How long periods of inactiveness end up straining the body
This last week I had a seven-hour drive for my Thanksgiving meal. Then later in the week I had that same seven-hour drive back to San Marcos. My right leg, after five hours of holding it still on the foot pedal, started to let me know that not moving muscles for five hours was not a good feeling. The discomfort increased over the next two hours and an effort to massage the thigh helped a little. I had never thought that a long drive would have that effect on my legs. I started to recollect my long drives to races over the years. I drove to Dallas and Houston and Old Dime Box and Pflugerville and several dozen other locations. Some of these drives were over three hours in time. I never thought much about the effect the long drive would have on my race time. I had heard from football coaches and how long drives to games seemed to take the speed out of the legs during the game from some of the players. They had asked me about exercises the players could do while sitting on the bus on the way to the game. It seems that a good run before the race seemed to bring my legs back to normal function. When the football coaches told me how it affected the running backs in the game I started to wonder if maybe my times were also affected. If I ran a slower time, I usually accredited it to a more difficult course for the race. I remember the Pflugerville 5K was all downhill to the turnaround point and then it was all uphill back to the finish. The combination of an uphill finish and a long drive might have been a reason for a slower time.
The problem could have been solved with a few stops along the drive back to let the leg muscles move and get some circulation back. The aches seem to start in the butt muscles, drift down to the upper thigh muscles, and eventually make it to the low back on the right side. It comes down to the priority of wanting to get home quickly or take an extra hour and be more comfortable. With the time change, I wanted to get home before dark. That falls back to getting an earlier start so an extra hour of walking around will still get me back before dark. Now that the results of a long seven-hour drive are fresh in my mind, I will try to make some changes to the drive and make it pain-free.
I had a similar problem when I was doing powerlifting. I had been on vacation and had a drive home over a two-day period. I did not think that holding the steering wheel with your fingers had any effect on the muscles of the hand. The next day, I tried a workout doing deadlifts. It was not the fact that the weight was heavy but I could not hold onto the bar. I tried a medium weight and dropped the bar. I could not grip the bar tight enough to hold it. My fingers had no strength for heavy weights. The weight of my hands and arms on the fingers resting on the steering wheel for a long stretch of driving strained the muscle of the fingers and needed a few days’ rest to recover.
One other case of the effect driving has on a body was from a traveling salesperson. He said he had pain in his leg from driving from one city to the other. His problem came from having a billfold in his right hip pocket and the pressure of the billfold on the nerves and muscle from sitting so long caused him discomfort. He took the billfold out of his hip pocket and it helped relieve the pain from driving across the state.
I guess the discomfort I had from a seven-hour drive made me think of how the simple act of driving can have such an effect on the muscles and nerves of the body. I never really thought about how sitting for a long period of time can have such an impact on the body. Office workers that sit for long hours at a computer probably experience the same problems. It all comes down to making an effort to take exercise breaks throughout the day to prevent many of the effects of sitting and not moving for long periods of time. I worked with an accountant that would get a migraine headache every day at 2 p.m. By holding the head tilted to read the payroll sheets caused the muscles of the neck to be strained and the tension caused the headache. The head weighs more than you think for weak neck muscles to hold it still for long periods of time. A few simple exercises to strengthen the neck and upper shoulders and back solved the problem.
It all goes back to the fact that you need to keep moving to stay healthy and pain-free.
