Complete health and wellness involve the whole person and are established and maintained by addressing issues at their root. Complete health is not about never getting sick or having symptoms. It’s about how the body heals when you do have a problem. Because the human body is designed not to be healthy but to heal.
Optimal health is obtained with your participation. It’s a lifestyle choice. The body is designed to heal itself, but you are the one who is responsible for providing your body with the conditions necessary for health and healing.
Since our definition of complete health is establishing and maintaining your body’s innate healing capacity, we focus on three main foundational factors that empower our clients to maintain that capacity.
Nerve Flow
Any effective plan for complete health must involve spinal care and awareness for one simple reason: nerve flow.
Exercise
Exercise is another integral aspect of complete health and wellness. But it’s important to know what exercise you should do.
While many people believe the focus should be on the cardio aspects of exercise, this is not the case. Cardio alone actually slows metabolism. That means when you aren’t active, your body stores fatter.
Resistance is the number one exercise modality for maintaining complete health because it speeds up metabolism by increasing muscle mass. This prompts your body to burn fat calories even while you are inactive.
So, while I recommend doing cardio as part of your exercise routine (as well as mobility and mindfulness practices), if you only have time to do one, resistance training should be your go-to. This is one way to avoid being in the 85% of people whose diet and exercise programs fail.
Another tremendous benefit of regular resistance training exercise is hormone regulation. And not just sex hormones like estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone. Resistance training helps regulate adrenal function and insulin production, while cardio alone increases stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. This drains the body’s resources and causes a crash later, not to mention the other undesirable effects on digestion and other aspects of well-being.
See this blog post for more on the benefits and specifics of resistance training.
Water and Nutrition
What are you putting into your body?
The most fundamental aspect of nutrition is water. It’s the foundation of life. And water, as nature intended, is not complicated. Unfortunately, it has become challenging to obtain water as nature intended it.
If you would like to know more about the essential aspects of water (like how it needs to be structured, what minerals it should contain, and how to ensure you are drinking the best water possible), check out this blog post and this blog post.
SUMMARY
The human body, in its optimal state, is a healing technology. Just as a tiny cut heals in a few days, any imbalance can be returned to health when the body is maintained so it can function optimally.
At Advanced Alignment, our focus is on helping our clients become aware of and develop the foundational factors that keep the body in a state of homeostasis, allowing it to do what it is designed to do: heal.