The hard thing about working in the medical profession is that we are theoretically bound by our postcode whilst our patients are not. Often you will be travelling around the country on holidays, heading away for a work conference or just seeking a second opinion. This makes our ability to link with other quality health professionals around the world vital as to ensure you get the greatest level of care wherever you may be. The role of the Finck-Tank is to highlight these individuals & their thought’s as to open your health educational lunchbox and fill it with goodness. Today we are travelling to one of the beef capitals of Australia to get the muscle on one companies VISION. (How sweet is that Picture BTW!!)
With Eyes Wide Open
Vision Exercise Physiology is redefining the way health companies present their gym based services to their clients. On the wave of holistic health, a multidisciplinary approach & new age delivery methods Michael and the team have been improving the lifestyle aspirations of people in the Darling Downs region for the past 10 years. Over this time they have incorporated the skill sets of varying professions into the company as to “Enrich the health and lifestyle of their clients, improve well-being, prevent injury and increase physical performance”. This along with the companies ability to diversify its modes of treatment type whilst maintaining its locally owned and operated mantra have lead to many individual success stories.
Forward Focused
Good Hip Rotation
What really sets the team aside though is its future VISION (In comedy we bring things back to the same joke 3 times…Can you find the last Vision Pun!). Their recently launched online program MoveSmarter is “an education and empowerment tool to assist participants to live a life full of abundance.” Honing in on the increasing number of us (1 in 5) that are living with chronic pain on a daily basis, the MoveSmarter program contains simple to follow habitual identification strategies along with daily exercises that can be viewed from the comfort of the home or office. The 5 week series not only emphasises the benefits of living an active and healthy lifestyle but also encompasses the power of modern web app’s that deliver constant motivation to the user. This is an aspect face to face consultation struggles to do due to the inherent costs and travel. I have always said that if you could bottle motivation you would have a worldwide distribution franchise. By opening up their minds to the online world of edutainment Vision has also provided us an easily accessible method of knowledge acquisition.
I Have a Vision
What we can learn from this as users is that there are no excuses when it comes to making meaningful changes in our lifestyles. I don’t want to hear “it’s too expensive, too hard or too complex” anymore as these thoughts will continue to drive the co-morbidity factors that are encompassing our society (like the 2 in 3 of us that are overweight or obese). Remember we are the generation that is projected to have a shorter life expectancy than our parents, something that has never occurred in the history of mankind. Take charge of your health with the tools that companies like Vision are creating with one eye on your & your kins future…it may have you moving smarter than Einstein doing the Dougie.
The hard thing about working in the medical profession is that we are theoretically bound by our postcode whilst our patients are not. Often you will be travelling around the country on holidays, heading away for a work conference or just seeking a second opinion. This makes our ability to link with other quality health professionals around the world vital as to ensure you get the greatest level of care wherever you may be. The role of the Finck-Tank is to highlight these individuals & their thought’s as to open your health educational lunchbox and fill it with goodness. Our lunchbox metaphor is more apt than normal today as we will be covering something that’s close to my heart (and stomach) – The Natural Nutritionist.
#BostonStrong
Freedom Fuel
Over the past few weeks I’ve covered a lot; farms, underwear, superheroes however I haven’t mentioned my current life goal. 3 years ago I set out on a journey to qualify for the Boston marathon for my 30th birthday. This was prior to actually running a marathon or knowing 1st hand the effort it would take both physically and mentally to run a Sub-3. In true Funky Finck fashion though I attacked it with a full heart and due to my previous thoughts on nutrition, a full stomach generally due to lots of carbs. We are constantly fed information via television advertising about the importance of fuelling with carbs – pasta, cereal, potatoes etc as this has been the staple diet of our athletes for decades. How on earth could you travel those kinds of kilometres without gorging the day before on a big bowl of spaghetti. Now while my times were going down gradually (improving my PB by 45 minutes in the first 12 months) I still always felt heavy while running and was 35 minutes away from the magical 3 Hour mark. Not one to rest on my laurels (& because I don’t like doing things “just coz”), I began a bit more research on all aspects of my training. This led me down the rabbit hole of “Fat Adaptation” and more specifically the musings of Steph Lowe and her team at The Natural Nutritionist.
