As the weather heats up I find that myself and others are experiencing more difficulties with allergies. Symptoms of sinus irritation, itchy eyes, sneezing and congestion that were less a problem when the weather was cooler tend to increase as the temperature rises. It reminds me to do the things I know I need to do to keep a clear head.
Years ago, before I had much interest in alternative health or even health in general for that matter, I was at an event out in an open field east of Sacramento in the summer. I don’t remember why I was there, but I do remember very clearly that I was suffering. My eyes and nose were on fire and I could not stop sneezing. I was miserable.
A gentleman at the event saw the state I was in and told me a story. He said that there was a time when he would have been suffering the way I was, but that he saw an allergy doctor that helped him. This doctor tested him for sensitivities to a variety of substances ranging from environmental irritants to household chemicals to various foods. After the tests the doctor revealed to him those substances to which he was most sensitive and pointed out that one of these was tomatoes. The doctor told him that if he stopped eating tomatoes he would see a significant improvement in his symptoms. The man followed this adivce and his allergies cleared up.
It’s fascinating to me that a relatively minor change in diet could have had such a huge impact on this man’s allergies. I come back to this story periodically and it reminds me that we all have things to which we’re sensitive and many of them, like environmental irritants or pollutants, we really can’t totally avoid. But despite the pervasiveness of many irritants in our environment, what we eat can still has a significant impact on allergies.
We had a rainy winter and plants are still vital and abundant and many of these plants produce pollens that can be irritating to our tissues and solicit reactions from those tissues in the form of allergy symptoms. Staying indoors when our allergy symptoms are at their worst is an option, but not a long term one and not one that avoids exposure altogether.
Most people I talk to who have seasonal allergies use over the counter medications to manage symptoms until these symptoms pass. Examples include steroidal nasal sprays such as Flonase that reduce irritation to the sinuses and anti-histamines such as Claritin and Allegra that prevent our bodies from producing more histamines, the chemicals our cells produce in response to a pathogen.
I am in no way against using these medicines to relieve symptoms and if I’m really suffering I have no problem getting out my stash of Flonase. But I also believe we shouldn’t limit ourselves to merely treating symptoms. It is within our power to limit our exposure to other irritants, such as those in our diet, and by doing so we can reduce our tendency to react to the irritants we can’t avoid.
Ayurveda has helped me see the tremendous value in understanding and addressing root causes of ill health and has exposed me to effective alternatives to symptom treatment. Ayurveda is a terrific source of “home remedies” or using common, easily available household items or methods to treat common ailments. I’ve found that trying out many of these remedies has given me a deeper understanding of how health problems manifest and made me more effective in making recommendations to clients.
Ayurveda views allergies as being a symptom of defective or deficient agni. The word “agni” means “fire,” and it refers to the digestive fire or the ability of a person or of a particular tissue in a person to break down and assimilate or neutralize a substance. If the agni is weak or not working right then a person or tissue will struggle with the metabolic process, resulting in the production of toxins rather than the production of more healthy tissue. If these toxins accumulate they further depress the agni which may eventually trigger an immune response in the form of an allergic reaction.
Thus an essential part of Ayurvedic treatment and prevention of allergies is to improve agni. Our main agni is our digestive agni and one way we can strengthen it is by avoiding foods that are heavy and/or difficult to digest. Foods high in refined sugar are the low hanging fruit for elimination as they greatly tax the agni and have been shown to dramatically depress our immune system. A 1973 study done at Loma Linda University showed that ingesting 100g of sugar, about the amount in 1 liter of soda, reduced the germ fighting capacity of white blood cells by 40%, and this effect lasted for up to 5 hours!
Another way we can strengthen agni is to use an appropriate herbal digestive. A simple one that will work for most people is a tea made from a decoction of cumin, coriander and fennel.
Boil 1 tsp each of cumin, coriander and fennel seeds (whole not powdered) in 3 cups of water down to 2 cups and sip this tea with meals.
“CCF Tea” will help to strengthen weak agni and regulate agni that is over active. Keeping our agni optimal helps us digest and assimilate our food better and prevents us from producing and accumulating the digestive related toxicity that can put a drag on our immune system and increase our allergy symptoms.
Besides taking the above steps to keep our agni strong and our digestion working well I also find neti- a nasal saline rinse – helpful for relieving allergy symptoms. Many people know about nasal saline rinsing as it’s often recommended by docotors for allergies and colds. In the case of allergies, rinsing the sinus passages with salt water helps clear irritants out of the sinus passages, thereby reducing our exposure to these irritants and our tendency to react to them. There are different ways to do a saline rinse, but my favorite and the one I recommend most is using a neti pot.
Depending on the size of the neti pot, dissolve 1/4 to 1/2 tsp of fine sea salt into boiled, body temperature water. Taste the water for saline content. It should have the salinity of your tears. Place the water into the pot and place the spout of the pot into your right nostril. Tilt the head down and to the left over the sink until the water flows into your right nostril and out of your left. Remember to breathe through your mouth.
For larger pots, use half of the water to pour from right to left and the other half to pour from left to right. For smaller pots use a full pot in each direction. When you’ve finished each side, gently blow the excess water out. Be careful not to blow so hard and to push the water deeper into your sinuses.
