In America, heart disease is the top preventable disease. Sure some people have genetic predisposition but we are learning that the environment has a lot to do with whether those genes decide to express. The field of epigenetics explains this phenomena. It turns out that the DNA is embedded with something like a lock. The locks can be opened through environmental factors. Once the lock is open the genetic info can express.

It turns out that an unhealthy lifestyle can open a lot of locks that allow negative genetic predispositions to present. Specifically, we know that smoking is a predisposition to chronic disease. We know that it causes the heart to work harder while also decreasing the overall amount of oxygen transportation. Cigarette smoke has free radicals, have unpaired electrons that disrupt normal and healthy tissue.

Free radicals also come from sun exposure, smog, charbroiling our food…there are many ways to be exposed to free radicals. When we consume antioxidants found in fruit in vegetables we can sometimes neutralize free radical damage.

Next, sedentary lifestyle plays a huge risk factor to health. A lifestyle that lacks sufficient exercise increases the risk of insulin resistance which is linked to type 2 diabetes. [1] Being inactive also increases the risk of heart disease, stroke, cognitive decline, obesity, and bone loss. [1]  When you exercise your immune system is boosted, also your blood pressure and resting heart rate decrease.

Body fat is also dangerous. We also know that the visceral body fat, the fat that surrounds your organs acts like a hormone, which signals for the increase of inflammation in the body. Visceral body fat also increases risk of cardiovascular disease.

Lastly, keeping your triglycerides, blood pressure, and blood glucose levels in check through diet and exercise are also very important factors in preventing cardiac disease.

Fitness is a journey and the journey is better when you have someone on that journey with you. Looking back on my fitness journey, I had the most success and regularity to my workouts when I had a workout partner. We would meet several times a week and jog around a park, at one point we both joined the same gym. Your workout partner could be a friend, a significant other, a co-worker, or even a roommate.

If there is no one who will commit it might be best to get a fitness trainer to help schedule and help you commit to a workout routine. Being a fitness trainer, I have specific times that I can use the private gym I collaborate with for my personal use. We schedule the clients first and then allow the trainers to train in the open time. I make sure to schedule and show up to the times that are open. This helps me be accountable. I notice that when I have completely open times to go to the gym, I sometimes don’t end up going. I will put it off one hour, then two hours…then eventually it gets too late.  If I am working out outside I will even make excuses about it being too hot or too colds. Even fitness professionals procrastinate, it happens to all of us.

Having someone else making you accountable really makes all the difference. Please contact me for a complimentary fitness session. I want to help you reach your fitness goals.

If you have a shoulder injury, there is a good chance it involves the rotator cuff. I can not tell you how many times I’ve seen an injury that likely could have been avoided with regular rotator cuff strengthening.

So what is a rotator cuff? 

The short answer is 4 relatively small muscles that are integral to holding your upper arm bone in the right location during shoulder movement. Yes, there are other muscle that do that, bigger muscles too but the rotator cuff is probably the most important set. Picture the top part of the upper arm bone. The top part of the bone, the part that connects to the shoulder looks like a shaft and a ball at the top. The ball on top is called the head of the humerous. Above that is a “roof” of bone. If you feel the very top of you shoulder, when you follow your collar bone out, you can feel the top of the shoulder is really hard, that is called your acromion bone.

So in review I’ve mentioned three major players so far: the head of the humerous, the acromion, and the rotator cuff. They are all have to work together for movement in the shoulder. This is quite an important job that is complicated by a large grouping of nerves and arteries that happen to run in that space between the head of the humerous and the acromion. The rotator cuffs job is to hold that head of the humerous from coming into contact with the acromion and also preventing impingement (squeezing) the nerves and arteries that run in that space as well. 

The rotator cuff looks like 4 little muscles wrapped around a ball, the same way a pitchers fingers wrap a round a baseball. It holds it tight into that shoulder joint, not allowing the ball portion of the bone to have a lot of excess movement with in the shoulder.

So, what happens if the rotator cuff is not strong? 

The bones are going to be grinding around in the shoulder. You have tendons in there, joint capsules, muscles, arteries, and nerves. The constant grinding could possibly eventually cause arthritis or damage to any of the other structures I mentioned.

In short, a strong rotator cuff keeps the bones in the shoulder in a stable position so that the optimum joint space is kept and we don’t have bones grinding on bones or bones grinding on soft tissue shoulder structures.

When we have problems with our rotator cuff we experience: weakness, numbness and tingling, blood flow problems, and lose the ability to move our shoulder in certain motions. 

Contact me at 407-205-7488 for a complimentary rotator cuff exam and also a preventative rotator cuff strengthening sample protocol.

We should all be taking heart health very seriously, it is the number one cause of death here in the United States. There are several reasons this disease has risen to such alarming rates. One is because we have increased our meat intake in the past decades. For more information about that please check out my previous blog covering this topic.

http://pivotholistichealth.com/americas-obsession-with-protein/

The next aspect of this deadly but preventable disease is inactivity. If your work and leisure activities are mainly sedentary you double your chance of dying from a cardiovascular disease. If your heart is in poor condition you are also more likely to suffer from a stroke.

