Your weight isn’t everything,
BUT. . .
Get your HRV test this week at New Day as Reassessment-palooza rolls on 💓
Good evening, sunshiners! Great to be with you again at the end of this long relaxing weekend. 😴🍗🎄
With my subject line are you wondering if I will soon be branching out into New Day Personal Training? 😂😂😂
Even though I am a long-time nutrition and fitness enthusiast, as you know this is NOT the focus of my practice with you at New Day.
My focus, rather, is on your spine and nervous system and how these are either helping you in life and health, or interfering with your life and health 💥
To have a healthy nervous system is to have a high level of adaptability and resilience (physically, emotionally, and otherwise) to all the stressors that are a natural part of life, as well as having an increased ability to make healthy lifestyle choices.
Now, back to the question of your weight. Have you ever joined a new gym or started a new fitness regimen with a trainer? 🏃🏋️🏋️
If so, you probably know the drill of what normally happens on the very first day when you show up to the gym to meet with the trainer.
Yes, they will probably discuss your health goals, health history, and any issues you’ve been recently having with your health and fitness (similar in some ways to what I do at your initial visits and reassessments)
But one thing they will DEFINITELY do with you right off the bat is get your starting weight (and probably Body Mass Index and some other measurements too) ⏲️
And it wouldn’t matter if you are one of those people who says that they don’t care about their weight and BMI because they are just focusing on being healthy and aren’t trying to lose weight. Your trainer would still insist on knowing your weight 🛑 #whetheryoulikeitornot
Taking your weight and other physical measurements on day 1 of a fitness regimen is important no matter what your goals are. Your weight isn’t everything– but it is SOMETHING. It’s data, and it’s not something you should be afraid of.
Similarly, in chiropractic, there are some important data points that help us get a sense of where you are, where you’ve been, and where you want to be going. We use these measures for clarity and to help us focus.
At New Day, these measures are:
☑️Your posture (and related to that your height)
☑️ sEMG– surface Electro Myography scan
☑️ my exam of your tension parameters and spinal tension cord patterns
☑️ (NEW): HRV— Heart Rate Variability test 💥💥💥💥
Heart Rate Variability is the newest test I have available to check the functioning of your nervous system.
It is also, arguably, the BEST objective indicator of your nervous system function. This test is part of the upcoming reassessment-palooza that I’m doing with clients.
Now, I’m going to take you through what this is and why it matters.
Have you heard of the Vagus Nerve? The Vagus Nerve has gotten a lot of press lately in mainstream and psychology literature as it relates to the stress response. Chiropractic care directly impacts the Vagus nerve. HRV is one way of measuring Vagal Tone.
Looking back, I guess I have always been really interested in Heart Rate Variability!
I found that I blogged it a couple years back while I was using the Whoop fitness tracker. You can read what I wrote here to get some more background.
Despite my longtime interest, I have only just now have I been able to add this to my repertoire for your New Client Appointments and Reassessments when I upgraded my sEMG (surface Electro Myography) equipment to the Insight system.
There are different devices on the market that measure HRV. They all use the same basic premise, but they may take measurements slightly differently depending on WHY they are measuring it. For example, the Whoop device took it’s HRV reading during sleep because of what this measurement would tell you about your restedness and recovery as you prepare for another workout.
The device I will be using with you now at New Day is called the neuroPULSE and is intended for use by chiropractors in chiropractic offices. The measurement is done before an adjustment and takes 3 minutes to complete. The reading it creates is a snapshot of the relative health and adaptability of your nervous system 📷
neuroPULSE shows us both your relative balance between the sympathetic (“fight or flight”) nervous system and parasympathetic system (“rest and digest”) system, as well as the overall activity level in your nervous system by using HRV, resting heart rate, and skin temperature data.
I have already been able to grab some of you before your adjustments to get this reading, and will be continuing until everyone has a baseline reading 🤗
Just like weight or BMI in a fitness program, this measure isn’t everything to us. But it is an important data point and something for us to keep tabs on going forward.
The colorful graph below on the right is an example of a reading from the neuroPULSE.
Note the 5 “Zones” of possible scores on this graph, and that in this case the white dot is in the lower left quadrant. This means that in this example, the person who was tested is showing increased sympathetic (fight or flight) activity, and slightly overall activity. A person with this reading would be functioning in a more challenged state.
This “Rainbow Graph” will show us your test results on the neuroPULSE. The graph divides all the potential scores into 5 zones. The Green Zone, or Zone 5, is the goal 💚💚💚
Zone 5 represents a well adjusted, adaptable nervous system with an abundant energetic reserve available. The other zones represent varying levels of overactivity, under-responsiveness, fatigue, and depletion.
When our nervous systems are exhibiting signs of imbalance, under-responsiveness, etc, this translates into having a less responsive immune system, more inflammation, less high-quality sleep, less balanced hormones, and more.
Hopefully you are excited to see your results from the neuroPULSE. I am too! 😊
As I gather this initial round of data on all New Day clients, as well as continuing my reading and learning about this indicator, I will be able to make the best recommendations possible for you so that you can continue to improve if needed.
If you’ve already seen your neuroPULSE reading and it wasn’t as good as you wanted it to be, that’s ok! Having this information, we are further along than we would have been without it. We are going to work on this together 👯
The good news is that receiving Network Spinal care on a regular basis has been shown in research to improve HRV. So if you are an existing client your neuroPULSE graph is likely better than it would have been if you weren’t already seeing me!
I’m excited for us all to have these new baselines to direct our focus going further, so that I can help bring us all to greater levels of nervous system health as a community 🌀🌍☀️
Thank you for staying with me and taking the time to read about this, New Day! I look forward to hearing from you, and seeing you this week 💖
