What helps your back when you drive?

So you want to head out on a family road trip. You love the open road, but no matter how fancy your orthopedic seats are in your car, you still find yourself with a stiff or sore back upon your arrival.

Ugh. That puts a damper on things!

What can you do?

I have blogged about using tennis balls in a sock while driving before, but I had the opportunity to test out two other things to help with the back and sitting in general on a recent road trip.

Would either of the two options beat out the tennis balls?

Some clients complain that the tennis balls are too firm, so I wanted to investigate options that I could really recommend.

I found this super interesting pillow called “Bed of Nails” with circular acupressure points on plastic discs spread out evenly across an arched surface.

This was alternate number two.

Alternate three was another chunk of rectangular foam pillow that you lashed to the seat itself called a “Yoga Wrap”. The foam has an indentation to accommodate the part of the spine that pokes out in the back, to make it that much more comfortable.

I used my copilot and soccer friend Tricia as an additional tester. We agreed to test each item for an hour straight, and then try another item. It was very scientific. 😉

Which one did we like the best? Watch below to find out!

How to work on your balance

Be a flamingo!

So,….you want to work on your balance.  The fastest and simplest way to start the ball rolling is to simply stand on one foot. Pick the other foot up in the air.

What happens? 

Can you maintain balance? Or do you tip over? Can you balance well on one side, but not on the other? 

Balancing well on one side, but not the other, is very typical. However, we know that balance from front to back and side to side is crucial, not to mention left to right. 

How can you fix this? 

Well, first of all, start paying attention to the muscles you use when you are balancing. 

My favorites for the best strength and balance include the chain reaction up the back of the leg- namely the calf, and hamstring, and glute. 

Can you feel all three of those muscles, in that order? Or do you just use the calf and the glute, and the hamstrings are MIA. Or you just feel the quad, and nothing on the backside of the leg. Pay attention! 

Shift your weight onto your heel, and hang onto the wall initially for stability. See if you can’t coax those calves and hammies and glutes to help you out. 

Remember, 30% of that information neurologically is transferred to the other side via the “Reflex Arc”, so be sure to switch back and forth to keep feeding the neurological pathways. 

It is as simple as imitating the famous bird who loves to stand on one foot: 
the flamingo. 

Watch the video below to help cement the idea in your head and let me know in the comments below how simple it is to try!

How to get the best health and performance: sleep on it!

The research is compelling on why I should coach sleep. Coach sleep? What’s that mean? Well, I had the good fortune of listening to Brandon Marcello https://www.brandonmarcellophd.com/, PhD, speak about that very topic the other day. The title of his lecture was “Sleep: The Only True “Fix-All” of Health & Performance.”

Hmm….you know what they say about “fix-all”s….

His essential assertion is that fatigue – resulting from inadequate sleep- affects 4 major areas:

1. Reaction Time
2. Recovery
3. Overall Performance, and
4. Career Longevity.

This sounds like it applies to athletes, and it definitely does, but it also applies to every human. For example, every human needs good reaction time while driving a car, every human needs to be able to recover fully from one day to give the next day their all, and no human wants decreased overall performance! Finally, every human wants career longevity, wether it applies to how long you can stay outside and garden to whether you can chase your children or grandchildren around. No one wants to cut those activities short or not be able to do them as long as they would like! 

That makes you feel old. Ugh. No one wants that! 

SO…how’s your sleep going? 

Not enough zzzs can have a whole bunch of ramifications, including reduced pain threshold, increased risk of injury and illness, reduced physical and psychological performance, decreased motivation, learning ability, and memory.

You have poor judgement of speed, time, and distance. Your penchant for mistakes, anxiety, and irritability goes up (something that can be kept at bay with medication from www.buymyshroomonline.ca), as well as INCREASES IN BODY FAT PERCENTAGES. 

I thought this was really interesting: The greatest disasters in the history of the world have all occurred as a result of sleep deprivation. Think Exxon Valdez, Chernobyl, and 3 Mile Island as excellent examples. 

