Yes, even Darth Vader was wrong on some things. (photo by DoodleDeMoon via Flickr)

When you have a problem with your plumbing, you call a plumber. When you have a legal issue, you call a lawyer. When you have a pain or posture issue, you call me (shameless plug).

But getting the help of an expert, especially with your body, doesn’t mean you get to go on auto-pilot. Quite the contrary, you need to make sure you recognize one thing: experts can be wrong.

At least 90% of the people I work with have told me stories of frustration when dealing with former doctors, chiropractors, physical therapists, Rolfers, trainers, acupuncturists, etc. etc. As a patient and client of other experts, I’ve been in the same situation and understand where the frustration comes in.

It comes when the expert refuses to listen to ideas that run counter to their theories about your issues.

Real life example: you have been seeing your doctor for months for pain in the elbows. “Take a stronger anti-inflammatory to reduce the inflammation.” Appointment over.

Or: your back has been hurting for a year, despite doing planks and bosu ball exercises for a year. Your physical therapist says, “Your core is still just not strong enough. Keep doing more planks for longer periods.”

Or: you try twenty acupuncture appointments and there’s been no positive change. “Just a few more sessions will do.”

La la la la — if I can’t hear your problems, you have no problems! (photo by humbert15 via Flickr)

It’s not that any of these experts are (necessarily) deceiving you — far from it. I can think of times where I’ve been guilty of this kind of thinking myself. Experts often have the best of intentions, but a lot of times experts (myself included) can get caught in the trap of thinking everything we know from the past is going to apply to everything we see in the future. That kind of thinking doesn’t work for the stock market, and it doesn’t work for  the human body.

In fact, it doesn’t work for a lot of things. There’s a philosophical discussion around the Problem of Induction (follow that link to start down the internet rabbit hole!) which addresses our ability to draw reliable conclusions about reality based on what we observe. Basically, what we think we know can be quite unreliable, and we can’t possibly know how unreliable our knowledge is until we encounter something that challenges our knowledge.

For example (liberally adapted from a book I just read: Fooled by Randomness), let’s say I have pot of 97 red marbles and 3 blue marbles. I tell you to reach into a hole just big enough for your hand (so you can’t see inside) and draw a marble. You reach into the pot and pull out a red one. We repeat. You get another red one. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another.  This goes on for another forty times.

I ask you, “So, what can you tell me about what’s in this pot?”

“It’s a pot of red marbles.”

“How sure are you?”

“Pretty darn sure.”

You’ve come to what most of us would consider a very reasonable conclusion. You’ve drawn umpteen times and all you got was red marbles. But the reality of the situation is that you’ve got a pot of mostly red marbles with some blue ones at the bottom — but you have no clue that they’re there, since you haven’t encountered them yet.

For health experts, it gets very easy to get caught in this same trap of thinking we know everything we need to know. We go to schools that ostensibly teach us “all” that we need to know, we get more training from other experts, and we apply what we’ve learned to our clients/patients. As clients/patients, we expect to be able to say, “this hurts” and have the expert hand us edicts from Heaven that will solve all our worldly problems. But that’s not how you should approach it.

Here’s a really simple example: your neck hurts. Depending on what kind of expert you consult, you might be looking for nerve impingement, disc herniation, fracture of bones in the neck, some kind of bacterial infection, a malignant growth, a subluxed vertebra, strained shoulder musculature, a shoulder that’s positioned poorly, a bad craniosacral rhythm, blocked chi…and whatever other possibilities that I haven’t thought of.

Or for back pain, if we limit it to some of the more popular musculoskeletal theories: your spine is compressed, your discs are bulging, your abs are weak, you have bad balance, you’re overweight, you have too much stress, you have weak hips, it’s all in your head…All of these have some amount of validity, but NONE of them are applicable 100% of the time to 100% of individuals with back pain.

Experts’ first thoughts are generally based on their existing knowledge base. If that knowledge base is faulty or simply doesn’t apply to the situation at hand, then you’re going to run into some serious frustration if the expert isn’t willing to question the validity of his/her theories in general or to your specific situation.  Back when I had knee pain that stopped me from walking down stairs, I had a doctor tell me my problem was “overuse.” I was 22 years old and had been sedentary for 3 years. The doctor was a very nice man, but the theory he was offering made no sense at all. So I just didn’t listen to him.