While Ayurveda recommends neti it goes a step further. This step, done after the rinse and when the saline solution has been gently blown out of the nose, is to apply sesame oil, coconut oil or a combination of the two to the inside of the nose.
Take a small amount of liquified coconut or sesame oil into your palm. Dip your small finger or a cue tip into the oil and apply it to your nostrils. Sniff a few times to pull the oil deeper into the nasal passages. If you have time, lie down for a few minutes with the head comfortably back to allow the oil to drain in more.
Oil will help to counter the dryness caused by weather and/or the effects of blowing the nose frequently. The oil also helps to strengthen the tissue of the nasal passages, making it more resilient and better able to deal with inevitable exposure to irritants. You may find that applying oil will solicit the impulse to blow your nose. Don’t worry if you must as it may require several oil applications to resolve this feeling and to gain relief from the sinus irritation.
Movement can also be extremely helpful in relieving allegy symptoms and clearing the sinus passages. Almost any intelligent movement will help, but a specific movement that seems to work well is to do a series of standing forward bends.
With the feet paralell and about 1 foot apart, bend forward with the knees straight down to a height that does not require a lot of bend from your spine. Use a chair or a yoga block as a support to put your hands on, but avoid leaning into the hands and keep the weight of the body mostly in your heel bones. Hold the forward bend for 5-10 seconds, breathing through your nose as much as possible. Then come up, keeping the knees straight and the weight in the heels until you are fully upright. Stand upright for another 5-10 seconds and then repeat the forward bend. Continue to alternate between the forward bend and standing upright until you start of feel your sinuses clear or you reach your fatigue point, whichever comes first.
Finally, altering our breathing pattern can be very helpful in relieving allergy symptoms. This is especially the case for anyone who tends to breathe through their mouth or must do so because of sinus congestion. When we breathe through our mouth we over oxygenate our blood, throwing off the delicate balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide necessary to make oxygen available to our cells. When our cells don’t get the oxygen they need, even for a short time, they struggle to metabolize well and this makes it difficult for our cells and the tissues they make up to neutralize pathogens. The following breathing exercise can be quite effective.
Sit quietly for a minute or so and allow your breath to be normal and relaxed. Set a timer for 5 minutes. Start to take smaller, sip like inhalations, followed by normal exhalations (meaning don’t attempt to alter your exhalation). Continue this breathing pattern for as long as is reasonably comfortable. If you start to feel short of breath, take a few normal inhalations until your breath recovers, then begin taking smaller inhales again. Continue this process, staying as relaxed as possible for the full 5 minutes.
With many of the over the counter medications available for allergy relief being so effective it’s tempting to rely on these and forgo other solutions. Ayurvedic medicine provides some easy to do and helpful means of symptom relief, as well as a fairly straightforward view of what causes allergies and how to address this cause at its root. The suggestions I’ve given above are a boon to anyone suffering with seasonal allergies and who is interested in relief that goes beyond symptoms. These suggestions may also provide insights into how other aspects of our health may be contributing to our allergies.
Tips for Better Hydration this Fall
in Ayurveda, Health Article, YogaAs we approach the fall season, especially here in California, too much dryness is a concern. Dryness increases vata dosha and an excess of vata dosha can interfere with agni and impair our ability to digest, assimilate and form new healthy tissue. If vata dosha gets too aggravated it can start to weaken the body and make us more prone to illness.
Our agni or digestive fire is what enables us to break down and assimilate the things we take in. A well functioning agni is necessary for the nutrient elements in our food to reach and become part of our tissues (for more on agni and its role in digestion, see my recent article and allergies). Good agni is also needed for the liquids we drink to reach and infuse our tissues. Therefore we should consider the role of agni both in digestion and assimiation as well as in hydration.
When vata dosha is high, dryness itself makes it harder for us to absorb liquids. Imagine a patch of very dry soil that receives rain after a long absence. The soil is so dry and hard that the rain water won’t readily absorb into the soil and simply runs off, preventing the parched soil from absorbing the much needed liquidity. A parched body can behave in a similar way. Say we feel very dry and thirsty so we drink a big glass of cold water to quench our thirst, then short time we’re urinating most of the water out. The water has simply “run off” the digestive track without much of it actually being absorbed.
We can help facilitate absorption and hydration by changing the qualities of the water we drink. The easiest way to do this is to warm the water, making it more favorable to our agni and preventing astringency in the digestive track. Think of how your skin feels when you’re exposed to very cold water. The pores close to keep the heat in. The digestive track responds similarly to cold water, whereas warm water relaxes the tissue, helping with absorption.
Another way of changing the qualities of our water is by adding other substances to the water that stimulate the agni and signal the digestive system to assimilate the liquid. The simplest way of doing this is to add lemon or lime to our water. Adding citrus to water stimulates the agni and improves absorption. Adding a tiny pinch of salt further enhances this effect and is also good for reducing vata dosha.
