The following article is from the New York Times a few weeks back. It discusses the way inactivity affects our metabolism any may other things. It has been said that pre-modern humans took 20,000 steps per day. The Amish now take on average 30,000 steps a day. The average American is around 6,500 a day, some thing to think about!
DR. LEVINE’S MAGIC UNDERWEAR resembled bicycle shorts, black and skintight, but with sensors mounted on the thighs and wires running to a fanny pack. The look was part Euro tourist, part cyborg. Twice a second, 24 hours a day, the magic underwear’s accelerometers and inclinometers would assess every movement I made, however small, and whether I was lying, walking, standing or sitting.
James Levine, a researcher at the Mayo Clinicin Rochester, Minn., has an intense interest in how much people move — and how much they don’t. He is a leader of an emerging field that some call inactivity studies, which has challenged long-held beliefs about human health and obesity. To help me understand some of the key findings, he suggested that I become a mock research trial participant. First my body fat was measured inside a white, futuristic capsule called a Bod Pod. Next, one of Dr. Levine’s colleagues, Shelly McCrady-Spitzer, placed a hooded mask over my head to measure the content of my exhalations and gauge my body’s calorie-burning rate. After that, I donned the magic underwear, then went down the hall to the laboratory’s research kitchen for a breakfast whose calories were measured
precisely.
A weakness of traditional activity and obesity research is that it relies on self-reporting — people’s flawed recollections of how much they ate or exercised. But the participants in a series of studies that Dr. Levine did beginning in 2005 were assessed and wired up the way I was; they consumed all of their food in the lab for two months and were told not to exercise. With nary a snack nor workout left to chance, Dr. Levine was able to plumb the mysteries of a closed metabolic universe in which every calorie, consumed as food or expended for energy, could be accounted for.
His nitial question — which he first posed in a 1999 study — was simple: Why do some people who consume the same amount of food as others gain more weight? After assessing how much food each of his subjects needed to maintain their current weight, Dr. Levine then began to ply them with an extra 1,000 calories per day. Sure enough, some of his subjects packed on the pounds, while others gained little to no weight.
“We measured everything, thinking we were going to find some magic metabolic factor that would explain why some people didn’t gain weight,” explains Dr. Michael Jensen, a Mayo Clinic researcher who collaborated with Dr. Levine on the studies. But that wasn’t the case. Then six years later, with the help of the motion-tracking underwear, they discovered the answer. “The people who didn’t gain weight were unconsciously moving around more,” Dr. Jensen says. They hadn’t started exercising more — that was prohibited by the study. Their bodies simply responded naturally by making more little movements than they had before the overfeeding began, like taking the stairs, trotting down the hall to the office water cooler, bustling about with chores at home or simply fidgeting. On average, the subjects who gained weight sat two hours more per day than those who hadn’t.
People don’t need the experts to tell them that sitting around too much could give them a sore back or a spare tire. The conventional wisdom, though, is that if you watch your diet and get aerobic exercise at least a few times a week, you’ll effectively offset your sedentary time. A growing body of inactivity research, however, suggests that this advice makes scarcely more sense than the notion that you could counter a pack-a-day smoking habit by jogging. “Exercise is not a perfect antidote for sitting,” says Marc Hamilton, an inactivity researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center.
The posture of sitting itself probably isn’t worse than any other type of daytime physical inactivity, like lying on the couch watching “Wheel of Fortune.” But for most of us, when we’re awake and not moving, we’re sitting. This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops — “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse,” Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides — for “vacuuming" fat out of the bloodstream,” as Hamilton puts it — plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall.
Hamilton’s most recent work has examined how rapidly inactivity can cause harm. In studies of rats who were forced to be inactive, for example, he discovered that the leg muscles responsible for standing almost immediately lost more than 75 percent of their ability to remove harmful lipo-proteins from the blood. To show that the ill effects of sitting could have a rapid onset in humans too, Hamilton recruited 14 young, fit and thin volunteers and recorded a 40 percent reduction in insulin’s ability to uptake glucose in the subjects — after 24 hours of being sedentary.
