Flexibility becomes increasingly essential as an individual ages. Thus, you will need to learn to remain flexible to make sure healthy aging. In this text, discover what can affect flexibility.
Knowing the aspects that may affect flexibility may be very essential, as flexibility is crucial to maintaining a superb quality of life. Below, you’ll discover the causes that the majority affect this range of movement.
Knowing the habits or actions that affect flexibility can aid you avoid them each day. Although it’ll be easier in some cases than in others, it’s definitely value a try!
Physical inactivity reduces flexibility
This is the #1 enemy of flexibility. Flexibility is a high quality that you will need to train, just as you do strength or endurance. If you spend all of your time in bed or sitting down, your muscles stay in the identical position and length and aren’t stimulated.
Just like lighting weights makes you strong, your body also adapts to this case. Therefore, in case your body adapts to being at rest and your muscles shorten, they’ll stay short. This will make it rather more difficult so that you can stretch them, which translates right into a progressive lack of flexibility.
Not stretching can affect flexibility
You all the time need to stretch after playing a sport or exercising. This is amazingly essential! Although you don’t all the time have to stretch beforehand, doing it afterwards is helpful.
When you play a sport, you place plenty of stress in your muscles and force them to contract and chill out repeatedly in a certain time frame. Thus, once you finish the activity, your muscles are tense and are inclined to retract.
But once you stretch, you tell your body that you just finished. You let it know that it may well chill out and be certain that the trouble you made doesn’t find yourself affecting your flexibility.
Lack of specific work
Apart from stretching after exercising or playing a sport, as we mentioned above, you will need to work to enhance your flexibility. Contrary to other qualities, this isn’t something you may simply improve by playing sports. In fact, experts are still conducting studies that seek to find essentially the most effective option to do it. One of them is the study published by the Andalusian Journal of Sports Medicine.
If you don’t wish to lose your flexibility, you’ve got to coach it by doing specific exercises. No matter what sport you play, adding an exercise to enhance your flexibility will do your body plenty of good. These varieties of exercises help de-stress and loosen the muscles, in addition to chill out the fascia and permit blood to flow freely throughout the body.
Age affects flexibility
Aging is totally unavoidable. We’re all aging! As you become old, your muscles are replaced by fat, which affects your physical abilities. According to a study published by the Health Research Journal of the University of Boyacáaging greatly affects flexibility.
Although you may’t stop aging, you may do other things to make sure well-being. Remember that a very powerful thing is to preserve your quality of life as you age. If you worked on improving your flexibility because you were young and proceed doing specific exercises for older people, you’ll have the option to avoid back pain and shoulder pain, amongst other discomforts.
In fact, certainly one of the the explanation why age tends to affect flexibility a lot is since it’s often accompanied by a sedentary lifestyle. If your muscles turn to fat and also you don’t move on top of that, the deterioration will probably be rather more pronounced.
Other aspects that affect flexibility
Women are naturally more flexible than men. This is the second unavoidable factor. Nevertheless, like age, it may well be neutralized to some extent. This signifies that it isn’t a determining factor. As such, a sedentary woman will probably be less flexible than a person who stretches after exercising or playing a sport.
The final factor that may affect flexibility is joint limitations. Whether as a consequence of surgery or joint problems (similar to arthritis or osteoarthritis, amongst other diseases), underlying conditions can limit mobility. This greatly reduces the probabilities of stretching, no matter whether your muscles are in shape or not.
Flexibility is a key aspect
As you may see, it’s crucial so that you can stay lively and stretch, throughout your entire life if possible. Pilates, yoga, or tai chi classes for seniors are currently highly regarded, and will help keep people flexible.
Remember that flexibility doesn’t just concern the muscles. If your muscles are shortened, they’ll pull on the bones and also you’ll find yourself affected by bone conditions.
In fact, should you get used to working with shortened muscles, once you make an effort wherein you’ve got to make a sudden stretch, you’re prone to suffer a muscle injury. Big muscles aren’t necessarily healthy. You need to be sure there’s a superb balance between strength, endurance, and suppleness.
What can affect flexibility? – Better with Health (as.com)
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to make sure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this text was considered reliable and of educational or scientific accuracy.
- F. Ayala, P. Sainz and A. Cejudo. Flexibility training: stretching techniques. Andalusian Journal of Sports Medicine. Volume 5, Issue 3, September 2012, Pages 105-112
- P. Calero and M. Chaves. Physiological changes in physical fitness in aging. Health research magazine, University of Boyacá. Volume 2, Issue 5, 2016
- E. Cyrino, A. Oliveira, J. Leite et al. Flexibility behavior after 10 weeks of weight training. Brazilian Journal of Sports Medicine, 10(4), 233-237, 2004.