Lactic Acid Myths

Readers wrote in with questions, showing common myths about lactic acid.

Jens wrote that his yoga teacher told him, "The reason he wakes up with stiff muscles is lactic acid build up during sleep." Reader Trish said her aerobics trainer said she must never work above her lactate threshold or she will not make gains. Reader Yash wrote that his massage therapist says he "has lactic acid build up, making little balls in his muscles... that continuously stay there for some reason." During TV coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, a television news show talking about Olympic training stated that a skier used a secret new method to reduce lactic acid between races.

None are true.

For Jens' question: You do not elevate or accumulate levels during sleep, it takes hard exercise. Lactate is not related to stiffness on waking. Muscle and joint morning stiffness is usually from not moving. It is normal to move change position a bit during sleep, but it is still greatly reduced motion. Lactate levels rise (not lactic acid) when you are exercising. Exercise during the day is important for muscle and joint health. Increased lactate during exercise does not cause stiffness - that is another myth. Delayed stiffness in the days after exercise is from other causes.

For Trish: Working above threshold is useful training. It increases physical ability by itself and makes physiologic changes that raise the existing level. Lactate only builds when you are exercising hard. Making lactate with hard exercise is a good and healthy thing.

For Yash: Lactate levels do not stay elevated in the body, whether at exercise or rest. When you exercise, body processes remove it almost as fast as you produce it. The "almost" is a good thing. Some is removed to make other products, and the extra is used as an important fuel for your heart and other muscles. Even when levels rise during exercise, it does not form a solid and cannot make lactate balls.

The television news show, 2020, aired a segment on February 26th about Olympic training. They stated that a skier "used a secret new method to reduce lactic acid between races." The secret was stated as "spinning." It is long known that activity reduces lactate faster than total rest (lying down). It is not specific to biking or spinning. Any mild activity works. It is not a new training technique or a secret. Reducing lactate levels between bouts of exercise using lighter exercise is sometimes called "active rest." That sounds like a funny name, until you remember that to athletes, doing light exercise is like resting.

Lactic acid and lactate are different. To be covered separately.

I have never personally seen a lactate molecule by itself, and neither had any of my professors in school who taught me about lactate and lactic acid. I think that none of the people telling readers these myths have seen a lactic acid molecule. What I was able to do is directly personally measure lactate in different people, in individual body areas, during and after exercise, and at rest, to be able to see for ourselves.


Related Fitness Fixer:

• Tour De France 2008 and Increasing Aerobic Capacity
• Three Common Swimming and SCUBA Myths in the News Again
• Beware of Hype in Training Methods
• Does Hyperbaric Treatment Help Muscle Injuries?
• Gluteal Muscles Myth - Shaking The Dog's Paw

Random Unrelated:

• Don't Confuse Exercise With Real Fitness

Labels: aerobic, lactic acid/lactate, massage, myths

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Contest - Name The New Feature on Fitness Terminology

Here is a fun new contest - can you think of a great name for a new Fitness Fixer feature?

In December, a reader helped me know that perhaps others beside himself do not know basic names of body parts and processes. "Anonymous" felt that the muscle names submitted to the Sit Up Straight contest were "impenetrable." He wrote:

"I think his answer, which may be 100% technically correct, is 0% helpful for most people without a degree in physiology. The great thing about this website is that it converts medical mumbo jumbo into accessible language (including visual language).

I replied:

"Dear Anonymous, Thank you for instructing me that other readers too, may not recognize basic body parts and what they do.

"No degrees should be needed to know fundamentals about yourself. Just like knowing common car parts, you can prevent unneeded repairs, and being fooled by sales pitches.

"I took your good idea in the next article after this one, I added a description why a muscle was named and how to understand its action by the name - Fast Fitness - Mobilize and Strengthen With Serratus PushUps. I plan others to follow."

It is not only people "without degrees" who don't know basic body parts and functions. Often, trainers, instructors, even doctors, do not know either. They just repeat the same myths they have read and heard.

The new feature will explain how muscles got their names, movement names like flexion and extension, and body processes that are often misunderstood and repeated in pop fitness, and in health care and medicine.

This new feature can be a fun way readers can understand and benefit, not like in school where it is often is just lists of terms and definitions you don't recognize or care about.

Some ideas:

Basic Body Terms
What Does That Mean? - Then the term goes here…
Understanding Health Words

Reader Paul J submitted these:

“How it works”
“How the body works”
“Body works”
“Bookspan’s Body Works”
“Bookspan’s Body Brain Booster”
“The Brain Booster”
“Say, what?”
“What Did The Doctor Say?”
“Under the Skin”

Submit your entries in the comments below - make the titles descriptive, helpful, smart. Hurry so we can begin this new feature.

Related:

• Winner - Contest to Name The Illustration
• Contest Winners - How Sit Up Straight
• First Winner - International Academy of Functional Sports Medicine Logo Design

Contests Still Open, Enter Now:

• Fast Fitness - Contest for Children (and Everyone) To Learn What They Live
• Fast Fitness - Balance Contest!
• Logo Design Contest for New International Sports Medicine Academy

Labels: contest, education, myths

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Are You Always Colder With Exercise In Cold Water?

