SolCoreFitness

Oct 21 2023

Tired of Peloton? Now what?

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So Peloton has gone downhill. As everybody knows or most people know, Peloton is a bike and treadmill company where you can purchase a bike, you can purchase a treadmill, and they have subscription services to some basic workouts that you can do most anywhere.

They got really popular during the pandemic because everybody had to stay at home and they just caught fire. They had the right marketing, the right messaging, everything shut down. Boom, it blew up. Everybody went out and got a bike, but now everybody’s selling their bikes and canceling memberships. Now there’s a lot of business reasons why. I’m not going to go into that. I want to talk about the exercise reason why people are selling their Peloton bikes and getting rid of their memberships.

If this is your first time watching one of my videos and we haven’t met yet, greetings, my name is Ekemba Sooh. I’m the owner of SolCore Fitness. It’s a therapy and fitness company where we offer online services and also in-house services, and I’ve been in this field for I think almost 30 years now, and I’ve been a Soma trainer and Soma therapist, which is under the osteopathic medical discipline for, I don’t know, 17, 18, 19, 20 years, something like that. I don’t remember exactly, but I’ve seen a lot in my time.

And so I had to go through and talk about topics I find interesting relative to health and fitness. I believe in a holistic fitness model. You can even say holistic health and fitness model because that’s how we’re designed, so it’s best that we find out how best to train our bodies in this grand design. So stay tuned for more videos and if you like them, please give me a thumbs up, share them with your friends and subscribe.

I find it’s good to look at the original intention of something as to where it would fit into my life. So I’ve dedicated myself to being in this osteopathic model to be a therapist, to be a trainer because the initial goal way back in the day with Andrew Taylor Still was to balance the body so it functioned its best. The thought process is the body can heal itself, which it can, so if I put it in the most advantageous position, it’ll heal itself. It’ll work in terms of movement and thinking and internal organs. It’ll work its best if the body’s balanced.

So every stretch, exercise, therapy, routine, whatever it is, that’s the goal, right? So I can get behind that goal because that’s what I believe in. Peloton’s goal from John Foley back in around January 2012, his main goal was to not have to drive to the gym and to be able to work out at home. Totally admirable. You don’t need to go to a gym. You can see here in my studio, it’s not fancy, it’s basic. Look, I got basic stuff here. I’m sorry if it’s a little rocky.

It’s about 2,500 square feet and then I got a studio room back there. In my humble opinion, I don’t think you need any more than that. So if you can sit something in your home, in your garage or wherever your living room that’s similar for just you, sure, why not? I mean, in my online program, you don’t even need that. You need enough space that your body can move and not touch anything. Maybe a mat, maybe some lightweights, and you can totally work your body if you know how to train the way its designed.

But his second motivation was that he didn’t like the time driving from home to the gym. He didn’t like driving because his motivation waned from the time, from driving from home to gym. That I have a problem with. I respect the fact that your motivation is waning going from home to gym, but that means that just shows you that motivation is fleeting. A goal is what you need to be motivated to work out, not for some external source to motivate you.

So when he developed Peloton, that’s his main goal. I want to work out at home and I want to be entertained. I want somebody else or that class, whatever to motivate me to keep moving. We all need support, but I think internal motivation, internal motivation, internal goal setting I should say is a much more sustainable way to approach health and fitness than having an instructor do what they do to motivate you to keep going.

So because their motivation was to one, work at home and two to feel motivated still to work at home, that’s how they design their product. So after you buy the bike or the treadmill, they have a membership subscription which you join. It’s like $40 bucks, $30 bucks, I don’t know exactly. I haven’t done this. I’m going to be truthfully honest. I haven’t used Peloton’s classes. I don’t need to. I kind of know what’s already in there. It’s the basic stuff that’ve been doing for decades now, just in the format of Peloton.

But when they designed it said, “Okay, how do we motivate people? Let’s get some really high energy instructors to keep us motivated. Let’s play this awesome music to keep us motivated.” Both totally fine things. You want to listen to good music, go for it. You want to feel that high energy, go for it, but it doesn’t make a whole program. Then they also did things like on a screen you’re running through the beach or through the mountains on the screen as a way to motivate you.

Okay, I get that. You want to have different forms of stimulus. Again, all these forms of stimulus are outside of you, they’re not within you. So this is the first problem, and I already alluded to it, is that to be successful, you can’t have external motivation. You can have internal motivation as a goal, and then if that goal encompasses using a bike or treadmill, whatever the case may be, great, but you’re not waiting for somebody to do it for you. You’re seeking out and doing it for yourself.

