The Sitting Disease

It’s a serious problem, and lots and lots of us are affected by it!  The Sitting Disease is caused by…too much sitting!

All that sitting causes lots of muscle and body malfunctions and aches and pains and premature aging.

Knots in your back, problems breathing, constipation, carpal tunnel syndrome, osteoporosis, back pain and headaches and MORE are caused by “The Sitting Disease.”

It’s practically an epidemic!  But there is a simple, natural cure.

Walk.

Can’t get much more simple than that, right?

When you walk correctly, you use almost all of the muscles in your whole body!  Pretty cool.

My friend, Rosalie, had the sitting disease.  At first, she could only walk around her own back yard and then, eventually, around the block.  And then she ended up race walking and had a ton of health benefits!

All from walking, even though she didn’t want to, and from gradually ‘stepping up’ her walking distance as her ability increased. 🙂

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3 Common Causes of Aging and the Pain of “Old Age”

You’ve seen people who are only 40 who already look “old.”  And you’ve probably seen folks in their 80’s or 90’s who still have a spring in their step or a sparkle in their eyes.

Why do some of us grow old so quickly and other stay youthful?

Here are 3 reasons:

1.  Attitude.  Optimists may not always have the most realistic outlook, but they live longer, healthier lives than pessimists and enjoy living more.  Attitude can be learned and unlearned.  A healthy attitude includes gratitude and happiness.

2. Nutrition.  People who give their bodies all the nutrients it needs are much more likely to be healthy and feel better longer.  This gets harder and harder as more of our “food” comes from factories rather than farms and gardens, but it CAN be done.  The best place to buy your groceries is in the produce section, and if possible, the best ones to buy are organic.  Try to eat a lot of different colored foods (and Froot Loops don’t count.)

3.  Posture.  When you lose the fight to gravity, and gravity is winning, your heavy head moves in front of your body.  Then, gravity can pull you forward even more!  Your posture can be corrected, at least enough to relieve some of your pain.  Posture is a BIG key in aging.  When you collapse forward, your organs gets squashed.  How can your heart function its best when it is being compressed?  How can your intestines and stomach do their best job?  This is a common cause of constipation.   You can overcome poor posture by stretching the muscles in the front of your body and strengthening the muscles in the back.

George Burns, the comedian, said:  “It’s okay to get older, as long as you don’t get old.”  I’m sticking with George!

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When Muscle Pain Won’t Go Away, Look For Trigger Points

If you have muscle pain or other symptoms that just aren’t going away with conventional (medical) treatment or with massage therapy, there’s a reason.

The reason could very well be “trigger points.”

Here’s an example: Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is very often caused by trigger points in your muscles.  The trigger points in this case are in the neck, upper chest, front of the arm and lower arm.  They “fire,” or refer, pain into the area of the carpal tunnel in the wrist.

A “syndrome” is a collection of symptoms.

Symptoms are things like pain, numbness, tingling.  If you can get rid of the symptoms, or the causes (triggers) of the symptoms, you get rid of the syndrome, too.

Trigger points are hyper-irritable (very irritated or crabby) areas of muscle.  Trigger points can also be found in other soft tissues like skin and organs.  Soft tissues are everything except our bones.

What do trigger points do?

They cause pain and symptoms in other parts of the body, sometimes at a far distance from the trigger point.  This is called “referred” pain.

We ALL have the potential to have them, because we all have soft tissues.

When a nagging pain or symptom won’t go away with treatment, that most likely means that a trigger point is causing the pain and needs to be released.

Whatever caused the trigger point also needs to be corrected.  Everything has a cause!

When I was making my notes for a recent Carpal Tunnel Radio show, I noticed a relationship between Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and trigger points:  All of the things that cause trigger points also cause Carpal Tunnel Syndrome!  And, so it is with a lot of our body pain.

A great deal of our pain and other uncomfortable symptoms are caused by trigger points.

Trigger points and muscles are largely overlooked by the medical community (your doctor) as a cause of pain.  It’s just not widely taught in medical schools.  In fact, very few doctors understand the roles of muscles in pain syndromes and fewer still understand trigger points.

Here are some of the things that cause (create) trigger points:

* abnormal bone structure that Continue reading “When Muscle Pain Won’t Go Away, Look For Trigger Points”

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