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Fifty Sense: Common Sense Ideas for Thriving after 50
Fifty Sense: Common Sense Ideas for Thriving after 50

Health: Fitness Balls

"When you sit on a ball, gravity insists that you sit up straight because it is too much work to do anything else. You are on a sphere and to stay balanced you have to adjust and stabilize your trunk around the neutral position. It is not a conscious thing because the body will do it by itself and over time your movements become much more efficient with gravity.

This continual movement helps you develop proper usage of all your stabilizing and neutralizing muscles in the lower lumbar and pelvic regions. This is important because these are the regions most people get back pain and where most tend not to move because they are static, sitting in a chair."

"Improvement of dynamic stability is more important to muscle strength than anything else because it allows you to use the muscle strength you have more efficiently. Machines have your muscles working in isolation. It is far better to train your body in integration- integrating a bunch of muscles in patterns similar to the way they work in real life."

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