Podcast Episode #13: Nutrition, Lateral Strength Building & Chiropractic

Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. This is your weekly free audio exposure to cutting edge fitness, diet and wellness news. Hey, whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, this podcast is going to present you with the latest exercise and nutrition content from the nation's top experts. My name is Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, certified nutritionist and exercise, diet and wellness guru. Each week I'm going to be bringing you cutting edge fitness, nutrition and wellness advice. Stay tuned for this Week's podcast from BenGreenfieldFitness.com. Hey podcast listeners, we've got a great episode coming to you today from BenGreenfieldFitness.com going to be introducing all sorts of new content that's appeared on the website this week in a new article series.

Called the Healthy Traveler.

I've got a fantastic interview with chiropractor Brian Mathers who really gives some very eye opening advice on chiropractic and what it's all about. We've got a bunch of Listener Q&As from the mailbox and just a host of really good information in this podcast. Episode number 13. So stay tuned to bengreenfieldfitness.

Com.

New content@BenGreenfieldFitness.com as many of you know, I have been traveling the past couple of weeks and so a lot of the blog postings and last week's podcast focus on exercise and nutritional concepts that relate to more the situations that we find ourselves in when we're traveling, when we don't have access to the exercise or the nutritional environments that we're accustomed to. So one of the series that I.

Did is called the Healthy Traveler.

Part one of the Healthy Traveler, which is completely based on airline travel, is entitled what's in your Carry on? And in that article I literally go through my carry on bag and describe to you what is in there from a nutritional and an exercise standpoint and why it's in there.

In part two of the Healthy Traveler.

I introduced the carbohydrate timing method as a system that you can use to limit the amount of weight that you.

Gain in, particularly the amount fat that.

You gain when you're traveling and you're sedentary for a long period of time. There is also a new post that.

Answers the question whether you should exercise.

In the morning or the evening. And as you may remember from last week's podcast episode, I introduced a brand new fitness device that I'm very excited about. If you didn't happen to listen to that episode. This is called the Gym Stick and the Gym Stick is basically an elastic band exercise device that allows you to do just hundreds of different exercises from sports performance to toning to weight loss to stability to rehabilitation. It's a fantastic device. I've been given the opportunity to offer this with free shipping from BenGreenfieldFitness.com so if you visit the website and go down the right hand side of the.

Page where there's all sorts of fantastic.

Sponsors that sponsor this show and the podcast, you'll see a picture of the exercise device, the Gym Stick. Click on that picture and you'll be brought to a page that will allow you to learn a lot more about what the Gym Stick is all about, what you can do with it, and how you can get your hands on one. And by the way, if you want to find more discount codes@bencreenfieldfitness.com from our sponsors, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com discount. Visit that page for a bunch of great deals from our show sponsors. So that's the new content for this week from Ben Greenfield, Fitness.

Listener.

Q and A Quite a bit of questions this week.

The first is from Nate and Nate.

Says, I was wondering if you could.

Help me out with two questions I just can't seem to find a solid answer for. Is doing a light workout, for example a 15 to 20 minute abs workout, good to do right before bed?

My second question is, is it good.

To take a low carb sugar slow release protein shake before bed? So these are both sleep bedtime related.

Questions and you know when you're asking.

Whether something is good or whether something is better. I'm assuming you mean from either a fitness perspective, a recovery perspective, or a weight loss perspective. Let's cover the first part of that question. Is doing a light workout, like a 1520 minute abs workout, good to do right before bed? There is research that suggests that heavy exercise prior to sleep can interrupt the quality of your sleep, specifically the degree to which you enter into your deep rapid eye movement sleep, which is where the majority of recovery and rest actually occurs during sleep. That being said, what we're talking about is exercise that takes you up into a fairly high range of your VO2 max and leaves you with quite a bit of an oxygen deficit after the workout or quite a bit of muscular damage after the workout. You know, for example, an hour long run or 60 to 75 minutes of heavy weightlifting. A 15 to 20 minute abs workout is not going to increase your post Exercise metabolic rate or your post exercise oxygen deficit high enough to where you would lose much sleep. It would be the same thing as going for a walk after dinner or going for a light bike ride at 8 or at 9pm around the neighborhood. 15 to 20 minute abs workout, if it's a typical ab workout made up of things like torso twists and crunches and plank holds and things of that nature, is going to stimulate a muscular response in the core without actually severely affecting the quality of your sleep. So you would be fine to do a 15 to 20 minute abs workout right before bed. Ideally, you'd get a little bit more out of that abs workout if you were to do it in the morning so that you're not just hitting the sack and putting your body to rest right after the workout. It's better to have blood flowing to that area that you've worked out for.

