My name is Bryan Ausinheiler and my wife’s name is Jessica Ausinheiler. My name was formerly Bryan Ausink and her name was formerly Jessica Gheiler. We combined our last names because neither of us wanted to give up our name, neither of us wanted to hyphenate our names and both of us wanted to have […]
Squatting Toilets in Peru The western world is full of chairs. We have chairs in our kitchens, offices, cafes, living rooms and our bathrooms. Traveling in Ecuador and Peru, I encountered considerably fewer chairs than I was accustomed to in the US. One conspicuous place that the chair was often absent was the bathroom. In […]
What happened to my strength and mass during10 weeks of travel in Ecuador and Peru? They both plummeted. I lost 25 pounds. I went from averaging 199.4lbs, 16.8% fat to 175.1, 16.6% fat on the same bio-impedance scale. While this scale may not be accurate as to my true body fat %, I had conducted […]
Have you ever been traveling for several weeks or months, being active all day walking, and sometimes running to catch taxis, buses and planes? At the end of each day you lie down exhausted and think, “wow I am getting way more exercise than I did back at home. But when you return to your […]
QUESTION I have been fascinated with the topic of carrying things on one’s head for the last several years. I took a class in 2010 by Esther Gokhale who recommends adopting the neck posture she observed in women carrying pots on their heads in India and Africa. This is a posture in which the […]
The ulnar nerve injury I acquired from pressure on my palm while biking in Peru has now completely healed and function is normal. It took about six weeks to heal from the time I stopped biking. You can read more about the injury in my prior blog post.s. Me unable to adduct my pinky when […]
After less than an hour of navigating the tandem bicycle through the crowded sweaty streets of Iquitos, Peru we were parched. Our bodies were perspiring relentlessly in a failing attempt to combat the combination of radiant heat from the Equatorial sun and body heat from the thousands of Peruvians packed into the market. We didn’t […]
What is a Tolerance Bandwidth? If you read my post on the human-environment interaction that results in disability you will already know where I am coming from. I posit that discomfort, like disability, is the result of a human-environment interaction. You are comfortable when the environment is somewhere within your preferred range of conditions. I […]
The preferred backpack of the Peruvian Andes is a blanket folded into a triangle, wrapped around the shoulders and tied in front of the chest. This backpack is simply called “manta” (ie blanket) by the Peruvians and is used to carrying things as varied as babies, five gallon buckets, and huge loads of sticks and […]
Now more than a month after I noticed that I had lost the ability to adduct my right pinky, I have gained about half of that motion back. The 8-10hrs of daily riding in Peru ended 18 days ago. My manual dexterity is within functional limits, and grip strength is find for all tasks of […]
Posture Movement Pain 