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| Transcript Chicago, USA August 2-4, 2007 |
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The Stoxen Approach to Re-establishing the bodies Elastic Recoil Mechanisms through Therapeutic Exercises
15th Annual World Congress of Anti-Aging Medicine Regenerative Biomedical Technologies
August 2-4, 2007
Chicago, USA
By Dr. James Stoxen DC
Team Doctors
Treatment and Training Center of Champions
6432 S Pulaski, Chicago Il 60629
To contact Dr James Stoxen DC
teamdoctors@aol.com
(773) 735-5200
You’ve been telling me about all the celebrities you deal with. James has access to a lot of celebrities and bands. He owns and operates Team Doctors, Training and Rehabilitation Center.
He provides anti aging consultation and cared for numerous top celebrity entertainers. James’ topic today is “Elastic Recoil Mechanisms -How Footwear Accelerates the Aging Process”.
Thank you.
I’m kind of shy so I hope you can bear with me. I’m going to keep this short because I have a boxing match to go to so and won’t keep you very long. In fact, this is a videotape of a fight that was occurring last year in which this gentleman suffered from an Achilles tendon tear. In fact, a complete Achilles tendon tear, which is normally a career ending injury. In fact, with these techniques that we use, we rebuilt him over the last 5 years to become the Champion of the World. In fact, tonight in about 3 hours he’s fighting Eric Morales for the Lightweight Title. It’s just down the street about a mile at the State Arena.
What we can learn from athletes is a lot of very valuable information for anti-aging medicine to keep our patients healthy and active because that’s what’s important in our practices. We are not practicing disease-based medicine anymore since anti-aging medicine and disease-based medicine are completely different.
In the area of orthopedics as a mater of fact, we talk about regional care. Regional care is if the pain is a backache, we’re going to treat the back. We’re going to x-ray and ultrasound the back, get an MRI of the back; we’re going to do surgery of the back, give medication and hopefully it reaches the back.
However, in my practice, we use more of a kinematic chain type of care. This means that we’re training the entire structure of the body to make the patient more active. This runs more along the lines of sports medicine care and performance-based treatment, because we’re trying to increase the performance of our patient so they may have better cardiovascular output and get involved in activities. What good is it if we increase the age of our client if we don’t allow them to do things in their later years?
In this lecture you’re going to hear a different kind of angle, which is going to be more about how to bring more efficiency to the body and increase the elasticity through Elastic Recoil Mechanisms. Understanding how they work is going to give you a great insight of how to increase the elasticity of your patients.
In my practice, we employ these techniques: We are finding that patients who are coming home at 8 and 9 in the evening are completely exhausted from an average day and are sitting on the couch or they want to go to bed. Then of course, they lay in bed; they have insomnia and can’t fall asleep because their brain is functioning fine, but their body is just exhausted. What we’re finding is that by restoring these elastic recoil mechanisms, we can add energy to their body within 2 to 3 weeks and at 11 and 12:00 at night they're ready to go dancing. As a result, this is a very valuable tool that you can employ in your practice on Monday to improve the health and well being of your patients.
Therefore, what we’re looking for here is to improve efficiency through these elastic recoil mechanisms. On top of that, when the body is vexed, the body movement is no longer the same. It is no longer biomechanically sound and as a result we have wear and tear and accelerated inflammation from these abnormal biomechanic mechanisms. Thus, as a result of a poor diet, as the doctors talked about Metabolic Syndrome X and as a mater of fact, if 65% of the adult population is overweight or obese, then we have extra load on the frame that vexes the elastic recoil mechanisms on top of this poor diet. Therefore, we have two forms of very damaging inflammation coming from multiple joint arthritis, as well as the inflammation that is coming from a poor diet. It creates a toxic soup for the patient. It is very damaging to the body and creates a very quick acceleration of the aging process.
This graph right here is a graph that I designed about 10 years ago for my anti-aging and prevention practice. This graph explains to the patient my anti-aging approach. This is not disease-based medicine. We do not treat you until the pain goes away – that’s the old way of treating patients. We’re going to do it differently now because we’re anti-aging doctors and we’re concerned about their level of performance and how their life is going to be outside of just pain relief.
