Month: February 2022
Do I Need An XRAY or MRI? EP|50
Live LOUD Life Podcast, Lafayette Colorado
Episode 50
Do I Need an XRAY or MRI?
With Dr. Antonio Gurule DC
In pain and wondering if you should get an Xray or MRI? Both are great tools but oftentimes they are overdone and overused. In Episode 50 of the Live Loud Life podcast, Dr. Antonio breaks down when and why you might need special imaging and when you would not need it.
Episode Highlights
- Why imaging is overused
- How proper evaluation trumps imaging
- Xrays and MRIs as a first step in care
- Pain does not equal tissue damage
- What happens when there are other red flags?
- Sometimes imaging will not change the course of care
About Dr. Antonio Gurule DC
Background:
- Father
- Doctor of Chiropractic
- Owner of Live LOUD
- Personal Trainer & Health Coach
Check Out Some of Our Other Blog Posts and Podcast Episodes
What’s New on the Podcast
Welcome back to another Live Loud Life podcast episode. I’m Dr. Antonio Gurule, your host of the Live Loud Life podcast brought to you by Live Loud Chiropractic and Coaching. My wife and I own Live Loud Chiropractic and Coaching, we’re based out of Lafayette, Colorado, which is in Boulder County. We went to Boulder for our undergrad, we were out to California for grad school and we knew we were coming back home because we love the mountains, we love the sunshine and it’s an amazing place to be. But that’s not what we’re talking about, that was just a little bit of brief history.
Not a lot of housekeeping stuff today. We hope you guys are enjoying the episodes, we have some other guests that will be joining us on the episodes soon, I promise. The start of the year is always a little crazy, we’re all in from the holidays, we had a wedding and all that stuff and just the scheduling–it’s just been harder to connect with people, to be honest. But we hope that you’re finding the content still valuable and beneficial for your health and your wellness and your longevity, to help you live a loud life.
When Do You Need Imaging?
Today, we’re going to be talking about something that we get as a question quite commonly. It was sparked by a recent patient we had who is 10, who ended up having an injury playing soccer. The parents just basically wanted to know, do we need to go get Xrays or an MRI? Pretty simple as that, they wanted an evaluation done. What’s interesting is, depending on who you see, imaging is pretty much the first and only thing that they do. And so I was thrilled that they trusted us with the care for their son and glad they came to a place like ours who values an evaluation and history to understand when imaging is not necessary and when it’s, quite honestly, overdone. That’s what we’re talking about today.
Special imaging, Xrays, MRI, CT scans–amazing technology. Like it blows my mind that we can do these things and get insight into the world within our body. It is absolutely amazing and it is necessary for healthcare and for certain things. In the case of musculoskeletal care and injuries, very beneficial but again oftentimes overused and overdone, so that’s what we’re talking about today.
Changes in Body Tissue
The insight into your body is a great tool that could give indication as to why there might be certain pain in certain areas or certain issues. But that’s not always the case because they have done a number of studies on asymptomatic individuals where we see changes from the “normal” body tissue and the way things should look in asymptomatic individuals. For instance, if you’re over the age of 50 and you’re asymptomatic and you go get an MRI, you’re going to find old injuries, old disc bulges, just different things that have happened over the years that don’t correlate to any pain. When someone is in pain and we do see those changes in imaging, yes, there could be an indication that those would be consistent with the pain pattern and maybe causing it. But the question always comes down to “will it change the course of care?” We’re going to get into a little bit of that because that’s always something that we want to understand and realize.
Simple Pain Remedies
In the case of this 10-year-old, we did a knee exam, we talked about what happened, a little bit of swelling, he was limping. But a lot of the why he was having the symptoms he was having is because he had been doing the old school method of RICE (Rest, Ice, Compress and Elevate) and he hasn’t moved his knee in over a week, like hardly moved it at all. The knee is stiff as can be and so I’m asking him to move and do things, it’s going to hurt because he hasn’t been moving it. And so all we did was kind of trick him in doing some gentle plyometric walking, skipping, different things like that, and miraculously the knee was fine. There was still some end range pain in certain directions but still… It doesn’t take it all away but it was pretty cool to see this immediate change. After all the evaluation, I was just like, no, you don’t need imaging. It’s slightly hyperextended because he missed a ball and that created some tissue irritation, added some swelling. What they did was not wrong but we encouraged them to just start moving him more and more and then we’re going to get a little bit of a return to play program going in.
Examples of Overuse
But in the case of musculoskeletal injuries, we oftentimes overuse this. They would have gone to a PCP. Many PCPs are skilled in orthopedic evaluation and they hopefully would have come to the same conclusion, but many would be like, yeah, it’s always good to just get an Xray to see if anything’s going on. Why? Just do the evaluation to figure out if something’s going on!
This is definitely the case, depending on the cascade of events of how you get to whoever’s helping you. And again, nothing against orthopedists but they are skilled at their role and almost everything they do revolves around having some sort of image around something. Many of the orthopedists that we work with, people will go see them and they’ll basically say nothing’s wrong with you–you need to go see a physio, a chiro or a personal trainer and you need to rehab this out. Which is amazing, but even chiropractors depend on Xrays to set up their treatment course and plan. There’s absolutely no reason you need to get Xrays before starting chiropractic care. Nothing indicates that that would be the case.
This is not a pain science episode, we just wanted to talk about some of the reasons as to maybe why you might get imaging. This is not a pain science episode talking about the complexity of pain, but we do know that tissue damage does not equal pain and pain does not equal tissue damage, and that’s the whole premise of this. You could have an injury or pain in an area and everything would check out, which would mean you would not need imaging. There are functional MRIs and stress Xrays but most of them are a stilled image of what the tissue looks like beneath the surface. Beneficial, but more times than not we’re going to try to do an appropriate evaluation and assessment to determine if something actually does need an image, and more times than not it doesn’t.
Here are some reasons as to why imaging might be good, and I’ll try to give some examples as they come up.
Significant Trauma
Let’s say for instance, someone was in a rollover car accident. If they were in a rollover, they probably were checked out by EMTs at the scene–and if they cleared everything, then most likely you’re good. But significant trauma like from a car accident and they’re having unrelenting pain and there’s just a number of different things going on, that would be a good time to be like, hey, let’s get some imaging to make sure things are good. And if you’re checked out by the EMTs, depending on the severity of the accident, you might be in a C-spine, on a board, brought to the hospital, and they’re going to do all that imaging to check you out.
When people are in significant car accidents and they come in to us, it’s kind of this middle ground where we’re like we want to find out about the severity. More times than not, the people that are walking in the clinic after a car accident probably don’t have something broken. It’s not to say they don’t. Depending on the story and the history as we go through it, that would lead us to believe if there’s something correlated to the traumatic trauma.
Another example would be a patient that I’ve seen on and off, does CrossFit, a lot of intense stuff, oftentimes will come in with like, oh my gosh, my back hurts so bad. I did this, this or this, whatever it might be. Chatting more with this individual, she’s like, oh, yeah, I got bucked off my horse last week and I’m having this SI joint, lower back pain–and she points kind of to the back of her pelvis and her lower back. We’re chatting a lot more and it’s like, yeah, getting bucked off a horse and hitting the ground, that’s quite a bit of trauma. I want you to get an Xray first. Fractured her pelvis, right? She had a fracture in her pelvis. It didn’t really change the course of care for what we did because we can still do some soft tissue and stuff, but I’m not going to be doing a lot of adjustments around a fractured pelvis that takes time to heal. That would be an example of significant trauma.
Inability to Bear Weight
Now, with significant trauma, we’re looking at things like is the individual able to bear weight? There are certain criteria, without getting to the specifics of it. Let’s say for instance you twisted your ankle. “I don’t know if I broke my ankle.” Obviously, a lot of swelling, different things like that, and we’re looking at can you bear weight. If someone’s able to bear weight and walk and do certain things after a sprain or a twisted ankle, the likelihood of them having fractured their ankle goes down. What’s great about an Xray is that a three-view ankle Xray cache is like $45 so it can be a simple easy tool to just rule that out. We’re not saying don’t do imaging; we’re just trying to find the appropriate time and place so that you’re not doing unnecessary imaging. In the case of something like that, it’s like, yeah, we’re curious. Let’s go get a quick image and we’ll hopefully be able to see something. So inability to bear weight could be a factor as well.
Cancer and Other Red Flags
When we’re looking at more potentially sinister things, these are these red flags where it’s like, yeah, let’s dive into some of these things. In the case of even something like lower back pain, part of our questionnaire is do you have a history of cancer? Cancer can grow in other areas and the spine depending on it can be an area that it definitely can. Someone who basically has this unexplained lower back pain that’s started and they have a history of cancer, it’s like let’s go get some Xrays and let’s get some imaging and see if there’s anything going on. That’s an easy way to rule out if it has metastasized to a different part. That can be again a very useful tool so that you’re not creating more of an issue where their pain might be. And we want to know those types of things to help manage their care because it’s not just something that we’re going to be managing on our own.
Signs of Inflammation
Other things that could be in the spine but let’s say even more peripheral, and we’re talking about more like a joint here, the affected area is very hot and swollen. We can have joint infections and there’s different reasons as to why that might happen. When something is infected, it doesn’t have to be very swollen but it can be very warm to the touch. We see a lot of this like acute inflammation moving to this area, trying to fight off whatever that is. That would be an indication of looking into further imaging or evaluation assessment to determine what that might be. Also, looking at the overall temperature of the individual and other things like that would lead you down that road.
Neurological Symptoms
Other things, let’s take into consideration lower back pain or even neck pain or something like that–progressive weakness or progressive neurological symptoms. A term that gets overused way too often is sciatica. Basically, anything from your back or in your butt or down your legs a little bit is going to be sciatica, that’s how people portray it. It’s a little bit more defined than that but we’re not going to talk about that today. When someone has a lower back injury or neck injury and let’s just say it is a disc herniation or a bulge and we’re having inflammation and/or direct pressure on the nerve root, they could be having weakness or neurological symptoms such as numbness and tingling, burning pain, or even motor deficit loss. Those would be considered neurological symptoms.
If we’re seeing someone and progressively those symptoms are getting worse, we want to get an MRI and check out to see what’s going on, what’s pushing on the nerve. There are obviously different interventions such as steroid packs and other things like that which would significantly help. (We don’t prescribe that because that’s a medication but we would refer on to that.) But that would be a time where I would be like, hey, your weakness is getting worse, your motor loss is getting worse, your numbness is becoming more prominent, if you will, and/or the area in which it is numb is growing. The tingling would be kind of correlated with that as well and then even if someone is having like burning pain, if it’s getting more intense, it’s progressing and/or the area is getting larger, you’re not going in the right direction–we want some imaging, we want to go check it out, we want to make sure what’s going on. That would be another indication of doing it.
Lack of Progress
And then last, one of the criteria is a potential just lack of progress. While what we do is super beneficial and it helps a lot of people in a lot of different areas, there are times when we’re just not getting the progress that we want to see. So if for whatever reason we’re working on an ankle injury, something like that, a knee or something like that. We’re working on it, we’re rehabbing it, we’re strengthening it and it’s just like, oh, I’m not getting better, there’s still this one thing or this one position or this is happening. I get a sharp pain or something like that in these certain angles, positions, so on and so forth, there might be something in there that’s just not right.
One case that comes to mind is I had a CrossFitter, this was years ago, who had a sticky elbow. Sticky elbow, the elbow did not like end range flexion and end range extension. There’s not many times when you go into like deep, deep flexion. Front rack would be definitely one of those. You have the barbell on your shoulders, rested on your fingertips and your elbows up–that’s deep weighted flexion. And then terminal extension, I actually do quite a bit because you’re locking everything out, whether that’s a press overhead, whether it’s a push up or dips. And we’re mobilizing, we’re working on it, we’re adjusting it, we’re doing all these things, and it’s just not getting anywhere. I was like, dude, I don’t know what’s going on. Can I just refer you for a quick Xray? He had a loose body in there. Basically, like a little fragment of connected tissue bone, whatever it was, that was basically just blocking the joint. You know a hinge? Imagine you have a door hinge with like a big granule of sand in there, it’s not going to be able to function as good as it could. A simple thing such as that, we found it. For him, it was enough where it was restricting the things that he wanted to do. They went in, they took that out, and it was like he had a brand-new elbow, nothing was wrong. So a lack of progress can be an indication of when to do it.
Pain Does Not Equal Tissue Damage
But, overall, when we’re looking at these, most of these are fairly intense things and the likelihood of these being the cause of your pain issue and under function are low. They are a possibility, we are not saying that this is not the case, but we do have to take into consideration (and just coming back into this) tissue damage does not equal pain and pain does not equal tissue damage. You can be in intense pain with literally nothing physically wrong or broken. The pain cycle is complex, that’s not to say that your pain is not real. Making sure that we make that a point. That does not mean that what you’re feeling is not real. It’s just saying that when you’re looking for imaging to try to find the cause and when you’re going through all these diagnostic things, sometimes providers make up things to correlate and associate with it because we need an answer, we need to know why. That’s getting down into again the pain science discussion, that pain is complex or our bodies are complex and when we want answers and we’re searching for answers, you’ll find something. You’ll find something but that doesn’t mean it’s the cause.
If you have an injury, obviously get it evaluated, get it checked out, but hopefully this brings a little bit of awareness and comfort in knowing that the majority of these things that would require special imaging, Xrays, MRIs and CT scans, if the individual who’s evaluating you does a really good assessment and evaluation, they’re going to rule those things out. So then if we’re working with something, we know we’re not dealing with a structural issue.
Would Imaging Change the Course of Care?
I just finished up with a gal who had a pinchy shoulder. She has been told, oh, it’s probably a rotator cuff tear and all these other things. It was just like, hey, your strength and everything is checking out, you have poor scapular mechanics and weakness in the shoulder. (Weakness meaning like a complete deficit from right to left as to what she’s able to accomplish.) Especially talking about an overhead athlete, it’s like let’s just try to make it super strong, work on your range of motion mechanics, so on and so forth, and see where we get. We checked it out, there doesn’t appear to be any sort of structural damage based on an evaluation. I don’t know that for sure, obviously, because I didn’t have an MRI. But even then, if her pain gets better but yet she did have a rotator cuff tear, does that mean the rotator cuff tear needs to be addressed or fixed? And that’s the conversation that we have constantly–will it change the outcome of care?
Do you want to know if you have a rotator cuff tear? Yes. Okay, fine, we can get imaging. We have insurance and free market healthcare allows us to get those things fairly quickly. You could pay cash for it too. Fine, ease of mind, great, and then we can set it up from there. But for a lot of people, you’re just like I’m not going to do surgery so it doesn’t really matter. It’s just like, cool, then let’s just dive into what we know and help make it better.
Conclusion
Special imaging–we love it, we need it, it’s great. But knowing when and what we are to do. And for your injuries, being evaluated by a good provider will help you strongly determine what needs to be done and so that way you’re not also just getting unnecessary imaging. Also, just knowing. It’s just like we said, the more things you go through–the more imaging, the more diagnostics, the more things you’re looking for–you’re getting further down that road that pushes towards more interventions such as injections and medications and surgeries and things like that. So, understanding that if you don’t need those things right off the bat and you can start a course of conservative care and improve, then you don’t even have to go down that slippery slope.
Live LOUD Chiropractic and Coaching Serving the Communities of Lafayette, Louisville, Erie, Broomfield, Longmont, and Boulder Colorado.
Consistency in Your Life EP|53
Live LOUD Life Podcast
Lafayette Colorado
Episode 53
EP|53 Consistency in Your Life
With Dr. Antonio Gurule
Connect With Antonio and the Live LOUD team: hello@liveloudlife.com
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Guiding your to the adventurous life you were made for!
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About Dr. Antonio Gurule
Background:
- Father
- Doctor of Chiropractic
- Owner of Live LOUD
- Personal Trainer & Health Coach
Check Out Some of Our Other Blog Posts and Podcast Episodes
Anthony Gurule 00:00
Hey what’s up guys, welcome back to another episode of the Live LOUD Life podcast. My name is Dr. Antonio, I’m your host of the Live LOUD Life podcast. My wife and I, we co-own Live LOUD Chiropractic and Coaching here in Lafayette, Colorado. We are just outside of Boulder, Colorado in Boulder County. And our mission is to help families. We want to help make families stronger, so that we can build a stronger community. We want to help guide you to the adventurous life that you and your family were meant for. And we do this through chiropractic and coaching. chiropractic, obviously being more of a hands on approach, more of a clinical conversation, clinical diagnostics, but the coaching aspect is really what we believe is, you know, the foundation of what our system methodology, whatever you want to call it is, because a lot of this comes around through just coaching suggestions and recommendations. also, you know, obviously within that comes into clinical prescriptions of certain things to eat or supplements, so on and so forth. But it’s coaching a lifestyle, it’s coaching, it’s coaching a philosophy and a foundation about how to live an active healthy life as an individual, and setting an example of a healthy active life for your family, for your immediate family, for your friends, and more importantly for your community. So stronger families to make a stronger community as a whole would be a win win, right? And that’s what we want to be able to do. we want to be able to help fill in the gaps in the holes that you’re maybe not getting from, from other roles and conditions.
Anthony Gurule 01:43
And today that’s in particular where we’re going to talk about. it’s going to be a little bit more of a shorter episode because this is more of a quote unquote, you know, just discussion around how to lay out a framework and a better understanding of how to work out or what exercises are safe or maybe not safe during pregnancy. This is a very, very common question that we get.
Anthony Gurule 02:12
My wife Nichelle has created a mini course that has some workout ideas, recommendations, and prescriptions than laid out into a workout. She guides and educates other clinicians on how to broach this topic as a chiropractor, how to better serve prenatal patients through chiropractic care, but also exercise recommendations and prescriptions, having recommendations with other personal trainers within the community whether that’s CrossFit whether that’s Orange Theory, chatting with coaches and owners and saying hey, if you have prenatal patients and they’re having these types of symptoms, or this has happened, here’s some better recommendations, not modifications. We call them lateralizations–you’re just you know, you’re doing something something different or something else we you know, we borrow that term from Charlie Weingroff, who’s a physical therapist and strength conditioning coach. But it also and also doulas, right, doulas and midwives and OBs who are directly involved with the prenatal process from nearly conception all the way through, having this conversation. we know that exercise is important during pregnancy,
Anthony Gurule 03:19
There are so many different studies that talk about the benefits of exercising during pregnancy, not only for the mom, but also for baby, which is quite interesting. They’re seeing increased cognitive-what’s the word I’m looking for? Excuse me, their cognitive output as a as an as a child through as they age is actually better from moms that actually worked out during pregnancy.
Anthony Gurule 03:50
Now this is tough, right? How do you define working out or exercise? it’s different for everybody. But we want to, and we encourage that, and yet we’re sympathetic to the different stages of life, aches and pains, so on and so forth, which obviously would limit what you can do from an exercise perspective. So you know, it’s a bit of a gray area on determining what is working out? what is exercise? What are the physical guidelines or recommendations for pregnancy? And without getting into the like, nitty gritty detail of every single thing. And obviously, every potential situation, if you had this versus this, what could happen? we’re not gonna be able to do that. What we just want to lay out is what is what are we trying to accomplish here, and we want to encourage you to stay as physically active as possible.
Anthony Gurule 04:41
And one of the things that constantly comes up is, well, should you add something in that you have not already been doing? Let’s say for instance, someone just through the stages of life with work and kids or whatever that is, they were not able to work out as much before they got pregnant, but now that they’re pregnant, whether they have more time or they understand the importance of exercises during pregnancy, well, would we say, “Well, you haven’t been exercising, so you shouldn’t do too much.” No, that doesn’t, that doesn’t really make sense. Now, we would encourage not to do too much, there’s obviously, you know, a too far swinging the pendulum of the other way. But we wouldn’t say “no, don’t exercise because you weren’t doing something before,” we just have to find those first few stepping stones to help them start to gain some momentum. and help hold their hand, if you will, So that their technique and they feel confident about lifting, or how far they’re walking or whatever that is. And that’s an important topic, because a lot of times people want to add things in, but they weren’t quite ready or weren’t doing them before. And they then assume that they’re not able to do them at all. So you do have to take that in consideration, there is a ton that you can do, and that you can still add, even though you weren’t doing them prior to pregnancy.
