Feb 01

Healthy Diet: Processed or The “Real Deal?”

In a world where nutritionists, exercise physiologists, and award-winning biologists have filled our archives of knowledge with countless amounts of valuable dietary and food documents to refer to. It’s challenging to know what decisions to make on choosing foods that best support our quality of life.  Scientists have proven that diets consisting predominantly of red meat supports our organs, blood, and brain.  History of cultures residing in the Mediterranean reveal people living happy and long lives consuming bread, pasta, espresso, and wine.  Sherpas calling Mount Everest their backyard live in some of the most extreme environments in the world are able to endure high levels of physical stress while conducting their everyday life routines a few thousand feet from outer space.  Some Sherpas claim their indominable body and spirit comes from their consumption of raw ginger and turmeric in their food and drinks.  The eastern cultures of feudal to modern day Japan depict the antithesis of meat eaters being at the top of the food hierarchy by demonstration where they have existed for millennia on a diet consisting predominantly of soy and raw seafood.

Whispers in our ears of too much or not enough of a specific food can be heard everywhere we go.  We’ll hear certain medical professionals state too much red meat, eggs, and cheese will clog our arteries with calcified cholesterol.  On the other end, cutting edge literature is stating that consuming vegetables, fruits, and seeds aren’t meant to be consumed by humans due to certain digestive enzymes we lack to break down the chemicals in plant-based food.  It’s probably no shock to some that soy-based products have gotten bad reputations due to suboptimal hormones that may or may not produce in our bodies with the consumption of soy-based foods.  And, wait a minute, people are saying alcohol and caffeine are good for your heart and stress levels?  These abundant rapid firing mixed signals can start sounding like someone might have chased that white rabbit down one too many holes and made a trip though Wonderland.  With so many signs and suggestions to go one way while another directs us to do the opposite, where do we begin?

As the internet articles, social media posts, and revolutionary trail blazer of scientific nutritional research’s published award-winning book and start podcasts, the world has become a prolific library of knowledge that smacks us in the face with terms, rules, and definitions like bugs bombarding a motorcyclist’s face shield traveling ninety miles per hour down Highway 5.  While this information is a potently cutting-edge ticket to a newer and brighter future for the choices we make with food, there’s just so much of it that we don’t know where to begin.  A safe place to start is to look for foods unhindered by the act of processing food if we aren’t sure where to start with our nutritional goals of losing weight, fending off disease, or supporting energy levels.  Processed foods are gathered, stored for long periods of time, cooked down, pulverized into a powder, emulsified with bonding chemical agents that only my peers who possess a PhD in organic chemistry can define, and wrapped in a package producing a shelf life that can last into the next ice age.

Can you recall the revolution of dial-up internet back in the nineties?  That beautiful noise of a phone dialing followed by the static mumble of an AM radio station that hasn’t been tuned in?  This was a long and drawn-out process to enter the world of the interwebs.  Nowadays, we simply double tap our phone screens and we can surf the web to get what we’re looking for in a blazing fast Google search in less time it took to power up our computer in the glorious days of the Curt Cobain era.  This example of slow processing compared to an efficient rapid act of processing relates to how we digest processed versus unprocessed foods.

By consuming overly processed foods such as the “just add water” meat in a Taco Bell Crunch Wrap Supreme, a bag of Doritos from the gas station, or a soda, we are telling our digestive system to break down these hyper processed foods at the speed of dial up internet.  Preservatives cooked down and then recooked sugars and chemically bonded fats aren’t easily identifiable by our body’s digestive tract.  The result is stressed out, inflamed, and slow-moving peristalsis of the smooth muscles that make up our intestines.  This afflicted state of our intestines significantly impacts our digestive tract’s ability to absorb vital nutrients and transport them to nourish our body.  Food influencing a challenging digestion process can cause bloating, inflammation of organs and blood vessels, and increased fat storage due to substates present in processed foods that are unable to disassociate into the body for nourishment and energy.

We live in the era of information.  Over time, this research will continue to form a well-rounded understanding of what foods will supercharge our lives and what foods ruin our day.  In the meantime, a great place to begin is by choosing foods that have just one ingredient.  An egg, an apple, some almonds, or a simple glass of water.  These foods haven’t been through an assembly line at a processing factory.   Simple, undenatured, unprocessed, and raw food have the ability to efficiently log onto our Wi-Fi network in our digestive tract to be readily absorbable in our bodies to support our bodies to live happy, disease free, energetic, and stress-free 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.

