Exercise

The Most Important Exercise Progression For Seniors To Master 65+

Improve Your Walking | Let's talk about how to walk properly! If you're suffering from knee and foot pain that hurt and stop you from walking. In this video, I’m gonna show you... | By WeShape | If it hurts when you walk, then it's probably because you're walking wrong and today, I'm going to show you exactly what that means and how to fix it. So, to start out with, let's talk about what walking wrong means. When people walk wrong, there's a number of reasons this could be happening. One, your feet could be flat and your ankle could be caving in which is forcing your knee to come in like this and turning off the muscles in the outside of your hip that's supposed to stabilize the knee joint and your lower back. Two, you could be leaning from side to side because you have poor balance which again is torque on the knees and causing potential pain in the lower back and a lot of other reasons why you're walking could be going wrong but today, I want to show you three different movements that you can use to fix your walk and make yourself feel so much better and let's start all the way down at the feet, okay? So, the first drill that I want to focus on is what's called an arch activation, okay? So, like I said earlier, if I step my foot on the ground and my arch is flat, my ankle's going to cave in like this. When my ankle caves in, then, guess what? Knee caves in. When my knee caves in, again, this glute muscle starts to turn off and then all of a sudden, we end up with back pain, knee pain, hip pain, or ankle pain or all of them at the same time. So, how do we fix this? We learn to activate our arches, right? Now, how do we do that? We start by putting our foot flat on the ground while we're in a seated position just like this. Then, we want to create shortness between the ball of our foot and our heel by scrunching our foot up. I like to do this by lifting my toes and imagining that I'm almost pushing the ball of my foot to the side. Immediately, you'll see that my arch gets really pronounced as I do this. Now, the second step that you need to do then is to spread the toes and put the toes back down on the ground, okay? While maintaining that arch. So, we're gripping the ground with the toes and maintaining that arch. Now, here's where most people go wrong on this particular movement. They can get the arch to activate. Then, the moment they push their toes down, they lift the ball of their foot up with their toes. So, if the ball of your foot's coming off the ground, you can get your fingers under there. That's not what we're trying to do. We don't want to just activate the arch for activating arch sake, we want to teach the foot how to do its job and how do we practice this? Well, at night, set a timer for a few minutes, three, four, five minutes and do this. Put your foot down on the ground, activate the arch, and then grip the ground with your toes and then pause, relax, put your foot down on the ground, activate the arch, and then grip the ground with the toes and the more times we do this and we practice getting better at activating that arch and getting faster at activating the arch, the more our foot can do our job while it's actually walking. And don't be afraid if this starts to feel kind of challenging for you. At first, some people might be like, I can't even begin to activate my arch. It takes time. It takes effort. It takes mind muscle connection and so this isn't a movement where you're going to feel your arches feeling all burned out and what not. This is a movement you have to look down at your foot and you might have to think for a little while to get this job done right but practice it every day for three to five minutes on your right side, three to five minutes on your left side. Again, focusing on how quickly can I put it down, activate the arch, and replace my toes like that. Eventually, we're up to being able to put your foot down and have an active arch from the moment you put your foot on the ground. Now, once you're capable of activating your arches and you feel like you've built that skill, the next step is to focus on your balance, okay? So, for this, I like to tell people to do one simple drill once a day and that is to stand on one foot with the goal of standing on one foot for one minute, okay? But this is where people go wrong. The majority of the people that I see with pain while walking walk like this. They put their foot down, and they lean their body to the side and then, they put their other foot down and they lean their body to the side. Obviously, I'm exaggerating this but the reality is when I do this type of walking, I'm putting torque on my knee, my hips, I'm encouraging flat feet and I'm going to hurt my lower back and so, what we need to learn how to do is what actual good balance is. It's not standing on one foot with my body to the side. It's actually standing on one foot with my body and torso vertical and aligned over that foot. So, how do we practice that with the single leg so what you want to do is this have a chair or a wall or something to support you that's next to you from there you're going to have the opposite leg be the balancing leg so if my right hand is on the chair my left leg is going to be the balancing leg the first thing I'm going to do is put my foot on the ground activate my arch grip the ground with the toes alright just like we did before now I'm going to imagine if I have a line drawn straight up and down from my nose through my belly button and I'm going to shift that line right over the center of that foot to find my balance so if I find myself with my nose not over my belly button this, not doing it right. I want to be able to have perfect posture upright position with that line right through the middle of the foot. To start out with, put all five fingertips on the chair and you might only be able to do this for 10 seconds or so without falling over. That's fine in the start. Work up by adding 10 seconds each week until you're able to hold this position with all five fingers for support for 60 seconds on the right side and then switch legs, 60 seconds on the opposite side as well. Now, how do we progress from there to actually increase our balance? Well, once we're able to hold 60 seconds with all five fingers on top of the chair, we lift our thumb and then the next week, we lift our pinky and the next week, we lift our ring, the next week, we lift our middle finger and finally, we lift our index finger off the chair and we slowly and gradually build the ability to balance our bodies with our torso upright. So, once you work up to this, you have an active arch and you have the ability to balance and transfer your center of mass right over your foot which is going to do a lot for your walking ready. The last thing you want to focus on is actually working on walking. Transferring your weight from side to side. How I like to do this? Get a rolled tape or stick, anything that's a straight line. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to put it down on the ground and roll a nice straight line out. From there, this line is going to guide us on how to walk properly. So, how do we do this? We put our foot down. We activate our arch. We put our toes down the ground and then, we shift our balance over that foot, okay? This foot can just still be dangling back here or you can lift it all the way off the ground. From there, all we do is we let this leg swing through, land on the heel, activate the arch, grip the ground with the toes, transfer the weight with that vertical torso over that foot. Let this leg swing through heel, arch, toes, balance. Let that leg swing through. Heel, arch, toes, upright balance. So you can see the slow practice of walking mindfully and having your foot just on either side of this line right here can be a fantastic way to practice your gate using the tools that you've already built by activating your arches, improving your balance, and now actually putting those together into a gate that's going to feel good to your body instead of feel bad to your body. So, if you have trouble walking, if it causes aches, pains, or injuries, then, what you need to do is stop walking. Stop rehearsing those reps and instead, do these three movement practices every single day and watch as it transforms how you walk and how you feel and just to recap, put your foot down on the ground, activate the arch, and then grip the ground with your toes. I'm going to imagine if I have a line drawn straight up and down from my nose through my belly button and I'm going to shift that line right over the of that foot to find my balance. So, if I find myself with my nose not over my belly button like this, not doing it right. I want to be able to have perfect posture upright position with that line right through the middle of the foot. To start out with, put all five fingertips on the chair and you might only be able to do this for 10 seconds or so without falling over. That's fine to start. Work up by adding 10 seconds each week until you're able to hold this position with all five fingers for support for 60 seconds on the right side and then switch legs, 60 seconds on opposite side as well. So, how do we do this? We put our foot down, we activate our arch, we put our toes down the ground, and then we shift our balance over that foot, okay? This foot can just still be dangling back here or you can lift it all the way off the ground. From there, all we do is we let this leg swing through, land on the heel, activate the arch, grip the ground with the toes, transfer the weight with that vertical torso over that foot. Let this leg swing through, heel, arch, toes, balance. Oh, and if you want workouts that support teaching how to move your body better so that you actually feel better in your body. Well, that's what we do at WeShape and you can try it out 100% for free, no credit card required. All you gotta do is click the link above.

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