Spring is right around the corner 

While new years is the time we make resolutions regarding our health, spring may be a better time to make a resolution that you can actually keep. As the winter passes, it is important to focus on getting our bodies out of the winter slump and into shape so that we can enjoy the colors of spring and the opportunities of summer.

Let’s focus on two important elements of a spring-season health plan:

Setting a goal is the best way to set yourself up for success in spring.

• Create a fitness goal and be realistic: fitness trackers say 10,000 steps a day but does that really apply to you? Perhaps 10,000 steps is above or below your threshold, but the essential idea is that you set a goal that will get you out in spring. And for people who don’t know where to start, walking is a great idea. 10,000 steps can be achieved in about 30 minutes of walking, so it can hardly hurt! 
• Find healthy food that you love: spring and summer are the seasons of abundance, especially when it comes to produce. I don’t think there’s a single person alive who can justifiably claim to hate fruit. Try shooting to eat 1-2 pieces of fruit per day and refine your fat-intake: focus on ditching bad fats and taking on the good ones. Cooking with coconut and olive oil in place of canola oil is a good place to start! 

How we will help you succeed in spring at Holmes Chiropractic

We support you feeling your best: to this end, we want to help you address long standing physical limitations so that you can focus on activities that make your happy. If you feel limited by chronic back pain, tight muscles and a body with little to no range of motion, we want to break you out of that mold. We will work with you to detect the true root of your body’s dysfunction and create a multi-dimensional wellness plan that will help you move on from the pain. Give our office in Houston a call to schedule an appointment today. 

Dr. Randall Holmes, D.C.

Feeling stiff as a board? It’s time to start unwinding your tight muscles.

If you are among the legion people who consider themselves, “inflexible,” let’s start doing something about that! Rather than lingering on the dangers of being inflexible (risk of injury from daily activities), let’s focus on the importance and purpose of flexibility. Flexibility is essential for performing everyday motions with ease and without injury: think about bending down, turning your neck or reaching for an object high on a shelf. While we take these motions for granted and perform them countless times a day, they will become more difficult if we let flexibility fall by the wayside.

Move more and move differently.

If you consider yourself, “inflexible,” remember that anyone can increase their flexibility given the right kind of stretching. All you need to know is where to start and with that we can help you. Here are some stretches we have come up with that will break you into a flexibility routine gently. 

• Spinal twist: Lay supine with legs straight. Inhale and bring your left knee up toward your chest. Exhale and lower your left knee across your body. Extend your left arm and let your neck turn left so you are looking back over your shoulder. Hold 30 seconds, repeat on the other side. 
• Upper shoulder stretch: Reverse the effects of sitting at a desk while sitting or standing. Use a towel for this one, placing it over your left shoulder. Grab the top of the towel with your right hand and the bottom with your left creating tension on the towel. Pull up with your left hand to stretch the shoulder. Hold 10 seconds, switch hands and repeat. 
• The chest stretch: stand up as straight as possible with feet hip-width apart. Straighten your arms out like wings and raise them high and then lower them over the back of your shoulders while squeezing the shoulder blades together. Return your arms in front of your body and repeat, each time lowering the arms toward shoulder level. 

Stretching could be the most important thing that is not a part of your routine.

By keeping our muscles pliant and flexible, we can reverse much of the damage inherent with poor posture and sedentary lifestyles and keep ourselves independent into old age. Let’s work together to start breaking you out of that stiff mold and restoring flexibility to your life today!

Dr. Randall Holmes, D.C. 

Workplace and computer screen headaches

Staring at computer screens is a primary occupation for many people nowadays and, whether it be for work or pleasure, this can take a toll on our bodies and brains. Though it feels second nature for many, interacting with screens is anything but straightforward- there are many unconscious bodily and neurological processes that take place which can leave us vulnerable to headaches. Here are a few ways that computers can cause headaches:

• Eye strain: because text is so small, we have to keep our computer screen at a reasonable distance, which is closer than our eyes are comfortable with for resting. Our eyes are struggling to keep focus at a point so close and this can cause fatigue and headache. 
• Lighting of the work environment: a brightly lit office and improperly adjusted monitor creates an excessively bright environment that can be hard for our eyes to bear.