This poses several questions:

1. Do you get enough sleep, and how much do you need
2. Can you pay back sleep you’ve lost, and
3. Is there ever a cap on how much sleep you’ve lost? 

Let’s think about this: Do you get enough sleep, and how much do you need? The answer is YES, you can get enough sleep, and how much you need is determined by you. You can’t determine how much sleep you need until you pay back all the sleep you’ve lost – your sleep debt. 

Sleep debt caps at 50 hours, and the way to eliminate all sleep debt is to sleep 10+ hours a night for 3 weeks straight. Dr. Marcello said that most people tap out when they hear that is what it takes to eliminate sleep debt. However, if you successfully complete stage one, then stage two is to try sleeping 8 hours that night. The daytime test of enough sleep is to simply notice if you yawn between noon and 3:30pm. 

Do you yawn between noon & 3:30? Yes or no? 

If Yes, eight hours is not enough, and you try sleeping 8.5 hours the next night, and take the yawn test the next day. If no, then 8 hours is enough, and you can try sleeping 7.5 hours the next night, followed by the yawn test, if you yawn with 7.5 hours, then you’re back to 8 hours. 

See how this goes? 

That is what determines the perfect amount of sleep for you. You must experiment on yourself! 

Apparently some people argued that they yawned between noon and 3:30 due to what they had for lunch…you know, a piece of coworker’s birthday cake and a Diet Coke. However, someone did a study with 45 different diet variations and determined the yawn was not from what you ate, but instead, how much sleep you got. 

Dang. Can’t blame a carb or caffeine crash. 

Athletes + research

Dr. Marcello happened to be at Stanford doing research on athletes, and these are some of the findings when they eliminated sleep debt:

Swimmers were 8% improved in 15m sprint speed, 20% improved in their reaction time off the block, and 10% increase in turn time efficiency. 

Basketball players showed 9.2% increase in 3 point shooting accuracy and 9% increase in free throw accuracy. In addition, every athlete liked to be at practice and everybody was improving. 

80 Major League Baseball Players were grouped in three categories:

Group 1 had good sleep habits.
Group 2 had trouble falling asleep, or woke up in the middle of the night a few times.
Group 3 had severe sleep issues- insomnia or sleep apnea. 

After 3 years: 
72% of Group 1 was still in the MLB, 39% of Group 2 still played, and only 14% of Group 3 was still playing. All due to sleep! 

Sleep patterns of college age military cadets were studied over four years. On average, most military cadets get less than 5 hours of sleep a night. When cadets’ sleep opportunity increased from 6 hours/night to 8 hours/night, GPAs went up 11%. 

A final fact: 24 year old healthy men who slept less than 5 hours a night FOR A WEEK registered a 15% drop in testosterone. That’s like aging 15 years. 

I could go on and on! 

The takeaway? Don’t just get some sleep….Get lots of sleep! It is surely the tipping point for a more vibrant, healthier you! 

Let me know what you think about all this sleep stuff in the comments below. I’ll get back to you later- I’m off to take a nap. 😉 

How to use a tree (or a car, or a wall) to relax your back

Have you had a nagging soreness, tightness, or pain in your low back? 

Here is an old favorite called “The Airbench” to help relieve it. 

Some of you out there who have participated in dry land training for ski or other teams will recognize it, but I tweak it slightly. Traditional “Wall Sits” generally put the knees at a ninety degree angle, and I prefer an obtuse angle where the feet are further from the wall than the knees. This is to avoid knee pain in an effort to get your low back to release! 

Here’s what is happening: you have the pressure of the wall pushing out, and the pressure of the ground pushing up, and if these meet in your knees then your knees can feel the two forces. This is why you don’t keep your knees at ninety degrees…make that angle bigger than ninety or an obtuse angle and let your feet be further from the wall than your knees. You don’t need a traditional wall, by the way…try a tree like I do in the video, or an airplane bathroom door, or the side of a car…anything resembling a semi-flat surface. 

