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Why Fitness Isn’t Working
Dr. Jolie Bookspan
Freely Ye Have Received; Freely Give. Matthew 10:8
You know that being fitter helps your health. So you buy health food and eat low fat or low carbs, go to the gym, do exercise videos, or have a trainer, but aren’t losing weight. You buy special equipment and beds, get acupuncture and massage but your back still hurts. You buy health food and pills for energy, try gizmos, hypnosis, and yoga. You’re still stressed, tired, achy, and not in good shape. Articles, books, and breaking news stories talk about this mystery. Medical conferences keynote the issue of increasing obesity when more people are exercising and dieting than before. What is going on?
A Mystery?
To many people, fitness means stopping your “real life,” changing clothes, driving to a gym, and doing uncomfortable things without similarity to movement they make in daily life.
To hear fitness experts say it, “fitness as a lifestyle” means “working out” at a gym or at home several days a week. But then you go back to “real life” - slouching, sitting around, bending wrong all day, poor posture, walking heavily, sitting round-shouldered, taking elevators, driving everywhere while sitting slouched, and avoiding all movement.
At the gym, you do squats with a trainer for an hour (paying to learn proper form and upright back), then bend right over at the waist to put the weight down when you’re finished. You do lunges for your legs in exercise class, then bend right over at the waist to pick up your things when you leave. You work with weights to isolate your arms and never learn how your entire body stabilizes a weight so you hurt your back opening a window. You work on a treadmill or elliptical trainer holding the sidebars, and sprain your ankle when you go out to walk on regular sidewalks. You haven’t trained balance and stabilization muscles for normal terrain.
You sit hunched in bad posture waiting for your exercise class to start. In modern life, exercise is something you go and specially “do,” then destroy your health the other 23 hours a day.
What To Do Instead?
The human body was designed for daily activity, and was active through the eons. Today in much of the “developing world” people commute by bicycle, lift and carry loads all day, sit and rise from the floor all day, and meet in the park every morning and afternoon for social physical activity. They are mostly lean, fit, and mobile to their last years. This is a big and inspiring area of rethinking and retraining your entire understanding and body involvement for fitness and health as a real and ongoing lifestyle and how to move in healthy patterns for your real life out of a gym. Following are a few samples.
Your Abs
Most people want “ab” exercises but have no idea what abs really do when you stand back up again, or how they help your back or posture. Using abs does not mean sucking them in, or tightening them, or “pressing them to your spine.” That is an outdated and ineffective practice. If you don’t believe that, go ahead and tighten your abs, just they way they tell you to. Press your navel to your spine. Make it good and tight. Now breathe.
You can’t move or breathe properly with tight muscles. Using your abs means using them, just like any other muscles, to move your back into healthy posture when you stand up, away from slouching back or to the sides. When you slouch, you allow the weight of your upper body to rest on the joints of your low back.
Trainers and exercise magazines often teach exercises done with the hips and behind stuck out in back. They may explain it as proper form or even a way to “support the back” however, it is a large contributor to back pain. Even though many fitness instructors say to use “neutral spine” they teach exercises with a too large arch in the low back. This is called “lordosis.” Allowing the low back to sway like this allows the weight of the upper body to push down on the low back. Look at most fitness magazines and you will see this bad posture. Many aerobics instructors, personal trainers and yoga instructors are my patients because their back hurts.
The “experts” say to strengthen your abs with crunches so the strong muscles will support you. But strengthening alone will not fix posture. Plenty of people with strong muscles stand terribly and exercise with their back arched. It’s like having brains and not using them. Crunches do not work your abs the way you need for real life. They do not train you how to use your abs to hold your back in good posture when you stand back up again, and they promote poor posture, even when done properly. It is the same hunched over posture that you do over your computer and steering wheel all day that made your back ache in the first place.
What To Do Instead:
Stand up, reach overhead, and see if you arch your back to raise your arms. To change that bad habit, straighten your low back by curling as if starting to do a crunch, to take the exaggerated curve out of your low back, but not curling enough to lean or hunch forward. You will feel you are using your torso muscles to hold your body weight. Instead of “doing crunches” for ten minutes and not using your abs the rest of the day, use your abs to move your back to good position and keep it there all the time - when you are standing and lifting things overhead, to put groceries away, pull off your shirt overhead, wash your hair in the shower, and lift weights at the gym.
