Readers Carol, Don, Teresa, AJ, and others asked about strength, and knee pain and placement when descending stairs.
Physical trainer Teresa wrote:
"Hello Dr. Bookspan, "The post on "Better Exercise on the Stairs" from July 2007 contains the following statement: 'When descending stairs or hills, bend your knees when landing for soft shock absorption. Don't step down on a straight, locked, knee.'
"Some clients I work with have the habit of descending stairs on one leg because they can land straight-legged on the "weak" leg. Pain or fear of pain keep them from having the confidence to bend that "weak" leg sufficiently to support themselves for a soft landing on the other leg, but the "strong" leg will let them land softly on the "weak" one. When I get them to practice it, they find the proper motor pattern that is pain-free, but end up falling back on the old motor pattern that creates pain.
"Do you have any ideas on this one since descending usually requires more use of the toes than climbing the stairs does?
"I keep recommending your site to loads of people because you are sooo right. It's about motor patterns of moving our bodies, not just "exercise." Thank you for your time and assistance!" Teresa Merrick, M.A. ACSM HFI, NSCA-CPT/CSCS, NASM CPT Master Trainer
Climbing stairs is a functional (real life) skill. Not having the strength to support your own body weight is serious weakness:
It is not healthy to land straight-legged with a locked knee on either a weak or strong leg. The functional life skill needed to descend the stairs is similar to what is needed for simple daily healthy bending (right drawing). Bending knees to retrieve and reach is something everyone needs to do many times a day. How many times a day do you think you bend for ordinary actions? Click How Good Would You Look From 400 Squats a Day - Just Stop Unhealthy Bending
Use the simple built-in life activity of healthy bending using the half squat (right drawing) to train your legs for the strength and mobility needed to descend stairs in a healthful way.
When you bend in the half squat, keep both heels down and your weight shifted back over the whole foot (right drawing), not just the toes (left-hand drawing). Pull back more to the heels if you slide forward.
No need to increase the inward curve, called hyperlordosis, or overarch (left). Hyperlordosis pinches the spine and can cause impingement and mystery back pain (Prevent Back Surgery). Overarching is sometimes taught to weightlifters because it shifts some of the effort onto the lower spine joints called facets, making the lift easier. It is healthier to keep the weight on the muscles and not overarch. Keep neutral spine (right drawing).
Keep heels down for bending using the half-squat, instead of lifting the heel. Keeping heels down shifts weight to the thigh and hip muscles and off the knee joint. Enjoy the free, built-in Achilles stretch with each bend. Specifics on this in the post Free Exercise and Free Back and Knee Pain Prevention - Healthy Bending.
Descending the stairs should not be a toe-intensive maneuver. Your body weight belongs on the strong muscles of the thigh and hip.
Once you have the idea of the healthy bending you need for daily life bending, transfer that healthy movement to the stairs:
Keep more weight on the leg on the upper stair, instead of flopping and stomping all weight down on the foot that is stepping down.
Keep your weight back more toward the heel on the upper leg.
Keep heel down longer on the upper leg, instead of lifting the heel right away. Get the free, built-in, functional Achilles stretch.
Bend knee slightly upon stepping down instead of landing straight-kneed. Remember this is the same strength and skill that you need and have been developing (or should have) for ordinary daily bending, which totals many dozens every day.
Use good shock absorption from the thigh muscles of the leg stepping down.
Instead of dong artificial leg exercises like leg raises, use legs for real life to get automatic built in exercise in the way you need to move. The movement gives built-in strengthening and stretch and movement patterns. The built-in strengthening and stretch and movement patterns directly improve daily function.
More will come in future posts. Have a real life of activity and fun, and enjoy.
Read success stories of these methods and send your own. Questions come in by the hundreds. I make posts from fun ones. Before asking more in the comments, see if your answers are already here by clicking labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, or in the Fitness Fixer Index.
Subscribe, free by using "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. See Dr. Bookspan's Books. Get certified - DrBookspan.com/Academy.
