Colorado Springs Functional Medicine

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Maximize Recovery…Reassess These

The point of exercise and training is to break the body down.  Your workout is actually doing damage.  This damage is essential and intelligent to you getting stronger, faster, quicker, and more efficient.  The only way the body gets better is through challenges. 

The problem is that many think it’s the workout that creates the magic.  The actuality is that it’s the recovery that is key.  Most people might workout 30 minutes.  That leaves 23 1/2 hours to recover.

Reassess these 3 common practices that put a damper on your recovery and ultimately your performance.

caffeineCaffeine

Many consume coffee pre-workout to boost their performance.  It’s essentially a performance enhancing drug.  There’s no denying that coffee boosts energy.  Just ask the 54% of Americans over the age of 18 who consume coffee daily.   It’s also no mystery that kids consume caffeinated beverages like energy drinks and such, which would drastically raise that 54%, if you included the entire population.

The problem is that this habit may boost short term performance at the expense of longevity, injury prevention, and recovery.  If you ever have lab work, usually there is a panel that lists out the type of white blood cells.  You will see these as neutrophils, lymphocytes, monocytes, eosinophils, and basophils.

Monocytes are cells that clean up inflammatory damage as well as debris from destroyed microorganisms.  They differentiate into macrophages and play a huge role in tissue repair whether you are injured, you are sick, or you have been training hard.  Without monocytes, muscles would not be able to heal after training or injury.

Cortisol and adrenaline (hormones released during times of stress, which can be physical, chemical, or emotional) lower macrophage activity and count.  In essence stress lowers your immune system.  Your immune system stimulates inflammation.  Caffeine is a direct hit to the adrenals, causing release of cortisol and adrenaline, lowering your healing inflammatory response triggered by your immune system.

Think about this way.  If you’re running from a bear, it would not be efficient if you had to stop to cough, sneeze, or dig a hole and pop a squat because you’re fighting the flu.  It also wouldn’t be conducive to your survival if you rolled your ankle and it ballooned up and caused you to be immobile.  Ever get injured during the heat of competition but not realize it until it was all over?  That’s the cortisol and adrenaline kicking in to keep you surviving.  Caffeine is a stress on the body.

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Chiropractic Kids

So far my wife and I have 3 boys.  In the picture below, the oldest is 4, the next is 2, and the youngest 8 months.  Being the kids of a chiropractor, they are going to be raised a little different that most American kids.  Face it, chiropractors are weird.  I understand they are going to be outliers and that I’ll face the “so and so is doing this, why can’t I” battles later in life over the health type decisions my wife and I will make.  

Pediatric Chiropractor

One of those parental decisions that make our children outliers is that they get checked and adjusted regularly.  So far, both were checked and adjusted minutes after birth.  Once mom had some initial bonding, she handed the child to me to check him out.  If you think labor and delivery is hard on mom, imagine leaving paradise forcefully (the womb) and havings your head shoved through a much smaller space, to be welcomed into a cold world naked, where everyone makes funny sounds and goofy faces.  This might be where the fear of clowns start for many.

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The World Will Never Need Chiropractic

I’m sure my colleagues are ready to jump down my throat with that title.  It’s true, the world will never need chiropractic…but the world cannot exist without health.  With that said, chiropractic is a vital component to helping people experience health.  I say that being a chiropractor so you can take that as me being biased or not.  I get adjusted regularly, I have checked my boys since birth, and my would tell you it’s a huge factor in her health success.

If you have been in the chiropractic world as a practitioner or as a patient, you will see the drastic approaches to our profession.  I personally subscribe to the notion that chiropractic is a piece of a healthy lifestyle.  I get adjusted regularly but I also follow my own Fit, Fuel, feel principles of a healthy lifestyle.

This is why I have coined what I do as ‘Functional Chiropractic.’  The body is a self-healing, self-regulating organism.  Those capabilities are organized and coordinated through your nervous system.  If there is an interference in the nervous system, then the self-healing, self-regulating capabilities diminish.  You can assess and affect the nervous system through many realms, movement patterns, eating patterns, and thought/attitude patterns.

These can be examined through lab work, through history and listening, and through a physical exam with my personal favorites, Heart Rate Variability (HRV), EMG, and thermography.  What can your heart, muscles, and skin tell you about the function of your nervous system?  Many, many things.   You cannot affect one system without affecting all of them.  Like I said, every system is affected by how the nervous system is being coordinated and organized, not just the spine, and not just the spine on x-rays.

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