Jan 24

Gardening and fitness

“Warm-up, proceed to strength training, and then venture to the cardio equipment. Finish up by performing a brief bout of regeneration and restorative working.”  During my first days of working at a large local gym, we handed out forms to new gym members containing these instructions as a welcome gift.  Each member received two complimentary personal training sessions to show them the ropes around the gym and offer an introductory program designed by a fitness professional to jump-start their journey to success and give them a sense of direction on the gym floor.  Intimidation, uncertainty, and over social anxiety of how to motivate oneself when diving into a new gym setting can be overwhelming.

The blueprint of this program laid out an efficient and safe routine for rookie gym participants.  The warmup routine was a five-to-ten-minute bout of submaximal exercise on a stationary bike, treadmill, or elliptical.  The strength training portion was a series of resistance training movements on weight machines including the leg press, chest press, and lat pull down machines.  The cardio routine included ten to twenty minutes of prolonged exercise on the one of the many cardio machines located on the upper level. Exercising at a six-to-seven rating of maximal perceived exertion scale out of ten, where the maximal age predicated heart rate was meant to elevate the heart’s beats per minute to sixty-five percent maximal capacity.  The session was concluded with three brief stretches in which the exercise participant held a stretch for thirty seconds.  For someone just entering a gym setting for the first time, this was as profoundly successful program to orient a gym newbie to feel comfortable in the boisterous gym setting.

As much as I support local gyms, they are not the only place to acquire functional fitness adaptations to support the longevity of our lives.  Many fitness components come in packages offered in physical activity through our hobbies and physical activities we perform around our homes.  What if we applied the introductory standard operating procedure that was included in the gym introductory orientations, I offered years ago to new gym participants as a similar mechanism of fitness in our home settings?  Let’s use the same format used to introduce first-time gym members and apply it to an hour’s worth of one of my favorite hobbies: gardening.

Please allow me to give you a brief orientation on how to use a gardening session as an efficient and effective fitness routine that is equal to, if not more effective, a trip to the local gym.  Get your overly exaggerated safari hat with neck protector attachment, UV sun protection long sleeve shirt, thick yet mobile gloves, Carhart pants, and trusty shin height boots ready to put on the same way you would prepare to put your gym clothes on before making the trek to the gym.  The warmup routine consists of the ear to shoulder neck stretches, arm crosses, and circles, hula hoop hip stretches, leg swings, and knee circles.  Performing five to ten repetitions of each movement shouldn’t take any longer than three to five minutes.  Now that your muscles and joints are loosened up, the heart rate is increased a little bit, and you’ve stimulated your nervous system sufficiently enough to resemble a brief smack in the cheeks to wake you up from a mid-day nap. Grab your favorite gardening shovel and prepare to squat, lunge, pivot, scoop, pull, and lift.

Weeds need to be pulled?  Assume a split stance as if leading off of first base getting ready to steal a base after a pitch, reach down, grasp the weed with a vice-like grip, and pull the dreaded beast out of its existence from your beloved soil.   By performing this act of weed obliteration, you are utilizing the muscles of the lower extremities while implementing balance and proprioception movements. Perhaps some culprit leaves have fallen from your walnut tree.  Time to show them who is boss with your elite raking skills.  Grasp the hilt and rake with two hands and prepare yourself in the universal athletic position.  Knees are bent, weight shifted to the balls of the feet, and eyes are positioned forward.  Perform ten to twenty repetitions of pulling the leaves toward you.  The act of raking and using muscles responsible for compound upper body pulling movements activates similar muscle groups that are targeted using the weight training equipment at gyms.  Conclude this task by squatting down with the same impressive posture and technique you would use when performing a kettlebell goblet squat at the gym.  Keeping the heels flat on the ground, bending at the knees and hips, and maintaining a rigid spine, pick the leaves up, and skillfully toss them in the compost bin.  Picking up these leaves and putting them in their final resting place of the compost bin emulates the same squatting movements we teach our beginning personal training clients.

Before you know it, a bout of three gardening techniques led by a simple warm-up has prompted a strenuous bout of physical activity very similar to an exercise session at the gym.  The scheduling structure involved in an introductory session to a gym is very helpful to guide new exercises participants to a successful experience at the gym.  However, let’s not forget that we can apply this same structure of warming up our muscles and completing a task at home to support our fitness efforts.

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 14

Exercise your way out of stress

“What are the top three stressors throughout your day?”  This is a question we include in our introductory paperwork we encourage our new personal training clients to complete.  Not only is this topic a great way to develop a productive and growth mindset oriented in an interpersonal coaching relationship, but this also offers valuable information on a data point that can substantially improve our everyday lives when embarking on a new fitness journey.