In fitness, odd and sham training methods are repeated, often whether they are true or not. It's important to remember this. A good example of avoiding this pitfall came from Mark Spitz, who swam at the 1968 and 1972 Olympics. As of this writing in July 2008 he is still the only Olympic athlete to win a gold medal and set a new world record in each in each (individual) event he entered. In an era when other swimmers, male and female were shaving body hair, he swam with a mustache. Mark Spitz is quoted as saying,
"When I went to the Olympics, I had every intention of shaving the mustache off, but I realized I was getting so many comments about it--and everybody was talking about it--that I decided to keep it. I had some fun with a Russian coach who asked me if my mustache slowed me down. I said, No, as a matter of fact, it deflects water away from my mouth, allows my rear end to rise and make me bullet shaped in the water, and that's what had allowed me to swim so great. He's translating as fast as he can for the other coaches, and the following year every Russian male swimmer had a mustache."
Keep this in mind when you automatically believe various training techniques without thinking it through.
I couldn't get a copyright-free photo of Mark Spitz to use for this post. Readers have been asking for more pictures of Paul, so here he is, in the Hudson River:
I think manufacturers should pay Paul to wear their gear.
--- Read success stories of these methods and send your own. Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. See if your answers are already here by clicking labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, and The Fitness Fixer Index. For personal medical questions - Replies to Medical Questions. Limited Class spaces for personal feedback. Top students may apply for certification throughDrBookspan.com/Academy. Learn more in Dr. Bookspan's Books.
Here is Friday Fast Fitness - Dips upside down holding a handstand, for shoulder and arm strength, balance, agility, and fun.
Readers Dave, Nine-Volt Terry, and others asked about dips. You don't need weights and equipment to increase strength. Body weight can be used in many fun ways. Fitness Fixer has shown how to do an easy handstand, then last Friday featured a short movie to learn a regular handstand - Fast Fitness - Step Up To Handstand.
This week - use the handstand for more:
Hold a handstand the way you are safe and comfortable.
Bend your elbows to lower toward the floor like a pushup, then push to straighten.
Increase how deep you can dip and how many you can do and push back up again.
These dips are safer for the anterior (front) shoulder than conventional dips which are done by leaning or hanging on hands while upright, and bending elbows behind you to lower and raise. They can work like a Safer Overhead Military Press. Make sure you don't have glaucoma or uncontrolled high blood pressure before doing these. Breathe and stay relaxed instead of tightening.
To increase skills, work until you can do handstand dips without a wall.
By the time this post comes out, we hope to be making our way across Colorado. We are on our way to teach Fun Workshops in Colorado in July.
I won't have e-mail access to get or reply to comments for the next two weeks. Enjoy the posts that will come over the next weeks, and click the links in the posts for more. With close to 400 Fitness Fixer posts already on-line, your questions may already be here in the posts and the many comments. At any time I may be writing replies to comments that regularly come in on any of the posts.
David from Belgium is a talented computer programmer who donated his time to fix my new Fitness Fixer Index. Keep your browser window wide for best results, and check back often for updates.
Paul and I will be backpacking until reaching the conference in Snowmass Colorado. A reader asked (for some reason) if I use rolling luggage. Gee, no. I wear a backpack I got at a garage sale for $15. Sometimes Paul and I share one pack, since beyond a spare t-shirt and jeans and one shared comb, there isn't much more we need, and food takes up most of the bag space and weight. We don't carry a tent and I don't usually use a ground cloth. I am happy enough sleeping on the ground. Paul is so tall that one pair of size 17 sneakers and 38" inseam jeans take up most of the pack. The rest of the time, Paul carries what we call the neutron knapsack. In his giant hands, he rolls and compresses a pair of jeans and some t-shirts into molecule size to fit in a regular small pack. We have to supply our own computer and projector to teach at the conference (or pay rental fee) so pack them in ourselves. The heavy pack may have conference equipment and books to teach the courses, plus a t-shirt for the 2 weeks :-)
Some ideas on making simple personal care items like toothpaste, hair care, and sunblock for travel:
Yesterday's post, Not Old for the Olympics Part I, told of athletes competing in the highest level athletic events over many years as they get older. The ability to keep physical skills by training is not new or unusual. To keep physical skills, you must continue to use and practice them.
Here is Leslie's movie again so you can practice along with her. Press the arrow to watch this short movie, approximately 30 seconds long.