The other week I worked with a lady who had severe neck pain that was not being caused by any of the usual suspects, and I was both confused and surprised.  Eventually we figured out what was causing her issue, but it was not just because I’m such a fantastic expert and can pinpoint everything on the first try. Far from it.

Many of my clients will tell you that I am open about my operating assumptions, testing my hypotheses, and changing course if it seems like the theory was wrong. For the lady with neck pain, what ended up getting the problem solved was her involvement and my willingness to let go of theories that were wrong. I tried some things and asked for feedback. She said that her pain was still there. I tried some other things, and she still had the pain. I asked lots more questions and eventually we both learned enough about the circumstances to realize that there was another possible cause of her neck pain, and so we did end up finding it because she was willing to say, “No, that’s not fixing it.” She provided the necessary information for understanding the real nature of the problem.

Had I relied solely on past experience and past training, and fallen back on the idea that “this will just get better with more time and more of the same approach,” she would probably still be in pain.

Experts who help people with their bodies need to strike a balance between what they know, what they think they know, and what you know. Somewhere in all that is the answer to your problem. If an expert tells you something that sounds completely and utterly inapplicable to your understanding of your own body and your own issues, make sure you get them to listen so that you can get your problem — whatever it is — solved. If your expert won’t listen, then they apparently aren’t expert enough to know just how much they can’t know!

——————–

A little bonus food for thought:

In the book, Fooled by Randomness, there’s a great little summary of how to classify scientific theories based on the work of philosopher Sir Karl Popper:

1. Theories that have been proven to be wrong.
2. Theories that have not yet been proven to be wrong but that can be proven wrong.

The post Don’t just listen to the experts appeared first on Upright Health.

I’m excited to announce that John deMahy will be teaching his Low Back Pain class here at Upright Health this summer! If you’re a structural integrator who wants to learn a clear and concise method for dealing with issues involving the low back and pelvis, you will not want to miss this!

Please click here for the PDF for more details!

The post John deMahy Low Back Pain class appeared first on Upright Health.

She’d already been to her chiropractor twice, but adjustments were making no difference at all. Massage also had not seemed to make any difference. Her neck hurt lying in bed, standing, sitting, and especially when turning her head to check her blind spots while driving.

Whenever I hear about neck irritation, my eyes immediately start looking at the shoulders. Often one or both shoulders will often be pulled well out of place, much too far forward and away from the spine. This can get the affected levator scapula working overtime, making the levator scapula pissed off and forcing all the muscles of the neck to work asymmetrically to essentially keep your cervical vertebrae from getting pulled out of whack.

But this woman’s shoulders didn’t really look that off — just very, very slightly. She did have a little slouch that gave her a little shoulder rounding, but it wasn’t that dramatic.

After having her do a few tests with her shoulders retracted, it seemed like there was something very, very different going on from what I normally see.

We went straight to the table where I began doing some neck work, feeling for anything overly tight in the front of the neck, back of the neck, and side of the neck.  We relaxed the traps and pecs, pulled the spinal erectors toward the midline to extend the spine a bit, all in an attempt to get the shoulders and head to sit better, then had her retest her range of motion.

The good news was the muscular discomfort was gone and she had more range to comfortably check her blind spots, but the sensation of bones rubbing together was still there.

This was when I started to really question what was going on. “Does lying down on your side, back, or front make any difference?” I asked.

She said not that she’d noticed.

“Did you experience any kind of twinge at all while working out? You just woke up with the neck pain?”

“Yeah. It’s so weird. I didn’t get hurt at all during the workout. It just felt terrible when I woke up.”

“What about lying down?”

“Oh, it’s still there.”

“On your back, stomach, and side?”

“Well, I’m not sure. I definitely feel it now.”

“Okay, go ahead and turn face down,” I said.

She flipped over and put her face in the cradle of the table. “It’s gone.”

“What’s gone?” I asked.

“The neck discomfort is gone.”

“Okay…” I said. “Turn face up for me.”

