 Our past couple blogs have revolved around neck pain. Why? Because it’s 2021 and we are a year and half into our “new normal” caused by the global pandemic, which means more time working from home, which means increased time spent behind a computer screen, which means more neck pain and more headaches. Throw on the added stress that people are experiencing and it’s starting to feel like there’s a different kind of pandemic going around with all the neck pain and headaches we’ve been treating at Athletes’ Potential. In our previous blogs this month we’ve given a ton of great information about how your neck is the source of your headaches and why looking down at your phone all day may not be the best idea. (If you missed those, you can find them here.) While all that may be great, there’s one area that frequently gets missed when people get their necks looked at by a medical professional, and that area is their back. While there are certainly fasial lines, misaligned joints and muscle tensions in the low back that can cause changes “up the chain” that lead to neck pain, those situations are a little fewer and far between and aren't necessarily the part of your back that I’m talking about. Instead, we’re talking specifically about your thoracic spine, or your upper back.  A little anatomy lesson for you to make sure we are all on the same page. Your spine is divided into three separate segments: cervical (neck), thoracic (mid back), and lumbar (low back)...in other words your thoracic spine connects your neck to your low back. Now, there are a couple of things that are pretty cool when we’re talking about your thoracic spine.
Going back to that first fun fact...the upper portion of your thoracic spine has to be able to move along with your neck. Hypomobility leads to pain. In other words, if one joint isn’t moving properly, then that causes other joints (above or below the stiff joint) to have to move in an excessive range of motion (hypermobility), which leads to pain in those joints. That is exactly what we see when it comes to the upper thoracic spine and its ability to cause neck pain. If your upper back has excessive stiffness then that causes your neck to have to rotate, extend, etc in excessive ranges of motions to do simple tasks (think looking over your shoulder to check a blind spot), which will inevitably lead to pain. Luckily there a ton of drills you can do to help improve your thoracic spine mobility and two of my all time favorites are listed below: Thoracic Spine Self Release: Open Book Exercise: The second way your thoracic spine can cause neck pain actually has more to do with that second fun fact. One of the most important functions of your rib cage is to protect some very important structures such as your heart, lungs, liver, diaphragm, etc. Your lungs and diaphragm in particular are what we want to focus on here. You see, when people sit at a desk for prolonged periods of time or are experiencing high amounts of stress, what tends to happen is people start taking shorter breaths and use the accessory muscles found in the neck when they breath instead of the more appropriate muscle being their diaphragm. When this happens we’ll start seeing muscles like the scalenes, sternocleidomastoid (SCM), and subclavius start to develop too much tension which will lead to neck pain and even referred pain causing headaches. Lucky for you, we have some favorite drills that can help with that too and a lot of them focus on proper breathing. Now, before you roll your eyes and think, “proper breathing?! Breathing is breathing!”, That’s what I used to think too but thanks to our good friends over at Shift, in addition to the thousands of people we’ve helped improve their breathing, I can promise you, that thought process couldn’t be further from the truth. Give the drills a shot and see for yourself, you’ll be amazed at how effective cleaning up your breathing patterns can be. 90/90 Diaphragmatic Breathing: Psoas/Diaphragm Release: In review, improving your upper thoracic mobility and appropriate breathing patterns could be effective treatment options for you if you’re dealing with neck pain and, at a minimum, will help you live a healthier life. However, these treatment options are just pieces of the ever elusive puzzle that make up neck pain. If you’re dealing with neck pain, reach out with any questions. We design and implement programs to help people just like you, whether you’re someone who doesn’t know where to start or has had an unsuccessful rehab experience. It is our goal at Athletes’ Potential for the people we work with to get out of pain and return to their sport or activity performing better than they did before.
Thanks for reading, Dr. Jake, PT, DPT, CSCS
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Today we are going over one of our favorite treatment styles at Athletes' Potential- Blood Flow Restriction Training, or BFR. We use the Owens Recovery Delfi units in our office.
