Somatic Mechanic

Parkinson's Patients improve with "forced" exercise

The NYTimes has an interesting article discussing the findings of a Parkinson's Disease researcher.  

"Scientific discoveries can be serendipitous, and so it was when Jay L. Alberts, then a Parkinson’s disease researcher at Emory University in Atlanta, mounted a tandem bike with Cathy Frazier, a Parkinson’s patient. The two were riding the 2003 RAGBRAI bicycle tour across Iowa, hoping to raise awareness of the neurodegenerative disease and “show people with Parkinson’s that you don’t have to sit back and let the disease take over your life,” Dr. Alberts said.

But something unexpected happened after the first day’s riding. One of Ms. Frazier’s symptoms was micrographia, a condition in which her handwriting, legible at first, would quickly become smaller, more spidery and unreadable as she continued to write. After a day of pedaling, though, she signed a birthday card with no difficulty, her signature “beautifully written,” Dr. Alberts said. She also told him that she felt as if she didn’t have Parkinson’s."

The article goes on to propose "forced" exercise, that is exercise that is performed at an intensity higher than the patient would normally have chosen, may have significant beneficial effects on Parkinson's Disease characteristics.  I think it is important to recognize that this probably has nothing to do with the patient's internal motivation and whether or not the patient is willing or unwilling to do the exercise. This isn't an unethical use of force by any means! But this *is* a wonderfully intelligent and elegant study design that examines the benefits of the least expensive and yet most effective therapies available to us:  exercise.

Franklin Method Jaw and Neck Workshop

Do you hold tension in your jaw?

The jaw has some of the strongest muscles in the body, allowing us to munch our way through peanut brittle, bruschetta and other crunchy foods, but sometimes they go rogue and cause too much tension.  When these muscles are too tight, it can cause the neck to tense up as well and lead to headaches, neck pain and shoulder tension.  Jaw clenching, teeth grinding, and postural issues such as holding the head too far forward all contribute to jaw and neck tension.

In this class, we’ll learn simple exercises, stretches and imagery that will release these patterns of tension, especially those patterns you were not even aware you were creating and actively maintaining.  We will access our inner sense of movement to learn simple and effective ways to release your jaw and relax your neck.

When: Friday, December 3, 2010

Where: Mindful Movement @ The Barnyard Shopping Center in Carmel, California.  Detailed map here.

Time: 1pm - 3pm

Cost: $50

Taught by:  Donna Luder, certified Pilates, Gyrotonic and Franklin Method instructor.

Class size is limited to 10 participants 

RSVP 831-206-0725

 

Relax your brainstem

If you have not experienced a Franklin Method workshop, you may think it strange to hear you can get amazing results for neck tension by imagining relaxing your brainstem.  What?  Your brainstem?!  Yep, that's where what's left of your reptilian brain lives.  It regulates stuff like blood pressure, respiration, consciousness and your sleep cycle and is located here:

 A skillful teacher of ideokinesis can help you take an image and apply it to your body to achieve release, power, flexibility, or strength.  Perhaps even all four!  One of my favorites is Eric's image of the brain, the brain stem, and the projecting spinal cord.  Imagine your spinal cord is soft and dangling from your brain stem.  What would that feel like?   Close your eyes, and imagine the spinal cord is long, soft, and floating like the tentacles from a jelly.  Watch the video and see how the jelly's tentacles are passively floating through the ocean currents.  Now go back into your own body and imagine your spinal cord floating passively in the cerebrospinal fluid. Do you feel the back of your neck relax and soften like warm butter?  Mmmmm!

This video was taken at the Monterey Bay Aquarium near where I live.  Normally jellies like to swim downward so the tentacles point up, but that didn't fit my image of the brain and the dangling spinal cord so I turned my camera upside-down.  Take THAT you jellies!

Dr Oz speaks out for Pilates

No matter what kind of tattoo might be adorning your lower back, it's not going to be all that appealing if you can't clip your own toenails. That's why now's the time to make sure your back has the strength to handle the load you ask it to carry - at work, on hikes, through the mall, while dancing on poles, all the time. If you want to stave off the crippling effects of a lower-back meltdown, the most important thing you can do is work the foundation muscles in your body's core. These muscle… Read More »

via ask.doctoroz.com

Dr Oz recommends Pilates! You gotta love a guy who brings an omentum onto the Oprah show.