Over a lifetime, the unhealthful effects of sitting add up. Alpa Patel, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society, tracked the health of 123,000 Americans between 1992 and 2006. The men in the study who spent six hours or more per day of their leisure time sitting had an overall death rate that was about 20 percent higher than the men who sat for three hours or less. The death rate for women who sat for more than six hours a day was about 40 percent higher. Patel estimates that on average, people who sit too much shave a few years off of their lives.
Another study, published last year in the journal Circulation, looked at nearly 9,000 Australians and found that for each additional hour of television a person sat and watched per day, the risk of dying rose by 11 percent. The study author David Dunstan wanted to analyze whether the people who sat watching television had other unhealthful habits that caused them to die sooner. But after crunching the numbers, he reported that “age, sex, education, smoking, hypertension, waist circumference, body-mass index, glucose tolerance status and leisure-time exercise did not significantly modify the associations between television viewing and all-cause . . . mortality.”
Sitting, it would seem, is an independent pathology. Being sedentary for nine hours a day at the office is bad for your health whether you go home and watch television afterward or hit the gym. It is bad whether you are morbidly obese or marathon-runner thin. “Excessive sitting,” Dr. Levine says, “is a lethal activity.”
The good news is that inactivity’s peril can be countered. Working late one night at 3 a.m., Dr. Levine coined a name for the concept of reaping major benefits through thousands of minor movements each day: NEAT, which stands for Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. In the world of NEAT, even the littlest stuff matters. McCrady-Spitzer showed me a chart that tracked my calorie-burning rate with zigzagging lines, like those of a seismograph. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to one of the spikes, which indicated that the rate had shot up. “That’s when you bent over to tie your shoes,” she said. “It took your body more energy than just sitting still.”
In a motion-tracking study, Dr. Levine found that obese subjects averaged only
1,500 daily movements and nearly 600 minutes sitting. In my trial with the magic underwear, I came out looking somewhat better — 2,234 individual movements and 367 minutes sitting. But I was still nowhere near the farm workers Dr. Levine has studied in Jamaica, who average 5,000 daily movements and only 300 minutes sitting.
Dr.Levine knows that we can’t all be farmers, so instead he is exploring ways for people to redesign their environments so that they encourage more movement. We visited a chairless first-grade classroom where the students spent part of each day crawling along mats labeled with vocabulary words and jumping between platforms while reciting math problems. We stopped by a human-resources staffing agency where many of the employees worked on the move at treadmill desks — a creation of Dr. Levine’s, later sold by a company called Steelcase.
Dr.Levine was in a philosophical mood as we left the temp agency. For all of the hard science against sitting, he admits that his campaign against what he calls “the chair-based lifestyle” is not limited to simply a quest for better physical health. His is a war against inertia itself, which he believes sickens more than just our body. “Go into cubeland in a tightly controlled corporate environment and you immediately sense that there is a malaise about being tied behind a computer screen seated all day,” he said. “The soul of the nation is sapped, and now it’s time for the soul of the nation to rise.”
James Vlahos (jamesvlahos@gmail.com) writes often for Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. Editor: Ilena Silverman (i.silverman-MagGroup@nytimes.com).
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Tired of Sitting at the Desk? Try Standing!
Do you find yourself tired and achy after a day at work when all you actually did was sit at the desk? Did you know that you had other options besides sitting down at your desk all day? They are called Standing Desks.
These are the same thoughts that Gina Trapani, the founder of Lifehacker.com, was thinking after spending at least 40 hours per week sitting at her desk working on her computer. She states that sitting all day was starting to take a toll on her health and body weight. So she decided to go out and purchase a standing work station from Ikea.
Whether you choose to stand or walk at your workstation, there are many benefits. Let me list some of those for you:
*Sitting in a slumped, static position all day puts increasing pressure on your joints. Standing allows you to keep a upright posture and is easier on your low back. Sitting puts about 50% more pressure on your low back versus standing.
*Standing also keeps your nervous system more awake. While standing, mechanoreceptors which are in your muscles, tendons, and joints in the body. This sends constant messages to your brain which in the long run can increase your balance.
*Standing causes you to burn more calories through having to constantly fire the muscles in your legs to keep you upright.
While those are all great reasons to stand at your desk instead of sitting, the benefits of walking are even better. Walking allows you to constantly shift your body weight from one leg to the other. In turn, this helps keep the joints better lubricated and also helps send more nutrients to the areas. On top of that, you burn even more calories!
