3 Key Movements Over-50's Should Do Daily!

if you're over 50 there are three movements that you should do daily to improve your strength and your mobility and in this video I'm going to show you what those movements are and why they're so important if you don't know who I am my name is will harow and I'm the over 50s specialist physio here at HT physio INF farum and today we're going to be revealing three movements that over 50s should do every day to improve their health now I've chosen these three movements because they are all do with areas of the body that become weak and stiff and tight in people over the age of 50 and just doing these movements a couple of times a day is often enough to reverse that process now I understand that the over 50s category has a whole range of abilities so for each movement what I've tried to do is break the movement down into an easy component an intermediate and a more difficult one for our more advanced over 50s but that being said these movements are not going to be suitable for everyone this is just general information so make sure you get checked out by your healthc care professional to see if it's applicable to you and definitely avoid any of the movements that cause pain now that's being said let's have a look at the three movements so you can have a go at them at home the first movement that over 50 should do daily is the sit back squat and this is one of my favorite exercises for mobility of the back of the hips of the knees and of the ankles so I'm going to show you the different levels of difficulty of this movement now so all you need for this to work is something to hold on to like a kitchen work toop or the back of a chair something that isn't going to move when you start to pull against it so I'm going to use my bed here what we're going to do is put two hands on the bed like this leaning slightly forwards and then all we're going to do whilst holding on is sit back into it as if we're going to sit back into a chair and try and round the the back and sit back down towards the ground now you'll see here that this is like a stretch for lots of different parts of my body so when I'm going back like this I'm stretching my lower back as I start to bend what I'm doing now is I'm stretching the bottoms of my hips up into flexion so my knees are coming up towards me and my buttock is getting stretched and now I'm starting to stretch the quads and I'm also stretching the calf muscles at the back so it's such a nice combined movement you're going to work a lot of different parts of the body doing this but I appreciate not everyone's going to be able to do this so what we're going to do instead if you can't do this movement is we're going to break it up into a few chunks so the first thing we can try and do is just this part where we're just holding on to something and leaning back and this is going to give us a nice stretch in the lower back so if that's where you need to start that's absolutely fine to do that and that's definitely valid you're also going to work your hips slightly if you feel you can bring your body down towards your knees more that is going to increase the stretch and this would be where I would start if you don't have great knees so if your knees are sore you can see I'm only slightly bending my knees but I'm getting all of the benefit in my hips and in my back now if you find that you've got a bad back and you don't like to do this what you can do is you can keep the back nice and straight and just practice going down into these types of movements so this is like an upright squat again another Bri brilliant movement there's nothing wrong with doing this if you've got a bad back and you still want to work your hips and your knees and that will also help you with your ankles now what I like to do or tell people to do is you just play around in these movements probably for 2 or 3 minutes a day just getting into that position and holding it really rounding your back bringing your bottom as close to the floor as you can is a lovely way to get a stretch all over the body and maintain mobility in these key areas so the next exercise I'm going to show you how to do is called the overhead reach and this is a great exercise for improving shoulder mobility and mobility of the thoracic spine or midback so doing this a couple of times a day is key for these specific areas of the body so the exercise is quite simple you just need a wall I'm going to show you the simple way to do it first and then we're going to move on to more Progressive ways so many people over 50 don't have great shoulder Mobility so what we're going to do is we're going to work to improve this movement called flexion okay so we're going to stand facing a wall one hand on the wall like this with a good posture and you're going to start just by walking your fingers up the wall as high as you can go now for many people this exercise alone is going to be enough and it will improve your shoulder Mobility so if you feel stiffness here just stop here hold for a second you might gently just want to try and lean in slightly to the wall as long as it's painfree and it's safe for you to do so and then bring yourself back down like this so this is nice to just improve shoulder Mobility if you're very stiff now if you're incredibly stiff you might only be able to get your shoulder to here which is fine you just stop here for a minute hold it maybe just lean into the stiffness and then bring yourself back down and repeat a few times in a row but if you're a bit more advanced and you can quite easily get your