In fact, in this first box we see the red frame, which is the area of inflammation that they can feel – that’s painful inflammation. That means that levels of inflammation of their body are high enough that they can actually feel frank pain. This is the area where they come to see you. I have pain in my foot, my back hurts, my knee has been chronically hurting, I have headaches and whatever they have orthopedically. Then you say, “Well we’re going to embark upon this treatment program.” But in fact, the second phase is when they decide that they are healthy. The absence of pain is good health. Of course! I don’t feel any pain and then tomorrow we drop dead of a heart attack.
The second phase as we’ve mentioned is called the ‘Silent Aging Process’, which means that inflammation is in the body–still toxic reaction to the cells. The patient is unaware of the damaging effects of the inflammation because as disease-based medicine doctors, we did not educate the patient on the damaging effects of this inflammation, both dietary as well as arthritic. The patient just goes along thinking everything is okay.
As a result, if we measure the level of inflammation on the outset of the first visit and determine that level, we say, “This is a safe level. We’re going to focus more on this diagnostic test rather than how you feel.” Then I think we’re going to have better luck bringing them from the pain stage into a stage where we can bring them into an anti-aging lifestyle based on the levels of inflammation.
Once we retest them where we feel have sufficient amount of reduction of the abnormal wear and tear of the movement pattern as well as have them on an anti-aging diet, then we retest them at the beginning of approximately the 8th week. That is what we usually do. At that point, we hope they enter the green phase, which is in fact where they are having an anti-aging lifestyle; then they can go. They can do what they want to do without abnormal stress and strain and wear and tear on the body. Because if you have abnormal wear and tear as a result of a reduction in the elastic recoil mechanism or abnormal biomechanics, every step that you take that is supposed to improve your cardiovascular condition is actually aging the body further or accelerating the aging process.
Exercises that we are doing to try to reduce aging are in fact aging us faster. Thus people get frustrated and they just quit. As a matter of fact, 21 million people start an exercise program and decide to embark upon a running program and within one year, 16 million of them have an injury, which takes them out of running. Thus, your patients have a 70% chance that if they embark upon a very nice cardiovascular running program that they are actually going to be in pain rather than healthier after one year.
When we look at elastic recoil mechanisms and body biomechanics, we are actually looking at the way the central nervous system controls the body. In fact, in this particular picture, we see a young lady who is on a balance beam. She is doing a routine, which she couldn’t do 10 years ago. However, as a result of practice, practice and practice, and engraining these nervous system patterns into her brain that control her body movements, then she could perform these activities that we can only dream of. In fact, in this video, I noticed that she did some spring movements and flips and those kinds of movements demand elasticity of the body, which makes the body efficient.
So, when you are training an athlete like we actually do in our office – (I don’t know what you do in your office)– but in our office, we actually train athletes for competitions.
It is a doctor’s office and we have a training center since 1991. I am very proud of the fact that many world champions have come from this training center. We have noted that we are looking at training the nervous system. We’re not training the muscles and the joints. We’re training the nervous system. In fact, if you understand how the system works, it works based on patterns. These patterns are called engrams or neuro networks. You have positive engrams and you have negative engrams.
Positive engrams are those nervous systems that actually develop a movement pattern that is healthy in the body. It improves the bone density, muscle strength, coordination, agility and those desirable effects that we’re seeking in training; and the negative engrams of those movements of walking or running that are negative or create damaging effects on the body. Those are the movements that are creating inflammation and accelerating the aging process.
Like I said before, not all of them cause pain. Movement patterns are divided into generalized and specific. Generalized movement patterns are those that we’re born with and then develop them in childhood. The way we walk.
I remember my father, who is in the audience today, evaluated children at the Shriner’s Hospital for crippled children. Mothers would bring their children to our office and my father would observe them walk. The parents were very concerned about their children’s walking pattern. They noticed if they had a little toe-in or they had a little difficulty when they were walking. These patterns were developed in childhood. My father would recommend they either A) Needed to go to Shriner's, or B) They just have to practice walking differently.
In fact, when we tell a patient or we can tell that a child is walking differently, those are called specific movement patterns. For instance, if you have a poor golf spring and you are having a poor round of golf, you see a professional. They look at your pattern of movement through the golf swing and make recommendations to change the movement patterns so you can have an improved golf swing. There is no difference in walking or running.