For a superior hydrating drink, adding even more elements to the liquid, to the point of making it more like food, is the way to go. Studies have shown milk, for example, to be more hydrating than water. In Kenya, long distance runners are known to drink plenty of rooibos tea with milk after a long run for rehydration. I recommend making any type of herbal tea that you enjoy and adding a small amount of sweetener such as maple syrup or agave nectar. If milk will complement the tea, as in the case of rooibos tea, then a small amount of cow’s milk or even soy or almond milk will add sufficient sweetness and substance to the liquid for optimal hydration.
Caffinated drinks, while often just as hydrating as water in the short term, can aggravate vata dosha longer term if taken in excess and are therefore not ideal for hydrating. Alcoholic drinks dramtically increase heat in the body. So while a G&T can feel refreshing in the short term, it tends to dry us out later as the heat of the alcohol “steams” away the moisture in the body.
Finally, eating foods with a higher moisture content and reducing our intake of dry, very salty foods can be helpful. As we move further into the fall and the weather cools it makes sense to eat more soups and stews and fewer dry sautéed or roasted dishes. It’s also helpful to sip warm water or herbal tea with our meals, deliberately mixing the warm liquid with bites of food as we liquify the food in our mouths. In this way we can offset the effects of dryer foods and infuse more liquid into any meal and ultimately into our tissues.
More Insights on Trikonasana – Stabilizing the Top Arm
in YogaThe other day I was working with a student on Trikonasana and I noticed that she was struggling to keep her back hip from moving forward. This student is pretty experienced and even though I kept emphasizing to her that she avoid letting her hip come forward, it kept happening anyway. I began to wonder if there wasn’t something else going on that I wasn’t seeing.
Then I noticed something about her shoulders that proved to be an important insight. When she stretched her arms apart, her shoulder blades retracted toward her spine. Then as she initiated the side bend her top arm, without a stable shoulder blade to prevent it, fell behind her shoulder girdle, pulling her backward from her shoulder girdle. The force of her arm pulling her upper body back required that she counterbalance by moving her hip forward.
It’s fascinating to me how an unstable shoulder blade can have such a huge impact on a standing posture, but there’s no getting around physics. Even though the arms are not weight bearing in trikonasana, if there’s instability in the shoulder girdle it will destabilize the entire asana. Therefore I find it not only helpful but essential to teach students to bring their top arm forward as much as is necessary to protract shoulder blade. Then the humerus must be externally rotated to stabilize the scapula and shoulder joint. This approach will help to integrate the shoulder girdle with the trunk and pelvis so it’s not working at cross puposes with the hips and legs, making for a stable, integrated posture.
This photo on the left illustrates the mistake and the photo on the right shows the correction.
Tissue Hydration and Movement – Keys to Keeping Your Body Young at Every Age
in Health Article, Movement ArticleI think we can all agree that staying hydrated is a good thing and becoming dehydrated is not. To hydrate our body we tend to think first of drinking more water, and while drinking enough water is obviously necessary and important for our health, keeping all of our tissues well hydrated, particularly our connective tissue, benefits from a more nuanced approach.
To understand tissue hydration better it helps to understand a bit more about the tissue we’re hydrating. Connective tissue, which includes our ligaments, tendons and fascia, is a tissue framework that supports and connects, you could say holds together, other tissues in the body. Our connective tissue plays an extremely important role in human movement. When connective tissue is healthy and well hydrated, it allow our bodies to move in a wide variety of ways. Conversely, if our connective tissue is not well hydrated it tends to limit our mobility, adversely affecting the health many other tissues in the body.
Connective tissue is composed of cells, fibers and ground substance. Understanding ground substance, our connective tissue’s liquid component, is the key to understanding how to keep our connective tissue well hydrated .Ground substance is a clear, viscous fluid that is 70 percent water. It can vary in consistency from relatively thin and water like to thicker and more gel like. What gives ground substance this variability in consistency is the 30% non-water component, the glycoamindoglycans or GAG’s. GAGs act like a binding agent that draws water into the tissue and keeps it there. GAG’s therefore play an important role in keeping our connective tissue well hydrated.
In addition to its role in tissue hydration, ground substance also:
In short, ground substance keeps our tissues fed, clean and lubricated while playing a key role in our movement. The ground substance can transform from gel to liquid, a quality called Thixotropy, and it’s this quality that explains in part why it is so important for human movement. Thixotropic fluids change when our environment and our movement changes, providing more support when we need it and less when we don’t.
This is something we can all feel. We recognize for example that our bodies feels stiffer when cold and looser when warm and that taking a hot bath or warming up the body with movement can help a stiff and sore back. But will drinking more water also help with a stiff and sore back? The answer is more complicated. Drinking more water can make more water available to our tissue, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into keeping our ground substance more fluid and our connective tissue better hydrated.
When addressing the health of our connective tissues it is important to understand that drinking more water only goes so far. We also need to move. Movement is essential for keeping our tissues mobile and hydrated, especially our connective tissue, and the fluidity of all of our tissue is compromised when we don’t move enough or with enough variety and frequency.
One reason movement is so important for tissue hydration is because it is needed to facilitate the feeding and cleansing functions of the ground substance, and this is especially important as we get older. As we age, the areas in our bodies where tissues become adhesive and stiff tend to increase. Past injuries, acute and chronic, along with the cumulative effect of poor and/or infrequent movement habits can lead to dried out tissue fibers. These fibers tend to stick to one another, causing the ground substance to decrease proportionally and the connective tissues to get less nutrition while allowing more waste products to accumulate.
