Apr 11

Finding Time to Exercise when Time is at a Premium

Acquiring a membership to a local gym, attending small group fitness classes, or signing up for personal training has proven time and time again to aid in refining an individual’s health and fitness.  Building muscular strength, redistributing fat mass to lean muscle, enhancing mood, staving off risk factors for metabolic disease, managing stress, and contributing to an overall increased state of happiness are just a few benefits of adhering to a consistent exercise routine.  Memberships to a local gym, a series package to a Yoga class, or signing up for ten sessions with a personal trainer are potent catalysts to accelerate efforts in achieving fitness goals.  Attending a fitness class or ensuring you are on time for a personal training appointment motivates people to adhere toward exercising consistently because there is a sense of accountability to attending a scheduled fitness class that only runs at set times throughout the week.   Regarding personal training appointments, fitness professionals reserve an appointment for someone to exercise at a specific time.  Additionally, there is an obligation to attend such fitness services because they have been paid for with someone’s hard-earned money.  However, even with financial commitments and an accountability partner with a personal trainer who has been paid a premium amount to be available to lead someone through a customized exercise prescription in a private setting, people still find a way to avoid exercising.

One of the biggest obstacles for people missing their exercise sessions isn’t necessarily the lack of resources to exercise; it’s factors of time, gym intimidation, or simply the dislike of entering a gym setting filled with other sweaty humans.  Time is slim pickings for busy professionals and parents of young children.  Forty hours a week is a lot of time to devote to one’s work and family life, making it challenging to drive to a local gym, find a parking space, and enter a packed gym floor during rush hour right after getting off of work.  Activities such as soccer practice, music lessons, or making dinner for middle school-aged children are priorities for busy parents. There isn’t much time at the end of the day.

Due to the demands placed upon some people’s schedules, the last thing on their minds is ensuring to get exercise accomplished.  More often than not, people want to progress in their health and fitness status.  Losing weight, having more energy, living in less pain, and healthy management of psychological and emotional stress are things that pretty much everyone on the planet wants.  It’s no surprise that consistent exercise offers this.  Research repeatedly supports exercise’s beneficial effects on human lives by decreasing physical pain due to advancement in age, increasing bone mineral density to fend off arthritis and osteoporosis, increasing overall functional capacity, and aiding in managing psychological and emotional stress. So, what can we do to improve exercise adherence?

Having something to look forward to can make ingraining tactics in our weekly to-do sheet more obtainable.  If we look forward to something, we build a sense of healthy anxiety, similar to an “I can’t wait” type of feeling.  Perhaps finding a particular instructor at a Yoga or Pilates class whose teaching style you like could resonate with the pace and flow you like.  You might enjoy the conversations, sense of humor, or music an instructor plays at a spin or core fusion class featured at one of Napa’s local gyms.  Maybe it’s the colors on the wall, the lighting, or the smell of the fitness center that appeals to you.  Having memorable portions of the experience at a chosen fitness center can offer a sense of fondness that makes participating in exercise desirable, as opposed to an inconvenient thorn in the side when the hours of the day rapidly trickle away.

Another helpful contributing factor toward ensuring a goal amount of exercise throughout the week is accomplished might be getting a workout in before the day’s hustle-and-bustle begins.  In other words, paving out time to exercise by working out before work starts or before chauffeuring children around is a potently effective tactic toward exercise compliance.  Don’t let the day get carried away on days you need to exercise.  Otherwise, the likelihood of completing an exercise session is substantially less likely to occur.

It’s also critically important to choose an enjoyable exercise experience.  If performing heavy barbell lifts and jumping around like a bunch of chimpanzees while listening to Swedish death metal is entertaining, go for it.  However, if you’re forcing yourself to endure an experience of lifting heavy pieces of metal up and down while a cacophony of drums, guitars, and shrieking screaming are filling the airwaves, producing a sense of strife, perhaps that setting isn’t for you.  Understanding what produces an enjoyable and memorable exercise experience is key to adhering to a healthy fitness practice.  If someone resents an exercise setting, they’re less likely to attend and comply with consistent fitness efforts.

Finding an enjoyable, memorable, and fun setting assists in participating in more regular weekly exercise.  Sometimes, working out earlier before our workday starts is helpful. Avoiding exercises and fitness settings that aren’t enjoyable aids in adhering to a fitness routine.  No one likes doing things against their will.  So, choosing exercises that give a sense of enjoyment, accomplishment, and fulfillment is important for complying with getting weekly exercise sessions accomplished.  Try to have a good time in your fitness journey and reserve time for yourself to exercise so you can live happy, healthy, and strong lives.

Sean McCawley, the founder and owner of Napa Tenacious Fitness in Napa, CA, welcomes questions and comments. Reach him at 707-287-2727, napatenacious@gmail.com, or visit the website napatenaciousfitness.com.

Apr 02

Health and Fitness Maintenance Throughout a Busy Schedule

Entering a career as an apprentice after trade school, acquiring a paid internship after graduating from college, or starting a company as a self-employed proprietor or independently run business are impressive accomplishments in one’s career.  The substantial investment of time and energy required to develop a valuable skill set and forge a life where talent and passion can be applied to create a new life is a rewarding and fulfilling accomplishment.  After a solid position in the workforce has been established, a sense of comfort and stability in one’s path toward making a living in the profession they feel the most comfortable with can be a significant part of one’s life.  Sometimes, we forget about the amount of time and energy it takes to reach our current position in our career path.  Five, ten, or even twenty years isn’t unusual for people to finally reach their desired level of comfort in their careers.  Even after that amount of time, people continue to strive for new professional and personal goals.

