Blog Posts - EQUIVITA

Go Faster

8/3/2022

Often my focus on biomechanics is centered around performing activity with maximum stress on the muscles and I would contend that this is exactly where focus should first be placed, especially with any structured exercise. Putting the stress on the muscles is not only how you ensure you are getting the benefits of the exercise, which is the reason you are doing the exercise, as well as how you decrease the potential for injury or progressive wear-and-tear to the body from the exercise.

However, biomechanics is also how you can focus your exercise for aesthetic gains like developing a peak to your biceps or raising the height of your glutes. And biomechanics is also how you can modify performance like changing the speed you run.

Running speed is a simple equation:
Length of stride x Frequency of stride = speed

Both of these factors are pretty simple and it seems fairly straightforward. The amount of distance you cover with each stride and the faster each leg covers that distance, the greater your speed. But, as your foot extends in front of your body the ground strike force pushes against your foot and against the momentum of forward movement and the further in front of your body the more directly this force pushes against the direction you are moving.

One way to counter this slowing force is to reduce the amount your leg is extended, but this obviously reduces your stride length. Some of this loss, but only some, can be regained by focusing on pushing the rear leg behind you more. Another way to change this equal-and-opposite force that is hindering your forward movement is by changing the position that your leg is in when you strike the ground. Having your knee more bent when your foot strikes the ground directs the force of impact in a more vertical direction and less against the forward movement. The extreme of this gait is the position that is used by sprinters and is the way to generate maximum speed for short periods of time.

So, those are three different gait patterns that each have their own stress forces to the body, positive aspects and limitations: extension in front, extend behind and with greater knee bend. If you are running for distance, I recommend that you use all of them and change your gait as you are running. This will change the way your muscles are working and disrupt repetitive forces to your body.

And while walking has its own gait patterns, and usually less force, there are some similarities not the least of which is that your body is actively trying to find an easier way and using consciously different gaits will decrease your body’s ability to leverage on joints and increase your benefits.

As always, let me know how I can help.
Adam

Envisioning Movement

8/2/2022

What does it mean to move mindfully through space? In a lot of cases, people move as though the body is a singular unit, rather than as a makeup of hundreds of smaller independent components. The degree to which these components are able to move independently is a direct correlation to the degree of freedom a body has to move. Thus, in order to move mindfully, we have to first recognize the independent components of our body. Take the spine and pelvis for example. When tension and tightness are present in the body, we tend to move as though this central column is a singular piece where bending is difficult, and turning the upper body results in the lower body turning with it, rather than each vertebrae moving freely and independently of the pelvis.

Perhaps the proper way to dissect the individual components is to first determine where your body is in space. Sensing the spacial occupation of the body helps to first connect the mind and body together and prepare the body for movement. When the mind is prepped for the movement the body will make, we can better move in proper alignment and mechanics. Sitting in a chair and without looking (or even close your eyes) or making any adjustments, sense into where the limbs are. Are they close to the body or further away? What is the relationship between the feet and the ground? Where is the spine in relation to the pelvis? Are the sitz bones connecting to the seat, or is the weight distributed more forward or back on the tailbone? Is the head stacked on top of the spine or is it shifted forward? Is the chest and lower ribs scrunched together or is there ample space between the ribs?

As you continue to scan the body and sense into where the components of the body are in relation to each other, you are re-connecting the brain with the physical body. This is a great grounding technique, too! When we re-link the brain and body, we are able to begin reprogramming the neural pathways of the brain, and begin to re-learn a new way (a proper way) of movement.

Now that you’ve identified where the body components are, gently make any adjustments needed: feet under the knees, weight grounded on the sitz bones, spine stacked with the head on top, shoulders back and down, etc. Once here, keep the eyes closed, and envision the movement of standing up. What is required in the body to happen in order to accomplish this movement? Envision the entire process: weight shifting forward as you hinge at the hips, thighs and glutes engaging, core engaging, pelvic floor coming online, exhaling as you lift the hips off the seat, maybe you bring in the assistance of the arms to push up slightly, unhinging at the hips to raise up as the legs straighten.

