Hello
Just recently I ran my 5 Day Advanced Nutrition course for the first time. Since running the course the feedback I have been getting is that the vast majority of people suffer from digestive troubles, particularly low levels of HCL or hydrochloric acid. To shed some information on the subject I will be posting a small excerpt from the manual to help who ever may read it.
Paul
Digestion
Digestion is the key to the healing process of almost any condition. We are not what we eat, we are what we absorb, assimilate, utilize and eliminate. A block in any of these functions will give sub-optimal health.
The first phase of digestion is known as Pre-digestion. This is a highly important phase and is often forgotten by the health care professional. The smell of food activated many centers of the brain and the digestive system. Smell in regards to digestion serves these main functions:
1. Excites the digestive system
2. Stimulates salivary glands
3. Stimulates the mucous glands
Smell activates the stomach, small intestine, large intestine, gallbladder and the pancreas. It initiates the redistribution of blood and sets the limbic system.
Some things that interfere with this include loss of smell. It is extremely rare when based on disease. It is more commonly attributed to lifestyle factors. These include smoking, drinking alcohol, medication, drug abuse and occupational exposure. It can also be due to a cranial fault that obstructs the nasal apparatus. If someone has a diminished sense of smell they will generally fall back on the sensation of taste. They will go for sweet first, sour and then bitter.
Another fault with smell can be a faulty cranial nerve. This could be Cranial Nerve 1 (the olfactory nerve) not working causing an interference with Cranial Nerve 10 (the Vagus nerve).
With digestion the second place we need to look at is the mouth. Optimal chewing is required for digestion. Lipase and Pytalin, which are enzymes for digesting lipids and carbohydrates respectively, are found in saliva. Proteins need to be adequately broken down so the HCL in the stomach can break them down efficiently and utilize their amino acid sequences. Food should be chewed around 30 times or until liquid.
Salivary states are of vital importance here. These include whether someone is a mouth breather or not, medical disease, emotional state, conditioned reflexes and the state of hydration. TMJ issues also need to be addressed as it could create an avoidance of chewing due to pain. The mouth also helps with the immune response. There is a Secretory IgA response in local tissues which is a non-inflammatory messenger.
Swallowing is an overlooked issue when it comes to food and digestion. It takes between 6-10 seconds for the food to travel to the lower esophageal sphincters. This is important because most people do not chew their food correctly, they shovel it down. This causes problems with digestion due to blockages. From a Kinesiology point of view Hyoid balances can be useful here. Problems in the esophagus are generally quite rare.
The stomach is next on the digestive pathway. This is the area that is most often a concern in digestive issues. The problem that plagues most people is HCL deficiencies or hypochlorhydria. This substance allows us to assimilate the majority of foods that we put into our mouths. This is why it is so important to look at digestion before other areas because if you aren’t absorbing nutrients the food becomes worthless.
Stomach acid breaks down food, chemically altering it so that the body can extract the required nutrients for proper structure and function, including muscle maintenance and growth. The acid begins the digestion of protein in the stomach and then triggers the pancreas to secrete digestive enzymes and the gallbladder to release bile into the small intestine. The acid is also responsible for killing pathogenic bacteria that enters the body via food. These functions and reflexes all need to be in working order for optimal health and are mostly dependent on adequate stomach acid.
If there is insufficient hydrochloric acid (HCL), proteins will pass into the intestine and putrefy instead of being digested. In addition, carbohydrates will also be left to ferment without adequate digestive enzymes from the pancreas. Fat digestion is also dependent on the acid’s influence on the pancreas to secrete lipase and the gall bladder to secrete bile. Poor digestion of these macronutrients means poor absorption of our basic energy sources. This consistently leads to fatigue and sub-optimal health.
Low stomach acid prevents adequate absorption of essential minerals such as zinc, manganese and calcium because they cannot be ionized for proper absorption. Cruciferous vegetables are known for their estrogen-detoxification properties through the production of Diindolylmethane from Indole 3C, but this extraction cannot occur without an adequate amount of stomach acid. These vegetables include broccoli and cauliflower. Excess estrogen is another huge problem with the amount of plastics in the environment. The average everyday intake of phthalates, as from every day plastic wraps is 210mcg a day. This is a dietary average!
The take home message with this information is to be aware of your digestion. Chew slowly, enjoy your food and relax. All these things contribute to optimal digestion. Drinking two glasses of water, with either lemon juice or apple cider vinegar can also stimulate the secretion of HCL. If digestion is still a problem, it would be a wise idea to see someone trained in the neurology and physiology of digestion to truly address the problem. Practitioners can be contacted through paulmeldrum@sportskin.net
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
How often do you poop?
