Rocking Chair Therapy

 Rocking Chair Therapy

https://amzn.to/33AdwA8

Pull up a rocking chair, have a seat and rock your way to feeling good and being healthier. The rocking motion soothes and improves all ages.

For infants being rocked the rhythmic motion also provides stimulation to the vestibular apparatus of the ears, the balance center, promoting the baby’s ability to be alert and attentive as well as helping with the development of balance mechanisms. So crucial is this stimulations that a charity, the Rocking Chair Project, has been created to provide disadvantaged mothers with rocking chairs for to aid development during the crucial early months of an infant’s life.

The comforting motion of a rocking chair helps calm ADHD children. They are able to move as they read, listen and learn which seems to improve concentration and focus. The net result is a calmer child who retains more. Rocking chair use for children in general is growing at schools, child care centers and homes.

Quality of life was improved when individuals with dementia rocked. Anxiety, depression, and pain medication decreased for residents of a dementia facility rocked. Averaging 101 minutes throughout the day, those who rocked the most, benefited the most. 

Fifteen minutes of rocking twice a day helps improve balance and walking abilities for seniors. Rocking also helps a problem common to seniors, vertigo or dizziness.

For more ideas about incorporating more moving and less sitting into your life, see Intermittent Moving, How I lost my pants and mastered weight control, Move More • Sit Less • Master Your Weight. https://amzn.to/33AdwA8

A Diet of Movement

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A Diet of Movement

A diet of movement? I know what you’re thinking: diets are about eating food. However, when you think about it, diets are about losing weight (or trying to). 

Intermittent moving is moving harnessed for a purpose, helping one of lose weight, trim waistline, reset metabolism and gain control over appetite.

When we move, helps our metabolisms work better. You see, our metabolisms go to work when we stand up and shut down as we sit for a long time. Stand up for 90 seconds and your metabolism resets. Sit for an hour and your metabolism shuts down. Take advantage of these facts to lose weight.

Intermittent moving is a pattern of moving frequently enough to control your weight and waistline, to get the most out of them and take full advantage of how the metabolism works.

How to do it

Best practice: take 10,000 steps a day; walk 15 minutes after each meal; take breaks from sitting of 2 minutes every 30 minutes or at a minimum every hour. Want to lose more? Do more.

Get up and walk as you check social media or talk on the phone. Time yourself or use your step counter as you walk & check social media. How many steps can you take? How many calories can you burn? (Every 15 minutes=2,000 steps or 100 calories)

For more ideas about incorporating more moving and less sitting into your life, see Intermittent Moving, How I lost my pants and mastered weight control, Move More • Sit Less • Master Your Weight. https://amzn.to/33AdwA8

Vertigo and Rocking Chairs

By Dominik Matus [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

Sufferers of vertigo and bouts of dizziness may also benefit from time in a rocking chair. A study by the Baylor College of Medicine in the US found that vestibular rehabilitation therapy, such as rocking chair therapy, can reduce the symptoms of those patients who can’t be treated through surgery.

“The elderly – an increasing proportion of our society – are often prime candidates for vestibular rehabilitation therapy,” study researcher Greg Ator says. “It appears that patients with peripheral vertigo with classical symptoms, especially of an episodic variety, will definitely benefit from a vestibular rehabilitation program.

http://optimaol.com/benefitsofrocking/

Too much sitting may thin the part of your brain that's important for memory, study suggests

Too much sitting may thin the part of your brain that's important for memory, study suggests:

The study subjects reported average sitting times of three to 15 hours a day. After adjusting for their subjects' ages, the researchers found that every additional hour of average daily sitting was associated with a 2% decrease in the thickness of the medial temporal lobe.

https://amzn.to/2vdfVUJ


By Henry Vandyke Carter - Henry Gray (1918) Anatomy of the Human Body (See "Book" section below)Bartleby.com: Gray's Anatomy, Plate 728This is a retouched picture, which means that it has been digitally altered from its original version. Modifications: vectorization (CorelDraw). The original can be viewed here: Gray728.png. Modifications made by Mysid., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1676555

The Two Minute Walk: Key to Longevity

You’ve read that right: the two minute walk can result in a longer life.

What’s the catch? You’ll need to be consistent and accumulate 30 minutes or more of moving time. That’s 15 up-and-about’s throughout the day and evening too. An hour of moving time is even better.

Your goal is to create the accepted 30-minute a day of exercise which as scientists have discovered can be beneficial even when taken in bite-sized bits of activity. 

A recent study found that “Those who moved more often, especially if they managed about an hour in total of physical activity over the course of the day, cut their mortality risk in half… .”

“And it did not matter how they accumulated those minutes. If people walked continuously for five minutes or longer, meaning in exercise bouts, they lowered their risk of dying young.

“But they gained the same benefit if they walked sporadically in short but repeated spurts, as long as they moved often.

“The message is that all physical activity counts,” says Dr. William Kraus, a professor at Duke University who conducted the study with researchers from the National Cancer Institute.

