Inspirational performance is accompanied by perspiration. Our muscles produce heat when they contract to move us — just like a motor. In order to keep our bodies performing at a high level, the heat we lose from our bodies (aka sweat) must be replenished. What, when, and how we add back the fluid is critical to performance.

When you sweat during a workout, your body needs fluid replacement. You might prefer to use water, or one of the “ades” — Gatorade or PowerAde. Do you remember a time your forgot a water bottle or Gatorade? Surely, you encountered a loss of energy, a parched throat or a sense of shakiness.

How about the feeling when you drink some water after a long run. There’s nothing better than feeling the cold liquid bring instant refreshment.

Body Water

When you work or train hard, you sweat. We are all made of 70% water. Water is a vital component of who we are and how we function with our minds, muscles, and organs.

Look closer next time you see an athlete in action, the sweat pouring out is a sign of exertion and it’s the body’s cooling mechanism. The contact of the sweat with the air allows the sweat to evaporate. This cools the skin and the blood, which is flowing close to the skin’s surface. The cooled blood then moves inward cooling the core. If the body cannot evaporate the sweat effectively, or if the fluid loss is too great, then dehydration can occur.

Even though hydration is important and we all recognize its usefulness during activity, it is striking how often we go into a game dehydrated. In fact, a study at Indiana State University showed that 80% of their college football players, and 50% of NFL players go into competition dehydrated. Such occurrences can lead to loss of performance and cramps.

The loss of water from sweat, even as little as 2% of bodyweight can lead to impaired performance, cramps, and impaired cognition. Even worse, excessive sweat loss can lead to increased core temperature. This could lead to heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Every year we read about a young athlete dying because fluid intake was inadequate. All of these outcomes are preventable with a good hydration plan.

Stay in the Game

Athletes need to stay in the game and dehydration should never be the issue behind decreased performance. It is important to encourage your athletes to drink fluids. Sports drinks are typically the best defense against dehydration because they mix fluid, carbohydrates, and electrolytes.

Even more, athletes need to be keeping up fluid intake before, during, and after competition. Gatorade has latched on to this concept, offering drink options for each stage. The NATA (National Trainer’s Association) and the American College of Sports Medicine have made the following recommendations:

“To ensure proper pre-exercise hydration, the athlete should consume approximately 500 to 600 mL (17 to 20 fl oz) of water or a sports drink 2 to 3 hours before exercise and 200 to 300 mL (7 to 10 fl oz) of water or a sports drink 10 to 20 minutes before exercise.

Fluid replacement should approximate sweat and urine losses and at least maintain hydration at less than 2% body

weight reduction. This generally requires 200 to 300 mL (7to 10 fl oz) every 10 to 20 minutes.

Post-exercise hydration should aim to correct any fluid loss accumulated during the practice or event. Ideally completed within 2 hours, rehydration should contain water to restore hydration status, carbohydrates to replenish glycogen stores, and electrolytes to speed rehydration

If exercise is intense, then consuming carbohydrates (CHOs) about 30 minutes pre-exercise may also be beneficial. Include CHOs in the rehydration beverage during exercise if the session lasts longer than 45 to 50 minutes or is intense. An ingestion rate of about 1 g/min (0.04 oz/min) maintains optimal carbohydrate metabolism: for example, 1 L of a 6% CHO drink per hour of exercise. CHO concentrations greater than 8% increase the rate of CHO delivery to the body but compromise the rate of fluid emptying from the stomach and absorbed from the intestine.”

Fluid is critical to performance. Fluid is important no matter the physical exertion. So instead of checking to see if you remembered your water bottle, consider, breaking down your fluid intake into pre-, during, and post-event segments. Hydrate now. Hydrate later. It is important.

Be Strong. Be Connected. Be Moved.

The larger question surrounds the process of getting to eudemonia. Does it require relentless devotion to the pursuit? Unfortunately as the hedonist paradox suggests, a single-minded approach to happiness might not work. Whenever we focus on pleasure, or happiness at the expense of other pursuits, it seems we never really find happiness.

