Zeus: Health and Movement Coaching

🔸️This image is from the book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear📚 It is showing how incremental progress may seem insignificant, but over time it leads to large leaps of progress in whatever part of your life/health you’re trying to improve!📈

🔹️Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero. What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much more. Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them💰

🔸️The impact created by a change in your habits is similar to the effect of shifting the route of an airplane by just a few degrees✈️ Imagine you are flying from Los Angeles to New York City. If a pilot leaving from LAX adjusts the heading just 3.5 degrees south, you will land in Washington, D.C., instead of New York🗺

🔹️Such a small change is barely noticeable at takeoff—the nose of the airplane moves just a few feet—but when magnified across the entire United States, you end up hundreds of miles apart. Similarly, a slight change in your daily habits can guide your life to a very different destination. Making a choice that is 1 percent better or 1 percent worse seems insignificant in the moment, but over the span of moments that make up a lifetime these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be. Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations!

🔸️Decide on what your goal is, figure out what the daily habits are that you need to do to achieve your goal, then do your best to follow through with the habits. This method is a sustainable, practical, and effective method for changing your life and/or health!🏁

Trying to lose weight and/or improve your health? Reducing the amount of blood sugar spikes you have is an extremely effective method for both!📉

Consistently elevated blood sugar levels wreak havoc on many different parts of your body. It can lead to:
-type 2 diabetes💉
-blood vessel damage(can lead to heart disease/stroke)❤️‍🩹
-nerve pain/damage(especially in the lower legs/feet)⚡️
-increases in body fat⬆️
-kidney problems⚠️
-decreased eye and gum health👁🦷

Fortunately most of these things are avoidable even if you have a genetic predisposition to high blood sugar levels. Genes can be turned on/off based on your lifestyle, nutrition, and exercise(look up epigenetics if you’d like more information about gene expression).🧬

Some of the things you can do to prevent excessive blood sugar spikes:
-eliminate/reduce processed foods🚫
-eat more whole foods(fruit, vegetables, potatoes, beans, etc.)🍎🥦🥔
-make sure to eat some protein with each meal/snack🍖
-reduce alcohol and caffeine consumption🍺☕️
-don’t skip meals⏰
-have a consistent sleep time and try to get 6-8 hours each night😴
-strength train x2-3/week🏋‍♂️
-try to do 100-150min of cardio per week🚴‍♂️

Choose a couple of the blood sugar spike reducing habits and try to incorporate them into your routine. Through consistent application of the changes you’ll find that you have more energy, have less sugar cravings, and have an easier time losing body fat!

🔹️This workout is for anyone looking to increase strength💪 and lose weight🔥

🔸️It starts with a circuit of upper and lower body exercises, followed by some arms and core, and finishes with some cardio.

🏁The goal is to keep your heart rate elevated during the initial circuit so that you burn extra calories during the strength training. This allows you to get in extra cardio while you’re lifting weights!👍

💡Coaches Tips:

◾️If you’re not sure on what an exercise is, try typing the name into youtube to see some examples.

◾️Use weights that are a 6-7 out of 10 intensity

◾️The cardio can be done on any type of equipment you like.

◾️Try doing this workout x1-3/week in addition to cardio on your off days

🔸️When I was suffering from chronic low back pain in college, the athletic trainer told me that my tight hamstrings were contributing to the problem🍖 I spent a lot of time working on my flexibility but no matter how much I stretched my hamstrings I still suffered from the low back pain🤕

🔹️Through continuing education and treatment from my amazing network of Chiros and Physical Therapists👨‍⚕️, I realized that my hamstrings weren’t tight because of lack of flexibility, but rather that they were overly stretched out↕️. My “tightness” I felt was them being stretched out to end range and by stretching them I was just making the problem worse🚫

🔸️The picture I provided in this post demonstrates visually what I am talking about. One of the most important jobs of the hamstring muscles is to help keep your pelvis in a neutral position↔️. As you can see in the photo, the hamstrings attach to the backside of the pelvis. When they activate, they tilt the pelvis posteriorly( backwards)⤵️. If they lack strength, then the quads and low back take over resulting in an anteriorly(forward) tilted pelvis⬅️. When this position becomes your ingrained posture the result can be knee, hip, and/or low back pain⚠️

🔹️So the moral of the post is that stretching the hamstrings isn’t always an appropriate treatment for back, hip, and knee pain. Often what we need is more hamstring and core strength💪 to allow the quads and low back to relax. On Friday I’ll post a video of one of my favorite exercises to improve hamstring strength/function!🔜📽