Even when lying face up, she still had a slouch.  It was as if she was constantly doing half of an abdominal crunch. Her ribs were being pulled toward her pubic bone by some extremely strong and shortened muscles. I poked around her abdomen a bit to see just how tight things felt. Forget a quarter — I could’ve bounced a bar of gold off her abs.

“Wow,” I said. “You’ve got some strong abs.”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “I’ve had super strong abs since high school. It’s always been that way.”

I spent about ten minutes working along the ribs, along the rectus abdominis, and all over the obliques to encourage the muscles to soften up a little and release their death grip on the pelvis and ribs. The benefit was immediate and was a welcome confirmation of my suspicion.

“Wow, it’s gone. You figured it out!”

This was not the first time I’d seen someone with abs that were way too strong and shortened. Usually the rib cage gets pulled down and you start to see shoulder problems (can’t raise your arms all the way out to the side, impingement, bursitis, etc. ad nauseum). This, however, was the first time I’d seen someone’s abs get so shortened that it clearly caused this kind of a pain in the neck.

So can you do too many sit ups? Yup. As with anything, balance is the key.

If you’re doing a lot of ab work, make sure you keep your abs stretched out and your back erectors strong enough to keep things in balance. A yoga stretch like the cobra on your forearms can be a really simple, easy way to stretch out your abs. For those who are already pretty comfortable using weights, Romanian Deadlifts and regular Deadlifts (DONE PROPERLY) will help get your erectors working really, really well. For those who aren’t quite ready for that stage — and also for those who think they have great erectors but actually are stuck in c-curves — you can try this Egoscue exercise known as Sitting Floor (video below) and see how your mid and upper back feel as you do this.

The post Can you do too many sit ups and crunches? appeared first on Upright Health.

In junior year of college at UCLA, I went snowboarding with a buddy in Big Bear. We both liked barreling down mountains as fast as possible, and he — being a little faster than I was — had a habit of making me go faster and take more risk than I normally would alone. And that’s how we ended up at the super pipe.

A super pipe is a half pipe, except it’s so big that you take a super poop in your pants. You take an even bigger poop in your pants if you have no real experience in doing half pipes. Undeterred, we both wanted to try the super pipe and see what it was like to be one of those spectacular athletes you see on the X Games.

I went tentatively up and down the sides of the pipe, trying to get a feel for pretty much anything I could get a feel for. As I came off the lip of the pipe, I started to twist so that I could point the right direction for the landing. I had my arms outstretched for balance as I spun in mid-air, my eyes and body set for the landing, and then all of a sudden my right shoulder simply gave out.

I fell with my face in the snow and screamed a few choice expletives as pain shot from the front of my shoulder all the way down to my back. Once I had gotten my screaming done, I slowly made my way down the hill, holding my arm against my chest as if in a sling.

The whole drive back to LA, I fidgeted in the car seat, trying to find a position that felt right. Nothing seemed to work. I felt like my shoulder was either too far forward or too far back, but I couldn’t figure out which it was. I wanted to figure out if I could just  lean my shoulder against the car seat in just the right way to help it sink back into a more normal feeling.

That sensation went on for weeks. I slept on top of a body pillow at night, trying to use gravity to leverage my shoulder back. I’d position the body pillow under me lengthwise (along my spine) so that my arm would be encouraged to hang down toward the bed. Despite my best efforts, there was no positive change.

My doctor told me to rest and take ibuprofen, but that didn’t really help either.

And so I made a decision that I hope no one else makes, even though I know the temptation is strong. When a shoulder feels like crap, it’s really common (I’ve heard this numerous times from clients of mine) to have this idea in your head that if you could just pop the shoulder into position, all would be well.

Since trying to lie in bed with the shoulder leveraged to drop back didn’t help, I concluded that  setting my shoulder  forward was what needed to happen. So, one sunny day, I was alone in my dorm room, resolved to finally fix my shoulder. I cupped my left hand on my right shoulder, took a breath, and gave my shoulder a solid yank forward.

This time I found myself muffling a string of expletives into the bed at myself. I literally saw stars. I had felt something squelch in the shoulder socket (likely my labrum), and had simply fallen forward onto the bed out of total disbelief, shock, and pain.

