6 FREE WORKOUTS FOR YOU TO DO OVER XMAS!

Back in days of yore in I think my 2nd attempt to get this blog up and running I did a series of free workouts.

They were designed to be completed at home with no equipment as well as being extremely time efficient.

This makes them perfect for the holiday break!!

Below are links to each workout that you are free to use before you finally come to realisation that nothing compares to the real stuff and you decide to make health and fitness a priority for 2017.

In the meantime get started with these simple workouts;

Workout #1 - http://fcfpt.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/free-home-workout.html

Workout #2 - http://fcfpt.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/here-it-is-free-home-workout-2.html

Woekout #3 - http://fcfpt.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/full-circle-fitness-home-workout-3.html

Workout #4 - http://fcfpt.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/full-circle-fitness-hoe-workout-4.html

Workout #5 - http://fcfpt.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/full-circle-fitness-home-workout-5.html

Workout #6 - http://fcfpt.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/full-circle-fitness-home-workout-6.html

No excuses in 2017!!

12 Tips to Tune Your Nervous System (article)

As you have probably gathered from my previous posts, I'm all for fine tuning your nervous system and this article from Anthony Mychal gives 12 tips to do this.

It's written from a physical performance output point of view but it holds true whether you're main focus is competitive sport, casual training or even just to perform at work at the highest level you can.

Some of these I've touched on before in various details and some I haven't so please give the original article read here but my biggest takeaways are:

- Enhancing performance is about balancing stress and recovery.

- The autonomic nervous system has 2 main branches with the sympathetic division which "excites"  (fight or flight response) and the parasympathetic that "inhibits" (rest and digest).

- You need to know when to excite and when to inhibit but most people stay "on' even when you don't need to be so you're going to run out of gas even though you're not physically expending any energy.

- Understanding the balance between the 2 sub-systems is is critical for optimal function

- A bad day energy wise is fine, it's simply you're body telling you "I'm just not up to it today and I can't really handle much stress today' so you HAVE to adjust what you'll spend your spoons on at work, at home and at play.

- A big event, physical or mental, requires big recovery so whether you have a huge presentation you just finished or a triathlon competition run on the weekend, make sure you plug in some recovery to get you back to a parasympathetic state.

- Don't hop from diet to diet, training program to training program and try and get a routine of some form. Every decision we make induces some form of stress and without a routine, even deciding what shoe to put on first creates minute stress. I am full of routines for the most part making decision making as little part of my life as I can. My morning ritual is fully ingrained in my brain because when the alarm goes off at 5:10am every bloody morning, the last thing I want to do is make 10 decisions before I even get to work!

- The easier you can kick your parasympathetic nervous system in and relax, the better you'll recover from any stress event meaning you can perform them more frequently. Yes you can induce high levels of stress which is how we adapt to workload but you need to be able to handle that stress and get rid of as well to get the balance mentioned above. Turning off is just as important as turning yourself on. If you need to turn on semi-regularly for sport or work then you if you stay turned on then you don't have another level to go to, and stress overtakes the body and you get sore, tired and sick. You HAVE to learn ways to disengage from reality and taking work and emails home with you isn't the way to do it. You hear of athletes sitting at home playing video games and gambling - this is what they're doing, just not in the best way they could be! I watch Friends and eat.

- Being able to nap is a GOOD thing and there's no medals for who can get up the earliest, do the most work, and stay up the latest. If you're struggling to sleep then you're in for a host of issues, GUARANTEED! I'd nap 2 - 3 times a week during the day and I want to nap right now before a school pick up but I gotta get this done!

- Train hard, recover harder! High intensity activities are great to do but again you need to make sure you are recovering even harder so that can manage the fatigue from them throughout the other parts of your life (work, family etc). Doing more bootcamps and group classes, both that have a ridiculously high emphasise of building fatigue (and not much else), is not the best idea.

- Reconsider your schedule and try and pace high stress events as evenly as you possibly can taking into account work, family and other outside interests. Trying to squeeze your weekly training into 2 days might not be a great idea with a 20 hour plane trip the next day!

- Celebrate special occasions especially after times of high stress as this can actually provide you some "closure" or a 'brain dump" of sorts that can 'officially" end the event and you can move forward rather then talking about it for weeks after it, what could I have done better etc. It's done - move on.

- Don't change all the time as new stimulus provides new stresser and when a stresser is new, it induces far more stress then after you've done it 5 times. Remember that great idea you had to start running again? That run around the block almost killed you but now you can do 5 laps before work. That's what new versus old stress looks like.

- It always comes back to breathing with me doesn't it! Learning how to breath correctly can control your heart rate and circulate oxygen around the body which will keep you in a parasympathetic state for longer assisting with all the things I just said above. And also if you don't breath, you die! A bit dramatic but you get the idea...

Your Hips Don't Go Out of Place (article)

This article came across my desk last week and I immediately knew it was the subject of this week's blog post.

