TAC Blog

It’s time to conquer the fear and enjoy your life.

Timberhill Athletic Club will be holding a come-one-come-all book release party for Cindy Killip’s new book, Living the BONES Lifestyle: A Practical Guide to Conquering the Fear of Osteoporosis on Wednesday, May 2nd from 5:30pm to 7:30pm. Refreshments will be served and Cindy will be available for book signings.

          It has been estimated that osteoporosis is associated with at least 1.5 million fractures per year. This awareness has led to improved research and screening, as well as medications and supplements that can help slow bone loss. Unfortunately the messages that are sent to encourage consumers to take action are usually fear-driven. Living the BONES Lifestyle is the culmination of six years of reviewing, compiling and applying the labyrinth of international research and information about osteoporosis in an effort to diminish the fear associated with it. Cindy’s goal with this book is to help you understand this thing called osteoporosis and teach you simple lifestyle changes that help build stronger bones, so fear will no longer drive you but knowledge and courage will inspire you to take action.

          The book was published through the publishing company, Level Head Wellness and is distributed through Amazon and Barnes and Noble to bookstores, online retailers, libraries, and academic institutions. It covers balance training, osteoporosis tests and how to read them, nutritional strategies, exercises for building strong bones, and supplements and medication. A key element that sets this book apart from other books about osteoporosis is its focus on exercises proven to increase bone mineral density. Cindy explains the “whys” and “hows” of bone-building exercises, including detailed illustrations and modifications for severe osteoporosis.

          Cindy is an Advanced Health and Fitness Specialist who has been teaching and writing about the power of positive movement for over 22 years. Known as “The Balance Coach,” she is a personal trainer, fitness instructor, author and public speaker. She draws from a strong knowledge of anatomy and exercise science as well as social psychology and communications. She has training in a multitude of movement disciplines including somatics, pilates, yoga, martial arts, sports, and dance. Her background in competitive sports including NCAA collegiate soccer and softball started her on the path to becoming a fitness expert and her passion to help people enjoy their lives throughout their lifespan has guided her to her current area of expertise.

 www.boneslifestyle.com

Dealing with Chronic Pain

Chronic pain is a huge problem. Over 115 million people nationwide—about 1 in 3 Americans—suffer from some kind of long-term pain. It’s the leading reason that people miss work.

NIH-funded scientists are working to better understand and treat chronic pain. They’re uncovering the intricate pathways that lead to long-term pain. And they’re looking for approaches beyond medication that might help you control your pain.

Chronic pain differs in many ways from acute pain. Acute pain is part of the body’s response to an injury or short-term illness. Acute pain can help prevent more serious injury. For instance, it can make you quickly pull your finger away from a hot stove or keep your weight off a broken ankle. The causes of acute pain can usually be diagnosed and treated, and the pain eventually ends.

But the causes of chronic pain aren’t always clear. “It’s a complex problem that involves more than just the physical aspects of where the hurt seems to be,” says Dr. John Killen, deputy director of NIH’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. “There’s a lot of accumulating scientific evidence that chronic pain is partly a problem of how the brain processes pain.”

Chronic pain can come in many forms, and it accompanies several conditions including low-back pain, arthritis, cancer, migraine, fibromyalgia, endometriosis and inflammatory bowel disease. These persistent pains can severely limit your ability to move around and perform day-to-day tasks. Chronic pain can lead to depression and anxiety. It’s hard to look on the bright side when pain just won’t go away. Some experts say that chronic pain is a disease itself.

The complexities of chronic pain can make it difficult to treat. Many of today’s medications for chronic pain target inflammation. These drugs include aspirin, ibuprofen and COX-2 inhibitors. But if taken at high doses for a long time, these drugs can irritate your stomach and digestive system and possibly harm your kidneys. And they don’t work for everyone.

“With hard-to-treat pain, the opioids are also used, sometimes in combination with the other drugs,” says Dr. Raymond Dionne, who oversees some of NIH’s clinical pain research. Opioids include prescription painkillers such as codeine and morphine and brand-name drugs such as Vicodin, Oxycontin and Percocet. Opioids affect the processes by which the brain perceives pain. If used improperly, though, opioids can be addictive, and increasingly high doses may be needed to keep pain in check.