Ever since my genesis as a health and fitness professional, a question about stress has been included in some form of initial evaluations.  The topic of stress was a theme covered during my experience working with acute rehabilitative patients in the physical therapy setting, the general population as a personal trainer at local gyms, and athletes in the high school and collegiate sport arena.  Immediately following an extensive surgery, an elite athlete looking to have a productive season while juggling sixty hours a week of academic work, or the general population forty hour per week worker, stress has been a topic having profound effects on our well-being.

External stress can be debilitating physiologically, mentally, and emotionally.  Increased stress hormone concentration such as adrenaline and cortisol cause anxiety, depression, and decreased motivation.   Stress triggers fatigue, increased blood sugar concentrations, and inflammation of joints and muscles.  In the exercise physiology realm, increased adrenaline and cortisol can serve a productive synergy during exercise and athletic activity.  Stress hormones produced during rigorous physical activity aid in shuttling sugar into working muscle support absorption of oxygenated blood to cells so the exercise participant can perform optimally.  During prolonged physical activity, stress hormones can convert fats to be utilized as calories.  Intense physical activity and athletic settings put the body into a “fight or flight” mode, in which an increased stress hormone concentration can be beneficial.  During exercise and rigorous physical activity, a little bit of adrenaline and cortisol isn’t such a bad thing.

Conversely, high stress hormone concentration while sitting down and performing grueling hours of desk work, having a conversation with your spouse about finance, or wondering why your fifteen-year-old child is mysteriously absent from her fifth period class can cause adverse effects to mental health.  One could imagine such interactions could cause your heart rate to rise over one hundred beats per minute, induce a glamorous display of arm pit sweating, and perhaps cause your pupils to dilate to size of dimes.  This isn’t the most productive state to be in while standing in still in one position.  External stress stemming from the challenges of life can tell our bodies to react in a “fight or flight” state when we actually don’t need to fight for our lives or run away from anything.  The result is an increased amount of stress hormone causing an incongruency in the natural mechanism of how stress hormones most productively serves the body.

Fitness professionals inquire about stress because we have seen stress naturally decline as exercise adherence is increased.  It’s easy to schedule a doctor appointment and tell the doctor about symptoms of anxiety and stress related symptoms.  However, it’s the natural human tendency in our fast-paced society to deviate away from things that might be a little challenging.  As adherence to exercise increases, our ability to manage stress hormones throughout our daily interactions becomes more advanced.  Inducing a naturally “fight or flight” stress response via consistently practiced exercise, our body and psychology of our minds become attuned to what a stressful situation is.  Connecting with what is truly stressful allows the mind to efficiently manage external stresses.

Stress medications are important and useful in many applications.  However, the refinement of our mind and body starts with fitness.  By constructing a foundation of physical strength in our bodies, we can naturally handle the stresses of life without the use of stress medication.  Perhaps, taking the challenge to exercise one to two times per week before renewing a prescription of anti-depressants can create positive shifts in our lives.  Take some time out for yourself.  Put the phone down, put social media on hold for few minutes,  and share with your family, friends, and co-workers you’d like a few minutes to yourself.  Get out and move.  I promise the world will still be there after you focus on yourself.

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 02

Best times to eat

“Weight loss is made in the kitchen, not the treadmill.”  I overheard this comment during the start of my personal training career while working at a local gym many moons ago.  To a degree, this was an accurate statement.  The context of this conversation referred to the logic of consuming foods aiding weight loss by burning calories via cardiovascular exercise on one of the many units of cardio equipment available at most local gyms.  A popular tracking system to achieve weight loss is the concept of calories in vs calories out.  Burn more calories throughout the day then what are consumed.  As rewarding as it is to meet the goals of calories consumed versus calories burned on a Fitbit or wearable fitness technology, simply counting numbers on a digital tracking system isn’t the entire color that fills the big picture of managing weight loss for the long run.

Carbohydrates, proteins, and fat are the big three that are predominantly focused on the back of nutrition labels when counting calories.  These substrates are also some of the most viewed at data on our wearable fitness tracking gadgets.  Carbohydrates are essentially forms of sugar that when ingested, are meant to supply the body with energy for the various activities we participate in.  Proteins are the building blocks of our connective tissue such as our bones, ligaments, tendons, and muscles.  They fill in the gaps of stressed muscle sites to repair the spots damaged by vigorous physical activity.  Fats are lipids and oils that can either be used as energy at a low physical activity level or they can be stored as fat under our skin when they are consumed, and minimal energy is used in a rest and digest period.  If weight loss and management is our goal, it would benefit us to understand what their purpose is after they are consumed.

