so in this video i'm sharing with you my trail maintenance routine which consists of three
of what i think are probably the most powerful stretches when it comes to staying injury-free and
balancing out a lot of that tightness that comes with long days on trail or on foot whether you're
hiking running or climbing running in particular these three stretches aren't really traditional
stretches they won't take a lot of time out of your day it's really just three different
ways of sitting things you can implement while you're cooking or relaxing at the end of the day
of a long hike or a big run or a climb so you can do this with me right now i'm going to take you
through these three moves get off the couch out of your bed onto the floor and let's try these out
so if i had to give an award for the position most likely to reduce knee pain it would be this one
it's the 1990 or the shin box position where we've got 90 degree angles in the knees now this is a
regression of the pigeon stretch which is also a very useful stretch but most people can't get into
it when they really tighten the hips so the best place to start moving into this is with the feet
actually a lot closer which is not going to be 90 degrees but it's gonna be more comfortable and it
will enable you to hopefully get your hips in the ground now if you feel a little bit of knee pain
that's okay you should be in maybe discomfort but not pain if you feel like it's really painful
and it's really sharp kind of stabbing pain in your knees then you're going to want to boost
your hips you can roll up your sleeping mat or just use a cushion and you'll find that that
becomes much more comfortable and as you become more comfortable you can open those knees up
the other thing i like to do is move through this position so i can weight my back hip here and
really try and get my butt to the ground and my sitting bones to the ground now in this movement
you can move forward as well and that gets you closer to what we would call a pigeon stretch
so i like to just come down and bring my chest towards my thigh in this position maybe spend
30 seconds here and just play with the movement keep it fun keep it enjoyable and just
remember to breathe deeply as you move through these positions you can also transition through to
the other side and that's a really nice mobility drill in itself really working the full range of
motion of the hips and remember the key with any stretching is for you to be able to relax and
even enjoy the stretching so make sure that you're breathing deeply focusing on your breathing when
you're sitting in these positions that's going to enable you to relax if you're tight and tense
it's probably going to have the opposite effect so it's up to you to try and find a
position where you're comfortable in that you can spend time in breathe deeply and let's get some
oxygen and some blood and some nutrients into these tight areas of the hips
okay our next position is the plantarflexion sit so we're going to be sitting with flat feet
doing this barefoot and placing a little bit of load both into the ankles
and the knees in this full bend position being comfortable in this position i think is one
of the first steps to building strong healthy knees what we're doing here is stretching the
tibialis anterior which is the muscle that runs down the front of your shin
it's a very important muscle it's one that's often neglected it's entirely responsible for
deceleration so i think going downhill and slowing down our movement when we're heading
downhill so in this position we're stretching the tibialis anterior we're lengthening that tissue
getting more blood flow and oxygen in there helping to create healthy knees we're also
boosting ankle mobility and we know that range of motion in the ankle is very important for reducing
ankle sprains strains and rolled ankles so it's pretty simple we're just sitting in this position
and just like any of these moves you can do your cooking you can read a book you can watch
television it's also a great position to sit at a coffee table and work from home the more time you
spend in these positions the healthier your knees and ankles and hips are going to be if you find
it difficult being comfortable in this position then we use the same technique as earlier just by
boosting the hips with a cushion lifting the hips that reduces the knee band it reduces the pressure
in this position in general and it should be a lot more comfortable over time though you want to be
able to come down to the floor and be able to do a couple of sets of two minutes whilst being pretty
comfortable one of the greatest challenges i think with long distance hiking is simply maintaining
healthy joint function over such a long period of time of doing this repeated stress activity
and when i look on forums and say comments in my youtube videos about people that had to quit
halfway through long hikes is because they had problems with their feet now as hikers we spend so
much time on our feet and it's really demanding on our feet but we don't really do a lot of training
and preparation for the feet a lot of the time we're thinking about you know cords hamstrings
glutes these have to be strong areas of the body and we often forget the feet do a lot of the work
and there's a lot of muscles in there 30 of the muscles in the body are actually below the knee
and it doesn't get a lot of attention in regular training so these are some things you can start
implementing to help build and maintain strong and healthy joints that will keep you going forever
the third and final position in this trail maintenance routine is dorsiflexion looks
very similar to the other one but there's a key difference we're going to be flipping
the toes underneath which means we're going to be stretching the plantar fascia now if you've
ever had plantar fasciitis on trail then this is the number one thing you want to do spending more
time in this position really useful position for stretching the plantar fascia encouraging more
movement and mobility in the bottom of the feet it's also a great position for building strength
remembering we're under load here of our body so where we are placing load into the bottom
of the feet the plantar fascia whilst flexing the toes in this position and that helps us to build
strong healthy feet again if you're finding this position too difficult we can place a cushion
underneath the butt we reduce the bend in the knee and the load on the ankle and it makes things a
little bit easier because we're shifting more of the weight onto the knee and off the ankle it
should be a lot more comfortable on my last hike of the gr11 i was wearing the new balance hero v5
they have a lot of cushion a lot of foam they're very comfortable and i found with that shoe
because it was so supportive and comfortable that my plantar fascia became weak it became tight and
this stretch really helped to be able to increase the blood flow to that area and it enabled me to
recover and really hold off that injury while i was on my hike and i managed to get through 824
kilometers without really experiencing proper plantar fasciitis which i was very grateful for
one of the most frustrating things about stretching and why i believe a lot of people don't
do it is because there's often no end goal when it comes to stretching there's no point where you can
reach where you can definitively say yes i've done this up enough now i can tick the box and move on
to something else things changed for me when i identified certain standards that i wanted to
maintain in each of the main six stretches that i do for my lower body and i know now that if i
can pretty quickly achieve that standard without too much stretching beforehand i'm probably doing
okay with my stretching and i don't need to have you know this massive stretching program where i
spend hours and hours every week just stretching pointlessly these stretching standards are a
great goal to work towards they're also a great little measurement tool something to signal to
you that you need to maybe revisit them and that will often come after a long period of hiking
if you want to check these standards out i have added them to my newer programs but i've also
added them to something brand new which is my patreon page there'll be more information coming
soon on what videos and content i'll be sharing on patreon but for now that's what i'm kicking
off with this six stretching standards so go and check it out if you like thanks for supporting
the channel hit the like button and subscribe if you haven't already i'll see you on the summit