Working out can give you a lot of different benefits and you can have a lot of different goals in relation to working out. Your body can do a lot of different things, and if the body is improved by training it, exercising it, then you can extrapolate that and say, okay, there’s a lot of different ways to train the body to get a total holistic total body workout.

When you look at Peloton, if you’re looking from just an exercise standpoint, you’re kind of getting mainly one aspect, cardio, different forms of cardio, steady state, more long endurance cardio and some high intensity or they call it HIIT workout, but basically cardio and the workouts aren’t progressive, so it’s just cardio.

Yes, they may throw in some weight, but it stays generally a circuit format, which for the most part is still cardio. Either long form or HIIT, so you’re getting cardio. While there’s ways to train your body for strength, endurance, functional strength, maximal strength, there’s a bunch of different ways, different levels for your heart rate to move up and down, peloton is not addressing very much those, addressing a couple.

So if you’re not getting total body workout intrinsically in your body, you’re going to know. It’s going to come out in you as probably boredom. You’re bored of the workout. I would be completely bored if I did those workouts too. If I did traditional workouts like Peloton or just went to the gym and did what traditional people did back when I did when I first started, I would get bored. I would get bored because it’s not integrated enough. There’s nothing to really work on. It’s just me moving around randomly and okay, like a check mark. It’s like a participation trophy.

If you want to feel good about just participating and just moving, then this is for you. There’s no judgment whatsoever. If your main goal is just to move and this allows you just to move, you don’t care about much other else, okay, go for it. That doesn’t work for me. It doesn’t work for a lot of other people. You have people like myself who want more out of exercise.

They want to use it as a tool to a better life, and you have people who are just getting into working out and dipping their toe in. Well, to throw them into a Peloton thing could be a little too much. In fact, physiologically, it is way too much, and now maybe you scare them off. So you have to understand the different facets that you can do from training and understand that Peloton gives you one-ish, let’s say maybe two, but it’s not a lot.

A third exercise reason why Peloton is going downhill and people aren’t using anymore is because it’s not specific to what you need in your body. Again, kind of like what I just talked about a second ago, you don’t have the depth of knowledge, I’m assuming to understand what your body needs, but you’ll kind of feel it. If your body’s not being challenged, getting different things that it needs, you’re not going to feel as good. You’re also not going to have as much drive to continue to work on what you need to work on.

Just because you’re using the body part doesn’t mean you’re giving the body part what it needs. In fact, by using that body part, you need to give it more what it needs. I’ll explain a little bit more. So in Peloton, I’m sitting down, I’m biking or I’m on a treadmill, walking, running. I’m mainly using my legs. That doesn’t mean I’m training my legs. I’m training myself in biking and treadmill by using my legs.

If I wanted to train my legs, training meaning I’m exercising it or stretching it or giving it therapy to make it better somehow, then you need to do a specific program for whatever you need for your legs, and if I use my legs more by biking and treadmill and Peloton, that means I’m going to need more type of work to work on my legs because when I use something, I degraded a bit.

I use it in one way so I can get overuse injuries or I can get imbalances of the body. So I want to train my legs to not be so overused, to be more balanced and neutral to train the other aspects that don’t get trained because if it’s basically one plane of motion, one type of activity, I want to be more specific.

So when you’re going through your program, you want to make sure like, “Okay, what is it that I need for my body? What is it do I want?” Just saying you want to get fit is not enough. That’s what leads to just doing things like jumping on a bandwagon on Peloton or they got SoulCycle now or the bungee workout. I mean, there’s so many different, they’re call popular, right? Popular workouts you can jump into, but they’re not going to give what you want. They’re just going to entertain you.

I’ve even heard it called “exertainment”. I not for that at all, but if that’s what you want, go for it. But if you’re looking for a full routine, you need to go through your body and go, “Okay, this is why I need to go move better.” That’s what’s going to motivate you, seeing results, working on something, getting better, incorporating into your body. The goal is not just to move and to do different things for your body. The goal in life is to decrease you as a human being. It means going through challenges, realizing you’re more than what you are, which means putting yourself into a program that challenges yourself to become more than who you are.

Did you jump onto the Peloton craze? So when everything’s shut down, did you go out and buy a Peloton bike and were all in, but now you want to sell it and stop your membership? I’d love to know why. Just put it in the comments.