It is winter in the northern hemisphere. Outdoor swimming and boating waters range from chilly to frozen. A widespread assumption is that exercise in cold water always makes you colder. Some scuba diving textbooks assert that cold water will cause heat loss and therefore you will always chill in cold water. Some survival protocols may say you must never try to swim to safety if you find yourself unexpectedly in cold water. Are these true?

Although you lose a high amount of body heat to moving water, it is also true that you gain heat from being alive and from moving. The more heat you can generate, the more it is likely to meet or exceed the amount you lose. Losing heat by itself does not mean that you are chilling. If you generate more than you lose, you do not chill, you can stay warm when swimming and diving, even overheat. If not, of course, you can get very cold.

In general, it is easier to chill than overheat in cold water. However, in some cases, you can generate enough heat through exercise to match or surpass the heat you lose, even moreso if you are well insulated with muscle and fat. Swimmers doing laps in pools and divers sweating into their masks during hard finning against currents can tell you that. During Desert Storm, some divers in the Persian Gulf needed to wear ice vests for heat extraction to prevent overheating.


Many factors are involved including your fitness (ability to exercise hard enough to make enough heat), your build, your clothing, medicines you may be taking, how far it is to safety, your health, how warm you were when you started, the weather, water current and conditions. You can have net loss and gain back and forth during the same swim. Much to know.

When I competed in swimming, we swam miles each day. In winter, after finishing pool training, I walked home, hair still dripping. A fun thing was to see how fast it would freeze. When I'd pat the top of my head, the frozen hair crackled humorously. You could hold locks out to freeze in shapes. Teammates and I experimented informally, running various speeds to see if the wind froze the hair more or our rising body heat could melt it. Some of us were able to generate a literal head of steam. Most of my training was pool swimming (wimpy) but I have tried ice swimming in no more than a bathing suit. My family were Russian Ice swimmers and my Grandfather was the oldest member of the Iceberg club, who swam in the ocean every day, including New Year's Day. I am trying to find any photos that may have been taken. I know the club and my Grandfather were pictured in an issue of Strength and Health magazine.

In my military work in cold survival, we used computer models to compare heat loss in critically cold water scenarios for downed pilots and combat swimmers, to our real experiments putting volunteers in cold water with lots of forced convection - waves, wind, overhead spray, and my little toy wind-up sharks and penguins. You can become incapacitated by cold before becoming hypothermic. You can die from cold incapacitation in the water without ever reaching a hypothermic state. In informal conversation, the terms hypothermia and chilling are often used interchangeably, but that is not correct, and they are not the same. I made t-shirts for "my guys" the military volunteers in each extreme experimental protocol. The cold immersion trial shirts were inspired by the verse "Many are called but few are chosen" to become, "Many are cold but few are frozen."

More On Surviving Cold:

• Sixteen Miles of Cold Water
• Getting Fitter in 50 Degrees
• Beware of Hype in Training Methods
• Do You Lose Most Of Your Heat Through Your Head?
• Swimming and Pulmonary Edema Part I
• Japanese Ama Divers - Cold, Clothing, and Children

Healthy Swimming and Scuba:

• Diver Down Flags - Boating, Swimming, SCUBA Safer and Smarter
• Better Stretches for Swimming - Cook Strait Update
• Lower Back Pain From Swimming and SCUBA
• Nutrition for Endurance Swim Training

Random Fitness Fixer:

• Inspiring Update from Jill - Celiac, Knees, Fasciitis, and Restoring Happy Life

Labels: cold, military fitness, myths, scuba, swimming

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Exercise in the Heat

Labels: aerobic, aging, circulation, heat, heat shock protein, injury, myths, perceived exertion, performance enhancing modality

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Diving Women of Korea - The Haenyeo

In the previous two weeks, I wrote about the Japanese diving women, the Ama. Readers asked about the divers of Korea. Although they are sometimes called Ama divers, "ama" is a Japanese word. The Korean diving women are the Hae-nyao. Both ama and haenyao mean "sea woman." The Korean divers are also called Jamsoo, or diving lady, and Jam-nyao, or diving woman.

The diving women are a respected profession of hard work to gather food for their communities. The work is difficult and cold. The numbers of both Ama and Haenyao are decreasing every year, as the daughters who would take their mother's roles go to other work in the cities.

The first recorded Korean diving (that I know of) is from the 400's A.D. around the Chechu (Jeju) Island area. It is likely that diving had gone on centuries before that. The Haenyao historically dived all year (even in winter), and without assistance of weights or ropes to ascend or descend. They made as many as 30 dives an hour, to depths from 10 to 30 meters, at temperatures in the winter as low as 10 C.


Diving clothes varied by geographic area, with some divers wearing only a rope belt or loincloth. No fins were used to help swimming. Later when wet suits were developed, only male divers wore them. Women were prohibited protective suits by their cooperatives, since they were considered more cold tolerant to begin with, and the advantage of the suit would "accelerate over-harvesting" Later, the work became pretty much exclusive to women.