We have to evaluate these walking mechanical patterns in our office. If we’re practicing true anti-aging medicine where we are actually integrating all aspects of anti-aging and perfection, we have to look at the way people walk because 10, 000 steps a day are a lot of steps to create abnormal movement patterns. It is not difficult. All we have to do is put them in an office in a long hall. As a matter of fact, here’s a patient in my office in a long hall. As you can see in this video, we’re just walking down the hall. I've become astute in determining where the stress points are in patients’ bodies by just observing them walk.
Maybe you are not really feeling like you can do it at this point because you haven’t done it. However, you can watch your friend’s golf swing and you can see that they’re not a good golfer. You can watch your son play football and notice some differences in the way he throws the ball or the way he runs and you can make corrections. You can do the same thing in your office on Monday. When you start and as you learn, you become better. Very soon you can watch a patient walk and they don’t even have to complete the forms on the history exam sheet. You can determine what’s wrong with them by observing them walk.
In fact, it is very shocking for a patient to put down that they have back pain and I say “Why didn’t you tell me about the knee pain on the left because I know you have it.” They look at me like I’m from outer space because they do have knee pain on the left. “Why didn’t you tell me about the chronic fatigue syndrome you’re suffering from? You didn’t mark that on the sheet. Because I notice this because of the labor’s pattern that you have.”
In fact, if you are interested in becoming a student in biomechanics and becoming a better-rounded anti-aging doctor, this is a very simple thing that you can do in your office. When does aging start? Aging started for those children when they walked in to be evaluated by my father and me. They were 5 and 6 years old. Aging of the frame occurs at all ages.
Here we have this example of where we can look at the body from a more advanced method, which is really sometimes necessary if you’re doing clinical research. However in your own office, it is absolutely not necessary. You don’t need fancy equipment to do research on the body because you just need your eyes and knowledge. Now, we’re going to look at the way athletes run and in fact, sometimes aging and injuries can occur in obvious ways that is in this slide here. But sometimes aging can occur in other subtle ways that not familiar to us.
Aging occurs without pain. We talk about that because aging occurs in inflammation. Inflammation does not have to be painful; we talked about that. It’s silent inflammation; it’s a silent killer. It attacks our cells and causes damage to our arterial system and we don’t even know about it. When you look at the body to determine where these abnormal biomechanics are originating, you want to look at it as an engineer would.
Why don’t doctors look at the body like engineers? Engineers are the ones that are the most astute in looking at structures and how they move: bioengineering and biomechanics. We look at the most important area of the body, which is the foundation. Foundation is the foot and ankle area. Why should we look at the foundation? Because ankle sprains are the number one injuries in sports, you can bet that all of your patients have had some sort of ankle sprain or damage to the foot.
Why is another reason: 65% of the American population is overweight or obese. That added weight on their frame, as well as a lack of exercise will cause damage to the foot and ankle and arches. The architecture of the arch is critical to the formation of all activities including simple walking.
Therefore, today we’re going to talk about how we can change that. Here is the area of the foot that I’m going to look at with you. We’re going to do a simple, 2-second review anatomy of the foot. As you can see from the left slide, that’s the connective tissue. The muscles and tendons surround the connective tissue. This is a word that I coined in 2002, which is called the “supinator/pronator cuff”. It’s like the rotator cuff. However it’s a cuff of muscles and tendons that have strategic attachments of the arches of the foot and maintain the foot in proper balance between supination and pronation to allow the foot to land properly and transfer the weight of the body across the architecture of the foot. The body weight then springs off in the toe off and allows the person to walk without extra wear and tear on f their body.
There are 160 scientific papers on subjects such as subtalar joints, excessive movement and over pronation syndrome, and these tibialis posterior tendon dysfunction syndrome and different maladies that scientists and doctors talk about with the foot.
There are about 80,000 articles on inflammation. It is unfortunate that I found in my practice that the majority of musculoskeletal inflammation comes as a result of overpronation of the foot, where that’s a different topic altogether. There’s a reason for that.
As I mentioned to you, the majority of the population is over weight. That means there’s an extra load on their frame as well as the fact that in order to stimulate these muscles, we must have activities that move the feet in side-to-side directions, such as walking on multiple terrains and exercises of movements from side to side and turning and twisting movements to keep these muscles healthy that are attached at the strategic points of the arch.
