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7 Ways to Supplement Your Yoga with Increased Mental Function

You may be practicing yoga solo or alongside us here on our membership platform- Mother Trucker Yoga LIFESTYLE JUMPSTART Platform and APP and you are noticing physical and mental benefits. Trucking yoga is an easy way to add a little yoga to your life, even if you don’t own a yoga mat. And for drivers, when you combine a stressful day and physical exercise, you can find yourself fatigued or mentally tired at times. But we don’t want you to ditch the yoga or movements because your brain is drained, instead, let’s boost your brain with the following strategies. 

A poor diet, not getting enough vitamins and minerals, or poor sleep are significant contributors to brain drain. Fortunately, you can supplement your yoga with increased mental function with some simple changes to your life. Supplements, physical and mental workouts, and changing your diet can significantly impact your brain health. As a result, you will have increased focus, reduced tiredness, and an ability to boost both your creative and logical sides.

Supplement Brain Boosters

While exercising, you can use a lot of supplements. Vitamins and minerals are great for your health, of course. They make your muscles stronger, your bones more robust, and give you more energy. But you can also get brain tablets. Nootropics are unique formulas like Unlocked Supplement Co. (click here for more info). Vitamins and minerals work the same way, but brain-boosting recipes work differently. They’re tablets that improve your logic and memory. Improved logic and memory help you stay alert and responsive when driving or doing your job.

7 Ways to Supplement Your Yoga with Increased Mental Function Mother Trucker Yoga blog post

Easy Brain Workouts

You probably already work out somewhat. Maybe a little, perhaps a lot. You can also keep your mind active by doing puzzles such as Sudoku and crosswords.- Who doesn’t love those? You can consider anything that requires concentration or creativity as a brain workout. Activities like the above are wonderful ways to stimulate the brain and beat brain fog and mental fatigue, two things that plague truck driver health.

Some examples of activities that require you to use both sides of your brain are exercise reps, learning an instrument, or playing games. However, logic and creativity don’t always go hand in hand, especially in today’s world. And when you make it a priority to give your brain a workout both sides of your brain benefit from better neuron health.

In trucking yoga, we focus on movements that require you to cross the midline as those are easy movements to help stimulate your brain chemistry.

Two examples are cross-crawl workouts and windmills where you take your opposite arm to the opposite leg. 

Body Movement for Brain Health

If you exercise or do yoga regularly, you already help your brain. The brain releases serotonin when you move quickly and use your muscles. So you know that you’re doing things right when you have serotonin in your brain. When you’re done with a project, for instance, serotonin helps you feel good. It also allows you to feel less stressed by reducing cortisol. So you’ll have a healthier hormonal balance. Having too much cortisol is concerning because it increases feelings of depression, anxiety, and self-doubt. So natural serotonin (not from drugs or alcohol) always helps.

Eating the Right Brain Food

For your brain to stay healthy, you need a healthy diet. Your body can benefit from a variety of foods that help it exercise. Fruits and berries are loaded with antioxidants, caffeine is motivational (in small doses and healthy sources), and protein repairs muscles.

You may already eat these foods if you eat a healthy diet and good sources are fish and seeds high in Omega-3, dark chocolate, and certain berries. These help maintain cell structure, serotonin, and age-related brain issues like memory loss and lowered concentration. Chemicals in leafy greens such as broccoli and fresh spices also help.

Today take a look at your diet and take inventory, does your fuel match up? Truck driver health is critical to the health and success of the trucking industry.

A Good Night’s Sleep

You probably know how vital sleeping well is, whether you exercise or not. A new bed or mattress can be a significant expense, though. If you want to save money on your bed and mattress, there are a few things you can do. First, try buying a memory foam mattress topper. These work exceptionally well. In addition, try not to let your bedroom get too hot, or you’ll be restless. And finally, make your sleeping area quiet and dark so your brain can function well. These will help your brain go through the sleep stages. It needs to be considered refreshing, including much-needed REM sleep.