Keep in mind you won't be ready for a marathon after using the walking desk. It is best used with a very slow pace. Instead focusing on the walking it is more of a rhythem or motion that will become second nature for those worried it will take your focus away from the task at hand.
If you have any other questions about how to set up your desk or about any of the other articles feel free to email me at landrumdc@gmail.com or visit my website at www.landrumdc.com .
These are the same thoughts that Gina Trapani, the founder of Lifehacker.com, was thinking after spending at least 40 hours per week sitting at her desk working on her computer. She states that sitting all day was starting to take a toll on her health and body weight. So she decided to go out and purchase a standing work station from Ikea.
Whether you choose to stand or walk at your workstation, there are many benefits. Let me list some of those for you:
*Sitting in a slumped, static position all day puts increasing pressure on your joints. Standing allows you to keep a upright posture and is easier on your low back. Sitting puts about 50% more pressure on your low back versus standing.
*Standing also keeps your nervous system more awake. While standing, mechanoreceptors which are in your muscles, tendons, and joints in the body. This sends constant messages to your brain which in the long run can increase your balance.
*Standing causes you to burn more calories through having to constantly fire the muscles in your legs to keep you upright.
While those are all great reasons to stand at your desk instead of sitting, the benefits of walking are even better. Walking allows you to constantly shift your body weight from one leg to the other. In turn, this helps keep the joints better lubricated and also helps send more nutrients to the areas. On top of that, you burn even more calories!
Keep in mind you won't be ready for a marathon after using the walking desk. It is best used with a very slow pace. Instead focusing on the walking it is more of a rhythem or motion that will become second nature for those worried it will take your focus away from the task at hand.
If you have any other questions about how to set up your desk or about any of the other articles feel free to email me at landrumdc@gmail.com or visit my website at www.landrumdc.com .
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
It All Starts With Your Feet
Imagine you are a building. The architectural structure of the building is important because it determines if the building will hold up to stress. The same is true for the human body. A balanced structure means a reduced chance of injury and increased endurance. An improvement in your overall structure also improves your athletic performance. It's clear how important it is to take care of your structure - especially your feet.
Your feet are the foundation for your entire body. They must be able to properly support your body; allow you to stand, walk, run, and jump; and absorb damaging shock that enters your body every time your heel hits the ground. Every athlete deals with structural defects, many of which start in the feet.
Pain tells you to consult your doctor, team physician or trainer. But foot imbalance or dysfunction does not always cause pain just in your feet - the pain may transfer to your lower legs, knees, hips or spine instead. Why? Your body is like a large, interconnected chain; movement at one of your joints affects movement at other joints. If your feet have imbalances or weaknesses, they travel all the way up your body.
If you don't think you have any foot imbalances, think again. Eighty percent of people develop some type of foot imbalance by the age of 20, and virtually everyone has foot imbalances by the age of 40. After years of standing, walking, and wearing shoes, the arches of your feet gradually weaken and are not able to provide the necessary support for your body.
Pronation, Supination and Proprioception
Pronation (inward rolling of the foot, particularly the heel and arch, as the heel contacts the ground) and supination (the opposite of pronation - outward rolling of the foot as the heel hits the ground) are normal foot movements that occur during walking and running. But when your foot excessively pronates or supinates, it puts the stability of your entire body at risk. These conditions can lead to other forms of an unstable posture, including uneven shoulder heights, one leg that is shorter than the other, and tilting in your hips.
Your athletic performance is directly determined by the status and coordination of your proprioception system. Proprioception is defined as "sensing the motion and position of the body." [BANNER]Special nerve endings in the tissues surrounding your muscles and bones interact with your nervous system - the center for all of your mental activity - to coordinate your body's movements, posture and balance. Three regions of the body contain the most proprioceptive nerve endings: your feet, your spine and your neck.
If you have weaknesses or imbalances in any one of these areas, you cannot function at your best. It's important to take care of your feet and your spine because interference in these areas can negatively affect the coordination of your proprioception system. Your athletic performance depends a great deal on this system - how smoothly and quickly your body can respond to position, speed and balance changes.