Nutrition has come a long way.  The brouhaha over the suboptimal properties of gluten in our diet has sparked awareness toward our consumption of bread, pastries, cookies, and pastas.  Gluten is present mainly in flour.  Flour is a processed carbohydrate originating from a wheat plant.  We can’t go out to a field, grab a piece of wheat, and start gnawing on it for a food source.  The wheat has to be gathered, baked down, powdered, cooked again, and then packaged.  Processed foods comprise some of the simplest forms of carbohydrates in the world.   Simple and processed carbohydrates don’t take long to be transferred into free floating sugar to our blood stream after consumption.  As a result, simple carbohydrates trigger an increase in insulin throughout our blood stream.  Any food that tells our pancreas to secrete insulin has a high glycemic index; the scale that is used as a reference on how much insulin is produced from a specific food.  Other foods that are high in the glycemic index are Starbuck’s beverages and breakfast sandwiches, granola bars, cereal, and rice.  Therefore, the more processed our carbohydrates become, the more insulin is being produced in our body.

Insulin can be a productive and unproductive hormone that acts as chemical messenger transmitting the message to utilize sugar in our cells as a form of energy or storage.   After completing a challenging workout, our muscles become insulin sensitive.  This means that our muscles will welcome insulin to their cells to be utilized as energy and grab onto free floating proteins and amino acids to repair the muscles stressed by exercise.  However, Insulin can be a double-edged sword.  If foods yielding a high glycemic index in a non-post exercise or sedentary state are eaten, the insulin will bypass muscle cells and travel to fat cells, telling the fat cells to absorb free floating sugar to be stored as forms of fat under our skin.  If our goal is to lose fat mass, an optimal time to consume our carbohydrates is after our workout routines.

Sedentary activity such as desk work, time commuting in the car, or sitting on the couch to watch the evening news is an ill-advised time to consume carbohydrates.  The skeletal muscles are doing little to no work.   There is no energy being expended to use the carbohydrates that have just been consumed while sitting.  A carbohydrate consumed in a “rest and digest” state will increase insulin in the blood stream, bypass skeletal muscle, and be transferred to fat storage.  If we go to the gym after our workday to hop the treadmill and burn three hundred calories, we will be burning those calories only while we are present at the gym.  However, the eating habits we may have executed throughout the day could have doubled, if not tripled, the amount of calorie absorption to fat during a low energy expenditure period paired with high glycemic index carbohydrate consumption.   Therefore, consuming carbohydrates in a rest and digest period will counteract weight loss effects in the form storing sugar as subcutaneous fat.

Wearable fitness technology is a useful tool to supplement weight loss efforts by tracking amounts of calories burnt versus consumed.  However, understanding how specific foods are metabolized in the body is an important factor to skillfully choosing when to eat certain foods at specific situations throughout your day.

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 23

Appreciating your shoulders

Throughout our careers, we reserve days of tribute to pay homage to a person or group of people who have positively impacted our lives.  Teacher appreciation day, staff appreciation day, Veteran’s day, Mother’s day, and Father’s day.  These are residing in our calendar to give thanks to our parents, veterans of the military who risked their lives for our society, and the teachers and mentors who guided us throughout our academic careers.  Truly appreciating something takes into consideration the true value and impact the efforts something has impacted our existence.  However, we sometimes forget to appreciate a part of our existence that has accomplished the other ninety-nine percent of the work that has brought us where we are today:  our body.

The support acquired from our family, friends, co-workers, and veterans.  Our body offers us significant structural support to be able to play sports, perform physical abilities for our careers, and enjoy life.  There are many integral portions of our body that need attention.  One that needs particular appreciation is our shoulders.  Without our arms and hands, life would be quite a challenge.  From brushing our teeth to holding the steering wheel in our cars.  The shoulder joint offers significant value to our everyday lives.

The shoulder joints are a ball and socket joint.  The head of the humerus fits into the scapula and is connected by a suction cup like ligamentous structure called the labrum.  The intricate network of muscles attaching the humerus and scapula together, allow for multidimensional movements of our arms.  Circular, overhead, reaching out in front and behind, and lifting objects up and down.  These muscles act as primary motors creating an elite performing crane like tool to manipulate objects in our world.  There aren’t many objects in this world that perform so many unique movements other than the shoulder joints.  Therefore, reserving a day throughout the week to pay attention to our shoulders is immensely important.  Simply performing shoulder injury prevention tactics for the integrity of the shoulder one day per week can change our world for the better.

