Feb 10

Moving Side to Side and Front to Back

Curbs, steps, speedbumps, and roots causing sidewalk cracks have a purpose in the functionality of our society.  Sidewalk curbs create a location for our automobiles to park next to as not to disturb walking patrons.  Speedbumps made of asphalt and painted with white or striped yellow give the message to drivers to slow down.  Otherwise, the bottom end of the car could receive a reminder in the form of a repair bill from a local autobody shop.  Trees need room to grow as well.  Their roots spread underground to acquire nutrients and water so their leaves can deliver oxygen to the air we breathe.

Society and mother nature harmonizes, offering organization between humans traveling on foot, our four-wheeled gas-powered transportation devices, and our tall leafy friends, the trees.  However, these byproducts of increased height on the ground we walk on are sometimes perceived as obstacles for individuals with hindered movement.

Walking is a normal human motion mastered at a young age.  Putting one foot in front of the other to travel a set distance is commonly perceived as a non-challenging task.  This is until something happens, causing us not to walk normally.  Overcoming a significant illness, recovering from surgery, or shifting from a deconditioned lifestyle poses physical challenges to the body.  Pain, lethargy, and decreased muscular strength and endurance can make these seemingly simple increases in height to move our feet while walking laborious and challenging tasks.

Maintaining the ability to have an efficient forward stride followed by the posterior follow throughout each step of walking ensures optimal forward movement.  Picking up the feet to increase the elevation of the foot moving forward ensures we don’t scrape or stub the front of our foot on any object while walking forward.  This motion requires adequate hip and knee flexion.  As the femur elevates and the knee bends in a normal stride, the foot’s distance from the ground increases.  Additionally, as the foot is elevated via optimal hip and knee flexion, the foot’s sole needs to be parallel to the ground.  If the toes are at a decreased angle, the probability for the front of the foot to drag and catch an object increases.  Lastly, proficient walking strides include an efficient follow-through in which the foot travels behind the body after that foot propels the body forward.

Awareness of these variables in walking is critically essential.  However, to increase our body’s walking performance and decrease the likelihood of falling, consistently performing routine exercise substantially improves our overall walking performance.  Below are a few techniques we practice with our personal training clients:

  1. Isolated single-leg step-up:  Place one foot on a step three to nine inches high.  The elevated foot remains on the step the entire time.  While shifting the torso slightly forward to where the axis of the armpit is over the middle of the thigh, push the elevated heel on the step into the ground as you elevate your trailing foot onto the step. Next, maintain the same elevated foot on the step and slowly descend the trailing foot to the ground.  Ensure to keep the elevated foot’s heel planted firmly into the step throughout the movement.  Repeat this movement for one to three sets of five repetitions on each leg.
  2. Standing isometric single-leg hip flexion: Standing with good posture, lift one leg to where the thigh is somewhat perpendicular to the axis of the crest of the hip.  Ensure to keep the shin directly under the knee as the thigh remains elevated.  Stand next to an object to grab onto for balance, such as a door frame or post.  Hold this position on each leg for one to three sets of fifteen seconds each leg.
  3. Standing knee flexion: Maintaining an upright posture, flex one knee by “kicking” the heel posteriorly toward the back of the body.  You should feel slight muscular sensation in the hamstring muscles.  If additional balance is required, perform this exercise against a wall.  Repeat this movement for one to three sets of five repetitions on each leg.

Walking might seem like a task as simple as breathing. Unfortunately, physically traumatic events in life hinder our ability to perform such an everyday task.  Remember to practice refining your walking stride.  Let’s also remember to refine our walking performance practicing consistency and adherence to our 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.

Feb 01

Self improvement balancing acts as time goes on

“It doesn’t get much easier.”  This statement came from one of my peers who was ten years older than me.  He who expressed this to me after sharing with him the knee pain I was experiencing.  This knee pain was brought about by spending a significant amount of time preparing my garden for the spring season over the weekend.  Moving wheelbarrows of mulch, laying weed barriers, setting up anti-squirrel defense systems, and turning my compost pile were just a few tactics that took a fair amount of physical exertion.  I knew my garden was getting prepared to become a lush and fertile climate for veggies to thrive.  However, my knee felt tired, swollen, and cranky after the rigorous effort I put into gardening.

I understood my friend’s dry, yet, honest exclamation.  His statement expressed his experience with aches and pains he has endured throughout his life.  He was a sage I respected who had seen ten more years of stress than me that life could throw at a person.  However, my entrepreneurial spirit was motivated to find the positive in this comment.

