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Monday, November 24, 2014

Mobility Monday: Sitting is Wrecking Your Hips

Since my first Active Release Technique course for the lower extremity years ago and their talking about the psoas I knew it was the root of a lot of problems around the hips.  As I learned the psoas release one of the instructors was discussing how in most of her patients with low back pain she will first release the psoas and it will relieve 80-90% of her patients back pain before she even does the evaluation.

The psoas is an amazingly strong muscle that flexes the hip.  Its attachments run from lumbar spine across the front of the pelvis and down to the front of your femur.  If it becomes short and locked-down it changes the entire mechanics of your pelvis, low back and general posture.  This can be a major contributor to hamstring injury (we'll save that for another post).

The psoas gets wrecked by sitting and having that chronic shortening from 6-10 hours a day of being immobilized.  Below is a great video by Kelly Starrett and how that can jack up your mechanics and your everyday posture.   If you have questions about how to fix those issues check out Mobility WOD or use the contact form on the right to ask and I'll pass some great ideas along.



Friday, November 21, 2014

Study(s) Spotlight: Tart Cherry Juice

People are constantly searching for different ways to increase their capacity to workout, decrease their soreness and generally take better care of their bodies.  Tart cherries have been around for awhile and their use has been used at different institutions for a variety of reasons. Tart cherries are unique in their high quantity of antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties (for the science folks: Cyclo-oxygenase inhibitory flavonoids and anthocynanins).   Consumption of about 45 cherries a day has been shown to reduce circulation concentrations of inflammatory markers in healthy men and women.

One of the studies reviewed showed that consumption of tart cherry juice had an effect in decreasing some of the symptoms of exercise induced muscle damage.  The one that was most notably beneficial to those who consumed the tart cherry juice was the amount of strength lost over the they 4 days.  Researchers found that strength loss was 22% in the placebo group but only 4% with the tart cherry juice.

The other study looked at utilizing tart cherry juice in a preventative way.  The study compared two groups who were going to compete in a long-distance race and had the experimental group ingesting tart cherry juice for 7 days prior to the race, compared to the placebo group who did not use the tart cherry juice.  What they found was that the experimental group had significantly reduced muscle pain after the race compared to the placebo group and that the experimental group was more willing to try the cherry juice due to it's benefits.

Bottom Line:
In a world of a lot of different options for both prevention and recovery from muscle soreness and/or injury tart cherry juice could be a vital addition to your nutrition/supplementation protocol.  The addition of tart cherry juice may help prevent decreases in acute exercise pain while also aiding in recovery from exercise and the preservation of muscle strength.  Hey, it's worth a shot right?


Tart Cherry Supplement Option:
Rapid Perform-Rapid Red



Sources:
Efficacy of a tart cherry juice blend in preventing the symptoms of muscle damage
D A J Connolly

Br J Sports Med 2006; 40: 679-683

Efficacy of tart cherry juice in reducing muscle pain during running A randomized controlled trial
Kerry Kuehl
JISSN 2010, 7:17

Friday, November 7, 2014

Continuum vs. Progression

This short video by Gray Cook brings up a great point that are we actually working to progress people through their workout, training, and rehab even if it means taking more time at a specific exercise until they have mastered it.  If we work on a continuum and just continue to push people through to new exercises without being proficient in the one before we will find ourselves explaining and re-explaining an exercise that the patient just wasn't ready for.

Do we often get to caught up in looking forward when getting back to the basics may be more important?  He raises a great point that I think can be applied to training, practice and rehab.

Monday, November 3, 2014

Pain is a Symptom, it is NOT Always the Cause of the Problem


By: Joel Luedke

Everyone has pain.  And whether is be from athletic related training and injuries or just general everyday life that causes it a common misconception in dealing with pain is that the pain is the only problem that needs to be fixed.  You want to resolve pain because of course it doesn't feel good and we want it gone but it is forgotten that PAIN is a symptom, not the injury and more often than not it isn't the root of the problem.


Gray Cook says "Patients with musculoskeletal problems often focus so much on pain relief, they fail to see the disparity between basic symptom management and true healing or resolution of a problem. In their distress, they mistake pain as the problem without understanding it is merely a signal, and that the problem may remain even after the signal is gone."  This is when we reach for the back of ice and pop the bottle of anti-inflammatories and give it a few days to hop it goes away.

Pain is a warning sign.  Long before pain represents a chronic problem, it can alert us to poor alignment, overuse, imbalance and inflammation.  Pain changes everything.  There is a trend of change coming across the sports medicine world about trying to address things that can cause pain before they reach that point.  When pain rears its ugly head it is getting to the tipping point of becoming to late to reverse the pattern of dysfunction or the problem without having to take time away from the activity that you are doing.

Take pain very seriously but do not be content with the just relieving it and thinking whatever problems it was related to is over.  Look to the surrounding areas of tissue that could be off or tight or overworked to relieve the tension that could be causing pain in your joints or other locations within the muscle.  Look at your position and posture.  Could it be better?  Come on we all can be better at this.

If you have headaches look at posture and the musculature around your neck and upper back.  Knee pain?  Look above and below for tight spots (especially the quads).

DON'T WAIT!!! A great analogy to getting to the root of the problem and addressing it before the point of no return is from Gary Reinl.  If it were to snow an inch an hour for twenty four hours on your deck you could go out every hour and sweep it off with a broom and put in a little effort.  Or you could wait twenty four hours and have two feet of snow to remove and risk it ruining your deck due to the weight and then you have reached a point of no return.  Moral: Take the time to work on everything you can before it accumulates.

One more analogy from Dr. Mark Hyman of the book "Ultraprevention".

His analogy was simple: "Our response to injury is like hearing the smoke detector go off and running to pull out the battery.  The pain, like the sound, is a warning of some other problem.  Icing a sore knee without examining the ankle or hip is like pulling the battery out of the smoke detector.  The relief is short-lived."


-Any questions about specific pain and maybe a couple or areas to start looking to fix yourself please use the contact box on the side and we'll pass on some starting points.