IT Band Self-Massage

Massaging your iliotibial bands can be a big help if you run, cycle, or are experiencing pain in your knees.
The IT band lives on the lateral portion of your thigh and runs from just below your knee to your pelvis. It’s made of tough connective tissue and muscle. The muscle is in the middle.
When it’s working right your IT band stabilizes your hip and knee. When it’s not working right you might experience pain along the outer portion of your knee. IT band syndrome is the overuse injury often suffered by runners and sometimes cyclists.
Massage can help. To help you give it a try I've posted a youtube video: IT Band Massage Quickie: Do It while You View It. I'm planning to post a couple more, a longer version with massage tools and another with the IT band stretched a little.
Another IT band massage video I like is this one by Art Riggs. If you're experiencing problems in your legs and you think it might be related to your IT bands this video is worth watching. And finally this one by Massagenerd is also worth checking out.

Quadriceps Massage

If you've got quads, you'll benefit from massaging them. But this massage is particularly helpful if you run (especially up hills), cycle, ski, board, play soccer, practice karate, squat, or jump rope.

Your quadriceps are a muscle group made up of four distinct muscles which live in the front of your thigh. The four muscles are rectus femoris, vastus lateralis, vastus medialis, and vastus intermedius. But you can call them all Bob. They're probably the strongest leanest muscles in your body. They straighten your knee when getting up from a seat, walking, running, cycling or any other activity that requires you to straighten your leg. So if your knees are a problem, the problem may be in your quads. Massage them regularly and your knee may feel better, but your quads definitely will. Try it: Quad Massage: Do It while You View It.

Naked Aerobic Foot Massage

Clothing is not at option. Check out this new youtube video Naked Aerobic Foot Massage: Do It while You View It. It's intended to be a workout and foot massage, but mostly a workout. You can do it at your desk in about 2 minutes. And it really can get aerobic. Try ten reps with a minute recovery. This video is meant to be part of a series of aerobic foot massage videos. I posted the first of the series, Aerobic Foot Massage, in June. Clothing was optional in that one. Hope you like them.

Therapeutic Foot Massage and Exercise

I hope you'll try my new foot massage video, Foot Massage with 2 Tennis Balls: Do It while You View It, for foot therapy and a workout. I used it to treat my neuroma and cramping in my feet. The cramping in my feet had been a problem my whole life. The neuroma had been bothering me on and off for a few years but grew much worse in the last six months. And now both problems are gone. In addition to its therapeutic value, this video can be a pretty good workout. Do it fast, hard, and often. It'll give you an aerobic workout at your desk and get the circulation going in your feet no matter how cold your office gets.

Chest Pec Self-Massage

Since being hit by a car in July, I've been unable to run and have been doing lots of swimming and more weight lifting. As a result my pecs were sore so I came up with this chest massage YouTube video. It's done me some good, hope it does you some. Try it out Chest Pec Massage: Do It while You View It. Let me know what you think.

photo by Mylor

Hamstring Massage

Want healthier, happier, younger, snappier, more articulate hamstrings? Check out the latest youtube video Hamstring Massage: Do It while You View It. A tennis ball, a backnobbber II, and your own hands are all you need. Actually all you need are your hands but the other stuff is nice. Give it a try and let me know what you think.




photo by ijiwar jimbo creative commons license

Foot Massage Workout

If you’ve ever wanted to warm up at your desk before going out for a run, walk, or whatever, I've got a video for you. It's a short warm up you can do at your desk before going out or, if you want a challenge, it's an interval routine you can do in your chair. It comes with free foot massage. To try it now, click here

Foot Health and Self-Massage

Four million years for the human foot to evolve, 200 years for modern shoes to undo it.

Your feet are highly evolved complex instruments. Each foot contains 26 bones, 33 joints, and 20 muscles. Most of the major muscles live in the soles of your feet along with more than 200,000 nerve endings. These are among the richest concentrations of sensory neurons in your body. Their purpose is to transmit information to the rest of you, especially your legs. They thrive on sensation, without it they die.

Modern Shoes
Your shoes act as sensory deprivation chambers for your feet. Sensory deprivation has been shown to be harmful, sometimes deadly. Want to drive someone crazy? Deprive them of sensory input. Want to damage your body? Deprive it of sensory stimulation. That’s what shoes, in part, do to your feet.

Information Transfer
Our feet, as evidenced by their large supply of nerve endings, are designed to transmit information about our environment. Without shoes, our feet tell us when they hit the ground so our legs can absorb the impact. Because of the cushioned shoes we wear our feet don’t get the message and neither do our legs so neither can do their job. Our whole body pays the price, especially our legs. For more on this check out this article You Walk Wrong.

To some extent your body compensates for this lack of sensory feedback by getting used to the shoes in question and calculating the correct response to each step you take. To make the calculation easier, it makes sense to wear shoes with little cushioning and be consistent in the shoes you wear.

