World Fitness Blog : Leading Global Bloggers

July 11, 2021

3 Ways to Address the Myth of Good Posture

Not many words make people shift in their seats as the word posture does. Probably just reading it made you straighten up. What did you do? How are you sitting now?

When most people think of good posture, they think of sitting and standing up straight with the shoulders pulled back. Trying to maintain this position can be tiring.

Many people give up, falling into the hunched position encouraged by gravity and our screens. Even those who manage to hold themselves in a good posture may experience tension and discomfort. So what’s the point?

The Downside of the Urge to Hunch or Slouch

While attempting to maintain good posture can cause discomfort, it’s better than the alternative. Sitting or standing for prolonged periods without actively engaging our muscles for support leads to an extra load on the joints and ligaments of the spine.

These structures aren’t designed to be loaded in a bent position for long periods, and the additional stress can result in stiffness and pain.

Our spine isn’t the only thing that suffers when we hunch and slouch. When the upper back stiffens, our rib cage and lung expansion are restricted. This restriction limits oxygenation and increases the work of breathing, which can trigger our stress response and impair cognition.

When your upper back rounds and your head sticks forward over your body, tension can develop in the muscles attaching to your jaw and face. This tension can result in the movement of your jaw becoming painful or restricted and contribute to headaches.

Many other hormonal and behavioral effects are associated with bad posture, some of which are discussed in this popular TED talk by social psychologist Amy Cuddy. But maintaining good posture is easier said than done.

To Maintain Good Posture, Avoid the Pitfalls

Many people develop imbalances when they try to achieve and maintain good posture. Imbalances occur when parts of your body that generally work together can no longer cooperate because of a mismatch in strength or mobility.

Imbalances can result in tension and discomfort and cause dysfunction in other parts of the body.

This pitfall comes from how most people think about attaining good posture. A common misconception is that to have good posture; you need to get into a straight position and hold it there while you sit or stand.

When you ask your body to complete a task such as stand up straight, or pull the shoulders back, without telling it how to accomplish this, the body will use the muscles you use the most.

This reliance on strong muscles results in the prolonged use of muscles that are already strong, while weaker groups are neglected. Over time, stronger muscles get stronger and tighter, while weaker muscles atrophy.

For example, if you’ve experienced lower back pain when sitting up straight, this may be because your stronger lower back muscles are working too hard, attempting to compensate for your weaker lower abdominal and pelvic muscles.

The Most Common Imbalance

Your lower back and pelvic muscles are the most common site of imbalance. The muscles that arch your lower back are often overused in many activities, including prolonged sitting and standing, exercising, and carrying.

Conversely, the muscles of your lower abdomen and pelvis are usually under-utilized. This neglect is partly because many of us experience stiffness and rounding in the upper back, and our body compensates for this by overarching the lower back when we ask it to sit or stand up straight. The result is an exaggeration of our natural spinal curves.

When the lower back is over-arched, the pelvis will tip forward, reducing activation in the lower abdominal and gluteal muscles. If left unchecked, this imbalance can contribute to dysfunction throughout the body.

Rethink Good Posture

Instead of thinking of posture as a position, think of it as the balance of strength and mobility across the muscles and joints of your body.

Rather than trying to achieve good posture by sitting or standing up straight, use your body in a way that promotes musculoskeletal balance.

An excellent way to improve posture is to move more. Setting reminders to move regularly by incorporating methods to move more into your day, such as:

  • Vary your work position with an adjustable desk.
  • Use the restroom on another floor, so that you can climb the stairs.
  • Vary the type of manual work you are doing.

A variety of movements will mix up the loading pattern on your body and reduce imbalances.

However, movement without conscious effort is usually not enough to resolve significant imbalances.

Unless we are performing a new type of movement, or consciously activating weak muscles and relaxing strong ones, the body will still use the muscles with which it is most familiar. You may still experience discomfort or tension, even after taking a break to move around.

Actively Improve Posture

Consciously challenging your weaker muscles and relaxing your overactive muscles is the best way to restore balance. But, this is easier said than done.

Overactive muscles are difficult to relax, and underactive muscles are hard to feel and use.