Leslie can now do 40 pushups easily, and says her goal is 45 for her 68th birthday this October. I didn't have a camera with me to record her 40 pushups last week in class before posting this post, but will try when I get back from the Wilderness Medicine conference.
Leslie says she wants me to tell all of you that she could not do any pushups when she started working with me. She says it was my training in functional daily movement that made the difference, instead of doing artificial exercises in "sets and reps" for isolated body parts. She says the last 5 of the 45 pushups are hard, but she perseveres and keeps smiling, knowing discipline needs training. Bookmark her movie so you can do your 30 pushups every day with her.
When Dara Torres made the news by qualifying for the Beijing Olympics, the first comments by the masses included that performance enhancement drugs were probably needed. Torres employs a head coach, a sprint coach, a strength coach, two stretchers who moved to Florida to stretch her daily, two masseuses, a chiropractor, a nanny, and household help, with costs estimated at least $100,000 per year, plus the support of family, friends, and good sponsors. You don't win an Olympics alone, but it does not require drugs to get better over years of training. Torres trains hard, and has a team of trainers and people who stretch her, using many of the conventional moves that "work" at the price of her 13 surgeries for injuries.
There are people who state that it is unfair and unethical to use performance-enhancing drugs, but they wear or allow a one thousand dollar engineered bathing suit like the new Speedo LZR. When I was competing, swim goggles were considered an unfair advantage. Mark Spitz won his record setting medals without even wearing goggles. When I was competing, it was considered unfair for an American athlete to earn any money from athletics. No sponsors were allowed. Athletes swept floors to earn money to compete. Today they are not only sponsored and advertised, pro athletes arrive at events with chauffeurs from their villas.
Is it fair to be taller, a trait which favors speed in swimming? Some who say performance-enhancing drugs are wrong will eat engineered food, and use expensive altitude chambers and other training devices. Is it fair to other competitors when one swimmer has a rich family who gives up all to support their dreams? It is considered unfair doping to use certain steroids to hasten healing of internal injuries and soreness from intensive training, but not if you use them to heal skin erosions from the same hard training. Drugs are vilified in some sports, glorified in others, and routinely used in the business and military world for increased concentration and competitiveness, and reduction of hunger and fatigue.
Debate continues about ethics. Two truths are important to remember - Performance enhancing drugs are not necessary to win or to achieve the highest goals of competition. There are women swimmers today who without any drugs are breaking records of men swimmers of the 70's who used steroids. Performance drugs are not healthy. The purpose of athletics is not just to mindlessly best the person next to you. A higher view is the beauty of clean healthy athletics.
Related Fitness Fixer on exercise and aging, and enhancing drugs:
--- Read success stories of these methods and send your own. For more, click labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, and the Fitness Fixer Index. Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. See Dr. Bookspan's Books, take a Class, get certifiedDrBookspan.com/Academy. ---
The 2008 US Olympic swimming trials were held June 29 to July 6 in Omaha, Nebraska, photo at left. New world records were set, including by a swimmer that the news likes to call old. Dara Torres is 41, not old for an athlete.
Swimming is the Olympic event that I trained for over many years. I have seen an assortment of training beliefs and procedures come and go, and hope to post on them as the Olympics begin August 8 in Beijing China. It may seem like a new idea that experience and years of training make you a better athlete, but it is not new to maintain skills, even improve as years pass.
Hiroshi Hoketsu, age 67, will compete in two equestrian events. He was born in Tokyo Japan in 1941.
Rajmond Debevec born in Slovenia Yugoslavia in 1963 is now going to his seventh Olympic Games at age 45. He is an Olympic and world record holder in 50m rifle shooting events.
Laurie Lever, born 1947, will compete in individual and team horse jumping at 60 years old.
John Dane III, born 1950 in New Orleans, LA, will compete for the US at age 58, and Peter Douglass, born 1955 will compete for Barbados in sailing.
Juan Carlos Dasque, born 1952, will compete for Argentina in trap shooting.
Mark Todd, born 1956, has made the New Zealand Equestrian team at age 52.
Juha Hirvi of Finland, born 1960 will go to his third Olympics at 48, competing in Men's 50m Rifle Prone and Men's 50m Rifle 3 Positions.
Canadian Donna Saworski, born 1960, made the fencing team.
