Fast Fitness - Which Books to Get for Holiday Shopping Black Friday

Here is Friday Fast Fitness - quick, inexpensive holiday gifts, easy to get, helpful to have. Many readers asked which books to get. Thank you everyone who sent me great notes and success stories how the books made their lives strong, fun, and pain free, and requests for more for friends. Here are descriptions and ways to get books and other fun:

• All my books have different information. If you get them all you won't go wrong, or repeat the same stuff.

• Limited personally signed copies to you or someone else are possible. I can write something special, with different signing for each person on your list. I can mail them all to you for the same postage, or to different people separately. You can also order straight from retailers instead of me. Links follow below (or click items).

• A reader wrote a comment, angry that his e-book did not print, and that it hurt his back "sitting at the computer pasting screenshots into into MSWord" to print his e-book on fixing back pain. He must have thought it was "Reprimand your way to my heart" day. E-books don't print. That is why they are called "E" (electronic) books. The book company lawyers told me his pain was divine punishment for copyright violation. Also for not following book instructions on healthy sitting. I am working on getting new editions of e-Books complied and uploaded (buggy slow software is keeping me at the desk many days overtime). New e-books should be ready for Christmas orders. New editions will soon be available for Kindle and other readers. The e-books already on my web site download directly to your computer. For portable print books, get the print editions.

If you can only get one book:

Top choice for athletes is Healthy Martial Arts. It is a treasury for all athletes. It teaches how to live and move and be healthy during all action of body and mind. For regular exercisers, or those who want to start and just be healthy and have fun, a good choice would be Health & Fitness THIRD edition - How To Be Healthy Happy and Fit For The Rest Of Your Life. It's an all-in-one book with thirty-one fun chapters of fitness, nutrition, health, disease prevention, fixing back and neck pain, joint pain, functional exercise, "green" fitness, emotional health, brain health, stretching, and fun facts about the body. (Or as they say, "if you only read one book this year, you should read more...")

Best Combo:

With either Healthy Martial Arts or Health & Fitness THIRD ed., add Fix Your Own Pain Without Drugs or Surgery.

For the Most "Bang for the Buck:"

Get a bunch, above, and throw in a Stretching Smarter Stretching Healthier and Ab Revolution™ Third Edition expanded. The Ab Revolution™ is described in: Back Pain From Running and Innovation in Abdominal Muscles

Thank You Anonymous:
Who left this comment on Who We Read - Using Fitness Fixer for More:

"Thank-you for your considerable research and explanations regarding neck and low back pain. Have recently checked out the Stretching Smarter... book you wrote to see if it is better than other posture books. It is infinitely better. Want to buy some books with photos next.

For new parents and grandparents:

Fun items with good kid lifting and carrying to save your back and neck
Mothers Day and New Parents Back and Neck Savers
and How To Remember Good Kid Lifting and Carrying

Water bottle with healthy neck and upper body positioning:

Fast Fitness - Stop Neck Pain From Biking

For scuba divers and diving medicine people on your list:

Diving Physiology In Plain English - all my career work and research in the field of decompression and diving science
and two books summarizing the entire field of Hyperbaric and Diving Medicine.

All books and descriptions - on my web site BOOKS page.

All fun UnCommon sense gifts - Dr. Bookspan's Backsavers.

Related:
Health & Fitness Third Edition at Last

Labels: education, fast fitness, holiday

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Thanks To Readers Thanksgiving 2009

I give thanks for wonderful readers who use my work to make their lives better, their friends' and neighbors' lives, and their communities, write me nice notes and stories, send web-photos of their progress, and jokes and help for my website.

Thanksgiving Fitness Fixer:

• Thanksgiving Health
• Fitness and Health as a Lifestyle for Thanksgiving
• Make Healthier Cleaners

Giving thanks as a lifestyle:

• Calories Burned in Prayer

Stay safe for holiday travel:

• Fast Fitness - Prevent Death and Disfigurement, Save Lives and Property

Labels: holiday

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Veterans Day 2009

Today is Veterans Day in the United States, honoring military veterans, intended as, "A day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace."

If they are to fight, they are too few,
If they are to die, they are too many

- Chief Hendrick Mohawk, French and Indian War 1755

More on Veterans Day:
Veterans Day

Labels: holiday

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Healthy Halloween - First Do No Harm

Halloween - the time when I take off my lab coat for work, and others put them on for costumes. A time when we dress as groups who pledge: "An it harm none, do what ye will" also stated as, "First, do no harm." Who are these groups? Read on.

The Wilderness Medical meeting where I have been teaching certification courses held a costume banquet last year. Medical professionals and students dressed in costumes depicting wilderness medicine. One couple was wearing outdoor clothing. I looked again and their faces were covered in red face paint. Except around their eyes, strangely pale. Also long thin white strips from eyes to ears. Sunglasses were propped on top of their head. They were sunburn. (White areas were those unburned, shielded by the glasses.) Another student was wearing regular clothing, except there was a large bat attached to his chest. Look closer. His face had strange white around the mouth. Rabies! Professors of envenomations wearing suit jackets covered with plastic bugs and snakes. Another wearing a giant falciparum, a protozoan parasite that causes malaria. Many others, simple, intelligent, and fun. When a solution in medicine is brilliant and simple at the same time, it is called "elegant."

For other events, one year I wore black jeans and sweater, and held up a black card with a white circle enclosing a black 8. People shrugged, "Oh, an 8-Ball."

I flipped the card. It was a black card with a blue triangle that read "I am The Magic 8 Ball" which got some laughs.
Flipping over the cards got them another blue triangle that read, "You May Ask Your Question Now"
I came ready with cards and never had to say a word.
They flocked over.
Lots of questions.
Funny how they can all be answered by the Magic 8 Ball.
A couple walk over together: 8 Ball: "I am The Magic 8 Ball." He: "Will I get lucky tonight?" 8 Ball: "Doubtful" She: "Will *I* get lucky tonight?" 8 Ball: "Outlook Good"
He: "Hey!! Not fair, how do you know that?"
8 Ball: "I am The Magic 8 Ball"
She: "Hey, you thought of a good costume"
8 Ball: "My Sources Point To Yes."

See photos of incarnations of other Halloweens past:
I am a living statue in Mischief is Not Good Exercise - Halloween Ahimsa,
and a Bodhisattva in Exercise Common Sense Discipline - Turn Down Halloween Junk Food. A Bodhisattva is someone who stays behind and postpones their reward to help others forward.


"Do what you will, so long as it harms none" is a rede - a long known counsel and advice.

Who pledges it? It is a specific part of Wicca practice and the physician's Hippocratic Oath. Two groups who dress as each other this week.


Encourage Health, not Disease on Halloween:

• Fast Fitness Halloween
• Mischief is Not Good Exercise - Halloween Ahimsa
• Is Your Health Food Unhealthful
• Healthy Youth Parties - Fun Exercise, No Junk Food
  
• Exercise Common Sense Discipline - Turn Down Halloween Junk Food

Come To the Fitness Fixer Virtual Halloween Party:

• Happy Birthday Happy Halloween

Halloween Forensics:

• Body Farm Not Just For Halloween

Labels: holiday, mind, spirit

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Thank You Grand Rounds 6.6 for Halloween

Thank You Code Blog for collecting the best medical articles of the week for the Halloween Edition, and including my Kneecap Tracking article among the scary entries. A reader's doctor says the fix for tight knee muscles is to cut the muscles. That is scary when pain can be stopped by stretching them instead.

On the web, Grand Rounds is a collection of the best on-line medical articles from the past week. A different host works hard each week to find and list the articles. This is different from the Grand Rounds in a hospital, which is a lecture for doctors about a patient or topic.

Thank you to this week's host, Code Blog Tales of a Nurse, for the hard work of collecting and featuring our posts for Grand Rounds Volume 6, Number 6.

Labels: Grand Rounds, holiday

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Happy Independence Day 2009

The 4th of July is a holiday in the United States to thank and remember the work and sacrifice made for independence. Thank you to all who pick up litter, help the poor, enrich the soil, teach the children, breathe and smile in traffic instead of shooting each other, who don't pollute the economy, the waters, the lives of children and adults.

The Pledge of Allegiance is an oath of loyalty to the nation of the United States of America that every American school child learns.

The original pledge, written in 1892 was deliberately direct and short:

"I Pledge Allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all."

The writer, Francis Bellamy, wanted the words "equality for all" included. According to some sources, that phrase and idea was opposed as that might include minority men and all women.

In 1923, "to the Flag of the United States" was added so all (immigrants and others) understood who they were pledging to. The words "of America" were added a year later. The phrase "under God" was not added until the 1950s.

American freedoms have meant protests by groups who refuse to pledge, including Jehovah's Witnesses and other religious groups, plus those who don't like the grammar.




Click:

• Fast Fitness - Freedom for All on the 4th of July
• Independence Day for Fitness
• Click the label holiday under this post for all Fitness Fixer posts on holiday health and lifting up daily life living.

Dr. Jolie Bookspan, The Fitness Fixer wishes everyone a happy 4th of July.

Labels: holiday

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Wishing All Readers Happy Mothers Day

Ideas for Family, Friends, All People, Mother Earth:

Mothers Day and New Parents Back and Neck Savers
Healthy Mother's Day
Fast Fitness - How Abdominal Muscles Prevent Hyperlordosis When Carrying
What Is Functional Exercise? - DrBookspan.com/Academy

Labels: arm, holiday, partner exercise

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Mothers Day and New Parents Back and Neck Savers

Readers, patients, and students have asked me for years to write down for them about good lifting and bending over babies and children. I wrote articles and books. I did experiments in the lab. They still said they couldn't remember. So I made something for all of you. You can give these to everyone in need for Mothers and Fathers days, coming up, and all year.

Here it is, quicker and easier than reading the books:


I designed singlets and one-piece suits for infants, T-shirts for toddlers and children, various sizes and colors.

One student had asked me to write down and hang the information around her neck so she would have an easy way to remember all the time. So I made a bib too - for the baby - so she could see it each time she bent to feed and lift.

I was surprised people wouldn't just remember on their own to live in a way so important to their health. But they kept coming back asking for me to tell them again. I am drawing the various concepts and putting them on daily items as funny reminders. I will show them in future posts if readers are interested.

Labels: children, education, fix pain, holiday, lower back, neck, partner exercise, posture, upper back

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Happy Tax Day

"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax"
-- Albert Einstein

Healthier Sitting and Looking Over Your Work - Tax Preparation Health
Nice Chair Stretch Break - Tax Stretch
Get Out of Your Chair and 'Unround' the Upper Back - Fast Fitness - First Morning Stretch
Remember to Breathe - Do Breathing Exercises Work?
While Waiting in Line at the Post Office - Fast Fitness Friday - Strong Spirit
Keep Smiling - Exercise Your Sense of Humor
Keep Blood Pressure From Rising - Healthier Heart
Stay Focused - Which Ancient Exercise Gives Focus and Concentration?

Labels: holiday

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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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Fitness For The Spring New Year

Image by Nariman-Gh via Flickr

Friday, March 20th, is the start of the Baha'i and Persian/Zoroastrian New Year, falling on the Vernal Equinox, the beginning of Spring. Under various spellings, Norooz is a celebration of renewal. It is time to clean and plant, cook and make new clothes, dance and celebrate. Spring is a new beginning for many things in many cultures.


Fitness Fixer Posts for New Beginnings of Healthy Fitness:

One New Year's custom of my own family - swimming in the ocean every day of the year, all winter including New Year's Day in January, with temperatures below zeroC:

• Happy New Year 2009

Healthy Spring Cleaning uses good body mechanics. Get exercise and injury prevention throughout the day:

• Household Fitness in the New Year
• Cardiovascular Cleanup
• Free Exercise and Free Back and Knee Pain Prevention - Healthy Bending
• Fast Fitness - Better Back and Leg Exercise When Vacuuming
  
  

Healthy Gardening:

• Autumn Yard Work - Limiting the Person Instead of the Injury Again?
• Lifestyle Fitness for Kids Through Gardening

Healthy Celebrating:

• Celebrate The Holidays
  
• Thanksgiving Health
• Fast Fitness - Strengthen Character
  
  

Healthier Exercise Food:

• Exercise Common Sense Discipline - Turn Down Junk Food
• Junk Food Through Your Skin?
• Healthy Youth Parties - Fun Exercise, No Junk Food
• Is Your Health Food Unhealthful
• How Strong Is Your Arm? - Readers Find Out
• Fast Fitness Friday - Healthier Fitness Water

Spring Training:

• Get Inspiration With New Years Resolutions for Fitness Successes - Reader Hall Of Fame
• Daughter's Love Saves Parent's Knees
  
• Get Certified With Certification Workshops in Healthy Exercise and Fixing Injuries
• The Stretch You Need The Least
  
• Are You Making Your Exercise Unhealthy?
  
  

Labels: holiday

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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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Inauguration

Last month, President-elect Barack Obama named four scientists to lead his science and technology team. I listened to his December 20, 2008 radio address. I heard words I waited all my life to hear.

When I was a small child, when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I told them, "A scientist!" I always knew.

I wanted to know how things worked and didn't work, and most importantly, why? Three men fall in freezing water. One dies. One is fine and warm and swims to safety. The third, shivering and miserable. Why? How? As a military scientist, my work was to find why standard operations and techniques didn't work. How to change them to make them effective, safe, sleek, powerful, good, and replace the wrong. Thankless work, what a surprise. I found why specific widespread medical practices weren't working, and what worked better. People using the changes began being able to do things previously hampered by injury and poor training methods.

When medicine and science aren't healthy, we find healthy ways, and do them instead. That is the best meaning of the word "health care," because it is finally healthy, and because we care how it affects people's lives. It is not health care if it is not healthy.

It is not a crusade, just doing what is simple and right, something anyone can know and do - not to sell products, hype, surgeries that you don't need, medicines or exercises that fix one thing and hurt six others, for profits and glory. Support what is true, not what you wish is true, or to repeat what "everyone" says, blind dogma, right or not.

At his December radio address, President-elect Obama said,

“The truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources—it’s about protecting free and open inquiry. It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology. It’s about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it’s inconvenient—especially when it’s inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us."

We are currently in Thailand. From abroad, we will be watching the inauguration. We are looking forward to returning to a healthier country.

Thank you President Obama.


See the text and video:
http://change.gov/newsroom/entry/the_search_for_knowledge_truth_and_a_greater_understanding_of_the_world_aro/

Labels: education, holiday

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Happy New Year 2009

Today is the first day of the Shinto New Year (Gantan-Sai) and the Western New Year on the Gregorian calendar, the solar calendar used in much of the world, reorganized by Pope Gregory XIII in the (solar calendar year) 1582.

One New Year tradition, of many, occurs in the freezing waters off Coney Island New York. For many years, my Grandfather was the oldest member of the Brooklyn Icebergs, a swimming club who swims in the ocean every day of the year, no matter what weather or temperature, including New Year's Day when air and water temperatures are often below zero centigrade, and sometimes Fahrenheit.

I will post more on the fun and physiology of cold swimming in months to come.

On the New Year, it is another tradition for people look forward and back at their lives and make plans for things to change. The two-headed Roman god Janus symbolizes and names the first month of the year.

To help your New Years resolutions:

• Household Fitness in the New Year
• New Years Resolutions for Fitness Successes - Reader Hall Of Fame
  
• New Year's Resolutions Made Easy
• New Year's Resolutions
• If Better Abdominal Muscles Are Your New Year's Resolution, Try This
• Is Your Drinking Hurting Your Neck?
• Holiday reminder - Fast Fitness - Prevent Death and Disfigurement, Save Lives and Property

The Mahayana New Year will be Jan 11 and Lunar New Year will be January 26
The Baha'i and Persian/Zoroastrian New Year's Day will fall on the Vernal Equinox on March 21.

