Internal Sense

Developing a practice that cultivates self awareness is the most important step in your health insurance program. Being able to self regulate your responses to life allows you to make choices that reduce stress and increase your enjoyment of life.

Health is not only determined by how well you eat and how much you exercise but also by your ability to cultivate your internal awareness and sense your self. How we respond to our interactions with our world and each other, will either support a state of ease and harmony or not.

Embodied Exercise, an article in Psychology Today by Alan Fogel, describes the importance of reducing chronic stress for better health. Fogel describes how the more we are able to become aware and sense our state of being the more we are able to enhance our performance in any and every activity of our life, resulting in an overall higher state of health.

Many people suffer from chronic stress and don't even realize it. The question you should ask your self is "Do you know how to really relax? Not just zoning out in front of some sort of media in attempt to not think about your day anymore, but rather something you do that deepens a relationships with all parts of your body.

How can we care for ourselves if we don't know really know what we need? As Fogel Stated, "You may have to put aside your mp3 player and video monitor so you can focus more on yourself. The more you allow time for your body sense, the more that whole body activation gets established, and the easier it becomes to access all those good feelings and health benefits in the future."

Some of my favorite ways to relax are meditation, singing, Tai Chi, and Pranayama (breath work meditation). What are yours?

Those Aches and Pains that Linger

Those aches and pains that happen occasionally in your body are not to be overlooked and are often warning signs prior to a bigger injury. Understanding if your body is moving well will help you prevent injury (surgery, etc.) for a lifetime.

I once asked a physical therapist about what she thought of Yoga and she replied, “It is a good business”.

So, often the intent of an exercise program is falsely achieved. Exercise is more than a series of repetitive moves! Exercise supports the goal of attaining a desired state of health. If your goal is to go hiking without knee pain, than a Yoga class with not reeducate you on how to walk in a less destructive fashion.

Our ideas of exercise often develop and change as we age. When we are younger we are often just moving around increasing cardio and playing sports because we can and its fun. Right around 30 yr., give or take a few years, our needs around exercise change. We change from wanting to look good and develop a higher priority of feeling better physically; Of course the aesthetics are there but the ability to do the activities we enjoy began to take precedence.

Lifestyle changes are considered eating habits, recreation, and emotional/psychological development all in the name of feeling better. We have a long life to live in our bodies and we realize that our lifestyle choices affect our experience of health.

I have many clients arrive to their session injured. With a confused look on their face they ask “how did this happen to me?” After years performing repetitive forms of exercise such as yoga or running, the aches and pains add up to deeper layers of injury. The fact is we age and everyone has adapted to this modern life with poor movement patterns. Aging slows our ability to recover, adapt to, and tolerate certain repetitive activities. Poor movement patterns set us up for injury down the road. Often the silent warning signals go unrecognized and we continue to move through our life unaware until we are sidelined.

For example, if there is an inability for a person to contracttheir Latissimus Dorsi in correct biomechanical form and they proceed to do twenty downward dogs 2-3 times a week, the lack of stability in the joint is creating micro injury thus eventually creates pain in the shoulder. The average cost of a shoulder surgery is $65,000.

My first Yoga instructor, Swami Vishnu Devananda, exclaimed “health is wealth!” My advice would be to make your exercise program support your personal experience of health. Learn how to move your body well by addressing the cause of pain and injury. You must identify poor movement patterns and create bio mechanically correct movement to have true wealth in your life.

A good beginning is a movement analysis...Not a class.

One of the most important things to understand in beginning a fitness program is your current state of health. Most ‘fad’ fitness programs are very intense. The marketers of these ‘fad’ workouts put a small disclaimer like these exercises are good for “most” people or “not for everyone”. You would be surprised to know how many people that truthfully includes, like 90% of everyone over 30 years old. I would NEVER recommend anyone that has been injured or is currently having low grade pain take a general class of any sort!

The nature of a class is participation oriented, not analysis/progression oriented.

Most gym goers believe they are beyond a simple beginning class and will avoid a more basic beginner level. What they fail to realize is a true beginner level includes learning how to prevent injury, developing self awareness, promote balance and longevity in your movement, not the classes.

Truth be told, most fitness establishments don't offer such classes. You are best suited to be humble, seek help from a trainer well educated in movement analysis, and start out right.

Check out this video to learn more about what a movement analysis looks like.

How Necessary Is Stretching?

Phys Ed: How Necessary Is Stretching?


For research published earlier this year, physiologists at Nebraska Wesleyan University had distance-running members of the school’s track and field team sit on the ground, legs stretched before them, feet pressed firmly up against a box; then the runners, both men and women, bent forward, reaching as far as they could past their toes. This is the classic sit-and-reach test, a well-established measurement of hamstring flexibility. The runners, as a group, didn’t have exceptional elasticity, although this varied from person to person.

