Do I really advocate you quit your job to eliminate you back pain? No.

But, what I do suggest that you move. Many people who develop back pain stop moving that area because it’s painful, or they become fearful that they will hurt themselves again. I know, I was one of them.

But, when you stop moving a body part, you lose awareness in that part of the body (we call that sensory motor amnesia, or SMA). Once you lose the awareness in one part of your body, you are likely to stop taking part in activities that would involve that body part, which starts limiting the scope of what you can do – and it becomes a slippery slope. It only takes a few months for the acute portion of an injury to heal, but the pain and fear of movement can stay with us forever — unless we re-educate ourselves.

For this Move It Monday, I want you to move your back. Because the back is a really touchy area, I have a couple of ground rules first.

• Never move in to pain. If anything you are doing makes the back pain worse, stop. You can try again with slower or smaller movements. If it still hurts, don’t do it.

• Do not contradict your doctor. I do not know you or your specific situation, so if your doctor has told you not to do back exercises, don’t.

Now that we’ve established the ground rules, here is what I want you to do:

1. Stand up nice and tall. If you’d rather sit, really tall in your chair. Think of pushing the crown of your head up through the ceiling. We call this “lengthening.”
2. Arms straight out to your sides. Re-lengthen.
3. Rotate your trunk gently and slowly left and right. Think about rotating then entire length from the pelvis on up to the base of your neck. Re-lengthen.
4. Rotate back and forth three to four times in each direction, taking your time with every rotation. It’s about the quality of the movement.
5. Return back to facing straight ahead. Brings your arms down for a minute and shake them out.
6. Now, arms back up, and re-lengthen.
7. Now, I want you to glide your back side to side – as if you are trying to reach your fingertips for something that is just out of reach. Visualize each vertebrae stair-stepping over to the side, and be sure to keep the pelvis square while you do this.
8. Glide back and forth three to four times in each direction – gently, slowly, and deliberately. Again, the quality of the movement is much more important than the speed or how far you go. Re-lengthen between each repetition.
9. Put your arms down.
10. Get up and go for a walk for a minute or two. Do you feel any different?

Many clients report feeling much better, taller, more relaxed. Tell me how it goes for you?

Pre-packaged muffins: 2 servings per muffin

Pint of ice cream: 4 servings

Double-stuff Oreos: ~2 cookies

Did you have ANY idea that that is the FDA-approved serving size for those items? I mean really, who stops at half a muffin? Or two Oreos?

While the US is making huge strides in its nutritional labeling, it still has a long way to go. It’s really easy to quickly glance at a label, note that the calories “aren’t too bad” and rip open the package or throw it in the shopping cart. What fewer people do is bother to see how many servings are in that same package and then consider how it’s likely to be eaten in their household.

Serving sizes came about in the 1990s, to make it easier to compare proverbial apples-to-apples, and the FDA used our portion sizes from the 1970s and 1980s, to determine a “serving.” However, as our countries growing waistlines and declining health and life expectancy are demonstrating — we are definitively eating more than we did a couple of decades ago. More food availability combined with less eating at home and busier lives has led to ungood results.

Fortunately, at the urging of the Obama administration, the FDA is once again considering re-evaluating serving sizes. It’s not only calories, but fat, sodium, and other nutritional markers individuals care about are all driven off of the magical serving size.

This week, read your labels and take note of the serving size.

And, then come back here and let me know what your biggest surprise was. I’ll put together a post with everyone’s favorite finds, and publish that later this month.

Thought, emotion, and movement are all tied together. Our brains literally tie them together when the activity happens.

This week we are going to move your emotional center, and talk about a concept called “neural chunking.”

When you do something that makes you happy, the next time you do it there is a good chance you will have a positive experience. Likewise, when you have a bad experience, the repeat of it is likely to be bad – just because you have this negative memory already associated with it.

For example, when I was 16 I had a terrible car accident on a rural Wisconsin road near my house. I ended up in the hospital, temporarily paralyzed, broken spine, spent Christmas in the hospital, and lived through 20 subsequent years of low back pain. Decades later, I STILL cannot drive on that road without breaking out in to a sweat. I love to drive, and have no issues – except on that specific road.

Because the holidays tend to have a lot of emotion (both good and bad) tied up with them, this week, I want you to be thankful/create positive associations with more things in your life.

1. Every day this week you will likely have to do something that you don’t look forward to. Identify it – it can be doing the dishes, holiday shopping, flying to see family, or even your training.
2. Say something positive about it. Use positive language, think a happy thought, and have a smile on your face as you say it. Find a way to spin it in to something positive before and during the activity.

EXAMPLE

Negative language: “I don’t hate doing dishes”is not a good choice because our brains still pick up on the word HATE instead of the word NOT.

Positive language: Instead try, “I like doing the dishes, how clean and fresh-smelling the kitchen is afterwards, and the sense of accomplishment I get from doing them.”

I’d love to hear what “positive chunks” you create this week. Be thankful.

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

-Jen

It is not only the spice of life, but also a critical component of a successful training program.

