Jan 27

Rainy Day Exercise

Our glorious holiday season has wrapped up as December shifts to the beginning of January.  Historically, January offers grey and cloudy skies.  Peering out the window, we aren’t granted the bright blue sky and warm days we get in spring and summer.  The cold, foggy morning brings us consistent bouts of rain.  Bleak wet environments are the most desirable to venture outside to for most humans.  As these conditions repeat for a series of days, our outlook on the world can drop along with the temperature of this chilly, grey season.

Staying indoor can trigger harboring of emotions.  Similar to when we get outside to move around and get some sunshine to put a smile on our face, lack of movement can stress us out, make us mopey, and influence a negative outlook on our days.  Being cooped up inside can put our thoughts, feelings, and emotions in a hazy realm where we can muster over recurring thoughts.  If we could only have a warm sunny day to go out for a hike, frolicking in the garden, or walk our dogs without getting drenched.  Unfortunately, with wet gray, gloomy days, these activities aren’t so enticing.  Additionally, if the body doesn’t move, our physical activity becomes stagnant, yet the mind still wanders.  Along with the cold gloomy days and lack of movement, our minds can match this environment to produce cold and gloomy thoughts.

Fortunately, the human body is an amazing organism capable of adapting demotivating and psychological immobilizing environments.  By exercising, the body produces amazing adaptations to counter the lack of sunlight brought to us by the early January climate.  Regular exercise promotes mood enhancing endorphins and offers a sense of accomplishment at the conclusion to bouts of regular exercise as a gift to the body.  Alongside the physiological adaptation of gaining strength, improving balance, and managing calorie intake, exercise also serves as an advanced form of meditation.  Outside of exercise, there aren’t many instances in which time is devoted specifically to our ourselves where our busy minds get put on hold so we can tend to ourselves.  Additionally, exercises promotes the ability for our bodies to get a better night’s sleep.  Therefore, while it’s January is blowing its cold air on us, we can at least get some much-needed sleep and be happy and fit for the sunny days in the future.  The solution to depressing outdoor cold weather is exercising.  So why not get some exercise indoors where the climate is well lit, dry, and warm.

Some simple exercises we recommend to our personal training clients to do indoors are squats, planks, and pushups.  Here are some instructions on how to do execute them:

Zombie Squat:  We call this exercise a zombie squat because we instruct clients to keep their hands out in front of them as they were a zombie from Night of the Living Dead.  To perform, extend hands out in front of the body to where the hand is elevated below the collar bones.  While keeping the chest and head upright, point the toes forward and sit your hips down and back until you feel a brief stretch in the glute and hip flexor region.  Ensure to keep the pressure on the heels.  Pay special attention to ensuring the heels don’t come off the ground or to let the arches of the feet collapse in.  Repeat for 3 sets of 5-10 repetitions.

Straight Arm Plank:  Position your body face down while on your knees.  Straighten the arms our so your elbows are extended, and you are posting on your arms.  With the core tight, straighten your legs out and hold this position for 15-30 seconds.  Be mindful not to let the lower back sag like a rickety bridge from the Indiana Jones movie.  Perform 3 sets of this movement.

Push Up:  With the same starting position that you had from the plank, lower your body to where the elbows just cross the border of the back of the body, then push the body up to the straight arm plank position.  Ensure that the knees stay extended.  Avoid injuries to the shoulder by decreasing the amount elevation traveled toward the ground.  If there are sensations of pinching, uncomfortable pain, go with the less is more principle.  Decrease the amount of movement traveled by descending a quarter of the way to the ground.  Once you feel comfortable with your strength, perhaps you can progress by increasing the amount of distance traveled downward on each push up movement.  This movement can also be done from an inclined surface to modify the difficulty level.  Repeat this movement for 5-10 repetitions for 3 sets.

The body is capable of reversing the quintessential raining day blues.  All we need is ourselves, the ground, and few minutes to move.  Pick a few indoor exercises that can be completed indoor.  Get the body prepared for the sunny days so we can soak in the sun and be active.

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 11

Posture Makes Perfect

“Is there anything you can do to help this pain in my neck.”  This is a common request that comes from our newer personal training clients just starting one of our exercise prescriptions.  This comment is usually paired with the participant turning around and showing me the spot that hurts.  As they struggle to reach their hand back to indicate where the pain is originating from, they turn around and offer me a final eyebrow furrowing grimace of disapproval to the way their body is acting.