A little bit longer than that.

But if that were the one time that you could do it, you're not going to destroy your sleep patterns.

Now, the second question when you ask.

About the low carb sugar, slow release protein shake before bed, I'm assuming what you're talking about are these proteins that they're basically marketed as slow release proteins and they're made from a type of protein called casein, C, A, S, E, I, N. And casein is basically a milk protein, but it's considered a slow digesting protein because it makes basically a gel in your gut. And so proteins are synonymous with amino acids. And what happens is when you get this gel in your gut, you actually get kind of a more steady, a little bit slower release of amino acids in your bloodstream. So when you're asleep, you know, sleeping over seven or eight hours, you're getting amino acids released into your bloodstream during your entire sleep cycle. And so the muscles are constantly exposed to what they need for repair and recovery. So a slow digesting protein would actually be ideal to consume prior to bed. If you were going to consume a food prior to bed. Carbohydrate, on the other hand, that elevates the blood sugar levels, that subsequently elevates the insulin levels and increases the amount of fat storage that occurs while you're sleeping, I would discourage prior to bed. So if you're talking about a slow release casein type of protein, that would be fine. And when you say low carb sugar or low carb, low sugar, slow release protein shake. Yes. For repair and recovery, that can actually enhance your response to your workouts. So I hope that answers your questions, Nate, and let's go ahead and move.

On to the second question, which is from listener Al.

And Al asks Ben, is the travel diet you discuss applicable over the long term for those people who spend much of the day at sedentary office type jobs? Well, the travel diet that Al is referring to was the diet that I introduced in the last couple of blog posts that were entitled the Healthy Traveler.

And in the second of those blog.

Postings I talked about the carbohydrate timing diet. And there were three rules of the carbohydrate timing diet. The first is that any carbohydrate based meal needed to be consumed only immediately before or after stretching or light fast physical activity, because these postings were posted actually directly in relation to airline travel. And so stretching and light physical activity are two of the main forms of physical exercise you're actually going to get on an airplane. So number one was your carbohydrate based meals have to be consumed immediately before or after stretching your light physical activity, and that'll just allow your body to be more responsive to the insulin that's released after consumption of sugar. The second rule is when exercise is not possible, you only consume primarily fat or protein based meals. And so that would mean that if you had to choose between, for example, an apple or a handful of walnuts to consume, if you were simply seated in a sedentary position, you would always want to choose the fat or the protein based food because sugar is your energy producing food and will lead to actually more fat storage and a higher degree of circulating fat storage type hormones when consumed when compared to say, proteins or fats. And then the third rule was do not consume any simple sugar based carbohydrates. That means no soda, no juice, no rolls, no pasta, no pretzels, no snack mix. And remember, all of this is under the assumption that you're going to be relatively sedentary or only have access to very light forms of physical exercise and so you don't need those high energy producing foods that send your blood sugar levels on a roller coaster. And so when Al asks if that same diet that I introduced for, say, traveling on an airplane would be good for people who spend much of the day at sedentary office type jobs, well, a sedentary office type job is very similar to the type of situation that you find yourself at on an airplane, I would say the only difference is that you may be able to engage in slightly more vigorous exercise and in an office situation when compared to the small cramped space of an airplane. But ultimately, if you were to time your carbohydrates to correspond to physical activity, to limit the amount of high sugar carbohydrates that you consume, and to only consume fats and proteins when exercise, physical activity or stretching is not an option that yeah, it would be highly applicable to a sedentary office type job. So I hope that answers your question. Al and the last question of the.

Day comes from.

Also an Al might be the same Al.

I don't know.

He says as a 58 year old man, I lift weights and perform core and back exercises regularly to try and keep and perhaps increase muscle and bone mass. My lifting primarily consists of traditional free weight exercises. I've been reading about lateral strength building and wonder if I should include some additional exercises to address this issue and also to help me in triathlon. What are your thoughts on lateral strength building exercises? If you feel they are important? Do you have some suggested exercises?

Well, what physical therapists and people who.

Study the human body have been finding more and more is that there is a there's an enormous deficit of lateral strength in chronic repetitive motion type of athletes, and especially in triathletes who are doing a lot of running, a lot.

