Health and Fitness

Can’t does not exist

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Not only is it a contraction of cannot, it is a word that disempowers us all. You cannot do that, I cannot do this. These phrases mentally weaken us by throwing up barriers that restrict our perspective.

Instead, reframe the statement. From I cannot, move to what is stopping me? With almost every goal and outcome, there are obstructions, whether physical, social or psychological. Some of these are with good reason and purpose (you cannot jump off the top of the london eye, for example), but for almost everything else, with a change in the way the statement is created, a path and a way forward can be discerned. From identifying what you want to achieve, it is possible to understand the knowledge you need to gain, the skills that can be learned and so step by step, move closer to where you wish to be.

We can get better, because we’re not dead yet.

Frank Turner Get Better

 

One foot in front of the other 

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The oft quoted line is “A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step”

What’s conveniently ignored is the subsequent steps. The ones up hills, through blizzards, rain and so forth. Inevitably our mythical mystic would have encountered these but they are brushed under the metaphorical mat unless pertinent to the retelling. 

A better narrative might be the one that admits such adversities and encourages progress and learning in spite or through the challenges. 

The trick is to maintain momentum, use easy moments to help carry over the harder ones and to accept that all things must change, all things have an end. 

In a running race, use the down and flat to recover, in a lifting competition, tactics, in the pool, don’t fight the water when tired and in life, take delight in the simple pleasures before the fading light. 

Semper Pergendum Sine Timore

Forward without fear! 

Breathe the pressure

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Come play my game, I’ll test ya…

Prodigy – Breathe

So sang the Prodigy and even if Keith Flint seems more than a little bit crazy, he perhaps has a point. 

Even under pressure, we still have control over our breathing. Very often, when stressed, we tend to hold our breath slightly, the effect of which is to change to vital gas balance in our blood stream. 

Respiration is one of the only autonomic functions over which we can have conscious control, and also the one that has the most profound effect on our physiology and mental state.

With controlled breathing comes situational control, the ability to mentally step back, assess the problem, be it a run, workout or stressful issue at work and regain focus. 

One of the fastest ways to control your breath under load is wheel breathing, where you follow an inhale / exhale cycle as though blowing a wheel around, no pausing, no flat points. Instead, you consciously become aware of a smooth, slower, deep pattern that starts to bring everything else back under control. 

Even a few cycles mid workout will pay huge dividends, so if in doubt, breathe. 

The secret to staying young… Revealed!

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Everyone experiences it in sightly different ways, but until science is able to halt biological aging, getting older is far better than the alternatives.The basic processes have a number of negative effects. Past the age of 40, and sometimes earlier, the body starts to slow down. Other than the obvious hormonal changes of the menopause or drop in testosterone, we begin to lose bone mass, muscle mass and neural communication speed. The microscopic cellular damage accumulated during life finally starts to overwhelm the repair processes, so the cellular systems tend to function less efficiently.

As this is a subtle and slow process, it is often not noticed until we realise we are able to do a less than before, that our balance is not quite as good and if we injure ourselves, it takes longer to heal.

The good news is that we can significantly slow this inevitable slide with a few simple concepts.

1. Lift weights. The saying use it or lose it is never more true than with muscle mass. Resistance work has been shown to preserve strength, help keep mental faculties and protect against illness. It also makes a significant difference if you do have to be admitted to hospital as you have more to keep you going and healing.

2. Mobilise, stretch and keep supple. Joints and soft tissue can lose their elasticity, so keeping them long and fluid will help you move better

3. Combine short high intensity bouts of exercise with lots of movement. This has been shown to keep body and brain firing more effectively and although you may not break records, challenging the body forces it to stay active.
4. Keep an eye on your diet. We are what we eat in every way. Protein is important, as is fat. Carbohydrate starts to become less so and gaining weight is not inevitable.

5. Learn new mental and physical skills. It was always thought that the brain stopped developing once we hit a certain age but research shows that we maintain a huge amount of flexibility and learning potential throughout life and are able to lay down new neural connections all the time.

This may seem like a long and tedious list but incorporating it should be simple. A few sessions of high intensity weight lifting week in a well supervised environment covers the skills, resistance training and high intensity areas, watching what you eat is as simple as checking what you stick on a fork and learning new information is at the click of a mouse with the Internet.

Aging is inevitable, getting older isn’t.

Food- more than just fuel. 

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What we eat has a huge effect on how we perform. 

Not just in the balance of macronutrients (carbohydrate, protein, fat) but in the way each food affects us. 