Backpacks and handbags don’t make you arch your back or have bad posture. The problem is not using your torso muscles to counter the pull so that you hold you back in good posture. Maintain posture when carrying things. Don’t lean back, hunch forward, or hike your body to the sides to carry the weight, use your muscles. Your bags and packages could be a built-in ab and back exercise.
Many people hunch forward for a few “ab exercises” then stand, walk, reach, and lift in arched postures. Use your abs while standing up to keep your hip tucked enough to prevent this bad arching posture. The familiar pressure on your low back will stop.
For more information on how to use your abs, plus fun exercises to work your abs more than you have ever done, without crunches, click here.
Your Back
You wake up and sit slouched at the edge of the bed, bend over the sink to wash, sit round-shouldered at breakfast, while commuting to work, and at a desk. You bend forward at the waist to pick up things all day. At the gym you curl forward with crunches and toe-touching. You bend over the dishes, the lawn mower, the vacuum cleaner, and slump to watch television. You go to sleep for the night with your head pushed forward on pillows. You are mystified when your back, neck, and shoulders ache. You call it stress. You go to someone and say, “My back hurts, can you give me a stretch to fix it?”
They suggest bending over to touch your toes, or bringing your chin to your chest, or your knee to your chest, sitting on the floor and leaning over to touch your toes, sitting in a chair and leaning forward with your chest on your thighs, touching your elbows in front by rounding your back, curling up in a ball, or others that promote more rounding and more pressure on your back. Your posture becomes stuck slouched. Your discs eventually bulge under the relentless push.
You say it feels comfortable to slouch? When your muscles are so weak and tight that good posture feels unnatural, that means you need to strengthen and stretch to be comfortable, not slouch to be comfortable. But isn’t it natural to slouch? As natural as wetting your pants, but you learn to hold it even when you don’t feel like it. Are you rounding your back and holding your head forward right now sitting and reading this?
What To Do Instead:
Most back pain is simple mechanics, and just as simply remedied if you stop the constant and injurious process of bad body mechanics. Don’t let your shoulders round when standing and sitting. Use your muscles to hold you in comfortable, upright posture when you stand, sit, and walk, and move. That burns calories and tones you while preventing back pain. Use your legs not back for lifting and bending all day. Bending knees while keeping torso upright saves your back and strengthens your knees and legs at the same time, when done properly. Use shock absorption to walk lightly, and use your body all day, not just sit. First thing in the morning, don’t sit on the bed. Turn face down, propped slightly on your elbows for a moment or two. Don’t force or pinch your back. Then get out of bed without sitting. Turning face down isn’t for everyone, but for many people it helps you start your day straighter and healthier. Click for a quick-start to fixing your own back pain.
Stretching
For many, stretching means wrapping your foot around your ear or bending forward to touch your toes. Some of these same people don’t have the flexibility to simply lie down flat without a pillow under head or knees, or stand against a wall with the back of their head touching. Their back and shoulders are too rounded. Their hip is too tight. Many stretches promote the original problem, like more forward rounding. Most people don’t have the hamstring flexibility to sit properly without their hip tucked under and back rounded. Instead of stretching their hamstrings to sit properly, they sit and stretch rounded because tightness makes it more comfortable that way. Other stretches are plain bad for you. They promote poor posture and load joints with your body weight, like shoulder stands in yoga, the hurdlers stretch, and lifting your arms up in back of you.For many, stretching means wrapping your foot around your ear or bending forward to touch your toes. Some of these same people don’t have the flexibility to simply lie down flat without a pillow under head or knees, or stand against a wall with the back of their head touching. Their back and shoulders are too rounded. Their hip is too tight. Many stretches promote the original problem, like more forward rounding. Most people don’t have the hamstring flexibility to sit properly without their hip tucked under and back rounded. Instead of stretching their hamstrings to sit properly, they sit and stretch rounded because tightness makes it more comfortable that way. Other stretches are plain bad for you. They promote poor posture and load joints with your body weight, like shoulder stands in yoga, the hurdlers stretch, and lifting your arms up in back of you.
