Dr. James Andrews is one of the nations top orthopedic surgeons who has treated many of the top professional athletes in the country, but he spends a lot of his time and energy focused on how we can reduce youth sports injuries. Of the 35 million or so children involved in sports in the US about 10% of those are treated annually for sports related injuries. Dr. Andrews says there are several things that we can do to reduce the number and severity of youth sports injuries (half of which are overuse injuries). He says often the problem starts with parents who think their child is going to be the next LeBron James, Serena Williams, Tom Brady, or Lionel Messi.
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As I have discussed many times, the human body is built by movement for movement. "We have a brain for one reason and one reason only - and that’s to produce adaptable and complex movements." - Daniel Wolpert Humans evolved to move: Running after food or away from danger. Climbing trees to gather fruit. Digging up roots to eat. Carrying firewood and food long distances back to our family. Throwing rocks or spears to kill animals for food. Walking long distances to follow migrating animals, ripe fruit, or water sources and to avoid predators, bad weather, and lack of food and water. Our bodies are designed to do all these activities (walk, run, climb, throw, carry, etc) every day of our lives. The human body is maintained by movement. Use it or lose it. If we don't walk, run, climb, throw, and carry on a daily basis our bodies start to fail. Muscles become stiff and weak. Bones loss density and become fragile. Cartilage becomes thin. Ligaments and tendons become stiff and prone to tears. Skin becomes thin and sensitive. Blood vessels become smaller, stiffer, and less resilient. Digestion slows and becomes incomplete. Immunity weakens. Brain function deteriorates. The signals for cellular repair and rebuilding slow. Most people call these changes "normal" aging, but they have very little to do with age and everything to do with lack of movement. How can we reintroduce a variety of functional or evolutionary movement to our lives? An easy way to start getting back to our roots is introducing easy, simple obstacle course workouts. Egoscue affectionately calls these "Patch" workouts or "PatchFitness". Below is episode 6 of Sonima's "Becoming Pain Free" video series that follows Steven as he uses the Egoscue Method of Postural Alignment Therapy to help him overcome chronic pain and become free of pain and limitations. Enjoy! If you missed any previous episodes of Sonima presents "Becoming Pain Free" you can find them here:
Episode 1: Taking the first steps toward pain free living. Episode 2: The surprising factors that contribute to chronic pain. Episode 3: Continuing the journey to become pain free. Episode 4: Seeing the effects of posture on pain relief. Episode 5: Why total body balance is crucial for pain relief. Why workout alone when you can workout together? Grab your wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, friend, roommate, or teammate and follow along with Linda and John Lynch for a great 15 minute workout! This full-body workout will strengthen your core, arms, and legs and bring a smile to your face!
Related videos/articles: Egoscue partner workout Cardio core workout Straighten before you strengthen How shoulder posture affects running performance Top ten posture myths Being a mom is a rewarding yet hard job. A study found that mothers will spend on average 27,250 hours in their lifetime shopping, cooking, and doing household chores - that equals 1,135 days of their lives!! 72% of moms with children over 1 year old work, and those moms with a full-time job will spend 13 hours a day between work and household chores.
Things that keep mom busy:
That doesn't leave a lot of time for exercise! The solution? Get in exercise whenever you can and wherever you are. This workout video by Sonima.com and Pete Egoscue is 15 intense minutes of exercise you can do in the living room, backyard, or park and can be done all together or in 2-3 minute parts. Next time you are fatigued and tired and ready to plop down on the couch and zone out to Facebook, try this workout and notice how much energy it gives you. Leave your comments below. References: Fun mothering facts Busy mothers Related videos/articles: Children's postural alignment Fun family workout Pete Egoscue on infants and alignment Children's declining fitness Text neck Osteoporosis is being diagnosed more often and at younger ages than ever before. In fact, between 1990 and 2000, there was nearly a 25% increase in hip fractures worldwide. Europe and the Americas accounted for 51% of all fractures which is a hugely disproportionate amount. Why is this?
If we look at America for example:
What is it that causes more people every year to get osteoporosis? Why is it that America and other westernized countries have much higher rates of osteoporosis than less developed countries? I believe it has to do with our posture. Americans have terrible posture which is getting worse all the time. Children, teenagers, and young adults have worse posture than any generation before them. Our bodies work on this wonderful principle called “vertical load”. This means that our bodies are designed in a manner where each of our major joints are designed to stack vertically one on top of the next. Shoulder over the hip, hip over the knee, knee over the ankle. Our posture should look like this: Not this: When our joints are aligned vertically, gravity is applying a constant force down through our bones, strengthening them. This is happening whether we are sitting, standing, running, skiing, or golfing. But if our joints do not line up vertically, then gravitational forces are not having this positive effect on our bone density and can even start to have a negative and degenerative effect over time. The answer to the mystery of why our bones are getting weak is very simple: because our posture is indeed weak and misaligned. When we realign our posture our body does what it is designed to do: increase our bone density. And it does this without the need for drugs such as Fosamax, Actonel, Boniva, Didronel and others that all have negative long term effects on our bone structure and overall health. Wouldn’t you rather do it the natural way? I know I would.