This scenario can contribute to pain and tension patterns that limit our mobility further and before you know it, we feel old. Meanwhile, connective tissue that doesn’t move well limits the movement of the muscle tissue it supports. This makes it difficult to generate new muscle in these areas, contributing to a weakening body.
The good news is that this trend can be reversed! Movement always remains available to us, no matter our age. So it’s always a good idea to try to increase the quantity and quality and regularity of our movements.
Here are some suggestions that will, when done with regularity, promote hydration of all of the tissues, help maintain strength and promote good muscle tone and function:
Stretching: When done with good alignment and stable joints, stretching can help to increase the normal gliding of the connective tissue, allowing for greater range of motion for our muscles. Muscles with more range make it easier to move our joints and help to keep fluid in the joint capsules, maintaining their suppleness.
*Research has shown that while stretching initially decreases the water content of the tissue, after 30 minutes of rest, the water content increases beyond the pre-stretch quantity and remains higher for up to 3 hours afterwards!
Natural Human Movement: This is movement that takes joints through a wide range of motions. Walking is a great example of a natural human movement that can take a wide variety of our joints through a wide range of motion. In fact, did you know that walking can mobilize more joints in your body than running?
*Moving your joints to maintain health need not be done with strenuous activities!
Orthopedic Massage: Orthopedic massage was designed specifically to reintroduce motion into connective tissues to decrease pain. This technique involves sliding the fibers of connective tissue across each other to create friction that increases fluidity. This along with the gentle rocking motion of Orthopedic Massage and its passive joint mobilization help to increase fluid uptake in our tissues.
*Massage is a must if you are dealing with injuries that are keeping you from moving as freely as you could because of pain!
Personal Alignment Training and Re-education: If our joints do not line up well we will have a greater tendency toward tissue tension, tightness, stiffness and weakness, and these issues can lead to chronic movement pattern disorders and decreased mobility. Over time, decreased mobility can promote adhesions in the tissues fibers. Personal Alignment Training helps re-educate you on how to hold yourself in proper alignment, reducing pain due to poor movement habits and improving mobility. Ultimately this keeps your tissues better hydrated.
*Remember, adhesions are effectively dehydrated tissue. That is, tissue where the connective tissue fibers have dried out and become stuck to each other.
Staying properly hydrated is important at any age, but becomes more important as we get older. Hydration is not simply a matter of drinking more water, but to be more proactive about tissue hydration. As we age we tend to move less and develop more movement habits that cause or maintain chronic pain and injures. This leads to more adhesions, causing more pain and discomfort and decreasing our mobility. This in turn can cause us to move even less.
Keeping our tissues young, supple and hydrated need not be strenuous, it simply requires more varied and biomechanically sound human movement. Movement is the key to staying youthful and well hydrated.
Understanding Allergies Better for More Relief
in Ayurveda, Cardiovascular Health, Health ArticleAs the weather heats up I find that myself and others are experiencing more difficulties with allergies. Symptoms of sinus irritation, itchy eyes, sneezing and congestion that were less a problem when the weather was cooler tend to increase as the temperature rises. It reminds me to do the things I know I need to do to keep a clear head.
Years ago, before I had much interest in alternative health or even health in general for that matter, I was at an event out in an open field east of Sacramento in the summer. I don’t remember why I was there, but I do remember very clearly that I was suffering. My eyes and nose were on fire and I could not stop sneezing. I was miserable.
A gentleman at the event saw the state I was in and told me a story. He said that there was a time when he would have been suffering the way I was, but that he saw an allergy doctor that helped him. This doctor tested him for sensitivities to a variety of substances ranging from environmental irritants to household chemicals to various foods. After the tests the doctor revealed to him those substances to which he was most sensitive and pointed out that one of these was tomatoes. The doctor told him that if he stopped eating tomatoes he would see a significant improvement in his symptoms. The man followed this adivce and his allergies cleared up.
It’s fascinating to me that a relatively minor change in diet could have had such a huge impact on this man’s allergies. I come back to this story periodically and it reminds me that we all have things to which we’re sensitive and many of them, like environmental irritants or pollutants, we really can’t totally avoid. But despite the pervasiveness of many irritants in our environment, what we eat can still has a significant impact on allergies.
We had a rainy winter and plants are still vital and abundant and many of these plants produce pollens that can be irritating to our tissues and solicit reactions from those tissues in the form of allergy symptoms. Staying indoors when our allergy symptoms are at their worst is an option, but not a long term one and not one that avoids exposure altogether.
Most people I talk to who have seasonal allergies use over the counter medications to manage symptoms until these symptoms pass. Examples include steroidal nasal sprays such as Flonase that reduce irritation to the sinuses and anti-histamines such as Claritin and Allegra that prevent our bodies from producing more histamines, the chemicals our cells produce in response to a pathogen.
I am in no way against using these medicines to relieve symptoms and if I’m really suffering I have no problem getting out my stash of Flonase. But I also believe we shouldn’t limit ourselves to merely treating symptoms. It is within our power to limit our exposure to other irritants, such as those in our diet, and by doing so we can reduce our tendency to react to the irritants we can’t avoid.
