Move for Your Own Sanity

Sometimes I have a hard time deciding what topic I want to write about. Sometimes I have a million things I want to stuff into one post and other times I seem to have writer’s block and can’t get anything down. Today is neither of those. Today I want to talk about our mental health. These past 13 months have been some of the most challenging ever experienced. We haven’t seen loved ones in over a year, some have lost their jobs, kids miss their friends and sports teams. The covid pandemic has taken an incredible toll and much of that damage will be felt for years to come. For this reason, I want to bring up something that I think can help us ride out what will hopefully be the tail-end of the pandemic. That thing is exercise.

Really? Exercise? That’s what you want to talk about? It is, and for good reason. I know we have heard that exercise helps with our mental health, but I want to lay a little groundwork on what it’s doing for you and how it can help you get through some of these tough days. Exercise may be one of the most misunderstood forms of care and it’s time we rethink it. If you ask the average person what they think of exercise, they will liken it to a 30-minute torture session and they might rather listen to nails scraped across a chalkboard for the half-hour. I think under a lot of circumstances, this may be a fair response to exercise. However, I believe this is not due to exercise in and of itself, so much as it is our misunderstanding of how and why we should exercise. Let me ask you if this sounds familiar. You see yourself in the mirror at a new angle or roll the scale over another couple of digits and you snap. “That’s it I’m going to get in shape!” You buy a treadmill or a subscription to the latest fitness craze and tell yourself this time you are gonna work until the weight is gone, and then keep it off! After nearly killing yourself for two weeks, you decide it’s not worth it. You give up and use that new treadmill as a very expensive clothesline. This is not an abnormal chain of events, in fact, I would say it’s pretty much the norm. But what if we decided to exercise for another reason? Instead of exercising for weight loss and because we wanted to fit into our pants from 10 years ago.

What if we exercised for our mental health? What would that kind of exercise look like? Well, a good place to start would be doing something that you enjoy, or at the very least don’t mind. For many people, that’s a walk, a hike, or a leisurely bike ride around the neighbourhood. You probably won’t get your heart rate to 200 beats per minute doing those things, and you probably won’t feel like coughing up a lung either. It turns out that something as simple as a leisurely walk or a 30-minute bike ride has huge benefits for our mental health. Studies have shown that even a small amount of non-intense exercise can elevate our mood and give us more energy and more drive. Studies have also shown that our brains are better at processing emotions when we are moving (there is actual biology and mechanism behind why it’s easier to talk about hard subjects while out for a walk). The reality is that our minds need to exercise just as much if not more than our physical bodies do. If you talk to someone who runs several times a week, some may say they do it because they want to lose weight, but many people who exercise several times a week do it because it helps keep them emotionally stable and they would be lost without it. Don’t get me wrong there are times when you just don’t feel like getting outside or even getting off the couch. However, I have yet to meet a person that says they regret all that time they spent walking the trails of Sudbury or going on a family bike ride. 

It is my firm belief that exercise is for every single person on the planet, but it also probably won’t look the same for every person. For me it might be running, for my wife it might be yoga, for you, it might be hiking and for that crazy guy you know down the street, it might be a 100-mile ultra-marathon. We are all different and have different needs and interests, but in one thing we are all the same, we are all biologically made to move.

Its All in The Hips

Modern life presents itself with a multitude of new stressors. In past columns I talked about dealing with our fight or flight response, poor diet and missing essential nutrients. For this column I wanted to focus on something a little more mechanical, and there are few muscles in the human body that cause as many problems as the hip flexors.

Before we can jump into the problems that the hip flexors cause we should know more about them. First off, the hip flexors are actually a complex of 3 muscles known as the psoas major, psoas minor, and the iliacus, or the iliopsoas when referring to all three. These three muscles are anchored to several parts of the low back and pelvis before attaching to the thigh bone. The main thing these muscles do is lift your thighs as you walk and stabilize the spine when you sit. The iliopsoas muscles are some of the largest in the body and have plenty of important things running around and even through them. 

