Mar 05

Maintaining Fitness Outside of the Gym

A new membership to Planet Fitness, weekly scheduled walks with friends, a season of recreational physical activities such as volleyball, pickleball, golf or hiking.  The resources needed to stay involved in our lifetime fitness journey seems simple enough to use as tools to improve our everyday lives.  The convenience of entering a local gym to utilize their equipment for resistance training give local gym attendees a place to exercise.  Fitness classes offered at these local gyms offer group energy and the social aspect of being part of a fitness class where everyone is achieving similar fitness goals.    Participating in recreational physical activities are fun and offers the chance to put the stress of life aside to focus on yourself.  The regular adherence to these resources offers our bodies much needed strength, cardiovascular endurance, and stress reduction.

However, what happens when work throws overtime and extra deadlines at you to where you can’t make your gym workout you were looking forward to?  Perhaps you come down with the flu.  The last thing you want is to infect your recreational teammate or weekly walking buddies.  Perhaps your kids need to be picked up from the new season of soccer games.  The unlikely random occurrence of family members passing through town can be graced upon us as well in which we feel obligated to spend a few hours of the day with.  These are examples of obstacles that can get in our way of our time that we devote to our lifetime fitness efforts.

Time is one of our most valuable tools for a full proof plan to make our lives healthier.  The last thing we want is for our most valuable asset to be taken away from the random obstacles of life that disrupt our schedule.  Fortunately, there are solutions to reinforce our fitness efforts when the times we have reserved for our fitness are taken away.   Some quick fix solution we offer our personal training clients in Napa is to focus on simple “low hanging fruit” exercises when we see our time we have reserved for our fitness about to disrupted.

We coach our personal training clients in Napa to focus on 3 simple exercises:  squats, pushups, and planks.  Simply performing one set of squats in the comfort of your own home is enough to get blood flow going to the lower extremities.  10 repetition of squats will improve mobility of the hips, knees, and ankles.  Pushups from the knees, on a countertop, or with knees extended off the floor activates the muscles of the upper extremity and core.  Planks need to be help for only 20 to 30 seconds to reinforce the muscle of the core and postural muscles of the upper and lower back.

The beauty of such simple exercises is that they can be done anywhere:  your house or waiting around outside.  Why not take some time to perform these simple filler exercises?  Just because you can’t make it to the gym or your regularly scheduled recreational activity doesn’t mean that we should forget about our fitness efforts for the day.  It’s critically important to keep the body in a strong and athletic mode even when our schedule gets erratic.  Performing simple exercises like the squat, pushup, or plank regularly will offer compounding strength and postural improvement results down the line when performed regularly throughout the week.  The time we devote to the gym and regular physical activity is very important.  However, ensuring to focus on getting some exercise in when time is limited is commonly overlooked.  It’s this small attention to detail that keeps us strong so we can pick where we left off in the gym and normal physical activities when the busy times subside.

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

Feb 25

Food and Wine: Too Much of a Good Thing

Food is something the Napa Valley is truly blessed with.  Alongside our delicious food comes delightful pairings of beer, cocktails, and wine.  We feed our glutinously hedonistic approach to setting our taste buds to lightspeed by pairing the Napa Valley’s award-winning wine with our world class food.  It can be irresistible to ignore such culinary delights with restaurants like R+D Kitchen, Morimoto, and the eateries at The Oxbow featuring their iconic food that will leave a monument of unforgettable tastes in your memory banks.

The food from Napa is amazing.  I take in pride in the pedigree of food culture I’ve been raised in while growing up in Napa.  However, we enter an issue with our unparalleled food and wine we have been blessed with in our valley.  Alongside our beautiful food comes butter, cream, flour, and fat.  Lots of fat.  The words duck fat and bacon come to mind.  Duck confit or pork belly, anyone?

The bread set at our tables while we are out to lunch, dinner, or just a social gathering before we order comes from our local bakeries.  Bouchon, Model, and ABC know what they’re doing when it comes to making a baguette.  Hard to resist when you’re probably not making that in your home kitchen.

Lastly, we Napans live in an ocean of the world’s finest wines.  Similar to how the people of San Diego live a stone’s throw from their breath-taking beaches.  The combination of a juicy filet mignon from Cole’s Chop House with a glass of award-winning cabernet is enough to send your palate on a one way to trip to Turks and Caicos.

