Often parents favor one side (arm, shoulder, hip) when holding their little ones, and have a tendency to compromise their posture when doing so. It is important to strengthen and support your body equally to decrease your risk of injury. One way to do this is to focus on holding your children from the inside out. Engage your core and try to level your body before picking up or holding your children. Soften your knees and try to shift your weight side to side to balance the load. Also try to switch sides, when possible.
Exercise & Muscles
Exercising to build muscle strength has many benefits. Core muscles provide stability to every movement, so a strong core is a must. Remember that your core is more than your stomach muscles -- it includes all the muscles that surround your spine, including your hips and mid to lower back. Strengthening these can help prevent low back pain and help you do all types of exercise with greater strength and ease.
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This is a common issue and something we see a lot in our studios. At barre3 we focus on balance and alignment in the body. The muscle groups we work develop and strengthen the entire body, helping to realign our imbalances. You can take that idea of balance into your daily life by noticing these common tendencies:
- slouching shoulders or arching the back
- leaning to one side and constantly putting all your weight on the same leg
- letting your core fall forward and tug the low back forward
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Dr. Michael Roizen, MD , Internal Medicine, answeredYou can strengthen your shoulder muscles by doing a standing side lift exercise using free weights.
Muscles worked: Middle deltoid (side shoulder), anterior deltoid (front shoulder), and supraspinatus (a rotator cuff muscle)
Starting position: Stand with your feet about shoulder width apart, and your knees and hips slightly bent. Lean forward slightly from the hips and let your arms hang straight down, with your elbows slightly bent and palms facing each other.
Action: Pull your arms up and out to your side, keeping your wrists straight and elbows slightly bent. Continue lifting until your arms are almost parallel to the floor and your hands are slightly in front of you. As with the tubing, the hands should be continually visible with your peripheral vision. That is, the hands should be in front of your body. Slowly lower them back to the starting position.
Tips:- Your shoulder is not strong in this position, so use light weights -- start with 1 to 3 pound or 1/2 to 1 kg weights. It's crucial that you discontinue the exercise if any shoulder or back pain occurs. If you're using your back to raise the weight to where it should be, use a lighter weight, even if it seems too light. Remember, the goal of these exercises is to strengthen muscles, not to injure yourself.
- Make sure your shoulders stay down. In this exercise, people typically try to lift with their shoulders, and their shoulders end up practically covering their ears. Have another person look at your shoulders or hold them down while you're doing this exercise, or look in the mirror at yourself, to ensure that you are doing it correctly.
- I like to do this in a modified-lunge position, and I do two sets, alternating one set with the right leg forward and one with the left leg forward. If you do them in this manner, make sure you split the sets up with another set of exercises in between, so that you don't do two sets in rapid sequence.
- Women very rarely get past 8 pounds in free weights; men very rarely get past 15 pounds, so I would start with considerably less weight ( 1 to 3 pound or 1/2 to 1 kg weights for women, 3 or 5 pounds or 1 to 2 and a half kg for men) unless you're a semi-professional weight lifter or body builder.
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Dr. Mehmet Oz, MD , Cardiology (Cardiovascular Disease), answered
A tight IT or iliotibial band can cause pain and bursitis in the hip joint. One technique for stretching the IT band is foam rolling, which acts like deep tissue massage to stretch the band. Watch Dr. Oz talk about this technique.
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Dr. Vonda Wright, MD , Orthopedic Surgery, answeredThe truth is that by and large, the active agers and athletes who come into my office with repetitive injuries are stiff as boards! Their hamstrings, their calves, their shoulders, and their backs are all stiff. This perpetual tightness often leads to injury and frustration. These people are not limited by the number of years they have lived but by the length of their muscles. It doesn't have to be this way. You grew these muscles and you can make them perform for you in just 15 minutes per day!
Flexibility is the ability of muscle to lengthen and allow your joints to move through a full range of motion. Maintaining muscle flexibility increases athletic performance, improves running economy (decreased energy expenditure at a given speed), prevents injury, decreases soreness, and hastens rehabilitation following injury. In their relaxed state, muscles and the tendons that attach them to your bones are "crinkled" up. (This is literally the scientific term for their accordion-like resting state.) When they are in a chronically shortened state, muscles and tendons prevent our joints from moving through their full range of motion, which changes the way we walk, our posture, and, among other things, our golf swing (heaven forbid). Not only this, but stiff muscles and tendons are like the old dried out rubber bands you find in the back of your desk drawer. One pull and these brittle old elastic bands "pop." Muscles are elastic bands, and when stiff, they are also more likely to "pop" and sideline us with injury. -
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Dr. Vonda Wright, MD , Orthopedic Surgery, answeredYou have all seen elderly people walking around with bent knees all stooped over. While there can be many reasons for this, one big reason people start walking with bent knees is shortening of the hamstrings. The hamstrings are the large muscles in the back of your leg that connect your pelvis to your lower leg. Hamstrings act as the rubber band that flexes your knee during walking or, more powerfully, during exercise. After years in a crinkled state, muscles like hamstrings get shorter. The thigh bone (femur), however, does not get shorter, so the only way you can make the distance between the pelvis and lower leg shorter is to bend your knees. Well, you can't walk with bent knees and straight hips, so to compensate, you bend your hips forward and, before you know it, you are walking around with a stooped gait -- looking old.
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Joey Greany, MS,NASM Elite Trainer , Fitness, answeredSee All 3 AnswersThe "core" is where all movement starts, and it is our body’s center of gravity. It consists of 29 different muscles that attach at the lumbo-pelvic hip complex. Having a strong core is important for the transfer of strength and power from the lower extremities into the upper body. Having a weak core will increase your chances of hip, low back, neck, shoulder, and knee pain.
A easy way to incoporate core training into your workouts is to perform integrated movements while on your feet, using all planes of motion. This means that you should mimic movements that you would normally do throughout your daily routine. Do not use stationary machines at the gym because they will deactivate your core stabilizer muscles. Free weight and body weight exercises will increase core strength and stabilization.
When people think of core training they most often think that they need to only do situps. When I think of core training I think of pullups, pushup variations, squats, dead lifts, lunge variations, rowing, jumping, sprinting, plyometrics, and plank variations, just to name a few! These exercises call upon many muscles to work at one time to produce movement, which is how the human body works efficiently.