Your Inner Guide to Health and Happiness

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Your Inner Guide to Health and Happiness

Healthy Lifestyle, Nutrition, Performance No Comments

 

 What is your inner guide?

Your inner guide, according to Miwa Mack of the Boulder Psychic Institute helps you evaluate the world and make choices which are good for your health and happiness. She describes the guide as your state of calmness of body and clear energy where you are experiencing your own vibration. It is that clear sentience when you are tuned in to your Self, where your mind is clear and quiet and free from self-deprecating thoughts.

We are designed to succeed.

The main point of the discuss was that for us as human body, we are actually designed to succeed. Our human systems is designed for success. That which is not successful is mostly not your energy and will have you make choices which are going to be unhealthy. By accessing our clear autonomy, our personal space, we are free from social, government and medical conditioning and can see the truth.”We are very much sold that we are controlled by the environment. This victim mentality crushes the humans spirit and self-determination. By maintaining your inner vibration, your inner peace, you will attract to you different experiences to you that might be ore positive or might feel more supportive.”

How to access your inner guide?

“Be in your own body, your own space, your own field. People tend to be 20-30 feet in front of them. This is the person who will fall into the television and become the affect of advertising. A person that has placed the outer world as primary, the senior level of influence, are going to make unhealthy choices.”

“One of the simplest ways to make sure that your inner world is the primary decision making point of reference is to make sure that you, on a conscious level, are in your body. Close your eyes and breathe, and imagine all your energy coming back to you — just being more within and contained within your own body.”

BoulderChiropracticClinic.com

Eliminating Short Leg: Cycling Performance

Cycling Performance, Exercise, Movement, Performance No Comments

“I knew a lot about the negative effects leg-length differences have on cycling performance before I had my unequal leg-lengths corrected by Dr. Groover. Leg-length differences are a big bike-fitting challenge I’ve dealt with in my bike frame-building company since the early 1980’s. Naturally, a way to correct these length differences on a long-term basis appeals to me.

For me, working with Dr. Groover is fascinating, informative, and generally very useful. I have been to Dr. Groover after many injuries about which I’ve seen many health practitioners. In almost every case, the unique way Dr. Groover explained the problem, treated it, and the rehab exercises he gave me made more difference to my healing than anything else I had tried.

From having my leg lengths even, my back pain is reduced and my pedaling is smoother and more comfortable. Dr. Groover’s adjustments hold for a long time — until my next bike or ski crash. I did not previously know how correctable most leg-length differences are (for the long term). I recommend Boulder Chiropractic Clinic because Dr. Groover’s treatments are effective, and the beneficial effects are lasting. The benefits riders will appreciate the most are more comfort, especially on long rides – low back, shoulders, and neck, as well as a smoother and more powerful pedal stroke.

The quality of care at Groover Clinic is high. Its Physiological Short Leg Correction program gets your human frame aligned. The Groovers offer high quality advanced treatment programs for taking care of you completely.

To take care of your injuries, I recommend Boulder Clinic’s advanced Holistic Injury Prevention and Treatment Program. Also take advantage of Groover’s Holistic Neuro-Muscular-Skeletal Performance and Wellness Program as a way to fine tune the way your body functions. And for optimizing energy production, power and endurance, try the Metabolic Performance and Wellness Program.

I recommend Boulder Clinic to any cyclist experiencing back, neck, shoulder, or joint pain. But really, in my experience, almost anybody from their teen years on could benefit from it. That’s because due to injury, or to carrying a backpack or purse for years over one shoulder, or to other posture habits, almost everyone has their head carriage off and stands with more weight on one foot than the other. And, while I’ve been to many practitioners who would improve that temporarily, only Dr. Groover’s methods have ever made a lasting difference. My first correction from him held from two years!”

Lennard Zinn is founder and President of Zinn Cycles Inc., Senior Technical Writer for VeloNews, Author, Zinn and the Art of Road Bike Maintenance/Zinn and the Art of Mountain Bike Maintenance/Zinn’s Cycling Primer/ Zinn and the Art of Triathlon Bikes.