It took a long, long while for the pain of that misguided self-adjustment to ease up, and it added time to my recovery (which was still pretty far down the line).

For anyone with that nagging sense that your shoulder just needs to be yanked into position, let me be the one to tell you, “DON’T DO IT.”  First of all, for the overwhelming majority of folks I’ve met whose shoulders are out of place, it’s because their shoulders are too far forward already. Second of all, a rapid thrust of your shoulder is probably not a great idea unless there are some rare extenuating circumstances (maybe if your shoulder is dislocated and someone who knows what they’re doing is yanking on it to reseat it).

Just don’t do it. Resetting your shoulder is a gradual process, but it’s a much more comfortable one than wrecking your own shoulder out of impatience.

Ah, memories.

The post Something you should never do for a shoulder injury appeared first on Upright Health.

As someone who’s been certified as a Posture Alignment Specialist by Egoscue University and someone who’s used it to help clients get over back pain, hip pain, and sciatica, I can tell you that it is, in fact, great for some people. It is not, however, a magical cure for all back and hip pain, and there are times that it can be a bad idea to use. So before you buy a Tower, see if you fall into the good candidates category or the “be careful” category of people.

First the good candidates.

If you’ve got lots of tightness around the hips, the Tower might be helpful. The people I’ve primarily seen get the most bang for the buck are those that are flexed in the hips with lateral rotation of their femurs.

Flexion of the hips basically means your pubic bone is pulled down toward the floor (this could look like a really severe curve in your lower back or as a relatively flat back with your upper body tilted forward).

Lateral rotation of the femurs is when your knees (and very, very likely your feet) point out to the sides in your normal relaxed posture. When you then try to point your feet and knees straight forward, it feels really awkward/tight in your knees and hips.

With the hip flexion and the lateral femur rotation, you just can’t stand up straight and your spinal erectors (and your hip rotator muscles) get burned out from trying so hard all day.  Your lateral hamstrings (hello, biceps femoris) are often quite dysfunctional, contributing to lateral rotation and possibly a bit of knee flexion.

Example of extreme lateral rotation of femurs. Note that knee caps and feet are pointing out to the sides instead of straight forward.

So how does the tower help?

As described in the book, positioning your foot for 45 – 60 minutes in the tower helps the hip flexors and all the other muscles around the hip relax. This allows your muscles and brain (neuromuscular system) to get used to having your leg pointing in the direction it’s supposed to point in. Tight, over-facilitated muscles learn to relax when your neuromuscular system realizes that your leg is going to stay in that straight position, regardless of how badly it feels like it wants to rotate to the side.

The position also allows the spinal erectors to relax, which can be nice if you’re always in a hunched position with your back or your erectors are working overtime to keep you from falling over. Just this chance for the muscles to rest, refuel, and reset can make a big difference to your comfort level. As an added bonus, as any kyphosis (upper back rounding) improves, your ability to get your shoulders in the right place also improves.

Using the Tower is like dealing with a naughty kid. Imagine you had a naughty kid who just liked to bang on pots and pans to annoy you. You ask him to stop. You put him on time outs. You bribe him. You cajole him. Nothing works. Finally, one day you just sit there, completely nonplussed for as long as he wants to bang on the pots and pans. Eventually, he tires out and just stops banging on pots and pans and then gives up on it altogether since apparently you are an immovable force.

It’s the same idea with the tower. Your hip joint keeps to rotate and stay flexed, but eventually it gives up and finds a new normal where your leg stops rotating and your lower back can drop to the floor. Your back wants to stay rounded, but eventually it gives in as well.

What’s it feel like?

When I work with clients with the tower, we pay close attention to that sensation of lateral rotation (foot trying to turn out against the pedal strap), and wait for that to dissipate at each level before moving on.  While waiting, you can end up with cramping and what I call “complaining” from your hip muscles; commonly I’ve observed complaining in the quads, the hip flexors (psoas), and the area around the glutes (usually in the deep lateral rotators and not actually in the glutes).  For the lateral hamstrings, usually you’ll get a sense of gentle stretch rather than any cramping, though everyone’s different and it may just happen to lucky you!

