Gardening and Your Back

Gardening is a favorite pastime of many Americans. It is an opportunity to breathe fresh air, beautify your home and exercise your muscles. Back pain, however, can take the joy out of gardening. But a bad back does not always signal the end of your gardening hobby. Oftentimes it is merely your body’s way of telling you to correct your posture and be more careful. So, if you want to deal with your back pain and continue gardening in a healthy way, read on to learn a few tips for safe gardening techniques with a bad back.

1. Wear comfortable clothes and shoes.

2. Stretch before you start gardening: Take 5 to 10 minutes to loosen up your muscles and get your blood flowing.

3. Use proper posture: This is perhaps the simplest and most important tip for people gardening with bad backs – you must lift and bend correctly while working! If you have good posture when gardening, you are going to have less pain.  So, instead of using your back muscles to lift, you should take advantage of the stronger muscles in your thighs and buttocks.  You can utilize these muscles by bending your knees, leaning over from the hips and keeping your back straight from the base of your neck all the way down to the end of your spine. If you find this difficult to do on your own, you might want to consider wearing a back brace for extra help maintaining proper positioning when bending and lifting.

4. Use a wheelbarrow and kneeling stool: If you are going to spend a lot of time working close to the ground, use a lightweight portable garden stool to protect your knees and joints while kneeling. Make sure you don’t strain your back when moving from place to place in your garden by lifting heavy things on your own. If you don’t have a wheelbarrow, it’s a good investment for your health to buy one. Ask for help from family or neighbors to load heavy items into or out of your wheelbarrow or divide up a large load into several more manageable smaller loads.

5. Keep flowerbeds narrow and weed-free:You will save yourself from straining your back if you don’t have to lean over lots of plants in a wide bed. Instead, design your garden so that you can easily maneuver around plants without having to reach too far. Also, make sure not to leave bare patches of soil where weeds will want to grow. Mulch the surface of your garden beds and use ground cover plants to maintain moisture and suppress weeds. This will minimize the need for bending over and straining your back to remove unwanted plants

6. Use appropriate tools:If you use gardening tools with handles that are too short or too heavy to allow you to easily reach the areas you need, you will increase the likelihood of straining your back. Instead, try using lightweight tools with long handles or extensions

If you feel pain while you’re gardening,  that’s your body telling you to stop. However, don't stop all movement entirely. Don’t sit down, go for a little walk, even if it’s just down to the end of the block and back. The main thing to remember when gardening with a bad back is to break up the work into manageable increments and to continue stretching your muscles throughout the process and to enjoy your beautiful garden.

Valentine's Day and Dark Chocolate: A great Combination

Chocolate lovers take heart! Recent findings reveal that dark chocolate is packed with high-quality polyphenol antioxidants that may promote overall cardiovascular health. Cocoa beans also contain flavonoids (like those found in tea and red wine), which promote healthy cholesterol levels and act as antioxidants. Great news!

Chocolate is also full of phenylethylamine, a naturally occurring substance in the body believed to help ward off the blues, as well as stearic acid, a unique saturated fat thought to help lower cholesterol. How’s that for proof positive that eating chocolate may make you happy and healthy?

A sweet side note: As if that wasn’t enough to convince you to dig in, chocolate also provides a slew of daily nutrients. A 1.4-ounce milk chocolate bar contains about 3 grams of protein, 7% of the adult daily value (DV) of riboflavin, 8% of the DV for calcium and 5% of the DV for iron.

So don't feel guilty for eating a square of dark chocolate and be sure you buy some for your Valentine too!

BodyBasics Corona

We are so excited to announce that BodyBasics Physical Therapy has opened up a new location in Corona! It is a beautiful facility located in South Corona. The address is:


2275 S. Main Street, Suite 102
Corona, CA 92882
Phone: (951) 273-7742

Our phone number has remained the same.


For directions to our new location: http://bodybasicspt.com/library_directions_1534

We continue to serve you at our Norco location as well.

It’s 2011, and for many of you better physical fitness is one of your New Year’s resolutions. We want this year to be your best year ever. So, in this video, we offer a few tips to help you achieve your goals.

                                      Click here to watch the video!

Our Services:

Orthopedic Rehab

Fitness Programs
Women's Health
Sports Rehab
Strength Training
Pelvic Pain Rehab
Hand Therapy
Sports Screening
Foot Orthotics


We look forward to serving you at either location and hope you have a Happy New Year!

