Functional Movement Archives - Hudson Valley Chiropractic & Wellness

MovNat: Why I got certified

June 21, 2016 by drchrista 1 Comment

The other weekend, I had the privilege to attend the first women’s only MovNat certification course. I came home with my Level 1 certification and a new passion.

It might be curious to some as to why someone with a doctoral degree would spend the time and money to get a little training certificate. The fact is, as a chiropractor, I’ve been passionate about natural human movements for quite some time. I think it’s bound to happen when you realize you are seeing the same common themes in people over and over again: tight hamstrings, lazy glutes and cranky psoas muscles from a lifetime of chronic sitting leading to poor mobility and increased compensation by the lumbar spine. I have glibly proclaimed in my office many times before that if it weren’t for people sitting all day, I probably wouldn’t have a job.

It doesn’t seem like it would be a smart idea to work one’s self out of a job, but given our gross de-conditioning as a culture, as well as our predilection for a sedentary lifestyle because of the structure of our economy, I don’t feel insecure. Rather, I feel it my duty as a HEALTHcare practitioner to do the best that I can to educate people on how to take care of themselves. This sense of fiduciary responsibility is what eventually lead me to MovNat.

How do you begin to teach people to move again? How do you do so in a balanced, thoughtful, personal and most importantly, effective, way? How do you take weakened, de-conditioned bodies and make them whole again, at any age?

The cultivation of the body, when done in a continuous and progressive manner, constitutes physical education. It can be done entirely with natural movement patterns, without order or methodology, the same as in people living outside of civilized areas.

So said George Hébert, who wrote his book, The Natural Method, in the early 20th century. Hébert was adamant that incredible fitness was the birthright of all human beings, not just the genetically gifted. In fact, he even went so far as to suggest it was a moral imperative for all humans to be fit. He was known for saying “be strong to be useful” to describe what was really at stake. Be fit not because you want to look good at the beach, but be fit because you never know when you might need to rescue your child from a mountain lion/alligator/gorilla (all recent news headlines).

The other thing that Hébert was adamant about was that this training regime needed to be systemized. In this way, a coach or trainer could ensure that a person developed evenly a whole host of natural movement skills that led to adaptability in novel situations. For instance, it’s not useful to have gigantic muscles and 450# deadlift if you can’t swim and potentially rescue someone from drowning. Swimming was one of the core skills The Natural Method taught.

Unfortunately, the system that Hébert created and successful implemented with the French Navy, as well as French school children, was pretty much decimated by the outbreak of WWI. (Those he had trained were so useful, they were often sent to the front lines of combat & other suicide missions.) His brilliant system of teaching everyday people how to regain their innate fitness as human animals was relegated to dusty bookshelves until Erwan Le Corre happened upon his book decades later. Inspired by Hébert ideas & system, Le Corre began training this way himself and created ‘The Natural Method 2.0’, known as MovNat.

When I first heard of MovNat, it must have been from one of Robb Wolf’s podcasts. Instantly, it made sense to me and I was intrigued enough to look it up immediately. At the time, Erwan was teaching most workshops himself and there were only a few each year. I had my eye on going to Summersville, WV to take one ‘someday.’ Luckily for me, Erwan & his team have been very busy int he intervening years educating other instructors and attracting some seriously talented trainers.

As I watched the growth of MovNat from afar and looked at what movement skills my patients were deficient in, I began to see the puzzle pieces fitting together. Here was the balanced, individualized, effective system I was looking for to begin to teach people how to move again. The only question left was- did I have what it takes to demonstrate enough physical competency in the basic skills to earn my certification?

Just. I came home from that certification grateful for the education I received on how to coach others as well as personal weaknesses and deficiencies that I need address. The certification weekend was just the beginning of my journey and I look forward to practicing, exploring and learning more.

Moreover, many of the skills I learned were immediately relevant. Monday morning in the office, I was using a regression of what I had learned to teach an elderly patient how to breathe fully and start building the strength to be able to get off the floor with minimal assistance.

In short, I got certified to be a better doctor for my patients. I want to have the tools to teach them how to maximize their health and maintain their fitness and vitality long into their golden years. To that end, I am currently working on offering movement-based group classes as ‘rehab’ for my patients. Stay tuned for details!!!

Gym-free workouts: Bust your Gym Rut!

