Dr Jace is a huge fan of exercise! It’s great for your spinal and overall health so what’s not to love! So, to help get the most out of your next trip to the gym, we’ve put together a list of pre and post workout tips from your North Brisbane chiropractor, Dr Jace herself!

Pre-gym: 

Warm up -  if you’re not taking an extra 5-10 minutes to do a warm up prior to your workouts, now is the perfect time to start! It’s difficult to have your body performing at its best during your workouts if your muscles aren’t warm and primed to perform! It doesn’t have to be crazy or a stretch for each individual muscle group you expect to be using, but just some general light weights to wake your muscles up, an exercise to get your heart rate up and pumping or some light stretches, that is more than enough! If you need some specific exercises or stretches to get a warm up started, ask Dr Jace at your next appointment! 

Mindset - to take care of yourself, is a combination of your body, soul and mind. It is important to do exercise that gets you up in the morning, for example, if you set unrealistic expectations of running every morning when you hate it, then you won’t be consistent long term. Reflect on why you’re doing this for yourself, try setting some goals (even small ones like amount of times working out in a week) and be mindful of these when you step into the gym or begin your exercises! We should count ourselves lucky to be able to be healthy and move our bodies! You can set aside some time for mindfulness meditations as a mini-warm up before you leave for exercise.

Get social - exercise is always more fun when you get your friends involved! Getting your friends involved can help with motivation and make even the most difficult sessions seem that much easier!

During exercise:

“No pain, no gain” - we need to forget this! Pain when you exercise isn’t a good thing. We all know the difference between an exercise being challenging and an exercise being painful. Make sure you’re not pushing past these limits when your body is trying to tell you that something isn’t quite right!

Movements - make sure you’re focusing on what your body is doing while you’re exercising. Form over weights every day! If you’re ever not sure what your form is looking like while you do any exercise, don’t be scared to film yourself and be self-critical on what you could do better! Don’t forget you can ask Dr Jace at your next appointment and she can coach you through it  too!

Post exercise: 

Drink water - water is super important for your recovery post exercise! Recommendations say that we should drink 1L per 25kg of body weight in a day as a baseline.

Post workout nutrition - Make sure you’re refuelling your body post exercise, especially if you’re trying to lose weight! Protein shakes are most effective between 15-30 minutes post workout. Make sure to replenish carb and protein to your muscles to prevent any breakdown. 

Muscle soreness - this is normal! Don’t let this put you off from your fitness journey. Muscle soreness post exercise, even in the days following, is known as DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness), which is temporary inflammation or micro-damage to your muscles due to exercise. If this pops up, heat or ice can help (whatever feels better for you), using a foam roller or trigger point ball, or applying fisiocrem to help with the inflammation. 

Chiropractic - In your initial phase of care, we recommend that you do not train directly following a Chiropractic treatment, due to the risk of damaging muscles (due to tension in your muscles being removed) or undoing the entire adjustment by the time the workout is over. Too much muscle relaxation combined with heavy exercise can result in injury! Once we are out of our initial phase of care, we recommend you can go and workout a few hours post treatment!

In saying that, getting an adjustment from Dr Jace or another one of our Chiropractors in North Brisbane can help you post workout. It can help with pain and DOMS that we mentioned before! It can help improve your confidence at the gym, due to trusting your body more and knowing re-injury is unlikely. Research has even shown that Chiropractic may reduce gym and fitness related injuries! Heidi Haavik, who is the Dean of Research at New Zealand College of Chiropractic, PhD in Human Neurophysiology and a Chiropractor, has found the benefits of Chiropractic can also include increased reaction times, hitting the golf ball further, help with posture and improving your overall spinal function which has countless positive benefits.