We see the goal of “reducing neck and back pain in” often in our initial interviews with beginning personal training clients.  These symptoms usually come from people with a profession requiring multiple hours of sitting and looking down at objects.  In particular, phones and computers.  Doctors, therapists, and teachers look at files, papers, and charts all day.  Accountants, executives, and administrative assistants answer emails and enter data in a seated position for hours at a time.  Dental assistant, nail salon technicians, and optometrists look at one myopic object and use their tiny tools in their craft.   Activities in these lines of work lead to suboptimal posture.

Looking at objects for a long period of time stimulates standing in in a drooped over position with a neck that resembles a candy cane’s shape.  Shoulder posture is usually overlooked as they begin to hunch forward resembling some of the zombies on Michael Jackson’s thriller music video.  Sitting for hours in a chair puts compressive forces on one of the most common sites of injury in the lower back by the lumber and sacral vertebrae.  Sometimes the problem doesn’t lie within the compression of the joints.  In most cases, the underuse of the structural muscles that hold us upright in optimal alignment is the issue we should pay the most attention to.

Fortunately, if you are a human these solutions can be remedied without the use of surgery, pain medication, or a “hocus pocus” impulse purchase over social media to cure all the pain in the universe.  Our muscular system which encompasses every bone in our skeleton is a masterpiece of architecture designed to hold us upright and manage the multitude of physical stresses we face in our everyday lives.  In particular, the threat of poor posture.  A foundational theme that we always teach our newer personal training clients is the importance of strengthening the muscles that attach to the shoulder blade, or scapula.  Acting as a key stone to the highway of muscles that attach to and intersect the upper back and shoulder joint, the scapula has anchor points on the top, right and left sides, in the middle, underneath, and at the bottom.  The various muscles originate from other critically important locations in the body assisting in reinforcing the structural integrity of the torso and cranium.   The latissimus dorsi originates at the lower back and attaches to the lateral portion of the scapula and humerus.  The trapezius is a large, inverted rhombus shaped muscle with multiple attachment points to the from the spine, rib cage, scapula and humerus.  The subscapularis muscle is a muscle located underneath the scapula responsible for reinforcing the rotator cuff of the shoulder. The lower back, ribs, rotator cuff, upper back, and neck vertebrae are just a few noteworthy sites that are reinforced by the muscles of scapular stabilization.  Therefore, it’s critically important to focus on the health and activity of these muscle groups to evade nagging neck, shoulder, and lower back injuries.

We don’t need an anatomy lesson on what holds what together.  However, understanding the importance of the muscles around the scapula helps us to appreciate how critical this is to our livelihood.  A cue we teach our new personal training clients is to “park the shoulder blades.”  We instruct clients to pull their shoulder blades downward as if they are performing the antithesis of a shrugging motion.  Simultaneously, we cue the retraction of the shoulder blades which means to pull the shoulder blades inward toward the spine.  The combination of these two movements activate the muscles responsible for keeping our body in proper alignment and reinforce optimal posture throughout the day.

An issue we have in our everyday jobs that pose a threat to the integrity of our posture is that we simply forget.  Who is going to remember to “park their shoulder blades” for 8-10 hours a day?  I teach people to this movement for 40 hours a week and I forget.  However, adherence to exercise is something that we can more easily manage.  Take some time throughout the week and spend special attention on the muscles attached to the shoulder blade.  If we can exercise 2-3 times a week and strengthen the muscles of scapular stabilization, we can alleviate the many problems associated with neck and shoulder pain.

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 28

Can Exercise Help With Stress?

We are living in a period where we are literally being depressed.  There are few definitions of the word “depress” when used as a verb.  Let’s look at 2 of these terms.  The first definition found on Google: “Make someone feel utterly dispirited or rejected.”  A second definition: “Reduce speed or activity in something.”

Living in the currency of the situation during the COVID-19 saga, I’m sure some of us can related to this feeling.  Perhaps we are forced to work from home when our normal jobs required us to get ourselves ready for the day and travel to an office.   Grocery store visits are more challenging due to bigger lines, longer checkouts, and having to avoid other shoppers.  Most importantly, due to quarantine restrictions and rules, we simply don’t leave our homes as much.  The normal activities we do have slowed down.  These situations can lead to feeling of having one’s spirit broken.