Taking many large breaths before a breath hold extends time because "overbreathing" lowers carbon dioxide in the body. Carbon dioxide signals you to breathe, so it is protective to have it build and make you want to return to the surface before you go unconscious from lack of oxygen. Hyperventilating (too many large breaths) before a dive can cause a drowning accident. The haenyao and ama practice a short hyperventilation with a distinctive whistling maneuver which was studied to find why it may not cause the problems of hyperventilation without the maneuver.

To call them "The haenyao women divers" is redundant. The word haenyao already refers to the female. I asked them what the males were called and the Haenyao laughed at me, saying that males cannot withstand the hard work or the cold, and it is known that women do better in the cold. Dr Suk Ki Hong, one of the best known researchers of immersion and the haenyao and Ama divers wrote, "The shivering threshold is elevated as compared to men, and thus women are distinctly in a better position than men to work in cold water. Undoubtedly there could be many other reasons. However these facts lead us to postulate that men could not compete successfully by virtue of their poor tolerance to cold."

Sadly, Western sport divers started writing articles and presenting lectures at dive conferences in the 1990s, mistakenly claiming women did not have better cold tolerance and had greater risk of cold injury. The myth was repeated in diving magazines, scuba classes, and textbooks of the era.

Are there male indigenous divers? Yes. I will write of them and their stories in the future. Stay tuned.

Link to haenyao museum site


Previously:

• Diving With the Japanese Ama Divers
• Japanese Ama Divers - Cold, Clothing, and Children
• The AmaSan Japanese Diving Women
• The Mermaid Stories

Related Undersea Stories:

• Living Under The Sea
• Nutrition for Endurance Swim Training
• Hyperbaric and Aquatic Medicine On Travel
• Train Exercise is Exercise Training
• Three Common Swimming and SCUBA Myths in the News Again
• Diver Down Flags - Boating, Swimming, SCUBA Safer and Smarter
• Exercise and Fitness in Decompression Sickness Risk
• Helium Speech - An Astronaut Calls the President of the United States
  
  

Labels: breath-hold diving, cold, myths, squat, swimming

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Ironman Triathlon

This is fun - this article is the 600th Fitness Fixer post.


Yesterday's post started a series on Triathlons. Triathlon races of different names, organizing bodies, and distances are held year-round. The Ironman is a trademarked name of one particular triathlon and its qualifying races.

The Ironman Triathlon is a long-distance race of a 2.4 mile swim (3.86 km), 112 mile (180.25 km) bike, and a marathon run of 26 miles 385 yards (42.195 km), continuously, in that order.

Fifteen men competed in the first Ironman triathlon in 1978. Then, it was a known "Fitness Fact" that women could not do hard athletics. Several sports of the time banned women. Magazine articles appeared regularly that women had special problems that made doing athletics more dangerous and less possible. Scuba magazines printed (and reprinted) bizarre myths by reporters, that women were physically predisposed to injury from heat, cold, exercise, and decompression. Even chapters in medical books had separate "woman sports" chapters with "proofs" such as shorter legs and less testosterone and blood volume. Currently, teen Asian girls are beating the times of big Western men from that era. Injury rates are shown to be not from gender as much as training. I am a former anatomy and physiology professor. Don't try to snow an anatomy professor about joint angles and limb length as proof of athletic prowess or injury. Future posts will dissect these myths from a physiology basis.

The name "Ironman" and related "Iron" labels are official property of the World Triathlon Corporation (WTC). The WTC hosts other triathlons around the world that are called Ironman. Who owns what name seems to change, and can get confusing. Several events formerly called Ironman no longer use the word due to aggressive trademark protection. Readers can comment to keep us current.

The Hawaii Ironman Triathlon (various alternate names) hosts the Ironman world championship and owns the race held each fall in Hawai'i. Last year's 2008 Hawai'i Ironman drew over 1700 athletes. The 2009 Hawaii Ironman will be held October 10, 2009. Qualifying races required for eligibility are held throughout the year. Several qualifiers are going on right now, this June and July.


Next - Ironman Triathlon Qualifiers for 2009+

More - Click the label Ironman, below, for all articles on the Ironman, and each label, swimming, biking, running, and others for all Fitness Fixer on each topic.

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Read success stories of Fitness Fixer methods and send your own.
Questions come in by the hundreds. I make posts from fun ones. Before asking more, see if your answers are already here by clicking labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, and the Fitness Fixer Index. For answers to personal medical questions - Replies to Medical Questions.

Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail" (under trumpet) upper right.
See Dr. Bookspan's Books. See class schedules, get certified - DrBookspan.com/Academy.

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Ironman Finisher by Jeff Kastner

Labels: biking, ironman, myths, running, swimming, triathlon

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How To Stay Underwater For A Month

Human beings have gotten all the way to the moon, but can't get far under the sea. In space we can wear special suits to decrease effects of pressure change and deliver air to breathe, but (in brief) the farther you go down underwater, the more these same conditions constantly change in difficult ways.

For ordinary scuba diving, divers wear a tank of regular air. A compressor squeezes ordinary filtered air into the tank, so that several times more air fits. For more time underwater than a tank allows, a diver can breathe from a special long hose from the surface. How far you can go depends on the length of the hose and the power to compress the air to the right pressure. With other specific training, you can wear a rebreather. A rebreather scrubs and reuses exhaled air instead of losing the exhale into the water (shortest description). In all these cases, the deeper and the longer you stay, the more nitrogen in the air you breathe dissolves all over your body.

