My hips are very cranky lately and instead of just being annoyed most of the time and stretching when I think of it, I have decided to actually try to make them happier by doing some targeted exercises and stretches and the like.
Yes, I know that a problem with my hips is not an isolated thing – I probably have a whole series of cranky muscles that need some kind attention – but I also know that my brain loves falling into the trap of ‘if I can’t do everything, I won’t do anything’ so I have decided to start by focusing on my hips.
And since I also know that my brain gets easily bored exercise routines, I have decided that ‘focusing on my hips’ means ‘trying all kinds of different videos to see which ones my hips like best.
So, here is my ‘happier hips’ experiment:
Try each of these videos once over the next two weeks and see which ones we (me and my hips) like best.
Updates will follow as events warrant.
A video called ‘7 Tight Hip Stretches’ from the Ask Dr Jo YouTube channel. The still image shows Dr. Jo, a woman with light skin whose brown hair is pulled back in a bun, sitting on a mat on the floor with her hands on the mat behind her. Her right leg is bent at the knee with her foot on the floor and her left leg is bent with her knee facing the camera and her left foot on her right knee. She is facing the camera and she is mid-sentence.
a short YouTube video called ‘Tight Hips? You’re not alone’ from the Yoga with DJ channel. In the still image a person in a grey tank top and black shorts. with black framed glasses with their hair in a bun on top of their head sits on a black yoga mat with the soles of their feet touching each other and their knees pointed to the sides of the mat (butterfly pose), and they are using their hands to push downwards on their knees. There are shelves of plants behind them and their yoga mat is on light-coloured parquet flooring.
a video called ‘Gentle Yoga for Tight Hips’ from Yoga with Adriene. In the still image, Adriene, a woman with long dark hair and a happy expression is wearing back leggings and a black tshirt as she sits on a yoga mat that is divided long ways into two shades of green. Her hands are resting behind her on the mat and she is leaned back slightly. Her left foot is on the floor and her left knee is bent (pointed toward the ceiling) Her right leg is bent, her right foot is resting on her left leg, and her right knee is pointing away from the viewer. Her dog Benji is sleeping in front of her but near the back wall and a table with a plant and a decorative item on it is behind her to her right.
a video called ‘Hip CARs//For IT Band Syndrom, Piriformis Syndrome etc’ from Tom Morrison. The left hand side of the image is red with text reading ‘What is The Best Hip Mobility Drill Ever!?and the right shows Tom Morrison, a man with long hair wearing a black shirt and dark pants and a woman in a black shirt and grey capri leggings with her blonde hair in a high ponytail standing next to the frame of a machine at the gym. She is holding on to the frame and tipping her leg to one side to stretch her hips.
another Yoga with Adriene video. This one is called ‘Hip Mobility – Open Your Hips – 13 Minute Yoga practice and there’s still image shows her lying on her back on a light green yoga mat and she is wearing a one piece exercise suit that is both a tank top and leggings. She is making the figure 4 position with her legs. Her right leg is bent with the knee pointing away from the viewer and her right ankle is resting on her left thigh as she pulls her left thigh toward her with her hands .
This video from Oscar Moves is called ‘Give Me 4 Minutes. I’ll Fix Your Tight Hips.’ Still image is divided into halves. On the left, he is wearing a dark shirt and shorts and he is pushing down on his right leg near the knee with both hands. On the right side, he is wearing a green shirt and dark shorts and he is sitting with the souls of his feet together and his knees pointing out to either side in butterfly position and he looks relaxed.
I have written About this before. So has Sam, multiple times, all the way back to 2018. Our focus was on bikes more generally and how they can help with disabilities, but three years ago I predicted an e-bike would be in my future. It was and I love it.
However, it was out of service for nearly a year with some sort of electrical issue. I hadn’t worried about it over the winter. But then I had to take it to Toronto for repair, only getting it back when my son brought it with him for Thanksgiving,
Meanwhile, my knees have been sufficiently sore that I didn’t feel like biking much this year. Plus I’m still nervous about biking too hard or too long with my heart murmur. And I have needed my car much more because I combine work with errands involving hauling stuff, or visiting my mom who lives almost 30 km away.
