Posts by Randall Holmes

The cold weather of winter slows our muscles down. 

This has a far-reaching impact when it comes to the range of motion and physical performance throughout the day. Whether you are working out or going to work, stepping out into the cold chill of the morning can cause muscles to lose heat and contract which leaves you feeling tight. It is no coincidence that people are more likely to report joint and muscle pain and stiffness during the chilly months. 

A gentle warm-up

Warming up could be the difference maker in your fitness this winter! People sometimes mistakenly think that warming up just means a blitz of movements and stretches that get your body ready for the impending exercise. However, it is much more subtle and we advocate a more gentle approach. We want to focus on the “warming,” part of the term: by slowly stretching, we ease our bodies into the routine and as body temperatures rise, the muscles heat up and loosen, allowing for greater muscle-building capacity, physical performance, and a lower likelihood for injury!

Keeping up fitness levels in the winter

There are a plethora of reasons why we want to keep our exercise levels steady in the colder months: 

• Keep stiffness at bay
• Strengthen muscles
• Improve circulation
• Control weight

All of these things contribute to healthier joints and bones, which in turn help you to feel happier even when the sky is grey. We urge you to not let your fitness fall by the wayside this winter. Instead, give our office a call so that we can work together on keeping your body in a state of balance and health this winter, beginning with the warm-up! 

The common cold is perhaps the most widely experienced illness in America 

And we are now entering its prime season. As viruses attack on all fronts (nose, throat sinuses, lung, muscles), we begin to sniffle; our heads get stuffy and we start to feel tired. Then we reach for the medicine cabinet, masking the symptoms and getting on with our day rather than treating them at the source. While there is nothing inherently wrong or bad about this approach, it could be avoided entirely in the first place, saving you money and time that could be allotted in better ways. 

Boosting the immune system

Colds generally befall people whose immune systems, for whatever reason, are compromised at a certain period of time. The germs have more potency against a weakened immune system and thrive in this environment. This is the pitfall of a traditional approach to treating the cold: by taking medicine, we are not allowing our immune systems to strengthen. Chiropractic, while not being a true treatment for the common cold, takes a different tack: by locating and correcting subluxation, we regulate the flow of the nervous system and increase your body’s capacity for natural resistance. This helps you to avoid the illness in the first place because your body’s systems are strong. 

Staying strong through the cold season with chiropractic help 

Exercise, sleep, and nutrition are other important factors that play into preventing the common cold. If you are having difficulty optimizing your lifestyle against the incursions of the common cold, give our office a call to schedule an appointment today; our services help you overcome illness quickly and increase your natural resistance to them simultaneously. In short, chiropractic combined with plenty of sleep, eating fresh fruits and vegetables, together with exercise will enable your body to fight back the onset of the microorganisms that are constantly attacking you. Good posture opens your airways, exercise opens your vasculature, and further improves your abilities to fight both small and large enemies. Stay vigilant my friends.

For most people posture is a marginal daily consideration, so it makes sense why desk jobs can inflict so much damage on the average worker. Sitting is the position most conducive to poor posture and probably the quickest to cause spinal degeneration; it is also the position that lends itself to comfort and, in our quest for comfort, we often leave our spines compromised as we slouch, slump and lean ever forward toward the computer screen. Poor sitting posture is a health concern because it leaves us open to so many injuries that are incubated and bred by weak muscles and poor curvature. Here is a road map of what poor posture and sit-heavy lifestyles do to your body:

• Beginning with the hips: sitting shortens the hip flexors, which respond by adjusting to their new length.
• This perpetuates anterior pelvic tilt because the tight hip flexors pull the pelvis forward, destabilizing your core, and contributing to lower back pain. 
• The glutes are not activated regularly and thus, the entire posterior muscle chain is being used less than necessary to keep them strong. This also contributes to lower back pain because the lumber region picks up a lot of the slack in regards to initiating movement (such as rotating or lifting). 
• Internally rotated shoulders: muscles become locked into a hunched over forward position, destabilizing the shoulder and upper back region. 

Recognizing what a mess we are in is the first step to extracting ourselves from it. At our office, we have the tools you need to overcome short hip flexors, reverse anterior pelvic tilt and restore your shoulders and upper back to a semblance of stability. Once we establish a baseline and a penchant for good posture, we can move forward with stretching and strengthening that focus on the muscles that make posture easier. If your body is in a state from the rigors of a deskbound job, give our office a call and schedule an appointment today.

