Exercises to Relieve Holiday Back & Neck Pain

Have you ever spent a day baking cookies and your back aches halfway through? Tis the season of back aches and neck kinks. There’s a lot we look forward to this time of year, but much of it comes with a lot of prep work. And even if we enjoy that, it can add to the time we spend hunched over. This hunch (kyphosis) can aggravate our back and neck.

But not to fret. There are moves you can do to counteract that forward bend. First remember, our low back and neck can move much easier than our midback. All those pesky ribs protecting our internal organs makes it a little hard to get mobility in the mid back. So, when we hunch over a lot, bending back becomes harder and harder to do from the mid back and we do more and more from our neck and low back. So, while it is okay to bend back at the lower back and neck, you do want to be mindful that you move from your middle when you want to counteract the slump of a long workday or baking marathon.

Moving from our middle […]

Exercises to Relieve Holiday Back & Neck Pain2022-11-21T21:16:10-05:00

The Shortest Workout You Need!

The shortest workout you need sounds too good to be true. It sounds like a gimmick, but there is research that supports its effectiveness. But while it’s short, it will be challenging.

Professor of kinesiology, Martin Gibala, and his team have shown that a specific 10-min, intense interval workout three times per week was as effective as 30-minutes of moderate exercise four times per week. What’s great about that news is that it means if you’ve said in the past, “I don’t have time to work out,” now you really have no excuse. Ten minutes can provide great impact on the body and your health.

Equally effective meant people seem to have very similar results in multiple health markers, including insulin sensitivity, VO2 max (how we utilize oxygen during exercise), and at a cellular level our mitochondria responded similarly.

Just to see those numbers a different way—30-minutes of high intensity interval work throughout the week yielded the same results as 120-minutes of moderate work throughout the week. It’s just a quick way to fit in exercise. It doesn’t mean that one way is better than another. Moderate and vigorous exercise challenge the body in different […]

The Shortest Workout You Need!2022-12-14T11:16:38-05:00

Wrist Exercises

Who wants to do wrist exercises when we could be working our abs, butt, and thighs, right? Unless they hurt our wrists are not the first body part we think to workout. And when I was younger, you’d have a hard time convincing me I should waste any workout time on my wrists. Ah, youth!

But it’s like any part of the body. Everything is integrated and we need strong and flexible wrists or our wrists will impede other exercises (like plank, pushups, and even potentially weight lifting). Type a lot? Don’t want carpel tunnel? You want to consider your wrists.

If you have wrist pain, these series of exercises are really helpful. The first video takes you through a series of moves that both strengthens and stretches the muscles. The second video is a series of deep stretches. If you choose to do either of the videos, listen to your body. Start small. Ease in. These are small muscles, and you can progress over time. Both videos are beneficial, but if you only have time for one, do the first.

If you don’t have wrist pain, I know it will be harder to convince you to make time for your […]

Wrist Exercises2022-08-15T10:59:38-04:00

Squats and Lunges safe for the knees!

A number of people are afraid to do lunges and squats because they think the moves are bad for their knees. If you have knee issues, you may need to modify, take precautions, or starts slow and small, but you don’t want to cut lunges and squats out of your exercise routine. We need to keep those muscles strong because we squat and lunge in many practical ways throughout the day.

You squat to get off the toilet, up from a chair, in and out of the car, to get down and up off the floor. And if you want to lift something heavy using your legs and not your back, you need to be able to do a deep squat (otherwise your back is still very involved).

So let’s talk about form so that we can do these moves safely:

Basic Squat:

  • Legs hip distance apart. That might be closer than you think. It’s where your femurs (bones in your thighs) come into your pelvis, not where you’d put your hands on your hips.
  • All ten toes pointing forward.
  • Then crease at your hips, stick the butt out and let your torso hinge forward holding a neutral spine—trying not to […]
Squats and Lunges safe for the knees!2022-07-09T15:50:05-04:00

Treadmillls are for Torture!

You may already consider the treadmill a torture device as you walk or run on the spinning band beneath your feet getting nowhere fast. You’d be right. The original treadmill was designed as a form of torture. Called a treadmill, it looked more like a Stairmaster.

By the mid 1800’s nearly half of all prisons in England had treadmills. They didn’t look like today’s treadmills. Instead of a spinning band, small steps rotated as prisoners stood side-by-side, separated by a partition to create a sense of solitude, and rotated the wheel of steps. Sometimes these machines ground corn, other times the prisoners just cycled through the air. Often they spent 7-10 hours a day on the treadmill.

British author, Oscar Wilde (author of the Importance of Being Earnest) was imprisoned for two years after being convicted of sodomy and was forced to walk the treadmill for up to 6 hours a day. He died a few years after his release, but not after petitioning to reduce cruelty in prisons.

United States prisons also used treadmills with a New York penitentiary liking the treadmill so much they bought more so as not to be limited to […]

Treadmillls are for Torture!2022-06-20T12:46:44-04:00
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