Of swimming, a lot of cycling in.

A front to back motion, spend very little time building strength from side to side. And after a long period of time neglecting those rotational side to side components, typically injury occurs. And a perfect example of that is, is that gluteus medius weakness is heavily associated with it Band friction syndrome. One of the more common complaints that endurance athletes experience and gluteus medius, that muscle is responsible for external rotation of your hip. When the external rotators your hip are weak, the long tight band of tissue called the it band that runs along your leg has to essentially take over and take some of the load that the gluteus medius muscle would normally be absorbing and provide some of the force that that muscle would normally be providing. So it is absolutely essential to include lateral strength building exercises. If you you are someone who spends a lot of time in your sport moving simply front to back and never side to side, you contrast a marathon runner with a basketball player. The marathon runner is simply going front to back the entire marathon, whereas a basketball player does a lot of side to side, whether defensively or whether cutting across the floor, there's quite a bit more rotational movement that occurs in that sport. So when you're in a sport that's only front to back. Absolutely. One of my favorite exercises for lateral rotation muscle building, in this case specifically for the gluteus medius is very simple. You simply get into a crawl position on the ground and you hike your leg. It's called a fire hydrant. You literally just hike your leg like you're going to hike your leg on a fire hydrant. Typically for the gluteus medius, we're looking for exercises that, like the rotator cuff, are a little bit more high rep, low resistance. You could attach an ankle weight to your legs, but really just the weight of the leg itself is sufficient. And you could do, for example, four sets of 25 fire hydrants per side. Just try that 25 for the right, 25 to the left, moving back and forth from right to left side until you get to 100 per side. If you are feeling incredibly weak or if you have a difficult time completing those four sets of 25, it is pretty likely that you have some lateral strength deficit that need to be addressed.

So those are the questions this week from Ben Greenfield Fitness. And if you have a question, what I'm going to do is this week I'll be giving away a copy of my book and video package Top 12 resistance training routines for Endurance Athletes. Now, if you're not an endurance athlete, this package would still provide you with a fantastic way to tone, to build strength, to lose weight, to boost your performance. It's basically a combination of 12 different workouts, each one with a unique series of exercises designed to get maximum results. And the book includes instructions on how you can change the exercises in terms of reps, in terms of weights, in terms of sets throughout the entire year so your body continually responds to what you're doing. Now, I wrote the book primarily from an endurance athlete perspective, taking into consideration that the training year would be broken into several periods and that you would be changing up your training based on whether you were in race season, off season, base training, etc. But you would actually be able to achieve results if you weren't an endurance athlete and just wanted to to change.

Up your routine throughout the year so that your body continued to see results.

Anyways, I'll be sending a copy of that package to the top question that I get on BenGreenfieldFitness.com this week. And if you have a question, you can either post a comment on the blog, which I would highly encourage you to do because then your question is out in public and we can generate.

Discussion from other people that visit the.

Blog, or you can just email me privately. Ben Greenfield fitness.com I'd love to hear your questions. I promise I'LL answer them on the podcast as long as they have something to do with health, nutrition with fitness. You may not want to ask me the best oil to use in your car or how to replace the roof on your house, but if it is a question related to the content here at Ben Greenfield Fitness, feel free to fire away. In this week's interview, I was fortunate enough to be able to sit down for a few minutes with Dr. Brian Mathers, doctor of chiropractic here in Spokane, Washington. And he really reveals not only some of the core concepts behind chiropractic, but also talks about some things that I didn't know about chiropractic, such as common mistakes that people make when treating their own low back pain and some of the more common injuries that Brian encounters in his practice and that tend to.

Be kind of universal among people who.

Struggle with low back pain. So the information in this interview is just fantastic and you'll really benefit from some of the things that Brian has to say. So let's move on to the interview.

This week from Ben Greenfield.

Hey podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield and I am here with Brian Mathers. Brian has been a doctor of chiropractic for the past 12 years. He has a great deal of experience in the field, and he's actually the chiropractor for the Spokane Chiefs hockey team. So I know he has a lot of experience working with people who beat up their bodies quite a bit. He's been doing that for the past eight years. Brian also happens to be the chiropractor who I see on a regular basis for the little tweaks and adjustments that I need for triathlon. And what I want to do today is have Brian give us a good picture of chiropractic and what its benefits are and also how you might be able to use it. And we'd also like to just go over how it can improve not only just performance, but also just total health and wellness. So, Brian, tell me a little bit about yourself, or did I cover it there?