Exercise has been repeatedly proven to help with these feeling of depression.  Various studies show the physiological results of increased dopamine and serotonin.  Along with these hormones that brighten your mood, exercise helps manage stress hormones, such as cortisol.  Anti-anxiety medication can also be a productive enhancement to managing depression symptoms.  However, the feeling of completing an exercise routine gives us a mental boost that we produce from our own effort.  Once we can look in the mirror and notice the hard that has been accomplished, no medication or physiological study can match a sensation of accomplishment after completing challenging exercise session.

Exercise sessions can act as an advanced form of mediation.  Some people might argue that meditation takes people to another place.  With the overabundance of restrictions put on us due to COVID and the fire hose stream of news being poured upon us, the idea of going to other places might sound enticing.  Whether it be an online Zoom Yoga session, a YouTube fitness video, or a virtual personal training session, working out serves as a way to decrease distractions and focus on ourselves.  The sounds we hear, the things we see, and conversations get put on hold when we focus on training our bodies.  Whether it’s holding a plank for 1 minute, performing warrior 2 pose, or doing jumping jacks with other Zoom participants in virtual group exercise sessions, the stress of life is put on hold when we exercise.  Exercise is a way to get away from it all for a brief period.

Being held down is no way to live.  Sure, we should adhere to rules, stay inside, and limit our activities during shelter in place restrictions.  However, let’s not forget how we can take a break utilizing the gift of exercise.  The ability to improve our bodies is something we are blessed with.  Let’s use it to lift our spirits and help us endure the stresses that weigh on 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.

Dec 24

Keep the Kids Moving

The innovation of electronic devices in our lives has brought us a long way.  Television is a tradition in which we watch our favorite shows, receive updates on current events, cheer for our favorite sports team, and use as an entertainment mechanism for our children.  The ever-evolving cell phone acts as a peripheral brain.  Not only do cell phones serve as a means of communication, but also as a link to social media, music, and video entertainment.  However, if these devices are overused, they can bring our lifestyles to a screeching halt the same rate as an addiction to methamphetamines and barbiturates.

The issue of college, high school, and junior high school kids developing an addiction to electronics links to another critical topic:  they don’t move as much as they should.  The introduction of virtual education as a result of the COVID pandemic contributes to the issue of decreased movement to the youth in our society.  Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok, Youtube, and various other applications on the phone affix their eyes to the 3 x 5-inch screen.  The almighty PlayStation, X-Box, and P.C. video games we provide to our kids as “gifts” encourage them spend endless hours in awkward sitting positions interacting with a screen and a remote control.  Supplying our kids with a cell phone and video game platforms could be seen as a token of love and affection or a reward for being upstanding students.  However, in an era where the need to show up on time, pay rent, or provide for a family is important to our functions as humans in society, these devices could hinder the ability for our generation of kids to realize the importance of these values due to the distraction of screen time interaction with cell phones and video games.

The biproduct of too much screen time on phones, televisions, or computers can quickly produce a sedentary lifestyle.  It comes to no surprise that if you are parked in a chair for 10 hours, 6 days a week, the body suffers.  Decreased physical activity leads to increased fat mass storage, decrease muscular function, and the development of insulin resistance.  Is this a foundation we want to build for our kids to grow up happy, healthy, and strong?  If we don’t encourage physical activity in the current state our society’s youth, we are contributing to a future of lazy, overweight, and sick kids.

Fortunately, the human body is constructed to overcome such obstacles.  If adults encourage regular exercise to the youth of our society, we can set a standard for the rest of their lives.  The bone structure, muscles, joints, and neuromuscular system of a teenager’s body are at the most sensitive state for adaptation.  Research supports that bone, muscle, connective tissue, nerve, and brain cells develops until the age of 25.  This means the imposed demand on the body via exercise will elicit lifelong adaptations to physically active youngsters.  The impact from sports, rough housing with friends, and sports specific training cause to bones increase in bone mineral density, ligaments to strengthen, and brain to muscular synapses to function more efficiently.  If kids participate in physical activity at their most developmentally sensitive years, they can permanently acquire these body strengthening adaptation for the rest of their lives.

The problem we see with kids and exercise is that there is simply not enough.  The benefit to influencing physical activity and exercise to the youth of our society influences them to be self-reliant, live longer, and to develop a physically, mentally, and emotionally stronger life.  The importance of exercise for our teenagers and college age kids has never been more important.  Exercise and physical activity for our kids super charges the brain, bone, neuromuscular, and personality development adaptations that will stay with them the rest of their 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 16

The Importance of Standing Up

I visited my grandpa at his assisted living center last week.  He was elated to see my face because his assisted living community was prohibited from public visits due to COVID restrictions.  As we chatted about what projects he was tinkering with and the social interactions he had with his fellow residents, he mentioned a few maladies that weighed upon him.  He shared that in his advanced age, his lower back and right knee were hurting.

