Tag: fitness

Feet

Published on by Caroline WhitehornLeave a comment

I love feet! Not in some weird way. Feet are often an ignored part of our self care. We run, workout, do pilates or play tennis. Keeping our body fit and our heart in tip top shape, but we often don’t think about our feet. Our feet have 26 bones, 33 joints and 29 muscles in the foot (well, some start outside the foot and finish in the foot). They need working and moving like the rest of our body. So how much do you move your feet joints and muscles?

If you are wearing stiff or firm soled shoes then the joints in the foot aren’t doing a great deal and therefore the muscles aren’t being used optimally. Do you ever walk around your home bare foot?

All the little muscles and joints need to move!

Often, pain in the foot can be from lack of movement through these muscles and joints over months or years, through foot wear or training changes or activity changes. Things like plantar fasciitis develop due to lack of flexibility through the foot and it’s arches. Tight calf muscles can be a part of it, as this can restrict the flexibility of the foot. This is a very common condition which can cause an awful lot of discomfort and affect normal daily activities or exercise.

Ideally, you should be able to walk around your home bare foot, without pain (if you get pain it may be you need to get an assessment and rehab advice). Also, have a go at moving each toe individually, can you spread your toes to create space between them?

Can you raise all your toes and lower each one individually to the floor?

Can you bend and create movement through your foot?

These are all signs of good and strong foot health. You can work on these and make your feet stronger. You can start with these things:

Scrunching your toes against the floor.

‘piano’ playing with your toes.

Moving your big toe away from the second toe.

Heel raises- both feet and single foot

Use your hand to wiggle your foot in different directions.

Hip pain?

Published on by Caroline WhitehornLeave a comment

Hip pain can be worrying, especially if you are thinking it is your joint and you are in your 50s or 60s or older. Often people assume they have arthritis in the hip. They come to me worrying about whether I am going to say they need to see the GP and then a consultant because their hip is worn down. Sometimes, it is true, this can be the case. wear and tear or degenerative change does happen over time and after the age of 25 we are all slowly deteriorating! Great news! Aging is normal.

However, often people come to me and describe they have hip pain. On further investigation I realise they are not talking about the hip joint. Commonly, hip joint pain shows itself in the groin, the pain is in the crease at the top of the thigh. I see people with worries about needing a hip replacement but what they are describing is lateral hip pain, pain on the outer side of the hip area.

How people describe the symptoms is part of the picture and the onset. A diagnosis is never one thing alone.

Women are more likely to suffer this when they are around the peri-menopause or menopause years. But they are by no means the only ones. Lateral hip pain can affect younger active people or older men.

What is it then if it isn’t my joint?

If after assessment your joint is cleared. There are several different tissues on the outer thigh that can be causing this, there are little fluid filled sacks called bursas, they can become inflamed and irritated, tendons can become irritated too. Also, the gluteal muscle can have a tear. These can happen individually or a few together. They cause pain on walking, going upstairs, standing.

What causes it?

It can be a change in activity, either an increase or decrease in activity. Have you had a recent lifestyle change or weight loss or gain? Have you taken up a new activity and increased the amount you do, or have you previously been quite active, stopped for a while and then tried to start again?

Irritatingly, you could be trying to become fitter or improve your activity levels only to come to a halt due to pain!

What to do about it?

First thing is to try to reduce the irritability of it. This can be by using ice over the area, or anti inflammatories if they are ok for you (speak to a pharmacist or GP if you are unsure or you are on other medication which may conflict with it). Trying to reduce the activities for a time that irritate it. For example, If that is after a certain distance of walking, reduce your walking. Pace activities that require you being on your feet. Or if you have an exercise regime reduce it to a level where you weren’t getting the pain.

There are exercises which can help alleviate the pain. These need to be suitable for where you are after diagnosis and progressed appropriately. That’s the good news. The bad news is it can take several weeks or even a few months to get to where you want to be, especially if you leave it ages to get it looked at.