The combination of food and wine from Napa is a pretty picture for those of us who enjoy the celebration of food.  However, just like many things in our lives, too much of a good thing can lead to destructive situations to our well-being.  Many locals work for the food and wine industry.  It’s common to dine at local restaurants and pair lunch with beer, wine, or a cocktail.  While promoting food and wine might be part of the job, an underlying vicious cycle is present with eating too much food and drinking too much alcohol.  The leading cause of cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease, and obesity is caused by suboptimal eating decisions.  Eating bread, pasta, or risotto more than three times per week imposes the threat of diabetes due to the insulin spiking properties from starchy carbohydrate based food.  The increased concentration of insulin throughout the week from frequent high glycemic index carbohydrates will decrease insulin sensitivity and increase insulin resistance, which is essentially pre-diabetic conditions.  Foods with high fat content and cholesterol from animal sourced protein increase the concentration of fat and cholesterol circulating in our blood stream, promoting the build ups of plaques in arteries and increasing the likelihood of cardiovascular disease.  Drinking wine can easily be an Olympic sport in the Napa Valley.  Before we know it, we can be consuming as much as 18 glasses of wine per week.  The overindulgence of alcohol can not only decrease fat metabolism and cause additional caloric input, but it also leaves us in a foggy, lethargic state of mind that can last a week and compound over years.

It’s important not to demonize from the good food and wine we are blessed with and that has given Napa success.  We wouldn’t enjoy all of the features Napa offers if the people withing the industry had not worked so hard to offer this amazing food and wine available at restaurants and wineries.  To help mitigate indulgence, there are healthy tactics to develop a balance between our good food and wine and the well being of our bodies.  Our personal training clients in the Napa Valley learn to manage such struggles by developing weekly tactics to maintain balance of their alcohol and food consumption and the integrity of their body.  Examples include setting a weekly goal to have one to two days a week of being alcohol free.  Declining bread at lunch and dinner helps decrease extra carbohydrate consumption.  The awareness to always ensure there is a colorful vegetable on the plate helps fill the stomach as to not overeat.  Developing systems and tactics to ensure we are not overindulging is a critical component to anyone’s success who is regularly in the environment of good food and wine.

We are fortunate to be in this unique, amazing place of the world.  Let’s cherish the resources we have in the amazing food and wine culture by truly appreciating it as a gift.  By doing this, we can improve our well-being and live strong, happy, and healthful lives.

 

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

Feb 18

A Balanced Visit to the Supermarket

The turning and skidding of tires in the parking lot fills ears with caution.  Humming car engines ominously traveling behind patrons passing through cross walks and exiting their vehicles on to the asphalt.   Curbs, steps, and trash find themselves in front of fellow shoppers as they step onto uneven surfaces.  Gazing forward, you observe people traveling on foot in your direction at moderate speed.  Some have carts full of groceries.  They might be looking down at their cell phones, oblivious of your presence.  There might be a young child frolicking in front of the store.  Running into you and knocking you off your balance is the least of their concern when they have only been on this earth for 5 years or so.  Why should they care if they hurt themselves yet?

As you pass this gauntlet of distraction and cacophony, the sliding glass doors into your preferred store of choice awaits your arrival.  If you don’t use caution and calculate the proposition of errors from the obstacles in front of the store entrance, your movement can be hindered if something randomly distracts, startles, or collides with you.  You haven’t even entered the store and physical challenges are already present.

Some light needs to be shed on the deceivingly simple task of going to the grocery store.  A simple visit can be a test of our coordination, balance, and ability to detect danger.  The various obstacles and distractions occurring even in the parking lot on the way to our food headquarters can be a mind field for the risk of tripping, falling, and an overall stress inducing time.  Unfortunately, there are cases of such scenarios occurring on a daily basis because of the hustle and bustle of our culture.  Being in a rush to get to the store, electronic distractions, and too many people being in the same place at the same time can introduce potential risks of falling and injuries.

Fortunately, we can prepare ourselves to prevent risks of falling and managing random mechanisms of injury by training our balance, strength, and hand eye coordination.  Here are some exercises we coach our personal training clients in Napa to help prepare the body for stressful distracting situations that can randomly occur throughout our day:

Strength:  We have mentioned this before in previous articles that the plank exercise is one of the most simple and effective forms to induce just enough stress on the body for a short amount of time.  The plank exercise stimulates over half the muscles in the body, which will allow the muscles worked in this exercise to become stronger and increase endurance.  To perform, simply lay belly down on the ground, straighten the arms with the elbows extended, and straighten the knees out so they are not touching the ground.  Hold this pose for 15-30 seconds.  Ensure that the lower back does not sag, and your core muscles are tight.

