Health Gem

If You Do One Thing This Week . . . Keep Your Balance While Stretching

IT’S ONE of the most welcome feelings – you are getting to the end of a tough workout and you are cooling off, bringing your heart rate down. Stretching out those hard-worked muscles can feel enormously satisfying, but you want to be sure you don’t keel over while you are at it.

One of the trickiest balancing acts is a stretch for the thigh muscles, where you stand on one leg, grab the other foot and gently curl your non-standing leg up towards your backside.

One way of not impersonating a tree being felled is to put your free hand against a wall, chair, spinning bike or whatever is handy.

Another trick is to raise your free hand up, either sticking it in the air in a “Lámh suas” or simply touching your ear. That reduces the wobbling surprisingly well.