Understanding Hormonal Fluctuations in Women’s Fitness

Published on by Caroline WhitehornLeave a comment

Last week, I attended a women’s health conference. There were speakers from different elements of women’s health such as endometriosis, specialist menopause doctors and lifestyle coaches. It was great to get the most up to date information about these issues.

What is possibly most useful to my sphere of interest is the advice regarding exercise and the effect on the menopause or perimenopausal woman. It is interesting in the subtle changes that can happen where the same work out you have done for years or the same activity such as running or cycling may not cut it, when it come to weight management and maintaining fitness. Of interest to me is the effect on tendons the rollercoaster ride of hormones has.

This rapid moment by moment change in hormones explains why one day a peri/menopausal woman feels fine and the next feels awful or achy or low in mood. Our hormones don’t plummet in a linear decline over a gradual period of time, neither do they drop off a cliff in one fell swoop. No they, drop and rise and plateau and drop again. This could be over a few months or few days then even out.

I think this is worth understanding when it comes to the ability to maintain regular physical activity and healthy balanced eating habits. If you can imagine, feeling great one day so you go and work out or have the run or bike ride, have a lovely balanced meal then the next day your oestrogen has dropped. You feel basically p***ed off at the world. Who wants to exercise in that frame of mind? Will you choose the lovely nutrient filled buddha bowl for lunch or the carb and starch loaded bread roll and chocolate bar?

Then to add to the fun, we chuck in the loss of resilience of tendons. So your now erratic training or exercise sessions are inconsistent and not gradually loading the tendons, because you had 4 days off then a day exercising then another few days off. The impact of this putting you at increased risk of injury is now increasing.

This is often where I meet women, Is they have a tendon issue and wallowing around in the weeds trying to work out what went wrong and how they can resolve it. I will talk with them a lot about consistency and how tendons love predictability. They don’t enjoy or respond well to sudden loading or persistent inactivity. This is where shoulder (rotator cuff issues) pain can start or achilles or lateral hip pain. Together we work out how to manage the pain, modify activities and progress to return to previous activity levels.

Remember tendons don’t like surprises!

Goals!

Published on by Caroline WhitehornLeave a comment

We are right at the end of the month and January is the time of reflection and resolutions and goal setting. Have you planned a new start or resolution what sort of thing have you gone for?

Have you chosen a new life choice, a job, place to live or hobby?

Have you gone for a physical goal?

Using the new year can be useful because if you make notes or journal entries in this month and plan to look back and evaluate how you did, a year is a good amount of time to get stuff done in. There’s a famous saying about over estimating what you can achieve in 6 months and underestimating what you can do in 10 years. I think a year is nice juncture to review changes you may have implemented throughout that time at all these new begin again points, such as a new day, a new week or a new month.

Using a goal can be a great way to gauge how you have got on. There’s lots of tidy little acronyms for goal setting like SMART, OKR, BHAG and my particular favourite WOOP. Goals are useful and help us have a direction to go in. I also think the process is pretty damn important too! It is, as they say, the journey.

For example, I am intending to do an ultra marathon in October 2024 (yes, this year). The idea of ‘running’ ( I say running a bit tongue in cheek because it will be a mix of running, jogging, walking and crawling) but the time between now and October will be filled with training runs, resistance training, eating well (I hope) and reading and resting and family time. All these things will involve a mix of people, some encouraging and some probably somewhat dispiriting. The point, for me, having this as a goal is I want some of the changes I will need to make to become habitual and stick.

For me this is the important bit of a goal. As I will need to develop a standard for this process and to be successful I will need to keep to this standard. My standard will be things I need to do every day for a step by step change to be ready for October. I have a running plan worked out, including time to do resistance training and Yoga. I have roped in some accountability buddies and exercise pals to keep me going. Some of these are in person and some is just a check in to say I am doing the workout. Each week I will set a meal plan for the week. I am sure I will have little hiccups along the way but the main thing I will be trying to do is avoid injury. If I prepare, train, sleep and eat adequately I will have done what I can to keep myself in good working order and to thrive on the event itself.

Now this is where the improvement is happening!