 

Really? - Throat Exercises Can Relieve Sleep Apnea - Question - NYTimes.com

The NYTimes points out that throat exercises such as

 "swallowing and chewing motions, placing the tip of the tongue against the front of the palate and sliding it back, and pronouncing certain vowels quickly and continuously."

have been found to decrease sleep apnea as well as throat circumference, which is a known risk factor for sleep apnea.  I recommend that, if you can't find a therapist to teach you these special exercises, get yourself a voice coach and study singing, especially singing in English which is one of the most difficult languages to sing nicely. Italian is so much prettier.

Amazon.com: EXEL Urban Skier Nordic Walking Poles

Here is a link to the Nordic walking poles I was using in this morning's WalkFIT class at the club.  They truly do help shift some of the work into your upper body.  They're also great for folks who just unsure of their balance or to support imagery of spinal transverse rotation during gait. 

 

Exercise Is Good For the Brain | LiveScience

 

While there is ample evidence of the beneficial effects of exercise on cognition in other animal models, such as the rat, it has been unclear whether the same holds true for people, said study researcher Judy Cameron, a psychiatry professor at Pitt School of Medicine. Testing the hypothesis in monkeys can provide information that is more comparable to human physiology.

via www.livescience.com

Researchers found that monkeys that exercised on treadmills for an hour a day, 5 days per week, for five months had a greater volume of blood vessels in their brains and performed better on cognitive tasks when compared with non-exercising monkeys . The study proposes that "exercisers learn faster, remember more, think clearer and bounce back more easily from brain injuries."  Article here.

Observatory - Converting Body Movements Into Electricity - NYTimes.com

It may not seem like it, but even the laziest of couch potatoes is a human dynamo. The act of breathing — of moving the ribs to draw air into the lungs and expel it — can generate about a watt of power. And if the potato actually gets up off the couch and walks briskly across the room, each heel strike can produce even more power, about 70 watts’ worth.

via www.nytimes.com

This article shows us the solution for the article last week about sitting and its detrimental effects on health! In order to power up your computer or television, you have to provide the current by wearing an item of clothing (pants? a vest? a sweater?) embedded with the piezoelectric crystals described in this article. Then you have to MOVE your body to power up your devices.
Even better, wouldn't it be great if you could store the electricity for later use? For instance, you know Mad Men is on tonight, you know you want to watch it, so you have to be active enough during the day to (*gasp*) earn the 60-minutes of downtime later on... Cool ideas...

Sitting leads to health problems....

The NYTimes has a great article today that summarizes the health impact of sitting.  It's not pretty folks. 

It doesn’t matter if you go running every morning, or you’re a regular at the gym. If you spend most of the rest of the day sitting — in your car, your office chair, on your sofa at home — you are putting yourself at increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, a variety of cancers and an early death. In other words, irrespective of whether you exercise vigorously, sitting for long periods is bad for you.

 

The author repeats the oft-suggested recommendation to turn your desk into a treadmill+desk area.  The idea being:  run or walk on the treadmill while you do your desk work.  I am reminded of how it felt to go for a run while pushing my infant son in a stroller.  All I can say is:  DON'T DO IT.  It completely disrupts the normal biomechanics of running or jogging or frankly, even walking.  You can check this out by going out for a run and holding your arms out in front of you.  Very quickly you realize how much momentum is created by your arms swinging at your sides.  If you are running or walking on a treadmill and you can't swing your arms (because they are on the keyboard in front of you) you are losing the wind-up phase of every step.  Ick. 

However, it may be that the health benefits of walking on a treadmill while working is worth the biomechanical ick factor.  I just know that I couldn't do it.  Instead I fidget.  I bounce my leg up and down... I type a few words then spin in my chair,  I look out the window, etc.  I never knew that being a fidgeter would turn out to be in my favor!

Get awesome lips without surgery or sticky lip gloss

 

So my 9-year old son and I are standing in line at the grocery store and I'm zoning out, thinking about making dinner and getting him started on his Cub Scout project.  My boy is looking at the magazines at the checkout stands and says, "Mom, that lady's lips are weird."  It cracked me up because I didn't know which celebrity he was looking at, but I was already agreeing with him. Yep, most of them are definitely weird.  

Turns out he was looking at a "plastic surgery gone wrong" issue, and the photos on the cover were amusing yet horrifying.  I was explaining that some people use surgery to look pretty and sometimes end up having to talk weird with great big lips.  So I was imitating how someone with lips-gone-wild would talk.  And I had an interesting experience:  I found out just how much tension I was holding in my mouth and lips.  And I also learned how tension in mouth-and-lips translates into neck tension.  Hm!