If you talk about orthotics, (we can get into that subject now for a brief moment). If you understand that the arch of the foot is actually a suspension bridge, it is a suspension bridge that is maintained and kept elevated. It’s a spring mechanism with the muscles that are above, then you will know and understand that to correct problems with the foot, it starts with arch problems, plantar fascitis, heel spurs and that putting something under the arch is like putting a post under the San Francisco bridge. It is absolutely in my opinion, and this is a point of contention if you’d like to talk to me after the program. If the arch is suspended from above by these muscles that are attached by the arch muscles, then why are we putting something underneath it?
The way to do it properly is not when having an abdomen that protrudes, we don’t put a girdle on our patients we exercise them.
We are going to talk about how we exercise and release this arch mechanism to allow the patient to come back to normal, because that’s what we are looking for.
Okay in this particular view, we see walking on the right and running on the left. As you can see if you look very carefully, the line shows the level of the arch. As a matter of fact, the arch actually seems depressed deeper in the running than it does in the walking. If you look carefully, you’ll see that the arch of the foot actually descends approximately 1 centimeter further in running than it does when walking. When the spring roll mechanism of the arch actually goes deeper, 40% of the energy is given off as heat and the other 60% is stored to allow the foot to recoil.
This stored energy in the recoil mechanism of the foot can become vexed. The foot can become frozen and that allows the patient to need to use more energy than they are accustomed. In this particular slide, we show the neutral position in the center and then supination and pronation. When you are walking, the body goes through supination and a pronation movement as part of normal walking. So if someone says you pronate, that’s normal. If they say you overpronate, that’s different. I've coined this term the “safe range” the foot lands in supination as in the right side and the body absorbs the weight- the shock mechanism through this supination to pronation movement during normal walking. As we land in supination, the body weight is transferred to the foot then rolls to neutral, then a little bit of pronation and then push off. It’s a normal progress of movement through the foot.
As you can see, if in fact this movement pattern goes outside the range – the “safe range”, that’s when we have abnormal stress and strain and abnormal wear and tear on the joints. As you can see in this particular slow motion video, the foot is slower on the running and this is when the muscles and the tendons that are from above the arch are actually stretched and this elastic energy is absorbed in the stretching muscles and then when we push off. They release their energies to allow the foot to move efficiently.
If the arch of the foot is locked which commonly happens, then this stretching of the recoil mechanism muscles and tendons cannot occur and the patient becomes extremely fatigued by the end of the day. Now you may be running blood tests or looking for some disease process: when in fact, it is much more simple.
When the body is actually landing, you can actually see with the naked eye in this video. You can look at the difference between when the foot was planted and ready for recoil. The side of the foot has very relaxed skin. As you can see in this video, the tendon is coming through the skin. These are the tibialis posterior tendons that actually emanate from the lateral aspects of the fibula to the medial aspect of the fibula. They crossed over the back of the leg and they crossed though underneath the medial malleolus like a puling mechanism and they attach as a three prong attachment like a booster foot right on the metatarsal cuneiform joint, which is the area where the arch must flex to be able to sustain the recoil mechanism.
In fact, feet are like bouncing balls. When we are running, we sometimes feel like we’re in a zone as if we’re just gliding across the ground. “I just had it today. I felt great. Running as so easy.” That’s because the recoil mechanism was intact. Sometimes you wake up in the morning and go running and feel like you are dead and you just can’t do it. Your body is aching and you just can’t run. That’s because your elastic recoil mechanism is not working. Fifty percent of the energy needed to accelerate the body and lift the center of mass of the foot is stored in an elastic recoil mechanism.
Sometimes the patients will come and tell you, “I’m tired and I’m in pain. I feel older than I really am. I just feel old.” When they tell you this, you may want to look at the lower body biomechanics to determine whether this is the source of their fatigue. What causes the arch to lose its spring mechanism? This is a graphic of the tibialis posterior muscle and tendon. As you can see from the graph, these tendons attach very strategically in the metatarsal cuneiform. A lot of doctors don’t know this muscle exists.
In fact, it was interesting to me to find it as a young doctor because it wasn’t in the body building magazines that I read before I became a doctor. In fact, I thought it was very interesting that the body building magazines and fitness magazines had the same muscles exercises month after month as we did. I said, “Well according to Dr. Fischer, there are 602 muscles in the body, but these muscles and fitness magazines only show 32 or 33. What happened to the other muscles?” We are not exercising these other muscles. I found that these other muscles are very important.
