Glenn Dawson shows four stretches to undo travel pain. Sitting in cars and planes tightens hip flexors and disables glutes. Do these stretches every two hours: a chest twist, knee-to-chest, back lunge, and figure-4 to reset your body.
If you experience pain during a road trip, whether it's flying or on a road trip in a car, those chairs are designed to cause pain to your body. I'm going to show you how to reset it and relieve pain in this video. So first, before we dive into the 4 stretches I want you to do, you got to realize the chair is set up to round your posture. It rounds your spine, it rounds your chest, and everything goes forward, turns off your glutes and hamstrings. It's definitely not hunter-gatherer being upright and walking. It's the opposite. Everything gets really tight. Hip flexors get tight, all that. We need to open it up. So the first thing I want you to do is actually in the chair before we get to our stretches, I want you to sit as upright as possible and tuck your tailbone into the crevice of the chair. So whether it's the car seat or the airplane chair, push your body up against it and push your hip bone, your tailbone into that crevice. That's the most optimal way for you to maintain good posture. You can try to open up your chest, you're not gonna get a lot from that. But then, when you get a break or you're in the air or you come to a rest stop, follow this next stretch. All right, so the first thing you wanna do is stretch out your chest. Sitting in an airplane seat or a car seat for so long gets you rounded in the front and it tightens up your hip flexor. So we're gonna just open all that up. What I want you to do is just grab the corner of the door handle like so, or the corner of the door at the top, and then twist away. So from here, you're basically just twisting into this, half of a Y stretch. Now I hear you, "Glenn, how do I do the other side?" That's pretty simple— you just take the corner of the door where you just came from and twist away the other way. Now if you're in an airplane, airplane seat works well, uh, and the cargo compartment above your head works well. Just find a spot, grab it, twist away from it. Next, we got to warm up those hip capsules. Like, the hips are super, super tight around here. The glutes aren't firing. So you're going to bring your knees to your chest just like so. In the airplane, I like to stand up in the back of the airplane and just pull my knee to my chest. If you're at a rest stop, just stand up, pull your knee to your chest. If you can't balance, sit up against your car, bring your knees to your chest. This is going to help you immensely. I promise you to not feel pain during or at the end of your road trip. All right. So the next thing we do is an assisted back lunge. Now, for this one, you want to grab the seat or even the interior of the car to give yourself an assist. You've been seated for a really long time. Doing a back lunge by itself is kind of cocky unless you're a super athlete, then you can get away with it. But for me, even I'm going to use the assist. So I'm going to grab on to the inside of the door handle, step back with the outside leg, and I'm going to bring this arm up. And you're just going to stretch. Now I like to do 5 reps of this. That way the leg in front, you can feel the glute actually work and you can stretch out the front of this hip. Now in a seated position, these hip flexors get really tight, gets really bound up and shortened because it's not stretching. So our job is to open it up and stretch it all the way. So 5 reps each side of this, and then you're almost done. All right. So last but not least, we're going to do a figure 4 stretch. It's a little bit difficult to set up, so pay attention really closely. This was a good one. You want to get your hip caps loosened up. I'm going to bring the outside of my ankle to the top of my knee on my quad, and I'm going to sit down into the stretch just like so. Now you should feel the stretch right here in the glute, and I want you to hold it for about 30 seconds and then switch. This should be enough to basically relieve most of your back pain. What I don't want you to do is round your back when you're doing this. So don't round. Make sure you stay seated straight up and down and keep that back straight and sit down. This should only be tight in this actual hip capsule. And now you're ready to hit the road. Make sure you do this reset at least once every 2 hours. Your body cannot last in these chairs that are designed to fold you up like a roly-poly for more than 2 hours. It's not going to happen. Even a healthy body isn't going to last long. And then if this video brought you value, make sure you share it with your friends. They got to see it too. There's other people that have pain when they travel. And if you don't want to miss out on content like this coming at you every single week, subscribe so we could just send it to you automatically, like a perfect little gift into your email inbox, where you get to open it and it's, you know, your birthday every single week with perfect Reset You content. You're welcome.
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