If you’re someone like myself, with the weather getting nicer and the sun staying out a little longer, you’re starting to get the itch to get out on your bicycle. With the abundance of quiet roads and trails on the South Shore, it’s the perfect place to spin your wheels. Cycling is a great form of exercise providing a huge variety of health benefits. Regular and consistent bouts of cardiovascular exercise have been associated with decreased risk of a wide variety of diseases

You would be hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t heard of, or doesn’t know of someone, affected be osteoarthritis (OA). OA is very common, affecting 1 in 6 Canadians, and only expected to become more prevalent in the coming years. It’s seen more often with age, and tends to affect the large weight-bearing joints such as the knees and hips most commonly. Now often when someone hears the term OA, they immediately associate it with a one way ticket to a joint replacement sur

I thought I would take a minute this month to discuss resistance training, and hopefully help clear up some thoughts and misconceptions that may be preventing people from taking part. Resistance training is defined as an exercise aimed at improving muscular fitness (strength/ endurance/ power) by exercising against some kind of external force (e.g. weights/ cables/ bands). By forcing a muscle to work against an external force to fatigue over time, that muscle will adapt to me

Degenerative meniscus tears are a common cause of knee pain. Often, these injuries are treated through surgery. Specifically, arthroscopic meniscectomies are performed, where the surgeon enters the knee joint and removes the damaged part of the meniscus, keeping as much of the meniscus in tact as possible. Intuitively, that makes sense. If pain is arising from a tear in the meniscus, removing that tear should remove the symptoms. But recent research is throwing that view into

The average full time worker spends about 8 hours a day at the office. Depending on your occupation, a lot of that time can be spent sedentary. Sedentary behaviour is defined as a period of behaviour assumed during waking hours where you are expending minimal energy (e.g. sitting, lying down). As I’m sure most people are aware, too much sedentary time is not good… So much so that when the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology published their updated Physical Activity Guide

Chances are if you’ve taken part in any sport, activity, or physical education class, you’ve given stretching a try. But have you ever asked yourself why you stretch? Today I wanted to review stretching, the rationale behind it, and what the science is saying. First off, let’s run over the two main types of stretching. Static stretching, which is probably what you’re most familiar with, involves bringing a tissue to the end of its range and holding it there for an extended pe

A lot of people ask us this time of year whether we see an increase in people through the door with fall-related injuries from the snow and ice and as you can imagine the answer is yes, however one population seems to get it the worst. Falls are the leading cause of injury and injury-related hospitalization in seniors and nearly 20-30% of seniors experience one of more falls each year resulting in costs upwards of two billion dollars per year across Canada. Although there’s d

There’s no doubt that exercise is associated with positive outcomes for a slew of different conditions including but not limited to: high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, different cancers, osteoarthritis, dementia, and depression. There are studies being conducted all the time that continue to reinforce these benefits and the importance of fitting it in to our regular routines. The problem isn’t that people are unaware of the benefits of exercise, but that they don’t