What are we doing with BFR? We are essentially restricting the blood flow that goes to a particular limb, in this case, Dr. Sam's arm by about 50%. What that does is restrict the blood flow coming out. Now when we do that, there are very interesting things that happen hormonally with exercise. You can get up to 200% increase in your human growth hormone. This won't make you look like The Rock but you will start to recover faster and build your connective tissue in a quicker way that wouldn't normally happen in a regular gym setting. If you haven't tried this or you'd like more information on this, please reach out to us! At Athletes' Potential we help active adults and athletes in the Atlanta area get back to the workouts and sports they love... without surgery, stopping activities, or relying on pain medicine. Life is too short to avoid doing the things that you love. Reach out to us at: www.athletespotential.com info@athletespotential.com 470-355-2106 Let us help you figure out to live your best active life today! Today we're talking about power development, specifically, through plyometrics. How much power can you produce and control? If you can't control that power, you are increasing your risk of injury. Unfortunately, plyometrics is done incorrectly in most gym settings. True plyometrics should be full intensity- EVERY TIME. To work on your plyometrics and to gain better control, we'll start with a few basic plyometric drills. Watch Dr. Jacob walk you through: -Snap Downs -Single Leg Snap Downs -Altitude Drops -Lateral Bound Stick Give these a shot- all out intensity for for 5 or so reps and see how you progress your power/strength and control in the gym. Good luck! At Athletes' Potential we help active adults and athletes in the Atlanta area get back to the workouts and sports they love... without surgery, stopping activities, or relying on pain medicine. Life is too short to avoid doing the things that you love. Reach out to us at: www.athletespotential.com info@athletespotential.com 470-355-2106 Let us help you figure out to live your best active life today! This video piggy backs on our Power Plyometrics Part 1 video. We're covering plyometric power with load once you've learned to control your body. This is a great progression for developing power.
The first exercise is loaded jumping squats. There are two key things to remember here, go 100 percent and stop when you drop down to a 90 percent effort and REST. The weight can be a kettlebell or medicine ball, really whatever you have. Get loaded, jump as high as you can and stop when your effort decreases. This exercise will help you continue to develop power. Good luck! At Athletes' Potential we help active adults and athletes in the Atlanta area get back to the workouts and sports they love... without surgery, stopping activities, or relying on pain medicine. Life is too short to avoid doing the things that you love. Reach out to us at: www.athletespotential.com info@athletespotential.com 470-355-2106 Let us help you figure out to live your best active life today! Today we're working on our running mobility issues in our feet and ankles. We all know these can get stiff after miles and miles of running. We're going to work on our big toe, or our first ray. When you toe off in a run position, you have to get about 70 degrees of dorsi-flexion in your big toe. If you do not have that much flexion in your toe, you'll start see problem creep up up stream. To prevent this, grab your favorite lacrosse ball or Yoga Tune Up ball and really warm up your plantar fascia on the bottom of your foot. After that, get into a runners stretch against a wall and focus on stretching your big toe. You can also try toe walking around your house. At Athletes' Potential we help active adults and athletes in the Atlanta area get back to the workouts and sports they love... without surgery, stopping activities, or relying on pain medicine. Life is too short to avoid doing the things that you love. Reach out to us at: www.athletespotential.com info@athletespotential.com 470-355-2106 Let us help you figure out to live your best active life today! Foot strength is super important for runners. Our feet are what propel us forward so in order to generate a lot of power or strength in running, we have to have strong feet. Intrinsic foot strength- simply put, it's the muscles of the foot. Far too often we neglect this part of our body a lot but we need to show it some TLC. To help us gain foot strength, we've got a simple exercise for you to try at home or the office to start building up that strength. It's called the short foot drill. We want to make our foot as short as possible. Go back and forth between squeezing that foot together and relaxing. Do about 15-20 reps at a time. Watch the video for the all tips and get after it. At Athletes' Potential we help active adults and athletes in the Atlanta area get back to the workouts and sports they love... without surgery, stopping activities, or relying on pain medicine. Life is too short to avoid doing the things that you love. Reach out to us at: www.athletespotential.com info@athletespotential.com 470-355-2106 Let us help you figure out to live your best active life today! Today we're covering mobility for foot and ankle issues. If you've been struggling with this or you don't know that you have been, give these exercises a shot.
