At-Home Workouts

November Move of the Month – Hanging

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At the beginning of September, I had the great opportunity to spend a week interning with Ido Portal in Germany.  While I was there, I met a great women from Northern Ireland and last month (October) she invited her crew to participate in a hanging challenge.  So for the month of October I hung and swung and watched my grip get stronger and my shoulders more open.  So, I decided this month, I should invite my crew to participate.

The details of the original hanging challenge from Ido himself can be found here.  In short, the challenge is to hang for 7 minutes of accumulated time per day.  However, since I am a big proponent of not letting the perfect get in the way of the good, I suggest we start at just hanging every day.  So, it can be in dosages of 10 seconds or 2 minutes.  You can hang for an accumulated time of 1 minute or 15 minutes and each day can be different.  There are no rules.

I do have a few suggestions though…

  • Hang in different places with different grips.
  • Set yourself up for success by identifying easy to access areas to hang.
  • Set an alarm on your phone so you do not forget to get at least one hang in a day.
  • Try to build on your time each day.
  • Don’t bore yourself out of the challenge, find friends to hang with our post your photos on Instagram and tag me!  (@brennabacke)

Today is day 1!  Get our there and hang!

Runner and Walker Recovery – Hip Pain

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At my studio, Koa Fit, we work with not only runners and walkers with hip pain, but also cyclists, dancers, golfers, tennis players and a lot more.  As said before in my previous posts about foot pain and knee pain, “hip pain” is a broad term.  Most importantly, your hip pain could actually be back pain in disguise.  It is important to know if your hip pain is a symptom of overuse/misuse or if it is nerve pain.  A physical therapist can run you through some tests to help you identify where your pain is coming from.

For the purpose of this post, I am going to be addressing the hip pain in the upper hamstring that is usually associated with activity.  It normally comes about during or after strenuous activity and feels like a a deep ache or muscle strain located where your leg meets your bum in the back.  Any pain that feels “sharp” or “burn-y” is most likely nerve pain and you will need more evaluation before getting appropriate exercises.

To help relieve and prevent the onset of hip pain, try the exercises below.  Even with the absence of hip pain, these exercises are good to perform to keep the hips moving smoothly and to avoid over-tightness.

Runner and Walker Recovery – Knee Pain

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Let’s move on to the 2nd biggest complaint among runners and walkers, knee pain (if you have the 1st, foot pain, please see my last post).  I know “knee pain” is such a broad term, but let’s start big picture and then move into the details.

Pain in the knee, if not caused by trauma (getting side-tackled for example), comes from a dysfunction of your biomechanics, or movements.  The movement I am talking about most is your gait, whether walking or running.  When you have a breakdown in the mechanics of your gait, that deficiency gets highlighted over thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of repetitions with each training session.

It is important to have a professional assess your walking and running patterns to identify any inefficiencies you may have in your stride.  But for now, we are going to focus on one of the more common points of pain, patellofemoral pain.  This is the pain commonly felt just below the kneecap and is usually a signal of over-used quadriceps and an under-utilized posterior kinetic chain (arch, calves, hamstrings, and glutes).

Try the exercises below to help prevent the onset of patellofemoral pain and keep your knees happy!

Runner and Walker Recovery – Foot Pain

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One of the main complaints I hear from my runners and walkers is about pain their feet.  Whether it be the heel, arch, or ball of the foot, it seems every pedestrian ends up with foot pain at one point or another.

There are many factors that can cause inflammation on the bottom of the foot.  It is best to get an assessment by a movement specialist to determine your precise cause.  However, there are a few general movements you can start doing to help you keep the pain at bay or even prevent it from starting in the first place.  Check out the video below and follow along to help increase your foot’s flexibility and strength.

Fix Your Forward Head Posture

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Did you know it has been estimated that up to 90% of us have forward head posture?  Want to know if you do?  Stand up right now, turn your camera on, hold your arm straight out to the side and snap a pic of your profile, including your shoulder.  Take a look.  Are you ears forward of your shoulders?  Congratulations!  You have forward head posture.

Let’s take a quick look at what causes forward head posture (from now on we will call this FHP to save me some time sitting at the computer).  There are the obvious culprits – prolong sitting, computer use, texting, and trauma such as whiplash from a car accident.  But there are also things we don’t think about – the sports we play, the heavy backpack we carry, our jobs, the way we breath.

{Side Note}  Let’s talk about this last one for a hot second.  The stress of our daily lives has left most people with shallow, stressed, labored breathing.  We no longer take relaxed breaths.  Instead, most of us have a habit (without even noticing it) of holding our breath or breathing faster than we need.  This alone can not only affect things like your heart, your oxygen intake, and your mood, but it can also start to tighten down the muscles at the front of the neck, pulling your head forward.  For more on how to help your breathing, check out my past blog post, Breathe Deep.