The next day, I thought about the phrase “it doesn’t get any easier” and connected that statement to the currency of the situation regarding my knee pain.  My immediate counter to this statement was, “but, it gets better.”  I’m sure many people can relate to challenging times in life.  Being a parent, attending college, and starting a business were not easy parts of my life.

I learned fast that progressing from a regular undergraduate student to graduate classes didn’t offer any breaks.  After my son turned fourteen, I was posed with an intelligent, courageous, and strong-willed human under my roof that I hadn’t dealt with throughout my life.  Branching off from working for large companies to opening my business left me feeling like I was on an inflatable raft out in the Pacific Ocean with only an oar to paddle myself to shore.  Those times weren’t “easy” at all.  However, by enduring the trials and tribulations these circumstances put in my way, I’ve progressed through these challenging experiences. I now possess pertinent tools to make my everyday life enjoyable and fulling.

Enduring the nagging pain and the inconvenience of a swollen knee wasn’t the most desirable state of affairs I would prefer.  However, I believed I would feel better in more ways than one by developing well-thought-out approaches to progress past this knee pain.  As an advocate of lifetime fitness, my nature was to implement tactics to improve my knee status and find a way to “get better.”

We promote a phrase to our personal training clients at the beginning of their training session: “you’ll feel better walking out than when you walked in.”  Even though a person might feel physically deconditioned, enduring pain in the body, or stressed out from the logistics of life, nine times out of ten, they feel better after a bout of routine exercise.

So, how could the currency of my situation become better?  I had a strong sense that focusing on the healing abilities of my body as I aged wasn’t a productive way to improve my situation.  A billion research articles state that the body doesn’t heal as fast following each trip around the sun.  Mulling my mind on those thoughts wasn’t going to do much good for my knee pain.  However, designing a workout focusing on healing loads, injury prevention, balance, and strength training, the other parts of my body will improve how I feel.  If I can improve how I feel, things will “get better.”

Focusing on joint injury prevention, balance, coordination, and functional strength are simple yet effective exercise themes.  Techniques such as planks, push-ups, and single-leg balancing exercises promote strength, endurance, and durability in many critically essential joints throughout the body.

Enduring pain at any episode of life can obstruct the overall experiences we get out of our everyday lives.  Indeed, we can be posed with new challenges that we haven’t yet seen, making them a challenge to overcome.  However, if we can establish a starting point in how we can “make things better,” perhaps we can take steps forward to alleviating and potentially surpassing what malady is imposing its will upon us.

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 25

Instant Gratification and The Human Body

The human race has been privileged throughout the past few decades with phenomenological inventions offering instant gratification.  Payment via tapping our credit card or phone on the surface of a payment processor at grocery stores, gas stations, and restaurants removes any apprehensions of thinking twice about the number being deducted from our digital bank account.  Remember when we needed to acquire a carbon copy by superimposing an image of the credit card’s number on a triplicate of white, yellow, and pink paper?  Those days have been conveniently put in the archive of human history.  Our lives are far less complicated thanks to the genius of the human race.

Downloading content on our phones can be acquired in the blink of an eye.  To make this more impressive, I could watch the entire series of Friends on a road while droning through the badlands of I-5 on Hulu, thanks to the assistance of our 5G phone networks.  Remember the sound of connecting to the internet back in the ’90s?  It sounded akin to the combination of screeching tires and an albatross mating call.  For the generation of humans who lived through these experiences, they can appreciate that the era of digital instant gratification is here to stay.

These technological advances to aid in our everyday productivity can offer massive improvements to our lives. For example: opening up the Amazon app and having a thirty-six pack of toilet paper delivered to my doorstep in less than twenty-four hours is pretty cool.  This convenience allocates a free hour in my day by alleviating a trip to Wal-Mart to buy some toilet paper.  Avoiding waiting in a line watching people stare at their cell phones to absorb the latest mind-leaching Tik-Tok reel while being blasted by the cacophony of screaming children isn’t that bad.

Unfortunately, this immediate result of completing tasks requiring physical effort and thought can be debilitating to our productivity in human development as we age.  The resources that give us that “ta-dah!” effect after we get something done right away can become too prevalent in our day-to-day lives.  Too much immediate gratification could lead to a lack of using the brain to produce creative thoughts and the body to move and interact less with the environment around us.  If long-term health is a goal in our lives, it’s worthwhile to maintain clarity of the critically important factors of moving and making conscious decisions throughout our day.

