Everyday Mobility Habits For Stronger Joints

If your knees ache, your hips feel tight, or your shoulders complain every time you reach overhead, the fix might be simpler than you think. We’re talking mobility for midlife in a way that actually fits real life: small “movement snacks” you can stack into your day so your joints move better without adding another full workout to your already packed schedule. 

We start with the big idea of mobile versus stable joints and why the body compensates when the wrong areas get stiff. When feet and hips lose mobility, the knee often tries to create motion it was never built for, and that can show up as nagging knee issues. From there, we walk through practical mobility habits you can do anywhere, including foot tapping to loosen the ankles and big toe work that supports better walking mechanics and stability. 

Next, we bring mobility up the chain to the hips and pelvis with simple tilts, playful side-to-side movement, dancing, and even a stability ball option for your desk. We also tackle thoracic spine rotation to ease neck tension, including the surprisingly effective toilet paper placement trick. Finally, we cover shoulder mobility with an easy overhead reset and a supported hang using a pull-up bar or playground bars, with bonus grip strength for everyday function. 

If you want more support building a sustainable midlife movement routine, check out the community at movingthroughmidlife.com, and if this helped, subscribe, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review so more women can move through midlife with confidence.

Head to www.movingthroughmidlife.com for more information. 

Transcript

Why Mobility Matters With Age

Mobile Versus Stable Joints

Mobility Without More To Do

Foot And Big Toe Mobility

Hip Mobility Through Play And Tilt

Mid Back Rotation For Daily Life

Shoulder Mobility With Overhead Work

Hanging For Shoulder And Grip Strength

How To Work With Courtney

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to Moving Through Midlife. I am your host, Courtney, a personal trainer and movement specialist who wants to help you move through midlife with more grace. Each week, we will discuss ways we can show up better for ourselves and our children without the burnout. We will focus on overall health through habit stacking to help increase energy, provide movement snacks to help you move more throughout the day while also moving your body more, and learn from professionals on moving through midlife with ease so that you can feel confident with aging gracefully. Grab your earbuds and join me on a leisurely walk while we discuss moving through midlife. It is the first Monday of the month, which always brings me back to our movement snack. So this week I wanted to talk to you about mobility. If you follow me on any of the social media handles, you may have seen me talking about mobility. And if not, no worries, we're going to cover it today. So we are going to talk about the importance of mobility and also a few things you can do in everyday life to help you get more mobile. When we were little, we tended to move a lot more and in various ways, in all sorts of different ways, which helped us with mobility. And as we get older, we tend to not move as much and move our joints less altogether. So think about yourself as a child or how your children have moved over the years and what you noticed about them. A lot of dancing, a lot of running around, a lot of jumping onto things, a lot of jumping off to things. I know my kids weren't really big into parkour when we were little because my husband will watch it on the TV. So they were jumping on everything and climbing over things and bounding and leaping and all sorts of movement patterns were going on. They were falling to the floor, rolling, and these were all things that we did, which increased our mobility. And as we've gotten older, we tend to play less, which is so very unfortunate. And the movements that we move through tend to be a lot of the same patterns. So I'm all for exercising. But what I've noticed, and this includes myself and my fitness classes in the past as well, that we tend to do a lot of movements that we do in everyday life, which is great. It's their functional movements. They are patterns that you want to move through to make sure that you stay strong and are able to continue the patterns. The problem becomes we don't ever go outside of those movement patterns. So you might do a squat because we do a lot of sit-to-stands from a chair all day long. So therefore, we're squatting to ensure that we can keep that movement going. But then are we practicing squatting all the way to the floor and standing up? Those movements are going to get much more uh deeper into the hips than just a regular squat, like when you think of exercises. So we want to work on moving deeper into our movements and moving our joints through different positions. So, how can we do this? That's what we're going to talk about today. I want to first help you to understand that when we think about the body, we need to think about uh mobile and stable joints. So our foot and our ankle need to be mobile. Our knee should be stable, our hips should be mobile, our low back should be stable, our upper mid back area, which is known as