Here's how you do it:

Imagine you have these lips

Wow - that's a whole lotta lippa.  How would your mouth feel if you had that much lip?  Close your eyes, and imagine your lips as being inflated like these. I don't necessarily want you to stick your lips out into a pout, just relax your muscles and let your mental imagery guide the sensation.  Would these lips be projected outward, tense, squeezed?  Maybe yeah, if they were overstuffed like sausages.  So let out some of that inflation, until your lips feel like the next photo.  In your imagination, release the imaginary valve that will deflate your lips until you have Brigitte's lips:

Ok, too much lipstick.  And that's still kind of an over-filled lip.  Do your lips feel relaxed?  Do you like how they feel?  And, by the way, I don't mean "feel" like reach up with your fingers and touch your lips, I want you to use your internal sensations of how tense your lips feel.  This is called proprioception; it's your ability to sense yourself (such as your body's position, posture, and muscle tension).   In my own imagination, Brigitte's lip feels a little ... umm... turgid.  And I still feel a bit of tension in my puckering-up muscles.

How 'bout Jessica Alba's lips?  Yep, they look pretty good.  Ok, so in your imagination, deflate your lips a little bit more until they are at Jessica's plumpness.  Now smile.  Now pout.  Now open your jaw slowly, and close it.  Can you feel the relaxation across your cheeks and even in the back of your neck?

If you're a guy, you can aim for this:

Oh Lordy lordy lordy.  What a mouth.  (Y'know, I had a very interesting experiencing googling on Rudolf Nureyev and looking at the resulting images.  VERY interesting.  And that is ALL I am going to say about that.  Lordy lordy lordy.)

Okay, so let's keep going, deflating our lips (this sounds very strange, I know) beyond what we like.  Close your eyes, inhale and as you exhale, imagine your lips deflating more until you've got this:

 
(Mary Pickford.)  Do you notice the new tension in your face?  Open your jaw and close it.  Smile. Frown.  Which is easier with this amount of tension?  Smiling or frowning?  For me, it's easier to frown.   That's not good!  Okay, close your eyes and inhale, then exhale and deflate your lips until you get this: 

Hee hee hee!!!  I know, it's not a very nice photo.  But what's interesting about this is that her lips are actually fairly plump.  It's the tension in her face that is making her lips look really thin.  When I look at this photo, I actually feel the tension in my own face.  It's one of the skills of being a teacher of movement, when your student moves, you can anticipate how she feels as she's making the movement.  If I see your shoulders hunched up, I know how your neck is feeling and if I let my attention lock onto that for too long, I'll actually feel it in my own neck.

Last time now, inhale and exhale, deflating your lips until you've got this:

Do you recognize her? She's Margaret Hamilton, she played the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz.  She had the perfect lips for that role: thin and tense.  Okay, now that your lips are that thin, do you like the kinesthetic sense of it?  No?  Me neither.  Check your cheeks and neck.  Tense and icky, huh.

Some people say that we deserve the face we have after 40.  I think that's a little harsh, but I like the sentiment.  Our facial posture, just like our spine posture, can change.  We don't have to have injections or buy expensive lip plumping gloss or hire a private makeup artist or inherit the perfect genetics.  You can maximize your natural features through mental imagery and by altering the way you hold your face.

These lips below are gorgeous, and yet not obviously plastic (surgery):

 

Audrey Hepburn

 
 
 Marilyn without makeup and with....

 
the Marquise de Pompadour...

If you would like to maximize your natural lips, hold them softly.  Don't tense your neck, cheeks, and lip muscles.  It's unnecessary and probably leads to you looking like the Wicked Witch of the West.  (Did I ever promise I wouldn't exaggerate?)  Beyond looking like the Wicked Witch, how do you think a tense face contributes to your mood?

Imagine if your lips were like tubes of toothpaste, all that tension would squeeze out the paste!  And then your lips would look like shriveled up empty Crest tubes.  Do you want that for YOUR lips?  Of course not.

Next time you are in an argument with someone, look at their lips.  Are they tense, tight, and thin?  Do you want that for yourself?  Notice your own mouth and lip tension.  Do you spend the majority of your time with tight, tense lips?  No amount of lip-plumping gloss is going to overcome that, no matter what Maybelline writes on their packaging.  Next time you notice someone else's beautiful plump lips (celebrity or girl-next-door) I want you to practice softening and releasing the fullness of your own.  (Yowza!)