A couple weeks ago I wrote about little movements that can make a world of difference in our health. Three minutes, two or three times a day, of vigorous, but very simple movement triggers a flood of nitric oxide into our blood stream opening up our blood flow throughout our body. It is good blood flow that both brings the necessary oxygen for energy formation to our tissues as well as the necessary nutrients for both energy and cellular repair. You need that same flood of blood to flush away the toxic byproducts that are released from normal cellular functioning, the most important being simple carbon dioxide. The blood is able to carry these wastes to the lungs for release in our breath, to the kidneys for discharge in our urine, and to our liver to be broken down and then dumped into our colon for later discharge.
The most common complaint heard by doctors everywhere is lack of energy. Everyone is tired. Everyone wants more energy. Coffee and energy drink sales are at an all time high. These give you fake energy by amping up your brain, but they do not really give you more actual physical energy. Physical energy is manufactured in each cell by the mitochondria energy factories in the cell. Physical energy is carried in our bodies by a chemical called ATP. ATP is like a tiny full battery that flows around the cell until energy is needed to do something. It donates electrochemical energy by splitting apart and releasing its stored energy. The pieces of the battery now travel back to the mitochondria, where they are reassembled with a load of new energy. Those of you that took biology in school might remember this process as the Krebs cycle and electron transport chain. Sugar or ketones go in the top, and are slowly broken down and form high energy ATP from the low energy ADP and P along the Krebs pathway.
One of the hard things to get across to people is that to have energy, you have to use up energy. You have to eat the right foods to create energy – people understand this even if they don’t do it, but then that food has to get to the cells, and that means good blood flow. Well the body is
super good at conserving energy, so if you do not demand a high level of performance from the body, it will automatically downgrade to the lowest level of energy use it can get away with. That means starving your cells for nutrients and instead storing that energy for later use as fat. It is vigorous exercise that counters that process by opening up the blood flow and getting that nutrition to the cells where the mitochondria in the cells can turn it into lots of ATP.
Now here is an interesting physio fact I just learned – it takes lots more energy to relax a muscle than it does to tighten up a muscle. That is why muscles tighten up into rigor mortis when we die – there is not enough energy to relax. What does that say about those chronically tight muscles in your neck and back? Maybe they do not have enough energy to relax. The blood flow is restricted to them because of stress tension and now they only have enough energy to stay tight – a nice self-perpetuating cycle. Opening up blood flow is the key to having enough muscle energy to simply be able to relax. That is why I tell people after I adjust them to engage in a simple rhythmic activity, like walking. We want to encourage blood flow without straining the muscles. They would like to curl up into a ball on the couch and take pain meds, but this only makes the healing take longer because it slows down circulation. Lack of movement is destroying our health.
This is counter intuitive I know, but there you have it. It is what it is. The problem is that people have been conditioned to believe that exercise means a hour of pounding the pavement or killing yourself at the gym. This is exhausting and drains you of the energy you are seeking…and is unnecessary for health. You would do far better doing little movements, little short bouts of vigorous movement two or three times a day, than you would do going to the gym for an hour or two at a time. I am talking about the average person here, not the high functioning athlete pushing the boundaries of their performance envelope. For some of you that are seriously out of shape, this vigorous activity might only need to be 20 seconds three times a day to start, and then you gradually work up to three minutes over as many months as it takes. You should feel better after doing these little bouts of exercise, or at least the same. If you feel worse and more tired, then you have done too much… cut it back. Exercise is meant to invigorate you, not exhaust you.
More importantly, it is the opening up of the circulation that will build you more energy for the rest of the day because of the reasons I outlined above – more ATP production and the flushing of the wastes. You have to convince your body that you are serious about really needing more energy before it will give it to you. Doing less to rest in hopes of getting more energy turns out to be the exact opposite of what you need to get more energy. You need to do just a little bit more exercise. A lot more exercise will drain you of energy and leave you with less energy over-all. Like everything else in life, just the right amount is good, but too much or too little is bad.
The “Little Movements” article was about generating energy for you. This time I want to address another concern – strength. Energy will do you no good if you do not have the strength to get up and do. The most basic medical measure of aging is the getting up out of a chair test. It means exactly what it says. Your doctor watches how you get up out of a chair. Do you pop up directly in one smooth movement without using your hands, or do you have to heave yourself up by pushing with your arms on your thighs or on the arms of the chair? There is a rating scale based on how fast and how much you have to help yourself up that translates to an age equivalent for general strength.
Years ago I noticed myself getting lazy to the point that I had to use my arms to get up out of a chair. When I caught myself, I realized how lazy I had gotten, so I started doing chair squats to rebuild my lower body strength. I was in my 50’s and acting like I was in my 70’s. So the idea here is that strength training is a special type of little movement for building strength rather than energy. The idea I came up with was based on the super-slow weight training I was doing in the gym. And yes, even though I was training in the gym, my hip muscle strength was really wimpy.
So here is the idea – go to a chair and try to take ten seconds to sit down super slowly and then immediately go to stand up also super slowly taking another ten seconds. Immediately repeat this process without any rest at all until you can’t lift up out of the chair at all. That’s it. Don’t do this again for at least four to seven days.
Obviously if you are deconditioned you will have to use your arms and hands just to get up and down, and you may not even be able to do one repetition. That is ok. If you take ten seconds just to go down half way and another ten seconds to come back up, then that is just fine. Do what ever you can do, just do it super slowly. When you reach muscle failure, meaning you can’t move any further, you are done for about a week. You need that long to allow your body to recover and rebuild. It is when you take a muscle to failure that you are telling your body that you really want it to build more muscle. As long as you stay in your comfort zone, your body will constantly decrease its abilities. Comfort equals the slow winding down of your body towards death. Growth only occurs when you push out of your comfort zone – for the body and the soul.
This is just a little 1-2 minute a week health building challenge.