The skill sets that offer optimal career outcomes, such as promotions within a workplace or an increase in business success, are usually due to the mastery of the skills necessary to excel and produce exceptional outcomes in that line of work.  Years of performing the same duties, continuously troubleshooting and resolving problems, and being immersed in a specific job skill produce the ability for people to conduct successful job tasks instinctually.  For example, general physicians can diagnose symptoms and conditions due to their rigorous educational training throughout medical school and residency.  They can treat patients and understand health concerns more quickly than the average person because they’ve practiced that skill set for a significant portion of their lives.  Law professionals, such as police officers and attorneys, are another prime example of individuals who have honed their job-specific skills to stay up to speed on the infrastructure of various legal structures throughout society.  Their understanding of the logistics involved in society’s legal structure enables them to speak eloquently and fluidly to the general public, educating them about legal topics without hesitation.  Advanced skill sets, such as practicing medicine and navigating legal logistics, take years to master.  Due to the in-depth studying and diligent efforts invested into their work, making decisions in what appears to be intimidating and complicated to the general population is second nature to doctors, lawyers, and police officers.  Could this process of instinctually understanding how to skillfully conduct work and resolve issues be applied to forging a solid foundation of lifetime fitness as well?  I’d like to raise my hand and say yes.

If a police officer, criminal defense attorney, or emergency physician were to call in sick one day, take a vacation, or take an extended personal leave, they could return to their jobs and perform the same set of tasks they did before their brief absence from their line of work.  In what appears to be an intimidating and stress-inducing set of job duties to the general population, the years of experience and study by advanced legal and healthcare practitioners allow them to pick up where they left off in their work duties and are akin to riding a bike after a brief absence from their line of work.

Comparing this to the world of lifetime fitness isn’t much different.  That is, if there is a strong foundation of eating healthy, taking time out for recreational physical activity, and ensuring to achieve one to three days a week of strength training, flexibility and mobility work, and injury prevention training.  What would happen if we spent the same amount of time on reinforcing our knowledge of exercises that are the best for our bodies and ensuring we consistently hone our skills in how to exercise utilizing tactics that are the best suited for our bodies, similar to the way a doctor, attorney, or street cop hone their skills?  It should go without saying that many more people would have a lower likelihood of metabolic disease, be happier, and be more productive throughout their everyday lives.  Additionally, having a body with an efficient amount of lean muscle mass, less fat mass, and less pain, along with an increased bandwidth in psychological and emotional well-being, could enable society and various workforces to operate at a higher level of productivity.

When advanced skill sets aren’t practiced, the quality of the subtle nuances of a particular skill is likely to diminish.  To avoid the possibility of our health being hindered, it is essential to prioritize exercise and not let it fall to the back burner.  If exercise isn’t adhered to consistently, an increase in subcutaneous fat mass, threats of metabolic diseases, or carrying emotional and psychological stress aren’t the only things that might affect our livelihood.  The very foundation and infrastructure of lifetime fitness efforts become hindered because regular exercise can quickly become a diminishing skill set if it’s not practiced consistently.  Just as we show up to work at our jobs and try to avoid calling in sick, ensuring to plan out consistent exercise shouldn’t be treated any differently.  Adherence to a consistent, safe, and effective exercise program should be viewed as part of our careers, and we should continually hone our skills in exercise so that we can not only thrive in our careers but also enjoy the lives we’ve worked so hard for to create a lifelong future we can thrive in.

Sean McCawley, the founder and owner of Napa Tenacious Fitness in Napa, CA, welcomes questions and comments. Reach him at 707-287-2727, napatenacious@gmail.com, or visit the website napatenaciousfitness.com.

Mar 21

Finger Strength-Get a Grip on your Fitness Routine

The small bones protruding from the ends of our hands meticulously function throughout our everyday lives to perform tasks with remarkable dexterity and precision, beginning first thing in the morning and maintaining their efficient productivity until the last moments before our heads rest on a pillow and we transition into a deep slumber.  These little bones are our fingers.  Sometimes referred to as digits or phalanges, the fingers are powered by small ligaments, tendons, and muscles that encircle each bone.  The fingers are equipped with a network of nerves that immediately receive a signal from our brain, which then travels through our spinal cord and ends up at the tips of each of our ten fingers.  This signal contains messages instructing our fingers to move harmoniously and in an intricately organized fashion to execute fine motor movements. These small organs, located at the end of our hands, don’t receive a lot of attention compared to other joints and muscles in the body.  Why are the fingers just as important as other commonly injured joints, such as the neck, shoulder, lower back, hips, knees, or ankles?  We probably don’t think twice about how important our fingers are until they have trouble functioning.  The anatomy of the fingers is more complex than what they first appear, and the condition of our fingers is critically important to our overall quality of life.

As I sit in my computer chair typing this article, I’m engaging in a tremendous amount of neuromuscular interactions by striking the keys with the tips of my fingers, utilizing the skills I was taught in grade school to type over sixty words per minute.  There have been moments when I’ve cut the tip of my thumb or one of the neighboring fingers, in which a band-aid had to be placed on that finger to lessen the impact of hitting a key so I wouldn’t be distracted by the annoying pain of each key click.  That seemingly small distraction also disrupted my efficiency in tasks such as grabbing a fork to scramble my eggs in the morning, zipping the zipper of my hoodie, and typing on my keyboard while answering emails and conducting administrative duties.  Who would’ve thought the seemingly simple activity of pressing down on a space bar, “e” key, or shift button could be taken away by a minor flesh wound?