Hey everyone,
What a title! Although a incredibly important facet of human function it is a topic that not many of us are willing to talk about. How many times we go to the bathroom a day and how long food takes to go from mouth to anus tells us a lot of information about the general state of our digestive tract.
Ideally, according to Bernard Jensen, a naturopathic researcher we should have 3 bowel movements a day. The stool should be brown, float, no visible food remains and not smell foul. If your stool smells foul, has visible food or streaks the bowl, it indicated that you are in a degree of digestive distress.
Food should not reside in the digestive tract for a long time. If food is left in the digestive tract for too long, proteins will putrefy, carbohydrates will ferment and fats will go rancid. Not an ideal situation! Accoding to Dennis Burkitt, the ideal transit time (time from mouth to anus) should be around 16-24 hours. Many people take around 56 to 72 hours for food to leave the body.
To help these processes out, there are a few practical steps you could take. When you wake up, it is ideal to drink 1-2 glasses of clean, room temperature water and go sit on the toilet. This will train your body to have a bowel movement in the morning and the water will encourage peristalsis (the contraction of the large intestine). If you wake up between 5-7am this is ideal because according to Chinese medicine this is the peak time for the large intestine. Sitting at the toilet about 20-30 minutes after each meal will also help entrain this system. Also, when the urge comes, do not suppress it! This will entrain the body to hold and cause cause problems with the colon.
I hope this simple advice will help improve your health and demystifies what your toilet habits should be!!!
In Good Health
Paul
What a title! Although a incredibly important facet of human function it is a topic that not many of us are willing to talk about. How many times we go to the bathroom a day and how long food takes to go from mouth to anus tells us a lot of information about the general state of our digestive tract.
Ideally, according to Bernard Jensen, a naturopathic researcher we should have 3 bowel movements a day. The stool should be brown, float, no visible food remains and not smell foul. If your stool smells foul, has visible food or streaks the bowl, it indicated that you are in a degree of digestive distress.
Food should not reside in the digestive tract for a long time. If food is left in the digestive tract for too long, proteins will putrefy, carbohydrates will ferment and fats will go rancid. Not an ideal situation! Accoding to Dennis Burkitt, the ideal transit time (time from mouth to anus) should be around 16-24 hours. Many people take around 56 to 72 hours for food to leave the body.
To help these processes out, there are a few practical steps you could take. When you wake up, it is ideal to drink 1-2 glasses of clean, room temperature water and go sit on the toilet. This will train your body to have a bowel movement in the morning and the water will encourage peristalsis (the contraction of the large intestine). If you wake up between 5-7am this is ideal because according to Chinese medicine this is the peak time for the large intestine. Sitting at the toilet about 20-30 minutes after each meal will also help entrain this system. Also, when the urge comes, do not suppress it! This will entrain the body to hold and cause cause problems with the colon.
I hope this simple advice will help improve your health and demystifies what your toilet habits should be!!!
In Good Health
Paul
Breathing for Health and Wellness
Hello everyone,
Breathing is key to our health. The average person takes between 20 000 and 26 000 breaths per day. This is between 16 and 18 breaths per minute. In my opinion this is far too much. Ideally you should breathe between 6-8 breaths per minute. This adds up to 8640 to 11520 breaths per day. This is far more economical and far healthier.
16-18 Breaths per minute can be considered as hyperventilation. The symptoms of hyperventilation include increases stress hormones, muscle tightness, compromised digestion and increased feelings of anxiety. In fact, many practitioners believe that hyperventilation can bring on anxiety rather than anxiety bringing on hyperventilation!
The question is how do we bring our breathing down to an acceptable rate? There are a number of factors to look at, structural, emotional, physiological and spiritual.
On a structural level one of the main issues is posture. The majority of people today fall into a Kyphotic or rounded shoulder posture. This posture is often coupled with forward head posture. This posture ordinarily creates muscle tightness in the sub occipitals, sternocleidomastiod, Levator scapula, Upper trapezius and Pectoralis Minor.
These muscles should be stretched on a regular basis. A good resource for this is the text 'Stretch to Win" which is in the recommended text side bar. Another good idea is to purchase a pool noodle or foam roller and lie on it longitudinally for up to 15 minutes a day. This stretches out the ligaments at the front of the spine allowing you to come back into a nice, upright posture. This is also a good time to practice your diaphragmatic breathing, effectively killing two birds with one stone.