Your computer screen can be a headache trigger

Before choosing to blame your headaches on computer screens outright, it is important to consider other factors including posture, caffeine intake, overall stress level at work, diet and level of exercise- there is a good chance that your headache is a manifestation of a combination of all these factors.

However, if the computer screen is a common trigger, here are a few ways to prevent the onset of computer-related headaches: 

• Take a break once per hour. Focus on activities that are completely unrelated to the monitor.
• Try not to let your eyes refocus too often. Shifting between referring to the paper on your desk and the computer screen forces your eyes to refocus often and leaves them vulnerable to strain.
• Turn down the overhead lights, adjust the brightness and contrast settings on your monitor. 
• Create a good ergonomic environment: this includes monitor settings as well as posture- you want to make your office as easy on body and brain as possible. 

These tips are easy enough in theory, but we want to know: can you be disciplined enough to put them into practice? They will surely go a long way toward helping prevent headaches related to computer screens. However, chronic headaches are not normal- there could be an underlying problem such as subluxation or muscle tension that is contributing further to regular headaches. At our office in Houston, we can help detect the true cause of your headaches and start a path of healing that will reduce their grip on your life. 

Dr. Randall Holmes, D.C.

^Hans the human is holding his head forward

Tight muscles that are holding your head forward

With forward head posture, we often see the muscles in the front of the neck become overextended, while those in the back are short and tight. This is a characteristic picture of muscular imbalance in the head, neck and shoulders and it sets up an unstable support for your head! Let’s focus on two sets of paired muscles that are frequently noted for their tightness in people who have FHP: the sub-occipitals and sternocleidomastoid.

• The sub-occipitals are located in the back of the head and connect the head to the top of the spine- these are small muscles with a direct connection to the spinal cord. Tightness in this region has the potential to create muscular dysfunction and pain. 
• The sternocleidomastoid connects from the middle of the throat to behind the ear and is responsible for flexion of the neck, and is innervated by the accessory nerve. This muscle can be clearly seen when you rotate your head to the side. 

The way to begin reversing forward head posture is by releasing tight neck muscles

The occipital release:

• Lie flat on your back 
• Use a tennis ball or foam roller and place it under your neck, right at the base of the skull.
• Turn your head and roll over the different muscles for about 5 minutes. 

Releasing the sternocleidomastoid

• Turn your head to the side and locate the muscle. 
• Use your fingers to gently massage the muscles; don’t dig your fingers too deep
• Roll the muscle with your fingers
• Repeat on the other side. 

These techniques should instigate a noticeable relief in tightness of the neck. After releasing the neck from tightness and improving your experience with pain, we can start strengthening the muscles that will help keep your head atop your spine where it belongs. 

Dr. Randall Holmes, D.C.

Forward Head Posture (FHP) is allegorical to our society’s constant looking to the future.

We are at a point in time where our technology, for all its insistence that it optimizes our health, can also do us a great deal of harm. FHP itself has been around for a long time, more commonly known as “reading neck,” but it is taking on a new importance today; computers of all sizes have our rapt attention throughout the day and FHP is a natural result of this interaction.

When our brains are so involved, the same thing happens as when you are in the midst of a stimulating conversation, you lean in. But instead of your whole body, it is just your head moving forward toward the screen. Now quantify the amount of time you spend engaged with a phone, tablet or laptop and you begin to see the scope of the problem

A matter of pressure on the neck

As your head inches forward, it is leaving its true center of gravity: studies suggest that the spine is put under pressure by another 10 pounds per inch your head leans forward. At our office in Houston, we often treat people who are carrying their heads between 2-3 inches forward of their spine. You can perform a simple check using a wall test to determine whether you may have FHP: 

• Align your heels at shoulder width and press your buttocks against the wall.
• In this position, your shoulder blades should also be touching the wall. 
• Is the back of your head touching the wall? 
• If not, you most likely have FHP

However this is nothing to fear; many people today are walking around with their heads at least mildly forward. 