For some members of the general population, a small cut to the tip of the finger is minor compared to other factors that hinder finger strength and everyday life human functionality.  Degenerative bone and joint conditions, such as osteoporosis and arthritis in the wrist and fingers, can impair an individual’s normal daily functions. These conditions not only cause pain in the fingers, wrists, and hands but can also lead to physical deformity due to the progression of arthritis.  After long careers of hand usage to conduct rigorous physical labor, such as swinging hammers as a craftsman, working with a knife as a chef, or being a massage therapist for years, arthritic physical side effects can appear in which the interphalangeal joints between each digit in the fingers can deviate in an abnormal direction away from normal joint congruency, creating fingers that appear crooked when compared to their normal straight alignment. Additionally, the deterioration of tendon and ligament strength within the fingers can occur over time if excessive stress is applied throughout a career of demanding physical activity.  The result of years of hard work using our hands can lead to a loss of strength, reduced ability to fully flex or extend the fingers, and impaired neuromuscular coordination throughout the fingers.

As the physical stresses of being a successful human in our society seem to appear at multiple angles, in addition to our finger and hand health, we don’t need to settle on the fact that we might be dealing with maladies that appear permanent.  We can always make an effort to improve our situation and progress towards a better outcome.  In the case of finger and hand performance, adhering to a consistent exercise program can lead to positive outcomes in enhancing finger and hand strength, allowing us to operate more efficiently in various activities that involve hand and finger movements.

A simple and effective movement we instruct most of our personal training clients to perform at the beginning of each training session includes a forearm, wrist, and finger warm-up:

Finger Flexion and Extension:  To perform the finger flexion and extension exercise, start by extending your arms in front of you at about armpit level.  Straighten the fingers away from the body until you experience a muscular sensation in the back of the hand, wrist, and forearms.  Reverse the motion by making a fist and squeezing with both hands, as if you’re wringing out a wet towel, until you experience a muscular sensation in your forearms.  Repeat this movement with both hands simultaneously for five to ten repetitions.

If we’re looking to improve grip strength or tactics to reduce wrist or finger arthritic discomfort, adhering to a consistent exercise routine one to three times per week is critically important.  Whether it’s completing a self-guided workout for forty-five minutes at Planet Fitness, attending Yoga classes, or setting aside time for an at-home exercise routine, consistency in an exercise program is a critically important asset in maintaining not only hand health but also the overall health of the body.  If you have time, try to incorporate a few finger-specific exercises into your routine before starting the day.  The results of a strong set of fingers has the potential to create a surprisingly happier, healthier, and stronger life for years to come.

Sean McCawley, the founder and owner of Napa Tenacious Fitness in Napa, CA, welcomes questions and comments. Reach him at 707-287-2727, napatenacious@gmail.com, or visit the website napatenaciousfitness.com.

Mar 14

Exercising for Something you Look Forward to

What inspires you?  What motivates you?  What makes you excited?  These questions can help us get up in the morning and get the most out of the time and energy we dedicate to activities throughout our day.  How?  If we answer these questions in a few sentences, perhaps we can either remind ourselves of what we enjoy doing or we can discover new goals we want to achieve.  The ambition to experience fun and invigorating new adventures, interact with energizing environments, or complete projects is fulfilling and rewarding.  However, monumental goals, whether short term or big and audacious, require a certain amount of energy, time, and preparation.  Having something to look forward to is potent fuel to prepare us for special moments, whether a few days away, three to four weeks from now, a few months, or even years.

The arena of lifetime fitness pays substantial dividends to our ability to enjoy what we look forward to.  A few examples of events that might produce feelings of excitement on the horizon for hard-working parents, employees, or the retired population can span anywhere from a weekend getaway to a nearby location or a trip to Europe in celebration of monumental accomplishments like a 60th birthday, a college graduation, or retiring after a long career.  Another example might be the draw to feel and look the best for a wedding for oneself or a friend.  Additionally, preparing for recreational sporting events such as a golf tournament, long-distance run, pickleball, or tennis tournament requires a refined fitness level.  Let’s not forget about a few of the more simple things that might occur every weekend that are a bright spot in our lives such as throwing a baseball with our kids or grand kids, walking or taking hikes with loved ones or friends, having the ability to bend down to pull weeds out of the garden, refinish a piece of furniture, or move a Kitchen-Aid stand mixer from one side of the kitchen to the other.  These activities don’t necessarily require a hyper-athletic fitness model like physique, but existing in our everyday environment with less fat mass, more muscle and strength, and extra energy unquestionably assists us in enjoying and savoring moments we look forward to.

Adhering to a healthy lifestyle, exercising regularly throughout the week, and abstaining from activities and environments that could harm our health doesn’t come without challenges.  After a long day of work, a cold beer, a few glasses of wine, and chips and crackers while paroosing through the multiple sources of sporting news, Instagram and Tik Tok feeds, and Netflix shows is psychologically and emotionally comforting and decompressing.  A homemade dinner consisting of vegetables, a lean protein, and a glass of sparkling water at the end of the day probably doesn’t sound as appealing as a slice of pizza or taco dish delivered from one of Napa’s amazing restaurants brought to our doorstep by Doordash.