Another Canadian, Leslie Thompson-Willie, born 1959, will row crew in the woman's eight, at nearly 49 years old.
Galina Belyayeva of Kazakhstan, born 1951, is scheduled to compete in shooting at age 57.Elizabeth Callahan of the US will compete in pistol shooting at age 58.
Jeff Hartwick, born 1967 qualified for pole vault. Romy Tarangul of Germany, also born in 1967, will compete in Judo at age of almost 41.
Jeannie Longo-Ciprelli, pictured at right, is a French cyclist born 1958, who won three Tour de France races, the Olympic Gold medal in the Atlanta 1996 games, a bronze at the Sydney 2000 Olympics at age 41, made the 2004 Athens Olympics at age 46, and will compete in Beijing in the Women's Individual Time Trial and Women's Road Race at nearly 50 years old (birthday is Oct 31).
Sheila Taormina, born 1969, will go to her fourth Olympics this August in Beijing. She competed in 1996 as a swimmer, the triathlon in 2000 and 2004, and will compete in the Modern Pentathlon (five events) in Beijing, making her the first U.S. athlete to compete in three sports in the Olympics.
Al Oerter, picture at left, born 1936, won four consecutive Olympic gold medals in the discus in 1956, 1960, 1964, 1968, setting Olympic records each time. At age 40 in 1976, he threw his personal best. At age 44, he qualified for the U.S. Olympics trials in 1980. That was the year of the US boycott of the summer games.
The legendary Oerter passed away last year. Thank you Mr. Oerter for your inspiration.
Here is Friday Fast Fitness - learn to lift up to a full handstand, for shoulder, arm, and wrist strength, balance, agility, skill, and fun.
Previous posts showed how to step up to an easy handstand by putting one foot up high behind you on a wall or surface. Here is how to learn swinging up to full handstand:
Stand close to a secure surface.
Plop both hands on the floor about a foot from the wall and swing one leg upward
Use momentum of putting hands down and swinging leg up, to swing the other leg upward to the wall.
Click the arrow to run the short movie. Three of my students demonstrate three stages of learning this handstand:
Mr. Sosaku at right holds the finished stance.
Helen, center shows swinging up straight, bringing both feet to the wall.
Kimberly shows the beginning - placing hands and getting the idea of lifting legs upward.
Let your feet come to the wall and straighten your body, so that you do not curl your back against the wall. Work to increase strength and balance, so that you need the wall less and less, eventually holding straight handstand without the wall. Note the hand weight on the floor. Future posts will show weightlifting with one arm while in handstand on the other.
Tour De France 2008 and Increasing Aerobic Capacity
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Jolie Bookspan, M.Ed, PhD, FAWM
The Tour de France is a 23-day bicycle race. This year it runs from July 5 to 27, 2008. It is a stage race, broken into individual races, from one town to another. The number of stages has varied over years since the tour began in 1903. Course distance runs approximately 3,000 km (1,864 mi) through most of France and often through one or more adjoining countries.
Some of the essence of "le Tour" was incorporated in the synthpop song "Tour de France," a 1983 hit single by the German group Kraftwerk. They put the motto of France in krautrock (krautrock is considered a fun and positive term by enthusiasts): Liberté, égalité, fraternité, French for liberty, equality, good company - which is the point of much of the race.
The Tour de France is a difficult event. Even with light bicycles designed for each stage, it is still grueling. Athletes must train for exceptional aerobic ability.
Cardiovascular endurance, also called aerobic capacity, determines how long you can continue activity at your chosen pace. When you exercise, your body needs more oxygen, so your cells extract more of the oxygen your blood provides. Aerobically fit people can extract more oxygen when exercising, and so, can do more exercise. Average exercise needs about 10 times more oxygen supplied to your active tissues, than at rest. Heavy exercise can increase need to around twenty times. If you do not have high enough capacity from training, you will be too out of breath to continue. World-class athletes have been recorded to reach over 30 times their resting rate.
With regular endurance activities, such as biking, running, swimming, your body makes many changes that improve function. You increase blood volume, the number of oxygen-carrying blood cells, expand the network of blood vessels, reduce incidence of vessels clogged with fatty deposits, increase number of cellular organelles and enzymes your body uses to process oxygen into energy, and other physical improvements, to be covered in future posts.