Muscles  attaching the scapula to the humerus comprise the shoulder’s rotator cuff.  The supraspinatus lines the upper border of the scapula which has tendons attaching the muscles to the upper portion of the humerus.  The subscapularis resides underneath the shoulder blade, tracing along the back of the body and adhering the inner part of the humerus close to the body.  The teres minor, trapezius, and serratus anterior muscles all have tendons that connect the posterior aspect of the humerus to the lower portion of the ribs and bottom of the scapula.  These muscles should be appreciated by implementing specific exercises to strengthen them because they are the supporting structures of the rotator cuff.  If these muscles don’t receive proper attention, they can suffer from atrophy and loss of blood flow to the connective tissue adhering the humerus and scapula to each other.  A loss of structural support and strength to these important muscles can lead to a collapse in the structure of the rotator cuff of the shoulder joint.  The end result of these neglected muscles of scapular stabilization can lead to rotator cuff tearing, shoulder labrum impingement, pain, and suboptimal performance in our everyday lives.

To prevent such problems from occurring, is to reserve a shoulder appreciation day throughout the week.  Don’t forget to appreciate the other parts of the body each week too.  Examples of exercises that can be included in your shoulder appreciation day, include shoulder internal and external resistance band exercises, performing scapular protraction and retraction, and the simple yet effective plank exercises.

We take time out each year to buy cards for mom and dad, the birthday boy, or the daughter who is graduating.  Those days are special.  However, let’s make sure to appreciate ourselves by taking three to five minutes out once per week to a few repetitions of shoulder injury prevention tactics to appreciate what our shoulder does for our lives so we can give back to those people who support 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.

Indent first line

Dec 16

Keep Picking Things Up!

If I were in a room full of thirty-year-old humans and asked the question: “Does anyone’s back hurt?”, at least half of the room would raise their hand.  A mentor I followed in my years as a student in the physical therapy field once told me, “Anyone past the age of thirty is diagnosed with arthritis.”  Once we get to our thirties, we have probably dabbled with high school and college sports, various forms of exercise, and more than likely experienced a few work-related injuries.  As the body endures this stress up to the thirty years of age marker, connective tissues surrounding bones can become damaged, bones fractured, and sedentary lifestyles unmask under use injuries from sitting too much.

Traumatic post thirty-year-old bodily stress can lead to back pain.  A thirty-year-old body isn’t as new as a twenty-year-old’s spry and springy frame.  Wear and tear of the body accumulates as age increases each decade.  Lower back pain is among the most common types of nagging pain as decades progress.  Back pain can significantly limit our functionality and lifestyle.

The function of bending over and getting closer to the ground is commonly overlooked on the impact it has on our lives when it is taken away.  Do weeds need to be pulled?  Those weeds will only grow longer and spread their seeds if no one bends down to remove them.  Do baseboards need cleaning?  Getting on our hands and knees could be painful.  Those spider webs and scuff marks from shoes can display our neglect to house guests.  Do your grandkids request to be picked and held by their favorite grandma?  This request from our favorite munchkin for some grandmotherly love could be immediately declined due to consistent back pain.  The last thing we want is the fear of bending over to lead to the idea that our grandkids think we don’t like them.

Consistent practice and awareness of the significance of bending over is a critical part of our daily lives currently and for the years moving forward.   Our lifestyle becomes severely limited without the ability to bend over.  Practicing how to hinge from our hips, bend our knees, and keep our back rigid reinforces the invaluable ability to bend over and acquire items at ground level.

The hip joint is similar to the structure of a socket wrench.  In fact, the hip is classified as a ball and socket joint.  Similar to how the square knob of socket wrenches insert into a socket bit to create torque on a bolt, the femur fits into the hip joint to create torque on our hips to propel our lower extremities under our torso.  This is a hinging mechanism that uses the powerful motors of the gluteal and hamstring muscles to take the brunt of the load when bending over to the ground and extending upright when returning to standing.  Prioritizing this hinging movement along with the bending of the knees limits unnecessary spine movement, making the spine tertiary mover and prioritizing its job of changing small angles of direction to align vertebrae.  The spine isn’t meant to be the shape of a rainbow when bending over.  Therefore, by learning how to keep the back the rigid while hinging from the hips can significantly decrease overuse of the spine and limit rounding of the back.

To perform a hinge from the hips, begin by slightly bending the knees, allowing the shins to flex forward.  Once the shins are “parked” forward, prioritize a rigid spine to keep the torso rigid.  Limit rounding of the lower back, shoulder blades, or tucking of the chin.  The spine should be as a rigid as a redwood tree in Big Sur.  Finalize the movement by rotating the hips around the head of femur as your torso articulates over the hip joint.  Similar to the socket wrench moving around a bolt.  Keep hinging until a brief stretching sensation is experienced in the hamstrings.  Revert to your initial position by hinging back over the hips and ensuring to keep the back in straight while activating the glutes and hamstrings to bring your hips under the torso and over the thighs.  This movement can be performed to pick objects up from the ground, picking up twenty-five-pound humans, or bending over to pull troublesome weeds.