• It keeps you from getting bored.
• It keeps your body from adapting too much to what it is doing, leading to plateaus. While practice makes perfect, fooling around speeds, reps, sets, and environment keeps the body challenged while still allowing it to excel at what it’s doing.
• It keeps you from getting hurt (repetitive use syndrome, anyone).
• It keeps your kids from getting hurt. Too much specialized (single-sport) training too young in life is more likely to lead to injury, burn-out, and inability to compete than just letting your kid play and learn the basics of movement and motor coordination. (Recent study on ScienceDaily)

This week, change things up. If you are used to doing 3 sets of 5, do two sets of 10 (if you can safely). If you are used to doing sets of 25 kettlebell swings, do sets of 20 but reduce your rest time. Head outside. Play music. It’s up to you!

You can get more training progression ideas here, and motivation to keep a training log here. But, mostly…

Change it up, make it fun, make it interesting.

You jumped headlong in to a new training program and are really sore. If you are like most of my clients, at this point you are likely to do one of two things, neither of which sets you up for long-term success:

1)     A hot bath, curl up on the couch, and decide that training isn’t for you (or that you will start again once you feel better).

2)     Keep pushing yourself as hard as you can – after all “no pain, no gain.”

Neither option is ideal.

If you choose what is behind door #1, there is a distinct possibility that you won’t start again – momentum is everything. Bonus: you will actually recover more quickly if you continue to move – you really want to keep from getting stiff.

So, then the answer must be to keep at it, right? Wrong again. If you are really sore or hurt, training that way is most likely going to exacerbate the problem – so if you aren’t hurt yet, you will be soon. If you are hurt, you will either further aggravate the existing injury or cause new injuries from your compensatory movement patterns.

This week, if you just aren’t feeling the love for the training program you have planned that day, take a day of active rest. By active rest, I mean still get out and do something, but cut way back on the intensity. It can be a nice walk, a leisurely bike ride, or light dynamic mobility work to keep the body moving.

Work out the stiffness, but never move in to pain.

Silly as those examples are, how do you think you got that good? Practice!

Everybody has to start some place, and every day you are a different person than you were yesterday. You’ve learned, grown, and through practice (or lack thereof) gotten better at some stuff and worse at other.

So, this week find one physical activity you wish you were better at, and practice for 5 minutes a day.

Say you wish you could do a push-up. So, start by getting in a plank position (and get that butt down!). Maybe that’s all you can do on day one. Now, start adding in bending the arms (and keep plank). Gradually keep going down further and further. It doesn’t even matter if you can do a perfect push-up this week – what matters is that you’ve made progress. With time it will come.

What’s my thing for this week? A somersault. The simplest of kids tricks, but I can’t anymore. Time to learn again!

So, this week, I want you to get up out of your chair (or up off the couch) every hour for just a few minutes and move.

If you are in an office, go see a colleague instead of using IM or picking up the phone (or make it look like you are, while you are actually just stretching your legs). If you are settled in for Must See TV, use the break between shows to change out the laundry, unload the dishwasher, or just a walk around the block. If you have a DVR, you’ve got at least 20 minutes between shows (and then you can skip the commercials).

Yep, that’s a lot.

That makes it by far the most automatic thing that we do — but it is also trainable. You can choose to hold your breath when you go underwater or go past that open sewer grate, so that makes respiration something we have control over (and can therefore train).

Why should you train respiration?

Poor breathing patterns lead to oxygen/carbon dioxide imbalances in the body, which throws off the pH balance in the blood, which leads to all sorts of symptoms, including: frequent sighing or yawning for no apparent reason, dizziness, nausea, aching muscles, insomnia and nightmares, anxiety/phobia, ringing in the ears, tachycardia (rapid pulse),  erratic blood pressure, etc…

Quite the crazy list of symptoms, right? And millions of Americans are diagnosed with chronic hyperventilation, with millions more who likely suffer symptoms and remain undiagnosed.

A quick test

Sit up in your chair nice and tall, one hand on your chest and the other on your abdomen. Now, breathe. If your top hand moves up towards your chin or moves more than the one on your abdomen, your breathing pattern is upside down — you should start your breaths by filling the bottoms of your lungs first.

The fix

Hands on the chest and abdomen, just like before. Now, I want you to count to 10, 2 counts to inhale through your nose and 8 to exhale through some lightly pursed lips. Focus on filling your lungs from the bottom on up. Repeat 10 times — ideally several times throughout the day. Because breathing is such an automatic activity, the first few tries at this might be difficult — in that case stop before you get to 10, and come back and try again later.

Remember, because we breathe so many times during the day without thinking about it, it is going to take some time and practice to fix the patterns. But, it’s well worth the time spent.

I’m turning Mondays on my blog in to Move It Monday. This new weekly column takes inspiration from Healthy Monday, a non-profit public health organization founded in 2005 in association with Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, and Syracuse University.

Fundamentals Move It Monday Tip

Today: Grab a piece of a paper (real or virtual, I don’t care) and make a list of 5 movement-based activities that you find fun. If you are struggling for ideas, I’ve listed some below.

The Rest of the Week: Pick one activity from the list and do it for JUST 5 MINUTES. It can be the same activity every day — just get out and MOVE.

Inspiration Activities

• A walk around the block
• Yard work (and, you kill two birds with one stone)
• Walking the dog
• Hiking
• Dancing (throwing on some music and dancing with the kids or while cooking dinner or cleaning the house absolutely counts!)
• Playing catch with the kids in the yard
• Tennis
• Walk to the store
• Dust off the bike and take it for a spin
• Rollerblading/inline skating
• Kettlebells
• Parkour

Still looking for more ideas? Check my list of Seattle-based recreation options.