well welcome to the life without limits family wellness show they were talking about the health benefits of type she before we get into that i want to know a little bit about my background as far as she goes it really started whenever i was in her practice school i happened to be sitting right next to a young man actually a doctor who was quite literally right off the boat from china really doctor who'd been sent to the states to learn her practic and while i was with him for those four years in school i was able to  to partake in some of his knowledge he was a orthopedist he's an acupuncturist he was a chiropractor and he was a doctor of traditional chinese medicine so he very very rounded in learning type she helped me to understand not only my martial arts background a little bit better but my chiropractor a lot better type she really is based on what most of us think today as health benefits but it starts out as a martial art so as we went as we progressed through school and began understanding you know bony articulations better and soft tissue changes and then finally the neurophysiology or the nerve component to chiropractic i really didn't understand touchy at that point because type she talks a lot about meridians she flow or the japanese will call it t that's the energy they they discussed moving through the body for the longest time it was thought that those those meridians didn't exist tracked it's been verified it's been quantified and more importantly what we know is that it moves down your nervous system so for me it was a no brainer source chiropractic has been all about having a healthy nervous system but the practice of tight she took as i said my martial arts training a step further because i had trained in karate for years and it's most crowds are very hard in their approach martial arts are categorized in the two two basic forms one of these are harder extra on the other softer internal she falls into that soft component whereas karate falls into that hard compound because it's very much a physical xterm all muscle based event type she really works on developing your core the tone of the the core and the ability to become very flexible so thousands of years old has been perfected and that perfection has led us to an understanding not only of the martial arts side but the health benefits of this time so i'd like to go through a few of those just last year we made some changes to our office we actually added two thousand square feet to our actual office in doing so in the last area of practice so we were fortunate enough to be able to add another twelve hundred square feet to our downstairs facility which is actually our wellness facility this is where we teach type she is where we teach our health classes where we teach karate sort of idea of these kinds of things go on the wellness center was a really important addition to us because chiropractic or health care can't be just about one thing it can't be just about the physical it's got to be about the whole person so touchy is that piece that allows us to bring into play the movement based activities and you know there's a lot of people that i see that just can't get out and do aerobics or go running so it gives them the opportunity to do something that helps tone the body strengthen the body and not your other joints what a lot of people don't know is the type she gives you cardiovascular benefit because you're moving so slowly most people look at it and right away i think it can't be any cardio that you're barely moving but because you are moving so slowly and you're bearing the weight of your body through these movements and your controlling your breath through the process and large muscle groups are being involved you consume vast amounts of oxygen it's pretty incredible work out so you get it you do get a card benefit there have been actually been studies not that long ago where they were showing that type she was just as effective and in some cases more effective for cardiac rehab then the traditional cardiac  for a couple reasons one were to get patients to do that who may be more physically fit to do standard rehab or had some physical limitations and the other thing that i thought they found was very very interesting is that there were additional health benefits they hadn't considered what they found was that there tended to be less falls and those groups and that those groups were able to begin having greater balance as a result of the false improvement of falls were related to greater muscle strength in the legs but it was also because they were learning to use their body correctly that their balance is improving and those are just a couple of things that we see that not a lot of people talk about the topics that we're going to include today have been verified over and over and over and they're the ones that western science has recognized to this point certainly the chinese science who has been understanding and utilizing touchy for well over a thousand years has more information but i'm going give you just a few of the basics today and really the first one is tight has been showed me shown to lower blood pressure so you're working diligently in controlling your breath slow coordinated movements as well as posture posture has a huge implication on your overall level of health and if you see me at all before you know that posh is one of the things that we talk consistently about so it lowers blood pressure just by the very nature of the movements very simple to do and there's a lot of people out there doing blood pressure issues the other thing is if you get into an aerobic activity that's it's a standard aerobics base maybe you do have high blood pressure sometimes just to be careful not to you can't do it but you do have to monitor so here we have a system that is going to drive your blood pressure up because of your activity level because it is so slow but it's also going you're also going to get the benefit of lowering that blood pressure so that was an interesting find and as i said it's been validated over and over and over but deep breathing in type she has been it's been termed moving meditation for a really long time so deep breathing is really what we're getting into and that's what helps to change that really big topic i just had a lady in the other day and one of the things that she said based on her recent bloodwork was that her bone density has become an issue and that they want to supplement her now the problem with that is no matter how many supplements you put in the body you can only absorb so much calcium and if you overload the body's levels of calcium you're just going to catch it in your kidneys i mean that's what the kidneys job is the filter along with the liver but the kidneys tend to precipitate that calcium out and when they do that you have to be careful too much caffeine can cause stone formation so you want to be aware of that and if we are seeing a change like that be conscious of it if you're if you're seeing abundance a change in somebody has recommended you increase