As humans, we usually gravitate toward the path of least resistance.  It’s easy to eat whatever foods we think taste good without any care for the consequences they might have on the amount of fat mass we have on our bodies.  Lounging around and enjoying more than a few glasses of beer, wine, or cocktails after a long day of sitting at a desk for eight hours is relaxing and doesn’t take much effort.  However, if these activities of consuming too much unhealthy food and decreasing physical activity occur too often, the experiences we look forward to in life can be threatened because we didn’t take care of ourselves.

Finding a bright spot on the horizon that we embrace with anxious anticipation is a potent tool that helps fuel motivating factors to live a happy, healthy, and strong life.  Whether it be spending time with others, preparing for an event in which the body needs to be optimally conditioned, or planning a monumental vacation, maintaining a healthy and active life supports these events we look forward to.  It takes additional motivation, effort, and concentration to abstain from activities that hinder our health goals.  Additionally, it also takes effort to exercise two to three days a week and practice healthy eating habits.  However, if we dig deep and tap into what inspires us and focus on what we look forward to, perhaps building a path to be happy, healthy, and strong can empower us to enjoy the events we cherish in the future.

Sean McCawley, the founder and owner of Napa Tenacious Fitness in Napa, CA, welcomes questions and comments. Reach him at 707-287-2727, napatenacious@gmail.com, or visit the website napatenaciousfitness.com.

Mar 06

Train me to get up off the floor

“What’s the sport where the super athletic crazy guys jump on walls and scale them like a lizard?”  Asked Ophelia at one of her morning training sessions.  “You know, you see stunt men do it in Jason Bourne and John Wick movies.  They hang off walls, drop from cliffs, and land like cats after a broad jump from a twenty-foot roof top.”  She added.  “Oh, that’s parkour.”  Coach Slash, her assigned personal trainer for the session, replied.  “That’s a type of athletic discipline in which the goal is to get from one point to another the fastest way possible.  That sometimes means jumping from one roof top to another.”  Ophelia paused momentarily with a sly smirk. “I want you to train me to be able to do that.”  She snickered and added, “Either that or make it to where I can get up and down from the floor.”

Ophelia is one of our diligent and devoted personal training clients in her mid-sixties.  She is in exceptional health and maintains a healthy ratio of lean muscle mass to fat mass, show’s up on time to her bi-weekly training sessions fifteen minutes early ready to warm up and exercise, and, as we can see by her comments at the beginning of the page, she has a witty and spry sense of humor.  So, Ophelia is doing a lot of things correctly when it comes to practicing the art of lifetime fitness.  A consistent exercise ritual, a healthy diet, smiling, and laughter are a significant portion of her life.

As humans advance in age, events occur that make seemingly normal activities like getting up and down from the floor become challenging.  Past events throughout our lives can contribute to joint pain, mobility limitations, or muscular weakness.  The first steps when getting out of bed first thing in the morning can remind us that somewhere along the line in our life, we’ve tweaked our back, strained a shoulder tendon, or our joints have developed arthritis.

The byproducts of enduring the stresses of life have the likelihood of producing pain-like symptoms, contributing to the reduction of our normal physical activities, and changing the way we interact with our everyday life environments.  Contributing factors leading to increased pain and mobility impairment include sedentary lifestyles, poor dietary decisions, or lack of motivation to overcome and rehab significant injuries.  These examples are often due to neglecting the importance of staying active and exercising, which produces suboptimal lifestyle adaptations that might include the inability to perform simple human functions, such as getting up and down from the floor.

Superflous amounts of sitting for hours, consuming high amount of starchy and fatty foods during low levels of physical activity, endulging in drinking copious amounts of alcohol more than half the week, or putting routine exercise on the back burner are self induced examples of why people struggle to perform something as simple as getting up and down from the ground.  These examples don’t include living with an advanced form of arthritis and osteoporosis, a degenerative nerve disease, or recovering from joint replacement surgery.  Those extreme cases require a more advanced form of therapy and medical intervention.  However, human’s in our current day and age can significantly benefit from focusing on the low hanging fruits of success by ensuring to refine the issues that are right in front of them they have control over such as practicing healthy dietary choices, sitting less, moving more, and finding exercises and recreational physical activities they enjoy.

General advancement in age can be expected to occur every time we pass around the sun.  We don’t need cutting-edge research to demonstrate that a body that is a year older than it was three hundred and sixty-five days ago has bone, joint, and connective tissue that isn’t as new as what it was in the past.  While we know that the tissues in the body change over time, and sometimes the tissue becomes more brittle and our coordination isn’t where it was as teenagers at our athletic prime, one thing that we never want to disappear is our ability to get up and down off the floor.  Similar to when a baseball player doesn’t practice playing catch and the ability to catch and throw can decrease, getting up and down from the ground is a diminishing skill set.  Focusing on small goals such as managing weight, working on not overindulging too much in alcohol or treats, and practicing exercises that reinforce the ability to get up and down from the floor can help us to live happier, healthier, and stronger lives.

Sean McCawley, the founder and owner of Napa Tenacious Fitness in Napa, CA, welcomes questions and comments. Reach him at 707-287-2727, napatenacious@gmail.com, or visit the website napatenaciousfitness.com.