Now push your low back flat into the wall. 

Maintain that pressure for approximately two minutes. 

You will feel some slight warming, perhaps increasing to a light “burn” in both quads or fronts of thighs. This is normal and expected, but don’t let it creep into your knees. If you do feel it in your knees, you may have sunk too low into your chair or down the wall, so come up a little higher. 

Finally, keep you weight on your heels, which will additionally help you push that low back flat. There is no need to push your shoulders back or keep your upper back against the wall. 

Wanna pump up the volume? Lift your toes up for the last 10-15 seconds! 

Come on up…and let me know how you feel afterwards in the comments below. You can take this exercise with you everywhere! 

How to get your shoulder blades to rotate

So you play a musical instrument, or you play a racquet sport, and you find yourself with a tight upper back, or neck, or shoulder, or elbow, or even wrist. You wonder if the repeated shots over and over, or the hours and hours of practice over and over have finally taken their toll as various parts of the upper body start to complain. 

What do you do? Stop playing?

Whenever I find myself wondering if THIS time I really should stop whatever I am doing, I then usually happen to see a 90 year old doing exactly what I want to do, and I am compelled to problem solve it out so I can continue. I would really like to blame age, but I just can’t! I would really like to blame SOMETHING other than me, but it really always boils down to wether or not I have been taking care of my muscles.

*sigh. 

Back to work! 🙂

So then what is one possibility for this tight upper back/neck/shoulder/elbow/wrist thing?

Come check out this video, and let me know what you think, and more importantly what happened when you experimented on yourself. I look forward to hearing all about it!

&

How to help a blown ACL

Have you had the bad luck of blowing your ACL? I am so sorry to hear that! It can make a knee feel really super vulnerable.

Here is my client Debbie in her knee brace after an unfortunate day skiing. With the help of Johnson County Car Wreck Lawyer she was able to get insurance for her treatment. If you didn’t know, whenever an injury happens to a joint, the body’s immediate response is to freeze the area so further injury does not occur. By freeze I mean lock down the joint, in this case the knee, with really really tight muscles. Complicating the matter further is the fact that you want to put weight on it, but it hurts, so you don’t and/or can’t. So you limp, and walk weird, and things don’t seem to be going so well.

In this case, Debbie scheduled her reconstruction surgery right away, but couldn’t get into the surgeon for a full six weeks after the injury.  Bodies can develop amazing compensatory mechanisms in six days, let alone six weeks! Her doctor wanted her getting into “prehab” shape ASAP, so she worked with a physical therapist from fort lauderdale rehab center as well as me to whip her knee into pre-surgery shape. Current research and practical experience shows that rehab goes lots better if you are in a good “prehab” place before getting sliced and diced.

What is one of my all-time favorite exercises to accomplish exactly that?

Here we are, sitting on the floor glued up against the wall. Pull those toes back, tighten that quad, and try lifting the leg up off the floor 10x. Note how high or easily the leg lifts.
I will guess it won’t lift terribly high or easily.

Now lift the leg up onto the roller under the ankle area, pull the toes back, tighten the quad, and rotate the ENTIRE leg from the hip socket keeping the leg perfectly straight. Do each leg 3×1:30, alternating sides.  Also try your best not to tighten up your shoulders by bracing on the ground like Debbie is.

You will feel stretch along the backside of the leg, behind the knee, and hopefully in the hamstring area.

Once you have completed the rotations on the roller, try the leg lifts agian.

Does it go better? Can you lift higher, as if by magic?

Let me know in the comments below! Good luck prehabbing and rehabbing those ACLs out there. Do as much work as you can beforehand and it will pay off in spades later.

How to fix a sore foot

So you’ve tripped over a tree root, or you’re just plain ‘ole running (or biking, or swimming, or walking) and suddenly your foot hurts. 

What can you do?