Your patients are actually involved in exercise programs to make themselves look better and make them look sexier. In fact, if they do not embark on a training program that you prescribe for them that includes movement patterns to exercise the particular muscles, the tibialis posterior, they are going to break down and their exercise program is over. Now they begin to age very quickly.
Thus, what you have to do when the patient comes to you, is say, “Look, bring your exercise routine to me so I can take a look at it to ensure the fact that it is balanced; that it’s protecting your foot and ankle, your foundation and that it has eccentric movements. We are going to make sure it’s right for you so you don’t end up with lower limb extremity biomechanics like the one picture here: mechanical stress and strain up the leg, into the back, into the neck. No wonder these people are not healing. No wonder they have to go to surgery for the herniated disc.
Did you ever realize that if you have a herniated disc, a lot of them heal up? Why do some herniated discs heal up and why some of them don’t? What I found in my practice is that the ones that have failed the physical therapy programs, other chiropractic programs and medical programs that embarked on some strategic way to get rid of the back pain, or herniated disc, knee pain or whatever it was – the one most important missing component of the program was they completely ignored the other floors that were beneath the spine such as the hip, knee, foot and ankle. They were completely left out of the examination. Why? I know this because I asked the patients. “Did they examine your foot? Did they ask you to walk down the hallway?” Do you want to be the doctor that makes the mistake by leaving out the foot portion of the exam, then having your patient be in my office and have me bring out these things? I doubt that.
Therefore, on Monday, when you have patients with lower back pain and inflammation that does not go away, then you need to take a look at those floors beneath the spine to determine whether you’ve missed something. Because if you don’t, they're going to say, “Well I’m going to go to Dr. Walgreen’s because this doctor is obviously not helping me. Or, I’m going to go here or there; or they're just going to quit and say “I guess this is the pain I’m going to have to live with.” That’s certainly not anti-aging medicine. Because it’s a constant and chronic release of inflammation that causes a toxic effect on the body and damages not only that, but can they outlive the wear and tear that’s occurring on their joints leading to a joint replacement surgery?
I don’t know if any one of you would like to have a doctor walk in the room and say, “I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do for you. We are going to have to replace the hip socket with an artificial hip.” Well your patients certainly don’t want to hear that either. We have to do what’s necessary for our patients when they’re in their 20’s and 30’s. If they're wearing footwear that’s not good for their body, we have to make them aware. If they laugh and say, “Well, I have to wear these shoes and so and so forth.” You don’t laugh with them. You reiterate to them the importance of lower extremity biomechanics and how it creates inflammation and they want to look sexy, but this inflammation actually ages them faster. Then they wonder why they're not feeling well in their 40’s.
Lack of elastic recoil also affects the hip area and makes that area weak. The spinal biomechanics are thrown off. The swivel mechanism of the spine is disrupted. So how are we going to correct it?
How is this weakness corrected? First of all, we are in an age where we are actually in a very high tech and flat environment. All those fun areas where we climbed up the hill and went down the hill and got an ice cream cone have been taken away. We have escalators and elevators. We have flat surfaces such as sidewalks and streets. As a result, you're getting out of bed; you walk through the hallway of your home and getting into your car. There is no exercise to your body except pushing the accelerator and the brake pedal. You get out of the car, you walk up to your building and you walk down the hall. You have no exercise to the areas that are balancing your elastic recoil mechanism of your arch. As a result, your arch is collapsing because it is weak. You’ve gained some weight and this makes it worse.
We call some muscle exercises ‘Functional Exercises’. Those muscle exercises actually bring function back to the body as we described today. We have ‘Dysfunctional Exercises, which actually cause more stress and strain on the body and wear and tear.
Because the patient does not understand the technique, they need to be schooled. That’s different, or exercises that are just a waste of time. How many of you can think of a sport where you're sitting down thinking something. There is no sport where you're sitting down thinking anything. This particular sport exercise can be weighed as being effective or not effective?