“The little things that people do every day,” like walking from their cars to the office or climbing a flight of stairs, “can and do add up and affect the risk for disease and death,” he says.”

“If you can’t go for a long walk,” he says, “a few short walks are likely to be just as good for you.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/28/well/move/walking-exercise-minutes-death-longevity.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fphys-ed&action=click&contentCollection=move&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=collection

The Two Minute Walk Taken Every 20 Minutes: More Health Benefits

What happens when the two-minute walking break is taken not only consistently but also in a regular pattern? Research shows there’s even more benefit if your efforts are timed, happening every 20 minutes. 

Taking a two-minute walk every 20 minutes re-sets the body’s mechanisms put on hold and under stress by the inactivity of sitting.  Positively impacted are: blood pressure and glucose levels; aching muscles and learning abilities. Lessened are risks for cardio-vascular disease, cancer, metabolic syndrome, and diabetes. 

Then there’s the added benefit: expending more calories as you move more. Consider: whether you’re at the office or at home: a 2 minute walkabout every half hour results in 59 extra calories expended and a 5 minute walkabout every half hour results in an 132 additional calories expended.

Experiencing muscle or joint aches and pains: moving often, taking breaks from sitting of even 30 seconds or one minute every 20 minutes impacts discomfort.

Then consider what happens when you engage in more activity every 20 minutes. Dan Buettner, author of The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and Living Like the World’s Healthiest People, found cultures around the world whose residents live the healthiest and longest are “nudged into physical activity (such as house work, yard work, kitchen work with no mechanized appliances) every 20 minutes, my team estimates. This activity not only burned 500 to 1,000 calories a day; it also kept their metabolisms humming at a high rate.”

Barbara and Kevin Kunz, Un-Sit Your Life

Study: Standing could trim weight | Albuquerque Journal

Study: Standing could trim weight | Albuquerque Journal

More info:

Take breaks from sitting at work

Taking breaks in sitting at the office expends from 24 to 132 calories during an eight-hour day depending on how much of a break you take each hour: 

• a 1-minute break every half hour results in the expenditure of an additional 24 calories over an 8-hour time period 
• a 2-minute break every half hour results in 59 extra calories expended 
• a 5-minute break every half hour results in an 132 additional calories expended.

Not much you might think but remember: researchers studied the impact of how sedentary jobs impact weight. Using data accumulated since 1970, they found the resulting lessened expenditure of calories to be 100 calories a day—enough to account for a significant portion of the increase in weight gain experienced by women and men in the U. S. over the intervening years.

On other measures, though, the five-minute walks (every hour) were more potent than the concentrated 30-minute version. When the workers rose most often, they reported greater happiness, less fatigue and considerably less craving for food than on either of the other days. Their feelings of vigor also tended to increase throughout the day, while they often had plateaued by early afternoon after walking only once in the morning.

“Reynolds recommends standing for two minutes every 20 minutes while desk-bound — even if you can't move around your office. "That sounds so simple,” one researcher tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "But that actually has profound consequences. If you can stand up every 20 minutes — even if you do nothing else — you change how your body responds physiologically.”

Fun Gifts Kids Love —and Are Even Good for Them

http://amzn.to/2nlJlvF

Children opening a gift and going wild with enthusiasm. That’s the gift we want to give, the present the child in our lives will love. 

We recently had that experience. “It’s a hit,” our niece texted us with the video of her two-year old daughter Sofia using the present we’d given her. 

And the best part? The fact that the over-size piano keyboard makes music with the child’s footsteps lured Sofia out of her chair and into motion. Little Sofia loves the movies Troll and Moana as testified by their presence in the background as she watched them over the Thanksgiving holiday. Just like adults tempted to sit too much, children’s health suffers the effects. Their are immediate effects as well as establishing a pattern for a lifetime of sitting. 

The giant piano keyboard is suggested for children over the age of 12 months. It is suggested adults can enjoy it too. Warning: the keyboard does not come with the necessary 4 AA batteries.

This next gift suggestion is something I want for myself —but, unfortnately, it doesn’t come in adult-size.

Music and special effects noises are created by SoundMoovz, a FitBit-type device worn on the wrist, as the child moves, dances or just runs around. It is advertised as “Music by Moooving.” I haven’t seen any videos of them in use but it sounds like a promising fun gift.

It’s intended for children ages 8 or more. While I won’t be buying gift for a child in that age range this year, a friend appreciated the suggestion for the children in her life.

Keyboard Playmat 71" - 24 Keys Piano Play Mat (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B073R2FBWY/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1)

SoundMoovz, by Cra-Z-Art (https://www.amazon.com/SoundMoovz-Musical-Motion-Activated-Bluetooth-player/dp/B0748G2F8Z/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1510610585&sr=8-2&keywords=Cra-Z-Art+SoundMoovz+Musical+Bandz&dpID=41YSwQO8Z9L&preST=_SY300_QL70_&dpSrc=srch)