Archive for the ‘General public’ Category

Are Some of Your Exercises Contraindicated?

Tuesday, March 27th, 2012

No two bodies are exactly alike. Therefore, in any form of exercise there are always exercises that are considered “contraindicated”. A contraindicated exercise is any exercise that would be deemed unsafe or potentially unsafe for the demographics of the group in question.

This is an important distinction to make because an exercise deemed contraindicated for a back care class may not be contraindicated for group of professional football players training during the off-season. And because of the variety of body shapes, sizes and abilities of people in general, what might be considered contraindicated for one person may not be for another.

Due to the nature of group exercise, it would be nearly impossible to make those determinations for each and every student and for multiple exercises or movements. Therefore, to err on the conservative side we often label an exercise as contraindicated if it is potentially unsafe for anyone in any class. In private or semi private training, the needs of the individual can be catered to more specifically, therefore only exercises specifically contraindicated for that individual need to be eliminated.

There are certainly exercises that are contraindicated for most people including athletes. For example, exercises that repeatedly load the ligaments of the joints without protection from the muscles will ultimately lead to instability and injury. Loading of the ligaments occurs when joints move past a “normal” range of motion and rely in the ligaments to hold things in place.

An example of this is the “hurdler stretch”. Once a very common stretching exercise seen at track meets, in group exercise classes and with team stretching, it is now generally accepted as a contraindicated stretch. The reason for this is due to the stress placed on the inside of the knee joint of the back leg while it is held in place. The stress is placed on the ligaments of the knee from the hip position above and the foot position below.

hurdler stretch


At Function First we often hear statements such as, “I was told squatting is bad for your knees”. Squatting in and of itself is not bad for your knees. If it were, we would all have to find a way to use the bathroom standing up and crawl on our stomachs into and out of our cars. The fact is we all squat many many times a day just through every day life.

Repeated squatting, with weights and using poor form could be bad for the knees of someone with an existing knee injury or with poor lower body mechanics. But overall the squat is a safe and very effective functional exercise.

An exercise or movement may be contraindicated for you right now, especially if it causes pain. We know pain is a warning sign and telling the body it does not appreciate what you are doing to it. But an exercise is not necessarily contraindicated for life. Over the years we’ve had hundreds of clients be able to do exercises and movements they thought they would never do again. Bending, reaching, twisting, shifting-all things that we need to do in life and are better prepared for through the right exercises.

Be smart about what you do, but don’t assume you can never do something again. You might be cheating yourself of a more fulfilling life.

Easy Ergonomics to Stop the Pain

Thursday, December 8th, 2011

Corrective exercises are small changes with big results

Thursday, December 8th, 2011

Understanding Pain

Thursday, September 29th, 2011

This brief video by GP Access and the Hunter Integrated Pain Service does an exceptional job at explaining how the brain processes pain.

What’s up with those Finger Shoes? Part II

Thursday, September 29th, 2011

Derrick Price, MS, CPT, CES, PES

In Part I, we explored the pros and cons of the FiveFinger’s foot support. It can be great for some people to regain the dynamic mobility that the foot is designed to have, but may be overwhelming for those who are accustomed to highly supportive footwear. In Part II, we’ll examine how well FiveFingers protect the feet and how comfortable they really are – compared to traditional footwear.

Protection

Whether it’s braving the weather or the ability to walk on rough surfaces such as asphalt, protecting the soles of the feet is a must for many of us who were born with shoes on. It’s important to compare the traditional shoes to the Fivefingers in terms of thickness and levelness of soles from heel to toe – as each have their pros and cons.

Fivefingers have a very thin and flexible sole (roughly 4 mm) that is leveled evenly from heel to toe. This characteristic awakens receptors in the foot and can result in changes in normal walking/running patterns – which, due to the thick soles and heel lifts, you will not find in traditional shoes. When running in Fivefingers, you’ll quickly learn that landing on your bony heels can be uncomfortable. This discovery may cause your foot to switch its landing to the area where the midfoot and heel meet. This switch may help you take advantage of the spring-like nature of the foot; which was designed to allow for minimal energy expenditure and improve gait efficiency. However, your foot is most likely not conditioned to walk or run on pebbles, rock, glass, hard dirt, concrete, etc. Be prepared to feel EVERY single step you take. Also, one must be cautious of stepping on sharp surfaces that may penetrate the shoe. Our friends, over at the American Council on Exercise, recently published an article that discussed how most people actually need to re-learn how to walk/run in Fivefingers. Simply putting a pair on will not automatically cause you to move better – it must be a conscious change.