Feb 28

Strong, Mobile, and Durable Hips

Hobbies, traveling, completing weekend projects, and spending time with friends, family, and significant others require the ability to move and interact with the environment around us.  Retired and career-driven populations looking to start a family or who are already raising children depend on efficient human movement.  Whether it be working on refinishing a side table for our living room, sitting at a desk for eight to ten hours at the office, or carting a group of pre-teens to and from extracurricular activities or youth sporting events, our bodies need to function properly to support the people, communities, and projects that rely on us.

Bending over, getting up and down from a seated or kneeling position, reaching in front, twisting and rotating, or simply walking to and from the car seems simple.  That is, until a spasm in the lower back, pain in the hip region, or knee mobility limitations unveil themselves to hinder normal human function.  While a healthy diet, maintaining a reasonable lean muscle mass to fat mass ratio, and staying cardiovasculary fit are critical toward the success of our everyday life activities, a commonly overlooked component of our body that contributes to a substantial portion of our human movement is the hip joint and its sophisitcated network of muscles, tendons, ligaments, nerves, bursaes, and bone-to-bone attachments.

Residing smack dab in the middle of the body, the hips consist of the attachment of the spine to the sacrum, the pelvic girdle, and the right and left femur that inserts into the hip joint.  This dense, bony framework assists the torso in rotating from left to right and bending the torso up and down.  Additionally, the hip joint allows our lower extremities to stride forward when walking, scaling a set of stairs, or stepping up and over objects.  It’s valuable to appreciate the muscles that create such seemingly simple movements, granting us the ability to function successfully in society as bipedal organisms.

The hip flexor muscles originate from the anterior portion of the spine and the inside of the pelvic girdle and attach to the front of the femurs.  Deep, intrinsic hip flexor muscles such as the psoas and rectus femoris create powerful movements of hip flexion, better known as bringing the thigh closer to the torso and forward when we walk, climb up a set of stairs, or lift the legs to put on our shoes and socks.  The glutes originate at the back end of the hip bone and are attached to the back of the thigh.  Gluteal muscles are strong hip extensors that push the pelvis forward underneath the torso to assist in maintaining an upright posture.  Bringing the leg backward during the posterior path of follow-through when walking movement is also supported by the gluteal and hamstring muscles.  The abductors originate at the top of the pelvic girdle and attach to the inner bottom portion of the thigh and the top of the tibia, or shin bone, below the knee joint.  Moving the leg to the outside and away from the body’s midline is powered by the abductors.  Abduction means to “take away,”  for example, like someone is being “abducted by aliens.”  The difference is that aliens aren’t taking away our thighs.   Our hip abductor muscles are “taking away” the thigh from the body’s midline, utilizing muscular force by abducting the hip.

A movement that we conduct with our personal training clients every training session to ensure the body never forgets how to perform the normal daily function of walking, stepping up, or getting up and down from the ground is hip flexion.  The seemingly basic function of bringing the hip forward is commonly overlooked.  Hip flexion usually isn’t on the forefront of people’s minds until one can’t get up off the ground or has issues going up and down stairs.  Therefore, practicing the forward movement of the hip should never be overstated and practiced consistently.  An example of practicing hip flexion is the “standing leg kick stretch” within our dynamic stretching warm-up that is conducted at the beginning of every training session to activate the muscle of hip flexion.

Standing Leg Kick Stretch:  Reach your hand in front of you.  While keeping your supporting leg straight, actively bring one leg in front of you to touch your hand as if you are performing a kicking motion.  Ensure that the kicking leg is kept as straight as possible. You should experience a slight stretching sensation in your hamstring and calf muscles.  Repeat this movement five to ten times on both legs.

If a guitarist doesn’t practice their musical talent, they might not perform to their musically gifted potential because lack of rehearsing a movement that one seems to know like the back of their hand consistently becomes a diminished skill.  The movements of the hip aren’t much different if a seemingly innate skillset isn’t practiced.  Therefore, ensuring to consistently practice the movements our hips produce contributes to keeping the body’s physical conditioning in a fine-tuned and polished state to live happy, healthy, and strong lives.

Sean McCawley, the founder and owner of Napa Tenacious Fitness in Napa, CA, welcomes questions and comments. Reach him at 707-287-2727, napatenacious@gmail.com, or visit the website napatenaciousfitness.com.

Feb 19

Going on Walking Dates for Physical and Emotional Health

The never-ending hamster wheel of stress hits us from all angles in portions of our lives where we spend most of our time.  An example might include spending eight to ten hours per day devoting our time and energy to our jobs, whether on our computers, phones, commuting in the car, or parked in chairs at the office.  Or, we might spend a superfluous amount of time absorbing electronic forms of entertainment, such as checking our phones every five minutes to see what text messages we may have received or what the hottest new thread of social media networks might be.  For parents of school-age children, the demands of ensuring children get to school or sports practice on time adds another set of tactics that can’t be left undone.  It’s easy for us to put other activities first before taking care of ourselves.  For those of us who have spouses, significant others, or friends that we enjoy hanging out with outside of employment and family life logistics, spending time with those people might be exactly what we need to separate ourselves from the perpetual fire hose of the stresses life imposes on us.  Scheduling a date to set aside your normal work life and taking a walk with a special person not only helps enhance physical well-being but also introduces much-needed time to decompress and enjoy social interaction with another human who doesn’t want your money, depend on you to make money for their business, and grants you freedom from worrying about other humans who depend on you.