Breathing in more oxygen won't increase your ability to extract more oxygen. For that you need training. When your body senses it needs more oxygen than it is getting - during hard aerobic exercise or exposure to altitude - the kidneys secretes a natural human hormone called erythropoietin (EPO). EPO stimulates the bone marrow to make more red blood cells. Everyone can do this on their own through regular aerobic training. When some people want more EPO, they may try blood transfusions, called Transfusion Doping, an illegal procedure to increase maximum oxygen carrying ability. They may also inject various kinds of synthetic human erythropoietin. Whether having the money and access to these substances is fair play is topic of many debates in sports ethics. More important is that they are not healthy. Blood can thicken and cell count increases to a dangerous level leading to cardiac problems. Deaths have occurred in young athletes from blood doping practices. There have been experiments with artificial oxygen carriers based on recombinant, bovine (cow), and human hemoglobin or perfluorocarbons. These substances have potentially lethal side effects including renal toxicity, increased blood pressure, and immune depression. Champions don't need them. You don't need them.
Posts to come will cover more on performance enhancement, drugs, supplements, Le Tour and other bike races, The Olympics and other events. Posts on supplements and performance enhancing drugs:
What Is The Difference Between A Leg Press and a Squat?
Monday, July 14, 2008
Jolie Bookspan, M.Ed, PhD, FAWM
Is a leg press the same as a squat upside down? Both the squat and leg press bend and straighten the legs against resistance. But something special makes opposite forces on the joints.
The post Exercising With A Friend - Partner Leg Press showed a fun leg press without equipment using a friend for resistance, balance, and teamwork. Reader Nina left the comment on the post: "This could being done another way. Sit on a bench or sumthing (sp) else back-to-back with your partner. Interlock arms sitting straight with your backs pressed together. Rise up and down, and feel the pressure on your leg muscles."
What Nina describes is called a squat or half-squat. The exercise in the post is a leg press. Standing on your feet changes it to a squat.
The squat has opposite joint and muscle dynamics to the leg press. In the kind of leg press described in this post, your body is fixed, and the feet move away. In the squat, the feet are fixed and the body moves. The difference in which end is stationary creates different forces on the muscles and joints.
My students Lily and Biji demonstrate one way to do a fun partner leg press. Hold your body (and head) stable.
To do half-squats with or without a partner, it is usually better exercise and balance training without the bench. There is no need for equipment. Instead, use your own muscles to hold up body weight, rather than sitting or touching down to a bench between each raise. The squat is functional - meaning it uses your body the way muscles need for real life. The key is using the half squat for healthy daily bending instead of "bending wrong." Bending over forward unequally weights the discs of the spine. Over years of bad bending, you can accumulate enough small pushes on the discs to begin to break them down and push them outward toward the back. This is the process of disc herniation. It is not a mysterious situation or a disease process. It is simple mechanics. The resulting disc damage, slippage, herniation, is an injury that can heal, usually easily and quickly when you stop the injury process of bad bending during standing, sitting, and lifting.
Your body needs to practice both kinds of leg resistance to be good at both. Have fun building functional squatting into daily life instead of dong artificial squats in a gym, then bending wrong hurting your discs the rest of your day. Have fun doing leg presses balancing friends and family that move and squirm, instead of ignoring real humans to interact only with artificial stationary gym equipment. Get real fitness with real life.
Listen to native pronunciation of the Word of the Day in a list of languages.
The same page has a free registration link, or clickwww.travlang.com/wordofday/register.html to e-mail you the Word of the Day each day it comes out. Choose as many languages as interest you from the list. Change your free subscription any time.
Speaking and learning language, exercises several brain centers and widens world view and skills.
Thank you The Blog That Ate Manhattan TBTAM for hosting Volume 4 number 42. TBTAM said my post was just about Fixing Posture. But was it really? Click to see.
In a hospital, Grand Rounds is a lecture for doctors about a patient or topic. On the web, the weekly Grand Rounds is an electronic post that lists its vote for the best the best in online medical writing.