Balance:  Lift one leg off the ground and balance on the supporting leg for 10-20 seconds.  Make sure to alternate between legs.  To make this exercise a little safer, you can stand next to a wall to support yourself if you get unbalanced in the middles of the exercise.

Hand-eye coordination:  Find a ball and toss it up in the air about 1-2 inches and catch it.  To increase the challenge, bounce the ball against the wall and catch it.  Attempt 5-10 catches each hand.

Performing these exercises at least once a week can make a significantly improvement on our ability to ensure adequate equilibrium throughout unbalanced scenarios, recover from a collision with another body, and react appropriately to unpredictable movements that occur in our path of movement.

We should have the ability to withstand the raucous activities of a supermarket parking lot.  In fact, being able to pause in the middle of a grocery store and balance on one leg at any time should be attainable.  If we can achieve the ability to stay balanced on a foot any moment for 10 seconds, reaction time, strength and balance are sufficient enough to help us manage obstacles that might get in our way.  It’s critically important to stay balanced and alert of danger not only in the grocery store, but in our everyday lives.

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

Feb 11

Healthy Plant Based Breakfasts

There can be a rumbling heard in our midsection after waking up from a 6 to 8-hour slumber.  Reasonably so, the body is yearning for sustenance.  As we sleep, our body breaks down cells to promote hormone rebalance.  With the various chemical balancing acts our body endures throughout our slumber, the first meal of the day is vital for an optimally performing day of human production.

A traditional breakfast that has been embraced throughout our culture is a bowl of cereal and milk.  The term “part of a balanced breakfast” was used in the Raisin Bran, Cheerio, and Frosted Flake commercials.  Remember Tony the Tiger?  “They’re GRRREAT!”  However, the processed, denatured, preservative filled cereal we have connected with in our past is closer to a recipe for instant diabetes.

Another popular trend that has become prevalent in our culture include the easily obtainable breakfast sandwich from McDonalds, Starbucks, or 7-Eleven.  Being able to swipe your credit card and have a multi-layered, mouthwatering sandwich in your hand before you go to work is remarkably convenient.  However, underneath your skin, in your blood stream, and alongside digestive enzymes circulating in your stomach, your body doesn’t see that olfactory gland stimulating breakfast sandwich the same way.  That scrumptious English muffin encasing the “just add water’ egg in the middle has been whipped up in a factory and filled with a form of salt for preservation that only my organic chemistry PhD peers can pronounce.  After they are shipped in bulk to a fast food facility, they are distributed into the hands of consumers through drive through window and lines of Starbucks.

The gluten-filled, salty, temporarily satisfaction inducing food is similar to smoking a cigarette.  Smokers know that cigarettes are bad for you, but the first few puffs elicit that numbing high for a few seconds.  Before they know it, autopilot kicks in and the entire cancer promoting death stick is toxic gas in the lungs.  A breakfast sandwich or a bowl of cereal isn’t much different when life threatening disease such as diabetes, high blood pressure, or cardiovascular disease are present from the regular consumption of these foods.  The first few bites of that breakfast sando tastes good.  Before you know it, the entire sandwich is past your teeth and in your stomach ready to be processed.  Insulin is now being produced and circulating through the blood due to the glutenous, high glycemic index processed flour of the bun.  Cells and connective tissue in the body begin to inflame and swell from the copious amounts of salt.  Before you know it, the body starts to get a little sick after consuming too much of these breakfast foods on a regular basis.  The quick fix breakfast solution taste good at first.   However, people can easily enter a viscous cycle of the drive thru and “wait in line” addiction.  If this gets out of hand, threats of metabolic disease ensue.

This is all curable with a solution that is about 10 to 20 yards away from your bed every day:  cook at home for breakfast in your kitchen.  Here are some healthy and easy to make dishes that have plant-based ingredients to help fend off cancer and metabolic disease:

  1. Pan seared sweet potato hash and eggs: Simply warm two pans to low-medium heat and put about half a spoonful of coconut oil in the pans.  Peel a sweet potato and chop in up into the piece of size of a penny.  Throw those sweet potatoes in a pan.  Put an egg in the other pan.  Season with salt and pepper.  Once the sweet potatoes are browned to your liking and the eggs is fully cooked, place the sweet potatoes on a plate and the egg over the top of the potatoes.
  2. Vegetable Hash and egg: This is pretty much cut and paste of #1.  Choose 2 to 3 of your favorite vegetables to sauté in a pan.  Personally, I enjoy carrots, cauliflower and bell peppers.  Take those veggies and seer them in a pan until they are cooked to your liking.  Top with your favorite style of egg.