When a diver starts back to the surface, pressure reduces all the way up, letting nitrogen back out. You need to come up slowly enough and not have stayed too long to be able to go directly to the surface without the nitrogen forming bubbles inside your body, part of the diving injury called decompression sickness or The Bends. Decompression sickness, and bubble formation, transit, and medical effects was a passion of my career work in physiology for many years. Still is.

On deeper dives, it works better to breathe less nitrogen. You can't substitute more oxygen at deep depths, because oxygen becomes increasingly toxic. You need a gas that doesn't make as much trouble during each depth and time. One choice is helium to replace some or all nitrogen, and part of the oxygen.

If you have lots of dissolved nitrogen or helium or other gases chosen for a long and/or deep dive, you need to stop on the way up, called a decompression stop. Where and when and for how long to stop is interesting, and the subject of research and arguments (discussions) among scientist and divers. Different Navies and commercial companies use different protocols, some known well, some closely guarded as company secrets.

For extreme depth diving for research, commercial work like oil drilling, mining, and communications, military surveillance, espionage, and "proprietary commercial interests," divers can spend time on "deco" stops, but for long dives, many stops are needed, some more than 10 hours. Doesn't work to do that, then go back to work the next day and repeat. One solution is to stay down inside the rig or habitat or other enclosure designed for that. I wrote a little of my work doing that in Living Under The Sea.

At each depth, you can only absorb a certain amount of gas. After that, no more fits. It doesn't matter how long you stay past a certain point, you have the same decompression obligation on the way up. Staying down until you are full of gas is called saturation diving. You can stay down a week or a month, then decompress once. Decompression can be done in the water, but there are problems of cold, darkness, bathroom needs, and gas supply. Another solution is inside a vehicle designed for that purpose. The decompression vehicle can be raised and removed from the water, and the divers inside slowly decompress safely. It was also experimented, to drag divers straight to the surface and throw them as fast as possible into a surface chamber to quickly compress them back to pressures at depth, then slowly release according to algorithms people back then decided were right. Tragically, some regular scuba divers heard about these two kinds of "surface decompression" and thinking it meant the water surface, managed to publish articles in diving magazines, and give lectures at dive shows, with that misinformation being widely repeated, that one could come straight to the surface after deep dives and float around in an inner tube and read dirty magazines, as the guys in the special recompression chambers did to pass the couple days they'd spend.

You wouldn't turn inside out from the huge pressure differential produced, as depicted in some science fiction movies, but it might kill you as effectively. That is a sample of what happens when reporters don't read what scientists write in their research articles, just repeat some sentences taken out of context, conclusions in the abstracts, or what someone else wrote.

Tomorrow - a fun story about NASA Astronaut Scott Carpenter in 1965. He lived 30 days underwater in SEALAB II, in the US Navy’s Man-in the-Sea Project off the coast of California. Commander Carpenter was breathing a helium mix during his surface decompression in a chamber. In tomorrow's post, hear a recording of what happens when he makes a pre-arranged phone call while breathing helium in the chamber to President Lyndon Johnson - Helium Speech - An Astronaut Calls the President of the United States.

Related stories:

• Space Walks
• Indiana Jones Rocket Sled
• Exercise and Medicine Underwater and at High Pressure
• Exercise and Fitness in Decompression Sickness Risk
• Living Under The Sea

Labels: aerospace, breathing, hyperbaric, injury, myths, scuba

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Fitness Myths - How Many Legs Does a Dog Have If You Call the Tail a Leg?

How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg?

Four.

Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.

- Abraham Lincoln

Myths! Hype. Fitness has many.

People argue over who is right about health topics, sometimes with unhealthful mental state. They argue things they have never actually seen, such as muscle fibers or blood flow or metabolism. Things they read or heard from someone else, who read or heard them from someone else, who had also not actually seen them.

Even medical books are often written by people who have not researched it themselves (in a laboratory themselves), but compiled popular consensus. Doing "medical research" does not mean "read it in a book." On April Fool's day, time to set myths straight-

Reader Favorite Fitness Myth Posts:

• Three Common Swimming and SCUBA Myths in the News Again
• Gluteal Muscles Myth - Shaking The Dog's Paw
• Aren't You Supposed To Stick Your Behind Out to Sit Down or Do Squats?
• Fixing Fitness Myths
• Fixing More Fitness Myths
• When Did Health Become Thinking Out Of The Box?
  
• Beware of Hype in Training Methods
• Back Pain in Pregnancy - and Why Men Can Get It
• Time of Death From Body Temperature?
• Forensic Science
• Exercise and Aging - Don't Limit the Patient to Limit the Pain
• Fixing Posture - No Exercise Needed
  
• Does an Exercise Ball Make You Sit Straight?

Read success stories of these methods and send your own.

Labels: holiday, myths, practice of medicine

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Do You Lose Most Of Your Heat Through Your Head?