Now that you’ve run through the process in your mind’s eye, do it! How does it feel in the body when the mind has prepped the nervous system for the movement to come? You can test this out during normal daily activities, and during exercise. Try a movement like normal, then try envisioning the movement before doing it and notice the differences.

This envisioning exercise goes both ways in that it can help and hinder us. The mind is the powerhouse of the body and holds supreme influence, so much so that envisioning things like jumping, running, or throwing a ball tell the nervous system to begin prepping. The muscles will actually contract and certain chemicals and hormones in the body begin releasing—the body is experiencing the act prior to it happening! This is how consistent exposure to a mental fear state negatively impacts the body and keeps it in a fight or flight state. So if envisioning is powerful enough to help us use our biomechanics to their best ability during exercise, being mindful of what we envision the rest of the day is just as important. If someone’s mental capacity is mainly being used to think of negative things, the body is constantly prepping for this event that the brain keeps telling it will happen.

Mindful movement is a mental exercise just as much as it is physical. We can re-wire the brain towards healthier movement habits the more we provide it the opportunity to do so. When you can, take a deep breath and run through what the optimal movement or action you’re about to take would look like and notice the changes that happen over time!

Best,
Katherine

Map Your Marvelous Diaphragm

8/1/2022

The diaphragm (the orange colored organ in the 3D image above) is a muscle nestled up under your lungs--by design. When the diaphragm contracts and relaxes, with the help of the intercostals (muscles between the ribs), it causes air to move in and out of the lungs.
If you look at both the above 3D image and this illustrated image of the diaphragm, you can see how the expansion and contraction of the diaphragm will impact the viscera of the belly (your guts) and the psoas muscles that reside behind the guts. In fact, tension in the psoas can restrict deep diaphragmatic breathing, and conversely, the inability to take a deep belly breath can inhibit hip function. Perhaps this is why some like to title the diaphragm as possibly the most important muscle in the body–I vote the heart, but I’m a born-lover. I contrast the 2 images above to underscore why if you hold tension in any one of 3 zones, diaphragm, psoas, or belly viscera (by way of the fascia casing around the organs) you can restrict range in one of the other zones.

There are a host of everyday behaviors and environments that can lead to tension around these areas. Slouchy prolonged sitting can lead to restricted shallow breathing behaviors and a shortened psoas muscles, you can find such behaviors at the work desk, watching TV, long car trips. Experiences that send the nervous system into high alert/attention may also engage tension in one of these zones. For these reasons, there is value in spending some time being clear on the range of diaphragmatic breathing available to you, feeling the movement of your diaphragm as it expands and contracts (the mapping), and also knowing a couple ways to stretch the diaphragm.

Carla plays a big role in my awareness of this concept and work. To map the diaphragm, Carla and I teamed up back in 2020 to create an introduction to breath work video, that aims to help you witness the breath, assess the state of tension in your abdominal area, and then your ability to soften/dissipate tension where you find it.

Breath Awareness & Three Part Breath Video with Tami and Carla (11 mins)
https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/aUUmmmbNCa8ndvzwb7T7izVHVtlU5dzB4xHOQZ4Vi5IGnrXILl1_1uwJVdF8us00.xlQ-p33GD38Yvt71

As the "motor muscle of breath, it can be automatic, forced, or controlled in its movement;" that makes it a rather unique motor muscle. The diaphragm also has both local and global effects on the functions of your body systems: directly it affects breath, but breath influences our body systems in ways we are only recently able to understand and explain. Breathing and breath practice can influence a host of shift in things like cortisol production, insulin production, O2 absorption in the blood, lymph system movement, cues to digestion--to name but a few of the systems influenced by the activity that can be impacted by your connection to your respiratory motor muscle, the diaphragm. Awareness of tension in these areas and your ability to move this tension is a tool you deserve!

Next month I will continue this segment with more stretches for each of the 3 zones, not only more for the diaphragm, but the psoas as it is influenced by the diaphragm and the fascia that surrounds the viscera of the belly.

