Health
Struggling with lower limb weakness? Nutritionist shares easy exercises to improve balance and strength
Nutritionist Rujuta Diwekar shares 3 easy exercises for lower limbs.
If you are strength training, you are probably already working on your legs to some extent. Apart from maintaining the strength of our limbs, we need to ensure that we keep our DALYs to a minimum. What is that, you ask? DALY, or disability-adjusted life years, is a metric used to measure the overall burden of disease. It adds up the number of years lost due to living with disability (YLDs). Nutritionist Rujuta Diwekar shares some easy exercises to do at home that can help maintain strength and balance in your lower limbs.
1. “Sit on a chair, cross one leg over the other and stand up. Be careful about getting down slowly. Hold for a count of 3, repeat on the other side. If you are having trouble standing up, take someone’s help and then place your foot on the floor and slowly get down. Once you can get up without any help, start practising lowering yourself,” says Rujuta. This exercise helps improve balance and strength and also teaches you how to avoid falls.
2. For the second exercise, place the leg you are sitting on on the less used side. If your knees are up, use a rolled blanket to support them and continue to push downwards from the upper thigh towards the knee. Since we all use one side of our body more than the other, we often experience aches, pains and stiffness in our joints. Stiffness and dehydration of the synovial fluid around your joints are also signs of ageing.
3. Place a stepper in front of you and cross it with your left foot. After repeating three times, switch to the right foot. Once you get used to it, come back with the same leg. Many of us start dragging our feet as we age and it is also common in people with back problems.
Walking with legs elevated may seem easy, but it is important to maintain your speed, posture and effectiveness as you age. Apart from taking the load off your femur, this exercise also helps strengthen bone density.
Nutritionist Rujuta Diwekar suggests doing this exercise daily.
