Staying positive and happy is my moral duty to myself, my loved ones, and my community, especially during uncertain and tumultuous times.

Negative thoughts, feelings, and actions trigger the human sympathetic nervous system activating our hard-wired, fight or flee reactions which restrict our breathing, tighten our muscles, and increase our blood pressure. Our body becomes flooded with health-damaging stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which clouds our reasoning and judgment.

With this rush of survival, chemicals coursing through our bodies comes a feeling of power, focus, and sometimes invisibility. Magnify this powerful experience if you are among a crowd sharing the same heightened alert mode. In this heightened alert chemical state, we are more prone to impulsive words or actions that can have lasting, unintended, damaging consequences that directly impact us or others. We have all experienced this biological reality throughout our lives.

It can show up with fighting, arguing, fits of rage, and rioting. It can also show up by us shutting down, disconnecting, or feeling numb.

The majority of us are addicted, even enslaved by our internal biological reality and the habits we have created in response to our sympathetic nervous system firing off.

Over millions of years, evolution has brilliantly wired this predictable, biological, and chemical response into our brains as a survival mechanism.

Our media and tech-driven society have trained our brain and sympathetic nervous system to always be on high ALERT, ready and waiting to be triggered by anything we perceive to be a threat or what they want us to perceive as a threat. A word, a look, our projected thoughts about others’ thoughts about ourselves can trigger us into a “locked and loaded” reality.

I won’t get into the instant gratifications we derive from tech and media.

Practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanent.

Humans are very capable of retraining our ancient brains. The sympathetic nervous system responds by activating our parasympathetic nervous system with intentional deep breathing heightened awareness of our pre-programmed reactions to our environment and our thoughts with deliberate, conscious, positive thoughts, words, and actions. Lasting change requires behavior modification work like setting goals, implementing strategies, and getting support, so the behaviors we desire can become our new reality.

All battles are either won or lost within ourselves.

Each human can either be ruled by their ancient biological wiring and internal chemical reactions or learn how to reprogram their brain and body. We can master our actions by implementing positive thoughts and words and creating habits that can rewire our brain and our biology resulting in more joy, contentment, and peace in our lives regardless of internal or external influences.

As long as you have breath, suffering is inescapable, but how we handle suffering is a breath to breathe choice with a lifetime of opportunities.

Each day, each week, each year are our opportunities to reshape ourselves within the body we were born into and the very same body we will take our last breath in.

This is each human’s ongoing life work, and I know we can reshape ourselves to experience a better life and be better beings.

Buddha’s Brain by Rick Hanson is an enlightening book that may deepen your insight or stimulate your curiosity.

BE Well

 

It has always been easier for me to stay fit or improve my fitness status when I was feeling good. A considerable challenge came when I sustained a significant knee injury that required surgery and a 12-month recovery diagnosis. May of 2018, my right patella tendon sheered off (see story below in a previous blog post), but I did not let that stop me from trying to stay strong and healthy thanks to a fitness device I designed two years earlier called the Stress Away Strap. I have used TRX suspension straps at the gym with my personal training clients for their stability and functional strength routines, but when I saw the price tag of $179.99 – $234, I experienced sticker shock. Not only was it expensive but it was bulky and required a lot more space in an average house than was typical. I set out to design a product that was easier to set up, portable, and could be used in any home, hotel, office, gym or at the park at a fraction of the cost. I created the Stress Away Strap. 

I saw vital value in a portable device that allowed individuals of all fitness and wellness levels to stay fit by using your body weight to increase functional stability, strength, and flexibility safely and effectively.

During my post-rehab and recovery from knee surgery, I shot the attached video of the possible uses of the Stress Away Strap, even though I was hobbling on one leg. I genuinely feel that everyone needs a Stress Away Strap in their house. Check out the video. 

>>Special<< If you purchase a Stress Away Strap, I will give you a FREE 30 minute virtual tutorial of the product.  

Your health is an investment, not an expense, all though it will become an expense if you don’t take time to invest in it. BE Well!

