Want to Kick Up Your Walking? Here’s How.

When you’re walking for exercise, there are a few ways that you can change the intensity:  you can walk faster, you can walk up a hill, or you can add an external weight—hand weights, wrist or ankle weights, or a weighted vest.

If you’re interested in increasing the intensity of your walking workout, here’s how to do it safely:

  • Use weights that are 3 pounds at the most. This will allow you to keep your regular walking pattern
  • Don’t exaggerate your movements. Using small weights is intended to increase the intensity of your cardio routine, it is not to turn the walk into a strength training workout.
  • You could hold a full water bottle in one hand if you don’t have dumbbells or wrist weights. It is fine to hold something in just one hand, it doesn’t have to be even on both sides.
  • Use a weighted vest, if you can find one! Some researchers believe this is better as it adds weight to your trunk, where it is more natural to move with it. They feel that a vest that adds 10-15% of your body weight helps to burn more calories without necessarily feeling like you are exerting more.
  • Don’t walk with weights every day—begin with 2-3 days per week with light weight, and progress to more frequent or longer walks over four to six weeks

Have fun with it! The goal is to keep your body moving, and using weights can add variability to your workout. It should not be painful or overly strenuous, and certainly should not be heavy enough that it changes your gait pattern. Go see what you can do!

Why Would You Strengthen Your Hips When It’s Your Knees That Hurt?

Elevation Physiotherapy & Wellness :: Why Strengthen Your Hips When It's Your Knees that Hurt?

Pain at the front of your knee is often called patellofemoral syndrome, and can be a nagging ache or a sharp pain that you might feel after exercising or even sitting too long.  Over time, your knee might start to hurt during exercise or throughout your day, and may cause you to limit your activities. 

Recent research showed that in people with patellofemoral syndrome, strengthening the thigh muscles can be helpful, but it is even more helpful to strengthen hip muscles.  One study followed 33 women who did consistent knee or hip strengthening exercises over four weeks:  the group that strengthened their hip muscles reported 43% less pain than the group who did knee/ thigh strengthening exercises—they reported only 3% decrease in their knee pain. 

Pain relief and function were similar for both groups by 8 weeks.

Why?

The power for you to move your body around is supposed to come from your hip muscles, specifically the “outer” butt muscles.  Often people are fairly weak through these muscles and your brain makes your thigh muscles take over and do more of the work than they should.  It is thought that getting or keeping the hip muscles strong helps to improve the mechanics of the whole leg and therefore reduces stress on the knee itself.

Strengthening your hip muscles can help decrease knee pain faster, but it is also thought that keeping those muscles strong can actually prevent knee pain from beginning. Examples of targeted hip strength exercises are clamshells, lateral walking with a resistance loop around your legs, and even squats—these exercises need to be done properly and should not be painful. It is always best to see your Physiotherapist who can determine specifically what is causing knee pain, and can then design a program individualized to help you.

Snow Shoveling … Canada’s “Other” Winter Sport!

Elevation Physiotherapy & Wellness :: Snow Shoveling Tips for Canada's "Other" Winter Sport!

With winter comes snow, and with snow comes shoveling.  Snow shoveling can be the cause of muscle and ligament injuries, as well as back pain.  It should be treated the same way as any sport—warm-up and cool down with some basic stretches and movements to increase your heart rate.

7 Steps to Easier Shoveling

  1. Start Slowly – shoveling can increase your heart rate and blood pressure, so warm up and cool down with stretches.
  2. Clear Off Snow as Soon as Possible – fresh snow is lighter than packed snow, so the job is easier.
  3. Push Snow Out of the Way – when possible, push snow off to the side rather than lifting and throwing the load.
  4. Don’t Overload the Shovel – fill the shovel half full and step forward when loading the shovel.
  5. Don’t Stoop and Lock Knees When Shoveling – that position increases the pressure on your low back, so bend your knees and keep your back straight.
  6. Take Breaks – if it’s a heavy job, rest awhile and return later to finish
  7. Stop to Stand Upright – make sure you regularly stand up straight and even stretch backward during shoveling to give your spine a break; repeat a few times in a row.

Choosing a Shovel

“Ergonomic” shovels have a bent shaft that allow you to keep your back much straighter, as you can get a good grip on the shaft without having to reach down too far.  Often these shovels have an aluminum shaft, making it lighter and helping to minimize the stress that shoveling imposes on your back.  Also look for a small, lightweight, plastic blade to help reduce the amount of weight that you are moving.  When shopping for such ergonomic snow shovels, pick them up first and go through the motions of shoveling to see if they’re the right length for you.

Proper Lifting

When lifting even a light load, be sure to keep your feet wide apart and put your front foot close to the shovel.  To lift, shift your weight to the rear foot and keep the load close to your body; turn your feet in the direction toward which you are throwing the snow rather than twisting your body. After you’re done, try to keep moving for a short time afterward—allow your muscles and your lower back to stay limber.

How to Keep Your Fitness Goals Rockin’ this Winter

Elevation Physiotherapy & Wellness :: How to Keep Your Fitness Goals Rockin' This Winter

Winter is here, and although it’s not bad yet, we know what is in store for the upcoming months.  It’s dark, it’s cold, it’s icy— all conspiring to suck any motivation to keep up your fitness goals right out of your body!

But here’s the thing. We know it’s coming, so now is the time for a few easy preparations to keep your workouts loaded through the next few months.