These are very serious conditions that can not only can steal away years of your life but also severely decrease the quality of your life if you are able to survive a cardiovascular event. Shortness of breath and decrease blood pumping volumes can hold you back from experiencing all the great things life has to offer. With poor heart health it may be very difficult to complete your daily activities and even prevent you from sharing experiences with loved ones, such as playing with our children and grand children- they need us.

Now that we realize how serious it is that we keep our cardiovascular health in good working condition, lets explore how exercise helps our heart.

We know the heart consists of muscle. We know from experience, if we don’t use a muscle we lose it. Imagine the biceps, lets say we do bicep curls two times a week habitually. Eventually, the muscle builds with exercise and we will need to increase the weight we are curling. The heart is the same. Working it out makes the muscle stronger and it will be able to increase the amount of blood it pumps out with every beat, in turn the heart has to beat less times to move the same amount of blood. The cardiovascular system also becomes more efficient in many aspects with regular exercises. You can see this with people that work out regularly. They can do activities with ease that someone who is unconditioned struggles with.

Regular exercise also helps the blood vessels work better, helping with blood pressure levels. It also has been known to increase HDL which decreases cholesterol and decreases body fat percentage.

You can do this! It’s important and deserves your time. Stay tuned to this blog for sample workout protocols and activity suggestions!

One of the most common reasons I hear people cite for not working out is that they have some existing issues. For injuries such as spinal injuries I would definitely take those very seriously and consult with a doctor every time you add a new exercise into your workout protocol. The information shared here is in no means a replacement for consulting with your doctor. This article should however help to give you an idea of what to discuss with your doctor on your next visit.

Having spent many years working with athletes- doing sports medicine for high schools, colleges and professional organizations, I’d say the most common places for injury are back, knee, ankle, shoulder, elbow and wrist. As I mentioned, the spine is complex and should be taken very seriously. If you would like to know more about spinal injuries I will touch on it briefly at the end of this article.

Ankle, knee, elbow, and shoulder- these injuries are often not as extensive as spinal or internal injuries. If you have had an injury that has been lingering around for a while, especially with in or around a joint, it may be wear and tear, inflammation or arthritis. This is common as we age. Additionally, some people suffer from impingement injures. Impingement is when nerves and/or arteries become entrapped in the structures they run though or close to (such as a joint or muscle). If you are having numbness and tingling this could be a sign of an impingement injury. For these type of injuries, sometimes there are muscle imbalances, which in turn affect joint posture, causing impingement. Sometimes balancing the musculature through stretching and strengthening can help place the joint back into a more natural positioning. Other times, problems with form during activity may be the culprit. These things are all things an athletic trainer specializes in recognizing.

Something as simple as keeping your core tight while working out can make so many differences- not only in the effectiveness of your work out but also help with injury prevention. For these reasons, I recommend finding someone who’s trained to help you begin the work out process if you are 1) Just now implementing a new exercise regimen 2) If you are not currently moderately conditioned or 3) You are new to working out in general.

Some tips and pointers:

1) Gradual. Please go gradual. Pick some basic exercises, that are pain free, get used to that routine first. Slowly add more exercises (one at a time). Then as you are ready, slowly make your workouts longer or slowly increase intensity.

2) Workout in front of a mirror. Simply because you can keep an eye on your form. Athletic trainers watch for things like- keeping your shoulders back while working out your arms or how to position your knees and back while doing a squat. These activities work so much better when the force is being generated properly and more importantly, decreases the risk of injury.

3) Listen to your body, those twinges of pain are telling you something is going on. It’s better to get to the root of the problem than to ignore it, cover it up with pain relievers or to avoid exercise. Avoiding exercise only leads to more long term health issues.

4) Allow for recovery days- avoid working out the same muscles consecutive days a row when lifting weight.

Part two of this blog will describe some activities that someone with an existing injury or weakness might be able to utilize.

A word on the spine:

There are intervertebral disks that naturally become less functional with age. Think of a disk like a jelly filled doughnut, our disks have the same shape and even have the jelly filled center inside. These disks are found between your vertebral bones and help absorb shock and allow for movement of the spine. Just like a jelly doughnut, the jelly of the disk can protrude out too. The tricky part here is that there are nerves that run through spaces between the vertebrae. That intervertebral space is greatly affected by the condition of the disk and if the jelly inside the disk has ruptured (just like an egg yolk would rupture). A ruptured center of a vertebral disk can come out of the disk space and into the space of a nerve, causing nerve issues. Also, sometimes the actual spinal bones have deformity or degeneration can also affect the intervertebral space.

With spinal injuries it is even possible to feel pain in a different part of the body when in fact, the pain is actually originating in the spine. For those reasons, if you have back pain or know you have a spinal problem please go to see a doctor and ask them to explain exactly where your defect is located, what symptoms it causes, what’s the prognosis, what activities are acceptable, and which activities to avoid. There also might be activities or exercises you can do to strengthen the muscles around the injured areas. Strengthening the surrounding musculature can take stress off the injured structures. You must strengthen these areas properly and as always form during activity is critical when dealing with any injury.