Stuck in an office all day? Get unstuck. Photo: Shutterstock
How you allocate your time out of the water is just as important to me. I take it personally when I see people jogging around their surfboard in circles, and doing the odd tricep and rhomboid stretch in some vague notion of a warm up (you know who you are).
Have you ever seen an olympic swimmer jogging around the pool before their assault on the 50m freestyle world record? No? Then you probably don’t need to either. Every time I see this happen, I take it as a personal failure that this message still is not getting out there. How you allocate your time pre and post surf is just as important to me.
So with Part Two (read Part One here) of my “Stretching Tips For The Office Bound Surfer” I wanted to do something completely different. Instead of simply telling you the names and a very brief description of exercise as I normally would, I wanted to do more, AND to give away more than I usually do. This series of movements can easily replace your “tour de surfboard,” but is just as useful if you are locked up in your neck, shoulders and back for whatever reason.
In this video, I actually take you through a simple, big bang, fully-led bodyweight mobilization class.
If you are stuck in an office all day, or are just locked up and looking for something simple, effective, and quick that you can do daily, I invite you to follow along. Just let me know what you think.
Here are the guidelines:
1. I want you to perform this every damn day for a minimum period of 2 weeks. There are only 3-5 reps of each exercise, which means that what we are trying to do is to create a training effect through consistency.
2. Look to see improvement between each session, not neccessarily each rep. We are using mobilizations in this video, not stretches, so this is more a gentle battle of millimeters as opposed to larger results that you would typically feel from Contract-Relax style stretches I demonstrated in Part One.
3. Work only within a comfortable range of motion (for all the reasons I point out in Points 1 and 2); and
4. Make each movement as smooth, deliberate and effortless as you possibly can. Repetition is the mother of skill, as long as there is skill in the repetition.
Mobilizations are very different to stretching, and require very little effort to get done. The aim is to encourage greater blood flow through your tissues, which comes with the added benefit of bringing nutrition into your tired or overworked neck and shoulders, but also helps carry waste product away. If you find that your joints get very little movement throughout the day, then this can be a perfect start.
This is totally cookie-cutter, so a “one-size-fits-all” strategy often doesn’t fit all sizes. That means that some of these exercises might not be suitable or just too aggressive for you, so if in doubt, send me an email and ask before trying anything that might aggravate any pre-existing conditions you may have. Having said that, they are pretty basic.
I believe that a combination of regular stretching, mobilizations and exercise is the best method of correcting office funk, but this is great way to get started.
The aim of this program, just like in Part One, is to learn to decompress the head, neck, shoulders and spine in a way that offsets the issues created from sitting on your arse all day, or to offset many hours paddling on your board.
So give it a try for two weeks, and let me know how you get on. If you like this video, please let me know, and as long as it doesn’t take too much time, I will do more just like this for you, and anyone else you would like to share this with!