Symptoms of FHP don’t just include looking like a sad puppy, there are also REAL issues that can occur.  Because of the strain FHP puts on the cervical spine, every system is affected.  This includes the musculoskeletal systems (headaches anyone?), the nervous system (maybe you are a tingling hands kind of person?), and the vascular system (raise your hand if you have sleep apnea!).  The longer your head hangs out there, the more vulnerable you are to muscle spams, bulging and herniated discs, and even TMJ.

So, let’s get to work.  Perform these 8 moves a couple times a week.  Use them as a warm-up to your other activities or do them right before bed.

6 Exercises for Stronger Feet

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We all know our feet are important.  They are our foundation and help keep everything above them safe.  But weak feet can lead to aches, pains, and injury.  So, here are 6 exercises you can do using a rolled up yoga mat (I use a 1/2 roller in the videos).  That’s it!  That is all you need to help strengthen your feet and simultaneously improve your balance, strengthen your hips, and take stress off your spine.

Move That Mid-Back to Save Your Neck and Low Back

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I know I know.  You are probably sick of me talking about the thoracic spine, but I can’t help myself.  A few months back, I talked about the thoracic spine in my post “Exercises for a Tight Neck and Shoulders“.  Today, I want to dive a little deeper and talk about the whole spine and the importance of movement and fluidity especially in the thoracic spine.

For an array of reasons, your spine needs to move fluidly.  Proper movement in your spine not only allows you to move properly and avoid injury, but it also helps nourish the discs in your spine and move cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) to and from your brain.  Today, due to high levels of stress, constant sitting, and working on computers, our spines do not get a lot of chances to move forward, back, side-to-side, and in rotation.  The place this shows up the most, is in the thoracic spine.

The thoracic spine is the the middle portion of your spine.  The spine should move like a snake – flexible but strong.  Imagine you are holding a snake (I know it’s gross, but it’s just pretend), if you hold onto the center of the snake, his head and tail are going to move like crazy!  The same thing happens to your back.  When we lose movement in our thoracic spines, our necks and low backs become hyper-mobile.  This excess of movement puts huge forces on our vulnerable discs and vertebrae and can lead to muscle soreness, nerve pain, and bulging discs.

So, now that I have scared you into moving your spine (I am totally proud of that by the way), let’s give you something you can actually use to help yourself.  Below you will find videos to move your thoracic spine in 3 different ways – flexion and extension, lateral movement, and rotation.  Do the whole set or pick one from each movement and get your mid-back moving!

Thoracic Mobilization – Flexion/Extension

Thoracic Mobilization – Lateral Shift

Thoracic Mobilization – Rotation

Sore Knees? Try These.

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Knee pain.  It has happened to most of us.  1/3 of Americans will experience knee pain at some point in their lives.  It is the 2nd most common cause of chronic pain and new reports show it is affecting more people each year.  So, if you are experiencing a “twinge” or maybe a “tweak” in your knees, it is time to take some action before bigger issues occur.

The greatest cause of knee pain is, by far, poor body mechanics and poor mechanics are  typically caused by a lack of mobility  which leads to a lack of strength.  For example, due to prolonged sitting, a lot of people experience a tightness in the front of their hips.  This tightness in the front of the hips leads to decreased strength in the back of the leg (glutes and hamstrings), which decreases the support in the back of the knee.  Without the support and strength in the back of the knee (posterior), force traveling through the knee joint is pushed into the front of the knee (anterior) and causes pain across the front of the kneecap (commonly called “Runner’s Knee”).  This is not the only cause of knee soreness, but it is definitely one of the most common.

The knee joint is where the femur (thigh bone) and the tibia (shin bone) come together. All 4 muscles of the quadriceps come together to form the patellar tendon which starts at the top of the knee joint, adheres to the patella as it crosses the anterior (front) of the joint until in attaches at the tibia below.  The patellar tendon lies within a grooved-out notch the allows you to bend and straighten your knee without irritation.  A lot of knee pain is caused when the alignment of the patellar tendon and this specially made notch go out of whack.

The inside of your knees is referred to as the medial side and the outside of your knees is known as the lateral side.  Imbalances between these two sides can cause the patellar tendon the shift towards the stronger side.  For instance, if you have had an injury to your knee in the past, you may remember your therapist trying to get the inner-most muscle of the quadriceps to fire.  This needs to be strong, so that your patella does not start to track to the lateral side of the knee joint and cause you more pain.  If this imbalance continues, a person can start to feel tightness in the IT band and other soft tissue on the lateral side of the knee while also experiencing sharp pain on the medial side of the joint.  The knee has to be balanced side-to-side (medial to lateral) to stay pain-free and happy.

