Weekly Exercise Guidelines, How Much Should We Really Be Doing?

There will always be new apps, new fitness trends and new fitness influencers reinventing the wheel and creating content to promote healthy living.

Many of us have busy lifestyles and find it difficult to integrate physical activity into those schedules, so we look for the short duration, high intensity style activities that will give us the most bang for our buck. While that can be great, it is also important to keep in mind that our exercise is meant to be diverse, all-encompassing and purposeful in order to decrease our disease risk and ultimately prolong our lives. 

The American College of Sports Medicine and the Center for Disease Control worked in conjunction to create Physical Activity guidelines for the healthy adult that will allow us to do just that, decrease risk of developing cardiovascular disease and maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Here are the take home points to think about when scheduling your weekly workouts: 

Move Your Way Adult Physical Activity Guidelines

Move More, Sit Less:

Anything is better than nothing! Often the task of exercising is so daunting, that people give up before they even start. Taking a walk around the neighborhood, or the office, during the day can still be beneficial, so start there!

Aerobic Physical Activity:

While we often shorten the phrase to cardio, aerobic physical activity that gets our heart pumping is an incredibly crucial part of our routine. Our body responds to the stress we put on it, so we need to make sure we incorporate 150-300 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic physical activity, or 75-150 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity into our routines. The preference is to spread this throughout the week, performing at 3-5 rounds of 30 to >50 minutes of activity at the various intensity levels. 

The Talk Test:

How do we determine moderate and vigorous intensity? There are a multitude of scales out there, and a rising number of fitness monitors that can help you track. One of the easiest ways is the Talk Test. A person doing moderate-intensity exercise can talk, but not sing, during the activity. A person doing vigorous-intensity exercise cannot say more than a few words without pausing for a breath. 

Examples of aerobic physical activity: 

• Brisk walking
• Running/jogging
• Swimming
• Bicycling

Strengthening:

All the sweating and heart pumping action of aerobic activity is great, but we can’t forget about strengthening the muscles we are using during those types of activities. Muscle strengthening at moderate or greater intensity at least 2 days a week that involves all major muscle groups is the current recommendation. If you are someone that likes to split up your workouts, don’t fret! That’s a perfect way to split it up, just make sure you include everything!  A great way to do this is adding functional movement patterns that require lots of different muscle groups throughout your workout. 

Examples of muscle strengthening: 

• Bodyweight exercises
• Dumbbells or kettlebells
• Resistance bands

We at FX Physical Therapy have developed “The Movement Physical”, which is a quarterly preventative screen to evaluate a healthy individual’s movement in order to identify limitations that could lead to decreased performance, potential injury, and/or pain. If you are looking to start living out a more healthy lifestyle and need some guidance, let us know! We’d be happy to perform a Movement Physical and set up a preliminary physical activity program for you!

While the recommendations above are generalized to the healthy adult, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has Physical Activity guidelines for youth, older adults and those with chronic health conditions. Check out https://health.gov/our-work/physical-activity for more information!

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Strength Training For The Mountain Biker

Author: Dr. Colin van Werkhoven, PT, DPT, CSCS 

Strength training has been shown, through research, to have a variety of different benefits for multiple populations. Some of the main benefits of performing strengthening exercises include: increase bone density, increase lean muscle mass, decrease body fat, and improve performance aerobically and anaerobically. All of the listed positives of strength training can correlate directly with mountain bike fitness and performance. 

For endurance athletes, strength training is important for performance, and injury prevention.

Over time, the body is doing very similar movements in mountain biking – from pedaling all day to absorbing impacts from drops or jumps. The human body adapts in certain ways in order to promote your ability to perform those movements. However, when you are performing similar movements repeatedly, if your body is not strong enough to handle those loads – you start to compensate and this can put your tendons and ligaments at risk when your muscles do not perform their job correctly. 

This is where strength training comes into play.

If you are able to strengthen your muscles in the gym, they will be far less likely to fatigue and fail you on the trail. This will help you be able to keep your good form through all technical moves and even help you get better at simple endurance rides up fire roads. If your movement quality can remain consistent and strong, you are far less likely to suffer from nagging injuries like tendinitis, muscle cramps and strains. Another added benefit is that if your body is strong and your bone density improves, crashes that occur will be a little easier to handle and recover from. 

Some of the key areas that mountain bikers should strengthen are: shoulders, quadriceps, hamstrings, glutes, and the mid-back.

There are a lot of strengthening exercises one can perform – however these do not need to be complicated. Stick to the basics, perform them well, and the benefits will come faster than using gimmick exercises or equipment. There is no need to balance on a ball while doing bicep curls. The foundational movements of a push, pull, squat, and deadlift will be exactly what a new weight lifter will need to build a strong foundation and see quick benefits from their strength program. 

More in depth explanations of exercises will come via instagram @fxphysicaltherapy and these blog posts. If you want a personalized plan for mountain biking – contact FX Physical Therapy and set up an appointment soon! 

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What is Dry Needling?

More and more often we are getting patients who walk in our doors with a referral that mentions dry needling, or people coming in off the recommendation of a friend who may have received dry needling during their course of treatment. A pretty common thread we see is that these patients have no clue what dry needling is or how it is used in a PT plan of care. So follow along for a look into this tool!

It’s the same as acupuncture, right?

Wrong! 

While dry needling uses the same needles as an acupuncturist would, the technique is completely different. 

Dry needling targets the muscular level, either to release a trigger point or reset the firing of the nervous system to that particular muscle. 

The technique is named “dry” because the needle is solid with no well in it for delivery or extraction of fluids. Because of this, the needles are extremely thin and often a patient doesn’t even feel it when the needle breaks the skin. 

Is dry needling a quick fix for my pain?

Short answer, no. 

We use a lot of different tools in PT to help alleviate pain, and this is just another tool. It does have the ability to quickly decrease pain, which is great because then we can train the associated muscles or movement patterns. 

However, our overall goal is to figure out WHY you are having that pain, and attack it at the source. 

Are there different ways to dry needle? 

As with anything, there are varying techniques to this tool we use. 

One technique is “pistoning” where the needle is moved in and out to target a trigger point release. 

Another technique is “functional dry needling” where the PT inserts the needle into the muscle and leaves it there, connecting electric stimulation at varying levels to either fatigue that muscle out and force it to relax, or create more input to get that muscle to activate. When that happens, patients’ feel a heartbeat sensation in the muscle. 

As with anyone that walks through our doors, we perform complete evaluations of your entire body, not just the particular part ailing you, and use that to inform our clinical decision making for the best plan of care that is individualized to you.

With that being said, this dry needling tool may not be used on your first visit, but we are constantly thinking through what the best tools are to use in your case! If you have any questions about how dry needling could pertain to your injury or symptoms, don’t hesitate to reach out!

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