Losing most of your heat through your head is a popular myth. Head heat loss is not the majority of body heat lost. Not even close.

Years of my career in research have been to study how the human body performs in extremes - exercise, injury states and how to prevent them, working and exercising in heat and cold, changes in air and pressure on mountain tops, and the related but different problems in space and underwater. I have lived in laboratories underwater and done experiments aboard aircraft. I have studied combat swimmers and done extreme swims with them for fun. For military research, I put men in vats of freezing water to see how we can keep pilots alive after bail-outs and how to get covert swimmers to their objective and, I found out, an entire separate topic to get them back again. Strong brave men got hazardous duty pay just to have a day with me. My life is scientific research and finding out why things are the way they are and how to make us better at surviving them. After finding out all these interesting things, I found out another thing - people still like myths more than fact. Here are some interesting facts (cool facts on cold):

Head heat loss is usually less than one-third to one-fifth of total heat loss. That means it is not the majority, which would be more than 50%. Head heat loss is usually less than 20-30 percent or so of total heat loss.

Head heat loss changes with how cold it is. The lower the temperature, the higher percentage head heat loss. Head heat loss is linear with temperature. At 0 degrees Centigrade, up to about 30 to 35% of heat could be lost through your head at rest.

Head heat loss changes with how much you exercise. When exercising at about a work rate of 50% of aerobic capacity, head heat loss falls to less than half of heat loss at rest.

Head heat loss changes if you are in water compared to air.

The heat you lose from your head is small compared to the rest of your body. Some people have bigger heads than others in proportion to their stature, so maybe they can lose a percentage more heat. To reduce heat loss, wear a hat.

All about cold, cold immersion, and scuba, try my book Diving Physiology in Plain English www.DrBookspan.com/books.
Post about body heat and cooling after death - Time of Death From Body Temperature?
All posts on myths - click the label 'myths' under this post.
All posts on aviation and aerospace - click the label 'aerospace' under this post.
All posts on cold or heat - click the corresponding label under this post.

Labels: aerospace, cold, heat, myths

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Fast Friday - Valentine's Day Partner Weightlifting

Here is Friday Fast Fitness - don't leave your love to do weight lifting alone, lift your love:

1. Partner 1 (white uniform) stands straight and lifts partner 2 (black uniform) onto forearms.
2. Partner 1 (white uniform) does biceps curls and other lifts using partner 2's weight.
3. Partner 2 uses core and whole body strength and endurance to hold straight positioning. Partner 2 can face up, down or sideways, in each case using appropriate muscles to maintain straight position. Breathe normally.

This Fast Fitness can be done with willing friends, children, pets, and furniture.

Partner 1 uses core and abdominal muscles to stand with neutral spine rather than leaning backward, and whole body strength to support weight of partner 2.

It is a myth that you must lean back to offset a carried load. You get intense and functional abdominal muscle workout by using them to pull you forward to neutral standing position.


I once used this exercise of holding straight horizontal position (partner 2's part) while helping out a friend who is a stage magician. I filled in for his absent assistant for the floating lady illusion. I was too tall for the apparatus. It usually holds your body out flat using struts reaching from head to thigh. It reached only to my midback. I wound up holding my weight myself, from hips to feet - high above the stage - while trying to look hypnotized. More on this, someday, in another post.

Related Posts:

• Fast Fitness - Plyometric Partner Bench Press for Valentine's Week
• Friday Fast Fitness - Partner Achilles Tendon Stretch
• Fast Fitness - Dynamic Partner Balance Challenge
• Stretching With a Friend - Partner Pectoral Stretch
• Exercising With A Friend - Partner Leg Press
• Valentine Partner Pushups
• Valentine Family Exercise

Labels: abdominal muscles, arm, chest, children, endurance, fast fitness, holiday, martial arts, myths, neutral spine, partner exercise, posture, strength

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Hamstring to Quadriceps Ratios Not the Answer in Knee Injury

A common myth is that injury comes from "muscle imbalance" in the thigh from too much strength in the quadriceps muscles over the hamstring muscles.

Early studies showed poor ratios of quad to hamstring strength. It was concluded that because of this, when the athlete would kick, for example, the overly strong quadriceps would overstraighten the knee, and the overpowered hamstring behind the thigh would not be able to stop the powerful straightening. The knee would overstraighten and hyperextend the joint, injuring it.

Athletes were put on hamstring strengthening training. Then they went back to kicking with the same bad habit of overstraightening as before.

The problem was simply that they athlete would hyperextend the knee. They were allowing it through bad training habits, not being made to do it by a strong quadriceps. Your muscles do not make you move. You learn though training and practice how to move in healthy ways.


What to do?
When you kick, don't fling your leg out and hyperextend (overstraighten) the knee. Control the end point position.
When you land from jumps or descending stairs, don't step down on a locked, straight knee. Control the end point position.