When it comes to healing herniated discs, knowledge is a golden ingredient. Turning yourself onto the right activities and avoiding ones that can aggravate the injury, while eating properly and checking in regularly with the chiropractor can help your body rehabilitate a herniated disc efficiently without surgical intervention. 

Avoiding bed rest is key. If the pain is severe, a few days of rest may be advisable, but it is important to keep yourself moving to prevent the injury from worsening. Avoiding activity is the best way to weaken your body, making the soft tissues surrounding the injury even more susceptible to injury. Intervertebral discs are also more likely to stiffen if they are not articulated regularly. 

• Focus on light aerobic activity: the kind that keeps your circulation flowing and your body in balance. This is the best way to ensure 
• Focus on strengthening the core as a stabilizer: this helps develop muscles to share the burden of the body’s weight with the lower back. 
• Avoid certain exercises: weightlifting, leg presses, and twisting exercises can be problematic to the herniated disc sufferer. 
• Focus on posture and forget about soft furniture that lets you sink into it. 

Our services are an augment to anyone’s fitness plan for rehabilitating a herniated disc. Chiropractic adjustment and spinal decompression are two modalities that open up the injurious region to an influx of healing nutrients, while our massage techniques help to break up scar tissue and fight inflammation, keeping you relaxed and easing the pain. 

Feeling stiff is not feeling well 

Even if we don’t have a tool to measure it with, everyone knows what it feels like to be stiff. It’s uncomfortable, it might even be a little bit painful, and when it occurs regularly, we generally look to the muscles for answers. 

Knots, trigger points, tight balls of pain

Whatever your name for them, they indicate a malfunction in the musculature. Remaining motionless for long periods of time (especially sitting) keeps some muscles constantly contracted and others completely disused. This constant contraction is what often develops into tight balls of pain and we feel tight. Your muscles are also being trained to resist elongation, perpetuating the problem further. The next time you go to activate the muscle, you feel stiff. 

Stiffness doesn’t mean there is something wrong with your range of motion.

Because the range of motion is the metric most people rely on for measuring potential movement, conversations regarding stiffness are quite often misguided in the direction of the range of motion.  Being stiff doesn’t mean you automatically have a poor range of motion: you could have an excellent range of motion and still feel stiff. When our muscles are trained a certain way and we ask them to perform an opposing motion, they are bound to feel tight. 

We want to make stiff and tight the exception, not the rule!

We identify muscles that have become excessively contracted and release them from their state of chronic tightness with trigger point therapy. By dispelling stiffness and pain, we allow you to focus on stretching and strengthening the key muscle groups that will help you stay free of pain throughout a day of sitting.

Mood swings are reflective of age and lifestyle.

Changes in temperament are normal for everyone on earth; mood swings are the more abrupt and seemingly extreme changes that seem to come on without reason. If we take the time to probe a little deeper, however, there is always a reason. Perhaps stress has been insidiously stacking for weeks; perhaps you haven’t been eating quite right and your cells aren’t getting the nutrition they need; maybe your activity level has been down and your body is responding with signals of pain that affect your mood; most likely, it is a combination of all of the above.

Mood swings are about imbalance.

The body and brain are constantly striving for homeostasis, which taken broadly is the tendency of your body and mind to seek equilibrium between the interdependent systems. As we get older, the pressures facing the body and minds’ attempts at homeostasis grow, our bodies trend toward becoming weaker, activity levels go down while stress levels go up and diet affects us more than when we were kids. Mood swings are a natural reaction to these pressures, but when they become unpredictable and destructive to our state of mind, it is time to take action.

Accounting for mood swings with help

At our office, we believe that many of the factors contributing to our mood swings can be reined in naturally, without pharmaceutical intervention. Chiropractic helps to correct subluxation and regulate the nervous system, the main vehicle of communication between brain and body. By streamlining nerve function, homeostasis becomes easier to achieve when you exercise control over other key lifestyle factors including diet, exercise, sleep and stress management. To start coordinating an action plan for dealing with your mood swings, give our office a call to schedule an appointment today!

It’s time to make your weight work for you!

No matter your body weight, or your level of activity, body weight training allows you to utilize the most basic resource of all, the body weight you’ve accumulated, to condition your body and build muscle. Best of all, no gym membership is required and you won’t even need to spend a dollar on a dumbbell. 

Here are some advantages to bodyweight training: 

• Boosts circulation and improves range of motion in the joints
• Increases core stability, easing the burden on the lower back and helping with posture
• Increases relative strength: strength in relation to your body size. 
• Increases reactive strength: the ability to stretch and contract muscles and prevent injury. 

