Why Fitness Isn't Working

Your Abs
Most people want "ab" exercises but have no idea what abs really do when you stand back up again, or how they help your back or posture. Using abs does not mean sucking them in, or tightening them, or "pressing them to your spine." That is an outdated and ineffective practice. If you don't believe that, go ahead and tighten your abs just they way they tell you to. Press your navel to your spine. Make it good and tight. Now breathe.

You can't move or breathe properly with tight muscles. Using your abs means using them, just like any other muscles, to move your back into healthy posture when you stand up, away from letting the low back slouch back into an arch. When you arch backward, you allow the weight of your upper body to rest on the joints of your low back. Increased arch is called lordosis. It pinches the low back under the weight of the upper body pressing down.

Trainers and exercise magazines often teach exercises done with the hips and behind stuck out in back and the back arched. They may explain it as proper form or even a way to "support the back" however, it is a large contributor to back pain. Even though many fitness instructors say to use "neutral spine" they teach exercises with a too large arch in the low back. Look at most fitness magazines and you will see this bad posture. Many aerobics instructors, personal trainers and yoga instructors are my patients because their back hurts.

The "experts" say to strengthen your abs with crunches so the strong muscles will support you. But strengthening is not what will fix the bad posture called lordosis that causes the pain. Plenty of people with strong muscles stand terribly and exercise with their back arched. It's like having brains and not using them. Crunches do not work your abs the way you need for real life. They do not train you how to use your abs to hold your back in good posture when you stand back up again, and they promote poor posture, even when done properly. It is the same hunched over posture that you do over your computer and steering wheel all day that made your back ache in the first place.

What To Do Instead: Stand up and reach your arms high overhead. See if you arch your back or lift your ribs, or push the hip forward or backward when you raise your arms. You may feel the familiar pressure in the low back as you arch backward. To change that bad habit, straighten your low back by curling as if starting to do a crunch, to take the exaggerated curve out of your low back, but not curling enough to lean or hunch forward. If you were sticking your behind out in back, tuck it under you. If you were pushing the hip forward, pull it back so that you are straight. The pressure in the low back should immediately disappear. You will feel you are using your ab and core muscles. It is not tightening, but using core muscles that supports the low back.

Backpacks and handbags don't make you arch your back or have bad posture. The problem is not using your ab muscles to counter the pull so that you don't let the bag arch you backward. Maintain posture when carrying things. Don't lean back, hunch forward, or hike your body to the sides to carry the weight, use your muscles. Your bags and packages could be a built-in ab and back exercise. Many people hunch forward for a few "ab exercises" then stand, walk, reach, and lift in arched postures. Use your abs while standing up to keep your hip tucked enough to prevent this bad arching posture. The familiar pressure on your low back will stop.

Put this technique to use with all you do. You will get a free, all day abdominal and core muscle workout while you stop back pain from lordosis arching. Instead of "doing crunches" for ten minutes and not using your abs the rest of the day, use your abs to move your back to good position and keep it there all the time - when you are standing and lifting things overhead, to put groceries away, pull off your shirt overhead, wash your hair in the shower, and lift weights at the gym. This method is called The Ab Revolution™. For more information on how to use your abs, plus fun exercises to work your abs more than you have ever done, without crunches, read an article about The Ab Revolution™

or get the book, full of fun effective ab exercises that reteach you how to move in natural ways while getting better workout.

Your Back
You wake up and sit slouched at the edge of the bed, bend over the sink to wash, sit round-shouldered at breakfast, while commuting to work, and at a desk. You bend forward at the waist to pick up things all day. At the gym you curl forward with crunches and toe-touching. You bend over the dishes, the lawn mower, the vacuum cleaner, and slump to watch television. You go to sleep for the night with your head pushed forward on pillows. You are mystified when your back, neck, and shoulders ache. You call it stress. You go to someone and say, "My back hurts, can you give me a stretch to fix it?"

They suggest bending over to touch your toes, or bringing your chin to your chest, or your knee to your chest, sitting on the floor and leaning over to touch your toes, sitting in a chair and leaning forward with your chest on your thighs, touching your elbows in front by rounding your back, curling up in a ball, or others that promote more rounding and more pressure on your back. Your posture becomes stuck slouched. Your discs eventually bulge under the relentless push.

You say it feels comfortable to slouch? When your muscles are so weak and tight that good posture feels unnatural, that means you need to strengthen and stretch to be comfortable, not slouch to be comfortable. But isn't it natural to slouch? As natural as wetting your pants, but you learn to hold it even when you don't feel like it. Are you rounding your back and holding your head forward right now sitting and reading this?

