Tag: movement

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Do’s & Don’ts

Spinal Care Do's & Don'ts

When it comes to maintaining your structural alignment, what you do outside our office can have a huge impact. Here are some of the ways you can help get the best results in the shortest amount of time AND ensure that you’re not undoing your progress.

Sleep: Your bed and pillow should both help keep your body in natural alignment. Aim to sleep on your side or back. Choose a pillow that supports the head so that the neck vertebrae are neutral (level with the rest of your spine) and use a good mattress that comfortably prevents your spine from dipping or sagging while you sleep.

Work: The spine is architecturally designed for walking. Sitting in a chair is a very unnatural position for the spine. Plan to break up your sitting every 45 minutes.  Make sure you have a high quality chair that has adjustable arms, height, lumbar support and ample padding.

Movement: Ideally we should be spending a good portion of our days walking, standing and moving in general. Support your newly straightened spine by engaging in an exercise routine that encourages strengthening the core and back muscles. Be consistent with your WebExercises custom stretches/exercises.

Diet: When the body has the right nutrients it is better able to heal itself. A nutrient-rich diet with a diversity of plants, healthy proteins and high quality, healthy fats actually feed and nourish your genes, slowing the degenerative process.

Automobile Ergonomics: Bring the steering wheel down and towards you to minimize reach. Increase the lumbar support until it fits your back with no gaps. If your vehicle doesn’t have one, you can purchase a lumbar cushion or use a rolled up towel to give you more lower back support. Keep your head against the headrest on long drives to avoid anterior head syndrome.

Sleep: Avoid stomach sleeping. Having your head and neck turned to one side while sleeping can significantly strain the muscles and ligaments of the spine. This results in negating the work of the adjustments and adding pressure to the joints and nerves. Avoid using more than one pillow – which can push the neck too far forward.

Work: Sitting for long periods of time. The fascia (which connects muscles) begins to set when you stay in one position for too long. If you’re hunched over a keyboard all day with rounded shoulders, this eventually becomes your normal posture.

Movement: Having a sedentary lifestyle. If you spend the majority of the day sitting and not active, you are setting yourself up for muscle stiffness, poor balance and mobility, and lower-back, neck, and hip pain.

Diet: Bad dietary habits are often a contributing factor to delayed recovery from an injury. Diets high in processed vegetable oils, sugar, and flour, ALL promote inflammation in the body. Not drinking enough water – keeping the body well hydrated is important to nourish the spinal discs and help keep them healthy.

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6 Ways To Get More Movement Into Your Day

time-to-move

As a society, we need to stop thinking of exercise as something that requires a change of clothes and a warm-up – after all, you wouldn’t do either of those things in an emergency. Life is busy, and fitting in exercise can be tough – but it doesn’t have to be that hard. By making a few simple changes to your life, you’ll be in better shape in weeks. It’s worth the effort – as well as making you happier, there’s evidence that regular physical activity can protect you from everything from obesity to Alzheimer’s. To help, here are 6 ways to move more every day:

1. Always Take the Stairs

Simple, and yet so easy to avoid. It’s easy to rationalize taking the easy way – elevator, escalator, that cool motorized walkway thing at airports – because you’ve had a long day, or you’ve got a heavy bag, or because it barely burns any calories anyway, right? But that misses the point. There’s evidence that even minimal amounts of resistance exercise can increase your body’s levels of a substance called GLUT4, which encourages calories from food to be stored in muscle cells rather than as body fat – so even a single flight of stairs helps.

2. Walk More

You’ve heard this one before, but it’s worth looking at the numbers to get the full picture. According to a 2012 study, participants who ran one mile burned 112 calories, but those walking a mile still burned 88. While running means preparation, getting changed, finding a shower and – depending on how fast you go – a level of unpleasantness that can be tough to get psyched up for. Walking is just walking. Get off the bus a stop earlier, or park a little farther away and enjoy your exercise – without any need for equipment.

3. Break Up Your Sitting

We’ve addressed this over on over on this blog. Sitting down puts your body in neutral – it constricts circulation, slows your metabolism, shuts off muscles and tightens your connective tissues (fascia). Even exercising for an hour a day can’t do much to compensate for the 10 hours you spend slumping in a variety of chairs. But fortunately there’s a solution: just stand up. Take small breaks as frequently as possible. Go to the bathroom. Use a smaller water cup so you have to refill it more often. Do a lap around the office. Ask for a stand-up desk. Step outside for a minute to get some fresh air. Stand while you’re talking on the phone.

4. Sit on the Floor at Home

Yes, like a child. Here’s why: modern sofa technology has advanced to the point where you can remain essentially motionless through an entire Netflix streaming session, but if you sit on the floor for exactly the same amount of time  you’ll be squirming, stretching, essentially changing position the entire time. If you’re feeling really motivated, this would also be an ideal opportunity to foam-roll away some of the aches and pains of everyday life – there’s a brief guide to that here.

5. Do the 10-minute Squat Every Day

In most countries, the deep squat is still part of everyday life – it’s just how you sit, relax, or go to the toilet. For many Americans, user of chairs and western toilets –  – we probably haven’t done one in years. But you should – it’ll help enormously with your hip and ankle mobility, as well as providing you with a jolt of isometric exercise. Mobility expert Kelly Starrett suggests that you should be able to hold the position for 10 minutes, but if you can’t, just start with a minute at a time – it all counts, and it all adds up.

