exercise Archives | Aspen Club

Avoid These Exercises

I spend a lot of time talking about what is good to do in the gym for spine and overall health, so I thought I would say a quick word about a few things you should avoid. With some exceptions, such as training for a specific sport or certain rehab protocols, these exercises should be avoided when trying to achieve overall health.

Sit-ups: If you were to set out to design an exercise to ruin lumbar discs, the discs in your low back, you would be hard-pressed to design one more effective at that task than sit-ups. Why? Repetitive flexion aka forward bending and twisting damages the discs in your low back. Sit-ups and sit-ups with rotation reproduce these movements exactly. Instead, try crunches, like a sit up but your low back doesn’t bend, and planks with short isometric holds.

Upright Rows: This exercise places the shoulder into internal rotation, putting the supraspinatus and its tendon at serious risk of injury over time. It also places a lot of stress on the cervical spine. Instead, do “full can.”

Behind the Head Lat Pull-down: This one places the shoulder in a vulnerable position, which can lead to injury of the rotator cuff and shoulder joint. It also puts enormous strain on the cervical spine (neck) because of the forward head position. Instead try Lat pull-down to the chest or pull-ups if possible. Also, try alternating between standing Lat pulldowns and seated Lat pulldowns to activate more of the core and gluteal muscles.

Rotations from the Waist with Band, Cable, or Medicine Ball: As mentioned, sit-ups, rotation, or twisting of the lumbar spine can lead to disc degeneration and/or herniation over time, especially with load. Twisting from the waist will get your oblique ripped but at great expense to your low back. Instead, rotate from the hips. This strengthens the hips instead of the spine and is a great exercise. It also trains you how to move in your day-to-day life, avoiding low back injuries.

Smith Squats: Smith machines were designed to help people squat with heavy load while minimizing the risk of the lifter collapsing due to a built-in catch mechanism. The problem with doing Smith Squats is that the machine guides the bar in one plane of motion, which won’t allow most people to do a functional squat on it. The squat is a very complicated and important exercise for back health. It is crucial that one masters squat mechanics before applying load. Most people need to work with a trainer in the beginning to master this move. Since all people’s bodies are different, the one size fits all approach of the Smith Machine doesn’t work and creates poor squat patterns, which can lead to knee, hip, and back problems down the road.

As always, feel free to send us a message with all your questions about spine health and fitness at backinstitute@aspenclub.com. Good luck!

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Mobility Matters

It is very important to move correctly when exercising. Everything we do in the gym, squats, lunges, pushing, pulling, and rotating should become a reflection of what we do in everyday life, including our recreational sports. Longevity of our bodies, especially our joints, is largely dependent upon good movement patterns that are reproducible. If you want to spare your low back and save your knees from debilitating arthritis, you must take the time to move with purpose.

So, what does this take and how do you begin? Although there are many facets involved that I will eventually cover, the first aspect of moving well is mobility. I like to think of mobility as the ability to move freely and easily into and out of positions that are essential for everyday life. If you can’t squat into a balanced position where your thighs are parallel with the floor while keeping your upper body upright and your feet facing forward, then you lack mobility. The lack of mobility may be in your ankles or your hips and combined with a variety of short and tight muscles such as your hamstrings. The key point is that you can’t squat correctly because you lack mobility, and that must be addressed. It makes no sense to overload your squat patterns with weights or to perform heavy leg presses until you establish a good squat pattern, otherwise you just wear your joints down.

So, the question is how do you improve mobility. The first point to consider is that mobility is much more than muscular flexibility. Mobility also involves range of motion of our joints, extensibility of elastic membranes that surround our muscles referred to as fascia, among many other tissues including the skin. The traditional approach of simply static stretching the tight muscles such as our hamstrings or quadriceps will do very little by itself to improve the way you move. Static stretching does have a place, but it’s not enough. To move better, we must also enhance joint mobility and put that mobility into motion. Hence, a dynamic approach! In a dynamic approach, one moves into and out of positions and with each repetition, the joint being addressed is stretched a little more, and the muscles being stretched are under tension. This results in greater range of motion that is both supportive and controllable by muscular contractions. This is the key to moving better. Don’t simply attempt to get greater range of motion, but rather, greater range of motion with control.