Increase Calcium Intake

Calcium maintains the proper communication between your brain and the body, which controls muscle contractions. Plus, it’s good for your brain too. Your brain and body are always talking to each other with neuron activity. Axons need it to transmit electrical impulses so synapses can work. As a result, the brain forms neuronal synaptic pathways. Calcium deficiency causes extreme tiredness, insomnia, confusion, and memory loss. But you can quickly get more calcium from milk and cheese, dark greens, and fish with bones you can eat, such as sardines.

Cut Out Alcohol

Alcohol is a socially accepted drug consumed by millions of people each day. However, it is a known contributor to increasing brain fog. Brain fog is a tiredness-related issue that reduces concentration and neuron activity. Quitting alcohol altogether helps minimize brain fog. But doing so can be challenging. Many people across the globe use alcohol to manage their feelings, but what ends up happening is they simply mask or numb them. Trucking yoga can help any person create space, breathe and improve mental function. Regardless of how much you drink, alcohol often leaves the user drained, in a mental fog, physically drained, and emotionally low. When it comes to truck driver health, alcohol also dehydrates your body, which results in headaches, lethargy, and trouble concentrating, something truck drivers should pay attention to. In addition, alcohol even reacts with many medications, making the symptoms worse or even dangerous in some cases.

No matter where you are in life or in your yoga journey, any one of the above seven could help you improve your mental health and truck driver health. Here at Mother Trucker Yoga, we believe it’s about the small simple changes that lead to the big results so you can feel good again™.

 

 

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The Missing Link In A Safety Check

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More trucking companies are tuning in to incorporate a driver wellness program for their truck drivers and other employees as a means to improving their bottom line and attracting and keeping hold of drivers for the long haul. But what to do and how to implement this for all drivers has yet to be successfully implemented for all drivers to benefit.

Most driver wellness programs currently out there focus heavily on exercise. Traditional methods and fitness models take the driver out of their workflow and ask them to “workout.” And although that approach is helpful and will work for some. The likelihood of the drivers who need it most to implement it themselves and stick with it is lower than anyone wants to admit.

The New Stretch With Safety Checks

It is nothing new for a company to have a list of required safety checks each driver must do every day before heading out on the road. But with the current state of our trucking industry, our driver’s health, the stats don’t lie. These stats lead us to see that 86% of drivers are obese and  54 percent of commercial drivers smoke cigarettes, and only 8 percent exercise. So is it that we need more safety checks for drivers to remain safe on the road, is it that we need another exercise program telling drivers how to do push-ups or pull on a resistance band, or is it about time we require something a bit different?

The missing link in a driver’s safety check is not another walk around on their truck, another electronic device regulating something or another, nor is it another cargo inspection. It’s an inventory of the driver themselves. That inventory is in the name of safety, except it has everything to do with simple ergonomics drivers can implement every day. If you care about the driver being safe on the road, isn’t it time to consider the one behind the wheel?

 

What We Can Learn From the Construction Crews

Those who work in the construction world have had similar fallouts with quality workers and those who stay in the game long term. Many feel it is hard on the body, and those that suffer injury often begin to look for other means for work. Recruiting quality talent and keeping the existing healthy enough to keep pounding nails are becoming increasingly difficult.

However, companies that chose to implement properly designed stretching or ergonomic (driver wellness) programs for their workers found success in reducing work-related injuries. However, for these programs to work, the exercises and stretches must be taught by a well-trained individual and done repeatedly at least two to three days per week with a time commitment of five to ten minutes. What if every driver on the road took 5 minutes every day to do a few stretches designed specifically for driver success?

