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There's a lot you can do to sleep more deeply at night, helping to rejuvenate your body with each and every night. The following video shows one of the many techniques I'll be teaching at my 10/10 seminar: Sleep to Rejuvenate the Body. Click here for more details. There's a lot you can do to make sitting more comfortable. The following video teaches you the Five Foot Postures, a simple way to enhance your sitting experience. Neck rolls are one of the easiest and best exercises you can possibly do for your neck. Learn more by watching the video below. [I'm teaching a seminar March 14th, 2018 entitled How to Rejuvenate the Body: Easy Exercises for a More Youthful Body which will cover this topic and much more related material. Register here.] Most of us know that we should be doing some form of stability work for the spine so as to prevent low back pain, but stability work can be absolutely overwhelming. There are simply far too many exercises out there, and even if you do some of these exercises, you'll probably be told that you're doing them 'wrong.' For every exercise guru there is another (and absolutely critical) way that stability exercises are supposed to be done. "Flatten your stomach - but don't use your obliques!" "Breathe from the diaphragm - no, not that diaphragm, the other diaphragm!" "Don't let you pelvis move - but don't hold it rigid!" The list of commonly heard comments from exercise gurus could fill pages. It overwhelms anyone hoping to have better stability - no one except the gurus think they're doing it right. In order to cut through the clutter, I ask people to focus almost exclusively on one stability exercise: planks. A plank is when you hold your trunk up and reasonably straight, while gravity is trying to pull it down. The standard plank is to assume the starting position for a push-up and to simply hold this position. Hold your trunk straight as you do this: don't lift your butt in the air.  A key thing to know about 'core' stability is the more you think about stability, the less you actually have it. There are two major modes for the brain: 1) sensorimotor processing (movement), and 2) reflective thought (thinking). These modes are mutually exclusive: they inhibit each other. The more you're thinking, the less well you will move, and the more challenging a movement is for you, the less clearly you can think. So if you're thinking about how to move, you really can't move well at all! Real 'core' stability is an automatic, unreflective process - there is no thinking involved. The body unconsciously stabilizes itself. This means that the best stability exercises are those that don't require you to think about them. Planks are one such exercise: as long as your butt isn't up in the air and as long as you aren't hurting while you do them, then they're making your 'core' stronger and more coordinated. Another great thing about planks is that they are modifiable for everyone. If you aren't strong enough to do standard planks, then you can start with your hands on the wall and slowly work your way lower and lower. If you are too strong for standard planks, then you can elevate your feet. And everyone can slowly work their way from standard planks to doing one-legged, then one-armed, and finally one-legged, one-armed planks. If you can do a 60-sec one-legged, one-armed plank (30-sec on each side), then you have excellent 'core' stability and really don't need to focus on stability anymore - just maintain your current abilities. That's yet another great thing about planks: they have a reasonable endpoint. Don't get caught in the trap of thinking that if a 60-sec plank is good, then a 5-min plank must be even better. Just get to the 60-sec plank and feel confident in your abilities. If your low back gets hurt, and you weren't doing something really crazy, then you didn't get hurt because you didn't have enough stability. Something else was the cause. I encourage everyone to simplify spinal stability by focusing on planks. The following video walks you through my basic plan for planks. In my March 14th, 2018 seminar How to Rejuvenate the Body, I'll be covering planks and other key exercises that will simplify the world of exercise. Register here. I'll be giving a lecture entitle A Good Stretch at Orange Coast College soon (Sept 12th, 2017), so I've got the topic of stretching on my mind. When it comes to stretching, the hamstrings are always one of the first questions to come up. So let's talk about the chronic problem of tight hamstrings. We all know we have tight hamstrings. They're a big problem, a bigger problem than you probably realize. Not only do tight hamstrings limit knee motion, but they also limit hip motion and place excessive stress on the low back. Also, because of the sciatic nerve running with them, they can pinch this nerve and cause problems all the way down into the ankle and foot. Most people realize that they need to stretch their hamstrings, but often what happens is that the hamstrings refuse to relax. I know many people who have spent an entire year stretching their hamstrings only to have them be just as tight, if not tighter, by the end of the year. This is because of two major problems with hamstring stretching: we stretch too vigorously, forgetting that the point is to relax them, not to literally stretch them longer, and we use stretches that are by nature not useful for relaxing the hamstrings. Let me explain this with some examples. The most common hamstring stretch is the toe touch. Whether you do this in sitting or standing, notice what happens when you reach for your toes. You're loading your hamstrings when you do this. It's as if you're handing your hamstrings the entire weight of your upper body and then saying, “okay, relax.” This is an unreasonable request. The hamstrings won't relax under such circumstances. Another option is the straight leg raise. Here you lie down, hold your thigh perpendicular to the ground, and then straighten your knee. This is a much better option than the toe touch, but it is active work and doesn't exactly encourage relaxation. Another alternative is the doorway stretch, using the doorway to hold your leg in the air. This is more like it! Now you can actually lie there and relax as you stretch. But people still don't make much progress with this stretch. This is because the knee needs to be totally straight to really get the hamstring, the calf muscle that intertwines the hamstring behind the knee, the sciatic nerve, and the surrounding fascia to all relax. Unless you're already very flexible, you won't be able to get your knee totally straight with the doorway stretch unless you're so far from the doorway that you actually have to engage your hamstrings to hold your leg in place. Once again we meet the problem of the stretch itself not being conducive to relaxation. For all these reasons I suggest the Leaning Hamstring Stretch. This is a modified toe touch that actually encourages relaxation. You bend forward and lean your upper body into a sturdy object. The sturdy object takes away the weight of the upper body, removing the load on the hamstrings, allowing us to nicely stretch the hamstrings with little to no risk to the low back. You keep your knees completely straight the entire time, ensuring that the hamstrings, calves, sciatic nerve, and the surrounding fascia are all stretched together.