Not everyone gets cramps, but for those who do, they can be pretty darn shocking. I clearly remember feeling a primal kind of panic when my hip rotators or lateral hamstrings would release when I first started using the tower years ago. I’ve also had to gently talk many a client through the aches of the tower until their bodies found a new normal and the tension and cramping dissipated. You’re asking muscles to elongate in a way that they probably haven’t done for years if not decades, so it can sometimes be pretty rough going. As you repeat, the cramping may ramp up for a brief period, but once you’ve gone through it a few times, the intensity should taper off. It’s pretty similar to the experience of novice weight lifters feeling crazy soreness after their first few workouts.

Who should be careful?

I do not use the supine groin progressive with anyone who already has hyperextended knees, unless there is some way to bolster the knee and prevent it from going into its locked out position — and even then I’ve not found it to be all that useful. For people who have normal range of motion in the knees, the supine groin progressive can already be stressful on the back of the knee. For someone whose knees hyperextend already, you’re adding 45 minutes of constant pressure to stretch the ligaments of the back of the knee — not exactly a recipe for longterm structural integrity in my estimation.

I’ve heard some postural therapists say that using towels under the lumbar spine and neck can help reduce the strain on the knee, but this adjustment doesn’t seem to change anything. From my perspective, the roll puts the hip flexors into a shortened position, basically ensuring that the only thing in the lower body that’s going to do any lengthening is around the knee (e.g. distal hamstring lengthening = even more hyperextension of the knee). The force of gravity on the knee joint is still there, still stretching out the knee.

This is a butt that is barely there.

Also, if you are someone with NBD (No Butt Disease), the Tower may or may not be helpful — just depends on your unique situation. The thing to look out for is whether lying in the tower actually makes things worse in your back or in your hips. As noted above, the Tower can help over-facilitated muscles relax and reset. When you have poor muscle development in your butt, lying on your back and butt in the Tower can actually allow too many muscles to go limp. In this case, the more you use the Tower, the weaker your butt (AKA hip extensors) get, and the more your spinal muscles may attempt to compensate, which could potentially aggravate your symptoms.

From personal experience with having ridiculously weak hips that caused me all manner of chronic pain (foot pain, calf pain, knee pain, and painful hip snapping), the Tower can be quite helpful for reprogramming the hips initially, but if the Tower makes your hip joints feel weaker and looser (or just the inner thigh much tighter) or your back feel more painful, then some more specific examination of your body’s holding patterns is definitely in order, and some other exercises to activate your hips will likely be better for you and help you get stronger, healthier, and more pain free.

The gentleman in the picture above got absolutely nothing out of using the Tower for his knee and hip pain, but he got a whole heck of a lot out of doing exercises to improve the baseline activation and overall strength of his butt. In a few months’ time, he got back to running half marathons despite having been told by his doctor that his running days were long over. Another bonus: he didn’t have to block out 1.5 hours of time every day to lie on his back.

And that’s it!

Hopefully that gives you a good, realistic idea of what to expect with the Tower. For any other  questions that weren’t answered here, feel free to post in the comments section below. If you’d like to buy a Tower, keep scrolling down!

Where to buy a Tower

If you fall into the good candidate category and want to try a tower based on Tim Ferris’ recommendation and what you’ve read here, you can order one online at Railyard Fitness by clicking their logo below. You don’t really need the full kit unless you really, really want to have all the toys. All you really need is the Tower and a chair to put your leg up on.  Enjoy!

The post Will the Egoscue Tower help you? appeared first on Upright Health.

This cat thinks it’s a good idea to stretch as a warm up. (photo by naitokz via Flickr)

Gretchen Reynolds of the NY Times Well Blog posted another article today about stretching. If you read my post about her interview on NPR last year, you know I don’t agree with her stance on stretching. Well, she’s at it again with more evidence to back her case.

The crux of the argument is in this paragraph where she summarizes the findings of some studies recently done on pre-activity static stretching:

The numbers, especially for competitive athletes, are sobering. According to their calculations, static stretching reduces strength in the stretched muscles by almost 5.5 percent, with the impact increasing in people who hold individual stretches for 90 seconds or more. While the effect is reduced somewhat when people’s stretches last less than 45 seconds, stretched muscles are, in general, substantially less strong.

