By Miguel J. Ortiz
When it comes to your circulatory and cardiovascular system there is one muscle group that is heavily overlooked and unproperly trained, the calf muscle. Your heart gets assistance from the calf muscle by helping pump blood back up the body in order to help get it recycled. Which always means that even with simple walking you can drastically improve your health. However some people still aren’t getting enough oxygen. I have an easy and effective solution.
You see it’s not as much about how much you’re doing, but in how you’re doing it. How we walk makes a huge difference and he can even help other leg stretches and relieve lower back pain. So, here are some general tips and exercises you can utilize daily in order to improve what you’re already doing, and some exercises to add in the gym.
First, when it comes to your walking patterns, how you push off your calf it technically the driving force behind the blood going back up the body to get back to the heart. It also could be why when people climb hills they tend to get lower back pain. To change both, we need to start pushing off our toes more, almost completing a single leg calf raise in the process. We don’t want to be bouncing up and down, but many people tend to walk “flat footed.” When we don’t push off with our calves, we don’t help the heart cycle blood back for oxygen.
When walking up hills, if we don’t improve our ankles ability to push off our toes, our heals drive into the ground causing us to pull with our hamstring more than our glutes. This puts pressure on the lower back – depending on how steep the hill is – and the person’s ability in the moment to properly push off their toes.
Here are a couple of exercises to improve your heart’s ability to oxygenate blood.
Calf raises, if you’re sitting at your desk for long hours or you haven’t been walking around much, when you do come up hold a wall and try to push up onto the balls of your feet, and slowly come down for about 20 reps. If your activity consists more of light walking, doing this 3 times a day will be very helpful.
For the more active people, exaggerate the movement with smooth transitions and start adding in the following:
Glute Bridges from the toes, or Glute Bridge march, for ankle stability. Reverse Lunges so both legs are working on variations of strength and stability. And maybe add some jump rope to a warm up or some Split or regular jump squats.
Have fun with your movements and keep that heart healthy.
