Movement Challenge – Day Six
Our movement challenge – day six brings us something new and fun. We hope the movements have motivated you to begin a more active lifestyle. Today’s movement is a little harder than many of the previous challenges, but it is an essential part of having greater mobility. Remember to keep getting in those steps and be aware of your body. Awareness of our current limitations and fitness is a critical part of learning to improve our movement. Don’t forget to head back to Day 1 if you are new to the challenge.
Welcome to Day six of the movement challenge. I hope everything has been going great so far. Today we are going to introduce a new move. It’s actually really fundamental to how we move and how we do everything in life. So we are going to introduce the deep squat. The deep squat is helpful for getting out of a chair correctly and getting up off the floor correctly. It’s going to help increase mobility in your hips, in your knees and ankles. It really is good to help stabilize any kind of ankle weakness. So we are going to go ahead and get started. I’ll have Dr. Perkins kind of get in position here. She’s going to drop down into this deep squat and we want to make sure there are a few things going on. So she goes down. Notice she’s keeping a neutral back, and you’ll feel some pressure on the knees but it’s okay if you have a little bit of pressure. You don’t want any pain, though. And also, we want to try and keep our feet as forward as possible. It’s okay if they don’t go forward at the beginning. And also we want to try and get our heels on the floor. For a lot of us, that’s not going to happen. So Dr. Perkins is going to come up a little bit to show what most of us are going to be like. When you start coming down, you’re going to be with your feet up, and that’s fine. The more you practice, the more that’s going to drop down. The other thing you don’t want to do is you don’t want to arch your back. You want to keep a nice balance. You don’t want to fall forward or fall backward, okay. So this is how it should be. I’m going to have her come up. Perfect. For some people, that’s not going to be possible, especially if you’ve had knee injuries or if you have been stiff for a long time and sedentary. So one thing we can do is hold on to a bar or a great way to do this is going to a door jam. Go to a door, hold on to the jam and do this as well. She’s going to use this helpful guide to go down as far as she can. Now maybe you can only go down a few inches. Maybe that’s it. That’s a great place to start if that’s all you have. Another great thing you can do is put a chair behind you. So if you’re worried about a fall, you can have the chair to sit down on. But you’re practicing sitting correctly by doing this squat. And the better you get, the stronger our knees, the more flexibility in our ankles, the more we can continue to go down to the floor until eventually, we can do a normal deep squat. So, perfect. As I said, we can use a door jam. Essentially you would hold on to the door like this and that allows you to go down safely. Now if you can do all that fine, and you can get down into a deep squat without a problem, you can actually increase the difficulty by actually walking while you do deep squats. Some places refer to this as a gorilla walk. So Dr. Perkins is going to get down into a squat again. Get down into position, you’re going to put your arms straight out front, keep your elbows locked and straight, and then you’re going to walk. What this will do is really put a lot of stretch into the back of the ankle, the Achilles, and even the hip flexor, low back, and hips. So that’s a great way to increase the difficulty of the movement if you want to really do it. I hope this helps. The deep squat is really an important movement if we want to increase our flexibility and our strength, and it’s a great thing to do. I hope you guys can start working on this, and you should also be working on the other movements we showed you earlier in the week. Keep working on your steps. Our goal is 10,000 steps by tomorrow, so we will see you tomorrow.