Telling your muscles good morning

When it comes to fitness, one thing by which I am commonly I humbled is the never ending opportunity (and necessity) to learn.

While much of this knowledge comes from books, DVDs and references, my greatest “AH-HA” moments have come from real world experience.

My most recent case in point has been the opportunity to train my Mom. A 61 year old triathlete and runner,
She can run a sub seven minute mile and perform over 15 nose to ground push ups.

Her performance abilities, strength and commitment during our workouts rival people half her age and she is truly a joy to train (plus this is the only time I can boss her around)

But aside from performance (the fun stuff), even she has been stricken in recent years with chronic upper back and neck pain which often impairs her sleep and radiates up and down her arm.

Particularly frustrating is that she has worked with our physical therapist and been given specific programs to address various imbalances, but the pain always seems to go away for a while and return in earnest.

While we always perform muscle activation work prior to her workout, one sentence that struck me in a recent Mike Robertson blog on the role of corrective exercise was:

“the movement patterns of older individuals are much more engrained than those of younger athletes, and therefore need constant reinforcement of newer, more optimal patterns.”

What to do:

From a practical standpoint, this means that while a set or two of glute bridges per day may be sufficient to improve activation for a thirty year old. A sixty one year old with the same problem will require much greater reinforcement.

Interestingly, Robertson also coined a concept known as the “decade rule” in regard to flexibility/mobility work.

This principal states that for every decade of life, you should do that many days of stretching and mobility work. So for example, a thirty year old would do three days and a sixty year old would do six (what happens when you turn 90?! Eek)

Because dedicated flexibility/mobility work takes time to perform, this activity is generally limited to once per day.

But when it comes to muscle activation, targeting a specific area of your body can be done in less than three minutes.

For the purposes of activation, this means that the same decade rule could and should apply on a daily basis.

As discussed above, if you are thirty years old with bad posture, this means you could perform a set of activation work three times per day and expect to see a reasonable return.

For someone in their sixties however, this means performing this sort of work every 2-4 hours to wake up the muscles after sitting or leaning forward.

While this may seem like something of a daunting task, the good news is this process literally takes 45-60 seconds.

With this in mind, included below are simple activation drills for the upper and lower body. Those with back or hip pain would perform the lower body drills while those with issues in the shoulders will concentrate on the upper body.

While these drills will provide temporary relief in many cases, it is also important to perform regular stretching, mobility and massage work for these areas (more on these in future posts)


Upper back/neck pain:
- Wall slides
- Band pullbacks

Hip/lower back pain:
- Glute bridge
- X-band walks
• Perform one set of fifteen reps after long periods of inactivity and/or based on the chart below.

Age: Frequency per day:
20-30 2
30-40 3
40-50 4
50-60 5
60-70 6
70+ 6+