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Rewilding your Feet: Tips to go barefoot safely

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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.

rewilding your feet

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!

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!

Barefoot: 5 reasons to ditch your shoes for better health

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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.

barefoot

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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….)
  5. 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!

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Understanding musculoskeletal pain: “You are how you move”

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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.

How to avoid death by sitting

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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!

Free Your Feet- and the rest will follow!

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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!) Earth RunnersI 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. 

Sitting is the new smoking and walking is the new superfood

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I’ve been geeking out lately on all things natural movement. It started when I picked up Move Your DNA by Katy Bowman. Actually, I had ordered the book when it first came out, but just now got around to reading it. I’m sorry I’ve waited this long!!!

As a chiropractor trained extensively in the function and disorders of the musculoskeletal system, I’ve always taken a keen interest in Katy’s work. What I love most about it is that what Katy talks and writes about is functional movement. It’s to chiropractic what functional medicine is to the western medicine/sickcare model.

I help fix my patient’s musculoskeletal complaints in the short-term, but the reality is that most of those symptoms came to be because of long-standing patterns in how a person uses (or doesn’t use) their body. Take for instance, someone who has developed arthritis in their lumbar spine. They probably have lost disc height and maybe have begun to grow osteophytes off of their vertebrae. Osteophytes are bone spurs that begin to grow in areas where a tendon attaches to a bone. They don’t develop simply because you get older. They develop in response to abnormal forces/loads placed on that muscles/tendon/joint every minute of every day, day in and day out, for years.

With this in mind, the only way to truly ‘fix’ the problem is to begin to undo those patterns of movement that place the abnormal loads on the tissue in the first place. This involves diligence and commitment to maintain awareness about problematic movement patterns as well as consistency in executing restorative stretching and strengthening exercises (Note that I did not say that it involves getting adjusted three times a week for the next six months). The payoff for that hard work and consistency is similar to that to be gained from consistent commitment to eating a whole foods diet: significantly improved health and longevity!

Regaining functional movement and natural movement patterns isn’t just about being pain free; it’s also about health. Through a process known as mechnotransduction, the loads placed upon an individual cell can affect how the DNA of the cell is expressed. Whoa! Movement is another epigenetic factor!

One of my favorite points Katy makes in her book is about atherosclerosis. We’ve been indoctrinated to believe that this disease develops because your cholesterol is too high (because you’ve been eating those evil animal foods and saturated fats that humans have been eating since their evolutionary beginnings) and that statins will save you. This indoctrination is so complete, we in the alternative health movement are guilty of assuming that if our patients & clients simply eat better, they can reverse the disease and no longer need a statin drug. What Katy points out however, is that if atherosclerosis is primarily a biochemical problem, then we should see it develop in any and all arteries with equal frequency.

But that’s not what we see.

Atherosclerosis is most likely to develop in the abdominal aorta, iliac, femoral, popliteal, carotid and cerebral arteries. Basically, in areas where the arteries have to change angles. This changes the hemodynamics, or the way the blood flows through those arteries. Picture two rivers- one flowing fairly straight and another with lots of twists and bends. The one with all the twists and bends while have more eddies and rapids. When a similar change happens within a blood vessel though, we get localized areas of higher force, or loads on the cells of the artery wall. Over time, this may damage the arterial wall, leading to a need for cholesterol to act as the spackle to patch the ‘hole.’ Can you see now why taking a statin drug may lower your total cholesterol level but not actually protect you from cardiovascular disease or a heart attack???

Here’s what more- most of those arteries named above where atherosclerosis is most common are in the area of the hip and the knee. Which for most modern humans who are accustomed to sitting in chairs for hours a day for YEARS of their life, increases the loads on the arterial walls even more, because if the joints are constantly stuck in 90 degrees of flexion from chair sitting- so are the arteries. So what is really leading to the atherosclerosis- eating healthy animal foods in your diet or being stuck sitting in a chair all day? Can you see now why sitting is the new smoking?