Anthony Gurule 05:54
Now on the big questions is, is it safe? you know, outside to contact sports, or different things like that the majority of what you’re going to do is safe for pregnancy, right? Rock climbing, we have pregnant patients that have been rock climbing before, obviously, there’s a certain inherent risk with certain sports or activities. You know, you could fall off riding your bike, you could fall over running, right, so we’re not encouraging any of these by any means. We’re just kind of, you know, setting some suggestions, if you will. And you have to take into consideration.
Anthony Gurule 06:31
Now, there are certain things to consider when you’re talking about like weightlifting, and how heavy and the intensity that you’re doing. And if you’re doing Valsalva movements, which is essentially holding your breath to maintain a more rigid or stiff torso, as you’re seeing changes in blood volume and blood pressure, you know, you do have to take that in consideration. And that is again, of course a conversation with your provider that is managing your, your pregnancy, but we recommend Mama’s weight lift, or do resistance training. During pregnancy, again, we talked about about load management and the intensity and things like that, but you can still lift and do fairly intense things. And it’s a fairly as a you know, as a scale and a wide range during pregnancy and see a ton of benefit from that. Now, are we trying to hit one rep maxes and PRs during pregnancy, I mean, some would argue yes, but I would argue, why, that’s not really an accurate representation of what your strength is anyways. So you know, you do have to to kind of keep manipulating the numbers and the weights and the intensity and the sets and reps in order to do it. But weightlifting and resistance training is safe, and it is effective. Now, outside of that, there’s not a lot of unsafe things to do, again, outside of contact sports, or things that would elicit, you know, potential trauma to you or baby based on impact we’ve had, again, not our recommendations, but some have tried very just easy scheme, because they’re in the winter months, and they wanted to and they felt very confident about not falling. So you know, you have those types of things.
Anthony Gurule 08:16
Overall, again, we’re talking about movement. You need to move, and it’s good to get your heart rate up. And it’s good to breathe hard. So that doesn’t mean just because you’re pregnant, you can’t do HIIT training or circuit training or CrossFit or Orange Theory. But you do have to listen to your body and understand certain signs that would indicate that things might be too much, right? Now those are going to be different for everyone, but a lot of this comes down to you know, lightheadedness, you know, breathing too hard. Certain aches and pains within lower extremity, chest, abdomen, so on and so forth would be obviously like your more extreme ones. If you’re becoming pale or anything like that, I mean, again, these are the same criteria, though, that would be if someone else was working out or training too hard. So it’s realistically the same thing. It’s just that your threshold level for all those most likely have gone down. And depending on what type of an athlete you were before, you’re going to be maybe a little frustrated that you’re not able to do the things you were able to do previously, which makes sense. But if you’re someone who wasn’t exercising before, you’re probably going to be a little bit more hyper aware of that, of just feeling that shortness of breath or that uneasiness. So again, we’re not saying you have to push through that because we’re not trying to set yourself up for a strength and conditioning program to increase your metabolic capacity to increase your strength and conditioning during pregnancy. We’re trying to help you maintain a healthy active pregnancy.
Anthony Gurule 09:54
Now, walking. walking is great. but in general, we encourage you to do something above and beyond walking. Obviously, again, certain things would dictate that you would not be able to do so. And this is again, any exercise. Any exercise that you do during pregnancy needs to be consulted with and work through and have a conversation with the primary physician who is managing your pregnancy, whether that’s your nurse practitioner, your midwife or your OB or obstetrician, right. But we would encourage more than just walking. walking is fantastic, but that’s kind of like your baseline minimum, right? Just like our activities, or recommendation activity guidelines. We want a few days a week of where we’re kind of just doing this steady state getting our steps in, you know, kind of pushing ourselves, we’re huffing and puffing, but still just kind of at that conversational level, but you’re not really getting a lot of benefits outside of that.
Anthony Gurule 10:55
So if you’re just walking, high five. kudos. can you do something more? Can you do some bodyweight squats? Can you do some bodyweight, you know, good mornings? can you do some walking lunges? do you have a suspension training, we’re able to do some bodyweight rows? Do you have some bands that you can do some rows with? You know, there’s a lot that you can do that allows you to get a little bit more out of that. Now, again, this all comes back down to preferences of exercises that you like to do, because that’s gonna allow you to maintain the most consistency, but then also the intensity that you like to do. And we do encourage having an open mind and at least being willing to try some high intensity things that allow you to still get your heart rate up a little bit. And it’s okay to lift more than five or 10 pounds. And not saying that that is a bad thing. There’s programs out there where it’s all directed around that where it’s lighter weight, high rep, but I just don’t want individuals and mamas to feel like they’re not able to do more and or being ashamed because other people are just saying they should back off because they’re pregnant. “why would you need a lift that much?” It fits within your strength, and your comfort, and your wheelhouse, that is totally fine.
Anthony Gurule 12:05
Again, you if you’ve been doing that enough, you understand the risk reward ratio and having a conversation with your practitioner has driven us to kind of help navigate and guide as you start to get further through pregnancies, what things maybe we need to change or manipulate. But that’s totally fine. Now outside of that, the question around safe also comes up around core exercises. diastasis recti, pelvic floor strength, so on and so forth, we want to enhance the capability of understanding how to control tension within your abdominal wall and your pelvic floor through pregnancy, because the pressure is increasing due to baby taking up more space. But we’re not we’re not necessarily we’re not gaining more strength, right.
Anthony Gurule 12:45
And so what a lot of people assume it’s when we’ve seen this, is “I don’t want diastasis. So I’m doing more core work to prevent diastasis from happening.” diastasis recti will happen in 100% of moms, it’s estimated at the week 35 Everyone will have some form of it. Now it is technically not a quote unquote diagnosis, though, until 12 weeks postpartum, because it is a normal thing that everyone will get. So you can’t diagnose someone with something that everyone will get–doesn’t make sense, right? So after that, though, if you still have weakness or spacing issues, then we can have a you know, a stronger conversation about putting a diagnosis on that.
Anthony Gurule 13:26
But what we’re trying to enhance and help is what exercises are quote unquote, not safe versus unsafe, but adding too much pressure or tension into the abdominal wall or the pelvic floor and creating more laxity. again, as that pressure for as baby’s growing starts to put more pressure on the pelvic floor and the abdominal wall. If you’re doing more things that increases the pressure within the within the abdominal cavity that’s going to push on that separation even more and/or push on that pelvic floor even more, creating potential incontinence or prolapse issues and/or more bulging and doming within the abdominal wall stretching out that separation or that gap even further, potentially making the recovery process more challenging or slightly longer. I’m not saying that it will but potentially, so we do have to take that in consideration. So we go through activation exercise of the pelvic floor, of the abdominal wall so that you better understand how to control those pressure increases while you’re lifting or exercising so that you simply can stay at a management level.
Anthony Gurule 14:28
And that in turn, helps you get through pregnancy of understanding how to lift up your older kiddo, having to lift up dog food or anything like that. It’s just managing and controlling pressure. So there’s really not anything that I would say that safe or unsafe. Now, things that we would advise against for core exercises is sit ups or crunches. You know a lot of those things that create like hanging knee raises and different things like that during pregnancy. A lot of those things that create a lot of intra abdominal pressure and tension. and especially during a flex position, that tends to put a lot more pressure on the abdominal wall, the separation where diastasis will occur as well as the pelvic floor.
Anthony Gurule 15:09
So, you know, while we never say never, there’s definitely a category of things that we definitely urge against because the risk/reward benefit and again, risk not being “injured,” But risk of potentially putting more pressure and making the recovery process on the other side harder, is not is not something that we find to be as advantageous. But you can still get the benefits of quote unquote, core exercises through full body movements such as goblet squats, such as deadlifts, you know, depending on the phase that you’re in, push ups, which are, you know, a dynamic plank. or being able to do a TRX row, which is a reverse plank as you’re just lifting yourself up. three point rows where you’re on, you know, two hands or doing like a row on a bench, where you’re in a tabletop position that’s adding anti rotation exercises. So there’s a ton that you can do that still highlights and isolates, the core isolates, sorry. that highlights and will emphasize core activation, but through a full body compound movement. And what’s great about that is during pregnancy, depending on your energy levels, it’s hard to do all the little isolated accessory and all these separate exercises as it is. So it’s kind of nice being able to combine everything, so you get more bang for your buck, especially if you’re a parent and you’re on and you’re on baby number two or three, right?
Anthony Gurule 16:31
So what exercises are safe for pregnant women to do? All are. reduce or eliminate for sure contact activities, different things like that. the increased risk activities of you know, trauma and things like that. Outside of that you’re managing pressure, I would definitely encourage reducing anything that’s heavy lifting, that’s, that’s requiring you to do Valsalva moves, you’re having to hold your breath for an extended period of time. that changes blood pressure, so on and so forth. But outside of that, Pregnancy is a completely safe time to do all exercises. we definitely as we highlighted, urge and encourage, you know, certain things over other ones just for you know, added bang for your buck or full body movements, so on and so forth. And that, but outside of that you are free to do what you want.
Anthony Gurule 17:19
If you want guidance, though, you know, there are there are trainers out there that work specifically with prenatal patients. we would love to be able to have that conversation with you if that’s something you want to bounce back or navigate. Because we do want to encourage as much as we can. A very, very active pregnancy through exercise working out or however you want to describe that. So if you found this beneficial, please like share, subscribe. if you’re pregnant, I hope you can utilize this and take some of the information for you and yourself. If you have anyone else you know… a relative a family member, a friend who is pregnant and they’re unsure they’ve been you know asking this question what things I don’t know what things I can do. I don’t know if it’s safe for baby share this video with them. We’d love to be able to provide a better frame of reference and or context to be able to ask better questions so that they can find the workout program or the movements that work best for them during their pregnancy. Until next time guys live loud .if you’re currently pregnant, Congratulations, and we look forward to helping and serving in the future.
–
Easy Vs Hard Choices EP|52
Live LOUD Life Podcast
Lafayette Colorado
Episode 52
EP|52 Easy Vs Hard Choices
With Dr. Antonio Gurule
Episode Notes:
- The consequences of easy vs hard
- we assume that because it is a hard choice that it is actually harder for you but when you chose the easy path you actually make it much harder on yourself in the long run
- There is strength in the struggle
- Something I and all of us on a daily basis have to work on “Si vis pacem, para bellum” translation: if peace is what you want, prepare for war
- You have to work and sometimes that work is for simply peace
- keep challenging yourself and growing!
Connect With Antonio and the Live LOUD team: hello@liveloudlife.com
Subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/LiveLoud
Visit the website: http://www.lifeloudlife.com
Like the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/liveloudchiropractic/
Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/live.loud.life/
Guiding your to the adventurous life you were made for!
If you dig this give it a like ❤️, if you’re loving it let me hear you with a comment 🗣👂, and if you know it will help someone or anyone out please share 👥📲 Videos are instructed by professionals and for educational purposes only.
Viewers should consult with their providers to see if the movements are right for them. The videos are tailored to educate families on prenatal, postpartum, and pediatric-related issues., along with general health, wellness, and pain issues such as low back pain, shoulder pain, neck pain, etc.
About Dr. Antonio Gurule
Background:
- Father
- Doctor of Chiropractic
- Owner of Live LOUD
- Personal Trainer & Health Coach
Check Out Some of Our Other Blog Posts and Podcast Episodes
Anthony Gurule 00:00
Hey what’s up guys, welcome back to another episode of the Live LOUD Life podcast. My name is Dr. Antonio, I’m your host of the Live LOUD Life podcast. My wife and I, we co-own Live LOUD Chiropractic and Coaching here in Lafayette, Colorado. We are just outside of Boulder, Colorado in Boulder County. And our mission is to help families. We want to help make families stronger, so that we can build a stronger community. We want to help guide you to the adventurous life that you and your family were meant for. And we do this through chiropractic and coaching. chiropractic, obviously being more of a hands on approach, more of a clinical conversation, clinical diagnostics, but the coaching aspect is really what we believe is, you know, the foundation of what our system methodology, whatever you want to call it is, because a lot of this comes around through just coaching suggestions and recommendations. also, you know, obviously within that comes into clinical prescriptions of certain things to eat or supplements, so on and so forth. But it’s coaching a lifestyle, it’s coaching, it’s coaching a philosophy and a foundation about how to live an active healthy life as an individual, and setting an example of a healthy active life for your family, for your immediate family, for your friends, and more importantly for your community. So stronger families to make a stronger community as a whole would be a win win, right? And that’s what we want to be able to do. we want to be able to help fill in the gaps in the holes that you’re maybe not getting from, from other roles and conditions.
Anthony Gurule 01:43
And today that’s in particular where we’re going to talk about. it’s going to be a little bit more of a shorter episode because this is more of a quote unquote, you know, just discussion around how to lay out a framework and a better understanding of how to work out or what exercises are safe or maybe not safe during pregnancy. This is a very, very common question that we get.
Anthony Gurule 02:12
My wife Nichelle has created a mini course that has some workout ideas, recommendations, and prescriptions than laid out into a workout. She guides and educates other clinicians on how to broach this topic as a chiropractor, how to better serve prenatal patients through chiropractic care, but also exercise recommendations and prescriptions, having recommendations with other personal trainers within the community whether that’s CrossFit whether that’s Orange Theory, chatting with coaches and owners and saying hey, if you have prenatal patients and they’re having these types of symptoms, or this has happened, here’s some better recommendations, not modifications. We call them lateralizations–you’re just you know, you’re doing something something different or something else we you know, we borrow that term from Charlie Weingroff, who’s a physical therapist and strength conditioning coach. But it also and also doulas, right, doulas and midwives and OBs who are directly involved with the prenatal process from nearly conception all the way through, having this conversation. we know that exercise is important during pregnancy,
Anthony Gurule 03:19
There are so many different studies that talk about the benefits of exercising during pregnancy, not only for the mom, but also for baby, which is quite interesting. They’re seeing increased cognitive-what’s the word I’m looking for? Excuse me, their cognitive output as a as an as a child through as they age is actually better from moms that actually worked out during pregnancy.
Anthony Gurule 03:50
Now this is tough, right? How do you define working out or exercise? it’s different for everybody. But we want to, and we encourage that, and yet we’re sympathetic to the different stages of life, aches and pains, so on and so forth, which obviously would limit what you can do from an exercise perspective. So you know, it’s a bit of a gray area on determining what is working out? what is exercise? What are the physical guidelines or recommendations for pregnancy? And without getting into the like, nitty gritty detail of every single thing. And obviously, every potential situation, if you had this versus this, what could happen? we’re not gonna be able to do that. What we just want to lay out is what is what are we trying to accomplish here, and we want to encourage you to stay as physically active as possible.
Anthony Gurule 04:41
And one of the things that constantly comes up is, well, should you add something in that you have not already been doing? Let’s say for instance, someone just through the stages of life with work and kids or whatever that is, they were not able to work out as much before they got pregnant, but now that they’re pregnant, whether they have more time or they understand the importance of exercises during pregnancy, well, would we say, “Well, you haven’t been exercising, so you shouldn’t do too much.” No, that doesn’t, that doesn’t really make sense. Now, we would encourage not to do too much, there’s obviously, you know, a too far swinging the pendulum of the other way. But we wouldn’t say “no, don’t exercise because you weren’t doing something before,” we just have to find those first few stepping stones to help them start to gain some momentum. and help hold their hand, if you will, So that their technique and they feel confident about lifting, or how far they’re walking or whatever that is. And that’s an important topic, because a lot of times people want to add things in, but they weren’t quite ready or weren’t doing them before. And they then assume that they’re not able to do them at all. So you do have to take that in consideration, there is a ton that you can do, and that you can still add, even though you weren’t doing them prior to pregnancy.
Anthony Gurule 05:54
Now on the big questions is, is it safe? you know, outside to contact sports, or different things like that the majority of what you’re going to do is safe for pregnancy, right? Rock climbing, we have pregnant patients that have been rock climbing before, obviously, there’s a certain inherent risk with certain sports or activities. You know, you could fall off riding your bike, you could fall over running, right, so we’re not encouraging any of these by any means. We’re just kind of, you know, setting some suggestions, if you will. And you have to take into consideration.
Anthony Gurule 06:31
Now, there are certain things to consider when you’re talking about like weightlifting, and how heavy and the intensity that you’re doing. And if you’re doing Valsalva movements, which is essentially holding your breath to maintain a more rigid or stiff torso, as you’re seeing changes in blood volume and blood pressure, you know, you do have to take that in consideration. And that is again, of course a conversation with your provider that is managing your, your pregnancy, but we recommend Mama’s weight lift, or do resistance training. During pregnancy, again, we talked about about load management and the intensity and things like that, but you can still lift and do fairly intense things. And it’s a fairly as a you know, as a scale and a wide range during pregnancy and see a ton of benefit from that. Now, are we trying to hit one rep maxes and PRs during pregnancy, I mean, some would argue yes, but I would argue, why, that’s not really an accurate representation of what your strength is anyways. So you know, you do have to to kind of keep manipulating the numbers and the weights and the intensity and the sets and reps in order to do it. But weightlifting and resistance training is safe, and it is effective. Now, outside of that, there’s not a lot of unsafe things to do, again, outside of contact sports, or things that would elicit, you know, potential trauma to you or baby based on impact we’ve had, again, not our recommendations, but some have tried very just easy scheme, because they’re in the winter months, and they wanted to and they felt very confident about not falling. So you know, you have those types of things.
Anthony Gurule 08:16
Overall, again, we’re talking about movement. You need to move, and it’s good to get your heart rate up. And it’s good to breathe hard. So that doesn’t mean just because you’re pregnant, you can’t do HIIT training or circuit training or CrossFit or Orange Theory. But you do have to listen to your body and understand certain signs that would indicate that things might be too much, right? Now those are going to be different for everyone, but a lot of this comes down to you know, lightheadedness, you know, breathing too hard. Certain aches and pains within lower extremity, chest, abdomen, so on and so forth would be obviously like your more extreme ones. If you’re becoming pale or anything like that, I mean, again, these are the same criteria, though, that would be if someone else was working out or training too hard. So it’s realistically the same thing. It’s just that your threshold level for all those most likely have gone down. And depending on what type of an athlete you were before, you’re going to be maybe a little frustrated that you’re not able to do the things you were able to do previously, which makes sense. But if you’re someone who wasn’t exercising before, you’re probably going to be a little bit more hyper aware of that, of just feeling that shortness of breath or that uneasiness. So again, we’re not saying you have to push through that because we’re not trying to set yourself up for a strength and conditioning program to increase your metabolic capacity to increase your strength and conditioning during pregnancy. We’re trying to help you maintain a healthy active pregnancy.
Anthony Gurule 09:54
Now, walking. walking is great. but in general, we encourage you to do something above and beyond walking. Obviously, again, certain things would dictate that you would not be able to do so. And this is again, any exercise. Any exercise that you do during pregnancy needs to be consulted with and work through and have a conversation with the primary physician who is managing your pregnancy, whether that’s your nurse practitioner, your midwife or your OB or obstetrician, right. But we would encourage more than just walking. walking is fantastic, but that’s kind of like your baseline minimum, right? Just like our activities, or recommendation activity guidelines. We want a few days a week of where we’re kind of just doing this steady state getting our steps in, you know, kind of pushing ourselves, we’re huffing and puffing, but still just kind of at that conversational level, but you’re not really getting a lot of benefits outside of that.
Anthony Gurule 10:55
So if you’re just walking, high five. kudos. can you do something more? Can you do some bodyweight squats? Can you do some bodyweight, you know, good mornings? can you do some walking lunges? do you have a suspension training, we’re able to do some bodyweight rows? Do you have some bands that you can do some rows with? You know, there’s a lot that you can do that allows you to get a little bit more out of that. Now, again, this all comes back down to preferences of exercises that you like to do, because that’s gonna allow you to maintain the most consistency, but then also the intensity that you like to do. And we do encourage having an open mind and at least being willing to try some high intensity things that allow you to still get your heart rate up a little bit. And it’s okay to lift more than five or 10 pounds. And not saying that that is a bad thing. There’s programs out there where it’s all directed around that where it’s lighter weight, high rep, but I just don’t want individuals and mamas to feel like they’re not able to do more and or being ashamed because other people are just saying they should back off because they’re pregnant. “why would you need a lift that much?” It fits within your strength, and your comfort, and your wheelhouse, that is totally fine.
Anthony Gurule 12:05
Again, you if you’ve been doing that enough, you understand the risk reward ratio and having a conversation with your practitioner has driven us to kind of help navigate and guide as you start to get further through pregnancies, what things maybe we need to change or manipulate. But that’s totally fine. Now outside of that, the question around safe also comes up around core exercises. diastasis recti, pelvic floor strength, so on and so forth, we want to enhance the capability of understanding how to control tension within your abdominal wall and your pelvic floor through pregnancy, because the pressure is increasing due to baby taking up more space. But we’re not we’re not necessarily we’re not gaining more strength, right.
