Amplify Health and Wellness

10/16/2026

Not the trails this weekend 🏔️
On a plane instead — out of town to help my parents. That wraps the training. From here it's taper, a little speed work, and then Canyonlands.
Some weekends are for miles. Some are for showing up somewhere else. Both count.
Hope yours is a good one. What's the plan?

10/15/2026

Thursday Thoughts 🏔️ Two weeks out from Canyonlands and I'm not training this weekend — I'm out of town helping my parents. Convention last weekend, family this one, and then it's taper. That's it. The build is done, whatever it ended up being.

Six months ago that would've frustrated me. It doesn't now.

The race matters. It doesn't matter more than this. I'm not running 62 miles through the desert so I can post about it — I'm doing it because I want to be someone who can still do hard things, and the whole point of being able to do hard things is being able to show up for the people who need you.

If training ever starts competing with that, the training lost the plot.

Your health isn't the goal. It's what lets you go be useful.

Who are you showing up for right now? ⬇

10/14/2026

Wellness Wednesday. Here's a ten-second test most people fail and almost nobody has heard of.

Stand facing a wall, barefoot (I know, I did it with my shoes on). Put your toes about a hand's width back from it. Now drive your knee forward toward the wall, keeping your heel flat on the floor. Can your knee touch?

If your heel lifts before your knee gets there, your ankle is short on dorsiflexion, which is the motion of your shin traveling forward over your foot. You use it every single step, every stair, and every time you squat down to pick something up.

And when the ankle can't provide it, the motion gets borrowed from somewhere else. The foot flattens to find it. The knee drifts inward. The hip and low back make up the difference. That's the same chain I've been writing about for the last several weeks, just starting one joint lower.

Old ankle sprains are a common culprit here. People stop limping, call it healed, and never get the motion back. Years later the knee on that side starts complaining and nobody connects the two.

Try both sides — the difference between them is often the interesting part.

Did your heel lift? Which side was worse? ⬇

10/13/2026

Truth Tuesday. MYTH: "Chiropractors only treat backs and necks."

Eleven weeks of posts about spines probably didn't help my case here, so let me correct the record: extremity work is my favorite part of this job.

Shoulders, knees, ankles, elbows, wrists, hips. The principles don't change when you leave the spine. A joint that isn't moving the way it should makes its neighbors pick up the slack, and the neighbors eventually complain. That's as true for an ankle as it is for a lumbar segment.

I see a lot of people who've spent months on a stubborn shoulder or a knee that never quite came back, who had no idea this was even an option. Frozen shoulders, tennis elbow that isn't responding, ankles that never regained full motion after a sprain years ago, wrists that bother them at a keyboard.

Sometimes the fix is at the joint itself. Often it's upstream or downstream from where it hurts, which is the whole theme of the last few weeks here. Either way, it starts with examining the thing rather than assuming.

If you've got something that's been hanging around and nobody's looked at it from this angle, that's worth a conversation.

What's the nagging one for you? Shoulder, knee, ankle? ⬇

10/09/2026

Not my other office this weekend
I'm at my annual chiropractic convention picking up continuing education credits instead of picking up miles. Three weeks out from Canyonlands and this was supposed to be my biggest training weekend — but this is the one weekend a year I get to sit in a room full of people who do what I do and find out what I've been missing.
Twenty-five years in and I still leave these things with a list of things to try. That's a good sign, I think. The day I stop learning is the day you should find a different doctor.
Back on the trails next week. What's your weekend look like?

10/08/2026

Thursday Thoughts

This weekend was supposed to be my biggest training weekend before Canyonlands. Instead I'll be at my annual chiropractic convention earning CEs. Next weekend I'm out of town helping my parents. And last week I was recovering from 62 miles at Palmer Lake.

So the peak I planned months ago isn't happening. Life overwrote it.

That's not a training failure, that's just how it goes. You can be frustrated your plan broke, or you can do what's available in the time you've got. You're getting to that start line either way — the only question is how you show up.

I see it in the office weekly — someone misses two visits because their kid got sick, and they come back apologizing like they let me down. They didn't fail. Life happened. We adjust and keep going.

Plans should always be written in pencil. Showing up is the part in ink.

What plan of yours has life rewritten lately? ⬇️

10/07/2026

Wellness Wednesday. A patient comes in with shoulder pain. The shoulder tests out fine — good range, no weakness, nothing reproduces the symptom. So why does it hurt?

Because the nerves that supply your shoulder and arm originate in your lower neck. When something's irritating them up there, the symptom can show up well downstream: the shoulder, the outside of the arm, sometimes all the way to the hand. The shoulder isn't damaged. It's the mailing address, not the sender.

It works the other way too. A stiff, painful shoulder changes how you hold your head and neck all day, and eventually the neck starts complaining about work it was never meant to do.

Here's a test you can run yourself. Find the position that provokes your shoulder symptom, then slowly turn your head, tilt your ear toward each shoulder, and look up. If any of those neck movements change the symptom — better or worse — your neck is part of the conversation.

This is also why treating only the sore spot so often fails. Rubbing, icing, and stretching a shoulder that isn't the problem will get you exactly what you'd expect.

Worth saying plainly: new numbness, weakness, or a symptom that runs all the way down the arm should get looked at rather than self-tested.

Try it — does neck movement change your shoulder? ⬇

10/06/2026

Truth Tuesday. MYTH: "I have arthritis, so I should take it easy on that joint."

This is one of the most costly beliefs I run into, because it's self-fulfilling. People protect the joint, the joint gets stiffer and weaker, moving it hurts more, so they protect it more.

Here's the part that changes how people think about it: joint cartilage has no blood supply of its own. It gets its nutrition from the fluid inside the joint, and that fluid only moves in and out when the joint moves and loads. Compression and release, over and over, is literally how cartilage gets fed.

So a joint that stops moving isn't being preserved. It's being starved.

That doesn't mean ignore pain or grind through whatever hurts. It means the answer is usually adjusting the type and the dose rather than stopping. Swap the surface. Change the range. Reduce the load and keep the movement. Build the muscle around it, which takes load off the joint itself.

Strength work and regular movement are among the better-supported things we have for arthritic joints. "Rest it" is not on that list.

If you've been told to take it easy on a joint, what did you stop doing because of it? ⬇

10/05/2026

10/05/2026

Movement Monday 💪 Sixty seconds and three checks will tell you more about your shoulders than you'd guess. And the point isn't whether you can do them — it's whether your two sides match.

One: reach one hand over your shoulder and the other up your back, and try to touch fingers. Then switch. Most people have a difference. A big one is worth paying attention to.

Two: Raise both arms out to the sides, elbows straight, slowly up overhead, and watch in a mirror. If one shoulder hikes toward your ear earlier than the other, or one arm doesn't get as high, that side is compensating.

Three: hand flat on a wall at shoulder height, then rotate your body away. Compare the stretch across the chest and front of the shoulder on each side.

Full disclosure, you can see my right side isn't moving as good in this video. I took a hard fall trail running and I'm still in the last phase of getting it back. Which is a good reminder: an asymmetry isn't a verdict, it's a starting point. Mine's better than it was a month ago, and that's only measurable because I checked.

Try it and tell me which side came up short ⬇️