These days, it doesn’t seem that way at all. At least not to me.  I’ve seen countless people in their 20s and 30s come in the door with major balance issues. And I’ve had people in their 70s come in with fabulous balance. So I don’t think it has so much to do with age as it does with something one 75-year-old client has taught me.

The older you get, the more you have to do to maintain your body.  

And it’s not JUST because you’re getting older. It’s because our lives have also gotten more sedentary. We sit and sit and sit and don’t realize what an effect it has on our bodies. Luckily, we’re starting to wake up to the problem and acknowledge that it is a problem. So you have age, which means you gotta do more to keep your body feeling good, AND you have your lifestyle working against you.

So what’s the way to combat worsening balance? Well, you can’t reverse time (there’s not an app for that yet), but you can do one thing that will help you FEEL younger.

Move! Move your body intelligently and in ways that re-awaken the right muscles the right way. That doesn’t mean you should end your workday by doing a five hundred pound leg press. It means challenging your body gently and effectively constantly.

One quick thing you can do after a long period of sitting is balance on one leg. Just get out of your chair, stand near a wall or desk, then pick up one leg and try to balance for a minute. Switch legs. See what happens. It’s not as easy as it sounds. You may find you can’t even do it for 15 seconds.  You’ll also find that it’s going to be MUCH harder at the end of a long period of sitting since the hip stabilizers often get shut down by long periods of sitting.  This little exercise throughout the day can help improve your balance and reawaken some of those poor hip muscles that you squash all day long in your office chair. Give it a shot and see what happens! As your body’s balance improves you’ll be surprised at how much younger you start to feel.

So we’re asking our clients: what is your favorite exercise and what does it do for you? Post your answers below in the comments section below!

If you feel pinching pain at any point during this test, it means you’ve got misalignment and muscular imbalances in your shoulder blades and shoulder joints that will affect your neck, mid-back, lower back, and hips via direct muscular and connective tissue connections. Not a good thing to have, but it’s a great thing to know so you can get started fixing it.

This short video demonstrates how to do the self-test:

The great thing about this test is that it can also help you start restoring shoulder health if you do it gently and with proper technique (and assuming your muscular imbalances don’t stem from somewhere other than your shoulders and mid and upper back). If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, don’t hesitate to get in touch with the comment section below!

The week leading up to the back pain, I had been sick. Too tired to move.  Too tired to leave the house.  Too sick to do anything but send a few emails, type some things up, and then take a nap.  I contorted myself on the bed, on the floor, and on the couch with my laptop and my iPod touch throughout the week, too tired to do any posture-restoring exercises to counteract all the slouching and twisting I was doing.

So when I woke up that Thursday with back pain, it wasn’t any wonder why.  A week’s worth of lounging, lazing, and generally being miserable had visibly distorted the balance of my muscles.  My posture had changed for the worse.  My shoulders were hunched.  My spine was curved.  My hips were twisted.  Apparently 7 days of lying in bed ISN’T good for your posture.

So I did what any posture alignment therapist would do in my position.  I panicked!

And then I did a few exercises to fix the posture (with what little energy I had).  In under 5 minutes, the back pain was gone, and I was ready to go about the business of getting back to full strength again.

Are you ready with a quick, simple plan of action for the next time you wake up with back pain (that does NOT involve pills!)?

According to some doctors, 11 million Americans have email addictions that interfere with their lives. It happens to all of us, and it’s definitely something I struggle with!  Enter Google Labs and the new Take a break! feature.

When you activate the Take a break! feature, Google actually locks you out of your email for 15 minutes so that you can “Take a walk, get some real work done, or have a snack.”

To get access to the Take a break! feature, log into your Gmail account (as if you aren’t already), go to settings, and then click on Labs.  You’ll find a list of cool little productivity tools and Take a break will be one of them.  Once you’ve activated it, go back to your Gmail inbox.  At the top right, you’ll see a link next to your name that says “Take a break.”  Click that and you’ll be locked out for 15 glorious minutes from your email!

For those of you without Gmail, there’s an old-fashioned workaround: get someone to stand behind you all day and monitor what you’re doing.

Do you have a better idea of how to break the email addiction that leads to forward-head posture?  If so, leave your comment below!

If you don’t have a watch or cell phone with a handy countdown timer and you happen to have your laptop and an internet connection, this will be real handy for you: the Online Stopwatch!  All you need to do is enter in the amount of time and away you go! 

For many of my clients (and often for myself!), prolonged computer usage often leads to a host of dysfunctions including: tingling, numbness, and/or weakness around the shoulders, neck, and wrists; the sensation of friction in the elbow; pain in the middle of the back; and just a general sense of discomfort all over. Sometimes the collection of symptoms you end up with get called carpal tunnel syndrome or thoracic outlet syndrome or medial epicondylitis or tendonitis (or just plain “ouchies” if your diagnosing physician happens to be under the age of 10). What all of these issues have in common is that you can do some exercises on your own to help alleviate them!