In comparison, traditional athletic shoes come with heavily padded heels. So much so, that the heel rests about 1-2 inches above the toes. This has a dramatic influence on how we move and carry our posture. Try this: Stand up, lift your heels up off the floor just 1-2 inches, and balance there. What did you notice? What did your knees, hips, and/or torso do? More than likely, you had to flex your knees, shift or tilt your pelvis forward, and/or lean your torso forward to maintain your center of gravity. Even a slight heel lift in your shoe, changes your center of gravity resulting in a change in postural alignment. Over time, these changes can be disadvantageous because it is energy expensive to maintain the unnatural posture. It also stresses numerous tissues and joints that are commonly painful or sore in many people; such as, the knees, low back, upper back, shoulders, and neck.

To sum up, the Fivefingers may not protect the soles of the feet as well as traditional shoes, but they may do a better job of protecting one’s posture from deteriorating. If you choose to wear Fivefingers, it may be best to start with walking and strength-training – and then gradually progressing to running and more athletic movement. If you enjoy running in Fivefingers, I would recommend sticking to “real” surfaces only (e.g., grass, dirt, sand), as opposed to concrete. This helps avoid, not only the hard impact, but also the repetitiveness of a flat surface.

Comfort

Let me be completely honest here. Putting on FiveFingers for the first time was a big pain in my gluteus maximus! It took me over 20 minutes to put my first pair on and I was sweating bullets. Putting on, what is essentially a glove for your foot, and trying to wiggle your toes into the correct holes is no easy task – especially considering what poor control most of us have over moving our toes and feet. But with more practice, I can now slip them on and off in seconds.

So a common question I get is, “Are they comfortable?” ABSOLUTELY! If you can find the right size and you don’t have a funky shaped foot, there’s a good chance you’ll be calling these your most comfortable pair of shoes in your closet and wearing them around town every chance you get. Plus, they come in many styles, although some styles may be more comfortable than others (which I’ll talk more about in part III). Heck, they even have a casual FiveFingers that is soon to be released. But beyond the physical comfort, they may actually be mentally uncomfortable for some. Again, these shoes are not the most attractive on the market and they definitely make you stand out. Beware of people staring, pointing, talking behind your back, or stopping you in your tracks to discuss your footwear. On the other hand, this may be a great way to help you become more social!

A last note on the comfort level of the FiveFingers, I must address the “stank” factor. Yes, your feet and FiveFingers will stink up the joint after a few wears. The nice thing is you can throw them in with your laundry every week (and then air dried). Baby powder and wearing special toe socks can also help keep the stank factor down. Ultimately, I just wanted to give you a quick heads up of what’s to come.

In Part 3, we’ll look at the many styles of the FiveFingers, along with some other Minimalist Shoes that have recently hit the market to give you a better idea of what may best suit your needs and desires.

Derrick Price MS, CPT, PES, CES has been active on many levels in the fitness industry for over 8 years. He holds a MS in Exercise Science and Health Promotion with an emphasis on injury prevention and performance enhancement from the California University of Pennsylvania where he has also spent time as an Adjunct Faculty member teaching courses in Exercise Program Design. Aside from personal training 20 hours a week, Derrick also is a Master Trainer for ViPR and PowerPlate. He began his educational career as a Master Instructor for the National Academy of Sports Medicine and has since moved on to become a Faculty Member for the Personal Training Academy Global. To inquire about personal training, Derrick can be reached at dprice@functionfirst.com.

References
https://www.acefitness.org/certifiednews/images/article/pdfs/ACEVibramStudy.pdf

Best Time to do Corrective Exercises

Thursday, August 4th, 2011

What’s up with those Finger Shoes? Part 1

Wednesday, July 27th, 2011

vibram

Vibram’s Fivefingers

By Derrick Price MS, CPT, PES, CES

They’re ugly, funky and a bit pricey. And yet they’re ever increasing in popularity, especially in the health and fitness community. Personal trainers, doctors, massage therapists, chiropractors, and now, even your kids may be sporting them. So the obvious question for all of us: Should I trade in my traditional sneaks for a pair of these hideous contraptions?

To answer this question, we must first pose another: What is the purpose of wearing a shoe? We all have different reasons – style, support, protection, and comfort. Those are just a few reasons that come to mind. I’m no expert in fashion, so let’s explore support, protection, and comfort.

Support

FiveFingers fall under a new category of shoe type called the Minimalist shoe – with the idea that they are as close to walking around barefoot without actually being barefoot. In other words, they provide as minimal support for your foot compared to your traditional athletic shoe. This can be good and/or bad.