He elaborated on the mechanism of injury that occurred to cause his back pain.  As he was performing his daily exercise routine utilizing his TRX suspension trainer that he affixed to the wall on his patio, the strap came loose and he feel backwards, landing in an awkward position on his tailbone.  Discouraged the by event, my grandpa mentioned to me some exercises he did to help correct the injury.  “I might be 99, but your grandpa doesn’t give up,” he exclaimed.

As my grandpa updated me about his life during my visit, he wanted to show me a few projects he was working on.  Then something astonishing occurred, he effortlessly stood up from his chair.  Sure, this seems like a normal occurrence for the general population.  However, for someone who fell backwards and damaged their tailbone at the age of 99, let alone with a pain ridden deteriorating 99-year-old knee that has never been operated on, standing up without the assistance of grabbing onto a supporting object or pushing on his knees for assistance was quite remarkable.

As he shuffled across the room, I noted that his living premises were impeccably clean, tidy and organized.  “Grandpa, do you have a cleaning service that helps clean your place?” I asked.  “No, I would never hire a maid.” He answered.  Just as baffled from his ascent from his chair, I was increasingly impressed by the evidence that he organizes his living space all by himself.  Clean countertop, no dishes in the sink, toothpaste, floss, and early morning drinking glass clean and ready to go by his bathroom sink.

Despite injures, previous surgeries, or the advance of age, getting in and out of chair is critical to our longevity.  The ability to effortlessly get up from a chair gets the body moving in various settings.  In my grandpas’ case, getting up and down from a chair sets the tone for other events throughout his life.  Staying mobile enough to keep his dwelling organized even through his movement is hindered would not be possible had he not been able to effectively get up out seated positions regularly.  Additionally, if he can efficiently get up and down from his chair, this probably helped him get up from the ground after his accident that left him with an injured coccyx.

The first exercises we focus on with newer personal training clients who are underconditioned are lower body strengthening, balance, and core exercises.  During my visit with my grandpa, he inquired about what exercises would help his back.  Ironically, I went over an exercise that we teach the majority of our personal training clients who suffer from lower back pain, the posterior pelvic tilt.  I informed my grandpa that he can perform this exercise while sitting, standing, or laying on the ground.  I first reminded him to appreciate what good posture was.  I reminded him to line his ribs up over his hips and ensure his ears were in line with his neck.  This way his head would not hunch forward.  Then I told him to put his hands on the crests of his hips and “tuck his hips toward his ribs.”  He mentioned that he felt his abs and glutes activating throughout the movement.  I told him to do this at least 10 times a day in an effort to strengthen the muscles around his spine and hips.

It may seem like a simple task, but efficiently getting in and out seated positions is critical to our functionality as humans.  Perhaps we can use this as a guide to manage our fitness levels.  If we are impeded by pain, weakness, or lack of mobility to the point we are having trouble getting out of seated positions, perhaps it is time to take a look at what we can do to improve our health, strength, and overall quality of 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

Holiday Strength and Conditioning

Thanksgiving and the holiday season are fast approaching.  Many traditions take place this time of year where we celebrate the last month and enter in to next 12 months.  2021, here we come.  Along with holiday festivities of reuniting with friends and family, eating copious amount of decadent holiday food, and traveling, comes a critical component to our holiday traditions, decorating.

Lights border our windows, gutter guards, and roof tops.  Inflatable snowmen, reindeers, and elves can be seen on front lawns as we peruse down the streets of our neighborhoods.  Let’s not forget one of the most popular holiday decorations of all found in many living rooms, the Christmas tree.  These decorations offer quite a spectacle signifying a time to reflect our previous year’s success and be thankful for what we have and the people around us.  However, in order to see these decorations, work needs to be accomplished to unveil this final product to appreciate the end of the year.

If most people are like me when it comes to holiday decoration, lights, tinsel, and sometimes artificial Christmas trees are stored in the catacombs of the garage or high atop the archives in an attic.  In order to acquire these coveted items, heavy boxes covered in dust must be moved aside, ladders need to be ascended, and we may need to contort our bodies in unique shapes to acquire stashed away items.  Perhaps you’re missing the star to put on top the tree hidden in the depths of a years’ worth of stored boxes.  Sound familiar?  In order to successfully prepare for the holidays, we need a mobile, injury free, and strong body.  Setting up and taking down holiday decoration should be fun and rewarding.