Three Common Swimming and SCUBA Myths in the News Again
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
Jolie Bookspan, M.Ed, PhD, FAWM
On Monday July 7, a news show Troubled Waters featured a story of two scuba divers who floated 19 hours overnight after they and their dive boat did not connect after a dive on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.
In their television interview, the two divers told various points of the situation. Three of the concerns were common myths often repeated in scuba training.
1. They mentioned they experienced signs of hypothermia. Technically, not any chilling is hypothermia. Being uncomfortably cold does not mean you have hypothermia. Shivering and teeth chattering does not mean you have hypothermia. You can even become incapacitated by cold before becoming hypothermic. In informal conversation, the two terms of hypothermia and chilling are often used interchangeably.
2. The woman of the pair stated she had read in a book, which had a section about progression of hypothermia, that exercise is not good and can be counterproductive. They were worried that body movement would, "send blood to the muscles away from your core, and your organs" and for that reason, make them colder.
I have read the book they mention. It is a book of wonderful stories and great writing, interesting medicine, but the physiology is frequently off. As a physiologist, I notice these things. When I teach medical students in their classes, I often see that they do not want to learn physiology, they only want to learn what medicine to give and where to cut. I tell them that without understanding the reasons for how the body resulted in the situation in the first place, they will only repeat the mistakes of their teachers by giving medicines and cutting.
Back to the shivering divers floating all night, waiting for rescue. It is not always the case that exercise in the cold must only make you colder. Exercise in cold water can generate enough heat to match or surpass the large thermal drain, depending on water temperature, work load, duration of exposure, your body composition, what you are wearing, and other factors. It is true that exercise in cold water increases heat loss, but it is an important point that it does not mean that you will always cool. Whether you stay comfortable or get cold depends how much heat you keep and how much you lose. If you generate more heat than you lose, you will be warmer than when you started. When I worked on cold water immersion for the Navy, we studied body cooling in pilots downed in cold water, and how long they could survive (all volunteers, really they loved my studies). We also studied divers. Some divers sent for underwater missions during the Gulf War were overheating underwater and had to wear ice vests with their scuba gear.
3. The last myth is a popular one. I am a scuba instructor and have heard this one repeated often. The two divers mentioned that the woman of the pair was menstruating and that there were sharks in the water. The woman said, "I'm shark bait is what I'm thinking." Diver researcher Dr. Carl Edmonds found that Australia's shark attack tracking system reported nine times more shark attacks on men, even though there was an even number of male and female swimmers.
Menstrual blood does not attract sharks. Neither does menstrual blood attract grizzly bears during camping trips, cause wine to sour as stated in ancient religious writings, or cause wings to snap off airplanes, as pilots insisted in the 1920's. The term man-eating shark, for now, remains.
I explain these myths and more about swimming and diving physiology, underwater and in heat and cold, in the book Diving Physiology in Plain English.
The summer Olympics will begin this August. The Olympics are an international cooperative athletic contest held every two years, alternating winter and summer Games. Before 1992, the summer and winter games were held in the summer and winter of the same year, so that four years passed between each Olympic year, called an Olympiad.
Estimates on the date of the first recorded Olympic Games in ancient Greece vary around the early 800's BC, with indications of regular games held far earlier. The first events were foot races. Soon wrestling and the pentathlon (five events by one athlete) were added. More events followed.
The games and ceremonies emphasized reverence to heaven, ability of body and mind, plus nakedness and deliberate gore for the ratings (popularity). Olympics continued in Greece every four years for about a thousand years. After the Romans gained power in Greece, Emperor Theodosius I outlawed the Olympics in the year 393 AD because they (the Games) weren't Christian.
Fifteen hundred years passed. In 1894 the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was founded to rekindle the Olympic games. In 1896, the first modern Summer Olympics was held in Athens Greece. Fourteen nations participated track and field, fencing, weightlifting, rifle and pistol shooting, tennis, cycling, swimming, gymnastics, and wrestling. No women were allowed to compete. The IOC director stated that including women would be, "impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic, and incorrect."
The following Olympics in Paris in 1900 allowed eleven women to compete in lawn tennis and golf. This August, it is projected that athletes will compete in 302 events in 28 different sports. At the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin Italy there were 84 events in 7 sports. Currently, 203 countries participate in the Olympics. This is higher than the 193 countries who presently belong to the United Nations.
