing up like we did in the previous part and then once you're up I want you to reverse the movement put your hand down and come all the way back down to sitting. Now people do this movement in different ways, there's no right or wrong way to do it. You could turn first this way, you could turn first this way if you wanted to. Some people like to turn around like this, put both legs to one side, come up onto all fours and then use the chair to get up but ideally we've got the chair there to help us so you can wait there through it if you need to. Now the final iteration of this basically is to do the same thing but from a lying down position. So I'm going to start off lying on my back obviously to make use of the space I have underneath the chair. So you would start like this as if you've fallen, you might start on your side to give yourself extra practice and then what you're going to do is you're going to use your hands, your shoulders, you bring your knees together like this, you might come up onto all fours and walk around then use the chair. There are many many ways to do this and I'd encourage you to practice each way and then to also practice getting back down to lying as well and this feels like a silly exercise when you're doing it but it's so relevant to accidental situations in the home and it can really improve your safety when you're out and about or when you're at home as well. Whatever works for you I would encourage you to practice it, to master it and then it's there for you in the future if you ever need it. So those are the three non-obvious daily habits to improve your pain and mobility if you're over 50. I hope you've enjoyed this video, please subscribe to the channel if you have so you can get our new content as soon as it comes out and if you want more from me you can pick up a copy of my book it's called Thriving Beyond 50 and you can find it on Amazon.com. Anyway thank you for watching and I'll see you on the next video.