Race Across America World Champion Kami White

Exercise, Pain Relief, Performance, Strength, Uncategorized No Comments

“We’ve ridden exclusively on the tandem (for the past 27 years!) We take pride in pushing boundaries for what Tandems can achieve.  In 2013 we became the first tandem to complete the Colorado Triple Crown, the country’s hardest double century series, setting course records for tandem on all three courses. In 2014 we set a tandem course record on hoodoo 500. And in 2015 we were on the 4-tandem mixed RAAM team that shattered the course record that had stood for 19 years, for a 4-tandem mixed team under 50 (and the over 50 record while we were at it.) 3050 miles on 6 days 10 hours 37 minutes. We’re planning a Great Divide off pavement tandem expedition for 2017.” Andy White

Race Across America Finish Line Podium

Race Across America Finish Photo

Race Across America Racers and Crew

Bicycle Racing Association of Colorado Frostbite Time Trial

Climbing into sunrise in the Appalachian Mountains

Low Back Pain: Understanding, Correcting and Managing Healthy Lumbar Curvature and Pelvic Tilt

Balance and Equilibrium, Exercise, Movement, Pain Relief, Performance, Posture, Strength, Uncategorized No Comments

Spinal curves are essential for balance, flexibility, and stress absorption and distribution.

Lumbar Curve and Pelvic Tilt Mythology

Of the 80% who have low back pain, an inordinate number seem to be getting, and worsening this condition from believing in some common low back pain-perpetuating myths. These myths surround misconceptions about the role played by the lumbar curve and the pelvic tilt. Their lumbar curve and pelvic tilt assumptions come from an uninformed aesthetic, structural and functional point of view.

 

Sitting in forward flexed “C-Shape” flattens your low back curve.

Flattening Your Lumbar Curve

Forward bending exercises and stretches, without objective assessment of lumbar curvature, may cause you to develop an abnormally flat low back.

Sitting in a “C- shape”, the shape forced upon us when we sit in a bucket seat, will flatten your low back too.

Ligament Injuries

Flattening your lumbar curve moves your spinal load forward, stretching open and spraining the posterior ligaments of your lumbar spine. Injured ligaments cause joints to become unstable — predisposing them to further misalignments and resulting nerve, inflammation, muscle and pain problems.

Disc Injuries

Chronic straightening and loading of your lumbar with spinal loading forces the intervertebral disc’s nucleus posterior, increasing your risk for nerve encroachment from disc herniation.

Flattening your lumbar curve overloads your front-side lumbar discs, increasing your risk for acute disc injury (bulging, herniation, rupture) and disc degeneration. Flattening your lumbar curve removes or decreases that curve’s spring-action, shock-absorbing function. Therefore, pounding forces traveling through your spine, previously absorbed by this spring, are focused upon your anterior lumbar discs.

Posterior Pelvis Rotation

Rotating your pelvis in the posterior direction additionally flattens your lumbar curve, adding to your already elevated risk for acute lumbar disc injuries and degenerative arthritis of the lumbar spine.

Also, by rotating your pelvis in the posterior direction, it is often believed that you activate your abdominal core muscles, stabilizing your pelvis, low back and rib cage. Unfortunately posterior pelvic rotation does not activate your abdominal core. By assuming that it does; and by using this maneuver during spinal loading activities like lifting, pushing and pulling; you exposes your unstable pelvis, low back and rib cage to joint misalignments and acute joint injuries.

Hyperlordosis (excessive lumbar curve) with accompanying anterior pelvic rotation loads your posterior spine.

Excessive Lumbar Curve

On the other hand, excessive lumbar curve and forward rotation of your pelvis shifts the loading down your posterior lumbar spine. Doing so stretches and sprains your lumbar spine’s anterior ligaments, resulting in associated ligament-injury problems.