your calcium loads be conscious of how much you can tolerate what kind of calcium it is because there's more than one type of calcium out there and they're not all they don't all have the same observability or availability of the body some calcium that you can buy in any health food store today is really the equivalent of and that's not going to give you the the effect you're looking for in the bones the other thing is as far as bone density goes just a couple things you should know about what would affect your bone density negatively smoking has a huge impact on bone density carbonated also very high on the list and third is london city is established in those teen years so from about fourteen fifteen on out to twenty twenty one is really when you're sabotaging your bone density so your activity level at that point your life is really crucial if you say well that's nice but i'm fifty then the other thing that you should know is there are times also in life or abundance and we really begin to see a change in that is right about fifty to fifty three if you're in that range then you do want to talk to somebody who understands interest and who can give you some insight on things you should be doing or should doing because everybody has a decrease in bone density that time but you can help to mitigate that loss with the right nutrition right activities and touchy is one of us the next one is we mentioned a second ago it's a blood pressure but it's an improved your deep breathing now  a couple reasons not just because we ask you to deprave but because when you posture properly you allow the body to bring the rib cage up and when you bring the rip cage up and down tight she is adamant about establishing really appropriate posture but when you do this in the rib cage comes up and out you relax the abdominal muscles and viral acting as abdominal muscles you allow for the diaphragm which is really crucial to your ability to breathe to actually relax also and so when the diaphragm relaxes you can take a deeper breath and the abdomen relaxes you can take a deeper breath and this is where we get that breathing from the stomach people who are really healthy tend to breathe from their abdomen singers know this musicians know this because especially if you're in a if you're in a brass instrument or a woodwind you know that you got to be able to hold that breath or hold that note so they learn really early on to breathe properly and not a lot of us do that we tend to hold our breath our breathing really shallow or breathe with the top of the chest music some accessory muscles this weakens the chest and also doesn't allow the rip cage to go through a full range of motion so if that happens as time goes on we tend to see that rip cage become a little bit rigid the muscles in between the ribs become a little less flexible and this can lead to all kind of issues related to  next on the list is immune function i talk a lot about immune function i think it's a really important key one of the statistics that i give on a regular basis is every time you get adjusted there's a thirty percent increase in immune function in your natural killer cells these are like the marines of your immune system so it's important that we keep that music that immune system functioning properly and here we are again with one more thing that's going to help establish normal immune function it does this again because we're deep breathing when you breathe properly  abdomen is moving in and out as we just said you're actually massaging the gut as you massage they've got it up to digest and eliminate properly the other thing is and i think a lot of people are aware this is eighty percent of your immune system is in your gut that doesn't mean that only stays there but it is there and it's there for a reason because you have to eat to live and as you put all those things into your body sometimes you put some contaminated things in there and the body has to be ready to handle that because it's the most obvious and likely place where bacteria or any other  immune function being improved is significant add to that a healthy lifestyle meaning drinking plenty of water getting rest rest is a top of the list and it's also one of those things we just don't tend to do enough of if you're getting eight hours of sleep you don't really well but that's only if you're in your thirty's to forty's if you're a teenager you need far more in that nine to eleven range if you're really young if they're a newborn they're absolutely going to be sleeping longer almost like a cat they sleep more than they're awake and it's normal because they're growing so much as you get older you need less so it really depends on who you are and what type of sleep you're getting as well because if you're not getting into a deep sleep you're not getting the restored of sleep and it's only that deep sleep state that allows for that restoration to a car and that's when your body repairs and rebuilds so the immune system  has two jobs it is to repair the body as well fight infection and if you ask somebody about what is the effect on the i mean it's the means to some other body most people imagine the advice of affection and it keeps you healthy but it also repairs tissue even down to a cellular level so keeping that immune system really healthy is critical if you want the body to stay healthy as a whole are next on our list is tight has been shown to reduce stress the stress hormones will come down not only during the practice but they will also continue to stay down after the practice so we're talking about having a lasting effect one of the really nice things in my eyes is i see it especially when we teach this is what we talk about in this form or your exercise hopefully does more than one thing for you if you're exercising regularly hopefully it's improving your overall level of health because exercise can damage your health if you overtrain so that possibility does exist it may seem like a no brainer that if you're exercising you're going to be well but that's not always the fact you can overtrain and actually break the body down at a rate faster than its ability to heal and that's back to are we getting enough rest with proper nutrition to have a healthy nervous system but one of the nice things about touchy is while you're practicing you're getting a reduction in stress hormones and after you finish that reduction stays for a period of time series having lasting benefits the interesting thing with a practice like this is if you do this on a consistent basis the body tends to begin to stay in that space and a body that can stay in that space is really where we talk about moving into a state of wellness or wholeness because having health is just the beginning and that generally refers to a physical state having wellness refers to a mental state and having wholeness refers to having a complete state in some people put term that is a spiritual state if you can do all three of those things well now what we've we've done much more than just taught just improve your