May 11, 2016 by drchrista 1 Comment

Looking for a gym-free workout? Are you stuck in the same out routine at the gym? 30 minutes on the cardio machine, a circuit or two of the weight machine and then you’re done? Has your progress plateaued leaving you frustrated and unmotivated? Tired of the ‘scene’ at your local gym? Or maybe you’re just not thrilled at the idea of being inside a smelly gym when the sun is shining and there is a nice breeze outdoors. If so, then here’s some fun gym-free workouts to bust your gym rut!

Take your workout to the woods! If you’ve been following me on Instagram, then you know I love MovNat! What’s that you ask? Besides being the original gym-free workout, it’s a system for teaching and training normal and natural movement patterns- ones that many of us have lost or are deficient in because so much of our modern lives are oriented around being ‘chair shaped’ humans. Though doing workouts outside is not required, it makes it so much more fun to be outside as you balance on a log, jump from rock to rock, or climb a tree. (See this video and tell me that doesn’t look like way more fun than 30 minutes on the dreadmill?!) It feels more like playing than working out! Practice these movements and I dare say you’ll be more able to keep up with your kids as they play outside! (They are playing outside, right???)
Try an aerial silks or yoga class! More like vertical dancing, aerial silks can be a great way to indulge and augment a creative, flowing type movement practice. It takes both flexibility AND strength to climb the fabric and do some of the moves. Aerial silks are fun way to take your yoga practice to new heights (pun intended!) or work towards your first pull-up. If you are a Hudson Valley local, check out Hudson Valley Circus Arts for classes. I’ve taken classes from Mai Frank and she’s a fantastic instructor!
Parkour!!! (Have you seen that episode of The Office?) Parkour is an AWESOME gym-free workout! Again, you’ll be having so much fun, an hour long class will FLY by. Don’t be intimidated by the versions of Parkour that you see in the movies or on YouTube. Those folks are long term practitioners of this movement discipline. The basics of Parkour are accessible to everybody with a body! For Hudson Valley locals, check out Innate Movement Parkour in Kingston, NY. The instructors are fantastic! Both encouraging and safety conscious, they emphasize safe movement progressions tailored for the individual. They offer classes for both adults and kids, of all ability levels. If you’re a parent with a hyperactive child and you are dreading the approach of summer & the kids being home from school- definitely check out their summer camps!

These are all gym-free workouts I have tried and LOVED! Give them a try and your might find yourself in the best shape of your life!

Looking for more information about creating a healthy, natural lifestyle through food, movement and alignment? Sign up for my email list below to get my tips delivered to your inbox regularly and get my free report!

Rewilding your Feet: Tips to go barefoot safely

May 3, 2016 by drchrista 2 Comments

Rewilding your feet can have many health benefits, which I discussed in my previous blog post. The key is to remember that if you’ve been wearing shoes, especially really built up shoes, for most of your life, you have to transition slowly to barefoot.

If you’ve ever had a cast (or known someone who has) for a broken bone, then you’ve probably seen how small and shriveled their muscles were after getting the cast off. This muscle wasting is called disuse atrophy. The body very much works on the “use it or lose it” principle. While it’s not being used, the muscles cells are broken down and their constituents parts are either recycled of excreted.

Shoes are similar to that cast. They’ve held most of your foot muscles and joints immobile in one position for a long time. The muscles themselves are small and weak in comparison to what they would or could have been without the shoes. As any natural bodybuilder could tell you, it takes time, patience and diligence to build muscle.

Another thing to consider in rewilding your feet is the ‘toughness’ of your feet. Shoes are a protective covering and as such, your feet have not had the stimulus to build thicker, more protective skin on the soles of the feet. If we lived without shoes for most of our lives, our feet would have a nice little fat pad underneath the heel bone to help cushion them on hard surfaces. This heel pad is often very thinned and ineffectual in persons frequently wearing shoes.

So again, I reiterate- you must transition to rewilding your feet and going barefoot slowly, so as to not risk an injury because of weak muscles, nearly non-existent fat pads and overly tender skin.