Next time you see a rogue candy wrapper left over from the ghouls who trick or treated last week on the ground, bend over and pick it up.  Make sure to use proper technique in doing so.  It’s these repetitions of consistently practicing mindfulness of picking up objects from the ground that mitigates the debilitating effects of back pain while bending over as we progress through 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.

Dec 10

Stop Light Exercises

Hours at the computer desk tinkering on your keyboard and mousepad.  Attending class while listening and take notes at a lecture.  Catching up on phone calls and texts at home.  Conversations at the coffee shop or on lunch break.  These activities are usually followed by a trip to our automobile where we sit down and venture home.  We sit down to conduct intellectual production in our everyday lives just to get ready to sit down some more.  Our rides home are usually accommodated with autopilot driving scenarios.

Nine out of ten times we have our way home mapped out immediately after turning the ignition on in our cars.   Our post-work ride home rituals follow a prolonged static body shape.  Our bodies re-enter a static position while we mosey on home in our mechanical carriages.  The time we spend on static body activities before our day ends, followed by more sitting in our cars, includes positions leading to underused joints and muscle groups causing injury, mobility restrictions, and annoying pain causing symptoms.  The front of our necks shorten as we peer down at phones for texting on our three by five-inch cell phone screens, typing emails, or writing important notes.  Shoulders roll forward as we lean our elbows on table tops during coffee and lunch conversations, shortening pectoral muscles and compressing the anterior compartment of the shoulder joints.  The low back can round as we stay static in any seating position, causing compression in lumbar vertebrae and shortening the area between the crests of our hips and ribs.  This can potentially lead to tight hip flexors and lower back pain.

Our beginning personal training clients present these suboptimal body ailments.  Usually, this is caused by repetitive prolonged time sitting in one position in our everyday lives.  The solution is to keep moving and avoiding stationary positions.  A fun and challenging tactic we prescribe to our personal training clients is “stop light exercises.”  Since we do nothing but sit and wait for car rides to be over, perhaps we can make the most of our time as we wait for red lights to turn green.  Since the wheels in our automobile aren’t moving, this is a great time to direct our concentration toward a few movements to give our body some much needed TLC.

Here are few exercises to perform while waiting at stop lights:

  1. Right and left lateral cervical flexion:  With strong posture and ears in line with the spine, gently tilt your ear toward your shoulder stretching out the side of your neck. Hold this position to where a brief stretching sensation is experienced for about a second.  Perform the same movement to the opposite side of the body.  Perform five to ten repetitions or until the light turns green.
  2. Scapular protraction and retraction:  With the forehead facing forward and ears in line with the spine, pull the shoulder blades backward along the rib cage until a brief muscular contraction in sensed in the muscles surrounding the shoulder blades and thoracic spine.  Reverse this motion forward gliding the shoulder blades forward along the rib cage.  “Flex and hold” the muscles around the shoulder blades in each position for about a second.  Perform five to ten repetitions or until the light turns green.
  3. Posterior and anterior pelvic tilts:  Sitting with strong posture in your car seat, line the midline of your ribs up with your ears and the middle of the crest of your hips.  “Roll” the crest of the hip forward toward the front of your rib cage and flex and hold the abdominal muscles.  Reverse “roll” your hips in the opposite direction.  Perform five to ten repetitions or until the light turns green.

Filling latent periods of sitting with consistently practiced corrective exercise can assists in decreasing pain and propositions of injuries form prolonged sitting.  Simple adjustments applied in everyday activity such as driving are just some small, yet powerful, adaptations to refine our lifetime fitness journey.

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 02

From the ground up

Diving to keep volleyballs from touching the ground; popping upright after sliding to kick out a soccer ball away from an opposing player; springing up off the ground after diving for an infield ground ball and gunning the ball to first base to throw out a runner booking it to first base; in high school, college, and post collegiate recreational sports, we get acquainted with the ground quite often.

Following our athletic career in our and teens and throughout our early twenties, physical activity in which we are on the ground seems to decrease in the events of our everyday lives. We might find ourselves in a profession where it is necessary to lay supine, kneel, or crawl on our hands and knees. Even with this necessity to be on the ground with our professions, these vents of being on the ground occur less and less as we age.  We can enter a recreational softball, volleyball, or pickleball league to remain active. However, we don’t practice these sports five times per week like we did in high school and college sports. Athletic activity decreases as we advance in age. Therefore, the experiences in which we get down and dirty occur less.