In future posts I will deal with the other issues that restrict proper breathing. Until then keep stretching, moving and eating high quality food and love your life!!!
Namaste
Paul
Breathing is key to our health. The average person takes between 20 000 and 26 000 breaths per day. This is between 16 and 18 breaths per minute. In my opinion this is far too much. Ideally you should breathe between 6-8 breaths per minute. This adds up to 8640 to 11520 breaths per day. This is far more economical and far healthier.
16-18 Breaths per minute can be considered as hyperventilation. The symptoms of hyperventilation include increases stress hormones, muscle tightness, compromised digestion and increased feelings of anxiety. In fact, many practitioners believe that hyperventilation can bring on anxiety rather than anxiety bringing on hyperventilation!
The question is how do we bring our breathing down to an acceptable rate? There are a number of factors to look at, structural, emotional, physiological and spiritual.
On a structural level one of the main issues is posture. The majority of people today fall into a Kyphotic or rounded shoulder posture. This posture is often coupled with forward head posture. This posture ordinarily creates muscle tightness in the sub occipitals, sternocleidomastiod, Levator scapula, Upper trapezius and Pectoralis Minor.
These muscles should be stretched on a regular basis. A good resource for this is the text 'Stretch to Win" which is in the recommended text side bar. Another good idea is to purchase a pool noodle or foam roller and lie on it longitudinally for up to 15 minutes a day. This stretches out the ligaments at the front of the spine allowing you to come back into a nice, upright posture. This is also a good time to practice your diaphragmatic breathing, effectively killing two birds with one stone.
In future posts I will deal with the other issues that restrict proper breathing. Until then keep stretching, moving and eating high quality food and love your life!!!
Namaste
Paul
Australia is World's Fattest Nation!
ello everyone,
Well today is a sad day. It has just been announced that Australia is the worlds fattest country, overtaking the United States of America. 4 million Australians are now considered obese - 26% of the adult population. The U.S has similar figures at 25% of the adult population. Here is the link to the full report.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/health/australia-worlds-fattest-nation/2008/06/19/1213770886872.html
All this has happened even though we are being told to cut down on saturated animal fats, reduce butter, cut down on meat and eat low fat everything. Clearly something is not right. A great man once said ' The definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result'. This is what we have being doing, with these recommendations being given every year.
What do we need to do? What we need to do is promote a return back to REAL foods. We need foods with life force, vitality,enzymes and real nutrients. Processed, synthetic vitamins and minerals will not lead us to a path of health. If a food was not here 10 000 years ago, we should not consider putting it in our mouths.
To battle this obesity epidemic, I believe this is needed:
A return to sustainable, organic agriculture
Clean, pure drinking water
The reintroduction of organic, raw dairy
Health warnings on ALL packaged foods
Better public education
An overhaul of dietary recommendations and the food pyramid.
These plans will not be easy to implement. But they can be done. Public education is so important and the consumer needs to be warned of the risk that comes from putting processed, garbage food into their mouths.
A government initiative and funding is not enough. Effort and dedication and a strong desire to know the truth is needed by all of us, whether in the health care industry or the general public. All of us, whether we know it or not, are in the health care industry. We all want our loved ones to live full, healthy enriching lives. My blog is one small contribution I can make and everyday I try to make a difference to this figure.
If all of us make even small changes in the way we approach our own health, the ramifications will spread further than we can ever realize. We all have the power and the ability to change the world, one person at a time. The best person to start with is the man in the mirror.
Be the change you want to see in the world
Paul
Well today is a sad day. It has just been announced that Australia is the worlds fattest country, overtaking the United States of America. 4 million Australians are now considered obese - 26% of the adult population. The U.S has similar figures at 25% of the adult population. Here is the link to the full report.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/health/australia-worlds-fattest-nation/2008/06/19/1213770886872.html
All this has happened even though we are being told to cut down on saturated animal fats, reduce butter, cut down on meat and eat low fat everything. Clearly something is not right. A great man once said ' The definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result'. This is what we have being doing, with these recommendations being given every year.
What do we need to do? What we need to do is promote a return back to REAL foods. We need foods with life force, vitality,enzymes and real nutrients. Processed, synthetic vitamins and minerals will not lead us to a path of health. If a food was not here 10 000 years ago, we should not consider putting it in our mouths.
To battle this obesity epidemic, I believe this is needed:
A return to sustainable, organic agriculture
Clean, pure drinking water
The reintroduction of organic, raw dairy
Health warnings on ALL packaged foods
Better public education
An overhaul of dietary recommendations and the food pyramid.
