Hi Friend!
Happy Wednesday to you!
I'm working my way through a number of continuing education units to fulfill my requirements for my Athletic Training and Strength and Conditioning credentials and I had a random thought. All of this thoughtful preventative and proactive programming and ways of training to reduce injury risk, support not missing workouts / practice / games and enhance physical and sports performance is all mute if we don't make sure that we're addressing health first and foremost.
Waist to Hip Ratio One way to easily track your health is to measure your waist and hip circumferences and divide your waist inches by your hips inches. You can read wikipedia yourself for a deeper reference, but here's a general guideline. Aim to be under 0.85 for women and 0.9 for men. It's not the best method, I'm sure there are flaws, but it's simple to measure and track and some research says its better than BMI.
Eating to Contentment Thanksgiving just passed, so for some people this is an easy reminder. Did your belly feel full after Thanksgiving? Did you feel pressure on your waist band and/or did you have to loosen your belt? If yes, that's eating past contentment and most likely well past full. No judgement here as sometimes I do that too and hence one of the reasons I like 2 hour workouts on thanksgiving, family walks and any other burn & earn activities.
The problem if you do this regularly, eating to fullness or past fullness is your stomach expands, and this can effect many things, but in relation to todays email, it affects your waist to hip ratio, therefore your health.
On the other hand, if you eat to contentment, this means your eating all the food you need to recover from the energy you previously expended and provide nourishment and fuel for what's coming up without taking anymore than you need. A kind of minimum effective dose. If you do this every time you eat or at least 80-90% of the time you eat, guess what's going to happen. Your waist is going to naturally draw in because you're not constantly training it to expand. You're training it to draw in. This will help you to easily and naturally reduce your waist to hip ratio, therefore increasing the chances of increasing your health.
Isometric Contractions Isometric contractions are contracting a muscle without changing the range of motion. It would be holding a weight, but not lifting it. Holding the bottom of a push up, holding a plank, holding the top of a chin up. Thats an isometric contraction. Lift a weight up and down and that's an isotonic contraction.
Isometric contractions strengthen the muscle in the range they're held and as a side effect they're cross sectional area usually decreases and with it circumferences of limbs and body areas. Isotonic contractions increase the cross sectional area of a muscle, potentially increasing the circumference of a limb or body area, though body composition, contributes to whether circumference goes up or down.
Take home message as it relates to this email, is that planks, side planks, anti-extension, anti-rotation and anti-lateral flexion isometric holds are great ways to strengthen your waist line or core and decrease the circumference of it.
Do this every morning to start your day for 1-3sets of 20-30sec and combine it with eating to contentment and you have 2 easy ways to work towards decreasing your waist line, decreasing your waist to hip ratio and increasing the quality of your health.
Keep it simple,
Coach Mike
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