Even more, defining what makes a high quality of life is difficult; it means different things to different people. Health is a part of quality of life, but so is your work, housing situation, relational status, cultural values, and spirituality.

The pursuit of happiness has been a question batted around philosophical circles for centuries and their definitions span a wide spectrum, but do these well-known issues mean we have no hope in understanding wellbeing, happiness, and the overall quality of life?

By no means!

Understanding Quality of Life

In the context of health, quality of life does indeed have some determining factors.

Individually, health related quality of life includes physical and mental health perceptions and their correlates such as health risks and conditions, functional status, social support, and socioeconomic status. It is not necessarily whether you have this or that, but how you feel and what you believe about these issues.

Communally, health related quality of life contains resources, conditions, policies, and practices that influence a population’s health perceptions and functional status.

Even though these individual and community perceptions provide much description around quality of life, we believe the central point around quality of life is function. As we have mentioned before, the World Health Organization asserts that quality of life has less to do with diminishing pain than it has to do with the ability to participate in life with others and to perform the tasks that are important to you.

Focusing on Function

Therefore, our central tenet is that the more we focus on what is important to our patients — the tasks that trouble them and the things they once enjoyed that they now experience limitations — the higher the health-related quality of life will be when they can once again perform them at a high level.

To illustrate, look at this diagram: the red wedge reflects the growing health-related quality of life as we move outward from the traditional model of treating just the medical condition, to addressing the task and participation restrictions.

In line with the conclusions of the World Health Organization, the thesis behind our work suggests the more we direct our attention to bringing functional ability back to the lives our patients, the higher the quality of life.

Ever since Aristotle, we have been pursuing the question of eudemonia. What makes us happy? How can we live the good life? How should we define well-being and human flourishing?

These philosophical inquiries are important and have value in the human pursuit of knowledge, but don’t let the debate fool you into thinking there’s nothing to be done about improving your quality of life and the quality of life for those around you. The ability to participate in life with others and to perform daily tasks is a central component to a high quality of life. If you are interested in improving your quality of life by improving your ability to move, let us know! We will gladly help you get on track!

The body is more complex than one cause and one effect. As we have discussed before in our dialogue around the idea of being “connected,” the body is a complex system. This means pain from one area of the body quite often comes from a myriad of results around the entire body.

One type of headache exemplifies this idea: the cervicogenic headache.

What is a cervicogenic headache?

In basic terms, it is a headache that is caused by something malfunctioning below it. It can be caused by the mixing of nerve signals between the cervical (neck) nerves and the cranial (brain) nerves. It is a head pain from the bony structures or soft tissues of the neck. It commences with short, spaced-out episodes of pain but eventually moves to continuous pain.

Cervicogenic headaches are not extremely common but they can be an explanation for those suffering from chronic headaches. However, they are difficult to diagnose because they closely resemble tension-type headaches and migraines.

How do they occur?

The head pain can be triggered or reproduced by active neck movement, passive neck positioning, or abnormal postures while sitting and sleeping. The joint between the base of the skull and the first cervical vertebrae (the atlas) is innervated by the greater occipital nerve. Irritation of this nerve can refer pain to the back of the head.

Usually, the cause of such headaches comes from high levels of stress to the neck and spine. This can come from many places but the most frequent results reside in fatigue, sleeping poorly, back problems, existing injuries, basic posture, and high levels of muscle stress.

This type of headache manifests itself in many ways. It can be a consistent pain in the back of your head, even extended down into your neck and arms. It can occur behind your eyebrows in the front of your head. These headaches can intensify after sudden movements such as a sneeze or a jerk of the head. In its worst cases, you might even feel nauseous, with blurred vision and sensitivity to light.

Make Them Go Away

Sometimes, basic pain relievers such as aspirin or acetaminophen can work as a treatment. If the headaches are constant or degrading to your quality of life, prescriptions are available from doctors that provide a sustained-release medication for constant treatment.

But, truthfully, the best treatment is prevention. Because the cause of this pain comes from the neck, good posture and reduced tension will help.