How to do this…

Begin by simply going barefoot more around your own home. (Slippers don’t count!) Socks can be used for purposes of warmth, but may not help your soles toughen up enough. Notice which surfaces in your home are more uncomfortable than others. (Concrete is an ‘unnatural’ surface and it can take time to stand comfortably on such a surface). Remember that its totally normal to be uncomfortable to stand for long periods of time like this. Start slow and work your way up. It will get better with time and patience.
Once that feels comfortable, try small bouts of going barefoot in your yard or lawn (hopefully you don’t spray any toxic chemicals on your lawn). Sticking your barefeet in grass when its still covered in the morning dew is a divine delight!!!
From there, you can begin to have barefoot adventures! I like to look for soft, mostly dirt trails to do short barefoot walks on.
Use barefoot and minimalist shoes where appropriate. Something like the Vibram Five Fingers or Vivobarefoot shoes have very thin, flexible soles- just enough to give your feet a little protection while still allowing them to move through their full ranges of motion. By increasing the amount of time I wear such shoes, I have been able to strengthen my feet very safely over the last year.
Do your corrective stretches!!! Remember that it’s not really just your feet that have adapted to wearing shoes- other muscles in your lower leg have as well. Stretch your calf muscles several times a day to provide them the stimulus to ‘lengthen’ after years of signals to ‘shorten’ because of positive-heeled shoes. Use a lacrosse ball and roll on the bottom side of you foot to break up any ‘sticky’ areas- bits of adhesive or scar tissue- that are limiting the range of motion of the various joints within your foot.

Has ditching your shoes improved your health? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below!

Barefoot: 5 reasons to ditch your shoes for better health

April 18, 2016 by drchrista 2 Comments

People going barefoot is not something you see often in modern Western society outside of a swimming pool or similar body of water. And what a shame! There are many health benefits to be gained from going barefoot.

April is National Foot Health Awareness Month, so before I get into some of the specific benefits let’s talk a little first about your feet, what they are capable of, and a little bit of their anatomy, because form = function.

Fun fact: 25% of your muscles & bones live below your ankle. (Another fun fact: your foot is a hydrostat. That means it can change its shape without changing it volume- like an elephant’s trunk.) There are 33 joints that make up your foot and your foot has a very similar anatomy to your hand. Now, imagine for a moment what your life would be like if an evil person came along and put your hands in casts from the moment you started crawling around on them and you wore these casts 75% of your day. It wouldn’t be pretty right? Your hands would be more like paddles or fins than hands. You certainly wouldn’t have all the dexterity that you do now. Wearing stiff shoes from the first moments of walking is really no different.

‘Sure Doc, but we don’t walk on our hands like we walk on our feet. Shoes protect our feet from glass, and sharp rocks and things like that.‘

True enough. But again, that is because most of us walk around on altered foot. If we have a shoe to protect our feet, we don’t build up callouses or tougher skin on the soles of our foot. With shoes, the muscles and other tissues of the feet become weaker and lose their ability to respond quickly and reflexively to sensory stimuli from the bottom of the feet. Remember those 33 joints in your foot? In a fully articulating foot, you have the ability to move them independently of each other, allowing you to ‘lift’ one part of the foot off of a sharp object without unweighting or lifting the entire foot.

Imagine that I took your hand and quickly & forcefully pushed the palm of your flattened hand down on a table. Your hand would stay flat. Now imagine we repeated this experiment, but this time I placed a tack, sharp side up, on the table and lined up your hand to land right over top of this. Hopefully, you wouldn’t let me do this to you, but if somehow I did manage to slam your hand down on the tack, you could articulate your hand in such a way that it tented up over the sharp end of the tack so as to lessen and potential injury from the tack. Your feet innately have this exact same capability when it comes to sharp objects on the ground. Hopefully, you use your eyeballs to scan for any potential danger and avoid stepping on them, but in case you miss it, or miscalculate how sharp the object is, reflexes in the foot should engage to protect you from most injuries.

The reflexes become extremely dulled by shoe wearing for most our lives, so at first going barefoot may be a painful experience to you. With time and patience though, your feet will ‘toughen up’ as your reflexes, range of motion, and muscle strength come back.

If it’s going to take some work, time patience and little pain to get your feet ready to go barefoot, why even bother??? I’m glad you asked. Here’s 5 reasons that going barefoot can help improve your health.