the thoracic area, should be mobile, and our shoulders should be mobile as well. So if we're thinking of those things, we need to ensure that we are mobile through certain joints and then stable through certain joints. What tends to happen is if you are tight in your foot and ankle and you are tight in your hips, you're going to have to give somewhere else. And a lot of times I will see clients of mine that have a lot of knee issues. And a lot of times this has to do with the fact that their hips are not as mobile as they should be, or their feet are not as mobile as they should be. And then they end up making it up within the knees. So the knee has to start moving, creating some of that mobility when the knee is not designed to have that mobility within it. Okay, so how can we work on getting more mobility? You have to move through different positions to start to ease into those positions. Just like if you're stretching or doing yoga or strengthening, you're only going to get better at it if you do it more. And the problem comes when we start thinking about all these things we have to do. So, okay, not only are you telling me that I need to be doing some zone two cardio sessions or going for walks, you're also telling me I've got a strength train. Now you're telling me I've got to do uh mobility work and I've got to do breathing exercises and I've got to do this and this and this, you know, it all adds up and we get frustrated, so we don't do anything. What I want to share with you today are things you can do in your everyday life to help you work on your mobility. So we're gonna start with the feet. I always start with the feet, don't I? If you know me, you know I start with the feet. But we're gonna work on just tapping our foot. This is something you can do in everyday life. When you're listening to music, tap your feet. When you're standing in line, tap your feet. Go back and forth between both feet. Notice if you have tension tightness in that front of the ankle when you tap your foot. You may notice that one side is more mobile than the other side. Spend more time tapping the side of the foot or the not the side of the foot, spend more time tapping the foot that you are tighter. Usually it's the side that it you know is your weaker side, so to speak. So spend some time tapping that foot instead of the one that you might normally tap. That would be the first thing. The second thing is work on bending the big toe. You have possibly heard me talk about the big toe. I know I have spoken about it in regards to incontinence. So if you're leaking urine, you may lack strength and mobility in that big toe. So we need to work on increasing both strength and mobility. If you can lift your toe up, even if you're using your hand to help, you want to see how high you can, how much range of what is the range of motion of that big toe? Is it 45 degrees? If it is, that's pretty good. We want to work on getting some range of motion within that big toe. A simple way we can do this is calf raises or going up on our tippy toes. Just notice when you go up into those tippy toes or calf raises, what is happening with that big toe? Are you sliding out to the side? Because if you are, that tells you that is a clear indication that you are protecting that big toe and you need to start moving into it more. So, two simple exercises for the feet. Let's move up to the hips. I have spoken about this before in past movement snacks. The movement in your hips and how you need to be able to move into a posterior pelvic tilt and an anterior pelvic tilt. So you're just rounding your low back and arching your low back. That's going to be through the pelvis that you should be making that movement occur. The other thing is, can you shake your hips from side to side, independent of other body parts? Yes, your knees will move a little bit, but can you move your hips from side to side without your shoulders moving as well? The easiest way to do this is to dance. Dance around the hip house, shaking your hips. Hula hoop. Grab a hula hoop and have fun. Be silly. Move through those movement patterns. And that is going to help you work on mobility of the pelvis. If you have a stability ball, you can put it at your desk and you can do the same type of movement patterns on the stability ball while you're sitting at your desk or while if you have it at home and you want to watch TV while sitting on it, all you're doing is circles. You can do like circles around one direction, circles around the other direction, forward and back, posterior tilt. So rounding that low back, arching that back. Those are going to help increase mobility within the hips. You may notice that you strengthen your pelvic floor this way. You um loosen a lot of us tend to be tight in our pelvic floors, so even that can help loosen the pelvic floor as well. So those are a couple of things that you can do in everyday life to get your hips more mobile. As we move up the line, we're gonna work into our mid-back. For many of us, we are in this rounded forward position a lot throughout the day. So we tend to lack mobility and movement in that mid-back. How many times do you rotate through your upper body? So think shoulders, rotate to look behind you. When we think about looking behind us, what are we ending up moving