Unlocking Wellness The Essential Role of Walking and Balance Exercises

In this episode, we dive into the importance of daily movement and balance exercises for improving overall health. Building on previous discussions about New Year's resolutions and omega-3 benefits, we emphasize the need to incorporate a 30-minute walk into your daily routine. Walking helps nourish spinal discs and combat the negative effects of prolonged sitting. For those with joint pain, alternatives like walking in a pool or using a recumbent stationary bike are recommended. Additionally, balancing exercises are discussed to prevent loss of proprioception and enhance core strength, which are crucial as we age. Join us to learn practical tips for incorporating these essential activities into your life for improved wellness.

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Transcript

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Hello, Dr. Brant Hulsebus here, and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask the Chiropractor is my little podcast that I do when someone has a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, I try to answer. I'm a chiropractor here in Rockford, Illinois. I'm a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic, and I'm happy to be the team chiropractor of the Rockford Icehogs. Let's dive into it. Hi, thanks for tuning in. So two weeks ago I did one on the New Year's resolutions. People said they got into that. There was some of the topics they wanted to know more information on. So I wanted to dive into these different topics. I'll give them each one of their own little episodes and they talk more about them. Last week I talked about omega 3s and fish oils and the benefit of it and when I was recording it I made the comment that if a patient asked me what's one thing I can do. I realized, one thing I can do to make myself better, excuse me, I realized that I gave the wrong answer. I told them that for a supplement take a omega 3 fish oil, but if you want to do one thing in truth this new year that you're going to make yourself a healthier better person than you were last year, taking fish oil is a great choice, but the easiest thing to do and the number one thing you should do is move. Get up every day and do at least a 30 minute walk every day. Just go for that. If you're the, we are, eugenically speaking, we are hunters and gatherers, we heal and we improve on the go. An example of this. Your back is made up of discs. Everyone's heard about disc protrusions, disc herniations, spinal stenosis from a disc. All these things they talk about discs with a scary one, the agenda of disc disease, which is just discs dehydrated. It's not really a disease. But if you're worried about the overall health of your disc, you need to understand your discs have no direct blood supply. Your discs only get nutrients in and toxins out when you walk. When you walk, the muscles contract, they push the good stuff in, they pull the bad stuff out. By going for a 30 minute walk every day, you flush out the majority of your spine. Now, when I say a 30 minute walk, that's exactly what I mean. I don't mean be on your feet for 30 minutes, I mean go for a 30 minute walk. Leave, go outside, walk 15 minutes in one direction, then come back. A solid, straight, continuous 30 minute walk a day. That is what our bodies need in order to flush the joints and the spine out, help the disc get better, help your overall health. We learn more and more that people who sit all day behind a desk, they're the ones getting the arthritis, they're the ones getting degeneration, they're the ones whose spine's running out, they're developing horrible posture. So you have to do the opposite of sitting all day and that would be going for a walk. So going for a walk every day for a minimum of 30 minutes is almost essential. It's essential as drinking water in my opinion. You got to get up and move. If you don't get up and move, you're cutting your life shorter. Now, I said 30 minutes a day. Does that mean that's all you need? No. I mean if you can go a whole exercise hour, and that's amazing. If you can get two hours of walking, and that's even better. But you should have a minimum standard, and that should be 30 minutes. Now some of you are listening to this or watching this, and say, hey listen, my knees are shot, my ankles are shot, my hips are shot. I can't go 30 minutes. That's fine. Go for as long as you can. Let's say it's 12 minutes. Start going for 12 minutes every day. Then after a week, then try to go for 14, then try to go for 16. But sitting in your chair, telling us that it hurts to walk so you're not even going to try, you're only going to be able to go shorter and shorter. You're not going to get better by not trying. And if you want some other things that you can do that mimic walking that aren't walking, because your hips, your knees, and your ankles hurt, and 12 minutes of walking, then I recommend a couple of things. One, get a membership at a gym and go walk in a pool. It's the action of walking that makes this happen. Yeah, the more gravity, the better it is. But just moving the muscles is the key. So if you get into a gym, and you go into a pool, and you walk around the pool, you have less gravity, but your muscles are still doing the actions. Okay, maybe if you're in the pool, you don't go for 30 minutes, you go for longer because you have less gravity, but you get that action in. Another thing you can do if you don't want to get into a swimsuit and join a place with a pool, get a recumbent stationary bike. Now what's that? That's this recumbent bicycle with a chair where your feet are out in front of you, and you pedal your feet while you're sitting down. That mimics the action of walking. Now, do I need you to go super fast? Absolutely not. I need you to go at a walking pace. Just sit down and go through the action. You see a lot of these now, like commercials those, buy it now on online TV commercials, where they tell you it's just like a little thing that sits on the floor and you pedal