Unraveling the Mystery of Neck Pain

Among the myriad of issues addressed in the best physical therapy in Orlando, the connection between the thoracic spine, or “T-Spine,” and neck pain is particularly intriguing. When the T-Spine becomes restricted or “stuck”, it has a domino effect, causing a pull on the neck muscles. This tension, if not treated, manifests as persistent neck pain.

What Is Gait Training?

Simply put, gait training focuses on the science of movement. It’s not merely an offshoot of Functional Strength Training Orlando but a refined methodology to understand our walking and running patterns. Beyond the feet, gait training delves into the intricacies of our body’s coordination. It’s a harmonious dance where, for instance, the right arm and left leg sync during running, playing a crucial role in propulsion and balance.

The Evergreen Relevance of Explosive Exercises

Our age might determine the number of candles on our birthday cake, but when it comes to the efficacy of explosive exercises, age is just a number.
As we grow older, our body witnesses a decline in muscle mass, bone density, and overall strength. But should that deter us from challenging, intense workouts? No! In fact, engaging in explosive exercises becomes more vital as we age.

Are you an active individual seeking to maintain your physical vitality and prevent injuries? It’s time to discover the proactive power of sports physical therapy, particularly right here in Orlando. At ND Wellness, one of the best physical therapy centers in Orlando, we focus on holistic health, promoting a vibrant, injury-free lifestyle for all our clients.

Many people perceive physical therapy, especially sports physiotherapy, as a reactive approach – a way to regain strength and mobility after an injury or surgery. However, the reality is that physical therapy can serve as a proactive tool to enhance your wellbeing and performance while preventing injuries.

I’ve devoted my professional life to understanding human movement and the principles of functional fitness. A recurring theme in many discussions around body aches and pains is the practice of yoga.

While yoga has an established reputation for enhancing flexibility, balance, and mental peace, it’s crucial to acknowledge its limitations in the context of functional training, especially for our friends here in Orlando.

The Need for Functional Mobility over Flexibility

Yoga is often lauded for its focus on flexibility. However, prioritizing flexibility over functional mobility can lead to instability and hypermobility in your joints. As a proponent of Functional Exercise in Orlando, I advocate for functional mobility, emphasizing joint movements through their entire range of motion. This is crucial for stability, strength, and ultimately, improved functional fitness.

Functional Exercise: The Key to Daily Life and Athletic Excellence

Functional exercise forms the bedrock of a well-rounded fitness program.
Unlike workouts focused solely on aesthetics or lifting weights in isolation, functional training in Orlando is geared towards enhancing our ability to perform real-life activities. These exercises aim to correct imbalances, optimize movement patterns, and ultimately lead to improved physical function and injury prevention.

Just like any sturdy building, our bodies need a strong, well-balanced foundation. Functional exercises, carefully designed to mimic daily movements, provide this groundwork. These exercises don’t just prepare us for physical tasks. They allow our bodies to move efficiently and gracefully, minimizing the risk of injury.

At ND Wellness in Orlando, we’re always at the cutting edge of health and wellness techniques. Today, I’d like to share with you an approach that may seem simple, almost primal, but is rooted in scientific evidence and offers numerous health benefits. This is the art and science of going barefoot.

Trace back to our ancestors, who navigated vast terrains – forests, deserts, mountains – sans shoes. This connection to the Earth led to profound physiological and biomechanical benefits. Let’s explore how these benefits can be harnessed in the domain of sports physical therapy.

Here are compelling reasons why integrating ‘going barefoot’ into your sports physio regimen in Orlando is a game-changer:

As we bask in the warmth of the sun-drenched summer in Orlando, many of us are striving to achieve our personal fitness goals. We’ve logged miles on the treadmill and remained faithful to our diets, yet that persistent belly fat may still linger. If this scenario feels familiar, you’re not alone, and the remedy may be unique and unexpected.

It turns out that the pesky fat you’ve been battling could, in reality, be chronic or trapped inflammation. Yes, it’s a surprising revelation for many. But, recognizing this paves the way to realizing the body transformation you’ve been ardently working towards.