Structural Management
Doctors of chiropractic can provide you with structural management. What's that? Structural management evaluates the weaknesses and imbalances in your body so that your doctor can develop a program to address them. Most sports injuries are mechanical or structural in nature, so it makes sense to evaluate and manage your body's structure.
Every individual's body is unique. Every individual also has structural defects. A structural defect is a fault or flaw in your body's structure. If you are an athlete, you have probably had a prior injury or have hereditary weaknesses, conditioning problems, physical and emotional stresses, dietary problems, or equipment deficiencies - all of which contribute to structural defects.
In order to effectively manage your structure, your chiropractor must first examine your structure. They will probably visually evaluate you first, making note of important information about your posture, such as your shoulder and hip heights, internal and external rotations of your knees, and abnormal spinal curves. Then they will examine all the arches of your feet. Your doctor also will conduct range-of-motion tests on all of your joints, muscle tests, leg-length measurements, and a standing X-ray of your overall body structure.
From examining your structure, your chiropractor learns important information that will be used to educate you about your specific imbalances and weaknesses. Because structural imbalances and weaknesses can increase your risk of injury, they should be addressed immediately with treatment, support and exercises.
Your Doctor Recommends ...
Once your doctor has evaluated your body's structure and identified any imbalances or weaknesses, they can correct the problems by developing a program that combines specific chiropractic adjustments, custom-made orthotics and a personalized conditioning program. This program usually will be based on three things: your individual needs, your fitness goals, and how well you progress with the exercises your doctor has recommended.
Chiropractic adjustments of the spine and extremities have a direct and immediate effect on optimizing your body's proprioceptive responses. Adjustments will help improve your body's overall balance and coordination. They can help keep your body correctly aligned, improving your posture. They also can help relieve pain. The purpose of adjustments is to re-educate the joints and other supportive areas of your body. This will enhance the mobility of your joints and increase the amount of stress your body can tolerate before an injury occurs.
If your doctor determines that you have specific structural defects, you should be fitted for flexible, custom-made orthotics. What are orthotics? Essentially, they're shoe inserts - made specifically with your feet in mind. By supporting and balancing all three of your foot's natural arches, orthotics work with your chiropractic care to help stabilize your spine and hold your adjustments longer. They support, move and protect your body from the damaging shock that occurs when your heel strikes the ground with each step. Orthotics help control the angle and timing of pronation or supination, but do not restrict or eliminate your normal foot motion. By controlling movement in your feet, flexible orthotics encourage normal reactions all the way up your body.
Custom-made orthotics can benefit any athlete. Many studies have shown that flexible orthotics help reduce fatigue and have a positive effect on stride length and hip rotation. They help properly position your body to improve its balance and proprioceptive abilities, helping to enhance your athletic performance.
This unique approach to troubleshooting problems before an injury occurs is what separates doctors of chiropractic from all of the other sports medicine providers who treat only the injured athlete. Chiropractors can help predict certain injuries and correct structural defects, giving athletes new and exciting possibilities for success in the sports world.
If you have any questions about neck pain or a topic for my next blog, email me at landrumdc@gmail.com or visit my website, http://www.landrumdc.com
This article is from To Your Health: http://www.toyourhealth.com/mpacms/tyh/article.php?id=897
Your feet are the foundation for your entire body. They must be able to properly support your body; allow you to stand, walk, run, and jump; and absorb damaging shock that enters your body every time your heel hits the ground. Every athlete deals with structural defects, many of which start in the feet.
Pain tells you to consult your doctor, team physician or trainer. But foot imbalance or dysfunction does not always cause pain just in your feet - the pain may transfer to your lower legs, knees, hips or spine instead. Why? Your body is like a large, interconnected chain; movement at one of your joints affects movement at other joints. If your feet have imbalances or weaknesses, they travel all the way up your body.
If you don't think you have any foot imbalances, think again. Eighty percent of people develop some type of foot imbalance by the age of 20, and virtually everyone has foot imbalances by the age of 40. After years of standing, walking, and wearing shoes, the arches of your feet gradually weaken and are not able to provide the necessary support for your body.
