Ian, two things were happening when you were getting that nasty chest and shoulder stitch.

The tissue that may be responsible for the pain at least in the shoulder is the parietal peritoneum, which envelops the abdominal cavity, separating the abdominal organs from the stomach muscles. This piece of tissue is sensitive to movement when irritated, which would explain why rest quickly relieves the pain. Additionally, part of the parietal peritoneum extends up and under the diaphragm, giving rise to the referred shoulder pain when irritated.

What could cause this tissue to become irritated? One obvious answer is that if you fill your stomach with food and drink it's going to get bigger, causing it to push against - and so irritate - the parietal peritoneum, so watching food before and water during exercise may help. If its not from over consumption it may well be as a result of a diaphragm spasm irritating this tissue and creating a pain cascade..

As for the stitch itself, it's due to a spasm of the diaphragm. The reason it happens on the right-hand side is the heavier weight of the organs attached on that side. What can happen when your running is that you get into a rhythmn of breathing out as the right foot hits the ground, or in boxing exhaling with that big right hand, which increases the load on the diaphragm and causes the spasm. To avaiod this problem try to change to breathing out as the left foot hits the ground, or breathing more evenly between your left and right handed strikes.

thats all from the handyman tonight. 

you kiddies all have a great day

Lucas

Fritz Perls, Gestalt pioneer, popularised the maxim:

 "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts"

Nothing can be more true in your wellness. Remeber the times of your life when everything goes incredibly. There is a sense of exitment, you see opportunities everywhere and problems dont phase you, you are in your 'flow' most of the time.

What do you do in your life that gets you to this place? Painting? Running? Coffee with friends? When your relationships go well? Its highly individual, but one thngs for certain, its an accumulation of factors. Seemingly simple activiities and prespectives all add up together and create a momentum in your life that lead you towards a state of flow, a state of wellness.

Coaching is a huge growth industry. Business, executive, life and Wellness coaching are the most common areas of specialisation in this field that is very established in the US and is growing at a significant rate through out the  rest of the modern world.

 Coaching can improve an individuals performance in any given area as the principles are to use coaching skills to improve the individuals own thinking around an issue, rather than simply offering advice. This approach is largely based on the recent advances in the unsderstanding of how the mind works, and makes connections- Neuroscience, which I will venture further into explaining in the coming articles.

 Everyone has their own system of organising their life, achieveing their own state of balance.  Wellness coaching is a system of coaching that allows a person to asess whats working in their life, what an ideal outcome of balance is, and figure out new possiblities for achieving and sustaining that level of wellness. It is a very exiting concept, but unfortunatley without direct experience it can seem a little abstract, idealist or unattainable, which is whay I always reccommend people to give me a call for a free run through if it sounds like it  is something that would make a difference in your life

 It has made a huge impact on my life. I am not only more aware of the cycles of wellness and away from wellness that I was operating in, i have managed to take action and move myself into a position where I am no longer pulled as far out of my own rhythm.  Im healthier, gaining more insight into how I perform my best each day as I liove closer to my potential, and as a result of this I have exceled in various areas of my life that at first glance would not be assumed to be directly associated with my wellness- areas such aswork performance, relationship development and life direction and self development.

Give me a call if your interested to know more

Lucas

0414343 733

long answer:

It really all depends on how much you weigh and the type, intensity and duration of your exercise. 

Ive attached a guide as to how much energy you burn per 10mins of exercise during different types of exercise.

A bottle of wine is around 500 Calories.

the calories/ 10mins /body weight during say traditional aerobics is: 

 So if your 79kg and work out for 40mins (1 hour minus warm up/cool down) you burn 540 Calories

so pretty much a bottle of wine

wine calories.htm (26.23 kb)

After looking at this stuff enough it makes sense why people throw around figures such as 'losinig weight is 70% what you eat, 30% exercise."

(you might have heard that your metabolism is boosted for hours after exercise, well unfortnately the current research does not support this popular opinon)

http://sportsmedicine.about.com/od/anatomyandphysiology/a/rmr_2.htm

  short answer:

one bottle of wine = one hour exercise session. more or less. 

The fitness work does a whole lot more that just burn calories,  so its worth keeping the fitness work up, but just really consider the impact of what you put in your mouth...

more stats: 

If you get your diet working, and are able to consume less calories than you burn it is very possible to lose 0.5 a kilo per week if you get it right,

(if you are starting to lose weight after having put it on for a while)

 3-4 exercise sessions a week will help you burn a whole extra days worth of resting metabolism on top

Ill make this one very brief for now:

Two main reasons:

When Lactic acid, a by product of your body during strenuous exercise, is produced faster than it can be 'flushed out' of your blood stream your body is in an acidic state and attempts to rebalance the pH by throwing up the stomach contents and acids.

The lack of blood and oxygen to the digestive organs when it is prioritised by the bodies muscles during exercise, can cause dizziness and nausea as a result

Hi guys, 

Well actually I had no idea that this many people would be reading my posts, I thought it would only be my immediate clients. Fantastic. I really like to write, so ill continue to add regular entries as well as use this blog to document a book im currently writing.

The book will address the 'elephant in the room' I've seen i the health and fitness industry for as long as Ive worked in it and no one will address it...

Consistency. Achieving some kind of balance that lasts.

If you haven't experienced it yourself, you've at least had a friend who might have impressively lost weight on a diet, or through a new exercise program, thought they had found 'the answer' only to find themselves in a few months time back in at best a new version of the same old habits again. This happens for a very simple reason: the person is still thinking the same. They still have the same neutral pathways that are that have been reinforced over and over again to perform or behave in a certain way, trying to simply forget the old way of being just doesn't work, you are literally 'hardwired' through your neural conditioning to revert back to the same behaviour.  