Ayurveda has helped me see the tremendous value in understanding and addressing root causes of ill health and has exposed me to effective alternatives to symptom treatment. Ayurveda is a terrific source of “home remedies” or using common, easily available household items or methods to treat common ailments. I’ve found that trying out many of these remedies has given me a deeper understanding of how health problems manifest and made me more effective in making recommendations to clients.
Ayurveda views allergies as being a symptom of defective or deficient agni. The word “agni” means “fire,” and it refers to the digestive fire or the ability of a person or of a particular tissue in a person to break down and assimilate or neutralize a substance. If the agni is weak or not working right then a person or tissue will struggle with the metabolic process, resulting in the production of toxins rather than the production of more healthy tissue. If these toxins accumulate they further depress the agni which may eventually trigger an immune response in the form of an allergic reaction.
Thus an essential part of Ayurvedic treatment and prevention of allergies is to improve agni. Our main agni is our digestive agni and one way we can strengthen it is by avoiding foods that are heavy and/or difficult to digest. Foods high in refined sugar are the low hanging fruit for elimination as they greatly tax the agni and have been shown to dramatically depress our immune system. A 1973 study done at Loma Linda University showed that ingesting 100g of sugar, about the amount in 1 liter of soda, reduced the germ fighting capacity of white blood cells by 40%, and this effect lasted for up to 5 hours!
Another way we can strengthen agni is to use an appropriate herbal digestive. A simple one that will work for most people is a tea made from a decoction of cumin, coriander and fennel.
Boil 1 tsp each of cumin, coriander and fennel seeds (whole not powdered) in 3 cups of water down to 2 cups and sip this tea with meals.
“CCF Tea” will help to strengthen weak agni and regulate agni that is over active. Keeping our agni optimal helps us digest and assimilate our food better and prevents us from producing and accumulating the digestive related toxicity that can put a drag on our immune system and increase our allergy symptoms.
Besides taking the above steps to keep our agni strong and our digestion working well I also find neti- a nasal saline rinse – helpful for relieving allergy symptoms. Many people know about nasal saline rinsing as it’s often recommended by docotors for allergies and colds. In the case of allergies, rinsing the sinus passages with salt water helps clear irritants out of the sinus passages, thereby reducing our exposure to these irritants and our tendency to react to them. There are different ways to do a saline rinse, but my favorite and the one I recommend most is using a neti pot.
Depending on the size of the neti pot, dissolve 1/4 to 1/2 tsp of fine sea salt into boiled, body temperature water. Taste the water for saline content. It should have the salinity of your tears. Place the water into the pot and place the spout of the pot into your right nostril. Tilt the head down and to the left over the sink until the water flows into your right nostril and out of your left. Remember to breathe through your mouth.
For larger pots, use half of the water to pour from right to left and the other half to pour from left to right. For smaller pots use a full pot in each direction. When you’ve finished each side, gently blow the excess water out. Be careful not to blow so hard and to push the water deeper into your sinuses.
While Ayurveda recommends neti it goes a step further. This step, done after the rinse and when the saline solution has been gently blown out of the nose, is to apply sesame oil, coconut oil or a combination of the two to the inside of the nose.
Take a small amount of liquified coconut or sesame oil into your palm. Dip your small finger or a cue tip into the oil and apply it to your nostrils. Sniff a few times to pull the oil deeper into the nasal passages. If you have time, lie down for a few minutes with the head comfortably back to allow the oil to drain in more.
Oil will help to counter the dryness caused by weather and/or the effects of blowing the nose frequently. The oil also helps to strengthen the tissue of the nasal passages, making it more resilient and better able to deal with inevitable exposure to irritants. You may find that applying oil will solicit the impulse to blow your nose. Don’t worry if you must as it may require several oil applications to resolve this feeling and to gain relief from the sinus irritation.
Movement can also be extremely helpful in relieving allegy symptoms and clearing the sinus passages. Almost any intelligent movement will help, but a specific movement that seems to work well is to do a series of standing forward bends.
With the feet paralell and about 1 foot apart, bend forward with the knees straight down to a height that does not require a lot of bend from your spine. Use a chair or a yoga block as a support to put your hands on, but avoid leaning into the hands and keep the weight of the body mostly in your heel bones. Hold the forward bend for 5-10 seconds, breathing through your nose as much as possible. Then come up, keeping the knees straight and the weight in the heels until you are fully upright. Stand upright for another 5-10 seconds and then repeat the forward bend. Continue to alternate between the forward bend and standing upright until you start of feel your sinuses clear or you reach your fatigue point, whichever comes first.
Finally, altering our breathing pattern can be very helpful in relieving allergy symptoms. This is especially the case for anyone who tends to breathe through their mouth or must do so because of sinus congestion. When we breathe through our mouth we over oxygenate our blood, throwing off the delicate balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide necessary to make oxygen available to our cells. When our cells don’t get the oxygen they need, even for a short time, they struggle to metabolize well and this makes it difficult for our cells and the tissues they make up to neutralize pathogens. The following breathing exercise can be quite effective.