Muscle use is not automatic from muscle strength:

• Fixing Posture - No Exercise Needed
• Gluteal Muscles Myth - Shaking The Dog's Paw
• Good Life Works Better Than Bad Ab Exercise

Labels: anterior cruciate ligament/ACL, hamstring, injury, knee, leg strength, meniscus, myths, practice of medicine

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Your Muscles Are Your Orthotics for Arches, Knock Knee, and Knee Pain

David from Belgium has been a success story and valuable contributor. He frequently makes us photos and movies showing how to fix pain and unhealthful fitness using Fitness Fixer techniques. He first left a comment on a post in 2007:

"I'm training to be a yoga teacher and I'd love to teach the right things to my pupils such as good posture. Your insights are very inspirational. After struggling with minor but persistent knee pain for some years, I was diagnosed with seriously fallen arches recently. I'm not really flat-footed, but ankles that drop inwards too much. (I could clearly see that on the video my podiatrist made of me walking on bare feet). In a week I'll be getting new orthotics. Though, after reading a patient's testimony on your site I decided to try and use my feet differently. So now on my walks to and from my day job I'm trying to walk 'right'. Rolling on the entire foot, heel to toes, leaning more on the sides and using all five toes. It feels awkward though and I notice that I often forget it. I wonder if this will 'fix' my feet eventually? Anyway, thanks for sharing your knowledge!"

I replied that it "fixes" arch positioning as soon as you do it. It is natural to control how you stand and move - the whole intent of functioning in a healthy way in life, and the intent of yoga (supposedly). It seems at odds to say that yoga teaches body awareness, strength, or positioning, then let ankles slump without control, and purchase devices to do it for you. Once you understand the purpose, it will not be awkward. It is the same as any other good posture.

Since then, David has consistently made good use of these materials, and shared many success stories. He has fixed various pain producing habits for himself and his students, fixed his mother's herniated lumbar disc by showing her healthy bending around the house - Bending Right is Fitness as a Lifestyle, and developed a new yoga system of healthier movement - Getting the Right Yoga Medicine.

• Orthotics are rigid shaped devices, fitted by prescription, that specifically move and hold your foot in a certain position.
• Orthotics are different from over-the-counter shoe pads that can help by cushioning impact.
• Orthotics do not do anything you cannot do yourself using your own muscles and sense of positioning (kinesthetics).
  
• It is a myth that only a device can move your foot and leg leg. Click the label "myth" under this post for all Fitness Fixer posts on fitness myths.
  

Try these in relaxed way:

• Stand and see that you can raise your own arches back to normal, taught in the post Arch Support Is Not From Shoes. It takes only seconds.
• Understand more with Which Shoes Help Exercise, Fall Prevention, and Ankles?
• Make sure you are also not pronating from higher up - Healthy Knees.
• Remember, don't force. If it hurts, it's wrong. All you are doing is learning how to stand neutral, not tilted so much that you compress the joints.
  
• The concept is to hold your feet in the same healthful position that shoe supports would. It is like an ice skater holds their skates straight at the ankle, not angled.

During walking and running, a brief and small inward drop (slight pronation) occurs right after foot contact that creates part of the "spring" and propulsion. The idea is not to prevent all foot motion, but to not let the knee twist inward. You can do that with your own brain and muscles.

Check back tomorrow, Friday January 23 2009, for: Fast Fitness - Fixing Arches, Knock Knee, and Knee Pain Without Orthotics - with a short movie by David of restoring arches and knee position.

Labels: ankle, arches, feet, fix pain, knee, myths, orthotics, pronation, readers inspiring story, shoes, yoga

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Fast Fitness - How Abdominal Muscles Prevent Hyperlordosis When Carrying

Here is Friday Fast Fitness - How to use your abdominal muscles to maintain neutral spine when carrying babies, and other things held and carried.

1. When you hold loads in front, notice if you lean your upper body backward - right-hand photo marked with red X. Leaning backward from the waist increases lumbar lordosis (hyperlordosis) which pinches the lower spine, causing aching after long standing.
2. Instead, stand upright - middle and left photo. The muscles that pull your spine forward to straight position against the load are your abdominal muscles. Upper spine angle will be a little more upright than pictured (center).
   
3. It is a myth that you must lean back to offset a carried load. You get a free abdominal muscle workout and increase abdominal muscles endurance by using them (not tightening) to change from painful to healthful standing position. Breathe normally.

David from Belgium is pictured at left. David has made many contributions to Fitness Fixer through photos, movies, success stories fixing his own pain and of his yoga students, translated many of my articles into Dutch, and has developed a healthier yoga style which he premiered at a world yoga congress last year

He did all this during the time he and wife (pictured center and right above) were expecting their first baby, arriving early last February. Thank you David and family from all of us.


Related posts:

• Friday Fast Fitness - Neutral Spine in 5 Seconds
• Getting the Right Yoga Medicine
• Healthier Carrying - Get Free Ab Exercise and Stop Pain

Labels: abdominal muscles, children, exercise ball, fast fitness, lordosis, myths, neutral spine

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Fast Fitness - Don't Shorten Hip When Stretching Hamstring

Here is Fast Friday Fitness - Get a more functional hamstring stretch, and a built-in posturally helpful functional stretch to the front of the hip at the same time.

When lying on your back to stretch your hamstrings by lifting one leg:

1. Lie flat. Keep the leg you are not lifting flat on the ground, not bent at the knee and hip, or with upper body curled and neck craned, as pictured.
2. Don't let your pelvis and hip round under you. Don't let your backside curl up off the floor.
3. Keep your hip, leg, back, shoulders, and head relaxed, flat, straight, touching the ground.

