Your daily routine to maintain joint strength and mobility to keep your body moving well. CARs stands for Controlled Articular Rotations. When doing this routine, you want to be pain-free – especially no pinching on the closed-angle side fo the rotation (short side). To get the most out of your CARs, make any part of your body that is not doing the motion rigid and stiff.
Injury Prevention
Floor Series
Everyone should be able to get up and down from the floor. Here are 5 options to do this common task with grace and ease. Want to learn more? Book a session with me at Koa Fit to get started.
Option #1
Option #2
Option #3
Option #4
Option #5
Kneed Relief?
Our activities can put some strain on our knees. At the end of a long hike, or maybe it was a bike ride, or maybe after working in the garden our knees can feel achy and sore. Grab a foam roller and try these 3 exercises to help bring some relief to your knees.
Do your knees need more love? There are 3 routines on the Koa Fit Online Platform for knee health and strength. Check them out here.
Grab a Tennis Ball and Go!
Hiking, biking, and playing through the summer is the best. But, between the miles on the trails and the miles in a car or plane, our lower legs can start to feel stiff. For your next adventure, pack a tennis ball and give these 3 moves a try.
Elbows Can Be a Pain
Who has a tweaky elbow? One of those twinges or aches that seem to almost go away, and then with one wrong pick-up or swing, the pain is back. For a lot of people, the position of their shoulders is the root cause of their elbow discomfort. Below is a set of 5 exercises, to be done in order and together, to help relieve minor aches or tweaks in the shoulders, elbows, and wrists. Done daily, noticeable changes will happen within 1-2 weeks. Try these out and share with your friends!
Also, check out my Online Platform for the Shoulder Strength Series that can help you incrementally build stronger shoulders fo injury mitigation.
Does Your Low Back Move?
To protect our low backs, it is important that we can generate a lot of power in our neutral spine position. But, unfortunately for us, life doesn’t always allow for us to move perfectly. That is why we need to train the low back’s capacity to move and to move while loaded.
When training this way, you are always walking the line. If you put too much load without building your body’s capacity up first, it will lead to injury. But, if we can train smart, and train our capacity and load together, then we become resilient. 🤩
Check out the 3 videos below to start moving your low back. They are in order of easiest (or lowest load) first and move to harder. Remember that when building capacity, the exercise may feel hard to do, but not due to weight like some other training you may have done. Stick with the exercise that feels challenging to do, before moving on to more load to keep your body safe.
If you are looking for full routines to help you get strong, check out the Koa Fit Online platform which includes 2 full-length routines for the low back + over 20 other videos to try. Click below to learn more.
May Mobility – Week Two
This week, we are looking at hip rotation. Try this hip internal rotation exercise to gain more mobility through the hip capsule. Then, follow it up with the cross-over step-up to strengthen that new mobility.
Hip Mobility Month – Week Two
This week, we are working on our hip rotation and our glute strength. Put these two exercise together for a great lower body warm-up before heading out on your hike, bike ride, or run.
Neck and Shoulder Month – Week One
This week, we are focusing on the internal rotation of the shoulders. A lot of people think they don’t want to work on internal rotation because their shoulders are rounded forward. However, it could be a lack of internal rotation that drags your shoulders, neck, and upper back forward. If you can’t move properly from the shoulder joint, everything else will have to move to compensate. Long story short, stop ignoring the shoulder capsule. Make sure it moves properly…in all directions.
Joint Health Month – Week Four
We are finishing our lat week of Joint Health Month focused on the knees.
A lot of the time, our exercises only focus in the knee in it’s most neutral position. In the first video, try this rotation and mobility exercise to find the full range of your knee. Explore how it moves so you can train smarter.
Our knees need the hamstring. Weak hamstring = weak knees. In the second video, try this version of a bridge to target the whole posterior chain system and start supporting those knees.
Brenna Backe 