Scratch Test

Here is something interesting I learned yesterday known as the scratch test:

Take your fingernail and scratch any area on your body.  Now observe the shade of red that develops.  Do this a few times on different parts of your body.  Perhaps you noticed that one area becomes a deeper shade of red than another.  Why is this?

The scratch test was developed in order to detect inflammation and possible mobility limitations to that area of the body.  A deeper shade of red indicates a greater histamine response and hence greater inflammation.  I first saw Chris perform this test on a client complaining of low back pain.  The scratch test was done on each side of the low back.  We saw that a deeper shade of red developed on the right side, indicating that the right side had more inflammation.

Nutrition

The inspiration for this post came from my camping trip this weekend.  It was a lot of fun but I came back feeling a bit heavy and groggy.  If a nutritionist were to stop by our site she would have been highly disappointed in our choice of food.  I think this is a good time to instruct on the importance of nutrition.  You can spend day in and day out in the gym but it will all be negated by poor eating habits.  The vast majority of the calories we burn come from the foods we eat, not how much time we spend on the treadmills.

But of course it’s always okay to splurge once in a while

Success vs. Excellence

Many athletes and personal training clients at KP are asked to distinguish between success and excellence.  Moreover, can one have success without excellence?  Can one have excellence without success?  Are you trying to be successful or excellent?

I recommend you take a few moments out of your day to ponder these questions. 

Why we don’t do crunches

Around 85% of us will miss a day of work at some point in our lives due to back pain.  Much of this is because we go to work and sit in a chair for eight hours, sit in our cars to drive home, and then sit down to dinner.  Over time this can reinforce poor posture which in many cases can lead to back pain. 

At KP we NEVER do crunches and very rarely does anyone do any exercise in which the spine is flexed.  Many people develop back problems from being in positions such as in the picture below.

 

Does that position look familiar?  It’s the same posture used during a crunch or sit-up! 

Exercise choice

So how do we choose what exercises to do?

Analyze what movements are performed in your every day life or sporting event.  Examples would likely include standing up, turning and bending.  How often do you sit down and extend your legs in a seated position… or flex your arm in the motion of a bicep curl?  Probably not too often.  Don’t mistake my point, exercises such as the bicep curl and leg extension are good for isolated muscles and can have high aesthetic value.  But they will not make you move or feel better.  Also analyze the exercises you are currently doing.  How many major joints (i.e. shoulder, hip, knee) are working?  Are these exercises challenging your core musculature?

Full-body exercises such as the squat, deadlift, lunge, pull-ups/chin-ups and rotational exercises are much more effective.  They do much more for your fitness in the same amount of time because they involve more mucsle groups and also challenge your core musculature.

Are you exercising properly?

Walk into your local gym.  Take five minutes and simply observe.  I’m sure you’ll report seeing many people walking on treadmills, riding stationary bikes, and using strength training machines.  Is this proper?  Perhaps for a small portion of the population, but for most of us it is an inoptimal way of exercising.  Physical therapists and other medical professionals have known this for years, but it has not carried over to personal training and the general population.

Research done in the last decade has shown that many methods of exercising can and should be replaced.  For example, levels of fitness when performing interval training (running at different speeds during a session) increase more than jogging at a constant pace.  This is due to different metabolic pathways being trained (more on this in a later post).  Many variations of cardiovascular training can be used that better increase fitness levels.  However, I’d rather focus here on strength training.

Most people like to do their strength training by isolating certain muscles.  For example, the biceps muscle is isolated in the arm curl and the quadriceps musculature is isolated in the knee extension.  But is this how our body moves?  One of the first things I learned at KPA was that it is more efficient to train MOVEMENT PATTERNS rather than MUSCLES.  We exercise in order to increase the quality of our lives, largely through the way we move.  So does it make sense to sit down on a machine and perform an arm curl in order to move more efficiently?

I’ll be providing some example exercises that can be used to increase the quality of your movement over the next couple of days.

Welcome

Welcome all and thanks for taking the time to read my blog. My name is Ryan Maloney and I will be a senior this fall at SUNY Fredonia. I’m currently majoring in exercise science and hope to go on to obtain a degree in physical therapy from the University at Buffalo.

I first found out about Kinetic Performance through their article in the West Seneca Bee about a month ago. Since I was looking for an internship after my junior year I figured I’d call. I was granted a visit by Chris Nentarz in West Seneca and was very impressed right from the start. The way the practice was conducted was an excellent fit for what I was looking for because of Chris’s scientific background in physical therapy.

The staff decided that it would be a good idea to start a blog from Kinetic Performance in order to better reach out to the community and anyone else looking for quality information. Hopefully by blogging about my experiences I can provide readers with good insight into sports performance, wellness, personal development, and KP Athletics.

If there are any questions about this blog feel free to send me and e-mail at jrpmaloney@gmail.com or leave a comment here.  Check back often because there will be new information very frequently.