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Originally Posted At: https://breakingmuscle.com/feed/rss

I’ve found athletes at every level will go to extremes to improve their game. Powders, pills, lighter equipment, better shoes, expensive coaching programs, and banned substances. 

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http://www.marksdailyapple.com/

Today’s article is a guest post by Dr. Mark Burhenne, the #1 bestselling author of The 8-Hour Sleep Paradox. As an authority on dental health, he is also on a mission to help shift the conversation about sleep from quantity to quality as the foundation for primal living. As a member of the American Academy of Dental Sleep Medicine, Dr. Burhenne blogs about the mouth-body connection on his website, AsktheDentist.com.

As followers of the Primal Blueprint, we talk a lot about blocking blue light, for example, to mimic the sleep of our ancestors. But there’s another big thing that we’re missing when it comes to sleep that is drastically different from our ancestors—and that’s how we breathe during sleep. Our sleep breathing faces many modern challenges that Grok never faced. In this article, we’ll cover what those are and how to overcome them for the best sleep of your life.

Modern humans are developing with smaller jaws and smaller airways than Grok did, and it’s preventing us from reaching and sustaining deep restorative sleep. It all starts with the airway. Modern humans’ airways develop differently from Grok’s airway. As you can see in these photos, Grok didn’t have crooked teeth or a small chin. He enjoyed a broad, symmetrical face, and proper jaw growth. Because of this, he didn’t need to have his wisdom teeth taken out as he had proper jaw growth. Grok’s children also ate the right foods which stimulated the jaw to grow down and out—leaving plenty of room for the airway at the back of the throat.

Your airway development as a child was different from Grok’s. Chewing on soft foods doesn’t stimulate the jaw enough to grow down and out to its full potential. In today’s world, food allergies and other epigenetic factors, cause nasal congestion which further impede proper jaw and facial development.

When the jaw and face do not grow to their full potential, the airway is compromised. A jaw that grows down and out leaves plenty of room at the back of the throat for the airway. Additionally, an underdeveloped jaw reduces space at the back of the throat, further compromising the airway.

Smaller airways mean less deep restorative sleep in which the body is able to repair itself. As Grok approached the deepest stages of sleep, and his body went limp, his jaw fell back and his tongue relaxed. The jaw and tongue didn’t block his airway, though, because of the ample room created by his fully developed jaw, wide arch, and proper swallow reflex.

This is the main reason we struggle to get good sleep. Every time you toss and turn, talk in your sleep, kick your legs, grind your teeth, or snore—these are signs your body is making an attempt to reopen the airway for more efficient breathing. These interruptions prevent you from remaining in this stage of deep restorative sleep.

Why is interrupted sleep such a big deal? Because it is a contributing factor to the chronic diseases of our modern age such as Alzheimer’s, cancers, heart disease, diabetes, ADHD, mood disorders such as depression, and cognitive learning disorders.

And, forget what you’ve been told about sleep apnea being reserved for obese, older-aged men. I am currently treating more young, thin, 20-something patients for small airways more than the older stereotypical sleep apnea patient.

Tips to Make Sure Your Kids Have Facial Growth Like Grok

• Learn about orthotropics.
• Know that getting braces to straighten teeth—especially headgear—can compromise the airway. Work with a dentist who understands this – most likely someone who practices orthotropics.
• Feed your child foods rich with Vitamin K2, like natto, or consider a supplement. I recommend reading The Calcium Paradox by Dr. Kate Rheume-Blue.
• Breastfeeding is key in facial skeletal development, which is a key influencer of the size of the airway.
• Have your pediatric dentist check for tongue tie—especially in newborns.
• Feed your children whole unprocessed foods that they can chew
• Don’t use sippy cups and pacifiers as they can also impede optimal facial skeletal development.

You’ve heard Mark say it before: A good night’s sleep is the foundation for a healthy, happy, productive existence. Quality sleep keeps us lean and thinking clearly. Without it, we go through life in a fog and become susceptible to disease, and age faster. We know this intuitively because we’re not really ourselves if we haven’t had restorative sleep.

So why is eating dinner before 6pm, not drinking alcohol anywhere near bedtime, dimming the lights and shutting off screens before bedtime, or even donning your orange goggles to block out blue light to protect your circadian rhythms from being altered by our modern lifestyle not enough? Because a compromised airway negates the benefits of all of the above.

Check the box and move on? Not quite. All of these sleep hygiene suggestions get us closer to what Grok might have experienced through the night, but miss one key element—few of us today possess the same airway that Grok had—and this can make all the difference in the world when achieving perfect deep sleep.