Through the eyes of an exercise program. Let’s go do a quick recap on why Peloton is now being, now it’s going downhill. Why people are selling their bikes and getting rid of their membership. First is the motivation component. People are relying on external motivation from the music, from their classes to motivate them to keep working. That only lasts so long. Eventually your motivation needs to come from goals. Your goals need to come from what is it you want in your life and then what you want in your life comes out in what type of exercises, health activities you do in your life, not by somebody else yelling at you or playing some music that you like to keep you going.

The second is that basically Peloton is a bike and treadmill with a little bit of working out. That’s been around for a long time. A bike and treadmill will give you what a bike and treadmill will basically give you, which is basically endurance. That’s not a whole program. There’s a lot of things you can get through exercise. It’s one will be nice, say maybe two aspects, so people are going to realize that and start to get bored in their workouts because it’s the same thing over and over again, but again goes back to goal setting because they don’t have a goal.

The third is it’s not specific to you. We’re all individual people. Yes, we have the same basic framework, but how our body responds and what it needs for exercise is different for each person. That requires you to want to have goals and do a deep dive into what is it my body needs? Why do you want to be strong? Why do you want to have endurance? Why do you want to balance your body? Why do you want to correct injuries? Why do you want to prevent? Why, why, why, why, why, why? Keep asking why, and then start to dive in deeper as to what you need.

The surface layer of things you see with exercise is just that surface layer. It’s just there to, sorry to say it, but basically make money. If they can get you in, if they can get you pain, if they can keep you “exertained”, they’re going to keep spending money with them, but that for you, that’s not good. This is why we have such a high rate of injuries and people with back pain because they’re only doing these things to get these superficial aspects of working out and not diving deeper. Look, if you want a bike, go bike, but Peloton average, it’s $2,000 plus you have to do the membership. That’s an S load of money. I would never pay that.

The bike you saw me at the beginning was an Airdyne. That’s about a thousand dollars and it doesn’t have all those fancy gadgets. I have a basic thing I put my music on and I go. In the example of my studio, you saw I had an elliptical trainer. I have some weights, but I go outside. I run, walk, hike, I bike outside. You don’t need a screen to show you what it’s like to bike outside. Buy a bike and go outside.

You can buy a bike for let’s say $1,500 bucks. You can get those low stands you can put in your house to put your bike on, and now with two purchases, you have an indoor and outdoor bike for much less. Your motivation is going to be because you want to do it for cardio and you want to use that. You can buy very minimal equipment to keep yourself going. In fact, you don’t need equipment like I said before, but it’s going to come down to your goals and what you want.

After hearing this if you’re kind of getting a paying deep inside, something’s resonated with you and you like the information I’ve talked about, till you want to find out more than I’ve got a great resource for you. It’s an interactive resource to have a free Facebook group. It’s SolCore Fitness – Strength, Mobility and Flexibility for Active People.

The idea here is that you’re active already and you’re tired of just doing random acts of movement, like jumping on Peloton or whatever craze is happening. You know that exercise can do more for you and you want more from yourself. Well, in this group, we interact, we talk about stuff like that, so I choose topics and I do mini trainings. Quick little one to two minute videos that you can watch and comment on.

I interact with members when they asks questions. We do masterclasses where I take topics and really delve into it and interact with you as I give a presentation. And then we also do challenges, which is for three to five days. We pick a topic, we talk about the topic, I give you the reason why, and then we actually go through and show you stretches, exercises, and routines relative to that topic. This will start to give you a really good idea of how to holistically train your body, which is the way the body wants to be trained, and then you can start to feel the improvements your body’s making.

So the descriptions going to be in the… the information’s going to be a description. Had it reverse, and you can just go on there, click on it, answer three questions, agree to the terms, poof you’re in and you can start interacting. Please don’t forget to give me a thumbs up if you like this content, share this with your friends who might find it beneficial and then subscribe to the channel. By liking your telling YouTube, “Hey, this is a good information,” and allows other people like yourself to find me and find my information. I appreciate your support.

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Oct 18 2023

The Importance of Rest and Recovery

Standard thinking used to tell us that we had to push ourselves relentlessly to be in good shape.

But here’s the scoop: We’ve evolved from that, and we know better now.

Rest and recovery are essential to living a truly healthy lifestyle. We all need downtime to recharge and come back stronger than ever. But taking off is only one way.

Rest and recovery should be incorporated into the routines you do.

Have you heard the phrase “active rest” yet?