This is called a single joint exercise for the calf. It makes it look very beautiful, but by itself can cause tremendous damage to the foot because it only works the foot in one particular direction and does not work the foot in supination and pronation which is the most important component. We didn’t have to worry about that before because we would walk and go into the countryside when we were farmers and worked in the farm and fields. But now life has changed. We don’t have any movement patterns that actually maintain the solid arch or walk mostly on the sidewalk, or we’re mostly running on the treadmill.
A lady asked me, “You mean I can’t run on my treadmill?” I told her “Well, you certainly have to do more than that.” To help balance the foot, we have to do exercises that actually balance the foot area. As you can see, in this particular picture, this is a normal foot on the left. It’s not very sexy, but that’s normal. On the right is a baby’s foot. As you can see, the adult and baby’s foot look very much the same. How many of your feet look like that? The toes are straight and there is a nice landing strip for the body’s weight to land on. That’s the normal presentation of the foot.
As a result of putting on shoes over years’ time, those shoes actually deform the foot. In fact, if you put a shoe on a baby’s foot, it begins deforming their foot at age one.
This is the deformity of the foot that is a physical deformity that will cause an abnormal movement pattern in the rest of the foot as a result of abnormal biomechanics.
Physical deformities have been around for thousands of years as a result of binding the foot. This is a most extreme example of binding a foot that occurred for a thousands years in China. It was acceptable to bind the feet. Ten percent of these children did not live through the procedure and died. That (foot binding) was to make you look attractive. We have our own modern foot binding, which is called shoes.
Foot binding creates weakness in the foot. Yet, we decide that we’re going to put on our gym shoes to exercise, and heaven forbid that you take off your shoe and exercise barefoot in the health club because it’s unsanitary. Or can you imagine, you took off your shoe to exercise in the health club? I had a patient of mine who is here, Cindy. Right?
Using this example, she actually told me what happened. She asked, “Could I come back and exercise with you because the health club won’t let me take off my shoes to exercise my foot.” I said, “Absolutely.” She’s been exercising with us going on another 2 years. Exercising with shoes causes the foot to become weak. The foot drops, the arch drops and locks. The arch is suspended from above the arch and then more muscles have to be exercised.
Here we have the question: Do we train with footwear or should we take off our shoes? Is it dangerous to run with our shoes off? As children we ran around without shoes and never had a problem. Why is it that as adults, it’s forbidden? It’s ridiculous to think that training without shoes is dangerous. In fact, a couple of athletes won gold medals without shoes. Here’s one particular athlete.
There’s a book called Running Barefoot. I did not write it and had nothing to do with it. It’s a story about an athlete who won the Olympic games in 1960. He ran the marathon, won the gold medal and broke the world record running barefoot the entire 26 miles. He’s the only athlete in marathon history to repeat defeat again in 1964. He won. After he won he did a series of calisthenics while he was waiting for the other runners to come across the finish line. He beat them so badly.
Why are the African runners so good? Why do they beat us in all the marathons? Is it because they're from Africa? That’s ridiculous! It’s because they can’t afford shoes. They run barefoot to the school and they run back home for lunch. They run barefoot back to the school and they run home for dinner. They run 20 miles a day. How do I know this? I know this because I interviewed and studied them. I analyzed their training. I know what they did. They ran without shoes because they couldn’t afford the fancy running shoes.
Therefore, what I recommend to our patients for anti-aging medicine is to run barefoot or exercising with barefoot sports such as Martial Arts and stretching of the foot. There’s a particular stretch that is done. You could teach your patients how to do it. Patients pay me a lot of money to stretch their feet like this. It’s absolutely unnecessary for me to stretch their feet. You can teach them how to do that. Each individual toe must be stretched in order to allow the foot to release its elasticity or movements from side to side. Why is it that the lady who reaches for something in the cupboard loses her balance, falls and breaks her hip? This is because she does not do that movement very often.
Well, I don’t get up on a balance beam very often either; but if I do it regularly, I’ll be able to do the balancing movements. What I’m saying is that your patients probably don’t do movements like this and that’s why when they do movements like that, they don’t do them good. “Oh, don’t run, it’s bad for you. Don’t do this, don’t do that.” When in fact we need to work very hard to bring movement back. Bringing them back to the activities that they used to love and having them become more active.
There’s an anti-bunion stretch. In a lady like this one – is it possible to stretch the toe to prevent bunions? Of course it is; then you should do it. Because if you’re set on wearing high-heeled shoes and shoes that damage your feet, then do the maintenance in the evening when you get home to prevent these damaging effects from occurring.