The time it takes to drive to the McDonalds drive thru matrix or wait in line at Starbucks is equivalent or less than the amount of time it takes to cook a healthy plant-based breakfast at home.  You can probably even get your dishes done with time to spare as well.  If you compare the two times, you’ll be astounded.   If we can get out of the habit of getting our breakfast on the go and start cooking plant-based foods in the morning, we can significantly decrease the overwhelming threat of metabolic diseases, cancer, and obesity in our society.  Get in the kitchen and fire up that stove.  Cook some veggies and give your body the nutrients necessary to live to the fullest.

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

Feb 04

Napa’s Local Gyms: Ease Into Going to the Gym if you’re a Newbie!

The term “working out” conjures thoughts of a gym-like setting.  This visual can include gym regulars dressed in tank tops, Yoga pants, and sporting headphones.  Resistance training machines are uniformly lined up like parked planes in an aircraft bunker.  The sounds of the bass from hourly aerobics classes can be heard down the hallways as the groups of class participants funnel to the rooms.  Local gyms in Napa attract many participants aiming to improve their health and fitness.  Such gyms are significant catalysts when initiating a path to improve one’s fitness.  While gyms are effective starting points to a path of lifetime fitness, what if the busy gym setting is overwhelming for the novices?

As a lifetime gym rat and student to the game of fitness, I understand my way around the gym.  However, a small percentage of the population knows what nooks and crannies of the gym are the most effective for a successful exercise session.  For gym rookies, thoughts might include, “What machine properly focuses on compound lower body movements, upper body pushing, or upper body pushing movements?”  “How do I use the rowing machine?” “What is that terrifying structure tucked in the corner where that gorilla has a bar on his shoulders?”  And, what does, “Can I work in, bro?” mean?  The gym is a great setting for success.  It has helped many of our personal training clients in Napa achieve some of the biggest goals in their lives.  However, there is an underlying intimidation factor that can pose as an obstacle deterring people from progressing forward in their fitness goals.

To resolve such issues, we recommend to our personal training clients in Napa to ease into regular gym attendance if they are brand new to that climate.  If we are beginning to get into an exercise program, we don’t need to attend a gym local gym 3-4 times per week right off the bat.  Starting out with one day per week of regular gym attendance will suffice.  Going from 1 day per week of going to the gym from zero, you will have a 100% improvement rate.  The other day of the week can be done utilizing bodyweight exercises in the comfort of your own home.  The daunting drive to the gym, finding a parking place, and seemingly overwhelming stimuli of rush hour gym times can be bypassed by performing a home exercise routine.

A quick and effective exercise routine we prescribe to our personal training clients to do at home in conjunction with their weekly gym attendance is a High Intensity Interval Training program, commonly know as HIIT.  HIIT is a mode of exercise that utilizes negative work-to-rest time ratios instead of counting repetitions.  For example, performing a set of body weight squats for 20 seconds and ceasing exercise for 10 seconds would be a 2:1 work: rest ratio.

This is an easy to learn HIIT routine that we give to our personal training clients in Napa to perform at home on off days from going to the gym:

  1. Chair Squats (20 seconds): Find a chair to place behind you in the standing position.  Push your hips down and back while ensuring your heels are on the ground until your butt touches the chair.  Once your maximum range of motion is achieved, squat back up to the standing position.  Ensure to contract your gluteal muscles until your hips are inline under your ribs.  Repeat until 20 seconds has expired and rest for 10 seconds before starting the next exercise.
  2. Straight Arm Plank: Position your body belly down, posting your fully extended on arms on a countertop or the floor.  The countertop will be less challenging.  The floor will be more of a challenge.  With your knees off the ground, weight situated on the balls of your feet, and hands just in front of your collar bones, hold this position for 20 seconds.  Ensure to flex your abdominals, glutes, and pec muscles while holding the position.  Limit any sort of drooping in the back and shoulder blades to avoid lower back injury throughout the movements.  After 20 seconds has expired, rest for 10 seconds and cycle back up to exercise #1.

We recommend beginning exercise participants repeat this routine 5 times.  However, as fitness levels improve, sets can be repeated from 6 to 10 times to impose a greater adaptation.

Committing to a membership to one of Napa’s local gyms is a fantastic method to improve one’s lifetime fitness success.  However, it might be a good idea to ease into gym attendance as to not over do it.  Gradually introduce yourself into regular adherence to exercise by not only going to the gym, but also performing exercise sessions at home using your own body as an exercise tool.