Physical therapy is an excellent tool on the preventative side, as studies suggest. The findings point toward ongoing exercise and physical conditioning as a clear long-term prevention tool. Exercise can reduce stress as well as build better mobility and stability of the neck and shoulder complex.

In particular, mobilization techniques such as muscle energy techniques, strain-counter strain, and joint articulation techniques are well suited for headache management.

Slowly but surely, including strengthening and aerobic conditioning will help get you to a position where headaches are more manageable.

Headaches Are Never Fun

Your ability to diagnose headaches, while difficult, will lead you to a place where you can manage the pain and have fewer occurrences. Do you have chronic headaches and think they might be cervicogenic headaches? At PróMotion Physical Therapy we will evaluate the particular signs and symptoms related to your complaints and work alongside you to treat the causes, compensations and symptoms of headache.

When was the last time you heard a perfectly strummed guitar? Do you recall how the notes rung in beautiful harmony, vibrating at complementary pitches? Isn’t it fascinating that noises at separate but steady intervals unite together to create a complicated, textured, and gorgeous sound?

Compare the chord to a single-note melody on the same guitar. The same strings, crafted wood, fingers, and pick produce a remarkably different sound. Of course, there’s no doubting the note proceeds from the same instrument, but it feels different. Sonically, it is alone; it proceeds melodically without the help of others. The muscles, much like a guitar can be tuned to play in an isolated fashion to move a joint (bend your knee), or can be contracted in synchrony to produce integrated patterns of motion (jump over a hurdle).

Musical errors can be heard when a note is not tuned correctly as a chord is played.  You’ve recognized an instrument out of tune.

Human movement errors are much more evident when a muscle is not tuning it’s forces in synchrony with the rest of the muscular system in support of specific tasks or motions.

Training Individual Muscles vs. Muscle as a Coordinative Structure

Classically understood, gaining strength was associated with training individual muscles. You would lift weights focusing on gaining bicep strength or use a machine to develop your lats. Much like playing single notes on a guitar, these exercises developed muscles in isolation without considering the importance of training in a more harmonic fashion.

However, your muscles do not work in this individualized way. Muscles work together is support of whatever task your body is trying to accomplish.  The muscles fire as a group (like a chord), rather than individually (like a note).  In movement science this principle is Muscle operates as a coordinated structure — the collective action of elements that govern the behavior of a system. The muscle system works as a system.  It changes the way it works in response to the challenges of the task. 

Even a simple task such as walking involves muscles all over the body, working in harmony and underneath constraints to accomplish the desired task. A group of muscles throughout the body operate together in order to accomplish a single functional goal. The action of walking is a relation to the muscle group that allows a body to walk. Similarly, the parts of an airplane work together to give the machine the opportunity to fly. The airplane, like muscle, is an object; flying, like walking, is a relation.

Therefore, tasks ought to be classified not by the mechanism (i.e., a specific muscle), but by function and intention.

The Muscle Chord

So then in strength training illustration, it is critical to understand how muscles work in harmony. Train functionally and intentionally, letting the muscles perform their tasks, not in isolation but with a purpose toward the relation you hope to achieve. No matter the training, your muscles need to function in three planes of motion, in response to the task you are performing,  and in the environment in which you are located, and your individual factors.

“Be strong” is more than lifting weights. It’s a frame of mind focused on functional harmony, the ability for your muscles to perform as a cohesive chord instead of a single note. Muscle is potential energy, a combination of force and sensation. Muscle can feel, react, liberate, and utilize energy in other physical objects to feed it’s own growth. Muscle is the scale by which we measure the invisible forces of mass, acceleration, inertia, and momentum. Through our muscles, we have the unique ability to respond to the world around us. Muscle is a sense organ.

Your body is a finely tuned instrument and strong muscles are an important part of a high functioning life. So consider the tasks you want to perform, not the specific muscles you want to strengthen.

Once you know the task, you can train with it in mind, strengthening muscles in harmony instead of isolation with a view toward function and intention.

Be strong doesn’t mean bulk up; it means possess the physical strength and coordination to achieve better in mind, body, and spirit.