The other day I had a client who was in this very situation. In this case, the outside of her foot hurt. Look at the picture below. I traced the path of the yellow highlighted tendon from the outside of the foot up into the outside of the lower leg. I pushed into the red area- aka the muscle belly- and she said, “ouch!”

The name of that muscle is the peroneal, and that long yellow tendon is the peroneal tendon.

It has been my experience that the peroneal muscle often tries to work as a lateral stabilizer. Why does it do that? Well, and I know this will make everyone *groan*, but the much bigger and more powerful lateral stabilizer glute muscle isn’t working as well as it should.

So we kicked that glute muscle into gear, but still the foot was sore.

I used to think when you kicked in the muscle that wasn’t working, the muscle that worked too much would let go. Now I think that sometimes the muscle that works too much needs the help to get it to relax.

So how do you relax such a tiny muscle like the peroneal? Or any tiny area for that matter? 

Have you ever heard of Gua Sha? It’s an Eastern technique that uses simple tools to do small area foam rolling and release. Traditional Gua Sha tools include water buffalo horn and jade.

Really what you need is something you can hold in your hand with a little bit of density, so I used a river rock. Western medicine has replicated Gua Sha to ASTYM or SYSTM, and they use plastic spoons and forks and things. Same idea! 

Watch the video below to learn how to do it, and let me know in the comments below how you liked it or if you’ve used it before! 

P.S. How does this story end? This text warmed my heart:

How to fix your posture while sitting

I love the idea behind the “posture fixing” devices on the market now. We have already established that “sitting is the new smoking”, so anything that you can do to improve  the position your body is in seems like a great concept. I would love it more if you’d grab a sit-to-stand desk and spend more time standing than sitting, but if you do have to sit, how do you fix it?

How to best use the TB12 Method – Tom Brady’s workout program

Hello, New England Patriot fans. I am sure you were all thrilled to see your hero, Tom Brady, pen a book dedicated to how he stays fit. I’ll give him that he is a five-time Super Bowl Champion, four-time Super Bowl MVP, and 40 years old.

That is some amazing longevity and achievement, so in the interest of my readers but with some hesitation, I decided to delve into his book. As I said in the email introduction, I have read that it is better to study the masses and their successes rather than the outliers.

Let me first say that writing is not his gift. I had to resort to skimming the book, because it isn’t written terribly well. However, he has faced adversity and pain as have all of us, and I am always interested in how he dealt and eventually overcame it.

Page 19 got my attention: He writes that he’d “accepted pain and soreness as a part of the job of playing sports. Playing football for a living was like getting into a car crash every Sunday- a scheduled car crash.”

Boy, that sounds like fun. 🙁

Let’s quickly sum the TB12 Method up:

“…my Method for sustained Peak Performance focuses on Pliability, Hydration, Nutrition, and Supplementation. The goal is to strengthen through workouts and lengthen and soften through pliability sessions, which exercise my muscles but prevent any added inflammation in my body.” (Pg. 270)

What exactly does he mean by “Pliability”?

Here is a summation from the Q & A index in the back of the book, pg. 293:

“Pliability refers to the state of muscles that stay long, soft, and primed through the acts of daily living and activity- in contrast to muscles that are tight, dense, and stiff, and less able to adapt to the stresses placed on them… a certified TB12 body coach…applies manual deep-force pressure to muscles as they functionally contract and relax through movement. A key principle at TB12 is integrating pliability treatments both before and after workouts or activities. Muscle pliability optimizes oxygen-rich blood circulation while substantially decreasing microtearing and scarring, thereby reducing the risk of injury and accelerating recovery from injury when and if it happens.”

TB12 is into the vibrating roller and sphere if you don’t have a body coach handy, and if you’re an avid Just Muscles fan, you’ll know that I extolled the virtues of vibration training in a video blog not long ago. https://youtu.be/nlw5bi4qaF8

You too can be part of the fun

By visiting the TB12 Sports Therapy Center in Foxborough, MA.