My Husbands Story

My husband is a construction worker by trade and has done everything from operating machinery (a CDL holder) to concrete forming and pounding every type of nail you can imagine. And at one time, he worked on a crew that required an 11-minute stretching routine each morning before starting work. If you didn’t show up, you didn’t work. Although my husband laughed at it (I was telling him about these stretches for years, but hey, better late than never), after just a few days, he mentioned his hands hurt less, and there was a reduction in tension related to swinging his hammer and gripping certain various tools throughout the day. All of which points to a reduction in future work-related injuries. My husband no longer works on that crew, but he still does many of the previously required stretches he learned during his morning safety routine on the job.

If it helps, this decision is not about making your drivers healthier (although the industry points to us that we should care about this more), but rather making your drivers safer. The truck can only be so safe, and at some point, it is then in the hands of the competent, alert, physically healthy driver to execute and perform the tasks at hand.

The Outdated ROI Decision Making Strategy

Sadly far too many employers (trucking company owners) are still stuck on the old method of ROI (return on investment), where it all comes down to the dollar bills. And although you should always weigh the cost factor when considering a new company program or feature, you also have to ask yourself, what is the potential value on investment (VOI) and long-term ROI, not just the immediate cost?

When a company is considering implementing a well-designed program into their driver’s safety check routine, they are showing future drivers, lawmakers and hopefully it never comes to this, but lawyers or agents that they have done all they could to help reduce the chances of an accident, injury or hazardous outcome by implementing the missing link into a drivers safety check, with a properly designed wellness program.

It’s about demonstrating that the expenditure comes with a benefit (ie. Reducing soft tissue or musculoskeletal injuries, reducing fatigue, improving reaction and response time while behind the wheel, all for a reduction in workers’ compensation costs and improved worker productivity and wellness). And if you can do this, then the training or program will be more likely perceived as a benefit by the employer, driver, and even insurance company.

truck driver wellness program the missing link in a safety check mother trucker yoga blog

With nearly 20 years of experience designing usable fitness, wellness, and ergonomics programming for both individuals to take part in and companies, I have learned that when choosing a driver wellness program, make sure:

  1. The program is broken down in an easily digestible way, meaning drivers can utilize the content in a way that makes sense for them and their day. Have you ever seen an entire parking lot of drivers working out outside their truck? Great concept, but highly unlikely.
  2. It’s simple. When you incorporate a driver wellness program into a safety check, you are showing drivers when and where to apply these strategies, and that will ensure a greater means of measurable success. More does not always equal better, and in some cases is confusing, overwhelming, and causes wellness regression.
  3. Finally, it happens from the top down. When the owner, CEO, or the man/woman in charge is all in on their drivers, you’ll see your drivers boost your bottom line all on their own. ,.once you have a well-designed program and safety protocol when integrated properly with the right leaders in place, anything can happen! As humans want to feel cared for, a program can only do so much for the company and drivers.

The Bottom Line

If you fail to make any newly implemented program mandatory, you will struggle to see any real value or ROI on your investment. Don’t look at mandatory as a bad thing. You require your drivers to secure the load a certain way. You require them to wear a safety vest. You require them to fill out certain forms regarding the load they are carrying a certain way-right? All in the name of being able to run a successful company. A safe, reliable trucking company.

When implemented correctly, asking drivers to integrate specific stretches or ergonomics into their day as a part of their safety check will help both the driver and you as a company overall. While others in the trucking industry are focused on exercise programs for drivers, I’m telling you that it won’t do much of anything in the immediate and long-term it may end up as just a feel-good box checked.

We have to start small and start smart. If exercise were the solution, then the stats wouldn’t be reading like they are, that drivers are amongst the most unhealthy in our nation compared to any other industry. These are the men and women driving your company’s trucks, shipping your cargo, and driving your bottom line in one direction or the other. They deserve more. They want more. They are just as critical to your companies success as a well-running truck. And if you are ready to improve your company in the name of safety. And I’m here to show you how simple it can be.

If you would like to learn more about Mother Trucker Yoga’s Driver Wellness Program and Safety Check / Pre-Trip Initiatives-

Learn more about Driver Wellness Program HERE

Contact Hope HERE

 

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