Why Grok Only Needed Six Hours & We Barely Get By on Eight

When it comes to having an airway just like Grok’s, the cards are stacked against us: allergies, food sensitivities, chronic nasal congestion, and asthma all cause us to breathe through our mouths instead of our noses. This mouth breathing changes how our faces develop—instead of the wide, symmetrical faces of our ancestors, we develop longer faces, receding chins and weaker profiles. Easy-to-chew packaged foods don’t encourage the jaw to develop properly, so there isn’t enough room for the teeth, so they come in crowded. Prolonged bottle-feeding and sippy cup usage doesn’t allow for a proper tongue and swallow reflex.

When children have to breathe through their mouths instead of noses, the tongue is no longer in the right position to keep teeth straight and act as nature’s braces. Your exposure to all of these modern factors changed how the lower third of your face developed during childhood. But the real concern isn’t crooked teeth—it’s that the crooked teeth indicate you have a small airway. If the lower face does not develop properly, you won’t be able to breathe at night and sleep without interruption.

As we approach deep stage sleep, the muscles that normally keep our airways propped open are turned off and go limp. The tongue, also a muscle, goes from toned and firm to a spread-out, floppy lump at the back of the throat, falling back into and blocking the airway. In MRIs of people sleeping, the tongue in its flaccid state looks like a squash ball sitting on top of the airway. Moreover, the deeper stages of sleep cause the airway to narrow and become too flaccid to support effortless breathing. In extreme cases, the airway becomes so narrow that breathing stops completely. This is the condition referred to as obstructive sleep apnea.

Every time breathing slows or is interrupted, the brain has to figure out a way to get you breathing again, at any cost. The brain stops what it’s doing in deep sleep to tense up your muscles so they support the airway again. You don’t have to wake up when this happens, but your brain does have to bounce out of deep sleep into a lighter stage of sleep for the airway to be saved. In healthy people, the airway remains open even when the muscles become paralyzed. But for most of us, this isn’t possible. Our airways have gotten smaller so we’re left with bodies that aren’t equipped to keep breathing while in deep stage sleep. It’s not your breathing that suffers with these interruptions; it’s your sleep. Each time the brain has to deal with a breathing interruption, it can’t pick up where it left off— it has to start over. This means your body isn’t able to fully complete stages of deep and restorative sleep.

How to Find Out if your Airway is Like Grok

So how do we acquire the airway of our ancestors? Even as modern humans, we’re not doomed to a modern airway. Here are things you can do to obtain Grok’s efficient airway.

Consider your sleep breathing. When you optimize your sleep quality (sleep hygiene), all the sleep hygiene tweaks mean nothing unless you consider breathing to be the foundation. Have that frame of mind.

Assess your breathing. Record the noises you make with an app on your smartphone. Snoring means your airway is collapsing. But don’t let “no snoring” lead to a false sense of security as it may mean your airway collapses to such a degree that you can’t make a snoring noise. Get a sleep study polysomnography (PSG). Your primary care provider usually prescribes this test but there may be resistance due to insurance. Better yet, there are very accurate alternatives to the conventional sleep studies, such as Knit Health. They give you a 21 day sleep assessment that is as good as the PSG in your own home for $99 deep-stage knithealth.com. Verify your sleep ability, and do it often. Your quality of life depends on it.

Refer to a specialist. See your primary care provider to get a referral to a specialist who can help you.

Ensure proper development with Vitamin K2, orthotropics, and breastfeeding.

Most importantly, don’t assume you don’t have a sleep issue. Even in light sleep stages, we are not the best at assessing our own sleep.

Deep restorative sleep is innate if you are Grok, but it is not guaranteed if you are living in modern times.

—Mark Burhenne DDS

Sources:

• Gandhi Yetish, Hillard Kaplan, Michael Gurven, Brian Wood, Herman Pontzer, Paul R. Manger, Charles Wilson, Ronald McGregor, and Jerome M. Siegel, “Natural Sleep and Its Seasonal Variations in Three Pre-industrial Societies,” Current Biology, (2015) doi: http:// dx.doi.org/ 10.1016/ j.cub. 2015.09.046
• Davidson, Terrance, “The Great Leap Forward: The Anatomic Basis for the Acquisition of Speech and Obstructive Sleep Apnea”
• Dr Steven Park podcast 39 drstevenpark.com

Thanks to Mark Burhenne, DDS, for the informative post today. You can follow him at AsktheDentist.com and check out his other guest post on MDA. 

What questions do you have regarding sleep breathing or ancestral versus modern dental health? Share your thoughts below, and have a great day, everyone.

The post Ancestral Sleep Breathing appeared first on Mark’s Daily Apple.

