How To Enjoy Your Garden Without Stressing Your Back

Tips for digging and shoveling dirt to improve body posturing and reduce pain.

• First thing’s first, digging is easiest when the soil is moist.

• A sharpened shovel can be very helpful to diminish required forces.

• Wear good boots to protect your feet pushing on the shovel.

• When digging, throw the dirt to the side of the lowest hand on the shovel. Pivot from your hips to throw the dirt, rather than from your arms alone. If you need to throw the dirt to the opposite side of the low hand, change how you are holding the shovel so that the other hand becomes the low hand. This is extremely important so that you have a base of support, the foot and leg on the side of the low hand , to take your weight and not have your back holding the weight of the shovel!

• Often you can have the lower forearm resting on your thigh and the upper hand pushes down on the handle to use the shovel as a fulcrum. This way, rather than actually lifting the dirt up, you are pushing the dirt up.

Enjoy this beautiful spring and hang out in your garden to nourish your soul more and more!

Stay tuned for an upcoming post on weeding, raking and energy conservation strategies.

Solving the Pain Mystery: Movement Alleviates Chronic Pain

Do you experience musculoskeletal pain that diminishes spontaneity, peace of mind, and joyful living?

This post will help you begin to understand the factors contributing to chronic pain and how a movement awareness based approach can bring you relief.

Pain Means Change

It is widely accepted that pain is our body’s way of communicating a request for change, asking us to do less of certain stressful behaviors and more of stimulating, comforting, and nourishing activities.

At The Wellness Station, we see clientele who have often had prior therapy that has been unsuccessful. The key missing piece, the piece to solving the mystery of chronic pain, it’s not so much WHAT we do activity wise, but HOW we do it!

Here is an opportunity to experience a Feldenkrais-inspired movement lesson that will improve neuromuscular coordination, decrease tissue stressors and improve bio mechanical efficiency and comfort.

Try This At Home

1. Please come to standing, and preferably have some object - real or imaginary - that you might be reaching up to. For example, the molasses on the top cabinet shelf.

   Let’s assume you’re right handed. If otherwise, just transfer all the below instructions to the left.

   Which ever arm you are reaching with for the object is to that side above you.

2. Please take a moment to pay attention to easy breathing.

3. Have both feet making full contact with the floor and reach up with the right arm for an object that is a couple of inches beyond a simple overhead reach. In other words, your heels stay on the floor and you have only moved primarily from the shoulder complex.

4. Now explore how you would get your hand 2 inches higher to access that object. Do you lift a heel, one or both? If only one, which one?

   Any tipping of your head, change anything at all in your rib cage?

5. Lower your arm, and return to paying attention to relaxed breathing.

   Now explore doing the same with the left arm, reaching for an object that is to the left of the midline.

6. Leave that and sit towards the front edge on a relatively firm chair.

   Feel your feet making firm contact with the floor. Push with your right foot and feel your pelvis rolling to left; reverse that by pushing with the other foot, Your pelvis with now role to the right.

   Repeat that a few times. it’s a little bit like being on a rocking boat, Your pelvis like a ball rolling left and right.

7. Pause; interlace your fingers and place them on top of your head so that your elbows are out to the side like wings.

8. Resume rocking your pelvis left and right and tip your arms and your head the opposite direction.

   Your pelvis is like a ball going one direction and your head is another ball at the top of your spine going opposite. For example, as your pelvis roles to the left (you could slip a thin piece of paper under your right buttock), your arms are tipping with the right elbow going down and the left elbow going up. And then experience the reverse as your pelvis rolls to the right.

9. Rest for a few moments.

10. Resume your pelvis rolling left and right with the head and arms tipping the other way. Can you feel how your body is acting like an accordion, folding in on one side, expanding on the other?

11. Please come back to standing.

    Return to reaching for that imaginary or real object and whichever arm you reach with raise the heel of the opposite foot pushing with the ball of the foot and keeping that knee straight. Explore that for a while.

12. Can you feel how on the side of the lifting heel, your rib cage and torso are folding in. On the opposite reaching side your torso is expanding towards that object.

    For example, reaching with the right arm and pushing with the left foot, your left shoulder will drop and your right shoulder will go higher.

    Repeat that a few times.

13. You may want to shift to the other arm reaching.

    At some point go back to the original reaching and compare which reach feels easier and more accessible.

14. Let’s make this reach for that object that’s 2 inches beyond a simple reach, let’s make it even easier!

    Initiate with the opposite foot pushing, sense that the arm reaching is a result of the opposite foot pushing and your body shaping like an accordion-expanding on that reaching side to send that shoulder and hand higher.

