A common oversight among golf and tennis players

Why neglecting the cool down can lead to poor posture and pain

golf.jpg

By Tania Haas

“I would say the biggest mistake golf and tennis players make is an improper cool down,” says Brendan Fox, Head Fitness Trainer at Medcan.

The golf swing, or the tennis swing for those who favour one side, demands asymmetrical rotation. That repeated twisting can lead to spinal compression, muscle imbalance, uneven posture or back pain. Fox says it’s like doing 100 arm curls on only your left side, dropping the weights and walking out of the gym.

How to offset the imbalance: a sufficient cool down will even out muscle tension. Restored muscle tension will improve recovery and allow your body to be balanced for your next round or match.

It’s understandable to avoid stretches when the far more appealing post-game revelry awaits, but Fox says injuries can be avoided with a simple 5 to 10 minute routine.

Try this mini-routine (modelled by fitness trainers Tremayne Mischey and Alan Kerr-Wilson) after your next game.

Standing-side-bends.gif

Standing side bends. To mobilize obliques and quadrates lumborum.

  • Stand tall, feet wide apart, with one arm wrapped overhead

  • Push hip out to the side of the raised arm, bend the torso to the side of the down arm

  • Return back up switch sides and repeat, alternating sides

  • To increase intensity, use free hand to grab wrist of overhead arm, to help pull it into a deeper side stretch

Noodle arm twist. For thoracic rotation.

  • Stand with feet shoulder width apart. Twist torso side to side, allowing your arms to swing like wet noodles.

  • Allow elbows to bend naturally, wrapping around your body, to slap back of hand to low back

  • Generate the whipping action in the arms by rotation and pivoting with foot and rotating hips and trunk

  • Stay relaxed , let the arms enjoy the ride. Keep a tall spine, don’t hunch forward.

  • Remember to alternate directions for the rotation, and to alternate which foot swivels.

Seatbelt-arm-swings.gif

Seatbelt arm swings. For shoulder flexion, internal rotation, adduction and posterior cuff.

  • Do a one arm diagonal raise, grabbing the seatbelt (arm up across opposite shoulder, palm faces back) to fastening the seatbelt (arm beside same side hip, palm faces back).

  • Complete all reps before changing sides.

  • Progression: go with both arms at the same time, crossing them in front, alternating which arm is on top.

Fox has customized programs for golf and tennis players with five to 15 exercises depending on their needs and interests. Speak to your fitness trainer to create a specialized warm up and/or cool down to match with your chosen sport or activity.

Rewire the mind for optimism: Train your brain like you train your body

Ninety percent of your long-term happiness is a predicted not by the external world, says Shawn Achor, but by the way your brain processes the world.  Based on this monumental 90%, the Harvard professor and New York Times bestselling author, says it’s necessary to train the brain to your advantage. That advantage, he says, is happiness.

It seems a little backwards, doesn’t it? Since we were young, we’ve been told that in order to be happy, we have to work hard, be successful, and then happiness ensues. But in reality, the formula is flipped. Positive psychology has shown that when we start with happiness, we are primed to be more successful, creative, innovative and productive.  That’s because when our brain is skewed to the positive, it performs significantly better than when the brain is in a negative, neutral or stressed state. Better can mean a wide range of outcomes from enhanced learning to better vision.

But how does one see the world with rose-coloured lenses when the realities of day-to-day life require us to be reasonable, critical and analytical? Achor agrees that there are times and situations when those responses are warranted. That’s why he suggests to develop a healthy sense of optimism by practising the following skills:

Regularly recognize the good in your life (and your brain starts to scan for the positive)

Training your brain to notice the good in life takes practice. Achor recommends making it a daily ritual: at the same time everyday (set an alert in your calendar) jot down three good specific things that happened in your day — maybe a driver waved you in a lane or a colleague paid you a sincere compliment. This five-minute practice causes your brain to scan for potential positives. With repetition, this will become automatic. The Five Minute Journal makes it easy.

