Saturday Steel : Spinal Health & Nutritional Compass

***Every first Saturday of the month, Saturday Steel delivers helpful takeaways on strength, mobility, nutrition topics, and the most effective coaching techniques. (Did some amazing friend forward this to you? Subscribe here.)

Welcome to this month's "Saturday Steel," - where we focus on forging ourselves into better versions, much like the steel forging process. As we dive into June, let's explore spinal health with insights from seasoned strength practitioners and a world renown spine expert. With practical tips and detailed guidance, discover how to set your spine up for success. Our nutrition/health tip of the month involves reframing your nutritional needs in a way that makes nutritional decision-making way more intuitive. Move beyond the level-based framework and embrace the Nutritional Compass, a holistic guide that inspires a comprehensive approach to well-being, emphasizing self-awareness, environmental support, balance, and growth.

🦴 Enhancing Spinal Health: Insights from Seasoned Strength Practitioners

Are you setting your spine up for success?

In the world of strength training and daily life, maintaining good spinal hygiene is crucial for both performance and longevity. With its intricate stack of 33 vertebrae, the spine is not just a backbone. It's a pillar of strength that keeps you upright, provides a flexible structure when moving, and channels force safely and effectively between the hip and shoulder joints.

When it's resilient, it can handle reasonable loads applied or created by the body in athletic pursuits. But how does this stack of vertebrae stay healthy, youthful, and less injury-prone?

As someone who wants to perform well, what needs to happen for the spine to be safe under the chaotic loads of that sport? As someone who wants to age gracefully, living their best life every step of the way, what needs to happen for the spine to continue to work well into their Golden Years? Accidents happen, but how can we mitigate injury and recover quickly because of a high level of strength?

The power is in your hands to maintain high general spinal health and support your back’s performance and longevity.

1. Embrace Basic Movement Throughout Your Day

Movement is essential for keeping your vertebrae well-lubricated, cushioned, and articulating fluidly. When any joint remains stuck in the same position for long periods, it starts to lose the ability to articulate well and support load healthily. The spine is no different. If you feel like you are constantly fighting to "undo" the posture of your office work environment or chosen sport, then regular movement in the opposite direction should be included in your daily routine. This might look like:

• Office Workers: Stand up from your desk hourly, use a standing desk, opt for walking meetings, or incorporate specific ways to squeeze in more movement like taking the stairs to get to a bathroom on a different floor.

• Work-from-Home Individuals: Take advantage of your flexibility by getting on the floor and playing with kids or pets every hour for five minutes, or do a set of Getups or Swings on the hour.

Flexibility in scheduling of course allows for arranging your day around movement easier, but especially if your schedule is not flexible, ensuring extra activity before or after work, or incorporating family time into your movement routines can be ways to creatively take ownership of your joint health. The goal is to make movement a non-negotiable part of your day in whatever capacity your body can support and grow from.

2. Cultivate Impeccable Core Strength

*Hint - this does not mean do 100 crunches per day! Core strength involves building the muscles responsible for spine movement and stability. This means LOTS of different muscles need to be strong in order for the spine to be properly protected and stabilized through movement. Strengthening your core means strengening muscles directly connected to or near the spine including the diaphram (this is why proper breathing is so important!) and pelvic floor muscles. It also means strengthening muscles in your back like the erector spinae and latissimus dorsi (lats) as well as muscles wrapping around your sides like internal and external obliques (many more muscles are involved but you get the idea!).

Imagine a multi-layered, almost 360 degree suit of armor made out of muscle for your torso - this is what a strong core is like to the spine. This suit of armor creates force (think a martial artist striking quickly and powerfully), absorbs force (think soccer player making a quick and precise change of speed and direction), stabilizes the spine (think backpacker balancing on uneven rocks while climbing a mountain with a heavy pack), protects the spine (think gardener lifting a heavy and awkward bag of soil from the ground without hurting their back).

3. Load Your Bones (safely) to make them stronger

Loading the body in safe ways with resistance training (especially free weights) stimulates bones to becomes denser and stronger. While a safe and consistent strength practice over time creates stronger muscles or prevent muscle mass loss as we age (who doesn’t want that?!), it also creates less breakable bones and strong tendons and ligaments. This plays a huge role in preventing issues like injury and osteoporosis. For the spine, this is great news as it means our vertebraes stay stay stronger, denser and able to handle forces more readily.