Now there are many different things that can start to cause issues with the iliopsoas muscles, but I will stick to the most common ones. The first, and probably the most common cause of iliopsoas dysfunction is lack of activity and sitting. When we sit, the muscles are in a shortened state and after a long period of time the muscles tighten. When we finally stand up, the muscles remain tight and cause dysfunction. A second cause is frequent exercise without proper stretching, runners run into iliopsoas problems because of the nature of running. When a person runs, the legs go through the same motion over and over again often thousands of times a day. If the runner doesn’t properly stretch out after the run, the iliopsoas will tighten into the rather limited range used to run. The third and perhaps less looked at cause is stress, yes going back to that fight or flight response. If we are stressed, our bodies go into fight or flight and this tightens our iliopsoas muscles up in preparation for running from that bear, or in a more modern circumstance, meeting with our new boss.

When there is dysfunction in the iliopsoas muscles, various symptoms will arise. The tightening of the muscle will actually cause  a rotation of the pelvis forward, this leads to low back pain and changes in the natural spinal curvature right through the neck. Tight iliopsoas muscles also affect the surrounding nerves, this can lead to pain going into various parts of the legs, buttocks and groin area. The last and most controversial is the effect on the digestive system. Our intestines are extremely dense in nerve endings and a vast number of those nerves pass directly by the iliopsoas muscles, it is theorized that when these muscles are tight and irritated it will lead to digestive dysfunction.

So what do you do about tight iliopsoas muscles? Several things actually. The first is to stretch, stretch, stretch! Whether you spend your day sitting at a desk, or running marathons, stretching will help to calm the muscles and prevent rotation of the pelvis. The second thing is to strengthen the opposing muscles, these muscles consist of the gluteus muscles and the abdominal muscles. When the muscle strength is properly balanced the iliopsoas muscles will be forced to stay in a more lengthened state. The last thing is to bring your body out of that stressful state. Whether it be through meditation, mindful breathing or yoga, when you relax your mind, your body will follow suit.

So What's the Deal With Probiotics?

Many of us have heard about probiotics and we know that we should probably have some because they are apparently good for us. We hear it from the latest trendy health news article or perhaps on the label of a yogurt. More often than not though, we really don't know why we should actually be consuming a probiotic or even what it is. My goal is to give you a basic low down on what a probiotic is and why you should be on one.

To start, we should define what exactly a probiotic is. A probiotic is a live culture of organisms and are essential in maintaining proper gut health. From the time we are born, we are in contact with bacteria and a huge population of those bacteria live within our gut (around 100 trillion) that’s somewhere around 3 times as many cells as we have in our own bodies! These trillions of gut bacteria maintain what is known as a symbiotic relationship with their host (you) and make up our gut flora. What this means is that we help each other out. As we ingest food the bacteria in our gut are able to survive and in turn, provide us with life sustaining benefits. BUT! We have a problem, as modern diets have changed and we have become an excessively sterile society, our gut bacteria fails to be properly restored through ingesting new bacteria. This is further complicated by the overuse of antibiotics both from prescriptions and ones that are fed to the meat we eat. Antibiotics are largely indiscriminate in what bacteria they kill and will wreak havoc on your guts natural and required bacteria. Obviously this is not to advocate against the use of antibiotics, they are often necessary and life saving against bacteria that are much less friendly. It is however, important to remember that antibiotics can cause some collateral damage. When this damage occurs it is of the utmost importance that we replace the lost good bacteria as quickly as possible.

So what exactly is so important about this good gut bacteria? Well there are several extremely important things that only your gut bacteria can do. One of those is the break down and fermentation of starches and fatty acids in the food that you eat. This breakdown is something that our bodies are incapable of doing on their own. If the bacteria is not present is sufficient amounts irritation and inflammation of the gut will follow. Further, a dysfunctional gut flora (the gut bacteria) has also been associated with systemic inflammation and hormone dysregulation. Poor gut flora is further associated with increased susceptibility to autoimmune diseases and nervous system disorders including depression, autism, and OCD. For these reasons among many others, the need for a healthy gut flora cannot be overstated. By consuming a good probiotic we are supporting and keeping our gut bacteria healthy, we are making sure that they keep our guts out of inflammation and working optimally.