#realfoodathlete
Fat Adaptation…sounds like something that a bear going into hibernation would encounter? Oh contraire my dear Watson’s this is a revolution that is gradually taking off in the health field but picking up pace due to diligent practitioners such as Steph, Elyse and Min. The idea of the importance of gut health has been around since Hippocrates who stated that “All disease starts in the gut”. Unfortunately the power of the big commercial companies has saturated the market in the past 50 years to incept the notion of “Carbo Loading” into our brains. These quick bang for your buck products however aren’t real leading to nasties like refined sugar and poor quality dairies & fats joining the party. Human evolution hasn’t progressed enough to process these party poopers (By the way “The poop” is a key indicator of poor gut health – pay attention to it!) leading to metabolic illnesses and chronic inflammatory processes. This is where the beauty of Real Food comes into play.
#thenaturalnutritionist
It sounds like a play out of the KISS handbook but it is effective as it is simple. The girls at the Natural Nutritionist lean on Real Food as the base of making long lasting changes within peoples health story. Expressing that “anything out of the ground, off a tree or from an animal…will be the most nutrient dense and whole food source of nutrition”, they create the link to optimal personal health are rotate back to natural food sources and the easy elimination of packaged and processed products. The website provides an easy to navigate pantry of information (#puntastic) providing knowledge to people who are hungry for information about kitchen essentials, favourite products, simple JERF recipes along with links to the associated blog and podcast. One of my favourite aspects of the site is the availability of Skype consultation which I myself as a practitioner feel is vital in spreading essential health information in this e-driven world. The additional benefit of this service is the complementary 15 minute Skype consultation which encourages people that may want to dip their toes into the water before cannonballing bottom first. The thing that really caught me though was the science behind metabolic efficiency and this way of eating.
#JERF
Here’s the Proof – It’s a Pudding
JERF stands for “Just Eat Real Food” and was the mantra of becoming a fat adapted athlete. Fat adaptation is the metabolic re-orchestration from a predominant fuel source of glucose to a predominant fuel source of fat. I explain to people as Steph does in her most recent book The Real Food Athlete that this is like driving the car with diesel – fat is a slower burning fuel source which leads to less emissions in our body (lactic acid). In turn this promotes a glycogen sparing effect which allows this type of fuel to be utilised when it is truely needed (high intensity activity). The bonk is something that most endurance athletes know well and it was something I had encountered in all races before switching to becoming a real food athlete in February 2016. The proof since then has been in the proverbial Coconut, Raspberry and Cacao Chia pudding. From then until March I followed the training guidelines of gradually building up my tolerance pre endurance activity with the limitation of carbs I could envelop. I dropped 4 percent of body fat increasing my lean muscle mass and in July 2016 at the Gold Coast Marathon I achieved one of the biggest accomplishments in my life by clocking a 2:59:23 – A PB of 35 minutes in itself.
#HFTB (Help From The Bench)
With the continued support of the Natural Nutritionist my next goal is to qualify for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics as an Australian long distance racer. It’s a long way off however I now have a sustainable navigational pathway to write one part of that journey. The Natural Nutritionist is a Holistic Nutritionist specialising in real food education, high performance fat loss, and metabolic efficiency. They can be found via their website thenaturalnutritionist.com.au, Facebook /thenaturalnutritionist , Instagram or Twitter. All of their content both hard published and online can be found within these bowels (ok thats the last one).
The hard thing about working in the medical profession is that we are theoretically bound by our postcode whilst our patients are not. Often you will be travelling around the country on holidays, heading away for a work conference or just seeking a second opinion. This makes our ability to link with other quality health professionals around the world vital as to ensure you get the greatest level of care wherever you may be. The role of the Finck-Tank is to highlight these individuals & their thought’s as to open your health educational lunchbox and fill it with goodness. Today’s juicy morsel comes from the Sweet Home that is Alabama…Roll Tide!
“Move well to Live Better”
Dr’s Beau & Sloan Beard are the creators of the wondrous movement (Pardon the Pun) that is the FARM Chiropractic in Birmingham, Alabama. They approach the body as a machine whilst treating you as the individual running gear understanding that it’s function that drives us 1st and foremost. Utilising this notion of “functional rehabilitation” they look at injuries as an opportunity to come back stronger than you were before. This idea of not just stopping or chasing pain but making the extra effort to bridge the gap between rehabilitation and performance is one that I myself have subscribed to throughout my clinical career. If there is one thing I will always tell you when you chat to me is that most health care practitioners are still in practice because they focus too much on the pain rather than the dysfunction that leads to it.
