Stretch for Instant Pain Relief

Now that I'm almost 67 and suffering from fibromyalgia and osteoarthritis, I'm not the exercise freak I used to be.  This is hard on me.  I want to exercise, but I manage to make myself miserable by doing it.  The exercise itself feels good enough; I love feeling my muscles work, and I love that warm, glowy feeling I get as juices start flowing.  The bad part comes later--typically an hour or two after I've finished my light workout. Arthritic shoulders ache, there's a pain in my knee that wasn't there before, and my wrist hurts from accidentally straining it too much.  All this, after maybe ten arm pulls with a yellow TheraBand, or four steps on and off the Bosu Ball.  It's gotten to the point where I find excuses not to go down to my basement gym in the morning, and one of them is the discomfort I now experience after even the mildest workout.

Hence, I've lost contact with my body, as if it was a Facebook friend that suddenly blocked me.

If you've read my book, Bucket List Weight Loss, you know one of the 11 tenets to success is "Gut Talk"--in other words, learning to dialogue with your body, not just with your mind.  Your body is an efficient machine which, left to its own devices, would function quite well if we learned to LISTEN to it.  But our minds and subconscious end up sabotaging many good dialogues we might have started with our bodies.  Our minds are the entities that tell us we want chocolate fudge frosted brownies, when our bodies are pleading for a simple glass of water.

After a long period of non-communication with my stiff and aging body, I started up a dialogue with it almost by accident one morning last winter.  It began when I got up at 6am to feed the dog and re-stoke the fireplace wood box.  The fireplace is raised about 18 inches off the floor and has a wide, deep hearth in front of it.  I opened the fireplace doors, inserted a piece of split larch, and swung the doors to the "almost closed" position so that the draft from the cracked doors would pull the remaining embers back into an open flame.  As I stood there half asleep, I placed my palms above my head and onto the chimney's warm rocks.  I leaned into the heat, let my head drop to my chin, and enjoyed the relaxing sensation of shoulder, back and leg muscles being stretched by shear gravity.  It was heaven.  I held the pose for about 30 seconds, then lowered my hands and let my upper torso gently drop farther and farther until my palms rested on the hearth.  I stood there, feeling the stretch of small muscles I'd forgotten I even had.  I flexed my shoulders up and down, ever so slowly and gradually, and felt a release of tension that started in the neck region and traveled all the way down to my calf muscles.  I dropped my head a little more, and my hamstrings suddenly said, "Hello!"

One little stretch led to another, until I was on a quest to see how many muscles I could wake up this quiet, gentle way.  As I slowly flowed from one position to another, I breathed deeply, bringing oxygen to the areas that were being stressed.

During this process, if something started to hurt, I'd immediately back off, mentally marking where and how the hurt occurred so I could avoid it the next time.  From yoga classes, I knew pain was a signal that something wasn't quite right, and that I should take care not to further aggravate it.

My morning "firestarter stretching" has now progressed to a routine that takes about 20 minutes to complete. I try to stretch the upper body first, then the lower torso and abs, and finally the legs, with special emphasis on hamstrings, psoas, and quadriceps  I throw in some heel stretching and flexing too, so I can better maintain my "heels down" position in the saddle.  Depending on time and energy, I might complete the whole stretching routine again before going upstairs to dress.  With more than 650 muscles in the human body,  it's not like I'll run out of stuff to stretch.

This isn't unlike a yoga session, except that I don't have to get up and down off the floor to keep pace with anyone else's set routine.  I'm not adding strengthening or balance exercises to it either.  Those I will do separately.  The stretching itself seems to help chronic pain as much as anything at this point.

I used to think "stretching" meant leaning up against a wall like runners do; it was the thing you were supposed to do before your real workout.  No doubt it still is for many folks.  But I now practice stretching for its own sake.  At 6:20 am, when I finish my stretching routine, I'm not going out for a job.  I go back to bed and enjoy a blissful nap!

Want an easy primer on healthful, sensible stretching?  Check out wikihow.com/Stretch. 
You'll find some easy non- intimidating starters with great illustrations.