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 16

2020: The Year of Decreasing Pain

The first of the month of the year is underway.  One of the most popular fitness trends every new year is weight loss.  Refining dietary habits and ensuring to fill the activity rings on your preferred wearable fitness tracking technology are great tactics to help lose weight.  However, with all of these numbers and devices that we have to keep track of, sometimes we forget about how our body feels.  Newly motivated individuals diligently achieve 10,000 steps per day and make it to the gym to burn extra calories.  Before you know it, your body is sore and pain-like symptoms can demotivate us just as fast as we hopped on the fitness band wagon.  Grinding through pain and soreness from previous injuries or from a current exercise routine is never fun.  Living with pain can make our days less productive and make us grumpy.  Therefore, along with all the exercise, calories to burn, and steps we are motivated to achieve this new year, about it would benefit us by focusing decreasing pain as a key point of focus this year.  Prevention of pain and decreasing the likelihood of future injuries is a commonly forgotten critical success factor that can yield another year of success.

Posture is commonly the last thing we think about.  Our posture is affected by long hours at our desk, standing too long, sitting in the car as we commute, and the almighty cell phone that we tilt our heads down to stair at a million times a day.  These commonly forgotten positions contribute to pain in the neck, shoulder blades, low back, hips, knees, and ankles.  These detrimental effects of poor posture can lead to pinched nerves in the neck and shoulder, sciatica in the hips, and arthritic bone-on-bone contact throughout the body.

An easy solution to counteract the effects of sub optimal posture is to frequently remind yourself to sit and stand upright.  Try to view yourself from a 3rd person standpoint and picture your body from a side profile.  Visualize your ears on the side of your head, the side of your arm, and the sides of your legs.  Now imagine an imaginary line traced perfectly through the center of this side profile image of your body.  This line should bisect the middle of your head, past the ear, through the middle of the arm pit, along the rib care, to the hips, and continue through the center of the thigh to the heel bone in your foot.  This is great practice to organize your body in alignment to have sufficient posture.  Maintaining proper stacking of the body will reinforce the bones of the body to be in alignment to protect against the painful symptoms caused by poor posture.

As we work hard in our professions and our family lives, age gradually progresses.  Along with father time moving forward, our bones, muscles, and joints start to deteriorate.  However, along with good posture, these symptoms of deterioration over time can be significantly slowed down so we can enjoy our lives to the fullest.  To decrease the compounding effects age and poor posture have on the body, adhering to a form of strength and conditioning regularly each week will fend off future pain.  Committing to group fitness classes, Yoga, Pilates, or private personal training sessions in Napa offer conditioning for the body to reinforce the muscles, bones, and ligaments to hold up strong for years to come.  During these exercise sessions, it is critically important to exercise larger muscle groups surrounding the shoulder joint, shoulder blades, core and hips.  Ensuring to exercise the larger muscles will reinforce the bones from grinding on each other and veer us away from pain caused by muscle weakness.

Take pain reduction and injury prevention seriously this new year.  With pain, we won’t be able to get our 10,000 steps in or burn 2,000 calories every day.  We all have a lot to look forward to.  So why not take care of our body so we embrace these experiences to the fullest?  Remember to focus your efforts on pain reduction and injury prevention to have a happy and productive 2020.

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 10

New Year’s Resolution: Be Kind to Yourself

Year 2020 is underway, and the new year resolutions are in full force.  What better way to make a new year’s resolution than focusing on the health of your body and mind?  Eating healthier foods, staying away from sweets, laying off booze, and making it to the gym are all fantastic methods to reinforce the wellbeing of our bodies.  While we focus on such healthy trends to aid us in our health and fitness goals of losing weight and decreasing the likelihood of metabolic diseases, sometimes we forget about how we actually treat ourselves.  Are we following these trends because of what the doctor says or millions of messages that we get from the news or social media?  Or, are we purposely taking time out to plan to be kind to ourselves?  If we want our mind, body, and spirit to be top of the line for the people we support, it’s important to look in the mirror and support that person first.  One of the easiest and financially effortless way to treat yourself to some much needed “you time” is to put the phone down, get out of the car, step away from the fire hose of electronic device shooting social media and news in your face, and focus on moving your body.