How we help at Holmes Chiropractic

Carrying your head forward all the time is likely to cause damage to vertebrae and muscles, especially those of the neck. We approach FHP with a mix of postural analysis, chiropractic adjustment, targeted stretching and strengthening of the neck muscles and improvement of daily habits to effect a change in the way you carry your head!

Dr. Randall Holmes, D.C. 

This is aimed at you, college students!

How many minutes have you spent tinkering with a pillow pile until it feels just right for you to lean back against the wall or headboard to watch a show in bed?

For many people, this defines the penultimate phase of their day: struggling to find comfort to watch a show or read until you fall asleep. Unfortunately, trying to read, write or conduct work from the computer in bed is one of the most ruinous things you can do for posture and your body. Nothing about it sets you up for success (unless you have an ergonomic set-up)- there is no real support and very few positions lend themselves to comfort without stressing the back. 

The pillow propping game

Picture yourself, pinned against the wall with a few pillows to support your lower back and a clear picture emerges of:

• Poor curvature and an imbalanced spinal column.
• Your neck bent at an aggressive angle
• No lumbar support 
• Pain

But people will persist with this because bed is comfortable. So whether you are working from bed regularly or just trying to find comfort for recreation, keep a few tips in mind. 

Let’s make this a little less painful: these tips will help prevent many of the bad effects inherent in the half-reclined, half-propped position that we seek. 

• Use a pillow to prop your computer, keeping the monitor at eye level, and avoid over-flexing your neck.
• Put a pillow under your legs and behind the lumbar to create something approaching neutral posture. 
• Stop using your bed for working! The bed is no replacement for an office chair and your brain will start to associate bed with work (and worse, pain!). 

Above all, listen to your body. Get up regularly to break the monotony of sitting in your bed and stretch if you feel tightness occurring. 

Dr. Randall Holmes, D.C. 

Is this your idea of a quick snack? 

Sugar is fuel 

And for all intents and purposes, carbohydrates are sugar! When the body is fed glucose through food, it signals for insulin to be released which helps cells in the uptake and absorption of glucose; this glucose is then used to power your cells and contributes to a noticeable boost in energy and performance. But here’s the catch: it’s a balancing act. 

• Low blood sugar: when blood sugar levels dip below normal, symptoms such as shakiness and light-headedness set it. This is that “hangry” feeling that most of us are familiar with. 
• A “sugar crash:” on the opposite end of the spectrum, consuming an excessive amount of carbs spikes blood sugar levels and causes a rapid release of insulin and rapid uptake of glucose. The end result: an extreme feeling of fatigue; the dreaded sugar crash. 

Energy levels are primarily determined by food

We can see that we need sugar in the right amount so how do we stay balanced? We want to focus on consuming the carbs your body needs for fuel, along with protein and healthy fats to keep us sustained. If we can do it naturally, then all the better. 

• Avoid refined sugars and saturated fats
• Create a healthy blend of carbohydrate, protein and fat. 
• 150-200 calories 

Snacks are a useful way to keep blood sugar from dipping low in between meals. Here are some wholesome snack ideas:

• Peanut butter and banana
• Quinoa
• Trail mix
• Yogurt and granola 

Food is medicine and it can be made portable! At Holmes Chiropractic, we want to help you redefine, “simple eating,” to move away from processed snacks and into something more wholesome. We think it will change the way you feel throughout the day. 

Dr. Randall Holmes, D.C. 

Breakfast is important for busy people

You woke up late and rushed out the door without grabbing a bite- it takes a minute to microwave oatmeal and that’s a minute you don’t have. There is a lot of misinformation on the internet regarding the importance of breakfast and it is always important to remember that everyone is unique- some people find that it makes no difference whether they eat breakfast or not. In any case, simply telling people to eat breakfast without giving them advice on how much and what type of food is counterproductive.

Is any breakfast better than no breakfast? 