These plans will not be easy to implement. But they can be done. Public education is so important and the consumer needs to be warned of the risk that comes from putting processed, garbage food into their mouths.
A government initiative and funding is not enough. Effort and dedication and a strong desire to know the truth is needed by all of us, whether in the health care industry or the general public. All of us, whether we know it or not, are in the health care industry. We all want our loved ones to live full, healthy enriching lives. My blog is one small contribution I can make and everyday I try to make a difference to this figure.
If all of us make even small changes in the way we approach our own health, the ramifications will spread further than we can ever realize. We all have the power and the ability to change the world, one person at a time. The best person to start with is the man in the mirror.
Be the change you want to see in the world
Paul
Flattening the Abs
Hi again,
I went to the gym today and again I saw people on the floor doing hundreds of crunches, leg raises and many other exercises to achieve that dream of a flat stomach. Every time I see this I either want to scream or I feel so sorry for these people for all that useless training. The abdominal region is one of the most misunderstood areas of the body when it comes to training so I am going to address some of the factors here today. This post will lean towards the technical side so if you have any problems feel free to contact me or post a response
So, here we go...
With flattening the abs many factors have to be taken into consideration. It is not as simple as exercise and cutting calories. If it was, every person who went to a gym would have six pack abs and this is clearly not the case. Some of the factors that need to be looked at include:
Food allergies and intolerances
Digestive health
Processed food intake
Co-ordination and recruitment sequencing of the abdominal wall
Visceral conditions
Intake of medical drugs
Proper training technique
Emotional stress
All these factors add up in the body and need to be addressed to get you to your goals. Now lets look at these in greater detail.
Food allergies and intolerances are one of the biggest reasons why people can't flatten their abs. Food intolerances are highly likely in society today with the amount of foods that we eat that have not been here in the last 100 years. According to research by BioHealth Diagnostics founder Bill Timmins over 60% of Caucasian people have gluten intolerance. When the food pyramid tells us we should be eating 6-11 servings of cereal grains a day it creates a few problems. Similar figures exist for dairy consumption but the reasons for that are enough to fill another post.
How food intolerances affect our ability to contact our abs is the inflammation they create. When we become allergic or intolerant to a food, when we put it in our mouths our immune system becomes hyper vigilant and creates a ton of inflammation in an attempt to destroy the offending food. This inflammation reduces the ability of the abdominal wall to contract which I will explain in detail later on. We generally become intolerant of a food for 2 main reasons:
Genetic factors
Poor digestion and 'Leaky Gut syndrome'
The first factor is something that there is not much that we can do about. Leaky gut is a syndrome that is caused by poor lifestyle and poor choices. What happens in a leaky gut is that food particles in the small intestine irritate the lining of the intestinal wall. They affect the micro villi (small hair like projections that look like tentacles) and the mucus covering of the wall, create leaks and get into the bloodstream. food particles are not supposed to be in the blood stream! On another note, that is one of the flaws with the Eat Right for Your Type books. Many of the studies on food lectins ( the substances that cause our problems by causing our blood to clump together) have been done on food added to blood isolated in test tubes. This is not how food gets into our bodies. A person with healthy digestion is completely capable of handling food lectins - although this is a minority of people.
This situation creates some problems for us as we try to flatten our abs. One of the things the body does when an organ is under stress is cause pain and dysfunction is inhibit or communicate through the musculoskeletal system. This is called a viscerosomatic reflex. This is not a radical concept. For many years we have known that one of the impending signs of a heart attack is pain radiating down the left arm to the little finger. Many women get back pain every month that coincides with their cycle. It is not an unknown subject but is neglected by therapists, doctors and trainers when it comes to training programs and rehabilitation.
Beal has described the phenomenon of viscera-somatic reflexes as resulting from afferent stimuli, arising from a dysfunction of a visceral nature. An afferent nerve is a nerve that carries impulses towards the spinal cord from an organ or muscle. The reflex is in initiated by afferent receptors, which are then transmitted to the Dorsal horn of the spinal cord, where they synapse with interconnecting neurons. The stimuli are then converted to sympathetic and motor afferents and result in measurable changes in skeletal muscle, skin and blood vessels.
