20/20 Vision

Regular Chiropractic Care Supports Your Goals of Health and Wellness

When you set your sights on the goal of achieving fitness and good health, it's important to be sure your plan of action is complete. You'll establish measurable goals for three of the main pillars of good health, that is, regular exercise, a nutritious diet, and sufficient rest. In addition, a complete action plan for achieving a healthy lifestyle that lasts includes regular chiropractic care. Regular chiropractic care helps ensure that the time you're spending on obtaining a healthy diet and regular, vigorous exercise is put to good use. In order to derive maximum benefit from the good food you're eating and the cardiovascular exercise and weight-training you're doing, your nerve system, your body's master system, must be functioning at peak efficiency. By detecting and correcting misalignments of the spine, regular chiropractic care helps restore and maintain a free flow of information from your brain to your body and from your body to your brain. By removing nerve interference, regular chiropractic care enables your nerve system to do its job. The result is optimum benefit from your lifestyle activities and greater levels of health and wellness.

All of us have thought, at one point or another, and possibly more than once, "I wish I knew then what I know now." It's been famously said that "hindsight is 20/20". Our clarity of thought with respect to what we should have done is frequently much more acute than was our thinking in those past irretrievable moments. However, some things are capable of being put right to a substantial degree. We cannot go back in time, but we can take steps in the present to redress certain relative failures of ours, specifically those regarding healthy lifestyle choices.
Of course, we don't get a "do-over" regarding the past 10, 20, or 30 years of relative neglect. But the very good news is that it's not too late to get back on track and obtain higher overall levels of health and well-being. It's not too late to begin making healthy lifestyle decisions that will provide a lifetime of benefit. Starting now, by taking action in the areas of regular exercise, a nutritious diet, and getting sufficient rest, you can obtain substantial across-the-board improvement in your health.^1,2
How is it possible to gain such improvement, despite however many years of lack of attention to regular exercise and unhealthy eating? The answers lie in the dynamic nature of human physiology and the complexity of its internal feedback structures. One such dynamic process is the adaptive response to mechanical stress. For example, Wolff’s law states that bones remodel along lines of physiological stress. Exercise causes long bones and the bones of your pelvis to bear increased physiological loads during relatively short intervals. In turn, these load-bearing bones are stimulated to build new bone. Your bones become structurally stronger in response to physiological work. Similarly, large muscle groups such as the quadriceps, hamstrings, calves, pectorals, and latissimus dorsi are stimulated to increase their mass and bulk. Regular, vigorous exercise causes growth of additional muscular tissue and development of new networks of blood vessels to supply these muscles with necessary oxygen and nutrients. In addition to your musculoskeletal system becoming stronger, leaner, and more efficient, your heart and lungs develop increased capacity and become more resilient. Physiological dynamic responses are also engaged when you shift your dietary habits toward a healthy regime. No matter your current condition and circumstances, by engaging in regular, vigorous exercise and healthy eating habits you will dramatically improve your levels of fitness, health, and well-being.³
Looking back with regret as what has occurred will not help us achieve what we want to achieve in the here and now. We can apply 20/20 vision to our present choices and choose healthy lifestyle behaviors now and into the future. The beneficiaries include our families, our friends, and ourselves.
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¹Schnohr P, et al: Dose of jogging and long-term mortality: the Copenhagen City Heart Study. J Am Coll Cardiol 65(5)411:419, 2015
² Watson K, Baar K: mTOR and the health benefits of exercise. Semin Cell Dev Biol 36:130-9, 2014
³Kelley GA, et al: Effects of exercise on depression in adults with arthritis: a systematic review with meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Arthritis Res Ther 17(1):21, 2015

The Home Stretch

Regular Chiropractic Care and Effective Stretching

Starting a stretching program is appropriate for most people. As we want to get the most out of our stretching routine, it's important to ensure that our musculoskeletal system is working at peak capacity. Regular chiropractic care performs these essential services by detecting, analyzing, and correcting spinal misalignments. Left uncorrected, such misalignments cause muscles, ligaments, and joints to become tight and irritated and also cause irritation to spinal nerves. By correcting spinal misalignments, your spinal nerves are free to conduct information properly between your brain and the rest of your body. Your musculoskeletal system is enabled to do its job properly. The result is that regular chiropractic care helps to optimize the functioning of our muscles, bones, and joints, thereby making our stretching and exercise time useful, healthful, and profitable.

Thanks to effective public health campaigns regarding healthy lifestyle choices, many people have incorporated regular, vigorous exercise, a nutritious diet, and getting sufficient rest in their daily routines. For many people, an additional important component of a healthy lifestyle is regular stretching.
Regular stretching provides numerous benefits, including enhanced flexibility and adaptability of your musculoskeletal system, that is, your bones, muscles, and joints.¹ As a result, regular stretching helps improve overall mobility and range of motion. Regular stretching helps reduce injury by improving circulation, bringing increased supplies of oxygen and critical nutrients to the large muscles of your thighs and legs and the small muscles of your back. As a bonus, regular stretching helps to reduce stress. It's clear that stretching activities provide a very big return for a modest investment of time and effort.^2,3
In order to derive the greatest benefits from your stretching program, knowledge of stretching "best practices" is essential. First, it's critical to conceive of stretching as a journey rather than a destination. In stretching, we have to give up all our notions of how much we think we should be able to achieve. On any given day, our muscles will be tighter or less tight. On any given day, it will be "harder" or easier to obtain the stretchability of the day before. The best practice is to pay attention to your body, focus on what you're doing, and work with what you have on a particular day. This "centering" approach is in direct contrast to trying to force your muscles to conform to the stretching length you think they should achieve. Using force while stretching will always result in injury. Instead, the activity of stretching calls for a calm, steady, and methodical approach.
What is it that you're doing when you stretch? Primarily, you're using a process of visualization. You're visualizing the particular muscle getting "longer". When you do a stretch for your hamstring muscle group (there are three muscles that comprise this group), you have an image in your mind of the muscles of the back of your thigh and you're "seeing" these muscles lengthening. You're not actually "doing" anything other than performing the activity of the stretch itself. In other words, you're not actively making the hamstrings longer. But you are "seeing" them lengthen in your mind, and the result is an effective stretch, that is, increased length and flexibility of the hamstring group.
Pictures of the quadriceps muscle group (the muscles on the front of your thigh), the hamstring muscle group, the calf muscles (the surface gastrocnemius and the deeper soleus), and your spinal muscle groups will provide great assistance with your visualization process. Such images are widely available on the Internet. Your "Zen-like" process of visualization will make your 10 or 15 minutes of stretching time more effective and may also be applied to various other tasks throughout your day, providing additional ongoing benefits to your health and well being.
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¹Peck E, et al: The effects of stretching on performance. Cur Sports Med Rep 13(3):179-185, 2014
²Morrin N, Redding E: Acute effects of warm-up stretch protocols on balance, vertical jump height, and range of motion in dancers. J Dance Med Sci 17(1):34-40, 2013
³Avloniti A, et al: The Acute Effects of Static Stretching on Speed and Agility Performance Depend on Stretch Duration and Conditioning Level. J Strength Cond Res 2014 Jun 17 [Epub ahead of print]