physical health so the practice is gentle movement you know you've seen it on v probably one hundred arthritis commercials and they're there out there and ok representation of what's going on but you'll get to see it for a second the thing you should know is that there are many forms of touchy many styles i guess is a better way to say it the three main styles are chan son and yang and within each of those styles are also different breakdowns that doesn't really matter which one you decide you want to go into but you should research what each of those are especially if you have an option in your community and you find somebody  chand maybe versus son or yang versus chan because they have different characteristics that they seek to achieve chien was the original art and its name chen because it came from the chen village the chen village still practices today it's one of the oldest  verifiable arts in china and it follows family systems like most martial arts in the asian countries do their inherited from one person to another and it's been around for generations one of the things that people are not aware of those is touchy is in fact a martial art and when i teach the class i said a second ago it should fulfill a couple of roles for you when we teach the class we talk about how this is affecting your overall quality of health we talk about how it's a part of it can be used as a pure form of exercise and last we talked about the fact that it is a martial art if you're going to train in this you might as well get the benefit of knowing what these techniques are and what they do so because we have this martial arts i think it's important to understand the technique from that perspective as well even if your goal is only to get the health benefits you may not want to learn martial art you don't have to but if you don't understand what the actual goal of the technique is your ability to apply it from a health perspective i think is really really limited and when you truly look at any one technique you'll realize that the martial application of the fighting application is the same as the health application and if you understand that then you can really begin to put your mind into what you're doing because if you don't have your mind and that's that mind body connection tha everybody conflict talks about what that really means is being aware what's going on and not doing a simple dance at that point you just be parroting what you see and there's no depth to that and you really will not receive the full health benefits if you're doing that the ability to move or direct that energy flow which is really opening the the nervous system up requires focus intent and we know this in our in our society because we talk about it with baseball players football players golfers especially there's a huge focus on getting that person to be able to really get a clear intention about what it is they're trying to do and be able to stay in that place and we call that being in the zone in the west they're no different they just have a little bit different language to it so if you learn something like this it gives you not only your health but  self defense component and i think that's crucial we don't have the room here to show you the whole form in the form that i teach is actually quite short it's a short form of chen type she it's only thirty four moves and it repeats most of the moves are done in sets of three but what i would like to do is show you a real simple technique it's the very first one of the four minutes when the most important is in form and i teach this form we always talk about the fact that the first move sets the tone for the whole form and every move that follows that is a reflection of that first technique so the very first move looks simple it's a simple raising of the hands but there is as we said a marshall component to this and we'll demonstrate both of those see so you can see what the health component is and then how the actual application would look the very first move you can hang on for just one second is a simple raising of the hands the body stays tall and straight the hands come right to here and they stop at this gentle forty five degree bend the hands are always open but not stiff and they're not hanging down either this is an indication that there's normal energy flow through that hand and that it's right here this rising though is a function of somebody grabbing you so if he were grabbing me in a two handed grab and he's holding tight and i want to get out of this i can't just raise my hand because he's stronger than i am if i raise from my shoulders he's pushing his whole body down on me and i can't overcome that with my tiny little shoulder muscle but if i'll simply sink my body and break the wrists up then the hand position finishes to there what this does is it frees me from his grip as i come to here and around the wrist when my hand is here it's flat and he has an easy ability to grip but when i come to hear it rolls and he can hold this round structure so i would come up and finish  free to re grab him and attack him or simply just push him away thank you was perfect so what we're looking for are simple techniques that you can easily apply it doesn't matter what age you are i've taught this to people in wheelchairs as well as people who were injured had a broken ankle or something and just couldn't be up and around for a while as well the young kids anybody can learn this the benefits are much longer than what we talked about today but those are some basics of give you an idea of what you can do with a very simple very light very easy movement and i've been practicing this for coming up twelve years now and i have to tell you for the short form for only being thirty four moves that one form has given me immense amounts of information  and in that time frame in that twelve years i've continued to as i practice go deeper and deeper into form and see more and more and more and went with martial arts viciously that's the goal is to teach you form give you a very basic understanding and then send you off to practice it because  practice it those basic techniques over and over and over it offers you the opportunity to reveal more of that technique for yourself because each person has a slightly different perspective so if you can get these basics and you come to a simple understanding with this and i think you can take control of your health you can practice something that is a drawing to your body and the nice thing is you can practice just about anywhere you don't require a lot of room you don't have to have a partner it's nice to have somebody so these you can actually see what that technique looks like but it isn't necessary so thank you will be back next month with my partner in crime robin who is working at the office with me and we'll be talking about nutrition we're going to start getting some basic information especially as we especially as we come into spring people are starting to get ready and change their bodies and break out of his hibernation mode