Originally Posted At: https://breakingmuscle.com/feed/rss

Day 254 of 360

If sets require interruption, make as minor an adjustment as needed and complete the next uninterrupted. When scheme is listed as “3 x 5″, it always refers to “Sets” x “Reps”.

Reminder: Position and range of motion always govern weight.

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http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain

I have fond memories of being in the kitchen with my mom and sister, but I would never think to gather my family for a day of cooking. Usually lines are drawn in the journey from kitchen to table: cooks vs. eaters, hosts vs. guests.

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https://www.girlsgonestrong.com/

When it comes to knowing pain, the science is clear: knowledge is powerful [1-7].

The more I learn about this incredibly complex topic, the more empowered and excited I am about my own body and that of all humans. One of the most rewarding things that I get to do is share information about how impressively smart our body is. This stems from my deep love of science, the body, and the human condition.

My hope is to instill this sense of empowerment and excitement that comes with understanding your body and its response to threatening experiences.

What is Pain?

To funnel the word pain into a single definition would be like attempting to describe love. It’s entirely too complex for a singular definition and the experience of pain is unique to each of us. There are, however, crucial pieces of information to understand when it comes to “knowing pain.”

First of all, we all experience pain. Pain is normal — unless you have a congenital insensitivity to pain. Without pain, our species would have a very hard time existing in this world.

When working to define pain, it’s important to look to credible sources, rooted in science. Pain has been defined by the International Association for the Study of Pain as “a distressing experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage with sensory, emotional, cognitive, and social components” [8].

All of what makes us human and unique intricately influences the way we experience pain [6-7,9-11]. We must recognize the biological processes involved, along with the rest of our human condition, which includes the emotional, cognitive, and social processes. This framework is referred to as the biopsychosocial model and encompasses the whole person [6-7, 11-12, 16].

As a person who works with those in pain every day, creating awareness of how a person’s entire life affects why they experience pain when they do is a constant pursuit. But this is a very important first step towards understanding pain.

Our whole self and all of our experiences affect why we feel painful sensations when we do.

Let me repeat this with bold letters because it’s true: all pain is influenced by all of our systems. For example, one might have heightened painful sensations right before a big event because of the complex nature that stress can add to our protective pain system. This may have absolutely nothing to do with the structure of our body, our capabilities, or tissue damage, but more to do with how our body works to perceive the level of threat involved. If a threat is high enough, our system will respond accordingly.

Pain and Bio-Plasticity

What is exciting about us as living beings is that each of us possess an incredible gift: we are amazing learners. In pain science, this is referred to as bio-plasticity [13]. Bio-plasticity is the ability to adapt, learn and change of all of our body’s organisms, based on our experiences, our thoughts, our feelings, our beliefs, how we move, how we speak, what we know, and more [7, 12, 13].

Let’s take strength training for example: adding consistent load to our musculoskeletal system will inevitably lead to change. Our muscles will start to become more developed, our bones will become stronger, and our minds might become more empowered and confident [14]. In all, our bodies will adapt as a result of the plasticity, or ability to be changed, of our systems.

This means that our brain is not the only thing in our body capable of learning: our whole body has the capacity to change and learn. When it comes to why we experience pain, the learning that has occurred throughout our entire life’s experience will have its influence.

If our entire body and all of its systems determine that a situation is threatening and that we need to be protected, it might increase our sensitivity to that threat. Turning up our protective dial is a way for our body to keep us safe.

What is even cooler is that pain is only one of our many protective systems that can be turned up or turned down based on a perceived or credible threat. Some other protective systems include our motor system, our sympathetic nervous system, our endocrine system, and our immune system.

For example, our body might turn up the protective dial on our motor system if we find ourselves in front of a moving bus — turning up the motor dial becomes the action of moving out of the way of the bus as quickly as possible. We do this instinctively, based on our knowledge of what a bus will do to our life if we don’t move.

Our pain system behaves in a similar fashion. We cannot always see that it’s happening, but it is happening nonetheless and it’s happening very quickly. It’s as if we were our very own superheroes, in a way — it’s awesome.

Pain and Protection

Let’s dive a bit deeper and take a look at one person’s story to provide us with some context on this notion of turning up our protective dial based potential tissue damage.

This story is that of a man who arrived in the emergency room with excruciating painful symptoms after jumping down onto a 15 cm nail. Because of all of the protective systems working together, he felt very real, very painful sensations — enough to bring him to the hospital. They were also acute enough that the doctors had to sedate him to calm him down so that they could remove the boot and inspect the foot.

As luck would have it though, the nail had missed his toes and foot entirely. It hadn’t even penetrated his skin [15].