 

 

Laughter: The Best Medicine

Laughter reduces pain, increases job performance, connects people emotionally, and improves the flow of oxygen to the heart and brain.

In these challenging and stressful times it is important to create some time and space for laughter. Attached is a link to a Psychology Today article listing the many benefits of laughter.

Enjoy and share the gift of laughter.

   

Over 60 workout or stretching routines

Part 1

On Saturday, May 5th 2018, I ruptured my patellar tendon, shearing it clean off of my tibai (shinbone) while navigating a Ninja Warrior course at an indoor trampoline park in Orland Park Il. My wife, daughter and I were there celebrating my son’s 10th birthday along with seven of his friends. While pushing off side to side on the 45 degree angled slant boards I heard a loud pop that vibrated through my whole body followed by instant shooting pain in my right knee then my right leg gave out. My body bounced off one of the 45 degree angled platforms, and I fell eight feet down into an inflatable pit. I won’t bore you with the following 45-minute ordeal which required six huge firefighters to stabilize my body so they could lift me out of that pit and get me into the ambulance.

WTF:
As I lay on my back clutching my right knee to keep it stable, and to minimize the excruciating pain, I scrambled to pull my wits together. I immediately started deep and controlled breathing to manage the pain while trying to get my wife’s attention without causing any concern to my kids or their friends. Finally, my wife noticed me at the bottom of the pit and in a calm voice I informed her that had I seriously hurt my knee and she needed to get the staff to call an ambulance and get me an ice pack. I encouraged my son, daughter and their friends to continue playing but Will and Lily wanted to sit next to me in the pit until the paramedics showed up. They stayed with me until I was lifted out of the pit, put on a stretcher and taken to the ambulance. My kids and their friends were all concerned and thoughtful. It reinforced that as parents Peg and I are raising them up right so far. For 120 minutes I clutched my bent right leg to support it, and the extreme pain never subsided. Finally, the doctor on duty at Palos Community Hospital wanted to straighten my leg out to assess the damage but I wouldn’t let go of it. The pain I knew was better than the pain I didn’t know, so the doctor gave me a shot of morphine and my body turned into jelly. The doctor did straighten out my leg then got me to the x-ray lab. The x-rays confirmed I had a ruptured patellar tendon and that I needed surgery. The doctor said he could schedule the surgery for that night. I was still high on morphine, so before I made any decisions, I need to reach out to my wife and also two friends who are well-regarded professionals in the Physical Therapy field. I needed to get educated fast about this type of injury and what was the recommended path for recovery.

 The Next Day

The day before surgery. That divot in the middle of my leg is where my knee cap should be.

I’ve had over 28 years as personal trainer and wellness consultant, I’ve had my share of injuries which I have had fully recovered from, and I’ve helped a lot of my clients to recover from their various injuries, but I was in uncharted waters with this injury. So my friends Molly Scanlan Malloy and Phil Malloy informed me that even though it was crucial that I get the surgery within 5 days it wasn’t essential that I have the operation that night. So the doctor put my leg into a brace, gave me crutches, wrote me a script for Oxycodone and home I went. When I got home around, 11 pm, my son, daughter and friends had been waiting for me to get back from the hospital before they would cut my son’s birthday cake. If there was a silver lining for the day, this was it. All my pain subsided when my daughter and son along with Will’s friends came out of the house to greet me home.

My next step, I had to quickly learn about this type of injury, what was a realistic path and timeline for recovery considering my age, oh, and what was this all going to cost but that would have to wait for the next day.

To be continued……

How I went from……

To…..

The blue arrow in the above picture is where my patella (knee cap) should be, and the red arrow is where is my quad muscle retracted the knee cap up into my thigh after the patellar tendon rupture. The yellow line is the 45 degree angle platforms that got the best of me. From healthline.com “The patellar ligament not only helps keep the kneecap in its proper position but also assists in the bending of the leg at the knee. Damage to this ligament can include a complete rupture (tearing). This leads to the patella losing all support from the tibia. As a result, the leg will not extend properly. People suffering from a ruptured patellar ligament will not be able to stand, as the knee will buckle under the weight of their body.”