An essential daily routine of Controlled Articular Rotations (CARs) for optimal joint health.
Your teeth are important and you care for them by brushing morning and night and flossing (hopefully). My hope is that after you read this blog post, you will find the significance of taking care of your ‘meat vessel’ and start a daily routine to care for your joint health.
First, let’s define a joint. The most common in the body are called synovial joints. Joints are the connection at the end of bones and a sac called the joint capsule surrounds them. Joints move against one another to produce movement. A healthy joint lubricates the tissue and space within the capsule. A joint’s role is to express movement.
The joint capsule is the deepest ‘stuff’ of your joints. This is the place where we want to increase nutrients and effect change.
Healthy functioning joints are critical to be pain free and do all the things you want to do.
How, you might ask, do you keep a joint healthy? As mentioned above, a joint’s ‘role’ is to express movement. Force is the language our cells speak, and movement is what we say. Movement is lotion and lubrication. Movement is the most important anti-inflammatory you have.
Does your Lifestyle fit your Exercise Routine?
The problem therefore lies in our lifestyle. For most people, a day consists of sitting in a car, at a desk, and on a couch with hips at 90 degrees of flexion. It’s no wonder that most people don’t have good range of motion in their hips and shoulders.
As biomechanist Katy Bowman explains, ‘Exercise is often un-natural and repetitive forces, layering poor movement patterns, creating compensations and over-using a few joints, leaving us with more pain’.
To get ‘fit’ you may spend an hour of your day to ‘x’ fitness routine. However, that one-hour is not enough to undo the other fifteen hours of your day, and exercise can be part and parcel of the problem.
Dr. Andreo Spina, founder of Functional Range Systems is famously quoted, it’s not the exercise routine that we are doing as such, but the bodies we are doing them in.
Functional Range Conditioning has made an imprint on the fitness and training community over the past years. The premise is simple – control yourself. The mantra is control, create, and expand. Coming from a yoga background, flexibility is in good supply, we typically do what we are good at. The only ‘problem’ with flexibility is that it is passive. Mobility on the other hand is having articular strength and neurological control.
Flexibility = passive
Mobility = active
The backbone of the FRC system is a daily joint mobility routine, called CARs, which stands for Controlled Articular Rotations. By moving your joints through their biggest range of motion daily and exploring their outer ranges, it will help to bring nutrients into the joints. It also helps to remind your nervous system that you’re using these ranges of motion, so that it doesn’t take it away.
Why? Force is the language cells speak – and movement is what we say.
If you don’t use it, you will lose it.
Our bodies are smart and we have an efficient nervous system that doesn’t want to exert extra energy if it doesn’t have to. So if you never move your joints through their entire range, you will end up losing that range of motion.
Doing your CARs every day will remind your nervous system, ‘hey, I’m using this; don’t take it away from me’. Doing your CARs daily will help to maintain your current range of motion, it will help to improve articular health and longevity, it also helps you to screen for any movement problems, and it’s great for rehabbing an injury you may have sustained.
It’s the perfect accompaniment to whatever it is you like to do. Learn to control your joints and ranges of motion. Develop articular independence before joint interdependence.
I still love yoga, movement practices, and strength training. My style of teaching has changed over the years, but I still incorporate yoga, mindfulness, and various smart training techniques from the FRC systems.
Learn your simple every day CARs Routine
Hopefully you’re psyched about doing your CARs now, here’s a link to my youtube that goes through a basic CARs routine in detail. See the video above.
If you want more to learn how to be pain-free, optimise your breathing, and movements so that you can do all the things you love to do, better. I can help you! I teach online and in-person sessions to help people move better, feel better, and do life better.
Contact me now to find out how.
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