Here is a little insight for most of you. The areas of the body where most people begin to lose motion as they age is in the shoulders, the mid-back, the hips, and the ankle. Loss of motion in any of these areas will affect the overall quality of your movements in almost anything you do. If you need to lunge down to pick things off the floor, you need mobility in your ankles, hips, and mid-back. If you lack mobility in any of these areas, there will be compensation in the way you move and some type of abnormal stress on one or more of your joints. Often it is the knees, which is why so many aging people have knee pain. The best way to prevent knee problems is to make sure you have good ankle and hip mobility and the muscular control to support your knees as you move into and out of positions.

So where do we go from here? The best thing I can suggest is to direct you to an informative resource to learn how to address mobility. I don’t want to sound like an infomercial, but I created the DVDs “Thinner This Year Preparation for Movement” and “The Sacred 25 and Beyond” exactly for this purpose. These DVDs serve as a guide to teach you how to perform the exercises that are essential to move with greater motion and control. Both are available on youngernextyear.com/DVDs. Give them a try and start moving in the right direction.

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Going to The Gym

I spend a great deal of time in gyms all over the country. It is part of my job both as a physical therapist and trainer. Much of the time, I watch and observe in frustration as people lift weights with no thought at all about the alignment of their joints, particularly their very fragile spine. In the task-oriented world we live in, it does in fact seem to be all about completing the task without any thought of the consequences. Complete 3 sets of 10 repetitions of squats or leg presses with a hundred pounds, and you get a medal for finishing but no consideration is given to “how” you completed the exercise set. Did your knees buckle inward, did you round or hyper extend your back like a gymnast as you squatted down, did your head shoot forward like a turtle, and did your feet turn way out like a ballet dancer? I am here to tell you that other things matter a great deal more than completing the set. Before I get into these intricate details, let’s first discuss why they matter, and first and foremost, what the objective should be in putting your body through the strain and hardship of weight training exercises in the first place.

Make no mistake, the primary purpose for the typical exercises we do in the gym (whether at home or in a club) is to reinforce good patterns of movement that we need for everyday life. Think about it, squatting is simply sitting in a chair, lunging is what we often do to pick things off the floor, pushing and pulling relate to a wide arrange of daily tasks such as lifting objects over our head and opening doors. These movements are also common to sports whether it be golf (rotational movements) or skiing (lateral lunges). Everything we do in the gym becomes an expression of what we do outside the gym. If we do things in the gym with proper alignment and form, we train our bodies to minimize the loads on our joints, and then we are more likely to repeat the same patterns in daily life. Most of the ailments people suffer from, ailments such as low back pain, hip or knee arthritis, or tendonitis, are simply because they performed the movements I discussed above the wrong way repeatedly.

Think about it, how many times have you squatted in your life? If you are around my age of 48 or older and think a few hundred times, a few thousand times perhaps, think again. How about a few hundred thousand times to possibly over a million times. Same goes with lunging, and these numbers probably only factor into daily life. If you go to the gym and workout with weights or machines, add onto that the strain of performing these movements under loads and stresses that accelerate the wear and tear on your joints. That is why the blue print matters.

Have you ever picked up a hobby such as dancing, golf, or even something as simple typing? Imagine if you were taught the wrong steps in the tango, grip for the golf swing, or the hand position on the keyboard. Now imagine you rehearsed these skills the wrong way for several years. How much harder would it be then to correct these dysfunctional patterns? It would probably be better if you started from scratch all over again because the original blueprint is faulted. That is just the way our brains work.

Remember when you first learned to walk. If you don’t, simply watch a one year old going through the process. Every step is a conscious effort – the step length and width and the arm position. Thousands and thousands of steps are analyzed by our main computer framework, the brain. Then over time, the process of walking no longer becomes a conscious effort but rather automatic. I would hope that none of us really must think about walking anymore and that it is an ingrained software pattern in our brain.

