Every new year we have a tradition of reflecting on the year that has past and setting in motion a new idea of the future. Hoping the new year will be an improvement and we will be better than the year before. While goals are personal and thus specific to each of you reading this, there are some big things that we would hope you include in your self-care routine this year.
Drink more water
Get more sleep
Fix your workstation and stand up more
Have a strength routine
Have a foam roll and mobility routine
Get treatment before injuries are too far gone
Manage Stress
Drink more Water
How much water should I drink every day?
One of the most common things we see in our society is a lack of hydration. Having less water than your body needs leads to dehydration on various levels ranging from a slight decrease in endurance performance to headaches and feeling a mental fog.
Body Processes Influenced by Including Hydration in Your Self-Care Routine
Metabolism
Skin health or Acne
Kidney function
Gastrointestinal or Bowel Function
Heart Function
Exercise induced Asthma
A frequent question we get from patients is how much water should I consume daily?
Most studies recommend somewhere around 8-15 servings of 8 ounces of water daily for men (about 4 liters) while women can typically consume slightly less due to body mass, about 11 cups (3 liters).
Learn more by reading our Drink More Water blog.
2. Get more Sleep as Part of Your Self-Care Routine
How many hours of sleep should I get every night?
Our body is an amazing machine. It has the ability to sense if something is hot enough to burn your skin, sense when a room fill with scent of gas, or even hear when someone is sneaking up behind you. It would be silly to not listen to one of those signals as you would likely end up hurt. So why would you ignore when your body says it needs sleep?
The average American ignores the signal of sleep. We’re a go-go-go society. We must achieve and be productive, but an effective self-care routine says otherwise.
Often people feel tired and drink another coffee instead of going to bed a bit sooner that night. We tend to override the need for sleep to the point that most of us have forgotten what it feels like to be well rested. This creates a “sleep debt” that will be hard to make up.
7-9 hours is optimal with slight variations for each person. The national sleep foundation has come up with a few questions to help you decide if you are well rested or if you’re in sleep debt.
Ask yourself:
Are you productive, healthy and happy on seven hours of sleep? Or does your optimal self-care routine take nine hours of quality sleep to get you into high gear?
Are you experiencing sleep problems?
Do you depend on caffeine to get you through the day?
Do you feel sleepy while driving?
Do you have chronically tight muscles?
Sleep is important for your body to fully recover and influences many of your normal body functions. It’s been shown that not having a full night's sleep can influence:
Memory, concentration, problem solving
Increased rates of depression
Decreased libido, decreased metabolism
Increased risk of developing high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease
Decreased athletic performance as part of a poor self-care routine
Increased muscle fatigue, scar tissue deposition, and tightness
Muscle Pain
When you use a muscle to hold your less-than-optimal desk posture, for running, lifting weights, etc., you are breaking down the muscle fibers at a microscopic level. In an optimal situation the body should repair that muscle during sleep and get you ready for the next day ahead. If you are not getting your full night’s sleep, you are likely not fully repairing those tissues that were initially broken down. This starts a cascade effect. The body knows that you still need to function the next day, especially if you’re training for an event. As a short-term solution, instead of a lasting self-care routine, your body uses scar tissue and forms knots or adhesions in the muscles. Repeating this process frequently leads to chronic muscle tightness, muscles that never seem to let go, and neck pain or back pain that goes with it.
Read the rest of the How many hours of sleep do I actually need? blog.
3. Fix Your Workstation and Stand up More Frequently
The human body is amazing at adapting to the environment it is put in. If you teach it to do something, it listens! While amazing when used in a positive way as part of a self-care routine, it can conversely create a negative effect when those habits are dysfunctional.
Posture is an example of a learned pattern and it is one of the most important risk factors for developing neck and back pain. Postural habits are learned from the position you hold your body in most frequently. Most patients we see have decent standing posture, however most run into trouble when they sit for long periods of time.
It is crucial to have optimal posture while doing the things you do most frequently. If you sit at your desk for 8+ hours a day with a forward head carriage, it will likely lead to neck or back pain.
If you can set up your desk in an ergonomic fashion for your 2020 self-care routine, you can avoid quite a bit of muscle tightness and pain in your neck and lower back.
Learn more about optimal desk posture here.
Find some stretches that you can do at your desk to promote optimal posture and decrease pain.
While setting up your desk for optimal posture is important, you shouldn’t be sitting all day. Try incorporating frequent standing breaks throughout your day.
4. Have a Strength Routine
A common excuse you hear someone say when they get injured is, “I’m getting old”. Let me tell you, I don’t buy it. While it is true that more injuries occur in people over the age of 25. I think the biggest reason for that is people often do the same things for years with little thought to an all-encompassing self-care routine.
When you’re young you are active. You move daily and you regularly move in different directions- running, jumping, or playing. After high school gym class, you are no longer forced to move. College comes and goes with the number of hours sitting ever increasing.
Free time becomes limited and we do our best to stay active with what we have. At this point we typically have two extremes, the overachiever who trains a ton with one sport (triathlon or extreme running) and you have the sedentary career-focused who doesn’t make time for exercise. Somewhere in the middle lies most of us, running, yoga, spin classes, HIIT classes, etc. are sprinkled throughout the week.