Sit quietly for a minute or so and allow your breath to be normal and relaxed. Set a timer for 5 minutes. Start to take smaller, sip like inhalations, followed by normal exhalations (meaning don’t attempt to alter your exhalation). Continue this breathing pattern for as long as is reasonably comfortable. If you start to feel short of breath, take a few normal inhalations until your breath recovers, then begin taking smaller inhales again. Continue this process, staying as relaxed as possible for the full 5 minutes.
With many of the over the counter medications available for allergy relief being so effective it’s tempting to rely on these and forgo other solutions. Ayurvedic medicine provides some easy to do and helpful means of symptom relief, as well as a fairly straightforward view of what causes allergies and how to address this cause at its root. The suggestions I’ve given above are a boon to anyone suffering with seasonal allergies and who is interested in relief that goes beyond symptoms. These suggestions may also provide insights into how other aspects of our health may be contributing to our allergies.
The Best Breathing for Reducing Pain and Stress
in Cardiovascular Health, DNS, Health Article, Personal Alignment TrainingWhen working with our clients one of the first things we check is their breathing pattern. This is because the way a person breathes can have a big impact on their health, including the health and function of the musculo-skeletal system. Much of the impact of breathing on our health has to do with the role of our diaphragm.
The Diaphragm during Respiration
There are many ways to breathe but the most effective, efficient and relaxing way to breathe involves using our diaphragm. The diaphragm is a dome-shaped muscle that spans the lower border of our rib cage. On inhalation, as the diaphragm contracts, it flattens and moves downward. This downward motion creates a vacum in the chest, helping to pull air into the lungs. When the diaphragm relaxes it moves upward, back into its dome shape, and this upward motion helps us to exhale.
Intra-abdominal Pressure and the Stabilizing Role of the Diaphragm
The downward motion of the diaphragm also creates pressure in the abdomen. This pressure is called “intra-abdominal pressure” and is important for facilitating a stabilizing response in the muscles of our abdomen, low back and pelvis. This highlights the dual role of the diaphragm. Under optimal circumstances it acts as a facilitator of both respiration and muscle-skeletal stabilization.
Often people are taught diaphragmatic breathing by lying down and breathing into the belly, inflating it toward the ceiling. Although this may be a good way to get started, it is an approach which focuses only on the respiratory role of the diaphragm and fails to address its crucial role in stabilizing the trunk and pelvis.
Experiencing Diaphragmatic Breathing and Intra-abdominal Pressure
For the diaphragm to perform optimally in both of it’s roles it is essential that its downward motion be symetrical and that the pressure it creates in the abdomen be distributed evenly. To experience this even distribution of intra-abdominal pressure for yourself, place your hands around the abdomen just below the lower ribs, making contact with the front, sides and back of your body. Your diaphragm sits just above where your hands are touching. Now inhale and feel how the pressure created in your abdomen is pushing gently into your hands.
True diaphragmatic breathing creates intra-abdominal pressure that expands outward into the full circumference of the abdomen. When you breathe in with your hands wrapped around your abdomen, check and see if you feel the pressure moving in all directions. If you feel most or all of the pressure pushing into your belly, then on subsequent breaths try to gently, but consciously, redistribute the pressure into every place your hands are touching, especially into the sides of your waist and into the back.
Another technique for improving diaphragmatic breathing and intra-abdominal pressure involves tying a theraband or a stretchy cloth around your lower ribs and feeling your inhale touch the whole circumference of the lower ribcage. Here you can feel the intercostal muscles between your ribs move. The intercostals assist the diaphragm in playing both its roles and are an important source of load and mobilization of the rib cage, helping to keep these bones healthy and mobile.
Intra-abdominal Pressure and the Pelvic Floor
As I mentioned earlier, when we are truly breathing diaphragmatically the downward motion of the diaphragm will be symetrical and create an even distribution of pressure in the abdominal cavity. But it doesn’t stop there! In fact one important benefit of diaphragmatic breathing is its affect on the pelvic floor. This is because true diaphragmatic breathing and optimal intra-abdominal pressure will move directly downward toward the pelvic floor, loading the pelvic floor muscles and soliciting a response from those muscles that maintains their strength and responsiveness.
To sense the intra-abdominal pressure in your pelvis, place your hands on the front of your belly below your umbilicus (belly button) and above your pubic bone and take a breath. You should feel a gentle pressure increase here. You may also begin to sense a gentle pressure in the floor of your pelvis.
Other Benefits of Diaphragmatic Breathing
Another reason the direction our diaphragm moves is so important is that it helps pull air into the lowest lobes of your lungs. Since the lungs are narrow at the top and wider at the bottom, blood flow into the lower lobes is greater than into the upper lobes and therefore breathing diaphragmatically will allow for more oxygen transfer into the blood. With a big chest breath we are actually taking in less oxygen than if we simply take a small but healthy diaphragmatic breath!
Diaphragmatic breathing also has benefits to our nervous system. The para-sympathic nervous system (rest and digest) is activated by relaxed, diaphragmatic breathing while the sympathetic (fight or flight) is activated by chest breathing. Again, for healthy breathing that big chest breath is not always what we want. It is actually preparing our body to ramp up, promoting a stress response rather than alleviating it.