So where am I going with all of this? Squatting, lunging, rotating, pushing, and pulling should be ingrained software patterns in our brains. The problem is that for many people, the software is flawed because for years, we have been doing it the wrong way. Not only that, but those who exercise reinforce these poor patterns under loads and stresses. No wonder their bodies eventually break down. It’s time to learn how to walk all over again and to move away from task completion mentality to one of conscious effort of how we move. It should not simply be about going to the gym to lose weight or to lift weights to make our muscles bigger and stronger. On the contrary, it should be all about performing purposeful movements that transfer over into everything we do in life. Of course, we can still get fit along the way and develop muscle mass in a proportionate manner. However, these are the byproducts of performing movements with correct alignment and form especially when under the loads of weights.

It takes a little bit of work and some open mindedness, but the benefits far outweigh the ease of repeating the same old stagnant program that will only break your body down. I think you will the find the information precious to your longevity.

Being Happy in Stressful Times

With everything going on these days, many of us are finding it difficult to deal with stress. I personally have struggled with stress management in the past, especially regarding things I cannot control such as those in the daily news, world events, etc. Here are a few simple tips to find balance in your life and be happier and less stressed:

Improved Sleep: Don’t watch or read the news for several hours before bed. This can cause heightened anxiety, leading to more difficulty getting to sleep. This includes Facebook. Put the phones, computers, and tablets away for at least an hour before bed. The blue light emitted by these display screens is a spectrum of light that keeps the brain awake. Multiple studies show that people that read on devices which emit blue light sleep less well than those that read traditional paper books. If you wake up in the middle of the night and want to read, pick up a paper book or magazine instead of your smartphone or tablet.
Exercise: Get regular exercise during the day. Simple. Try to get some exercise most days of the week.
Improved Nutrition: As mentioned in my previous blog, nutrition plays a role in the stress response. Try to eat “real” foods. This means foods that don’t come out of a package. Snack on nuts and fruits instead of chips, power bars, and cookies. Eat lots of different colors everyday – reds, oranges, greens, purples, etc. I find that this is the easiest way to make sure you get plenty of nutrients in your diet.
Improved Relationships: Studies show that people who interact with those they care about more regularly are happier. Who would have thought? Finding a balance between work and real life is one of the hardest things for Americans to do. It’s so important. Make some extra time for your loved ones every day.
Meditate: Meditation is exercise for your brain. Just like exercise, you must do it regularly for it to have the desired benefits. Regular meditation has multiple health benefits.

I don’t claim to be anywhere near perfect in managing my stress, but I try to do each of these things as much as I can. I need the reminders too, and writing this all down helps me as well. Try one this week and another next week. Good luck!

Work Smarter Not Harder

I think most of us would agree that we would much rather put in 6 to 8 incredibly effective hours at work than 8 to 10 mediocre ones. I am sure our bosses would agree even more. I am going to share some general strategies from our ACP3 Program at the Aspen Club. Our team teaches companies how to maximize productivity while lowering healthcare costs. I am incorporating the knowledge and teachings of our other team members, Dirk Schultz and Dr. Christina Miller, here as well with their permission. There are a few simple things you can do to make your workday more productive and be healthier at the same time. We like to target three key areas: Stress Management, Nutrition, and Exercise.

Stress Management: Stress Management is a huge concern in modern America. The inability to deal with stress leads to a variety of bad things: disease, loss of productivity at work and home, strained relationships, and increased health care costs for the company. Stress is important to us as humans and some stress is a good thing. Stress triggers our “fight or flight” response and helps us respond to crises. As Dr. Miller says, we needed this when we had to run from that tiger thousands of years ago on the savannah. We need it today when we must deal with that important deadline or some other crisis at work. When we are in a stress response many physiologic changes occur in our body: among others, our blood pressure goes up, our digestion slows down, our libido goes down, and our immune system is depressed. Basically, the body’s physiologic processes change so that we can deal with the immediate crisis or problem and other processes are put on hold. The problems start when people live in this stress response for days, weeks, months, and even years. Imagine running at a deficit in these crucial areas and you can see what chronic stress does to a person. Our team teaches people how to change this and bring that stress response back down, returning the body to its normal state. One of the simplest tactics is changing the rate at which you breathe. A change in ratio of inhale to exhale is shown in multiple studies to bring the body out of the stress response and back into a relaxed state. With some coaching, this one is easy to learn. Another way to affect the stress response is through nutrition. Meditation is the other key activity to modulate stress.
Nutrition: Simply, some common foods we eat increase the stress response and some bring it down. You can probably guess which ones are good and which aren’t. I’ll give you a hint: that donut isn’t helping. Dr. Miller offers simple, effective advice to keep a healthy diet. It doesn’t have to be that complicated. Two easy things you can do are to eat “real food”, i.e. food that doesn’t come out of a package and to eat lots of colors. Easy, huh?
Exercise: Small bouts of exercise throughout the day at work help you remain focused and combat the effects of sitting. Studies show that this leads to increases in productivity and decreases in health care costs for companies.