The physiology involved in the human body doesn’t offer instant gratification the same way as the tap payment of a credit card when filling up our gas on their convenient payment processors located on the pump.  If our fitness goals entail increasing strength, losing weight, or decreasing pain, a substantial amount of focus and consistent practice in keeping the body moving must be allocated to our schedule.  We can’t download an app from the Apple or Google Play store to immediately be able to perform ten pushups, maintain a healthy weight, or overcome nagging pain and injuries.  The efforts, thoughts, and energy we dedicate to moving our bodies are the application.  There aren’t many machines that can replace the willpower and discipline ingrained within our human identity.

It’s helpful to put digital devices away for a moment that track every variable of data present in our lives.  Ensuring we can participate in everyday activities like walking long distances, stepping up and down stairs, or bending down to pick objects up off the ground are necessary to live long and happy lives.  Instant satisfaction from technology has created this fantastic world we exist in.  However, let’s not forget to maintain the movement that our ancestors who lived before the era of instant digital satisfaction.  Even though our everyday lives are proficient thanks to technology, we still need to roll up our sleeves and consistently perform chores, walk frequently, and train our bodies to endure the demands the world imposes on our bodies.

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 12

Getting Fit and Staying Healthy for The New Year

As January approaches mid-month, New Year’s deals for group fitness classes and gym memberships are operating in full effect.  The local gyms are flooded with current and annual gym members who put their attendance on the back burner. Newbies to the gym scene flock through the sliding glass front door of the gym, filling the aisles bordered with weight machines like schools of fish during a seasonal breeding season.  As a veteran gym rat, this time of the year is akin to the tourist season in the summer months in Napa Valley.  Visitors from afar flood the roads with rental cars traveling twenty miles below the speed limit while they fiddle with Google maps on their cell phones to find their next winery to visit.  It’s not much different on the gym floor when an individual with little-to-no gym experience attempts to adjust the setting on the leg press machine.  A look of bewilderment, awe, or even terror isn’t uncommon for this novice population of exercise participants in the gym throughout the first month of the year.

Our society is fortunate to embrace this New Year’s theme of self-improvement by focusing on life-enhancing factors via exercise.  However, I’m sure my fellow gym rats who spend ten-plus hours a week in the fitness arena know that come February, we’ll see the number of New Year fitness enthusiasts substantially decrease.  As an advocate for self-improvement using exercise as tool for success, it’s a bummer to see people veer away from such a powerfully impactful goal toward overall quality of life

I can recall when my son was attending first through sixth grade in elementary school.  I happened to be starting my journey as a self-employed businessperson at the same time.  I knew I needed a specific level of adherence to a solid routine to be a good parent and business owner. This meant I needed to understand the business logistics of balancing financials, communicating with clients, and maintaining a physical storefront while ensuring my son ate breakfast, got to school on time, and could be picked up from school on time.  These requirements of a business owner and parent meant I needed a sturdy foundation of waking up earlier than everyone else, going to bed on time, and becoming a master of time management. Understanding that I needed to establish this foundational level of “busy” kept my business and son healthy as they both developed into thriving and strong pinnacles in my life.

Maintaining optimal fitness levels is similar to owning a business or ensuring your 1st-grade child receives adequate attention.  More importantly, the consistent nourishment toward a living and breathing business and a developing human learning to read, write, and socialize is similar to optimizing our ability to stay fit and healthy.  Establishing a base fitness level helps us stay in shape for the long run.

Understanding a solid base level of fitness helps to set parameters of our expectations of what defines a strong version of ourselves.  An example might be to set the goal of performing ten to twenty push-ups without resting in between reps, a one-minute plank, or conducting the sun salutation by memory.  Once those movements are mastered, and the desired number of repetitions is achieved, the next trick is to maintain those examples of strength for an extended period in the future.  Additionally, the ability to stay in shape is forged by the expectation to avoid deviating from movements we hold ourselves accountable to be able to perform at will.  If we falter from those numbers, we now have a barometer of an inadequate fitness level.  Once we detect our performance in these baseline exercises is suboptimal, we know that we need to spend more time and energy on our exercise adherence.

Exercising to improve the overall quality of life is essential.  Setting guidelines to stick to and ensuring specific movements can always be performed allows us to live happier, stand up to the stresses imposed upon us, and avoid psychological and physical illnesses.  It’s equally, if not more important, to get in shape and then stay in shape 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.

