Cooking Pain Series Part 1

Holiday Pain in the you know what. Does holiday cooking leave you in pain?

Holiday cooking can be fun but it can also wreak havoc on your joints. More time spent in the kitchen, often hours, leads to sore joints all over. Holiday home chefs like you often complain of sore hips, knees, backs, and yes — a pain in the neck. In this series of posts, I’ll lead you through some solutions to get you out of pain now and take you through some tactics to prevent it from happening again. We’ll also fill in some details on why this happens.

PROBLEM

Back
Low back spasm or soreness from all that mixing of cookie dough.

Hip
Hours of shifting hips and pivoting between counter tops and cooking stations leads to sharp pain in the side of the hip or deep in the rear.

Knee
Standing on a hard kitchen floor travels up from ankle to knee causing pain typically above the knee cap towards the midline of the body.

Neck
Mixing up ingredients and reading through recipes has lead to a stiff neck. Perhaps even headaches.

SOLUTION:
This is the first and most important step out of a sequence of steps I will introduce in a series of posts. It applies to all the above joint maladies.

Belly Breath in Table Top (also known as Tummy Vacuum)

How to set up in position:

1. Line up hips over knees and shoulders over wrists

2. Fingers point straight ahead, hollows of elbows point forward (boney prominence of elbow points behind you). Bend elbows an inch or two to line up shoulders with your hip height (keep elbows tight by ribs).

3. Keep lumbar curve (curve in small of back)

How to do the movement:

1. Breathe deeply in and let stomach drop and relax. Breathe in and expand, relaxing abdominals.

2. Exhale all of your breath out as you pull your belly button up to your spine. Hold belly in for a count of 10. Repeat 10 times.
Visualize that you shrink wrap your abs in tight as you exhale all your air. Make sure not arch your back like a cat and do not tuck your tailbone under as you exhale out. You should keep your lumbar curve in place. You only want your deep layer of abdominals working you are not moving your pelvis or spine.

I often find with my clients that upper body strength is the limiting factor when they first start this exercise. If you need to then do it for 30 seconds at a time and build up to a full minute. Make sure not to sink into your shoulders as you get tired.

This exercise will provide direct relief after a couple days of doing a set every single day. Work up to doing 3 sets of 10, holding for a count of 10 on each repetition.

“You can’t shoot a cannon out of a canoe.”
Paul Chek

WHY:
The center of the issue, the root of the matter, lies in the core. Do this easy exercise to strengthen your inner deep abdominal muscles that hold you upright. They support everything you do. The forces of mixing dough, shifting your weight, standing for hours on a hard floor get transferred to sensitive joints if the core does not give you a stable platform to work off of. As famously said by Paul Chek — the founder of the functional coaching program the CHEK Institute which I first trained under — “You can’t shoot a cannon out of a canoe.”

Essentially, if you do not have enough strength in your trunk to support lifting your limbs (arms and legs) then the forces (friction, gravity, shear etc.) will directly cause pain in your hips, back, knees and/or neck from poor motion. Therefore, start with this exercise for immediate results. I will introduce next steps for each joint in the following posts.