Hasty Treat - Stretching For Developers with Scott

Welcome to syntax in this Monday. Hasty treat. We're gonna be talking about your body and stretching, and I'm talking about how to feel better. Because as developers, there are a host of issues that can happen from staring at your computer and most likely sitting in a chair all day long.

So my name is Scott Tolinski. I'm a full stack developer from Denver, Colorado. And with me, as always, is the Wes Bos. Hey. I'm excited for this one because I'm not very flexible at all. And whenever I do do some little bit of stretching, I feel amazing, and I think that I need to do more of it. Yeah. Well, let me just say, 1st and foremost, off the jump, I am not a physical therapist. I have no training in this regard. I have been seeing a physical therapist for, quite a bit of time, but I've also been a stretching enthusiast for a very, very long time. Stretching enthusiast? Seriously, Node, I have read so many books. I even sick picked in one of our 1st episodes, how to become a supple leopard, which is like a physical therapist's favorite book. So I've been very into this scene for a very long time. And as a developer and also somebody who has a lot of tight muscle issues, I can tell you I've done a lot of research. So if you disagree or your physical therapist disagrees, that's cool too. This is gonna be just general guidelines for most people. This episode is sponsored by Log Rocket. Hey, Wes. Do you wanna try the LogRocket

every this time? Yeah. LogRocket. I think their tagline puts it best Scott guessing why bugs happen. So you install LogRocket into your JavaScript application, and it gives you sort of this thing that they it's called session replay. So when a bug happens on your website, it's going to show you exactly what happened. So they give you a pixel perfect replay of what the user saw for that bug to actually happen. You get all the network activity for something like that, and I imagine that'd be super helpful to see, like, this network request failed for whatever reason, and we didn't show the user or we didn't try again or we didn't show the user any sort of UI, and the thing just broke. That happens to me all the time where I'm on a website, and it like, it's not showing the right thing, or you're clicking a button that doesn't do something right. I'm like, they should have handled that failed request a little bit better. You get to see the user's console, all the errors that happen, and, like, I'm guilty of this myself JS if if, something happens on my website, I ask the user, okay.

Can you send me a screenshot of your console? Right? And you shouldn't have to go back and forth with with your user. So check it out if you want it for your JavaScript application.

Pretty nifty. Check it out at logrocket.comforward/syntax.

You can try out the free demo on there. Thanks so much to LogRocket for sponsoring.

Cool. So I should state, first and foremost, some of these will be pretty visual. I will do my best. If I am unable to make a video, I will link videos showing you how to do these things. I've I've considered making a bunch of little just short We look at screens. I don't know about you, but I I like to get my face right up in that screen. I just shove it right in there, really jutting my head forward.

I don't know about you, Wes, but I'm pretty addicted to my phone. I know a lot of developers who spend a lot of time on their technology and their devices specifically because we work on these things. You're on your phone a lot. Now when you're on your phone, another thing that happens is this new, like I don't know if they're calling it, like, a, like, a pigeon neck phenomenon

where you jut jut your chin out forward. You could imagine you're trying to chin somebody. Could you You should see the video of Scott trying to show me what he's talking about right now. It's hilarious. He looks like a chicken.

Yeah.

And so you what you end up having is you end up having your shoulders forward, your neck forward, and all of that stuff's just pulling on your back. I know me personally, I've been having a conversation with my brother about this. He's not a developer, but he works on a computer all day long. And he's saying, I need to actively focus on pulling my head back and my shoulders back or else I have back pain all day long. And if you are a, yeah, you know, a youngin', you're not not in the thirties and up category. You might not even notice some of these things until you're our age. And when you do, it sucks. I'm definitely in muscular pain all the time. Now another thing that can happen in generally from sitting too much is interior pelvic which is something I suffered from before even using a computer too much, where you end up having comparably a a weak underactive core and overactive lower back, and so your lower back hurts all the time, and simultaneously, it's pulling on that muscle and also can cause some issues with where your glutes and your quads are not working in the correct way as well. Your glutes become weak from sitting all day long, And even if you have, you know, ESLint the maybe you got abs in a nice butt, that does not mean that they are working correctly. Right? So let's talk about 1 more thing too, which is carpal tunnel, which is something that I've personally suffered from because I love I've had it too. Yeah. I love to use the trackpad. Trackpad, not great for carpal tunnel. You're doing all these little micro movements with your fingers, and what a carpal tunnel really is sorry, medical people if you this is, you know, explained incorrectly, but I'm pretty sure carpal tunnel is is those individual tendons, they're being inflamed because of the way that they're rubbing in these sort of patterns in ways that the tendons themselves become inflamed, and that inflammation can damage all sorts of things in your your hand long term.