Jan 05

Finding a stable relationship… with exercise

The new year brings about feelings of revolution in our lives.  Two Thousand and Twenty-Two  is behind us.  Along with all of the time, energy, and emotions we devoted to progressing ourselves last year, those remnants of time become water under the bridge.  As we dust the debris of last year off our shoulders, the popular new year’s theme of motivation produces a path to a new frontier of laying plans to achieve big audacious goals for 2023.  Along with capitalizing on financial logistics, obtaining new skills to support our careers, or improving our interpersonal relationships, one topic commonly hitting the New Year’s resolution wish list is self-care.

Losing weight, getting more sleep, or weaning off caffeine are a few examples of common goals to refine wellness.  As much as these goals contribute to substantial benefits to human productivity and adequately enjoying life, sometimes people can enter the tactics required to obtain these goals in a state of reluctancy.

Let’s take a trip back to our years as seniors in high school.  I’m sure we can recall one of the most challenging teachers who seemed to be in emotional rapture after handing out in-class reading assignments of Catcher in the Rye;  no offense to J.D. Salinger.  Catcher in the Rye was one of my favorite books that developed my love for reading and writing.  But in my last year of high school, itching to graduate and never set foot on a high school campus again, sitting down at a desk and reading a book wasn’t at the top of my list of priorities.  After the teacher administered this mind-numbing, dry as a bone assignment, he exited the room and left the students to their own devices with the trust that the chapter would be complete.  We were expected to regurgitate the pertinent lessons this critical reading assignment offered our lives upon his return.  Did we read that chapter when the teacher walked out of the door?  Nope.  My fellow students and I flung the Salinger’s masterpiece over our shoudlers, turned to our favorite classmate, and began chatting about where the next raging party was after Friday graced us with its presence.

The same feeling of irritable inconvenience my adolescent classmates and I experienced when given an in-class reading assignment can be related to the tactics required to accomplish our new year’s health and wellness goals.  Sure, new year deals at local gyms, small group fitness classes, and personal training services offer spectacular value.  However, if we resent the actual activity, the likelihood of executing the actions taken to achieve these goals significantly decreases.  Supporting a plan in which the user views the activity as a mundane, undesirable task makes accomplishing these new year goals challenging.

To counteract these feelings of being pressured into improving our health because we have to, it helps to remember a few helpful tips to adhere to exercise without feeling like you’re walking over hot coals to accomplish your health and wellness tactics.

Pick modes of exercise you enjoy:  Do you want to spend five hours a week in Planet Fitness utilizing their state-of-the-art exercise machines and running on treadmills?  If the answer is yes, that sounds like a great solution.  However, if the thought of being surrounded by individuals in a large setting terrifies you, then don’t do it.  If you like hiking, Yoga, Pilates, or Salsa Dancing, then those activities could be fitness topics to focus time and energy.  Exercise doesn’t have to be undesirable.  Our community offers plenty of fun and engaging avenues to reinforce our health and wellness.

Look forward to something:  Recreational sports and local activities have leagues and classes offered once a week.  Developing a schedule to attend activities you look forward to an established amount of times per week makes completing these tasks enjoyable.  If we look forward to something and develop a sense of excitement to attend a bout of physical activity, the effort to clear our schedule and spend the time and energy to attend seems less complicated.

Have a reason:  Embracing exercise as a gift to allow our bodies to perform pain-free and efficiently throughout our lives is an excellent reason to adhere to an regimented fitness routine.  Getting down on the ground to play with our grandkids, hoisting our kids in our arms after they win their first baseball game, or being healthy and strong to show our friends and family we can support them is a gift they can’t buy.

Redefining our eating habits, exercise consistency, and other elements of self-care offer life-enhancing benefits; offering us a healthy and strong new year. However, a significant amount of effort must be allocated toward the tasks required to the success of our goals. Therefore, find routines that you look forward to providing us with a realistic scenario of victory in our goals.

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.

Spell out when starting a sentence with the year

Dec 29

New Year’s Resolution: Simple and Effective Tactics

The eventful, yet restful holiday season is coming to an end.  The lights encompassing houses illuminating streets will be taken down.  The Santa Claus, reindeer, and snowman decorations at grocery stores prepare to enter hibernation in a storage shed until next year.  Holiday music and classic television shows convert to normally scheduled programming as we approach New Year’s Eve.