What To Do Instead: Most back pain is simple mechanics, and just as simply remedied if you stop the constant and injurious process of bad body mechanics. Don't let your shoulders round when standing and sitting. Use your muscles to hold you in comfortable, upright posture when you stand, sit, and walk, and move. That burns calories and tones you while preventing back pain. Use your legs not back for lifting and bending all day. Bending knees while keeping torso upright saves your back and strengthens your knees and legs at the same time, when done properly. Use shock absorption to walk lightly, and use your body all day, not just sit. First thing in the morning, don't sit on the bed. Turn face down, propped slightly on your elbows for a moment or two. Don't force or pinch your back. Then get out of bed without sitting. Turning face down isn't for everyone, but for many people it helps you start your day straighter and healthier. Click for a quick-start to fixing your own back pain.

Stretching
For many, stretching means wrapping your foot around your ear or bending forward to touch your toes. Some of these same people don't have the flexibility to simply lie down flat without a pillow under head or knees, or stand against a wall with the back of their head touching. Their back and shoulders are too rounded. Their hip is too tight. Many stretches promote the original problem, like more forward rounding. Most people don't have the hamstring flexibility to sit properly without their hip tucked under and back rounded. Instead of stretching their hamstrings to sit properly, they sit and stretch rounded because tightness makes it more comfortable that way. Other stretches are plain bad for you. They promote poor posture and load joints with your body weight, like shoulder stands in yoga, the hurdlers stretch, and lifting your arms up in back of you.

What To Do Instead: Flexibility training should address normal posture. Tight chest muscles pull you into round-shouldered postures. Pull your shoulders back when standing to stretch the front of your chest. Remember that slouching is a stretch - but a bad one. Your back becomes overstretched and rounded. Don't add to that by doing all your stretches with more forward bending. Don't bend over from a stand to stretch your legs. You know picking things up that way is bad for your back. It doesn't magically become good for you by calling it an exercise. Stretch your hamstrings by lying on the floor and lifting one leg up, keeping your back straight and shoulders and neck relaxed. Click here for healthy stretching info.

Balance Skills
Balance is easily and highly trainable, but usually forgotten. Good balance is crucial for ease of movement, on rocking boats, a variety of activity, and preventing falls and sprains. Injury and disuse diminish balance. Vicious cycles grow of poor balance, injury, and decreasing activity because of inability and fear of activity.

What To Do Instead: Practice balance. Put on and take off pants, socks, and shoes standing up for a combination balance and flexibility workout. Stand on one foot while on the phone or washing dishes, for example. Practice getting up from the floor and back down in a smooth manner. Then repeat without using your hands. Then repeat holding a package. Practice standing on one foot with your eyes closed. Practice standing on one foot and swinging the other leg around. Increase the challenges with fun and varied balance games.

Health Foods
Major sellers in "health" food stores are "fat burners" and various energy potions. You may buy them because they are "natural" and "herbal." That does not mean they are harmless or nonaddictive. Caffeine, cocaine, and nicotine, for example are naturally occurring plant substances. Many energy and diet products contain stimulants like ma huang and ginseng. Be careful if you think there won't be problems because they say: "Used medicinally in China for over 5,000 years." Opium was used medicinally too.

Stimulants can have serious side effects of raised heart rate and blood pressure, erratic heart rhythms and chest pain, plus any of several nervous system effects like insomnia, tremors, anxiety, or seizures depending on dose, even if you have no history of heart trouble. Add coffee and cigarettes, with a few alcoholic drinks (to calm you), and any prescription medicines, it is a wonder that more people aren't suffering cardiovascular effects and road rage.

What To Do Instead: If you think you need stimulant drugs, look at your health habits and determine why you don't function without them. Taking them can produce a vicious cycle of dependence and fatigue, and a cycle of being too stimulated to sleep well at night. A brisk walk or other short exercise will "pick you up" more than a candy bar or drug. For weight loss or to increase energy, it is safer and quicker to just go out and exercise.

Your Nutrition
Would you drink drain cleaner? What if it tasted good or were low-calorie? Many people do the equivalent -- eating foods more unhealthy than smoking cigarettes, like donuts, fries, cream sauces, most fast foods and packaged snacks, and refined sugar. Sausage and processed bread for breakfast. Candy and coffee. Lunches of fast food, a large supper at night, and a snack or two later on. The result is fatigue, cravings, crankiness, extra pounds, and sleeping poorly at night from the late protein and meal.