Abnormal stimulation or dysfunction, which is often caused by dietary choices can result in the following symptoms:
Hyperaesthesia of the skin
Vasomotor, pilomotor and sudomotor changes
Reflex rigidity of the somatic musculature
Sensory motor amnesia and the inability to voluntarily and involuntarily recruit the muscle
Sensory motor amnesia was first identified by Thomas Hanna, the creator of the Somatics school of neuromuscular retraining. It is the inability to recruit muscles in the correct patterns required for normal function. This can really affect your abdominal training efforts! An example of this is inflammation in the stomach. This can be caused by alcohol, non-steroidal anti inflammatory drugs or simply stress. The stomach receives its sympathetic innervation (the same part of the nervous system that innervates the muscles) from the 5th to the 9th Thoracic Vertebrae. The external oblique, internal oblique, rectus abdominis and the Transversus Abdominis are all innervated by Anterior Primary Rami of T7-T12. This means a stress on the stomach will affect all abdominal muscle recruitment patterns! What happens concomitantly with this loss of abdominal recruitment is the spinal muscles become reflexively rigid. This loss of stabilization with extra torque can very often cause low back pain.
This illustrates to us the importance of a proper diet for flat abdominals. It becomes more complicated when you look at immediate onset of food allergy and delayed onset food allergies. An immediate onset is usually obvious. A reaction to peanuts, where a person can go into anaphylactic shick and die is an immediate onset reaction. The second kind, which is far more common, is a delayed onset food allergy. These allergies are not immediately traceable and can cause reactions in the body for as long as the food remains in the body. When it is totally eliminated the problems will stop. Unfortunately, due to modern dietary choices our transit times have been greatly lengthened. Transit time is simply put the time from which a food enters the mouth until it exits the anus. Dr Dennis Burkitt discovered while looking at native Africans that their average transit time was 12 hours. A good transit time should be between 12 and 24 hours. Many people have a transit time of 56 hours, about what you would have if you have three bowel movements a week. This is not good from a health perspective as well.
Improper co-ordination and sequencing of the muscles involved creates problems as well. The abdominal musculature is a unique system with the muscles having nine sources of innervation. Most muscles have 2 sources, a primary and a secondary. This illustrates how complex this system is. Optimal recruitment patterns are needed for proper aesthetic appeal and proper function. Much research has been done linking low back pain to an inability to sequence proper abdominal sequencing. This is not a question of one muscle not being strong enough. It is a neurological issue meaning it is due to the nervous system. As i have illustrated above, we can clearly see that what we ingest affects the ability of our nervous system to recruit the right muscles.
Training the abdominals should then progress in a linear, hierarchal fashion. The process should be:
Isolation of the muscles that are dysfunctional.
Integration of these muscles into full body movement. This sequence could go -
Static Core - Static Extremity
Static Core - Dynamic Extremity
Dynamic Core - Static Extremity
Dynamic Core - Dynamic Extremity
The goal should be to integrate correct function of the abdominal wall into everyday life and movement patterns. To help with all this professional help is needed. If this interests you please look at the practitioners listed or contact me and I will put you in touch with one in your area.
Incorrect exercise choice also limits Abdominal development. Two examples of this is the crunch and lying leg raise. I will break these two common exercises down for you and offer up some better alternatives.
The crunch is an exercise that does not look at many things in regards to function but also aesthetics. The first problem with the crunch is that it is performed on the floor. Doing the exercise on the floor limits your range of motion significantly. The human spine has the ability to both flex and extend. The crunch on the floor puts you into a position of forward flexion. This then has further ramifications. When doing the exercise you are working in a shortened range of motion. It is like doing half a biceps curl. What will happen is you will get stronger in this shortened state is you adapt. Your muscles get shorter. When a muscle gets shorter it drops sarcomeres. Sarcomeres are functional units of muscle fibers. When this happens consistently these sarcomeres cannot be regained It is estimated you can only ever regain back 80% of your lost sarcomeres.
This flexed position which you are now stuck in affects your breathing. Your rib cage is immobilized which will force you to breathe through your mouth to get a full breath. This leads to further rigidity of the rib cage and thoracic spine. This flexion in the spine then affects shoulder function. When your thoracic spine is flexed doing a pressing motion vertically is very painful as the shoulder becomes impinged. This then limits the rest of your training and stops you from performing some very beneficial exercises.
The Lying leg raise does wonders for your low back. When you see this exercise performed you will often see the trainee failing to keep their low back pressed against the ground. They will generally have an increased lumbar arch or lumbar lordosis. This means that the main muscle that they are recruiting is not the abdominals but the hip flexors, in particular the psoas. The Psoas is a powerful muscle that originates on the vertebral bodies and transverse processes of all 5 lumbar vertebra and attaches to the lesser trochanter of the femur. When it gets stronger it pulls the lumbar spine further into extension, a position that is often associated with increased pain. It is often doe at high speeds with an unstable spine putting massive loads through the lower back.
