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Product of the Month

M.E.L.T. Hand and Foot Treatment Kit

“The MELT Hand and Foot Treatment is an innovative self-treatment technique that can make your whole body feel better in just minutes. By stimulating the hands and feet, this easy-to-learn treatment can help reduce these common painful symptoms in just minutes a day:

• hand, foot, back, and neck pain
• plantar fasciitis, bunions, neuromas
• arthritis, carpal tunnel syndrome, trigger finger
• even headaches, gut issues, and insomnia!

The MELT Hand & Foot Treatment Kit includes everything you need to start feeling better now: 6 MELT Treatment balls (2 of each size), 1 Bunion Reducer Band, a 60-minute DVD featuring MELT Method creator Sue Hitzmann, and an illustrated instruction guide, all in a convenient travel case.

These quick self-treatments can be done anywhere – home, work, or travel.”

www.meltmethod.com …………………………………………………………………………….

We sell the M.E.L.T. Hand and Foot Treatment kit at Nimble Fitness. If you are unfamiliar with how to use it, schedule a session with one of our M.E.L.T. certified trainers – contact us

GET YOUR BODY ORGANIZED

by Daniel Lucas

If you’re someone that runs, bikes, lifts weights, plays in a league, does any kind of consistent training, and lets not forget the non-sport of sitting at your desk you should think about having days in your exercise program dedicated to getting or keeping your body organized.  Whether it’s the repetitive nature of different sports or the destructive effect of sitting for prolonged periods of time, committing a little time to your structural alignment will pay major dividends.

What does it mean to have an organized body?

It’s when the structure of your bones, muscle, neuro-fascial tissue and organs are functioning in a balanced, energetic way. You feel strong and flexible, have natural poise and your movements feel light, not heavy or sluggish. It’s when your body and mind are functioning together at a high level—where you can run, jump, squat, lunge, push, pull, lift or twist with strength, power and flexibility through a full range of motion, without disruption or injury.  This organized scenario creates an optimal environment for joint health, organ health, muscular development and emotional flow/release.  So how do we get there?

Here are some Nimble tips for getting organized:

1.    Give yourself permission to have deeper body awareness! This takes a little bit
of courage, but bringing your awareness inside your body, to feel how your body is moving and holding itself together, is extremely valuable.  Assess yourself–no one knows how your body feels as well as you do! Identify where you’re tight, where you’re weak, where you’re strong, and then get to work. Use your “organization day” to focus on strengthening weaker muscles, opening up tight muscle tissue, and addressing imbalances in your system.

2.   Ask yourself this question: Is my exercise routine helping me with my posture or training me out of good posture?  I’ve watched people training for hours at a time with hunched shoulders, misaligned lower backs and strained necks. I’ve even seen people read a book while walking on the treadmill! Doing this hinders our natural gait and our functional lines across the body, which in this case run from the latissimus on one side to the gluteus on the other. Examine your own training habits—are you enhancing your posture with your exercises, or working into deeper imbalance and strain?

3.    Be open to how integrated and intelligent your body naturally is. Your body was designed to function harmoniously, whether moving or at rest. That harmony is your ultimate goal. To move towards that goal, you can start with isolated movements, but be sure to end in a fully integrated, functional way. For instance, you can train your postural stabilizers (the “core” muscles) first, and progress into the integrated compound movements. A simple example of this progression would be starting with the plank exercise, which engages the core stabilizers, and continuing on to the traditional squat.   Functional training prepares you for lifting your heavy bag of luggage, squatting to pick something up from the floor or simply giving someone a big loving hug.

4.    Identify where you are prone to tightness, and be consistent in stretching/resetting those muscles. We touched on this already, but stretching muscles helps to keep balance and symmetry in your body, and improves neural flow and oxygen delivery to your tissue. Be aware of the imbalances in your system and address those. If the right hamstring is a lot tighter than the left, for example, give it a little bit more time in your stretching. This will not only help you feel better, but help you function better.

5.    Strengthen weaker muscles–the other side of flexibility. Activating weak muscles and strengthening them through a proper exercise progression will also lengthen opposing muscles and assist in proper joint function.

6.    Get some professional eyes on you!  The earlier statement we made that no knows your body better than you do is only partially true.  Working with a trainer/practitioner/coach will help you to understand your strengths, weaknesses and imbalances, and improve your program to achieve more.

A little bit of practice and dedication to these key points will pay major dividends.  Having an organized body is the path to longevity!  It’s your journey, so I encourage you to trust the guru within.

Namaste
Daniel

Nimble Fitness in NYC Splash Magazine

NYCSplash Magazine wrote about Nimble Fitness and our new studio on West 12th street, near Union Square in Manhattan.

