Oxygen Advantage

Got pain? Want to be at your best? Get back out on the trail with the right help.

June 18, 2023 by Shawn M Flot

Recently a prolific content producer on backpacking had a series of incidents that led to, in my observation, a cascade of the body’s inability to adapt well and heal itself. A myriad of symptoms have presented themselves that in his video published as a health update, he stated he is receiving medical care, they are not related symptoms, and most concerning were his comments he makes about his age, his body’s capacities and what he must now do in the face of his struggles.

To me this is a bad case of the blues, false belief and despair.

To me this is a case of not getting the right guidance or help, in looking wholesomely at him instead of the symptoms he is suffering with. It’s a different way of getting back on the trail with sound guidance from those who understand the inter-related body and the body-mind complex that loves to hike and backpack!

I’d like to breakdown what I saw in the video and where you might find better answers and individual solutions to meet your need and desire, instead of falling trap to false beliefs and into despair.

First major whammy: Trauma, Survival, Rescue & Breakdown

The inability of the body to handle the demands, pressure and lack of attention often leads to the body saying NO WAY in some way. Recovery from a survival situation requires proper down-time, proper guidance and follow through with the right help. The right help is not managing symptoms. The right help goes beyond just getting over an body shutting down event.

Also facing the unexpected breakdown of one’s own body is a challenge physically, mentally and emotionally. It’s even more difficult when you work with a trainer, or coach, and trust the program to be “fit” for the adventure. Being “fit” for an adventure has specific measures and require an individualized program, just like having the right gear for the adventure. If a program focuses mainly on strengthening your legs, core and “cardio” you are in for a huge disadvantage. This is because being capable and confident in the wilderness requires other variables that typical trainer styled programs don’t address. These include functional mobility and movement standards, physiological parameters of how your body adapts to stressors (and yes exercise is a stressor), your recovery and resilience capacities, your daily routine and habits, and the condition you bring yourself to train and to the trail. Let’s break these down a little bit to know what to look for in a skilled trainer or coach (or in my experience, someone with some therapeutic and wilderness experience).

Functional mobility and movement is about how the entire body collaborates for your time on the trails. This includes more than the legs. For example, it is well known in functional movement assessments that the shoulders and neck can limit the mobility in the hips, knees and ankles. May I add, flexibility is not functional when one joint is measured for a range of motion. Also the challenges of carrying a pack, and your spinal health, are more about diaphragm function than your core muscles of the abdomen. Also the diaphragm plays a key role in force transfer and lower leg fluid motion. In addition, I would hope the person you hire to help you get further well, at a minimum assesses your body behavior with the loaded pack you will be carrying.

Physiological parameters that are important for your confidence and enjoyment on the trail include the traditional – heart rate and intensity ranges, and also measures many do not test for (and don’t understand how to interpret the assessment). These include measuring gas exchange potential – without drawing your blood, circulation dynamics (why most rely on hot and stinky compression socks is because of this factor many long distance backpackers and hikers suffer from), adaptations to environmental stressors – cold and altitude, recovery and resilience, nutritional states (oral and gut health), sleep respiratory function, and nasal breathing optimization.

Recovery and Resilience do not happen by chance. The body needs to be trained and supported for the day in, day out rigors of multi-day adventures on the trail. Understanding your body’s signaling language, importance of sleep states, morning felt-sense measures, and mental resilience are essential to your adventure.

Daily routines and habits are essential to know before you get on the trail. For example if you sleep in, or eat late, you can not expect your body and mind (and your physiology) to just switch to a different pattern. I hope you know eating late and sleeping in are dangerous for your overall health and well-being, and even more so on the trails. Other routines include a flexibility, or warm up, prime before the trail day begins, and sometimes a warm-down, work out the kinks, evening routine goes a long ways to being on those long trail adventures.

And lastly, your current state of health, fitness and other performance based capacities as you enter a training program are critical to the right program for you. Having an understanding of what you are working with with your body and mind will make for a successful training program and time on the trail. This includes disclosing history – injuries (if you have injured an ankle there is more of a chance you will injure it again unless it is addressed functionally, not just the symptoms go away), health status (this includes any known conditions that may impact your training and your time on the trail – heart, lung, circulation, digestion, immune, joints and other tissues, sleep, mental/emotional). And knowing who you want to be when you hit the trail is also incredibly important, as getting the right help can include if a stress or strain shows up once your on the trail, you know what you can do to keep you on the trail.

Being capable in the back-country wilderness in challenging environmental conditions that force the body to adapt for function is not about a “suffer-fest.” Thrive over Survive any time out there! Surviving something does not make for a special-ness, or some superhuman capacity. Survival is actually a weakened, sub-optimal state often leaving a person not accessible to many factors related to rest, recover, restore and regain capacities that make one ready and “fit” for their next adventure.