Massage
Bare foot walking provides a massage for your feet as they directly touch a rich and varied terrain. Shoes prevent your feet from getting the daily massage they need. Unless you’re walking around barefoot, you need another way to get your feet the sensory stimulation they must have to remain healthy.

A handy way to deliver the sensory information your body needs is massage, and the handiest way to massage your feet may not be with your hands but with your balls, tennis balls that is. Just put them under your feet and run with them. You should be seated when you try it. Here, take a look at this foot massage video and give your feet a treat.

Recommendation
Keep a couple of tennis balls under your desk, and from time to time kick off your shoes and roll your feet over your tennis balls. Your whole body will thank you for it.

Trigger Point Yoga

Admit it, you go to yoga for one reason and one reason only because it makes you feel better. For you, better might mean healthier, stronger, more flexible, or happier. Adding massage to your yoga practice will make you feel even better. How much better? For some it’s the difference between a firefly and a fire. Here’s why:

Massage and yoga are two different ways to stretch your muscles and two different ways to release trigger points. Trigger points are those nasty little knots that form in muscles day and night. If your body is to feel its best, you must continually release them. Yoga and massage release different types of trigger points.

If you weren’t aware that yoga asanas release trigger points, you’re not alone. Few yoga practitioners are aware of this hidden benefit. Fewer still are aware that trigger points are continually forming in their muscles. The more active you are the more trigger points you’re likely to have. Every time your muscles are overworked trigger points grow.

One reason you practice yoga is because of a need, albeit unconscious, to release trigger points. In part, it’s that release that gives you a sense of pleasure and pain. But yoga doesn’t release all of your trigger points. Some trigger points are resistant to yoga and release only when direct pressure is applied to the muscle, by pressing on it with a finger or a massage tool. The best way to eliminate trigger points is a combination of pressing and stretching your muscles which is what trigger point yoga is all about.

What’s a trigger point?
Think of a trigger point as a knot of muscle fibers. It serves as a defense mechanism when your muscles are injured, over worked, or weakened in some way. The tiny strands that make up your muscles contract into a hard knot. Imagine an injured muscle as being like a scared turtle receding into its shell. It’s a good defensive strategy but not good for getting any work done. Trigger point therapy is a way of getting your muscle to come out of its shell so it can get back to doing its job.

If the trigger point is not released your muscle will remain weakened. Other muscles will be recruited to do its job and they too will be compromised as they try to make up for your slacker muscle. In a weakened state, they’re more likely to get injured and form trigger points of their own, until your entire muscle group looses strength and range of motion.

This loss usually happens gradually over a long period of time so its not noticeable. Your loss of strength and range of motion will be blamed on the usual suspects: old age and arthritis. You will become less and less active and eventually your body will give up and you’ll take drugs to ease the pain. That too will happen over a long period of time so you’ll accept it as part of the natural aging process. Don’t!

What Types?
There are two types of trigger points, active and latent. The active ones emit pain on their own so you are aware you have one. The latent ones are sneakier and only emit pain when pressed. Latent trigger points are much more common. Both types reduce muscle function and can be resolved in the same way. Unless they’re released they will continue to weaken your muscular system and burn excess energy doing so.

Pressing it is stretching it
When trigger points are pressed they hurt. If they continue to be pressed the pain will give way to gain, and disappear like a fist when you open your hand.

Go
If you want to leave the yoga room feeling much better than when you entered it, add a touch of trigger point massage to your yoga practice. Click here to learn more about trigger point yoga.

above photo by Neeta Lind

Back Pain Relief: Do It Yourself Massage

photo by rileyroxx

When Sophia Loren, still sexy and beautiful in her 70’s, was asked how can you look so good, she said "posture, my back is always straight, and I don’t make old people noises.”

Yoga teacher Iyengar says your back determines your age,

Learn to give yourself an effective back massage.

This massage is especially good to do while working in front of a computer screen. It makes your back younger.

The video will show you how to get a younger healthier back. Check it out and relieve your back pain now.

Top Ten Reasons the U.S. Health Care System Sucks

Last week, I got a heavy dose of the latest health care news at the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado. The panel was titled “The Path to Universal Healthcare.” The panelists were: Dr. Susan Love, Val Koromzay, Michael Franc, and Evelyn Resh.

Photo by PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE

Here are the questions and the answers:

10. What’s the public good got to do with it? The purpose of a public health care system, you may be surprised to learn, is to serve the public good not the good of health insurers, doctors, hospitals, drug companies, or the very wealthy. The public good is likely to be the last thing served by our health care system.

9. Why isn’t more better? We have too much health care, too many operations, and are on too many drugs, according to doctor and best selling author Susan Love. “So it’s not just the poor who are getting screwed,” according to Dr. Love, “it’s the people with really good insurance that are getting taken to the cleaners.” “Part of the reason is that the economic incentives are all wrong. All the economic incentives are to do. I’m a surgeon, we get paid only if we surge, we don’t get paid to tell you you don’t need an operation. If you’re a radiation therapist you give radiation, if you’re a medical oncologist you give chemo. We give more chemo than any other country for breast cancer and our outcomes are no better.” “All of the incentives are to do more and we as Americans think more is always better and therefore we’re happy to have more.” Most medical problems disappear if nothing is done. Making lots of money for hospitals and doctors does not equate with quality health care for patients.


