I recommend variety in exercise for several reasons, one of the main ones being that this causes us to move different muscles and different joints in different ways. This is important because if we do not do this, if we move the same way all the time for many years we actually can wear joints out. This is why we have so many knee, hip, and shoulder replacements happening. So as everyone who knows me knows, I am partial to yoga for this very reason - it moves your body in a thousand different ways (probably not an exaggeration). Yoga invites your joints to move in ways they normally would not in day to day living. But some people do not like yoga which I understand. Pilates is also good. Or just doing a variety of things like running and basketball or touch football or ballet or body weight exercise or lifting weights or boxing. Just mix it up some.   

I get acupuncture ever other week or more. It's just one of the things I do to stay healthy. It's hard to understand from a western standpoint how acupuncture makes us healthier. But the best word to describe it might be balance. Acupuncture brings balance to all the systems in the body. It does this through acupuncture points that were mapped out more than 3000 years ago and have been in constant use and scrutiny. These acupuncture points affect our organs making them healthier. Healthy organs lead to overall balance of all the systems that work to keep us so healthy that we don't even have to think about it. Acupuncture also cuts stress and can even affect the way that the body reacts to stress. Acupuncture cuts inflammation which is good for just about everything.  Our regulars here are some of the healthiest people around.  So I recommend you come in and stay healthy.

This is just my personal opinion, perhaps more so than my usual blog posts. In my opinion its better to do some exercise every day (or nearly every day) instead of doing a big workout a few days a week. I believe this really from just experimenting on myself. What really taught me this was doing a certain type of yoga call ashtanga yoga. In ashtanga yoga you do a certain set of poses (depending on your level) 6 days a week. I did this type of yoga for a solid 3 years and I was in great shape. I felt great and I moved I thought like I was 10 or 15 years younger. If we do some type of exercise 6 days a week the benefits really add up. Just like learning the piano or guitar where they say to really advance to practice some every day, even if it is only 10 or 15 minutes. I think exercise is the same way. What do I do now for exercise? Twenty to 30 minutes of yoga 6 days a week first thing in the morning, treadmill for 10 minutes and my rebounder (mini-trampoline) another 10 minutes. Every other day or so I do some medium hard weight lifting. I take Saturdays off as a recovery day and now and then a lighter day where I might just do yoga if I feel I need it. 

The latest evidence is that yes, coffee is good for us all. The latest actual research says that up to 5 cups a day is not only OK but has great benefits like lower risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, liver cancer and Parkinson's. The only caveat I would include here is that from a Chinese medicine standpoint, if you tend to run warm, coffee is a drink that adds heat to body. So if this sounds like you then drink it in moderation or maybe not every day. Most things are best in moderation. Except maybe water!

A microsystem in acupuncture is any part of the body from which you can treat the entire body. The Chinese, very early on, recognized the symmetry of the human body. They noticed that our hands look similar to our feet and also move and work in a similar way. Our forearm looks very similar to our lower leg and so on. They also realized that parts of the body look similar to the entire body. They noticed this especially in the feet, the hands and the ear (imagine an upside down baby image in the ear, imagine the back of the hand as the human back, the front as the gut area, the fingers as the arms and legs). There are many such microsystems but perhaps the most common are the ear, used in aricular acupuncture, and the foot used in reflexology. This is why in reflexology the entire body can be treated by rubbing the feet. We use ear acupuncture every day in our clinic. We might use needles in the back to treat back pain and add the back point in the ear to make the treatment more effective. We often get asked why we typically treat just one ear with the needles. This is because each ear represents the whole body so you don't need to do both of them. Korean hand acupuncture is also a commonly used microsystem where usually just the hand is needled in a typical treatment.