This is a very general overview. For specifics, please contact me at backinstitute@aspenclub.com for further info. We have had great success at helping companies keep their employees happy and healthy while increasing productivity. It’s a no brainer!

The Importance of Recovery

In all things in life, most of us want to work smarter and not harder. For our physical wellbeing, recovery is one of the keys to working as smartly as possible. Many people have a hard time wrapping their heads around this concept. I like to think of it this way: you are making those gains in strength and fitness during the recovery phase. It is the response to stressors that gives us the benefits, not the stressors themselves. During recovery, our body is “improving” itself so that it can better perform the task next time.

I am no better than anyone else – I must remind myself constantly. I love mountain biking. Love it. I want to do it every day and do so for big stretches of time. But guess what? After several days in a row, I hurt. My legs hurt. My back hurts. My endurance going uphill suffers and I get slower. I must make myself take days off. Your body needs a break.

So how much recovery is necessary? Well, that’s a complex question, but let’s make it as simple as possible for the average person (i.e. non-professional or semi-professional athlete).

Most people can do mild to moderate cardiovascular exercise up to 6 days per week. With strength training, if you hit it hard enough to be sore the next day, most people are going to need at least 2 days for that activity or type of training before doing it again. If you are just doing bodyweight exercises/light weight, it can be okay to do those a few days in a row if you aren’t going to the point of soreness.

With activities and sports such as skiing, cycling, and mountain biking, you need to take a day off every once in and awhile-at least once a week. With high intensity interval training, you need to take at least a day off every other day. Studies show that you lose the benefits of high intensity interval training if you do it every day.

To give you an idea of how to put this all together, I like the program offered in Chris Crowley’s Younger Next Year. This is a great general layout for a comprehensive workout plan:

Monday: Aerobics – Moderate Intensity
Tuesday: Strength Train
Wednesday: Aerobics – Intervals
Thursday: Rest
Friday: Strength Training
Saturday: Aerobics – Intervals
Sunday: Aerobics – Moderate Intensity

For a much more in-depth discussion on this, check out the book titled “Younger Next Year: The Exercise Program: Use the Power of Exercise to Reverse Aging and Stay Strong, Fit, and Sexy.”

HIIT ME?

High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is all the rage these days. My clients frequently ask me if this type of training is safe and effective. The short answer is, it can be. There are many HIIT programs going on around the country with one well-known program becoming extremely popular over the last few years. Many of these programs offer substantial benefits but have some potentially serious risks.

My biggest concern with most of these programs is that they encourage participants to do extremely difficult, technical moves to fatigue in a competitive environment. Many of these exercises, especially some of the Olympic weight lifting moves, require a lot of instruction and practice to master. Experts spend years developing their technique with many of these moves. For the average person to go into a class and do these moves as many times as they can, with heavy weight, in a competitive environment, can be a recipe for disaster.

However, there are many benefits to High Intensity Interval Training. It is a very quick and extremely efficient workout and is very beneficial for overall health, weight loss, and training purposes. The American College of Sports Medicine presented a 2011 study indicating that two weeks of HIIT could boost the body’s aerobic capacity as much as almost two months of endurance training. HIIT is highly effective for weight loss and has been shown to burn more fat and calories than other forms of exercise. Unlike weight loss exercises like cycling and running, HIIT maintains muscle mass while losing fat.