Article by Shawn M Flot, MPT – Masters in Physical Therapy (1994). He is an experienced Certified Oxygen Advantage® Instructor, and Functional Movement Systems specialist. Combined with his 35 years of experience in Exercise Physiology, Physical Therapist for health and performance, and a dedicated Hatha Yoga practitioner, is making for a power-house to help many people succeed in re-discovering their own health and healing, being fit and living well for their adventures.

Breathe through your nose – Your Body-Mind will love you!

June 13, 2023 by Shawn M Flot

30 functions of the Nose

Promotes Relaxation & Balancing the Nervous System

Nasal breathing has a naturally greater resistance than mouth breathing to how air enters and exits the body. This promotes a slower breathing rate, a lower breath with greater recruitment of the diaphragm and brings about balancing nervous system’s response to activities of daily living. The perceived effort or demand of any activity can be met with greater internal stability.

Boosts Brain Functions

Nasal breathing helps to bring greater clarity with all functions of the human brain. This includes task prioritization, orientation, interpretation of information, recall and memory, intuitive integration, perception and so much more. The brain is one of the greatest consumers of oxygen. Proper nasal breathing stimulates and optimizes oxygen delivery for all functions. Furthermore, nasal breathing during sleep has shown to help the brain circulate all fluids for rest, recovery and restoration of brain tissues, especially the glial-lymph tissue responsible for removal of metabolites and keeping a healthy environment for all brain cells and tissues.

Expand Visual-Spatial Field

The eyes are directly linked to nasal breathing. With a greater expanse in the visual field – seeing the forest through the trees – promotes a neurological circuit of more relaxed breathing. When the eyes are looking at something specific – a big redwood in the forest – then the breath changes to slightly more rapid as the concentration, often with a greater work load to focus, and stimulates survival mechanism internally.

In 2019, researchers at the Weizmann Institute in Israel suggested that nasal inhalation could be linked to part of an evolutionary survival mechanism. We see this in nature with other mammals using their nose in environments, and can sense the state of safety. The Weizmann team theorized that nasal breathing in modern life and competitive sports might trigger the brain for visual-spatial focus. They demonstrated that nasal breathing synchronized electrical activity in the brain on a wavelength that helped to maximize visual-spatial (VS) awareness.

Mediates Smell & Behavioral Response

The nose and its functions shape our behavior, memory, and emotional responses.

The sense of smell is directly linked to the gateway of our emotional and survival systems – the limbic complex which includes the amygdala and hippocampus centers. The amygdala is responsible for the emotional processing of essences, with the smelling information providing positive and negative feedback in the associative learning process. Brain imaging studies have found that activation of the amygdala correlates with pleasant and unpleasant odors, reflecting the link between odors and emotions.

The hippocampus, which is also closely linked to the sense of smell, assists with the learning process and is associated with memory, specifically experiential episodes. This is how a specific smell can stimulate the retrieval of a specific memory.

Optimizes Vocal Effort

It is important for anyone who speaks, or sings, for a living – teachers, presenters, news and sports broadcasters, leadership roles – to maintain nasal breathing during their everyday life, including exercise, rest and sleep.

The voice relies upon many functions. Sound is a vibration of the vocal cords. This physical and physiological activity is optimized with proper nasal passage health. A plugged nose makes the pressure distribution for sound much more on the vocal folds. The vocal cords rely heavily on the health of the nasal passages for the proper pressure distribution. With a stuffy nose the vocal cords can be more susceptible to pressures and forces that can cause irritation and inflammation. In addition, nasal breathing naturally humidifies, warms and filters incoming air. This prevents contraction of the tissues inside the throat due to cold, dry and polluted air. Therefore, breathing through the nose can help reduce the vocal effort required during speech.

Harmonize Vocal Sounds

The vocal folds, or chords, rely upon the nose for proper distribution of forces and pressures when they vibrate to make sound. The rate of vibration determines the frequency, which are perceived by the ear as specific sounds, tones, and rhythms. This may often be referred to as a resonance with the nasal passages. Compare your own voice with clear nasal passages vs. a stuffy nose voice. There tends to be a hollow, monotone and shallow sound to the voice when the nasal passages are not clear. In addition, the nose provides moisture that is specific to lubricating the vocal fold tissues.

Article by Shawn M Flot, MPT. He is now a Certified Oxygen Advantage® Instructor. Combined with his 25year experience in Exercise Physiology, Physical Therapist for health and performance, and a dedicated Yoga practitioner is making for a power-house to help many people succeed in re-discovering their own health, healing and well-being.

Warning! Trying to get fit is now a health risk.

March 10, 2023 by Shawn M Flot

Don’t get me wrong. Physical Activity and Exercise have incredible benefits…..when done in synch within your capacities to respond and adapt positively to a demand, or load (used in scientific literature as a measure of “workload”).

The benefits of physical activity and exercise are well documented as investigators compare these to inactive, or sedentary, lifestyles. Across the board there are great improvements in health markers. And most of these references are from very controlled physical activity environments and variables, for a short period of time. It isn’t til recently have there been long-range observations of populations and lifestyles to really see what happens outside the short time in a laboratory setting. And these are highlighting the great benefits of physical activity.

