Homo Urbanus 30 Minute Squat

Life in the urban jungle is full of opportunities to rest. We have furniture to sit on in our homes, where we work, in our transportation, and most places we visit. The urban jungle in Western society has so many places to sit that culturally we have forgotten the squat as a resting position.

Look at small children playing and it doesn’t take long to find one in a perfect squat. No one had to coach the child on what the squat was supposed to look like. No one has to tell the child to keep its weight on its heels, where its feet go, or how to protect its knees. Why? Because they have not yet spent years in chairs altering its habits and deconditioning its muscles.

Our lifetime of sitting takes its toll. Most of the clients we meet have some sort of pelvis issues that contribute to knee and low back pain. Lack of squatting isn’t the only culprit here, but it is a significant contributor. We find everyone moves better when they are able to do a deep squat and hold it comfortably.

But if you are like most people we meet, you first have to be able to get into a squat before you can work on holding the squat for any length of time.

When we say a “full range-of-motion squat” we mean being able to squat as deep as a baby with no pain. A nerve glide you can perform to help with this may be practiced by laying on the back, raising the leg as high as possible without bending the knee, moving the leg across your body until the knee is at or past the […]

By |2017-09-06T15:55:26-07:00November 12th, 2015|homo urbanus|Comments Off on Homo Urbanus 30 Minute Squat
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Homo Urbanus Out of Breath

Breath for Fitness in the City

Throughout our blog we already have several resources for the importance of better breathing, as well as ways to achieve it.

So, here I will organize some of that material so you can go more in depth if you have not already read those articles.

To perform a good self-analysis for your breathing start with this article, Respiration Weight Loss and Metabolism. It is an excerpt from our RESOLUTE Weight Loss and Metabolism course. In it we touch on what is proper breathing, common issues we see daily, and how to resolve those issues.

Earlier this year we did a 30 Day Breathing Challenge. The challenge was composed of four videos with three exercises each. The purpose of the exercises was to improve posture, diaphragm control, and to help reduce the number of breaths we take each minute.

One of the ways we measured progress was with the length of our controlled pause. This was how long we could go between needing to take a breath.

Here are the links to the series:

30 Day Breathing Challenge Week One

30 Day Breathing Challenge Week Two

30 Day Breathing Challenge Week Three

30 Day Breathing Challenge Week Four

In our studio we ran the challenge for thirty days and it was so successful that we continued to indefinitely as part of our warmups before our workouts. Many participants saw at least a 50 to 100 percent increase in their controlled pause. This reflected their increased respiratory efficiency.

If you are just getting started with the Homo Urbanus article series we encourage you to start from the beginning and keep you eye out for the rest of the series.

Homo Urbanus is on the Hunt

Homo Urbanus Just […]

By |2017-09-06T15:55:27-07:00October 5th, 2015|Blog, breathing, homo urbanus|Comments Off on Homo Urbanus Out of Breath
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Sleep time for Homo Urbanus

Sleep and Fitness

The function of the parasympathetic nervous system is rest and repair or sometimes called rest and digest.

During slow wave sleep the body relaxes, breathing becomes more regular, blood pressure falls, and the brain is less responsive to outside stimuli. The pituitary gland releases growth hormone, which stimulates tissue growth and muscle repair.

In a study with the Standford men’s basketball team. They slept ten hours a night for five weeks. The results were that the freethrowing percentage improved by 9 percent, the three point shooting improved by 9.2 percent and their 80 meter sprint was faster.

REM sleep is to the mind what slow sleep is to the body. REM sleep is when your brain dreams and reorganizes information. Your brain clears out irrelevant information, boosts your memory by connecting the events since your last sleep to your previous events, facilitates learning and neural growth.

One of the ways it repairs the brain is to remove toxic proteins from its neurons that are the by-products of neural activity when you are awake. Unfortunately, it can only do this when you are asleep. And when the toxic neurons are not removed they wreck havoc on your prefrontal cortex effecting cognition, creativity, problem solving and inhibition.