The rest of this post will discuss techniques designed to help you restore balance while:

  • Sitting
  • Standing
  • Performing functional tasks like manual work and exercise

Improve Lower Back Posture

The first step to achieving balance across the muscles of your lower spine and abdomen is to move the area through its full range of motion, rather than to confine it to an arched or slouched position. You can do this with an exercise called the pelvic tilt.

If you have limited control of your lumbar spine and pelvis, you may find the pelvic tilt to be difficult at first.

These exercises are fundamental, and we recommend them for people of all ability levels.

To perform the pelvic tilt:

  • Sit in a comfortable position with your feet on the floor. Place the hands around the hips so that you can feel the bony bit on the front of your hip with your index finger. Wrap your thumb around and feel the bone at the back of the pelvis. Imagine you are holding a big bowl of water in your hands.
  • Tip the pelvis forward as far as you can, as if pouring water out of the front of the bowl. Your lower back will arch, and you will roll forward onto your crotch. Tilting forward will activate the muscles of the lower back while reducing the load on its joints and ligaments. If held for a prolonged period, the tipped forward position will lead to overactivity in muscles of the lower back and front of the hips. The muscles of the lower abdomen and pelvis will be put at a mechanical disadvantage, leading to an imbalance.
  • After you have pushed the bowl forward as far as it will go, roll backward (tipping water out of the back of the bowl) while preventing your chest and upper back from slouching. As your pelvis tips backward, activate the lower abdominal muscles.
  • A useful cue is to imagine that you are using the area underneath your belly button to zip up your pants. Tipping backward and drawing up like this will stretch the lower back and activate the muscles of the lower abdomen and pelvic floor.
  • Sitting in this tilted back position will offload the muscles of the lower back, but may stress the joints of the spine if held for a prolonged period.
  • Rather than arch or slouch, try keeping the back and pelvis in the middle of the two positions. With a neutral pelvis, the load is balanced across the front and back of the trunk. The spine, abdominal, and back muscles all take a share of the load.

Repeat the pelvic tilt five times to activate and stretch both sides of the trunk, and then finish in a neutral position. You can find the neutral by moving your bowl of water to a level position so that the bony bits on the front and back of the pelvis are even in height.

Another way to tell is by looking at the waistband of your clothing. In a neutral position, the waistband usually is parallel to the ground rather than at an angle.

You can perform the pelvic tilt while sitting, standing, or exercising. It can function as a preventative measure or as a technique to relieve pain in the back or hips. It’s one of the best ways to assess and improve the most common site of postural imbalance.

If you have an existing back injury, you may experience some pain when pelvic tilting. This pain is normal. Reduce the range of motion until the movement is no longer painful, and then gradually build it up again.

Or, try imagining that a string is pulling the top of your head to the ceiling, making you as tall as possible as you perform the tilt. This lifting will help to unload the spine and reduce pain.

Another effect you may experience is the feeling of being hunched when you tip the pelvis backward. This feeling is also familiar, and it probably means that your upper back has stiffened into a rounded position. This stiffness may be why your lower back was arching excessively in the first place: to keep your upper back more upright.

Improve Upper Back Posture

Now that you’ve begun to improve your control of the lumbopelvic region, you can move on to the second most common region of imbalance: the upper back and neck.

These areas may feel rounded now that the lumbopelvic region is in a neutral position. You will need to improve their ability to arch if we want to promote musculoskeletal balance.

You can extend the upper back, also known as the thoracic spine, over the back of a low-backed chair.

  • Lace your fingers together behind your head, squeeze your shoulder blades together, and lean back so that the top of the backrest pushes into your back.
  • To emphasize the extension of the upper back, limit arching of the lower back by keeping your lower abdominal muscles engaged.
  • Hold this extended position for about fifteen seconds, feeling a stretch in your chest and upper back.

Stretching the muscles and joints of the upper trunk with the thoracic extension is an excellent way to reduce overactivity. But we still need to strengthen our underactive muscles.

The muscles between and below the shoulder blades are often underused, and activating them can help to relieve upper back, neck, and shoulder pain.