The post Should you stretch before your sport? appeared first on Upright Health.

I’d like to say that by doing a few sessions of Rolfing, you can expect all your knee pain to go away.  Sometimes it’s true. Sometimes all you need to settle down some knee pain is to look at what’s tugging and yanking your hips, knees, ankles, or even upper body out of line (thus stressing out the knee joint).  Unfortunately, sometimes even Rolfing doesn’t help.

Why?

Let’s say the excess tension that’s distorting proper movement and/or shock absorption of your knee exists only because one muscle or an area of fascia is just locally wound up and bound up. Getting in to release that area can be quite helpful. Many times I’ve seen, for example, trigger points in the lateral and posterior hips really irritate people’s knees. This is the best of options, because the positive change is fairly immediate and can last quite a while barring reaggravation.

But there’s the rub! For many people, the gooey bound up areas of tension do not exist in isolation. There are entire movement patterns built around the tight areas that make it very likely you’ll reaggravate. Without proper retraining of those movement patterns, the results of a few sessions of Rolfing are going to be rather short lived (unfortunately).

And that’s where proper exercise comes in.

One of the first places I look when a client tells me about knee pain is the hip joint. More specifically, I’ll put my hands over both greater trochanters to see how well the muscles are developed around each side.

A lot of muscles attach to the greater trochanter. When well-developed, the mass of these muscles can be felt with your hands.

For folks with knee pain, I’ll usually find that the musculature around the greater trochanter is ridiculously underdeveloped at least on the side where the knee hurts, if not on both sides. Ideally, if you try to cup the back side of the greater trochanter with your fingers, the gluteal muscles will block you. With a lot of desk workers/weekend warriors, you can basically feel nothing but bone all around the greater trochanter. This is from squashing the butt all day long.

One exercise that helps reactivate the muscles around the hip is the ubiquitous clam.

Another exercise for the truly underdeveloped hips are hooklying abductor presses.

Lie on your back with your knees bent and feet flat on the floor. Tie a belt or strap around your thighs so they are parallel to one another. Pull your thighs away from each other (against the strap) and then relax. Do it for 2-3 sets of 20 reps.

Neither of these exercises should be particularly difficult, but if your hips are pretty weak, they will likely cause some intense muscle burn. You may even feel some burn of embarrassment when you realize how weak your hips are. It’s okay. This is just the first stage. Right now, the goal is simply to get the brain and butt/hip muscles talking again so that you can gradually increase the activation of those muscles.

As your ability to recruit those muscles improves, you’ll be doing much more “cool” looking hip exercises, and that extra help from your hip muscles will help your knee recover from all the overtime you’re making it work.

So back to our original question: will Rolfing help with knee pain? Maybe! If something is too tight, Rolfing will probably help. If something is too loose/weak, then it probably won’t (or at least not entirely).

The post Will Rolfing Structural Integration help with knee pain? appeared first on Upright Health.

Photo by Rance Costa via Flickr

For people who’ve been diagnosed with fibromyalgia and other chronic pain conditions like arthritis, exercise has become a commonly accepted and very important form of self-treatment that can reduce and relieve the body-wide nagging pain and fatigue. For those who have a couple aches here and there that slow them down in the morning, exercise and stretching can also be extremely beneficial to get the body prepared for the day.  For those who sit at a desk all day and are noticing a disturbing pouch form above the belt line, exercise can be extremely important for heading off some impending health issues.

But it’s not always easy to find the time and motivation to get actually do exercise in the morning — or at any time for that matter. So today, I want to talk about three easy ways to smooth the transition from sleeping like a baby to exercising and stretching like a champ.

1) Set aside a place.

You wake up. You stumble out to the kitchen and have a cup of warm tea or water, then gaze out the window into the dark morning. You look around some of the clutter in the living room, kick a couple toys to the side that your kids left out, and then sit down on the couch to shift aimlessly through the internet on your iPad or — even worse — check your email. You just missed a golden opportunity.

The iPad will stop you from exercising. Put it away.