Notice I say – physical activity.

Physical Activity is often defined in general populations as not sedentary. Each person observed had a regular walking activity during each day of the long-range time observed. They participated in regular physical activity – walking, gardening, dancing, and other outside activities involving their joys of moving about on their feet. This is physical active, NOT exercise.

Many confuse the two terms. We as a species, with two legs are built and organized to move….on our feet.

Exercise is a different activity, as defined by the language. It is a load, a stressor, for the purpose of creating a change in the body. The challenge is if there are negative impacts – unhealthy breathing habits, stiff joints, and a driven mind – one can promote a negative outcome to the stressor, and thus leading to strain on the system….ALL systems. The main four that you might begin to experience are:

Muscle, Tendon, Joint – aches and pains, even injury if the accumulation of strain is not addressed.
Cardiopulmonary Malfunctions – heart rhythm issues, shortness of breath, loss of stamina – the main culprit here is too high intensity for too many times. And intensity is not measured by how good you feel after….you need more direct feedback about how the body responded.
Loss of Motivation – often associated with the body-mind’s ability to continue the want because of many factors – not progressing like you want, difficulty in doing, or too much time, and internal brakes that the body is trying to get you to stop strain it that then the mind says “what? why?”
Loss of Sleep Quality – disturbances and lack of good quality are signs the body is too strained.

Good measurable feedback helps you understand yourself better and bring some guardrails to the driver behind the wheel of exercising. It is a major factor in staying healthy is exercising well for what capacities you have. Does not help to stress a stressed body-mind complex.

Why? Because this re-occurring circumstances with the people who seek help and guidance from me are showing this to me. And very often these clients have seen me after being seen by many clinicians and when shown has never been addressed related to their condition, or setbacks in their fitness and performance progress.

It’s been the primary variables I see over and over again that are limiting a person’s potential for healing, fitness and performance. It has not been identified, understood, addressed or placed importance on what I consider minimal standards for real progress and success.

Here are the top 5 variables:

The Ankle, and the Foot (below discussion), are the most important area for proper movement in any shape for health, fitness and performance. The mobility of the ankle in particular have a profound influence on what occurs up the chain of motion….all the way to the head. Good balance strategies, good multi-directional movement, stability and impulses from the huge sensory portion of what the foot feels in relationship to the ground all coordinate on an integrated, beyond attention, the pattern of mobility and motion you accomplish. Your ankle mobility also affects how you sit AND how well you breathe!

In-person sessions can easily identify if this needs to be addressed based on the activities and demands you place on your body for health, fitness and performance.

In all motions, especially ones that you do with walking or use of one hand require a coordination of motion and flexibility to accomplish even simple acts of walking. Then add running, hiking and other more demanding activities and you have the necessity for both capacities. In addition, when you use your hands for any activity, then this same coordination of freedom of movement is essential to promote healthy patterns of movement, instead of deteriorating patterns of movement that lead to illness, injury and degeneration.

And a very simple measure is done in a very safe way to better look into this capacity, and what to address if not in a range for proper movement to the activities you do.

I would say 75% of the people in the last 5 years who have come for help demonstrate a overuse pattern of engaging their core for daily activities, recovery from injury, fitness and recreational activities. And this is because the myth of the core being something one needs to voluntarily contract to prevent something from happening that they are afraid of, or experienced before……..such as back pain.

The message to people from misguidance is the assumption that they are weak at the core. Now, just say that to yourself and what does that really feel like? “You are weak to the core.” In my clinic, and online assistance, I debunk this false belief and embedded concept and replace it will feelings of proper engagement and understanding how each individual can uniquely empower themselves beyond fear, apprehension and un-coordinated mechanical movement to be at their best.

And there is a simple measure, actually three that I use to identify where to link in the true core.

The arrangement of how you use your hands and feet in exercise can impact your core stability, spinal health and your breathing. Especially if when you raise your hands overhead…and notice I guided you right there to raise your hands not your arms (this can have good positive impact on the mentioned capacities).

Do you rise up in the ribs and torso, does your navel lift upward toward your heart when you raise your hands? Not a good way to move. Notice when you raise your hands what the quality of your breath is compared to when you don’t rise out of your base…..naturally, not bind something else like your abdomen to keep from rising!…but rising out of your base what is your breath like compared to raising your hands differently and staying home in your base and legs?

How your breath is driven is from the metabolic process. If there is accumulated strain – or the opposite, congestion and immobility of fluids inside – then the breath is usually faster, louder, heavier and more forceful to get good breath. And the breath often becomes over-breathing when you exercise. The BOLT score, or comfortable pause measure, can give you an indication into the physiological capacities of how your exercises impacts you. It also directly relates to blood pressure, heart rate variability and tissue integrity. This article goes into a bit more detail.

Acquire the right capacities with the right guidance. Your capacities of Moving and Breathing Well will fundamentally support every activity you do for daily life, recovery and healing, health, fitness and performance.