Now, it’s not as contradictory as it might seem. Active rest simply means incorporating lighter, gentler activities into your routine on “rest days”, between your harder days.

That could mean going for a walk or taking a relaxing swim. These activities keep you moving without too much strain. To maximize these active rest days, do exercises and stretches that rebalance your body from the harder workouts you did before.

If you went for a big hike or run the day before, do some exercises and stretches that balance the chains of your body from your legs, pelvis, and spine.

If you gardened hard the day before, work the chains of your body of your different back muscles and shoulders.etc.

You’re looking for the right balance, the perfect harmony, to optimize your life. Your body is this wonderful gift that allows you to do amazing things. Give “it love” by incorporating active rest into your routine.

Embrace the power of rest and recovery as essential pillars of a healthy lifestyle.

MOVE BETTER, REDUCE PAIN, AND LIVE LIFE ON YOUR TERMS

it’s not just working out, it’s building a foundation for a better life.

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Oct 14 2023

Joint and muscle pain in active people. How to identify the root cause

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So you’re active and you want to continue being active. You want to live your life. You want to really express yourself physically through different activities and travel and be with your family, but joint and muscle pain is getting in the way. And you’ve tried everything. You’ve tried chiropractor, acupuncture, foam rolling, Graston technique, ART, myofascial release, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And you’re getting ready to throw in a towel and chalk it up to the universe hates me or I’m just too old, right? So let’s not go there. Let’s talk about the reasons why this may be happening. Just stay tuned. Before we get into it, I don’t want to be rude, I want to introduce myself. If you don’t know me yet, my name is Ekemba Sooh. I own SolCore Fitness, therapy and fitness. And I’ve been in this field for almost 30 years and I’ve been a summer therapist and summer trainer for almost 20 years or close to it.

So that means I’m proficient in therapy and exercise in a holistic method, which is, in my personal opinion, the best way to approach things. If you like this content, you want to see more things about holistic fitness and therapy and best way to live your best life, then subscribe to this channel. About weekly, I’ll bring new content to help you with different topics that I think are most important. If you like this video, don’t forget at the end, give it a thumbs up and share with your friends.

So before we begin, I want to take away your condition thinking, what you think you know, and your emotional responses around the subject. It’s not that your emotions aren’t valid, you’re free to have them, but when you react from emotion, you think from emotion, you flinch and you just want to appease that emotion to make yourself feel better, and generally 10 times out of 10, that’s a wrong response, right? It’s not logical. You need to think outside of what you know now.

So I know there’s a lot of different ways of thinking that’s been perpetuated to you for a long time, which leads to confusion. You see these things that tell you, hey, if you do these things, you’ll feel better and you’ve probably done them, like I mentioned in the beginning, all these things you try to do before it hasn’t worked. We need to think outside that. So joint and muscle pain, excuse me, I’ll use my phone because I have a list, can come from a lot of different sources. Can come from overuse, an injury that wasn’t dealt with properly, an incorrect movement, doing more than your body can handle, dehydration and stress or bad body position. If you had an acute injury, something happened acutely, you got hit by something, you fell down, you’re going to know where it comes from. But injuries that happen over time are an accumulation of different things that I just talked about. That’s when you need to detect which one is it coming from, mainly from you, and what’s it causing other things to happen for you.

Overuse injury. Overuse is just like it sounds. You’re using something too much, you’re using it too much and you’re not giving it a love or corrective exercise or treatment or self-care, however you want to describe it that you need. An example is let’s say running and walking. A big thing they say to do is to go walk for 10,000 steps per day. Now that’s healthy. So you go out and walk 10,000 steps per day and you think, okay, I’m being healthy, but after about five years, you go, my knee kind of hurts a little bit, but you keep going, and after a while, like my knee and my mid-back hurts a little bit, but you keep going. You keep going because they told you to walk 10,000 steps. Not knowing that you’re using these areas too much and not giving it love to balance it out. Your body, you could say, wants to stay in homeostasis, it wants to be balanced, but that balance can be adjusted by the way your body moves.

So if I’m walking a ton, I’m putting a lot of force on my quads, let’s say my legs, my thoracic and my shoulders to be general. If I don’t do things to correct those areas, I keep using them without bringing them back to balance. Now my homeostasis starts to feel a little off. That’s why you may not know exactly how you’re imbalanced because your body’s adapted or feeling unbalanced, but you’ll know because you’ll feel little pains. You want to address these things before you feel pain. Unfortunately, people don’t. But overuse injury is a big reason why people feel joint and muscle pain.