Posterior loading of your lumbar spine takes the load off your intervertebral discs and shifts it upon your lumbar facet joints. Overloading of these joints causes compressive joint ligament injuries and joint surface wear and tear, bone deformation and arthritis.

Overloaded lumbar facet joints compress, jam, fixate, inflame and are painful.

Joint Pounding

Your lumbar discs cushion and absorb shocks passing along your spine. Shifting loading forces from your lumbar discs to your facet joints exposes these joints, and also joints throughout your entire body, to excessive pounding.

Abdominal core activation compresses abdominal contents, producing a “fluid-filled” column supporting up to 40% of your weight transferred between your thorax to your pelvis.

Bypassing Abdominal Core

Posterior lumbar load-shifting will bypasses the the critical weight-bearing/weight-transferring work performed by your abdominal core musculature.

Bypassing Lumbar “Leaf-Spring”

Furthermore, posterior loading of your lumbar spine diverts shock-producing forces from becoming dissipated through the leaf-spring action of the lumbar curve and into the posterior facet joints of your lumbar spine.

BoulderChiropracticClinic.Com

Did This Happen When You Fell On Your Butt?

Elderly Health, Pain Relief, Performance, Strength, Uncategorized No Comments

Snowboarding season is upon us here in Colorado and I can’t tell you how many times I have treated these athletes for sacroiliac joint butt-landing ligament injuries. These ligament failures accompany sacroiliac joint subluxations (misalignments less than dislocations) with attendant pain, stiffness and weakness. Depending upon the patient’s age and general health, immediate, accurate diagnosis and treatment will re-align the sacroiliac joints and heal the ligaments for uncomplicated recovery.

On the other hand, most people with chronic low back-hip-pelvis-leg pain, stiffness and weakness have, at some time in the more distant past, fallen on their butts and experienced the same injuries. Due to the long-term wear and tear of these injuries, these cases are often complicated by more severe ligament laxities, inflammation, cartilage loss and the pain of degenerative osteoarthritis.

I recommend that you take care of your sacroiliac joint ligament injuries and their attendant joint subluxations quickly and effectively. If you are still symptomatic after undergoing reasonable treatment, seek another opinion from a sacroiliac joint injury expert. Left unattended, these injuries can make your life miserable.

boulderchiropracticclinic.com

How’s Your Baseline Fitness?

Exercise, General Chiropractic, Movement, Pain Relief, Performance, Strength No Comments

When performance of your activities of daily living are successful and within your ability to maintain good health, you have baseline fitness. Looking specifically at your joints, when you do your everyday lifting, bending, sitting, walking, running, pushing, pulling and throwing, do your joints remain stable? Are they already aligned or are they misaligned? If they are aligned, when you use them, do they remain aligned? How do you know if your joints are aligned in the first place? How do you know if you have healthy brain-to-nerve-to-muscle-to-joint feedback?

Of course you may come to see me and I’ll answer these questions for you. However, by using the following criteria, you should be able give yourself a fairly accurate assessment.

  1. Do you have joint aches or pains? When your joints miss-align, their state of abnormal mechanics cause them to grind and chafe, to become inflamed and they hurt.
  2. Do you have muscle aches or pains? When your joints miss-align, their associated nerve endings will report this to your brain. You brain will respond to this abnormal feedback by contracting certain muscles. Long-term muscle shortening strangles the muscular blood supply, cutting off the exchange of oxygen (anoxia) and nutrients with carbon dioxide and other waste products. Contracted, oxygen-deprived, waste-saturated muscles hurt.
  3. Are your joints stiff? Contracted muscles stiffen your joints.
  4. Are your muscles weak? Poor neuromuscular control of your joints weakens your muscles.