Diaphragmatic breathing can also help alleviate back pain and reduce back tension. When breathing diaphragmatically, the intra-abdominal pressure solicits a response in the abdominal and lower trunk muscles that gently unloads the spinal joints and strengthens the abodminal muscles. These muscles get a gentle massage and workout just by breathing correctly!
Breathing through Your Nose is Essential
Finally, to get the most out of diaphragmatic breathing it is essential to breathe in and out of your nose. Mouth breathing is shallow and will promote lifting the chest up in lieu of the diaphragm moving down. Since ALL of the benefits of diaphragmatic breathing hinge on the symetrical downward movement of the diaphragm and the even distribution of intra-abdominal pressure then breathing through the nose is key in reaping these benefits.
For guided instruction on the basics of diaphragmatic breathing, check out this video.
Aligning the Hip for Success in Trikonasana
in Movement Article, YogaAs the variety and number of classical yoga postures that I continue to teach and practice has decreased, my interest and enthusiasm for certain postures has only increased. Utthita Trikonasana or Extended Triangle Posture is a great example of this. I keep coming back to it and it keeps giving, providing countless opportunities for insight and reflection.
As any student of yoga knows there are as many ways to teach Trikonasana as there are teachers who teach it. This can present a challenge for the student practicing it. What should I focus on? What are the keys to this posture? What should I be doing (or not doing) to prevent injury?
Trikonasa can serve as a litmus test for low back pain and when certain mistakes are made doing it the asana can increase low back issues and even create them when they didn’t exist before. This is espeically a pitfall for yoga teachers and more experienced students who have the strength and stamina to sustain misaligned postures for longer periods. Therefore it is essential that the posture not bring up any existing pain in students who have it and that all students are attentive to executing the posture in a way that doesn’t excessively load the lumbar spine and sacroiliac joints.
I’ve discovered that a single, key early step in this posture will dramatically reduce the tendency to manifest the various problems that this posture can bring up, including low back issues, and it will greatly increase the chances of success in the posture. Basically, this step involves getting the lateral hip aligned vertically with the outer ankle bone.
Figure 1
Notice in the photo to the left (Figure 1) how the my left hip joint (both hips really) is pushed forward of my ankle. This results in a laxity of the muscles in the lateral hip, leaving the muscular support of this hip much to the quadriceps and the forefoot and results in excessive load on the hip and knee joints and a significant misalignment of my spine.
Figure 2
Often accompanying the hip forward is the lower ribcage which tends to shear forward of the lumbar spine (Figure 2). When the ribs shear forward this way, any turn of the rib cage and chest must come primarily from the lumbar spine and will tend to accelerate the hips even more forward, excessively loading the lower back and increasing the load on the hip even further.
Look at how my rib cage in the photo below (Figure 3) reveals the excessive arch in my low back. As I twist to the left, the arching of the back will only increase along with the load on the spine.
Figure 3
Bringing my hip back in line with my ankle bone, or at least closer to it, will go a long way toward resolving these issues.
First, it immediately reduces load on the quadriceps and the anterior hip, reducing stress on the hip and knee joints.
Second, it allows me to relax the gluteus maximus of my front leg hip, making it easier to upright the pelvis and give greater space to the lower lumbar vertebra and sacroiliac joints.
Third, with the added length in the lower back it’s now possible for me to release the rib cage back into a more optimal alignment with the pelvis, further reducing stress on the back. You can see these changes on my Trikonasana in the photo below (Figure 4).
Figure 4
With the hip back in alignment I can initiate the twisting action in the posture from the pelvis, incorporate more abduction in my front hip and reduce the demand on my spine for providing the bulk of the rotation. This alignment will also help to involve my front leg more in the twist for better distribution of loads between the two legs.
Along with optimizing the alignment of the ribcage with the pelvis I have reduced a lot of the load to my lower back and SI joints in this posture and redistributed it into my pelvic floor and legs. Now with the spine communicating directly with my legs I can generate more length through the whole spine and up into the chest and arms and really bring the pose to life!
Overall, bringing my hip back distributes more of the loads in this posture into more places. This improved load distribution serves to strengthen and increase blood and lymph flow to tissues throughout the body and contrasts starkly with a posture that simply overloads the hips, knees and lower back. That’s the difference between a posture that brings health to the body and one that only serves to wear it down.
Exercising For Health vs. Fitness
in Cardiovascular Health, Movement Article, Personal Alignment TrainingI think we can all agree that exercise is a good thing, regardless of how motivated we may or may not be to do it. The questions that remains are whether a particular activity can be called “exercise” and whether one type of exercise is better than another. Sports are a great example of this. I love basketball! I don’t play it anymore but I find it really fun to watch and can appreciate that it’s even more fun to play. Is playing basketball exercise? If so, is it good exercise? This depends on what you mean by good exercise.
What is good exercise?
If a client of mine asks me my opinion about an activity they engage in from the standpoint of it being good or bad, I always ask first what is the primary reason they are doing that activity. Recently I had been working with a client who had been running for exercise in the past but had stopped because it was impacting his health in negative ways. After a few sessions he was feeling much better and he asked me if I thought he should go back to running. I asked him “do you like running?” His answer was an unqualified “No”. I then told him that I would not recommend he start running again.