Anthony Gurule 12:45
And so what a lot of people assume it’s when we’ve seen this, is “I don’t want diastasis. So I’m doing more core work to prevent diastasis from happening.” diastasis recti will happen in 100% of moms, it’s estimated at the week 35 Everyone will have some form of it. Now it is technically not a quote unquote diagnosis, though, until 12 weeks postpartum, because it is a normal thing that everyone will get. So you can’t diagnose someone with something that everyone will get–doesn’t make sense, right? So after that, though, if you still have weakness or spacing issues, then we can have a you know, a stronger conversation about putting a diagnosis on that.
Anthony Gurule 13:26
But what we’re trying to enhance and help is what exercises are quote unquote, not safe versus unsafe, but adding too much pressure or tension into the abdominal wall or the pelvic floor and creating more laxity. again, as that pressure for as baby’s growing starts to put more pressure on the pelvic floor and the abdominal wall. If you’re doing more things that increases the pressure within the within the abdominal cavity that’s going to push on that separation even more and/or push on that pelvic floor even more, creating potential incontinence or prolapse issues and/or more bulging and doming within the abdominal wall stretching out that separation or that gap even further, potentially making the recovery process more challenging or slightly longer. I’m not saying that it will but potentially, so we do have to take that in consideration. So we go through activation exercise of the pelvic floor, of the abdominal wall so that you better understand how to control those pressure increases while you’re lifting or exercising so that you simply can stay at a management level.
Anthony Gurule 14:28
And that in turn, helps you get through pregnancy of understanding how to lift up your older kiddo, having to lift up dog food or anything like that. It’s just managing and controlling pressure. So there’s really not anything that I would say that safe or unsafe. Now, things that we would advise against for core exercises is sit ups or crunches. You know a lot of those things that create like hanging knee raises and different things like that during pregnancy. A lot of those things that create a lot of intra abdominal pressure and tension. and especially during a flex position, that tends to put a lot more pressure on the abdominal wall, the separation where diastasis will occur as well as the pelvic floor.
Anthony Gurule 15:09
So, you know, while we never say never, there’s definitely a category of things that we definitely urge against because the risk/reward benefit and again, risk not being “injured,” But risk of potentially putting more pressure and making the recovery process on the other side harder, is not is not something that we find to be as advantageous. But you can still get the benefits of quote unquote, core exercises through full body movements such as goblet squats, such as deadlifts, you know, depending on the phase that you’re in, push ups, which are, you know, a dynamic plank. or being able to do a TRX row, which is a reverse plank as you’re just lifting yourself up. three point rows where you’re on, you know, two hands or doing like a row on a bench, where you’re in a tabletop position that’s adding anti rotation exercises. So there’s a ton that you can do that still highlights and isolates, the core isolates, sorry. that highlights and will emphasize core activation, but through a full body compound movement. And what’s great about that is during pregnancy, depending on your energy levels, it’s hard to do all the little isolated accessory and all these separate exercises as it is. So it’s kind of nice being able to combine everything, so you get more bang for your buck, especially if you’re a parent and you’re on and you’re on baby number two or three, right?
Anthony Gurule 16:31
So what exercises are safe for pregnant women to do? All are. reduce or eliminate for sure contact activities, different things like that. the increased risk activities of you know, trauma and things like that. Outside of that you’re managing pressure, I would definitely encourage reducing anything that’s heavy lifting, that’s, that’s requiring you to do Valsalva moves, you’re having to hold your breath for an extended period of time. that changes blood pressure, so on and so forth. But outside of that, Pregnancy is a completely safe time to do all exercises. we definitely as we highlighted, urge and encourage, you know, certain things over other ones just for you know, added bang for your buck or full body movements, so on and so forth. And that, but outside of that you are free to do what you want.
Anthony Gurule 17:19
If you want guidance, though, you know, there are there are trainers out there that work specifically with prenatal patients. we would love to be able to have that conversation with you if that’s something you want to bounce back or navigate. Because we do want to encourage as much as we can. A very, very active pregnancy through exercise working out or however you want to describe that. So if you found this beneficial, please like share, subscribe. if you’re pregnant, I hope you can utilize this and take some of the information for you and yourself. If you have anyone else you know… a relative a family member, a friend who is pregnant and they’re unsure they’ve been you know asking this question what things I don’t know what things I can do. I don’t know if it’s safe for baby share this video with them. We’d love to be able to provide a better frame of reference and or context to be able to ask better questions so that they can find the workout program or the movements that work best for them during their pregnancy. Until next time guys live loud .if you’re currently pregnant, Congratulations, and we look forward to helping and serving in the future.
–
Movement Modifications When You Hurt EP|51
Live LOUD Life Podcast
Lafayette Colorado
Episode 51
EP|51 Movement Modifications When You Hurt
With Dr. Antonio Gurule
Pain is inevitable
We all want to avoid it but when you can’t we need to ensure that you are staying active
One of the worst things to occur to someone who is elderly is an injury not because of the physical pain itself, but because of the immobility it creates as a result of the injury and they start to lose muscle and function deteriorates
How can you continue to move and work out in the presence of pain?
Let us help you!
Connect With Antonio and the Live LOUD team: hello@liveloudlife.com
Subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/LiveLoud
Visit the website: http://www.lifeloudlife.com
Like the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/liveloudchiropractic/
Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/live.loud.life/
Guiding your to the adventurous life you were made for!
If you dig this give it a like ❤️, if you’re loving it let me hear you with a comment 🗣👂, and if you know it will help someone or anyone out please share 👥📲 Videos are instructed by professionals and for educational purposes only.
Viewers should consult with their providers to see if the movements are right for them. The videos are tailored to educate families on prenatal, postpartum, and pediatric-related issues., along with general health, wellness, and pain issues such as low back pain, shoulder pain, neck pain, etc.
About Dr. Antonio Gurule
Background:
- Father
- Doctor of Chiropractic
- Owner of Live LOUD
- Personal Trainer & Health Coach
Check Out Some of Our Other Blog Posts and Podcast Episodes
Anthony Gurule 00:00
Hey what’s up guys, welcome back to another episode of the Live LOUD Life podcast. My name is Dr. Antonio, I’m your host of the Live LOUD Life podcast. My wife and I, we co-own Live LOUD Chiropractic and Coaching here in Lafayette, Colorado. We are just outside of Boulder, Colorado in Boulder County. And our mission is to help families. We want to help make families stronger, so that we can build a stronger community. We want to help guide you to the adventurous life that you and your family were meant for. And we do this through chiropractic and coaching. chiropractic, obviously being more of a hands on approach, more of a clinical conversation, clinical diagnostics, but the coaching aspect is really what we believe is, you know, the foundation of what our system methodology, whatever you want to call it is, because a lot of this comes around through just coaching suggestions and recommendations. also, you know, obviously within that comes into clinical prescriptions of certain things to eat or supplements, so on and so forth. But it’s coaching a lifestyle, it’s coaching, it’s coaching a philosophy and a foundation about how to live an active healthy life as an individual, and setting an example of a healthy active life for your family, for your immediate family, for your friends, and more importantly for your community. So stronger families to make a stronger community as a whole would be a win win, right? And that’s what we want to be able to do. we want to be able to help fill in the gaps in the holes that you’re maybe not getting from, from other roles and conditions.
Anthony Gurule 01:43
And today that’s in particular where we’re going to talk about. it’s going to be a little bit more of a shorter episode because this is more of a quote unquote, you know, just discussion around how to lay out a framework and a better understanding of how to work out or what exercises are safe or maybe not safe during pregnancy. This is a very, very common question that we get.
Anthony Gurule 02:12
My wife Nichelle has created a mini course that has some workout ideas, recommendations, and prescriptions than laid out into a workout. She guides and educates other clinicians on how to broach this topic as a chiropractor, how to better serve prenatal patients through chiropractic care, but also exercise recommendations and prescriptions, having recommendations with other personal trainers within the community whether that’s CrossFit whether that’s Orange Theory, chatting with coaches and owners and saying hey, if you have prenatal patients and they’re having these types of symptoms, or this has happened, here’s some better recommendations, not modifications. We call them lateralizations–you’re just you know, you’re doing something something different or something else we you know, we borrow that term from Charlie Weingroff, who’s a physical therapist and strength conditioning coach. But it also and also doulas, right, doulas and midwives and OBs who are directly involved with the prenatal process from nearly conception all the way through, having this conversation. we know that exercise is important during pregnancy,
Anthony Gurule 03:19
There are so many different studies that talk about the benefits of exercising during pregnancy, not only for the mom, but also for baby, which is quite interesting. They’re seeing increased cognitive-what’s the word I’m looking for? Excuse me, their cognitive output as a as an as a child through as they age is actually better from moms that actually worked out during pregnancy.
Anthony Gurule 03:50
Now this is tough, right? How do you define working out or exercise? it’s different for everybody. But we want to, and we encourage that, and yet we’re sympathetic to the different stages of life, aches and pains, so on and so forth, which obviously would limit what you can do from an exercise perspective. So you know, it’s a bit of a gray area on determining what is working out? what is exercise? What are the physical guidelines or recommendations for pregnancy? And without getting into the like, nitty gritty detail of every single thing. And obviously, every potential situation, if you had this versus this, what could happen? we’re not gonna be able to do that. What we just want to lay out is what is what are we trying to accomplish here, and we want to encourage you to stay as physically active as possible.
Anthony Gurule 04:41
And one of the things that constantly comes up is, well, should you add something in that you have not already been doing? Let’s say for instance, someone just through the stages of life with work and kids or whatever that is, they were not able to work out as much before they got pregnant, but now that they’re pregnant, whether they have more time or they understand the importance of exercises during pregnancy, well, would we say, “Well, you haven’t been exercising, so you shouldn’t do too much.” No, that doesn’t, that doesn’t really make sense. Now, we would encourage not to do too much, there’s obviously, you know, a too far swinging the pendulum of the other way. But we wouldn’t say “no, don’t exercise because you weren’t doing something before,” we just have to find those first few stepping stones to help them start to gain some momentum. and help hold their hand, if you will, So that their technique and they feel confident about lifting, or how far they’re walking or whatever that is. And that’s an important topic, because a lot of times people want to add things in, but they weren’t quite ready or weren’t doing them before. And they then assume that they’re not able to do them at all. So you do have to take that in consideration, there is a ton that you can do, and that you can still add, even though you weren’t doing them prior to pregnancy.
Anthony Gurule 05:54
Now on the big questions is, is it safe? you know, outside to contact sports, or different things like that the majority of what you’re going to do is safe for pregnancy, right? Rock climbing, we have pregnant patients that have been rock climbing before, obviously, there’s a certain inherent risk with certain sports or activities. You know, you could fall off riding your bike, you could fall over running, right, so we’re not encouraging any of these by any means. We’re just kind of, you know, setting some suggestions, if you will. And you have to take into consideration.
Anthony Gurule 06:31
Now, there are certain things to consider when you’re talking about like weightlifting, and how heavy and the intensity that you’re doing. And if you’re doing Valsalva movements, which is essentially holding your breath to maintain a more rigid or stiff torso, as you’re seeing changes in blood volume and blood pressure, you know, you do have to take that in consideration. And that is again, of course a conversation with your provider that is managing your, your pregnancy, but we recommend Mama’s weight lift, or do resistance training. During pregnancy, again, we talked about about load management and the intensity and things like that, but you can still lift and do fairly intense things. And it’s a fairly as a you know, as a scale and a wide range during pregnancy and see a ton of benefit from that. Now, are we trying to hit one rep maxes and PRs during pregnancy, I mean, some would argue yes, but I would argue, why, that’s not really an accurate representation of what your strength is anyways. So you know, you do have to to kind of keep manipulating the numbers and the weights and the intensity and the sets and reps in order to do it. But weightlifting and resistance training is safe, and it is effective. Now, outside of that, there’s not a lot of unsafe things to do, again, outside of contact sports, or things that would elicit, you know, potential trauma to you or baby based on impact we’ve had, again, not our recommendations, but some have tried very just easy scheme, because they’re in the winter months, and they wanted to and they felt very confident about not falling. So you know, you have those types of things.
Anthony Gurule 08:16
Overall, again, we’re talking about movement. You need to move, and it’s good to get your heart rate up. And it’s good to breathe hard. So that doesn’t mean just because you’re pregnant, you can’t do HIIT training or circuit training or CrossFit or Orange Theory. But you do have to listen to your body and understand certain signs that would indicate that things might be too much, right? Now those are going to be different for everyone, but a lot of this comes down to you know, lightheadedness, you know, breathing too hard. Certain aches and pains within lower extremity, chest, abdomen, so on and so forth would be obviously like your more extreme ones. If you’re becoming pale or anything like that, I mean, again, these are the same criteria, though, that would be if someone else was working out or training too hard. So it’s realistically the same thing. It’s just that your threshold level for all those most likely have gone down. And depending on what type of an athlete you were before, you’re going to be maybe a little frustrated that you’re not able to do the things you were able to do previously, which makes sense. But if you’re someone who wasn’t exercising before, you’re probably going to be a little bit more hyper aware of that, of just feeling that shortness of breath or that uneasiness. So again, we’re not saying you have to push through that because we’re not trying to set yourself up for a strength and conditioning program to increase your metabolic capacity to increase your strength and conditioning during pregnancy. We’re trying to help you maintain a healthy active pregnancy.
Anthony Gurule 09:54
Now, walking. walking is great. but in general, we encourage you to do something above and beyond walking. Obviously, again, certain things would dictate that you would not be able to do so. And this is again, any exercise. Any exercise that you do during pregnancy needs to be consulted with and work through and have a conversation with the primary physician who is managing your pregnancy, whether that’s your nurse practitioner, your midwife or your OB or obstetrician, right. But we would encourage more than just walking. walking is fantastic, but that’s kind of like your baseline minimum, right? Just like our activities, or recommendation activity guidelines. We want a few days a week of where we’re kind of just doing this steady state getting our steps in, you know, kind of pushing ourselves, we’re huffing and puffing, but still just kind of at that conversational level, but you’re not really getting a lot of benefits outside of that.
Anthony Gurule 10:55
So if you’re just walking, high five. kudos. can you do something more? Can you do some bodyweight squats? Can you do some bodyweight, you know, good mornings? can you do some walking lunges? do you have a suspension training, we’re able to do some bodyweight rows? Do you have some bands that you can do some rows with? You know, there’s a lot that you can do that allows you to get a little bit more out of that. Now, again, this all comes back down to preferences of exercises that you like to do, because that’s gonna allow you to maintain the most consistency, but then also the intensity that you like to do. And we do encourage having an open mind and at least being willing to try some high intensity things that allow you to still get your heart rate up a little bit. And it’s okay to lift more than five or 10 pounds. And not saying that that is a bad thing. There’s programs out there where it’s all directed around that where it’s lighter weight, high rep, but I just don’t want individuals and mamas to feel like they’re not able to do more and or being ashamed because other people are just saying they should back off because they’re pregnant. “why would you need a lift that much?” It fits within your strength, and your comfort, and your wheelhouse, that is totally fine.
Anthony Gurule 12:05
Again, you if you’ve been doing that enough, you understand the risk reward ratio and having a conversation with your practitioner has driven us to kind of help navigate and guide as you start to get further through pregnancies, what things maybe we need to change or manipulate. But that’s totally fine. Now outside of that, the question around safe also comes up around core exercises. diastasis recti, pelvic floor strength, so on and so forth, we want to enhance the capability of understanding how to control tension within your abdominal wall and your pelvic floor through pregnancy, because the pressure is increasing due to baby taking up more space. But we’re not we’re not necessarily we’re not gaining more strength, right.
Anthony Gurule 12:45
And so what a lot of people assume it’s when we’ve seen this, is “I don’t want diastasis. So I’m doing more core work to prevent diastasis from happening.” diastasis recti will happen in 100% of moms, it’s estimated at the week 35 Everyone will have some form of it. Now it is technically not a quote unquote diagnosis, though, until 12 weeks postpartum, because it is a normal thing that everyone will get. So you can’t diagnose someone with something that everyone will get–doesn’t make sense, right? So after that, though, if you still have weakness or spacing issues, then we can have a you know, a stronger conversation about putting a diagnosis on that.
Anthony Gurule 13:26
But what we’re trying to enhance and help is what exercises are quote unquote, not safe versus unsafe, but adding too much pressure or tension into the abdominal wall or the pelvic floor and creating more laxity. again, as that pressure for as baby’s growing starts to put more pressure on the pelvic floor and the abdominal wall. If you’re doing more things that increases the pressure within the within the abdominal cavity that’s going to push on that separation even more and/or push on that pelvic floor even more, creating potential incontinence or prolapse issues and/or more bulging and doming within the abdominal wall stretching out that separation or that gap even further, potentially making the recovery process more challenging or slightly longer. I’m not saying that it will but potentially, so we do have to take that in consideration. So we go through activation exercise of the pelvic floor, of the abdominal wall so that you better understand how to control those pressure increases while you’re lifting or exercising so that you simply can stay at a management level.
Anthony Gurule 14:28
And that in turn, helps you get through pregnancy of understanding how to lift up your older kiddo, having to lift up dog food or anything like that. It’s just managing and controlling pressure. So there’s really not anything that I would say that safe or unsafe. Now, things that we would advise against for core exercises is sit ups or crunches. You know a lot of those things that create like hanging knee raises and different things like that during pregnancy. A lot of those things that create a lot of intra abdominal pressure and tension. and especially during a flex position, that tends to put a lot more pressure on the abdominal wall, the separation where diastasis will occur as well as the pelvic floor.
Anthony Gurule 15:09
So, you know, while we never say never, there’s definitely a category of things that we definitely urge against because the risk/reward benefit and again, risk not being “injured,” But risk of potentially putting more pressure and making the recovery process on the other side harder, is not is not something that we find to be as advantageous. But you can still get the benefits of quote unquote, core exercises through full body movements such as goblet squats, such as deadlifts, you know, depending on the phase that you’re in, push ups, which are, you know, a dynamic plank. or being able to do a TRX row, which is a reverse plank as you’re just lifting yourself up. three point rows where you’re on, you know, two hands or doing like a row on a bench, where you’re in a tabletop position that’s adding anti rotation exercises. So there’s a ton that you can do that still highlights and isolates, the core isolates, sorry. that highlights and will emphasize core activation, but through a full body compound movement. And what’s great about that is during pregnancy, depending on your energy levels, it’s hard to do all the little isolated accessory and all these separate exercises as it is. So it’s kind of nice being able to combine everything, so you get more bang for your buck, especially if you’re a parent and you’re on and you’re on baby number two or three, right?
Anthony Gurule 16:31
So what exercises are safe for pregnant women to do? All are. reduce or eliminate for sure contact activities, different things like that. the increased risk activities of you know, trauma and things like that. Outside of that you’re managing pressure, I would definitely encourage reducing anything that’s heavy lifting, that’s, that’s requiring you to do Valsalva moves, you’re having to hold your breath for an extended period of time. that changes blood pressure, so on and so forth. But outside of that, Pregnancy is a completely safe time to do all exercises. we definitely as we highlighted, urge and encourage, you know, certain things over other ones just for you know, added bang for your buck or full body movements, so on and so forth. And that, but outside of that you are free to do what you want.
Anthony Gurule 17:19
If you want guidance, though, you know, there are there are trainers out there that work specifically with prenatal patients. we would love to be able to have that conversation with you if that’s something you want to bounce back or navigate. Because we do want to encourage as much as we can. A very, very active pregnancy through exercise working out or however you want to describe that. So if you found this beneficial, please like share, subscribe. if you’re pregnant, I hope you can utilize this and take some of the information for you and yourself. If you have anyone else you know… a relative a family member, a friend who is pregnant and they’re unsure they’ve been you know asking this question what things I don’t know what things I can do. I don’t know if it’s safe for baby share this video with them. We’d love to be able to provide a better frame of reference and or context to be able to ask better questions so that they can find the workout program or the movements that work best for them during their pregnancy. Until next time guys live loud .if you’re currently pregnant, Congratulations, and we look forward to helping and serving in the future.