4. Treat All Weights with Respect

When training, the weight in your hands whether it is —light (L), medium (M), or heavy (H)—deserves respect. Light and medium weights should be handled as though they are heavy, ensuring proper form and technique from the start. This approach helps in making the transition to heavier weights smoother, maintaining consistency in setup and technique. Training excellent loading patterns with light weights also strengthens the smaller stabilizing muscles more effectively rather than only training them when you “get serious” with your heavy weights. This means that over time, newer and heavier loads are easier and safer to graduate to as you get stronger. With all the repeated neurological patterning of good lifting technique, it’s also more intuitive for your body to react properly to more chaotic loads outside the gym - which is really what we train for anyway!

5. Ritualize proper Setup and Technique

Remember, setting up and safely parking the kettlebell are integral parts of your set. A rounded back or disconnected lats while parking the bell or barbell can compromise your position, especially in strength sessions lasting over 20 minutes. Each repetition is an opportunity to refine and improve your technique, embracing a mindset of continuous improvement over merely “getting it done.” This approach not only leaves your spine more protected due to proper position under load at all times but also ensures that you’re not “leaving any strength on the table” by keeping your core engaged longer and more intentionally through the beginning middle and end of a set.

6. Warm-Up According to Your Body’s Needs

Prepare for heavy lifting with extra pre-session movement depending on the time of day and nature of your training load. For example, if your training session includes heavy lifting in the morning, dedicate at least an hour to light movement or walking between waking and training. The cartilage disks between the spine need time to settle before being loaded with heavy weight in the morning. Pre-session activity increases the readiness of your muscles, joints, and neurology to handle load well and may necessitate additional warm-up exercises depending on the logistics of your day.

7. Ensure Adequate Rest Between Sets

In strength training protocols, resting sufficiently between sets is paramount. It ensures that technique remains sharp and safe, especially under heavier loads. It's also wise to listen to your body and cut the session short if your nervous system isn't up to par with the day's heavy demands. If you push the pace in training, know how to do it intelligently and safely for your goals. Remember it is more important for most people’s goals to train a core that can safely support their spine through a heavy squat or deadlift rather than to just squat many times in a row because the number or the pace feels impressive. Resting properly in between properly loaded sets gives your core and other muscles a chance to get stronger.

8. Choose Movements That Enhance Spinal Mechanics

Prioritize exercises that promote better spine mechanics, tailored to your strength and mobility needs. For example, kettlebell swing is a wonderful movement that improves hip power and fast twitch muscle fibers when done well but can create problems when done improperly. You must ensure good spinal mechanics in a slower movement before jumping into fast or power-based movement. Solidifying proper spinal mechanics with glute bridges and core work then deadlifts with good technique before jumping into swings would be a great way to start. If looking for a routine, keep it simple and high quality. Most people benefit from doing fundamental strength movements well and at an appropriate weight/load for their needs (not too light or too heavy). This takes time, patience and intention. Find good sources of information regarding form and program design or seek out coaching to make sure you’re on the right track.

9. Do Not Neglect Mobility Work

Lack of mobility in parts of the spine can make other parts of the spine work in ways that cause pain or disfunction. Likewise, lack of mobility in joints adjacent to the spine - like hips and shoulders - can cause the spine to absorb loads in unhealthy ways. For example, if you know your hips are tight, hip mobility should be in your regular routine as it will influence the quality of your movement under load.

10. Incorporate Regular Hanging Exercises

Regularly hanging from a bar or a tree branch can significantly relieve your spinal discs. This practice, often overlooked, is a simple yet effective way to decompress the spine and enhance overall spinal health.

11. Get Good Nutrition

Our bones need and store minerals. Over time, the abundance or lack of those minerals affects how they age. Paired with an intelligent strength training routine, good nutrition means denser, less breakable bones. “If we’re well-nourished, then our bones remodel themselves robustly” [All About Nutrition & Bone Health] which is great news for our spines as the mileage on the body adds up.