Improved balance. In senior citizens, the greatest health risk is falling, which is directly related to a lack of balance that seems to come with aging. You don’t have to lose your balance just because you are getting older though. We lose our balance because we don’t use it enough. If your feet are articulate enough to go barefoot regularly without pain, then you’ve trained those reflexes in your foot to a very high level, which means you will have much better balance. Better balance = less falls = less likely to break a bone. In fact, I would say that if your are worried about keeping healthy, strong bones as you age, but aren’t regularly working on your balance, you’re missing a huge opportunity to prevent broken bones.
Better posture. You might not wear ‘high heels’ but even most athletic sneakers have a positive heel. That means your heel is higher than your toes relative to flat, level ground. Structurally, even a few millimeters of height difference pitches your skeleton forward. You don’t fall forward though because your muscles along the back of your body- the calves, hamstrings, gluts and low back muscles- overly tense in order to keep you upright. If you walk around like this all the time, those muscles will eventually physically shorten by decreasing the number of sacromeres- the repeating contractile units that make up the muscles. Once they are shortened, they stay that way, unless you give them enough stimulus to lengthen again. Going barefoot puts you in a ‘zero drop’ or neutral foot position and allows your skeleton to achieve a balanced, “stacked” position over the feet without having to shorten your muscles.
Less foot/knee/hip/low back pain. As above, if your muscles have started to physically accommodate their length to keep you from falling over, they are probably very tight too. This means they are putting an increased amount of force on the bones to which they are attached and the joints which they cross. For example, the calf muscles attaches to the lower part of the femor (thigh bones) in the back and the hamstrings cross the back of the knee to attach to the lower leg bone, the tibia. If both of these muscles are short and tight, they are going to pull and compress the knee joint. How many people do you know who have “bone on bone” in their knees, or are losing the space (and therefore cartilage) in their knee joint? Do your knees grind, click or pop? Taking supplements to increase the synthesis of cartilage in the knee can be helpful, but if there is no space for that cartilage to grow because the joint is compressed, how effective will that be? Perhaps that real reason clinical trails fail to find a conclusive benefit from taking glucosamine, chondroitin and/or MSM. By walking around on a neutral foot, going barefoot can help correct these imbalances that lead to poor posture and increased compression forces on certain joints. Also, if you have bunions, let me correct a misconception right now. Bunions themselves are not hereditary. The tendency to wear shoes with a narrow toe box that squish the toes together, can be taught or even encouraged by family members, which is why it might seem to ‘run in the family.’ Also, the shape of your foot- how wide or narrow it is, may be under some genetic control. So if everyone in your family has wider-than-average feet, but all insist on cramming them into average width shoes, most people in the family will end up with foot malformations at some point in live.
Less foot odor/nail fungus. Fungi love dark, moist environments. So do most of the bacteria that lead to foot odor. If you want to clear up these conditions, you don’t need a lot of expensive creams, sprays or powders. You do need to let your feet air out and dry out though. Going barefoot around your house or yard more often can be a great way to do this. (Note: if you have an advanced case of nail fungus where most or all of your nails are thick brittle and yellow, please see a doctor for a medication. Once the fungus is cleared, going barefoot more often can help prevent it from coming back. Especially since some of that fungus is probably now living in your shoes….)
Earthing. When we walk with our barefeet directly on the earth, there is a measurable exchange of ions. Specifically, we discharge excess positive ions. Holistic health experts believe that a build up of these positive ions in our bodies can support inflammation and have negative health consequences. One clinician did a small experiment and found that just 15 minutes a day of walking barefoot on the ground helped her patients reduce inflammation. If their inflammatory load was already low, it helped them lose weight.

If you’re excited about and ready to start adding some barefoot time to your life- excellent! Stay tuned for next week’s post where I will give you some guidelines for incorporating this in your life safely and without injury! Can’t wait? Check out my favorite book on this topic by Katy Bowman.

Also, feel free to follow me on Instagram (@primaldoc) for some inspiration from my own barefoot adventures!

Or sign up for my email list with the link below to get my free report and to receive emails with important information for living your best, healthiest life!

Understanding musculoskeletal pain: “You are how you move”

March 15, 2016 by drchrista 1 Comment

Musculoskeletal pain is one of the main things that brings people into my office. Most of us have resigned ourselves to pain simply being a part of life. We’re even told by the medical establishment that it is simply part of getting older.

Pain from trauma or acute injury not withstanding, I generally don’t accept this ‘simply getting older’ argument. I think a much more likely culprit is the way we do or do not move our bodies on a regular basis.

For instance, I have joked with people that I have a job because people sit at computers all day long. They spend hours a day using only the tiny muscles of their hands and eyes, while hardly using the large “prime mover” muscles of the hips, legs & torso. As the number of hours a person spends in a chair accumulates over a lifetime, their body begins to adapt to this position. Hamstring and calf muscles become short & tight, as does the psoas (which helps stabilize the lumbar spine). Glut maximus muscles lengthen and become weaker. This alone correlates with most of the cases of low back pain I see in my office. When the glutes are no longer effective at extending the hip- a motion which allows us to standing up right from sitting, I find that more of the effective load shifts to the smaller, paraspinals muscles of the low back. This often leads to a person’s back going ‘out’ and musculoskeletal pain in the low back as these small muscles aren’t designed to take that much of the load. (Read more about why sitting is bad for you in my post Sitting is the New Smoking.)