8. Why does free medical school buy better doctors? Medical school is paid for by the state in almost every country but this one. Thus medical students outside the U.S. graduate without financial debt and owe a debt of gratitude to the public and therefore are more likely to want to serve the public good. Inside the U.S., the opposite is true.


photo by celestehodges


7. Why don’t Americans get the health care they pay for? Because the money we pay for health care goes to insurance companies. Administrative expenses for health care, costs us almost 12 times more than they cost the French. Out of every $100 Americans pay for health care, $35 goes to administrative expenses. What do Americans get for all that money? You get a system of competing insurance carriers paying big salaries to insurance executives to sell policies and you get staffs of lawyers to fight insurance claims and devise contracts that shift health care costs back to the public. “According to Mike Franc of the politically conservative Heritage Foundation, “People have horror stories about insurance companies for a reason.”

6. Why don’t we have the holy grail of health care coverage too? Unlike most other countries, the U.S. lacks a standard health insurance contract which lets you and your doctor know what coverage you have and don’t have. Under the American system the only way to truly know if your illness will be covered by your insurance coverage is to submit a claim and see if it’s paid. “The standard contract may be the holy grail for Universal Health Insurance,” says Val Koromzay, former Director, Country Studies Branch, Economics Department, OECD. In Switzerland, he says, all insurers are obliged to offer a standard contract to anyone who wants it. If you can’t afford the contract, it’s subsidized by the government. Insurers can’t make a profit on the standard contract but can sell supplemental policies at a premium. That’s what the Swiss system does, it’s expensive but no where near as costly as health care in the good old U.S.A.


photo by PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE


5. Do we even have a public health care system? In a word, no. “Public health is rooted and based in prevention and health education,” says nurse midwife Evelyn Resh who has a masters degree in public health and is the director of Sexual Health Services at Canyon Ranch. Because public health in the U.S. is not based on prevention and education, according to Resh and Love: “there is no public health care system in this country.”

4. Why can’t you blame medical doctors when they blow it? The medical profession and AMA is against electronic medical records and the reason is that it will allow for accountability, says Dr. Love. “Because the big secret in this country is that we have no accountability in health care. Medical practices are a cottage industry. When you get your M.D. you can do whatever you want, to whoever you want, and charge whatever you want, and you’ll get paid for it. There’s no accountability whatsoever in the health care system in this country. If we had electronic medical records then we would be able to have accountability. Doctors are very afraid that people will be looking over their shoulder and figuring out that they don’t know what they’re doing.” “Accountability would be a huge benefit if we had electronic medical records.”

3. What is the best way to ration medical care? All countries ration health care. Medical doctors in the U.S. ration it based on price. If you can’t pay you don’t get it. Other countries ration health care based on waiting lists. Love and Resh believe that rationing health care based on a waiting list makes some sense because most illnesses resolve themselves with time and eliminate the need for costly medical procedures. Dr. Love believes comparative effectiveness research is as good a way to ration health care as any. “So really,” she says, “look at what’s been shown to work and what doesn’t. A lot of what we do as surgeons has been shown not to work, but that doesn’t stop us.”

photo by Barack Obama

2. Why do new medical technologies make us poorer but no healthier? The main reason health care costs are out of control in the U.S. is that the cost of new technologies are so high. Although you’ll pay for these new technologies in your insurance premiums, they’re unlikely to improve your health because they’re designed to help only a few very very sick people. But they make the financial statements at hospitals, doctors offices, and drug companies healthier.

1. Why is shutting off the lights so costly? A relatively large portion of health care dollars is spent on the elderly in their last six months of life. Maybe it’s because doctors have a financial incentive to keep patients alive at all costs. Or maybe it’s because doctors don’t want to have the hard talk with their patients’ families and tell them the final curtain is near, so money is poured down the tube, many tubes really.

Free Massage Helps You Look and Feel Younger

photo by Samyra Serin under cc license

The reason people practice self-massage is not just because they’re cheap or even because they want to relieve muscle pain, avoid injuries, and strengthen their immune system. They use self-massage because they want to get younger. Just ten minutes of massage a day and you’ll feel and look ten years younger. There’s a fountain of youth in your fingertips.

See for yourself. Try this neck massage and see how much younger you feel and look.

Neck Massage: Don't Neglect Your Neck

Neck massage is one of the kindest things you can do for your body. I just posted a new neck massage video that I've been working on for the last few weeks. Working on this video, experimenting with different neck massage routines, was one of the most pleasant things I've done in the name of work in a long time. If you don't want to spend hours, days, and weeks looking for the best neck massage of all time just click and follow along: Neck Massage: Do It while You View It.
Thanks and let me know what you think.