  • With your pelvis in a neutral position, pull the chin back as if trying to be as tall as possible.
  • Then, squeeze the shoulder blades down and back together.
  • The body often compensates for limited movement of the shoulder blades by arching the lower back, so be sure to keep the pelvis neutral.
  • The upper shoulders will also try to compensate during this movement, so remember to squeeze the shoulders down and back, rather than up and back. Perform the squeeze ten times to activate the muscles of the upper back.

There may not be much movement at first, and it will be hard to feel the muscles working..

It’s All About Balance

Good posture is traditionally thought of as standing and sitting up straight with the shoulders pulled back. This is difficult for many people to maintain, and those who do maintain it do so by often overusing their strong muscles.

To improve your strength, mobility, and risk of injury, think about posture as the balance between different muscles and joints of the body.

Improve your posture by introducing more movement to your daily routine and by consciously developing a balance between overused and underused muscles.

When performed regularly and deliberately, the pelvic tilt, thoracic extension, and shoulder retraction exercises will help you achieve and maintain balance without strain and discomfort, making good posture second nature.

Initially, these movements can be made difficult by stiffness in adjoining parts of the body.

Source

February 22, 2021

Train Hard, Recover Harder

Based on my email inbox and Instagram DMs, recovery from training is a hot topic. I get asked all kinds of questions about recovery techniques.

  • “Can you assess my supplement stacks?”
  • “Should I do active recovery workouts?”
  • “When do I foam roll?”
  • “How would you change my nutrition on rest days?”
  • “What stretching routine should I do post-workout?”
  • “Will ice baths or cold showers help my gains?”
  • “What about cupping, compression garments, and percussion massagers!” 

I’m delighted people are giving their recovery some attention. Sadly, I think they are focusing their attention on the wrong parts of the recovery puzzle. In this series of articles, I will help you maximize your recovery and results by focusing on what matters.

I’ll explain:

  1. Why stress is a double-edged sword and how to manage it.
  2. Why recovery starts with great programming
  3. The two most powerful recovery tools and how to optimize them
  4. Six other recovery methods that work

This trend for increased attention to recovery is admirable.

In part, it isn’t surprising given I’m fond of reminding people they don’t get bigger and stronger lifting weights, but by recovering from lifting weights.

I have often tried to illustrate the importance of recovery by displaying progress as a simple equation:

Stimulus + Recovery = Adaptation

Stress Can Be Good

Stress can be both good and bad. Good stress, or what psychologists refer to as eustress, is the type of stress we feel when excited. Training is a stress to the body. If adequately dosed, it is undoubtedly useful. 

Bad stress comes in two forms:

  1. Acute stress triggers the body’s stress response, but these triggers and emotions are not happy or exciting. In general, acute stress doesn’t take a heavy toll. The stress response is fleeting, and the body returns to homeostasis, or its pre-stress state, quickly.
  2. Chronic stress is bad. It occurs when we repeatedly face stressors that do take a heavy toll. We often feel crushed, overwhelmed, and trapped by this stress. For example, a stressful job with a jackass for a boss or an unhappy home relationship can cause chronic stress. 

Your tolerance for stress and the ability to manage it is different from mine.

Our tolerance also fluctuates over time. There is only so much stress you can handle. When you have too much pressure, you get overwhelmed. Your recovery from training will suffer at times of high stress.

Managing your stress levels will improve the quality of your life.

It will improve your digestion, recovery, mood, and productivity. It will also enhance your muscle gain and fat loss efforts.

Stress Management; Not Avoidance 

Notice I refer to it as stress management—Not stress avoidance or reduction.

The fact is that you cannot avoid stress altogether.

You can, however, improve how you manage it. If you manage stress better, you will be happier, fitter, leaner, and more muscular. In short, life will be better.

What Is Stress?

The body’s control center is the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS). The ANS regulates the involuntary functions of the human body. The stuff that happens without you consciously thinking about it, such as breathing or digestion.

The ANS has two branches

  1. The parasympathetic is also known as your rest and digest mode. 
  2. The sympathetic is the fight or flight mode.

These two work in a see-saw-like fashion. Whenever one of the modes is activated, the other isn’t. When one is up, the other is down.

Unfortunately, your body cannot differentiate between different types of stress.

When the sympathetic nervous system is upregulated, it cannot tell the difference between the stress of a life-threatening event, a challenging workout, or the asshole who just cut you off in traffic.