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, if the problem is caused by the way a person is moving and using their body on a regular basis, then the solution should be aimed at this root cause. That’s because “you are how you move.”

Here’s a couple of examples:

Baseball pitchers show a “twisting” of their humerous (upper arm bone) in their pitching arm on CT scans. Why would the bone twist? Because it is responding to constant twisting forces that come from the wind-up portion of the pitch. (Read more in Katy Bowman’s Whole Body Barefoot.)
Ever known someone who has a bunion on one foot and not the other? If this was just genetic condition (as some people believe it is), it should happen on both feet because your feet are not genetically different from each other (unless you are the world’s first walking foot transplant recipient). The bunion develops on the foot where there has been downward movement of the arch, toward the ground. This results in forces that push the big toe to the side as the foot rolls over it or “toes off.” The bunion is a callous of bone that develops in response to this force.

I could go on, but for the sake of brevity, I won’t. The point is this: despite what it may seem, your bone structure is not fixed. Neither are your muscles. They simply react to the loads and forces placed upon them on a regular basis.

This means that even something like osteoarthritis- and it’s subsequent musculoskeletal pain- is subject to change! After all, what osteoarthritis really is, is a mal-adapation to forces and loads placed on a joint or joints from the way we use them (or don’t) over our lifetimes. This is essentially what mechanotransduction is- the physical loads and forces on a cell effect the way it’s DNA is expressed. (The word of the day kids is ‘mechanotransduction.’ Bonus points if you can use it in a sentence today!)

So how do you ‘fix’ this and end your musculoskeletal pain? The solution is simple, but its not easy. It requires a daily commitment. A commitment to move more- through a variety of ranges, positions and conditions. It requires a transition away from positive-heeled, overly built footwear, to zero-drop or minimal footwear. It requires a transition away from sitting at your desk in front of a screen all of the time, to standing, squatting or even sitting on the floor more and taking frequent screen breaks to ‘rest’ your eyes. It requires doing the daily work of performing corrective exercises that stretch and lengthen tight tissues while also committing to doing work to strengthen weak areas. In short, it requires commitment to a daily movement practice.

The good news is that this doesn’t have to take long. You can do many of these things while doing your normal daily activities. Watch for a future post about how to incorporate more beneficial movement into your daily routine. (You may want to sign up for my email list below to be notified when it’s posted. You’ll even get a free gift from me for signing up. Use the box below.)

In the meantime, if you are struggling with musculoskeletal pain and are looking for a doc who will help you work to fix the root cause, give my office a call at 845-687-6387.

MovNat: The workout the world forgot

March 2, 2016 by drchrista 2 Comments

Our bodies are designed and capable of doing amazing things!!!!

Neck Pain: why you probably don’t need a chiropractic adjustment

March 1, 2016 by drchrista 2 Comments

Are you suffering with neck pain and wondering what can be done about it? Have you tried chiropractic or physical therapy with little benefit? Are you afraid drugs or surgery are your only options?

I just had a patient leave my office. It’s be a few months since I had seen her. Prior to starting to see me, she’d see a chiropractor monthly for an adjustment, otherwise her low back would really start to bother her and prevent her from doing things she needed to get done around her house. When she first came to me, we addressed her low back. In 2-3 visits, I fixed it. Not like ‘oh, it’s 75% better and as long as I don’t do x, y, and z, I’m fine.’ Fixed it, as in, 100% gone. Buh-bye. She even does the stuff around the house she was afraid to do before lest her back go out.

How did I do this? I was able to fix her low back because I also looked at the muscles around the spine- the ones that support it and attach to it- and instead of adjusting the spine (which she had already experienced plenty before walking into my office) I addressed the muscle imbalance. Problem solved and she no longer needs a monthly visit just to keep it at bay.

After not seeing her for a couple of months, she came back, this time with neck pain. Again, I addressed the muscles around and attached to the neck and gave her an exercise to do to support that. That seemed to take care of the issue because she came back in today, after not seeing her most of this winter, and told me,

That exercise you gave me fixed my neck! I haven’t had any neck pain since then!