In the vast panorama of human evolution, our muscles and muscular anatomy have been carefully crafted by nature. It’s time we re-imagine our approach to fitness with functional training in Orlando, harmonizing with our inherent physiological design.

As our ancestors roamed the earth, they weren’t isolating muscle groups for a workout. Instead, their daily activities—running, hunting, gathering—required them to utilize every muscle in their bodies concurrently. This orchestration of muscle groups working together reflects our body’s natural functional exercise patterns, which have been refined over thousands of years of evolution.

“I had to take myself out of everything and focus on what I had to do.”
“Obviously, I was nervous,” recalls newly minted Worlds Under 17 Girls champion Hannah Stopnicki. “But I knew what I had to do and I decided as long as I did that, everything was going to be okay.”

Having already completed a championship level run at Pan-Ams at the end of 2022, Hannah placed first at Worlds in January of this year in the Tricks category and her home country, Team Canada, finished with a silver medal placement overall.

Stopnicki was doing all this while receiving treatment and care for multiple hindering injuries.

“I had a partial dislocation in my hip which I had been training on. There was issues with my ligaments and SI joint and inflammation in my muscles,” Stopnicki said.

“There were times I thought and even tried to have the hard conversation with her that we may need to consider not going to Pan-Am’s to give her some time to heal and a fighting chance of making it to Worlds, which was 4-5 weeks later but she wouldn’t hear it,” Hannah’s mom Christina said. “Even when things were bleak, she knew she would go, compete, win and be good for the team score.”

Are you looking for a workout routine that can improve your shoulder strength, flexibility, and posture while preventing injuries? Look no further than club training. Unlike traditional gym equipment such as dumbbells and barbells, clubs can provide a unique and effective tool for developing a strong, mobile, and injury-resistant shoulder complex.

One of the most significant benefits of using clubs is that it can help improve shoulder mobility and flexibility. The dynamic swinging motions used in club training can help stretch and strengthen the shoulder muscles and joints in ways that traditional exercises cannot. By connecting the shoulder back into the torso, hips, and feet, club training helps to integrate the entire body into the movement, resulting in a stronger and more stable shoulder complex.

It takes your entire body working in sequence to have that effortless, effective, reproducible swing all of us want as golfers! Here at New Dimensions Wellness we say there are three main movement pillars of the body that must have mobility and strength. These “three pillars” are the foot/ankle complex, the hips and the thoracic spine. I will focus on the hips, because we all know that they don’t lie, as sang by the beautiful Shakira.

The hips are one of the most mobile joints in the body as they go through six measurable ranges of motions as compared to the knee which only has two. Therefore, it is imperative that the hips have good mobility in order to keep the body from compensating from a less mobile joint. From the bottom up, the body is assembled in a mobile-immobile-mobile-immobile-mobile fashion. Meaning the feet are very mobile, the knees are not, the hips are very mobile, the lumbar spine is not and the thoracic spine is therefore mobile. If the joints that are supposed to be mobile are not, then the immobile joints must move to compensate thus starting the aches and pains which can keep a golfer away from the course.

If you are like most you have a love/hate relationship with golf. Sometimes (when you’re playing well) you love it and other times it can be the cruelest game around. The question is how can we change our minds and our bodies to make golf as easy as Sunday morning and leave our rounds feeling refreshed, revitalized and content.

When we are playing with expectations of a result and the fear of what can go wrong, it is easy to get frustrated with ourselves if that expectation is not met. With this comes feelings of low self esteem, anger, frustration, fear, insecurity and many other negative emotions. When we resonate with the frequencies and vibrations of these emotions, we attract more of this negativity towards us and life becomes increasingly difficult. Golf becomes increasingly difficult and not much fun. We can become physically sick, manifest pain in our bodies and negatively impact the people around us.

What if I told you that I had the simplest golf performance hack imaginable? What if I then said it has nothing to do with swing technique, wrist angles or body positions? That you would not need to see a guru or perform painstaking drills to reprogram your body?