Getting the e-bike back felt like a gift, especially when two swimming friends invited me for a little ride. One cycles everywhere and the other does triathlons. Did I mention I have barely ridden in a year?
I didn’t have to worry about keeping up or overdoing it; the little boost from my battery was just enough.
Me with my e-bike, along with Florence and Sumiko, enjoying a glorious late afternoon near the Ottawa River.
We rode for a little over 20 kilometres, with frequent stops to admire the views on both sides of the Ottawa and Gatineau rivers. And of course there was ice cream.
Me in a bright blue shirt, enjoying an ice cream cone It was a locally-made green apple flavour.
Ok, for a change, this is not referring to me taking charge of the meeting or the performance, this is a much more literal situation.
Not completely literal, of course. I am not actually reclaiming floorboards that I once owned. Anyway, let’s carry on!
Have you ever heard the quote, attributed to various writers, about how the goal of writing is to figure out what we already know?
Today’s post is a prime example of that.
I started out writing a post about my Monday morning exercise and then discovered something I hadn’t realized I knew:
I haven’t been spending enough time sitting close to the floor in the past few months and it is having a negative effect on my whole body.
Before our Christmas tree went up in December, my living room floor featured a huge blue exercise mat with a big, green, circular cushion (over 3ft in diameter) on top of it and a bolster cushion on top of that. (Yes, in case you couldn’t guess, my house is much more functional than pretty.)
And, in general, when spending time on the main floor of our house, I would either sit at the kitchen table or I would sit on on the big cushion, the mat, or on the bolster. (Our main floor is pretty open and the living room/kitchen are kind of in an L shape so it’s equally possible to watch tv, hang out, or do whatever in either location.)
I really liked having both options and I found the mat/cushion combo much more interesting than sitting on a couch or chair. (Yes, my ADHD insists that even sitting must be interesting to my brain.)
And when I chose the mat/cushion combo I was always sitting in different positions, at different heights, and either completely relaxing (i.e. lying limbs akimbo like a pile of goo) or doing some stretches/moving around a bit.
Having different resting positions as part of my routine was really good for me.
Not only did it tend to make me aware of which parts of my body needed some extra attention but it also made using a variety of muscles a much more automatic part of my day. It was a low-key use of those muscles but I was still using them.
However, when we put up all the decorations this past Christmas, I put the big cushion and the mat down into the basement hallway to keep the living room from feeling too crowded.
And, unfortunately, I really liked the way the room looked without those things in the middle of the floor so…
Both the mat and the cushion stayed downstairs for ages and I didn’t really think about the things I *wasn’t* doing because they weren’t in their usual spot.
A couple of weeks ago when I was having people over and I wanted an extra place to sit so I dragged the big cushion back to the living room. It didn’t seem to take up as much space without the mat under it so I left it there in the living room.
I quickly noticed that the living room felt more inviting to me and I was choosing to sit on that fairly low cushion instead of on the kitchen chair that I had been defaulting to over the last few months.
It was pretty good for a while, even without the mat, but then Khalee went from occasionally climbing on the cushion to deciding that this circular chummy was actually *hers* instead of mine. So, instead of lying on it for a few minutes here and there, it became her first choice of resting spots in the living room.
Poor KP looks worried in this photo but I think she got her taxes done after. (Ha!) image description: a photo of Khalee, a medium-sized, light-haired dog, curled into a semi-circle on a large green circular cushion with a rectangular bolster cushion (in a blue pillow case decorated with green frogs) behind her. She looks a little worried or sad but not actually in distress.
Now, as much as I love KP, I am allergic to her fur, even with an allergy pill. Thanks to the increased time she was spending on the cushion, my allergies would arise in a fury if I tried sitting on it.*
So, I went back to not using the cushion at all but the fact that it is in the living room keeps drawing my attention. (FYI, the fact that it was behind me when I was exercising this morning actually led to this post.)
