Barefoot Running

"When I got into barefoot running, I was a broken runner. Overuse injuries, imbalances, and more had brought me almost literally to my knees, which weren't all that healthy either. Turns out, that wasn't a bad thing at all. It forced me to build back slowly while allowing my body to recover. It liberated me to ecperiment too; with nowhere to go but up, I could try to find the best ways to heal and grow back stronger.

At a recent clinic, I advised a struggling runner with plantar fasciitis to recover, then built back slowly. His response, "That sounds great, but I need to train for my next marathon." How many of us have said something like this? Unfortunately, your body doesn't know it needs to race again, it knows it needs to rest. If you don't give it the rest it needs, you'll never recover.
Many runners struggle year after year limping along. Until you're ready to let go of the goal, to built back stronger, a cycle of pain continues. Sooner or later, you need to step back, take a break, and start from scratch.
Becoming the best runner you can be isn't about brute force, disciple, or training harder. It's about training smarter, be being aware, feeling the ground, and feeling your body. Instead of training on intellect, you're training with intuition.This may sound ambiguous, but the biggest challenge for runners has never been a lack of work ethic of the ability to push oneself; instead, it's been an ability to go slow, go with the flow and listen to one's body. It requires a degree of mental flexibility that's hard when you have goals. However, when you force anything, something has to give, and something always breaks. I don't want that to be you.

My best advise: Don't do everything at once. Rather, pick and choose what seems like the most fun and go for it. Try new things out and feel free to mix up the routine. Our bodies are incredible at adapting to new challenges. So dont get stuck in a rut. Instead, change things up as much as you can. This helps work muscle groups you never knew you had and loosen you up in ways you once thought impossible, so you can become a balanced athlete."

Is Weight Training Dangerous for Youth Athletes?

I have been asked this question hundreds of times during my 25 years in the sports medicine and sports performance fields.

Think about this:
1. When you run, the force of each foot strike is equal to about 2 - 3 times your bodyweight.
2. When you jump, the force of each landing is about 5 - 6 times your bodyweight.
3. Here is an interesting passage from Dr. Timothy Gay's book, The Physics of Football:
"With just how much force did Dick Butkus hit running backs?" "1,150 pounds of force, or the three-fifths of a ton"
4. Pitching creates rotational velocities of up to 7200 degrees per second about the shoulder - that's almost twenty windmill motions in one second! This creates tremendous forces about the shoulder joint.
5. Bone maturation is not uniform throughout the body. Different areas fully fuse at different ages: proximal humeral growth plate (top of the arm at the shoulder) - about age 19, distal humeral growth plate (arm bone at elbow) - about age 15, clavicle (collar bone) - about age 23.

Therefore, your child will NEVER replicate these kind of forces while strength training as long as your child is properly supervised. Even if they are not supervised, your child could simply not lift enough weight to replicate these forces. Plain and simple, your child MUST BE PROPERLY SUPERVISED and shown proper lifting technique.

Strength training is an essential component of getting a young athlete's body ready for the forces of sports. We do things backwards in this country....we start kids playing sports at 6, 7, or 8 years old with no basic body movement instruction. How about learning to run, jump, land, change direction, roll, skip, hop BEFORE you dive in hard and fast into sports.

Get your children into the hands of a qualified strength and conditioning coach and watch the amazing improvement in their performance! The added bonus (and most important thing as far as I am concerned) is the decreased chance of injury he/she receives due to this training.

New Virginia Concussion Law

The new Virginia Concussion law will go into effect in July 2011.

The main provisions of the law are:
1) Student-athletes and parents shall review information on concussions annually and sign a statement
acknowledging receipt of such information
(2) A student-athlete suspected of sustaining a concussion shall be removed from play. A student-athlete who has been removed from play shall not return to play that same day nor until evaluated by an appropriate licensed health care provider
(3) Local school divisions may provide concussion guidelines to other organizations sponsoring athletic activity on school grounds, however, school divisions are not required to enforce compliance with such policies

Watch this video:

Montgomery County's injury-prevention guru

Silver Spring-based doctor leads way in preventative care for athletes

A simple jump, said Dr. Steven Horwitz, is one of the most dangerous moves in sports.
On the website for his Silver Spring-based office for preventative care, Capital Sports Injury Center, Horwitz shows a 71-second YouTube video of evidence. He first shows a teenage girl wearing a Bethesda Soccer Club shirt, buckling her knees on a short leap. He then presents a stat: Girls are four-to-six times as likely as boys to injure their anterior cruciate ligaments.
He has the remedy and many others, and the testimonials to prove it. Now, he wants to make them more mainstream.


"You just look at these jumps and you can tell who is at risk for serious injury; it's just a matter of time," said Horwitz, a certified chiropractic sports physician, strength and conditioning specialist. "So many serious injuries can be avoided if the kids were just taught simple things at a young age."

Read more...

Vitamin D

Here is a post by Dr. Allen Spreen on Vitamin D. It is a must read!

Click Here.

Good News for Popeye - Spinach makes muscles more efficient

Inorganic nitrate in fruits and vegetables increased the efficiency of the mitochondria that power our cells says a study in the journal Cell Metabolism. Here are some highlights of the study:

"We're talking about an amount of nitrate equivalent to what is found in two or three red beets or a plate of spinach," said Eddie Weitzberg of the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

The new study offers yet another benefit of nitrate and the nitric oxides that stem from them. It appears that the increased mitochondrial efficiency is owed to lower levels of proteins that normally make the cellular powerhouses leaky. "Mitochondria normally aren't fully efficient," Weitzberg explained. "No machine is."


Questions do remain. The new results show that increased dietary nitrate can have a rather immediate effect. But it's not yet clear what might happen in people who consume higher levels of inorganic nitrate over longer periods of time. Weitzberg says it will be a natural next step to repeat the experiment in people with conditions linked to mitochondrial dysfunction, including diabetes and cardiovascular disease, to see if they too enjoy the benefits of nitrates.

Popeye and Jack LaLanne were right - eat your spinach!

A Sad Day for the Fitness World - Jack LaLanne has died.

I got to meet Jack LaLanne about 10 years ago. His energy and magnetism bordered on religious fervor.

"Well it is. It is a religion with me," he told What Is Enlightenment, a magazine dedicated to awareness, in 1999. "It's a way of life. A religion is a way of life, isn't it?"

"Billy Graham was for the hereafter. I'm for the here and now," he told The Times when he was almost 92.

During his talk he sat in a chair and then popped himself into a perfect "L" like a gymnast....at 86 years old! His handshake was bone-crushing and his voice boomed across the auditorium.

"The crusade is never off my mind — the exercise I do, the food I eat, the thought I think — all this and how I can help make my profession better-respected. To me, this one thing — physical culture and nutrition — is the salvation of America."

Look at America today and you will see that Jack LaLanne had it right. PAY ATTENTION AMERICA!