
The new year is a time for setting goals and adopting healthy resolutions. Here are 6 healthy habits you should be striving for:
1. Hydrate
America is the number one fatigued nation in the world. We’re all under-hydrated, typically. A good rule of thumb is to figure out your body weight in pounds and divide it by two. That is how many ounces of water you should be trying to drink a day.
Hydration is key to physiology, how we feel, and how we function. Tissue that’s hydrated functions a lot better than dehydrated tissue.
2. Keep Moving
Motion is lotion. We should be trying to move at least 20 minutes a day, every day. It should be continuous movement, so that can be anything from just going for a walk to some big exercise.
You can start a new exercise routine with really basic stuff you can do anywhere. Then you want to get that habit rolling and then build around that habit.
Pick some really basic exercises and pick a number that you’re going to do once a day, every day. I’m going to do 10 air squats, I’m going to do 10 push-ups, I’m going to do 10 crunches, I’m going to do 10 banded seated rows. I’m going to do that before I get in the shower every morning. Then build that habit and then increase the reps to 20.
Then next thing you know, you are going to go walk for a mile as well as doing the basic exercises.
Start small, start simple. You don’t need to run a marathon on day one. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Just pick some really foundational stuff that’s going to benefit you. Again, walking a mile, some squats, some lunges, some push-ups, things of that nature. Start with a low number, pick a target, follow through on it. Then obviously as you build that habit, just ramp up how much you do, reps and time and distance.
3. Maintain Good Posture
Think about your posture. Sitting in flexion creates a massive amount stress and tension in the spine. Flexion is your chin being down your chest when you’re looking at your phone. That’s going to pull your head forwards, straightening your neck out, which is going to drive symptomology over time in the neck, the head, and the upper back. The same in your lower back. When we’re leaning forward, same thing. It strains the spine out and increases stress and tension in the spine.
Posture is a window to your health. Focus on some postural improvements that have basic spinal mobility throughout the week. Do exercises that are going to engage those postural muscles. Use your sit-stand desk at work, take some posture breaks during your workday and really manage your posture. If you’ve got good posture you’re going to feel and function a lot better than someone who’s in poor posture.
4. Manage Stress
We practice in downtown Chicago and our patient base is the corporate athlete. Let’s focus on the micro-stress that comes from corporate America as being sedentary.
There are a couple of things we can do. Get a sit-stand desk. A good rule of thumb is to start with sitting for 20 to 30 minutes, then standing for 30 to 40 minutes. That desk is moving up, down, up, down, up, down all day. That’s going to provide some variance in your posture. Regardless of how good your posture is, one posture held for too long is not good.
Next is to take some postural breaks during your workday. Muscles that control posture are intrinsic. They pick up on movement. If we’re not moving, they get weak and lazy. Let’s focus on those muscles. Do some chin tucks where we’re drawing the chin back into the neck. It’s going to engage the neck and help keep your neck back. Do some exercises against the wall to engage muscles that sit between our shoulder blades to keep shoulder blades back. This is going to allow us to maintain good posture or improve posture depending on where you’re at.
5. Eat Healthy
View your metabolism as a fire. You throw a ton of logs on the fire, and it’s going to burn really bright, then it’s going to die down and it’s not going to be a big fire because you’ve used all the firewood.
Instead of having three big meals, try and eat every two to three hours, smaller portions. Essentially, you’re eating less in one sitting, but you’re eating more throughout the day. Obviously, by doing that you’re going to keep that kind of fire just burning steady throughout the day instead of having these big fires that kind of blow up then die down.
So just eat little and often steadily throughout the day. Shorten up your meal sizes for breakfast, lunch, dinner. Then obviously eat some snacks between breakfast, lunch and dinner, just to keep that metabolism going. I find that’s really effective.
6. Visit a Chiropractor
Our job as chiropractic physicians is to take care of the patient’s needs, whatever that is. Also, we educate our patients on healthy habits such as how to eat well, think well, and move well. Chiropractors are holistic in our approach. Holistic healthcare is educating our patients on how to eat properly and then obviously how to optimize your stress in the workplace.
Make it known to your chiropractor that the focus for them should be to educate you on ways to be healthy. Your chiropractor can suggest healthy ways to fuel your body and stay hydrated to keep our tissue hydrated. They can explain how to sit-stand at work, explain what you should be doing during a workday to maintain good posture such as taking postural breaks. They can also advise on things we can do to manage emotional stress. These are the sorts of things that should be discussed through a patient journey with a chiropractor.
A typical chiropractic visit in our office starts with you coming in, sitting down with the chiropractor and then doing a really detailed health history consultation to figure out what’s going on and why. After that we put some goals in place. Next, we conduct a very detailed orthopedic, neurological exam, and then take some X-rays so you can see the spine and its structure. Then take those clinical findings and your goals and create a treatment plan that fits your case.