So, what is a person to do? How do you know what’s safe and what’s not? The first and most important rule is: form comes first. Never achieve a greater number of reps or a heavier weight at the expense of good form. What is good form? Here at the Aspen Club’s program, “HI2T,” Dirk Schultz and Bill Fabrocini call it “Set, Brace, Align.”

Set: This refers to posture. Keep it simple. Shoulders back stand tall – don’t round your low back or slouch-especially when bending over.
Brace: This refers to stabilization. Lightly tense your abdominal muscles and squeeze the shoulder blades back and down.
Align: Align your body. The ears, shoulders, and hips should form a rough line down to the ground when standing.

That’s the foundation — Set, Brace, Align. When you begin to move, you must practice the movement patterns: hip hinging, rotating from the hips, squatting properly, lunging properly, etc. If you must sacrifice any of these foundations of posture and movement to get in that extra rep or go up a few pounds in weight, you do it at great risk. Listen to your body. Make your gains safely. Failure to adhere to this philosophy can lead to a long list of ailments that nobody wants to hear their doctor say: disc herniation, degenerative disc disease, arthritis, rotator cuff tears, tendinitis, ACL tear, meniscus tear, etc. Remember: most spinal problems are the result of thousands of cycles of movement, not just one bad move. So just because you got away with it today doesn’t mean that you aren’t doing long-term damage to your body. Done correctly, HIIT is a very efficient, safe, and fun way to get fit.

Why Yin Yoga Enhances Your Athletic Skills and Daily Life

As important as it is to our physical and mental wellbeing to be strong, it is not muscular strength that gives us the feeling of ease and lightness in the body. It is the flexibility of the joints at the connective tissue level (the deep, fibrous, dry, inelastic tissues that are our tendons, ligaments and fascia). I have taught many muscularly powerful adults who are physically incapacitated or uncomfortable because of joint problems. Bad ankles, backs, knees, and hips – these are the injuries that force athletes to retire and older people to shuffle around.

Think of it this way: connective tissue is to animals what cellulose is to plants, the scaffolding around which everything else is built, hung, or inserted. Plant cellulose maximizes stability, and healthy connective tissues permit more dynamic mobile stability, and our stability requires near constant maintenance. Not as obvious to us as atrophy or weakening of our muscles, but just as undesirable is the slow shortening and stiffening of connective tissues throughout our body due to injuries, abuse, neglect, and aging (beginning around the age of 30!). Shrink wrapped joints hurt. They don’t bend, and they prevent youthful stability, fluidity, and range of motion. They kill the fun!

If we want to maintain our joint flexibility, we must exercise them, but here is the rub – we cannot exercise them like muscles, we must exercise them very differently, in the Yin Yoga fashion. Why? Because connective tissue does not respond to brief or rhythmical stretches the way muscles do. Fortunately, a mindful practice of Yin Yoga (long held, muscular passive stretches), will, over time, enhance flexibility and circulation in our bound-up joints. Connective tissues must be stretched slowly and gently, like taffy. Hard, strenuous activity can injure or snap them like the familiar but dreaded ski or football injury.

The practice of Yin Yoga reaches down into one’s own body and gently stimulates the flow of chi through the meridians of the connective tissue and helps regain youthful range of motion (ROM). Yin Yoga results are first produced mainly in the shoulder, and even the ankles and wrists, depending on the choice of yin posture. When these joints become suppler, all activity becomes easier and less painful… like when we were kids.

The Yin Yoga practice is mindful, precise, and best learned under the watchful eye of a trained Yin Yoga practitioner who can guide you into “suggested shapes” safely.

3 Tenets of a Healthy Yin Yoga Practice:

Come into the suggested shape to an appropriate and personalized, edge, depth, sensation, and intensity. Something doable and perhaps assisted by a prop.
Build on the pose, becoming more and more still and passive. Muscle tissue must NOT be engaged or resisting. Gentle Yoga Long Breath is helpful.
Hold for time, maintaining stillness 3-5 minutes. Yin tissues are dull and resistant, and it takes time for them to respond effectively. The sensations, depending on the pose, are strong and it is okay to back off a bit if they become sharp, searing, or raw.
Yin Yoga is a mindful practice where mind, body, and breath learn to be present, quiet, still, and let go despite discomfort… A very transferable life skill!