Chronic feelings of tightness don’t necessarily mean that your muscles are tight and short, especially if you have tried stretching and it doesn’t change things. It is more likely an indication of an increased neurological sensitivity. Perhaps strengthening or improving the way you move may provide the solution. At Backs Etc we can help you with this.
Read the full article, Why Do Muscles Get Tight?
We at Backs Etc. love hiking! We find getting out in nature and getting from place to place under our own natural power immensely satisfying and cathartic. And now it seems that more and more doctors are actually writing ‘nature prescriptions’ or recommending ‘ecotherapy’ to reduce anxiety, improve stress levels, and to curb depression. Looks like it’s good for body, mind and soul, so what are you waiting for? Get out there and hit the trails!
Read the Full article, ‘Doctors Tell Us How Hiking Can Change Our Brains’
Women of all ages should be doing some form of weight training. It is the most important type of exercise to do, coming in ahead of flexibility and cardio training. It will massively reduce your risk of osteoporosis, and is essential in weight control too. If you feel intimidated by weight training and don’t know where to start at, Backs Etc we specialise in giving you a program that will meet your health and fitness goals and is tailored to the equipment you have access to.
Read the full article ‘6 reasons why women should lift weights’
Here at Backs Etc we focus on building our clients’ true and dynamic core strength, initially by getting them to breathe abdominally. We then use primal movements such as rolling and crawling to enable them to integrate the breathing and improve their basic movement patterns, which will translate into improvements in more advanced movements such as running or weight lifting. Get in touch with us if you need some help finding your true dynamic core stability.
Read the article, Crawling like a Baby: How to Break Records and Restore Your Body.
Can something as simple as holding hands really help mitigate pain? Researchers at the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab at the University of Colorado have published a study indicating that, in fact, it can.
Read the full article, The ‘most exciting discovery in pain in the last 20 years’.
As a kid growing up in New York City, sauerkraut meant one thing to me: the salty slop you slathered all over a hot dog purchased from the ubiquitous Sabrett carts to drown out the awfulness of said hot dog. That, and mustard…lots of mustard. (I never understood ketchup on dogs – to me that was reserved for burgers, but I digress.)
I never appreciated sauerkraut until much later in life, and certainly never realised the health benefits of it. Of course, those benefits were pretty much non-existent in the kraut of my youth due to over-processing, pasteurisation, and likely inclusion of all sorts of unpleasant and/or unnecessary additives.
But now, due to the growing awareness of the importance of good gut microbiome, the humble kraut has undergone something of a resurgence. It may be that it never really went away in certain cultures. That is certainly the case with kimchi, essentially a Korean version of sauerkraut (but with many more ingredients) that has continued to be a staple of Korean cuisine. And certainly, you’ve always been able to find kraut on the menu at many eastern European restaurants, not to mention the aforementioned NYC hot dog carts, and of course the glorious Reuben sandwich (which, by the way, if you haven’t tried, you owe it to yourself to do so).
I won’t bore you too much with the history of this saline side dish, rather my aim here is to show you how easy and inexpensive it is to make your own super-nutritious and tasty kraut at home with a minimum of fuss and mess. Okay, a minimum of fuss, perhaps. Mess can certainly be a part of the process, at least the way I make it. But don’t let that dissuade you, it’s worth it!
If you want to enjoy a long, healthy, energetic and productive life, it is pretty much agreed that you need to work on four basic areas: nutrition, exercise, stress and sleep. In this post, I’m going to focus on sleep as it is something that many people (and I include myself here) struggle with.
Why is Sleep so Important?
There is a very rare condition called Fatal Familial Insomnia (FFI) whereby sleep becomes impossible, it leads to panic attacks, hallucinations and eventually death, with no known cure. Thus this shows that sleep is essential to stay healthy. Recent research has found the existence of the glymphatic system which drains metabolic waste products from the brain via the cerebrospinal fluid (including those pesky amyloid plaques that build up during the progression of dementia). This system only works when we are in deep sleep, making regular good sleep essential for maintaining brain health, aside from other body maintenance and repair processes that occur mostly whilst we are asleep. It has also been shown that good sleep is essential for memory formation and that mood and willpower problems are exacerbated by a lack of sleep.
Why do we have so much trouble with sleep?
Until recently, our sleep cycles were driven by circadian rhythms with the rising and setting of the sun driving the release of hormones and brain wave patterns. Now the abundance of electric lights and digital stimulation after dark, as well as jet lag and shiftwork has disrupted this primal cycle. Most people find that when they go camping, with light being limited to torches and the campfire, they start to sleep much better, especially if they have a comfortable airbed
What can we do about this?
The key is to support your body’s production of melatonin, the sleep hormone which is triggered by darkness, and is suppressed by light – particularly bright white light at night – including these new energy efficient bright LED street lights that are replacing many of the old yellow ones. So here are a few tips which I try to implement most days to support melatonin production and sleep cycles:
Are more and longer exercise sessions always a good thing? Exercise is a stressor. Usually a good one. But a stressor nonetheless.
If you exercise intensely and/or often, you add stress to a body that may already be overloaded from other life stuff like work, relationships, travel, late nights, etc. People often feel they need exercise to help relieve stress. But it is important to realise that this is physical demand, which you need to recover from and if there is a lot of other things going on, then more recovery time or less intense sessions are essential. Also if your form is poor when exercising this will increase the chance that your session is hindering rather than helping you. So if you’re not sure whether you’ve got the right program to support your fitness and health goals, come on in and get assessed.
Read the full article, How intense workouts (and overtraining) can ruin your results.
People often ask us what kind of diet we recommend. “Are you guys paleo?” is one we also get a lot. We lean more towards the Primal diet (and lifestyle). In this article, Mark Sisson, the founder of The Primal Blueprint, gives a good explanation of the differences between “Primal” and “Paleo”.
Read the article, What’s the Difference Between Primal and Paleo?