For a busy person, the answer is probably yes. Skipping breakfast altogether leaves you short in a few critical ways: 

• Metabolism: avoiding breakfast causes your metabolism to slow, meaning you burn less calories throughout the day.
• Blood sugar: your blood needs glucose levels to be restored after a night of fasting. 
• Stress hormones: in particular cortisol, is at its highest point in the morning and breakfast goes a long way lowering its presence.

This is before we get into the murky debate over whether skipping breakfast actually causes weight gain as opposed to weight loss. If you need to be productive between the hours of 9 and 12, it is beneficial to have breakfast. But what if you miss it and your only option is a doughnut in the office? While it is less than ideal, a doughnut still has the very bare essentials needed to spark your brain and stir your body, which many people will take over feeling tired while trying to start a day of work. 

What constitutes a “good breakfast?”

Here are a few guidelines to keep in mind when considering breakfast, whether from the drive-thru or at home. 

• 300-500 calories
• Consumed within 1-2 hours of waking 
• with a mix of protein and good fats

A breakfast with this mix, something like egg and avocado on toast will stabilize blood sugar levels and keep you satiated the longest. Breakfast is important, but so is eating healthy at all points in the day. At Holmes Chiropractic, we know that diet is one of the most important elements of a lifestyle that keeps pain at bay and a smile on your face. 

Dr. Randall Holmes, D.C.

Fitting exercise into your busy daily schedule may mean embracing the 21st century

A novel idea- that you could use the timing of a television show to work out incrementally. Most health professionals will recommend that you get at least 2.5 hours of exercise/week and that is on the low end. What they don’t say is that this can be broken up any way you like- 2 minute quick bursts, 10 minute yoga routines or a longer, fuller work out. The important part is that you get the body moving, for the benefit of your brain, bones and body! 

Commercial break workouts integrate with your favorite television show.

That is, assuming you are watching cable TV. However, the concept can also be applied to binge-watching shows on Netflix. When you add it up, a lot of minutes slip by watching commercials that we don’t care about; at Holmes Chiropractic, we say it’s time to put those minutes to work. Here’s how it works: 

Every commercial break or between shows, rotate between push-ups, sit-ups, jumping jacks, lunges, squats and wall sits. Try challenging yourself to plank for at least 30 seconds, or just get into some simple stretching positions such as child’s pose.

How realistic is a commercial break workout plan? 

The answer: as realistic as you make it! Set aside your fears of looking goofy- you are in the comfort of your own home. Besides waylaying the damage of sitting on the couch, you could actually turn TV Time into a boon of health for core muscle groups that will help you keep better posture throughout the day.

Dr. Randall Holmes, D.C. 

Life often puts us in a position where we feel over-worked, under nourished and, consequently, stressed out. 

A powerful way to fight stress is by carving out a few minutes from the daily routine to practice controlled breathing. Today I want to highlight a technique known a breathing technique which can be done from anywhere and at any time. As I wrote about in my blog here, oxygen is nourishment for cells throughout the brain and body,  As such, in a moment where you feel overwhelmed, controlled breathing will help influence the feeling of relaxation and lower blood pressure which both help you to de-stress.

Use this breathing technique to slow down the moment and alleviate tension throughout the body.

Here’s the how-to: 

• Start a cycle of deep breathing- in through the nose, hold for a count of five and release (avoid making yourself dizzy). This allows the oxygen to fully saturate your cells.
• Tense and then relax muscle groups, one by one. Start with the shoulders and work your way down to the toes. 
• Breathe in during contraction and out during release.

For increased relaxation, you can close your eyes to block out any extra-sensory stimuli.

Staying ahead of anxiety will always be a work in progress. 

Breathing is a simple example of how you can take advantage of the tools at your disposal- your lungs- to achieve powerful changes in stress levels. Chiropractic is a modality that focuses on your well-being and seeks to relax body and mind by correcting spinal misalignment that contributes to dysfunction in the nervous system. For help on fighting back against the stress of daily life, give our office in Houston a call to schedule an appointment today. 

Dr. Randall Holmes, D.C.