Valerie Grantham is like a lot of people who have desk jobs.
"I’m very sedentary when I’m not working out,” she says. “I work at least 9 or 10 hours a day, sitting at a computer."
Three to four times a week, she gets her exercise in. But she says as she's gotten older, it's a lot harder to recover. That's why she decided to try the latest fitness craze: a stretch studio.
"A lot of times when we see people with tight glutes, we see a lot of back pain," says Ben Yates, a stretch practitioner and general manager at the Stretch Zone location in Broomfield, Colorado.
Yates says most of his clients come in with aches, pains and soreness.
"As we are getting older, our muscles are only getting tighter,” he says.
The tighter your muscles, the more prone you are to injury, muscle tares and extreme joint pain.
"I couldn't do this at home or move my body in the ways that they do it,” Grantham says.
That's because at Stretch Zone, they use a patented strap system to safely push your edge and gain even more flexibility than what you can get from at home stretching.
"I leave here feeling much better than when I come in," she says.
Stretch studios like Stretch Zone are popping up all over, but if a stretch studio isn't in your budget, a personal trainer gave us three stretches you can do at home to increase flexibility and range of motion. Three types of stretches you can easily do at home include:
- Side bend stretch
- Lying hamstring stretch
- Lying single knee to chest stretch
"The more you stretch the better you are going to feel," Yates says.