The ability to set up decorations competently and efficiently for the holidays is important.  However, this is just an example of the everyday activities requiring strength, coordination, balance, and overall fitness.  Envision the activities around the house and in our usual activities that require a certain amount of strength and athleticism.  I’m sure you can find a few.

To help you prepare for a fun, healthy, and strong holiday, here a are a few introductory exercises we teach our personal training clients in Napa to master for a foundational level of fitness:

  1. Improve your hand grip strength with finger flexion and extension:

With elbows fully extended and palms facing downward, elevate elbows upward until hands are perpendicular armpits and hands are in front of the body.  Extend the fingers out toward the front of the body as if “putting on a glove” until a muscle contraction in the forearms and fingers can be sensed and “flex and hold” for 1 second. Reverse the movement by flexing the fingers in toward the body to “make a fist” as if “ringing out a wet towel” until a muscle contraction in the forearms and fingers can be sensed and “flex and hold” for 1 second. Repeat for 5-10 repetitions.

  1. Improve your core, low back, and upper extremity strength with the simple and effective straight arm plank:

Facing the ground, position yourself in a “push up” position.  Extend legs to where your body is straight and elevated off the ground.  Spend special attention on ensuring the lower back does not sag and that the knees are extended.  Hold this position anywhere form 10-30 seconds.

  1. Improve spine mobility and decrease back pain with the “cat and cow” exercise:

Position your body in a prone quadruped position kneeling on your knees and hands are positioned underneath the arm pits.  Breath in and drop the belly down toward the ground to make a “u” shape in your back, stretching and holding that position to stimulate stretch of the abdominals and ventral portion of the spine for 1-2 seconds.  Reverse the motion by bowing your back up to the ceiling in an inverted “u” shape to stretch out the paraspinal muscles surrounding the spine and separating the shoulder blades.  Hold this position of 1-2 seconds.  Repeat each movement for 5-10 repetitions.

Make the end of this year an enjoyable one.  Invest some time into your body before and throughout the holiday season to endure the various physical stresses of decorating.  More importantly, as the new year’s approaches, get a head start on the popular new year resolution  by focusing on your lifetime fitness today.

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 03

Keep Warm, Stay Illness Free

The average temperature has officially dropped significantly and the hour hand on our clocks have been wound back for the next few months.  These factors convince people to stay indoors.  Outdoor physical activities embraced during the sunny, warm time of year are losing popularity due to the dark and frigid conditions.  This change can be a good thing for us.  Staying indoors stimulates activities inside the house that may have been passed up because the environment outside allowed us to get things done on the exterior of our dwellings.  We also might spend more time with our families as our outdoor activities lose appeal.  As the cold and wet season begins to grace us with its presence, our runny noses, cold fingertips, and wet shoes start to become a common occurrence as well.  Along with the biproducts our bodies endure due to the cold air and wet ground, our physical activity decreases as well.

If we can’t garden outside, play golf, or paint the house outside, what’s the next best thing?  Usually we stay inside where it’s warm and dry and park ourselves on the couch that has been unoccupied all summer.  If it’s raining and dark outside walks, hikes, and leisurely jogs become less enticing.  Additionally, the last thing we want is to come down with an annoying illness limiting us from getting any physical activity in.

The outdoors is temporarily off limits, what can we do about support our health and fitness?  A productive solution is to ensure we stay healthy and illness free in preparation for when the sun comes out and gives us an opportunity to resume the outdoor physical activity we embrace so much.  We want to ensure our bodies are ready to go when the clocks spring forward an hour to bless up with warm weather and another hour of daylight.  Here are a few tips that we remind our personal training clients in Napa to practice not only during the cold and damp times of year, but also as a practice to avoid illness in their everyday lives:

