It’s Day 8 of the Mykidstime 21 Day Health & Fitness Challenge! If you missed yesterday’s video, catch up with Day 7 here.
Our health and wellbeing expert, Fiona O’Donnell, explains what’s involved for Day 8 in the video below. We want you to tell us during the challenge how you are getting on so tag us on social using #mkt21days and we’ll give you some encouragement!
Mykidstime 21 Day Health & Fitness Challenge: Day 8 – Shoulder Mobility
Today’s challenge is a mobility challenge. I am one of those people who spends a lot of time at the laptop even though I’m very active, and I find that my neck, my shoulders and my upper back gets really tight. One of the exercises that I find is just invaluable to me is an upper body mobility exercise.
I promise you when you look at this you’re going to say ‘that’s easy, I can do that’ but if you follow my instructions correctly you will realize that, unless you’ve been doing gymnastics all your life and you’ve got fantastic upper body mobility, this is probably one of the most essential exercises for you to do right now.
So listen carefully, follow my instructions nice and slowly, make sure you’re in the correct position and let’s get going to bring you better upper body and shoulder mobility.
We’re going to start by putting our feet about half a foot out from the wall and leaning our bottoms against the wall. If you put your heels against the wall, you’ll find yourself feeling a bit imbalanced and that’s why we’re putting our feet out a little bit and you can bend your knees.
Now, the next thing is to flatten your back against the wall. That’s a difficult enough part if you don’t have good lower back mobility (we’re going to come to that one again on another of our sessions). So you’re squeezing your belly button back towards your spine, you’re flattening your back into the wall, so from the tops of your shoulders all the way down to your sacrum (the bottom by your bum) is going to be flattened into the wall.
For some of you, that’s going to be difficult; for the rest of you, it might be easy, but let’s see about the next step – I want you to bring your elbows up to 90 degrees. Double check that your lower back is still pressed against the wall because, for some of you, your mobility might prevent you from having your elbows on the wall while your lower back is pressed into the wall.
The next thing we’re going to do is point our hands so that we’re level and rotate our arms upwards, pressing your wrists against the wall. Check that your lower back is still pinned to the wall, take a breath in, exhale and rotate downwards. Now make sure that your elbows aren’t dropping, squeeze your lower back against the wall again, and we’re going to go for four more of these.
Squeeze your wrists against the wall and down, flatten your lower back into the wall, pressure into your feet – if you don’t feel a bit of a burn in your shoulders, you’re probably not doing it right because I do this at least three or four times a week and I still find it difficult! If you can do it every day, I promise you your shoulder mobility is just going to be so much better than it is now – for many of you your wrists won’t even touch the wall, but that’s what we’re aiming to achieve.
If you have any questions throughout the Challenge, email Fiona or send her a message on Instagram, Facebook and use hashtag #mkt21days to let us know how you are getting on with the Challenge!
About the Author: Fiona O'Donnell