What’s it like? Well, a USA Today journalist went on a day-long visit, and came to this conclusion:

“My ultimate takeaway was to try to focus on a sort of middle ground: Of course loosening up your muscles and finding ways to use them all together in a balanced manner would help you be a peak performer. Eating better, sleeping better, drinking more water, and reducing inflammation would do the same. And there’s no reason to abandon other more traditional workouts like weight lifting and cardio, but incorporating The Method seems like a good way to improve both.

The problem is that’s all shrouded in mystery, funky recipes, expensive equipment and scientific question marks. It’ll take a while before what’s based in actual science and what’s just myth is edited by its users or even its guru. Maybe there will be parts that will end up in the mainstream world of exercise.”

Another journalist from Sports Illustrated spent 2 weeks at the Center

He was a convert at the end of the two weeks:
“I’m a walking advertisement for TB12, which is a little awkward given my status as a journalist. But it’s working. I extol the virtues of electrolytes to strangers, tell friends about the diet and add “brain exercises” to my to-do list every morning. I progress to the second level with the vibrating fitness roller. I even consider buying some recovery-pajamas . . . but decide against it.”

(He’s referring to the fact that Tom Brady likes to sleep from 9pm to 6am, and wear specially created TB12 Under Armour far-infrared bioceramic infused recovery/sleepwear nearly 24 hours a day
(not cheap- $99 on Amazon).) Under Armour Men’s Ultra Comfort Athlete Recovery Sleepwear Pants

He also does plasticity brain training during Pliability sessions to reeducate the mind-body connection. (There are several brain games on his app to accomplish this.)

In short, if it was your job to keep your body in prime condition because you needed it at peak performance to execute your job, then it sounds like TB12- although controversial -is a good way to go.

The core of the program centers around the Pliability, and at home that can simply begin to be accomplished through the vibration sphere and roller. Try contracting and relaxing the muscle as you move it in multiple directions on the sphere and roller…to get it soft and lengthened, not just stretched. That gives it what they call at TB12 “100 percent muscle pump function” to both the brain and muscle.

Play with it. I am going to! Let me know what you think in the comments below!

How to work on your balance

What do NYC subway riders have as an advantage on the rest of the world? Or, really, any subway, metro, MAX, or tube riders? Consider the environment: You’re standing on a flat surface, and sometimes there are lots of people around, and sometimes you have the option to hang onto something, and sometimes you don’t. It’s completely unpredictable. The subway sways form side to side, and stops suddenly. It is an relatively unsteady surface to constantly navigate, and you must have both feet firmly planted on the floor. You do not have have the luxury of favoring one side of their body and popping out one hip or the other, as we see people do all the time. 

What happens if you do? 

You fall over. 

Some people blame this on age, or assume balance problems are a result of aging. 

See how my niece Fifi has more weight on her right leg, and her left leg is bent? She’s not weighting both hips equally, and if she was riding the subway, she would fall over and lose her balance. 

Does she have balance issues? She’s 11. 

So we can’t blame age. 

Hmm. 

No, it’s actually letting one hip do all the work and unloading one hip as the bigger issue. 

This is a very key concept to grasp: weighting both feet equally, so that both hips work equally. Everyone has a stronger hip and a less strong hip, but the more you can catch yourself favoring one side and fix it by EQUALIZING them, the better off you will be. 

This also allows for better biomechanics as you are just walking around. That is another advantage New Yorkers – and other big city occupants -have over the driving populations of the world. They walk more. They move more. Movement is a natural part of their day, not something artificially infused via a one hour trip to the gym. 

I wish I was a big city girl, for the walking that you naturally do. Unfortunately, I am not. 

However, wanna have fun with the balance stuff and replicate the riding the subway or waterskiing? Watch the video below and see what I use to make that happen! You will HAVE to use both sides of your body- BOTH HIPS EQUALLY- to be successful. 

Give it a whirl and let me know in the comments below your experiences!