The stability your joints depends upon their ability to function with strength, flexibility and comfort. Your joint-mover and joint-stabilizer muscles must be reporting and receiving normal information to and from your brain. While your joint mover-muscles remain active, your joint stabilizer muscles must effectively oppose the actions of your joint-movers to keep your joints aligned and healthy. This is joint fitness in a nutshell.

boulderchiropracticclinic.com

Neuromuscular Education of Your Knee & Joints

Balance and Equilibrium, Exercise, Movement, Performance, Posture, Strength, Trauma Release, Uncategorized No Comments

Neuromuscular re-education is an attempt to teach your body to move normally through analysis of your abnormal movement and then learning and practicing the normal movement. Theoretically, your normal movement patterns involve specific nerve signals transmitted through specific nerve tracts between your muscles and your brain. By practicing normal movement repeatedly over time, these nerve tracts become reinforced and these normal muscle movement patterns are learned and remembered. It is thought that normal muscle movement patterns are disrupted when nerves or muscles are injured, and normal movement may be regained through Neuromuscular re-education.

I find it is true that abnormal movement results from nerve and muscle injuries and may be relearned. However, it is my clinical experience that certain conditions must be in place for that to occur. Namely, movement-disrupting injuries are more extensive than those to nerves and muscles, and to restore normal movement, these injuries must be healed.

The traumas which injure muscles and nerves will most likely injure your joints too. In most of my cases, joint injury is the primary injury and the nerve and muscle injuries are secondary to (they are caused by) the joint injury. Joint injuries occur from both acute and repetitive stress traumas. Acute traumas abound in contact sports and motor vehicle collisions, where excessive forces sprain your ligaments, strain your muscles and bruise your nerves, and worse. Accompanying these sprains and strains are displacements of your bones from their healthy, neutral alignments within your joint capsules.

Your joints contain bone, cartilage and synovial fluid encapsulated by ligaments, muscles and membranes. Your joints contain nerve endings (mechanoreceptors) which deliver feedback such as information about the alignment of the bones within your joints, joint capsular pressure, ligament, tendon and muscle tension/tone and the position of your limbs in space. When your joints are injured, and therefore misaligned, feedback from these injured joints to your central nervous system becomes abnormal. You’ve heard the expression “garbage in — garbage out”. The control of the nerves associated with those injured  joints is disrupted or lost and abnormal motion of the joints ensues.

In this case, treating the abnormal muscles and nerves without realigning the joint and healing the ligament and other soft tissue injuries can only go so far. Based upon my clinical experience, I propose that the injured ligaments, tendons, muscles and nerves will not effectively heal until their associated joints are realigned and are moving normally in the first place.

boulderchiropracticclinic.com

Overcoming Anterior Head Carriage Affliction, By Dr. Tom Groover

Movement, Performance, Posture, Respiration No Comments

Anterior head carriage with elevated Frankfort Line, a syndrome afflicting almost everyone, is the basis for acute neck injuries and long-term restricted breathing, arthritic degeneration, weakness, stiffness, inflammation and pain. Posture and movement training and spinal joint corrections align and stabilize your head – shoulder relationships for vibrantly healthy living.

Odds are you have anterior head carriage accompanied by superior Frankfort Line. Anterior head carriage exists when your ear canal protrudes forward beyond mid-shoulder and superior Frankfort Line when your inferior eye socket is elevated above your ear canal. These pervasive, acute and repetitive stress-induced, head and neck trauma-related disorders account for widespread headache, neck stiffness, fatigue, pain; even anxiety and depression. Understanding this condition, making the necessary lifestyle modifications and getting the proper professional help could change your life for the better — forever.

Posture and Movement Origins

Our bed pillows, car seats, chairs, couches and desks; at home, work and leisure; forwardly flex our bodies, for many hours per day, into C-shapes. The forms taught to us for gym workouts and even yoga practice do the same. Our activities of daily living train our front side muscles to become short and strong, and back side muscles to become long and weak. Our world is so full of forward flexion and forward interaction, that we are not too aware of the space immediately behind us. We tend to move into, and relate very well to the space before and beside, but not behind us. Therefore, when asked to stand up completely erect, almost everyone’s body curves forward while they insist that they are standing completely upright.