To space and ease of breath~
Tami

If you have any questions please email me at twise@equivita.com.

Get a Participation Trophy

7/2/2022

A lot of what I offer as a professional can be read about in books. In my experience, reading about yoga, meditation, fitness and Ayurveda does a wonderful job of generating curiosity, contemplation and connection to guidance. Beyond that reading does very little.

Nearly everything worthwhile that I have to offer requires participation in order for it to really be beneficial.

With that in mind, an invitation to try a brief iRest practice. This practice offers a connection to a sense of wholeness. Curious? Try it!

https://vimeo.com/693753743

Warmly,
Carla

But What About the Finish LIne?

7/2/2022

Recently my wife joined me on a nature walk and we saw a woman who was running, working hard and clearly challenging herself. While my wife’s reaction was one of how great this woman was out there pushing herself, my thoughts were more along the lines of "at what cost?"

As fitness clients of EQUIVITA know, once you start to learn about biomechanics you start to see movement dysfunctions everywhere. The drive of the body to find the easiest way doesn’t go away during exercise; in fact, exercise can often bring out this efficiency-focus of the body even more.

If you set a goal to bench press your bodyweight, the shortest path to that goal is to shift your position so that the bar is more in line with your shoulders and not across your chest. This shift places greater stress on the shoulders and doesn’t rely on as much muscle to move the weight. Of course, joints don’t tell you they are wearing out until they have and they don’t heal as well as muscle, not to mention the fact that you aren’t developing the muscle to move the weight. So, not as much benefit with the addition of wear and tear to the body.

Similar “cheats” happen with every exercise. Running is about alignment to keep the stress on the muscle, which is so hard to do especially if you are focused on maintaining a desired min/mile pace or achieving a goal distance. Prioritizing goals of achievement, or what you did, over how you did it, is easy to do and often encouraged. I can even agree that there are certain times when the performance is a higher priority, but consistently choosing what over how, is not aligned with longevity.

To maintain an active lifestyle requires conscious focus on how you are using your body, because your body is designed to consistently find easier ways. Some of our bodies are more gifted than others in this pursuit, but it is the nature of the body. So to ensure your body continues to be able to support the lifestyle that you want, keep the "how" high on the priorities.

And, as always, let me know how I can help.
Adam

You Are a Three-dimensional Being—So Why Not Move Like It?!

7/1/2022

A large majority of our daily activity consists of moving in a very limited manner. For instance, we sit most of the time, drive a lot, walk… all these things keep our limbs relatively close to the midline of the body, and any movement is usually done in a repetitive, single planer way. But the body exists and has the capability to move in three dimensions or planes: sagittal, frontal, and transverse.

We move forwards or backwards, such as walking, running, or biking, along the sagittal plane. This plane is responsible for flexion, extension, dorsiflexion, and plantarflexion.
The frontal plane is responsible for adduction, abduction, inversion, eversion, and movement occurs in this plane when we move towards and away from midline of the body. For this one, I like to think of when I was a kid making snow angels—this movement of the limbs is happening in the frontal plane.
The third plane, transverse plane, consists of rotation, such as spinal twists or making circles with the wrists, and generally occur in the larger joints of the body.

The body is astonishing in its ability to move, and keeping that mobility becomes more pressing as we age. Prioritizing mobility can help in a lot of aspects of life’s journey, such as being able to pick up an item that was dropped on the floor, playing with kids/grandkids, being able to do the yard work or gardening, getting in and out of the car, looking behind you, or reaching for a glass in the cupboard. All of these things, and many more, may seem very mundane, but get increasingly difficult when mobility practices are neglected.

So what does the three planes of movement have to do with this?

When we only move the body in one plane, we limit the strength and flexibility of the muscles. Muscles grow stronger only in the range of motion we use them in, so if we are consistently just running, lunging, doing bicep curls, and pushups then we are only building up the body in the sagittal plane. In doing so, we can probably push/pull things really well, but motions like pivoting, turning around, etc., become challenging as time goes on due to the lack of motion in the other planes.