Massaging and stretching are great but there's one important technique that you might be missing. The first ray needs to be mobile! In order to be an efficient runner, you need about 70% dorsiflexion in your big toe. Any less that that, will cause pain. Try these two foot exercises to improve that mobility. 1) Grab your favorite Yoga Tune Up ball or lacrosse ball and get it under you foot, moving it side to side across your plantar fascia. 2) Do a wall stretch, but lift your heel off the ground to stretch that big toe. 3) Do some toe walks around your house! Hit these for 1-5 minutes. At Athletes' Potential we help active adults and athletes in the Atlanta area get back to the workouts and sports they love... without surgery, stopping activities, or relying on pain medicine. Life is too short to avoid doing the things that you love. Reach out to us at: www.athletespotential.com info@athletespotential.com 470-355-2106 No drills or techniques here! Today, we're going over SLEEP. We highly suggest getting that (ideal!) 8-10 hours of sleep each night, however, we understand that sometimes that isn't possible. There are a couple of things that you can do to help with those sleep deficits.
1. Tactical napping- 20-30 minute nap followed up with a quick hit of caffeine. 2. Sleep Banking- This is ideal when you know you'll be missing out on sleep soon (think time-changes or travel). To combat this, for 6 straight days, bank sleep by getting an extra two hours of sleep each night. Give these two a shot if you are short on sleep or you know you'll be short on sleep and let us know how it goes. At Athletes' Potential we help active adults and athletes in the Atlanta area get back to the workouts and sports they love... without surgery, stopping activities, or relying on pain medicine. Life is too short to avoid doing the things that you love. Reach out to us at: www.athletespotential.com info@athletespotential.com 470-355-2106 Let us help you figure out to live your best active life today! Today we're going over one of our favorite drills to teach spinal neutral when performing a squat. Grab a PVC pipe or broomstick. This will help give you some real-time feedback.
Align the PVC pipe against the back of your body and go into a squat position. Did you lose contact with the bottom of the pipe? If so, you might have tight hips and your back is overcompensating. Give some of our hip opener exercises a try and see if it helps. Again, align the PVC pipe against the back of you body. Does it lose contact in the middle of your spine? (Think arched back). If so, you might need to do some core exercises and engagement. Check out some of our core stability videos. At Athletes' Potential we help active adults and athletes in the Atlanta area get back to the workouts and sports they love... without surgery, stopping activities, or relying on pain medicine. Life is too short to avoid doing the things that you love. Reach out to us at: www.athletespotential.com info@athletespotential.com 470-355-2106 Let us help you figure out to live your best active life today! This lower extremity assessment is great if you're struggling to get into the bottom of a squat or you can't keep your chest up when you're squatting. We'll walk you through this assessment and then give you a great drill to help you depending on the outcome.
As always, reach out to us at 470-355-2106 or info@athletespotential.com if you have questions. We're here for you! Remember, Movement is Medicine! During the month of September we focused our efforts on helping YOU combat nagging knee. It's super helpful to take the time to watch the first video before moving on to the rest. You need to understand the types of knee pain and where yours might be coming from before you can start to solve a problem. As always, reach out to us if you're not getting better, you have questions or you're ready to get out of pain and start living your life. Knee Pain can be frustrating. However, in order to improve it, you need to know what you're dealing with. Are you having more mobility related issues or stability and control issues? Confused? Watch Dr. Danny walk you through 2 simple tests to see which category you fall into. What if you don't have enough mobility and you have knee pain? These exercises will give you hope! Walk through these exercises with Dr. Jacob and see if you can improve your mobility and decrease your knee pain. 1. Couch Stretch- one of our all time favorite drills- but focus on the cues. 2. Knee gapping- if your pain is coming from your joints, this is the exercise for you. 3. Hamstring mobility- grab a band and work on your hamstring mobility to help improve your knee pain. Are you having knee pain? Dr. Marcus is going to walk you through 3 exercises to strengthen your leg to decrease knee pain and get stronger. 1. The first one is a classic- wall sits. He throws in some twists for those of you that think you're too strong. 2. One way to get strong legs is to target your hamstrings with hamstring roll outs. Move out as far as you are comfortable while maintaining form. 3. Last we want you to target your glutes. Go through these and see if you can help decrease your knee pain. If not, or these are too painful, you need an expert to help you If you're having knee pain, here are 3 cues to help alleviate some pain.