So let's talk about before we get into the actual stretches and the actual fixes for a lot of these things, let's talk about misconceptions about stretching. People think wrongly so. I don't know if your high school or your middle school or your elementary school gym class was like this, but I know mine was, everybody, let's sit in a circle and do some you bend over and touch your toes kinda stretches Wes you're just holding a static stretch for a given amount of 10 seconds. I can still tell you the sequence in which my gym teacher counted in elementary school, which is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10, and then we did the next stretch. I mean, it was just every day. Right? And so that was, like, how a lot of people learned how to stretch was like, alright. Let's just hold these stretches.

Let's just hold this, that, whatever, and then I'm gonna be more flexible and then when I started. Now unfortunately, your muscles don't really work like that, and first and foremost, the stretches that is going to help the most for any of us that have a tight back, tight wrist, carpal tunnel. The the exercises and stretches that are going to help the most, are going to be more dynamic, and I don't mean, like, rapid, and I don't mean hard. I mean slow controlled movements.

So you could think of, like, a solution that they talk about for carpal tunnel JS, like, wrist rolls. Right? You're just rolling your wrist or you're you're doing, like, shoulder rolls, shoulder circles. I feel like I need to do this as I'm listening to you. Forwards and backwards, shoulder rolls. And you might not even think of those as being stretches, but those are the most important stretches you've Scott, and you shouldn't do static holds, like touch your toes and don't move for 10 seconds. You shouldn't do that without being warp muscles. Not only that, but those those things aren't going to give you the type of bang for your buck that some of these things are. So when I'm talking about these stretches and stretching to help your back and all of these things, a lot of these are going to be straight up dynamic movements. Okay? So the first one, dynamic movement that can help you the most, and this one is through your lower back entirely. You put your arms up at, like, shoulder level.

You can make fists. You can have your elbows at, like, a 90 degree angle. I have my arms in, like, almost like a T pose with bent elbows. My fists are facing forward, and then you just rotate left and right. You just do a twist, and these are just, like, trunk twists Wes you're twisting your core, your back, everything left and right, back and forth. And the goal for these should not be to, like, really slam it or do it hard. It's just, like, slow and low. Right? Like, you're doing some barbecue, fully controlled all the way through, twisting and twisting back and forth and back and forth. This one helps me so much. I do it every morning. Dynamic twists are a great one to get your back muscles warmed up. I've been having, just a tremendous amount of back issues lately, so just being able to warm all of those muscles up is just really, really important. It also gets your core nice and engaged, and you warp it again Node it nice and slow. Now the next one that's probably gonna get you the most bang for your buck is cat cow. Are you familiar with cat cow, Wes? No. I would go as far to say as I'm not familiar with any of these. Tell me about cat cow. Cat cow. I cannot tell you because you you what you do is you you on your hands and your knees, so you're in, like, a tabletop position, hands and knees on the ground. And what you do is you do a fully rounded spine and then a fully arch spine.

So, like, I'll think about it in your back. Then you gotta be on the hands and knees, and you're doing a a cap position where your your butt's up and your back Oh, yeah. Yeah. And then a cow position where your chest is in and you move a rounded back the other way. And it's important to have your what's that? Do you make sounds when you do these? I bet you this. We recently started watching child yoga videos with Landon. I bet if we started doing cat cow noises while we did this, the kids would get involved a lot more. So I might start doing that, in case you wanted an example of cat and cow noises. So, this one is important for your neck to do the same thing. So if you're doing, like, the the cap position with your, you know, your your your butt up, whatever, is that you tilt your head back as well. You wanna complete the the concave and convex shapes. And likewise, when you do the cow position, you're going to want to pull your head in. So you want a convex and concave. And the most important things about these positions isn't to, like, hold any of them for particular amount of time. It's to to go slow and controlled through each of them back and forth, because what that does is it's warming up your muscles. It's actually making long term changes to those fibers, and it's going to help you build the, antagonist muscles for those positions.

