I have been spending more time sitting lately. And not sitting particularly well. Not doing what I tell others to do, thinking that I am impervious to the kind of things that I talk about.
Well, I’m not. I have started to feel stiff when I get up, stiff getting out of the car, and it hurts intermittently in my back. Nothing too bad, but noticeable where it wasn’t there before.
A couple of things occurred to me (as I was doing my backward stretches).
Firstly, it is much easier to manage at this stage of stiffness and a little bit of pain than when it gets more critical. Because I have the knowledge, I can change and improve it much more quickly without going really south and having to claw my way back.
Secondly, it is so much more convenient doing extension in standing exercises and exercises that are convenient to do, than having to do extension in lying.
When things are more serious and acute, often there isn’t a choice and you need to do a lying version of the exercises. That is a whole lot more inconvenient, but is usually required often in the early stages.
So the bottom line is this – it is much easier, quicker, cheaper to sort a problem out BEFORE it gets serious.
The way that most of us think is ‘I’ll wait and see if it gets better, I don’t have time, I don’t want to waste their time’ or some variant of that.
The other useful message is – if you know how to read the signs early and you know how to do the preemptive stuff early, you can prevent things getting bad.
And now I’m going to stand up and do my exercises.