Some Spine Health Resources:

• Spine Resilience and Performance for Life - Dive into spine health by world-renowned spine specialist Stuart McGill in his recent lecture

• All About Nutrition & Bone Health - check out this article about how nutrition influences bone health

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🍽️🧭 Nutritional Compass

From Levels to Compass: A New Approach to Wellness

One way to approach nutrition is to pile on skills, meal plans and ways of eating that are tough to keep up with sustainably. Eating with lots of limits or parameters is an example of using a high level of nutritional rulesets but this doesn’t work very well for many people because it takes a general set of parameters and applies it to individual needs, lifestyle, or goals. A more intuitive and flexible way to navigate the complex and confusing world of nutrition is to imagine a compass that shows which skills to focus on at any one time to reach the goals that are unique to you.

The Nutritional Compass concept prioritizes self-awareness, balance, and growth for your wellness journey. Tailored to your needs and circumstances, it promotes a sustainable approach to health based on your preferences and life situation. It is, quite simply, a better road map to your destination than a list of complex diets (unless that diet is designed by a dietician specifically for you and your needs) that may or may not match your lifestyle or needs.

The Nutritional Compass: Navigating Your Path to Holistic Health 🌿

Let’s imagine a car that is built for efficiency. It has fantastic gas mileage and is a very trusty car to get you from A to B in the city and you get many many years of service out of that car. If you look up directions and have the option of going on very rugged paths with massive potholes, dirt roads, and possible snow, you’d understandably want to choose a different option with a smoother path even if it took longer so that you could better prevent unnecessary damage to the axel, tires, etc. of this city car. Likewise, if you have a car that’s built specifically for off-roading and try to only drive it in cities where its capabilities are never really used, it would be an un-ideal pathway forward. Keeping 4 concepts in mind for navigating nutrition based on your individual needs is a way of plotting the ideal pathway for yourself given your individual preferences, lifestyle, challenges & skillsets.

The 4 Pillars of the Nutritional Compass:

1. Awareness: The Foundation of Your Journey 🤔

Awareness emphasizes the importance of introspection and understanding oneself. This means tuning into your body's needs and signals, recognizing the psychological factors influencing your eating habits, and setting realistic health goals that match not just your needs but your skillsets as well. Awareness is the first step towards making informed decisions about your health and nutrition.

If you know you eat more than you intend to when stressed, for example, you can more easily anticipate unfavorable nutritional decisions before they happen. If you are working on getting more vegetables in your daily routine AND know which vegetables you like best, you can more easily take next steps towards preparing weekly meals that are sustainable. If you are on the intuitive side of mental processing, you might have created a habit of walking into your grocery store’s produce section first thing in order to get your food prep creative juices flowing and oriented towards healthy cooking choices. If you’re a fan of structure you might have created the habit of spending time to write a list of things to buy that reflect your health goals before walking into the grocery store.

2. Environment: Cultivating Your Wellness Ecosystem 🌱

Your surroundings significantly impact your health journey, affecting what you eat and the support you receive and the level of resistence you feel when trying to make meaningful changes. Since your environment is so influencial in making change easier or tougher, it’s a good idea to shape your environment in whatever capacity, big or small that you can to optimize your nutritional journey. Food variety & availability, supportiveness of a community, social and culteral influences on eating habits are all part of the bigger environmental landscape.

3. Balance: Harmonizing Your Nutritional Path ⚖️

Achieving wellness is about striking a balance that accommodates both nutritious eating and the enjoyment of life's pleasures. Dietary extremes tend to be heavy on the results at cost to the sustainable. Eating for pleasure without regard for wellness also leads to an unsustanable path. Finding the right balance of joy and health when forging your nutritional path is the key. Staying curious, patient and connected to your greater health goals will help with achieving balance along the way.

4. Growth: Embracing Continuous Improvement 🌟

Like any journey there are highs, lows and points of feeling lost. Keeping a Growth and Progress the goals rather than perfection and fast results will keep the journey a authentic as possible. This means setting attainable goals, pursuing new knowledge when you feel stuck, and being flexible enough to adapt to the chaos you will encounter. With Growth as the focus, curiosity and flexibility along the journey become superpowers.

Integrating The Nutritional Compass into Your Wellness Strategy 🔄

The Nutritional Compass provides a practical framework nutrition (as well as other health goals!). The goal is to make nutrition habits simple, actionable, intuitive and tailorable for your individual needs. Let’s make meaningful changes while feeling empowered by our own self awareness, ability to cultivate a supportive environment, sense of balance between our health needs and enjoyment and commitment to growth over perfection.

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