Happy New Year To All.

Labels: cold, holiday, swimming

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New Years Resolutions for Fitness Success - Reader Hall of Fame

Happy New Year to readers on the Gregorian Calendar.

Happy day to the rest.

For your New Year's Resolutions, here are real stories from readers that appeared here on Fitness Fixer.

Readers tell how they used these methods for stronger, healthier, pain free, happy, more active life:

• Physical therapist George Nakhlé is assisting me to develop an entire new International Academy of Functional Sports Medicine using my methods.
  
• David of Belgium developed and teaches an improved new yoga system. He presented it at a world yoga congress. His system corrects for the widespread pain syndromes from flexion overuse, and reduces the cause instead of adhering to set ritual pose sequences - Getting the Right Yoga Medicine. He continues to translate my work into Dutch, create links for posts to reach world audiences, and make dozens of photos and videos for Fitness Fixer posts.
  
• Dr. Clara Hsu teaches Fitness Fixer methods to patients in her practice, prescribes my website, gives my books as presents around the world, and has offered her office space to hold workshops for our new International Academy - How Doctors Help Patients With Fitness Fixer and How Doctors Use The Wall Stand.
  
• Mr. America, Jim Morris, internationally encourages goodness and my Ab Revolution retraining technique - Mr. America Urges Goodness and Responsibility

• Leslie - Are You Stronger Than A 67 Year Old Lady?
• Ivy - Farm Work, Lifestyle Exercise, and Preventing Overuse Pain
• Ivy - Good Life Works Better Than Bad Ab Exercise
• Zoe - Don't Confuse Exercise With Real Fitness
• Mike demonstrates - Fast Fitness - Core Hip & Body, Posture Strength & Balance
• Terry Lee tries the handstand in the comments of Fast Fitness - Handstand Rows
• Liz Brown M.D. does her morning handstands in the comments of Thanksgiving Health
• Liz teaches how to overcome thinking that you can't do the handstand - Wall Handstand Success With Liz
  

• Sylvia - Fixing Foot Drop
• Ivy - Inspirational Ivy and Inspirational Ivy II - Beating Foot Drop and Sciatica, and Getting Healthier

• Rich T - Fix Neck, Play Hockey, Use Brain, Fun Life
• Bill - Freed From Pain, He Rides Again and Inspirational Update from Bill

• After 4 years and physical therapy didn't fix his pain, this "Big D" athlete tells how it is done - Fixing Posture - No Exercise Needed

• Mike - Flasher Exercises Not Best for Shoulder Pain
• Hanson stops shoulder pain caused by yoga - Overhead Lifting, Reaching, and Throwing - More Part I

• Kristin - 14,000 Miles on a Bike - Herniating and Fixing Discs
• Barb - Feeling Better Than She Ever Has Part I - Fixing Herniated Disk and Reclaiming Active Life and - Feeling Better Than She Ever Has Part II - Fixing Herniated Disk and Reclaiming Active Life

• Ted - Back Pain From Running
• Nick - Prevent Main Factor in Back Pain After Running and Walking
• Carina - How Much Inward Curve Space Should There Be In The Lower Back?
• Jean Christophe requested this post - Lower Back Pain and Golf
• Jeff - Fixing Pain and Golf Easier With Real Life Movement Than Isolated Exercises
• Liz - Which Stretch Stops Back Pain by Making Neutral Spine Possible?

• Bernie - Fixing Leg Numbness, Back Pain, Flank Pain, Knee Pain, Nerve Pain, Three Unhealthy Surgeries, Part I and Fixing Leg Numbness, Back Pain, Flank Pain, Knee Pain, Nerve Pain, Three Unhealthy Surgeries, Part II

• Zoe - Exercise and Cancer and Don't Confuse Exercise With Real Fitness

• Ivy - Is Healthy Living Less Expensive?
• Lily sends - Non-Plastic Non-Aluminum Sports and Fitness Food Carriers

• David from Belgium - Your Fitness Fixer Requests in the Works
• Jill - Inspiring Update from Jill - Celiac, Knees, Fasciitis, and Restoring Happy Life
• MMLash - You Can Fix Your Own Knees
• Diana fixed her ankles, and demonstrates while I film her - Sprain Prevention and Rehab Training
• David from Belgium filmed himself demonstrating - Fix Flat Feet, Pronation, and Fallen Arches

• Kristin - 14,000 Miles on a Bike - Herniating and Fixing Discs
• Liz - Which Stretch Stops Back Pain by Making Neutral Spine Possible?

• Mike sent us - A Laugh at Sedentary Mindset

• Barb - ER Nurse To Her Own Rescue
• Liz - How a Reader Stopped Recurring Pain, Got Stronger, and Said Aha!
• Jean Christophe - Readers Count - Second Missed Cause of Back Pain With Golf
• Jeff - Fixing Pain and Golf Easier With Real Life Movement Than Isolated Exercises

• Ted - Runner Fixes More Pain With Straighter Push-Off
• Ivy - Getting More From a Hip Stretch

• My student Christopher fixed serious martial arts injuries and demonstrates - Common Exercises Teach Hip Tightness When Kicking, Stretching, and on the Stairs
  
• David S demonstrates a different way to do the lying figure 4 hip stretch - Fast Fitness - Better Posterior Hip, Iliotibial, and Piriform Stretch
• Mike shows the seated figure 4 - A Whole Big Fix
• Bernie, who is 80 years old - Relaxing Hip, Leg, and Groin Stretch and Quick Relaxing Hip Stretch
• Pearl - Pearl is 97 (she will be turning 99 this coming February!)
  
• Dr. Ernie - Better Stretches for Swimming - Cook Strait Update
• Steve K demonstrates - Fast Fitness - Great Hip, Side, Leg, and I.T. Stretch
• I filmed a short movie of my student Ms. Han demonstrating how to sit on the floor and rise without hands - Functional Agility, Flexibility, Strength
• David of Belgium took time to make many movies for us to see methods better, this one to increase hip stretch (carefully) - Fast Fitness - Balance, Strength, Stretch, and Socks
• David of Belgium also took many photos to demonstrate fun ways to increase strength, balance, and stretch - Easy Handstand
• Ivy - Strengthen and Retrain Function With The Lunge
• Vikki, a Search and Rescue Paramedic demonstrates - Quick Hamstring Stretch At Work

• Mom V enrolled daughter - After School Trapeze Arts is Good Exercise

• Dr. Ernie swam it - Sixteen Miles of Cold Water and Getting Fitter in 50 Degrees

• Steve K - Fun Steve Loses Weight With Fitness Fixer
• Dr. Ernie - Nutrition for Endurance Swim Training
• Jill - Inspiring Update from Jill - Celiac, Knees, Fasciitis, and Restoring Happy Life

• Marla - Fix Scoliosis and Arthritis Pain, Fix New Orleans

• Bill - Stronger Pain-Free Wrists When Biking
• Stephie fixed her knee pain by not letting her arches flatten when standing (see knee and arch links), and demonstrates - Prevent Wrist Pain During Pushups and Cooking

• Dean and Ivy - How Strong Is Your Arm? - Readers Find Out
• David reminds us - Health Can Occur on Weekends Too

• Bernie - Cauda Equina - Result Not Cause

• Rich T reminds - Fix Positioning by Watching Others

• Joe - Married 63 Years With Good Balance
• Bernie - Fast Fitness - Dynamic Partner Balance Challenge

• Katayon - Daughter's Love Saves Parent's Knees
• Ginger - Student Balances, Listens, Fixes Father's Back Pain
• Ivy - Each One Teach One
• Mike - changes school programs to be healthier - Healthy Youth Parties - Fun Exercise, No Junk Food
• An anonymous reader took time to find a neighborhood association with volunteers to shop and deliver a food order at no extra charge to the blind diabetic widow in - Thank You To Readers - Simple Gifts

• Mike - A Whole Big Fix
• Dennis fixed knee, ankle, foot, lower back pain - Walking Softly Benefits Olympic Wrestler
• Bernie - Fixing Leg Numbness, Back Pain, Flank Pain, Knee Pain, Nerve Pain, Three Unhealthy Surgeries.
  Ivy - Inspirational Ivy

Thank you everyone for using my methods for Good. Thank you for writing your stories for others to benefit. Congratulations on your great work.

Thank you readers Mim, Kate, Al, Kathy, Julia, PhatMac, Eddie, Carol, Dave, Tony, Anton, Terry Lee, Airchild, Teresa, Nina, Marina, Wondering Oriental, 9Volt Terry, Alberto (farioreo), Kip, Lee, Ness, Jayakrishnan, Michael LMT CNMT who gives his massage clients the Fitness Fixer and my professional website DrBookspan.com as their homework, and all the others who wrote their success stories in the comments of various posts.

Hundreds more, too shy to have their story online, mailed me the best thanks - that because of these methods, they had their lives back.

Labels: fix pain, holiday, readers inspiring story, spirit

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Fast Fitness - Strengthen Respiratory Muscles

Here is Fast Friday Fitness - Strengthen your breathing muscles for easier breathing.

• Blow up balloons instead of using a pump this New Year's Eve and through the New Year.
• Inflate some with the quickest breath you can do. Inflate others with long slow breath.
• Don't overbreathe or hyperventilate to become dizzy or force breathing or strain, which can increase blood pressure and pressure in the brain and eye. Stay healthy.
  

Your lungs don't have muscles, but you have inspiratory and expiratory muscles in your chest and diaphragm. They are muscles like any others that improve with training and decline without regular workouts. Breathing muscle exercise is now accepted scientifically as helpful to patients with various respiratory conditions, asthmas, and allergies.

Related posts:

• Lung Training from the Exercise Ball
• Do Breathing Exercises Work?
• Respiratory Muscle Training for Swimming, Diving, and Running
• Respiratory Muscle Training for Better Health and Exercise
• High Fat Meals Hurt Lung Function
• Grunting and Exercise
  

Labels: blood pressure, breathing, chest, children, fast fitness, holiday

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Celebrate the Holidays

How do people from Thailand celebrate their birthday? Traditionally they give gifts to others.

Young Thai children are thrilled when their birthday arrives, so that they can give gifts
and do good.

They will give extra food and gifts to monks (right).

Many holidays are celebrated around the world this time of year. Doing good returns merit and goodness. That gives health to celebrations and holidays.



By generosity and thanks to others you can overcome personal fear and selfishness:

• Take children with you to volunteer at shelters and community centers.


• Spend time with your family instead of rushing away in isolation to shop and wrap material things that are not needed in the first place.


• Sort closets with family members for warm clothes and helpful household items to donate. Use healthful bending to sort and lift with the half-squat, full squat, and lunge with front knee over foot.


• For babies and toddlers, wrapping paper and the box it comes in are fabulous treasures. For smarter older ones, too. They don't need video players television, or computers, and will develop better without them. They need the 3-D world and you, face to face.


• Instead of expensive so-called fitness trainers involving imaginary motions and swatting the air, try a playground instead.


• Learn handstands.


• Try simpler toys and games that need imagination and input from the user's brain, not predefined by a machine.


• Make Your Own Balance, Agility, and Leg and Ankle Retrainer


• To go high tech with an electronic game, try active games like Hyperjump from wildplanet.com: Place the targets at a distance, and race, alone or with friends, to tag whichever target momentarily lights. Tag with hand or foot, according to the voice command given by the game at the moment. Or give the money to charity and use your brain making your own game, using a real person, named "it."
  


• For an electronic game of stamina, eye-body coordination, and cardiovascular health everyday, try Dance Dance Revolution. www.DDRgame.com. I found this gem over 15 years ago in Asia. You quickly move your feet to targets to visual cues and music. Difficulty is graded from slower and easier to faster and more complex as you practice. In Asia, some kids even manage this on their hands. Good music has been scientifically shown beneficial for health and the heart.
  


• Go dancing for real, with real people. In your living room, if nowhere else.
  


• If you can't do good works face-to-face, give fruit orchards and beehives to impoverished villages to develop self-sustaining economy and healthy food sources through Heifer.org (those are the vegetarian choices, along with options to send livestock to subsistence farmers who then give offspring to others to continue healthier cycles of independence).


• Go outside. The graphics are better. Fresh air. Sunlight in the dark winter months is needed and healthy. Click the label "sunlight" under this post for Fitness Fixer articles listing physiologic benefits of sunlight.

• Best gift for children? Your good example of healthy simple ways, joy, love, knowledge, and self-discipline. They need caring leadership.
  


• Consumerism and debt are not stable or healthy ways to live. Invest in simple happy ways. In the Kingdom of Bhutan, the "Land of the Thunder Dragon" in the eastern Himalayas, the government says their plan is to create "Gross National Happiness" grossinternationalhappiness.org. Their health system does not focus on medical potions, surgeries, and treatments, but healthy respectful human interaction, making a healthy base, and preventing much harm in the first place. Click the label "spirit" for ideas.
  
  

Posts for Happy Holidays:

• Make Healthier Cleaners
• Grate Christmas
• Healthy Christmas
• Get Muscles for Christmas
• Holiday Leg and Abdominal Exercise
• Calories Burned in Prayer
• Fast Fitness - Prevent Death and Disfigurement, Save Lives and Property
• Healthier Heart
  
  

Labels: children, holiday, mind, spirit, sunlight

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Thank You Grand Rounds 5.14 Holiday Edition

Thank you to the blog Highlight Health for including my post Fast Fitness - Reduce Holiday Driving Stress, Increase Human Connection in this past week's edition of Grand Rounds.

The web version of Grand Rounds is a collection of the best on-line medical posts from the past week. A different host works each week to find and list the articles. This is different from the Grand Rounds in a hospital, which is a lecture for doctors about a patient or topic.

Thank you to this week's host for doing the hard work of collecting and featuring our posts. Happy Holidays to all.

Labels: Grand Rounds, holiday

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Human Rights Day Dec 10

December 10th is Human Rights Day.

The health of humanity is accomplished by freedom, equality, dignity, and the conscience for all to act in goodness to each other.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948. Read it in languages, "from Abkhaz to Zulu" on the website of:

Labels: green fitness, holiday, mind, spirit

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Healthy Holiday Gifts

If you would like my signed books for holiday presents, go quickly to my web site page BOOKS.

I just received notice that Amazon.com is discontinuing the service allowing direct credit card payment called "honorbox."

Starting December 11, I will not have a way to accept credit card payment.

Labels: holiday

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Fast Fitness - Reduce Holiday Driving Stress, Increase Human Connection

Here is Fast Friday Fitness - Instead of cursing crowds, delays, weather conditions, and other drivers, spend your commuting and errand time every day in the car learning with audio books:

1. Find your local library.
2. Check the audio book section.
3. Find audio books that teach you valuable things you would enjoy.

Children in the car can become engaged in listening and learning instead of withdrawing to personal video games, and texting devices. From the content of the audiobooks, you can restart dialog and develop skills of talking to each other.

Large numbers of interesting audio books can be checked out on line.

Click the labels for more ideas in each topic.
Add your suggestions here.

Labels: children, fast fitness, holiday, mind, spirit

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Fast Fitness - Healthier Holiday Shopping

Here is Fast "Black Friday" Fitness - In the rush of holiday consumerism and overindulgence in acquisitions, take pause:

1. TOMS is a shoe company who gives away shoes to children who have no shoes.
2. For every pair you purchase, TOMS will give one pair to a child in need. "One for One"
3. www.tomsshoes.com

Blake Mycoskie created TOMS footwear to, "Produce stylish, comfortable, and practical footwear while improving the lives of children around the world."