A noticeable one for a lot of bodies is that most of us can stretch our arms out front like zombie arms fairly well since our society tends to work and live in the sagittal plane, but bring the arms back down to the sides and then lift them up straight out to the sides like a bird and the shoulders tend to lift up to the ears, making it difficult to keep the proper shoulder alignment due to lack of strength building and movement in the frontal plane. Balance is another great example of a movement that can be affected when we limit our movement.

Intentionally moving the body through each plane helps increase strength and flexibility throughout the full range of motion of the joints, and helps keep the body moving with less stress and pain. So building a fitness practice that incorporates all three planes of movement is a holistic way to approach the body, and honor the three-dimensional being that you are.

Best,
Katherine

Got Tight Summer Feet? You Have Options!

6/30/2022

Summer is here! It draws us out into the great outdoors! In the warmer months we have more opportunities to stand for extended periods of time, watching a local parade, socializing at a block party, attending a festival, watching our team dominate the other team. Or perhaps we are on a ladder painting or window washing, and it is likely many of us are mowing the lawn!

These summer classics are also culprits in the creation of tightness of the calves, ankles and feet of your body. Standing in one place for a period of time, or standing with little walking, or lots of small-step walking-like in a crowded type situation, much longer than the muscles and fascia of your legs are conditioned for, can leave these areas tight. Likewise, a lot of activity in the heat may leave your body a bit dehydrated (another way to tightness, or worse, muscle cramps).

This month I thought we could quickly review a few ways to restore supple happy feet, calves and ankles after a demanding summer day. All you need is a few found-objects: a tennis ball (of course if you have a fascial release ball, that’s a bonus), a yoga mat (foam half-round, if you have one), and an old t-shirt (Yoga Toes, if you have a set).
To support better leg energy, and to reduce wear to the joints of the toes/ankles/knees/hips/low back, it is worth the time to assemble practices that can loosen the feet, exercise the ranges of the ankle, and loosen the calves.

Toe stretching can have a surprising restorative effect on tight feet, simply by weaving an old, soft t-shirt between the toes and kicking back for 15 minutes while the space between your toes opens up a bit. This gives the toes more ability to spread and disperse forces to the foot when you stand/walk with them.
Learn more…

Using a tennis ball to roll out the arch of the foot as well as roll out the tight places in the calves can help hydrate the fascial web of these parts, and help loosen tight calves.

Using a rolled up yoga mat like a half round, can help with calf raises , calf stretching, and “mashing the arches.” Mashing the arches is the glorious feeling of pressing the arch of your foot into the arc of the rolled up yoga mat--sometimes doing what I also call "typewriter walking"; the practice of taking tiny little steps (for approx. 1 minute), side-by-side from one end of the mat roll to the other (have a wall nearby, or a chair back for balance). You are essentially kneading the bottoms of your feet…heaven.
Learn more here

Finally, as the summer heats up you have to hit the water, a-plenty! It seems that a well hydrated body is the product of consistency. You have to adapt (train) your body to absorb water. Drinking a consistently plentiful amount of water every day trains your body that you are safely near water and it can calibrate to utilitze, say all 100 ounces, that you drink. In the absence of consistent conditioning, you may not appeal to you bodies sense of survival, and it may send water it deems excess right on down-river. Likewise, during heat spikes, or higher work load in high heat (yard work, cardio) we can often benefit from some form of electrolyte support to encourage our bodies to better utilize fluids.

Between the festivals and the parades, I am here to answer any questions all summer long.
Just email me at twise@equivita.com~

Stay loose, keep fluid, and be ROBUST!
Tami

That's not Cardio

6/9/2022

For blood flow, endurance, fat loss, metabolism shifts, blood sugar reset, mental clarity…this list could just keep going and that’s just a list of what we know thus far. It seems every day there is more research that adds something more to the list of benefits to be gained from cardio exercise. But what is cardio exercise?