We all know about food allergies, apparently increasingly common, where the person has a massive and rapid negative reaction to a specific item but there are some other ways what we eat influences our performance. 

One of the most important is the potential inflammatory response from consuming items that our body reacts to. This is known as a non IgE mediated reaction and are more commonly treated as food intolerances.  Because of the delayed onset, between 4 and 48 hours after ingestion, they are difficult to isolate. This also makes the effect harder to observe using standard clinical blood tests.

However, this background reaction can significantly effect not only every day life but athletic performance as well, due to the generalised inflammation it can cause. 

The most common reactive agents are: 

  • Dairy
  • Grain
  • Seafood
  • Nuts
  • Soya
  • Egg
  • Nightshades (tomato,aubergine,peppers etc)
  • Alcohol 

If you suspect that this is something you are dealing with, the safest way to detect these reactions is to follow a medically supervised exclusion diet under an experienced doctor so that they can help guide you towards avoiding the substances in question. 

Here’s why your six pack won’t make you a better runner. 

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Most core exercises are a waste of time. They will not make you a better athlete. In fact, they could be slowing you down and creating injuries. 

Why? Because for athletic performance in any discipline, one of the most important functions is the ability to connect your upper and lower body effectively and efficiently without shortening your front. 

The function of the abdominal muscles is to link upper and lower body, provide stability to the lumbar spine and pull the rib cage down during certain motions. 

A short anterior (front) from too many crunches or planks will reduce your hip mobility, create an unwanted curve in your back and reduce the power you can produce. 

To overcome this, by all means do your stability and integration work, preferably under professional guidance to give dynamic feedback but then lengthen and mobilise the front again (for example cobra stretch or warrior poses if you have no spinal or other issues). 

By having a long and fluid front, to work with a strong back, you’ll be closer to optimising your performance and breaking that PB. 
And of course, if in doubt, seek guidance from an experienced professional. 

Running it off does not work

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Each week, we see a number of runners and increasingly gym based athletes, who have had an injury for a while and have tried to train through it.

This never works for a number of simple reasons:

  • Unless it was a non traumatic injury, it will have happened due to a chronic issue somewhere, which needs to be addressed before the problem resolves fully
  • If it was traumatic, there will be a knock on effect, which can get worse if you attempt to train through in any way that loads the injured area
  • Training through, even if it does not dynamically load the injured place, demands modifications in your form and movement patterns, which can cause injury later on

The best approach instead is to use the PRICE principles and book in to get it checked by a professional, who is used to working with athletes.

PRICE:

  • Protect: Avoid loading the injured area and strap or support it if you do need to move
  • Rest: Cut back on your workload and give it some time to heal properly
  • Ice: If acutely injured, cold treatment can help reduce the swelling and pain
  • Compression: A simple bandage may help reduce the swelling and pain, particularly in joints
  • Elevate: By raising the effected area to level or higher than the heart, the chance of swelling is reduced, helping the body heal more effectively

Whether you’ve tweaked an achilles, strained your knee or have a chronic lower back problem whenever you run over a certain distance, don’t just ignore it, pop a pill and carry on, call in and get it resolved quickly and effectively.

Total body circuits for injury detection and prevention

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There are a few simple exercises that, if carried out correctly, can help prevent injury in other areas of training by allowing you to spot where and when you are weak.

Amongst my favourites are:

Kettlebell swings. Preferably a full range of motion. http://www.catalystathletics.com/exercises/exercise.php?exerciseID=251These work pretty much everything and can be used for strength, conditioning, warmup, incredibly useful.

Turkish getups. http://www.catalystathletics.com/exercises/exercise.php?exerciseID=255 They look simple but demand huge range of motion and coordination of all the major joints to be successful.

Single arm overhead squats. http://www.catalystathletics.com/exercises/exercise.php?exerciseID=236 Another all over body exercise which will make everything fire in the correct sequence.

Dead hang pull ups http://www.catalystathletics.com/exercises/exercise.php?exerciseID=39

Mountain climbers, just to finish off http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J4hRICVjRo Focusing on maintaining a stable trunk throughout the movement.

By doing these as a circuit, ensuring good form at all times, they should prepare you for any other, more focused gym work or training you wish to do. Or, if you’re time compressed, just doing a 10 minute of a few of them (not everybody has a suitable pull up station in their home) will bring huge benefits.

One of the best resources for improving mobility is Mobility WOD, which has hundreds of excellent videos for fixing all the areas you may feel are restricted.

And if in doubt, come and see us for a full assessment of the issues.

