An important topic in wellness is body awareness. It’s beneficial to spend time focusing on the physical as a portion of your whole being. However, realizing your emotional, spiritual, and mental aspects are necessary for true awareness.
We quickly take note of our physique. But body awareness includes all parts of health, not only your weight and appearance. It’s vital to listen to your body. Understanding a focus on every area increases your success with awareness.
Let’s take a closer look at some techniques that improve body awareness and overall wellness.
In This Article
Focus on Body Awareness
Strength and endurance are two typical areas of physical training. However, for overall focus, it’s important to consider flexibility and balance as well. A greater understanding of all four areas creates better results for body awareness.
We’ll look at an overview of four areas that promote body awareness. Then we’ll highlight strength and flexibility in depth. The other two areas are covered in an article on endurance and balance.
Each focus has its own benefits, examples, and may require compensation at times based on illness, injury, or chronic issues. Another important point to note is that the ideas behind body awareness overlap and are more beneficial when utilized together.
Strength
Strength is based on force, energy and load pertaining to your muscles. The musculoskeletal system has its own structure including bones and the attached muscles. This allows the movements of your body.
Although muscles are made up of fibers which create ability to withstand force, create energy, and tolerate load, there are many aspects that go into building and maintaining strength.
Specific muscle groups increase strength in each area and help us stay fit. So, it’s good to understand strengthening to promote a greater impact on your body as a whole.
Flexibility
A portion of body awareness that often gets overlooked is flexibility. You might have been taught to stretch before and after exercising. But there’s more to flexibility than warmups and cool downs.
It’s important to be intentional when increasing flexibility. Rather than only use it as a focus around activity, begin to view it as part of overall health. Flexibility promotes increasing and maintaining normal movements. Strengthening coupled with flexibility helps maximize your musculoskeletal system for everyday use and when exerting more force.
Endurance
Endurance involves action with your body for longer periods of time, for farther distances, or for greater duration with resistance. Described in its most basic form, endurance allows an increase in activity tolerance.
There are two body systems that are highlighted with endurance training. The circulatory and the respiratory systems; your heart and lungs.
Balance
The final focus of body awareness is balance. Much like flexibility, attention to balance is often reserved for older individuals or only when difficulties arise. It’s important to give attention to balance prior to this point and to maintain a focus on balance as part of your whole being.
Addressing balance before you feel pressed to need correction helps your body stay prepared if an issue arises. Also, it promotes greater safety when you’re functioning in challenging movement realms. It’s good to stay sharp with higher level balance tasks.
Overview of Strengthening
Strength is one of the most commonly talked about methods of movement to increase body awareness. Most often strength is accompanied by examples of types of activities as a definition. However, strength itself should be understood prior to simply performing activities for strengthening.
Strength is based on the energy, exertion, and load bearing of your muscles. There are indeed several methods that can be used to achieve strengthening. But first, it’s good to understand that strengthening movements are based on the concept of shortening then lengthening your muscle fibers.
Gaining muscle strength takes resistance. This can be your own body weight or sources such as weights, machines, or resistance bands. To ensure you have optimal preparation for muscle strengthening, you should also address flexibility (more on this later). Maintaining flexibility keeps your muscles from shortening and becoming less pliable.
Benefits of Strengthening
It is said that strengthening “makes you stronger.” But what does that mean? Specific strengthening involves the musculoskeletal and nervous systems. It helps keep your body in better condition for tolerating daily routines and movements. There are numerous benefits to resistive and repetitive exercise training.
With increased strength, and body awareness, you’re less likely to have injury. There’s a higher level of safety during lifting, pushing, pulling, and bending that also encourages better body awareness.
In addition, exercise helps improve joint integrity. As we age, or with prolonged activity, there is natural wear and tear on our joints. Exercise helps offset the continuous pressure put on your joints by maintaining fluid in them. This also helps keep the surrounding muscles moving and in good condition.
Examples of Strengthening
When looking into different strengthening programs, you quickly realize the choices can become overwhelming. One of the most important first steps for strengthening—and maintenance—is to focus on types of activity you enjoy and will actually do. This might sound obvious, but it is very common for us to want a specific outcome and try to work toward it by mimicking others.
The problem is that the same programs do not maximize the exact benefit across the board for everyone. Also, activities may be difficult or even dangerous when done incorrectly. This causes people to give up.
It’s important to begin with strengthening goals and make sure not to jump ahead too quickly. Unrealistic expectations are a sure killer of your progress and participation. You need to stay optimistic.
Personal trainers are excellent for helping you establish a program but can become an expensive investment. If you are unable to maintain their help, have them outline a program that you can follow.
Weight training and isokinetic machines are two good ways to improve your strength. If the gym is not your favorite place, but you are motivated to gain strength, try some exercises at home. For example, four great activities for overall strengthening are lunges, squats, burpees, and push-ups. These work multiple muscle groups simultaneously. Fitness bands are also used more easily than weights for resistive exercise.
Along with general strengthening, it’s important to spend time focusing on each specific muscle group. For global strength, work your shoulders, arms, back, chest, abdomen, gluts, and legs. Your focus should change with each workout and cover a portion of these areas while allowing an off day for rest.
Limitations of Strengthening
We’ve established that it’s a vital part of your overall health to take steps to improve strength. Unless you have an injury, you’re usually working within the parameters of your own ability. Everyone is different. That’s why weight amounts change with each person when working out.
