YOU ARE AN ATHLETE! Fitness Tips From Olympians — and Your PT
Watching Olympians’ feats of strength, agility, and speed may have you looking at your own body, disappointed, but the steps these athletes have taken to compete for a coveted gold medal are not unlike the process necessary to relieve pain or improve mobility.
training or leg and back exercises. A physical therapist can help you develop a routine and treatment regimen to specifically target your balance deficiencies. Don’t forget diet and nutrition. Movement and exercise are powerful tools for building strong muscles and staying active, but what fuels your body can be just as important. Eat lean protein, complex carbohydrates, and full fats to protect your body’s muscles and give you enough energy. For those in pain, water can also improve the flexibility of your muscles and joints. Try It: Soccer athlete Morgan Brian doesn’t like vegetables, but she incorporates them into a smoothie with fruit and a small amount of yogurt to create a tasty drink with many essential vitamins. Copy Brian and find a trick that works for you! Always forgetting to drink water? Set a reminder
on your phone. Need more protein? Try adding salmon to your salad.
Quality is key. Athletes like skeleton racer and powerlifter Katie Uhlaender practice for countless hours, but it’s not the total number of reps they are watching. Instead, Uhlaender told Fitness HQ that athletes get better results when they pay attention to their form rather than race through reps. Try It: A physical therapist can provide you with the knowledge you need to correct your form, and then you can practice it at home. Try working out in front of a mirror or videotape yourself. It may feel awkward, but you will be able to watch for improvement.
If you’re ready to get back to the activities you love, heed the advice of Olympians.
Focus on balance. When our bodies are not balanced, that’s when we tumble, fall, and get injured. Olympic water polo player and triathlete Julie Swail Ertel told Fitness HQ that she has a simple solution for that. By incorporating more one-legged exercises into her routine, her balance steadied and her time improved.
Try It: Like Ertel, focus on exercises that target your body’s balance, like strength
If you need guidance to relieve your pain and improve your mobility, please call us today!
LET’S GET TO THE BONE OF THE MATTER ...
The Ins and Outs of Bone Grafts
As you know, dental health is about more than just our teeth. But that means that dental problems can also cause a wide variety of difficulties in the mouth and beyond. As a clinic with extensive experience in both surgery and IV sedation, we’re often able to fix things even when they seem to have gone “too far” to repair. And if that’s needed for some of the bone mass in your mouth, odds are a bone graft will be part of the solution. The whole idea is to replace bone loss in your jaw; in this case, with hydroxyapatite, a mineral found naturally in your bones! Why is that important? The existing bones will fuse with the graft instead of rejecting it. Did you know that the body actually reabsorbs bone mass if you’re missing teeth, causing shrinkage of the jawbone. Later, if you decide to replace a tooth, there might not be enough bone left in the jaw for an implant, meaning a bone graft may be the solution.
Two other factors in bone loss are periodontal (gum) disease and teeth misalignment, both of which may require bone grafts to treat fully. We perform three kinds of procedures at our office. The block bone graft is a common one for restorative dentistry. For that, we use bone from your own jaw from back near the wisdom teeth, where there’s plenty to choose from. By contrast, we’ll usually perform a socket graft at the time of tooth removal to prevent the typical reabsorption and bone- loss from occurring. The last type involves a sinus lift because it’s common for the sinus to lower into space left by teeth or cavities. If you have any questions about these three grafts or any other restorative dentistry, please reach out to us!
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