80:20 Revisted

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With the forthcoming release of Dr Kelly Starrett’s new book, I have been reconsidering the advice we tend to offer injured (or preferably non injured) athletes. Dr Starrett (a Phd physical therapist) offers practical and applicable advice on injury prevention and recovery, stating that if you cannot perform basic functions safely (squatting, stretching etc) then you need to sort them out before you try running.

These days, with web access virtually ubiquitous in the western world, there is a surfeit of information available at our fingertips. The difficulty is in discerning what works and what doesn’t. With the rise of athletic “biohackers”, who promote tips and tricks for small percentage improvements, finding the signal amongst the noise is even harder.

For most of us, performance improvement comes down to three simple things.

  • Optimise Nutriton / Diet
  • Train efficiently
  • Recovery / Sleep

Dr Starrett covers much of this in his excellent book Becoming A Supple Leopard and reviews indicate he will cover this in the running guide.

Breaking down the above bullet points, optimising diet means ensuring you eat cleanly and sensibly most of the time, getting a suitable balance of proteins, fats and carbohydrates, with plenty of micronutrients. Nothing clever or fancy but by not doing this, you are ensuring that your body is not going to operate effectively. This is the base upon which all the others stand, mentally and physically.

The part we all think about is the training aspect. We plan, prepare and put in the hours and miles to attempt to achieve our goals. But are we doing it in the most efficient manner? Could we save time by cutting out junk miles or hours in the gym, since more is not always better. Is there such a thing as a recovery run, or easy workout? Would that time be better spent with friends and family, which might help improve our mental state, or doing mobility work (as described by Dr Starrett)?

This ties in to point 3, recovery and sleep. Do you recover enough? Are you waking refreshed and ready to go each morning without needing an alarm or two? There is no set formula for this since the factors involved in recovery are complex, including external stressors, but by tracking basic biomarkers (resting heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation (SpO2) etc) and personal reflection, we are able to observe how our bodies are responding to the load we place upon them. If your resting heart rate is elevated and your SpO2 depressed then you are simply not recovering from the load. Another simple test is to attempt to create a change in your heart rate during a training session. If during a run or ride, you cannot easily elevate your heart rate by increasing pace or effort, then there is a possibility that you are neurologically as well as physically tired and as such, backing off would be advised.

Some people are beginning to use heart rate variability (HRV) to track their stress and recovery. Like many tools, this gives a view into the workings of the body, in this case the autonomic nervous system, which can be used to explore the effect training or stress is having. Many researchers and doctors have shown that there is a link between low variability and mortality from a number of causes but these are measured using ECG over a long period of time (24 hours), especially after an acute myocardial infarction. Some work is being carried out with regards to the use of HRV to track physiological changes due to stress and training and although this appears to be useful over long term measurements, such that trends can be visible, it appears to be a back up to the other measurements and as such, outside of the 80% rule of most efficient use of resources.

To conclude, eat to meet your nutritional needs, train efficiently and recover effectively. Then start making the 20% changes.

Pain is not normal

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Pain is the body telling you something is wrong. It is driven, as with most things, by only a few factors – Degeneration, disease processes or dysfunction. However, as we age, we tend to normalise it, put it down to getting older, one of those things or to be expected. We are even told this by medical professionals, which reinforces the myth.

Aging happens, it is better than the alternative. Some of the processes of aging are unavoidable but many are not. By attempting to eliminate those triggers we can control, through correction of function and awareness of degeneration, then the pain left is triggered by either a disease process or changes which have already occurred. With the miracles of modern medicine and the bodies inherent desire to heal itself, even the majority of these can be improved with time, patience and external intervention.

Prevention is always better than a cure and the necessary activities to prevent degeneration are all things that we know. Eat a nutritious, well balanced diet, maintain a sensible weight, exercise regularly and moderately including resistance work. Dysfunction can be reduced or prevented by considering the way we use our bodies and becoming aware of our senses more. We are sensory creatures and yet spend so little time in our bodies that we recognise only those signals that are big enough to break through to our conscious awareness.

You do not need to live with pain unless there is a known and unavoidable reason for its presence. Even then, osteopathy and allopathic medicine can both help, together with self driven changes to give you back control. With a good working diagnosis and a plan, the future can look far brighter.

5 points to being pain free:

1) Get a diagnosis of why you have pain. If you don’t understand why, you can’t change the triggers
2) Start a treatment plan that you are actively involved with
3) Get your life patterns in order. Change diet, exercise or other factors that can influence the pain
4) Engage with the pain and take control, mentally and physically
5) Practice mental and physical activities within a pain free framework every day

The Camford Clinic
http://www.the-camford-clinic.co.uk
01420 544408