The exercise I gave her was nothing extraordinary or profound. It was just a simple chin retraction exercise. But it lengthen the muscles in the back of her neck so that her head could rest balanced over the rest of her spine, instead of coming forward of her torso. This was causing an increased load to the muscles like her trapezius and levator scapulae (in the back, these go from the shoulder blade to the top of the neck and help ‘hold’ the neck up). Your head weighs about 12 pounds as it is, and every inch it moves forward, it gets 10 pounds heavier.

Unfortunately, most of us do this all day long. We sit starring at screens, at smartphones and now tablets, with our heads subtly coming forward so we can see better. Then we go to bed at night, stick a pillow under our heads to jack our head & neck in the air and replicate this posture again for the next 6-8 hours. Over time, the muscles in the neck become adapted to this position and there they stay, increasing the loads on your spine and neck musculature, leading to tight shoulders, knotted neck muscles, loss of joint space in the cervical spine and eventually arthritis, even things like stenosis in the neck. In short, this posture over long periods of leads to neck pain.

Why does this happen? Does it happen because there is a ‘joint out of place’ in the neck or does it happen because the way we use our bodies on a daily basis is out of context with the way it was designed to moved?

I work from the premise that it is the later. Just like fast food isn’t truly nourishing food that will allow us to realize our full health potential, unnatural positions & postures (particularly when engaged in for long periods of time), change our underlying movement patterns. If these patterns are out of context with the normal architecture of our musculoskeletal system… well the end result at some point will be pain and degeneration. Neck pain, back pain, knee pain- it doesn’t matter where the pain is because in the end, unless there was a precipitating trauma, it’s just a symptom of dysfunctional movement patterns.

The empowering part of this point of view is that these problems can be fixed! Granted, it may take time. If you spent years in a certain position or using your muscles a certain way, it will take some time to undo that, but it is possible. And it’s more possible the younger you are, before arthritis starts to change the underlying shape of the bones. However, bones are constantly remodeling themselves in response to the forces placed on them, so there’s always the opportunity to change those forces and then change their shape. You are a product of how you move. You change the product by changing how you move!

By changing the way my patient’s neck was functioning, we eliminated her neck pain. She did the daily work of stretching and doing the exercise. My part was simply to spot the dysfunctional movement and give the appropriate correction. I never needed to ‘adjust’ her neck.

If you’re struggling with neck pain and other things you’ve tried aren’t working, feel free to give my office a cal at 845-687-6387. We can chat about how I may be able to help you the same way I helped my patient today.

How to avoid death by sitting

October 8, 2015 by drchrista Leave a Comment

It’s almost old news now, but sitting is no good for you. Well, let me be more specific- chronic sitting in the same position (usually in a chair) is no good. Just in case you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last couple of years, here’s just of few of the negative impacts of prolonged sitting:

decreased metabolism in the core muscles
increased risk of chronic disease & death even if you exercise
weight gain and obesity
‘chair butt’ (a flat, but wide posterior)
shortened calf muscles
shortened psoas muscle
tucked pelvis
alignment adaptations that can lead to low back pain, knee pain, hip pain or even pelvic floor disorders
chronic neck tightness and headaches

You can also get caught up by reading more here, here and here.

In a nut shell, I’ve joked with many people that as a chiropractor, I have a job because people sit too much. I mean it light-heartedly, but sadly there is a kernel of truth to the joke.

So what to do to be healthier, extend your life and lessen your bill at your local chiro’s office? It may surprise you, but the answer is not to simply stand all day long at work either. Walking work stations utilizing treaddesks have become en vogue recently as well. This is certainly better from a ‘calories burned’ perspective, but it still misses the bigger picture. Kale is a superfood, but if kale is all you ever ate, you’d still end up with a nutrient deficiencies. Same with walking. It has a ton of benefits for your body- you should do a lot of it. But if its the only way you move your body on a daily basis, you’re still going to be deficient. For instance, walking won’t do much for the balance of muscles in the shoulder girdle that need to hang, grip and pull.

I could go on and write a whole big blog post about what you should do instead, but why reinvent the wheel? Katy Bowman has already written the book on the subject- literally. Her newest book, Don’t Just Sit There! is now available in paperback. Use the box below to sign up for my newsletter. You’ll get my free PDF 7 ‘Health’ Foods to Ditch to Lose Weight & Feel Great AND one lucky winner will be chosen to receive a copy of Katy’s book, on me. Giveaway closes on October 31, 2015 at midnight, so sign up today!