That spot in the living room is a perfect place to get moving. All it takes is a yoga or exercise mat on the floor to give you a place to start establishing a habit. Do a few clam shells, a couple pushups on your knees, some stretches for your quads, perhaps? Is it a dedicated exercise studio? No! Will it work for 15 minutes? Yes!

So before you go to bed, set out the mat so when you wake up in your morning stupor, you see the mat and get going on your morning routine. Believe me: the internet will still be waiting for you when you’re done. You can still have that water or tea though.

2) Set a time(r)

Which sounds best? I want you to exercise in the morning OR I want you to exercise for 15 minutes in the morning OR I want you to do exercise A for 2 minutes, exercise B for 4 minutes, exercise C for 3 minutes, exercise D for 3 minutes, and exercise E for 3 minutes? Which of those three options do you think is easiest for you to follow through on? The last one, right? Chunking out what you’re going to do in manageable, timed bites will help you get your routine done, and knowing how long it’s going to take will help you schedule it into your day. And you should schedule it into your day at a fairly regular time if possible.

I may not be a looker, but I make your eggs and your exercise easy.

Timing your exercises can be really helpful if you are terrible at counting (like I am). If your mind consistently wanders off at number 5 when you’re trying to count to 15, time yourself to see how long it takes to do one set of 15. Then, on subsequent days, just set your timer for that amount and pay attention to your form while your timer does the counting for you. Stop watches from sporting goods stores and digital kitchen timers are great, cost-effective tools. You can even get some kitchen timers off eBay for around $2. For a very free option, download a timer app for your iPhone or Android. I actually don’t like this option that much because you actually have to look at touch screen phones to stop and reset the timer, whereas a stopwatch has physical buttons that you can feel and use without even bothering to look with your bleary eyes.

3) Set a routine

You have the time and place, but the last hitch is the actual stuff you’re going to do. It can take time to develop a routine and your routine may change as your body changes, but knowing what you’re going to do removes anxiety-inducing uncertainty and  reduces how much mental energy you spend figuring out what to do next. Keep a list right by your yoga mat so that you can just move right through the list (with the help of your timer).

Your routine needn’t be hopelessly complex, and it doesn’t even need to be on the floor. For example, check out this quick routine for travelers that can even be done in a bath tub.

That’s it!

These are simple tricks that will reduce the mental and physical friction that stops you from regularly exercising and stretching. Put them into practice, and start moving your body. If you’re dealing with lots of pain, know in advance that it can take months before you really get some momentum going in the right direction, but know also that sometimes improvements can be very quick. There’s no way to predict it in advance, so hop in and get to it!

The post How to make exercise a daily habit appeared first on Upright Health.

We know that sitting isn’t the greatest strength training activity in the world. We know that it’s also not really that good for you.

Have you ever thought of sitting as a transaction as a debit that eventually needs to be balanced with a credit?

Let’s say you start the month with $1000. Your rent is $200 (yes, with this number I’m also assuming you live in California circa 1975). Your food costs you $100 a month. You have an economy car that you pay $150 a month for. You party hard and spend about $300 a month on drinks, movies, etc. How are you doing by month’s end? You’re doing okay, right? You have $250 leftover, right? Let’s say you make $1000 a month from your job. Every month, you’re saving $250. Not too bad! Keep partying it up and saving up some money and when the 80s roll around you’ll be able to get yourself a pretty awesome pair of rock n roll tights!

But what happens if your income gets cut? What happens if you lose your job altogether and can’t find another? You’ve got some savings, but it won’t be long before those savings are burned through, and then the pain really starts.

This is the same story with our bodies. I think of sitting in one position for longer than 15 minutes as a withdrawal from the body’s “good activation and alignment” account. When we were kids, we ran around, jumped up and down, climbed on things, rode bikes, walked all the way across town to get Orange Bang, and just generally did stuff that ensured that our muscles were definitely getting activated (though generally not in perfect alignment).

As we get older, though, we sit more and more. We hit grade school, and some serious sitting time starts. We’re in chairs for a few hours, but then we’re let loose to run around and move — then back into chairs for a bit. Then we have lunch and we’re running wild again before sitting back down in our chairs. And in another few hours, we’re running again. We make a withdrawal, and then make a deposit. Make a withdrawal; make a deposit. Ideally we make larger deposits than withdrawals; our muscles get stronger and increase their endurance, and we feel healthier, more athletic, etc.