Whiplash Origins

Whiplash thrusts your head and neck backward and then forward, injuring neck ligaments and muscles; misaligning your vertebral joints, bending your neck forward and forcing your face upward. Whiplash injuries frequently occur during car crashes, but also from sports collisions and slips and falls.

Ligament Traumas

Torn and overstretched ligaments of your neck’s vertebral joints injure nerve endings within these ligaments responsible for maintaining your spinal stabilization system. Your spinal stabilization system protects your spinal joints from injuries and vertebral misalignments by activating and coordinating your core stabilizer muscles. These muscles maintain the alignment of your spine during movement and exertion. Neck ligament injuries disrupt the nerve control of your neck stabilizer muscles, making them weak, contracted, painful and unresponsive. Cervicogenic headache is the headache generated from such neck injury. Destabilization of your neck causes susceptibility to acute injury, and causes abnormal neck movement and neck joint wear and tear leading to degenerative neck arthritis.

Spinal Nerve Injuries

Spinal nerve roots emanating from your neck undergo tension, compression and congestion stress when your neck miss-aligns. Associated nerve disruptions impair your muscle and organ functions and interfere with your righting mechanism, disturbing your balance and sense of where your body is located in space.

Postural Stress

Your forward positioned neck and upward tilted head lock up your neck’s vertebral joints. They chronically over-stretch your back-side neck ligaments and muscles and compresses your neck’s intervertebral discs. These abnormal posture and movement patterns generate neck stiffness, pain and headaches. In addition, your forward head carriage chronically stretches your spinal cord, which in turn stretches your brain and spinal nerve roots. This nerve tension interferes with neurological function throughout your central and peripheral nervous systems and therefore,  all organs and systems throughout your body.

Respiratory Stress

Anterior head carriage with superior Frankfort Line disrupts normal breathing by shortening your respiratory muscles, compressing the front side and tensing the back side of your rib cage. The resulting shallow breathing reduces your lung capacity, requiring more frequent breaths. This respiratory impairment diminishes your lung function (O2/CO2 exchange), reduces your energy production and alertness, but also affects your mood. Shallow, rapid breathing correlates with anxiety and resignation.

Overcoming Anterior Head Carriage

Healing neck ligament injuries involves body-awareness training to wake up to the blind spots in our postural and movement perception. Along with posture and movement training, spinal misalignments must be corrected. Doing so facilitates your joint movement and activates the nerves and muscles to successfully execute, strengthen and stabilize that new upright and aligned posture and movement.

You must develop the capacity to extend (bend backward) your lower back and neck while tilting your head down (lowering of your chin) for placing the center of your head over the center of your shoulders and holding it there without effort. The relief you feel from your stiffness, aches and pains and improved capacity for breathing, thinking, feeling and being will more than reward you for your time and efforts.

Professional Treatment and Training

During you initial evaluation at Boulder Chiropractic Clinic you head carriage will be examined. Treatment will usually include specific, expert correction of your upper cervical spinal misalignment (deviation of the base of your head from your upper neck). This procedure will be followed by evaluations and corrections of your pelvis, lower back, upper back, lower neck, shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees, ankles, feet and temporomandibular joints as indicated. Posture and movement training, neck extension traction, and follow-up examinations and corrective care would continue until stabilization. Occasional wellness check-ups are then required for long-term maintenance.

www.boulderchiropracticclinic.com

Clearing and Overcoming Accumulated Traumas that Shut Us Down, With Dr. Tom Groover

High Blood Pressure, Performance, Trauma Release, Uncategorized No Comments

Dr. Robert Johnson, biological dentist from McLean, Virginia speaks with Dr. Tom Groover about his definition of trauma, how it is acquired and compounded throughout life, how it shuts down the body and mind, his essentials for eliminating trauma and what life looks like when trauma is cleared, not only physically, but psychosomatically as well.