However, it’s possible to injure yourself during a workout by attempting to lift too much weight or using incorrect form. For safety reasons, it’s good to realize that strengthening cannot happen faster by lifting more weight than you can tolerate. Nor can you get ahead by shortcutting. Instead, you chance injuring yourself and creating a setback.
Limitations to strengthening also happen as we age. Muscle strength begins to decrease with less activity. Muscle size and strength change over time when we aren’t able to perform resistance training or even normal movement.
In addition, even for a healthy and active person, an onset of illness—or stillness—can quickly deteriorate the muscle strength that was present. People are continuously amazed at how fast they lose strength and how much effort and time it takes to build up after an illness. A focus on healing the body physically is important when this happens.
Thankfully we have muscle memory. This is a term that pertains to the “memory” of your muscle from when it operated at a stronger capacity. If you have an onset that disables your ability for strengthening, your muscles can later be strengthened to “recall” the former level. However, it’s important to note that the more time goes by—and the weaker the muscles become—it’s more challenging to count on muscle memory. This concept can still be used with rehabilitation and is especially helpful if the person was active before.
Overview of Flexibility
Flexibility involves keeping your muscles stretched and your body limber to carry out daily activities. Signs of too little flexibility are tightness, tension, or inability to complete full range of motion (moving your joints through the entire arc or motion.)
It’s common for us to briefly stretch before or after exercise, but we often skip focusing on flexibility otherwise. A better effort to increase body awareness is to pay attention to any tightness you have when first waking up or with prolonged sitting or standing. It’s often easier to pinpoint muscle tightness during these times due to less activity. If you neglect to stretch tight areas, it won’t be long before you sense limitations in them.
One easy example to highlight is your neck. It readily becomes tight with less activity or without specific intention of stretching. Normal daily routines, including sitting and sleeping, tend to decrease full range in your neck. With less flexibility, tension in neck muscles can lead to less function when driving, looking up, left, or right. This is only one example of how tension in a particular muscle group affects your movements.
Benefits of Flexibility
Maintaining flexibility keeps your body healthy including your skeletal and muscular systems. To keep moving (muscles move bones), it’s important to keep muscle fibers stretched and capable of full movement in multiple directions.
For example, it’s not uncommon to have tight hamstrings. When this large muscle group begins to draw up with absence of flexibility, it causes problems. Not only does it create less leg movement, cramps, or injuries, but tight hamstrings often cause low back pain. This is due to where the muscle attaches to the pelvis.
Focusing on your muscles and keeping them flexible by gentle stretching promotes better posture, less aches and pains, safer exercising, and even optimal positioning with activity. Have you felt tightness in a muscle and held it still to keep it from hurting? Lack of flexibility is possibly the culprit for your discomfort. However, focusing on this issue can often encourage breakthrough.
Examples of Flexibility
Good practice is to perform gentle stretches daily, or at least multiple times a week. This can be easily accomplished by starting at your neck and moving through each part of the body. Any movement you perform can be turned into a stretch. For simplicity of explanation, holding a movement in the opposite direction puts a muscle and tissue on stretch.
For example, your knee bends and straightens. To stretch the muscle that bends your knee, you fully straighten the knee. To stretch the muscle that straightens your knee, you bend it. That same concept applies throughout the body.
Some joints rotate and others only hinge forward and backward. Stretching can be done on the neck, shoulders, arms, hands, hips, knees, and ankles. In addition, you can stretch your back by leaning forward and even your trunk by leaning to the side or extending backward.
A focus on flexibility is gently holding a stretch at the end range of any motion. An important point is to make sure you do not bounce or move quickly in opposite directions. Rather a stretch for greater flexibility should be held up to 20 seconds and performed for less repetitions (usually only 2 to 5 times).
An easy way to recognize inflexibility is to note areas that are tight when a stretch is performed. These should draw a greater effort for better movement and more comfort. As the discomfort subsides with stretching, it’s a sign improvement has been made with flexibility.
Yoga is a great activity for increased flexibility and can be done in a group setting or individually. It is a combination of stretching and strengthening.
Limitations of Flexibility
When discussing body awareness and overall health, we’ve mentioned that it’s important not to wait until you detect a problem. This is often too late and creates a more challenging situation for correction. Instead, it’s better to gain flexibility and maintain it throughout life.
It’s common for our tissue to lose elasticity and our muscles to tighten over time. Aging is a prominent reason for limited flexibility. Lack of joint integrity is another common problem for tightness or tension and less movement. One example of this is arthritis, but it is not the only reason joints could be involved. Joints lose fluid over time, and this causes pain and limited movement. In turn, less movement shortens and tightens muscles.
Gentle stretching is important throughout life to prepare for these deficits and assist your body in reaching optimal flexibility before it becomes difficult. It’s preferred to perform stretching activities before you experience pain.
Final Thoughts on Awareness of Your Strength and Flexibility
We looked at an overview of four areas of activity for improved wellness. In this content, we covered two of these. Strength and flexibility.
It’s important to remember that both play a role in increasing your physical health. You shouldn’t increase muscle strength without flexibility. Nor should you address only flexibility without resistive movement.
Together, the two improve your musculoskeletal system which allows better health for activities and a foundation to increase your lifelong wellness.