If you would like a free postural evaluation and personalized discussion about your body, bones, and overall musculoskeletal health contact me today. At Oregon Exercise Therapy I specialize in helping people just like you relieve pain, restore function, and rediscover your bodies amazing ability to function pain and limitation free no matter your age. Are you an athlete? Looking for the best workout program to take your performance to the next level? Want to prevent injuries and extend your career? These athletes are doing the perfect workout for that. See if you can guess what sport they play as you watch. Didn't guess it until the end did you? They are Olympic weightlifters. Why would weightlifters waste so much time running, jumping, tumbling, and playing other sports when they could be lifting weights the entire time? To get better at lifting weights, you have to practice lifting weights right? Yes and no. Of course to be able to perform a snatch or clean and jerk with hundreds of pounds you have to practice the technique of those lifts thousands of times but that's not the only thing that is needed to perform better. Doing one thing - anything - repeatedly will lead to imbalances in the body. Some muscles get stronger as others get weaker. Gains in certain ranges of motion increase, as others decrease. One side of the body might get stronger and more capable, at the same time the non-dominate sides gets weaker. These changes throw the body out of balance, causing changes in joint position or posture along with alterations in movement patterns. These adjustments (compensations) the body has made in response to the demands put upon it will lead to decreases in efficiency and increases in stress, strain, and compression in the body. Compensation leads to decreased performance and increased chance of injury and pain. Swimmers overdevelop the arm adductors and internal rotators while the abductors, external rotators, and scapular stabilizers tend to get weak. Cyclists end up with strong quads, hip flexors, and calves and weak hamstrings, glutes, spinal extensors, and scapular retractors. Tennis, baseball, and other one sided sports lead to athletes developing large imbalances between the dominate and non-dominate sides. The types of workouts shown in the video above do several very important things for the athletes completing them.
There are several ways to get started with these workouts.
Related articles/videos: Straighten before you strengthen Sports and the blame game How shoulder posture affects running performance CrossFit: how to survive injury free and achieve success Tennis warm-up and cool-down exercises Difference between play and sports training The human body is designed to stand, just as the body is designed to sit, run, jump, throw, lift, and carry things. But doing any of these activities repeatedly can lead to imbalance in the body and pain. This posture exercise menu is designed for people who have to stand a lot during the day, like cashiers, baristas, bartenders, teachers, nurses, doctors, chefs, hairdressers, construction workers, and mail carriers. These posture exercises when done on a regular basis will relieve back pain, knee pain, and foot pain associated with standing for extended periods by realigning the load joints (ankles, knees, hips, and shoulders), engaging posture muscles, and balancing the body.
Leave a comment below about how these exercises worked for you. If you'd like personalized help and exercises to help you become pain free contact me today. Related videos/articles: How you stand is how you move 10 things that cause posture imbalances and pain Why sitting and rising from the floor is important for health 10 minute after-work workout Simple posture exercises for office workers Downhill skiing is a fun and exhilarating sport that millions of Americans (including me and my family) enjoy each winter. But traveling down a snowy and often icy mountain at speeds exceeding 25mph comes with risks. Head injuries, broken legs, twisted knees. Over the last 10 years, the introduction and increased use of ski helmets has reduced the incidence of head injuries while skiing by 25%. But the rate of knee injuries including Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) tears has remained steady over the same time period despite improvements in skis, bindings, and lessons. Researchers at the University of Vermont School of Medicine estimate that 17,500 skiers tear an ACL every year skiing, which accounts for about a third of all skiing injuries. While changes in ski technology and trends (hour-glass shaped skis which allow skiers to go faster and fat skis which increase knee torque) might play a role in knee injuries, I think the biggest factor has nothing to do with expensive ski equipment. Michael Decker, a biomechanical engineer at the University of Denver, said that asymmetry between the left and right leg may be a factor in ACL injuries. “You are seeing big differences in right and left legs,” Decker said. “What we are finding is the non-dominant leg has been injured, especially the ACL, much more than the dominant. Females have two times the rate as males of the non-dominant leg.” Postural imbalance causing knee injuries including ACL tears is something I have talked about before and think is the number one factor in why these injuries happen. Look at the image above left which shows a woman with good postural alignment and balanced leg strength. You can see that both her feet point straight ahead as do her knees and her hips and shoulders are level. This means when she repeatedly squats while skiing, her ankles, knees, and hips will work together as a team distributing workload throughout all the lower body muscles and avoiding excessive strain on any ligaments, cartilage, or other connective tissues in her body. This means she is very unlikely to tear her ACL while skiing. Now look at the image above on the right. Notice how her feet turn out at different angles. Her knees also point in different directions and her hips and shoulders are not level. Since we know that how we stand is how we move and bad posture equals bad form, there is no way her body will move or ski in a balanced and even way. She will end up overloading her dominate side while collapsing on her non-dominate side. This is a recipe for injury including an ACL tear - whether it happens while she's alpine skiing, playing soccer, returning a tennis serve, or jumping up and down during a bootcamp workout.