Detecting and Correcting Postural Distortion, By Dr. Tom Groover

Dr. Groover Way, Performance, Posture, Strength, Uncategorized 1 Comment

Correcting or significantly reducing postural distortion is essential for successful treatment of most conditions.

Boulder Chiropractic Clinic corrects and maintains correction of your postural distortion as the basis for accurate, effective diagnosis and treatment, and for long-term stabilization and healing.

Postural Distortion?

Your pelvis, shoulders and head may be tilted and positioned to the right or left of your center of gravity. One of your legs might be pulled upward, making it appear short. While standing and feeling like you are balanced, you could be carrying considerably more weight on the right or left side of your body.

You may be surprised to know that these asymmetries are very common —  in fact quite typical. In the eyes of most health practitioners, these physical asymmetries are not even considered distortions. But, if a majority of people are crooked, is that normal, or is this a widespread disease condition?

Disease Condition?

Yes, these postural distortions are statistically normal, but for a small group of doctors like myself, they constitute a widespread curable disease condition. Postural distortions exert harmful mechanical, neurological, chemical, muscular and gravitational stresses upon your spinal and extra-spinal joints. When your body’s structures are tilting off their horizontal or leaning away from their vertical relationships to gravity, your joint components become both compressed and closely packed, and stretched open in relation to their neutral operating positions. Under these circumstances your joint surfaces grind and chafe; ligaments, tendons and muscles wear and weaken; muscles deactivate, contract and stiffen, while others loosen and atrophy. Eventually inflammation, pain and arthritic degeneration ensues.

Eliminating Postural Distortion?

Yes, this is the question. Most people, including health care practitioners, do not recognize postural distortion. Some recognize different aspects of this condition, but see each element separately; pelvis, low back, upper back, neck and head; as individual areas of distortion, weakness and muscle length/muscle tension imbalance. Treatment under this paradigm involves stretching the short, contacted muscles using muscle-lengthening procedures. These include stretching exercises, massage and acupuncture. The overly lengthened muscles are contracted and shorted with resistance exercise. This approach fails to eliminate the patient’s global pattern of postural distortion because the practitioner fails to locate and correct, at its source, what’s fundamentally causing distortion of the posture.

Yes, Eliminating Postural Distortion.

Accidents and injuries often mechanically miss-align your head from the top of your neck, and this misalignment is called the upper cervical subluxation. The abnormal position and movement of your occiput (base of your head) with the upper neck vertebra distorts the spine’s neural canal, the passageway through which your spinal cord travels from your brain to your lower body. Resulting compression and tension of your spinal cord and congestion of your cerebral spinal fluid disrupts muscle tone-controlling nerves, thus throwing your body into a pattern of head-to-toe postural distortion. The key to eliminating the tilting and shifting of your pelvis, spine and head,  your right-to-left weight imbalance and apparent short leg is straightening out your neural canal. Doing so requires upper cervical specific examination, X-rays, X-ray analysis, corrective procedure, re-examination, post-initial treatment X-rays and X-ray analysis, and successful follow-up.

How to Find A Qualified Doctor?

Chiropractors trained in upper cervical correction are the only doctors qualified to realign your upper cervical spine. Make sure your doctor measures your posture before and after treatment and during every subsequent follow-up visit. Make sure your doctor administers specialized upper cervical X-rays and X-ray analysis. Make sure the doctor’s treatment procedure quickly eliminates your pelvis and spinal tilting and shifting, your weight imbalance and your apparent short leg.

We adhere to these standards at Boulder Chiropractic Clinic. In addition, we screen our patients for joint conditions throughout their bodies, and perform detailed regional evaluations, corrective and rehabilitation procedures for abnormal pelvis, hip, low back, upper back, lower neck, TMJ, ribs, shoulders, elbows, wrist and hand, knee, ankle and foot joints.

www.boulderchiropracticclinic.com