–
How to Audit Your Injuries EP|49
Live LOUD Life Podcast
Lafayette Colorado
Episode 49
EP|49 How to Audit Your Injuries
With Dr. Antonio Gurule
Injuries are inevitable
More times than not though when we have a better understanding of possible causation or an evaluation of the severity that can help yourself recover faster.
Here I walk you through an example of an audit process from a shoulder injury that was presented to our office the other week.
This is in no way to say this is the specific cause of your shoulder injury, but if you ask similar questions you might be able to help yourself direct a good approach from what to do next whether to rest or keep going or whether you should be seeking outside help from someone like the clinicians in our office!
Connect With Antonio and the Live LOUD team:
Subscribe to my YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/LiveLoud
Visit the website: http://www.lifeloudlife.com
Like the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/liveloudchiropractic/
Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/live.loud.life/
Guiding your to the adventurous life you were made for!
.
If you dig this give it a like ❤️, if you’re loving it let me hear you with a comment 🗣👂, and if you know it will help someone or anyone out please share 👥📲
About Dr. Antonio Gurule
Background:
- Father
- Doctor of Chiropractic
- Owner of Live LOUD
- Personal Trainer & Health Coach
Check Out Some of Our Other Blog Posts and Podcast Episodes
Anthony Gurule 00:00
Hey what’s up guys, welcome back to another episode of the Live LOUD Life podcast. My name is Dr. Antonio, I’m your host of the Live LOUD Life podcast. My wife and I, we co-own Live LOUD Chiropractic and Coaching here in Lafayette, Colorado. We are just outside of Boulder, Colorado in Boulder County. And our mission is to help families. We want to help make families stronger, so that we can build a stronger community. We want to help guide you to the adventurous life that you and your family were meant for. And we do this through chiropractic and coaching. chiropractic, obviously being more of a hands on approach, more of a clinical conversation, clinical diagnostics, but the coaching aspect is really what we believe is, you know, the foundation of what our system methodology, whatever you want to call it is, because a lot of this comes around through just coaching suggestions and recommendations. also, you know, obviously within that comes into clinical prescriptions of certain things to eat or supplements, so on and so forth. But it’s coaching a lifestyle, it’s coaching, it’s coaching a philosophy and a foundation about how to live an active healthy life as an individual, and setting an example of a healthy active life for your family, for your immediate family, for your friends, and more importantly for your community. So stronger families to make a stronger community as a whole would be a win win, right? And that’s what we want to be able to do. we want to be able to help fill in the gaps in the holes that you’re maybe not getting from, from other roles and conditions.
Anthony Gurule 01:43
And today that’s in particular where we’re going to talk about. it’s going to be a little bit more of a shorter episode because this is more of a quote unquote, you know, just discussion around how to lay out a framework and a better understanding of how to work out or what exercises are safe or maybe not safe during pregnancy. This is a very, very common question that we get.
Anthony Gurule 02:12
My wife Nichelle has created a mini course that has some workout ideas, recommendations, and prescriptions than laid out into a workout. She guides and educates other clinicians on how to broach this topic as a chiropractor, how to better serve prenatal patients through chiropractic care, but also exercise recommendations and prescriptions, having recommendations with other personal trainers within the community whether that’s CrossFit whether that’s Orange Theory, chatting with coaches and owners and saying hey, if you have prenatal patients and they’re having these types of symptoms, or this has happened, here’s some better recommendations, not modifications. We call them lateralizations–you’re just you know, you’re doing something something different or something else we you know, we borrow that term from Charlie Weingroff, who’s a physical therapist and strength conditioning coach. But it also and also doulas, right, doulas and midwives and OBs who are directly involved with the prenatal process from nearly conception all the way through, having this conversation. we know that exercise is important during pregnancy,
Anthony Gurule 03:19
There are so many different studies that talk about the benefits of exercising during pregnancy, not only for the mom, but also for baby, which is quite interesting. They’re seeing increased cognitive-what’s the word I’m looking for? Excuse me, their cognitive output as a as an as a child through as they age is actually better from moms that actually worked out during pregnancy.
Anthony Gurule 03:50
Now this is tough, right? How do you define working out or exercise? it’s different for everybody. But we want to, and we encourage that, and yet we’re sympathetic to the different stages of life, aches and pains, so on and so forth, which obviously would limit what you can do from an exercise perspective. So you know, it’s a bit of a gray area on determining what is working out? what is exercise? What are the physical guidelines or recommendations for pregnancy? And without getting into the like, nitty gritty detail of every single thing. And obviously, every potential situation, if you had this versus this, what could happen? we’re not gonna be able to do that. What we just want to lay out is what is what are we trying to accomplish here, and we want to encourage you to stay as physically active as possible.
Anthony Gurule 04:41
And one of the things that constantly comes up is, well, should you add something in that you have not already been doing? Let’s say for instance, someone just through the stages of life with work and kids or whatever that is, they were not able to work out as much before they got pregnant, but now that they’re pregnant, whether they have more time or they understand the importance of exercises during pregnancy, well, would we say, “Well, you haven’t been exercising, so you shouldn’t do too much.” No, that doesn’t, that doesn’t really make sense. Now, we would encourage not to do too much, there’s obviously, you know, a too far swinging the pendulum of the other way. But we wouldn’t say “no, don’t exercise because you weren’t doing something before,” we just have to find those first few stepping stones to help them start to gain some momentum. and help hold their hand, if you will, So that their technique and they feel confident about lifting, or how far they’re walking or whatever that is. And that’s an important topic, because a lot of times people want to add things in, but they weren’t quite ready or weren’t doing them before. And they then assume that they’re not able to do them at all. So you do have to take that in consideration, there is a ton that you can do, and that you can still add, even though you weren’t doing them prior to pregnancy.
Anthony Gurule 05:54
Now on the big questions is, is it safe? you know, outside to contact sports, or different things like that the majority of what you’re going to do is safe for pregnancy, right? Rock climbing, we have pregnant patients that have been rock climbing before, obviously, there’s a certain inherent risk with certain sports or activities. You know, you could fall off riding your bike, you could fall over running, right, so we’re not encouraging any of these by any means. We’re just kind of, you know, setting some suggestions, if you will. And you have to take into consideration.
Anthony Gurule 06:31
Now, there are certain things to consider when you’re talking about like weightlifting, and how heavy and the intensity that you’re doing. And if you’re doing Valsalva movements, which is essentially holding your breath to maintain a more rigid or stiff torso, as you’re seeing changes in blood volume and blood pressure, you know, you do have to take that in consideration. And that is again, of course a conversation with your provider that is managing your, your pregnancy, but we recommend Mama’s weight lift, or do resistance training. During pregnancy, again, we talked about about load management and the intensity and things like that, but you can still lift and do fairly intense things. And it’s a fairly as a you know, as a scale and a wide range during pregnancy and see a ton of benefit from that. Now, are we trying to hit one rep maxes and PRs during pregnancy, I mean, some would argue yes, but I would argue, why, that’s not really an accurate representation of what your strength is anyways. So you know, you do have to to kind of keep manipulating the numbers and the weights and the intensity and the sets and reps in order to do it. But weightlifting and resistance training is safe, and it is effective. Now, outside of that, there’s not a lot of unsafe things to do, again, outside of contact sports, or things that would elicit, you know, potential trauma to you or baby based on impact we’ve had, again, not our recommendations, but some have tried very just easy scheme, because they’re in the winter months, and they wanted to and they felt very confident about not falling. So you know, you have those types of things.
Anthony Gurule 08:16
Overall, again, we’re talking about movement. You need to move, and it’s good to get your heart rate up. And it’s good to breathe hard. So that doesn’t mean just because you’re pregnant, you can’t do HIIT training or circuit training or CrossFit or Orange Theory. But you do have to listen to your body and understand certain signs that would indicate that things might be too much, right? Now those are going to be different for everyone, but a lot of this comes down to you know, lightheadedness, you know, breathing too hard. Certain aches and pains within lower extremity, chest, abdomen, so on and so forth would be obviously like your more extreme ones. If you’re becoming pale or anything like that, I mean, again, these are the same criteria, though, that would be if someone else was working out or training too hard. So it’s realistically the same thing. It’s just that your threshold level for all those most likely have gone down. And depending on what type of an athlete you were before, you’re going to be maybe a little frustrated that you’re not able to do the things you were able to do previously, which makes sense. But if you’re someone who wasn’t exercising before, you’re probably going to be a little bit more hyper aware of that, of just feeling that shortness of breath or that uneasiness. So again, we’re not saying you have to push through that because we’re not trying to set yourself up for a strength and conditioning program to increase your metabolic capacity to increase your strength and conditioning during pregnancy. We’re trying to help you maintain a healthy active pregnancy.
Anthony Gurule 09:54
Now, walking. walking is great. but in general, we encourage you to do something above and beyond walking. Obviously, again, certain things would dictate that you would not be able to do so. And this is again, any exercise. Any exercise that you do during pregnancy needs to be consulted with and work through and have a conversation with the primary physician who is managing your pregnancy, whether that’s your nurse practitioner, your midwife or your OB or obstetrician, right. But we would encourage more than just walking. walking is fantastic, but that’s kind of like your baseline minimum, right? Just like our activities, or recommendation activity guidelines. We want a few days a week of where we’re kind of just doing this steady state getting our steps in, you know, kind of pushing ourselves, we’re huffing and puffing, but still just kind of at that conversational level, but you’re not really getting a lot of benefits outside of that.
Anthony Gurule 10:55
So if you’re just walking, high five. kudos. can you do something more? Can you do some bodyweight squats? Can you do some bodyweight, you know, good mornings? can you do some walking lunges? do you have a suspension training, we’re able to do some bodyweight rows? Do you have some bands that you can do some rows with? You know, there’s a lot that you can do that allows you to get a little bit more out of that. Now, again, this all comes back down to preferences of exercises that you like to do, because that’s gonna allow you to maintain the most consistency, but then also the intensity that you like to do. And we do encourage having an open mind and at least being willing to try some high intensity things that allow you to still get your heart rate up a little bit. And it’s okay to lift more than five or 10 pounds. And not saying that that is a bad thing. There’s programs out there where it’s all directed around that where it’s lighter weight, high rep, but I just don’t want individuals and mamas to feel like they’re not able to do more and or being ashamed because other people are just saying they should back off because they’re pregnant. “why would you need a lift that much?” It fits within your strength, and your comfort, and your wheelhouse, that is totally fine.
Anthony Gurule 12:05
Again, you if you’ve been doing that enough, you understand the risk reward ratio and having a conversation with your practitioner has driven us to kind of help navigate and guide as you start to get further through pregnancies, what things maybe we need to change or manipulate. But that’s totally fine. Now outside of that, the question around safe also comes up around core exercises. diastasis recti, pelvic floor strength, so on and so forth, we want to enhance the capability of understanding how to control tension within your abdominal wall and your pelvic floor through pregnancy, because the pressure is increasing due to baby taking up more space. But we’re not we’re not necessarily we’re not gaining more strength, right.
Anthony Gurule 12:45
And so what a lot of people assume it’s when we’ve seen this, is “I don’t want diastasis. So I’m doing more core work to prevent diastasis from happening.” diastasis recti will happen in 100% of moms, it’s estimated at the week 35 Everyone will have some form of it. Now it is technically not a quote unquote diagnosis, though, until 12 weeks postpartum, because it is a normal thing that everyone will get. So you can’t diagnose someone with something that everyone will get–doesn’t make sense, right? So after that, though, if you still have weakness or spacing issues, then we can have a you know, a stronger conversation about putting a diagnosis on that.
Anthony Gurule 13:26
But what we’re trying to enhance and help is what exercises are quote unquote, not safe versus unsafe, but adding too much pressure or tension into the abdominal wall or the pelvic floor and creating more laxity. again, as that pressure for as baby’s growing starts to put more pressure on the pelvic floor and the abdominal wall. If you’re doing more things that increases the pressure within the within the abdominal cavity that’s going to push on that separation even more and/or push on that pelvic floor even more, creating potential incontinence or prolapse issues and/or more bulging and doming within the abdominal wall stretching out that separation or that gap even further, potentially making the recovery process more challenging or slightly longer. I’m not saying that it will but potentially, so we do have to take that in consideration. So we go through activation exercise of the pelvic floor, of the abdominal wall so that you better understand how to control those pressure increases while you’re lifting or exercising so that you simply can stay at a management level.
Anthony Gurule 14:28
And that in turn, helps you get through pregnancy of understanding how to lift up your older kiddo, having to lift up dog food or anything like that. It’s just managing and controlling pressure. So there’s really not anything that I would say that safe or unsafe. Now, things that we would advise against for core exercises is sit ups or crunches. You know a lot of those things that create like hanging knee raises and different things like that during pregnancy. A lot of those things that create a lot of intra abdominal pressure and tension. and especially during a flex position, that tends to put a lot more pressure on the abdominal wall, the separation where diastasis will occur as well as the pelvic floor.
Anthony Gurule 15:09
So, you know, while we never say never, there’s definitely a category of things that we definitely urge against because the risk/reward benefit and again, risk not being “injured,” But risk of potentially putting more pressure and making the recovery process on the other side harder, is not is not something that we find to be as advantageous. But you can still get the benefits of quote unquote, core exercises through full body movements such as goblet squats, such as deadlifts, you know, depending on the phase that you’re in, push ups, which are, you know, a dynamic plank. or being able to do a TRX row, which is a reverse plank as you’re just lifting yourself up. three point rows where you’re on, you know, two hands or doing like a row on a bench, where you’re in a tabletop position that’s adding anti rotation exercises. So there’s a ton that you can do that still highlights and isolates, the core isolates, sorry. that highlights and will emphasize core activation, but through a full body compound movement. And what’s great about that is during pregnancy, depending on your energy levels, it’s hard to do all the little isolated accessory and all these separate exercises as it is. So it’s kind of nice being able to combine everything, so you get more bang for your buck, especially if you’re a parent and you’re on and you’re on baby number two or three, right?
Anthony Gurule 16:31
So what exercises are safe for pregnant women to do? All are. reduce or eliminate for sure contact activities, different things like that. the increased risk activities of you know, trauma and things like that. Outside of that you’re managing pressure, I would definitely encourage reducing anything that’s heavy lifting, that’s, that’s requiring you to do Valsalva moves, you’re having to hold your breath for an extended period of time. that changes blood pressure, so on and so forth. But outside of that, Pregnancy is a completely safe time to do all exercises. we definitely as we highlighted, urge and encourage, you know, certain things over other ones just for you know, added bang for your buck or full body movements, so on and so forth. And that, but outside of that you are free to do what you want.
Anthony Gurule 17:19
If you want guidance, though, you know, there are there are trainers out there that work specifically with prenatal patients. we would love to be able to have that conversation with you if that’s something you want to bounce back or navigate. Because we do want to encourage as much as we can. A very, very active pregnancy through exercise working out or however you want to describe that. So if you found this beneficial, please like share, subscribe. if you’re pregnant, I hope you can utilize this and take some of the information for you and yourself. If you have anyone else you know… a relative a family member, a friend who is pregnant and they’re unsure they’ve been you know asking this question what things I don’t know what things I can do. I don’t know if it’s safe for baby share this video with them. We’d love to be able to provide a better frame of reference and or context to be able to ask better questions so that they can find the workout program or the movements that work best for them during their pregnancy. Until next time guys live loud .if you’re currently pregnant, Congratulations, and we look forward to helping and serving in the future.
–
5 Tips To Improve Your Deadlift Technique EP|48
Live LOUD Life Podcast
Lafayette Colorado
Episode 48
EP|48 5 Tips To Improve Your Deadlift Technique
With Dr. Antonio Gurule
5 Tips To Improve Your Deadlift Technique
1. Keep The Bar Close to You
2. Do Not Yank The Bar From The Floor
3. Do Not Let Your Hips Raise First
4. Stiffen Your Torso and Expand Your Canister
5. Wedge and Tension Into The Bar
Click Here to Watch the YouTube Video Reviewing the Tips
Connect With Antonio and the Live LOUD team:
Subscribe to my YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/LiveLoud
Visit the website: http://www.lifeloudlife.com
Like the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/liveloudchiropractic/
Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/live.loud.life/
Guiding your to the adventurous life you were made for!
.
If you dig this give it a like ❤️, if you’re loving it let me hear you with a comment 🗣👂, and if you know it will help someone or anyone out please share 👥📲
About Dr. Antonio Gurule
Background:
- Father
- Doctor of Chiropractic
- Owner of Live LOUD
- Personal Trainer & Health Coach
Check Out Some of Our Other Blog Posts and Podcast Episodes
Anthony Gurule 00:00
Hey what’s up guys, welcome back to another episode of the Live LOUD Life podcast. My name is Dr. Antonio, I’m your host of the Live LOUD Life podcast. My wife and I, we co-own Live LOUD Chiropractic and Coaching here in Lafayette, Colorado. We are just outside of Boulder, Colorado in Boulder County. And our mission is to help families. We want to help make families stronger, so that we can build a stronger community. We want to help guide you to the adventurous life that you and your family were meant for. And we do this through chiropractic and coaching. chiropractic, obviously being more of a hands on approach, more of a clinical conversation, clinical diagnostics, but the coaching aspect is really what we believe is, you know, the foundation of what our system methodology, whatever you want to call it is, because a lot of this comes around through just coaching suggestions and recommendations. also, you know, obviously within that comes into clinical prescriptions of certain things to eat or supplements, so on and so forth. But it’s coaching a lifestyle, it’s coaching, it’s coaching a philosophy and a foundation about how to live an active healthy life as an individual, and setting an example of a healthy active life for your family, for your immediate family, for your friends, and more importantly for your community. So stronger families to make a stronger community as a whole would be a win win, right? And that’s what we want to be able to do. we want to be able to help fill in the gaps in the holes that you’re maybe not getting from, from other roles and conditions.
Anthony Gurule 01:43
And today that’s in particular where we’re going to talk about. it’s going to be a little bit more of a shorter episode because this is more of a quote unquote, you know, just discussion around how to lay out a framework and a better understanding of how to work out or what exercises are safe or maybe not safe during pregnancy. This is a very, very common question that we get.
Anthony Gurule 02:12
My wife Nichelle has created a mini course that has some workout ideas, recommendations, and prescriptions than laid out into a workout. She guides and educates other clinicians on how to broach this topic as a chiropractor, how to better serve prenatal patients through chiropractic care, but also exercise recommendations and prescriptions, having recommendations with other personal trainers within the community whether that’s CrossFit whether that’s Orange Theory, chatting with coaches and owners and saying hey, if you have prenatal patients and they’re having these types of symptoms, or this has happened, here’s some better recommendations, not modifications. We call them lateralizations–you’re just you know, you’re doing something something different or something else we you know, we borrow that term from Charlie Weingroff, who’s a physical therapist and strength conditioning coach. But it also and also doulas, right, doulas and midwives and OBs who are directly involved with the prenatal process from nearly conception all the way through, having this conversation. we know that exercise is important during pregnancy,
Anthony Gurule 03:19
There are so many different studies that talk about the benefits of exercising during pregnancy, not only for the mom, but also for baby, which is quite interesting. They’re seeing increased cognitive-what’s the word I’m looking for? Excuse me, their cognitive output as a as an as a child through as they age is actually better from moms that actually worked out during pregnancy.
Anthony Gurule 03:50
Now this is tough, right? How do you define working out or exercise? it’s different for everybody. But we want to, and we encourage that, and yet we’re sympathetic to the different stages of life, aches and pains, so on and so forth, which obviously would limit what you can do from an exercise perspective. So you know, it’s a bit of a gray area on determining what is working out? what is exercise? What are the physical guidelines or recommendations for pregnancy? And without getting into the like, nitty gritty detail of every single thing. And obviously, every potential situation, if you had this versus this, what could happen? we’re not gonna be able to do that. What we just want to lay out is what is what are we trying to accomplish here, and we want to encourage you to stay as physically active as possible.
Anthony Gurule 04:41
And one of the things that constantly comes up is, well, should you add something in that you have not already been doing? Let’s say for instance, someone just through the stages of life with work and kids or whatever that is, they were not able to work out as much before they got pregnant, but now that they’re pregnant, whether they have more time or they understand the importance of exercises during pregnancy, well, would we say, “Well, you haven’t been exercising, so you shouldn’t do too much.” No, that doesn’t, that doesn’t really make sense. Now, we would encourage not to do too much, there’s obviously, you know, a too far swinging the pendulum of the other way. But we wouldn’t say “no, don’t exercise because you weren’t doing something before,” we just have to find those first few stepping stones to help them start to gain some momentum. and help hold their hand, if you will, So that their technique and they feel confident about lifting, or how far they’re walking or whatever that is. And that’s an important topic, because a lot of times people want to add things in, but they weren’t quite ready or weren’t doing them before. And they then assume that they’re not able to do them at all. So you do have to take that in consideration, there is a ton that you can do, and that you can still add, even though you weren’t doing them prior to pregnancy.
