Archive for December 2016
Mood Swings: A Balancing Act
Mood swings leave us feeling out of sync, irritable or low for seemingly no reason
But the important thing to realize is that there is a reason. Changes in temperament are normal to everyone, but the degree to which they affect your life determine whether action needs to be taken. While medication is an efficient recourse for some, others find that a more natural approach works. Often, western medicine focuses on using medication to, “balance” brain chemistry when really all it is doing is changing brain chemistry.
Mood swings reflect an imbalance in our body’s functioning
Balance of the body and mind is determined by the coordination of a network of lifestyle factors and inherent traits that become harder to manage with age. As we grow older, our body’s attempts at establishing homeostasis are jeopardized by changes in diet, levels of activity and the stress of adulthood. If mood swings result from challenges to your homeostasis, we must use all the factors within our control to maintain this balance, and this begins with the decisions made by You.
An action plan for balancing mood swings, as seen by Holmes Chiropractic
As with most wellness initiatives, keeping your mood in check begins with diet, levels of activity and stress management. Our wellness library, found here, shows how chiropractic care corrects subluxation and regulates the nervous system, an essential piece of restoring balance to the body and mind. From here, it is a matter of coordinating your lifestyle to account for your mood swings; in this endeavor we can help! Give our office in Houston a call to schedule an appointment today.
Dr. Randall Holmes, D.C.
What About Cooling Down?
While secondary in importance, cooling down post-exercise is a great way to finish off your work out
Cooling down helps us transition from the intensity of working out to the slower pace of relaxing and going about your day. If your work out is a fluid story, then the cool down is the feel-good ending, where you revel in a state of raised endorphin release. But before you rush off to shower, or on to the next activity, take a second to practice deep breathing and perform a few gentle stretches.
Cool down stretches
The stretching involved in the post work-out period is of a more static nature than the warm up. Because your muscles have already been put through some form of movement beyond the norm, we want to focus on lowering the heart rate and gently stretching the parts of the body which may have incurred stress during the workout, especially the lower back, hips and shoulders. Exercises including the child’s pose, piriformis stretch and reclining twist are low key movements that relieve any lingering pressure and help you relax.
At Holmes Chiropractic, we help you feel your greatest, no matter the activity.
It makes sense that if you are experiencing pain your likelihood for exercising is lower. We want to help you overcome any physical limitations that are gumming up your fitness plan. Through chiropractic adjustment, we help keep the spine aligned and the nervous system functioning correctly- this goes along way to stop pain signals resulting from nerve impingement. By working on proper body mechanics and treating tense muscles, we keep your chance for injury low and your motivation on the upswing!
Dr. Randall Holmes, D.C.
The Importance of Warming Up
Warming up is more important in winter!
Frozen muscles are not productive muscles and with winter fast approaching, it’s time to up your warm up game. Reasons why you want to pay extra attention to warming up include remaining injury free and getting the most out of your work out this winter. Cold muscles are more likely to strain under stress and are less likely to provide you with the optimal strength you need to excel with your fitness plan.
Staying loose means being patient
For building muscle or preventing injury, muscles always respond better to a gentle warm up rather than a blitz. This holds more gravity in the winter, when muscles need a bit more time to truly warm up. Pay close attention to warming your body up as a whole: as body temperature rises, so too will the temperature of your muscles, loosening them up so that they can contract and relax more efficiently.
The warm up is worth it.
The extra minutes you spend during warm up will pay massive dividends when you reach the end of winter injury free. At Holmes Chiropractic, we want to show you how a solid warm up routine can make all the difference in the prevention of injury and in boosting your athletic performance. If you need extra attention to any part of your body, whether it be restoring balance to your spine, treating tight muscles or improving range of motion give our office in Houston a call to schedule an appointment today.
Dr. Randall Holmes, D.C.
The Health of your Neck
Where does neck pain come from?
Neck pain is often symptomatic of a deeper lying cause; you may be experiencing symptoms of pain in the neck, but they are very likely caused by a misalignment elsewhere. Your head could be stuck forward in a position that undermines the stability of your spinal column; your pelvis may be tilted forward causing the neck to over correct in an effort to maintain horizontal balance; this is before even considering more serious conditions such as degenerative disc disease, herniated discs or more intangible factors including viral infection in the throat, creating lymph node swelling that can also cause neck pain. Myriad factors lead to the presence of neck pain butregardless of where it is coming from, it is important not to ignore it or shrug it off.
Chiropractic is about detecting and addressing the underlying causes rather than just the symptoms.
At Holmes Chiropractic, it is our job to determine where exactly the pain is coming from and what to do about it! This often means an evaluation of the body as a whole: neck pain is often the end point for a road map of inadequate posture and weak muscles. We start by helping you learn how to hold your head- not forward with the shoulders rounded but balanced atop the spine- and training the muscles which can hold it tall and proud. Next we focus on load-bearing joints; often we treat people with a set of shoulders and hips that have been trained through repetition to literally destabilize the spine: shortened hip flexors and hamstrings are pulling the lower back out of alignment, while the upper back is in a state of tension caused by dysfunction in the trapezius muscle. All of this is causing the muscles of the upper back and neck to tense up. resulting in the stiffness and pain with which many desk-bound workers are so familiar.
Seeking harmony for the whole body.
It is an inconvenient truth that we have to “relearn” how to use our bodies, but we shouldn’t feel shame about it and we certainly shouldn’t feel alone in our quest to fix it! If you are struggling with where to start, we urge you to let us do the leg work for you: detecting the root of your pain and devising a plan to reverse it. If you are interested in finding out more, give our office in Houston a call to schedule an appointment today.
Dr. Randall Holmes, D.C.