It is a myth that you must bend your knee to protect your back. If you must bend your knee to protect your back, how are you supposed to stand on one leg and lift the other in real life to climb stairs, kick, and even run and walk, without curling into bent over, old-looking, tight, injury-producing position?

When stretching your hamstrings, remember function. Why practice a position that is rounded, tightening, and detrimental to how you move when you stand and extend your legs. Get stretch by lengthening you body enough to be able to straighten out.

Send me your photos of fixing this stretch. Doing is the best learning. I will publish the photos in a reader success post to come.

Related posts:

• What Does Stretching Do?
• Are You Making Your Exercise Unhealthy?
• Better Achilles Tendon Stretch
• Sitting Badly Isn't Magically Healthy by Calling It a Hamstring Stretch
• Healthier Hamstring Stretching
• Is Bad Martial Arts Good Exercise?
• The Cause of Disc and Back Pain
• Good Life Works Better Than Bad Ab Exercise

Labels: fast fitness, hamstring, hip, hip stretch, leg strength, myths, strength

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Trainers Don't Exercise Enough? Functional Fitness Needed

A study making repeated news was that less than half the athletic trainers in a recent survey get a healthful amount of exercise themselves. Of two hundred and seventy five certified athletic trainers who work with athletes, only 41% themselves exercised even half an hour on five or more days a week.

The survey was conducted by graduate student Jessica Groth, now an athletic trainer. In the study conclusion she wrote that (these) athletic trainers, "…were not ideal role models in demonstrating healthy behaviors." However, the Los Angeles Times quoted Groth as saying, "By and large the results are not too bad," and that trainers couldn't exercise enough since, "We're on other people's schedules as far as practices and games are concerned. We work a lot of long hours, and nontraditional hours, as far as mornings, nights and weekends are concerned. You add in families and personal lives, and we're spread pretty thin."

The study was published in the December issue of the Journal of Athletic Training, Self-reported health and fitness habits of certified athletic trainers. J Athl Train. 2008 Oct-Dec;43(6):617-23.

Trainers making the same excuses as the sedentary for not exercising?

Lack of exercise and excuses can happen when you separate healthy movement from real life. Healthful movement and activity should not be something you have to stop your real life to "do." Changing from artificial exercises to how your body needs to move in real life is the realm of functional fitness. The Fitness Fixer, most of my research in orthopedics, the classes I teach, and our new international sports medicine academy deals with functional fitness.

Here are ways to change the myth of "exercise as separate" to movement as functional daily life. It is life-changing:

• Start with What is "Fitness as a Lifestyle?"
• Retrain daily movements with Bending Right is Fitness as a Lifestyle and Free Exercise and Free Back and Knee Pain Prevention - Healthy Bending
• Many opportunities for functional exercise - Ancient Shoe Exercise for Hip Stretch and Balance
• How can you exercise even when you are busy? How Good Would You Look From 400 Squats a Day - Just Stop Unhealthy Bending
• When can you squeeze it in? How Often Should You Be Healthy?
• Functional abdominal exercise done standing - Overlooked Ab Muscles in Overhead Lifts
  and Innovation in Abdominal Muscles and Good Life Works Better Than Bad Ab Exercise
• Another daily functional movement - Fast Fitness - Functional Agility, Flexibility, Strength
  
• What about during holiday rush? Fitness and Health as a Lifestyle for Thanksgiving and Healthy Christmas and Household Fitness in the New Year
• Think you can't exercise without a gym? Getting Stronger Without a Gym
• You don't need to do less exercise to prevent or rehab an injury - Exercise and Aging - Don't Limit the Patient to Limit the Pain and Autumn Yard Work - Limiting the Person Instead of the Injury Again?
  
• See the beginning of our new International Academy of Functional Sports Medicine - www.DrBookspan.com/Academy.

Labels: myths, performance enhancing modality, practice of medicine, weight loss

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Vertebral Artery Compression, Dizziness, Discs, and the Forward Head

I received an e-mail from Serbia. Miroslav had suffered eight years of dizziness from compression of the vasculature and nerves of his neck. Then he found how to prevent the bad position called "forward head" using my methods. Miroslav had previously read various sources promoting the often-repeated bad advice to bend the neck forward as a the way to make space for the nerves that exit the back of spine. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. That kind of forward bending is not a healthy way over the long term.

Bending the spine forward pinches vertebrae closer in front and farther apart in back, creating unequal pressure that over time, wedges and squeezes discs rearward and outward, like squeezing a tube of toothpaste. A disc nearly always bulges (herniates/moves/slips/migrates/extrudes) toward the back of the spine out the enlarged space, from years of the bad posture of sitting and standing with a rounded/bent forward spine.

Sitting and standing straight would make more space for the nerves without the herniating force. Miroslav also had a forward head as a regular posture, also called "straightening the cervical lordosis." He had been flexing his neck (bending forward) trying to fix his various numbness and pain, and wound up compressing verves, blood vessels and other structures.