“The studio is in a class of its own. I loved the décor; it’s clean and simple with personal touches of elegance. The spacious studio is stunning with high ceilings and stylish changing rooms with shower facilities. It offers a great place to workout in a relaxed, peaceful environment without the crowds.”
- Sabrina Hunter

Read the full article here

Stretching Tips Part II: Static Stretching

In our first stretch article [Part I], we explored the basic concepts of stretching and how it affects you. We made it clear that it’s up to you to learn your own body’s strengths and limitations, and to focus your attention on what you’re feeling when you perform a particular stretch. Use your mind and your instincts when you’re stretching muscle tissue. Know when you’ve gone far enough, and continue to build your awareness of where you need more flexibility and where you’re already open.

Today we’ll discuss the most basic and widely used form of stretching: static stretching. Static stretching is called “passive” stretching, because you use an external force, like a bench, a wall or even a partner, to cause the muscle tissue to lengthen. This type of stretching involves reaching a comfortable, lengthened position for a muscle (or group of muscles) and holding the stretch for at least 30 seconds. Static stretching is considered low-risk because it’s performed in a controlled environment, and uses (ideally) low force.

A static stretch is most effective after an exercise session, when the muscles are really warmed up and more elastic. Static stretching before exercise can actually be harmful, because the muscle tissue can become less neurally active. As we discussed in the last stretch article, active stretching, where you move slowly through an increasing range of motion, is a much more effective warm-up.

Key points for static stretching:

*Pay attention to any differences in tightness from one side of your body to the other (for example, your right hamstrings and left hamstrings) and spend more time with the tighter side.

*Pay special attention to your body’s position when you’re stretching. Often we think we’re going deeper into a muscle tissue stretch, when we’re actually just tilting the pelvis or bending the back. Make sure your spine and joints are stable before you stretch the muscle around them!

*Use your breath to relax, and you can progress to holding the stretch from 30 seconds to several minutes.

*The goal is symmetry, freedom of movement around the joint, and strength through a full range of motion.

*Also, remember that sometimes your just resetting your muscles back to their orginal resting length.

Stretching Tips / Part I

I recently attended three stretching seminars, all taught by experienced health and fitness educators, on three consecutive weekends. One seminar focused on stretching muscles that are tight, one focused on activation for muscles that are weak, and the third dealt with how both approaches can be effective. There are many different ways to effectively stretch, so to make sense of all that information, it might be helpful to start by saying this: not everyone responds the same way to stretching, and not every body needs every stretch.

Here are some key questions to ask yourself before you stretch: What is your own physical set-up? Are you chronically tight, hyper-mobile through the joints, or somewhere in between? Are there some muscles that are always tight, while others never seem to tighten up? And how flexible do you need to be? The first step in effective stretching is to know your own body. If you have hyper-mobile joints and are loose already, you’ll create problems for yourself if you continue to stretch muscles that are already flexible. Sorry, no yoga classes for you …unless you’re experienced and really know how to balance strength with openness in each pose. Believe it or not, your goal in stretching or yoga should never be to stretch every muscle group as far as you can—because becoming too flexible in many cases can cause weakness. If your muscles are on the tighter side, its important to raise your own awareness to what is a safe limit for stretching your muscle tissue.

Another key concept is using stretching as an effective way to reset muscle length. Often, when we stretch at the end of a workout, the most effective thing we can do is reset tight muscles to their resting length, which maintains balance through your body and just feels good. In other words, stretching doesn’t always have to be about creating new length in muscle tissue. Here are some Nimble foundation principles for effective stretching:

*When you’re stretching, use this guiding principle: Being strong and limber is ultimately about having stability in your joints and freedom of movement around a healthy spine, not about how far you can stretch. Don’t sacrifice the health of your spine or your joints just to push your tissue a little bit further.

*Think balance when you stretch! Be aware of where you’re tighter—front to back, right to left, top to bottom—and spend more time stretching the tighter side. Seek balance in your stretches. Think about balance also in your twisting stretches.

*Your breath is vital in the process of relaxing muscle and fascial tissue. Your breath will help you focus your awareness and open up muscle tissue. Exhaling helps relax the muscle you’re stretching, allowing you to take it into a deeper stretch.

*There’s no need to do static stretches before playing a sport or an intense workout. In fact, it can be counter-productive, making your muscles less neurally active. Static stretching, where the stretch is held in one position, is much more effective post exercise, because warm muscle tissue is easier to stretch. Before sports or intense workouts, we recommend muscular activation exercises and doing a more dynamic warm-up that will prepare muscles to handle more stress.

*Active stretching is OK before sports and workouts. Active stretching is moving through a particular range of motion repeatedly, allowing the muscle tissue to gradually warm up and lengthen to a greater range of motion. For example, a baseball player will swing the bat from side to side in a gentle arc, gradually increasing the range of motion with each swing. You use the same approach for your warm up, moving your legs and arms gently through different planes of motion to prep for exercise.

So! In this article, we just scratched the surface of the when, where and why of stretching. Next month we will continue to discuss effective stretching techniques.

LIVE HEALTHY NOW!
Daniel Lucas / Keith Paine