  1. Mindful Hydration: The lowest common denominator on the necessity of nutrient needs 9 times out of 10 for people looking to improve their nutritional needs is hydration.  The human body requires at least a minimum of 3 liters of water per day.  That’s 96 ounces of fluid.  It’s not uncommon to drink below this amount.  People get so busy with their jobs and tasks throughout the day that they don’t drink enough water.  Sufficient hydration is the key to delivering nutrients throughout the blood stream to help the body function properly.  If the body is able to absorb beneficial nutrient and utilize substrates efficiently, the likelihood of becoming sick significantly decreases.  We recommend our personal training clients drink a full glass of water immediately after waking and after each meal.
  2. Eat your veggies: Yes, when reading this column you might hear echoes of your parent voices when you were below the age of 10 years old, “If you don’t eat your vegetables, you don’t get any dessert.”  They were correct, and they always will be.  Fresh vegetables contain vitamins, minerals, and cancer fighting substances that no pill or magic powder can offer you.  Additionally, vegetables contain a high amount of water to help keep the body hydrated.  We encourage our clients to consume a vegetable with 3 of their meals throughout the day.  Therefore, as you’re reading this column, I challenge you to consume a vegetable during your breakfast, lunch, and dinner meals.
  3. Dress warm: This seems like a no brainer.  However, we forget that the cold weather will significantly hinder our immune systems.  Add in wet clothes that fail to fleck of water, the water on our clothes doesn’t do the best job at keeping our bodies warm.  The seasons have changed.  Our wardrobes should as well.

My fourth-grade teacher reminded us that if you eat the right foods, wear the right clothes, and drink enough water, you won’t get sick.  It’s amazing how the simple lessons that we learn in our youth still hold true in keeping us healthy and operational in our adult years.  Staying fit, injury free, and strong is critically important to our lifetime fitness.  However, the cold weather and wet conditions significantly challenge our immune systems.  If we come down with some illness, it will take us one or two weeks to fully recover.  Then another week to reacclimate to a baseline fitness level.  Sitting out from our fitness routines for three weeks isn’t productive toward our lifetime fitness.  The sun will be out in a few months and the weather will be warmer.  If we want to pick up where we left off in our outdoor physical activities, staying illness free is a priority.  Get your sleep, eat the right foods, bundle up, and drink enough water.  Adhere to simple guidelines to staying healthy.  We’ll be supercharged and ready to go get out and play in the Spring.

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 25

Exercises to Perform in the Car

My pickleball partner and I travel various places to get some games in against other players.  We also travel via plane and lengthy distances in our cars to compete in tournaments.  The result is always worth it.  We get some much-needed physical activity in and refine our craft by fine tuning our skills in the game we love so much.  However, after sitting a car seat for an hour or more, our bodies contort to a shape that is not conducive to playing 2-3 hours of pickleball.

Cars and planes do not give us much room to move.  Bent knees, flexed hips, and our backs being supported by the confines that our car seats offer a scrunched-up position to our bodies that causes muscles to shrink and compress.  After we arrive to the courts, I sit out a game or two and perform the dynamic stretching routine that we train all our personal training clients in Napa to do before their exercise sessions.  However, my partner does not take the same measures before he goes out to play.  He simply gets out of the car, grabs his paddle, and starts running around the court practicing his high level pickleball skills.  Then the classic, “My body feels like it’s going to fall apart,” comes out on the way home.  If my partner had done some mobility and flexibility exercises before he scurried off to the court to play 10 games, maybe he would not be hurting so bad at the end of the night.  In fact, research supports that performing a uniformed warm up routine of a few exercises of just 5-10 repetitions before physical activity improves performance.

My pickleball partner heard my response about ensuring to warm up before he goes out to play before.  It’s my trade to ensure people warm up their joints and neuromuscular system correctly to ensure their bodies perform correctly and avoid injury during exercise.  He mentioned that he is impatient and is chomping at the bit to go play when we arrive.  Hence why he “never has time to stretch.”  However, he did mention a useful suggestion to at least warm up his body before he even steps out of the car.  “What if I were to perform some stretches while I was in the car?”

We encourage our personal training clients to perform exercises in the car often to get as much productive exercise possible in throughout their day.  We call these “stop light exercises.”  First, I would not encourage anything other than looking at your speedometer and the road when driving 70 MPH on the highway.  However, when you are stopped for 30 seconds to a minute at a stop light, or better yet while you are in traffic, there are some useful exercises to perform while sitting.  Here are 2 examples:

  1. Posterior pelvic tilt:  This is an exercise I learned from my physical therapy internships as one of the first exercises my mentors would teach patients coming in with back pain symptoms.  Possessing adequate strength around the pelvis and surrounding musculature of the back substantially assists in the structural integrity of the spine.  To perform, sit up right with hips underneath your arm pits, ears in line with the neck.  “Tuck” the crests of your hips toward your ribs and roll your tail bone forward.  You should feel a brief muscular sensation in your abdomen’s muscles and a slight stretch in the low back.  Revert to your initial position and repeat for 10 repetitions.
  2. Scapular protraction and retraction: Once again, this exercise is top of the list for the clients during my physical therapy internships that my mentors taught to people with chronic neck pain and shoulder rotator cuff pain.  Similar to the setup of the anterior pelvic tilt, this exercise requires optimal posture to render optimal benefits.  For this exercise, you can put your hand on your steering wheel, about arm pit height.  Glider your shoulder blades backward against your spine and contract your shoulder blade muscles.  Immediately change the direction of the tracking of the shoulder blades to glide forward toward the chest.  Flex and hold the muscles of the anterior deltoids, pectorals, and attachment underneath the armpits.  Rinse and repeat for 5- 10 repetitions.

There is nothing worse than having your favorite recreational activity or exercise taken away from you because your body isn’t able to endure the stress imposed upon it.  Sure, we deal with aches and pains often.  Some more than others due the history of injury and physical maladies in our lives.  However, we do not need to settle on pain and watch our bodies deteriorate after partaking in the physical activities we enjoy.  Whether it’s in the car or a few minutes before embarking on your recreational activities, it would be productive to prepare your body by choosing warm up exercises to perform better and decrease pain.

 

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 18

Shoulder Strength and Functionality

Frequently used kitchen items such as coffee mugs, glass ware, and plates can be found in the cupboards over the countertop in the kitchen.   Reaching up to get a mug for drinking coffee, a plate for eating breakfast and dinner, or obtaining a glass for your favorite beverage is an everyday task for most of us.  Our kids might ask us to go outside to throw a baseball or Frisbee with them.  The simple act of putting your arm outside the car window to feel the breeze while diving down Soscol going 40 miles per hour.  Do any of these actions seem like they shouldn’t hurt?  For most of us, the answer is yes.  However, for those of us dealing with shoulder pain, performing these simple actions can be a daunting and strenuous task.

The shoulder joint is comprised of the humerus, clavicle and scapular bones.  These bones have unique attachment points comprised of muscular, tendinous, and ligamentous tissues to each other.  Ligaments are bone-to-bone attachments.  Tendons attach muscles to the bones.  Skeletal muscle move bones closer or further away from each other.   The ends of the each of these bones have a smooth, pearl-like surface made of cartilage articulating each bone.  This smooth gliding cartilage is meant to prevent bone-to-bone contact and impingement of tissues in between the bones.  Additionally, each bone has small fluid filled sacks called bursas that serve as shock absorbers in joints to dampen percussive forces within the joints.

It’s important to understand how the optimal or suboptimal integrity of these structures can affect the functionality of the shoulder joint in our everyday lives.  If the cartilage surrounding the joints decrease, then the likelihood of developing arthritis increases.  As tendons, ligaments and muscles are damaged from injuries, strength in the shoulder joint falters.  Bursas that get inflamed cause pain, which is a distraction to the productivity during our day.  These mechanisms of injury occur from events throughout our lives.  Perhaps a previous sports injury from a recreational event, a traumatic activity such as a car crash, or an overused injury from the demands of the actions of a job.  The result of the afflictions to the affected area is pain.  This pain and unproductivity can negatively affect our physical, psychological, and emotional wellbeing.  Fortunately, adhering to exercise and understand a few pieces of anatomy, these painful symptoms of the shoulder are curable.

Shoulder issues are a common malady among our personal training clients in Napa.  One of the first tactics we teach our clients is to “park the shoulders.”  This means to retract the shoulder blades backwards and downward against the ribs using the muscle responsible for scapular retraction and scapular depression.  The action of pulling the shoulder blades backwards toward each other is scapular retraction.  Pulling the shoulder blades downward, performing the opposite action of shrugging, is scapular depression.

If we think about what causes poor posture, it will make sense why brining the shoulder blades back will revert harmful conditions to our body.  Some of us work in office settings, sit in chairs all day, or view files placed on a desk while sitting.  Let’s not forget how much we place our cell phones down on surfaces and peer downwards at them.  We enter into a “hunch back” like or kyphotic posture where the back rounds at the shoulder blades and the head falls forward.  Prolonged exposure to this posture tightens the anterior muscles of the neck, shoulder, and chest.  This leads to a rounded back and neck.  We promote clients to “park their shoulders” to productively revert this kyphotic position.  Not only will this posture issue cause problem in the neck and back, but poor posture paired with underutilized shoulder blades muscles will lead to the joint issues described earlier.