Anthony Gurule 05:54
Now on the big questions is, is it safe? you know, outside to contact sports, or different things like that the majority of what you’re going to do is safe for pregnancy, right? Rock climbing, we have pregnant patients that have been rock climbing before, obviously, there’s a certain inherent risk with certain sports or activities. You know, you could fall off riding your bike, you could fall over running, right, so we’re not encouraging any of these by any means. We’re just kind of, you know, setting some suggestions, if you will. And you have to take into consideration.
Anthony Gurule 06:31
Now, there are certain things to consider when you’re talking about like weightlifting, and how heavy and the intensity that you’re doing. And if you’re doing Valsalva movements, which is essentially holding your breath to maintain a more rigid or stiff torso, as you’re seeing changes in blood volume and blood pressure, you know, you do have to take that in consideration. And that is again, of course a conversation with your provider that is managing your, your pregnancy, but we recommend Mama’s weight lift, or do resistance training. During pregnancy, again, we talked about about load management and the intensity and things like that, but you can still lift and do fairly intense things. And it’s a fairly as a you know, as a scale and a wide range during pregnancy and see a ton of benefit from that. Now, are we trying to hit one rep maxes and PRs during pregnancy, I mean, some would argue yes, but I would argue, why, that’s not really an accurate representation of what your strength is anyways. So you know, you do have to to kind of keep manipulating the numbers and the weights and the intensity and the sets and reps in order to do it. But weightlifting and resistance training is safe, and it is effective. Now, outside of that, there’s not a lot of unsafe things to do, again, outside of contact sports, or things that would elicit, you know, potential trauma to you or baby based on impact we’ve had, again, not our recommendations, but some have tried very just easy scheme, because they’re in the winter months, and they wanted to and they felt very confident about not falling. So you know, you have those types of things.
Anthony Gurule 08:16
Overall, again, we’re talking about movement. You need to move, and it’s good to get your heart rate up. And it’s good to breathe hard. So that doesn’t mean just because you’re pregnant, you can’t do HIIT training or circuit training or CrossFit or Orange Theory. But you do have to listen to your body and understand certain signs that would indicate that things might be too much, right? Now those are going to be different for everyone, but a lot of this comes down to you know, lightheadedness, you know, breathing too hard. Certain aches and pains within lower extremity, chest, abdomen, so on and so forth would be obviously like your more extreme ones. If you’re becoming pale or anything like that, I mean, again, these are the same criteria, though, that would be if someone else was working out or training too hard. So it’s realistically the same thing. It’s just that your threshold level for all those most likely have gone down. And depending on what type of an athlete you were before, you’re going to be maybe a little frustrated that you’re not able to do the things you were able to do previously, which makes sense. But if you’re someone who wasn’t exercising before, you’re probably going to be a little bit more hyper aware of that, of just feeling that shortness of breath or that uneasiness. So again, we’re not saying you have to push through that because we’re not trying to set yourself up for a strength and conditioning program to increase your metabolic capacity to increase your strength and conditioning during pregnancy. We’re trying to help you maintain a healthy active pregnancy.
Anthony Gurule 09:54
Now, walking. walking is great. but in general, we encourage you to do something above and beyond walking. Obviously, again, certain things would dictate that you would not be able to do so. And this is again, any exercise. Any exercise that you do during pregnancy needs to be consulted with and work through and have a conversation with the primary physician who is managing your pregnancy, whether that’s your nurse practitioner, your midwife or your OB or obstetrician, right. But we would encourage more than just walking. walking is fantastic, but that’s kind of like your baseline minimum, right? Just like our activities, or recommendation activity guidelines. We want a few days a week of where we’re kind of just doing this steady state getting our steps in, you know, kind of pushing ourselves, we’re huffing and puffing, but still just kind of at that conversational level, but you’re not really getting a lot of benefits outside of that.
Anthony Gurule 10:55
So if you’re just walking, high five. kudos. can you do something more? Can you do some bodyweight squats? Can you do some bodyweight, you know, good mornings? can you do some walking lunges? do you have a suspension training, we’re able to do some bodyweight rows? Do you have some bands that you can do some rows with? You know, there’s a lot that you can do that allows you to get a little bit more out of that. Now, again, this all comes back down to preferences of exercises that you like to do, because that’s gonna allow you to maintain the most consistency, but then also the intensity that you like to do. And we do encourage having an open mind and at least being willing to try some high intensity things that allow you to still get your heart rate up a little bit. And it’s okay to lift more than five or 10 pounds. And not saying that that is a bad thing. There’s programs out there where it’s all directed around that where it’s lighter weight, high rep, but I just don’t want individuals and mamas to feel like they’re not able to do more and or being ashamed because other people are just saying they should back off because they’re pregnant. “why would you need a lift that much?” It fits within your strength, and your comfort, and your wheelhouse, that is totally fine.
Anthony Gurule 12:05
Again, you if you’ve been doing that enough, you understand the risk reward ratio and having a conversation with your practitioner has driven us to kind of help navigate and guide as you start to get further through pregnancies, what things maybe we need to change or manipulate. But that’s totally fine. Now outside of that, the question around safe also comes up around core exercises. diastasis recti, pelvic floor strength, so on and so forth, we want to enhance the capability of understanding how to control tension within your abdominal wall and your pelvic floor through pregnancy, because the pressure is increasing due to baby taking up more space. But we’re not we’re not necessarily we’re not gaining more strength, right.
Anthony Gurule 12:45
And so what a lot of people assume it’s when we’ve seen this, is “I don’t want diastasis. So I’m doing more core work to prevent diastasis from happening.” diastasis recti will happen in 100% of moms, it’s estimated at the week 35 Everyone will have some form of it. Now it is technically not a quote unquote diagnosis, though, until 12 weeks postpartum, because it is a normal thing that everyone will get. So you can’t diagnose someone with something that everyone will get–doesn’t make sense, right? So after that, though, if you still have weakness or spacing issues, then we can have a you know, a stronger conversation about putting a diagnosis on that.
Anthony Gurule 13:26
But what we’re trying to enhance and help is what exercises are quote unquote, not safe versus unsafe, but adding too much pressure or tension into the abdominal wall or the pelvic floor and creating more laxity. again, as that pressure for as baby’s growing starts to put more pressure on the pelvic floor and the abdominal wall. If you’re doing more things that increases the pressure within the within the abdominal cavity that’s going to push on that separation even more and/or push on that pelvic floor even more, creating potential incontinence or prolapse issues and/or more bulging and doming within the abdominal wall stretching out that separation or that gap even further, potentially making the recovery process more challenging or slightly longer. I’m not saying that it will but potentially, so we do have to take that in consideration. So we go through activation exercise of the pelvic floor, of the abdominal wall so that you better understand how to control those pressure increases while you’re lifting or exercising so that you simply can stay at a management level.
Anthony Gurule 14:28
And that in turn, helps you get through pregnancy of understanding how to lift up your older kiddo, having to lift up dog food or anything like that. It’s just managing and controlling pressure. So there’s really not anything that I would say that safe or unsafe. Now, things that we would advise against for core exercises is sit ups or crunches. You know a lot of those things that create like hanging knee raises and different things like that during pregnancy. A lot of those things that create a lot of intra abdominal pressure and tension. and especially during a flex position, that tends to put a lot more pressure on the abdominal wall, the separation where diastasis will occur as well as the pelvic floor.
Anthony Gurule 15:09
So, you know, while we never say never, there’s definitely a category of things that we definitely urge against because the risk/reward benefit and again, risk not being “injured,” But risk of potentially putting more pressure and making the recovery process on the other side harder, is not is not something that we find to be as advantageous. But you can still get the benefits of quote unquote, core exercises through full body movements such as goblet squats, such as deadlifts, you know, depending on the phase that you’re in, push ups, which are, you know, a dynamic plank. or being able to do a TRX row, which is a reverse plank as you’re just lifting yourself up. three point rows where you’re on, you know, two hands or doing like a row on a bench, where you’re in a tabletop position that’s adding anti rotation exercises. So there’s a ton that you can do that still highlights and isolates, the core isolates, sorry. that highlights and will emphasize core activation, but through a full body compound movement. And what’s great about that is during pregnancy, depending on your energy levels, it’s hard to do all the little isolated accessory and all these separate exercises as it is. So it’s kind of nice being able to combine everything, so you get more bang for your buck, especially if you’re a parent and you’re on and you’re on baby number two or three, right?
Anthony Gurule 16:31
So what exercises are safe for pregnant women to do? All are. reduce or eliminate for sure contact activities, different things like that. the increased risk activities of you know, trauma and things like that. Outside of that you’re managing pressure, I would definitely encourage reducing anything that’s heavy lifting, that’s, that’s requiring you to do Valsalva moves, you’re having to hold your breath for an extended period of time. that changes blood pressure, so on and so forth. But outside of that, Pregnancy is a completely safe time to do all exercises. we definitely as we highlighted, urge and encourage, you know, certain things over other ones just for you know, added bang for your buck or full body movements, so on and so forth. And that, but outside of that you are free to do what you want.
Anthony Gurule 17:19
If you want guidance, though, you know, there are there are trainers out there that work specifically with prenatal patients. we would love to be able to have that conversation with you if that’s something you want to bounce back or navigate. Because we do want to encourage as much as we can. A very, very active pregnancy through exercise working out or however you want to describe that. So if you found this beneficial, please like share, subscribe. if you’re pregnant, I hope you can utilize this and take some of the information for you and yourself. If you have anyone else you know… a relative a family member, a friend who is pregnant and they’re unsure they’ve been you know asking this question what things I don’t know what things I can do. I don’t know if it’s safe for baby share this video with them. We’d love to be able to provide a better frame of reference and or context to be able to ask better questions so that they can find the workout program or the movements that work best for them during their pregnancy. Until next time guys live loud .if you’re currently pregnant, Congratulations, and we look forward to helping and serving in the future.
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New Years Resolutions & 75 Hard EP|47
Live LOUD Life Podcast
Lafayette Colorado
Episode 47
EP|47 New Years Resolutions & 75 Hard
With Dr. Antonio Gurule
New Years Resolutions are always tough
We participate for good reason but understanding what the rules are and what habits you are trying to create better helps you create the system to stay consistent.
Tune in as we review our first week of doing 75 Hard as our New Years Resolution and habit forming platform. Read more about 75 HARD HERE
Connect With Antonio and the Live LOUD team:
Subscribe to my YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/LiveLoud
Visit the website: http://www.lifeloudlife.com
Like the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/liveloudchiropractic/
Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/live.loud.life/
Guiding your to the adventurous life you were made for!
.
If you dig this give it a like ❤️, if you’re loving it let me hear you with a comment 🗣👂, and if you know it will help someone or anyone out please share 👥📲
About Dr. Antonio Gurule
Background:
- Father
- Doctor of Chiropractic
- Owner of Live LOUD
- Personal Trainer & Health Coach
Check Out Some of Our Other Blog Posts and Podcast Episodes
Anthony Gurule 00:00
Hey what’s up guys, welcome back to another episode of the Live LOUD Life podcast. My name is Dr. Antonio, I’m your host of the Live LOUD Life podcast. My wife and I, we co-own Live LOUD Chiropractic and Coaching here in Lafayette, Colorado. We are just outside of Boulder, Colorado in Boulder County. And our mission is to help families. We want to help make families stronger, so that we can build a stronger community. We want to help guide you to the adventurous life that you and your family were meant for. And we do this through chiropractic and coaching. chiropractic, obviously being more of a hands on approach, more of a clinical conversation, clinical diagnostics, but the coaching aspect is really what we believe is, you know, the foundation of what our system methodology, whatever you want to call it is, because a lot of this comes around through just coaching suggestions and recommendations. also, you know, obviously within that comes into clinical prescriptions of certain things to eat or supplements, so on and so forth. But it’s coaching a lifestyle, it’s coaching, it’s coaching a philosophy and a foundation about how to live an active healthy life as an individual, and setting an example of a healthy active life for your family, for your immediate family, for your friends, and more importantly for your community. So stronger families to make a stronger community as a whole would be a win win, right? And that’s what we want to be able to do. we want to be able to help fill in the gaps in the holes that you’re maybe not getting from, from other roles and conditions.
Anthony Gurule 01:43
And today that’s in particular where we’re going to talk about. it’s going to be a little bit more of a shorter episode because this is more of a quote unquote, you know, just discussion around how to lay out a framework and a better understanding of how to work out or what exercises are safe or maybe not safe during pregnancy. This is a very, very common question that we get.
Anthony Gurule 02:12
My wife Nichelle has created a mini course that has some workout ideas, recommendations, and prescriptions than laid out into a workout. She guides and educates other clinicians on how to broach this topic as a chiropractor, how to better serve prenatal patients through chiropractic care, but also exercise recommendations and prescriptions, having recommendations with other personal trainers within the community whether that’s CrossFit whether that’s Orange Theory, chatting with coaches and owners and saying hey, if you have prenatal patients and they’re having these types of symptoms, or this has happened, here’s some better recommendations, not modifications. We call them lateralizations–you’re just you know, you’re doing something something different or something else we you know, we borrow that term from Charlie Weingroff, who’s a physical therapist and strength conditioning coach. But it also and also doulas, right, doulas and midwives and OBs who are directly involved with the prenatal process from nearly conception all the way through, having this conversation. we know that exercise is important during pregnancy,
Anthony Gurule 03:19
There are so many different studies that talk about the benefits of exercising during pregnancy, not only for the mom, but also for baby, which is quite interesting. They’re seeing increased cognitive-what’s the word I’m looking for? Excuse me, their cognitive output as a as an as a child through as they age is actually better from moms that actually worked out during pregnancy.
Anthony Gurule 03:50
Now this is tough, right? How do you define working out or exercise? it’s different for everybody. But we want to, and we encourage that, and yet we’re sympathetic to the different stages of life, aches and pains, so on and so forth, which obviously would limit what you can do from an exercise perspective. So you know, it’s a bit of a gray area on determining what is working out? what is exercise? What are the physical guidelines or recommendations for pregnancy? And without getting into the like, nitty gritty detail of every single thing. And obviously, every potential situation, if you had this versus this, what could happen? we’re not gonna be able to do that. What we just want to lay out is what is what are we trying to accomplish here, and we want to encourage you to stay as physically active as possible.
Anthony Gurule 04:41
And one of the things that constantly comes up is, well, should you add something in that you have not already been doing? Let’s say for instance, someone just through the stages of life with work and kids or whatever that is, they were not able to work out as much before they got pregnant, but now that they’re pregnant, whether they have more time or they understand the importance of exercises during pregnancy, well, would we say, “Well, you haven’t been exercising, so you shouldn’t do too much.” No, that doesn’t, that doesn’t really make sense. Now, we would encourage not to do too much, there’s obviously, you know, a too far swinging the pendulum of the other way. But we wouldn’t say “no, don’t exercise because you weren’t doing something before,” we just have to find those first few stepping stones to help them start to gain some momentum. and help hold their hand, if you will, So that their technique and they feel confident about lifting, or how far they’re walking or whatever that is. And that’s an important topic, because a lot of times people want to add things in, but they weren’t quite ready or weren’t doing them before. And they then assume that they’re not able to do them at all. So you do have to take that in consideration, there is a ton that you can do, and that you can still add, even though you weren’t doing them prior to pregnancy.
Anthony Gurule 05:54
Now on the big questions is, is it safe? you know, outside to contact sports, or different things like that the majority of what you’re going to do is safe for pregnancy, right? Rock climbing, we have pregnant patients that have been rock climbing before, obviously, there’s a certain inherent risk with certain sports or activities. You know, you could fall off riding your bike, you could fall over running, right, so we’re not encouraging any of these by any means. We’re just kind of, you know, setting some suggestions, if you will. And you have to take into consideration.
Anthony Gurule 06:31
Now, there are certain things to consider when you’re talking about like weightlifting, and how heavy and the intensity that you’re doing. And if you’re doing Valsalva movements, which is essentially holding your breath to maintain a more rigid or stiff torso, as you’re seeing changes in blood volume and blood pressure, you know, you do have to take that in consideration. And that is again, of course a conversation with your provider that is managing your, your pregnancy, but we recommend Mama’s weight lift, or do resistance training. During pregnancy, again, we talked about about load management and the intensity and things like that, but you can still lift and do fairly intense things. And it’s a fairly as a you know, as a scale and a wide range during pregnancy and see a ton of benefit from that. Now, are we trying to hit one rep maxes and PRs during pregnancy, I mean, some would argue yes, but I would argue, why, that’s not really an accurate representation of what your strength is anyways. So you know, you do have to to kind of keep manipulating the numbers and the weights and the intensity and the sets and reps in order to do it. But weightlifting and resistance training is safe, and it is effective. Now, outside of that, there’s not a lot of unsafe things to do, again, outside of contact sports, or things that would elicit, you know, potential trauma to you or baby based on impact we’ve had, again, not our recommendations, but some have tried very just easy scheme, because they’re in the winter months, and they wanted to and they felt very confident about not falling. So you know, you have those types of things.
Anthony Gurule 08:16
Overall, again, we’re talking about movement. You need to move, and it’s good to get your heart rate up. And it’s good to breathe hard. So that doesn’t mean just because you’re pregnant, you can’t do HIIT training or circuit training or CrossFit or Orange Theory. But you do have to listen to your body and understand certain signs that would indicate that things might be too much, right? Now those are going to be different for everyone, but a lot of this comes down to you know, lightheadedness, you know, breathing too hard. Certain aches and pains within lower extremity, chest, abdomen, so on and so forth would be obviously like your more extreme ones. If you’re becoming pale or anything like that, I mean, again, these are the same criteria, though, that would be if someone else was working out or training too hard. So it’s realistically the same thing. It’s just that your threshold level for all those most likely have gone down. And depending on what type of an athlete you were before, you’re going to be maybe a little frustrated that you’re not able to do the things you were able to do previously, which makes sense. But if you’re someone who wasn’t exercising before, you’re probably going to be a little bit more hyper aware of that, of just feeling that shortness of breath or that uneasiness. So again, we’re not saying you have to push through that because we’re not trying to set yourself up for a strength and conditioning program to increase your metabolic capacity to increase your strength and conditioning during pregnancy. We’re trying to help you maintain a healthy active pregnancy.
Anthony Gurule 09:54
Now, walking. walking is great. but in general, we encourage you to do something above and beyond walking. Obviously, again, certain things would dictate that you would not be able to do so. And this is again, any exercise. Any exercise that you do during pregnancy needs to be consulted with and work through and have a conversation with the primary physician who is managing your pregnancy, whether that’s your nurse practitioner, your midwife or your OB or obstetrician, right. But we would encourage more than just walking. walking is fantastic, but that’s kind of like your baseline minimum, right? Just like our activities, or recommendation activity guidelines. We want a few days a week of where we’re kind of just doing this steady state getting our steps in, you know, kind of pushing ourselves, we’re huffing and puffing, but still just kind of at that conversational level, but you’re not really getting a lot of benefits outside of that.
Anthony Gurule 10:55
So if you’re just walking, high five. kudos. can you do something more? Can you do some bodyweight squats? Can you do some bodyweight, you know, good mornings? can you do some walking lunges? do you have a suspension training, we’re able to do some bodyweight rows? Do you have some bands that you can do some rows with? You know, there’s a lot that you can do that allows you to get a little bit more out of that. Now, again, this all comes back down to preferences of exercises that you like to do, because that’s gonna allow you to maintain the most consistency, but then also the intensity that you like to do. And we do encourage having an open mind and at least being willing to try some high intensity things that allow you to still get your heart rate up a little bit. And it’s okay to lift more than five or 10 pounds. And not saying that that is a bad thing. There’s programs out there where it’s all directed around that where it’s lighter weight, high rep, but I just don’t want individuals and mamas to feel like they’re not able to do more and or being ashamed because other people are just saying they should back off because they’re pregnant. “why would you need a lift that much?” It fits within your strength, and your comfort, and your wheelhouse, that is totally fine.