Most people eat far more calories, fat, and simple sugar than they think. Candied yams, glazed vegetables, and buttered lima beans isn't "eating healthy vegetables" it's fat and sugar--bad for your teeth, bad for your heart, and bad for the rest of your body. A sweet drink with "added vitamins and calcium" is not a health food, it is sugar water. French fries and mashed potatoes are not "eating healthy vegetables." Ice cream and cream sauce is not ok because, "you need a little fat in your diet."

You need oil in your car, too, but that much and the wrong kind will kill your engine. Even if you ate only steamed vegetables, grains, nuts, seeds, and fruit with no added oil, you would still get enough fat from natural, healthy plant oils. You'd have to eat only unhealthy sugary processed foods to exclude food fat, which many people seem to make an effort to do.

Most packaged food in stores, and prepared food in restaurants, are full of bad sugar (not healthy complex carbohydrate), and unhealthy amounts and kinds of fat. Even if you want to eat less refined sugar, which is a good idea, you don't have to eat more fat to do that. The "low-carb" diet craze is not magic chemistry. You lose pounds when the restrictive diet lowers calories, and as your muscles shrink, you lose much water in the first two weeks. Eating all that fat is still not healthy. Losing weight is not the only part of a diet. You need health. The American Heart Association still recommends no more than 30% of your calories come from fat to protect your entire cardiovascular system. Grilling meat increases cancer-promoting compounds.

Diets excluding healthy complex carbohydrates don't provide the chemical energy to do exercise, or manufacture calming compounds and the important vitamins and cancer fighting "phytochemicals" only found in fruits and vegetables.

What To Do Instead: There is more to nutrition than fat or carbohydrate. Fruits and vegetables (not processed with sugar, sauces, fried in corn oil, stripped of their natural fiber, or exposed to high heat) provide many dozens of important anti-inflammatory, cell building, mood stabilizing, and disease-fighting compounds you won't get in vitamin bottles.

Don't confuse the complex carbohydrate of vegetables with unhealthy simple sugar. Don't eat white bread and white rice thinking it is good, while shunning vegetables as fattening starch. White rice and white flour noodles are part of the "hour later you're hungry again" phenomenon - stripped of fiber and complex carbohydrate to keep your blood sugar even. They are little more than junk food and raise blood fat just as eating fatty food. "Eating carbohydrate" should mean the healthy, complex carbohydrates of vegetables, legumes, fruits, and whole unprocessed grains, not the simple sugar of candy, donuts, and fast food. It's healthy to have a "low simple-sugar diet" but that does not have to mean a "low carbohydrate" diet. Don't go overboard eating whole grains, as with any food. Too many calories from any source is how you gain weight and expose your body to constantly varying insulin levels from overeating.You do not need as much carbohydrate when not exercising. Save grains for hard exercise days.

For breakfast get complex carbohydrates, healthy fat, and protein from raw nuts like almonds and walnuts, and fresh uncooked fruit, instead of processed sugared cereal. Add whole oatmeal or rice if you are going out for long exercise. Eat the washed skins of fruit like apples. The peel is nutritious and the fiber keeps blood sugar more even. Throw oranges and other whole fruit with raw nuts and fresh grated ginger in the blender to make your own juice. Keep the pulp in juice. Without it, you're drinking little more than sugar water.

Vegetables are important, healthy protein sources. There is no need to carefully mix certain ones to get complete protein. Use seasonings instead of junking up otherwise good food with oil and sauce.

Fitness water" is marketing. Make your own. Use non-plastic containers, which contribute in high degree to use of fossil fuels and litter.

The Mystery is Simple
People aren't doing what they think. They exercise in ways that don't help but injure, they eat far more fat, sugar, and unhealthy food than they know, and live a daily life without movement for normal activity. Getting fit is not, "Do three sets of 10," "Park further away" and "Drink more water."

The very thing we regard as exercise advice, "Exercise at least 30 minutes a day, three to five days a week," is the root of the problem because it separates exercise from the rest of your life.

When you're a child, you're told "Sit Still! Be Quiet! Eat Everything on Your Plate!" Now as an adult, it's suddenly "Get Moving, Don't Eat So Much, Say Something Profound!" Your lifelong habits got you into a sedentary mind set. It's time to shake loose and realize that muscular activity is health and should be used for regular life including just standing up properly. Using your body is like the Ten Commandments. You're supposed to do it all the time, not just during your hour of worship. Health is not something you go and do 3-5 times a week. It is moving, stretching, bending, lifting, and using your brain for your daily life.

This information was drawn from the fun, new editions of the books

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