Remembering to move the shoulder blades down and back to stimulate the surrounding musculature is critically important toward injury prevention of shoulders and living productively.  In a society which now thrives on productivity coming from desk workers and looking at cell phones, shoulder, upper back, and neck injuries are becoming more apparent.  We need to be productive and pain free to support our livelihood.  Remember to put those shoulders “in park” for a pain free, strong, and productive 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.

Nov 03

Learning to Squat Correctly

Maintaining stability is an important theme to efficient functionality in our everyday lives.  We can relate to this by referencing non-human structures possessing solid foundations.  For example, trees have a root system that reinforces the heavy wood trunk and branch structures to grow vertically.  A backhoe requires a strong load behind it to stabilize when extracting earth from the ground.   Fire engines utilize stabilizers that press into the ground and distribute forces appropriately to avoid toppling over as a ladder extends to the top of a building.  Even though humans don’t have roots or mechanized stabilization devices, we operate in a similar fashion when it comes to maintaining our balance and overall upright shape.

Humans are bipedal organisms.  We have 2 legs and an upright torso that is stacked over our lower extremities.  As we maintain our vertical posture, a vast array of stabilizing muscles and neuromuscular impulses are present that keeping us from losing our balance.  The quadratus lumborum attaches to the spine, the transverse and rectus abdominus circumference the abdomen, and the psoas muscle attach to the ventral portion of the spine.  These are just a few stabilizing core muscles responsible for maintaining upright posture of the torso.  The glutes, deep rotator muscles of the hip, and abductor and adductor muscles serve as a form of “roots” by creating forms of torque and countermovement to stabilize the weight of the upper body.  These muscles aid in lateral balance, which assists our torso and lower extremities to react and catch ourselves if our center of gravity gets disrupted during front-to-back and side-to-side movements.  Without foundational strength in these muscle groups, stability, and reaction to maintain balance becomes significantly impeded.

Our personal training clients in Napa newer to the continuum of exercise can present issues of imbalances.  An immediate assessment is to request a novice personal training perform a squat movement.  In ideal scenarios, their form is amazing and the foundational movements that we teach first are already present.  Their knees drive out, optimal posture is demonstrated, and the ankles and arches of the feet look strong without any collapse present.

In contrast, there are times where this initial assessment of balance proves to be suboptimal.  A suboptimal squat presentation will demonstrate the knees caving inward, center of gravity is falling forward on the balls of the feet as the heels are lifting off the ground, and the back is rounded like an angry cat.  This below average performance of the squat assessment indicates suboptimal muscular strength in the core and hip muscles.  Knees caving in provides evidence of weakness in the glutes and hip abductor muscles.  Squatting on the balls of the feet and lifting the heels demonstrates a “front heavy” imbalance and leads to a forward leaning center of gravity.  An outwardly rounded back shows the posture needs attention as well.  These failed competencies are detrimental to our bodies and functionality of our everyday lives for a multitude of reasons.  Luckily, with a little attention to a few helpful exercises, these misbalancing conditions are curable.

The first movement we teach our clients before performing a squat and changing elevation of the hips is to build a solid foundation from the ground up.  To start, we instruct a novice personal training client to line their toes precisely in front of them, as if their feet are perpendicular to a wall in front of them.  Once that movement is established, the next cue is to “peel the ground apart,” as if trying to screw the feet into the ground like screwdriver.  The right foot should be “screwing” clockwise and the left foot should be rotating counterclockwise into the floor.  Another helpful cue to master this cue is to “act like you are peeling a crack apart in the ground.”  If performed correctly, the balls of the feet should not come off the ground.  In association with this movement, the knees and thighs will rotate slightly outward.  This movement imposes a demand on the external rotational muscles attached to the hips and thighs.  An indication this movement is performed correctly is the muscular engagement of the glutes and lateral thigh muscles.  Once these markers are checked off, the client is instructed to” push their heels into the floor” and sit their hips down and back until a brief stretch is experienced.  Lastly, during the downward decent of the squat, the final cue is to ensure that the shoulders don’t go past the knees.  We use the cue “keep your chest up” to help remind clients not to tilt too far forward.

Mastering a simple exercise such as these preparatory movements of the squat triggers the muscles of lateral balance, neuromuscular facilitation of the stabilizing muscles attached to trunk of our body and improves posture.  One of the keys to success in training for balance, overall functional strength, and fall injury prevention is taking the simplest of exercises that offer the most beneficial results.  Mastery of the squat technique can significantly improve our balance and 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.

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