Good Herbal Health

Flexibility enables a person to easily carry out physical activities that he needs to do.  Flexibility makes a person less vulnerable to body pains.  But as a person grows older, his flexibility decreases. To still maintain your body’s flexibility, you must do several stretching exercises.  And one of these stretching exercises can be done late at night.

Before you go to sleep, there is one stretching exercise that is fun to do.  One of its effects is to give you a great sleep.  This exercise will relax your entire body.  It will also relieve your shoulder pain.  This stretching exercise can be called the “clock exercise”.

To begin, you must lie on the floor on your right side.  Do not use the soft bed.  Your right arm should be bent and placed underneath your head.  Then, position your two legs so that they are bent in the most comfortable position.  Visualize your upper body part as part of a big clock.  Your head points to twelve o’clock.  And your free left arm will be the hand of the clock.

Next, extend your left arm in front of you so that it points to nine o’clock.  Extend as far as you can manage without moving your entire body.  Then, slowly move your arm clockwise, moving to ten o’clock, to eleven, and then to twelve, keeping the hand softly touching the floor.  Gently move this left arm towards the one o’clock position.  Then stop and hold this position.

Then, roll your upper body part to your back.  But do not move or change the position of your hips and legs.  From the one o’clock position, move your arm again, imitating the hand of a clock.  Your arm will pass through the two o’clock, three, and four o’clock positions.  Then, with palms up, your arm will move over your hips, reaching the seven, eight, and back to the nine o’clock position.

Repeat the whole clock sequence again.  But this time, lie on your left side and your right arm will imitate the clock movement.  Your right arm will begin at the three o’clock position.  You will feel the expanding and relaxing in several parts of your body, such as the shoulders, the chest, the hips, the upper back, the middle back, and the lower back.

As you do the clock exercise, make sure that you breathe.  At the beginning, you may do this only once.  But as you become more familiar with it, you can repeat this and other stretching exercises up to four times.  Just make sure that each movement is done deliberately and slowly.  Abrupt movements can do harm to your tendons and ligaments.

This clock exercise may be done about three times a week.