Quick Tips for Healthy Joints

Healthy joints are essential for our physical functioning, and we need to care for our joints in order to keep them in solid working order. Especially as we enter spring and leave winter, it’s time to get back into regular movement and lubricate our joints after the cold weather hibernation. Like the solid foundation of a house, our joints maintain the structure that supports our muscles, tissues, organs, and all other body systems that work for us day in and day out.

 

Try incorporating some of these quick tips into your routine to increase and maintain strong, supple joints:

 

• Exercise – Move it! Shake it! Walk it! It really doesn’t matter what exercise you do, just make sure you are moving frequently (at least 20 minutes per day). However, weight-bearing exercise is especially good for joint upkeep and is recommended at least a few times per week.
• Warm up first – Before you exercise, make sure you warm up your body. Attempting vigorous exercise with cold, tight muscles can lead to pulling or tearing muscles, or injuring joints. Give your body at least 5-10 minutes warm up time to ease into the workout and exercise safely and sustainably.
• Stretch – You don’t need to go to a 90 minute yoga class every day to get your stretch on. You can incorporate single poses or stretches throughout your day, or consider spending 10 minutes at the end of each evening doing some simple stretches on your bed before going to sleep.
• Take a bath – Soaking in a warm tub can do wonders for relaxing the mind and the body, including muscles soreness and joint stiffness. Consider adding half a cup of epsom salts to your soak to get a mineral-rich magnesium boost, absorbed through the skin.
• Set your work space up well – Take advantage of ergonomic research and resources and find a desk setup that is comfortable for you. Make sure your computer is at eye-level to reduce unnecessary neck strain, and make sure your chair is far enough away from your keyboard that your arms hang comfortably and your body isn’t cramped.
• Reduce portion sizes – Take it from the French – it’s about quality, not quantity! Portion size is directly linked to maintaining a healthy weight, and the lighter your physical load, the less weight your joints have to carry.
• Eat your Omega-3s – Omega-3 fatty acids can help reduce inflammation and joint stiffness and ensure your joints are well lubricated. Try our eco-harvested krill oil – you only need ⅕ of the recommended dose of fish oil since it has such high absorption rates!
• Maintain strong bones – Make sure you’re incorporating enough calcium into your diet to stave off any signs of osteoporosis, and if you already have osteoporosis, to bolster calcium intake to maintain the integrity of your bones and reduce further deterioration.
• Get a full body massage – For more reasons than joint health, we encourage getting a full body, deep tissue massage as regularly as you can afford. Massages loosen muscle tissue and cartilage build up, and ease pressure on the joints. Not to mention, they feel great!

 

We hope these tips encourage you to take excellent care of your joint health. For more on joint health (because we love to talk about this important topic!) check out our previous blog, Treat Your Joints Like Gold, for some background info on why joint health is so important. Do you have any other joint maintenance health tips? If so, we’d love to hear from you!