December 31st usually brings about a sense of nostalgia and overwhelming excitement.  As boisterous New Year’s Eve parties and street celebrations occur worldwide, this exuberant day of the year filled with decorated streets, confetti on the ground, bottle caps popping off of sparking wine bottles, and fireworks bursting in the air at 11:59 PM signifies the start of a new calendar year.  The words,:“2023 is going to be the best year ever,” motivate our society to adopt a more refined mission statement in their personal lives, careers, and outlook on self-care.  As the new year approaches, many people adopt the practice of putting the previous twelve months behind them and embark on a new journey filled with goals, experiences, and never before obtained milestones.

Improving health is a popular topic for a new year’s resolution.  This could be achieved by preparing for an outdoor journey requiring endurance to hike a mountain or trek long distances through foreign terrains.  Another popular goal is training for marathons, bike rides, or backpacking expeditions.  One of the most prevalent new year’s goals is to lose weight.

“This year, I’m cutting out sugar,” “I’m not drinking as much alcohol,” or “I’m giving up gluten” are a few themes we might hear from our peers when establishing their new year’s resolution.  While all of these comments are effective in losing weight and refining our overall health, the steps it takes to achieve these goals don’t occur overnight.  If the process involved in fulfilling these tactics were as easy as the less than ten-word mission statement, we’d all have the physiques of Greek gods.

Losing weight requires a significant amount of discipline and adherence to healthy decision-making tactics.  Big audacious goals such as training for a physically demanding expedition or mitigating vices responsible for impeding our dietary success positively impact our quality of life.  However, let’s not forget a critically important theme in virtually every other aspect of life:  what you get out of something is equal to what you put in.  Perhaps focusing on simple yet effective tactics that can be repeated throughout the week, or even daily, can help attain these new year’s aspirations.  Here are a few tactics to encourage simple and effective refinements to our dietary habits.

  1.  Buy small packages of treat food:    If we enjoy cookies, chips, or cheese on crackers, then have some.  Just don’t go off on a bender.  A helpful tactic in controlling the overconsumption of treats is to stay away from the sales and value packages grocery stores offer consumers.  If weight loss is a goal, then purchasing a value size of Chips Ahoy and having that vessel easily accessible in your pantry isn’t going to help efforts to manage adherence to healthy eating habits.  Instead, purchase only one treat item and ensure it’s of the smaller portion size.  Focus on the quality of the treat, not quantity.  You’ll consume less “guilty pleasure” food and prevent storing treat foods in your home within your arm’s reach.
  2. Consume veggies with at least one meal per day:  The habit of buying vegetables and preparing them at dinner has countless positive effects for supporting weight loss efforts. For example, order a vegetable-themed dish while out to lunch is a valuable tactic in controlling the amount of food consumed while in a restaurant setting.  Additionally, veggies’ fiber and water content aid in food absorption and movement through our digestive tract.  The faster food is absorbed, the more nutrients our organs and connective tissue can utilize to fend off disease and regenerate connective tissue.
  3. Drink water first thing in the morning:  After waking from six to eight hours of slumber, our bodies are dehydrated and waiting for nourishment.  Drinking a sixteen-ounce glass of water immediately after waking is a simple and effective tactic to regenerate our bodies and start our metabolism too.  Research supports the more hydrated our systems are, the more efficiently the body can metabolize calories.  Additionally, hydration improves the amount of energy we have throughout the day as well.  If we have more energy, we’ll be expending more calories for energy and storing fewer unused calories as subcutaneous fat.

New year’s resolutions are a powerful component of our culture that fuel motivation for people to better themselves.  Lofty goals are essential to set a target for us to work diligently to achieve.  However, let’s not forget the nuts and bolts that hold us together.  By practicing the simple and effective tactics of consistency in dietary awareness, we can establish a solid foundation to achieve our new year’s aspirations.

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.

Dec 22

Too Busy to Exercise? Set a timer

My baking hobby ensues at full capacity throughout the holiday season.  One of my favorite baked treats I’ve mastered throughout years of trial and error is the lime white chocolate blondie.  These vessels of mind-blowing lime and rich white chocolate require a refined yet simple recipe I developed throughout years of surfing the internet and browsing cookbooks to acquire a path to blondie heaven I could confidently repeat and create on demand.  Throughout my trials to produce blondies suitable to gift my friends and family, I discovered I needed the correct baking equipment, precise measurements, and, most importantly, time.

The world knows investing time in optimizing our health offers a feature in our lives that outweighs countless hours of working and making money.  Investing time to exercise allows us to live happier, longer, healthier lives in which we can allocate the bi-products of our success in our careers to when we have vacation time or after we retire.  Without our health, we’re hard-pressed to enjoy the life we work so hard to create throughout our careers.