And, now that I think of it, my body has been pretty cranky lately and some of that crankiness is definitely related to the fact that I am just not getting that same range of motion and variety of activities/sitting positions in my day-to-day over the past few months.
And that happened because I changed the seating ‘geography’ of my living room
When the cushions and the mat were there, it was an automatic thing for me to choose to sit low to the floor in a variety of ways for part of every day.
Sitting low meant that I was doing a lot of getting up and down from the floor, shifting into different positions, doing a bit of stretching, and just generally not staying in the same spot for a long time.
But, for a while now, I have been mostly staying on the kitchen chair and staying relatively still. (Why aren’t the living room chairs or couch interesting? No idea! It’s a mystery to me, too.)
Right now, in order to comfortably sit low to the floor, I would have to make a conscious choice and move things (and a dog) around and as someone with a busy brain who has trouble prioritizing, it’s pretty hard to choose to do that because there are extra steps involved.
It’s annoyingly easy to get out of the habit of doing things, isn’t it?
I had noticed that my body was cranky but I hadn’t noticed the change in my habits.
What if it had taken me longer to pay attention?
It seems like a really slippery slope to becoming the kind of person who doesn’t get down on the floor at all.
And that, in turn, could be a slippery slope to becoming a person who *can’t* get down on the floor.
I mean, I understand that our mobility changes as we age and that not all movements will continue to be available to me but I sure as hell don’t want to lose any everyday mobility options just because I left a mat in a different room.
So, I have to remove the obstacles between me and my plan to spend more time sitting close to the floor.
I have to move the mat back upstairs.
I have to put the bolster cushion back in the living room.
I have to wash the cover on the big cushion and once its clean, I need to put a blanket over it so most of the dog hair will be on that instead of the cushion cover.
I must retake the floor!
PS – I was singing Was (Not Was)’s Walk the Dinosaur in my head all while I was writing this post. I may open the door, I will get on the floor, but I will probably just walk the dog. I don’t have a harness for a dinosaur.
*And that doesn’t even address the fact that she now considers it her space and will stand there staring at me if I sit on it. Yes, I am a people and she is a dog so I can technically overrule her on the question of cushion ownership but it’s very hard to enjoy sitting cross-legged on the cushion with her staring woefully at me – or worse, poking her nose into my face – from the side. I’ll have to figure something out. 😉
I’m sure that, by now, we all know what my brain is like.
It either wants me to do all of the exercise things or none of the exercise things. It either thinks that I can’t possibly do enough or that there’s really no point in doing just a little.
Even though I know better, my brain gives me pushback on these things every damn time.
BUT
Recently, I’ve had some successes.
Last week, I wrote about how I managed to reframe my muscle soreness into a positive sign.
This week, I wanted to tell you about how I have coaxed my brain into believing that mobility exercises “count.”
This photo has nothing to do with my post. Unless you choose to believe that Khalee is trying to convince me that all movement counts. Or maybe she’s suggesting that I should take a nap? Photo credit: Steve Drodge Image description: A photo of my light haired dog, Khalee, resting with her head on my pillow. The photo is mostly of her face and she looks kind of pensive. My pillowcase is light blue flannel and is covered with a variety of monsters and the word ‘scary’ is printed here and there across the fabric.
Obviously, intellectually, I know that mobility exercises count. Everything counts when it comes to movement (and to building new habits!)
But I’ve always had a lot of trouble making myself do them because there’s no immediate payoff – they don’t FEEL like they count. They’re annoying and they are boring and it takes a lot of work to make myself stop what I am doing and start those exercises.
Now, despite all that, I’ve actually done pretty well for the last couple of months with doing one hip mobility drill before bed. And most days in March I’ve managed to do one shoulder mobility drill in the morning. A good start but it has often taken way more energy than I’d like to make myself do the drills.