Walking is an underappreciated form of fitness that optimizes human performance in a multitude of ways.  If we were to track the daily steps a server at one of Napa’s local restaurants takes, twenty thousand steps would be a minimum amount throughout an eight-hour shift of waiting tables. The physical demands of food servers, bartenders, and bussers require a sufficient cardiovascular system, a strong core to stand upright, and joints that can endure the stresses of being mobile for an eight-hour shift.  For workers who sit at a desk answering phone calls, working on reports, or answering emails, achieving ten thousand steps is a reach.  The desk worker, commuter, or stay-at-home parent might not have the same physical demands as a high-speed food server.  Furthermore, the type of stress an individual produces when completing the administrative logistics of managing schedules, answering phone calls and texts, and tabulating financial logistics produces a substantial amount of mental, psychological, and emotional stress.  By the time we come home to our families or loved ones, we’re pretty much a ticking time bomb full of enough stressful energy to unleash upon the first person in sight after stepping through the front door.

Research has repeatedly produced evidence that exercise is a panacea of solutions to not only enhance our physical well-being, but regular exercise also acts as a potent medicine to counteract psychological stress.  While going to the gym and adhering to gym sessions containing resistance training, entering a cycling class to get a sweat on, or following a Yoga instructional video produces significant adaptations toward enhancing fitness levels, it might be just another box to check off for an individual getting off an eight to ten hour work day.  If attending the local gym or participating in a spin or Pilates class doesn’t seem like the right fit, perhaps the simple act of walking with your spouse, friend, or child might be a useful alternative.  The combination of a leisurely walk with someone you get along with and look forward to sharing time with has the potential to decrease psychological and emotional stress while exercising muscles that might have laid dormant all day while working.

Scheduling walking dates throughout the week doesn’t hold the same expectations as completing a rigorous workout at a local gym or small group fitness class.  The demands of walking are more achievable than ensuring one must show up at a certain time for spin, Yoga, or Pilates class.  We can walk outside our dwelling and start moving forward at a slow pace with minimal expectations on when we’re going to start a walk.  The only requirement is showing up for a walk.  The chirping birds, trees waving in the wind, the bright sun, and the dimly lit moon don’t care when you join them for a leisurely walk.  So, take a walk when ever you want.  More importantly, if you find a friend who wants to join you on a walk with little to no expectation of physical exertion level and a flexible schedule, the benefits toward our lifetime fitness efforts are profoundly empowering.

Sean McCawley, the founder and owner of Napa Tenacious Fitness in Napa, CA, welcomes questions and comments. Reach him at 707-287-2727, napatenacious@gmail.com, or visit the website napatenaciousfitness.com.

Feb 13

Consistent Exercise and Pain Management Keeps the Spine Strong

Generalized “wear and tear” from enduring the stress of life for over fifty years elicits repercussions to our joints.  The articular surface of joints can get scuffed after being used for manual labor, the stresses of an athletic career, or recovering from a traumatic injury.  As the surface of joints wears down, they become rough and gritty, akin to the feel of sandpaper.  The result of the rough surface of joints can lead to arthritis and sensations of crepitus, such as the sound and feeling of two marbles grinding against each other.  This is commonly felt in the knee joints when traveling up a set of steps.  Along with the contributing factors toward the wearing down of the surface of joints caused by a person’s history of physical stress, a factor that comes attached to our lives no matter what our physical activity background is aging.  General age-related degeneration of bone and joint structure is something every human has as part of their life.  One of the most common joint injuries affected by the advancement of age occurs in the spine.

Consisting of over twenty bones, the spine is a complex of bones called vertebrae.  These spinal bones have a multitude of critically important functions to the success of our lives.  The spine’s most obvious observable attribute is the structural feature of holding the torso upright.  Acting as a vertical rod that connects the hips to the skull, the spine keeps a human upright to walk around and interact with the environment.  In addition to the important structural features of the spine, each section of the spine has unique functions.  The cervical section of the spine consists of seven vertebrae that attach the skull to the shoulder region, which have a distinctive shape meant for rotation of the neck, allowing for turning, rotation, and hinging of the skull.  Just below the cervical section are twelve thoracic vertebrae, which allow for attachment of the ribs.  Between the ribs and the hips resides a set of five lumbar vertebrae before the spine meets the sacrum and hips.  The lumbar vertebrae are the largest and most dense section of spinal bones, acting as a weight-bearing centerpiece to keep the body upright.

It should go without saying that the health and well-being of our spine are critically important for the functionality of our everyday lives.  Degenerative joint conditions in the spine can include arthritis, stenosis, and compressed nerves caused by bulging or herniated discs.  These examples of spinal conditions can lead to debilitating symptoms of pain, numbness, and weakness throughout the body.  I wish I could give everyone magic spine-strengthening pills that would alleviate pain, and we can live in a world with an indestructible back, but we don’t live in a fantasy world. The truth is the body is prone to injury and gradual deterioration.  However, we don’t need to settle and give in to pain.  The detrimental effects of pain and debilitating spine injuries can be mitigated via strategically designed exercise tactics.

Two factors that affect people and can be rectified relatively soon via consistent exercise practice are staving off pain and increasing mobility. If the body is in less pain, fewer restrictions hold a person back from moving freely in their everyday life activities.

