Ten minutes on the floor

Nobody puts a photo of their stretching on the internet. It does not look like anything and it does not feel like progress, so it is the first thing to go when time is short, which is most of the time.

Then a back goes at forty-three lifting a bag out of the boot, or a shoulder will not go above the head any more, and the training stops for three months, and that is where a lot of people's training ends for good, over an injury that ten minutes on the floor would have prevented.

Ten minutes is enough. Hips, because we sit all day. Shoulders, because we hunch at a screen. Hamstrings and the lower back, because they do everything. The best time is while the kettle boils or while the children find their shoes, and the best place is the kitchen floor, because that is where you are.

Mobility is what lets you keep doing everything we ask of a body when you are sixty, and the people still doing it at sixty mostly did this at forty.