At this point, you are hopefully itchy to get out of your seat and move somehow. So here’s a few practical tips to get you started moving more functionally.

1.) Stretch your calves. Get a towel, roll it up and place it on the floor. Put the toes & ball of one foot on it so that they are higher than the heel. Now stand with your feet hip width apart, toes even with each other. You should feel the stretch in the calf muscle on of the leg that is on the towel. Now notice the rest of your posture. Do you have to learn forward at the waist to maintain this position? Is your pelvis tucked under as you hold this position? With the foot not on the towel, try stepping forward a few inches. Do you have to break at the waist to accomplish this? Does you pelvis tuck to allow your foot to come forward? This is a great stretch to do through the day, every day. Since most of us have worn positive-heeled shoes for our entire lives, this stretch begins to combat the muscle length (& mass) changes most of us have in the lower leg that have developed as adaptations to shoe-wearing.

2.) Do anything but sit in a chair. It’s not that chairs and sitting are evil in and of themselves. It’s that we spend so much time in this one position that over a lifetime of chair sitting, our muscles adapt to chair sitting. So much so, that even when you stand up, your muscles maintain some of the length adaptations they have made to sitting. The fact is that there are many, many ways to sit that don’t involve sitting in a chair with the hips and knees flexed and the pelvis tucked under. The solution isn’t just to stand all day either. The key is to try lots of new and novel positions so your muscles & joints can experience loading in all different directions.  Forget apples, kick your chair habit if you really want to keep the doctor away.

3.) Go barefoot. Of course, please be sensible here. If you’ve been wearing shoes all of your life, your foot muscles have atrophied, just like when you broke your arm as a kid and your arm was all little and wimpy when the cast came off. Start with walking around your house barefoot. Try taking it outside in your yard. If you want go next level, get a pair of super minimalist shoes and starting taking walks in them. Start slow and small with your barefoot walks and slowly work your way up.

4.) Speaking of walking… go walk!! Walking is one of the best things you can do for your musculoskeletal system. Think of walking as being on the same level as kale in your diet. You don’t have to go super fast; this isn’t about burning up the calories. Even better, make walking a useful, integrated part of your day. Walk to the post office or the mailbox. Walk to visit a neighbor or friend. Give your walking a purpose other than ‘exercise.’ And just as note here, walking indoors on a treadmill is not the same thing as walking outside. First of all, the biomechanics are totally different. In walking over ground, forward motion is created by hip extension (pushing backwards). On a treadmill, the backwards motion of the tread does that part for you, so all you have to do is flex the hip to swing the leg forward to met the tread in front of you. Especially if you are trying to counteract the musculoskeletal adaptations of chronic sitting, treadmill walking is not the way to go. Also, its messes with your optic flow. Ever notice how when you get off the treadmill you have those few seconds of feeling disoriented and maybe even dizzy? That’s because your brain was getting information that the body was moving, but the eyes were telling the brain ‘nope, same scenery. We’re not moving past or by anything.’ This information mismatch is what gives you that disoriented/dizzy feeling and the science indicates that this only gets worse as you get older. So, do me a favor and just walk outside, mmm’kay?

5.) And speaking of eyes and optic flow- LOOK UP. Look out a window. Focus on something really far away. Or go outside and focus on something far away. We are having an epidemic of near-sightedness because of all the screen time we log. The shape of your eye- and therefore, what you can focus on- is determined by the length and contraction of 6 different muscles around your eyes. And just like any of the other muscles of your body, they will adapt over time to the length at which they are used the most. So if you use them all the time to focus on things 12″-24″ in front of your face, that’s what they are going to be best at. Take ‘eye breaks’ throughout the day to train these muscles to retain their ability to see distances. You can also download a handy Time Out program for your computer to remind you take a screen break, get up and stretch or whatever.

Stay tuned for some more posts about functional movement. And on that note, I’m going to go take a short walk and get away from this computer screen for a bit!

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