Aching, dull, or searing muscular pain in the lower back can create a psychological and emotional distraction, impeding people from wanting to pursue recreational physical activities.  Throwing a ball with grandchildren, gardening, or participating in sports such as tennis, golf, or pickleball can be limited due to the onset of lower back pain.  Fear and anxiety that someone might hurt their back further could veer a person away from participating in the physical activities they cherish.  As a solution to control pain when lower back injuries are perpetually presenting themselves, ensuring to stick to a schedule of pain reduction tactics is critical.  Pain-reducing tactics such as applying a heating pad to the lower back for twenty minutes, applying a topical anti-inflammatory ointment, or acquiring therapeutic bodywork can be helpful.  However, it’s challenging to tell if these tactics alleviate and stave off pain if they aren’t practiced consistently.  To ensure the maximum effectiveness of such simple pain relief tactics, paving out time somewhere once per day to apply these tactics has the potential to make a change.

Another relatively safe tactic we recommend to our personal training clients to manage back pain is increasing mobility.  Sufficient management of mobility means optimizing the body’s ability to bend, twist, and extend in a greater range of motion.  One of the most simple pain relieving techniques we conduct with our personal training clients is a knee tilt stretch:

Knee tilt stretch:  To perform the knee tilt stretch, start by positioning yourself flat on your back on the ground with your arms extended and your knees bent.   Tilt your knees to one side of the body as far as you can while keeping your knees and ankles touching.  After a brief stretching sensation is experienced in the lower back and outer hip, alternate this motion to the other side.  Repeat this movement for five to 10 repetitions on both sides of the body.

As humans advance in age, generalized wear and tear of the organs and tissues within the body can appear when we least expect it.  However, the older we get, the more we gain experience in the trials of life, usually resulting in becoming smarter humans.  Therefore, while our bodies might not be as new as they were when we were running around in our high school and college years, life experience grants us the gift of knowing that we should work smarter and not harder.  To reduce the maladies of lower back pain, ensure that pain-relieving and mobility tactics suit your needs.  Once that’s established, practicing these techniques daily can serve as the magic pill to reducing back pain and the likelihood of future injury so we can live happy, healthy, and strong lives.

Sean McCawley, the founder and owner of Napa Tenacious Fitness in Napa, CA, welcomes questions and comments. Reach him at 707-287-2727, napatenacious@gmail.com, or visit the website napatenaciousfitness.com.

Feb 07

Take Care of Your Feet

The gift of existing in the world as bipedal organisms puts the human race at the top of the hierarchy in the animal kingdom. With a set of hands with opposable thumbs and the ability to walk, our body’s engineering makes us one of the most sophisticated and successful species on earth.  While the skeletal structure of the human body is impressive in many aspects, one area that allows us to get out of bed, get in and out of our cars, traverse a set of stairs, and travel from our vehicle to our jobs includes a particular body part that is commonly overlooked:  our feet.  Until we get a case of plantar fasciitis, shin splits, bunions, lower extremity neuropathy, or a harsh case of sore soles of the feet after a long day of walking, we don’t necessarily understand how important the condition of our feet can be.

The connective tissue in the feet consists of a complex matrix of tendons, ligaments, blood vessels, nerves, and muscles. Made up of over twenty bones and a vast network of muscles, the human foot has many functional units, allowing us to walk, stand up, and conduct dynamic movements on our feet.  The tiny bones of the feet, including the toes, metatarsals, and heel, hold the load of our body when standing, walking, climbing stairs, or running.  Additionally, the neuromuscular signals throughout the feet harmoniously create coordinated movements in the toes, ankle, and lower extremities throughout most movements we conduct in our everyday lives. Therefore, appreciating the structural integrity and conditioning of the foot muscles can’t be overstated.

Foot pain can arise from sedentary activities in which the foot is stationary for a prolonged period.  The lack of blood flow and neuromuscular engagement can cause a decrease in muscular tone, hindering the ability of the foot muscles to maintain sufficient muscle mass and coordination.  A lack of physical activity can lead to a decrease in athleticism and coordination, which contributes to rolling ankles, stubbing toes, and the risk of falling.  Additionally, periods of inactivity increase the liklihood of  injuries due to the lack of muscular conditioning and the foot muscles’ inability to manage the stress of everyday life when walking and bearing weight on the feet throughout a normal day.  The combination of being on one’s feet for hours on feet lacking strength and muscular endurance, and is not used to taking ten thousand or more steps per day can lead to bruising to the sole, collapsing of the foot arch, or pain in the ankle and shin area.  If our goal is to recover foot pain and mitigate the likelihood of further maladies within the foot, intervention and maintenance routines must be consistently followed.

When our personal training clients report foot pain, the first tactic is identifying what issues worsen the pain.  If standing at the workplace seems to be the primary culprit for foot pain, perhaps strategically integrating periods of fifteen minutes sitting down with the feet propped up on a chair could help.  Paving out a portion of your day to set aside two or three fifteen-minute gaps in which a timer is set and the feet are propped on a chair off the ground is a simple solution that doesn’t need a doctor appointment or a list of fifteen physical therapy exercises that must be performed twice a day.

We recommend ankle and foot stretches and resistance training exercises to our personal training clients. While strength, muscular endurance, and mobility are unquestionably important in mitigating undesirable foot issues, it’s also worthwhile to understand a simple physics equation: force = mass multiplied by acceleration.  Mass in this equation is our body weight, and gravity combines with our body mass to anchor down to the ground.  If the body has excess fat mass contributing to the overall weight residing over the feet, the feet are going to have to support more force being pressed down upon the tiny little bones responsible for holding our body upright.  If adjustments toward lessening overall fat mass haven’t been addressed when foot pain is present, another low-hanging fruit toward resolving foot pain could be losing weight.