Overall, the women were more supple, as might have been expected. Far more telling was the correlation between the various runners’ tight or loose hamstring muscles and their running economy, a measure of how much oxygen they used while striding. Economy is often cited as one of the factors that divide great runners from merely fast ones. Kenyan distance runners, for instance, have been found to be significantly more economical in their running than comparable Western elites.

When the Nebraska Wesleyan researchers compared the runners’ sit-and-reach scores to the measurements of their economy, which had been garnered from a treadmill test, they found that, across the board, the tightest runners were the most economical. This was true throughout the groups and within the genders. The inflexible men were more economical than the women, and for both men and women, those with the tightest hamstrings had the best running economy. They also typically had the fastest 10-kilometer race times. Probably, the researchers concluded, tighter muscles allow “for greater elastic energy storage and use” during each stride. Inflexibility, in other words, seems to make running easier.

For years, flexibility has been widely considered a cornerstone of health and fitness. Many of us stretch before or after every workout and fret if we can’t lean over and touch our toes. We gape enviously at yogis wrapping their legs around their ears. “It’s been drummed into people that they should stretch, stretch, stretch — that they have to be flexible,” says Dr. Duane Knudson, professor of biomechanics at Texas State University in San Marcos, who has extensively studied flexibility and muscle response. “But there’s not much scientific support for that.”

In fact, the latest science suggests that extremely loose muscles and tendons are generally unnecessary (unless you aspire to join a gymnastics squad), may be undesirable and are, for the most part, unachievable, anyway. “To a large degree, flexibility is genetic,” says Dr. Malachy McHugh, the director of research for the Nicholas Institute of Sports Medicine and Athletic Trauma at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York and an expert on flexibility. You’re born stretchy or not. “Some small portion” of each person’s flexibility “is adaptable,” McHugh adds, “but it takes a long time and a lot of work to get even that small adaptation. It’s a bit depressing, really.”

What happens to our muscles and tendons, then, when we dutifully stretch before a run or other workout? Doesn’t this lengthen our muscles, increasing our flexibility and range of motion?

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According to the science, the answer appears to be no. “There are two elements” involved in stretching a muscle, Dr. McHugh says. One is the muscle itself.

The other is the mind, which sends various messages to the muscles and tendons telling them how to respond to your stretching when the discomfort of the stretching becomes too much. What changes as you stretch a muscle is primarily the message, not the physical structure of the muscle. “You’ll start to develop a tolerance” for the discomfort of the stretch, Dr. McHugh says. Your brain will allow you to hold the stretch longer. But the muscles and tendons themselves will not have changed much. You will feel less tight. But even this sensation of elasticity is short-lived, Dr. McHugh says. In a new review article of the effects of stretching that he co-wrote and that will be published soon in The Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports, he looked at the measurable impacts of a number of different stretching regimens. What he found was that when people performed four 90-second stretches of their hamstrings, their “passive resistance” to the stretching decreased by about 18 percent — they felt much looser — but the effect had passed in less than an hour. To achieve a longer-lasting impact, and to stretch all of the muscles involved in running or other sports, he says, would probably require as much as an hour of concerted stretching. “And the effects still wouldn’t be permanent,” he says. “You only see changes” in the actual, physical structure of the muscles “after months of stretching, for hours at a time. Most people aren’t going to do that.”

And most of us don’t need to. “Flexibility is a functional thing,” Dr. Knudson says. “You only need enough range of motion in your joints to avoid injury. More is not necessarily better.” For runners, extremely tight hamstrings and joints have been found in some studies (but not all studies) to contribute to overuse injuries. But somewhat tight hamstrings, as the Nebraska Wesleyan study showed, can make you more economical. Some degree of inflexibility may make you a better runner.

How then to judge your own flexibility? “The sit-and-reach test is pretty good” for at-home evaluations, Dr. Knudson says, at least of your back and hamstring muscles. Using a staircase, sit and straighten your legs so that your feet push against the bottom step, toes upright. Stretch forward. “Try to lay your chest onto your thighs,” he says. If you can reach past your toes, you’re more than flexible enough. (No one yet has devised a way to reduce flexibility, by the way, although some Olympic-level coaches in other countries are rumored to be trying.)

If, on the other hand, “you can’t get anywhere near your toes, and the lower part of your back is practically pointing backward” as you reach, then you might need to try to increase your hamstring flexibility, Dr. Knudson says, to avoid injuring yourself while running, cycling or otherwise exercising. You can find multiple hamstring stretches on YouTube, although you should consult with a physical therapist before replicating them at home; proper technique is important to avoid injury. “You won’t get a lot of change,” Dr. Knudson says, ” but a little may be all you need.”