Imbalances front-to-back (anterior to posterior) are the usual cause of pain in the first example of our Runner’s Knee.  However, we also see in the example above, that imbalances medially to laterally can cause different, but equally annoying pain.  The routine below starts with releases of the most commonly tight areas of the hip and lower limb that may cause imbalances at the knee joint.  They are followed by exercises that strengthen the muscles that are commonly weak in people with knee pain.  This routine will not help everyone with knee soreness, but if you have been experiencing sore knees after activity or “tweaks” and “twinges”, this is a great place to start.  Even if you have not had knee pain, this routine will help your knees stay happy, healthy and pain-free.

Exercises For a Tight Neck and Shoulders

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Do me a quick favor.  If you are reading this on your computer or your phone, take a quick second and press the top of your head towards to sky, make yourself as tall as possible, and level your chin.  Ok, now keep reading.  I would hate for my blog post about sore, cranky necks actually cause sore necks.  Nobody needs more pains in the neck.  Ok, I’ll stop…

In all seriousness, chronic stiff and sore necks and shoulders seems to be a thing people are just “putting up with” these days.  That feeling that you want to “pop” your neck or stretch it, or move it to release some tension.  We have all had it at one time.  If jobs and responsibilities allowed us to move more, allowed us to turn our heads to look at different things, allowed us to view things both up close and at a distance, allowed us to MOVE more, we could probably avoid it, but most of us don’t have that luxury.

So first, let’s understand your neck and shoulder pain.  For most people, the issue may not even start at the neck.  So all that pulling and popping and stretching you are doing up there, stop for a minute.  Most people’s necks are already hyper-mobile, the problem is not that they don’t move, but that they move too much.  You have probably heard of “Forward Head Posture”.  If you have it, your neck has moved a lot!  It is suppose to be sitting right on top of your shoulders, but you are able to move it way out in front!  Yes, that is sarcasm.

The position of your head sitting out in front of your shoulders acts as a big ol’ ball and chain on the muscles of the neck, the shoulders, and the upper back.  If you would like to understand it more, pick up something that weighs about 20lbs (kids, dogs, and bowling balls all work).  Now hold the weight close to your belly and feel the strain on your shoulder and back.  Not bad right?  Now straighten your arms and press it out in front of you about chest level.  Now we are talking.  Feel that pull on your shoulders, maybe a little twinge in your low back?  You neck pain is a product of the same mechanism.

There is a network of muscles that equally pull your neck forward, backward, and side-to-side.  When your head is forward, those muscles become off-balanced.  The muscles normally used to pull your head forward and down tend to get short and tight.  The muscles that normally pull your head back and up become long and stiff.  The side-to-side muscles don’t even know what to do, they are like children watching their parents argue.

The stiffness you normally feel in your neck and shoulders come from those muscles in the back that would normally pull your head back and up.  The most common response to these long, stiff muscles is to stretch them.  Here is the thing, they are already LONG.  They have been stretched day-in and day-out since your forward head posture started.  Stretching them will give you temporary relief, but it will not bring you any long-term benefits.  What we need to do is lengthen the deep muscles in the front of the neck as we strengthen the posterior muscles.

Ok, but why is your cervical spine moving so much?  Well, it is most likely because your thoracic spine is not moving at all.  Lack of fluidity in this mid-area of your back tends to make the segments above (neck) and below (low back pain anyone?) move too much.  This area tends to get stuck for a few reasons – excessive sitting, lack of core strength, tightness through the chest and diaphragm  – all of these can lead to stiffness in the thoracic spine.

So, when you start to address your neck pain, it is important for you to address the stiffness in your thoracic spine first.  If you only address your neck pain at the neck, it will come back time and time again.  The spine must move fluidly together, that is the basis of all good movement.

Below is a short exercise and stretching routine that will help you relieve your achy neck and shoulders.

*Please note – The exercises above are not medically prescribed.  Please check with your physician to check if the exercises are appropriate for you.

 

 

Suspension Training Workouts

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Most of you have probably heard of or seen a suspension training system.  It looks  a little like something you might use to move furniture or ratchet down a kayak on the top of your car.  These straps may look a little silly, but this system is one of the most versatile pieces of workout equipment out there.

  • You can use it anywhere, and I mean anywhere!  I have looped it over tree branches, shut the anchor in hotel room doors, and I currently have one dangling from a machine at my studio.
  • It is portable and packable.  The straps weigh nothing and take up a small amount of space when you are packing them for a trip or putting them away when guests come over to your house.
  • You can do a high intensity interval workout (HIIT) using the suspension system.  Check out these routine ideas.
  • You can get a full-body workout done in 20 minutes.  There are so many ways to use this piece of equipment to exercise every part of the body.  Because it is bodyweight focused, your core is challenged during every move.

Try out the moves below to get a full-body routine done fast.  Do each move (or each side  if the exercise works one side at a time) for 45 seconds.  Rest for 15 seconds before moving to the next exercise (or side).  Finish all the exercises in the set, rest for 2 minutes, then repeat 2-5 times.

Also, please note the very adorable gym dog, Lily, sleeping away in the background.