15. AND, The next time you reach for that object allow your head to tip away from where your hand is reaching reaching with the right, slightly rotate your head to the left.

Clients who have participated in this Feldenkrais inspired lesson, especially shorter women, explain how grateful they are to reach higher — no longer experiencing strain on the neck and shoulders.

How would you describe the difference in effort and relative ease when you compare reaching after having done the lesson?

That lesson, “reaching with my foot,“ is an example of a task being done with optimal musculoskeletal organization.

When we move with more awareness and bio mechanical efficiency, the outcome is less stressful forces on our tissues and joints.

Please, again reach for a higher object. Can you feel your body thanking you for the absence of muscular strain and the experience of ease and flow?

The take away relative to chronic pain is that by using the Feldenkrais method to you are practicing preventative medicine and enhancing the healing of overstressed tissues.

If you pause and reflect on what happened with your reach after doing that lesson, you may realize that the missing link in resolving chronic pain is learning how to better coordinate and integrate all of the moving parts from the head to the toes.

In summary, by moving better, we feel better!

Yoga: Like Flossing for your Joints!

For our whole lives, we participate in a daily practice to ensure the health of our teeth, as it is obvious that tooth decay is extremely undesirable. Neglecting dental hygiene can lead to issues far beyond affecting that beautiful smile on your face, including infection, as well as compromised gut and heart health. In order to ensure dental health, we brush and floss daily, and visit the dentist two times per year. We have accepted this as the gold standard practice, and dental hygiene becomes almost an unconscious part of our lives.

What about our joints? We have over 200 of them in our body, and without them, we would be unable to move. Each of these joints desperately need movement, compression, and relaxation in order to stay healthy, mobile, and well-lubricated. Unfortunately, we have an epidemic of poor joint health that is on the rise. In fact, around a quarter of US citizens have arthritis (an inflammatory disease of the joints), and the prevalence of knee osteoarthritis has actually doubled since the mid-20th century.1 This is contributing to extreme rises in healthcare costs, risky surgeries, chronic disability, and unnecessary pain and suffering. Poor joint health is also associated with many other health conditions- depression, cardiovascular disease, stroke, and metabolic conditions such as diabetes.2 There are many theories as to why the incidence of this disease is so high- increasing weight, sedentary behavior, as well as the overall aging of our population. However, there is little discussion about how to address the root cause of this disease through education and prevention.

Why is there not more education about how to keep our joints healthy as we go through our lives? My main takeaways from gym class growing up were pretty much as follows: how many sit ups and chin ups can I do in a minute in order to "perform well" on the presidential fitness test, as well as how quickly can I run a mile in order not to embarrass myself around my peers? However, there was absolutely no discussion of joint health in any of my education up until physical therapy school.

What joints need is movement- movement that goes behind repetitive gym exercises, walking, and running. As joints do not have great blood supply, they are completely reliant on us moving our bodies through our given ranges of motion in order to distribute the lubricating synovial fluid around the joint space. As we move and load our joints through their given ranges of motion, we develop an improved mind-body awareness that helps us control the force we put through each joint through our body's posturing and muscle recruitment/relaxation. By regularly moving each joint, we also build up our injury resistance to both chronic and acute injuries. For example, if you never practice moving your ankle inwards, and then you accidentally trip over a root during a hike that forces your ankle into an inward position, you will be far more likely to sprain this joint compared to someone who regularly practices moving and loading their ankle in this position.

One might be thinking…."Are you telling me that in order to have to have healthy joints, I have to move each and every one of them every single day?? This sounds like a lot of work… I already have enough on my plate, especially with how often I am supposed to floss my teeth!"

Luckily, even a brief mindful movement practice such as yoga can help ensure your joint health! A yoga practice has the potential to move every joint and engage every muscle in your body in a relatively short, continuous sequence. And, you will naturally start to use what you learn on the mat in your daily life as well, perhaps without even meaning to! Rather than a chore, a yoga practice can be fun, and make you feel more comfortable and strong in your body. Yoga can be an excellent supplement to whatever else is in your fitness routine that can actually improve your performance in other athletic endeavors as well.

My mission for PhysiYoga is to teach people more about their bodies, provide engaging and challenging movement sequences, and create a safe space for self-care and self-compassion. The current series- PhysiYoga Fluid: From Ground to Crown, will consist of full-body yoga practices with a special emphasis on joint health in particular body areas (e.g. the foot/ankle, the knees, the spine, etc). Consider this practice like "flossing for your joints"- take the opportunity now to learn what you may not have learned in gym class: how to keep your joints healthy so you can live your life to the very fullest for as long as you are here.