Similar to the creation of my jaw-dropping blondies and devoting energy toward the busy lives required of our careers and family obligations, exercise involves time.  However, exercise requires less time than baking holiday treats, an eight-hour shift at our jobs, or running errands around town.  Fortunately, our bodies are equipped with the tools needed to exercise on demand at any time in pretty much any environment:  a brain, heart, and muscles.  No measuring cups, baking tins, or ovens are necessary.  Every organism on this earth has two pieces of resistance training equipment required to conduct an effective workout:  gravity and the ground.  Performing exercise using only our body, such as squats, pushups, and planks, offers us an equally if not more effective workout than heading to a local gym and using their fancy exercise machines.

The features we have been gifted with since birth make it seem like a structured exercise routine should be simple to achieve.  However, we need to remember one variable in accomplishing exercise:  time.  The complex structure of thoughts in the human mind is a miraculous blessing.  However, our minds are also fantastic escape artists at finding reasons to avoid exercise.  For example, people are too busy with the demands of their jobs or managing family dynamics.  Deadlines, emails, texts, and phone calls before or after the ordinary workday sucks up time throughout the day. Additionally, finding the motivation to exercise presents complications.  The thought of carving time out of the day to achieve a bout of exercise could be boring.  Getting that extra hour of flipping through text messages and social media on cell phones while in bed sounds like a far more entertaining experience than exercising.  Sometimes, investing time in venturing to the drive-through and sitting in the car after a long day of work to wait for an In-N-Out burger and fries seems more stimulating than making a quick trip to the gym.

There is a connection between baking, looking through text messages, or sitting in our cars at the In-N-Out drive-through. They all take fifteen minutes or more to participate in these tasks.  What if we took that time and devoted it to exercise?  A simple and effective tactic we recommend to our personal training clients posed with similar aversions to exercise is setting a timer to complete the exercise.  The simple act of opening the timer in our cell phones and setting a time limit to perform an exercise routine for fifteen, twenty, or thirty minutes can produce substantial benefits to an individual’s health and well-being.  During this period, simple and effective exercises such as body weight squats, pushups, planks, or stretching exercises can be achieved in this small window of time.  The best part of this tactic in setting a timer is that after the timer goes off, the person who isn’t the fondest of exercise is allowed to do their favorite movement in their exercise routine:  stop exercising.

Understandably, exercise isn’t appealing to the entire population.  Humanity has been blessed with so many wonders that give us something to do through the advancement of technology.  However, the anatomy and physiology of our bodies always remain consistent.  The only way to keep our bodies in optimal operating conditions is through compliance and consistency through an exercise program.  If exercise is challenging to achieve because the demands of life impede the ability to take time out to exercise, set a timer and get a few exercises in.  This short amount of time can significantly affect how our bodies operate and feel in our everyday 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.

Dec 15

Healthy Eating During the Holidays

“A narrow valley between hills or mountains.”  “The action of eating a large amount greedily; fill oneself with food.” The term gorge can be defined in many ways as nouns or verbs.  Regarding overeating and indulging in decadent food, the term “gorge” can fit our status appropriately during the holiday season.

The holidays bring a tradition of food usually not seen in other parts of the year.  “Comfort food” is a theme filling social media headlines, store specials on shelves, and traditional family recipes.  Why call it the sweets, breads, and chocolates we make at home for our friends and family comfort food?  I suppose it involves applying warm, rich, and filling food to alleviate the frosty, damp, and dark climate present during these holiday months before the winter solstice.  Not only does comfort food present itself in our homes but also our workplaces, children’s schools, or holiday gatherings.  We swim in an ocean of holiday comfort food during these last two months of the year.

Don’t get me wrong, I reserve a special place in my soul for holiday comfort food.  Pumpkin cheesecake, buttery mashed potatoes, and monkey bread have a magnetic attraction to my plate when I happen to be in the same room.  I’m sure many people have an intimate relationship with their comfort food of choice.  However, let’s shed some light on the term “gorge” and ensure we don’t fall into that narrow valley of engulfing holiday treats whenever they cross our line of sight.

Indulging in copious amounts of our holiday treats can significantly dampen our health.  Climbing out of a downward spiral of engulfing candy canes, panettones, and Hershey’s kisses can be a challenge if we fall into a hole of partaking in too many pleasures.  Two methods we recommend throughout our nutritional consultations with our personal training clients is to practice mindfulness about portion size and food absorption properties our bodies experience on days of physical activity.