Entry level manual labor professions require some grunt work.  Grocery store and warehouse job tasks requires to stocking bottom shelves while bending down and reaching forward.  Car mechanics get down on both knees and twist tires off the rims of automobiles.  Skilled trade workers such as farmers, landscapers, and electricians squat down while working in small areas to reach, twist, and contort their bodies to conduct a wide array of tasks on the ground.

This working population move their bodies up and down without a second thought.  They do it all day for forty or more hours per week.  They have the muscular endurance and coordination to do so.  As times goes on, we advance in age.  We also receive promotions or expand our abilities to acquire the resources to get a younger and willing person to perform laborious tasks for us.  The resource of having a younger apprentice available can introduce a sense of complacency to perform floor level labor as we progress in life.  The interactions with kneeling, picking things up, and addressing small fixes that happen to be below waist level can become an afterthought.  Why would we want to change our electrical outlet when your grandson can do it?  Baseboards need painting?  They’re too close to the floor, no one will notice.  They can be left alone.  Weeds?  We can hire a landscaper to get those up.  A sense of complacency, with lack of bending down to get things done that are closer to the ground, can shunt our ability to get up and down off the ground if we don’t perform this activity as we age.

Research supports that skeletal muscle, neurological facilitation between cells, and athletic coordination decrease as human age increases.  This evidence has validity, but it’s not just the degradation of the cells within our bodies that shunt our body’s ability to be strong and productive.  If the activities that require us to change levels, bend down, reach into small areas, and get back up are decreased, we are more likely to forget how to perform these tactics.  Therefore, if we want to be able to get up and down off the ground for the longevity of our lives, we can’t neglect activities that include interactions involving squatting down, kneeling, performing activities while being down on our bellies, or even on our backs.  This includes simple activities such as bending down to tie your shoes, or putting your socks on, gardening, or picking up after your grandchild’s party.

We can focus on the muscles responsible for helping us get up and down off the ground effectively by participating in Yoga classes and visiting the local gym.  However, if we don’t stay involved in the environments that require us to get up and down from a crouched down activity that is close to ground level, our body and mind forget how to be comfortable in a position close to the ground.  Count reps and sets on the resistance training exercise routines you perform.  More importantly, don’t forget to count the occurrences you get up and down from the ground everyday to ensure you maintain this invaluable skill for us 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.

Nov 27

Grip strength as we age

Opening jars, turning a set of keys to the deadbolt to our homes, or just picking up bulky items throughout our day; hand movements make our lives functional.  The unique organization of fingers and thumbs at the end of our arms gifts us the ability to type, use our phones, drive, and make food.  Opposable thumbs are a unique tool to the human race, giving us a one up on over other animals.  What would we do without our trusty hands?

Our five fingered money makers provide many life enhancing attributes.  Toddlers learning to build Legos and refining their dexterity and fine motor skills.  Students from grammar school to college perfect the art of depicting their thoughts via pen and paper, typing, and now enter into the era of utilizing cell phones to text as their primary mode of communication.  Tradesmen such as framers, electricians, and mechanics have the unique ability to of build houses, wire the electrical infrastructure of a house, and the invaluable ability to make cars go “vroom.”  Hands are significant to life the same way wings make birds fly.  Hands take a beating throughout life.  After a career’s worth of putting our trusty mitts through stressful situations, they might get tattered and worn out.

Maintaining physical abilities to perform everyday tasks is important.  Hands deteriorate over time just like a car’s brakes do after a few years of driving.  As we advance in our age, we might develop painful symptoms in hand joints such as arthritis, broken fingers, or damaged tendons.  These maladies present obstacles to function in our normal routines.  The first natural approach to an obstacle is to move around it.  Unfortunately, maneuvering around hand upkeep can lead to a halt in our daily physical activities we enjoy so much hand pain isn’t as enjoyable as a November trip to Kauai.  However, if we let it deter our normal functions, it’s a hassle to regain the strength of our hands if unmaintained over time.

Risk of falling is another critically significant factor that can occur as we age.  After a hard-working career, physical activity might slow down during retirement.  As physical activity decreases so does balance, coordination, and awareness to the surroundings of our environment.  This presents the situation of tripping over objects and falling to the ground.  As my 100-year-old grandpa told me last week, “There’s nothing worse than plummeting to the ground and not knowing when you’re going to crash.”  He related this to when he bailed out of a flaming plane in World War Two and to a fall that he experienced a few years back.  He shared that both experiences were similar.

