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September is Healthy Aging Month, which is the perfect time to keep working on the healthy habits that transform your life physically, mentally, financially, and socially. We’re here to help guide you toward your goals and offer the inspiration to create new ones. As one of our top health practices for a healthy lifestyle, we recommend stretching for its positive impact on both your body and your mind.
While not the main focus of an active lifestyle, stretching is a vital component of one. It’s a key element of a well-rounded fitness routine and enhances your everyday life by improving your flexibility and range of movement. With a proper stretching routine, you can continue to protect both your mobility and independence. Learn more about stretching and how it can benefit your lifestyle below!
5 Benefits of Stretching
1. Increases your flexibility and range of motion
One of the most important benefits on the list, regular stretching increases your flexibility and mobility levels in order for you to perform everyday activities with more ease. It’s especially important to work on flexibility with age. As we get older, we can find ourselves with greatly reduced mobility. Muscles shorten and become tight, leading to weakness, joint pain, and strains when doing physical activities. A reduction in skin elasticity, muscle tone, and bone density also contribute to a loss of flexibility. If we don’t continuously work on it, chronic aches and pains will become more prevalent. By stretching and allowing your joints to access their full ranges of motion, you can give yourself more freedom to move as you please.
2. Improves your physical performance
After properly warming up with some cardio, performing dynamic stretches gets your blood flowing and prepares your muscles for physical activities. This helps you avoid injury and perform to the best of your abilities while also improving your circulation. Because you’ll find that your recovery time shortens and you have less muscle soreness, you’ll be able to bounce back more quickly than ever.
3. Improves your posture
One of the most noticeable benefits of stretching is improved posture. As you perform stretches, you work your muscles by strengthening and elongating them. Encouraging the proper alignment of your muscle groups will result in improved posture, especially since stretching relieves back tension.
4. Helps prevent and heal muscle pain
As mentioned previously, tight muscles lead to a lower range of motion for your joints. This increases your chances of muscle injury and strains. By stretching, you can strengthen your back to heal an existing injury and also prevent future ones.
5. Helps to calm and destress
When we get stressed out, our bodies hold that stress by tightening up and increasing muscle tension. In areas that tend to hold stress, like your neck and upper back, stretching relieves this tension and is great for stress relief. Once you settle into a good routine, you’ll also be amazed at how therapeutic stretching can be. It can give your mind a mental break, decrease fatigue and anxiety, and increase energy and mindfulness.
Where to Start
Experts suggest adding dynamic stretches to your warm-up routines to help increase your body temperature and get it ready for movement. Dynamic stretches encourage your body to make active movements, like walking lunges and high knees. Static stretching, where you sit and stretch in place, is more ideal for post-workouts because your muscles are already warmed up.
On days you are exercising, experts recommend you get in 5 to 10 minutes of dynamic stretching before your activity, and 5 to 10 minutes of static stretching after it. If you aren’t exercising, doing some light cardio, like walking, followed by 5 to 10 minutes of stretching is ideal and brings you the same benefits!
Stretching Safety Tips
Try to avoid bouncing. This will minimize the risk of stretching too hard and straining your muscles.
Do some cardio beforehand. This way, you can warm up your body and make it easier to stretch it out.
Avoid overdoing your routine. Over-stretching can also put too much strain on your muscles and make it harder to recover.
Take it slow. Learning proper form takes time, and your body also needs to adjust.
Not sure how to build your stretching routine? We recommend this one by Harvard Medical School, or this 5-minute routine by Healthline. When in doubt, talk to your doctor about the right stretches for you. In no time, you’ll be more flexible than ever and on your way to achieving a Healthy Aging routine!
We believe in active lifestyles and promoting safe ones, too. With a health and wellness room where you can practice your stretching routines daily, gain more control of your mobility in a comfortable and safe environment. Take a look at some of our other community amenities that encourage healthy living here.