An injury that wasn’t dealt with properly is a big way that joint and muscle pain can happen. Now, when I say injury again, I don’t mean acute. You’re going to know when that happens. You fall down, you hit your knee, whatever the case may be, okay, you know I hurt myself. An injury can happen with you lightly rolling your ankle and you kind of going, oh, that kind of hurts, and then continue to walk and not get treatment. A slight injury could be like you tweak something and your back or SI joint and you go, okay, you let it go away. That’s the basic premise that people will feel something and then not treat or train it right away. They think, oh, it’s little, it’s not a big deal. But that little thing turns into a big deal over time.

So if I roll my ankle real quickly and I get a little slight pain and I keep walking with that ligament, whichever one in my ankle and I got irritated by rolling it, never got retrained. So it stayed injured. You didn’t feel it because it was asymptomatic, but it still needed to be reeducated, trained, brought back to normal so it functioned properly. But because you didn’t, assumingly in this example, now when you’re walking, running, using your legs basically, that ligament isn’t doing its job, which compromises the movement in this example of the ankle which compromises the rest of the body.

Moving badly. Bad mechanics, bad form is another way that joint and body pain can happen. If I don’t move the way my body is designed or move incorrectly or I put myself in a position that causes strain, undue strain on a certain area, that’s going to cause a joint or muscle pain. The most obvious way that you have bad form is bad form. So an example is I’ll take a squat. I’ll take two examples. First is a squat. Squats global. Global means I use my whole body. So unless I’m taking myself down into a squat where my shins and my torso or parallel, to where I have a nice good position between my head and my butt, nice straight line, and I start doing funny things like everybody else does, stick my butt out or shift my weight or look up like that, that’s going to start to cause me pain. It causes me pain because that’s not the position my body likes to do a squat at. It likes to do it the way it began with not the way I ended it.

And if I have bad mechanics, I end up with pain in let’s say my back and my neck, potentially my knee and all that stuff. I can also have bad mechanics through segmental. Segmental means to do individual exercises. So I’m down on the ground and I want to do an ab roll. If I roll down properly and I use my abs and my spine together with breathing, now I’m using my abs properly. But if I do a sit-up like everybody does and just lean back and sling forward, lean back and sling forward or worse hook my feet, well that’s bad mechanics. Now I start to have pain from moving them properly.

Bad movement can also come from the way your body sends signals to your body is the best way to put it. [inaudible 00:07:47] called PIT and DAM. Prepare, imagine, think. Do, act and move. The deep muscles in my body, say the [inaudible 00:07:55] spinals, my deep shoulders, my deep hips, prepare my body to move and keep it in place. If those muscles are asleep or non-existent or in bad positions. Now it can’t prepare my body to move. That’s a prepare, imagine, think, so that by the time I get to do, act and move, DAM, those movements are bad. So you can take that squat or ab position as an example. I could practice the form all I want with those two activities. If my prepare, imagine, think muscles aren’t trained properly, I’m going to move incorrectly. These are muscles people generally don’t train.

They don’t train them because it’s not exciting. It doesn’t show in the mirror. They don’t feel like they’re circuit stricken, doing a lot of stuff. They’re like these little tiny movements that are really important. So if you haven’t trained them at all, then they’re never going to work properly, which means you’re never going to move properly.

Doing more than your body can handle is a big way that you can get joint muscle pain. It sounds obvious, but people don’t take into consideration. If I go from not moving much to doing something crazy like CrossFit or extreme yoga or some sort of high intensity training or some sort of these Trojan racing, stuff like that, then that’s going to be too much for my body. I’ll give you an example of a guy I trained back in LA and he was overweight at the time. We’re trying to lose weight, trying to balance his body, and the big fashion of the toe shoes came out.

I have nothing against the toe shoes, I use it myself. Big proponent of using your feet properly. But he went from never using his feet and using big, clunky shoes, being overweight, deconditioned, to all of a sudden running with toe shoes outside. Surprise surprise, about a month later, he had plantar fasciitis, complete lower leg pain and had to stop working out. Because he did too much for his body and this is big now because the way people view fitness is that the crazier things that I can do and show off, the better. That’s why CrossFit is so popular. These extreme yoga inversion positions are so popular. It’s an ego gratification. It’s totally fine if you want to do that, but you need to prepare your body to do these extreme movements and then when you’re doing the extreme movements, you need to know they’re extreme. If they’re extreme, I can’t do them all the time and when I do them, I need to make sure I also correct my body after doing them. But your body being prepared for what you can do is a big part of not having joint and muscle pain.