If we take a moment and reflect on how this could be possible, we start to gain awareness about the protective nature of pain. How can a person experience pain when there is no tissue damage? Ultimately, it’s a combination of all the body’s systems working together to protect it. This story, and many others like it, tell us a wealth of knowledge about pain, but again, only scratch the surface to how complex this topic actually is.

When it comes to pain, bio-plasticity can either work for us or against us. Ultimately this means we have the capacity to learn and can teach our bodies to do some pretty amazing things. To adapt to new situations, turning down the dial so to speak.

In the end, pain as a protective mechanism is quite amazing. It is important that when we experience a painful sensation, we work to approach it with curiosity, rather than fear, ultimately viewing pain as a friend, as our fierce protector.

Being curious about the sensation of pain, and how the entirety of our personhood might be affecting our feeling of pain, can empower us to be unafraid of our own bodies. To know that our bodies are not under attack when we feel pain, that we aren’t damaged goods. That we are, indeed, the most capable, most intelligent, most advanced species in the world.

Pain and why we feel it, is a result of these incredible advancements within our protective systems. In the end, we only get one body and it will go with us everywhere, so learning to love the intelligence of all pieces of it, can go a long way for our overall health.

References

1. Louw A, Diener I, Butler DS, Puentedura EJ. The effect of neuroscience education on pain, disability, anxiety, and stress in chronic musculoskeletal pain. Arch Phys Med Rehabil. Dec 2011;92(12):2041-56.
2. Ryan CC, Gray HG, Newton M, Granat MH. Pain biology education and exercise classes compared to pain biology education alone for individuals with chronic low back pain: a pilot randomised controlled trial. Manual Therapy 2010;15(4):382-7.
3. Moseley GL. Combined physiotherapy and education is efficacious for chronic low back pain. Australian Journal of Physiotherapy 2002;48:297-302
4. Moseley GL. Evidence for a direct relationship between cognitive and physical change during an education intervention in people with chronic low back pain. European Journal of Pain 2004;8:39-45.
5. Moseley GL. Widespread brain activity during an abdominal task markedly reduced after pain physiology education: fMRI evaluation of a single patient with chronic low back pain. Australian Journal of Physiotherapy 2005;51:49-52.
6. Butler DS & Moseley GL (2013) Explain Pain. 2nd Edn. Noigroup Publications: Adelaide.
7. Moseley GL & Butler DS (2017) Explain Pain Supercharged. 1st Edn. Noigropu Publications: Adelaide.
8. AC de C. Williams, K.D. Craig. Updating the definition of pain. International Association for the Study of Pain. 157(2016)2420-2423.
9. Engel GL (1977) The need for a new medical model: a challenge for biomedicine. Science 196: 129-136.
10. Engel GL (1960) A unified concept of health and disease. Perspect Biol med 3: 459-585.
11. Engel GL (1980) The clinical application of the biopsychosocial model. Am J Psychiatry 137: 535-544.
12. https://noijam.com/2015/02/27/bioplasticity/
13. http://www.bodyinmind.org/time-to-embrace-bioplasticity/
14. Watson SL, Weeks BK, Weis LJ, Horan SA, Beck BR. Heavy resistance training is safe and improves bone, function, and stature in postmenopausal women with low to very low bone mass: novel early findings from the LIFTMOR trial. Osteoporosis Int. 2015 Dec;26(12):2889-94
15. Fisher JP, Hassan DT, O’Connor N. Minerva BMJ. 1995; 310:70
16. Jull, G. Biopsychosocial model of disease: 40 years on. Which way is the pendulum swinging? Br J Sports Med. 2017; 51 1175-1175

The post What is Pain and Why Do We Experience It? appeared first on Girls Gone Strong.

Originally Posted At: https://breakingmuscle.com/feed/rss

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There are many great mysteries in this big, wild world of ours. For instance, why do people think it’s OK to wear socks and sandals at the same time, or who really killed JFK, and, my personal favorite, why can’t my husband hang up a hand towel in the bathroom?

But none of those things captured the internet quite like Oreo’s latest mystery flavor. Did you get a chance to try it? Do you think you have it figured out? Well, their mystery flavor was revealed this morning and the answer might surprise you.

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http://www.thealternativedaily.com/

Some years ago, I decided to undertake a 72-hour fast as something of a spiritual exercise and a way of getting in touch with my deeper self. The experience was both exhilarating, but also surprisingly challenging. For three days I subsisted on little more than organic rice cakes and lemon water. I felt the process […]

http://www.thealternativedaily.com/

Cheese aficionados rejoice! There’s something cheesy brewing on the horizon — cheese tea! Wait… what? Yes, you heard that right. Cheese tea. Not necessarily a combination you’d expect to work. Yet, this cheesy tea fad seems to be making a big splash with tea enthusiasts all over the world. And the long lineups prove it’s […]