To manage stress, we want to spend most of our time in a parasympathetic state. The reality is, however, that we spend too much time in a sympathetic state. The non-stop barrage of stresses adds up as we face daily challenges.

This sympathetic state has many negative health implications and inhibits our ability to build lean muscle and drop body fat

In my experience, so many hard-gainers struggle to see progress because they are chronically stressed and work to manage stress, which increases their anxiety and causes a downward spiral.

Rather than being hard-gainers, I refer to these people as easy-losers

Their stress levels result in them losing gains alarmingly quickly with the slightest change in a routine or life circumstance because they manage stress poorly.

With that background out of the way, it’s time to identify strategies that help to control stress as much as possible.

Monitoring Heart Rate to Manage Stress

A good proxy for your stress levels and parasympathetic versus sympathetic dominance is your waking heart rate.

Monitoring your heart rate will give you useful data to assess your general stress status and identify when stress levels spike upward.

Significant increases or decreases in your waking heart rate indicate when you are experiencing higher periods of stress. I suggest you get a decent heart rate monitor to assess this. You could also explore heart rate variability apps to add another level of assessment.

Be More Productive With Less Stress

Cal Newport talks about how being on autopilot can help you be more productive and less stressed. He says that there are two types of work in his world:

  1. Regularly occurring tasks

  2. Non-regularly occurring tasks

Being on autopilot is true of almost everyone’s life.

The problem with regularly occurring tasks is that they are so numerous that if we try to manage them on the fly, we get behind and become overwhelmed.

I believe this sense of being overwhelmed is one of the critical drivers of stress in people’s lives. It certainly is a significant cause of mine.

To deal with this, Newport assigns every regularly occurring task a specific time slot. He calls this his auto-pilot schedule. He found that he doesn’t waste time or energy struggling to prioritize and schedule tasks day-to-day. They run on autopilot.

Once you have this stuff allocated to specific times and make that a routine, you can assign all other available time to other things that interest you. This method takes some up-front planning but, it pays dividends.

The final point is to understand that it will take time to refine and adjust this process.

Fortunately, you’ll be so much more efficient you’ll have the time available to make adjustments when needed.

The Miracle Morning Routine for Positivity

Having a morning routine to start your day gets you off on the right foot and sets the scene for the rest of the day.

It allows you to run the day rather than the day running you.

I am a proponent of the Miracle Morning Routine. I do the express version, which takes less than 15 minutes and has six steps.

 The six steps are:

  1. Silence

  2. Affirmations

  3. Visualizations

  4. Exercise

  5. Reading

  6. Scribing

There are various apps available that guide you through the process

When I stick to the Miracle Morning routine, I am more productive and feel in control. 

Meditation Combats Stress

Meditation is a great way to combat stress. I have not gone full granola-yogi yet. Perhaps when I’m a bit older, I’ll embrace Zen fully.

I am aware that the word meditation conjures negative connotations with some people (my granola-yogi reference is a case in point). So, if you’re not quite prepared to consider meditation, call it sitting in silence, chillaxing, mindfulness, or whatever makes you comfortable.

Rather than full-on meditation, I sit quietly and focus on my breath for a couple of minutes.

Belly breathing deep breaths through the nose and slow exhalations out through the mouth do the trick.

If you want some guidance, then the app Headspace is excellent. I have done some of the 5-10 minute guided meditations, and it certainly chills you out. These few minutes every day will have a remarkable effect on managing your stress levels.

Mindfulness

Being mindful or present is all the rage these days.

There is a good reason for that. We live in an ever-connected yet hyper-distracted world. The sheer volume of inputs competing for our attention is mind-boggling.

Living in this always distracted state is stressful and similar to Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).

Try to fix this:

  • By focusing entirely on one task at a time 
  • Then, aim to be present within that task.
  • Fully immerse yourself in the sounds, smells, sensations, visuals, and taste of whatever you are doing.

Whether that be journaling in your leather-bound notepad while drinking a coffee, hanging out with friends at a BBQ, or drafting that killer sales pitch sitting in front of your laptop in the office.

Being fully in the moment will make you more productive, efficient, and effective at whatever you are doing. It will help to improve your mood and filter out external, potential stressors.