  1. Keep your gym/yoga studio/dojo close to your home or work.  If you have to travel more than a few kilometers out of your way, you won’t go.  At least not regularly like you should.  Make your workouts easily accessible to go first thing in the morning before work, at lunch, or right after work before you go home and settle in for the night. Or train at home. It only takes a few basic piece of equipment to get in a solid workout in your own space. Some resistance bands, dumbbells or kettle bells, maybe an exercise ball or suspension system, and you’re gold.
  2. If you’reworking out outside, dress appropriately. Layers are the key. You will still sweat if it’s -20° and you’re running outdoors. No cotton, including socks, as that will hold the moisture close to your body.  Clothes that wick the moisture away from you is best, and won’t restrict your movement.
  3. A warm-up is actually important.  Even if you’re inside at the gym, you’ve probably just arrived from outside and changed into shorts and a t-shirt. When it’s cold out, blood flow to muscles decrease and joints can get stiff. Even a short warm- up will better prepare your body for the work you’re about to do.  Some dynamic stretches, a few bridges and body-weight squats, 5 minutes on a treadmill and you’re good to go!
  4. Use the winter months to try something new.  Why not try out the kickboxing studio you pass each day on your way to work?  You’re more likely to do “inside” workouts during the winter months, and why not mix it up with something you haven’t tried before? 

The bottom line:  keep yourself moving!  The pull to hibernate can be strong, but think of the next few months as an opportunity to keep yourself fit so you can hit the ground running (literally!) in the spring.

Are Our Brains Making Us Sit Too Much?

Elevation Physiotherapy & Wellness :: Are Our Brains Making Us Sit Too Much?

 

A recent study in the journal Neuropsycologia finds that our brains tend to be wired towards being lazy.  People know that they should exercise and even may plan to work out, but electrical signals in the brain may be motivating them to be sedentary.  Relatively few people exercise regularly, even though most know that it is important for our health.  Earlier research shows that many people sincerely wish to be active, but few people actually follow through.

Scientists wondered if there was something going on in the brain that lessened the motivation to exercise, so they recruited 29 healthy and fairly sedentary young men and women who said they wished to be more active.  Each volunteer was fit with a helmet that had multiple electrodes that read and recorded the brain’s electrical activity.

Each person was given a computer test where they had an avatar they controlled by pushing a keyboard key, and they were instructed to move their avatar as fast as they could toward either the active images and away from the sedentary ones, and then vice versa.

If people respond more quickly to one kind of image, moving their avatars to it faster than they move them away from other types of images, then it is thought that they are drawn to that subject. The people in this study were almost uniformly quicker to move toward the active images than the sedentary ones–they all consciously preferred the figures that were in motion.

But at an unconscious level, their brains did not seem to agree. The electrical tests of brain activity showed each person had to use much more brain resources to move toward physically active images than toward sedentary ones. Brain activity there was much slighter when people moved toward couches and hammocks, suggesting that our brains are naturally attracted to being sedentary.

The results were explained in that our ancestors needed to conserve energy, so they had fewer calories to replace when food was not easily available—it was a survival strategy.

Of course, this study was small and looked only at electrical activity in the brain, but the authors feel that it would be helpful for some people who are reluctant to exercise to know that they are not alone.  It is also very important to note that we can consciously choose to move, despite what our brains might think.

Where are the Pelvic Floor Muscles?

The group of muscles that make up the base of your core are collectively called the pelvic floor.  They are muscles like every other muscle in your body, they are just inside, so most people don’t give them any thought until they start to have a problem, like leaking(incontinence) or when the bladder or uterus starts to descend (pelvic organ prolapse).

People often hear that they should strengthen the pelvic floor, but either don’t even know what muscles are involved, or if they are able to work them properly.  Let’s break it down:

This is the view of the pelvic floor muscles if looking from below; at the top, there is the urethra (the hole where urine comes out), then the vagina, and at the bottom, the anus.  The pelvic floor muscles sling from the pubic bone on the front to the tailbone at the back, and also can wrap around the vagina and anus.  Together they act as support for the base of the core and trunk, and stability as they attach to the bones of the pelvis, spine and hips.  When the muscles contract, they behave like a sphincter to affect the vagina or anus, and can also help pump lymph through the system to prevent pooling at the pelvis.

So now that you know where they are anatomically, how do you locate these muscles?  Both men and women can do this in the same way.

  1. Sit or lie down and keep all of your muscles relaxed.  It is often easier for people to identify these muscles if they are lying down to start.
  2. Squeeze the muscles around the back aspect of your pelvic floor as if you are trying to stop passing wind, then relax them. Try this several times until you are sure that you are contracting the right muscles, and don’t squeeze your buttock muscles—they should stay relaxed.
  3. When sitting on the toilet to urinate, try to stop the stream, then start it again. You can try this to learn the right muscles to engage, but do not train this way or do it often, as it can mess with the reflexes between your bladder and pelvic floor muscles.  It’s a good technique to understand the proper contraction of the pelvic floor (it should feel like a lift in your vagina or scrotum), but continue to practice this Kegel exercise while not urinating!
  4. If you don’t feel a distinct “squeeze and lift” through your pelvic floor muscles, it’s time to contact your doctor, or better yet, a physiotherapist who is specially trained in working with your pelvic floor

 

Strength Training

No one has ever told me that they feel they have injured their (fill in the blank here) because they are too strong.  I agree with this article in The Globe and Mail on two tenets of strength training.

I would also emphasize that form is important, and breathing is even more important, especially with core work.  Ideally with every exercise you want to perform a core breath, which is actively engaging the pelvic floor muscles as you exhale.  This manages the increase in abdominal pressure as you are working your core muscles, and prevents that pressure from being forced downward to your pelvic floor muscles.

We all know it’s important not to slouch for long periods… and that’s easy to say and hard to do! This article from the Globe and Mail has some solid information on movement, and how to “unlearn” that poor habits that keep us all rounded forward!