And while my hips and shoulders have shown a little improvement, I knew that I needed to do more if I wanted a bigger improvement.
So I needed to figure out how to make it easy to get started, how to do enough to give me more results without wearing myself out. And I needed to find a way to make sure that I could tel that my exercises counted.
So, I have been doing the good habit-building technique of adding them to something I’m already doing. i.e. I’m doing my mobility exercises before or after my Fitness + exercise sessions each day.
So that’s one part of the trick – I am already in exercise mode so it feels pretty easy to add in my hip circles or foot stretches or whatever.
The second part involves making sure those exercises feel like they count…or at least, making sure they are counted.
I hate counting reps (it makes everything feel like it takes waaaaaay longer) so I usually set a timer for anything I need to do over and over. Using a timer didn’t help me convince my brain that the exercises counted though, because I was still only seeing a few minutes here and there.
But tracking with the fitness app on my watch has let me overcome that issue. Now I choose a video of the kind of exercises I want to do, I tell my watch that I’m doing a workout in the ‘other’ category, and it starts recording my minutes.
This makes all the difference in the world for my brain because the video length lets me know that I won’t actually be stuck doing these exercises forever (even if it feels that way) and using my watch to track it as an ‘other’ workout means that I can see how the short sessions are adding up to something bigger.
At the end of the day or the end of the week, I can see how much time I spent doing ‘other’ workouts and it feels tangible and useful instead of piecemeal and pointless.
By using my watch and a video, I can spend less time thinking about when and how to do these exercises and more time actually doing them. This process is way less frustrating because even though I have described this as tricking myself, I am actually working WITH my brain instead against it and that means I require far less energy to get each exercise session started.
Do you have any tricks you use to get your exercise sessions started?
Do you also have trouble making yourself do mobility or rehab exercises?
Do you have a favourite YouTube channel or Instagram account for these kinds of exercises?
As a kid, my bike was for fun. As an adult, I have always thought of myself as a commuter cyclist. I was never interested in road racing, or cross-country cycling or any of the other specialized cycling options involving fancy bikes and Lycra.
I have realized, however, I actually need my bike as a mobility device. I live close enough to my work place that I can walk. Except:
when it is too hot
or too cold
or when the sidewalks are icy
or when the sidewalks are unploughed.
or I have my laptop and my lunch and who know what else to haul in a backpack.
or when it’s raining
or when my feet (knees, hips) are sore.
My poor sore feet. The left one has a scar from past bunion surgery. The right one show a growing bunion that will eventually need surgery.
I am not the only one. People who have e-bikes use them for far more than short leisurely rides. A recent study about e-bike use in Norway found that “The people who bought e-bikes increased their bicycle use from 2.1 kilometers (1.3 miles) to 9.2 kilometers (5.7 miles) on average per day; a 340% increase. The e-bike’s share of all their transportation increased dramatically too; from 17% to 49%, where they e-biked instead of walking, taking public transit, and driving. You can read more about the study here.
Melissa and Chris Bruntlett are Canadian urban mobility advocates and authors of Building the Cycling City, The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality. In their view “Cycling is, for many people, a powerful mobility tool. Moreover, building wide cycle paths also helps create space for people that are on tricycles, adapted cycles, mobility scooters, and other modes.”
Adult tricycle with two child seats on the back and a wire basket on the handlebars. Photo is by Peter Biczok, who spotted it in Hungary.An older woman with her hair in a ponytail and wearing a large knapsack rides an electric tricycle in Leiden, Netherlands. The tricycle is laden with packages and bags in the back, on the front and from the handlebars. Photo originally shared by Melissa and Chris Bruntlett on Twitter.A woman rides a hand-powered adapted electric tricycle in Amsterdam. She is accompanied by a husky-type dog on a leash. Photo originally shared by Melissa and Chris Bruntlett on Twitter.
For now, I am perfectly content with my regular winter and summer bikes to get around. But I can definitely see a an electric bike or a regular/electric cargo bike or trike in my future.