1.The first one, is the simplest, SIT DOWN! Compare this to your squat and see how much further back your hips AND knees are. 2. Practice squatting without sitting and focus on keeping your knees back. Do not let your knee come over your toes. 3. Focus on pointing your knees out towards your pinky toes. Do not let your knees come into your big toe. Knees out! Give these a shot and see how you can improve any lingering knee pain. Questions? Give us a call at 470-355-2106.  What’s up, everyone! Doc Jake here. In the spirit of Halloween, I wanted to take a moment to talk about some of the common “scary” comments my patients have heard from other providers, or seen on imaging, and why you shouldn’t be afraid at all. I know we’re all busy getting costumes and candy ready, so let’s jump right in: “Worst case of bone on bone I’ve ever seen!” If I’ve heard this once, I’ve heard it a thousand times. “The doctor said I’m bone on bone!” “Worst case of arthritis he has ever seen!” Most often your physician or other healthcare provider is referring to something called osteoarthritis (also called Degenerative Joint Disease or DJD) in situations like this, and guess what… it is totally normal to have arthritis! More and more studies are coming out that show many active adults have some form of DJD and that calling this a “disease” is incredibly misleading. While DJD cannot be reversed, it’s often not the main pain generator and can easily managed with education on symptoms, appropriately prescribed exercise, and just plain out staying active. Walking the dog, playing with your kids, gardening… all great examples of non-exercise based movement that keep your joints moving. As cheesy as it may sound, the old adage of “motion is lotion” is spot on and is the reason that “worst case of arthritis I’ve seen” shouldn’t get you weak in the knees. Torn Meniscus This one hits close to home. At the young age of 14, I actually had two knee surgeries. One to attempt to repair my meniscus and one to remove it once the repair failed. Looking back on it and relating my symptoms I was having to what the research is now showing, I had no business getting any of those surgeries and you most likely don’t need one either. Once again, a torn or frayed meniscus is a normal sign of aging and is often found on imaging with people who have NO knee pain at all. Even in an acute situation where a tear is found on an image after injuring your knee, as long as you don’t have a physical “block” in your knee, where that meniscus has essentially turned into a door stopper and impeds normal motion at the knee, you will be absolutely fine without surgery. In fact, research consistently shows that conservative treatment will have equal to (or better) results as surgery AND you won’t be setting yourself up for future complications associated with missing portions of your meniscus. Herniated Disc I’ll keep this one short. Simply put, in most situations, herniated discs do not require surgery. In fact, multiple studies have demonstrated that you can take 10 random people off the street with no back pain, give them an MRI, and an average of 7 out of 10 people’s images will come back with some variation of a herniated disc. In fact, “large low-risk-of-bias trial between surgery and usual conservative care found no statistically significant differences on any of the primary outcome measures after 1 and 2 years” (Jacobs et al). Our bodies are incredibly resilient and will heal just fine with appropriate treatment. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3065612/ “You’ll never be able to do ‘X’ again.” This is the most frustrating thing for me and the rest of the staff here at Athletes’ Potential. We are constantly hearing people come in and say something like, “My doctor said I’ll never be able to deadlift again,” or, “My physical therapist said I shouldn’t do CrossFit.” This is absurd and is a fallacy you shouldn’t fall for. We constantly get people coming into our office and we are constantly getting them back to the activities they love. So, in review, there are a lot of scary phrases out there that, in reality, have no right to be scary. New research is being pumped out every day that our bodies are incredibly adaptable. If you’re in the Atlanta area and you’ve heard one of these phrases before, give us a call or fill out the contact request form by clicking the button below. We’d love nothing more than to help you get back to what you enjoy. Thanks for reading, Dr. Jacob, PT, DPT, CSCS |
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