Dehydration and stress. If your body’s dehydrated and you’re stressed out, your body’s going to hurt. It can hurt from not even moving. So dehydration allows the soft tissue of your body to stay soft, not hard. So I give the example of if you’re hydrated the muscles and tissue, soft tissue in your body, specifically your fascia as well, are like supple pieces of meat. If they’re dehydrated, it’s like beef jerky. Dehydration also allows your muscles and your visceral, your internal organs to slide upon each other without friction. If I’m dehydrated, they still slide or they try and slide, but they rub now and now rubbing causes inflammation. Inflammation causes pain.

If you’re stressed out, your body’s always contracted. It’s not relaxed, it never relaxes because it thinks a tiger’s going to eat your head off so it’s ready to do something. So if I’m overly stressed, then my body’s going to hurt because I’m constantly in this sympathetic state. Never allow myself to become relaxed. So this one’s an easy fix. I can tell you what to do right now is that you need to drink enough water. Ideally you’re working up two at minimum a liter to two liters per day. And if you can, up to half your body weight in ounces of water, but you have to account for activity level, where you live.

Like here in New Mexico where I live, in Santa Fe, I am 7,200 feet up. I’m going to need you to drink more water. And then for mindfulness, for your [inaudible 00:12:08], for your stress, do some sort of mindfulness practice, some sort of meditation. That can be something as easy as walking in nature, sitting down and breathing for five minutes, watching a candle. Whatever you want to do, it doesn’t matter to me, but you find some way to reduce that stress and to separate yourself from all those crazy thoughts and feelings that we all have.

Bad body position. Bad posture is a big way while you have joint muscle pain. So your body should function on a couple of different ways in terms of posture. One is your plumb line. Plumb line just means this line. You want a straight line up and down. Do you line up that straight line? Do you line up with your ear, your shoulder, your hip, your knee and your ankle in one straight line in different points? You can tell. A lot of people will look like that or back, forward. So you look yourself in a plumb line.

Then the second is your gravity line. You can’t really look in the mirror for this one, and you might need some help. You probably need help, but you can also just tell. So your gravity line is an inverse four degree cone that starts right below my pubic symphysis, on the ground, comes up around me in a four degree cone. You want to be able to stay in that cone. If I stay in that cone, my body was relaxed. If it’s relaxed, which means I’m not having any undue pressure. But if I’m in that cone and I have bad posture, then my body goes outside the cone, which means that my body’s constantly trying to be active to keep myself in the cone, which will cause you pain. So if you stand there, if you’re just aware, you can feel yourself moving too far forward, too far back, left or right. This will tell you which way your body’s leaning and if you feel yourself leaning, chances are you’re going towards or maybe outside that four degree comb.

The third is one that you need assistance in. The third is your SI joint. That’s your SI joint. That’s your SI joint, that’s your back. I want to say that because everybody says I got back pain and they point to here. That’s your SI joint. Now the SI joint comes into a big position here with your body position because you can think of your pelvis as the basement of your body. Basement meaning it connects the upper part of the house, your upper body, and the lower part of your house, your legs, and one balanced area. If that basement is off, namely through the SI joint, is my pelvis is off, then my upper body and my lower body are also off.

If those upper body and lower body are off because the SI joint I have bad body position and posture. And if you have bad body position and posture, there is nothing you can do besides correct it because it’s always going to lead to joint and muscle pain. Because whenever you move, you’re going to move badly. Whenever you try and do things, you’re not going to do it properly and it’s never going to go away until you correct that. So let’s slow down just a little bit. I just gave you a lot of information on why you might be having joint and muscle pain, bunch of different reasons and explanations of the reasons why. Just take a piece of paper or in your head or your phone, doesn’t matter, just think about for a second where your joint and muscle pain may be coming from. Write it down, put in the comments too. This is going to help you as we go further into the video to try to assess a little bit more on where your joint muscle pain might be coming from.

So the most effective way to get at these joint and muscle pains is to find the root cause, to find that initial area that started all the cascade of issues that you’re now having. Now, if you were aware, you could address a root cause right away. So like the example I gave with the rolling the ankle or the bad movement patterns, if you knew about that stuff before, you could dress it right away. Specifically for the ankle, getting specific treatment for whatever ligament. With the movement patterns, change your movement patterns. Understand that your pit muscles need to be stronger, whatever the case may be, you could address it right away, but people don’t do that unfortunately.