Cheesy quote alert:

Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift––that is why it is called the present.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Emotional Reactions Last 90 Seconds

In his book, The Chimp Paradox, Dr. Steve Peters talks about our chimp brain and how it can control us. When the chimp takes over, logic evaporates, and emotion takes over. All too often, when we are under stress, we take the emotional approach. The chimp inside us gets irritable and can wreak havoc before we know what has happened.

When we get an emotional reaction to something, it usually subsides after about 90 seconds if we don’t act on it.

Pema Chodron speaks about this in the book, Living Beautifully: With Uncertainty and Change.

Emotions will ebb and flow. Under stressful situations, they might rise like a Tsunami inside you. That’s only natural. It seems the best way to deal with and keep stress under control is to accept the emotions. To feel them. But do not act on them. If you act on them, you add fuel to their fire. They will rage higher and for longer. Instead, let them burn themselves out. Then, once you are calm and logic has returned, consider ways to avoid repeating the situation, which placed you in a stress position and caused negative emotions like fear, worry, hate, or anxiety to surface.

Pema Chodron

Take a Deep Breath

While feeling the emotions, it might be a good idea to take a deep breath in through your nose, hold it for a few seconds and then exhale through your mouth.

This deep breathing has an incredibly calming effect on your body. In my experience, it can help to speed the reduction in negative emotions when they arise.

A side effect of stress is shallow breathing.

Shallow breathing impairs the proper oxygenation of cells and reduces your body’s ability to recover.

Given I am so fond of saying, “You don’t get big lifting weights, you get big recovering from lifting weights.”

I’ve said it twice in this article, so it should be obvious why I believe being stuck in a stressed, shallow breathing state limits your gains.

Post Workout Recovery Pro Tip: Using some simple breathing exercises, post-workout switches you from the fight or flight mode to the restorative rest and digest mode.

This breathing instantly reduces stress levels, increases the oxygenation of cells, and accelerates the recovery processes. If you train in the evening, it will also help you to relax and get to sleep.

Sleep is the most powerful recovery tool you have available, so this is crucial!

Breathing exercises can also be beneficial as a proactive stress management tool when done daily. As I mentioned earlier, I try to do it each morning for a couple of minutes. It creates a wonderfully calm sensation. I would never claim to appear serene, but this is probably the closest I feel.

Gain Perspective 

Is what is stressing you out that bad? Most of the stuff we worry about is not that significant. It’s rarely life or death or leading us to financial ruin.

Sit back, take stock, and ask yourself, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Often this allows you to gain some perspective, view the stressor objectively, and place its significance appropriately in the hierarchy of events, needs, wants, or stresses in your life.

Nine times out of ten, you’ll then chill the f**k out and realize you’ve got your knickers in a twist unnecessarily.

Bonus Tip:

Step away from your phone–no, not this very second–keep reading this fascinating article:) then, step away from your phone.

Phone Dependency

While waiting for a train or in a line, what do you instinctively do? Most of us reach for our phones. This dependency for our phone wasn’t the case as recently as 10 to 12 years ago. We would have to wait—occupied only by our thoughts or perhaps the conversation struck up with a stranger waiting alongside us (conversations with real people, in-person–now that is weird).

We’ve lost the art of patience, waiting, and thinking.

Boredom is a thing of the past. There is always a notification, something on social media, YouTube, or Netflix to entertain us. We still plug into the matrix and appear unable to extract ourselves.

There are many positives to smartphones (don’t get me wrong, smartphones are incredible). The downside is we have become slaves to them.

Our phones increase our stress and anxiety and help to push us towards a sympathetic state.

Try to take some time away from them—a digital detox of sorts. Switching off/into flight mode can relieve stress and anxiety. It can also allow you to achieve the mindfulness and presence that I discussed earlier.

Taking time away from our phones isn’t easy. Smartphones are addictive! I struggle with it but, I am aware that when I have work to do, or I’m out with the family, I am less stressed, more productive, and happier when the phone is out of sight. This struggle applies to those that I am with also. Start small and build up the time. 

Some ideas to begin to control your phone usage are:

  • Don’t check it for the first 30 mins of your day.

  • When doing important work, please switch it on airplane mode and set a timer for how long the work task should take. Don’t look at your phone until the time is up.