Happy Holidays

The holidays are here and we want you to enjoy them! View our video newletter for ways to relieve your holiday stress. To view our video newsletter, click on the link below.

http://www.bodybasicspt.com/library_nl_1083

Your First Visit

We want your experience at Bodybasics Physical Therapy to be a pleasant one. These are a few tips to help your initial appointment run smoothly.

First, Avoid the Waiting Room:


Click Here To Download Your Paperwork

Print the paperwork, fill it out at home, and bring it in for your scheduled appointment. By doing so, we should be able to get started with you much sooner.

If you can't view the paperwork, get the free Adobe Acrobat Reader

For your first visit, please remember:

1. Insurance Card

2. Prescription for therapy that you received from your doctor

3. Wear comfortable clothes so we can assess your condition

For Worker's Compensation Cases:

Case Number - Only Worker's Compensation Patients
Phone number of your case manager - Only Worker's Compensation Patients

Location information:
We have two locations to serve you in Corona and Norco.

Bodybasics Physical Therapy
3179 Hamner, Suite 7
Norco, CA 92860
(951) 736-5646

Inland Empire Physical Therapy
1303 W. Sixth St., Suite 104
Corona, CA 92882
(951) 273-7742

Click here to View the map and address

October is National Physical Therapy Month

Are you aware that October is National Physical Therapy month?  In recognition of this, we would like to present to you some informative facts.





Good news for seniors: Part of the prescription for a healthier, better retirement is exercise. That simple? Yes, it is!
Physical exercise has been proven to discourage declines in health and fitness. Join the growing number of seniors who are actively demonstrating that exercise helps keep a body strong and on the go.
The best retirement is a healthy one
Did you know that moderate physical activity can help you live longer? That it can actually reduce health hazards? It's true.
So is the fact that regular exercise helps control blood pressure, body weight and cholesterol levels, and reduces the risks of hardening of the arteries, heart attack and stroke.
A well-balanced fitness program holds other benefits for you, too. It conditions muscles, tendons, ligaments and bones to help fight osteoporosis, keep your body more limber and stabilize your joints, lowering the risk of everyday injury. Regular physical activity can even help you maintain your independence.
Physical exercise is probably the best all-natural laxative you'll find. It not only improves digestion, but exercise is also good for managing lower back pain, arthritis and diabetes. And recently, there's been more indication that an active lifestyle helps lower the risk for certain types of cancer.
But maybe the best reason for incorporating regular exercise into your life is that you'll feel better and enjoy life more. Exercise helps you sleep better, manage stress better, and gives you more endurance to enjoy work and play.

If you are unsure how to get started consult your physical therapist for an exercise program and fitness plan. Physical Therapy can help prevent falls!  According to the National Aging Council, about one in three seniors above the age of 65 and nearly one in two above the age of 80 will fall once this year.  We are there to help you improve on your balance skills and therefore prevent those falls.



Physical Therapy helped 92% of patients with low back pain.  Along with our hands on care, we will help direct you on an appropriate exercise program to manage your back.  (Spine July 2008)

Physical Therapy developed exercise programs can reduce athletes risk of injury by 41%, With proper conditioning and stretches, we can instruct you properly so these risks can be reduced.  (American Journal of Sports Medicine Aug. 2008)

We are here for you to improve your quality of life. By working together, we can formulate an exercise program and help you reduce the risk of falls, manage your low back pain, and reduce the risk of injury while enjoying an active lifestyle.

Back to School with a Healthy Start

Now that the children are returning to school, it’s time to make their lunches once again. Instead of their typical PB&Jelly sandwiches, chips and soda; how about switching it up a little and giving them something a little more nutritious? You can send them on with a yogurt, cream cheese celery sticks, slices of apples that have soaked in pineapple juice (so they don’t discolor), pretzels, and of course a bottle of water. By giving them something healthy, they can think more clearly during their day. Thankfully, creating a healthy midday meal doesn't have to be time-consuming. The key is creativity,  a trove of healthy recipes that can be quickly prepared.  A lot of kids get bored with sandwiches, but take the same ingredients and package them in a different way, and it becomes a lunch your child gets excited to eat.  Your kid might stick her tongue out at a ham and cheese sandwich, in other words, but gobble up ham and cheese shish kebabs—chunks of skewered whole-grain bread, ham, cheddar cheese, and a few cherry tomatoes.

Another way to improve the odds that your brown bag lunch will actually be eaten—not trashed or traded—is by getting your child involved. So get your kids involved and start them off with a healthy new school year!