Body weight training works best in circuits

And circuits are intense: the methodology relies on the fact that you do workout after workout with no break in between, conditioning your heart to work at a higher level and boosting your Exercise Post Oxygen Consumption, which means you will continue to burn calories after your work out. Body weight training circuits are much more efficient at burning calories and contributing to weight loss than basic cardio. 

As chiropractors, we would love to see people find better balance through increased core strength- this helps immensely with posture, especially if you have to sit all day at work. Furthermore, we would like to see you move with less pain and we can help you do this, through chiropractic adjustment and devoted attention to sore and tight muscles. 

Why is it so difficult to join the wide world of working out? 

The start of a fitness plan is where many of us will fail. The reason is that with no momentum and no visible results, we lose motivation. We must therefore begin by redefining attitude: rather than obsessing over lost pounds, focus on the importance of fitness for your body and how it makes your brain feel. You should be getting at least a mild endorphin boost post-workout, so use what you have as motivation in the early stages. 

Walking before running

If you work at a desk, in front of a computer, chances are that between home and the office you spend up to 70% of the day on your butt. So when it comes to starting small, walking more may be the place to look and it is certainly the easiest. Experts recommend getting up to 10,000 steps a day, a goal that can be tracked with a fitness app on most smartphones.

Focus on activities that make you happy

Your brain is the most powerful muscle in your body, so we want to get it involved! The best way to do this is by choosing an exercise that makes you happy. Running bores you? Don’t make running the center of your exercise plan. The gym isn’t for you? Choose an environment, like your own home, where you feel most comfortable. At our office, we help people create clearly defined goals and stick to them. We are about making your body feel better- through chiropractic adjustment and treatment of muscle dysfunction, we get your body into conducive shape for exercise. From there, we help you maintain a fitness plan for the benefit of your body and mind. 

Television time can be doubled up as workout time.

While there is great value in using your time in front of the television to unwind- down time if you will- we often forego exercise for the easiness of kicking back on the couch. The two don’t have to be mutually exclusive; you can still get a great workout while watching your favorite show. 

To demonstrate my point try this exercise while you are sitting reading this blog: 

• Sitting with good posture, squeeze your abs, hold 5 seconds, and release. Repeat a few times. 
• Again with good posture, squeeze your glutes, hold 5 seconds, and release. Repeat a few times. 

Just like that, you are on the road to toning your muscles, especially the external oblique muscles of the abdomen which are important for maintaining good posture while you sit and watch. 

Try incorporating an easy workout circuit into your Netflix habit.

Between episodes, try alternating between push-ups, sit-ups, jumping jacks, lunges, squats, and wall sits. Challenge yourself to plank during the credits and in between shows. You will barely even notice the physical exertion before you sit down on the couch again, but trust me your body will be thankful! 

Undoing the damage of sitting.

You already sat all day at work and now you are going to put your body through another spree of sitting in the evening. Simply getting up and having a stretch or doing 20 jumping jacks breaks the monotony of sitting, gets your circulation flowing, and utilizes the functional muscle groups of the body so that they don’t tighten up excessively. 

Meals are most important but snacking has its place too! 

And it’s right in between! Snacking helps regulate blood sugar, which is important for people who need to stay steady throughout the day. When blood sugar drops low, we feel light-headed, hungry and stressed out- this is the classic formula known as “hangriness.” This drives us to crave something quick and satiating- say a chocolate bar. Which then does the opposite, spikes blood sugar levels, causing the body to produce more insulin, uptaking the glucose faster and leaving you low again. Snacks can help us stay balanced.  

An equation for healthy snacking

• 150-200 calories
• Blend of carbs, protein and healthy fats
• Nutrient density 
• Leave out processed fats and sugars

Some snack-y ideas that fit the formula: 

• Apple and peanut butter
• Granola and yogurt
• Lunch meat and low-fat cheese
• Quinoa 
• Hard boiled egg and hummus
• Certain nutrition bars

In a very basic scenario, you could split the difference between breakfast, lunch and dinner; i.e.: breakfast at 8, first snack at 10, lunch between 12-1, second snack at 3 and dinner at 6. But every schedule is different and a snacking schedule is rarely rigid. The important thing is to stay in touch with your body- know the warning signs of blood sugar dropping and hasten to eat something healthy before you cave into your sweet tooth’s tastiest desires. When done right, snacking can be fun and keep you sane!