Pronation, Supination and Proprioception
Pronation (inward rolling of the foot, particularly the heel and arch, as the heel contacts the ground) and supination (the opposite of pronation - outward rolling of the foot as the heel hits the ground) are normal foot movements that occur during walking and running. But when your foot excessively pronates or supinates, it puts the stability of your entire body at risk. These conditions can lead to other forms of an unstable posture, including uneven shoulder heights, one leg that is shorter than the other, and tilting in your hips.
Your athletic performance is directly determined by the status and coordination of your proprioception system. Proprioception is defined as "sensing the motion and position of the body." [BANNER]Special nerve endings in the tissues surrounding your muscles and bones interact with your nervous system - the center for all of your mental activity - to coordinate your body's movements, posture and balance. Three regions of the body contain the most proprioceptive nerve endings: your feet, your spine and your neck.
If you have weaknesses or imbalances in any one of these areas, you cannot function at your best. It's important to take care of your feet and your spine because interference in these areas can negatively affect the coordination of your proprioception system. Your athletic performance depends a great deal on this system - how smoothly and quickly your body can respond to position, speed and balance changes.
Structural Management
Doctors of chiropractic can provide you with structural management. What's that? Structural management evaluates the weaknesses and imbalances in your body so that your doctor can develop a program to address them. Most sports injuries are mechanical or structural in nature, so it makes sense to evaluate and manage your body's structure.
Every individual's body is unique. Every individual also has structural defects. A structural defect is a fault or flaw in your body's structure. If you are an athlete, you have probably had a prior injury or have hereditary weaknesses, conditioning problems, physical and emotional stresses, dietary problems, or equipment deficiencies - all of which contribute to structural defects.
In order to effectively manage your structure, your chiropractor must first examine your structure. They will probably visually evaluate you first, making note of important information about your posture, such as your shoulder and hip heights, internal and external rotations of your knees, and abnormal spinal curves. Then they will examine all the arches of your feet. Your doctor also will conduct range-of-motion tests on all of your joints, muscle tests, leg-length measurements, and a standing X-ray of your overall body structure.
From examining your structure, your chiropractor learns important information that will be used to educate you about your specific imbalances and weaknesses. Because structural imbalances and weaknesses can increase your risk of injury, they should be addressed immediately with treatment, support and exercises.
Your Doctor Recommends ...
Once your doctor has evaluated your body's structure and identified any imbalances or weaknesses, they can correct the problems by developing a program that combines specific chiropractic adjustments, custom-made orthotics and a personalized conditioning program. This program usually will be based on three things: your individual needs, your fitness goals, and how well you progress with the exercises your doctor has recommended.
Chiropractic adjustments of the spine and extremities have a direct and immediate effect on optimizing your body's proprioceptive responses. Adjustments will help improve your body's overall balance and coordination. They can help keep your body correctly aligned, improving your posture. They also can help relieve pain. The purpose of adjustments is to re-educate the joints and other supportive areas of your body. This will enhance the mobility of your joints and increase the amount of stress your body can tolerate before an injury occurs.
If your doctor determines that you have specific structural defects, you should be fitted for flexible, custom-made orthotics. What are orthotics? Essentially, they're shoe inserts - made specifically with your feet in mind. By supporting and balancing all three of your foot's natural arches, orthotics work with your chiropractic care to help stabilize your spine and hold your adjustments longer. They support, move and protect your body from the damaging shock that occurs when your heel strikes the ground with each step. Orthotics help control the angle and timing of pronation or supination, but do not restrict or eliminate your normal foot motion. By controlling movement in your feet, flexible orthotics encourage normal reactions all the way up your body.
Custom-made orthotics can benefit any athlete. Many studies have shown that flexible orthotics help reduce fatigue and have a positive effect on stride length and hip rotation. They help properly position your body to improve its balance and proprioceptive abilities, helping to enhance your athletic performance.
This unique approach to troubleshooting problems before an injury occurs is what separates doctors of chiropractic from all of the other sports medicine providers who treat only the injured athlete. Chiropractors can help predict certain injuries and correct structural defects, giving athletes new and exciting possibilities for success in the sports world.
If you have any questions about neck pain or a topic for my next blog, email me at landrumdc@gmail.com or visit my website, http://www.landrumdc.com
This article is from To Your Health: http://www.toyourhealth.com/mpacms/tyh/article.php?id=897
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