Thai massage can help with Parkinson’s symptoms
Parkinson’s disease affects 1 in 350 people in the UK (Parkinson’s UK, 2018).
A ransomised controlled trail allocated 30 patients with Parkinson’s and muscle weakness to receive either six Thai massage treatments in three weeks alongside standard medical care or standard medical care alone.
Patients in the Thai masage group showed significant improvements in their peak flexion torque, peak extension torque and time to maximal flexion speed.
In conclusion the Thai massage study suggested Thai massage could help improve arm muscle strenght in people with Parkinsons.
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How to prevent Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness?
If your training was effective, you should feel some soreness the next day, and for two days at the most. If the second day is significantly worse than the first, and your soreness lasts into a 3rd day or beyond, you have what they call delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS), and it’s a sign that you trained too hard for you. There are no hard and fast rules on what is too hard as DOMS varies from individual to individual. So now I want to talk about how to prevent Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness.
- Anti-Inflamatories
2. Static Stretching
As its not that beneficial to stretch cold muscles, start with a gentle warm up to wam up your muscles. So both your joints and muscls are prepared and get the most benefits from stretching.3. Constrast Showering
Ideally after stretching, jump in the shower and give yourself around of contrast hydrotherapy by alternating the temperature between hot and cold every two minutes. The contrast effect has definitely proven to be effective for reducing soreness and restoring muscle performance more quickly when its used the day after the workout, and any other day that a muscle is sore.4. Warm Up
Ensuring that you warm up before exercising by lightly working the same muscles that you are going to train can go a long way to reducing DOMS and injuries. References Vaile JM, Gill ND, Blazevich AJ. The effect of contrast water therapy on symptoms of delayed onset muscle soreness. J Strength Cond Res. 2007 Aug;21(3):697-702.Does nature restore you? – Part 2
In my previous post, I shared the evidence of how nature can restore you. I appreciate that not everyone in London lives within easy access to a green space, and it turns out that it may not be necessary to visit the green space just look at a green space. This first occurred to me a few weeks ago, when I was in Manchester. In the hotel reception they had screens playing a short video clip of a roaring log fire. A roaring log fire just happens to be another of those things that I find both calms me, reduces my stress levels and restores me. What I noticed is that I had a positive response to the video clip, even though it was just a film of a log fire rather than an actual log fire. So this made me think, would just looking at a picture of nature on your PC have the same positive impact as going out in nature. Li & Sullivan in a randomised controlled experiment demonstrated that views to green landscapes promote attention restoration and help individuals to recover from stress. In another study, researches in China, have discovered that viewing nature based scenes were restorative and those with more openness but no people were more lived to reduce stress. So maybe you could just look at a picture instead. So for those of you where its not practical to spend 5 minutes in nature per day, why not look at a picture of a green landscape (without people) on your mobile phone or tablet or pc, and see if it boosts your attention levels and restores you. References D Li and W C Sullivan, Impact of views to school landscapes on recovery from stress and mental fatigue. Landscape and Urban Planning, vol 148, 2016, pp 149 - 158.
Wang et al Stress recovery and restorative effects of viewing different urban park scenes in Shanghai, China. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 2016, 15, pp 112- 122
