Health blog Category: walking
What is the most underrated form of physical activity? Walking!
Definitions:
- Physical Activity: any movement that’s carried out by muscles, thus requiring energy
- E.g. walking from the front door of your house to the mailbox at the end of your driveway
- Exercise: planned, structured, and repetitive movement intended to improve or maintain health/fitness.
- E.g. Taking a ¼ mile walk around a track because you want to get your heart rate up
Benefits of Walking:
- Gentle mobility for the lumbar spine (low back): the rotational movement at your trunk keeps the joints in your back lubricated
- Bone Loading: when taking a step, we put force into the ground and the ground puts force back into us (if it didn’t exert force back into us, our feet would be sinking).
Common Hamstring Injuries
Before we even begin talking about common hamstring injuries, let’s talk about some anatomy and get an understanding of what the hamstring even is and what it helps us do!
Your hamstring is the group of muscles in the back of the leg. The hamstring is made up of 3 muscles including the:
- semitendinosus
- semimembranosus
- biceps femoris
These muscles help flex the knee and extend the hip.
Read full blogJoin us for National Walking Day on April 7th 2021!
Come Take a Walk with LSTC!
FREE event, FREE fun, and FREE Raffles!
WHEN: Wednesday, April 7th at 12:30PM
WHERE: Right here at LSTC (21251 Ridgetop Circle, Suite 140, Sterling, VA 20166)
WHAT: Let’s start spring off on the right foot! Come take a 30-minute walk with us to celebrate fitness! (MASKS REQUIRED)
Sign Up at: https://pt.loudounsportstherapy.com/WalkingDayRegistration2021
https://youtu.be/-OzRwPiuBD0
Tightness in Hamstrings
We’ve all been there, we spend a long time sitting and when we go to stand up and walk we feel a pull in the back of our thigh and feel like we can’t stand completely upright. Those tight muscles we feel stiffening up are our hamstrings. These are the muscles that we commonly feel to be tight or restricting with our motion in our legs or sometimes our lower backs. The hamstrings are a large muscle group made up of 3 muscles:
- semitendinosus
- semimembranosus
- biceps femoris
These muscles attach from the bottom of our pelvis to just below our knee.
Read full blogBone Health and Fitness by Walking
Walking is a great step to improve bone health and fitness. It is one of the easiest ways to get a workout and it offers many physical and mental health benefits. So, lace up your shoes and go for a walk.
Bones and Muscles Strength
Walking is a low impact exercise, which means that it is gentle on your joints. Unlike running, the amount of stress placed on your joints is much less when walking making it a great exercise alternative for those with knee, hip or back problems.
Read full blogKnees Hurting When You Get Up Off the Floor?
Getting onto and off the floor forces us to put our knees in a bent position and put significant force through the joint. It also requires good leg and hip strength to be able to push yourself up into a standing position again from the floor.
There are a few common knee problems that can contribute to pain, when getting off the floor.
They are as follows:
- Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome
- When your knee cap tracks improperly
- This can be caused by muscle imbalances, tight IT band, or poor quadricep control with walking or running.
Putting a Spring Back in Our Step
If you suffer from knee pain, arthritis, low back pain or other aches and pains that keep you from being active, there are things you can easily do to become more active and put a spring back in your step.
Change How You Sit
A lot of aches and pains relate to how we use our bodies in the day. Many back pain sufferers actually begin having back pain, because they sit too much.
Read full blogStay Active with These Low Impact Activities
Do you have the desire to stay active but your joints can’t seem to keep up with the stresses applied to it with higher impact exercises such as jogging and lifting weights?
A great way to continue to stay active throughout the entirety of your life is to practice low impact activities.
What is a low impact activity?
Low impact activities are those that put less pressure on your joints.
Read full blogPiriformis Syndrome is a Pain in the Butt
What is the piriformis?
The piriformis is an important muscle of the hip and glutes that helps to rotate your hips to the side and move your hip to the side. The muscle connects from an area on your femur to the sacrum which lies at the base of your spine. The sciatic nerve also flows through this area and with some people even goes underneath the muscles of the piriformis.
Read full blogWalk Away From Hip Pain
Walk Away From Hip Pain With Physical Therapy. Your hips, due to the amount of loading forces they take on throughout your lifespan, can be a common area of discomfort in the body. This condition known as arthritis is the “wear and tear” of your joint surfaces.
Hip pain can also be caused by some type of injury like a fall, sports injury or overuse/weakness of the soft tissues that support the hip.
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