The normal reaction when a person falls is to reach out and grab onto something to either save themselves from toppling over or reducing the speed of the fall.  This is where hands can come in as an emergency breaking mechanism should a fall occur.  Society has adapted to decrease the severity of falls by ensuring there are ADA compliant rails around walkways and businesses.  These rails are a significantly important tool to be used as a resource if someone is at the risk of falling.  The ability to grab onto objects such as rails, handles, or a person’s coat sleeve decreases the catastrophic events a fall can impose upon a person.  Therefore, appreciating the ability to grab onto objects with our hands shouldn’t be overlooked.

We can reinforce our ability to grab, hold, and manipulate items with our hands via an adherent resistance training program.  Grab those weights and bust out a set of ten repetitions of biceps curls.  Perform finger, wrist, and elbow stretches.  Get in the garden and use that shovel to throw some dirt around.  Keep opening those jars without asking for help from your grandkids.  In order to maintain our ever so important grip strength, we can’t stop performing the duties that make our hands strong.

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 22

Carving out time to exercise

Time isn’t just the name of my favorite Pink Floyd song.  It’s not just a digital number changing digits on our phones when look to see where we are in our day.  The interactions, significant emotional events, and energy spent on the various experiences in our lives are what fill these brackets separated by seconds, minutes, hours, sunsets, and sunrises.  Every human has twenty-four hours allotted to us in a day’s worth of numerically counted time.  Events we choose to spend our time on creates what we want to achieve.  It could be to better ourselves in our professions, interacting with our loved ones and friends, or simply taking time for ourselves to shut off the mind and relax.

Exercise isn’t usually identified as the top of the food chain when focusing on the time we have allotted in our everyday lives.  It may not be blatantly apparent but allocating minimal time to exercise significantly increases the efficiency and effectiveness of how we spend our time in our jobs, relationships, and for our own psychological, mental, and emotional well-being.

The benefit of an adherent exercise regimen isn’t the hottest news off the press.  The benefits don’t seem as important as what occurs during the bulk of our day.  Our professions, romantic relationships, being a student, or being a parent are the pillars that are getting most of our attention.  However, a strong body equals a strong mind.  The results of exercise deliver a potent rationale to better us as individuals to support the people around us we care about.  Owning a physically and mentally strong presence demonstrates a profound sense of confidence, exuberance, and safety.  The people we are associated with in our professions and interpersonal relationships need a steady rock to support them.  Therefore, having a resilient and composed body, mind, and spirit gives the aspects of our lives we work so hard for, something to lean on.  In some cases, the people around us may even want to change their methods to be strong as well by practicing tactics to improve their lifetime fitness journey.

A doctor’s visit can swiftly reveal the need for exercise.  Losing weight, recalibrating blood pressure, or decreasing pain in joints is at the top of the list during a doctor’s visit. The normal prescription for exercises is seventy-five minutes of vigorous exercises per week.  Get your exercise tracking log out, you’re going to need it.  A request to track exercise works for some people.  On the flip side, tracking more statistics and data can drive a person bonkers.  Numbers, variables, and statistics can easily overwhelm a grown adult as similar to a high school geometry teacher demonstrating the beauty of the quadratic equation during a two o’clock high school sixth period class.  If this is the case, don’t track variables.  Go for the simple low hanging fruit.  Start off by performing something that can be consistently done each day that doesn’t equate to the mental fortitude required to repeat a trigonometry algorithm.  Simply focusing on three exercise techniques performed only once per day offers significant improvements to the mind and body.  It doesn’t take too much time either.

Attainable examples of exercises we request our personal training clients to perform at home include planks, squats, and pushups.  We encourage performing a straight arm plank for thirty seconds, ten pushups, and ten squats every day.  These exercises aren’t demanding you to climb up an extra telephone pole, make fifty phone calls, or answer thirty more emails.  Performing the requested exercises of a plank, a set of squats, and pushups each day throughout a week takes less time than it does to watch an inning of the Giants game.  Performing the straight arm plank for thirty seconds, once a day, for seven days takes three and a half minutes out of the entire week.  Additionally, seventy pushups and seventy squats throughout the week equates to one hundred and forty exercise movements throughout the week.  Those numbers are substantial when looking at the perspective of additional exercise completed throughout the week.  These additional mechanisms of productive stress to large muscle groups and joints of the body might not be used regularly throughout the day.  Therefore, areas of the body that aren’t normally stimulated are the ones that need the most work.  Performing simple yet effective exercises in small doses over a week’s time frame nurtures the body and mind in ways that support our everyday life by increasing our strength, decreasing the likely hood of getting injured, and decreasing nagging pain.

Constraints of hours in our demanding schedule is an eternal balancing act.  Don’t the let the idea of “I don’t have enough time” hold you back from much needed exercise.  Appreciate the simple forms of exercise.  Look through the lens of what small amounts of exercise can offer your 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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