What To Do After a Long Drive to the Cottage?

What To Do After a Long Drive to the Cottage with Eric Wong

After a long drive, you may find yourself sore and stiff from being in the car for so long or may not have been able to work out as much as you want to while away in the cottage. Luckily, there are a lot of excellent exercises that will help you get back into shape quickly. These simple exercises stretch your muscles and loosen up your joints after a long drive. Do them every day after your drive or at any other time that is convenient for you.

After a Long Drive

Simple Stretching Exercises

Stretching is an important part of any exercise routine, and you don’t have to do anything too fancy. All you need to do is stretch out your muscles. Doing so will help increase your range of motion and loosen up the joints in your body. This will help prevent pulled muscles and other pain issues by keeping your muscles loose and your joints free of build-up. There are lots of easy stretching exercises that you can do.

Here are a few:

1. Neck Rolls

Roll your head in a slow and controlled motion to stretch your neck muscles. Do this in both directions to stretch both sides of your neck. 

2. Shoulder Rolls

Roll your shoulders in a slow and controlled motion to stretch out your shoulders. Do this in both directions to stretch both sides of your shoulders.

3. Arm Rolls

Roll your arms in a slow and controlled motion to stretch out your biceps and triceps. Do this in both directions.

Last month, when I was in New Brunswick at a Mastermind Meeting, one of the guys asked, “What should we do after a long drive?”

We drove around 2 1/2 hours from the airport to our meeting spot. I started chatting, and the guy (Eric Wong) said, wait, let’s do a video on it. The video did not turn out great because of an old cellular phone but below are the tips I suggested.

Enjoy!

Rick Kaselj, MS


What to do After a Long Drive to the Cottage?

Eric: Hey, what’s up, everybody? Eric here, and I just arrived in New Brunswick in a little cottage. You can look at this, a rustic little cottage, and I am with my friend, Rick Kaselj.

He is a fellow Canadian from the West Coast, BC. He is an injury specialist and is good at helping people heal their bodies through exercise, different movements, stretching, or whatever it takes to heal your body.

I thought I would ask Rick what would be good to do after traveling. We sat on the plane for a few hours and drove for two and a half hours drive from the airport.

Two Good Things to do after Travelling

So Rick, what is the good thing to do or things to do after traveling?

Rick Kaselj: I recommend that people mobilize their hips and reverse the sitting position they were in.

Your first step is to stand up, move into a diagonal stance, contract your glutes, and bring your back hip forward to create a stretch in your quadriceps and hip flexor muscles. You will also experience a bit of hip joint movement due to this position.

I want to activate my glute muscles, which tend to shut down from sitting for long periods and stretch out my quads and hip flexors, which become shortened from sitting for long periods. I will perform this sequence five times on each side. 

After a Long Drive

The second thing that I will do is just going to do five back arches. You are arching back and loosening up that back.

Eric: Right on. It’s quick and easy stuff that you can do, squeeze those glutes and activate them, mobilize the hips up, and arch the back to neutralize those lumbar discs to reverse that sitting posture to keep your back healthy and stay feeling good.

Okay, guys, thank Rick for shooting that quick video for us, and I will post where you can find more about him just around this video, somewhere up there or below. Alright, guys, peace!

Rick Kaselj, MS.

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