Everything in our bodies are made up of cells. This means EVERYTHING! Our blood, muscles, organs, nerves, bones, ligaments and hair are all cells. Our cells are specialized to conduct electrical currents. Electricity is required for the nervous system to send signals throughout the body and to the brain, making it possible for us to move, think and feel. Water is a great conductor of electricity. Electricity moves through water like Michael Phelps in a pool at the Olympics! Our cells are supposed to be composed of 70% water. What does this mean for you?

“I’ve worked with a lot of trainers in the past. New Dimensions was my first time getting the whole package in one place. I learned more than ever about the connections in our body and how everything ties in and plays a role in living a healthy life and especially in my athletic performance.”

Pro golfer Motin Yeung came to New Dimensions with doors unlocking in his career, but impingements and pain locking his body. Born and raised in China, Yeung picked up golf around the age of 13 and placed well in early tournaments. In just a year’s time, he won his first events. Yeung realized he could use golf as a tool to make a better life for he and his family. He set his sights overseas to the States.

Find out what she did instead

“You’re done with golf. You’re never going to run again. You may never walk again. You need immediate surgery and even then, your playing days are done.”

When Trinidad & Tobago professional golfer and University of Central Florida women’s golf alum Monifa Sealy was told these words by her doctor, she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She spent her entire childhood as one of the most successful, up-and-coming golfers from her country and had eyes on a professional career in the LPGA.

This wasn’t what she spent her whole life painstakingly working for.

“It was by far one of the worst things to happen to me,” Sealy said. “This was the first time I had been put out of golf for such a long time.”

Sealy was at a traditional gym training doing deadlifts. In the middle of a lift on the way up, she heard a loud pop in her back.

Elizabeth Gibson was afraid. Her lifelong fear of being in water was alive and real. As the waves tossed and turned around her, she began to hyperventilate.

30+ years of embedded fear was sweeping over her. She had been scuba certified in Japan, dove the Great Barrier Reef and lived on a lake, each and every time fighting back crippling dread. This terror was inserting itself into moments that were otherwise beautiful memories. She decided enough was enough.

It was time to take her life back. She decided to seek out the help of New Dimensions Wellness Club.

Gibson was no stranger to being around water, growing up with a father that was in the Navy. Born in Oklahoma, she spent her entire life as a Navy brat and her family moved when she was just two months old. She also spent time in Alaska, California, Texas, Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Florida and Japan.

Think of the biggest iceberg you can possibly imagine. Grand in scale, seemingly larger than life. Each marked with different features and details from its travels. While they can be massive in scale on the surface, the bulk of each iceberg, what it is truly made up of, lies beneath the surface. This is known as the “Iceberg Theory”.

The same can be said of the Richbourg family. On the surface, they are known as some of the hardest working members of the New Dimensions Wellness community. What lies beneath tells their whole story.

All the time spent away from his family came with costs. He had missed his son’s first year and a half of high school. Stuck at a desk the majority of his days, his back was left compressed. Hours on hours, miles upon miles of travel left his body sore and achey. Frozen meals and uncomfortable beds left him sleepless and sluggish. All of this effort was to provide the life he wanted for his family, but his body was getting beaten so badly he wouldn’t be able to enjoy what he worked so hard to create. These should have been prime years of his life, but his body was stuck in an unsustainable cycle.

From Texas, to Illinois, to Florida, Matthew Giglio is no stranger to packing up and moving his life in the interest of family.

As a 23 year old engineering student in college at Texas A&M years ago, he and his wife Stacey Giglio welcomed their first child. Typically, the pressures of an engineering course load, prospective career paths and a growing family would add up to intense pressure that would be a lot for a college-aged young adult to handle.

From growing up in Michigan to studying in Chicago, teaching English in Thailand, living in Australia making jewelry and traveling to over 30 countries around the globe, Hannah Mae Levy has seen it all.

As a Florida fashion and jewelry designer running her own business, it takes a high level of confidence and focus to thrive in such a competitive industry. That wasn’t always the case for Levy, as every entrepreneur is well familiar with the uncertainties and pressures associated with taking that leap of faith on your dreams.

“I always knew I didn’t want to be in Michigan,” Levy said. “I wanted to go to Chicago after high school.”