Ironman athletes are active 10-20hrs a week and only move straight ahead. Marathon runners spend hours moving straight ahead. Even though you are active, you are at risk for injury!
No matter where you live on that spectrum, YOU NEED MORE MOVEMENT VARIABILITY AND STRENGTH!
Integrating a short but comprehensive strength routine will help in all aspects of life - most importantly - Your injury risk will be lower.
Isolate your weakness. For most of us, the biggest self-care routine weakness is core strength and hip strength and stability. With a 10-minute routine that consists of 4-6 exercises, you can do so much to maintain a basic level of strength and stability helping to keep you healthy!
If you’re wondering where to start, come in for an appointment and we can design a quick 10-minute plan for you designed to eliminate your biggest weakness.
5. Have a Foam Rolling and Mobility Routine
The last thing I would advise all of my patients to do is to have a foam rolling and mobility routine. As we previously discussed, the average adult human spends most of their living hours repeating the same motions and postures for years without too much of a thought toward a self-care routine. The years start to wear in a groove of tight muscles, and they pull on or restrict motion in joints.
Having a routine designed to break up tight muscles and get stiff joints moving will drastically decrease your injury risk and help improve your overall mood.
Foam rolling is one of the best methods to help break up tight muscles. The roller is meant to imitate a therapist's hands smashing through your muscles to release the knots and scar tissue. The results are typically much more effective than stretching due to breaking up of the tissue and knots versus simply pulling on the knots. This principle is called self-myofascial release and is important for building your self-care routine. You can use other tools, such as a lacrosse ball as a more aggressive application. When you pair a few mobility exercises with your foam rolling, you can make a solid improvement in the feeling and function of a few areas.
While each person has different problem spots and different needs for mobility, an overwhelming amount of you reading this have a few common tight spots - lower back/hips and neck/shoulders. To see videos of us demonstrating these exercises, head over to our YouTube page.
Neck and Shoulders
This is the forward rolled shoulders group. The group who sits most of the day with poor posture. This group needs to add a few things to their self-care routine to restore that upright posture of the torso to keep the neck and shoulders happy. Try these few exercises.
Start by stretching your pectoral muscles (pecs).
Then use the foam roller to roll your latissimus dorsi muscles (lats).
Using the foam roller across your back horizontally. Gently lean back to create some thoracic extension.
Lie on your side with your knees bent, arms out in front of you. Bring your top arm over the top and follow with your head. When you get as far as you can go, hang out there for a few breaths and let it sink in. The goal of this self-care routine is to get some motion through your rib cage and upper back. Repeat 5-10 times on both sides.
Lower Back/hips
This is typically the group of folks who sit for work and have adapted to that position. Hip flexors, hamstrings, and lower back are always tight, or potentially “feel tight” from compensation. Stretching seems to give temporary relief. This is often due to an imbalance of muscle tension and strength. For a long-term fix, we need to activate and strengthen specific muscles that are not doing their job. Add in these few routine self-care exercises to balance out your pelvis and hips.
Start by foam rolling your hips (front and back pocket), quads, adductors
Frog stretch
Stretch your hip flexors
Do a glute bridge
Do a plank or dead bug
Do the clamshell or leg raise exercise
6. Get Treatment Before Injuries are too far Gone
A question that frequently comes up is “When should I come in?” Well the simple answer is the sooner the better. Pain is the last symptom to occur with movement dysfunction and following up with treatment, as an additional part to your self-care routine, pain is the first to leave. Everyone can benefit from a movement screen or analysis to determine their likelihood of injury. The most common predictors of future injury injuries are 1) history of prior injury and 2) asymmetrical motion patterns. If we can determine the source of inefficient movement or asymmetrical movement patterns, it allows for better success for treatment of both acute and chronic injury.
Life tends to get in the way of our best intentions. Humans will make time for things they have to and things they enjoy. Work, vacation, running the kids around, hobbies tend to take up nearly every second.
When someone is in acute pain, they make time for self-care come in for routine treatment.
Often, we will give the pain time to self-resolve. After a week or two of the pain, they finally make an appointment. By this time, you’ve started to walk differently or carry your shoulder in a different way to compensate and avoid the pain. This often requires an average of 6-8 visits to get you out of pain and back to “normal”.
On the other hand, the patients who come in when something starts feeling “tight” or “off” tends to have the benefit of:
Not having acute pain
Prevention of chronically tight muscles often leading to neck pain and low back pain.
Symptoms take dramatically less time to resolve
7. Manage Stress
Last year was an incredibly stressful year and most of us learned the value of stress management. This year, implement some stress management strategies. Start with small time blocks throughout your week to schedule stress management activities such as:
Yoga
Meditation
Low intensity exercise
Massage Therapy
We offer yoga and massage therapy in our Boulder office.
Start 2021 off with a plan for success by using the tips laid out in this article. Take your self-care seriously this year and don’t wait until you feel terrible to do something about it!