Because what a lot of people don't think about is, like, with stretching, it's not just lengthening even if that that may not even be, like, a scientifically accurate term. But it's not just lengthening the muscles that you're trying to stretch. It's also increasing the strength of the antagonist muscle, the muscle that's on the opposite side. Because if you increase the strength of the antagonist muscle, then it is going to do much more work for you long, long term.

Another one here is that we do we sit a lot. Right? And one of the things that can happen with sitting is you get this, like, real compressed feeling in your back, your spine.

Everything feels compressed. Right? It just feels like you're you're been squished.

And so for me, in addition, a lot of people well, my my dad at one point had rented an in well, not rented, borrowed an inversion table from one of his friends. It's like one of those things where you hang upside down. Oh, yeah. I've been on one of those. Supposed to, yeah, it's supposed to pull you apart. Well, it turns out you can, you could do the exact same thing just hanging from a pull up bar or hanging from literally anything.

And this is man, when I'm having a a rough backdate, one of the best things I can possibly do is ESLint the backyard, grab onto something overhead, hands kinda closest, and just hang. Just hang. Let let your whole body decompress and just do straight up hang.

You don't have to do it for super long, but it will really help you pulling apart. So the hanging is definitely like a great thing to help relieve some of that compression that happens.

Another one is going to be this flat down curl up spine. This JS, like, sort of like straight up yoga, essentially. What you're doing is you keep your back as flat as possible while you hinge at the hips and try to touch your toes. Right? You go as far down as you possibly can with the flattest of back. You cannot let your back curve. And then on the way up, you do it vertebrae by vertebrae and then unwind yourself and round your back all the way up. This is going to get the 2 effects of having both the flat back as also the curled up spine that bivertebrae thing that you do in yoga is just so fantastic because, again, it hits all of those vertebraes. It hits your back in so many different ways. I Node know that a lot of these things that we're talking about is back related. That is going to be, like, the primary hitter for a lot of these people is both lower back, upper back, mid back. So a lot of these things is going to really, really help you there.

Carpal tunnel, we talked about doing wrist rolls. Another thing I like to do specifically for carpal tunnel, I'll often make a video for this. You can get any sort of, like, weighted anything. What I use is a dumbbell with a weight on the end, like, low weight, but you could use any stick that has any bit of weight to it. And you do these 3 exercises, one of which which is just a like, if you were to hold your hand in a fist straight out in front of you and you were to go back and up and down with your wrist without moving the rest of your Yarn.

So up and down with TypeScript and then holding on to a pole that it maybe have some weight. There's another one where you do the opposite, where you hold on and you do, like, ski poles with it. So it's like your ski pulling back.

These are gonna be hard without visuals, so I'll have to do a visual for these. And then the other one would be windshield wipers, where you hold both your wrists like this and you do so without moving your hands, and you rotate them. And it looks like windshield wipers once you're holding on Node the barbell.

Yeah. Try not to rotate your arms as much. Just wrist action as much as possible. Obviously, you're gonna rotate your forearms. But those things will help. I used to it's funny. I played the drums a lot, which is also a carpal tunnel thing. Right? You can do carpal tunnel for playing the drums. And on a flight, my family JS going somewhere. I don't remember why, but I got stuck being the 1 person who had to sit next to some random person. It was the young youngest person in the family. I don't know why that worked. They were just like, oh, yeah. We'll put Scott next to the random person. I guess his seniority got screwed, but, the guy ended up being a semi famous drummer. He was like a drummer in this jazz group that traveled the world, and he found out I played the drums. So besides giving me sticks, he also taught me all these, like, wrist warm ups where you make a fist and you do the loop, you do the other loop. Oh, yeah. You do your handout. You do the other handout. And so there's always, like, wrist rolls, and all of these things will help you so much make your wrist feel a little bit better.