Check out the full Article By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS, New York Times

Yoga Reconsidered

I can’t say that I think that yoga is an effective practice for Modern Western society. Yoga is a contextual system meaning that its creation was designed to fit the needs of a culture for a certain period of time to attain certain goals.

Originally Yoga was used for rituals and ceremonies, to attain ultimate consciousness. Patanjali “the father of Yoga” had a great influence on how yoga is practiced today including more emphasis on the powers of the body. Today yoga primarily is used for physical exercises or ‘Hatha’ yoga.

Yoga does not make you strong. Strength is defined as “the ability of the neuromuscular system to produce internal tension (in the muscles and connective tissue that pull on the bones) to overcome an external force”. (NASM Essentials of Personal Fitness Training, 2007, P.227) I know people that do yoga that have their back go out on them from picking up a 1 oz. pen. I guess the pen was stronger. The question is what activity are you training for? Are you training for skiing, cycling, and dancing or just daily life activities? Sometimes I feel like I am training just to be able to open the door at my local hardware store, some doors are really heavy, this one is about 80lbs. Yoga does not teach you good biomechanics to open doors like this or even other daily activities like lifting your grocery bags, walking up stairs or even just walking, picking up and holding your children, getting into your car, sitting at a computer, and cleaning your home.

I question the reason for trying to duplicate a lifestyle system from another culture, time and intention. I also question the logic of group classes in which Yoga is usually taught. They are generic and when it comes to movement there is no one size fits all. More injuries come out of group classes than ever. The inability of the instructor to pay attention to your individual needs is inevitable. Yes, you have individual needs that are often dramatically different than your yogi neighbor. It is this lack of attention and correction from the instructor that makes you prone to injury. Every year the emergency rooms sees more Yoga related injuries. Check out this Time Magazine article out. When Yoga Hurts


Aspects of Yoga are beneficial. Being a Yoga instructor myself and a past rigorous practitioner for many years I come to realize the value of knowing the ‘Why” behind my choice of yoga movements and techniques. Yoga should not be practicing haphazardly. Before practicing a posture one should carefully study the pose and understand the reason for doing it. Often people say consult your doctor before doing exercise (Doctor complete about 20 hrs. of physical education credits in a typical non specialized program) I also recommend consulting with an well experienced personal trainer or physical therapist. They will have the ability to discern what poses are good and not good for you and the proper way to do them. For most clients that I personally train, I would not recommend that they be doing downward dog repetitively, a very common pose in most yoga flows.
One of the most valuable techniques in Yoga is learning to breath and concentrate. Understanding how to control your nervous system and relax is an invaluable life skill that can be applied to every activity in life. It is the idea of being full of care or careful.

If you have any aches and pains and you participate is a Yoga class, you may want to question if the postures you are doing are truly beneficial for your body. What is the purpose of putting pressure on a bent/extended wrist position, like in downward dog and plank pose, over and over again in the course of an hour? Not to mention the range of motion of your shoulder! There are many was to do yoga…make sure the way that you are practicing is giving you what you need. Know the ‘why’ of your exercise!

Listen to your doctor? Or should you?

We have all heard a doctor recommend exercise as protocol to address hundreds of ailments. Seems simple enough but how do you know what exercise is right for you? Find a good personal trainer to avoid the confusion created from all the commercial exercise fads that are popularized to make money. Getting a good personal trainer is more of a health investment or insurance policy. A personal trainer that can build your awareness of good body mechanics awareness could help you avoid needing or delay a $50,000 knee, shoulder, or hip surgery. How’s that for an investment? Yes, getting a personal trainer can be a bit pricey but you can gain personalized information that will last a lifetime and will translate to any activity that you do.

As a personal trainer at Functional Fitness Wellness Center in Boulder, Colorado I specialize in corrective exercise and personal movement analysis. Clients usually come to me after they are injured and are often are surprised when they get an injury. They ask “how did this happen”? There is always a reason. Unfortunately most injuries are silent and can take years to develop, but can often be identified in a movement analysis. One of the most common places that facilitate injuries is in a group exercise class and in fad workouts. Classes and exercise fads are usually too general and cannot tend to your personal body needs. Everyone is very different! It is my goal to help people to understand ways to move that facilitate true health and longevity through understanding the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of movement when they are exercising.

When interviewing a trainer ask what they specialize in? How long they have been practicing? Do they have client testimonials? Do they have experience with meeting your particular needs? What is their certification? Do they have any other education? What is their focus?

The truth is not all trainers are the same. If their focus is not on longevity and injury prevention then find another trainer. It is worth paying the extra amount to get quality training and true health insurance.