Two exercises that helps fix these problems are the swiss ball crunch and the swiss ball prone jack knife. Doing a crunch on a swiss ball helps restore healthy range of motion to the thoracic spine and the swiss ball jack knife helps maintain a neutral posture in the lumbar spine while training the abdominals and the hip flexors to work together.
The last issue i would like to talk about is emotional stress. Emotional stress can be the downfall of every good intentioned exercise program. In the field of work I do, Sports Kinesiology each different emotion affects a muscle, an organ and a gland. This is known as the muscle/meridian/organ/gland matrix. This basically means that an issue in one part of the body will compromise the function of the body in many others. This is because the body seeks to disperse stress over as many systems as possible. This allows all systems to function rather than having the total shut down of one system. To describe these connections takes a 2 year diploma to understand but the important thing to take away is that your emotional health affects your performance and can undo all your attempts to train your abdominals.
These are some of the reasons why training the abdominals is such a complicated task. Simple exercise is not the solution. An integrated and holistic approach is required to really get to the 'core' issues. I hope this has helped you in your quest for optimal health
Love the journey
Paul
I went to the gym today and again I saw people on the floor doing hundreds of crunches, leg raises and many other exercises to achieve that dream of a flat stomach. Every time I see this I either want to scream or I feel so sorry for these people for all that useless training. The abdominal region is one of the most misunderstood areas of the body when it comes to training so I am going to address some of the factors here today. This post will lean towards the technical side so if you have any problems feel free to contact me or post a response
So, here we go...
With flattening the abs many factors have to be taken into consideration. It is not as simple as exercise and cutting calories. If it was, every person who went to a gym would have six pack abs and this is clearly not the case. Some of the factors that need to be looked at include:
Food allergies and intolerances
Digestive health
Processed food intake
Co-ordination and recruitment sequencing of the abdominal wall
Visceral conditions
Intake of medical drugs
Proper training technique
Emotional stress
All these factors add up in the body and need to be addressed to get you to your goals. Now lets look at these in greater detail.
Food allergies and intolerances are one of the biggest reasons why people can't flatten their abs. Food intolerances are highly likely in society today with the amount of foods that we eat that have not been here in the last 100 years. According to research by BioHealth Diagnostics founder Bill Timmins over 60% of Caucasian people have gluten intolerance. When the food pyramid tells us we should be eating 6-11 servings of cereal grains a day it creates a few problems. Similar figures exist for dairy consumption but the reasons for that are enough to fill another post.
How food intolerances affect our ability to contact our abs is the inflammation they create. When we become allergic or intolerant to a food, when we put it in our mouths our immune system becomes hyper vigilant and creates a ton of inflammation in an attempt to destroy the offending food. This inflammation reduces the ability of the abdominal wall to contract which I will explain in detail later on. We generally become intolerant of a food for 2 main reasons:
Genetic factors
Poor digestion and 'Leaky Gut syndrome'
The first factor is something that there is not much that we can do about. Leaky gut is a syndrome that is caused by poor lifestyle and poor choices. What happens in a leaky gut is that food particles in the small intestine irritate the lining of the intestinal wall. They affect the micro villi (small hair like projections that look like tentacles) and the mucus covering of the wall, create leaks and get into the bloodstream. food particles are not supposed to be in the blood stream! On another note, that is one of the flaws with the Eat Right for Your Type books. Many of the studies on food lectins ( the substances that cause our problems by causing our blood to clump together) have been done on food added to blood isolated in test tubes. This is not how food gets into our bodies. A person with healthy digestion is completely capable of handling food lectins - although this is a minority of people.
This situation creates some problems for us as we try to flatten our abs. One of the things the body does when an organ is under stress is cause pain and dysfunction is inhibit or communicate through the musculoskeletal system. This is called a viscerosomatic reflex. This is not a radical concept. For many years we have known that one of the impending signs of a heart attack is pain radiating down the left arm to the little finger. Many women get back pain every month that coincides with their cycle. It is not an unknown subject but is neglected by therapists, doctors and trainers when it comes to training programs and rehabilitation.
Beal has described the phenomenon of viscera-somatic reflexes as resulting from afferent stimuli, arising from a dysfunction of a visceral nature. An afferent nerve is a nerve that carries impulses towards the spinal cord from an organ or muscle. The reflex is in initiated by afferent receptors, which are then transmitted to the Dorsal horn of the spinal cord, where they synapse with interconnecting neurons. The stimuli are then converted to sympathetic and motor afferents and result in measurable changes in skeletal muscle, skin and blood vessels.