A simple and effective exercise tactic for strengthening the feet we conduct in about ninety percent of our personal training clients’ exercise prescriptions is plantar flexion, commonly known as calf raise exercises.  This tactic assists in maintaining the muscles that are responsible for bringing the heel up and down throughout walking movements.  Here is an example of a plantar flexion exercise:

Isometric plantar flexion:  While standing upright, lift the heels off the ground until a brief muscular activation sensation is experienced in the gastrocnemius muscles.  Ensure to press on the balls of the feet and avoid letting the feet roll out to the side.  Maintain this position for fifteen to thirty seconds.

Foot pain is no fun.  And, doctors and podiatrists are invaluable assets to the success and production of the human race.  However, when foot pain arises, we can resolve a few issues before booking a visit to a medical professional to assess foot pain.  A few first steps toward helping the feet could be as simple as resting more, ensuring we’re getting enough steps throughout the day, managing the composition of excess fat mass on the body, and ensuring the muscles of the feet get the attention they need throughout exercise sessions.

Sean McCawley, the founder and owner of Napa Tenacious Fitness in Napa, CA, welcomes questions and comments. Reach him at 707-287-2727, napatenacious@gmail.com, or visit the website napatenaciousfitness.com.

Jan 29

Am I Getting Enough Protein in My Diet?

“It’s challenging for me to eat enough protein throughout the day,” shared Nester during his training session.  “I’m only one hundred and fifty pounds, and the doctor recommends that I eat about half a gram of protein per pound of body weight.”  This would mean that Nester must consume around seventy-five grams of protein throughout the day.  A busy work schedule that includes massive amounts of phone calls, emails, computer work, and meetings posed a hindrance for Nester to sit down and eat.

“How much protein do you usually eat in a day?” I asked Nester.  “Sometimes around fifty grams or so,” He replied.  I was curious of what Nester perceived as fifty grams of protein,“What do you have for breakfast, lunch, and dinner?”  Nester answered, “I usually do some toast at breakfast.  Lunch is a wild card. Sometimes I don’t eat lunch at all.  At dinner, sometimes I have to go out to dinner with my colleagues and clients and have something there.”

From my standpoint, Nester was so busy with his work schedule that his goal of practicing optimal dietary decision-making habits was on the back burner.  The obligations toward the successful operations of his work schedule unquestionably took priority before making skillful eating decisions to reach his protein goals.  If Nester wanted to rectify the issue of not getting enough protein in his daily diet, prioritizing awareness toward ensuring protein is consumed throughout the day regularly would need to happen.

Dietary protein is essential for nurturing the skeletal muscle in the body.  In the exercise arena, adequate protein consumption and consistent resistance training go hand in hand.  After a session of performing compound resistance training tactics such as squats, push-ups, and pulling movements for three sets of ten repetitions on each movement, the skeletal muscle becomes stressed resulting in microscopic tears within the connective tissue comprising the muscle.  The body’s natural reaction is to heal these microscopic tears via muscle resynthesis by adhering protein from the bloodstream onto the damaged site of muscle.  This action of protein resynthesis rebuilds the muscle to become larger and stronger during muscular contractions.   Therefore, consistently practiced resistance training plus adequate protein consumption produces structurally reinforced lean muscle mass.

After gathering information on what Nester ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I found a gap in his tactics for acquiring sufficient protein.  It wasn’t the intimidating number of acquiring seventy-five grams of protein in his diet that was the primary culprit.  Nester simply wasn’t eating enough food overall.

A simple solution we offer our personal training clients looking for nutritional guidance, like Nester, who are struggling to acquire adequate protein in their diet, is to ensure they eat enough throughout the day.  It’s all too often that we hear that people work themselves to the bone and never get out of their office chairs until the final minutes of their shift conclude.  Before they know it, they haven’t eaten anything besides a mixed coffee drink and pastry from Starbucks.  When it’s dinner time, anything will suffice to fill the hole of hunger.  In this case, the last thing on people’s minds is getting enough protein.

An attainable solution that many people find useful is to ensure that they eat three to five times per day.  This could mean breakfast, a morning snack, lunch, an afternoon snack (if necessary), and a light dinner.  Furthermore, in each of these meals, including a lean protein source about the portion size of what can fit in the palm of the hand is a useful way to include protein in each eating period.  The average hand palm size is about two to four inches in surface area.  So, including a protein source such as one or two eggs, a slice of chicken breast, or a handful of raw unsalted nuts could suffice as an acceptable source of protein in each meal.  In Nester’s case, if he were to eat fifteen grams of protein in each meal throughout five eating periods, he could come very close to meeting seventy-five grams of protein if he simply included about a handful serving size of protein in each meal without even looking at a nutritional label.

Identifying and consuming adequate dietary protein is essential to optimizing fitness adaptations, such as managing weight and building lean muscle mass.  If tracking the amount of protein consumed daily is challenging, try to include lean protein in every meal.  By practicing this simple tactic of frequently eating protein in every meal, the body will be able to repair damaged muscle and assist in getting the most out of a consistent exercise routine.

Sean McCawley, the founder and owner of Napa Tenacious Fitness in Napa, CA, welcomes questions and comments. Reach him at 707-287-2727, napatenacious@gmail.com, or visit the website napatenaciousfitness.com.

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