“As with all drugs, you have to find a balance between effectiveness and side effects,” says Dionne. He and other researchers have studied potential new pain medications to learn more about how they work in the body. But for the most part, pain medications are similar to those used 5 or more decades ago. That’s why some researchers are looking for approaches beyond medications.

“One thing we know is that currently available drug therapies don’t provide all the answers. Many people find that medications don’t fully relieve their chronic pain, and they can experience unpleasant side effects,” Killen says. “Evidence on a number of fronts, for several conditions, suggests that mind and body approaches can be helpful additions to conventional medicine for managing chronic pain.”

Research has shown that patients with chronic low-back pain might benefit from acupuncture, massage therapy, yoga or cognitive-behavioral therapy (a type of talk therapy).

NIH-funded scientists have also found that people with fibromyalgia pain might find relief through tai chi. This mind-body technique combines meditation, slow movements, deep breathing and relaxation.

But how much these approaches truly help is still an open question. Studies of pain relief can be difficult to interpret. Researchers must rely on patients to complete questionnaires and rate their own levels of pain.

One puzzler is that the exposure to the exact same pain-causing thing, or stimulus, can lead to completely different responses in different people. For example, when an identical heat stimulus is applied to different people’s arms, one may report feeling uncomfortable, while another might say that the pain is extreme.

“How do we account for these differences? We’ve now learned that genes play a role,” says Dr. Sean Mackey, who heads Stanford University’s neuroscience and pain lab. “Some differences involve our personality and mood states, including anxiety.”

Mackey and his team are using brain scans to gain insights into how we process and feel pain. One study found that a painful stimulus can activate different brain regions in people who are anxious than in those who are fearful of pain.

In another study, volunteers were taught strategies that could turn on specific brain regions. One technique involved mentally changing the meaning of the pain and thinking about it in a non-threatening way.

“We found that with repeated training, people can learn how to build up this brain area, almost like a muscle, and make its activity much stronger,” says Mackey. “That led to a significant improvement overall in their pain perception.” The researchers also found that different types of mental strategies, such as distraction, engaged different brain regions.

Another study found that intense feelings of passionate love can provide surprisingly effective pain relief. “It turns out that the areas of the brain activated by intense love are the same areas that drugs use to reduce pain,” says Mackay.

“We can’t write a prescription for patients to go home and have a passionate love affair,” says Mackey. “But we can suggest that you go out and do things that are rewarding, that are emotionally meaningful. Go for a walk on a moonlit beach. Go listen to some music you never listened to before. Do something that’s novel and exciting.”

That’s a prescription that should be painless to try.

Running, and participation in races, has really picked up here in Linn/Benton County.   Each weekend through the summer will be packed with races from a 5k to the half marathon.    I have the privilege of helping to put on the Corvallis half marathon, and work with the HOTV (Heart of the Valley) running club in helping people train, and meet nutrition needs for the Corvallis half.   

It’s really fun to work with a new, highly motivated group.  Running is different from any other fitness type sport; there are some basic fundamental physiological rules that must be followed to be successful in this sport, especially in the nutrition hydration area.  Runners need to properly fuel their bodies both at rest and while training or racing.     Enclosed are a few of the main topic areas I think are important for new runners.

Let’s start with basic diet, and calorie intake. As this article talks about, you have to take in enough calories to meet your training needs and know what types of foods are right for endurance sports: http://www.realbuzz.com/articles/a-balanced-diet-for-runners/ 

More specific diet composition info for people who are training for longer distances more frequently http://www.realbuzz.com/articles/what-should-runners-eat-and-drink-during-training/

Fluid intake for runners:  http://www.realbuzz.com/articles/the-importance-of-fluids-to-runners/

Can we drink too much?  This is a national issue. Particularly in populations running marathon distances:   http://www.realbuzz.com/articles/is-it-possible-for-runners-to-drink-too-much-water/ 

Keep in mind total calories and diet composition (% of carbs, protein, fats) guidelines are based on one’s level of fitness, and years of training in the sport.    Know your level of fitness (or basic pace per mile when you run or walk) and the months/years of continuous or periodic training to make your diet and hydration choices.