6. Get a Pull-up Bar

If you’re doing a lot of sitting – as in hunching over your desk or driving in a car all day – you should be doing pull-ups. They’ll counteract the computer-hunch, improve the health of your spine, build your arms and work your core muscles better than weighted crunches. Get a bar that clips over your door frame and aim to do one or two reps each time you pass through it during the day. Can’t do a pull-up? Try this: “Jump” to the top position, then lower yourself as slowly as you can – just for a rep or two. You’ll get there eventually.

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When It’s More Than “Just Muscle”

When It's Not "Just Muscle"

Being a chiropractor, one of the most common things I hear when people find out my profession is the list of aches and pains of the people in a group, and I’m happy to help and provide insight into the problem whenever this situation arises. Although I’ve noticed that a common thread runs through their descriptions of their health issues, and it goes something like this: “Oh, my back has been killing me for years… but I’m sure it’s just muscle.“

I have an idea as to what they are really saying, and it’s typically that they’re just not interested in making the time and financial investment that goes along with addressing and correcting the problem. But, lets go ahead and address the inherent problem with this statement, and go over some strategies to help identify some common problems and how to handle them on your own.

The Problem of being “Just Muscle”

Muscles are not tissues that operate in a vacuum of space and time. Our muscles are covered in fat, connective tissue (called fascia), connected to blood supply, and studded with nerve supply. In addition, muscles have multiple connections to various bone structures. The fascia wrapping around the muscles sometimes connected multiple muscles together across various joints.

The sheer number of pain generating tissues that are intimately related to our muscles is more complex than we could have imagined. Take these examples: A pain in your back can easily be traced to a muscle at the front of your leg. A pain in your shoulder can be a nerve traced from your neck. A pain in the calf can easily be a problem with an artery in the leg.

In essence, telling a chiropractor that you’ve had a pain in your spine for years and saying it’s “just muscle” is like telling a Medical Physician that you’ve had a cough for years, and telling them that it’s probably “just a bug”. The truth is, there is likely something more complex going on, and it should probably be addressed before it becomes a more problematic and chronic issue. Continue reading “When It’s More Than “Just Muscle””

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Why Do I Need Maintenance Chiropractic Care?

maintenance chiropractic care

Every day more and more people are reevaluating their options when it comes to health care. They are realizing that wellness comes from within and that the best way to avoid illness and discomfort is to be “health conscious” in their daily lifestyles. In order to accomplish this we must first understand what it is we need to do to get and stay well.

The simple answer is that we need to adopt lifestyle behaviors that promote health – as opposed to those that lead to sickness. Because the truth is there is no drug that can fix our poor diet or remove the toxins from the processed food we eat. There is no drug that can undo our sedentary living or poor fitness – the answer is in our lifestyle choices. One major lifestyle choice we can adopt is to receive regular chiropractic adjustments, often called maintenance or wellness chiropractic care.

Understanding the reason for maintenance chiropractic care mandates an understanding of two major well documented concepts: 1) immobilization degeneration; and 2) the neurology of pain processing. A primary component of a subluxation (misalignment in the spine) is loss of normal motion in that area; and there is an immense body of research to support the ensuing degenerative process that will occur with this loss of motion and the logical conclusion of restoring movement to the spine.

You see, chiropractic is important for our health in many of the same ways that exercise is so crucial for our overall health and well-being. It’s all about movement. Movement feeds the brain, when we become misaligned we lose the normal motion of that spinal segment – which leads to degenerated joints and  decreases these movement- rich nutrients to the brain (proprioceptive signals). Continue reading “Why Do I Need Maintenance Chiropractic Care?”

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The Importance of Motion

movement is lifeOne of Albert Einstein’s well known quotes is, “Nothing happens until something moves.” Motion is life. Lack of motion is death. Movement is a vital nutrient to your body, just as much as food, water or oxygen.

It feeds the brain, producing essential nutrient stimulation (called proprioception). It’s also a foundational reason why chiropractors adjust spines – to restore normal motion to joints, mental impulse transmission through nerves, and subsequently, life throughout your entire body.

When your spine is not moving properly it begins to degenerate and become inflamed. The spinal joints begin to send stress signals to the brain that can lead to stress hormones being released (cortisol and catecholamines). Lack of proper motion results in a decrease in proprioceptive messages being sent to your brain. This can also (but not always) lead to pain. High levels of stress hormones in the body will lead to fatigue, illness and ultimately – early death.

This is why – regardless of disease or symptoms – a healthy, properly moving, aligned spine is so essential to our health. By restoring motion to the spine (via the chiropractic adjustment), changes will begin to occur, such as: decrease in stress signals and stress hormones, decrease inflammation, and pain (if present) will subside. Most important of all, it results in a healthy body-brain neurological communication which is essential for overall health. This is why we often see patients who will have significant changes in their health, in areas that they were not expecting at all (digestion, sleep, etc…) when they began care. By restoring motion and removing this stressor on the body – you can begin to function how you were designed to.