🔸️One of the most commonly overlooked aspects to health, performance, and weight loss is adequate hydration💧 Water is essential to all life and all the individual processes that allow an organism to survive and thrive!💪

🔹️Many of the foods we eat, beverages we drink, workouts we do, and stressors we encounter dehydrate our body🔥 We must be constantly replenishing our stores so that our body can operate most efficiently. The goal for most people should be ⅓-½ of your body weight in ounces of water per day!🏁

🔸️When there is anything else in the water(coffee, tea, powdered flavoring packets, etc.) the body must use its water stores to help digest whatever else is in the water which nullifies some of the hydration you would receive🚫

🔹️For those who don’t drink enough plain water because it doesn’t taste “good”, if you can shift your mindset to thinking of it as a necessary medicine then hopefully you can learn to enjoy it more💧=💊

ℹ️Coaching Tip: Don’t try to go from drinking 1 glass of water a day to half your bodyweight in ounces. Start by adding a glass or two and work your way up! You increase your chances of sustaining the new habit as well as keep yourself from waking up 3 times a night to pee😂

Many of us deal with pain, injuries, or other health issues caused by lack of optimal posture and breathing mechanics. This is why I start almost every client with posture and breath work!

Our body works best when we maintain a proper relationship between our pelvis and ribcage. This allows your diaphragm and ab muscles to have leverage to be able to work as they should. If you look at the second photo you can see the “scissor position” I’m describing and get a visual of what a good and bad relationship between the hips and ribs looks like.

The hooklying breathing exercise I’ve provided in the first picture is how I begin working with clients to help them re-establish an optimal position. I have them do this exercise at least 1x/day as well as before any workouts. Over time your brain and body will learn to hold this posture and you’ll find yourself feeling more abs throughout the day as well as taking more full breaths.

Utilizing abs and completely filling/emptying the lungs allows other muscles like the low back, upper neck, and hip flexors to relax. This improves mobility, decreases muscle tension, and can lower stress levels(via reduction of cortisol and relaxing the nervous system).

I recommend doing this exercise first thing in the morning, at the start of your warm up for workouts, and it can be done in the evening to relax/recover from the stress of the day.

“What disease affects EVERY other American and one in four kids? Type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes. Type 2 diabetes in America has tripled since the 1980s, and researchers estimate one in three Americans will have diabetes by mid-century. More than one-third of American adults are obese. And one in three Medicare dollars is spent on diabetes making it the biggest driver of our federal debt. Sadly, these numbers continue to increase. Overall, it’s not a pretty picture, and experts predict things will only become worse.” -Dr. Mark Hyman(The Diabesity Solution)

This image I’ve provided shows the increase in diabetes in the US from 2004-2010. Since then the number of people diagnosed with diabetes has only increased!

Fortunately, even though these statistics seem grim, this epidemic of diabetes is preventable. Every one of us has the power to adopt a lifestyle that reduces the chances of us developing diabetes and the negative health effects that accompany it.

Dr. Mark Hyman, Head of the Cleveland Clinic’s Functional Medicine Department, refers to diabetes and the health problems it causes as “Diabesity”. In the second photo I’ve provided his 10-day detox diet from his book “The Diabesity Solution” to help reverse the effects of chronic inflammation and high blood sugar.

While the changes he recommends are all going to positively affect your health, I would recommend adopting 1 or 2 of the changes for a couple of weeks, then moving on to the others. This allows you to make these changes a lifestyle instead of simply a diet. I’ve found that this method increases the chances of success and sustainability!

Foam rolling is a cheap and effective way to help improve your mobility, reduce muscle tension/soreness, and lower stress levels.

As a corrective exercise specialist, one of my first steps in helping my clients improve how they move is to teach them how to use a foam roller. Research has show that repetitive movements and long periods of poor postures leads to tissue trauma and inflammation.

Inflammation increases muscular tension and muscle spasms. As a result of the spasms, adhesions may begin to form within the muscle tissue. These adhesions decrease mobility, reduce motor control, and change how the muscles are able to function which all can lead to pain/injury.

Foam rolling helps reduce the adhesions and provides a healthy stimulus to the muscles in the form of pressure, stretching, and relaxation of the nervous system. In future posts I’ll provide information of how to foam roll, techniques for specific muscles, and how to integrate foam rolling into your corrective program/warm up and cool downs.