What is Low-Impact Exercise
Low-impact exercise is exercise that allows us to avoid placing significant strain on our joints. When we perform low-impact activities like walking, swimming, strength training, water fitness, or cycling, we generally keep our feet on the ground and avoid ballistic movements. Just like high-impact exercise, low-impact exercise allows us to fight disease and improve health. However low-impact movements allow us to do so without less wear and tear on our joints, making it easier for people with pain to exercise.
Get Deep
If we’re strength training or performing low impact cardio aerobics, we should keep our squats deep. Deep squats then coming all the way to a standing position with each repetition will help ensure we get the most out of our efforts. Let’s keep our feet about hip-width apart and keep our knees and toes comfortably pointing forward. Find a depth that is challenging but does not cause any pain. Finally, keep the chest up through the down phase of the squat and come all the way to standing.
Use Big Arms
When walking, performing water fitness, or during low-impact aerobics use big arm movements to get your heart rate up. During a walk we can bend the arms, pump them faster, and increase the swinging distance to get our heart rates up. We could also add light hand weights and perform overhead presses or biceps curls while walking During water fitness we can. In a low-impact aerobics session we can add arms to most exercises or make any arm movement bigger for added challenge.
Practice Posture
If we want better posture we don’t necessarily need to, Instead we should practice good posture with everything we do, including our workouts. It’s particularly important to practice good posture when strength training, as we are sending our bodies a direct message as to how it should perform. Good posture involves a lengthened neck instead of shoulders hiked near the base of the head. We can accomplish this by lifting the crown of the head toward the ceiling and allowing the shoulders to rest. Good posture also involves engaging the postural muscles or the muscles along the spine. This can be accomplished by squeezing the muscles between the shoulder blades.
Practice Balance
Balance is another important element moving well and safely. It’s also something we can practice in everything we do, including our workouts. We can change the placement of our feet in many standing exercises to challenge our balance. To begin working on balance we could start by narrowing our stance (bringing the feet closer together) in our exercises. The more narrow our base of support is, the more our balance will be challenged. From there we could try a staggered stance (one foot in front of us and one foot behind us). After that we could practice our exercises on a single foot. Finally we can add movement on a single foot to further increase the challenge.
Use Functional Exercises
Low-impact exercise allows us to easily include important movements patterns that we need to practice to stay active and feel good. Movements like bending, twisting, lifting, pushing, pulling, and squatting, are essential to participating in life. All of these can be performed in your regular fitness routine. To learn more about including these important movement patterns, check out my post on How to Incorporate Functional Training.
Your Low-Impact Challenge
Now that you know how to make the most of low-impact exercise, go out and try it for yourself. Focus on at least one of the tips above to challenge your next low-impact workout. Let me know how it goes in the comments. I’d love to hear which tips you’ve tried and how they worked out for you.
Sources
Low-impact workouts: Health benefits, how to get started, and how to get better (everyday health). Low-Impact Workouts: Health Benefits, How to Get Started, and How to Get Better (Everyday Health). (n.d.). https://www.acefitness.org/about-ace/press-room/in-the-news/8417/low-impact-workouts-health-benefits-how-to-get-started-and-how-to-get-better-everyday-health/