TOMS press kits states they adhere to "No Sweatshops…ensuring both fair labor practices and minimal impact on the environment."

Mycoskie writes, “Inspired by a traditional Argentine shoe and challenged by continent’s poverty and heath issues, I created TOMS with a singular mission: To make life more comfortable. TOMS accomplishes this through a unique shoe and commitment to match every pair purchased with a pair to a child in need…no complicated formulas, it’s simple…you buy a pair of TOMS and TOMS gives a pair to a child on your behalf.

Privileged Western children may benefit from, even enjoy, practicing this type of gift giving, over spending on junk food and indulgent status items for themselves.

Labels: children, fast fitness, feet, green fitness, holiday, shoes

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Thanksgiving Greeting to Readers

Today is Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. Thanksgiving was last month in Canada. Thank you readers, every day for all your stories and enthusiasm. Thank you for using my work to make yourselves and the world healthier and happier.

Three posts for healthy Thanksgiving:
Thanksgiving Health
Fitness and Health as a Lifestyle for Thanksgiving
Make Healthier Cleaners


Giving thanks as a lifestyle:
Calories Burned in Prayer


Stay safe for holiday travel:
Fast Fitness - Prevent Death and Disfigurement, Save Lives and Property

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Questions come in by the hundreds. I make posts from selected ones. See if your answers are already here by clicking links and archives.
Read success stories of these methods and send your own.


Have The Fitness Fixer e-mailed to you, free.
Click "updates via e-mail" - Health Expert Updates (trumpet icon) upper right column.


Find fun topics on the Fitness Fixer Index.

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Labels: holiday

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Veterans Day

Today the United States observes the national and state holiday of Veterans Day, formerly called Armistice Day and Remembrance Day.

November 11 is the anniversary of the 11th hour signing of the Armistice that ended World War I. It is commemorated annually to remember military veterans.

• Important to remember, is that by an Act of Congress in 1938, it was intended as, "A day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace."


• Click the label Spirit under this post for ideas for more peaceful dealings in the world. Peace must be practiced like any other exercise, to make you fit and strong.


• To promote a safer healthier world, I will donate signed books as gifts to Fitness Fixer readers serving in harm's way. I have a small supply of the third edition expanded "Ab Revolution™ No More Crunches No More Back Pain," if you can cover shipping. Contact me through the BOOKS link of my web site and let me know your APO.

Labels: holiday, spirit

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Thank You Election Day Grand Rounds

Thank you to the blog Nurseratchedsplace for including my post Body Farm Not Just For Halloween in this week's Grand Rounds.

On the web, Grand Rounds is a collection of the best on-line medical posts from the past week. This is different from the Grand Rounds in a hospital, which is a lecture for doctors about a patient or topic.

Thank you to this week's host for doing the hard work of collecting and featuring our posts.

Labels: Grand Rounds, holiday

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Fast Fitness Halloween

Here is Fast Friday Fitness - Encourage health, not disease on Halloween.

Instead of junk candy, what about:

1. Give "Pledge to be Drug Free" stickers. If you don't have preprinted stickers, easily make some with blank stickers or labels, colored markers, and help of children (yours or neighbors).


2. Give small toys, available inexpensively in bulk. One choice is small blocks of modeling clay with a list of suggestions what kids can make - sculpt your dream profession, favorite person, flower... Toy, office, and hobby stores sell pre-packaged boxes of small cans of clay at economical prices. (Use some to make your high tech balance trainer.).


3. If you don't distribute treats this year (or any year) put a sign on your gate or door to Trick or Treaters with a healthy message - "Be drug free," "Always say 'please and thank you,'" "Please look both ways before you cross the street," or other good message.

If nothing else, not giving junk candy may cut down on visitors to your house :-)


If you are dressed as something scary, show kids that even scary things act well and do good. Try healthy Halloween games to teach manners, such as, "You've Been Boo'd" with a good deed. In this game, you say something nice to someone or let someone in line ahead of you, tell them they have been "boo'd" and they are next to pass it on.


More Healthy Halloween choices:

• Exercise Common Sense Discipline - Turn Down Halloween Junk Food
• Is Your Health Food Unhealthful
• Mischief is Not Good Exercise - Halloween Ahimsa
• Happy Birthday Happy Halloween

Labels: children, drugs, fast fitness, holiday

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Body Farm Not Just For Halloween

The Anthropological Research Facility in Tennessee studies decomposition of human corpses. Their informal name is The Body Farm. The bodies are real and donated to forensic science by willing donors, or are bodies unclaimed at a medical examiner's office.

At a body farm, dead human bodies are left lying in various environments, such as a wooded area, a pool of water, in a garbage bag, a roll of carpet, the trunk of a car, or tied to a tree. They may be buried shallowly or deeply, entombed or left exposed. The purpose is to study key forensic identifiers as time of death, insect colonization changes with environment and temperature, interpretation of insect evidence, and various changes related to whether a body has been moved from one location to another. Information gained helps the science and technology of forensics, forensic anthropology, entomology (study of insects), law enforcement, and others.

Some of the research goes toward determining causes and time of death. Previous assumptions for determining time of death from cooling or insect colonization have been found to be in error and in need of restudy. Another line of study is to develop identification technology to "sniff" and find a concealed body, creating an electronic version of a cadaver dog. It has been found that different conditions and geographic locations create different decomposition chemicals. A dog or machine calibrated to one area may be ineffective in another

There are three facilities in the United States (so far) that study the science of changes in a body after death. The University of Tennessee facility is the first body farm. Another facility is part of the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State (F.A.C.T.S.) A third opened through the Western Carolina University Forensic Anthropology program in 2006.

More Fitness Forensics:

• Time of Death From Body Temperature?
• Forensic Anthropology and Bone Density
• Forensic Science
• Forensic myths, body and fitness myths, and how to change exercises that were never healthy: Health & Fitness In Plain English English THIRD edition - How to be Healthy, Happy, and Fit For The Rest of Your Life.

Fitness Fixer Articles for Halloween:

• Happy Birthday Happy Halloween
• Exercise Common Sense Discipline - Turn Down Halloween Junk Food
• Is Your Health Food Unhealthful
• Mischief is Not Good Exercise - Halloween Ahimsa

Labels: forensic, holiday

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Fall Equinox

The equinox occurs this year on September 22. The Northern Hemisphere begins shorter days and longer nights of Autumn. Readers in the Southern Hemisphere begin seeing the longer first days of Spring.

What can you do for better health around this time?

Fall Equinox Posts:
Better Stretches - Cook Strait Update
Is Bad Martial Arts Good Exercise?

Spring Equinox in March:
Equinox - An Exercise in Treating People With Equality


Happy equinox.

Labels: holiday

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Fast Fitness - Freedom for All on the 4th of July

Here is Friday Fast Fitness - Remember freedom for all people and for Earth on America's Independence Day.

1. Reduce toxic waste from discarded batteries. Jacqueline Meier of Switzerland is creator of the Clean Planet Association. Part of this work is the Clean Kaïlash Project.
2. Donate blood - Blood Hero.
3. Build a school - Three Cups of Tea.

Click Independence Day for Fitness for ideas for personal freedom from bad foods, drugs, injuries, and physical and mental pain.

The Fitness Fixer wishes everyone a happy 4th of July.

Labels: fast fitness, holiday, mind, spirit

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Fast Fitness - Fixing Yoga Warrior and Lunge Exercise to Neutral Spine

Here is Fast Friday Fitness - quickly change your posture to change your luck on Friday the 13th. Hyperlordosis (swayback posture) seems to be unlucky - it causes lower back pain. You can do this in seconds to make a certain change to healthier spine for yoga or practicing the lunge. If you don't believe in luck, you're lucky. It's just good posture and simple anatomy.

Reader David from Belgium demonstrates in this 20 second movie that he made for us:

1. First ten seconds - he steps into a yoga pose called Warrior pose, but allows overly arched lower spine. He also demonstrates leaning more weight forward of center line, which is a different issue.
2. Note how the belt line tips downward in front and the lower spine overly curves inward - more than a normal curve.
3. At second 11 he levels the hip to bring the posture to neutral spine. Then he kindly demonstrates overarching when raising the arms further. Instead, hold neutral spine and raise the arms from the shoulder, not the lower back.

To prevent shoulder impingement when raising arms, keep shoulders down and back, don't just chin and neck forward, keep them gently in. A forward head posture compresses the rotator cuff when lifting arms. See Safer Overhead Military Press.

I never expected repeated requests to see how to do neutral spine in different activities. It is the same. Just apply the same neutral spine and that’s all. I thought one post would do it, but will post each activity readers ask about. I am aware that there are yoga and fitness places which teach to overarch the spine as part of the move. Teaching swayback does not seem to be as helpful as teaching neutral spine. Changing lunge and Warrior pose to neutral also improves the stretch to the front hip muscles of the back leg. Lucky.

Labels: fast fitness, fix pain, hip stretch, holiday, impingement, lordosis, neutral spine, posture, video/movie, yoga

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Memorial Days

This weekend the United States observes the national holiday of Memorial Day, formerly called Decoration Day, a day to remember soldiers fallen in war.

Labels: holiday, spirit

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Tax Preparation Health

Taxes are due April 15th. Piles of papers, forms, schedules, receipts. Readers have asked how to be healthier while working at the desk, and how to keep their cool during tax preparation.

Several readers asked how to stop neck pain when looking down over deskwork. Reader John M, specifically asked "How do you suggest someone look down (to look at a chart etc at work) without pushing the (herniated neck) disc out more (or aggravating symptoms)?

Three photos above show tilting the neck forward and/or jutting the chin forward. Holding the head forward of the neck and body is a major source of upper back and neck pain. The "forward head" is hard on the soft tissues, the joints of the vertebrae called facets, and the discs of the neck, and is a major overlooked cause of "upper crossed syndrome." The forward head is just a bad posture, and easy to stop. It is not necessary to jut the neck or chin forward to look downward.

Check how you are sitting right now. Are you letting your neck hang forward, are you jutting your chin forward, or are you pushing or rounding your neck and upper body forward? Instead, keep chin in, loosely and gently. If needed, bring your chair closer in closer to the desk and lean the upper body back instead of rounding your lower back against the chair back and leaning the upper body forwad.

To look down comfortably - tip chin down in relaxed straight position instead of jutting the head and neck forward. That is healthy positioning for everyone - injured or not. No need to lean or hang the head or neck forward, or round your upper back to look downward.

More Fitness Fixer with quick techniques to feel better during desk work:

• Stretch upper body in your chair - Tax Stretch
• Stretch and relax upper body - Quick, Feel-Good Upper Back and Chest Stretch
• Stretch and relax lower body - Quick Relaxing Hip Stretch
• Stretch and relax your breathing - Do Breathing Exercises Work?
• Stretch and relax your spirit - Fast Fitness Friday - Strong Spirit.

Labels: disc, facet joints, fix pain, holiday, neck, posture, sitting, stress, upper back

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Equinox - An Exercise in Treating People With Equality

Today is the equinox. As the earth continues on its yearly path around the Sun, the center of the disk of the Sun passed over the Earth's equator at 1:48 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time this morning (March 20, 05:48 Universal Time). At the date of the equinox, night and day are approximately equal length all over the world (small variations for refractive effects). The Northern Hemisphere begins Spring, while the Southern Hemisphere begins the shorter days of Fall. Each day, for the next three months, days will become a few minutes longer and nights shorter in the Northern hemisphere. Our Southern Hemisphere friends will have longer nights each night until the Solstice in June.

Japan celebrates six days of the Spring equinox (shunbun no hi). Graves are visited during the week to reflect on looking forward and back. The six days are based on the six perfections: giving, observance of virtuous teachings, perseverance, effort, contemplation, and wisdom. Nowruz, in various spellings, is a major Spring observance among many Eastern religions. Nowruz comes from Persian words meaning "new daylight." Observances may date to at least 15,000 years ago. Diverse Indo-European cultures celebrated the Spring Goddess-mother and source of returning life. In the West, many observe the return of Spring and life with symbols of eggs, birth, passing, and rebirth.

The equinox is a fitting time to reflect on equality. That does not mean that everyone must get the same shoe size, but that you consider someone of higher or lower social rank with the same respect.

There is a story that at the end of the final exam of the finest MBA program in the country, was one question, "What is the name of the person who cleans the floors of this building?" Anyone not able to answer this did not get a degree that semester.

Do you say hello to the people who work so hard to make a beautiful place for you to learn and work? Do you care who they are? They are a special human being like you are. Learn their name. Say hello. See the difference it makes to them and to your world outlook.

Happy equinox.

Related Fitness Fixer:

• Fall Equinox
• Better Stretches for Swimming - Cook Strait Update
• Is Bad Martial Arts Good Exercise?
• Healthier Heart

Book:

Labels: aerospace, holiday, spirit

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Fast Fitness - Leap for Balance on Leap Year

Here is Friday Fast Fitness for the intercalary year (Leap Year) - Leap to develop ankle and knee stability, leg power, and balance.

1. Leap forward, landing on the other foot with soft shock absorption. Don't land hard, which jars joints.
2. "Stick" your landing, without wobbling or setting the first foot down.
3. Leap backward to the original foot and place. Hold your landing steady. Try several leaps forward and backward, then change the leading leg and repeat.

When landing, keep ankle stable by preventing your foot from rolling to the outside. Info in the post No More Ankle Sprains Part II.
Train knee and hip stability by preventing your knee from swaying inward upon landing - Healthy Knees.

Labels: ankle, balance, fast fitness, feet, hip, holiday, impact, knee, leg strength, sprain

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Fast Fitness - Plyometric Partner Bench Press for Valentine's Week

Here is Friday Fast Fitness - Have fun together as you strengthen arms, shoulders, chest, back, wrists, and core, while practicing neutral spine, speed, teamwork, and cooperation in a fun plyometric partner bench press.

1. Lie face up with both arms held upward (white karate uniform) to support partner (black karate uniform).
2. Partner (black uniform) rests shoulders on your hands and holds straight body position on toes. Partner (black uniform) uses abdominal muscles to hold neutral spine without letting the lower back sag.
3. Push your partner up and down with your hands in a bench press motion. To add plyometric training, push partner strongly and quickly into the air (right). Catch them lightly, bending your elbows upon contact. Switch places and repeat.
   

Use common sense and springy light touch to reduce unhealthful impact in both partners. You can improve strength and speed without hurting joints and connective tissue. I will post more on plyometrics in articles to come.

Related Fitness Fixer:

• Exercising With A Friend - Partner Leg Press
• Fast Friday - Valentine's Day Partner Weightlifting

Labels: abdominal muscles, chest, elbow, fast fitness, hand, holiday, partner exercise, plyometrics, speed, strength, wrist

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Valentine Family Exercise

Valentines Day is for everyone, not just couples. It is healthy to have active fun with family and friends too.




Monday's post Valentine Partner Pushups gives a fun partner exercise idea. Here are more variations for active fun with children and friends of many ages.








Babies and children love to move. They can hold their body weight. Get them started early. Don't let them lose this strength by making them sit still and eat. Get up from the table and play. That is Valentines Day love.






























I will cover how to do this partner handstand in a future post. Send in your own photos of fun exercise with family and friends.