Set aside 5 minutes a day to meditate

Turn off your phone, close your door and focus on watching your breath. Meditation takes practice but it’s one of the most powerful happiness interventions. Research shows that regular meditation can permanently rewire the brain to raise levels of happiness, lower stress, even improve immune function. Apps like Headspace and Calm are helpful for beginners.

Exercise

Walk (preferably in nature), run, bike, dance, stretch or interval train – when you move you lift your mood, improve motivation, reduce stress and defend against depression.

Choose something to look forward to

Anticipating future rewards lights up the pleasure centres in the brain as much as the actual reward. So set a date, book a vacation or plan to watch your favourite show — whenever you need a boost of happiness, remind yourself about what’s coming up.

Flex your signature strength

Achor says one way to get an immediate jolt of happiness is to exercise a strength of character — be it creativity, a love of learning, kindness, leadership, teamwork or appreciation of beauty.  Find out your top 5 character strengths and use one every day. Studies show that the more you use your signature strengths in daily life, the happier you become.

Shawn Achor was a speaker at the 2016 Executive Performance Summit, presented by Medcan and The Globe and Mail. His bestseller The Happiness Advantage was published in 2010, and he is the CEO of Good Think, Inc.

Photo by Sebastián León Prado on Unsplash

5 ways to keep negative thoughts at bay

Negative thoughts can become so automatic we don’t even notice their running commentary of our lives. While negative thoughts can serve a purpose – to help us avoid danger and react quickly in an emergency – when they get out of hand, our health risks increase and life satisfaction diminishes.

Dr. Gina Di Giulio, Director of Psychology at Medcan, works with clients (in person or via video visit) to keep negative thoughts at bay. Here are her five suggestions:

1) The mindfulness approach: notice your worries without judgment

Rather than trying to control your negative thoughts, Dr. Di Giulio suggests observing your thoughts as if you are a witness to your own thoughts and feelings like you are noticing cars in traffic.

Once you’ve started to observe your thoughts, you will notice the judgmental or critical commentary that tags along. Judging thoughts or criticizing yourself makes you feel bad and can cause you to worry even more – and can enhance the body’s response to stress.

“Daily mindfulness practice helps with learning how to more readily ‘let go’ of negative thoughts,” says Dr. Di Giulio.

MRI scans show that after an 8-week course of mindfulness practice, our primal responses to stress (knee-jerk reactions) seem to be replaced by more tempered, thoughtful ones. Researchers have also noticed a reduction in the biomarkers of stress and inflammation like C-reactive proteins and cortisol, which are associated with disease.

2) Challenge negative thinking

Sometimes we can worry disproportionately to the actual risk at hand and those thoughts need to be challenged or they’ll take control.  Ask yourself questions like: ‘how many times have I worried about this or something similar, and how many times has my worry materialized?’ ‘When it did, was it as bad as I had imagined it to be?’

Reminding yourself about how many times you’ve actually worried about something, and how many times your worries have materialized can be a helpful tool to help examine your negative thinking more objectively, says Dr. Di Giulio.

3) Consider the worst case scenario

Asking yourself “what is the worst that can happen” and “how would I cope?” is also a helpful strategy.

“People often catastrophize and have images about their worries that end with the catastrophe being true. Thinking worries through to the end and asking yourself how you would cope, can be an incredibly powerful tool to help manage worries,” says Dr. Di Giulio. “Worrying underestimates our perceived coping skills, and leads us to believe that we wouldn’t be able to handle our worries if they came true, and in most cases, that is simply not the case.”

4)  Journal your thoughts and experiences

Writing your worries down –a technique can help you identify patterns in your worries. Are there any situations that are more likely to trigger your worries? Do you tend to worry about similar things again and again? Also, the act of reflecting on the joyous in our lives can increase one’s happiness. Twenty minutes of journaling at the end of the night about a positive experience can lead to positive thoughts and feelings.