Anthony Gurule 12:05
Again, you if you’ve been doing that enough, you understand the risk reward ratio and having a conversation with your practitioner has driven us to kind of help navigate and guide as you start to get further through pregnancies, what things maybe we need to change or manipulate. But that’s totally fine. Now outside of that, the question around safe also comes up around core exercises. diastasis recti, pelvic floor strength, so on and so forth, we want to enhance the capability of understanding how to control tension within your abdominal wall and your pelvic floor through pregnancy, because the pressure is increasing due to baby taking up more space. But we’re not we’re not necessarily we’re not gaining more strength, right.
Anthony Gurule 12:45
And so what a lot of people assume it’s when we’ve seen this, is “I don’t want diastasis. So I’m doing more core work to prevent diastasis from happening.” diastasis recti will happen in 100% of moms, it’s estimated at the week 35 Everyone will have some form of it. Now it is technically not a quote unquote diagnosis, though, until 12 weeks postpartum, because it is a normal thing that everyone will get. So you can’t diagnose someone with something that everyone will get–doesn’t make sense, right? So after that, though, if you still have weakness or spacing issues, then we can have a you know, a stronger conversation about putting a diagnosis on that.
Anthony Gurule 13:26
But what we’re trying to enhance and help is what exercises are quote unquote, not safe versus unsafe, but adding too much pressure or tension into the abdominal wall or the pelvic floor and creating more laxity. again, as that pressure for as baby’s growing starts to put more pressure on the pelvic floor and the abdominal wall. If you’re doing more things that increases the pressure within the within the abdominal cavity that’s going to push on that separation even more and/or push on that pelvic floor even more, creating potential incontinence or prolapse issues and/or more bulging and doming within the abdominal wall stretching out that separation or that gap even further, potentially making the recovery process more challenging or slightly longer. I’m not saying that it will but potentially, so we do have to take that in consideration. So we go through activation exercise of the pelvic floor, of the abdominal wall so that you better understand how to control those pressure increases while you’re lifting or exercising so that you simply can stay at a management level.
Anthony Gurule 14:28
And that in turn, helps you get through pregnancy of understanding how to lift up your older kiddo, having to lift up dog food or anything like that. It’s just managing and controlling pressure. So there’s really not anything that I would say that safe or unsafe. Now, things that we would advise against for core exercises is sit ups or crunches. You know a lot of those things that create like hanging knee raises and different things like that during pregnancy. A lot of those things that create a lot of intra abdominal pressure and tension. and especially during a flex position, that tends to put a lot more pressure on the abdominal wall, the separation where diastasis will occur as well as the pelvic floor.
Anthony Gurule 15:09
So, you know, while we never say never, there’s definitely a category of things that we definitely urge against because the risk/reward benefit and again, risk not being “injured,” But risk of potentially putting more pressure and making the recovery process on the other side harder, is not is not something that we find to be as advantageous. But you can still get the benefits of quote unquote, core exercises through full body movements such as goblet squats, such as deadlifts, you know, depending on the phase that you’re in, push ups, which are, you know, a dynamic plank. or being able to do a TRX row, which is a reverse plank as you’re just lifting yourself up. three point rows where you’re on, you know, two hands or doing like a row on a bench, where you’re in a tabletop position that’s adding anti rotation exercises. So there’s a ton that you can do that still highlights and isolates, the core isolates, sorry. that highlights and will emphasize core activation, but through a full body compound movement. And what’s great about that is during pregnancy, depending on your energy levels, it’s hard to do all the little isolated accessory and all these separate exercises as it is. So it’s kind of nice being able to combine everything, so you get more bang for your buck, especially if you’re a parent and you’re on and you’re on baby number two or three, right?
Anthony Gurule 16:31
So what exercises are safe for pregnant women to do? All are. reduce or eliminate for sure contact activities, different things like that. the increased risk activities of you know, trauma and things like that. Outside of that you’re managing pressure, I would definitely encourage reducing anything that’s heavy lifting, that’s, that’s requiring you to do Valsalva moves, you’re having to hold your breath for an extended period of time. that changes blood pressure, so on and so forth. But outside of that, Pregnancy is a completely safe time to do all exercises. we definitely as we highlighted, urge and encourage, you know, certain things over other ones just for you know, added bang for your buck or full body movements, so on and so forth. And that, but outside of that you are free to do what you want.
Anthony Gurule 17:19
If you want guidance, though, you know, there are there are trainers out there that work specifically with prenatal patients. we would love to be able to have that conversation with you if that’s something you want to bounce back or navigate. Because we do want to encourage as much as we can. A very, very active pregnancy through exercise working out or however you want to describe that. So if you found this beneficial, please like share, subscribe. if you’re pregnant, I hope you can utilize this and take some of the information for you and yourself. If you have anyone else you know… a relative a family member, a friend who is pregnant and they’re unsure they’ve been you know asking this question what things I don’t know what things I can do. I don’t know if it’s safe for baby share this video with them. We’d love to be able to provide a better frame of reference and or context to be able to ask better questions so that they can find the workout program or the movements that work best for them during their pregnancy. Until next time guys live loud .if you’re currently pregnant, Congratulations, and we look forward to helping and serving in the future.
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2021 Recap & 2022 Preparation EP|45
Live LOUD Life Podcast
Lafayette Colorado
Episode 45
EP|45 2021 Recap & 2022 Preparation
With Dr. Antonio Gurule
End of Year Recap 2021
Reflection on a few things and moving into the new year.
This is a shorter episode where I did not want to dive into any particular topic in great depth, but more so introduce the overarching principle of auditing and taking inventory and stripping down what is not working, and adjusting your focus to where it should be.
For myself, the shift in focus is on me.
Accountability is going to be a strong pursuit for me this year!
If you want to join our 75 Hard challenge or even a modified version of it, please send us a DM or email!
No cost, it is free, this is more of a support group and accountability group for all who decide to join because it will be hard!
Connect With Antonio and the Live LOUD team:
Subscribe to my YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/LiveLoud
Visit the website: http://www.lifeloudlife.com
Like the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/liveloudchiropractic/
Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/live.loud.life/
Guiding your to the adventurous life you were made for!
If you dig this give it a like ❤️, if you’re loving it let me hear you with a comment 🗣👂, and if you know it will help someone or anyone out please share 👥📲
About Dr. Antonio Gurule
Background:
- Father
- Doctor of Chiropractic
- Owner of Live LOUD
- Personal Trainer & Health Coach
Check Out Some of Our Other Blog Posts and Podcast Episodes
Anthony Gurule 00:00
Hey what’s up guys, welcome back to another episode of the Live LOUD Life podcast. My name is Dr. Antonio, I’m your host of the Live LOUD Life podcast. My wife and I, we co-own Live LOUD Chiropractic and Coaching here in Lafayette, Colorado. We are just outside of Boulder, Colorado in Boulder County. And our mission is to help families. We want to help make families stronger, so that we can build a stronger community. We want to help guide you to the adventurous life that you and your family were meant for. And we do this through chiropractic and coaching. chiropractic, obviously being more of a hands on approach, more of a clinical conversation, clinical diagnostics, but the coaching aspect is really what we believe is, you know, the foundation of what our system methodology, whatever you want to call it is, because a lot of this comes around through just coaching suggestions and recommendations. also, you know, obviously within that comes into clinical prescriptions of certain things to eat or supplements, so on and so forth. But it’s coaching a lifestyle, it’s coaching, it’s coaching a philosophy and a foundation about how to live an active healthy life as an individual, and setting an example of a healthy active life for your family, for your immediate family, for your friends, and more importantly for your community. So stronger families to make a stronger community as a whole would be a win win, right? And that’s what we want to be able to do. we want to be able to help fill in the gaps in the holes that you’re maybe not getting from, from other roles and conditions.
Anthony Gurule 01:43
And today that’s in particular where we’re going to talk about. it’s going to be a little bit more of a shorter episode because this is more of a quote unquote, you know, just discussion around how to lay out a framework and a better understanding of how to work out or what exercises are safe or maybe not safe during pregnancy. This is a very, very common question that we get.
Anthony Gurule 02:12
My wife Nichelle has created a mini course that has some workout ideas, recommendations, and prescriptions than laid out into a workout. She guides and educates other clinicians on how to broach this topic as a chiropractor, how to better serve prenatal patients through chiropractic care, but also exercise recommendations and prescriptions, having recommendations with other personal trainers within the community whether that’s CrossFit whether that’s Orange Theory, chatting with coaches and owners and saying hey, if you have prenatal patients and they’re having these types of symptoms, or this has happened, here’s some better recommendations, not modifications. We call them lateralizations–you’re just you know, you’re doing something something different or something else we you know, we borrow that term from Charlie Weingroff, who’s a physical therapist and strength conditioning coach. But it also and also doulas, right, doulas and midwives and OBs who are directly involved with the prenatal process from nearly conception all the way through, having this conversation. we know that exercise is important during pregnancy,
Anthony Gurule 03:19
There are so many different studies that talk about the benefits of exercising during pregnancy, not only for the mom, but also for baby, which is quite interesting. They’re seeing increased cognitive-what’s the word I’m looking for? Excuse me, their cognitive output as a as an as a child through as they age is actually better from moms that actually worked out during pregnancy.
Anthony Gurule 03:50
Now this is tough, right? How do you define working out or exercise? it’s different for everybody. But we want to, and we encourage that, and yet we’re sympathetic to the different stages of life, aches and pains, so on and so forth, which obviously would limit what you can do from an exercise perspective. So you know, it’s a bit of a gray area on determining what is working out? what is exercise? What are the physical guidelines or recommendations for pregnancy? And without getting into the like, nitty gritty detail of every single thing. And obviously, every potential situation, if you had this versus this, what could happen? we’re not gonna be able to do that. What we just want to lay out is what is what are we trying to accomplish here, and we want to encourage you to stay as physically active as possible.
Anthony Gurule 04:41
And one of the things that constantly comes up is, well, should you add something in that you have not already been doing? Let’s say for instance, someone just through the stages of life with work and kids or whatever that is, they were not able to work out as much before they got pregnant, but now that they’re pregnant, whether they have more time or they understand the importance of exercises during pregnancy, well, would we say, “Well, you haven’t been exercising, so you shouldn’t do too much.” No, that doesn’t, that doesn’t really make sense. Now, we would encourage not to do too much, there’s obviously, you know, a too far swinging the pendulum of the other way. But we wouldn’t say “no, don’t exercise because you weren’t doing something before,” we just have to find those first few stepping stones to help them start to gain some momentum. and help hold their hand, if you will, So that their technique and they feel confident about lifting, or how far they’re walking or whatever that is. And that’s an important topic, because a lot of times people want to add things in, but they weren’t quite ready or weren’t doing them before. And they then assume that they’re not able to do them at all. So you do have to take that in consideration, there is a ton that you can do, and that you can still add, even though you weren’t doing them prior to pregnancy.
Anthony Gurule 05:54
Now on the big questions is, is it safe? you know, outside to contact sports, or different things like that the majority of what you’re going to do is safe for pregnancy, right? Rock climbing, we have pregnant patients that have been rock climbing before, obviously, there’s a certain inherent risk with certain sports or activities. You know, you could fall off riding your bike, you could fall over running, right, so we’re not encouraging any of these by any means. We’re just kind of, you know, setting some suggestions, if you will. And you have to take into consideration.
Anthony Gurule 06:31
Now, there are certain things to consider when you’re talking about like weightlifting, and how heavy and the intensity that you’re doing. And if you’re doing Valsalva movements, which is essentially holding your breath to maintain a more rigid or stiff torso, as you’re seeing changes in blood volume and blood pressure, you know, you do have to take that in consideration. And that is again, of course a conversation with your provider that is managing your, your pregnancy, but we recommend Mama’s weight lift, or do resistance training. During pregnancy, again, we talked about about load management and the intensity and things like that, but you can still lift and do fairly intense things. And it’s a fairly as a you know, as a scale and a wide range during pregnancy and see a ton of benefit from that. Now, are we trying to hit one rep maxes and PRs during pregnancy, I mean, some would argue yes, but I would argue, why, that’s not really an accurate representation of what your strength is anyways. So you know, you do have to to kind of keep manipulating the numbers and the weights and the intensity and the sets and reps in order to do it. But weightlifting and resistance training is safe, and it is effective. Now, outside of that, there’s not a lot of unsafe things to do, again, outside of contact sports, or things that would elicit, you know, potential trauma to you or baby based on impact we’ve had, again, not our recommendations, but some have tried very just easy scheme, because they’re in the winter months, and they wanted to and they felt very confident about not falling. So you know, you have those types of things.
Anthony Gurule 08:16
Overall, again, we’re talking about movement. You need to move, and it’s good to get your heart rate up. And it’s good to breathe hard. So that doesn’t mean just because you’re pregnant, you can’t do HIIT training or circuit training or CrossFit or Orange Theory. But you do have to listen to your body and understand certain signs that would indicate that things might be too much, right? Now those are going to be different for everyone, but a lot of this comes down to you know, lightheadedness, you know, breathing too hard. Certain aches and pains within lower extremity, chest, abdomen, so on and so forth would be obviously like your more extreme ones. If you’re becoming pale or anything like that, I mean, again, these are the same criteria, though, that would be if someone else was working out or training too hard. So it’s realistically the same thing. It’s just that your threshold level for all those most likely have gone down. And depending on what type of an athlete you were before, you’re going to be maybe a little frustrated that you’re not able to do the things you were able to do previously, which makes sense. But if you’re someone who wasn’t exercising before, you’re probably going to be a little bit more hyper aware of that, of just feeling that shortness of breath or that uneasiness. So again, we’re not saying you have to push through that because we’re not trying to set yourself up for a strength and conditioning program to increase your metabolic capacity to increase your strength and conditioning during pregnancy. We’re trying to help you maintain a healthy active pregnancy.
Anthony Gurule 09:54
Now, walking. walking is great. but in general, we encourage you to do something above and beyond walking. Obviously, again, certain things would dictate that you would not be able to do so. And this is again, any exercise. Any exercise that you do during pregnancy needs to be consulted with and work through and have a conversation with the primary physician who is managing your pregnancy, whether that’s your nurse practitioner, your midwife or your OB or obstetrician, right. But we would encourage more than just walking. walking is fantastic, but that’s kind of like your baseline minimum, right? Just like our activities, or recommendation activity guidelines. We want a few days a week of where we’re kind of just doing this steady state getting our steps in, you know, kind of pushing ourselves, we’re huffing and puffing, but still just kind of at that conversational level, but you’re not really getting a lot of benefits outside of that.
Anthony Gurule 10:55
So if you’re just walking, high five. kudos. can you do something more? Can you do some bodyweight squats? Can you do some bodyweight, you know, good mornings? can you do some walking lunges? do you have a suspension training, we’re able to do some bodyweight rows? Do you have some bands that you can do some rows with? You know, there’s a lot that you can do that allows you to get a little bit more out of that. Now, again, this all comes back down to preferences of exercises that you like to do, because that’s gonna allow you to maintain the most consistency, but then also the intensity that you like to do. And we do encourage having an open mind and at least being willing to try some high intensity things that allow you to still get your heart rate up a little bit. And it’s okay to lift more than five or 10 pounds. And not saying that that is a bad thing. There’s programs out there where it’s all directed around that where it’s lighter weight, high rep, but I just don’t want individuals and mamas to feel like they’re not able to do more and or being ashamed because other people are just saying they should back off because they’re pregnant. “why would you need a lift that much?” It fits within your strength, and your comfort, and your wheelhouse, that is totally fine.
Anthony Gurule 12:05
Again, you if you’ve been doing that enough, you understand the risk reward ratio and having a conversation with your practitioner has driven us to kind of help navigate and guide as you start to get further through pregnancies, what things maybe we need to change or manipulate. But that’s totally fine. Now outside of that, the question around safe also comes up around core exercises. diastasis recti, pelvic floor strength, so on and so forth, we want to enhance the capability of understanding how to control tension within your abdominal wall and your pelvic floor through pregnancy, because the pressure is increasing due to baby taking up more space. But we’re not we’re not necessarily we’re not gaining more strength, right.
Anthony Gurule 12:45
And so what a lot of people assume it’s when we’ve seen this, is “I don’t want diastasis. So I’m doing more core work to prevent diastasis from happening.” diastasis recti will happen in 100% of moms, it’s estimated at the week 35 Everyone will have some form of it. Now it is technically not a quote unquote diagnosis, though, until 12 weeks postpartum, because it is a normal thing that everyone will get. So you can’t diagnose someone with something that everyone will get–doesn’t make sense, right? So after that, though, if you still have weakness or spacing issues, then we can have a you know, a stronger conversation about putting a diagnosis on that.
Anthony Gurule 13:26
But what we’re trying to enhance and help is what exercises are quote unquote, not safe versus unsafe, but adding too much pressure or tension into the abdominal wall or the pelvic floor and creating more laxity. again, as that pressure for as baby’s growing starts to put more pressure on the pelvic floor and the abdominal wall. If you’re doing more things that increases the pressure within the within the abdominal cavity that’s going to push on that separation even more and/or push on that pelvic floor even more, creating potential incontinence or prolapse issues and/or more bulging and doming within the abdominal wall stretching out that separation or that gap even further, potentially making the recovery process more challenging or slightly longer. I’m not saying that it will but potentially, so we do have to take that in consideration. So we go through activation exercise of the pelvic floor, of the abdominal wall so that you better understand how to control those pressure increases while you’re lifting or exercising so that you simply can stay at a management level.
Anthony Gurule 14:28
And that in turn, helps you get through pregnancy of understanding how to lift up your older kiddo, having to lift up dog food or anything like that. It’s just managing and controlling pressure. So there’s really not anything that I would say that safe or unsafe. Now, things that we would advise against for core exercises is sit ups or crunches. You know a lot of those things that create like hanging knee raises and different things like that during pregnancy. A lot of those things that create a lot of intra abdominal pressure and tension. and especially during a flex position, that tends to put a lot more pressure on the abdominal wall, the separation where diastasis will occur as well as the pelvic floor.
Anthony Gurule 15:09
So, you know, while we never say never, there’s definitely a category of things that we definitely urge against because the risk/reward benefit and again, risk not being “injured,” But risk of potentially putting more pressure and making the recovery process on the other side harder, is not is not something that we find to be as advantageous. But you can still get the benefits of quote unquote, core exercises through full body movements such as goblet squats, such as deadlifts, you know, depending on the phase that you’re in, push ups, which are, you know, a dynamic plank. or being able to do a TRX row, which is a reverse plank as you’re just lifting yourself up. three point rows where you’re on, you know, two hands or doing like a row on a bench, where you’re in a tabletop position that’s adding anti rotation exercises. So there’s a ton that you can do that still highlights and isolates, the core isolates, sorry. that highlights and will emphasize core activation, but through a full body compound movement. And what’s great about that is during pregnancy, depending on your energy levels, it’s hard to do all the little isolated accessory and all these separate exercises as it is. So it’s kind of nice being able to combine everything, so you get more bang for your buck, especially if you’re a parent and you’re on and you’re on baby number two or three, right?
Anthony Gurule 16:31
So what exercises are safe for pregnant women to do? All are. reduce or eliminate for sure contact activities, different things like that. the increased risk activities of you know, trauma and things like that. Outside of that you’re managing pressure, I would definitely encourage reducing anything that’s heavy lifting, that’s, that’s requiring you to do Valsalva moves, you’re having to hold your breath for an extended period of time. that changes blood pressure, so on and so forth. But outside of that, Pregnancy is a completely safe time to do all exercises. we definitely as we highlighted, urge and encourage, you know, certain things over other ones just for you know, added bang for your buck or full body movements, so on and so forth. And that, but outside of that you are free to do what you want.
Anthony Gurule 17:19
If you want guidance, though, you know, there are there are trainers out there that work specifically with prenatal patients. we would love to be able to have that conversation with you if that’s something you want to bounce back or navigate. Because we do want to encourage as much as we can. A very, very active pregnancy through exercise working out or however you want to describe that. So if you found this beneficial, please like share, subscribe. if you’re pregnant, I hope you can utilize this and take some of the information for you and yourself. If you have anyone else you know… a relative a family member, a friend who is pregnant and they’re unsure they’ve been you know asking this question what things I don’t know what things I can do. I don’t know if it’s safe for baby share this video with them. We’d love to be able to provide a better frame of reference and or context to be able to ask better questions so that they can find the workout program or the movements that work best for them during their pregnancy. Until next time guys live loud .if you’re currently pregnant, Congratulations, and we look forward to helping and serving in the future.