Labels: chest, children, elbow, hand, holiday, partner exercise, spirit, strength, wrist

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Valentine Partner Pushups

Exercising in social ways is healthy. Valentine's Day is this week. This week I will post several ideas for fun active partner exercise. Start with this version of partner pushups, then have fun making up your own.


Pushups give full body physical benefit when done with neutral spine. Here are two posts that explain how to tell neutral spine while holding a pushup position and how to correct an overarching lower back (hyperlordosis) to neutral spine:

• Change Common Exercises to Get Better Ab Exercise and Stop Back Pain
• Abdominal Muscle Exercise - Better, Different, Not What You Think

This post has instructions with an mpeg movie demonstrating the fix to neutral spine:

• Fast Fitness - Strengthen by Changing Your Plank

This post shows a technique to learn how to prevent compressing your wrists, and better use of hand and arm muscles:

• Fast Fitness - Prevent Wrist Pain During Pushups and Cooking

Here are links to last year's Valentines partner exercises:

• Stretching With a Friend - Partner Pectoral Stretch
• Each One Teach One
• Exercising With A Friend - Partner Leg Press

Why make Valentine's Day only one day? Stay active with good people through the year for the health that positive social interaction brings.

Labels: chest, elbow, holiday, partner exercise, spirit, strength, wrist

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Another Happy New Year

Important festivals of new beginnings fall around this time of year. The Lunar New Year began this week. It is a big festival. It is New Year to many people. Lent began for Latin rite followers, and the Triodion that marks the Lenten start for Eastern Orthodox will fall on Feb 17 this year. This past week was marked by wearing ashes in several cultures. Ash is deeply symbolic of endings, transience, and transformation.


Ash begins black with substance and turns white with formlessness, a symbol explained last year in The Story of the Black Belt. Ashes are used to clean bodies and spirits. They symbolize wisdom that remains when all else is burned away. All things eventually become ash. Catholics wore ashes last Wednesday. Hindus used bhasma, the sacred ash, at the recent festival we attended to learn more about wound healing, told in this post - Thaipusam - Exercise of Body and Spirit.



In the North, February is a harsh month. Through the cold and dark, the first plants begin to bud and animals show growing signs of spring births to come. The first signs of returning life inspired the February 1st Imbolc festival of Brigid (the Bride) a Celtic goddess. The Church later replaced this festival with Candlemas on February 2, dedicated to the Virgin Mother Mary. Both festivals are marked by candles and fire, a mark of the coming end of winter and the return of crops. Shinto followers celebrate this as Setsubun Sai.

• To help your New Years resolutions (or remind you to start) here is a link to a post with labels that will give all posts on the label topic: New Year's Resolutions Made Easy.
• Here is the link to last year's greeting and post: Happy Lunar New Year.
• February New Year celebrations are traditions times to clean the house (and your mental house).
  
• When cleaning and getting your garden ready, you can easily prevent back pain that comes from increasing the small inward curve of the lower back: Using Abdominal Muscles is Not Tightening or Pressing Navel to Spine.
  
• Use healthful bending with the half-squat, full squat, and lunge with front knee over foot.
  
• Here is why it is so important.

Happy New Year to all.

Labels: fix pain, holiday, martial arts, spirit

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New Year's Resolutions Made Easy

For all the things you look forward to doing in the New Year, here are the links for all Fitness Fixer posts so far.

The system does not yet keep a sidebar or other list of all post labels, so I made one for you as a holiday gift. You can bookmark or permalink this post to use in the future. Let me know links that need fixing, and missed labels. Any posts I add with these labels should automatically become included.

Look for labels with your New Year wishes. Click the label and all posts with that label will come up at once. Print and take with you

There will be new posts on new topics too, with new labels. A great New Year.

abdominal muscles

Achilles stretch

aerobic

aerospace

aging

altitude

ankle

arches

arm

arthritis

balance

biking

breathing

cancer

celiac

chest

children

circulation

cold

colds/flu/infectious

computer

diabetes

digestion

disc

drugs

education

elbow

endurance

exercise ball

facet joints

Fast Fitness

feet

fix pain

forensic

gait

gardening

hamstring

hand

heat

hip

hip strength

hockey

holiday

hyperbaric

iliotibial band

injury

knees

leg press

leg strength

leg stretch

lordosis/ hyperlordosis

lower back

lunge

martial arts

massage

neck

neutral spine

nutrition

orthotics

osteoporosis

Parkinson

partner exercise

performance enhancing modality

plantar fasciitis

posture

pregnancy

pronation

pulmonary edema/oedema

readers inspiring story

rowing

running

sciatica

scuba

shoes

shoulder

side

sitting

sleep

smoking

soreness

speed

spirit

sprain

squat (full squat and half squat)

strength

stress

stretch

surgery

swimming

toes

upper back

walking

warmup

weight loss

wrist

yoga

Labels: education, holiday

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Grate Christmas

Readers have been asking about overeating, drinking, not having time to exercise, and overstressing on the holidays. Is it unavoidable? How can you resist things that are bad for you. Of all times to mark an occasion that is meaningful to you, that marks endings and new beginnings of a new year, celebrates thanks, a rite of passage, a national day of remembrance, a day marking something holy to your highest beliefs, the reflection of a new things coming, that day is the time to be free of baggage. Of all times to do simple, healthful actions for yourself and others, this is the time.

After the fuss of the holidays, then what? After the smiles and gifts, where are happy times? Where are your resolutions? The rest of the year is also the time to check in on loved ones, sweep the floors of a shut-in, and do healthy actions. At a funeral, everyone is there helping. The next week, the survivors sit alone. On Western Christmas, cars stop at the steam grates to give mittens and treats to the homeless huddled to keep warm. The rest of the year, cars pass without stopping.

On Christmas, most of the grates are empty as the city programs sweep up homeless for day-long programs. Each year before and after Christmas I cook thick vegetable soup, bake fresh loaves, pack up, put on my Santa hat, and head out into the weather to the grates.

We know many of the guys. I make food for them the rest of the year, or we go in the convenience stores to pick up things for them when the store won't let them in. My dinners cast steam curls upward. They chuckled, "Heh heh it be Saaaan--tah." We squatted down with them and unpacked dinner. I gave out toothbrushes as presents. They smiled angelic toothless smiles. They asked me the weather report, which called for storms, but I told them it didn't smell like storms. The air smells different somehow when it is going to storm.

The photo is Paul who worked as a Western-style Santa when we helped at a center. Little girls ran to sit on his lap. So did big girls. Many men too. At almost 7 feet tall, Paul has enough knee-space for everyone.

Christmas is not over. Eastern Orthodox Christmas will be in almost 2 weeks, since the Julian calendar date of 25 December is January 7. Armenian Orthodox celebrate Jan 6. On lunar calendars, there are the Festivals of Light of Devali and hanukah.
The winter solstice, Yalda, Saturnalia, Karachun, Kwanzaa, Yule, "Mother Night or "Modresnach," and Shinto Tohji-taisai are also celebrated around this time. There are festivals of appreciation, such as the Purnima. Islamic New Year of Muharram will be January 10th.

Be happy, be healthy. Is it not hard. It is not expensive. It is not stressful. Breathe. Stretch. Happy Holidays.

Labels: holiday, spirit, stress, weight loss

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Kid Fitness Reading Maps

The solstice is here. The word solstice means "sun (sol) standing still."

Since the September equinox, the earth and sun have moved so that the sun now appears at the southernmost point it will reach. The northern hemisphere has the chilly shortest day of the year, and the southern hemisphere sees the longest day of summer. There it "stands still" before appearing to turn northward again.

Shinto and others celebrate the highest deity, the Goddess who is the Sun. Cultures around the world have traditionally marked this day with observances. It seems a good time to start a nice family activity of learning to read a map and the sky to find your way.

We live in the city and frequently see obvious out-of-towners who need directions. I enjoy stopping to tell them about the sights, sometimes guiding them where they need to go, or taking them to see fun things they didn't know about. One time, the two adults and young children didn't have the usual baffled look, just a map, a compass, and fingers pointing at the map and the air. When I asked them where I could help them get to, they replied they were locals working on spatial direction skills and map reading with their children.

They were teaching the children how to locate where they were and how to go to locations on the map. Then they walked to each place together, enjoying the sights and a day outside, developing their minds and bodies together. Intelligent, happy, active family interaction. That is fitness as a lifestyle.

All children (and adults) should know where they live and how to get back in case of emergency. They should know where help is, and where key people and places are.

Some locations to find using this key mind and body skill with your kids:

• Free library
• Police station
• Firehouse
• Local favorite museums
• Fruit market
• Shelters and project locations for volunteer work
• Finding their own home during any trip, near or far.

Readers, post your comments on beneficial places people should know how to get to, and family ideas. Many Fitness Fixer readers are pilots, navigators, military, search and rescue personnel, law enforcement, and the combination of all of those - parents. Let us know healthy ideas to find our way.

Labels: children, holiday, mind, partner exercise, spirit, walking

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Thanksgiving Health

Every year at Thanksgiving, some of my students are far from home or without a family to visit. We invite them to our little house for a warm meal on cushions by the fireplace.

We tell them the food is vegetarian and we sit on the floor without Western-style furniture. Some suddenly remember an uncle in Boston they'll visit. This year we're pleased that a former student is flying from Japan to visit after studying with us here years ago.

This is the link to last year's Fitness and Health as a Lifestyle for Thanksgiving to help holiday lifting, carrying, cooking, cleaning, and preparations. Here are more easy fun Thanksgiving fitness-as-a-lifestyle ideas:

• If you're traveling far for holiday visits, here is Exercise and Stretch for Long Travel Sitting.
  
  
• Sitting on the floor with good positioning is healthier than in chairs, and gives a built-in hip stretch. Done in rounded positioning, it is the same as bad sitting in chairs. Use Quick and Easy Strength and Balance Exercise.


• Vegetarian and vegan food makes a full, healthy, good tasting Thanksgiving feast. It does not have to be strange or spartan. Avoid unfermented soy in powdered protein drinks, bars, and textured vegetable protein. It is not as healthy as promoted. Real food gives protein, and is healthier. See Is Your Health Food Unhealthful? and Get Muscles for Christmas.


• While standing to prepare food at the counter, put your shoulders back with chin loosely in and hip tucked to neutral - photo example in Fast Fitness - Homemade Sports Food. Then your neck and back will not hurt during cooking.


• Even if you need to hurry to prepare and clean, remember to be happy that you are well-off enough to have things to prepare and clean.


• Have kids help, rather than stressing to do everything alone while they miss the discipline, good habits, and exercise of helping you. Make it fun to be together.


• Instead of hunching shoulders and rushing to get the cooking done, straighten, breathe, and use each stroke of washing and cutting as a meditation.


• Get free bending and spiritual exercise by cleaning closets to donate clothing to warm someone in need. Every year Paul and I stand with a clothing bag in city alleys near the shelters. Extra large homeless women take Paul's extra large shirts and jackets. Squirrelly homeless men pick out my small jeans. They smile jagged-toothed smiles at their new clothes. We enjoy listening to their stories and sharing warm home-baked food with them.


• Laugh until your cheeks hurt.
  


• "Before eating, give thanks to the food" - Arapaho Native American proverb.


• When possessions break, give thanks for having possessions, which is more than much of the world has. When your faucet leaks, give thanks that you have running water. When we lived in Asia, we walked down only two flights to a bathroom then climbed back two flights with a jug of water for cooking. People in many places in the world walk miles just for the privilege of digging for food and carrying heavy water pots back. That gives perspective on Westerners who easily eat much and exercise little, and believe only the most minor contributors to weight gain - Metabolism - How to Lose Weight and Save Money.


• There are groups of mountain monks in Japan, who, after going to the bathroom, give thanks because everything worked. Learn to give thanks for all the little things and big things.


• Get rid of an enemy this Thanksgiving. Abraham Lincoln explained: "Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?"

We are fortunate to have food, and cushions, and a warm fire, and friends who visit from afar. Thank you readers for using my work to make your lives better. You are my gifts.

More on the exercise of living happily and giving thanks in Healthy Martial Arts.

Labels: children, holiday, posture, practice of medicine, spirit, stress

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Happy Birthday Happy Halloween

Happy Birthday to readers who celebrate their birthday today, October 31. Also those with birthdays yesterday and tomorrow. Everyday too.

One reader with a special birthday today is Ivy who turns 71 - Inspiring Ivy. Ivy has been generously sending in stories for all to benefit, giving ideas for healthy exercise as part of normal daily life.


When I posted about Pearl who turned 97 last February and uses Bending Right for Fitness as a Lifestyle, Ivy wrote:

"I hope I can look as great as Pearl does when I reach 97, she is amazing. You will smile when I tell you that I did this fun test on the internet whereby you have to answer 34 questions re your health, what you eat, if you take medication etc. etc. The answer came back that I really was 45.5 years of age and I was going to live until I was 106.5 years of age.

"I had already told my kids that I am going to live until I am 96 and that it would be pay back time. I have now changed it to 106.5 years of age - my very words being "May God help you." Of course they laughed - I reminded them of the old saying 'Words said in Jest.'"

Happy Birthday! We made everyone delicious Internet birthday party and Halloween party food. Everyone come celebrate.

Happy Halloween and everyday. "Boo unto others" with good happy food, activity, and spirit. Celebrate everyday, by eating, moving, and living with fun, happy, intelligent, good spirit. Here is a Halloween poem to laugh:

Don't yell at us
Don't scream and shout
'Cause when we're scared
Our eyes fall out!

Labels: holiday, nutrition, readers inspiring story, spirit

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Mischief is Not Good Exercise - Halloween Ahimsa

The third harvest is here in the Northern Hemisphere. The Hunter's Moon is bright in the sky.

The last harvest of fall is a time of endings and beginnings. More than a commercial holiday of destruction and gruesome death, the approaching winter was historically a time to reverently mark departure of the living and life-giving fields, and be thankful for the harvests they gave. Revering of elders was observed in analogy.

The first and most important precept of thousands of years of yoga and martial arts is ahimsa. Ahimsa means non-violence, non-harm, non-destruction. Ahimsa was reaffirmed in recent times by the Mahatma Gandhi, and in the West by Martin Luther King, Jr. In all the classes I teach, I remind the students that ahimsa is something you incorporate in all your actions. Don't harm yourself by sitting in injury-producing bad slouching. Don't harm yourself with bad exercise. Don't harm yourself by destructive thoughts and actions. Don't harm yourself with unhealthful food and drink. Don't harm yourself by hunching your shoulders to stress through preparing meals, when you can relax your shoulders, straighten your back, breathe, and use each stoke of washing, cutting, and preparing food as beautiful meditation in the same amount of time. Don't harm others with spiteful words, deeds, and thoughts. Don't cause others fear or pain. Don't cause yourself fear and pain.

In many of the countries where we have traveled and lived, lovely short public service announcements occur daily with kind messages of doing good. Television and radio commercials are paid for with no other purpose than to give specific positive examples of helping each other for a better world. Where we have lived in the US, continuous messages of spiteful and worse behavior are common as entertainment.

Several centers in your brain process self-control. They need exercise like anything else. Studies of imaging these brain centers in people who overeat, showed that with retraining, the centers changed in level of activity when pictures of food were viewed. "Exercising self-control" is more than an expression.