To avoid overeating when these holiday food experiences are present, focusing on handful portion sizes is an effective tool to mitigate the effects of gorging ourselves when that meticulously decorated holiday plate gets dropped off by one of our office workers.  Limiting yourself to no more than a handful of food in one sitting can set a rate-limiting factor on the volume of food consumed in a short period. In addition, this tactic helps delay the conveyor belt-like action of shoveling food into our mouths when those holiday cookies and chocolates are begging us to mosey across the room to get our fill.

Understanding the body’s metabolic state is another potently effective tool to manage the effects of consuming sweets.  The body enters an insulin-sensitive state after performing rigorous exercise.  This means bouts of exertive exercise such as a Yoga class, Pilates class, or resistance training session, during a personal training appointment, allow the body to utilize insulin for muscle function.  In the case of muscles being stressed via rigorous exercise, the muscle cells allow insulin to bond onto damaged sites of muscle and absorb sugar throughout the bloodstream.  This sugar acts as an energy source within the muscles to grab onto free-floating proteins and amino acids to repair the damaged site of muscles caused by skillfully designed exercise-induced muscular stress.  However, lack of exercise does not develop this interaction.  Therefore, a lack of physical activity and exercise decreases the likelihood of muscular interactions with insulin.  This allows insulin to go to the next best thing: our fat cells.  Therefore, adhering to exercise compliance during this excellent holiday food tradition is critically important during times delicious and irresistible treats surround us.

To sum up, if you’ve exercised, you’re better off having a controlled number of sweets.  However, if you have not exercised, those tantalizing holiday treats have the potential to cause more harm than good and send you plummeting down the gorge of overeating.  Granted, in a perfect world, we shouldn’t consume treat items more than three times per week.  However, let’s be realistic with the currency of the situation.  This holiday spirit and sharing an overabundance of decadent food are only present once a few times a year.  So, let’s enjoy ourselves a little bit.  Just make sure to understand what the effects of overindulgence and falling into the comfort food gorge can do to our health and fitness.

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.

Dec 08

Developing effective exercise plans

The journeys throughout everyday life impose trials on our bodies and minds.  Everything from sitting too much, making phone calls, or being hunched over a keyboard to the complete opposite of performing knuckle-dragging physical labor required for landscaping, painting houses, or framing doors in a home.  If the body doesn’t consistently recover from strenuous bouts of the physical requirements of life, joints and muscles will hurt.

The good news is that the body is equipped with a healing mechanism to mitigate pain and dysfunction.  The phenomenon exercise brings to joints, muscles, and chemical functions of the body is a panacea for bodily pain.  Simply sprinkle a little exercise on the parts of the body that hurt and “voila,” your torn rotator cuff, bulging lumbar disc, and arthritic fingers are cured.  It’s also essential to have a rigorous relationship with the truth about the wear and tear involved with the body.  Only half of this statement is true, the part where the body produces healing properties via exercise.  However, the magic pill of eliminating pain from our lives isn’t that easy to discover.

Exercise requires time, dedication, and strategy to get the most out of adding fitness as a component of health to our lives.  Factors such as lack of compliance, redundant routines, and damaging exercises play roles in producing effective exercise routines.  Intimidation or feeling awkward when entering a local gym can quickly prevent someone from developing an adherent exercise routine when using community gyms like INSHAPE or Plant Fitness as a resource to exercise.  Additionally, the body won’t adapt to become stronger if we become complacent in our exercise routine and perform the same movements over and over again.  Furthermore, “grinding through the pain” and forgoing exercise altogether won’t work either.  Pain and physical dysfunction doesn’t simply go away.  A body that heals is piloted by a person who devotes meticulous attention to detail by consistently nurturing the body and avoiding harmful factors that break down the body’s organs.

To get the most out of an exercise routine, a “laying of plans” is a potentially effective method to cultivate healing properties. To create a worthwhile plan, establishing at least a four-week layout helps develop a sense of direction in a fitness journey.  First, pick exercises that can be performed competently.  No one should be performing single-leg inverted pigeon stretches in a Yoga class when performing ten repetitions of bodyweight squats are a challenge.  Next, assign how many sets and repetitions are a safe and effective dose for the exercises you want to achieve. Finally, make sure these exercises are engaging and enjoyable.  Exercising isn’t effective if they make you drag your feet while doing them or have nightmares about performing planks the day before you plan a trip to the gym.  The likelihood of an exercise routine continuing past a few weeks is little to none if it drones on and becomes dull.  It’s essential to be picky when choosing exercises in your routine.  The most effective exercise in the world can quickly become obsolete if the routine becomes mundane or causes more damage than when beginning the program.