hand up here what we're going to do next is walk closer to the wall until your nose is touching the wall so your nose is touching the wall like this still with a good posture you want to come quite close to the wall and then all we're going to try and do is keep that posture and lift your arm off the wall without lifting your nose away and then coming back down now this is a great exercise to build strength and stability in the shoulder in that last movement you'll also work on your thoracic spine control as well but the key here is to keep your neck relaxed we do that by keeping the nose resting gently on the wall and then just lifting that arm away hold for a second and then pop it back down I'll show you on the other side so again the nose stays on the wall we lift the arm as high as possible keep a good posture what we want to do is just squeeze the bum together as well just before we lift the arm so squeeze your glutes and then lift away you can probably see this arm is a touch stiffer for me that's because this arm is the one at the moment which is I've made a little bit sore with some of my own exercises so we're just going to work on this one a little bit longer until it starts to loosen up and until I can regain control over that joint so that's a great exercise to do spend a couple of minutes on each side and that will really really improve your shoulder mechanics and stiffness in the Upper Limb and give you healthier shoulders as a result then the final movement that over 50 should do daily is hip rotation now as we get older the hips become stiffer the ligaments tighten around the hips and if we lose cartilage in the process of arthritis we can lose the ability to rotate the hips and then that can be the first signs of things going wrong for someone in their hip joint so if we want to avoid unhealthy hips as we get older this is a key exercise to do daily it's very very simple we're going to do it lying down on your back like this and what you're going to do is straighten one leg and leave the want to be worked bent like this then we're going to bring the leg up to 90° so we've got a 90° angle between the thigh bone and your body the exercise is two stages and it's very very simple first thing we're going to do is we're going to turn the leg bringing the shin bone across the body as far as we can just till we reach The Natural end and then we're going to go the other way come back to neutral and then rotate outwards now you can see that I've basically got a line going down my leg like this so my leg is not moving it's just turning and the thing that's doing the rotating is actually in my hip so even though it's the shin bone that looks like it's moving the movement is all occurring from the hip joint this is like the pivot point and these two directions of rotation you might find or be surprised to find that one of them on one side is very very stiff and the other one moves quite well and that's the early sign that stiffness is setting in but if you start to work on it like this just going from one to the other as long as it's painfree to do so it will improve over time now for many people this can be quite fatiguing because what we're doing is we're working muscles or isolating muscles that aren't used to being isolated but if we do it consistently they will become stronger so that's that side let's have a look at the other side so we bend the leg up like this the line of force is going straight down and then that's like your pivot point so you're rotating across cross like this and then you're going to go the other way like that and you can see that movement there for me feels a bit stiffer which means I should probably spend longer working on medial rotation which is turning the thigh inwards like that and then coming back out into external which I'm quite good at now as a side note you might find that most men tend to be quite stiff going into medial rotation and that's because re version of the hip is more common in men and women tend to be a bit better in their hip rotation but both sexes should practice this at least for a couple of minutes a day just to keep that hip mobility good doesn't take that much practice to start to see improvements but the benefits on your mobility and your walking and your strength are definitely worth it so those are the three movements that over 50s should do daily I often give these movements out to my clients and if they do them over time what it does is improve their Mobility help them move with less pain and better strength and leads to better overall health so if you give them a go I hope they help you please do drop a comment below let me know how you got on if you gave them a try and if you want to get more from me you can pick up a copy of my book it's called thriving Beyond 50 and you can find it on Amazon using the link below anyway thank you so much for watching I appreciate your time and watching these videos and I'll see you on the next one

Channel: HT Physio – Over-Fifties Specialist Physio

Views: 1,108,673

Keywords: Physiotherapy, Knee Pain, Health, Exercise, Wellness, senior health, Over fifty, total knee replacement, physical therapy, knee pain, physical therapy (medical specialty), bob and brad, athlean X, OA knee, knee bend, walking, knee pain when walking, knee strength, strong legs, improve mobility, better walking, gait, falls, balance, prevent falls, vestibular, hunch, walking problems, posture, best exercise, exercises for seniors, key movements, movement, mobility

Id: QOIhn8Hjb1Y

Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 12 2024