I know that seems like a silly question since we all have so much experience with the concept, but if you look at some of the research methods for the “cardio” exercise you'll find that the studies were clearly pushing the subjects into an anaerobic energy production. Without getting too technical, this means that the gains realized in the study were from a higher intensity. An intensity that was beyond aerobic or “cardio”.

Aerobic exercise is not defined by the activity, but the intensity of that activity. Pedaling a bike at a resistance (indoor bike) and speed that you can sustain for at least 8 minutes can be considered aerobic. Pedaling that same bike at a resistance and speed that you can only sustain for 1 minute, is not aerobic, it is anaerobic, even if you repeat that minute multiple times with rest in between. But what if, instead of resting between bouts of the high intensity, you continued to pedal but at the lower resistance and speed? This is, of course, the idea of interval training and it has many benefits. It is a stretch, though, to call it cardio exercise.

This matters because of how the public uses the information from the fitness industry. In 1996 the Surgeon General’s report on physical activity gave recommendations for the minimum amount of exercise necessary to decrease risk of disease. One of these recommendations was that exercise could be broken into shorter bouts, as low as 8 minutes long, and that quickly became counting all movement toward exercise goal regardless of how brief. Another recommendation was that exercise should be most days of the week, which somehow translated into 3 days a week. And remember, the recommendations were the minimum to have any benefit. So, when they were lessened even more it is no wonder that the benefits also failed to be realized.

So, what we know is that exercise can make a huge difference in many areas of life and there is a clear dose-response relationship with greater benefits to be gained with higher intensity and greater frequency. Using this as your guide will be far more effective than some classification label that can lead you to believe that all of those listed benefits of cardio can be gained by walking.

As always, let me know how I can help.
Adam

Rest Mindfully

6/8/2022

EQUIVITA’s 5 Keys of Fitness don’t exist in a vacuum separate from each other. The keys are interconnected and when used together can create a fitness program that’s super beneficial. Last month we discussed the cardio key and some amazing topics were hit on, and this month as we explore the rest key let us take a look at how these two keys can work together to maximize your fitness goals.

As we get into the full swing of the warmer time of year, running becomes a go-to for a lot of individuals to get their cardio in. Just as we’ve discussed in the past where the method of warming up the body is important, the method of rest and cool-down periods are important as well. Rest isn’t just the time between your workouts, it’s the time during your workouts in between the act of “doing” the exercise. For example, interval running can help increase stamina and provide the body with a way to “work up to” running goals, and those seconds when not running are rest, and that rest time can be used to its fullest capacity when done with intention.

Sticking with this example, when we stop running and walk for our rest period during interval running, the muscles are warm and primed for “re-programming.” Our habitual posture tends to kick in when we are tired, and when in the walking phase of interval running, it's easy to let the body collapse back into old habits. However, if we take advantage of our body’s warmed up state and focus on proper alignment in our posture while walking/standing, we can help re-teach the contraction and release relationship of our muscles. If you tend towards collapsing in the chest with the shoulders rounding like I do, focusing on getting those shoulder blades back and down on the back and lifting the chest in those rest periods. This can put the muscles in proper alignment as they cool down, helping to keep those muscles from contracting back into the tightness that causes the pulling and collapse, and strengthen the weaker muscles to help hold the body in that proper posture.

This concept can be applied during resistance training as well, or any time there is rest in your exercise. Rest is where the change happens, and those little periods of rest create change that can be used to your advantage when done mindfully. Old habits are hard to break, and re-training the body requires attention during those important periods of change. View rest as an opportunity, not just as a passive phase.

Best,
Katherine

After Cardio Moment(connecting rest and cardio)

6/8/2022

Oftentimes after cardio and stretching are completed, I lie on my back, knees bent, feet flat on the floor wide apart and allow the knees to rest against each other in what is called constructive rest position. I’ll usually choose a mantra to listen to, and recently, I’ve enjoyed this one, which promotes physical rejuvenation.

https://youtu.be/Hb1qGAZJ7Eo

Let me know what questions you have!

Carla