Sitcom Fitness

I'm starting to think the things we do away from the gym are more important then the things we do in the gym.  First, I'm not saying skip the gym.  If you have a 2x bodyweight deadlift,  you most likely have strength, muscle and bone density in the bank.  All tremendously important things as we age.  So don't quit going to the gym and lifting some real weights.

But I think there are things we do away from the gym that will bring just as much health and performance benefits as a few gym sessions.  Again don't skip the weights.  Everyone needs IRON.

Sitcom fitness, is a concept of what can I do while I'm watching a 30 minute television show.  Most of the time, you are just sitting on the couch.  22 min of show, 8 minutes of commercials.  Some ideas to turn this into productive time.

Train your eyes.  Slowly bring a pencil from arms length towards your nose very slowly, not losing clarity.  Do this 5 times.  When you can bring it as close to your nose as you can and not go blurry, look from the tip to the TV, focus on the TV and then quickly back to the pencil tip and refocus.  This trains quite a few muscles of your eye.  Repeat 5x.

Get rid of the chair or couch.  Sit in a ninety ninety position.  The longer you sit in this position, the more you'll start to bypass muscle and get into the hip capsule.  Most people have tight posterior hip capsules.   When you have done both sides, work on transferring from one 90/90 position to the other and back again.

Foam roll your quads and tennis ball your hips.  These are tight on nearly everyone.  You can still pay attention to the TV while rolling on the ground.

Do 5 second holds on each stop of the Turkish Get Up during one commercial.  Kalos Thenos Style, so you are holding the bridge position at the top.

Hold onto something that allows you to sit in a 3rd world squat position with an upright chest for several minutes.  If that's too easy, switch to a Cossack style squat.  A few minutes on each leg.

So there are a few suggestions to turn your favorite sitcom into an even more awesome experience.  Go get better.

Reclaim Your Pinky Toe

I've talked before about reclaiming your big toe.  Feet flat, raise your big toe off the floor while still keeping your other digits on the ground.  Also, vice versa, keep your big toe on the ground and raise the other digits off the ground.  All of these drills go back to getting back or keeping the motor control from the brain to the foot.

For me, it's meant less calf tension.  The next step is to reclaim the pinky toe.  The main muscle is the abductor digit minimi.  So the goal is to move the pinky toe sideways away from the foot.  Don't give up if at first nothing happens.  Keep trying.

I read once where Dan John, the philosophical strength coach, thought this was the magic of wearing Vibrams.  It slowly brought back the pinky toe function.  For him it relieved some hip pain.  The pinky is part of your lateral stability line.  So anything that gets more integrated in function will make the line, in this case lateral stability, stronger.

The abductor digit minimi is important to posture and even contributes to stability into the hip.  So nothing to be ignored, although your Orthopedic will tell you that it is not needed.  If we have something on our body, we should be able to consciously make it do what we want.  When it doesn't, I think we lose the kinesthetic awareness of that area.

Will it drive your deadlifit up in weight?  Probably not.  Will it create a better, more stable foot?  More then likely.  So reclaim your pinky toe.

Why We Should Keep Doing Somersaults

Ever notice when you were a kid you could ride a merry go round or have someone swing you on a tire swing and not get that deathly sick feeling and perhaps even enjoy it.  As we age, those swirly type activities get less and less enjoyable.  I have always kind of wondered if there was a reason for this.

Reading through the book, "Smart Moves: Why Learning is Not All in your Head," by Carla Hannaford.  I came across the answer.

"As we go through puberty, the endolymph fluid in the semicircular canals thickens in response to reproductive hormones.  This thickening causes the hair cells to be bent for a longer time, thus causing the whole system to take a longer time to return to a comfortable equilibrium."

She goes on to stay that staying active with things like bike riding and yoga help to keep the balance and equilibrium from becoming to bad.

Having started doing some recent somersaults with moves incorporated into Animal Flow type work, I found it pretty unnerving that at first a simple tumbling activity could bring a bit of dizziness.  After a few sessions these simply vanished as my body adapted to it.

You only get rusty when you quit moving it.  Somersaults I think, should be a mainstay in life.  How many of us actually ever train equilibrium.  Simple, but effective.

Elderly Proprioception, Falls and Foot Function

Elderly falls is one of the mechanisms that can trigger the downward spiral of independent living.  Without the proper training and diet, osteoporosis may make it more likely to break a bone.  Fracturing a hip can literally be a death sentence for some individuals.  In 2010,  258,000 people age 65 or older had hip fractures.  Within one year, 1 out 5 died because of complications dealing with the hip fracture.