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Plant Based Healing With Janelle Orsborn EP|46
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Live LOUD Life Podcast
Lafayette Colorado
Episode 46
Plant Based Healing
With Janelle Orsborn
Tune in as we talk about healing from trauma and anxiety, plant based therapies, living in the present moment and much more.
0:47 Find out how Janelle started as a bodyworker and eventually learned about trauma.
1:55 Janelle’s sentiments on plant therapy; the effectiveness, the research and regulation.
4:21 Janelle journey of mental health and how plant based therapy has helped in her healing process.
9:35 How Janelle was able to treat chronic anxiety and how plant based therapy was part of the remedy.
14:22 The value and importance of the present moment.
17:37 Antonio and Janelle talk about how some cultures are using plant therapies for their kids; we also talk about parenting and homeschooling.
27:25 Janelle new adventure; her plant based product, upcoming book, and her therapy retreats and sessions
About Janelle Orsborn
Background:
- Bodyworker
- Therapist
- Breathwork facilitator
- Aspiring author
Connect With Janelle:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/janelleorsborn/
Coco Love Cacao: https://etsy.me/3qNYnsm
Check Out Some of Our Other Blog Posts and Podcast Episodes
Anthony Gurule
All right, what’s up guys? Welcome back to The Live Loud live podcast. My name is Dr. Antonio, your host and I am excited to chat with my good friend, Janelle Orsborn and you have to pronounce it Osborn because I heard you say it the other day on something online. I was like, I am saying it wrong.
Janelle Orsborn
Not Osborne.
Anthony Gurule
Orsborn
Janelle Orsborn
Yeah. That’s all right.
Anthony Gurule
All right, well, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
Janelle Orsborn
Yeah, am so glad to be here.
Anthony Gurule
We’re going to jump in because I think we’re going to chat for a while, we’ll get it in. But tell everyone who you are, and what you’re doing now?
Janelle Orsborn
Yeah. Absolutely. So, I’ve been a body worker for about 13 years now. I was 17 when I graduated from Massage Therapy School and it was kind of on a whim that I decided to do this, which of course, it’s always perfect and divine. But it was like this coin toss between hair school and bodywork school. And then while I was in massage school, I ended up falling in love with just the healing art form of bodywork and where that’s been able to take me. So my journey with that has been learning so many different people’s bodies, but then we’re like, they’re storing trauma in the body, where they’re storing pain and how the pain is manifesting.
So that kind of set me on my path of not only learning more about trauma therapy and the way that the body literally holds trauma, but also my own healing journey of working with my mental health, my anxiety, and some depression. And so now I’m working kind of more the psychedelic space; actually that is where I’m really fascinated with as far as how psychedelics are designed to literally heal our physical bodies, as well as our minds and how those two things work so well together.
Anthony Gurule
Why do you think, I mean, the psychedelics, plant therapies, obviously, they’ve been around for a really long time, right? Why did it get so, I guess, like, not mainstream and now being so not mainstream, but in this bush. It’s because they’re doing a lot of great studies with it, you know, PTSD, veterans and different things like that. Now, obviously, it’s so that’s getting up there, we’re fairly mainstream, where they are able to give this to people.
Janelle Orsborn
Absolutely, which is kind of a loaded question because you always think like, why did these things that have been around for thousands of years, and jungles and tribes have been using these therapies, these plants to heal themselves, their families for generations. So I think use in the 50s, 60s, 70s, people not having a lot of awareness around like of the how.
Plant Therapy is really effective and you can really make a lot of money if people are healing and then getting better. There’s a great business model in Healthy People. And so I sometimes just wonder if this is a rabbit hole conversation but, you know, if you can make money on the pharmaceutical industries, so can you make money on plant medicines? So, I’ll really be curious to see as the research comes through with psychedelic assisted therapies, specifically how they’re going to regulate that as they have kind of with the cannabis industry. So psychedelics specifically are– I consider those in the realm of MDA, MDMA and Psilocybin, which is derived from the mushroom.
Anthony Gurule
Yeah. That’s a really good point. From my understanding the way that it’s being used now is not so much on a personal use, it’s more or is it always guided assistance?
Janelle Orsborn
Well, right now it’s all just done in research settings, legally. Obviously, there are people who are willing to go there and just administer and be facilitators of plant medicine work that’s not necessarily done legally through the regulation. But that’s how I’ve done a lot of my own healing; has just been through working with facilitators who are extremely knowledgeable, they just might not be FDA regulated and done in like a therapeutic setting in that regard.
Anthony Gurule
So, what interest you being younger and dealing with anxiety, depression and different things like that, when mostly what we hear is either medication or even just standard therapy? You know, we think a lot of times with those– therapies is a good start and then if that doesn’t work, then sometimes it goes further. But how did you first hear about this and what really piqued your interest in it?
Janelle Orsborn
Well, I know just in the reflection of you, you’re really a creator at heart and this is a form of healing as an artist. This is my artistry to be a healer because everyone is individual. And so, there are no two people that are going to be alike in their healing and that was for me too. So, when I was having these feelings of anxiety in my body, and these really dark like depressive thoughts, I was like, this can’t be, my body is not deficient in medication. That’s not how I was made, I wasn’t made to be deficient in medication. So there’s something dis-regulated in my physical system. And so I really just became my own experiment of like, I’m a creative person, we’re all creative, we’re all creators on some level and in some fashion. So why would I want to numb or minimize my gifts and my connection with God in the name of being healthy? It set me on a course of what mental health really is and why is my body dis-regulated?
Anthony Gurule
Were there things you tried before?
Janelle Orsborn
Yeah, I was in Talk Therapy for years; three years of sitting once a week with a therapist. All modalities and tools that are helpful. But I just found that I wasn’t in my physical body, there was a disassociation between my physical experience and what was going on in my mind. And that will happen with a lot of really creative people, they’ll live so up in their head that they will not be able to drop it. And trauma also is a factor of not wanting to fully drop in the body; if there’s been physical trauma or if there’s just a really deep sense of fear state to be in the body. So the vagus nerve has really been what I’ve been passionate about studying; is how can we regulate the vagus nerve, which is the rest and digest kind of nerve. So when you stimulate this nerve your body’s able to actually fall into a rest state instead of being in like a fight or flight mode. You can actually just do that through breath work.
So that’s really where I started as well in therapy and then in breath work, I was having a tremendous breakthrough. I facilitate breath work journeys on retreats, and 1:1 session as well. You create an altered state of consciousness when you’re in that deep of a parasympathetic state, you drop into the delta brain wave state, and your brain is actually able to regulate itself again instead of having so many chemicals from being in fight or flight, that you just become so dis-regulated. I was literally disassociated from what I am even feeling because my mind is running away with itself. And so then I found plant medicine again kind of by accident, but it was recommended to me by several people before I finally said, yes.
Anthony Gurule
Is a big step, right? Like you said.
Janelle Orsborn
Yeah, I had actually worked with the Board of Health in Colorado when I was in my early 20s. And I was extremely opposed to a lot of the bills and the things the legislation that they were passing around cannabis and regulation of cannabis. I’m not really familiar with that plant specifically but it’s just the journey I’ve been on because I was so rigid and fixated in my mind thinking all drugs are bad and medicine that is regulated by the FDA is good. I think that there’s kind of a really big gap between the psychedelic space and western medicine. So that’s just been a journey in itself. For me is coming into the surrender of, wow, there’s probably a lot that we actually aren’t utilizing because it’s going to heal people, and it’s not going to keep people dependent on medication.
Anthony Gurule
Yeah. And I think what’s also hard to is– it’s funny, you may have heard this before because a pastor at a church who said it. Drugs work, if drugs didn’t work you got sold bad drugs, right? But I think what’s so hard now especially in our society is, I want to be better than yesterday. And when you take your medication, like they are pretty potent, and they do work some wonders, but it’s like that thing you were talking about was like systemically getting down to things, not just covering up, not just trying to balance certain levels because the chart said to do that.
Janelle Orsborn
Right. If you’re trying to balance certain levels, there’s probably a band aid kind of situation that’s being put on a real underlying issue. For me, it was just a lot of dis-regulated stuff from childhood that I had never really been able to sit with and face. Then it set me on a spiritual journey of really kind of deconstructing my faith and being like, what do I actually believe in, what really is my purpose because I can’t just stay on this hamster wheel of just medicating my own anxiety and depression. It has to be medicine. That became my agreement with myself that I’ll only go where there’s medicine because medication for me just keeps me and keeps anyone that I will come in contact with as a healer kind of just on that pendulum as well or on that hamster wheel.
Anthony Gurule
And oftentimes creates dependency issues and all that other stuff, which again— I mean, I don’t know enough about all those medications and obviously certain medications prolong certain situations.
Janelle Orsborn
Yeah, there’s a really interesting– there’s been a few books that I’ve read that have really felt resonant in the way that I approach my own healing and the people that I work with now in their healing journeys. “The Body Keeps The Score”, I’m sure you’re familiar with that book and if not it’s worth reading if you feel like there’s maybe chronic pain in your body that isn’t from anything, or even like chronic anxiety, because chronic anxiety is really good indicator that there’s probably something in your life that’s out of alignment, because that was really my indicator. And I was like, why am I always so anxious, and it was really just that I wasn’t in alignment with a lot of things in my life, a relationship, the way in which I had structured my life where I almost was structuring a life that I couldn’t afford. And I was working super hard to keep up with it. There was just a lot that wasn’t in alignment.
Anthony Gurule
It’s very common for a lot of people.
Janelle Orsborn
And so it got me on this spiritual journey of deconstructing my faith, really coming into like some honesty with myself. When I started down the pathway of psychedelics, it was unique, because the word psychedelic literally means to reveal the soul. And so when I read that and then really sat with that, I was like, whew, it can’t be an escape route if you’re really doing it. If you’re doing it you’re going straight to meet yourself. I remember the first time I ever worked with the psilocybin medicine, I was like, am I going to meet a demon like I don’t want any crazy stuff to happen. And my facilitator and good friend now she was like, well, if you have a demon inside they will be there whenever you meet me in order to be able to really– basically just love that part of myself. That’s my approach to healing is like where in yourself are you not– Because love is the ultimate medicine ever, period, end of story.
How can I as a healer then hold the space for myself to alchemize that thing in me that’s fear driven or that’s ego driven, that’s out of alignment? Can I love this part of myself to be able to alchemize it, to then be able to love it because love will ultimately heal it. That has probably been the biggest motto that I approach in any journey, or anything that I facilitate. And my body just completely shifted since working with psychedelics. I’ve lost weight that I was carrying, it was just emotional; almost like armor protection. I’m just more clear and been able to integrate them because the other side of this work is integration. I’ve been able to integrate, to structure a life that can actually support my healing and not just stay on the hamster wheel. And that’s been the most profound part of this work. It’s not for the faint hearted but it’s definitely for those who are just hungry for the truth, because we’re not meant to be in pain, we’re not meant to suffer. That could not be our birthright ever. And so for me the journey has been not only from a physical standpoint but it’s actually taken me very much into the spiritual aspect of healing.
Anthony Gurule
One thing I remember us talking about in the past in a framework of mindset and different things like that, one thing that I’ve heard is like anxiety is basically the separation between expectation and reality. We set certain expectations and then when we don’t meet it, we just get all frustrated and in which is tough because that can be misconstrued with goals and different things like that. But that’s something I know I’ve struggled with, is like I have this expectation of what something should be or where I should be, business standpoint, a father, a partner, and all those things and then when I don’t meet that it’s kind of upsetting or if it’s that anxiousness, right? So how do I have that kind of maybe the thought of expectations in reality, and not necessarily goal setting but just mindset wise, like being able to think about the future, strive for that greatness and the future and understanding when certain maybe milestones and things don’t match up with that.
Janelle Orsborn
Yeah, like I said, we’re all creators. And so we’re all creating our reality and we create the future, but we will miss whatever’s meant for us if we’re not in the present moment. And so the work that I’ve done in myself the last–, I’m 29 now, and I kind of started this work really in depth around 27. The last two years have been all in, giving myself over to the present moment, not to anything that I could be in the future. Because if I’m not present with myself and my work now, then the future that I’m going to create is going to literally just be more of the same; more separation between what the way I think it should be and the way it is. And it sounds simple, but it’s actually the most profound, potent thing in the world is the present moment. Like we had no idea what we’re going to talk about really when we sat down to do this podcast. If we are anywhere else but here, our medicine of these words, and this conversation isn’t even that– it doesn’t really mean anything if we’re already thinking about where we’re going to be after this. So it’s the slowing down, creating a lifestyle, cultivating a lifestyle where I can be present enough to then create a future reality that is true, I guess, because that’s really ultimately what we’re all after, is the truth. The truth can be rough, abrasive sometimes if there is a lot out of alignment.
Anthony Gurule
Yeah, that’s true. Obviously now everything we’ve been talking about it’s been more from an intervention of something happened, we’re trying to clear or work through some things– I don’t know if it’s even come to mind, which if it hasn’t, we can move forward on something else, but we can’t avoid trauma, trauma comes up, shit happens as they say. But from an early standpoint maybe younger kids and middle schoolers and high schoolers or maybe we don’t want to intervene with a psilocybin and things like that. Those types of medicines are like having discussions around how to deal with those things and work through those things or understanding.
Janelle Orsborn
Yeah, absolutely. There are tribes that are in different parts of Peru, as I’ve researched plant medicines where like 12 year olds will drink Ayahuasca with their dads and I’m like, oh, that’s one way to do it.
I feel for me, what would have been so helpful for me as a child was to be given– I was given tremendous space by my parents, and they absolutely have done an incredible job. I’m the oldest of six kids. But I think where I’ve noticed that parents can sometimes– they set the expectations for their children and rather than just allowing the child who comes full of purpose, fully tapped into their heart and who they are, and then they come into a reality that might not fully reflect or be they might not be given space to fully let that be expressed. And so for me, I noticed a big part of my journey was the expectations that I maybe were feeling more imposed on by my family, by the church that I went to, just the way that I was raised.
Anthony Gurule
Meaning like to do certain things.
Janelle Orsborn
Yeah, just like the level in which I was expected to show up from a really young age. Obviously, there was some trauma in my childhood as well but as far as– like you have young kids and so just kind of being like– There’s a really great song by Need To Breathe called Banks. It talks about being the banks to a river, where it’s like–, alright I’ve been operating in this world for longer than you but you’re actually the medicine for this next wave of consciousness to come through. Children are– I believe in. So it’s like holding these children in such a way that they can bring the medicine of their heart to the world. and then it’s just like giving them food and water and like enough place to sleep, and they will honestly figure it out. I think the biggest thing for me is just been deconstructing my own shoulds so that I can be the medicine that the world needs as well. So I can’t wait to have my own children someday so that they can come and show me the way instead of me thinking I could ever have anything to teach them.
Anthony Gurule
I did an episode with Dr. Bill Morgan. He’s one of our mentors and the president of Parker College of Chiropractic. He’s been a chiropractor for so many years. He treated Congress members, dude is amazing. And so we were talking about leadership and it came up his parenting and all that. He’s like the biggest thing I’ve learned about parenting it is the biggest reflection on myself. Of everything that comes out of me based on a certain situation is just like– my oldest son is the one that buttheads most, but when something happens with the kid, I’m like, I’m literally like almost looking at myself as I’m doing it. It’s like, I’m not even mad at him.
Janelle Orsborn
No, it’s actually the part of you that maybe isn’t– again, where am I not fully loving myself that this is still triggering me on some level or I’m having this perceived negative emotion around this like a child. And so I completely could see how that was.
Anthony Gurule
Which is always super curious to like where and how it gets built up through the generations wherever it is. I mean, we came from Catholic Hispanic on one side of my family, right? And that’s pretty rigid to the bone. Not that my parents were super worried. But I’m curious to within that is–, I think the biggest thing is just being adaptable, right? That’s the hardest part. Different kids need different things, different people need different things and understanding what that level is because some people work really well with more the banks are tighter. Whereas you open it up and then [CROSSTALK]
Janelle Orsborn
I was a kid that needed maybe just like a little bit of banks, and I was just a full river. I think I was given really tight, you know, this is how it needs to be done. Just for any parents listening, like if you can just really feel your children, not just listen to them and see but like feel them and just trust that their heart is fully tapped into. They know the way and that you might have more experience operating a car and like knowing how to buy food at a grocery store. The children really understand and they are our greatest teachers if we can feel them and give them the space to really let themselves be heard. I know that so many parents are probably like, yeah, my kids say like the most, they’ve no filter. It’s because they’re really just tapped in and they won’t hold back because the ego hasn’t been able to come online for children fully. Around age seven is when they hit that first seven year cycle hits. A child’s really able to first start to develop the ego, which is really just our fear manager, our trauma manager. A lot of plant medicine will dish this illusion, the ego for us to show us where our heart may be like was put on the backburner so that we could manage our fear.
Because really our heart is how–, for me I’m committed so much to living from a heart space of what wants to come through me into the world. It’s been a bit of a death to some of the things that I thought that I wanted and have still like formed a little bit of attachment to, I mean all the way to like relationships I thought I wanted or I want to live in this kind of a house or I want to– And so now I’m just so committed honestly to love and to healing myself and being medicine for so many people that I’m kind of having to even surrender. Again, I’m about to turn 30 into like, alright, well, that’s not how I thought where I was going to be at 30. But even surrendering to that too, it’s like I’m just continuing to stay present and listening truly to what my heart is saying, which is a cultivated practice. It was something that honestly I didn’t know how to do two years ago really without the work that I’ve done.
Anthony Gurule
That’s awesome. Back to kids, I think one of the hardest parts is obviously this is what we’re talking about as parents and kids at home and what not. I’m more so just kind of curious because we’re starting this journey of potentially homeschooling our kids, your homeschool journey, being one of six kids and everything else, did that make it too hard? Because you guys were living together and then you’re doing school together, which is good because it’s more time with family but sometimes it’s almost too much where getting out into different things.
Janelle Orsborn
Yeah, my parents, I was their oldest, so I was like the trial child and unlike all of my siblings. I’m lucky that I got to be the oldest in my family. However, there’s a lot of trial and error. And so for me, I think it was amazing to be homeschooled but it was the integration into the society because I always knew I was special. And I guess every kid has that, I knew that I was special. And it was almost like I didn’t have enough integration into being with other kids to see where I’m at because I just only hung out with other homeschool kids, and it was awesome, and we’re still great friends today. But I almost like dumbed myself down to go into society because I was just this really bright, vibrant kid but I would like go into society– and my parents did the best they could like signing up for sports and gymnastics but really I was like, man, it’s not resonating with me to do all these different activities. I want to interact with kids who are like me but not maybe just like all homeschool kids or like all just church kids. There needs to be diversity in it, I guess.
Anthony Gurule
Did that add to any of this stress, anxiety and stuff that you were feeling in that kind of early young adulthood?
Janelle Orsborn
Definitely.
Anthony Gurule
That’s heavy when you’re running your life one way, right?
Janelle Orsborn
Yeah, it’s always.
Anthony Gurule
Like wait the world operates like this?
Janelle Orsborn
Now I would absolutely homeschool my kids. I wouldn’t have said that a few years ago but I see the value of being able to cultivate so many things that you wouldn’t be able to in a public school system, but there’s some incredible like Montessori school systems. And just like more classically educated, I think that is the way that a child will learn best.
Anthony Gurule
Yeah. We’re obviously boarding our oldest. He’s only in kindergarten. But, I mean, homeschooling is honestly great. We wake up, we kick it early, and he’s done. He’s at least from kindergarten standards.
Janelle Orsborn
Yeah, I think it is cool too, and then the child can be on their own rhythm. Like every person has their own body rhythm, their own work ethic. Like my mom was just trying to be captain of a really busy ship, she had six of us. So she was like, structure and you need to be up at this time. But had I been given a little more space to be like, man, I actually work best at 11 o’clock at night. So that’s when I should do my school. When I was in 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grade– you know, I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was 19. I’ve never really had a job. I do owe that to being homeschooled. I have my own kind of work ethic. I’m a self-starter and I never really had anyone other than my parents telling me like your assignments are due. Yeah. So I’m excited for you guys. And homeschooling is going to be amazing.
Anthony Gurule
We’re looking forward to it. So tell me about some of the other newer adventures and things that you’re getting into.