5) Start today

Dr. Di Giulio recommends starting with apps like Headspace and Calm to help guide you through meditation. It might also be helpful to explore some of these patterns of negative thinking with a mental health professional who is trained in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). CBT is an evidence-based treatment that teaches people how to more objectively evaluate their worries, and change problematic negative thinking patterns.

“Taking the time to observe, challenge, and reflect on the way we think can change the way our brain functions and how we respond to daily interactions,” says Dr. Di Giulio.”With these five simple suggestions, we have the potential to reclaim our calm for good.”

Photo by Naseem Buras on Unsplash

Why reducing your multi-tasking can make you more efficient

Can you remember the last time you sat, walked or talked 5 minutes without checking your phone? How about enjoying a meal without part of your brain “on call” for an incoming call? For anyone who has had a conversation with someone while they texted, you know that the person’s attention is divided (and ability to converse is diminished). Turns out, it’s also ineffective. While multi-tasking has been touted as a badge of honour in modern life, our brains are not biologically wired to manage more than one stimulus at once.

A 2014 study found that interruptions as brief as two to four seconds were enough to double or even triple the number of errors on an assigned task.  A Stanford University study linked teenagers’ multitasking computer habits with the loss of the ability to focus. The findings could extend to adults who are equally as susceptible to interruptions stopping their flow.

It is certainly possible to do multiple things at once (walking and talking), but for those tasks that require your attention (having a conversation), one of the tasks always suffers when your brain manages multiple task processing at the same time. The alternative is to stop the multi-tasking and do one thing at a time: it’s called mono-tasking or single tasking.

Mono-tasking (or single tasking) improves focus

Dane Jensen, CEO of Performance Coaching, the partner organization with Medcan Coaching, says that almost any experience is improved by paying full attention to it.  It’s a simple concept – paying attention to what we are doing when we are doing it – yet it’s hard to execute with all the dings and pings in our lives.

“When the brain is switching from task to task, it consumes more glucose. Therefore, it takes more energy – literal, physical energy in the form of calories – to accomplish the same amount of work. It can be a real energy drain if it’s your default way of working,” says Jensen.

Time Management versus Energy Management

One way to increase mono-tasking is to approach time management differently; by managing priorities, rather than time.

Jensen says that time is just one dimension to consider, and it’s a limited dimension at that.

“Really high performers focus on energy management,” says Jensen. “What they know is that if they bring a different amount of energy to a specific amount of time, they can be a lot more accomplished.  Just consider what you can get done when you are energized versus when your energy is depleted or flat.”

“Many people are aware of energy cycles in the context of sleep but not as many know that these cycles continue during the work day,” says Jensen. “Human beings go through varying cycles of energy through the day, so when you notice your patterns, you can go with your optimal flow and focus.”

Work in chunks then take the right type of break

“We are built to be sprinters, not marathon runners,” says Jensen. “What Anders Ericsson found in his original research into deliberate practice was that the people who become true masters at something work on a singular task in 90 to 120 minute chunks, with 10 to 15 minute breaks in between. They don’t work straight through the day– because the breaks are where the energy comes from to stay focused.  But, you have to take breaks in a relatively specific type of way. You can’t take a break in a way that saps more energy than you gain.

“Tony Schwartz of the Energy Project, who is really smart about this stuff, divides energy into four different sources: physical, spiritual, mental and emotional energy. When you take a break, you want to structure your break to meet one of those needs,” says Jensen. “So if your job is very mental or cognitive, you want to take a break that focuses on one of the other types of energies like a walk. An emotional break does not mean cry in the bathroom. It could mean a fulfilling talk with your partner or child – to gain some emotional energy over the course of the break.”

Plan intentional breaks, defend against distractions

So to stay on the mono-tasking trail, be sure to plan intentional breaks (those that sharpen your so-called saw blades, not dull them down).   And with regard to your phone, try to keep it out of sight unless it’s part of your singular task.