 Shoulder pain is one of the extremely common pains, and a limitation in shoulder range of motion is also a major cause of poor posture and therefore many other pains in the body. Most neck, shoulder, elbow, wrist, upper back, and low back pain is at least partially caused by a lack of shoulder extension. In fact, a lack of shoulder extension is one of the crucial and forgotten root causes of many problems in the body. Shoulder extension is the motion of moving the shoulder back behind the body. The arm hanging straight down at our side is 0 degrees of shoulder extension.  The picture above with the arm hanging at the side, looks like the shoulder is positioned at its neutral 0 degrees of shoulder extension resting place. But hardly anyone has 0 degrees of shoulder extension. Most of us have about -30 degrees (and many of my patients have something like -70 degrees). The picture below shows -70 degrees of shoulder extension.  What this means is that almost all of us should be walking around like a zombie with our arms out in front of us. Instead of walking like a zombie, we've all found ways to cheat our way into allowing our shoulders to hang straight down. What we do to get our shoulder to hang down is to hunch our shoulders forward and slump through our mid-backs. These are two of the most common components of the poor posture that causes us so much trouble, and it's lack of shoulder extension that is the usual root cause of these problems. We often blame these posture problems on the mid-back or the shoulder blades (tight pecs, for example), but usually it's coming from the shoulders themselves. Restoring shoulder extension is vital for balancing posture and for resolving most shoulder, elbow, and neck pains.  The stretch pictured above works wonders for restoring shoulder extension. You place your hand, front of your elbow, shoulder, and chest against the wall. If you have a stretch at this point, then you just relax in this position and allow the stretch to relax whatever is tight. If you don't have a stretch, then you can advance by turning your sternum away from the wall, stopping when you get a stretch, and aiming to be able to turn your sternum 60 degrees away from the wall. Hold a gentle stretch for 10-30 seconds, ideally having the stretch completely disappear after 10 seconds. Repeat this on the other side, and repeat the whole thing once per day for a month. You'll see significant improvements in your posture and shoulder flexibility.  We ALL have tight calves. Even if you don't think you do, you have tight calves. And this tightness causes your foot, ankle, and shin to work way too hard, and it causes a terrible torque through your knee and hips, and it puts your low back in a distressed position. Any pain in the low back down into your foot is at least partially caused by your tight calves. Fortunately, there is a simple stretch you can use to improve the tightness of your calves. But I use the word stretch hesitantly, because the calves are NOT too short in need of being stretched longer. Instead, they are too tense and in need of relaxing. So when we stretch our calves (or anything else in the body) we want to relax them, not rip them apart. Almost all of us overstretch when we stretch, and this makes our calves even tighter. The video below walks you through this basic calf stretch. We should all do it daily.  There are few things more devitalizing than headaches. They suck the life out of us. They put us in a crabby mood and make us want to do nothing but sit around. I remember one of my patients telling me that now that her headaches were gone, she had to go and apologize to her friends for being so irritable for the last decade due to her constant pain. Headaches and their release are actually life changing things. One of the major keys to resolving headaches is the trigeminal nerve. I was working with someone's trigeminal nerve the other day, which is a complex technique involving many moving parts, when it suddenly dawned on me that patients can do self work on the trigeminal nerve! Now, that might not seem like a big deal to most people, but that's only because most people have no idea how important the trigeminal nerve is. The trigeminal nerve comes out of the skull deep to the jaw and wraps all over the head and face. It's the major nerve responsible for headaches, and most chronic head, neck, and jaw pain is at least partially due to trigeminal nerve irritation. Being able to release this nerve on their own at home is proving to be a major help for many of my patients. This technique gently releases the nerve, making changes all over the head, face, jaw, and neck. All you have to do is get in the position, hold the position for about one minute on each side, and breathe deeply while you do so. The deep breathing changes the pressure inside the skull and helps to move and release the nerve. This technique has proven so useful to my patients that I now teach it to most of my patients with head and neck pain and to other bodyworkers in my Balancing the Head and Neck course. I consider it one of the first steps in managing head and neck problems. The best way to imagine what we're doing with this technique is improving the blood flow through the opening in your skull, freeing the nerve and allowing it to function better. This area can become very stagnant, and stagnation