By high school, “recess” becomes “nutrition,” and the focus shifts from running around to standing around — which is still better than just more sitting, but it’s not as big a deposit into the good activation and alignment account.

The deficit problems become real debt problems when we hit desk jobs, and that’s probably where you are right now.

As an adult, you do an incredible amount of sitting. And you do it for hours on end. When was the last time you sat down at your computer only to realize four hours has passed? Did you just check your computer clock and realize it’s been four hours since you sat down? Say hello to your movement deficit for the day.

It happens to us all, and while it may be okay for a while, it’s not an okay arrangement forever. Eventually, you burn through the funds in your good activation and alignment account, and you start running into some serious debt.

As the debt builds, you start getting notices from your body that things are not right. You get notices of nonpayment (transient aches and pains) that get louder (chronic aches and pains) and that eventually turn into service shut offs (can’t move your shoulder, knee, etc. anymore).

If you want to avoid going into serious movement debt, then you need to start making more deposits. Get started addressing the movement debt, get your body back to an even zero, and in a few years’ time, you’ll start reaping the rewards of a movement account that’s in the black!

If you need some ways to get started:

1) Start foam rolling.
2) Go for a 15 minute walk once a day for the next week, then increase the walk to 20 minutes.
3) Train for an ironman.

Obviously item 3 is a bit of a reach, but if it’s a goal that will get you motivated, do it! Every little bit you deposit into your account helps you get out of debt!

The post Are you running a movement deficit? appeared first on Upright Health.

My lack of hip mobility was shocking, especially given that I play hockey as a goalie.

I could barely get below parallel. I wasn’t happy with it, and I wanted to make it change.

I did a bunch of adductor stretches (like the sumo adductor stretch) to try to get my hips to let me move, but after several weeks, it didn’t seem like it was helping much. My ankle mobility has always been good, so nothing I did there seemed to make any difference.

I tried doing a bunch of free squats, slowly lowering myself down. I tried stretching my hips in all kinds of directions, never quite finding the right stretch to help.  It didn’t matter if I stretched my quads or my hamstrings or my adductors or hip flexors…

Then one day, I took advantage of the beautiful San Diego weather and went to a boot camp class to get my blood moving. After a thorough butt kicking, I was back in the living room, watching TV, stretching things out and trying to get into a deep squat.  My hamstrings felt irritable, and I could feel my femurs wanted to rotate laterally (duck footed) as a result of what we’d done at the bootcamp workout.

So I started doing a little stretch for the lateral hamstrings to calm down some of the external rotation.

The stretch was intense — the kind of intense stretch that makes you want to quit but you don’t because you know that if you continue, you’re going to cry tears of joy.  After a couple minutes stretching out both sides, I was a much happier man.

All it took was getting my lateral hamstrings stretched out.

That was where the problem had been hiding the whole time.  Most hamstring stretches will tend to get you a great stretch on the semitendinosis and semimembranosis but not so much on the biceps femoris.  This stretch gets it. If your lateral hamstring is tight, you will feel this stretch all the way from the posterior, inferior, lateral side of your knee (where the lateral hamstring terminates) all the way up into your butt.

Make sure you keep your back in neutral the whole time, hinging at the hip to make sure your hamstrings get the brunt of the stretch and NOT your back muscles.

If it helps you deepen your squat a little, make sure you share this with a friend!  Without further ado, here’s the stretch.

The Stretch: Stand facing an elevated surface like a chair or couch. A low stool will also work if you are just starting with this stretch and/or are particularly tight. Place your heel on the surface and pull your toes back. Your knee and toes should be pointing toward the ceiling. Maintaining a neutral spine, twist your upper body to the direction of the outstretched leg. If your left leg is up on the surface, turn to your left. If your right leg is up, turn to the right. You should feel this on the lateral (outside edge) in the back of the knee and thigh and up toward the hip/butt.

Hold for 30 – 60 sec. per side and do 2-3 sets to get a good feel for what it does for you.

The post A stretch that got me deeper in my squat appeared first on Upright Health.