There are debates whether countries or heads of state should boycott Olympics to make influential political statements. Several boycotts have been held by various countries over several Olympics. In many Olympic years, different political topics from war, to the interpersonal war of apartheid, to the status of the country of Taiwan, have been focus for boycott. This year it is position of the country of Tibet in relation to the host country of China. As one of the swimmers who felt the impact of the 1980 boycott because of events in Afghanistan, I know it is a difficult thing to decide either way. Consider this: today, Olympics are boycotted over wars. In ancient Greece, wars were postponed and ceasefires called to observe and honor the Olympics.
Here is Friday Fast Fitness - Remember freedom for all people and for Earth on America's Independence Day.
Reduce toxic waste from discarded batteries. Jacqueline Meier of Switzerland is creator of the Clean Planet Association. Part of this work is the Clean Kaïlash Project.
A widespread myth is that to fix posture you must strengthen sets of muscles.
After spending time and money on strengthening exercises, people often wind up as stronger people with the same poor body position. The fallacy is that strengthening does not create movement. You do that yourself.
A physician wrote me that he has hyperlordosis from surfing, and is "working" to fix it. He had spent much time waiting for the exercises to "work." What he missed is that surfing does not cause it, and how you stand can be fixed there and then by deliberately, volitionally changing how you stand. How? Try Friday Fast Fitness - Neutral Spine in 5 Seconds.
"Thank you. I am a D1 athlete and have been struggling with back pain/extreme tightness when lifting and playing in the same day. I have known I had bad posture while running/walking for about 4 years, went to physical therapy for it, and still haven't changed it. I kept waiting for a certain exercise to suddenly "fix" me. Duh, what fixes me is ME CHANGING IT. Shocking."
When certain muscles are tight, it can feel normal to stand badly. Even though it is popular to talk about tight hamstrings changing posture, that is mostly an issue when sitting. When standing, two tight areas are most common, chest and front hip:
Tight front chest muscles make round-shouldered position feel normal. Round-shouldered positioning keeps the front muscles shortened, in a cycle of shortening and tightening. The upper back muscles over-lengthen. This is why the most common stretch of pulling an arm over the front of the body is usually counterproductive. To fix anterior (front) tightness start with understanding and doing the pectoral stretch, described in Fixing Upper Back and Neck Pain and stop promoting an already overstretched posterior shoulder with The Stretch You Need The Least.
Tight front hip muscles make standing badly feel normal. The front of the hip is pulled downward, tipping the backside outward in back. The lower back increases in inward curve in a painful posture called swayback or hyperlordosis. Many people stand this way without knowing it because they think standing with the hip tilted forward in front is normal or "cute." Much of modern conventional "fitness" encourages this unhealthy, unattractive bad posture.
Hyperlordosis is a major hidden factor in lower back pain. People may undergo months, even years of treatments, adjustments, shots, medicines, therapies for discs, sciatica, facet pain, and other pain without knowing or changing the cause - allowing a too large an inward curve to the lower back.
The photo at right demonstrates an over-arch in the lower spine, the hip tilted forward in front, and a forward head while doing an activity supposed to be for health.
It seems impractical to do "fitness" in unfit ways - practicing unhealthy positioning, shown in the photo ->
Moreover, tilting the hip forward reduces the Achilles stretch and reinforces bad movement habits. For a more functional Achilles stretch try Better Achilles Tendon Stretch.
Hyperlordosis is not a medical condition or unchangeable anatomy. It is simple bad posture that you can allow or change right as you stand. Neutral spine is not pushing the hip forward, just moving it enough to make it level. See a short movie in the post Friday Fast Fitness - Neutral Spine in 5 Seconds. To stretch the front hip, try these:
Remember that stretching the hip and shoulder, and anywhere else, will not automatically make you stand right. You do that yourself using your own muscles and brain. Free exercise. Free fix.
--- Read and contribute your own success stories of these methods. Before asking questions, see if your answers are already here - click labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, and the Fitness Fixer Index. Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. For answers to personal medical questions - Replies to Medical Questions. Limited Class spaces for personal evaluation. Top students may apply to certify throughDrBookspan.com/Academy.See Dr. Bookspan's Books. ---