One just because of lack of information. Hopefully this helps. Two, because people like to power through and if it’s not really extreme, they don’t want to think about it. So now you have to sort through the trash. Your primary lesion, your root cause is at the bottom of a trash can and you know it’s at the bottom and inside a trash bag that’s covered in trash. So it’s down there. You have to sort through all that to get it down. So how do you as a layman start to do that? Well here’s easy ways, you as a layman can go through. First you give yourself an assessment. So you take that easy postural assessment. You take that postural assessment and go okay, get somebody to take a picture of you. Then look, are you lined up? It’s best if you take a picture with a straight line, like a door hinge or something, something that’s straight, that you know it’s straight, that you stand in front of so you can see am I lined up or are you in front or behind?

Then you can have somebody watch you move. It’s better if you have somebody watch you move in these different activities you do than you because again, you’ve been doing this movement so long that even if you’re unbalanced, your body thinks it’s balanced because it’s not only your body that’s unbalanced, it’s your brain, because your brain has gone, oh, I thought this was balance, but because you move badly, now it thinks that this is balance, but it feels normal to you. I see it all the time in my studio. I’ll go to correct somebody’s head. It’s all the way off to the right. I move it to the left. They go, oh, I got a leaning left. It’s because your brain thought that was straight.

And then start to think about the different activities you do. Do you run a lot? Do you ski a lot? Do you swim a lot? What are these activities that you do a lot that begin causing these areas of pain? So there’s a really easy way for use a layman to go through. You start to check what’s my primary root cause. Once you have an idea where that might start, well then you want to be specific with training and treating that area so that it goes back to normal. We call it normalize. Normalize means it’s back in place. It’s mobile, it’s strong, it’s aware, it’s doing its job. If you pick right, then everything’s going to be much easier. Then all the accessory areas that are caused by the root cause will be much easier to correct because that root cause is back in place. If it wasn’t the root cause, well that’s okay because now you can go, okay, well I did what I could for that. Now I’m going to move to the next area that I think might be causing the issue. That’s the only way to go about it.

Me as a therapist, it’s a little more detailed, but that’s essentially kind of what I go through. Now, speaking of which, most effective way to treat this, to see somebody like myself, a therapist and trainer who use a holistic model, this is the most effective way for you to address your body and find your root cause. So let me explain how this works. How to be more holistic with your training, to find this root cause so you can get rid of those joint pains, muscle pains, so you can continue to be active and live your life. So prior to this, I’m going to make some assumptions, prior to this, you took a linear view stuff happened to your body. All of a sudden you have all these joint pains, muscle pains, all through your body because you didn’t address it when it first happened because you didn’t know, it’s not your fault. Hopefully you’ll know better going on.

And you went to a PT for a 10 pack or you went to a chiropractor for some sessions or you went to some [inaudible 00:20:15] or massage therapist for some sessions for body work. None of these are wrong. It’s just not the complete picture. You do need to work with your muscles to return your body. You do need to realign your body. You do need to have some sort of manual therapy, soft tissue, realignment, fascial therapy type thing. All these things are true, but they need to be true in one model. When you work with one model, in my case, osteopathic holistic model, you look at the whole person.

So when I go through, when I look at you, I go, okay, first I do an intake. I say, what’s going on? Your history, your health history, and I start to dig into, this is how this person was moving. This is what they did prior. This is what they’re looking for. But then I do some movement tests. I do some movement tests of your SI joint. I check that gravity line like I talked about. I check your plumb line and I check how you move because the assessment doesn’t stop at the assessment. The assessment continues into what I think might be happening. So then I go through and I go, okay, I think you have this and either I give you some exercises here or I tell you what to do on my online program, and we start to go down that road. From there it’s going to tell me and you, what’s going on, what’s tight, what’s weak? That’s going to give both of us more information. This is a holistic model.

Then you start to piece together more what’s going on because then we didn’t address it right away. We did not, which means we need to address the whole body because now it’s all contributing to joint and muscle pain. So I hope this information was good for you. I hope it wasn’t too confusing. Generally you have more questions than answers after these type of videos, which is good because I’m not here to give you a linear prescriptive, do these three things and everything is solved.