The Good

Consider this – the foot has 33 joints, a plethora of muscles and connective tissue, and not to mention enough sensitive receptors that it rivals the tongue in its ability to feel the most minute details. What this means is our feet are designed to move dynamically over ever-changing surfaces. This unique structure is designed to create, slow down, and transfer the high-impact forces of walking, running, jumping, climbing, stepping, and squatting in all different directions. Now imagine what happens to our feet when we wear shoes and socks that squish our toes together and minimize foot movement? Not only do we lose the ability to create, slow down and transfer multi-directional forces through all 33 joints in the foot, we also lose the ability to feel the earth underneath us. This can have a huge impact on, both, our static posture and locomotion; which may lead to acute and chronic pain in other areas of the body such as ankle sprains, knee pain, low back stiffness and even shoulder/neck discomfort. Wearing a minimalist shoe like the Fivefingers may allow your body to re-capture the mobility that the feet are designed to have – resulting in improved posture and movement.

The Bad

No support for a foot that has lost the ability to move dynamically or never had the ability to begin with (e.g., structural abnormality) may have its fair share of negative consequences. It’s like asking a person who has driven an automatic their entire life to switch to manual. It may feel like you’re learning how to walk all over again .That’s where the “itis” may come out from hiding, e.g., plantarfascitis, tendonitis, bursitis. It’s a lot to ask the body to move without the support it has been accustomed to for decades; which is why, if you decide to give the Fivefingers a test run, understand it’s slow learning curve for, both, the mind and body.

In Part 2, we’ll explore how the Fivefingers differ in both protection and comfort. In Part 3, I’ll give you my recommendations on trying out a minimalist shoe. Until then, feel free to continue mocking those weirdos who think these finger shoes are cool.

Derrick Price MS, CPT, PES, CES has been active on many levels in the fitness industry for over 8 years. He holds a MS in Exercise Science and Health Promotion with an emphasis on injury prevention and performance enhancement from the California University of Pennsylvania where he has also spent time as an Adjunct Faculty member teaching courses in Exercise Program Design. Aside from personal training 20 hours a week, Derrick also is a Master Trainer for ViPR and PowerPlate. He began his educational career as a Master Instructor for the National Academy of Sports Medicine and has since moved on to become a Faculty Member for the Personal Training Academy Global.

Keep Your Hands to Yourself

Wednesday, July 13th, 2011

What happens when a practitioner places their hands on a client or patient in a purely professional manner? Just like anything else, it depends on your perspective AND the expectations of your client or patient. A chiropractor is likely to respond that that is the only way they can perform an adjustment. A cardiologist may say that she has no need to touch the patient. Exercise professionals may say that it helps facilitate what they are doing with their clients.

The power of the human touch cannot be underestimated. To the client/patient it may bring a sense of connection with you, confidence in your ability and reassurance. The opposite may be experienced by the patient whose doctor provides a diagnosis only through oral communication and visual observation and never touches the patient.

I believe that some good and some bad come from the hands on approach. The chiropractors, physical therapists and massage therapists clearly have a need to contact their patients with their hands to practice their disciplines. The hands are used as both an assessment tool and to deliver an intervention. The accuracy of a skilled practitioner is used for reducing joint subluxations, mobilizing joints and relaxing and manipulating soft tissue. All of which have been scientifically proven to be beneficial to the patient.

The exercise professional may need to place their hands on the client for assessment purposes such as measuring body composition or pelvic landmarks. Some trainers will also use their hands to provide manual resistance for certain exercises and over-pressure to aid in flexibility. And at times, the hands are placed on the client to guide them through desired movement patterns.

With so much to gain how can there be a downside? What if the question was not what was provided to the patient with contact but instead, what is the patient being deprived of? And this question can completely change our perspective on the “hands on” approach to care.
hands on therapy
Whatever is provided to the patient/client by the practitioner removes the need for the patient/client to do it themself. We obviously don’t want people going around adjusting or attempting to adjust their own necks or manipulating their own gleno-humeral joints. We do want an attitude and belief system that ALL practitioners are simply adjuncts to the individual’s own abilities. We are facilitators.

Could chiropractic care and manual therapy create learned helplessness? Do clinics relying predominantly on passive modalities like ultrasound and electrical stimulation fool the patient (and themselves) that the modality is making them better? Is a client psychologically and emotionally dependent on the trainer if she refuses to work out unless the trainer takes her through a workout?

If I ask a client what he does regularly for his health and he tells me chiropractic care, I respond by telling him that is what the chiropractor is doing for his health care. I then ask again, “What are YOU doing?”

Could this kind of learned helplessness and dependency even be contributing to the obesity epidemic? It may not be that big of a leap from the dependent patient to the obese individual. If my healthcare consists solely of people doing something to me, how can I be expected to eat right and exercise on my own? The psychosocial behavior of anyone who is not responsible or response-able for their own musculoskeletal health will ultimately suffer from comorbidities.
This certainly is not a knock on any kind of manual care. I’ve personally benefitted from chiropractic care, manual physical therapy, acupuncture and Structural Integration. Of course I also have a specific corrective exercise strategy I follow along with my general fitness routine.