What To Do Instead:
Flexibility training should address normal posture. Tight chest muscles pull you into round-shouldered postures. Pull your shoulders back when standing to stretch the front of your chest. Remember that slouching is a stretch - but a bad one. Your back becomes overstretched and rounded. Don’t add to that by doing all your stretches with more forward bending. Don’t bend over from a stand to stretch your legs. You know picking things up that way is bad for your back. It doesn’t magically become good for you by calling it an exercise. Stretch your hamstrings by lying on the floor and lifting one leg up, keeping your back straight and shoulders and neck relaxed. Click here to link to an article about healthy stretching.
What To Do Instead:
Balance is easily and highly trainable, but usually forgotten. Good balance is crucial for ease of movement, on rocking boats, a variety of activity, and preventing falls and sprains. Injury and disuse diminish balance. Vicious cycles grow of poor balance, injury, and decreasing activity because of inability and fear of activity.
Health Foods
Major sellers in “health” food stores are “fat burners” and various energy potions. You may buy them because they are “natural” and “herbal.” That does not mean they are harmless or nonaddictive. Caffeine, cocaine, and nicotine, for example are naturally occurring plant substances. Many energy and diet products contain stimulants like ma huang and ginseng. Be careful if you think there won’t be problems because they say: “Used medicinally in China for over 5,000 years.” Opium was used medicinally too.
What To Do Instead:
If you think you need stimulant drugs, look at your health habits and determine why you don’t function without them. Taking them can produce a vicious cycle of dependence and fatigue, and a cycle of being too stimulated to sleep well at night. A brisk walk or other short exercise will “pick you up” more than a candy bar or drug. For weight loss or to increase energy, it is safer and quicker to just go out and exercise.
Your Nutrition
Would you drink drain cleaner? What if it tasted good or were low-calorie? Many people do the equivalent — eating foods more unhealthy than smoking cigarettes, like donuts, fries, cream sauces, most fast foods and packaged snacks, and refined sugar. Sausage and processed bread for breakfast. Candy and coffee. Lunches of fast food, a large supper at night, and a snack or two later on. The result is fatigue, cravings, crankiness, extra pounds, and sleeping poorly at night from the late protein and meal.
Most people eat far more calories, fat, and simple sugar than they think. Candied yams, glazed vegetables, and buttered lima beans isn’t “eating healthy vegetables” it’s fat and sugar–bad for your teeth, bad for your heart, and bad for the rest of your body. A sweet drink with “added vitamins and calcium” is not a health food, it is sugar water. French fries and mashed potatoes are not “eating healthy vegetables.” Ice cream and cream sauce is not ok because, “you need a little fat in your diet.”
Most packaged food in stores and prepared food in restaurants are full of bad sugar (not healthy complex carbohydrate) and unhealthy fat. Even if you want to eat less refined sugar, which is a good idea, you don’t have to eat more fat to do that. The “low-carb” diet craze is not magic chemistry. You lose pounds when the restrictive diet lowers calories, and as your muscles shrink, you lose much water in the first two weeks. Eating all that fat is still not healthy. Losing weight is not the only part of a diet. You need health. The American Heart Association still recommends no more than 30% of your calories come from fat to protect your entire cardiovascular system. Grilling meat increases cancer-promoting compounds.
Diets excluding healthy complex carbohydrates don’t provide the chemical energy to do exercise, or manufacture calming compounds and the important vitamins and cancer fighting “phytochemicals” only found in fruits and vegetables.
What To Do Instead:
There is more to nutrition than fat or carbohydrate. Fruits and vegetables (not processed with sugar, sauces, fried in oil, stripped of their natural fiber, or exposed to high heat) provide many dozens of important anti-inflammatory, cell building, mood stabilizing, and disease-fighting compounds you won’t get in vitamin bottles.