The Dynamic Duo
Horsing Around
Whilst Beau & Sloan are fantastic practitioners, thats not the reason I am highlighting them here in the tank. In the end it’s not books, machines or medicine that fix people…people fix people. All too often we lose sight of who we are in the uptight clinical world and it can make us seem distant. You’ve been there before right, sitting in the doctors office whilst they type feverishly on their laptop stopping just briefly enough to take a sip of coffee. To receive advice we must be able to open up to our practitioners and nobody wants to express their issues to a mannequin parading as a medico. It’s evident 30 seconds into his Youtube video “Change You not the Shoe” that Beau has a self effacing side and a sense of humour which makes him seem human, an important trait for our health care professionals. Drawing you in with this charm you are then open to take in the wealth of knowledge he possesses without feeling talked down to or better yet…Bored.
Monkey See, Monkey Do
Another one of this dynamic duo’s strengths is that they lead by example when it comes to living a healthy, active life – it also helps that they would be just as comfortable posing in a “Town & Country Weddings” photoshoot. Both Sloan and Beau have been high level competitors within their chosen sporting fields. With this comes the trials and tribulations of injury as well as a personal knowledge of what it’s like not being able to function at your optimal level. This provides a sense of camaraderie in the healing process as well as the satisfaction that your not just stopping me from competing so that you can raid my wallet. The added benefit of having sporting passions is that they have transferred this into high level sport specific programs (Sloan has created gymnastfix.com while Beau frequently posts under the flag “Running Rehab”). By following and working with your passion it leads to better outcomes for clients as the clinician is invested from the moment you limp, roll or hop into the door.
Greener Acres
Dr’s Beau and Sloan Beard epitomise the practice what you preach principal when it comes to any type of service industry. They have not only transferred their own passion into their business but have thrived within their community as they have been open about sharing knowledge and themselves. I will talk about these two again in a future Finck-Tank blog which will focus on practitioner diversity however until then get your FARM fix by visiting their website http://www.chirofarm.com/, or checking their social media pages with Facebook https://www.facebook.com/chirofarm/?fref=ts, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/chirofarm/ or twitter handles @drbeaubeard & @sloan_burdick.
The hard thing about working in the medical profession is that we are theoretically bound by our postcode whilst our patients are not. Often you will be travelling around the country on holidays, heading away for a work conference or just seeking a second opinion. This makes our ability to link with other quality health professionals around the world vital as to ensure you get the greatest level of care wherever you may be. The role of the Finck-tank is to highlight these individuals & their thought’s as to open your health educational lunchbox and fill it with goodness (as always that’s the scientific word). I’m just lucky today that today’s treat is picked from a close neighbours tree.
Guided by the Light
Mick Hughes is a breed of new health professional that focuses on easily accessible information for his clients and colleagues alike through social media & electronic channels. His website http://www.mickhughes.physio/blog has just been voted on registry.physio as the top .physio website on the web due to his “contemporary, interesting and relevant commentary” regarding all things sports physio & exercise science. However the reason I respect Mick, a fellow JCU physio alum (apart from his ability to rock the illustrious smile and shine combo) is his penance for being guided by the research which is something I feel can get lost in health care when we get comfortable with our individual skills.
Some Things Are Impossible to Measure
Over the past 6 months Mick has published his idea’s regarding ACL rehabilitation especially in adolescence and subsequent return to sport. His “How long is a piece of string” reference stated at the beginning of http://www.mickhughes.physio/single-post/2016/06/02/When-Can-I-Return-To-Sport-After-ACL-Surgery is a turn of phrase we often hear ourselves saying. This as we as human’s thrive on certainty in all area’s of our lives and this spreads to the idea that we can completely control our health. Unfortunately…No pumpkin – we can make healthy choices to enhance the possibility of the quickest recovery possible but often the wild thing called life can throw us a fast curve ball…Major League reference anyone.
Behind the Clinical Curtain
So what’s the closest thing to certainty when it comes to our health? Well it’s the numbers that get crunched over months, sometimes years by academics that may have never seen the light of a suburban gym before but understand the importance of core stability in the reduction of recurrent ACL injuries post hamstring graft. I used to scoff in statistics 1401 about the importance of P hat, median values and standard deviation however without those terms we wouldn’t even have that piece of string that governs our current practice protocols.
Take the Lead
It’s important then that we as both practitioners & patients interested in autonomous health creation take Mick’s sturdy lead (You’ll know what I mean when you see his avatar) and take notice of the latest research. It may literally save you a leg or give you a leg-up on the competition.
BryceFinck.com 