I know you hit most of it. I've been in practice here in spokane for about 12 years. I've been the chiropractor of the Spokane Chiefs for about the last eight. And primarily we do a musculoskeletal based practice that really emphasizes the treatment and prevention of injuries. And a large part of my practice is with athletic population. So I see a lot of athletes from kids that are in middle school all the way up to I have a group of professional athletes that I treat as well.

So when you talk about chiropractic for injury, for example, you get the people that throw out their backs, that get back strains and whatnot. But is chiropractic basically like surgery? I mean, is it something that you wait until you're hurt to do? Do you do this for prevention, for maintenance, for initial treatment of acute injury?

I think all of the above. A majority of the people that we see in our clinic primarily come in with a problem. They come in with pain. And so our job is to try to address those issues, try to do a full history and exam, determine, you know, how we can help them, and then treat them so that they can. Can get better. Then that often turns into. They see some of the value in being under chiropractic care and not having aches and pains. And so for some people, they choose to come back. And for some people, once they're out of pain, we try to educate them on exercise, things that they can do so that they don't have to come back. So it's really tailored to each individual. Some patients do come back because they find value in it, and other patients find the value in getting better. And they get educated on the things that they can do to minimize their aches and pains so they don't have to come back.

Okay, now, for me, most of my experience lies in the fields of nutrition, physiology, biomechanics. And I actually, as far as chiropractic treatments go, don't actually know a whole lot other than what I experience when I'm actually in the office with you. So walk me through a typical chiropractic treatment. Is it similar to what I experience in there with you, where we're on the table for just two, maybe three minutes? Or is there a different way that you approach each individual?

Everything's approached individually, so everyone is a little different in what we do. Once we take a full history, medical history, and done a full examination to determine what diagnosis we're treating and that it's appropriate to treat that particular condition, then we get to the actual treatment portion, which is kind of what you're referring to, and the adjustments themselves actually happen very quickly. So they only take that two or three minutes to do the physical manual manipulation or adjusting of the joint. And all you're really doing is taking a joint that's been stuck or fixated within its range of motion, and you're restoring motion to that joint. Essentially. Essentially, that is the premise of what we're doing with the chiropractic adjustment. And then the visits will last somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes. Part of the time we spent finding out how you responded to treatment, if you've had any benefit from it, what you've noticed. And then we do a lot of soft tissue work at times to work the soft tissues surrounding those joints so that you adjust easier. And we find that with a lot of soft tissue work, you get better faster and you stay better longer. And then there's a lot of rehab stuff that we offer patients, different exercises that they can do. We counsel them on all sorts of different lifestyle things when appropriate and when necessary. So those visits could be as short as just a couple of minutes to do just the adjustments, and they can last up to 15 or 20 minutes if we're doing a lot of other things in that patient interaction.

Okay, I want to rewind for just a second and ask you about something you just said about a joint being.

Stuck in a range of motion.

How would something like that actually happen?

That is a great question, and I can give you books on theory. And I don't think any of us know 100% accurately what causes a joint to lock into place. Some people will theorize that the muscle gets irritated and the muscle that attaches to that joint, and when that muscle tightens up, there's a reflex and the joint locks into place as a protective mechanism. Some people will tell you that it's the joint itself that gets an alteration motion somehow, and it locks into place, and then that causes muscle tightness and irritation. What we do know for sure is that the muscle and the joint work together, and they're always involved together. Rarely do we have just a joint issue or just a muscle issue. Almost always the two of them go hand in hand. And so both sets of tissues predominantly have to be addressed.

Okay. Based off of the questions that I get at Ben Greenfield Fitness, and based off of the audience that emails to me, I get the impression that a lot of our listeners are triathletes or do a little bit of cycling or swimming or running. Is there a common debilitating back injury that you find among chronic repetitive motion sports like triathlon type of events?

Hands down, the most common disorder that we deal with with back pain is the sacroiliac joint dysfunction. The SI joint, which is the sacroiliac joint, is the joint in the back of your pelvis. And that, by far is the absolutely most common problem that we deal with in not only the athletic population, but I would say across the board in any population of patients. But it is definitely a problem in the athletic population with overuse injuries and with the repetitive motion stuff that athletes.

Do, how do you actually address SI joint dysfunction?