Now I know an awful lot of people LOVE to run and to anyone who loves to run I would say this – if you love it and it’s not impacting your health in ways that are interferring with other important activities or responsibilities in your life then absolutely you should run. But if you don’t love it, then I really don’t recommend it as I belive it puts too much stress on the body in a variety of ways to really be healthful. Frankly I don’t think running is “good exercise.” And I would say the same thing about a lot of what serves as exercise in the fitness realm these days.
Why are we exercising?
This brings up an important point. We don’t always exercise for health reasons. Or, we place our psychological health ahead of our physical health, if those can really be separated. By this I mean many people enjoy and hugely benefit from the satisfaction that an intense, demanding workout brings. It’s reinforcing to work hard and feel like we’ve accomplished something physically challenging. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing this.
But if I am running a lot and I’m having joint pain that is affecting my ability to move in other ways and this pain is getting worse and I am experiencing some level of debilitation as a result or I see debilitation looming on the horizon then I need to reasses whether running is really the form of exercise I ought to be doing and start considering other options.
What is fitness?
Exercise done for reasons OTHER than promoting health I would generally categorize as a fitness activity. Fitness activities are a type of training used to become proficient at or “fit for” that same activity or a related one. If I want to be good at basketball then I should practice things that will improve my game and make me more “fit” as a basketball player. Will those same activities make me a healthy person? In some ways maybe, but in many ways clearly not. Just look at the athetes who play basketball professionally for a long time. They are frequently hobbled. Kobe Bryant and his knees come to mind.
Movement and Exercise
On the most fundamental level human beings thrive on movement. The better we move and the greater variety of movements we’re able to execute the greater potential we have for health and longevity. Movement is not sexy, but it is essential. Elderly people who fall down and break their hip often decline very quickly, even if they were functioning pretty well beforehand. Once our movement becomes very limited then our health immediately suffers. If you’ve ever suffered a serious injury that severly curtails your activity you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Exercising for health
Exercise that is done for health reasons is also a type of fitness activity in that it makes us more “fit” for fullfilling our human needs. On the most basic level our human needs consist of eating, sleeping and procreation with most of the fitness requirements related to eating in the form of food gathering and preparation. To eat a varied diet, our hunter gatherer ancestors needed to move and move in a lot of different ways from squatting to digging to climbing to chopping to grinding.
The what and why of exercise
Now that we have outsourced so much of the movement in our diet we don’t even think about all of the work that went into bringing our farro, arugula, beet and goat cheese salad to the table. The substiute for all of the digging, fertilizing, harvesting, picking, feeding, milking, processing, packaging and shipping that went into our salad has become exercise. Therefore if we wish to replace these outsourced movements with exercise, that exercise should have a significant variety of postures and movements. A single activity with a repetitive and limited movement profile like running won’t provide the variety of movements that will make us “fit” for the variety of human activities that keep us healthy. Again if you love running (or some other limited movement profile fitness activity) do it, but see if for what it is and what it isn’t. It IS going to make you very fit for running but it ISN’T going to make you fit for meeting your human needs.
Haven’t we adapted to modern life?
I suppose there’s an argument to be made that as our lifestyles have changed our needs have changed with them. Haven’t we as human beings adapted to the more sedentary lifestyle we now lead? Certainly we have. After all our bodies and our minds are extremely efficient in adapting to change. I can train myself to sit at a desk for 8 hours a day and have lunch delivered to my office. But is that what I want to be fit for? Sitting and eating takeout? Are those adaptations manifesting health?
Our bodies and minds adapt to the input they are given and therefore it’s the things we do most often that have the biggest impact on our health and function. It is this fact that we need to consider when making choices about exercise because ultimately it won’t be the 1 hour per day of exercise that has the greatest impact on our health but rather what we’re doing for the other 23 hours. How does the activity we’re spending an hour doing affect us during the rest of our day? Is our 1 hour of exercise making us more fit for enjoying a high quality of life? Or are we simply making ourselves fit for a single activity that may or may not be good for us in the long run?
Introducing DNS (video #3)
in DNS, Personal Alignment Training, VideosIntroducing DNS (video #2)
in DNS, Personal Alignment Training, VideosIntroducing DNS!
in DNS, Personal Alignment Training, VideosTiffany and I completed our second course in Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization (DNS) a couple of weeks ago and it’s already having a HUGE impact on our work with clients. It’s rather uncanny how using even a limited amount of these early developmental postures and movement patterns has such a significant impact on strength, balance, flexibility, joint stability and pain reduction.
Those of you who have worked with us know that we’ll often e-mail you handouts to facilitate the work we encourage you to do on your own. We are sending most folks home with at least one DNS “posture” now and have decided, at least for now, to post videos in lieu of sending handouts.
Here is the first of 3 videos that show 3 different DNS “postures” and provide some instruction for each of them. These videos are not recommended for people who have not yet received one to one or group class instruction from Tiffany and/or myself.
So if you haven’t yet set up an appointment to experience DNS, I would urge you to do so. You won’t be disappointed!