The takeaways:

 - Health professionals, or even friends for that matter, who tell you that you;re back is out (out of what?) are contributing to your problem because if you hear something enough, then you'll start to believe it. Health professionals are not great at the language they use and will often diagnose issues you didn't even know you had but now all of a sudden that issue is now holding you back from doing certain movement and modes of exercise - even though you were doing them with no issue just last week!

 - What something "feels" like and what is actually happening are 2 completely different things. Frequent readers of this blog will now be aware that pain isn't what we all think it is and that we can have pain and no injury as well as injury and no pain - 2 completely different things.

 - Treatment professionals (chiro's, physio's etc)  are often sought out to treat these types of ailments but what are they treating? There's often no injury and you're back can't be "out" or you'd be in diabolical pain.

- The treatment can "work" as it's providing different and hopefully, positive input to your brain that can then send out different messages to the body that aren't pain signals reacting to a perceived threat.

- When episodes like this occur then you'll also tend to determine what was the cause and this leads to a fear avoidance of movement so you don't throw your hip out again. This can shift stress to a certain set of muscles or overload a certain movement and then you can have an actual problem of overuse and potential joint/muscle breakdown.

- If heading off to your treatment person for a mild adjustment is enough force to put your hip 'back in" then that implies that it's takes next to nothing to put it 'out" in the first place. This makes buying into strength training, that will actually help you a great deal, next to impossible

- Your body is made up of resilient structures  and it actually takes over 1000 pounds of force to deform fascia by even 1%...but that's light hands on treatment put your entire back into place...

- Treatments technique can decrease pain but not from anything physical but more psychologically. You believe that the treatment has put your back in, everything is well in the world, your mood improves and pain is reduced as the body has responded to your less stressful state and down regulated whatever threat it perceived prior to the treatment.

- If you believe strongly in a treatment type then it's probably doing whatever issues have good, but not for the reasons you think. If you an believe in something a lot cheaper, then you could save yourself a lot of money! In the end though the treatment does something that your brain likes and thus has a positive influence on your result but just remember it's often not changing anything physically.

- Once you are "aligned' then it's important to promote threat-free movement and loading as soon as you can to "cement" this position or state, a position/state that your body loves and perceives as safe.

I follow these types of pain management strategies in the studio all the while on my never ending crusade of pain education and stress management so if you need a hand with this type of thing then definitely get in contact with me.

You can read this article in full here.

If Breathing is so Easy, Then Why Can't You Do It Properly?

You might recall the "Stress = Pain = Stress" blog series from the middle of the year, a 10 part-er looking how stress, pain and breathing all relate to each other.

In a nutshell here's how it works:

1 - Our working/busy culture of today pushes out bodies and minds to the limits

2 - Over time all these what seem like small stress events accumulate fatigue and the body needs to down regulate energy expenditure as it's in a state of threat. Think buying up cans of food in the event of Armageddon. This down regulation of energy expenditure mostly presents itself in 2 ways.

3 - The brain perceives your current fatigued position as a threat and needs to decrease energy output so it decreases ranges of motion at the hips and shoulders as a decrease in range of motion means less calorie expenditure.

4 - The brain also moves to a sympathetic (fight) state which alters your breathing patterns. Instead of inhaling and exhaling full breathes through the diaphragm like you do in a parasympathetic (rest) state, you shift to taking shorter, harder breathes through your neck, shoulders and back.

5 - The vital part here is that diaphragmatic breathes circulates great volumes of oxygen all throughout the body where shoulder/neck breathing barely circulates any of that breathe at all, let alone oxygen. You're basically taking a small amount of air in and and pushing that same air back out again, taking no oxygen in whatsoever.

6 - When you're body tips "over the edge", those the niggling little aches and pains you normally don't feel, come with a rush and you are at a greater risk of injury as the body's defense system is "down". That nagging knee and back pain you have for no reason? That's not an injury, it;s a stress response for the body to slow you down and as above, decrease energy expenditure.

During the week I has a young lady come in for her first Be Activated treatment with me. She'd had a small taste from a friend before but never the full treatment.

The full treatment takes about 40mins and various activation points, in sequence, all over the body.

The aim of the treatment is make the body initiate everything, breathing and movement specifically from the inside out, not the outside in.

First up we activate zone 1 which is the diaphragm, psoas and glutes - the 3 most important muscles of the body.

When you are ins sympathetic state, these muscles can shut down and then other muscles take over - muscles not equipped to do their job and that is what leads to overuse and breakdown of muscles and joints.

So 5mins into the session this is what her breathing stated at and shifted to:


Notice how the diaphragm/belly area uses the muscle to release to increase her inhalation - she has pretty much tripled her oxygen intake in 5mins!

I also came across this image today also showing the importance of breathing;

And the link between cancer and lack of oxygen have been around for 80 years.

If you want to improve your breathing then a Be Activated treatment is just what you need so contact me to make a booking.