Even as recently as ten years ago the common view of the brain held by medical professionals was that we were born with a certain amount of mental capacity and that our brain cells slowly diminished as we aged. Modern neuroscience has disproved this held belief proving now that the brain is an incredibly 'plastic' system. It is constantly making new connections and at the same time, reabsorbing old connections that have not been used. Think back to what you can remember about school, or some place quite a while back, and you'll notice that you'll be drawn to a certain group of memories you have connected with the experience, but the whole bank of details that originally composed the memories have faded, just a few core memories remain.

The other factor to consider is the fact that the fitness movement, which is a fairly recent movement in the scheme of things, has been spawned from the medical model of medicine. A 'diagnose and prescribe' mentality. Overweight? = eat less, move more. The problem with this approach is it not only does not take into account the individuals beliefs, attitude psychology and neural conditioning in these areas, it also fails to take into account the rest of their life. Health and fitness doesn't happen in a vacuum. Your job, social needs, relationships impact on your ability to perform and maintain health behaviour. What like to do for fun, growth or to give you a sense of purpose in life are all incredibly important to understand when designing a new approach to your health and fitness. The field that studies this are is the wellness industry. Again its a complicated topic but the two important tenants to understand about what this industry is saying is:

Wellness is not the absence of illness.  We actually don't have a clear way to express how 'well' we are in our culture, in our language, and as a result we don't think about it much, generally, and so we do not have a great understanding of the area. If we think of stages of illness we can se there are initially signs, symptoms, disability then eventually death from an illness. Past the 'neutral' point of midway of the continuum continues from awareness to education and then towards growth in the direction of high level wellness. 

State of health is just the tip of an iceberg. Think of the top 10% of an iceberg that is visible above the water is our state of health. Just below the surface is our lifestyle/behaviour . Our society is now gaining solidarity in our understanding of the effect that lifestyle factors have on our health.  How you deal with stress, what you eat, how you exercise or treat your body in a regular way at work etc  We generally all know whats good and bad for us in this area, yet many of us continue to be pulled away towards a much more destructive lifestyle. To understand why you can look at your cultural, motivational, psychological level. This is a fascinating level. Here we find out what moves us lead the lifestyle we have chosen. How thin is healthy in your culture? What is ok to eat? We all have differing perspectives based on this. I mean, look at smoking for instance. Years ago it was acceptable to smoke in planes, restaurants... anywhere you liked. Nowadays the social norms around what's acceptable have changed drastically in the last few years in many place around the globe, including the place where I live. On a deeper level again your beliefs, spiritual opinions and sense of purpose can effect your health deeply. Here enters topics like placebo medicine, how is it that your held beliefs about a particular health behaviour will influence the outcome of the behaviour dramatically? Have you heard about 'pointing the bone' as its called in Australian indigenous culture? If the Marangesh, the chief of medicine in a culture, would point a sacred bone at an individual, it would signify their eventual death over the next short period of time. The people had such powerful beliefs about their healer that it influenced their health to the point of dying. 

Wellness coaching can often use techniques based on our new understanding of how the brain works to help people change their attitudes and beliefs in the neural pathways of our mind in areas that make a huge difference to our wellness.

The central tenants of Daoism that heavily influenced the traditional medicine of China address the issue of balance from another level completely, and are included because they are able to describe through metaphor sometimes better than we can with prose.

 over the next few weeks i will be continuing through this series, working towards the process of self coaching and how you can coach yourself to better health using the techniques and methodology I will detail for you. 

Any interest? 

Lucas

s an amalgamation of theories from a few areas I have stu 

Answer coming soon...

HHH

I recieved a call on the weekend from one of my most determined clients at present. He rang to ask me if there was anything I could do/ prescribe to reduce the excess skin he has left over from a very fast drop in weight he in undertaking along te awy to his goal of having a '6 pack stomach'

Or skin is an incredible organ that responds and adapts to its environment incredibly. The visco-elastic properties allow for incredible adaption during weight gain/ loss: elastin and collagen are two of the building blocks of skin. Collagen and elastin are both proteins, in the form of elastic fibers. Collagen is a binding agent in skin. It's the building block of connective tissue. Elastin provides skin with, you guessed it, its elasticity. Seeing as our skin elasticity reduces as we age I wouldnt expect to be seeing a poor adaption to body fat loss, such as excess loose skin, in an individual under 50 years of age.

 I've only ever seen a few people who fit into the catagory of having 'loose excess skin' after weight loss. He lost an incredible amount of weight (60kg) in a short period of time and his body did not have time to adapt. These kinds of stories lead people to believe that they too may be suffering from excess body skin aftr their weight loss. My thoughts are that a large percentage of these people just dnont realise that there is still body fat underneaththeir skin.

 Skin thickness is usually thickest in areas of constant wear ie: the heel of your foot. Try this: pinch the skin on the back of your hand. If your skin was truley in excess with on body at beneath it, it would be hanging in sheets as thick as the skin you are pinching. Another way to lok at it is, have you ever seen 'excess skin' on someone with 10 % body fat? Of course not! I think many of these misconceptions can be corrected by a proper body composition assessment where your body fat percentage can be assessed independantly of your muscle mass, bone mass etc.

So, in answer to your question: Have your body fat percentage assessed by a professional; if its over 185 (20-25 year old male)you skin will be feeling thicker due to excess body fat.

Keep up the training and your body will adapt to the  new trim body it has to wrap around- its designed that way!

ANyother questions shoot them to me at

info@holistichealthhandyman.com

Lucas

Lucas Finch

Holistic Health Handyman