means too much pressure and not enough flow of the fluids through the area. This pressure causes irritation. The technique helps to resolve this pressure by improving the blood flow through the region. Instructions: Get into a hands-and-knees position and then drop your bottom to your ankles, and drop your head to the floor. Turn your head to the left so that you are resting the right side of your forehead on the ground (aim for the part of your forehead mid-way between the center of your forehead and your right ear). You'll probably feel an odd but painless pressure deep to your jaw on the right side. This is where the trigeminal nerve exists the skull, and this is where we want a gentle release to occur. Breathe deeply for about one minute. Each time you inhale the pressure will slightly increase, and each time you exhale the pressure will slightly decrease. This helps to pump blood and fluid through the opening in your skull, which helps the nerve to function much better. Then turn your head to the left and repeat for the left side. This technique should never be painful: if it ever is painful, then stop doing it.  Give this trigeminal nerve release a try for a few days and see how good your head and neck feels. I taught my own course for the first time last month. It was a lot of fun to present my own material, showing others what I do in my practice all day. One of the major things we discussed is an imbalance in the tissues of the body that ancient healers throughout history have called "moisture." In modern terms, we call it an "excess of inflammatory fluid" in a tissue of the body, but the ancient word "moisture" or "fluid" is a more useful image. Inflammatory fluid is a thick fluid, more like ketchup than water. It is the result of a previous injury and/or stagnant positioning. It's a big problem for almost everyone. This fluid does damage to the tissues with which it comes in contact, and it inhibits the strength of the muscles on which it presses. Many people with chronic pain are in chronic pain because of a ball of inflammatory fluid, a thick glob of ketchup, just sitting in a region of the body and making everything a mess. This glob of thick fluid creates pressure inside the tissues, overstretching them from the inside, which makes the tissues feel stiff. Many people experience this stiffness, especially in the morning. The video below is from the class I taught. It jumps in with me explaining what it's like to have an imbalanced tissue full of moisture. I then go on to explain the opposite syndrome: dryness. You might recognize your own symptoms when you watch this video. If you do, hopefully it will prompt you to start managing the moisture, which we'll discuss below. Managing moisture (excessive inflammatory fluid in a region of the body) is simple enough, but it takes consistent work. Basically, we have to stir the fluid, thinning it, so that the body can absorb it. The key is to keep the body moving as much as possible during the day without irritating the tissue. Walking is the number one exercise for this purpose. A fifteen minute walk really helps to stir and thin the fluid and helps to pump it out of the region. Any gentle motion that can be done easily for three minutes without causing fatigue or irritation is also very helpful for managing the fluid. The Cat Camel exercise from yoga is a good example of a pumping exercise that helps to pump fluid out of the low back in a gentle but effective way. Three minutes of Cat Camel followed by a fifteen minute walk done three times per day is a remedy I give at least two or three people per week for managing a moist low back. It works amazingly well. References
Adams, M.A., Dolan, P., and Hutton, W.C. (1987). Diurnal variations in the stresses on the lumbar spine. Spine, 12 (2): 130. Reilly, T., Tynell, A., and Troup, J.D.G. (1984). Circardian variation in human stature. Chronobiology International, 1: 121. Fam H, Bryant JT, Kontopoulou M. Rheological properties of synovial fluids. Biorheology. 2007;44(2):59-74. Gomez JE, Thurston GB. Comparisons of the oscillatory shear viscoelasticity and composition of pathological synovial fluids. Biorheology. 1993 Sep-Dec;30(5-6):409-27. Safari M, Bjelle A, Gudmundsson M, Högfors C, Granhed H. Clinical assessment of rheumatic diseases using viscoelastic parameters for synovial fluid. Biorheology. 1990;27(5):659-74. Barnes. Thixotropy - a Review. J. Non-Newtonian Fluid Mech., 70 (1997) 1-33. Proske U, Tsay A, Allen T. Muscle thixotropy as a tool in the study of proprioception. Exp Brain Res. 2014 Nov;232(11):3397-412. Vent-Schmidt J, Waltz X, Romana M, Hardy-Dessources MD, Lemonne N, Billaud M, Etienne-Julan M, Connes P. Blood thixotropy in patients with sickle cell anaemia: role of haematocrit and red blood cell rheological properties. PLoS One. 2014 Dec 11;9(12):e114412. McNair PJ, Marshall RN, Maguire K. Swelling of the knee joint: effects of exercise on quadriceps muscle strength. Arch Phys Med Rehabil. 1996 Sep;77(9):896-9. |
Dr. Jake Caldwell, DPTI have a doctorate degree in physical therapy, an advanced certification in Functional Manual Therapy™, a bachelor’s degree in biology, a bachelor’s degree in psychology, and a bachelor’s degree in history. I draw from these diverse fields in my approach to working with the body. Archives
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