Treating Ourselves Like Olympians
Two cool things I noticed when watching The Olympics:
(1) The fastest man in the world getting "adjusted" by his chiropractor. This is cool, it shows that this service isn't just for pain, but for performance. You don't need to be in a car accident to get your musculoskeletal system checked, and you may want to get checked just to get the upper "edge" against the competition.
(2) The k-tape returns to volleyball! The first time I saw k-tape was at the last summer olympics when USA's female beach volleyball team was all taped up in pink. "That's weird... probably nonsense." It wasn't until years later, when I had a sprain in my leg from running that I was able to experience how "magical" (Lance Armstrong called kinesio-tape "magic" tape) this tape was for myself. If you're an athlete, find someone who is experienced in k-tape application, and test it for yourself. It works. (Want to know some of the "How" it works, this man wrote a great article about it here) You really should experience it yourself next time you've got an injury.
Keep watching The Olympics, take notes. These are some of the fittest human beings on the planet, see if there's anything you can change in your own life to treat yourself like an Olympian.
Some Ways Sitting Literally Kills Us
I've been fond of the statement that movement is a necessary "nutrient" the human body absolutely requires to be able to express health. You can eat salads all day long, but you will not be as healthy as you should be if you're not moving.
New research that was published in this month of the British Medical Journal looked at the effect sitting had on life expectancy, and if they could get a number of years lost due to sitting. They did find this number.
The number they extrapolated was 2 years. TWO YEARS! If you want to extend your life two years, keep your daily sitting to less than 3 hours/day. I know, that's hard. Have you ever timed how much you sit in an average day? I'm aware of this fact, but between sitting here, writing this blog, typing up patient notes, sitting and taking histories of patients, and the ritual daily commute in my car (sitting, of course), I'm sitting WAY more than 3 hours per day... and it's killing me.
In another study done by researchers at Harvard, and published in The Lancet, it was estimated that sedentary living kills 1 in 10 people. A tithing of death given to those who use not the body they've been blessed with. (I'm being sarcastic, but a 10% effect is nothing to be joking about.)
To give us some perspective, let's compare sitting to something we're familiar with. You all know smokers, right? You probably ask yourself, How could they do that? They're killing themselves! You know they usually die earlier, you know they have heart problems more than others, and you can pick one out from a crowd by just the way they sound when they cough.
Well, being sedentary may be worse for your health than smoking.
With all that said, I'm going to leave this computer now and walk around my office, maybe even do some push-ups in a hidden corner. Cheers!
One Simple Tip To Avoid Shoulder Pain
... retract those blades, keep that joint in a secure position.
Example:
When benching, don't bench too much. And don't EVER bring your arm forward, if you feel your scapulae sliding sideways and forward, you're pushing too far forward.
It should look like this:
The picture on the right is correct, see those shoulders being pulled back.
Good luck making those pecs summer ready!
JVB