Mike Waters, Director of Health Promotion for TAC has been helping runners of all distances for over 30 years with their nutrition and training needs.     If you’d like him to help you with yours, you may contact him at timberhill.mike@comcast.net  or 541-207-4368 

1. Be Highly Precise and Specific. Imagine a typical New Year's resolution to "exercise regularly." It's a prescription for failure. You have a vastly higher chance for success if you decide in advance the days and times, and precisely what you're going to do on each of them.

Say instead that you commit to do a cardiovascular class (like Cycling) on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 6 a.m., for 45 minutes. If something beyond your control forces you to miss one of those days, you automatically default to doing that workout instead on Saturday at 9:15 a.m.

Researchers call those "implementation intentions" and they dramatically increase your odds of success.

2. Take on one new challenge at a time. Over the years, I've established a broad range of routines and practices, ranging from ones for weight training and running, to doing the most important thing first every morning without interruption for 90 minutes. In each case, I gave the new practice I was launching my sole focus. Even then, in some cases, it's taken several tries before I was able to stay at the behavior long enough for it to become essentially automatic.

Computers can run several programs simultaneously. Human beings operate best when we take on one thing at a time, sequentially. 

3. Not too much, not too little. The most obvious mistake we make when we try to change something in our lives is that we bite off more than we can chew. Imagine that after doing no exercise at all for the past year, for example, you get inspired and launch a regimen of jogging for 30 minutes, five days a week. Chances are high that you'll find exercising that much so painful you'll quit after a few sessions.

It's also easy to go to the other extreme, and take on too little. So you launch a 10-minute walk at lunchtime three days a week and stay at it. The problem is that you don't feel any better for it after several weeks, and your motivation fades.

The only way to truly grow is to challenge your current comfort zone. The trick is finding a middle ground — pushing yourself hard enough that you get some real gain, but not too much that you find yourself unwilling to stay at it.

4. What we resist persists.

Think about sitting in front of a plate of fragrant chocolate chip cookies over an extended period of time. Diets fail the vast majority of time because they're typically built around regularly resisting food we enjoy eating. Eventually, we run up against our limited reservoir of self-control.

The same is true of trying to ignore the Pavlovian ping of incoming emails while you're working on an important project that deserves your full attention.

The only reasonable answer is to avoid the temptation. With email, the more effective practice is turn it off entirely at designated times, and then answer it in chunks at others. For dieters, it's to keep food you don't want to eat out of sight, and focus your diet instead on what you are going to eat, at which times, and in what portion sizes. The less you have to think about what to do when it is time to eat, the more successful you're likely to be.

5. Competing Commitments.

We all derive a sense of comfort and safety from doing what we've always done, even if it isn't ultimately serving us well. Researchers Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey call this "immunity to change." Even the most passionate commitment to change, they've shown, is invariably counterbalanced by an equally powerful but often unseen "competing" commitment not to change.

Here's a very simple way to surface your competing commitment. Think about a change you really want to make. Now ask yourself what you're currently doing or not doing to undermine that primary commitment. If you are trying to get more focused on important priorities, for example, your competing commitment might be the desire to be highly responsive and available to those emailing you.

For any change effort you launch, it's key to surface your competing commitment and then ask yourself "How can I design this practice so I get the desired benefits but also minimize the costs I fear it will prompt?"

6. Keep the faith.

Change is hard. It is painful. And you will experience failure at times. The average person launches a change effort six separate times before it finally takes. But follow the steps above, and I can tell you from my own experience and that of thousands of clients that you will succeed, and probably without multiple failures.