Abnormal stimulation or dysfunction, which is often caused by dietary choices can result in the following symptoms:
Hyperaesthesia of the skin
Vasomotor, pilomotor and sudomotor changes
Reflex rigidity of the somatic musculature
Sensory motor amnesia and the inability to voluntarily and involuntarily recruit the muscle
Sensory motor amnesia was first identified by Thomas Hanna, the creator of the Somatics school of neuromuscular retraining. It is the inability to recruit muscles in the correct patterns required for normal function. This can really affect your abdominal training efforts! An example of this is inflammation in the stomach. This can be caused by alcohol, non-steroidal anti inflammatory drugs or simply stress. The stomach receives its sympathetic innervation (the same part of the nervous system that innervates the muscles) from the 5th to the 9th Thoracic Vertebrae. The external oblique, internal oblique, rectus abdominis and the Transversus Abdominis are all innervated by Anterior Primary Rami of T7-T12. This means a stress on the stomach will affect all abdominal muscle recruitment patterns! What happens concomitantly with this loss of abdominal recruitment is the spinal muscles become reflexively rigid. This loss of stabilization with extra torque can very often cause low back pain.
This illustrates to us the importance of a proper diet for flat abdominals. It becomes more complicated when you look at immediate onset of food allergy and delayed onset food allergies. An immediate onset is usually obvious. A reaction to peanuts, where a person can go into anaphylactic shick and die is an immediate onset reaction. The second kind, which is far more common, is a delayed onset food allergy. These allergies are not immediately traceable and can cause reactions in the body for as long as the food remains in the body. When it is totally eliminated the problems will stop. Unfortunately, due to modern dietary choices our transit times have been greatly lengthened. Transit time is simply put the time from which a food enters the mouth until it exits the anus. Dr Dennis Burkitt discovered while looking at native Africans that their average transit time was 12 hours. A good transit time should be between 12 and 24 hours. Many people have a transit time of 56 hours, about what you would have if you have three bowel movements a week. This is not good from a health perspective as well.
Improper co-ordination and sequencing of the muscles involved creates problems as well. The abdominal musculature is a unique system with the muscles having nine sources of innervation. Most muscles have 2 sources, a primary and a secondary. This illustrates how complex this system is. Optimal recruitment patterns are needed for proper aesthetic appeal and proper function. Much research has been done linking low back pain to an inability to sequence proper abdominal sequencing. This is not a question of one muscle not being strong enough. It is a neurological issue meaning it is due to the nervous system. As i have illustrated above, we can clearly see that what we ingest affects the ability of our nervous system to recruit the right muscles.
Training the abdominals should then progress in a linear, hierarchal fashion. The process should be:
Isolation of the muscles that are dysfunctional.
Integration of these muscles into full body movement. This sequence could go -
Static Core - Static Extremity
Static Core - Dynamic Extremity
Dynamic Core - Static Extremity
Dynamic Core - Dynamic Extremity
The goal should be to integrate correct function of the abdominal wall into everyday life and movement patterns. To help with all this professional help is needed. If this interests you please look at the practitioners listed or contact me and I will put you in touch with one in your area.
Incorrect exercise choice also limits Abdominal development. Two examples of this is the crunch and lying leg raise. I will break these two common exercises down for you and offer up some better alternatives.
The crunch is an exercise that does not look at many things in regards to function but also aesthetics. The first problem with the crunch is that it is performed on the floor. Doing the exercise on the floor limits your range of motion significantly. The human spine has the ability to both flex and extend. The crunch on the floor puts you into a position of forward flexion. This then has further ramifications. When doing the exercise you are working in a shortened range of motion. It is like doing half a biceps curl. What will happen is you will get stronger in this shortened state is you adapt. Your muscles get shorter. When a muscle gets shorter it drops sarcomeres. Sarcomeres are functional units of muscle fibers. When this happens consistently these sarcomeres cannot be regained It is estimated you can only ever regain back 80% of your lost sarcomeres.
This flexed position which you are now stuck in affects your breathing. Your rib cage is immobilized which will force you to breathe through your mouth to get a full breath. This leads to further rigidity of the rib cage and thoracic spine. This flexion in the spine then affects shoulder function. When your thoracic spine is flexed doing a pressing motion vertically is very painful as the shoulder becomes impinged. This then limits the rest of your training and stops you from performing some very beneficial exercises.