2019 may have produced a lot of success for us.  It could have offered us some challenges as well.  Stressful experiences can linger on our minds.  Personal or work-related mental hardships that may have been beyond our control take time to process.  Overcoming these events aren’t easy.  On the flip side, we could have had a lot of success.  Job promotions, welcoming a baby into the family, getting married, or graduating from school are all accomplishments that bring joy to our lives.  However, these are produced from experiencing mental, physical, and emotional challenges.  To help us cope with these times, we might stay up later watching Netflix or utilize alcohol as medication to calm nerves.  These detrimental biproducts of stress can cause an increase in stress hormones levels, increased blood pressure, weight gain, and grumpiness toward the people we care and love.  Even though success is a good thing, we can get tunnel vision and focus on the next obstacle to overcome.  Focusing solely on the next big project, financial logistics or the next semester at school can elicit more stress on ourselves in a vicious cycle. Putting ourselves last will significantly hinder our wellbeing after prolonged neglect.  If we neglect ourselves, we harm the environment we work so hard to support our friends, family and loved ones.  Decreased movement, low adherence to exercise, and limited time to ourselves will elicit symptoms of depression, irritability, and stress.  Luckily, the new year’s fitness resolutions are the perfect cure.

A popular phrase that we might be familiar with regarding exercise goes, “The hardest part about exercise is showing up and getting started.” The author of this article can relate to that statement.  However, when people finish an exercise session, they usually feel amazing.  Following exercise, we feel energized, confident, sleep better, waking up well rested, and have decreased pain from previous injuries.  The list can go on for another few pages.  Physiologically, circulating stress hormones decrease and positive mood enhancing hormones such as dopamine increase.  Fat cells begin to go away and lean muscle cells start to grow.  Add in a comment from your friends and coworkers about your positive mood and flattering physique after a month of regular exercise, you have a win-win situation when braving the first grueling minutes of exercise session and passing the finish line upon its completion.

One of the biggest culprits that hold us back from exercise is lack of time and distractions, such as cell phones and wearable technology that link us to the never-ending stream of news and conversations in our social circle.  To make time for ourselves, we can set these distractions momentarily aside by scheduling a time to exercise.  This time can made exclusively for you and no one else.  Our personal training clients in Napa take 75 minutes once or twice a week to complete their exercise routines.  During these training sessions, exercise participants are instructed to put their phones on silent and set them in a cubby 10 yards away from their fingertips.  This way they can focus solely on their much-needed exercise routine and their own wellbeing.  This setting where we set aside the necessities that tie us to our obligations in life don’t need to be in a gym setting.  What if we set our phones and watch phones aside when we went on a hike, a walk along the Napa River, a Yoga class, or a few games of Pickleball?  This time out of your car, away from your phone, or out of the office and classroom can act as an advanced form of mediation.  When this time is scheduled away from distractions, we get to focus on what gets overlooked the most, ourselves.

Let’s make 2020 an epic year for our friends, family, and loved ones.  Take some time out for ourselves away from the hamster wheel of “go go go.” Improve the health, strength, and happiness of the one who makes a difference in other’s lives.  Take some time out for you this year.

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 31

Decrease Shoulder Pain: Warm Up!

Over the weekend I had the privilege to attend a regional pickleball tournament in Rocklin, CA.  I not only got to participate in my new healthy addiction, but I also saw how such a simple form of physical activity and fun catalyzed movement of individuals with different skill levels, athletic backgrounds, and fitness levels.  As I prepared for my first match, I performed my normal dynamic stretching routine that I do before any exercise session or athletic activity.  This is the same dynamic stretching routine that we teach our personal training clients in Napa before beginning their training sessions.  As I warmed up the muscles of my neck, shoulders, back, hips, knees, and ankles, a fellow pickleball competitor commented on how I was moving my shoulders throughout the warmup.  “Wow, I was watching you move your shoulders around.  I never know how to stretch those areas.”  She continued to demonstrate how she stretches her shoulders, reaching her hand back behind her head as if attempting to scratch her back.  Then she started to perform the same stretches I was doing, emulating my movements to the best of her abilities.  As we bonded over preparing our shoulders for pickleball, I told her, “If you warm your shoulders every time you practice and play, your shoulders will be healthy for the long run.”

In my background as an exercise specialist, I have commonly come across the issue of, “How can I help strengthen, reduce pain, or stretch (insert body part)?”  My first inquiry to the knowledge seeker is, “What does your warmup routine consist of?”  The usual response is, “Warmup?  What warmup?”  You can imagine that my heart momentarily skips a beat and I have to refrain from letting my jaw drop to the ground.  If we can take anything away from reading this article for those  of  you wanting healthy, pain free, and strong shoulders, it is critically important to perform a ritualistic warmup for the major joints of the body before a bout of physical activity.