Another one which is really fun, this is for a lot of things, including your back, but also legs JS horse stance. Now horse stance is something that comes from martial arts. And what horse stance is if you stand, you pivot your feet out once. You pivot your feet out again. You pivot your feet out, and your your feet end up being a little bit wider than shoulder width apart.

So you're standing there with your feet a little bit wider than shoulder width apart, and then you bend at the hips and the knees, and you try to keep your shin bones perpendicular to the ground. So you get this really Deno like, you're riding a horse. Right? So you're just you're standing like you're riding a horse.

Oopsie. Oops. You're standing like you're riding a horse. And at first, this would, like, really atrophy me after a little bit. And, like, I started doing horse stance when I was working at my standing desk rather than standing. I can stand in horse Sanity for a long time now. Really? And the cool thing about it is is, like, the more you do it, it takes some of that pressure off your lower back. It brings it into your glutes, which are neglected from sitting into a chair. It definitely helps with your core muscles, which are neglected from sitting in a chair, and it Vercel is a great strength builder that you can do. And it might be a little bit hard at first, but it's a great strength and a great stretch that you can do while you're working.

And one of them, which is going to be shoulder circles. Again, this really follows along with the dynamic things that we were talking about before. There's a lot of different ways you can do shoulder circles. You can have your arms just down by your side and just do shoulder circles. The important thing to do shoulder circles is do it one way, then do them the other way. Then you can do it with your arms out like your like your Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like a bird in gym class. I remember that one from school. Yeah. You do big circles, little circles, all of those things. Let me tell you, if you're sitting at a desk and your back hurts, you do the twists, you do some cat cow, you do some shoulder Vercel. You're gonna be feeling a lot better afterwards.

Another one is going to be doorway stretches to open up your shoulders more. Anytime you have a doorway, you can grab the doorway with a straight arm or anything or whatever. Yeah. And you use the door as leverage, and you push against it to pull your arms back and open. And this works for open like this. It works like this. It works down here, here, here, and even above if you grab the top of a door handle or the top of the door frame and push your head through.

And what the key component is to all of these is to not let your back arch. You don't want an arch to lower back. What you want is your pelvis tucked under. You want a tight core, and you wanna push it through. That way, you're not stretching your lower back or whatever. You're stretching the actual shoulder. Yeah. So all of those are very good. One Wes gymnastics tip that I had for these is to make 3 different letters. So you do the a position where your arms are down at your sides wider than hips, and you're pulling in into the door like that in an a position. So your your body makes an a. Then you make a t, which is the standard t pose where your arms are out to the side. Right? And you're doing the same thing. And then the last 1 is the y. So you do a, t, and y. In between all 3 of those arm shapes, you really hit all of the muscles in your shoulder, and it helps a lot.

So that has been stretching with Scott. I am going to try to make some videos of all of these. I realize this is a very visual thing. These are things that I do all of the time, almost every day to help myself feel better, work better, and, not be in pain when I'm working or after I'm working for that matter. Yeah. I like it. I'm gonna try do these every day for the rest of October just to see Dude. What does doing a month of of this do? Because, like, yeah, I've got I'm getting old. I got I got pains. I got aches.

Love to see, how what this does for me. And just like the gain of, like, how bad it feels over time, for instance, like, doesn't feel bad overnight.

It feels bad after years of abuse. Right? Yeah. Yeah. The same thing will happen with fixing it. Fixing it doesn't happen overnight. Yeah. And I have so many different tight tight areas that I need to work on all the time to make them better.

So, yeah, this has been Stretching with Scott. I hope, hope you all got something fun out of this. I think this is a good one. This is one that we've been wanting to do for a long time. I've been thinking about it. I've been standing in horse stance, constantly thinking about this.

So we might do another one of these. I have so much stretching I have so many different stretches, so many different stretching tips for for various things, and maybe next time Wes can get into some, more leg stuff. This one's definitely back shoulder heavy.

Alright. Thanks so much for tuning in. We will catch you on Wednesday.

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