Ten Keys to Making it through Thanksgiving without Feeling More Stuffed than the Turkey

Thanksgiving is a great holiday to get together with family and friends and remember all of the great things and people we have in our lives. Unfortunately, it also has a reputation of offering way more food than anyone could possibly eat without exploding. Survive the multitude of heavy sides, savory entrees, and mouth-watering desserts by following the following tips.

Yoga for Performing Artists: 7 Ideal Poses for Dancers

This is the second article in a series designed to help you identify a handful of yoga positions that will be most beneficial to your particular performance genre. The first article was for marching band members.  This article focuses on dancers.  Check back for future articles for instrumentalists (not marching) and stage crew.

Practicing yoga offers performers many significant benefits, including lowering stress levels, promoting physical and mental relaxation, improving balance, and maintaining or improving flexibility. All of these things can help keep your immune system functioning optimally, maintain a healthy body weight, and reduce the likelihood of falls that can cause injuries. Additionally, regular yoga practice can improve body awareness, which can improve precision of movement, improve aesthetic qualities of performance and movement, lower unnecessary muscular tension, and improve posture.

10 Keys to Saving your Back...and Your Performing Career

This is the second article in a series examining low back pain and injury in the performing arts.

Nearly all people, active or otherwise, will experience back pain at some point in their lives. Most often, back pain is caused by a combination of poor posture and bad mechanics, specifically lifting technique. Adhering to the rules of lifting can save you a great deal of pain and disability – and may even keep you from missing rehearsals and performances due to back pain.

Your Guide to Pain Medicine

Pain is the most common reason people seek medical attention, so it’s no surprise that there are so many different medicines designed to reduce or eliminate pain. Pain signals are sent to the brain through the body’s nerves after pain receptors on the nerve endings have been activated by chemical, mechanical, or thermal damage to tissue cells. Medication and therapeutic treatments aimed at reducing pain work through a variety of mechanisms, including removing/limiting the irritants that contribute to pain, raising the threshold of the nerve endings to delay pain signal transmission (you have to be in more pain before your nerves decide that it’s important enough to tell your brain about it), or preventing or removing the swelling that increases mechanical pressure on nerve endings.

Pain medicine covers a wide range of types of medication, including counterirritants, local anesthetics, analgesics (narcotic and non-narcotic), anti-inflammatories (including steroid-based and non-steroid-based), and antipyretics. This article only addresses oral medication (pills) that is available over the counter (OTC) (as opposed to prescription medications), focusing primarily on analgesics and anti-inflammatories.

Shoulder Injuries in the Performing Arts: "Stingers"

This is the third and final article in a series on shoulder injuries in the performing arts. This series of articles addresses fairly damaging acute shoulder injuries. Unless otherwise noted, these injuries are substantial enough that they should not be self-treated until after you've seen a medical professional who has instructed you to do so. These traumatic shoulder injuries should be treated as emergencies, since there is a high risk of significant complications if they are improperly or incompletely cared for (these complications can include nerve damage, internal bleeding, and nonunion fractures).

What to Look for on a Nutrition Label

Eating nutritious, well-balanced meals is important because the food you eat is your body’s fuel. Giving your body what it needs can keep you healthy, help you achieve or maintain your target weight, improve your physical and mental performance, and improve your mood. But eating well can be very challenging. There are many factors that can get in the way – cost, time available for meal preparation, food allergies and preferences, daily schedule – but one factor that prevents many people from eating as well as they’d like is a lack of awareness of how to use a food item’s nutrition label and ingredients list to help make informed decisions.

Interpreting nutrition labels and ingredients lists can be intimidating, but it is incredibly helpful when comparing similar foods or identifying the nutritional value of your current diet.

6 Upper Body Stretches All Marchers Should Be Doing

This article opens a series examining upper body stretches for specific types of performing artists. The grouping of stretches presented in this article is targeted toward musicians who stand when they play and for members of the marching band. Future articles in this series will identify key upper body stretches for dancers and seated musicians.