Increasing productive stress on connective tissue throughout an exercise routine is important in conditioning the body toward optimal strength and longevity. For example, when performing resistance exercises such as squats, plank, or push-ups, increasing the workload each week for three weeks imposes gradual stress on the bones, ligaments, tendons, and muscles.  This can be very productive when the training load volume is slightly increased each week.  Training load volume can be defined as the increasing amount of repetition, resistance, or duration of a specific exercise.

With this increase in the challenge for a three-week cycle, it’s a good idea to have an unloading week.  This is a week in which performing the same exercises, but with resistance equal to or less than the first week, will act as a destressing period for the body.  After completing this four-week cycle, the body, more often than not, feels stronger.  Additionally, after practicing the same routine for four weeks, the body will likely develop mastery and competency toward those specific exercises. This allows one to try another four weeks of new and slightly more challenging activities.

A variety of exercises is beneficial to the development of strong connective tissue.  Yoga, Pilates, group fitness classes, and organized, well-planned resistance training create significant adaptations to the body.  To get the most out of fitness routines, let’s remember to track our progress to avoid overuse injuries and develop strength in our connective tissue to last for the long term.

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.

Nov 30

Advanced Age Fitness: The Body Doesn’t Heal as Fast

The other day, I talked with a few friends at Napa’s new Las Flores pickleball courts.  Tyler was sixty-five years old and Todd was forty years old.  They knew of my trade as a professional in the fitness industry and asked what I was doing there.  I told them I wanted to get some much-needed exercise after a long day’s work.  We all related that playing a few pickleball games is a safe and effective workout.  After a bit of buffoonery and telling jokes, we chatted about some of the other recreational physical activities we loved to do.

Golf, surfing, and paddle boarding all came up.  Todd mentioned, “Man, after a few injuries and getting old, I notice that things don’t heal as fast after I head out to play.”  Tyler, who was twenty years older than Todd, added, “Tell me about.”  Todd quickly elbow-jabbed Tyler in the side, followed by a brief chuckle.

After a momentary pause, they both looked at me as if waiting for me to add something to the topic of maladies that cause physical pain  while participating in physical activity hobbies.  I said, “When’s the next time you’ll be on the court.”  A new conversation about our love of pickleball ensued, and the commiseration of injuries quickly subsided.

It’s easy to relate to the aspects of life that challenge us.  As humans, we seem to focus on things that need to be fixed rather than the positive accolades we’ve already accomplished and the positive events on the horizon we are looking forward to.  In the case of Tyler and Todd, the effect of injuries and age was a remnant of history that might have affected their physical activity performance.  To their credit, after a brief note of the suboptimal feelings of the pain their bodies were experiencing from previous injuries and age-related joint pain, they redirected the topic of why all of us were in the same place outside of a pickleball court.  We all wanted to focus on the next logical step for us instead of commenting on our physical pain.  In this case, the next logical step was having fun and exercising.

Adhering to exercise programs and rigorous physical activity for improved health can be challenging.  Lack of time, loss of interest, and fear of hurting oneself further are common feelings of apprehension.  However, if we can focus on the “best next step is to progress our health further,” we can hone in on why we are exercising to make a more attainable task for the day.  For some, exercise is a tool to lose unwanted weight, recover from a previous injury, or fend off the long-term effects of metabolic disease.  In the case of the three recreational athletic fellows, sixty-five-year-old Tyler, forty-five-year-old Todd, and under-forty-year-old me, our next logical step was to get out and move so we could have fun.  If we want to ensure we can get out on the courts to run around to hit a perforated by while telling jokes to each other, we need to comply with an exercise routine so our bodies can support our performance.

Consistently sharing our problems with others around us is akin to discussing how a shoe in a dryer circles around and randomly bounces around repeatedly until the drying cycle is complete. Sharing experiences that aren’t perfect can become a mundane and stale topic.  There’s always going to be some theme in life that doesn’t necessarily work out how we want it to happen.  So, why share the issues in our life that will circle back and present themselves in another way?  Instead of highlighting a problem to our friends, family, or peers, perhaps we can share our “next logical step” to progress toward why we are participating in something that gives us joy in life.

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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