Move Well

Want to find out a lot about the health of a person?  Look at their posture; more specifically look at how they carry their head.  When viewing a person from the side, you will often observe that their head is poking way out in front of their shoulders. This condition, known as forward head syndrome or forward head posture is a key component to understanding the ‘what’ ‘where’ ‘when’ and ‘why’ of an individuals state of health, or for that matter, lack of health. Let me explain.

Your nervous system controls every single cell, organ, and tissue in your body without exception; and posture, especially head posture, is a way to measure how well your nervous system is performing.  At any given moment, millions upon millions of individual nerve impulses are sent to and from the brain in the most impressive dance you could ever imagine, to control and coordinate every function necessary to our survival and health.  Imagine your head and neck is the control tower for the busiest airport in the world.  In the normal healthy person, the tower is upright, providing it with a clear view to all approaching and departing aircraft thus allowing and maintaining clear communication.  Now imagine for some reason the tower sustains an injury and as a result begins to lean.  At first the lean is hardly noticeable but with time, momentum and weight begin to move that tower away from its normal position which, as you might already guess, begins to obstruct the towers view and ability to control the aircraft.

Our neck and head make up the tower for the most powerful and amazing control system on the planet and unlike the air traffic control tower; we cannot simply build another tower or replace the controller should it crash.  If our tower begins to lean from its normal healthy position, the stress and strain rapidly degenerates its ability to perform and as a direct consequence, the communication system held within begins to malfunction until without exception, a catastrophic accident occurs.

There’s no lack of evidence to support what happens when our control tower begins to lean but for the sake of brevity, I will offer just a few facts to give you a better understanding of this process.  When the head first moves forward it creates strain and dysfunction for the joints of your neck.  Troyanovich et al, showed that “Altered alignment of the spinal column is known to cause bone, disc, ligament and myofascial degeneration.”  So much strain occurs that “For every inch of anterior head carriage (Forward head posture) the work required of the posterior cervical muscles is effectively increased by a factor of 10.”  In other words the muscles of your neck have to work ten times harder to hold your head just for one inch of change in the posture.  No wonder so many people complain of being warn out at the end of the day.  With time however, it gets worse. Videman, T.  showed that  ”Scar tissue begins to be deposited immediately upon immobilization (a forward head can’t turn like a normal head) and serves to further decrease mobility. Within 2 weeks eburnation in bone is detectable and radiographic evidence of joint space narrowing, osteophyte formation and subchondral sclerosis is apparent.”  This is all just fancy talk to describe spinal arthritis is a normal consequence of ignoring the leaning tower and will occur regardless of your age.  This isn’t the worst of it.  Remember, the brain controls everything and if the tower that holds it is falling apart, the communication is interrupted and before long, the body doesn’t heal or regulate normal function as it used to. This isn’t new, the Mayo Clinic Health Letter Volume Eighteen, #3, in March of 2000 reported “F.H.P. (Forward head posture) leads to long term muscle strain, disc herniations, arthritis and pinched nerves.”  This whole process is known as subluxation.  Subluxation robs the body’s ability to focus, think, organize and heal and if your subluxations are corrected, your body can & will heal itself with the only exception being that you choose to do something about it before it’s too late. To learn more about the healing process, join us each week at our half hour to health workshop where we separate fact from fiction on the road to better health naturally.

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Fruits, vegetables, healthy fats, grass fed beef, raw dairy; I believe most of us have an inner sense of good healthy nutrition, even when the media sells something different; but does good nutrition simply refer to what we put in our mouth?  There’s a tremendous amount of research to show that movement, in the form of regular exercise, is just as vital to overall health as the foods we eat every day.  Your brain, connected to every cell in your body, has been shown to require a certain amount of stimulation from all the joints, especially those of your spine, to maintain normal health.  This stimulation is critical not only so the brain can manage every issue related to moving the body properly but to prevent the stress that has been shown to be associated with inactivity. 

This stress often comes by other names like obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and high blood pressure.  From the Journal of Applied Physiology, Booth et al. writes “In other words, physical inactivity is an abnormal event for a genome programmed to expect physical activity, thus explaining, in part, the genesis of how physical inactivity leads to metabolic dysfunctions and eventual metabolic disorders such as atherosclerosis, hypertension, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and so forth.”  What he is saying is profoundly important if you want to understand exercise for what it really is.  It is nothing short of genetic food for the brain and if we choose not to exercise then we choose to starve ourselves of one of the most important nutrients the body requires every day. To add, Eaton & Eaton state “At present human genes and human lives are incongruent, especially in affluent western nations. When our current genome was originally selected, daily physical exertion was obligatory; our biochemistry and physiology are designed to function optimally in such circumstances.”  With all our modern luxuries, we are sacrificing our genetic God given potential, our health many times for the sake of convenience.

I hope this has sparked some interest to reconsider the importance of regular exercise in our daily lives.  As always, I’m here to serve and should you ever have questions, feel free to ask about our weekly workshop schedule were we take time to expand on topics that nourish the body proper.

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