Children, and even adults, need consistent positive examples. It is good and crucial exercise. It is easy to destroy, and takes (but also gives) energy to be good. Instead of "Mischief Night" tonight, do good. Instead of spending money on destroying property with thrown eggs and toilet paper, have fun learning a healthful recipe that you can enjoy for years to come. Learn to stand on your hands safely. Paint or draw a picture of a good wish. Talk about how it can come true. Design and construct inspired homemade costumes. Help the community. Volunteer at a shelter. Exercise your spirit. Develop a fun, beautiful positive public service announcement for your home, or a commercial project, that reminds to uplift spirit and behavior. Teach a child something. Don't wait until they are already doing bad. Teach them consistently, before they know to do either, so that they will more often know to choose good and why.

The average American spends nearly $15 on Halloween candy - more than $1 billion total on unhealthful refined sugar and hydrogenated fat candy - just for Halloween. This is not parental love. It is the same as giving them cigarettes or addictive drugs. Change that. Parental love is giving them beautifully functioning self-control brain centers. Halloween story and ideas in Exercise Common Sense Discipline - Turn Down Halloween Junk Food.

Positive behavior is too important to leave up to only the schools, the entertainment industry, the government, the Internet, the home. We all add ahimsa.

Many chapters of ideas for happy bountiful living are in the book Healthy Martial Arts.

Labels: aging, children, holiday, martial arts, mind, nutrition, performance enhancing modality, posture, spirit, stress, yoga

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World Vegetarian Day

"Vegetarians have the best diet. They have the lowest rates of coronary disease of any group in the country. [T]hey have a fraction of our heart attack rate and they have only 40 percent of our cancer rate."
—William Castelli, M.D., Director, Framingham Heart Study, the longest-running epidemiological study in medical history

From my work in sports medicine, I will add to Dr. Castelli's work that I see fairly consistent reduction in joint pain and other pain syndromes when patients stop known "inflammatory foods" including meat and dairy.


October 1 is World Vegetarian Day (www.WorldVegetarianDay.org). The month of October is Vegetarian Awareness Month. The purpose is for a happier, more aware and respectful, and healthier society.

Hurting animals is unhealthy for all involved. In the spirit of healthy body and mind, this post gives four ideas:

1. Build your own health and benefit your exercise: food and recipes for better exercise training (regardless of your sport), and preventing disease and pain syndromes. Get the book Healthy Martial Arts


2. Enjoy healthy extra years: From the blog DiseaseProof.com - How Much Longer Do Vegetarians Live?


3. Free vegetarian starter kit, free newsletter, with materials in Spanish, to avoid cruelty to yourself, animals, and the Earth, one meal at a time - TryVeg.com


4. Reduce global warming: GoVeg.org reports on work published in NewScientist.com - It's Better to Green Your Diet Than Your Car (17 Dec. 2005). "You could exchange your "regular" car for a hybrid Toyota Prius and, by doing so, prevent about 1 ton of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere each year, but according to the University of Chicago, being vegan is more effective in the fight against global warming; a vegan prevents approximately 1.5 fewer tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere each year than a meat-eater does. The math is simple: You could spend more than $20,000 on a Prius and still emit 50 percent more carbon dioxide than you would if you just gave up eating meat and other animal products."

Feel encouraged. Being vegetarian or making occasional vegetarian meals does not have to involve any strange or expensive foods from specialty stores. You do not need any special pots or food processing equipment. It is a myth that vitamin supplements are necessary. Grocery bills can also be also far less expensive when you don't purchase meat (and don't substitute other expensive food that you do not need).

More Good Stuff:

• I will post easy-to-make healthful (real) food for athletes and exercisers, during October vegetarian month, and for Vegan month in November.
• Click the label "nutrition" under this article for all Fitness Fixer on healthy smart nutrition, and other labels for all posts on each topic. NonVegetarians are welcome.

Labels: cancer, circulation, fix pain, green fitness, holiday, nutrition, spirit

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Better Stretches for Swimming - Cook Strait Update

The September equinox was this weekend. At the moment of the equinox, the center of the disk of the sun crosses the equator. The northern hemisphere comes into Fall while the southern hemisphere begins Spring. For the day before and after that moment, the entire apparent disk of the sun passes the equator, and night and day are approximately equal length all over the world.

Japan celebrates three days before and after the equinox as a time for life reflection, looking forward and back. A Mid-Autumn Festival of the second of three fall harvests is celebrated in many East Asian communities around this time on a varying lunar calendar. The full moon closest to the Autumn equinox is the Harvest Moon, lighting long evenings of harvest work. The moon all during the month of the Autumn equinox is the Wine Moon, a good time for grape harvest, occurring (usually) around September in the northern hemisphere and March in the southern hemisphere.

With this equinox, the weather is warming in the Southern Hemisphere, meaning increased swim training for New Zealander 'Dr. Ernie' (blog name).

He is training to swim the 16 miles of the Cook Straight, introduced in May's post Sixteen Miles of Cold Water and updated in Getting Fitter in 50 Degrees.

Dr. Ernie sent the photo at left and wrote,

"This phase has been one of knuckling down. So here goes:
"Cook Strait Swim: Phase II
"Now it gets serious.....

"On June 6 I completed my last open water swim in Wellington Harbour in water temps of about 14 C: It felt really cold, the coldest I've experienced. The swim lasted 45 minutes and I noted that afterwards I didn't shiver at all -- a clear sign of acclimatization. I was advised by all to start serious swim technique and endurance preparation in the pool.

"I met with Phil Rush -- the man who has crossed the Strait seven times (including a double-crossing) and who holds the world's record for a triple crossing of the English Channel. He will be piloting the support boat for my attempt, which will hopefully be in February 2008. His advice: swim, swim, swim -- get up to 40 km/week by December (approx 25 statute miles or 21.6 nautical miles), and then be ready to take a 6-hour test in early January. In the test I will have to demonstrate that I can sustain at least a 3 km/hour pace for the 6 hours (a little under 2 miles per hour, a mid-training pace).

"Since July, I've been meeting with my coach, a former Olympian (I'll not mention his name until I've made it successfully across the Strait) and it's been hard going. But very necessary. What I assumed I could do on my own proved to be incorrect. For one, basic aspects of technique have been clarified and my entire stroke has been reworked in the past two months -- a good thing because I don't have a competitive swimming background and I've been doing lots of stuff to create drag. If' I' m to make it across the Strait I'll have to be extremely efficient. And I'll have to be able to keep up pace to stay warm. So my coach had done several important things: first, he's forced me to realign my body position, stressing posture, line and balance; second, he's pushed high-intensity sprint and interval training in addition to long distance swims. I plan to continue weekly lessons through the end of the year."

One of the things Dr. Ernie and I have been working on is better swim stretches.

Good shoulder range of motion helps swimming. Some experts regard the extra range as always destabilizing for the shoulder joints.

I investigated this over several years in the lab, and found that much of the problem is unhealthful stretches, not the range achieved.

You can have a mobile strong shoulder without developing instability or injuring the shoulder joints and surrounding cartilage and soft tissue.

One counterproductive stretch for most people is pulling one arm across the front of your body. It is usually The Stretch You Need The Least. Click the link for more about why.



A better way to stretch your shoulders is to stop doing this less healthful stretch and do three healthier ones:

1. Front chest (pectoral) muscles, taught in Fixing Upper Back and Neck Pain


2. Nice Neck Stretch. To make sure you get the stretch as intended and not lean or round forward, do the Nice Neck Stretch (trapezius stretch pictured at right) with your back and the back of your head against a wall so that you do not bring your head forward of the wall as you slide down to the side.


3. Fast Fitness Friday this week will add a third stretch that is more effective than the common practice of pulling the elbow overhead with the other hand - Friday Fast Fitness - Better Shoulder and Triceps Stretch.
   
   

Related Fitness Fixer:

• Dr. Ernie's story continues next week - Nutrition for Endurance Swim Training.
• Post from last year's equinox - Is Bad Martial Arts Good Exercise?
• More to understand what makes a good stretch - What Does Stretching Do?
• Click labels under this post for more Fitness Fixer about each topic.

Labels: arm, holiday, readers inspiring story, shoulder, stretch, swimming

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Labor Day Recharge

Today is Labor Day in North America.

Labor Day is an annual national holiday developed over 100 years ago as a tribute to the worker. It is generally less political than May Day, and more a day to renew yourself away from work.

Go away from the computer.

Walk or bike or skate outdoors nearby to somewhere green. Do real activity that you love. Doesn't have to be for long. Eat a piece of fruit instead of candy and soda. Lie with a book and learn something wonderful.

Labels: holiday, spirit

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Gaze Perseid Meteors Without Neck Pain

This weekend in the Northern Hemisphere, the moon will be new, and the night dark, and the skies filled with the shooting stars of the Perseid Meteor shower.

Every 130 years or so, the Swift-Tuttle comet circles the Sun, streaming icy, dusty debris the size of sand and peas. Every mid-August, the Earth passes the orbit of Swift-Tuttle, raining fiery remains through the atmosphere. Igniting against the air's intense friction, they "shoot" across the sky. Books by people who study these things say they fly about 37 miles per second (60 kps), most burning away far above the ground.

The Perseid showers are seen in the sky around the constellation of Perseus the Hero, giving the name. Early Greeks explained that the god Zeus, father of Perseus, visited Perseus' mortal mother Danae in a shower of brightness. Later the event was renamed (or reborn) as "The Tears of St. Lawrence" for their appearance during the August festival of Saint Laurentius. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writings of Perseid showers date from the 8th century. I grew up on Russian childhood social-utopian folk bedtime stories of comets, mixed with my Grandmother's whispers of fiery conflagration, later determined from an unknown comet or part bursting over Tunguska Krasnoyarsk Siberia around 1908, devastating the forest (later politically reinvented as a nuclear event, and editorially as UFOs for Russian science fiction writing and American television).

What about your neck?
When watching meteor showers standing or sitting, don't martyr your neck. If you crane your neck and push the chin forward when looking upward, you put destructive force on the neck, shown in three examples that follow:

• Three images above show craning the neck and jutting the chin. Injurious compression builds in vertebrae, discs, and surrounding soft tissue.
• The left and middle images show leaning the upper body backward. Thoracic lean overly arches the lower back (hyperlordosis), adding weighted compression to the joints called facets and soft tissue of the lower spine.
• The right photo shows unhealthy craning with the chin forward, common in some yoga and exercise classes. It adds sizeable compressive loading on the back of neck vertebrae plus shearing force on the discs. When raising arms upward, it contributes to rotator cuff compression and injury. Click Overhead Lifting, Reaching, and Throwing Part I - Shoulder and Rotator Cuff Injury.
  

I understand that jutting the chin far forward is often taught as proper form. I have taken yoga classes in India with major names and those unknown to the outside world. One teacher told me pushing the neck and chin forward protects the discs. It unfortunately doesn't. Shearing force on the discs is severe when you jut the chin forward then raise it. Shear is a structural strain when one layer shifts sideways (or front to back) in relation to the other. Damage may take years to accrue until visible on x-ray. Don't jut your chin forward, especially not when looking upward.

Photo 3 above shows tilting the neck forward when looking through binoculars (left figure with yellow arrow). The chin is not forward, but the forward head still creates painful forces on the upper back contributing to upper crossed syndrome, disc trouble, and muscle strain in the classic diamond and hangar shape across the upper back. The pain is easily stopped. Keep neck vertical and chin in (right green arrow).

You can look directly upward for all you need in healthful position. Here are ways:

• Keep your chin in, loosely and relaxed.
• Shoulders back.
  
• The back of your head lifts loosely upward without strain.
  
• Straighten the rounded-forward curve of the upper spine - get more upward gaze range from your upper back.
  
• Don't yank or force the head and chin back, or the corners of your neck will ache.
• Don't lean back by arching your lower back.

Healthy upward gazing is a nice good-feeling stretch and exercise for the upper back and neck without injury. Use it for all overhead needs, photo 4 of Amsterdam policeman at right.

The time where we pass through the Perseid shower is long, from about July 15 through August 25. The highest activity is predicted over the Northern Hemisphere this coming weekend. Look up on Saturday, 11 August before dawn, Sunday morning the 12th, late Sunday night through Monday early dawn.

Because of the tilt to Swift-Tuttle's orbit, its fiery dust falls almost entirely on Earth's northern hemisphere. Southern hemisphere friends see few Perseids. The next good Southern hemisphere meteor shower is hoped to be the Geminid showers in December.

The constellation where meteors appear to come from is called the radiant. The Perseid meteor shower radiant is the constellation Perseus. The Leonid shower is hoped to peak this 18 November. Look toward the constellation Leo. The Geminid shower radiant is the Gemini constellation. Watch in mid-December with the evening crescent of the moon.

In photo 5 at left of looking up through the telescope, the neck is a bit more forward than needs to be.

Experiment on your own. Use a mirror and send in your photos of remaking healthful fun overhead gazing activities.

Labels: aerospace, disc, facet joints, fix pain, holiday, lordosis, lower back, neck, upper back, yoga

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Independence Day for Fitness

Today is Independence Day in the United States. The Declaration of Independence was drafted in June of 1776. Signing began by July. The paper itself didn't grant independence - work continued until independence came a few years later. After getting the idea to do something, the next thing is to take action. Here are ideas for a life free from things that are unhealthy - pain, unhealthful food, and exercises that reinforce bad habits:

Freedom from junk food:

Instead of soda, put a red sweet pepper in a food grinder. Cut about an inch of fresh ginger root and add through the grinder. In about 30 seconds preparation time you will have a sweet, cool, red, slushy drink with an exotic tang of ginger. Healthy and good tasting.

Instead of refined sugar sports drinks, put a peeled whole cucumber into the food grinder or low speed blender with a whole kiwi fruit. It will make a sweet, cool, slushy, green drink.

Instead of processed peanut butter and refined sugar jelly, put fresh raw nuts and apple slices into a grinder, mill, or chopper. In less than a minute of preparation time, you have a sweet nut butter that you can spread on fruit slices, carrots, and other good foods. Try walnuts, almonds, other fresh raw nuts, and experiment with different fruit combination to make different sweet creamy fresh nut butters.

For more recipes, Healthy Martial Arts has an entire chapter on nutrition.

Freedom from overeating

Just as you can't go through red lights every time you just feel like it, or hit someone any time you just feel like it, you don't just eat anything you feel like it at any time. That is unhealthy. Some people say any denial is unhealthy. That is like saying you can just wet your pants when you feel like it. Self-control is cleaner in body and spirit:
Exercise Common Sense Discipline - Turn Down Halloween Junk Food
A Little Good Exercise, a Lot of Bad Food - Overweight Still No Mystery

Freedom from unhealthy drugs and medicines:

Masses of products crowding store shelves claim to fix this and cure that. Millions of dollars are spent. The products seem dazzling, but much is hype and many produce unhealthy effects. Then more dollars are spent on more pills and products for the new problems caused by the medicines. Many prescribed medicines cause new problems that can be avoided. Stop the cycle and save yourself time, money, and unhappiness. If it is not healthy, it is not health care:
Teen Dies After Using Muscle Soreness Rub
Human Growth Hormone
Is Your Health Food Unhealthful?
Stomach Acid Drugs Increase Osteoporosis and Hip Fractures

Freedom from physical pain and injuries:

At the Special Operations Medical Association conference two years ago, it was released that 62% of our American injuries in Iraq are "Disease Non-Battle Injuries"(DNBI) - not from combat or supporting operations, but occurring in the gym. At the ACSM conference last month, a research study reported that their American military units had 17% DNBI injuries. I asked them how they kept their numbers so low. They replied that the number was for evacuations - injuries so serious they required removal from the base. Some of the most common exercise and stretching practices are not healthy. It is not that they are not good for some people or that they are overuse or done "wrong" - they are inherently bad movements. The same high injury rate is happening to fitness and yoga and Pilates instructors and students. I wrote about this in Welcome to the Fitness Fixer. Here are some specifics on why and what to do instead:
Why So Many Aerobics Injuries?
The Stretch You Need The Least
Sitting Badly Isn't Magically Healthy by Calling It a Hamstring Stretch
Safer Overhead Military Press
Are You Making Your Exercise Unhealthy?