  • No smartphones at mealtimes

  • Put your phone down in another room when at home so you’re not distracted by it.

  • Are you watching TV with your wife, girlfriend, husband, boyfriend, friends, family, cat, or dog? Have the phone out of sight. Enjoy doing what you are doing and the fact you are not distracted by the phone.

  • Establish no-go zones. Whether it be physical (e.g., not in the bedroom) or time zones (e.g., no phone use for the first hour after I get home from work), this rule will improve the quality of your relationships with significant others.

  • Lead by example on this. If you would like to be less distracted when spending time with your partner, begin by deliberately being less distracted yourself. Then, when you suggest they do the same, they are more likely to respect and value your opinion. Trying to force it on them before you have achieved it will meet with resistance.

I hope the above tips on managing stress are useful to you.

If you can use some of these to manage your stress, you will be a happier, more productive, and focused person. You will also thrive on rigorous training programs and translate your workouts into noticeable gains in strength, size, and body composition.

Stay tuned…

In the second installment of this series, I will be explaining why significant recovery begins with excellent program design.

In it, I’ll outline four key concepts you need to understand how to optimize your training and maximize your recoverability. 

Source

January 8, 2021

The Physiological Effects of Face Masks During Workouts

End Tidal Carbon Dioxide Level

Despite the gym closures and the inconsistencies in lockdowns, maintaining a healthy lifestyle is an important strategy in keeping yourself safe during the coronavirus pandemic1.

While social media chatter and opinion may disagree, the reality doesn’t change: the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends wearing a mask or cloth face-covering in public, especially in places where maintaining social distancing is difficult, and mass masking is a low cost, easy way to complement social distancing and other methods of controlling infection rates.

Research also shows that gyms are a source of viral transmission2, like many other public spaces, and that masking should be part of the exercise and workout experience. This is especially true when the activity is aerobic3.

Researchers at the Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa, Israel, have looked into the physiological effects of face masks during exercise to assess the impact on the trainee.

They found that masking during aerobic training has minimal and statistically inconsistent impact on heart rate, respiratory rate, breathing and oxygen saturation in the blood.

However, using an N95 respirator did indicate an increase in EtCO2 (end tidal carbod dioxide) levels, a measure of carbox dioxide production and clearance in breathing. This increase could also be explained by the fact that exhaled air is being rebreathed when wearing a mask.

Granted, respiratory exposure to increased levels of carbon dioxide could impact performance, may cause headaches, confusion, stupors and increases in heart rates and breathing rates.

Short term exposure and intermittent exposure may also lead to improvements in respiratory muscle development and better performance.

The research doesn’t look at the impact of mask wearing from a psychological point of view and it is not a wide enough study to help draw any specific conclusions about specific populations because it was an all male subject group. So, it’s best not to generalize the results.

But, you can just stay out of the slipstream of anyone who is vigorously working out and keep your distance 4.

It used to be called an ounce of prevention which seems like a million years ago today, at a time when people are extremely polarized in their opinions about everything.

References

1. Epstein, D., Korytny, A., Isenberg, Y., Marcusohn, E., Zukermann, R., Bishop, B., Minha, S., Raz, A., & Miller, A. (2021). Return to training in the COVID-19 era: The physiological effects of face masks during exercise. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 31(1), 70–75.

2. Gontjes, K. J., Gibson, K. E., Lansing, B., Cassone, M., & Mody, L. (2020). Contamination of Common Area and Rehabilitation Gym Environment with Multidrug-Resistant Organisms. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 68(3), 478–485.

3. Leung, N. H. L., Chu, D. K. W., Shiu, E. Y. C., Chan, K.-H., McDevitt, J. J., Hau, B. J. P., Yen, H.-L., Li, Y., Ip, D. K. M., Peiris, J. S. M., Seto, W.-H., Leung, G. M., Milton, D. K., & Cowling, B. J. (2020). Respiratory virus shedding in exhaled breath and efficacy of face masks. Nature Medicine, 26(5), 676–680.

4. Blocken, B., Malizia, F., van Druenen, T., & Marchal, T. (n.d.). Towards aerodynamically equivalent COVID19 1.5 m social distancing for walking and running. 12.

Source

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