So to help you learn more, I got some options for you. You can join my free Facebook group for active people, how to get strong, mobile and live life you want. Here’s a more interactive way to get more information. Interactive means you can interact with me with questions. You can attend my mini trainings. You can attend my free challenges where you can go through information and different techniques relate to it, or you can join my masterclasses. If you’re not interactive, you just want to read more. Then I’ve got a free ebook, which I can send you. All you have to do is put your information in or you can reach out for a free consult to talk to me. All three options are down in the description below. Choose which one and fix for you or multiple and then you’ll be on your way.

In the meantime, check out this video on how to work out for a better life. So again, thanks for joining me. I really appreciate it. If you’d like this, please give me a thumbs up, it lets the algorithm know that this is a good video. Share with your friends who might need this information and I’ll see you next time on a new video.

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Oct 10 2023

This is very unfortunate. 🤦🏾

Beware the information you take in on Social Media and the interweb(slightly ironic)…

I saw a post from a “trainer” I know wasn’t certified and had recently started in the profession proclaiming that you don’t need to stretch.😳

Ummmm…..

Science says yes for multiple reasons:

✅ “Hills Muscle Model”

✅ Bio-tensegrity (how the body is balanced

✅ The health of your soft tissue, especially the fascia

✅ The range of motion(ROM) of your soft tissue and joint

✅ Etc

This person didn’t intentionally do something devious; they didn’t know. It doesn’t make them bad people, but for those who listen to this info, they will suffer.

I get the struggle. You want to be of service, and in this day and age, you have to put yourself out there with relevant, helpful information.

But for your information to be relevant, you must deeply understand what you are discussing. So much so that you realize how much you don’t know.

But for some reason, people don’t view it this way within this industry. Information is passed down as fact from hearsay, random things people read, or ideas that pop up in their heads.

#truth

And workouts are devised from a couple of partial facts and put together as a “total body workout.” Just because you are using your body doesn’t mean it’s totally what it needs.

The desire to “be seen as…,” trumps presenting a full and accurate picture as to what people really need if they are looking for a full holistic program.

Instead of trying to piece together information from random posts, videos, and hearsay, study it.

You can start by grabbing a copy of my ebook, where I curate some of the most helpful information that you need. This is from almost 30 years of experience and degrees in training and therapy.

If you have an interest in longevity, mobility, functional strength and getting rid of back pain, si joint pain, muscle pain etc so that you can have a body that can keep up with the life you want to live, this will be an excellent resource.

The link to the book is below.

MOVE BETTER, REDUCE PAIN, AND LIVE LIFE ON YOUR TERMS

it’s not just working out, it’s building a foundation for a better life.

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Oct 08 2023

It’s All in Your Mind

It’s All in Your Mind

I used to dislike the phrase, “It’s all in your mind.”

As I used all the most important techniques for manifestation and achieving goals, I would run into mental and emotional challenges.

Well-meaning people around me would drop the classic line, “It’s all in your mind,” and it just made me want to roll my eyes.

This phrase is used as if I should change my mind. Like a switch that I had forgotten to pull. 😵‍💫

But then I had an “ah ha” moment. I started viewing it as a powerful, positive mantra, and it became a secret weapon.

“It’s all in your mind” is like a magical gateway to turning things around. It’s about connecting the amazing thoughts we have with the powerhouse actions we take.

It’s all about embodying the positive truths while still respecting our humanity and the negative thoughts that we all have.

Now, when I reach a roadblock, I do some introspection while limiting my judgment and figure out the problem.

👉🏽 Why am I not doing what I intend to do? I look for an ACTUAL answer, like I’m not leaving enough time between work and home, rather than something punishing like, “I never follow through on anything.”

👉🏽 What’s missing in my approach? Should I try something new, rather than repeating the same mistake over and over, perpetuating the negative thought in my head that says “I can’t do it.”

👉🏽 Can I be more effective about setting a goal and an intention and supporting myself in taking the right steps? For instance, if I’m having trouble working out when I plan to, can I find a different time to workout?

That’s when “It’s all in your mind” made sense! It doesn’t mean, “Stop feeling sorry for yourself.” It doesn’t mean, “You just have the wrong attitude.” It doesn’t mean, “You’re just not smart enough to succeed.”

It means “mind over matter” is a game changer. Its away to learn and grow:

✅ Setting the right kind of goals, rather than ones that are rooted in fantasy
✅ Making a plan based on my desires and values
✅ Applying those desires and values to each step along the way – like making a daily intention for each workout instead of just showing up.

Aligning your thoughts and actions is the key to unlocking the door to your dreams — whether it’s smashing your fitness goals or anything else you desire in life!

Where your mind goes, your body will follow.

Try it!