The Lying leg raise does wonders for your low back. When you see this exercise performed you will often see the trainee failing to keep their low back pressed against the ground. They will generally have an increased lumbar arch or lumbar lordosis. This means that the main muscle that they are recruiting is not the abdominals but the hip flexors, in particular the psoas. The Psoas is a powerful muscle that originates on the vertebral bodies and transverse processes of all 5 lumbar vertebra and attaches to the lesser trochanter of the femur. When it gets stronger it pulls the lumbar spine further into extension, a position that is often associated with increased pain. It is often doe at high speeds with an unstable spine putting massive loads through the lower back.
Two exercises that helps fix these problems are the swiss ball crunch and the swiss ball prone jack knife. Doing a crunch on a swiss ball helps restore healthy range of motion to the thoracic spine and the swiss ball jack knife helps maintain a neutral posture in the lumbar spine while training the abdominals and the hip flexors to work together.
The last issue i would like to talk about is emotional stress. Emotional stress can be the downfall of every good intentioned exercise program. In the field of work I do, Sports Kinesiology each different emotion affects a muscle, an organ and a gland. This is known as the muscle/meridian/organ/gland matrix. This basically means that an issue in one part of the body will compromise the function of the body in many others. This is because the body seeks to disperse stress over as many systems as possible. This allows all systems to function rather than having the total shut down of one system. To describe these connections takes a 2 year diploma to understand but the important thing to take away is that your emotional health affects your performance and can undo all your attempts to train your abdominals.
These are some of the reasons why training the abdominals is such a complicated task. Simple exercise is not the solution. An integrated and holistic approach is required to really get to the 'core' issues. I hope this has helped you in your quest for optimal health
Love the journey
Paul
The Flow
Quote of the Day -
'The winds of grace are always blowing,
but to catch them we have to raise our sails'
Sri Ramakrishna - Indian Mystic
This quote is powerful in what it is saying and can be interpreted in many ways. The classical interpretation of this quote is that God (or nature, the universal energy, the tao etc) is always there to assist us, we just have to be aware of it and open ourselves to it.
It can also be interpreted as the feeling of the flow state. The flow state is that magical state where time seems to stop and everything is perfect. We often see this state in sporting events as athletes get into 'the zone' and perform incredible feats. This is the stage that I think we all look for in our training and sporting goals. This state, as the quote says is not a random thing but a state that can and should be cultivated. If this state is cultivated, it can be more easily accessed time and time again leading to better performance.
One method of accessing this flow state is visualization. This method has been highly researched and is incredibly powerful. It has been found that by just visualizing a movement it fires the same motor circuits in the body used by the muscles! Many experiments have been done where the subjects have been able to increase their strength by up to 20% by just visualizing the movement! Visualization helps refine motor programs to the state from which they become automatic allowing you to fully concentrate on the task at hand.
To put this into practice in your rest periods at the gym visualize the next set. Look at every detail and try to include that in your vision. Try to involve your other senses such as how the set feels, what sounds, what smells are involved. Before a sporting game visualize how you would like to perform. Anticipate every opportunity or outcome and prepare strategies for it. By doing this you will be preparing for the game not only mentally but preparing your physiological, neuronal and hormonal systems.
Good luck and reach your potential
Paul
'The winds of grace are always blowing,
but to catch them we have to raise our sails'
Sri Ramakrishna - Indian Mystic
This quote is powerful in what it is saying and can be interpreted in many ways. The classical interpretation of this quote is that God (or nature, the universal energy, the tao etc) is always there to assist us, we just have to be aware of it and open ourselves to it.
It can also be interpreted as the feeling of the flow state. The flow state is that magical state where time seems to stop and everything is perfect. We often see this state in sporting events as athletes get into 'the zone' and perform incredible feats. This is the stage that I think we all look for in our training and sporting goals. This state, as the quote says is not a random thing but a state that can and should be cultivated. If this state is cultivated, it can be more easily accessed time and time again leading to better performance.
One method of accessing this flow state is visualization. This method has been highly researched and is incredibly powerful. It has been found that by just visualizing a movement it fires the same motor circuits in the body used by the muscles! Many experiments have been done where the subjects have been able to increase their strength by up to 20% by just visualizing the movement! Visualization helps refine motor programs to the state from which they become automatic allowing you to fully concentrate on the task at hand.
To put this into practice in your rest periods at the gym visualize the next set. Look at every detail and try to include that in your vision. Try to involve your other senses such as how the set feels, what sounds, what smells are involved. Before a sporting game visualize how you would like to perform. Anticipate every opportunity or outcome and prepare strategies for it. By doing this you will be preparing for the game not only mentally but preparing your physiological, neuronal and hormonal systems.
Good luck and reach your potential
Paul
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