Janelle Orsborn
Yeah, so plant medicine can be like a kind of abrasive thing if you’re just new to it. It’s not been something that’s been introduced because I know that it really was for me. There’s a plant medicine that I’m really, really loving right now called Cacao. It’s literally just like the whole Cocoa bean, that roundup and it has the full fat in it but it can be a beautiful stimulant for the body rather than drinking coffee in the morning, which stimulates your brain and a lot of people say it just magnifies their anxiety. I’ve switched to drinking Cacao about two years ago and that’s been a credible shift for my body as well. There’s really high magnesium in Cacao; there is a lot of micronutrients and antioxidants that create just like a really beautiful heart opening experience, it’s a stimulant as well. It gives this really beautiful feeling to the body as like one would want when they drink coffee without the jitters of drinking caffeine. So I started a Cacao little label called Coco Love. And that’s my way to start sharing plant medicine with people because once you’ll try Cacao you’re more willing to have the conversation, maybe about a different plant medicine.
Anthony Gurule
Put the foot in the door.
Janelle Orsborn
Absolutely, yeah, we’ve been talking about children a lot and so I wrote a children’s book. Which will be out in the new year, still kind of in the development stages but preserving that inner child because so much trauma work and so much therapy, I’m like, man, if we could just like reach the five year old, which were all plant medicine journeys will take you to at one point or breathwork journeys, they’ll always take you back to that inner child at some point because that’s the truth. And so I wrote a children’s book that’s going to be out which is really exciting. And then have been facilitating retreats with some of my best friends, we all kind of created a platform called Pursuing Purpose that we’ve been able to do some healing retreats and take people on this adventure of healing themselves as well.
Anthony Gurule
That’s awesome, talk a little bit more about the retreat, how long are they?
Janelle Orsborn
The retreats are about four to seven days long and they are amazing. The thing for me was I started on my healing journey alone. And what I love that you guys are building here is a sense of community because I think you can heal without a lot of different things but if you’re feeling isolated and alone, it’s almost impossible to really feel, you know, seen, heard, love and encouraged; all the things we want to feel to operate at a high frequency.
Anthony Gurule
No doubt. I mean, isolation is the leading cause of a lot of diseases and the thing that everyone has been suffering from over the last few years.
Janelle Orsborn
Absolutely, which is probably another rabbit hole, but for me and for my team we want a holistic experience where someone can come experience breath work, cacao. We don’t work with psychedelics on our retreats yet, but just to be able to experience these holistic modalities and do it in a community where they’re held in a container and that’s just been profound. And so those are through pursuing purpose. Just following along on my Instagram, which is just adding in my first and last name, Janelle Orsborn, which is a great way to kind of keep up with the work that I do 1:1 and also in a group setting. I also facilitate breath work journeys here in Denver. So if people are interested in trying breath work, that’s a great way to get your foot in the door of altered states of consciousness, because it’s really your own breath. It’s just a hyper oxygenated state. So blood alkaline levels shift and all of a sudden you’re having this semi psychedelic experience without really even taking a substance. People that are hesitant to try, I completely understand. And that’s why I became a breathwork facilitator as well to be able to offer that medicine and experience
Anthony Gurule
Where do you hold those in Denver?
Janelle Orsborn
There’s a social club called Archipelago clubs. It’s fantastic. There’re a lot of different healers and teachers there. That’s been really fun. I’ve also studied– this is getting into a whole other conversation, but I’ve been studying the gene keys .The gene keys are basically based on the amino acids in your body and the way that they vibrate. They can be in a shadow state or a really high frequency state, and then how to elevate those amino acids to be in the highest vibrational state where disease really can’t exist.
Anthony Gurule
What were some of the interventions to make that shift be? Is that nutritional plants based?
Janelle Orsborn
Yeah, you can actually supplement amino acids but it’s first of all knowing what your gene keys are. There are 11 of them. They’re based on astrology and the Chinese teaching. I’ve been really kind of diving into studying like, each of us have individual genetic makeup. So we’ll each have a different way that our body understands itself. My purpose in life is different than your purpose but we both have purpose. So it’s just being able to work with people as an individual has been my biggest passion because one medicine is not going to work for everyone and my passion has just been making sure that anyone that comes in front of me feels seen by all of the modalities that I’ve been able to work on healing myself. My purpose in the gene keys is boundlessness. There are literally boundless expressions of love and healing. And I’ve kind of just been on the journey of discovering what works for me.
Anthony Gurule
Which I think is so good, right? Because it’s A: someone has been through the trenches, right? But B: it’s just for someone who’s been, I mean, for lack of a better term, just like stuck, and having someone that can help navigate that, all the different possibilities. Because it’s good as we said; talk therapy is great, certain medications run their purpose, body work serves their purpose, but someone who can do it all.
Janelle Orsborn
It’s even the energy that you set all of those modalities with, the voice notation goes down. I love to talk about things that are fun, having dance parties is fun. Like, that’s medicine and sometimes that will elevate my frequency into a completely different state then I’m like, Oh, It was just fun and laughter. So the community has been huge for that. So I love the work that you’re doing to kind of build our community here too because that’s profound.
Anthony Gurule
Well, we’re going to wrap it. Thank you so much. I learned some cool things. I’m not hitting the ice bath tonight with you guys, next time for sure. But I love following all your stuff. Thanks for sharing. Looking forward to seeing where everything goes with that.
Janelle Orsborn
Yeah, thanks for the work you’re doing too. And yeah, you can find me on Instagram. You can find me on Archipelago Clubs Denver, and just follow along and see kind of how you can come get involved with the work I’m doing, privately, 1:1 or in community as well.
Live LOUD Life Podcast Sponsored by Live LOUD Chiropractic and Coaching in Lafayette Colorado serving the communities of Boulder, Superior, Lafayette, Louisville, Erie, and Broomfield
The Light Weight High Rep Myth EP|44
Live LOUD Life Podcast
Lafayette Colorado
Episode 44
EP|44 The Light Weight High Rep Myth
With Dr. Antonio Gurule
Episode Notes:
We often think or have been told that lifting lightweight and doing high reps is safer for your body and helps prevent injury while making you stronger.
In this podcast episode, we dive into why this might not be the case and why you should consider starting to lift some more relatively heavier weights and the potential benefit of heavy lifting.
While the mindset of lightweight and high reps is not inherently wrong we have to always look at the context of the situation to determine what is the best course of action.
So if you are unsure whether you should be doing lightweight or heavier lifting have a listen.
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About Dr. Antonio Gurule
Background:
- Father
- Doctor of Chiropractic
- Owner of Live LOUD
- Personal Trainer & Health Coach
Check Out Some of Our Other Blog Posts and Podcast Episodes
Anthony Gurule 00:00
Hey what’s up guys, welcome back to another episode of the Live LOUD Life podcast. My name is Dr. Antonio, I’m your host of the Live LOUD Life podcast. My wife and I, we co-own Live LOUD Chiropractic and Coaching here in Lafayette, Colorado. We are just outside of Boulder, Colorado in Boulder County. And our mission is to help families. We want to help make families stronger, so that we can build a stronger community. We want to help guide you to the adventurous life that you and your family were meant for. And we do this through chiropractic and coaching. chiropractic, obviously being more of a hands on approach, more of a clinical conversation, clinical diagnostics, but the coaching aspect is really what we believe is, you know, the foundation of what our system methodology, whatever you want to call it is, because a lot of this comes around through just coaching suggestions and recommendations. also, you know, obviously within that comes into clinical prescriptions of certain things to eat or supplements, so on and so forth. But it’s coaching a lifestyle, it’s coaching, it’s coaching a philosophy and a foundation about how to live an active healthy life as an individual, and setting an example of a healthy active life for your family, for your immediate family, for your friends, and more importantly for your community. So stronger families to make a stronger community as a whole would be a win win, right? And that’s what we want to be able to do. we want to be able to help fill in the gaps in the holes that you’re maybe not getting from, from other roles and conditions.
Anthony Gurule 01:43
And today that’s in particular where we’re going to talk about. it’s going to be a little bit more of a shorter episode because this is more of a quote unquote, you know, just discussion around how to lay out a framework and a better understanding of how to work out or what exercises are safe or maybe not safe during pregnancy. This is a very, very common question that we get.
Anthony Gurule 02:12
My wife Nichelle has created a mini course that has some workout ideas, recommendations, and prescriptions than laid out into a workout. She guides and educates other clinicians on how to broach this topic as a chiropractor, how to better serve prenatal patients through chiropractic care, but also exercise recommendations and prescriptions, having recommendations with other personal trainers within the community whether that’s CrossFit whether that’s Orange Theory, chatting with coaches and owners and saying hey, if you have prenatal patients and they’re having these types of symptoms, or this has happened, here’s some better recommendations, not modifications. We call them lateralizations–you’re just you know, you’re doing something something different or something else we you know, we borrow that term from Charlie Weingroff, who’s a physical therapist and strength conditioning coach. But it also and also doulas, right, doulas and midwives and OBs who are directly involved with the prenatal process from nearly conception all the way through, having this conversation. we know that exercise is important during pregnancy,
Anthony Gurule 03:19
There are so many different studies that talk about the benefits of exercising during pregnancy, not only for the mom, but also for baby, which is quite interesting. They’re seeing increased cognitive-what’s the word I’m looking for? Excuse me, their cognitive output as a as an as a child through as they age is actually better from moms that actually worked out during pregnancy.
Anthony Gurule 03:50
Now this is tough, right? How do you define working out or exercise? it’s different for everybody. But we want to, and we encourage that, and yet we’re sympathetic to the different stages of life, aches and pains, so on and so forth, which obviously would limit what you can do from an exercise perspective. So you know, it’s a bit of a gray area on determining what is working out? what is exercise? What are the physical guidelines or recommendations for pregnancy? And without getting into the like, nitty gritty detail of every single thing. And obviously, every potential situation, if you had this versus this, what could happen? we’re not gonna be able to do that. What we just want to lay out is what is what are we trying to accomplish here, and we want to encourage you to stay as physically active as possible.
Anthony Gurule 04:41
And one of the things that constantly comes up is, well, should you add something in that you have not already been doing? Let’s say for instance, someone just through the stages of life with work and kids or whatever that is, they were not able to work out as much before they got pregnant, but now that they’re pregnant, whether they have more time or they understand the importance of exercises during pregnancy, well, would we say, “Well, you haven’t been exercising, so you shouldn’t do too much.” No, that doesn’t, that doesn’t really make sense. Now, we would encourage not to do too much, there’s obviously, you know, a too far swinging the pendulum of the other way. But we wouldn’t say “no, don’t exercise because you weren’t doing something before,” we just have to find those first few stepping stones to help them start to gain some momentum. and help hold their hand, if you will, So that their technique and they feel confident about lifting, or how far they’re walking or whatever that is. And that’s an important topic, because a lot of times people want to add things in, but they weren’t quite ready or weren’t doing them before. And they then assume that they’re not able to do them at all. So you do have to take that in consideration, there is a ton that you can do, and that you can still add, even though you weren’t doing them prior to pregnancy.
Anthony Gurule 05:54
Now on the big questions is, is it safe? you know, outside to contact sports, or different things like that the majority of what you’re going to do is safe for pregnancy, right? Rock climbing, we have pregnant patients that have been rock climbing before, obviously, there’s a certain inherent risk with certain sports or activities. You know, you could fall off riding your bike, you could fall over running, right, so we’re not encouraging any of these by any means. We’re just kind of, you know, setting some suggestions, if you will. And you have to take into consideration.
Anthony Gurule 06:31
Now, there are certain things to consider when you’re talking about like weightlifting, and how heavy and the intensity that you’re doing. And if you’re doing Valsalva movements, which is essentially holding your breath to maintain a more rigid or stiff torso, as you’re seeing changes in blood volume and blood pressure, you know, you do have to take that in consideration. And that is again, of course a conversation with your provider that is managing your, your pregnancy, but we recommend Mama’s weight lift, or do resistance training. During pregnancy, again, we talked about about load management and the intensity and things like that, but you can still lift and do fairly intense things. And it’s a fairly as a you know, as a scale and a wide range during pregnancy and see a ton of benefit from that. Now, are we trying to hit one rep maxes and PRs during pregnancy, I mean, some would argue yes, but I would argue, why, that’s not really an accurate representation of what your strength is anyways. So you know, you do have to to kind of keep manipulating the numbers and the weights and the intensity and the sets and reps in order to do it. But weightlifting and resistance training is safe, and it is effective. Now, outside of that, there’s not a lot of unsafe things to do, again, outside of contact sports, or things that would elicit, you know, potential trauma to you or baby based on impact we’ve had, again, not our recommendations, but some have tried very just easy scheme, because they’re in the winter months, and they wanted to and they felt very confident about not falling. So you know, you have those types of things.
Anthony Gurule 08:16
Overall, again, we’re talking about movement. You need to move, and it’s good to get your heart rate up. And it’s good to breathe hard. So that doesn’t mean just because you’re pregnant, you can’t do HIIT training or circuit training or CrossFit or Orange Theory. But you do have to listen to your body and understand certain signs that would indicate that things might be too much, right? Now those are going to be different for everyone, but a lot of this comes down to you know, lightheadedness, you know, breathing too hard. Certain aches and pains within lower extremity, chest, abdomen, so on and so forth would be obviously like your more extreme ones. If you’re becoming pale or anything like that, I mean, again, these are the same criteria, though, that would be if someone else was working out or training too hard. So it’s realistically the same thing. It’s just that your threshold level for all those most likely have gone down. And depending on what type of an athlete you were before, you’re going to be maybe a little frustrated that you’re not able to do the things you were able to do previously, which makes sense. But if you’re someone who wasn’t exercising before, you’re probably going to be a little bit more hyper aware of that, of just feeling that shortness of breath or that uneasiness. So again, we’re not saying you have to push through that because we’re not trying to set yourself up for a strength and conditioning program to increase your metabolic capacity to increase your strength and conditioning during pregnancy. We’re trying to help you maintain a healthy active pregnancy.
Anthony Gurule 09:54
Now, walking. walking is great. but in general, we encourage you to do something above and beyond walking. Obviously, again, certain things would dictate that you would not be able to do so. And this is again, any exercise. Any exercise that you do during pregnancy needs to be consulted with and work through and have a conversation with the primary physician who is managing your pregnancy, whether that’s your nurse practitioner, your midwife or your OB or obstetrician, right. But we would encourage more than just walking. walking is fantastic, but that’s kind of like your baseline minimum, right? Just like our activities, or recommendation activity guidelines. We want a few days a week of where we’re kind of just doing this steady state getting our steps in, you know, kind of pushing ourselves, we’re huffing and puffing, but still just kind of at that conversational level, but you’re not really getting a lot of benefits outside of that.
Anthony Gurule 10:55
So if you’re just walking, high five. kudos. can you do something more? Can you do some bodyweight squats? Can you do some bodyweight, you know, good mornings? can you do some walking lunges? do you have a suspension training, we’re able to do some bodyweight rows? Do you have some bands that you can do some rows with? You know, there’s a lot that you can do that allows you to get a little bit more out of that. Now, again, this all comes back down to preferences of exercises that you like to do, because that’s gonna allow you to maintain the most consistency, but then also the intensity that you like to do. And we do encourage having an open mind and at least being willing to try some high intensity things that allow you to still get your heart rate up a little bit. And it’s okay to lift more than five or 10 pounds. And not saying that that is a bad thing. There’s programs out there where it’s all directed around that where it’s lighter weight, high rep, but I just don’t want individuals and mamas to feel like they’re not able to do more and or being ashamed because other people are just saying they should back off because they’re pregnant. “why would you need a lift that much?” It fits within your strength, and your comfort, and your wheelhouse, that is totally fine.
Anthony Gurule 12:05
Again, you if you’ve been doing that enough, you understand the risk reward ratio and having a conversation with your practitioner has driven us to kind of help navigate and guide as you start to get further through pregnancies, what things maybe we need to change or manipulate. But that’s totally fine. Now outside of that, the question around safe also comes up around core exercises. diastasis recti, pelvic floor strength, so on and so forth, we want to enhance the capability of understanding how to control tension within your abdominal wall and your pelvic floor through pregnancy, because the pressure is increasing due to baby taking up more space. But we’re not we’re not necessarily we’re not gaining more strength, right.
Anthony Gurule 12:45
And so what a lot of people assume it’s when we’ve seen this, is “I don’t want diastasis. So I’m doing more core work to prevent diastasis from happening.” diastasis recti will happen in 100% of moms, it’s estimated at the week 35 Everyone will have some form of it. Now it is technically not a quote unquote diagnosis, though, until 12 weeks postpartum, because it is a normal thing that everyone will get. So you can’t diagnose someone with something that everyone will get–doesn’t make sense, right? So after that, though, if you still have weakness or spacing issues, then we can have a you know, a stronger conversation about putting a diagnosis on that.
Anthony Gurule 13:26
But what we’re trying to enhance and help is what exercises are quote unquote, not safe versus unsafe, but adding too much pressure or tension into the abdominal wall or the pelvic floor and creating more laxity. again, as that pressure for as baby’s growing starts to put more pressure on the pelvic floor and the abdominal wall. If you’re doing more things that increases the pressure within the within the abdominal cavity that’s going to push on that separation even more and/or push on that pelvic floor even more, creating potential incontinence or prolapse issues and/or more bulging and doming within the abdominal wall stretching out that separation or that gap even further, potentially making the recovery process more challenging or slightly longer. I’m not saying that it will but potentially, so we do have to take that in consideration. So we go through activation exercise of the pelvic floor, of the abdominal wall so that you better understand how to control those pressure increases while you’re lifting or exercising so that you simply can stay at a management level.
Anthony Gurule 14:28
And that in turn, helps you get through pregnancy of understanding how to lift up your older kiddo, having to lift up dog food or anything like that. It’s just managing and controlling pressure. So there’s really not anything that I would say that safe or unsafe. Now, things that we would advise against for core exercises is sit ups or crunches. You know a lot of those things that create like hanging knee raises and different things like that during pregnancy. A lot of those things that create a lot of intra abdominal pressure and tension. and especially during a flex position, that tends to put a lot more pressure on the abdominal wall, the separation where diastasis will occur as well as the pelvic floor.
Anthony Gurule 15:09
So, you know, while we never say never, there’s definitely a category of things that we definitely urge against because the risk/reward benefit and again, risk not being “injured,” But risk of potentially putting more pressure and making the recovery process on the other side harder, is not is not something that we find to be as advantageous. But you can still get the benefits of quote unquote, core exercises through full body movements such as goblet squats, such as deadlifts, you know, depending on the phase that you’re in, push ups, which are, you know, a dynamic plank. or being able to do a TRX row, which is a reverse plank as you’re just lifting yourself up. three point rows where you’re on, you know, two hands or doing like a row on a bench, where you’re in a tabletop position that’s adding anti rotation exercises. So there’s a ton that you can do that still highlights and isolates, the core isolates, sorry. that highlights and will emphasize core activation, but through a full body compound movement. And what’s great about that is during pregnancy, depending on your energy levels, it’s hard to do all the little isolated accessory and all these separate exercises as it is. So it’s kind of nice being able to combine everything, so you get more bang for your buck, especially if you’re a parent and you’re on and you’re on baby number two or three, right?
Anthony Gurule 16:31
So what exercises are safe for pregnant women to do? All are. reduce or eliminate for sure contact activities, different things like that. the increased risk activities of you know, trauma and things like that. Outside of that you’re managing pressure, I would definitely encourage reducing anything that’s heavy lifting, that’s, that’s requiring you to do Valsalva moves, you’re having to hold your breath for an extended period of time. that changes blood pressure, so on and so forth. But outside of that, Pregnancy is a completely safe time to do all exercises. we definitely as we highlighted, urge and encourage, you know, certain things over other ones just for you know, added bang for your buck or full body movements, so on and so forth. And that, but outside of that you are free to do what you want.
Anthony Gurule 17:19
If you want guidance, though, you know, there are there are trainers out there that work specifically with prenatal patients. we would love to be able to have that conversation with you if that’s something you want to bounce back or navigate. Because we do want to encourage as much as we can. A very, very active pregnancy through exercise working out or however you want to describe that. So if you found this beneficial, please like share, subscribe. if you’re pregnant, I hope you can utilize this and take some of the information for you and yourself. If you have anyone else you know… a relative a family member, a friend who is pregnant and they’re unsure they’ve been you know asking this question what things I don’t know what things I can do. I don’t know if it’s safe for baby share this video with them. We’d love to be able to provide a better frame of reference and or context to be able to ask better questions so that they can find the workout program or the movements that work best for them during their pregnancy. Until next time guys live loud .if you’re currently pregnant, Congratulations, and we look forward to helping and serving in the future.
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