To my fellow “burn as many calories as you can” exercisers,
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I know some of you can relate to me; for many, many years, since I understood about calories in and calories out (science 8 I believe), the goal of my work outs have been to burn as many calories as possible. How great was it when the tread mills and ellipticals started showing you the exact (really???) amount you were burning….five more minutes and there goes my banana.
Also, in the 1990s eating fat was tabo and who wasn’t vegetarian in university (read no protein)
and so it was no wonder we were addicted to cardio since all we ate were carbs. Exercise would have been the only way to manage those sugar spikes all day. (As a side note, just to show how far nutrition has come, I remember in my course to become an aerobics instructor, probably 1991, the teacher explaining to us that the best thing to keep in our car and nibble on all day was a bag of begels! For those of you who don’t know me, I am definitely part endomorph and know NOW that protein and fat (the good kind) and very little carbohydrates is the key to maintaining a healthy weight. Ohhhh poor 20 year old me!!) The more cardio we did, the better we felt. So, bring on the step classes, bring on the high impact aerobics, 10km turned into half marathons, turned into marathons.
So where am I going with this and what does it have to do with posture? Well, no where in what we deemed a “great work out” were exercises like “super mans”; range of motion exercises just didn’t burn enough calories (waste of time) and when we had a choice to spend the last 10 minutes stretching or going through “the pattern” one more time, well that was a no brainer.
Now we are in our 40s and feeling a bit let down by our bodies. We have lost important movement patterns (ie hip hinging), developed vulnerable facial adhesions (ie IT bands that are not flexible anymore) and created muscle imbalances (ie chronically tight hip flexors) that make us sore to sit on an airplane for more than 3 hours and get hurt way too often. None of this bodes well for youthful posture.
I have a life goal statement and in it are things like “biking, running and walking through foreign countries”, and “always being able to lift my paddle board”. I realize that I will not be able to do those things without mobility. Thanks to a program called “Precision Nutrition” I have relearned important movement patterns and learned foam rolling techniques and incorporate them into my workouts 3 times a week. If I am short on time, I will choose foam rolling and mobility exercises over another set of weights or 15 more minutes on the treadmill. Sometimes my inner cardio queen gets snitty about that but I remind myself of those life goals and know that the investment into the mobility is more important than ever being a size 6.
Sometimes we may need extra help with the mobility and a massage therapist or ART practitioner may be needed to break up old facia and scar tissue and a chiropractor may be needed to restore certain spinal, shoulder and hip joint motion. It will be a process but we didn’t tighten up like this over night, so be patient and understand it will be a bit of a journey. But hey, hasn’t all of life?
In Health,
Dr. Angela Macdonald DC
aka “the Princess of Posture”
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Well said.