I believe one of the greatest gifts we give our corrective exercise clients at Function First is the ability to produce the same result at home that we produce with them in our facility. That is why we only need to see our clients once a week. They are expected to continue with their home program daily. If they don’t do their homework-they are fired. This is an expectation of all our clients before they begin with us for a corrective exercise program.

For this reason, the referral from me to a chiropractor is much easier than the referral from the chiropractor to Function First. Our clients are already engaged in a comprehensive corrective exercise program. The chiropractic or other manual care is an adjunct to the exercises and can often help us expedite the results.

A referral to Function First often requires a complete paradigm shift for the person referred to us. They now have to go to work on themselves. And quite frankly, many long-term recipients of manual care just aren’t willing to do that.

We might say people are lazy and don’t want to do the work. Or, can we say that people have been conditioned that they don’t need to do the work?

Gil Hedley: Fascia and Stretching: The Fuzz Speech

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

Worth the watch! This 5:00 video is both educational and entertaining. Dr. Gil Hedley makes the complex simple. If you stretch, use a foam roller or get body work-this video will help make sense of it all for you. Enjoy!

Nutritional ‘No-how” Misleading Labels

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

Grocery shopping for healthy foods can be a real treasure hunt. This is particularly true when it comes to packaged items and their misleading labels. We often times assume that many of the items we pick up at the grocery store labeled “whole grains” or “reduced fat” are healthy. For example, a carton of 1% milk makes us think we’re doing the right thing for ourselves, and our families, but truth be known that 1% milk in reality is 18% fat by calories. Ouch! The dairy industry marks it’s product by volume, not actual calories. This is also true of the meat industry. A package of 93% lean ground beef, for example, is actually 45% fat by calories, (Nutrition for Professional, Jane Penz PhD 2008). Shocking, I know….

It seems the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) labeling guidelines allow meat and poultry products, as well as dairy, to label fat content by volume, or weight, rather than actual calories per portion. We assume it is by portion. Also, by definition The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidelines for “low fat” is “a product containing less than 3 grams of fat.” This allows 2% fat milk, which actually contains 36% fat, to be labeled “low fat”. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decided in 1998 to disallow this claim. Now the new claim is “reduced- fat.” This still leaves our 1% milk to be “low fat”, with a whopping 18% fat content.

Other labels to be on the-look out-for are “fat free” and “calorie free.” Items claiming to be “calorie free” can actually contain up to 5 calories per serving, according to labeling laws; and, “fat free” is even more misleading. An item containing less than 1/2 gram of fat per serving can be called “non-fat.” This becomes a BIG problem when we believe such claims and end up eating the way more than the actual serving size listed. Other shockers are: Promise fat-free is 100% fat and Pam cooking spray contains 1638 calories, based upon actual spraying time and sprays per can – not even close to calorie free.

Other grocery store label culprits are “whole grains.” There are no rules regarding the amount of actual “whole grain” in any product. There could actually be very little in the product. You are best off actually examining the list of ingredients on the item. FYI: Ingredients must be listed from the most prevalent item to the least. So, a package of wholegrain crackers may actually be nothing more than processed flours stripped of all nutritional value, glued together by some Trans fats. Trans fats are one of the most dangerous culprits out there. These items hide behind labels claiming they are free of Trans fats. How does this happen? The same labeling laws that govern the “fat free/calorie free” products govern these. Because the item contains less than 1/2 a gram of fat per serving it can be called “fat free”- regardless of it’s content. Partially hydrogenated products are Trans fats. These products turn oily foods into solid foods. They are used primarily in bakery items (cakes, cookies, and pastries), margarine, edible oil products, coffee creamers, fast foods and many others. These dangerous products are linked to many diseases and have zero nutritional benefit.

With this said, what can you do? Read the label! Make sure to read all labels carefully. Then, do the math. Make sure things add up on the side panels. Make sure you really know what is in your food. A good rule of thumb is if you can’t pronounce an ingredient or don’t know one or more of an ingredient listed, just don’t buy it! Also, avoid store bought bakery items; eat home made items if you must indulge. Eat fresh produce, or flash frozen. Limit dangerous Trans fats; get them out of your diet if you can. It takes time and self-denial, but it is truly worth it!

If you would like more details on any of the above mentioned in this article, please email at Wcole@functionfirst.com I would love to hear from you.

Wendy Cole ACE-CPT/ACE-CES/NS, is a life long fitness enthusiast with a deep desire to help others to live physically, mentally and spiritually clearer. She deeply believes that many of today’s illnesses can be overcome, or at least controlled by proper exercise, and diet. Wendy has been a part of the Function First team for the past year and has been helping clients attain both their corrective exercise and personal training goals.