Remembering the good times, learning from the bad

Memory can be used for good or for evil. If you use your past as a source of learning, it's worth remembering. If, however, all you do is mull over your mistakes and punish yourself for your failures, it's a waste of time. Rehashing failure can paralyze you in mortal fear of making another mistake, which, of course, just makes the feeling worse and practically guarantees future letdowns. The key to making meaningful changes is to pay more attention to the future than to the past. Have you ever noticed that the best athletes also have the shortest and most selective memories? Instead of dwelling on a missed shot or a flawed dive, they concentrate on making corrections and getting the next one right. It's as if the failed attempt never happened. It's forgotten and they don't fear trying again. If you mess up, even in an epic, life-altering way, work hard to leave it behind and concentrate on the possibilities yet to come. Tomorrow is much brighter when it's not smeared with a fixation on yesterday.

Put simply, the more behaviors are ritualized and routinized — in the form of a deliberate practice — the less energy they require to launch, and the more they recur automatically

from http://www.smokefree.gov/topic-benefits.aspx

Many people who quit smoking are surprised by how good they feel!

They feel in charge

• They don’t need to smoke
• They don’t have to find places to smoke
• They don’t have to worry about their smoke bothering others

They smell good

• Their hair, clothes, and breath don’t smell like smoke
• Their cars, homes, and kids don’t smell like smoke
• They can better smell food and other good smells

They feel more relaxed

• They don’t have to make sure they always have cigarettes
• They have more money
• They are not as worried about their health

They look and feel better

• They feel good about being able to quit
• Their skin looks healthier
• They have more energy when they walk, play with their kids, or do something active

The reality of quitting

The benefits of quitting are far better than the discomforts of recovery! Stay with it and find your freedom. Once you do, you'll never let it go.

Quitting smoking is hard work...
But it can be done. Millions of people just like you have become and are still former smokers.

I will crave cigarettes...
But cravings will pass. Most cravings only last a few minutes, and over time the urges to smoke will get weaker and come less often.

Withdrawal is uncomfortable...
But it isn’t painful. It’s for a short time and it’s manageable.

I might gain weight...
Gaining a few extra pounds after quitting is normal, but exercise and healthy eating can stop most of this weight gain, if not all of it.

Everything I do reminds me of smoking...
Smoking has been part of your daily life, like drinking coffee and waiting for the bus. But every day that you spend as a non-smoker will help make new routines that don’t include cigarettes.

Smoking is a part of me...
Smoking feels good because you’ve had lots of practice being a smoker. But you have years ahead of you to practice being a non-smoker.

New students often begin an exercise program with health goals – lose ten pounds, lower blood pressure, lower cholesterol, and as an RN, I would agree – those are important goals.  They motivate people to walk in the door and sign up for a membership.  And I sometimes notice that even the best motivations may not be enough to keep people coming back and working towards their goals. 
Sometimes people get good results, then get distracted by life, stop showing up, and develop the same health problems, and then start the cycle all over again.  The strongly motivated super student who attends lots of classes comprises another pattern.  She/he works hard to meet those goals, then has an injury or illness that takes a while to heal.  Once she falls out of the habit of working out, the road back to regular workouts gets longer and more convoluted.
Part of the pattern of on again, off again exercise may be related to an external motivation:  I do my workout to get ________, to check it off the list of things I must do.  I push myself to get it done.  Motivation is great.  It gets you in the door.  I can clean house much faster when something I really want to do is waiting for me on the other side of my effort.  And, could there be more?  What if we substitute inspiration for motivation - we dance, run, cycle or practice yoga because we have to – we are pulled by a force greater than ourselves.  The artist creates because she HAS to.  How are you inspired by what you do for fitness?
I am inspired by the creativity of the Nia technique – the synergy of all the components of the program.  I am inspired to go places I have never been, to explore different ways of doing the same move (rather than moving by rote).  I am moved by the different emotional energies of the music and movements, the many different flavors of joy:  quiet, restful joy, ebullient joy, dynamic yang joy, gratitude, and the sense of wonder at the ever-changing beauty of it all.  The cherry on top is the sense of connectedness I feel by moving with a group of similarly inspired people.
Let whatever moves you – truly move you from the inside out.  Find the inspiration and you won’t have to push yourself to show up for your workout.
Link to TAC Group Exercise Schedule for full listing of the classes we offer.  Everyone is welcome; Join anytime!