Freedom from neck pain:

Fixing Upper Back and Neck Pain
Nice Neck Stretch
Breasts Causing Upper Back Pain is a Myth

Freedom from mental pain:

Healthier Heart
Exercise Your Sense of Humor
Which Ancient Exercise Gives Focus and Concentration?

Freedom from crunches:

Abdominal crunches are a popular exercise, but they are not healthy. This is new and different information, I know. Crunches "work" your abdominal muscles, but not in a healthful or beneficial way, whether done sitting or standing or using a machine. Crunches also train rounded bad posture that you know is unneeded and unhealthy when sitting or standing that way in real life.

The idea that strengthening the abdominal muscles stops back pain is a myth. Many muscular people have pain. They do their crunches, then stand and move in the overly-arched spinal posture that is the hallmark sign that the abs are not even being used, and which creates one major kind of chronic pain: Fixing the Commonest Source of Mystery Lower Back Pain

Crunches do not automatically make you use your abdominal muscles to position your spine to support your back. You do that on your own: What Abdominal Muscles Don't Do - The Missing Link.

Neutral spine has a small inward curve to the lower spine, just not a large one:
What is Neutral Spine and Why Does Sticking Out In Back Harm?
Aren't You Supposed To Stick Your Behind Out to Sit Down or Do Squats?

The simple act of standing and doing all your activities and exercise without letting your lower spine overly arch, and instead keeping neutral spine, uses more abdominal muscle involvement than doing crunches: Using Abdominal Muscles is Not Tightening or Pressing Navel to Spine.

Functional abdominal exercises use no forward bending: Abdominal Muscle Exercise - Better, Different, Not What You Think

The book No More Crunches No More Back Pain The Ab Revolution explains a healthier better way to use and exercise your abs (114 illustrations 124 pages). I have a number of copies of the new 3rd edition expanded to give to military personnel as gifts. Contact me to send one (free) to someone you know, to keep our guys healthy.

Independence is Healthy:
This post included links to a few past posts about being free of unhealthy things. Click the labels below each post for more related posts. Keep the things you do, eat, and think healthy. If a medicine is not healthy, it is not health care. If an exercise trains injurious body mechanics, use the time for healthier exercises that are more fun. There are better, healthier ways. Be free.

Labels: abdominal muscles, drugs, fix pain, holiday, injury, military fitness, neck, nutrition, performance enhancing modality, spirit, stress, upper back, weight loss

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Healthy Mother's Day

Neolithic groups (stone age) worshiped the mother. Ancient Germans worshipped the virgin Hertha holding her child. Scandinavians worshipped virgin Disa holding her child. In ancient Egypt it was Isis with infant Osiris. In India, Devaki had Krishna (also by virgin birth). In Asia, Cybele and Deoius. Chinese holy mother Shing Moo held her child in arms. Christian missionaries to Tibet, China, and Japan found that holy mothers depicted with splendid light around their head and holding a divine child had been worshiped long before they got there.

In Rome, the goddess was Demeter, meaning Earth Mother, wearing wreathes of braided corn in her hair. In ancient Greece, Demeter was called Ceres, the great mother with baby at breast. From her name "Ceres," we get the word "cereal" (grains), "which made man different from wild animals."

In the spring in ancient Greece, celebrations were held in honor of Rhea, the Mother of the Gods. Christian Europe celebrated the spring festival of "Mother Church" who (they believed) would protect them from harm. During the 1600's, England celebrated "Mothering Sunday" on the 4th Sunday of Lent, honoring the mothers of England. All cultures worshiped the divine, the Mother, who gives life and food, compassion and love.

So. How to celebrate this Sunday on Mother's Day? I'm in favor of some goddess worship, probably involving some rocks and food and chocolates and compassion and love. Not so original, but time tested and universal:

• Visit Mom (or a Mom) and give her a massage (if she wants one). Neck, hands, feet, back. Good for circulation for giver and receiver. Touch can be healthy. Ask her stories.
• Teach her a Nice Neck Stretch
• Make her (and you) something healthy to eat. For light teas, try cinnamon, cloves, grated orange peel, or ginger in hot water.
• For a cold treat without unhealthy junk food, mash a frozen banana with crushed raw walnuts or flax seeds. Use a food grinder or get free exercise by mashing them yourself in a bowl. It will taste like creamy ice cream. Flax seeds and walnuts have been found to be effective to help bone health as vegetarian sources of omega-3 (n-3) fatty acids. Raw walnuts (as part of a general low fat and cholesterol diet) have also been found to have a beneficial effect to decrease cardiovascular disease risk, among other benefits. This treat has fiber and is non dairy, both associated with lower breast cancer risk.
• Goddess worship often is helped with chocolate. The primary chemical in chocolate is theobromine. "Theo-" means God and "broma" comes from a word meaning food. The theobromine in chocolate was named for "food of the gods." Theobromine is an antioxidant, weak diuretic, stimulant, and mood booster, opens breathing airways, and relieves coughing. Dark chocolate has more theobromine than lighter chocolate, with flavonoids and phenolics, plant substances that are good for the heart. People who get a kind of vascular headache called migraine do better not to eat chocolate. For others, get plain cocoa, unsweetened, not junked up with sugar. Add the unsweetened cocoa to the frozen mashed banana and walnuts for a healthy sweet wonderful treat that tastes better than you would expect. For exotic flavor and more health benefit, add fresh grated ginger root.
• Sit outside in the air and sun to have your tea and frozen banana. Warnings on the dangers of overtanning are important for preventing skin cancer for people who work outdoors, who over-tan for cosmetic purposes, and a few other populations. Another group to consider is those spending too little time outdoors. Sunlight exposure and the Vitamin D it makes your skin produce, is increasingly documented as crucial to bone density, healthy immune function, positive mood, sound sleep at night, relief of symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, MS, Parkinsons, polycystic ovary, diabetes, and other health issues. A nice massage and tea and chocolate outside in the sunlight could be made into a wonderful Mother's Day. Nice excuse to buy a hat.
• Make Mom (or a Mom) some homemade healthy skin lotion. Commercial products have preservatives, dyes, and chemicals. Try combinations of grape seed oil, tea tree oil (very small amount), vitamins C and E, ginger, honey, tea, fresh aloe, and fragrances from oils, fruit, flowers like lavender, or leaves like mint. (Don't wear citrus oils like lime out in the sun.)
• Help out at a woman and child shelter. Or help at a men's shelter to help the guys get back on their feet to help their own families.
• Celebrate Mother Earth - go out and pick up litter. It's good exercise. Bend right.
• Make a trip to look around a home improvement center to see about some do it yourself solar projects, even if only to replace a few lights.
• Go do gardening for your mother, or your mother Earth. Lift and bend right, reach right, carry in healthy ways.
  
• Do some cooking, shopping, vacuuming, and cleaning for Mom (or a Mom). Water their plants. It's good exercise for you and a nice thing for them.
• Be good to each other - all the children of Earth.
• Follow the advice of the unknown who said, "The most important gift a father can give his children is to love their mother."
• If that doesn't work, take the advice on the side of aspirin bottles: "Take two aspirin, and keep away from children."

Labels: arthritis, circulation, diabetes, digestion, fibromyalgia, fix pain, green fitness, holiday, massage, nutrition, osteoporosis, Parkinson, spirit, stretch, sunlight, upper back

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Exercise Your Sense of Humor

A woman walked up to an old man rocking in a chair on his porch. "I couldn't help noticing how happy you look," she said. "What's your secret for a long happy life?"
"I smoke three packs of cigarettes a day," he said. "I drink a case of whiskey a week, eat fatty foods, and never exercise."
"That's amazing," the woman said. "How old are you?"
"Twenty-six," he said.

There is a Buddhist saying that laughter is the language of the Gods. Like every other skill, your sense of humor needs exercise to be healthy and be strong. Exercising your sense of humor also seems to be key to keep you healthy and strong. Increasingly, medical studies show positive medicinal effects of humor and laughter. In reading them for this post, many were numbingly humorless. I looked around some local medical fitness programs and gyms where people are exercising for health, and everyone looked miserable. Then you have people like my Mom, a professional dancer. One of the classes she teaches is tap dance for senior citizens. She named one of her lively groups, "The Clogging Arteries." Another is "Tapaholics Phenomenous - We Do More Than 12 Steps." Josh Billings (pen name of humorist Henry Shaw) summed it up, "There ain't much fun in medicine, but there's a heck of a lot of medicine in fun."

Exercise your sense of humor to reduce unhealthy stress and daily troubles: Don't argue with an idiot; they'll beat you with experience. Don't stress to be punctual; there may be no one there to appreciate it. Be like Santa Claus; only visit people once a year. Reduce stress on the road by peacefully ceding way to others. Joe Louis, boxing heavyweight champion, explained why he did not hit a motorist after the motorist abused him following an accident, "Why should I? When somebody insulted Caruso, did he sing an aria for them?"

Earlier this month, the Health Observances blog from our HealthLine editors posted April is National Humor Month. Before April is over, see how you can make your life, your home, and your exercise healthier with genuine fun. For a post on helping your heart with happiness, see Healthier Heart.

"Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine." - Lord Byron

Click the arrow below to play the song:

Click > arrow above for Don't Worry Be Happy. This link for PhoneZoo.com

Labels: holiday, mind, performance enhancing modality, spirit, stress

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Tax Stretch

The tax filing date is coming in a few days in the United States. Bending forward over a desk is a common source of sore neck and upper back.

A nice stretch for the upper back is to stretch back.

Stretching back reduces pressure on (unloads) the discs. A little about why bending forward loads the discs is in Disc Pain - Not a Mystery, Easy to Fix and Are You Making Your Exercise Unhealthy? Stretching back also is nice for the muscles.

Keep it simple. Breathe. Don't stress.

Labels: fix pain, holiday, neck, stress, stretch, upper back

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Thaipusam - Exercise of Body and Spirit

At the end of January, I posted about the celebration of Thaipusam. Readers have been e-mailing, asking for photos and stories about our work there studying the devotional piercing, and the medicines, exercises, and nutrition practices done to prepare for, and heal from the festival.

Thaipusam is a Hindu celebration of deep devotion (bhakti) and thanks to Muruga (also called other names including Subramaniam), the son of Shiva. Thaipusam is celebrated in many places around the world, with the largest observances in India, Singapore, and Malaysia.


For more than a month before the full moon in the Tamil month of "Thai," the faithful begin mental and physical exercise and preparation. They eat vegetarian food, eat sparingly, pray, do acts of kindness and good deeds, exercise, wash, use medicinal incense, say kind and positive things out loud, refrain from bad action, and from smoking and alcohol. They say that these practices improve their physical and mental endurance, and reduce infection or scarring from the devotional piercings.


This year, in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia where we studied the festival, there were over one million devotees at the Batu Caves. Two nights before Thaipusam, the faithful begin an overnight fire-lit procession from the Maha Mariamman Temple in Chinatown to the Cave, 15 kilometers away, an 8-hour journey. Many carry pots of milk symbolizing purity and life-giving, flowers, fire, and other offerings.

The faithful make an enormous celebration of happy song, drumming, dance, the air filled with the smell of incense and flowers, and chanting "Vel Vel! Vel Vel!" A Vel is a symbol of the lance given to Muruga by his mother, to win in the battle of goodness over evil.

Muruga is regarded as a destroyer of evil and preserver of good. He is usually depicted with a vel (lance). For that reason, in the Thaipusam celebration of thanks to Muruga, silver or steel vel in various sizes are pierced through the skin of the back, cheek, and tongue, a symbol of stopping evil, purifying yourself, and becoming more noble.

As devotees entered the festival grounds, many shaved and painted their head with herbs as a sign of pure thanks.

At Batu, there are 272 steps to the top. On the trip upward, a holy man, dancing each step one by one, turned to me and with three fingers daubed my forehead in a traditional triple stripe of Vibhuti sacred ash from his own forehead as a gift to me. He laughed then "doinked" my forehead with one finger and pronounced that I had a good third eye, and the sacred ash would keep it awake from then onward.


A highly devotional rite is carrying the Kavadi. We took the photo below of a kvadi-bearer, dressed in devotional yellow, pierced back and chest with vels. We have since seen this man's photo in the Wikipedia article about Thaipusam. He was a representational figure, that was certain. We got to talk with him and his family. We didn't want to interfere with anyone during their intense personal prayers, and tried to move out of his way through the packed bustling throng. But he stopped and smiled at us. A young man with him whipped a cell phone from his shorts and took *our* photo, click click! He called to me, "Hello Auntie!"


Many devotees there stopped to answer our questions about their lives, and to ask about ours, and to ask to take their photo with us - the funny tall foreigners.


Many of the faithful perform acts of thanks for a specific blessing received. This year in Penang, a man who prayed to heal an injured leg and recovered, walked the entire way to the festival on shoes made of nails.



The idea is not masochism (or reinjury), but showing outwardly and inwardly that the benefit received was far greater than the self-sacrifice given in return. The piercings aren't meant as a violent act, they are "only by expert hands" and a sign of will power, concentration, and piety. There are tourists who attend for just the festival day and try piercings as a stunt, or sometimes, to better understand the meaning of the festival and the thanksgiving it teaches.

The claims for the sacred ash is that its use prevents pain, bleeding, scarring, and infection. Part of what we found is that it naturally contains a styptic, similar to the shaving pencil that constricts blood vessels to stop shaving cuts from bleeding. It also contains natural local numbing and antimibrobials similar to clove oil. That's as far as we could go in studying that particular ash. Our bags of it were confiscated at the airport by United States TSA agents, along with all my wasabi paste and research notes on that and other work while there. I will post more in the future about these kinds of medicines, which are used in modern day patches and creams for muscle soreness.

More than just the chemical nature of the sacred ash, the weeks of preparing through physical exercise, nutritional improvement, daily mental exercises, and the great kindness of the family and friends supporting the kvadi-bearers go toward quick healing.



Do happy things, praise others, exercise a bit every day, eat things that are good for you and the environment. These things will prepare you to be strong in all you do.


Photos copyright by Jolie and Paul

Labels: holiday, injury, performance enhancing modality, spirit

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Fixing More Fitness Myths

On April 1st, I covered some fun fitness myths and how to change myth into healthier exercise. Today continues with more fun ways to get more exercise and reduce injury at the same time:


Heart Health

Myth - Anger has no health effects. Instead, turn contempt and anger for others to healthy dialog with:
Healthier Heart.

Understanding How "Sticking Out in Back" Isn't Neutral Spine:

Start with this one to see what overarching the lower back means, and how correcting it lets you do more in healthier ways:
Fixing the Commonest Source of Mystery Lower Back Pain

Then try Using Abdominal Muscles is Not Tightening or Pressing Navel to Spine to visualize how you simply tuck enough to make the belt line level when standing, not tilted. A small inward curve in the lower back remains when you shift to neutral spine, but not large enough to cause degenerative pinching on the facet joints, the joints of the lower spine.