Various attachment points hold the shoulder together to ensure that it has sufficient mobility.  The shoulder joint is considered a ball and socket joint.  It has unique attachment points including the upper arm, collar bone, and shoulder blade.  Movements of the shoulder joint include adduction, abduction, circumduction, flexion, extension, protraction and retraction.  These are fancy terms for the shoulder being capable of crossing the arms in front of the body, reaching behind, and reaching overhead.  If we want to perform these functions efficiently, ensuring the stabilizing muscles of the shoulder receive oxygenated flow regularly is essential. regularly performed warmup routines come into play to make an immediate positive impact to the structural integrity of the shoulder joint.

These are examples of some simple, yet effective shoulder warmups that we perform with our personal training clients in Napa:

  1. Supine “Shoulder Angels:” Lie flat of the ground. Knees should be bent and feet flat on the ground.  Extend the arms at the elbows, ensuring the palms are facing upward.  Maintaining straight elbows and palms of the hands are facing up, perform a “snow angel” movement where the arms create two half-circle movements across the ground on the right and left side of the body.  You should feel a stretch in the arm pit region, chest, and rotator cuff region of the shoulder.  Repeat the stretch safely for 5-10 repetitions.
  2.  Straight Arm Horizontal Abduction and Adduction:  While standing, reach both arms out in front of your chest.  Ensure that the elbows are extended and the arms are straight.  Keeping the extended arms elevated underneath the collar bones, stretch them backwards until a brief stretch is felt.  This exercise can also be performed with the palms facing up or facing down to achieve more stretching at different attachment points.  Repeat the stretch safely for 5-10 repetitions.
  3. Protraction and Retraction: Elevate the arms to just below the collar bones.  Bending the elbow at a 90-degree angle, ensure that the fingertips remain facing forward.  You should look like a scarecrow with the hands facing forward and fingertips pointing in front of you.  While maintaining this “scarecrow” like position, glide the shoulder blades backwards against the ribs.  Reverse the motion forward.  You should feel a brief sensation of muscular activation at each end range of motion around the shoulder blade and chest region.  It’s important not to shrug your shoulders during this movement.  Repeat this exercise safely for 5-10 repetitions.

We should be able to perform our favorite physical activities pain free.  Scratching the back of your head, reaching for objects overhead, or reaching into the backseat of the car from the front shouldn’t be a taxing event on the body.  These problems occur from neglecting to the connective tissue that hold the shoulders together.  However, this can be cured with a routinized warmup before physical activities requiring shoulder movements.  Over time connective tissue, strength, and mobility can be restored.

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

Muscle Soreness is a Good Thing

There’s no better feeling than finishing an exercise session that challenges your patience and will.  Exercise routines such as resistance training, Pilates, or Yoga put demands your body that take true perseverance to complete.  The sweat, increased body temperature, and heavy breathing feel good after devoting an hour of valuable time to improve our lifetime fitness.  As we get home after a bout of exercise, our mind might be a clearer.  Our thoughts can decompress.  Most of the time we sleep better.  However, the next day we might feel the body moving a little slow.  Muscles experience slight soreness, joints are stiff, and our feet could be a little tender as we take the first steps out of bed.  This feeling following an effective exercise routine is called delayed onset muscle soreness, or DOMS.

Sore muscles are caused by minor pain signals from nerve cells surrounding the connective tissue around muscles that were stressed from exercise.  For example, when we train our personal training clients in Napa to perform 3 sets of 10 weighted squats, they often experience soreness in their glutes, quads, and hamstrings.  The muscles that were stressed from an organized exercise routine have had their cellular structure slightly disrupted.  This leads to microscopic tears in muscle cells and a brief inflammatory period.  This can cause slight discomfort.  More so, joints can feel the effects of soreness from workouts because of stress on the ligaments and tendons.  Muscle to bone attachments are held together by tendons while bone to bone attachments are held together by ligaments.

Living with pain is suboptimal.  However, it’s important to understand that the pain caused by DOMS is an important tool to reinforcing the architecture of the cells within lean muscle mass, tendons, and ligaments.  There is a difference between searing, shooting pain and DOMS.  For instance, if there was a random battery powered toy on the ground from the remnants of our child’s playroom that struck your shin, the shin would swell up, bruise, and hurt.  This is would be the effect of bruised bone that would take a week or so to heal.  In contrast, say you take a Yoga class from one of Napa’s elite Yoga instructors.  This workout could lead to muscle soreness in the chest, shoulder, core, and glutes.  However, this soreness would only last for a day or two.  This shorter span of soreness is caused by smaller tears in the connective tissue that heal faster due to controlled exercise.  The result of the connective tissue recovering following such a workout is stronger muscles, increased durability to the tendons and ligaments, and less pain the next day.  Additionally, now that the muscle has been reinforced following sufficient healing, soreness won’t be as pronounced following the next Yoga class.  This decrease in DOMS indicates that muscles are not as affected by physical stress due to increased repair stimuli and density in lean muscle mass.