Reading through Human Locomotion by Thomas Michaud, he mentions some worthwhile ideas as relating to the elderly.

Proprioception, (the sense of body awareness) just like muscles, gets weaker as we age.  The foot itself has a ton of information to give the body.  A few suggestions were vibrating insoles and also an irritating insole.  Both combined to give more proprioception and lead to less falls by stimulating mechanoreception in the skin.

He goes on to state that most elderly and most recommendations suggest the opposite.  I can verify this.  Most of my elderly clients wear tanks on their feet.  Well cushioned and heavy.  This does the opposite of providing proprioception to the body.  It actually takes information away.

Some things to remember.  When your toes splay, (spread apart) there is a reflex that triggers your quadriceps to engage.  This essentially helps support you further.  If your big toe goes through adequate range of motion, your glute max engages more fully.

So, with a big, heavy shoe, chances are we are decreasing information to the body and stunting two of the largest muscles in the body.  Doesn't seem like such a great idea to me.

Some concerns to deal with before putting your grandparents into minimalist shoes.  As we age we lose our calcaneal fat pad, it atrophies, as well as the metacarpal fat pad.  So the goal is to have the least amount of cushioning and not irritate the bones.  This is individual.  No cookie cutter answers there.

What can be done is test the proprioceptors.  One should be able to stand on one foot with eyes closed for 10 seconds.  If you can't pass, start some balance training.  This is different then just strength training.  Balance training activates the subcortical pathway, which when trained activates automatically.

Strengthen the flexor digitorum longus muscle.  Weakness here has been shown to have higher prevalence of falling.  Simply pointing the toes (minus the big piggie) against some form of resistance will strengthen these.

The best medicine is prevention.  Don't wait for a fall to get someone into PT.   Fire up the proprioception system and strengthen a few key muscles and perhaps wear a truck instead of a tank.

Anatomical Variants and What It Can Mean

Everyone is different and everyone is the same.  There.  Now you know in case you didn't.  We all have femurs and hips and spines that should move.  We also all have subtle differences in the way we are built.  Some have a wider pelvis, some have very narrow hips.  This is something that anyone can plainly see.  The idea that everyone should do the exact same thing is obviously not correct.  The squat guru's can't even decide whats the best way to squat.  

The emergence of self care to help how you move, in my opinion, is one of the best things to happen in the last few years.  Does it get carried overboard?  Again, in my opinion, I think it gets carried way overboard.  Putting a kettlebell handle into my guts to get on a psoas, or lacrosse ball deep into my arm pit to hit subscapularis, or trying to push down the first rib through my anterior neck triangle, with the caveat, if you start to black out, ease off, is not the smartest.  

But, using a lacrosse ball and bands to improve my squat, and shoulder extension, all awesome things.  No one is saying squat exactly to this depth, or everyone should back bridge.   The message hopefully taken home is lets improve your squat depth by improving your hips.  Lets improve you shoulder flexion.   Let's improve how YOU move.  

A few days ago a blog post was making the rounds about how you can't fix things with lacrosse balls and bands ect, `because we are so individual anatomically.  Then proceeded to show two hips from different people.  I'm guessing the pictures were of the least like photos the collector could find to show two extremes.  We all aren't that different.  When making a point.  Show the extremes.  It was well done. 

So my message to you is, yes we are different and yes we are the same.  Let's continue to work on each individually moving better.  We may not look the same at the end, but that's OK if we have improved from where we started.  

A Few Fun Exercises With No Equipment to Try

I love this first one.  Deceptively Hard.



I like this version, only instead of a slow squat to finish, finish with a jump squat.



Minus the handstand, I've been working on "Animal Flow."  This is the creator Mike Fitch.

Interesting Findings of N=1

They say N=1 doesn't matter when it comes to most things.  What works for you, doesn't mean much, what works for me, just as much.  That is why in research,  the larger the sample, the more impressive the findings.

But, for you and me, N=1 can be a powerful thing.  When we find the one thing that produces the result your after,  that's big.  Doesn't mean it will work for your family member, or your friend, but who cares!  If it works for you, wonderful.

In my clinic, sometimes N=1 can becomes N=2.  You find something that works for someone and if you ever see this complaint or situation again, you try it again.  Sometimes nothing, sometimes magic.

A few cool things that I've paid attention to that worked for one or two people.

Releasing the digastric muscle improved sleep apnea.

Squatting, produced inhibition in muscles that were previously strong on muscle testing.

Ginger root took away vertigo.

Black tea took away migraine headaches.

Releasing palmer fascia improves shoulder rotation.

The idea is to always explore and try new things.  You never know what will work.  N=1 is pretty cool in my book.