Do This Right Before Bed EVERY Night

Do you know what the last thing you should do before bed is? In this video, I am going to show you 5 stretches you can do before going to bed that will help you to not only have a more restful sleep, but will help you fall asleep faster, and make you wake up feeling more refreshed and loose. With ju

So, it’s the end of the day. You’re tired. You cannot wait to get to bed. But stop. Not so fast.

What if I told you there’s something that you should do every single night as the last thing you do before you get to bed that will not only help you to sleep better, go to sleep faster, but also wake up feeling better every morning, less stressed out, and actually less stiff. Well, it’s stretching. However, it’s not any type of stretching. It’s not any type of stretch. Actually, I’m going to show you the specific stretches that are going to do the most for making you feel the best when you wake up.

The first thing we want to do is stretch the muscles that are going to get tight as you sleep. And one of the things we know that gets tight is our calves because they get pulled down by the covers. So, all you need is a wall. And you simply anchor your foot up here against the bottom of the wall. That’s going to get a stretch on your calf.

But we also can stretch our hamstrings out a little bit, too. And the way to do this is just to keep a straight knee and then allow ourselves to drift closer to the wall with our chest. And you’ll feel it right away if you do this right. I’m just trying to drift myself closer and I use the wall for support. Now, the goal here with this first stretch and with all these stretches is to not take them to the point of discomfort or pain because any type of stimulus like that is going to wake you up before going to bed rather than help you to relax.

So, we don’t want to do that. We take it to the point where we know we’re stretching but not overdoing it. Then, what we want to do is we want to hold them for about 30 seconds at a minimum up to 60 seconds at a max and focus on breathing. So, what I want to do is take a deep breath in through the nose, out through the mouth. And if I can sink a little bit more into the stretch after that breath, then go ahead and go for it.

If you can’t, you want to leave it right there, that’s fine. But just make sure that you’re focusing on your breathing because this is part of the whole process here is the relaxation. When I get that done, all I have to do is swap it up. Go the other side. Ankle up against the the uh bottom of the wall, and again, straight knee, and I do the same thing.

Okay, that’s stretch number one. Now, how’s this different from other stretches? Dynamic stretching where you’re moving around. We don’t want that. Again, we want nothing that’s excitatory as we’re preparing to go to bed.

We want to be calming ourselves down and getting these benefits that I’m talking about. But like I said, you want to target the areas that are going to get most affected by sleep, get most tight. And for us, it’s the thoracic spine. We tend to sleep on our back or on our side with a rounded shoulder position. So, what we want to do is get that loose.

So the first thing is come down to the ground and put our forearms down like this flat in contact with the ground. Then from here we’re going to sit back into our hips just like that. All right. So forearms stay down. Almost drag your arms to lock them in place.

You’ll find that at some point they stop moving. You’ve locked yourself in. And now by sitting back onto your your heels, you’re going to feel a really good stretch up through the shoulders here in through the lats here, which is another muscle that tends to get tight at night cuz our arms are down all the time. And then we get back into the hips and the glutes. We get a little bit of the thoracic spine, but we’re going to target that even more so in a second.

So in this position, once again, deep breath in and out and sink down even more. And again, if you have to, you pull yourself back by sitting back into your hips and dragging your arms until they sort of lock you in place here. And again, 30 to 60 seconds. The third stretch is a variation now where we actually directly attack that thoracic spine to get more mobility into extension, right? To undo all that rounded shoulder position we’ve had throughout the day.

So, from here now, what we do is we just sit up a little bit, get the forearms off of the floor, have our hands here in the same position. But now what I’m going to try to do is just allow my chest to drop. And what happens is I’m almost dropping down between my shoulder blades. Right? You’ll see the shoulder blades go from this sort of flat position to almost a pinched position here as the chest tries to approach the ground.

And again, I take a deep breath in through the nose and then out and sink down even more. Your goal is just to allow your chest to try to get closer to the ground by keeping your arms up though. So, here’s where we really focus on getting that extension through that midback, right? And this feels great. And again, every single night for these stretches, and it’s a quick routine.

By the time I’m done explaining these to you, you guys could be done with what you need to do, and you’ll wake up feeling so much better. All right, that’s number three. Number four, again, attacking these muscles that get tight. The hip flexors are going to get tight. even for any sleeping position really unless you’re sleeping on your stomach and that’s not a great position to be sleeping in anyway.

I have a whole video on that. We just pull ourselves up with one hip now up in front of us into what we would call this modified pigeon pose. And what this is doing is stretching out the rotators of this front hip and then the hip flexor as I just mentioned on that back hip. Now, to lock this in place, what you want to do is try to put your hand up on top of the front thigh and then this hand up on top of your hand. And right there, what you’re doing is you’re giving yourself the support to maintain balance.

Number one. Number two, you’re locking this front leg down. So, if you have a hard time getting the flexibility in the front hip here because your rotators are tight, this will actually assist you in doing that. And then what it does is because I can get up higher here into more extension, I get more of that hip flexor stretch on that back leg. And again, this feels amazing.

And what happens again is by getting yourself into a more flexible state prior to sleep, you actually create an environment for more relaxed sleep, less disturbed sleep. So you’ll find that you wake up less during the night if you do an effective routine like this. So, there’s so many ways that we can benefit ourselves by doing a quick little stretch routine of the right stretches done the right way here, statically holding for 30 to 60 seconds. And again, I do the other side the same exact way, just by sliding that down, then opening this hip up like that and then locking in place the same exact way and doing that. Now, the last stretch we want to do is continue to sort of mobilize our entire back and spine, but not just focus on that thoracic area.

Because what we want to do, too, is make sure that our lumbar spines don’t get too tight. So, from here, I’m going to take my leg, bring it up across my body here like this, and then rotate it. You’ve probably seen this stretch before, but at this point here, I know we can stretch the lats even more. And I keep mentioning the lats because they’re one of the muscles that get tight and when they do they internally rotate the shoulders. So how can we maintain better posture when we wake up?

By making sure the lats are loose. So what I want you to do is reach above your head towards the opposite ear. Lock that in. So you’re getting the lats on stretch here. And then just sort of reach up and out.

So I’m reaching th