If you have a dominant or stronger leg or notice your feet or knees don't both point straight ahead I would highly recommend you seek professional help in correcting these imbalances from an Egoscue University certified Postural Alignment Therapist and Advanced Exercise Therapist to address your imbalances before you get in injury. As they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
I would be happy to offer anyone who is seriously interested in correcting their imbalances to prevent injury a free posture evaluation and consultation. I would also offer the same to anyone who has suffered a torn ACL or other skiing injury and would like help getting back to 100%. I stumbled upon an old article called “Want to run faster? Here’s how.” And thought I’d read it and see what it had to say. I’m not going to get into the beginning part of the article, but I do want to talk about the tips from David Jack, a Men’s Health adviser, on how to increase your speed and performance when running: Fix Your Posture If you spend a good portion of the day sitting at a desk, your posture is most likely taking a hit for it. Your chest gets tighter, your back weaker, and your shoulders roll forward. The result: Your sprinting becomes less efficient. “So if we concentrate on our posture, it helps us unlock everything and allows our body to move in a full range of motion,” says Jack. I love how he states that our range of motion is dependent on our posture. This is something, as a Postural Alignment Specialist and Advanced Exercise Therapist, I have always stressed to my clients. I remember one talk I was giving to a group of tennis players and one guy in his 50’s raised his hand and asked, “What can you do about tight hamstrings?” I asked him how tight they are and he proceeded to bend forward trying to touch his toes and he could only touch his knees. Pretty tight! I asked him if he stretches them and he said, "Yes several times a day for 15 minutes for years." I said, "I don’t think not stretching enough is your problem, I think it’s the position of your joints, your posture...that’s the problem." I had him do one e-cise that had nothing to do with stretching his hamstrings, but rather focuses on re-positioning his posture and then had him stand up and try to touch his toes again. He immediately touched his toes! He said it was the first time in his life he can remember ever being able to touch his toes. He was obviously blown away and immediately signed up to do 8 posture therapy sessions with me because he said, “If one e-cise that have that big in impact on me, imagine what is possible!” The article goes on to say: Think of fixing your posture as knocking the rust off, says Jack. “We can try and run as fast as we want,” says Jack. “But if we can’t get our body to get up straight and get our hips and legs to extend—we’re just paddling upstream.” Hip extension and knee extension. Very important to running. Most of us spend hours and hours sitting each day which teaches our hips and knees to be in a flexed position, and if we aren’t doing anything to remind our legs they can also extend, we are asking for injury – hamstring pulls or tears if we try to sprint, knee and low back pain if we are running long distances, foot and hip pain, the list goes on and on. (The Egoscue Tower is a great e-cise to encourage knee and hip extension while also creating thoracic extension.) The article continues: If you’re not ready to make the switch to a standup desk—which can drastically improve your posture—Jack suggests taking moments throughout the day to stretch. While in a chair, reach your hands above your head and roll your shoulders back. Or try standing up, take in some deep breaths, and hold them for a few seconds—that’ll help loosen up all the muscles attached to your ribcage and hips. Yes! Take motion breaks during your day. I suggest getting out of your chair every 30 minutes and do 1 or 2 e-cises that will break your body out of the flexed position. (Besides the above e-cises, here are some other e-cises you can do at work)
If you are interested in a free posture evaluation and gait analysis, contact me today and I'd be happy to help you understand what is limiting your running or athletic performance and what you can do to improve. Let’s start by knocking down some myths about core strength.
What is “core strength”? The ability to maintain structural integrity of the joints regardless of the position (i.e. standing, sitting, squatting, running, jumping, etc.). Isn’t that the same definition as “good posture”? Yes. They are the same thing. If your posture is compromised you do not have core strength (even if you have a six pack!). How do we measure it? By looking at your standing posture and then by watching your body in movement. If you can maintain joint position during movement, you have a functionally strong core. What muscles are part of the core? Lots. Deep and more superficial muscles. Every muscle that attaches to the pelvis, spine, ribs or scapula. Some examples are: Why do I need core strength? If you don’t have core strength and you try to pick up something heavy, you might injure your back and end up with chronic back pain. If you lack core strength and you go for a run, your knees might hurt later that day. If you are weak in the core you’ll get shoulder and neck tightness and pain from sitting at work. What are the best exercises to develop core strength? Anything that realigns your posture and teaches your joints to stay lined up while moving (running, golfing, gardening, tennis, etc. ).
I would recommend getting a free postural analysis including functional testing and gait analysis to identify where your imbalances are and then getting a program of exercises to correct your unique muscular and postural imbalances. |
About Matt WhiteheadI'm an Egoscue Institute® certified Postural Alignment Specialist (PAS) and Advanced Exercise Therapist (AET), certified personal trainer, PatchFitness performer, ultra trail runner, mountain biker, dad, music lover, environmentalist, and wanna-be slam dunk champion. I will be providing you with the latest posture exercises to help you live, play, and be pain free. Archives
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