your feet. Now, I don't know if those are any good or not. In my opinion, I think it'd be sliding around all the time and moving all the time, unless you did some permanent to your floor to anchor it down. I don't know. I've never tried one. I just get up and walk every day. Going for a walk is just essential. We're finding out more and more of this getting up and moving is so vitally important. When was the last time you noticed someone had a hip surgery or knee surgery? When I started practice, if you had those surgeries, you had to go to an assisted living for a couple of days while you healed and recovered. Now they get you up walking around within a half an hour after you wake up after the surgery? Because even they have figured out that walking is so vital and so important, to move is so important. Laying still and idle, you're not going to get better, you're not going to get healthier, you're not going to get stronger. You're only going to continue to weaken and have worse problems. So there you have it. What do I recommend everyone do? I recommend you get up and go for a walk. Now, I know, like I said, a lot of you this is going to be a challenge. This, that's going to be hard, but you got to start somewhere and you got to start doing it because if you're not doing it, if you're coming up with excuses for not doing it, like I said, maybe you could walk only 10 minutes today, but if you say I can't do 30, so I'm not even going to try, we're going to be in six months from now. It's going to be eight minutes. All right. The other area I want you to work on moving besides going for a walk is I want you to work on your balance. Whenever you see someone near the end of their life, or after they've had a major health care scare, they've lost their ability to have balance. What do I mean by that? They watch your feet when they walk. When they go to sit down, they look left and right and they take their time. They have no idea their balance is shot and their place in space, like where their feet are. Position where they are is totally shot and we call that proprioception, they lose that. And so if you don't want to lose that, you want to slow that down, you got to work on your proprioception and your balance or stabilization. Use any word you want to. And the easiest way to do that is to stand on one foot for 30 seconds. Final corner, put your forearms up and go into the corner, lift your leg up, have your arms right there to catch against the wall in case your foot's slow, getting back down, and try to go for 30 seconds per foot. What if you can only do 10? Do 10. Tomorrow, try 10 again, and then try for 12. Then try, do that three or four times and try for 14. Balance is something that we can lose, but we can get it back if we work on it. And working on this is very important. For those of you a little bit more advanced, you want to do better at this, get a basu ball or a wobble board and try to do a push up on that or stand on that and try to keep your balance. I have a lot of my teenage athletes that come in here, stand on that and throw a ball against the wall and try to play catch while they're on the wobble board or the basu ball trying to keep their balance and their equilibrium at the same time. That's going to develop an extremely strong core muscles. Your core muscles don't move voluntarily. What do I mean by that? Like right now, anybody here can raise their left arm no problem because your left arm has this thing called globally tendon organs, G-O-G-L-I, tendon organs, GTOs is what we abbreviate a mass, and you can tell a GTO to move, it'll move. Your spinal muscles don't normally have those, so they're different under a microscope when you look at them. They don't have them, but they have a thousand times more neural connections, because their job is always to keep your eyes level with the horizon no matter what. This is why when you get a cell vexation in your spine, The subluxation will change your posture, how you sit, and we always find a secondary subluxation to balance you back out. We rarely ever find anybody with one spot, almost everyone's two, three, or four spots, just for the simple action of the writing reflex. It's so important to keep your head level. So with that being said, you want to make your spinal muscles very strong. And so I see a lot of people trying to do stretches in their hips and their shoulders, and that's great stuff too, that has a lot to do with your posture. But in reality, you really got to focus on doing some stabilization exercises. And like I said, just trying to stand on something on, on, out of whack, out of balance, makes it really challenging. Some people will even try to stand on a pillow to make it a little more challenging. If you want to try to challenge yourself, if you're getting good at it, like I said, try to do exercises on it, try to bounce a ball off the wall while you're standing on it. Try to do push ups on it, try to do planks on it, and then if you're getting really good at it, stand in a pillow with one one leg up, one leg down, or try to balance yourself on one leg and close your eyes. That's really tough. Some of the strongest hockey players I've ever seen, they've been at, they have unbelievable proprioceptive muscles. They don't look like the biggest guys in the world, but you can't knock them over because they're their proprioception area is so strong. So there you have it. Somebody asked me about moving and exercise. That's what I advise. I really think it's important to do that. So work on those walking 30 minutes a day, and then try to do a couple of little balance exercises and see where you can go with that. All right, I hope I answered your question. Remember if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, there's only one person qualified to answer that question and that would be a chiropractor. They don't study chiropractic in dental school, optometry school, or medical school. Only chiropractors study chiropractic. So go ahead and leave a comment below or a post below and I'll get back to you. Thank you.