a lot? Our neck, and we're in this forward position and we're turning our head. That's creating a lot of tension and tightness in our neck area. So can you rotate where you're rotating through that mid-back and shoulder area? Easiest way to do this. Well, there's two easy ways to do this. And I believe I've spoken about this one before in a past podcast episode as well. But place a roll of toilet paper on the back of your toilet seat so that every time you go to the bathroom, you have to rotate around to grab that toilet paper. That is the easiest way to add rotation into your day. The other way that you can add rotation into your day is instead of relying so heavily on your rear view mirrors and your backup camera, use your body to rotate and look behind you. Try not to, yes, your head and neck are gonna move as well, but try to use some of that rotation within your mid-back shoulder area to rotate around. If you notice, like, oh my goodness, it's really tight. First think about sitting up nice and straight. So think instead of pushing your chest forward, think about someone pulling a string from the crown of your head up. So you're thinking about lengthening rather than because when we think about sitting up straight, most of them, most of us press our chest forward. Instead, I want you to imagine someone pulling and lifting you up almost by the ears. That might be another way to think about it. So either a string through your spine or someone lifting you up by your ears, and then that will help you kind of go into that upright position. And hopefully that didn't create a traumatic experience for you just now, as I said that. Uh, I'm thinking specifically about a friend of mine who um had that happen to her with someone pulling on her ear. Okay, so that is the thoracic area. Easy enough, right? The last one. Here's one more. It's gonna be a little bit more difficult to do because you're gonna have to buy something. Well, you don't really have to. Here, I'll give you two options. The first one is bring your arms up over your head. A lot of times when we do this, we have tension and tightness in our upper back and neck area. And when we bring our arms up overhead, we use our shoulders rather than using our shoulder blade. So, what I want you to do is once you've brought your arms up overhead, I want you to think about lifting your shoulders up towards your ears and then just relaxing down. And then you can do that again. Lift your arms up overhead, lift your shoulders to your ears and relax it down. You might notice that you relax a little bit further into it. Don't think about pulling the shoulder blades down because we don't want to create that force down. We just want to think not allowing the shoulders to rise up towards the ear. So if you go further into the movement and relax, a lot of times that will release tension and tightness and muscles that might be kind of overcompensating. So that's one thing you can do is get your arms up overhead and then just kind of shrug your shoulders and let them relax. The other thing, which is um where you're going to need to purchase something, but some people already have this in their house, or if you have a playground nearby, you can always go to a playground and use like the monkey bars. But you want a pull-up bar. And don't worry, I'm not gonna make you do a pull-up. I can't, I can't do a pull-up. I've got to figure that one out. But instead, what we're going to do is we are going to hang from it, and your feet are gonna stay on the floor the whole time. So you can get one of those where you can just put it up into the door frame, it like unhooks, or you can get one where you like screw it into the door frame and it's just always there. We have both options in our house. And as you move through a room that has it, just hang on it. Your feet are still on the floor. All you're doing is trying to let your body relax into that position hanging with your arms up overhead, right? And you can kind of play around, see. Do you notice when you open your chest? What happens? What about if you think about drawing your ribs down a little bit, trying to connect that uh pelvis to the rib cage? Do you notice anything different occurring with that? Just kind of move and allow yourself to play in that position and see what it feels like. You can take a foot off the floor if you want, but definitely not necessary. Um, if you take a foot off the floor, you're then going to be working on grip strength, which is a great thing to work on. Helps to strengthen the forearms, really good for like, especially as you get older, it's harder to open uh cans. You might notice you start to have wrist issues. So that's a great thing to work on strengthening. Um, so you could do that as well. But that is really going to help you work on shoulder mobility. There's some other exercises that I do have that you can work on, um, corner stretches, different things like that. If you're interested, if you know you feel like, oh, all these things helped me, or I'm not as mobile as I'd like to be. This is where you can work with me. You can head to moving through midlife.com. Click on join our community. You will have access to all of our courses for a week or join our seasonal programs. Have a great day and make sure to keep moving.