Sleep deprivation means you can’t recover physically, your immune system weakens, and your brain becomes foggy.

Sleep deprived individuals are at increased risk of viral infections, weight gain, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, mental illness, and death.

One of the ways it does this is by raising the stress load on the body and the cortisol levels. A lack of sleep helps break down skin collagen making you look older by reducing the elasticity of the skin.

In men, not enough sleep reduces testosterone levels […]

By |2017-09-06T15:55:36-07:00September 10th, 2015|homo urbanus, sleep|Comments Off on Sleep time for Homo Urbanus
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Homo Urbanus Just Hang’in Around

The urban jungle contains many forms of furniture for relaxation and comfortable means of transportation. But life in the urban jungle can be largely sedentary and has few opportunities to hang.

Hanging is foundational to grip and pulling strength. But climbing, hanging, and vertical pulling are seldom a part of modern life. At best we may do a few sets of pull ups at the gym.

As a result of our sitting, driving, and countless hours in front of a desk we see reshaping of the coraco-acromial-ligament and the acromion. In other words, our lifestyles are creating a deformity in our shoulders.

Dr. John Kirsch, founder of the Kirsch Institute for Shoulder Research is an orthopedic surgeon with more than 25 years of experience with frozen shoulders, torn rotator cuffs and impingement syndrome. So whats his cure for relieving pain from the most common shoulder problems?  Hanging from an overhead support.

Five to seven minutes a day of hanging is our goal for healthy shoulders. It may be active hanging like pull ups or swinging, or passive such a basic pronated or neutral grip hang. It does not need to be done all at once.

If you have shoulder pain or a past injury you may need some remedial work before hanging is appropriate.

Taiso Fitness and Nutrition

If you are looking for a shared personal training experience try Taiso Fitness and Nutrition. We are Tacoma’s fitness and nutrition gym for people who want to get out of pain or improve performance, who need immediate, measurable results, and want to make educated decisions to take control of their health.

Shared personal training provides the coaching of a personal trainer with the social support of a bootcamp style class.

Set up a complimentary consultation, or start […]

By |2017-09-06T15:55:39-07:00August 27th, 2015|Blog, homo urbanus|Comments Off on Homo Urbanus Just Hang’in Around
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Homo Urbanus is on the Hunt!

The urban jungle is rich with opportunities to hunt and gather. The local tribes call these areas grocery stores.

But the convenience can be dangerous for Homo Urbanus because the grocery stores contain both and bait.

As we enter the hunting ground we find a variety of food along the periphery. But if we venture into the aisled interior there are many pitfalls to avoid.

High Fructose Corn Syrup. This bait is dangerous to Homo Urbanus and according to Princeton University, studies show there is significantly more weight gain than other sweeteners even when the caloric intake is the same. One of the reasons HFCS is so bad is that it has to be processed by the liver the same as alcohol. Duke University has shown it to be a significant contributor to Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease.

Grains. The second bait we want to avoid is over-consumption of grains. Grains in general were key to the evolution of of Homo Sapiens to Homo Urbanus by supplying easy stores of energy to survive winter months and allow occupational specialization. Currently American grains have very few strains and the effects of genetic modification are only now being explored.

However, many people notice that when traveling to Europe they can eat grains without ill effect. So, here is a link to the only source I have found for flour that is both grown and processed in Europe and available in the united States.

L’Epicerie

Taiso Fitness and Nutrition

If you are looking for a shared personal training experience try Taiso Fitness and Nutrition. We are Tacoma’s fitness and nutrition gym for people who want to get out of pain or improve performance, who need immediate, measurable results, and want to make educated decisions to […]

By |2017-10-16T12:17:57-07:00August 20th, 2015|Blog, homo urbanus|Comments Off on Homo Urbanus is on the Hunt!
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DISCLAIMER: Results may vary. Consult your physician before beginning any exercise program.
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