Neuromas, pinched nerves in the foot that cause damage to the nerves then you could do a neuroma stretch. Here are some exercises that we devised in our office for working the foot. Eversion: just strap a cuff around the foot and exercise the foot in eversion. In fact, this was designed by one of the dance instructors in the back, who is one of my clients. She was able to avoid having a hip operation as a result of the exercises that we prescribed for her. It was nice to receive the cookies that she brought. It was very nice, but she did not have to have the hip operation. You can avoid these operations by rebuilding the structure either by hand or exercise, or both.
In my practice what I do is physically rebuild your body by hand. For the arch mechanism we rebuild the recoil mechanism by putting the recoil back into your body to become more efficient.
Here are some exercises that we do for an ankle sprain. Why? We do these because we want to strengthen the ankle. Then when your ankle feels good, we stop doing it. Wrong! Just as for the athlete that has won the world championship, we didn’t do that with him because it is important in boxing to have strength and power in the feet. It’s also important for your patients.
When we look at why people have injuries from running, we’re looking at something very simple and we don’t really realize that. In fact, I’ve never seen an article about this. However, if you go to your office and sit down like you’re sitting now, there’s absolutely no stress being put on your joints of the lower extremity. This means that your body is not getting stronger.
The way your body gets stronger is by putting stress on it. Then the muscles are developed in the evening with the exercises. Then we develop a stronger frame and we’re able to do more activities. In this particular chart I’m showing that walking causes 1 to 2 times the body weight is piled upon the musculoskeletal structures to increase the strength from exercise.
But if we’re sitting in our chair at the office and decide we’re going to go running, we’ve decided that if we weigh 120 pounds, which I know most women in the audience weigh about 110. But if we weigh 110 pounds, and if we put 5 times the body weight of 550 pounds of pressure on our feet. If all we’re doing is sitting down doing computer work at the office, then get out, put on our running shoes and put 550 pounds of pressure on our body, we’re going to cause damage. We have to graduate into running by light jogging and then running.
This is a cytoskeletal protein which is what scientists feel gives the body elasticity. It’s called the “Titan protein”. I heard a word “Titantunein”. I like that. It’s a great word, because what we’re going to do is use the elastic recoil mechanism to tighten protein, which is called eccentric foundation training, something that we developed.
We’re going to increase the elasticity through this titan protein by training and tuning it. If you tell patients, “Don’t do this and don’t do that”, then they’re going to become less elastic and lose function. They’re going to have more inflammation. You’re actually causing them to age faster than by having them do activities.
Here’s where we did a study of an athlete who’s running with toe out. This causes damage to the foot and the arch mechanism; in fact, we improved his running style.
Here’s where we used Titan Tuning to improve the strength of the actual recoil mechanism muscles that I showed you on the graph of the pronator/supinator cuff. By moving side to side, we were able to tune those muscles to eversion, abduction/adduction pronation and supination muscles to balance out the foot. In fact it’s so easy; just set up a course where they can run in a circle. This is as easy as it could get. In fact, you could do a figure 8 where they could get both movements in and is very easy to do in your back yard.
This can help them to avoid sarcopenia. With eccentric training, sarcopenia was reduced faster than weight training. Eccentric training is better for a patient than weight training. In fact, this study was done on patients over 70 years of age.
Hopscotch is something that is very simple. It can also reduce osteopenia. The number one cause of death in the American population over the age of 65 is from falls. Once they fall, their mortality rate is much higher.
Here is some other eccentric training that we do. These are very simple. In fact, like I told you, I didn’t want to keep you too long because I have a boxing match to go to, but I want to go over this last slide here I’m talking about orthotics, or these things that we put underneath our foot to fix our suspensory structure, which is our arch, which in fact is not the route to do.
In fact, it’s better to have the patient do exercises that actually build the eccentric component of the foot and ankle area in a balanced way to allow the arch to be suspended on its own so you don’t have to wear any of these orthotics. Allow the patient to get stronger.
In fact, I want to end my topic and hope that you learned something that by stretching and eccentric movements to help restore your patients to near perfect function. I’d like to end by telling you to live your life like a champion every day. Try to develop champions in your practice through your patients and support the anti-aging movement.
Thank you very much for inviting me.
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