Don’t confuse the complex carbohydrate of vegetables with unhealthy simple sugar. Don’t eat white bread and white rice thinking it is good, while shunning vegetables as fattening starch. White rice and white flour noodles are part of the “hour later you’re hungry again” phenomenon, - stripped of fiber and complex carbohydrate to keep your blood sugar even. They are little more than junk food. “Eating carbohydrate” should mean the healthy, complex carbohydrates of vegetables, fruits, and whole unprocessed grains, not the simple sugar of candy, donuts, and fast food. It’s healthy to have a “low simple-sugar diet” but that does not have to mean a “low carbohydrate” diet. Don’t go overboard eating whole grains, as with any food. Too many calories from any source is how you gain weight and expose your body to constantly varying insulin levels from overeating.
For breakfast get complex carbohydrates and protein from raw nuts like almonds and walnuts, whole oatmeal, and fresh uncooked fruit, instead of eating processed sugared cereal. Eat the washed skins of foods, like apples. The peel is nutritious and the fiber keeps blood sugar more even. Throw oranges and other whole fruit with some raw nuts and fresh grated ginger in the blender to make your own juice. Keep the pulp in juice. Without it, you’re drinking little more than sugar water.
Vegetables are important, healthy protein sources. There is no need to carefully mix certain ones to get complete protein. Use seasonings instead of junking up otherwise good food with oil and sauce.
The Mystery is Simple
People aren’t doing what they think. They exercise in ways that don’t help but injure, they eat far more fat, sugar, and unhealthy food than they know, and live a daily life without movement for normal activity. Getting fit is not, “Do three sets of 10,” “Park further away” and “Drink more water.
The very thing we regard as exercise advice, “Exercise at least 30 minutes a day, three to five days a week,” is the root of the problem because it separates exercise from the rest of your life.
When you’re a child, you’re told “Sit Still! Be Quiet! Eat Everything on Your Plate!” Now as an adult, it’s suddenly “Get Moving, Don’t Eat So Much, Say Something Profound!” Your lifelong habits got you into a sedentary mindset. It’s time to shake loose and realize that muscular activity is health and should be used for regular life including just standing up properly. Using your body is like the Ten Commandments. You’re supposed to do it all the time, not just during your hour of worship. Health is not something you go and do 3-5 times a week. It is moving, stretching, bending, lifting, and using your brain for your daily life.
Dr. Jolie Bookspan is a sports medicine specialist and former research physiologist with the US Navy.
This information was drawn from the fun, new edition of the book Health & Fitness in Plain English.
Classes
For Healthier Exercising That’s Fun. Get a workout at the same time you learn to use muscles properly for injury prevention. Click here for classes and schedule.For Healthier Exercising That’s Fun. Get a workout at the same time you learn to use muscles properly for injury prevention. .Articles
- Get the quick story on why you get back pain and how to fix your own back pain.For Healthier Exercising That’s Fun. Get a workout at the same time you learn to use muscles properly for injury prevention. .Get the quick story on.- Learn about neck and upper shoulder pain, herniated and degenerating cervical discs, impingement, and how to fix your own pain.
- Read the full back pain article for more understanding of how to fix your own back pain, plus learn effective exercises.
- Learn about herniated and degenerated discs in your low back, pinched nerve, and sciatica and how to fix them yourself.
- For more about how to move in healthier ways, read “Bad Exercises and Ones To Do Instead.”
- For why crunches don’t help back pain, and how to work your abs to help your back, read about The Ab Revolution™
- To learn to stretch the way you really need, learn why stretches can harm, and to feel better now, click on this stretching article.
Books
The Ab Revolution™ No More Crunches! No More Back Pain! by Dr. Jolie Bookspan. Expanded second edition.
Revolutionary core training method - No crunches. Combines sports medicine with fun exercise to get a workout at the same time that you retrain your muscles for healthy movement for ordinary daily activities. Burn more calories and get incredible abs. Used by military, law enforcement, and the nation’s top spine docs.
Order Toll Free: 800-839-8640 http://www.theabrevolution.com/
Health & Fitness in Plain English by Dr. Jolie Bookspan.
Previously sold out and unavailable, now bigger and improved in a bigger, better second edition. Thirty-one chapters on all aspects of Exercise, Nutrition, and Health with step-by step solutions for health, nutrition, exercise, and pain prevention to make your life fun and healthy. 363p.
Order toll free (888) 229-5745 http://www.healthylearning.com/cp/cgi-bin/cp-app.cgi?usr=8421671&rnd=9970230&pg=store&sub_pg=prod&ref=188