Written by: Jacob Tyson, DPT - Physical Therapist and Yoga Instructor

References:

1. https://www.pnas.org/content/114/35/9332

2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31207113/#:~:text=The%20key%20comorbidities%20associated%20with,to%20have%20other%20chronic%20conditions.

Embodied Anatomy

What is the best way to get to know the body from the inside out?

Written by Jacob Tyson, DPT - Physical Therapist, Yoga Instructor

While countless hours spent poring over anatomy textbooks in physical therapy school was helpful for learning the names of all of our internal structures, the most meaningful anatomy lessons have been on my mat, alone with my body and breath. Without complementing textbook knowledge with movement, there will be little relevance to real life. However, movement alone is also not enough- without having some background knowledge of the intricacies of our structural body, there may be blind spots in our awareness as we move through our day or move on our mat. This is why informed movement is so important- it can help one to avoid injury and move more efficiently.

Having a better sense of the biomechanics and anatomy of the physical body can help to improve mind-body connection and kinesthetic awareness by allowing us to move with intention and embodied intuition. For example, one might lack awareness that, unlike the hip or the shoulder which move in all planes, the knee is designed to perform sagittal plane movement alone, known as flexion and extension. By better understanding the structure and function of the knee, we can move the knee with intention, rather than trying to force it into a position that might be detrimental to our joint health. The same awareness can be applied to all individual joints, which we can integrate into whole body movement as well.

Through PhysiYoga Fluid: From Ground to Crown, I hope to share the anatomical knowledge I have in the context of a dynamic movement experience. These yoga classes will contain tidbits of relevant anatomy and kinesiology as we shine our awareness throughout different areas of ourselves. We will start to form an embodied understanding of how our parts move separately, together, and relation to our connection to the earth and to gravity. By starting from the ground and working our way up to the crown, we will learn more about ourselves, help to prevent unnecessary injuries, and develop the knowledge and tools to get the very most out of our yoga and movement practices.

I hope to see you on the mat!

The Elusive Obvious: How Better Movement Heals the Whole Person

How are stress, anxiety, movement challenges (e.g. balance issues, neurological disorders, musculoskeletal injuries), chronic pain, and even long-term symptoms of COVID-19 related to our approach at The Wellness Station?

At The Wellness Station, our clientele present primarily with issues of musculoskeletal pain, movement disorders, balance challenges, and various stress-related conditions. Our therapeutic approach is neuroplasticity in action, with the goal of helping people achieve their goals and live healthier, more active lifestyles. We provide movement lessons that emphasize working with one's body, rather than on one's body. These lessons help to establish and strengthen motor pathways that facilitate efficiency of movement and inner calm in order to move towards a more fulfilling and pain-free experience of daily life.

Our approach, based on the Feldenkrais Method and therapeutic yoga, helps to shift the autonomic nervous system into the parasympathetic state with all of the various organ systems working inter-dependently in a homeostatic, rhythmic flow. And thankfully when the body is more in a state of calm and balance, that systemic harmony allows for healing to occur in a variety of our bodies systems.

Our focus on decreasing the body's stress response (fight or flight) goes beyond improving movement and decreasing pain. Much to our delight, our clients often report that other health issues also improve, including sleep quality, gastrointestinal distress, memory and cognition, energy levels, and positive management of blood pressure and other heart-related conditions. While we do not claim to treat those conditions directly, research and our experience as healthcare providers can tell us that lifestyle choices- how well and how often we move, our ability to manage stress, the choices of what we put in our bodies, and our daily practices of self-care can have major influences on our mental and physical health.

For example, COVID-19 can lead to long-term symptoms including cognitive issues, labored breathing (dyspnea), pain with deep breaths, loss of smell and taste , and overall malaise. And all of the above create tremendous fear and anxiety about one’s present and future capacity for functioning well -the sympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system becomes over-stimulated, and fight, flight, or freeze characteristics prevail. By learning tools to regulate the nervous system through mindful movement and other daily practices, our clients develop the self-efficacy, knowledge, and wisdom necessary to combat or prevent the symptom manifestation of many diseases.

Coming full circle with the above health challenges, at The Wellness Station our emphasis on improving the quality of how we move, think, feel, and sense regularly resolves musculoskeletal pain, improves balance and movement difficulties, and also has many positive effects on the various organ systems.

It is wonderful to hear our patients report improvement with memory and other cognitive issues, high blood pressure and cardiac disorders, various gastrointestinal challenges, sleep quality, and expressing “I feel I have my life back again!”

In the words of Moshe Feldenkrais, we help our clients "make the impossible possible, the possible easy, and the easy elegant."