Then feel the difference of tucking until neutral: Throw a Stronger Punch (or Push a Car or Stroller) Using This Back Pain Reduction Technique

and Change Daily Reaching to Get Ab Exercise and Stop Back and Shoulder Pain

Here is how to try it during squats: Free Exercise and Free Back and Knee Pain Prevention - Healthy Bending

Here are some abdominal exercises using these principles: Change Common Exercises to Get Better Ab Exercise and Stop Back Pain

Here is what it looks like not to use abs:
What Abdominal Muscles Don't Do - The Missing Link
What Does It Look Like to Not Use Abdominal Muscles?
and Healthier Carrying - Get Free Ab Exercise and Stop Pain.

Abs and Tightening:

Myth - Pressing navel inwards to tighten abs is the way to strengthen your abs or fix your posture. Fact - tightening will not move your spine out of unhealthy position and it impedes normal fluid motion:
Using Abdominal Muscles is Not Tightening or Pressing Navel to Spine.

Exercise Injuries

Myth - Exercise injuries are usually overuse and aging.
Fact - Simple misuse is easily fixed: Why So Many Aerobics Injuries? and What is "Fitness as a Lifestyle?"
A recent injury survey by US military revealed that 62% of American injuries in Iraq are occurring in the gym. Welcome to the Fitness Fixer tells more.
Some top docs say the military press should be avoided. I think it is a functional exercise and can be done in ways without upper body injury: Safer Overhead Military Press.

Dispelling Myths about Circulation and Massage:

Keeping Thai Massage Healthy Part III - Should You Do "The Blood Stop?"
Making Thai Massage Healthier Part II - Avoid Snapping Elbows or Knees Backward
Changing Thai Massage to Be Healthier Part I - Avoid Pressuring Lower Back Discs.

Sitting and Rising:

Myth - The way to sit and rise from a chair is to lean forward and stick out in back. Here is a way that uses muscles more:
Get Better Exercise From Your Chair
and
Aren't You Supposed To Stick Your Behind Out to Sit Down or Do Squats?

Dispelling the Myth That The Best Ab Exercise Means Crunches, Leg Lifts, and Bending Forward:

Abdominal Muscle Exercise - Better, Different, Not What You Think
Throw a Stronger Punch (or Push a Car or Stroller) Using This Back Pain Reduction Technique
Change Common Exercises to Get Better Ab Exercise and Stop Back Pain.

Knee Pain:

Myth - to avoid knee pain you must avoid impact activities or exercises that bend the knees. Here are ways to do all you enjoy and get stronger healthier knees:
Understanding positioning and impact: Healthy Knees.
For full squatting to the heels: Save Knees When Squatting
For half squatting for bending and exercise: Free Exercise and Free Back and Knee Pain Prevention - Healthy Bending.

Backpacks and Back Pain:

Myth - Carrying the weight of backpacks makes your back hurt. Fact - You can change the source of the back pain by how you carry the same pack:
Healthier Backpack Carrying to Get Better Exercise and Stop Back Pain
and
Carrying Schoolbooks Is Not the Cause of Back Pain.

Back Surgery:

Myth - surgery is necessary to avoid later problems. Fact - Studies have now found that is it not true that you necessarily risk future consequences if you do not have surgery. Surgery itself can be a source of later trouble:
Fix Disc Pain Without Surgery
and
Studies Say Back Surgery Not Needed.

Squats:

There are medical people who say that squats are bad for the back and knees. I believe that healthy squats make daily life and exercise healthier and smarter, and can prevent much back and knee pain:
Bending Right is Fitness as a Lifestyle
How Often Should You Be Healthy?
Free Exercise and Free Back and Knee Pain Prevention - Healthy Bending
How Good Would You Look From 400 Squats a Day - Just Stop Unhealthy Bending.

Cause of Disc Degeneration and Herniation:

Myth - Vertebral discs just go bad without warning, from small provocations like a sneeze or reaching or from aging, so it doesn't matter what you do. The good news is that discs are not soft "jelly donuts" as often described. They are tough like truck tires. It takes years of the same, specific, problem to break them down and move them out of place. See the mechanism:
Disc Pain - Not a Mystery, Easy to Fix

Then see examples during daily life:
The Cause of Disc and Back Pain
Are You Making Your Exercise Unhealthy?
and How Often Should You Be Healthy?

Brain Damage:

Myth - knocks to the head are funny and harmless. In reality, long-term damage may be common and serious. This has far reaching implication for law enforcement, domestic violence, full contact sports, and extreme entertainment:
Rocky IV and Head Injury.

Sitting and Back Pain:

It made headlines when researchers seemed to say that sitting up straight was wrong. Here is what they really meant:
Don't Fall for "Don't Sit Up Straight."

When you exercise for health, are you sitting in unhealthy ways? Are You Making Your Exercise Unhealthy?

and here are two for more comfortable sitting:
When Did Health Become Thinking Out Of The Box?
and Exercise and Stretch for Long Travel Sitting.

Upper Back and Neck Pain

Breasts Causing Upper Back Pain is a Myth

Myth - All neck stretches fix neck pain. Fact - there are some stretches that increase neck pain:
Upper Back Exercise and Neck Pain Prevention Too
and The Stretch You Need The Least.
Here are stretches that work better:
Fixing Upper Back and Neck Pain
Thumbs Can Show Tightness That Leads to Upper Back Pain
Nice Neck Stretch
and Quick, Feel-Good Upper Back and Chest Stretch.

Dispelling the Myth That Any Exercise or Stretch is Good For You:

The Stretch You Need The Least
Is Bad Martial Arts Good Exercise?
Common Exercises Teach Bad Bending
Sitting Badly Isn't Magically Healthy by Calling It a Hamstring Stretch
Common Exercises Teach Hip Tightness When Kicking, Stretching, and on the Stairs
Healthier Hamstring Stretching
and Better Achilles Tendon Stretch.

Is More Calcium is the Answer for Bone Density?:

Exercise is More Important Than Calcium Supplements for Bones
and
Collapsing Astronaut Gives Healthy Reminder.

Making Peace

I have taken many classes where the teacher claims their exercise system gives focus and calm, then they lose all their concentration if a student arrives late, if a phone rings, or if the class next door is too loud. These posts give things to try instead:
Which Ancient Exercise Gives Focus and Concentration?
Exercise Common Sense Discipline
The Story of the Black Belt.

More myths - Fixing Fitness Myths

Labels: abdominal muscles, circulation, facet joints, holiday, knee, lordosis, massage, myths, nutrition, squat

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Fixing Fitness Myths

"The public has an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except which is worth knowing." - Oscar Wild

April 1 seems to be a day to notice, more than usual, if things in the news are not facts but April Fool. On other days, urban legends and other stories are still popular, sometimes more popular than what is really going on.

The observation that the Earth is flat seemed obviously true at one time until we had more information. It used to be a taught as a medical fact that the cause of epilepsy was masturbation. When I was in school, one of my medical books stated that you don't need to eat calcium since you can "get all you need from your bones." It is true that you pull calcium from your bones when you don't eat enough, although with unhealthy results.

The post Forensic Science told of two crime-science myths, often still taught in forensic books and popularized in television shows, which were never true. Following are more posts hoping to replace myth with information, so that you can get stronger and do more, without the injuries or restrictions in activity that are part of many fitness or injury rehab practices.

Feet and Ankles

Myth - You need tight shoes for support. Fact - tight shoes can deform toes and prevent healthy muscle use:
Are Your Shoes Too Tight?
and Healthy Toe Stretches.

Myth - All ankle stretches prevent sprains. Fact - Some may enhance predisposition to ankle sprains:
Unhealthy Yoga Ankles.

Myth - Following an ankle sprain, bracing must be continuous since no exercise can restore the area. Here is another way -
How To Treat Ankle Sprains and Prevent Them
and
No More Ankle Sprains Part II.

Dispelling Myths of Orthotics Use:

Myth - Only orthotics can place your arches in neutral position. Fact - your own muscles can often do the same:
Arch Support Is Not From Shoes
and
Which Shoes Help Exercise, Fall Prevention, and Ankles?

Dispelling Aging Myths - That respiratory function only declines with age:

Do Breathing Exercises Work?

Dispelling Aging Myths - That you only get weaker with aging:

Getting Stronger is for Everyone
What I Learned at the Aging Conference
Better Balance by Christmas
Conference on Aging Dec 2, 2006 in Midtown New York.

Dispelling Nutrition for Exercise Myths:

That weight gain with aging is primarily lower metabolism: Metabolism - How to Lose Weight and Save Money

or that Healthy eating is difficult or expensive:
What Medical Students Told Me About Nutrition.

Myth that you must eat much protein to get muscles:
Get Muscles for Christmas

Myth that acid prevention drugs are harmless:
Stomach Acid Drugs May Increase Osteoporosis and Hip Fractures

Myth that food marked "Health Food" means it has to be healthy:
Is Your Health Food Unhealthy
and Exercise Common Sense Discipline - Turn Down Halloween Junk Food

and the myth that it's healthy for children to eat junk food:
A Little Good Exercise, a Lot of Bad Food - Overweight Still No Mystery.

Myths that only gyms and weights can improve your strength:

How to get natural exercise is in Rocky IV and Healthier Exercise,
Getting Stronger Without a Gym
Exercising With A Friend - Partner Leg Press
Don't Confuse Exercise With Real Fitness
Healthy Toe Stretches
Quick and Fun Arm and Body Strengthener
and Quick and Easy Strength and Balance Exercise.

More to come for smart, fun, healthier ways to get exercise.

Labels: aging, ankle, arches, arm, balance, breathing, feet, fix pain, forensic, holiday, leg stretch, myths, nutrition, osteoporosis, partner exercise, shoes, sprain, strength, toes, yoga

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Happy Lunar New Year

The New Year is beginning in many places around the world. Happy Lunar New Year on Feb 18th - Sheng Dan Kuai Le Xin Nian Yu Kuai. To my friends who prefer Cantonese Chinese - Sing Dan Fae Lok. Gung Hai Fat Choi. To family, readers, and friends in Thailand, Suk san wan pee mai. In India, the Maha Shivaratri fell on the night of February 16th this year. 'Ratri' is Sanskrit for night, and Shivarati is the night Shiva performed the Tandava Nrityathe, the dance of primordial creation.


In the first photo above, friends are sitting in full squat to light Sai Lanterns, that float slowly overhead by the hundreds like ethereal jellyfish. See fun posts that show why squatting is part of Fitness as a Lifestyle:
How to Save Knees When Squatting,
and More Fun Squatting
and Achilles Stretch in the Bathroom
and Bending Right is Fitness as a Lifestyle.

Happy bending, lifting, dancing, stretching, and reaching for exercise as a lifestyle. Follow this blog for simple things, new with each post, to easily make this new year a year of health.

Labels: holiday, squat

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Stretching With a Friend - Partner Pectoral Stretch

The posts Quick, Feel-Good Upper Back and Chest Stretch and Fixing Upper Back and Neck Pain showed two ways to stretch your upper body in the way most needed - backward, not forward. Today's post gives the same great-feeling, healthful stretch for two, the Partner Pectoral Stretch:

1. Stand back-to-back, as in the photo, arms outstretched, hands comfortably linked, thumbs face upward.
2. Don't lean back, arch your back, or jut your neck forward. Stand straight.
3. One partner gently pulls arms forward, while the second partner allows their arms to stretch backward, letting the chest muscles stretch (left-hand photo).
4. The idea is not to yank the second partner's shoulder at the joint. Allow the front chest muscles to lengthen. It should only feel good.
5. Hold for a few seconds while breathing easily, then switch so the second partner who just stretched arms backward, pulls arms forward to stretch the first partner (right hand photo).

Valentine's week Fitness Fixer posts on sharing health began with a fun lower body exercise in Partner Leg Press. Tuesday linked to doing healthier massage. Wednesday told about a sincere meaning of Valentine's Day - teaching a neighbor how to quickly stop painful, frightening back pain and sciatica.

Valentine's day doesn't have to be one day, then forgotten about. It can be the start of healthy interaction between any people and for yourself, for every day, which is the idea of "Fitness as a Lifestyle."


More partner stretches and exercises in the book Healthy Martial Arts

Labels: arm, chest, fix pain, holiday, partner exercise, stretch, upper back

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Each One Teach One

I have grandchildren - my patients are using what I taught them, to fix pain for others.

Monday's post on Partner Leg Press began the Valentine's week Fitness Fixer posts on sharing health with a friend. Today on Valentine's Day I have a post that best shows this. This story is from one of our own Healthline Fitness Fixer readers, Ivy Griffiths of New Zealand. Ivy writes,

"On Thursday night my neighbour was taken to hospital as she was experiencing pain in her hip which in turn went down her leg. I told her that I thought it was sciatica. X-rays showed that there was degeneration of the spine and that she had a pinched nerve. They gave her the usual drugs and she returned home yesterday afternoon. Her son told them at the hospital that they knew someone who would help that person being ME. Dr. Jolie I just about freaked out so I told them that I could help with the cause but not fix the pain. I went on to show her how to lift herself up on her elbows (face down) before getting out of bed, how to sit straight and squatting instead of bending over and all the advice that I have received from you over the past year. I took her for little walks around the village so that she wasn't sitting all the time. Around 5pm this evening (Saturday) I went to see how she was. To my amazement, she told me that she had been reading your book "Fix Your Own Pain Without Drugs or Surgery" which I had lent her. She had thrown away the drugs and the pain had gone. Believe me when I say that I was blown away."

Ivy, thank you. The world is better because of you.

Ivy recently had a special birthday. See which one in The Best of the Medical Blogosphere.

Follow Ivy's fun post comments over the past months showing how she improved her health and stopped her pain:

Free Exercise and Free Back and Knee Pain Prevention - Healthy Bending
Quick and Easy Strength and Balance Exercise
Don't Confuse Exercise With Real Fitness
If Better Abdominal Muscles Are Your New Year's Resolution, Try This
Quick, Feel-Good Upper Back and Chest Stretch
Studies Say Back Surgery Not Needed
Healthier Carrying - Get Free Ab Exercise and Stop Pain
Achilles Stretch in the Bathroom

Readers, keep the intelligent comments coming in reply to posts. Send me your stories and (small file size) fun photos of your progress. Prizes for the best ones. Use a photo sharing service so I can upload directly from your photo link.

Happy Valentine's Day, a day of being good and healthy to yourself and others. That's health and love.

Labels: fix pain, holiday, partner exercise, readers inspiring story, sciatica, spirit, stress

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Exercising With A Friend - Partner Leg Press

It's Valentine week. Each post this week will show a fun way to improve health with a friend.

The Partner Leg Press strengthens your legs, hips, and posture muscles, and practices balance and good body position. It can be safely done with children too.

1. Partner 1 lies face up on the floor with both feet raised.
2. Partner 2 positions themselves facing down, with Partner 1's feet on their chest or abdomen, and holding their body straight (photo 1).
3. Partner 1, on the floor, bends knees to lower and pushes legs almost straight, in a leg-press action.
4. Repeat the leg pressing many times, trying for at least 10 presses, then switch places.
5. Be careful. This one is so much fun that Partner 2 may drool on, or fall on Partner 1 by accident (or purpose). Have fun on Valentine's Day.
6. Then try the Partner Leg Press with Partner 2 face up (photo 2). Start by partially sitting with Partner 1's feet on your back, and "walk" your feet away for straight positioning. Do several presses, then switch places.

Even when you're on your own, you don't need weights or machines to strengthen your legs. Past posts have shown how healthy bending during daily life strengthens legs in the same way as squats in a gym:
Free Exercise and Free Back and Knee Pain Prevention - Healthy Bending
and
How Good Would You Look From 400 Squats a Day - Just Stop Unhealthy Bending

As you do the fun Partner Leg Press, you adjust your balance and positioning for the other person. Working with a partner practices cooperation and empathy - important and often ignored aspects of health.

