Winter Aches And Pains!

It’s getting closer to winter, and lots of people complain about body aches and pains.

 

1. When weather changes, people’s injuries or joints tend to ache a little bit more. If they happen to have any precursor to arthritis or already have arthritis, that’s when we hear a lot of people complain that their joints are stiff, and that they tend to have more pain when they first start moving. Oftentimes, that’s pretty typical. Usually, when we’re a little older or have more injury under our belt, we’ll feel it a little bit more.

 

2. What tends to be most common is when we’re more sedentary. The first couple of movements when we get up out of a chair or when we’re getting out of bed, that tends to be when it’s the most sore. We just tend to be a little bit more inactive in the winter, so we tend to feel it a little bit more. 

 

3. Try to overdress rather than underdress because you can always remove a layer if you’re too hot. For those who suffer headaches, wrap your neck in a scarf. The warmth can help regulate blood flow and circulation around the body.

Arthritis, in general, can promote weakness because we tend to not move because we’re sore. In the medical field, what we recommend is to try to strengthen those arthritic or stiff joints. The more we strengthen it, the muscles will take on the brute force, energy, of work that has to be done by that joint in that area, so that the muscles tend to do more of the work than the rubbing of the two joint surfaces together.

The less we’re moving or the colder it gets, the more tense we tend to be. If we’re sitting, for instance, at the computer all day and the cold air has been on, chances are our shoulders have been kind of creeping up and we’ve kind of been tensing our whole body up just because we’re cold, sore, tired, and stiff. 

 

So we recommend, actually, to relax your shoulders, try and get your body to move a little bit more, and spend less static time doing whatever it is that we’re doing. Oftentimes, we hear people complaining by spending too much at the computer, and we don’t break it up as much. 

Let’s talk a little bit about our posture when we think about our tightness, our aches, and our soreness in our upper body from the winter. I just picture in my mind someone kind of hunched at a computer. Their shoulders are raised. 

 

Their chin is kind of jutting out a little bit and kind of scrunched up in there. That stiffness, that kind of clenching of our muscles when you’re cold and fatigued is a problem. What we talk about doing is just lengthening your whole body, kind of pretending someone’s got that string on top of your head, pulling your body up, getting your shoulders down, lengthening your back, pulling your belly muscles in, squeezing your shoulder blades a little bit together to try and maintain better posture.

 

Hopefully, we can avoid getting those tight upper trapezius muscles right at the base of our neck and at the top of our shoulder.
Taking your shoulders and doing some shoulder rolls to just kind of loosen that area up is good. Things like that will help. And then just staying active in general such as going for a walk when you have that ten minute break and spending time in the hallways, in the stairs in your house, moving around a little bit more and being less sedentary.

 

Think about what you have been doing for the last hour or so and see how you can change that so that you can have overall better posture and enjoy your body and your life a little bit more.