Miroslav wrote in one of his blog posts that he was practicing Alexander technique for the previous few weeks, "as specified in Richard Brennan's book /head up and forward." After getting worse and trying various doctors and cures, Miroslav found my web site. He wrote:

"Dear Dr Bookspan,
"I have found Your articles online and they have been extremely helpful. I just wanted to say that I appreciate Your work immensely. Few last articles I wrote on http://cvelee.blogspot.com/2008/11/quick-solutions.html regarding my problem and how You have helped me. If You have time, you can catch a glimpse of them.
"With respects,
"Miroslav Cvetinov"

Here is the post from his blog:

"Q u i c k s o l u t i o n s

"I am strong opponent to quick solutions to many of our everyday problem, whether money or health related. In such manner, I didn't expect my dizziness to disappear over night without trace.

"I had it since 2000. So 8 years before, they did everything necessary to rule out other diseases : EEG, Dopler, Blink reflexes, Evoked potentials... everything clean.

"In 2007. dizziness worsened so neurologist sent me to do endocranium MRI/MRA. Totally clean: no lesions whether white MS or atherosclerotic, balanced blood flow...

"2008. I have found article from Dr Jolie Bookspan, describing forward head posture and neurological deficits. I did have extremely straightened cervical lordosis, so I qualify for FHP. I started practicing healthy head postures : head back and FLEXION.

"I always thought that neck flexion was the key to healthy disc, because it opens neuroforamen, and that that degree of neck flexion wasn't possible without FHP. But, guys, I am physics scientist, I do not know how did it miss me : head-neck system has 5 degrees of freedom. I could pull it back, yet keep healthy degree of flexion. Just think of extending back of the neck while shortening front portion of it. That compulsive strengthening of SCM muscles I did, didn't do me any good, but...

"Anyway, MY TREMENDOUS DIZZINESS DISAPPEARED IN A MOMENT!! MOMENT, not day, not week, immediately. How? I do not know! I do not care! Thanks Dr Jolie.

"I can look over my shoulder while walking now. Easily without dizziness, loss of balance and lightheadedness. This it totally new.

"I have to give credit to 2 doctors more:
1. Dear ENT Vukoja Novak - he was the first one out of many doctors to tell me that if I consider it real, organic disease and not anxiety/panic related, I should check out carotid arteries on Doppler and cervical spine on roentgen. Latter revealed disk degeneration and straightened lordosis. He was the first to point to the spine.
2. Dr Mijanović - While doing EMG, he told me that tongue is clear except huge amount of hyperexcitability and asked me to check out something serious and real. I suggested left arm, with disesthesia running in C6 dermatome. He asked me about dizziness, I told him " I do have it, a lot of it, but dear doctor, I have panic disorder and somatoform disorder. It is due to this.". After poked me with a needle in left deltoid he immediately said "I can assure you, your dizziness are due to your spine."

"So, now I know. Not that it was spine, it can be cured in a moment:)"

Here is my web site post that Miroslav used: http://www.drbookspan.com/NeckPainArticle.html

These Fitness Fixer Posts explain more:

• Quick Fix?
• Fixing Upper Back and Neck Pain
• Overhead Lifting, Reaching, and Throwing - More Part I
• Disc Pain - Not a Mystery, Easy to Fix
• 14,000 Miles on a Bike - Herniating and Fixing Discs
• Breasts Causing Upper Back Pain is a Myth

Labels: dizziness, fix pain, impingement, injury, myths, neck, neutral spine, readers inspiring story, repetitive strain, upper back

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Time of Death From Body Temperature?

Television crime dramas often include a scene where time of death is predicted based on body temperature and cooling rates. Is this an accurate method?

After death, metabolic processes that make heat in the body stop. The body begins cooling. Cooling and cooling rates were first recorded in 1710, when English physician John Davey first used the new invention of the thermometer in a human body at autopsy. Davey’s experiments took place in the high heat of Malta, rendering measurements only good for that environment. Later pathologists who followed Davey’s published descriptions did not place the thermometer inside the body, but in the armpit. Publications of their inaccurate information of cooling became widely popularized and passed from school to school.

Cooling does not follow predictable time intervals as once thought. Cooling is often too imprecise to estimate time since death. It turns out that the widely held dogma that body temperature drops at a precise and steady rate of 1.6 degrees an hour (later rounded to 1.5 for ease of calculation) was never the case.

Inaccuracies and things that were never true have been found to be printed and reprinted in medical books, repeated by instructors who heard it from their teachers. Be careful of medical "facts" learned in school untested.

More forensics posts on Fitness Fixer:

• Forensic Anthropology and Bone Density
• Forensic Science
• Body Farm Not Just For Halloween
  

For all movie and TV health posts on Fitness Fixer so far:

• Click the label "movie/media fitness" under this post.

For more on "the chill of death" (algor mortis), more forensic myths, more body and fitness myths, how to change unhealthy exercises that were never healthy, and how to have healthy activity as a natural part of your day:

• Health & Fitness In Plain English English THIRD edition - How to be Healthy, Happy, and Fit For The Rest of Your Life.

Labels: forensic, movie/media fitness, myths, practice of medicine

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