Your brain on Movement

August 3, 2015 by drchrista Leave a Comment

Our big, wonderful brains. Arguably what makes us distinct as humans. We like to think that our brains developed in order to give us the ability to think and to create- and therefore give us the advantage that allowed us to develop language, art and civilization.

But this is wrong.

Scientist Daniel Wolpert puts it best: “We have a brain for one reason only: to produce adaptable and complex movements.”

The largest amount of data coming into your brain at any given moment is coming from the musculoskeletal system and the smooth muscle of other organ systems like the digestive system. Mechanoreceptors in every joint, every muscle, every tendon of your body are constantly telling your brain about where your body, and each part of it, is in space, something we call ‘proprioception.”

This information comes in to the primary somatosensory cortex- a strip of the neocortex that runs roughly from the top of your ear to the apex of your skull on both sides. It is organized in a way that it reflects perfectly how the body itself is organized (the part that receives information from the hand is next to the part that receives information from the lower arm) and its weighted according to where we have the most nerve endings/receive the most sensory input (the areas receiving information from the hands, feet, lips and genitalia for example are much bigger than the areas receiving information from the low back or the buttocks.)

Directly in front of the primary somatosensory cortex is the primary motor cortex- it gets the information about where your body is in space from the primary somatosensory cortex and then uses that information to decide which motor pattern to use. In order to reach for a glass of water, your brain needs to first know where your hand, arm, elbow and shoulder are so that it can tell those muscles and joints exactly how much to move and in what directs in order to reach out and grasp that glass of water.

This all happens so quickly, so eloquently, so seamlessly that though we can create robots that can master the game of chess, they can’t move the pieces around the board as deftly as even a child can.

So what does this mean for our brains and brain health?

Well, to begin with, your brain works much like your muscles- if you use them, they get stronger. And if you don’t they get weaker and less useful. As we move, we get stronger (and smarter) because the movement of our bodies and the subsequent firing of neurons that that requires causes the release of a chemical called BDNF- brain derived neurotrophic factor, or as one author put it “Miracle-Gro for the brain.” Its whole purpose is to stimulate growth of brain cells- not just in the parts of the brain most concerned with movement- but throughout the entire organ.

In a formal literature review, researcher Frank W. Booth showed that lack of movement was a factor in over 20 different chronic diseases. But even more poignantly, he wrote in his review “[s]edentary lifestyle is associated with lower cognitive skills.” Further studies showed that cognitive skills do not decline simply because we get older, they decline because we move less.

Not only is movement a key piece of preventing and addressing dementia and Alzheimer’s, but it has also been shown to be as effective as SSRIs in treatment of depression, with longer lasting benefits and less side effects too.

In short, you need to move to have and keep a healthy, keen brain throughout your life.

Exercise is definitely part of this, but it is only a part. We generally think of exercise as any movement we do in order to stay healthy and fit. Movement is broader than this. Movement is anything that changes the loads on your cells and tissues. A simple changing of the load on your muscles will cause a change in the feedback an embedded mechanoreceptor will give the brain about where that muscle is in space. Therefore movement can be as simple as changing the focus of your eyes from near distance to far, getting goosebumps from a chill in the air, getting up from being seated on the floor, or even evacuating your bowels- there is a reason we call it a ‘bowel movement‘ and not a bowel exercise.

Movement should happen throughout that day, all day long, providing plenty of input to the brain and stimulus for new neuronal growth. In contrast, when we spend 8, 10 or 12 hours a day being sedentary, sitting in a chair, and then go to the gym for an hour, we may get enough exercise to keep our waistline from expanding, but we are not getting enough of the movement we really need keep our brains happy and healthy.

The best part about having a movement practice as opposed to ‘exercising’ is that it can be much easier to fit into what is probably already a busy life. Find errands you can do by walking instead of in the car. Growing a vegetable garden can provide more nourishment than than just from the food alone. Moving your positions through the day from standing to sitting on the floor and back again can provide plenty of novel movement and loads for your body. Working in the kitchen to cook can provide a nourishing meal and nourishing movement at the same time. Play with your kids on the playground instead of sitting on the bench and starring at your phone while they play. Walk the dog in the evenings instead of watching another hour of TV. Its not hard: walk, play, crawl, hike, lifting, bend, run, swing, hang- pretty much do anything but sit and watch TV or zone out in front of screen.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. But now, for the sake of your brain health, please get out there and move!

Free Your Feet- and the rest will follow!