In an effort to spend less time sitting in a chair, I have been experimenting with standing, sitting on the floor, and lying down while I work, read, or watch TV and as I was going through all of those different positions while writing the other day, I reminded myself of this improv game:
Link to a video from the UK version of an improv TV show called ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway?’ The image shows three men in blazers on a TV set, one is sitting, one is lying down, and one is standing.
I think I was less awkward than that but I can never be sure. 😉
Once upon a time, I had a standing desk. This was before my ADHD was diagnosed and I did find it quite useful because I could fidget a fair bit while doing my work. However, once I really dug into what I was working on, I would end up standing in the same position for long periods of time and my body was not a fan of that.
In fact, I would actually end up with most of my weight on my right leg, my right hip jutted out a bit, with my left foot only lightly touching the floor to give me balance. I’m pretty damn sure that standing habit contributed to my overall challenges with my right hip.
Fairly accurate depiction of my standing desk days. My office wasn’t quite as damp as this, though. Image description: a flamingo stands on one leg in a wetland, the other leg is slightly raised and its knee is bent.
I kept a standing desk for years but at some point, I realized that having to stand up to work had become one more obstacle between me and my tasks. It was mostly subconscious. It wasn’t like I was thinking ‘UGH! I have to stand up? Blech.’ But, over time, it was becoming harder to get started and once I dug into that feeling a bit I realized that standing up was part of the problem.
So, I went back to a sitting desk but whenever I thought of it I would stand up to do voice dictation or I would prop my keyboard on something so I could type while standing. This, combined with a timer app that helps me focus for short periods and then take a break to move around a little, has helped me get important things done without sitting still for too long.
And I often bring my yoga mat down to the living room when my husband and I are watching a show so I can do stretches or just sit on the floor while we watch.
In January, once they went on sale, I bought a reading mat and bolster cushion so I could be even more comfortable lying or sitting on our laminate floor while I read, watch TV, chat with my family or even attend webinars where I don’t have to be on camera.
So, I was already open to the idea of spending more time at floor level when I came across a video (below) a few weeks back from someone who always works from the floor. I have occasionally done some journaling or drawing while sitting on my mat but I hadn’t tried doing any extended work from the floor. If it did cross my mind, I probably dismissed it because I didn’t want to spend any extra time hunched over during the day.
Before you watch this, I want to be clear that I am not necessarily endorsing the claims they make about the benefits of floor sitting and that I really wish they had said ‘dawn of humanity’ instead of ‘dawn of man.’
Link to video from a company called Plant Based Partners. The video is about the benefits of sitting on the floor to work and the still image shows a person with long hair sitting on the floor with one leg curled into a cross-legged position and the other folded into the position your leg holds in a squat. The person is sitting on a mat and is surrounded by low office furniture – a table, a credenza and a printer table. A small dog is also sitting on a soft mat nearby.
Once I saw the video though, I clued into the fact that I had more options besides hunching over or lying on my stomach to write in my notebook like a movie teenager – I could raise my work surface to create a more comfortable working position.*
So, now I have a whole variety of ways to get comfortable while I work or relax and I feel better for it. Switching positions during the day gets me moving but even when I am staying still I don’t end up holding the same posture for an extended period of time.
My body likes that and so does my brain.
Do you alternate positions during your work or relaxation time? Which ones work best for you?
Since all of our bodies work differently, I know that my options may not work for you but I would be interested to know what does.
Do you schedule a time to shift? Do you choose positions based on task? Or do you just move when you get uncomfortable?
I can’t rely on noticing that I am uncomfortable, sometimes ADHD hyperfocus gets the best of me, so I make a plan for what tasks I am going to do where, and I use a timer.
*Meanwhile, if I had consciously decided to work on the floor, I would have had a full brainstorm of ideas about how to make it more comfortable. I hadn’t chosen to focus on it so my brain had just dismissed it without further consideration. Brains are such pests sometimes!
