Arm and Hand Stretches

If you have had a treatment with us, we may have talked to you about importance of deep breathing,  if you have tension in your neck. Shallow breathing, thoracic breathing, or chest breathing is the drawing of minimal breath into the lungs, usually by drawing air into the chest area using accessory muscles rather than throughout the lungs via the diaphragm.  This means that you over use some of the accessory muscles of breathing, including the scalenes and sternocleidomastoid muscles both of which are located in the side of the neck.  The scalenes elevate the 1st rib during inspiration and the sternocleidomastoid raises the sternum.  Unfortunately, these accessory muscles aren’t built for routine respiration, and they exhaust and eventually injure themselves which may result in pain and/or a reduced range of movement (i.e. inability to turn your head fully from side to side). People shallow breath when they are nervous, stressed, anxious, or when they concentrate.  So simply stopping and taking one deep breath after you send each email, can reduce the over use of your scalenes and sternocleidomastoid.

Following on from my introduction to Hypertension (High BP), in this blog I want to discuss lifestyle strategies to prevent and assist the treatment of Hypertension (High BP). Manage your Stress I know its obvious, but I thought it was worth starting with this.  The link between hypertension and stress is well documented as are the long list of things that help you cope including exercise, counselling, massage, reflexology etc.  While we are on the subject of the obvious, I would like to remind readers that High BP is associated with high salt diets, smoking and high alcohol consumption too. Optimise your Vitamin D levels Ateria stiffness (atherosclerosis) is a driving factor for hypertension.  As your blood travels from your heart, cells in the wall of your aorta, called barorecptors, sense the pressure load, and signal your nervous system to either raise or lower the pressure.  However, the stiffer your arteries are, the more insensitive your baroreceptors become, and the less efficient they become at sending the signals.  Vitamin D deficiency is, in turn, linked to stiff arteries, which is why optimising your vitamin D levels are so important. Get enough sleep In a study presented at the American Heart Association High Blood Pressure Research 2012 Scientific Sessions, researchers found a strong link between sleep quality and a type of high blood pressure known as resistant hypertension, which does not respond to typical drug-based treatments. In fact, women who had resistant hypertension were five times as likely to also have poor sleep quality. While the average length of sleep in this study was only 6.4 hours a night (and nearly half slept fewer than six hours each night), it was sleep quality, not quantity, that appeared to influence hypertension risk. While this study only found an association with women, other studies have also linked hypertension in men to a lack of deep sleep,¹ and sleeping fewer than seven hours a night has been linked to hypertension in both men and women.² Read Part 3 References ¹ Hypertension AHA August 29, 2011 ² Sleep. 2006 Aug;29(8):1009-14.

Last time, I discussed the use of Cryotherapy to aid healing, today I would like to discuss the use of heat.  As many of you will know who have had a full body massage treatment with me, I often incorporate hot stones into my treatment.  And some of my readers will have heard me say they should use a wheat bag or cherry stone bag or some other type of hot pack. The simple reason why I do this is that most people I treat have one or more knots. A knot is created when a muscle contracts for a sustained period of time and looses its ability to stretch or relax.  A simple "muscle knot" will deprive an area of blood, oxygen, nutrients and a thyroid hormone called T3.  When a muscle has been deprived of T3 even for a few minutes it will lose its ability to relax, creating the perfect conditions for inflammation and fibrosis (the creation of adhesions).  A reduction in the partial pressure of oxygen (to 55 mm of Hg) due to restriction of blood to an area in that muscle will start the inflammatory process that causes the fibrotic condition (adhesion) to proliferate.  In the hands of a skilled massage practitioner the knot and any adhesions are located and ideally removed but at least reduced.  With the restoration of normal muscle motion, pain is decreased or eliminated, joint motion improves, and normal or near normal activities can be resumed. So heat is often incorporated into a massage treatment treatment because it

1. Increases blood supply to an area of the body
2. It warms up the muscle tissues to allow them to stretch (relax)
3. It reduces muscle spasm