The best way to address SI joint dysfunction is to adjust that joint. It is simply just the pelvis being locked into place in an altered position. And it tremendously affects the biomechanics of your body. You'll get tremendous compensation in the back, in the knees, the hips, the ankles, the feet. It is essentially as the buzzword today is your core, your pelvis is your core. And if it's not working the way it's supposed to, it throws off your entire body. And so we address it primarily by manipulating the joint, doing soft tissue work. There's 41 different muscle groups that are affected when that joint locks into place. So a lot of soft tissue work to control muscle irritation. And then we have to retrain your pelvis and your core how to do its job. So a lot of home exercise and rehab, it's really that kind of three pronged approach. Manipulation, soft tissue work and rehab is how we address 90% of all SI problems.

I don't really want to get into statistics and demographics too much, but I know that a lot of people have low back pain and everyone is aware that everyone has low back pain or.

Has experienced that at some point.

What are the most common mistakes that people make when they're trying to treat their own low back pain? Because I know for a fact, just based off people that I work with, not as many people see a chiropractor as they should. But what do people do?

What are the mistakes that they make.

When they're trying to treat themselves?

I would say that the three number one mistakes are people put heat on their back when they have back pain, which generally speaking is a bad idea. You should, generally speaking put ice on it. They rest, which is not a good thing to do with back pain. The worst thing you can do is to lay on the couch or lay in bed for days at a time.

Time.

And the third thing that they do is they ignore the pain and they assume that it's going to get better if they give it enough time. And unfortunately, a lot of the injuries that we see, the injury has gotten worse over time, not better. And we're seeing people on an acute basis because what was a minor back injury two or three weeks or months ago has now become a really nasty acute problem. And now we're doing damage control to calm it back down. So waiting, resting and heating are the three number one things that I believe people do wrong when they're trying to self treat their low back pain.

Now, when someone is looking for a chiropractor, for example, when someone is looking for a personal trainer, I tell them to look for certifications. Look for the nsca, the ascm, the nsasm, or the ACE are usually kind of the top four you would want to look for. When someone is looking into getting a chiropractor or are there certain screening methods.

That they should use?

Is any chiropractor a doctor of chiropractic, or how exactly does the profession actually work?

Well, if you're a doctor of chiropractic, then you've gone through virtually the same kind of schooling. You have the same kind of certifications, you've passed your national board exams, you've passed your state board exams, and you have to be licensed and certified. And most chiropractors across the the board are very capable of treating patients. There is a saying in the world of chiropractic that there is the science of chiropractic and there's the art of adjusting. And I think that's really what separates one chiropractor from another, is their ability to do the art of adjusting. Some people, you'll hear that when you get adjusted, it hurts, or that you're always going to be sore, or that once you start going to the chiropractor, you have to continue to go to the chiropractor. And these are all big misconceptions, in my opinion. And I believe that if you can find someone that is a very good adjuster, that they can get your problems better very quickly, they can keep your problems better with a limited amount of care, and it should not be a torturous, painful process. And the challenge is trying to figure out how you find those people that have really crafted their art. And there are little subtleties and ways that you can kind of talk to different physicians and you can kind of learn about the style that they do. But that is a major problem that we have in our profession is that there is no good postgraduate certification program that you can say, oh, look for this certification. And that means that they're very proficient and they've honed their art of adjusting. It comes with time and experience, and it is a craft that is learned over the years. We, and we are looking at perhaps trying to create something on a national level here at Champion Sports Medicine, at trying to figure out if we can develop something like that. But that's in its infancy stage, and I don't know that it will fully.

Ever come to fruition when. Brian McPherson, champion sports medicine. He's actually talking about the facility here in Spokane that's basically a one stop shop for sports medicine that I work out of of a lot along with physicians, physiologists, personal trainers, massage therapists and Brian offers our chiropractic treatments. So one of the ways that you can find more information is by visiting the website champsportsmed.com in terms of people finding out more information about you or your practice. Brian, what would be a good way to get a hold of you?

Call the office at 509-4658. I have a website that is very limited and I'm in the process of building it. But you can go to it and at least get our demographic and our phone numbers. And that's at www.spokanesportschiro.com and it will have all of our contact information on that page.

Brian, I want to thank you for giving me your time today and I think that was really eye opening especially in terms of the part where you talked about the mistakes that people make in treating their own back pain because I know a lot of people that actually do those very things. I'm actually guilty myself of doing some.

Icy hot treatments on my back when.

I've injured it in the past. So you learn something new every day. Thanks Brian.

Thank you.

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