July 15, 2015 by drchrista 1 Comment

In my last post, I talked about how excited I was after reading Katy Bowman’s book Move Your DNA. She likens the understanding about the role of movement in health to an example of nutrition: we can understand that though an orange is healthy and contains important nutrients like Vitamin C, if you only ever ate oranges, you would become deficient in other important nutrient- things like protein, healthy fats and fat soluble vitamins like A, D, E, & K to name a few.

The same is true for the relationship of exercise and movement. Exercise is like the orange. Yes, its good for you, but if the only time you move is when you exercise, you are most likely missing out on all sorts of other movement ‘nutrients.’

I know, I know, it can get overwhelming. You’re already trying very hard to adjust your diet, to get your exercise in and then here I go telling you need all this daily movement to be healthy too!

Fear not, there are simple solutions! For one, please realize that you don’t have to carve out a separate time in your already busy schedule to get your ‘movement nutrients.’ That’s the best thing- they are optimal when you build them into your daily routine.

“Make movement a part of your every living.”

Walking more is a simple way. Are there errands you could run on foot instead of in the car? Can you walk to the post office instead of driving there? What about work? Can you park in the furthest spot from the door to your office and then walk from there? Can you send a print job to a printer on another floor so you have an excuse to take a flight of stairs and go for a little walk? I bet with a little creativity, you can come up with more ways to include movement in your regular daily schedule.

Another thing I have been doing more of lately is going barefoot!!! Did you know that there are over 33 joints in your foot alone??? And each of those joints has multiple ways in which it can move- provided its allowed to do so. And unfortunately, shoes block most of that motion- even the most supportive, orthopedic shoes. In fact, those are some of the worst offenders! They ‘outsource’ the work of supporting your foot to the shoes instead of letting the muscles of your foot do that job. When that happens, the muscles become weakened and then your foot increasingly relies on the shoe in order to support it. This can lead to pain anywhere between the foot and low back (and in some cases, even higher!)

By going barefoot more often, you get these joints working again while strengthen the muscles of your foot. It’s an easy way to get more movement in your day and all you had to do was take your shoes off! If you are new to going barefoot, its best to start out by doing this in your yard on the ground. The floors in our homes can be unnaturally hard with very little ‘give.’ These unnaturally hard surfaces can make foot pain worse, or cause pain when there was none before. The soft earth is a great, forgiving surface to get started on. There’s an added bonus too. Just like your shoes vastly limit the number of movement that the joints of your foot can do, walking all the time on flat, level surfaces does the same. When you walk on an uneven surface like the ground, your foot has to move in lots of novel ways. The provides tons more movement nutrient-density to the joints and muscles of your foot.

What if you live somewhere where you can’t easily go barefoot on the earth? (I highly doubt this- almost everyone has a near by park, but if this is really the case…) Or what if you love going barefoot so much that you don’t want to ever again put on ‘foot coffins’ and yet, you have to in order to go grocery shopping, or to the bank, or into most any reputable establishment or place of business (you can always come to my office barefoot though!)?

This summer my favorite ‘unshoe’ is hands-down the line from Earth Runners. These are my one ‘unshoe’ to do it- walk, trail run, work, wear anywhere my feet are taking me really. They are based on the design of the foot coverings the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico wear and run long distances over rugged terrain in. Even more than that, they have a copper insert that can conduct to the Earth’s energy through the laces to your foot. (Full disclosure- I have not done the research on the health positive and negatives of this conductive phenomenon known as ‘earthing’, though I have seen where the change in conductance was measured with a voltmeter. Currently it appears to me to be one of those things that is benign at worst, so you can only benefit from this. I primarily chose the Earth Runners because I have studied the benefits of improved biomechanics from going barefoot. The ‘earthing’ is just an added bonus!) I wore them on a recent local hike and I enjoyed them quite a lot. They provided enough protection from rocks and hard surfaces, yet didn’t mute the feeling of the ground underneath of my feet. And I think they look at least as cute as most strappy sandals you can get now a days.

If you’d like to start your own transition to more natural, minimal footwear, remember to go slow. You’ve been wearing shoes for decades of your life and your feet have adapted to that. It will take them more than overnight to adapt to the increased loads of a minimalist shoes. Start off walking before you try to run and of course, walk short distances in them at first and then work your way up to longer ones- slowly! Get out and walk on softer surfaces in nature as much as you can. It’s not only good for your body, but the spirit as well. (and you’ll get some Vitamin D from the sunshine!)

For more information, or to get your own Earth Runners, see their website at www.earthrunners.com.