It’s important to understand that the body needs to get sore to improve.  However, it’s also worth it to discern between the difference of being hurt and being sore.  Use exercise as a tool to continue to feel sore for the result of becoming stronger and increasing productivity.  To succeed, your intuition is a powerful tool to decide what exercise movements are best for you and your 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 19

Winter’s Here: Train to Avoid Slipping and Falling

As the winter solstice nears, the days grow darker.  Along with these dimly lit times, the weather cools down and brings rain. Fog shows it’s face and lack of sunlight to leaves dampness on the ground from the previous night’s precipitation.  With lack of light in the evenings, we humans don’t have the nighttime vision of nocturnal animals like mice or owls.  This introduces a climate of low visibility and a terrain with a slippery surface.  For bipedal organisms walking on two feet, like the general population around Napa, we now have a perfect recipe for a risk of slipping, tripping, or worst off, falling. We can relate this type of slick, dimly lit environment to ice skating in the dark.

Remaining indoors to avoid the cold weather and stay dry is an effective way to avoid illness.  However, decreased physical activity can negatively impact our bodies.  It would benefit our bodies optimally by continuing to brave this cold, bleak time of year.  One of the best ways to fend off the threat of slipping and falling in terrain-altering conditions is to train the body to perform in slippery, dark environments.  Similar to how a snow athlete would train to perform in cold and snowy conditions, the general population should utilize strength and balance training to perform optimally during this wet time of year.  Here are some examples of a few techniques to decrease the likelihood of injuries from falling, tripping, or a losing balance:

  1. Perform static balance exercises: This is an effective technique to help people maintain balance.  Balance is critical for techniques requiring us to stabilize our limbs while dynamically stepping or walking.  Such as stepping off curbs or skillfully stepping over puddles.  A simple and effective static balance exercise is to stand on one foot while the other is elevated in the air for 15 to 30 seconds.  We recommend to our personal training clients in the Napa Valley to start off safely by standing next to an object to put their hand on, such as a wall.  To make this exercise more challenging, take your hand off of the wall and stand on one leg unassisted.  The next step would be to stand on one leg with your eyes closed.
  2. Increase your foot stride length and height: The winter weather introduces puddles and dark environments.  This decreases visibility which could lead to the need to step over puddles.  What if you accidentally clip an uneven part of the ground or there is some debris on the ground that can’t be seen? Walking mechanics with effective foot height and stride length decrease the likelihood of such obstacles effecting our ability to move in dark and wet environments.  To build stride mechanics, try marching in place.  Focus on maintaining an upright torso and alternate knees in a marching fashion.  Ensure that knees raise at least to hip height each march. Perform about 20 repetitions each leg.
  3. Improve Posture and Strength: Having strong and inline posture helps the torso to stay up right.  Most importantly, optimal posture allows the head to be upright.  As the neck is upright, we have better frontal vision which helps us predict hazards that impede our forward movement.  Poor, droopy posture in when the head is tilted down limits our ability to see what’s happening in front of us.  This introduces the threat of missing what is occurring in front of us and avoiding a possible fall threat.  The simple plank movement is one of the most effective exercises to improve postural strength.  To perform, lay face down on the floor.  Extend your arms and legs to where you are “planked out” on the ground and hold for 15 to 30 seconds.  Ensure not to allow the hips to sag and avoid any technique flaws that cause lower back pain.  This exercise safely and effectively targets the neck, shoulder, core, lower back, hip, ankles and knee joints.  If you’re not sure how to improve your posture and where to start, the plank exercise is one of the best places to start.

The cold, gloomy winter weather can introduce threats of falling.  However, to be productive in our everyday lives, we can’t let a little darkness and water slow us down.  There are plenty of gifts to be acquired to give to our loved ones as we do our holiday shopping.  Lots of hot chocolate and cookies need to be consumed on the Santa Wine Train with our kids.  Don’t forget all the beautiful lights that we only get to walk around and see this unique time of year.  Take advantage of this breath-taking time of year and exercise to prevent the threat of falling so we can enjoy the traditional holiday outdoor activities.

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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