Healthline Blogs
Bending Right is Fitness as a Lifestyle

Readers asked for more pictures of healthy bending around the house and workplace during daily life. They've been getting excited about the idea that daily life is the way to physical ability and health, instead of stopping life to do a bunch of exercises. People spend time and money for endless treatments and gadgets for back and knee pain and tight Achilles tendon. Healthy bending prevents the commonest sources of all of these.
- A major predisposing factor of knee and hip arthritis is weak thighs.
- A major risk factor of hip osteoporosis is lack of weight bearing exercise.
- A major risk factor of falls is weak legs and poor balance.
- The Achilles tendon gets a natural stretch with each time you bend right with heels down, and loses this constant normal source of stretch without good bending.
- The most important contributor to making a lumbar disc degenerate, or slip out of place (herniate), and press on nerves causing sciatica, is bad bending forward.
- The biggest contributor to upper back and neck pain is keeping the upper body rounded and bent over forward.
If you would like to reduce risk of falls, osteoporosis, bad discs, sciatica, achy upper back, and arthritis, get a built-in Achilles tendon stretch, and get strong shapely legs all at the same time, just use your legs with good body position for daily healthy bending.
Why go to the gym or to physical therapy to do knee bends to strengthen your legs, then spend your "real life" weakening your legs and degenerating your lower back discs with bad bending, and say, "I don't have time to exercise."
You will get free built-in exercise just moving in life. My friends and family in Asia are astonished when I tell them I teach Americans how to bend to look in the refrigerator, and that Americans tell me it is too much work to bend right to load dishes in a machine that washes for them. Then they pay money to go to a gym or buy equipment to exercise their legs.
Here is a fun way to change mindset to exercise as a lifestyle:
Count how many times a day you bend and how many times you can choose to harm yourself or help yourself.
If you would like to try "fitness as a lifestyle," this is the best place to start. Think of it:
- when bending to make the bed,
- to pick up laundry,
- look in the refrigerator,
- load and unload the dishwasher,
- to pick up your shoes,
- open a lower cabinet,
- lift a child or pet,
- feed a child or pet,
- pick up things from the floor,
- pick up hand weights to do exercise,
- put down weights after exercising,
- many daily activities.
Related Fitness Fixer:
- Fast Fitness - Count How Many Times You Help Or Hurt Your Body Daily
- Readers Count - Second Missed Cause of Back Pain With Golf
- How Often Should You Be Healthy?
- Better Balance by Christmas
- Free Exercise and Free Back and Knee Pain Prevention - Healthy Bending
- How Good Would You Look From 400 Squats a Day - Just Stop Unhealthy Bending
- Common Exercises Teach Bad Bending
- Stomach Acid Drugs Increase Osteoporosis and Hip Fractures
Books:
- Learn bending, reaching, and fixing knee and back pain: Fix Your Own Pain Without Drugs or Surgery
- Get built-in lifestyle exercise, fix back and knee pain, learn health and fun at the same time: Health & Fitness in Plain English THIRD edition.
Read success stories and send your own of these methods.
Before asking questions, see if your answers are already here by clicking labels and replies under posts, links in posts, archives at right, or in the Fitness Fixer Index.
For personal medical questions - Replies to Medical Questions.
Subscribe to Fitness Fixer Free - click "updates via e-mail" (under trumpet) upper right.
See Dr. Bookspan's Books, take a Class, get certified DrBookspan.com/Academy.
---
Recent Blog Posts
-
Mar 09, 2010
New Healthy Employment Programs for Developmentally Disabled -
Mar 04, 2010
Reader Uses Fitness Fixer Advice to Shovel Snow Painlessly and Beat Mother Nature -
Mar 01, 2010
Lactic Acid Myths