Why tell a loved one or child you can't spend time with them because you need to go exercise? Instead of making exercise isolating and separating, and something you have to stop your life and disrupt your family to do, make it unifying, friendly, and fun. That is health.

More partner exercise can be found in the book Healthy Martial Arts.

Labels: balance, holiday, leg press, leg strength, partner exercise, strength

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Thaipusam

We are in Malaysia for the Thaipusam. At the first full moon of the Tamil month named "Thai" when the Pusam star is highest in the sky, the Tamil community and others celebrate the festival of Thaipusam.

People fast, wash, pray, and give thanks by various acts of devotion. Simple acts of loyalty and care are to carry pots of milk. Others seek to purify themselves further with the self-imposed discipline and hardship of piercing their skin, tongue, body, or face with skewers.

Men carry altars called kavadis, attached to their bodies with skewers piercing their skin all over their bodies and faces. Fruit are hung from the skin with hooks. The kvadis pulled by pure human devotion range in size up to the enormous vel kavadi, attached by 108 vels pierced through the chest and back.

Some of the extreme piercing practices have been pointed out to be unhealthy and contrary to the intention of the Hinduism and non-Hindu beliefs that wanted to create a spirit of positive blessing to the festival.

There are claims that devotees enter a trance, feel no pain, do not bleed, leave no scars, and suffer no infection. That is why we are here to study. We will let you know what we find - click here for Thaipusam- Exercise of Body and Spirit.

Labels: holiday, performance enhancing modality, spirit

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New Year's Resolutions

This spring I will be offering two opportunities to learn breakthrough techniques in person to fix pain, and get stronger and more flexible. People come from all over and have a fun time.

The spring workshops are "Fix Your Own Back Pain - Medical Breakthroughs in Non-Surgical Treatment" and "Stretches That Help, Stretches That Harm."

In the fun, active back pain workshop, learn to get rid of neck, back, and hip pain and keep it from coming back. You will fix the causes of neck pain, back pain, sciatica, herniated and degenerating discs, stenosis, lordosis, facet pain and other problems right in class. In the stretch workshop you will learn about the many common stretches that harm your joints or don't improve flexibility, and innovative stretches to do instead. You will learn how to not get stiff and sore in the first place:

1. On April 21 2007, we will run both workshops in one full, fast-moving day at Temple University Ambler/Ft Washington campus in Ambler, Pennsylvania. Fix Your Back Pain will run 9:30am to 2pm, and "Stretches That Harm" will run from 2:30 to 4:30pm. Contact Rhonda Geyer, Director, by email or phone (215) 283-1304. Out-of-towners can have a fun Saturday in class and stay to visit Philadelphia on Sunday. Tourist info at www.goPhila.com.
2. For a slower pace, come to Temple University at the Center City campus in downtown Philadelphia to attend just the Back pain workshop, held over two Saturdays March 3 and 10, 2007. Each class is held from 9am-11:30am. This is one class divided over two sessions. Plan to attend both days. To register e-mail Kevin Wood Director, or call (215) 204-6565.

Links to register for both classes on-line plus more class info are on my web site page for CLASSES. Both workshops are a combination of fun and fast-moving audiovisual lecture and non-strenuous physical practice. Both classes are suitable for the out-of-shape as well as the athlete. Wear comfortable ordinary clothing. If you have to change your clothes to fix pain and move and stretch in healthy ways during normal life, how are you supposed to have an ongoing normal life without pain?

Come prepared to have fun and stretch your brain.

Labels: disc, education, fix pain, holiday, stretch

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Better Balance by Christmas

I heard a radio program about yoga for senior citizens. The yoga program directors made the usual statements about yoga helping strength and balance. Then they said something that seemed at odds with their goal. They said, "If your balance is poor, do the moves sitting down or hold on to the wall." The very thing that you need to improve your balance is to practice standing and (safely) not holding the wall. If you sit and hold on, you prevent practicing balance.

Balance that helps your normal daily life is easy to improve at any age. All you need is to stand up and balance. Balance is quickly lost with sitting and disuse.

How does balance practice help you? You have receptors in all your joints that sense positioning. They can tell if you are about to fall. They tell your body to send signals to your muscles to steady you. If you don't use your balance sensors with balance practice, they become slow and unable to sense positioning well. You may tip over far enough to fall before your receptors sense it and can tell your muscles to pull you to upright position. Balance practice also improves your muscles. Without balance practice, your muscles become too slow and weak to prevent you from tipping over and falling. If you have let yourself become tight, brittle, and weak from lack of general exercise, you may strain, tear, or break something from a fall that would not have otherwise caused any harm.

Years ago when I left working in the hospital to go into private practice in sports medicine, I found that by making house calls you learn the reasons for people's pain and injuries that you will never see in a hospital or clinic exam setting. It was the first time I ever saw anyone have to sit to put on or take off their shoes. Here are a few quick, functional (real life) ways to improve balance:

• Stand up when you put on your socks or hosiery.
• Stand up to put on your pants. Lift one leg in front of you, keep your upper body comfortably straight and upright, and slide on each pant leg.
• Stand up to put on your shoes. Try two ways: holding the foot in the air front of you to place the shoe, and by crossing the ankle on the opposite knee.
• For more balance, after putting on one sock or shoe, remain standing on one foot and do a small squat on one leg to reach the other sock or shoe on the floor.

If you can't stand to dress yourself, and you have at least one working leg, you may be too tight and weak and unsteady for healthy normal life. To get started:

• Practice standing on one foot without holding on to anything. If balance is poor stand near a wall for safety to get started and have a skilled friend help. Practice standing for 10 counts without holding on. Increase how long you can balance.
• Stand on one foot and swing the other forward and back, side to side, without holding on or touching down. Safely.
• If you use a cane, practice walking holding it off the ground. Use your brain to do this intelligently and safely to improve balance and reduce dependence on the cane.

Balance is "use or lose" and can be quickly improved with safe smart practice. You don't need to go to a gym or "do exercises." Use balance skills as part of your daily life.

For more fun and functional real life balance activities see the books Fix Your Own Pain Without Drugs or Surgery and Healthy Martial Arts.

Labels: achilles stretch, aging, ankle, balance, feet, fix pain, holiday, leg strength, leg stretch, practice of medicine, side, spirit, squat, strength, stretch, upper back, yoga

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Fitness and Health as a Lifestyle for Thanksgiving

If you think you won't have time to exercise over the Thanksgiving holiday, here is good news. This post will show you how to move in healthy ways so that you have healthy exercise built-in to all the cooking, shopping, furniture moving, and social interactions. Here is more good news. You don't have to go to a gym to work off the stress and eating too much of the Thanksgiving holiday. Life is not supposed to be a poison that you deliberately take, then need an antidote to offset.

Here are four of the healthiest, quickest ways to make your Thanksgiving into fitness and health as a lifestyle:

1. To pick up chairs, babies, and grocery bags,
   to move furniture, and for lifting things from the floor, bend your knees, keeping your weight back toward your heels, and your body upright.
   
   
2. To carry chairs, babies, grocery bags, furniture, and any loads in front of you, don't lean back. It is a common bad habit to lean the upper body backward, increasing the lower back arch. Leaning backward shifts the weight of the load off your core and arm muscles and onto your lower spine. Get free, built-in exercise for your abs and arms and save your back by standing straight. Don't lean and arch backward to carry things.
   
   
3. Notice all the times you round and hang forward over things that you can easily reach by standing upright. Check your upper back positioning when standing over counters, sinks, grocery bins, vacuum cleaners, cribs and baby-changing tables, and when setting food tables. Don't let your body weight hang over and forward. Stand upright, chin in, and just tilt your head downward in relaxed manner to see what you are doing. Relax shoulders downward. Smile. Breathe.
   
   
4. Preparations and family interactions are no excuse to do unhealthy behaviors out of habit like smoking, overeating, and arguing, then blame it on stress. The bad habits are even more stress on body and mind. If something is wrong, see about fixing it in a good way. Don't suffer in silence with people telling you that you have to be happy just because of a holiday. Make your home healthy for yourself. There is no place it matters more:

• Get exercise cleaning the house of junk and clutter. Take the extra clothing, toys, and household items to a shelter. Carry the bags with healthy positioning to the people who need it.
• Make a healthy meal with family or alone, without television or phone. Carry the meals to shut-ins and isolated elderly in your neighborhood, and the homeless on the street.
• Volunteer at a soup kitchen. Do grocery shopping, cooking, and vacuuming for those who are too sick or disabled or alone to do it for themselves. If you think you don't have time because you have young children, take them with you to help carry things and to teach them healthy ideals, and how thankful they can be for the home you provide.
• Don't smoke, drink soda (diet soda is just as unhealthy) eat junk food (even if it has marketing words like "organic" on the label), or undo the health benefits of fruit and vegetables by junking them with cream, sugar, and cornstarch. Add up all you spend on cigarettes and junk food that take a healthy body and give it health problems. Take the money and give to the poor. With what you save on prescriptions and treatments for all the pain and jitters you cause yourself, you can feed a village and still take a vacation.
• When you eat the Thanksgiving meal, say thankful things. Taste your food. Turn down seconds. Breathe. Smile. Help clean up. Shoulders back. Enjoy the roof over your head. That is health as a lifestyle.

Drawings and more ideas on healthy positioning - see the book Stretching Smarter Stretching Healthier

Labels: abdominal muscles, achilles stretch, arthritis, balance, disc, facet joints, fix pain, green fitness, hamstring, holiday, knee, leg press, leg strength, leg stretch, lower back, neutral spine

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Exercise Common Sense Discipline - Turn Down Halloween Junk Food

Martial arts class fell on Halloween night this year. Would students pay lip service to health and discipline in class then go out eating unhealthy junk?

The festival of Halloween, Samhain (pronounced "saow-in") or Summer's end, Hallotide, Saint's day eve (All Hallows Eve), Day of the Dead, and a month earlier as Babye Leto in chilly Russia, is supposed to remember and revere (or at least appease) the ancestors and Saints. The idea wasn't to glorify gore or sickness (or merchandising), but think of those who are gone, just as the life of summer is gone, and thank the last harvests before the coming Winter. Gifts of food, lights, and effigies of those passed on decorate houses and streets.

My students have been learning that self-discipline is a voluntary exercise. To have inner peace, you just stop tensing your body and saying rude things. To stop slouching, you just use your own muscles to move your spine to healthy position. There is no special exercise to strengthen you to do it; you use your muscles to sit and stand straight and that gives you the exercise. There is no special exercise to be able to do the vigorous moves we do in class. You just keep moving and trying, without stopping and without complaining, and that gives you the strength. This week when I came in to teach, students were sitting quietly and comfortably straight. Their equipment was ready and neat. Since class began in September, several quit smoking, at least the day before and of class, to be able to get through class. Two students told me they had stopped binge-and-purge eating because they could not do class as well when they did, even though they had always done it for exercise classes before. They realized a better body and spirit came more from all we do in class than from an eating disorder. Others stopped eating junk because they want to be healthier, and to practice having control instead of acting on every impulse.

Sometimes, people think that training in martial arts means whoever can beat up others the most, or be the most destructive, is the best. The kneeling Zen story before class last night was the story of who is the true master:
It was clear that the second wizard was the true master - the master of himself. In class, students stayed disciplined to learn rapid hand strikes and jumping kicks. After class I had bags for them of oranges and apples, notepads to write thoughts, sprouted mung beans to mix in snacks, some walnuts to crack for hand strength. When they walked outside in the dark and cold, they seemed to glow like harvest candles, standing straight with warmth and cheer from their hard work.

Related Fitness Fixer:
Is Your Health Food Unhealthful
Are You Making Your Exercise Unhealthy?
Fast Fitness Halloween
Mischief is Not Good Exercise - Halloween Ahimsa

Sort-Of Related:
Body Farm Not Just For Halloween

More On How To Get In Shape:
Secret To Get Better and Fitter

Book:
Story and more on developing physical skills and discipline in the book Healthy Martial Arts

Labels: holiday, martial arts, nutrition, spirit, stress, weight loss

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Is Your Health Food Unhealthful?

Most people know junk food when they see it at Halloween, coming next week. Would you recognize it in disguise now? In gyms and fitness centers, I see people buying expensive exercise foods and drinks advertised for "health" and "energy" that are not healthful. Here are four things to check, with more in coming posts:

Many "energy" and workout foods are high calorie. The sport science definition of calories is energy. That does not mean calories make you energetic. If you are calorie deficient you will feel weaker. More calories than you need will not make you stronger or able to exercise more. A 400 calorie workout then eating a 200 calorie sports bar and a 200 calorie energy drink plus regular meals will result in weight gain not loss.

Next, many bars and drinks are little more than unhealthful candy - refined sugar, fillers, dyes, hydrolyzed proteins, unhealthy fats, and some synthetic vitamins. Eating them does not make you healthy just because they have the words "natural," "healthy," "vitamins," or "exercise" on the label. You would get more vitamins and health from eating a pear and some walnuts. Some that are labelled "low-carb" are high in unhealthy transfat and hydrogenated fat. Many products labelled "low-fat" or "no-fat" have much junk refined sugar. Junk fats and sugars damage your health over the long term. There is nothing you need to eat that has high fructose corn syrup. Both junk food and "health food" low carbohydrate products can have sugar substitutes like sorbital that can make you bloated and gassy.

Third, many powders, drinks, and bars have unfermented soy, which does not have the benefits of fermented soy, and in large amounts can slow the thyroid and may have estrogen-promoting qualities. People with tendency to estrogen-dependent tumors like fibroids, cystic ovary, and endometriosis probably want to avoid these products.

Fourth, watch for stimulants in exercise foods, often caffeine, guarana, ephedra, ginseng, ma huang and others. You don't need them to exercise or lose weight. Many exercisers take them, plus energy pills, diet pills, and their usual coffee and espresso. A cycle starts of needing them to avoid feeling weary and headachy. Nervousness, anxiety, inability to concentrate by day and sleep at night, and irregular heart beats can occur. Then over-the-counter or prescription medicines to try to stop those effects? That's not health.

Make healthier, less expensive sports drinks by putting an apple, banana, grapes, or other fruit, with nuts, a green pepper, and clean water in a blender, grinder, food processor, mixer, or just mash them in a bowl. Add any combination of unsweetened cocoa powder, cinnamon, cloves, ginger root, sesame seeds, and healthy items for flavor. When baking Halloween treats, there is no need to add any sugar. Use mashed fruit. Instead of shortening, use a cooked sweet potato and ground flax seeds or walnuts. Instead of icing, mash apples (no cooking needed) for a topping as sweet as any sugar or syrup, and a better habit for the long run. Get more ideas on our food blogger's Candy Free Halloween Treats (and Tricks) and on The NYTimes opinion page today for commentary on making the change to healthier food thinking.

Exercise your brain and be able to spot foods marketed for health and exercise that are unhealthy foods in disguise.

Related Fitness Fixer:

• Healthy Mothers Day
• Junk Food Through Your Skin?
• Healthy Youth Parties - Fun Exercise, No Junk Food
• Fast Fitness - Homemade Sports Food
• Exercise Common Sense Discipline - Turn Down Halloween Junk Food
• Are You Making Your Exercise Unhealthy?
• See an entire chapter on making good tasting, easy health food for exercise and a chapter on performance enhancing supplements, drugs, and food in the book Healthy Martial Arts.

Labels: drugs, holiday, nutrition, performance enhancing modality, practice of medicine, weight loss

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