Using the computer tends to weaken the muscles and connective tissues that stabilize your shoulder blades from below.  When using the computer, the lower portion of your shoulder blade often slides forward.  It very rarely ever needs to slide back while you’re slouching in your chair.  Your body gets good at whatever you ask it to do, so your body gets great at letting your shoulder blade sit forward.  To get really good at this, your lower trapezius  — the one that helps bring your shoulder blade back — gets lazy.

If the lower trapezius gets lazy, guess what?  Everyone else has to pick up the slack, and the rest of the muscles and connective tissues attached to your shoulder blade are going to get irritated, inflamed, and start doing things that throw balance out the window and start compressing down on things that shouldn’t get compressed.

End result: pain and discomfort.

So here’s an exercise that works wonders at re-establishing balance around the shoulder blade and reducing computer pain. You may not be able to do this one at the office, but doing this at home on your bed before and after work (or on the office floor when everyone is on lunch break) can be great for maintaining proper balance around your shoulder blades because it gets your lower trapezius working again.  Give it a shot, and be prepared to be surprised by how hard it is!  (Remember, respect your body’s limits and don’t push beyond them.  And if you’ve got some medical condition that dictates that you shouldn’t do this exercise — don’t!).

As you’re doing this exercise, squeeze your shoulder blades together first, then bring your thumbs up toward the ceiling and feel how your shoulder blades come even closer together.  Then let your hands back down and then release your shoulder blades.  Now just wash, rinse, and repeat!

This exercise can go a long way to help with some people and may actually be too tough to do any good if you’re already in significant pain.  Give it a shot.  If it helps, it was free.  If it doesn’t, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do — it just means this one isn’t quite what you need to really address your shoulder issues!

Researchers now believe that some of the more entrenched elements of many athletes’ warm-up regimens are not only a waste of time but actually bad for you. The old presumption that holding a stretch for 20 to 30 seconds — known as static stretching — primes muscles for a workout is dead wrong.

Essentially, researchers are saying that slow stretching before athletic exertion isn’t good for you, which makes sense, given that your body needs a long time to recover from lengthy stretches.  So what to do?

A well-designed warm-up starts by increasing body heat and blood flow. Warm muscles and dilated blood vessels pull oxygen from the bloodstream more efficiently and use stored muscle fuel more effectively. They also withstand loads better.

For illustrated exercises and more detailed tips, read the full article at the New York Times.

According to Dr. Moshe Solomonow, Ph.D., M.D. at the Occupational Medicine Research Center at Louisiana State University, the faster you stretch, the more likely you are to injure your ligaments. Here’s how it works.

Your ligaments are not just like cables that pull on things.  The way a ligament lengthens and contracts depends on a variety of factors, particularly how quickly a stretch is happening and how close the ligament is to its max length.

In laboratory testing, Solomonow found that the faster a ligament gets stretched, the more the ligament tenses against the stretch while at the same time preventing reaching the ligament’s true max length.  So let’s say you’re standing up and you bend over to REALLY reach for your toes.  The more you reach and bounce and struggle and grunt and reach, the more tension you put into the ligaments, and the less likely you’ll ever get anymore length out of them (and the more likely you’ll end up damaging them).

Solomonow found, however, that if you apply a slow, constant stretch, a ligament will react with much less tension, thus allowing far more length.  So if you stretch slowly, you’ll get a little more length out of your stretch with a lot less effort and strain.  Ligaments don’t lengthen linearly and simply, though.  When you stretch, a ligament will only go to a certain point naturally.  You have to continue waiting with a slow, constant stretch before the ligaments lengthen more and allow you to get closer and closer to your toes!

After all that lengthening is done, you’ll reach the max length.  Solomonow found that the closer a ligament is to its max length, the more its going to tense against a stretch.  When more stretch is put in, the ligament will tense up very quickly, so you have to be careful near the max length unless you want the ligament to tense up and rupture.

That’s the second reason you want to go slow.  Slow, constant stretch will allow your ligaments to get as far as they naturally can without doing damage.  Once you hit the end, you’ll know because you won’t be getting any farther no matter how long you hang and wait.

Finally, when you’re done stretching, it’s important to return to your normal activities slowly.  According to Solomonow, once you’ve stretched a ligament for a given period, it can take 20-40 times longer for the ligament to fully recover back to its pre-stretch state, so you don’t want to go do a strong man competition ten minutes after you’ve been doing yoga stretches.

Solomonow, Moshe. Ligaments: A Source of Work-related Musculoskeletal Disorders.
Journal of Electromyography and Kinesiology. February 2004 (Vol. 14, Issue 1, Pages 49-60).