Elkins Dental July 2018

3 REASONS TO WORK OUT WITH A FRIEND

GET A LITTLE COMPETITIVE Whether you make your workouts explicitly competitive or not, working out with someone is a great way to subconsciously push yourself to improve. Even if your partner is stronger, faster, or in better shape than you, the drive to close the gap between your capabilities can be a big motivating factor. Psychologists call this mental push to avoid being the weak link the “Köhler effect.” In small groups, those who begin weaker often push themselves to improve the most. Why not put this psychological phenomenon to work for you? STAY ACCOUNTABLE The most valuable reason to have a workout buddy is accountability. Just having a dedicated person to ask you if you’ve met your fitness goals can have a significant impact on how regularly you exercise. In fact, something as simple as a bimonthly check-in has been shown to help people increase the amount of time they spend working out. A Stanford University study on the impact of social support on physical activity found that an occasional check-in boosted test subjects’ workout times by an average of 78 percent.This is part of a growing body of research that suggests positive social support may be a key factor in motivation. Even if you can’t actually exercise alongside your workout buddy, just checking in on one another’s goals can make a huge difference.

When you work out alone, it can be tempting to cut corners and get comfortable. After all, if you cheat on a pullup or don’t swing that kettlebell as high as you should, who will know? That’s where a workout buddy comes in. Here are three ways hitting the gym with a friend can make your workouts safer and more effective — and a lot more fun! ENSURE PROPER FORM even be working the right muscles, which makes all of your hard work pointless. At best, you’ll cheat yourself out of the full benefits of your workout. At worst, you risk injury. By working out with someone else, you can spot one another and keep an eye out for lapses in form. You and your partner When you don’t perform an exercise correctly, you may not

can keep each other honest, ensuring your routine stays safe and effective.

A Word From

Kalie and Caryn

Sometimes we refer patients to a specialist if the disease has progressed far enough or if they’re not able to manage it with home care. Our main goal is to do everything we can to show a patient how they can take control of periodontal disease. The hard takeaway is that patients who have reached this stage have a disease and will not go back to having healthy gums.They will battle bone loss for the rest of their lives. You don’t grow bone back, and once you have established bone loss, it’s a lot harder to keep up with cleaning. Bacteria is released in bigger pockets, and it becomes difficult to remove it without the help of a hygienist’s professional cleaning tools. At this stage, we are not preventing so much as we are maintaining and treating the disease. This completes our four-part series on professional cleaning. We hope you’ve found it helpful! We really want to emphasize that gum disease is avoidable. While everybody is different, proper home care and regular reservations have a big impact on your health. So take care of yourself. Your dental health is a vital part of your overall health. It’s as simple — and as hard — as taking those five minutes to brush and floss, every day.

When we meet with a patient who has gum disease, we use special tools to establish how far the disease has progressed. We measure bone loss, and typically,

when bone loss goes beyond 5–6 millimeters, we turn to perio-

maintenance reservations. At that point, our treatments are no longer about disease prevention; they’re focused on disease maintenance. We spend a good amount of time talking about home care and encouraging more frequent visits. During those visits, we measure bone loss and establish if the disease is progressing. When patients are receiving perio-maintenance treatments, we put them on a regular 3–4 month perio-maintenance reservation schedule so that we can manage the disease with our professional tools. We often recommend water picks for home care because of their ability to flush out deeper pockets. It doesn’t replace flossing, but it assists with at-home maintenance so fewer bacteria build up between reservations. We also give them an antibacterial mouth rinse that helps manage bad bacteria.

–Kalie and Caryn

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