We tend to blame everything on arthritis when sometimes the real problem is a lack of flexibility.
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Dr. Jeffrey Guild (00:00:00) –
“It may not have been the osteoarthritis; it may have been just the lack of flexibility overall. I can tell you, for myself, again, I’m not 40 yet, as of this recording, and if I don’t stretch for a while, I start getting aches and pains. I was starting to get that, you know, probably 10 years ago. The reason that I’m able to stay pretty much pain-free, for the most part, is because of the amount of stretching I do and the amount of corrective exercises that I do.
Why do I do this? Because I do this for a living and I love it. I do corrective exercises and I geek out on it. You know, I could do entire presentations on corrective exercises. This is just what I love to do, so I’ve been doing it since I was 22 years old. But, most 22-year-olds are not doing those sorts of things. Now, there’s plenty of other things I should have been doing when I was 22 that I didn’t, but that’s a whole other story altogether.
The corrective exercises, this flexibility, all that – the younger you start, the better. And the more you’re less likely to have joint problems and you’re going to have a lot less joint pain and achiness if you are stretching on a regular basis.
Okay, so we’ve covered a lot of things going on in the legs. And, that’s not everything, but it gives you a good start. Now, what about the upper body? How can the tightness and lack of flexibility in the upper body cause walking problems?
So, if you think about chest tightness, what that does is it tends to pull our shoulders forward. And that, of course, contributes to that vicious cycle of the person being pulled forward, their head being pulled forward, their upper back rounding. And that basically causes them to go into that forward vicious cycle, which can affect their balance and then contributes to more muscle tightness because they keep going forward.
So, chest tightness, in and of itself -“
