Ever wonder how stretching could be the missing piece in your strength training puzzle? 🤔 Discover the incredible benefits of incorporating stretching into your fitness routine! Don’t miss out on these game-changing tips! Hit play and transform your fitness journey today! 🚀💥

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Stretching is usually seen as a passive activity to kind of relax the muscles in the body and to kind of feel good. Maybe increase your range of motion, how flexible you are, and there’s an element that it does that. But stretching can also be active and stretching can help with the strength of your body. And so I take people through some of these stretches to help the strength of their body. They’re quite surprised. They’re surprised because they can’t believe how difficult it is relative to how tight they are. And then they can’t believe how much they translate into how much stronger they feel in their life. So how do they do that? Well, good thing you’re watching this video because we’re going to talk about that today. How’s it going? I’m Ekemba Sooh, I own SolCore Fitness. I’ve been in the health and fitness field for like 30 years.

So I’m a Soma Therapist and Soma trainer, which means I’m an osteopathic manual therapist and I’m osteopathic trainer, which obviously is underneath the osteopathic model. And osteopath says holistic and structured dictates function. But I didn’t start there. I started all the regular personal trainers before me by getting certified through whatever body certification that they do. They’re all basically the same, but they have stretching in there. But it’s the stretching that you’ve seen for decades now, the basic stretching. So I do it with my clients because it’s part of the curriculum and it helped a little bit, but it never was sustainable and that type of stretching didn’t lead to them being stronger. When I got into this osteopathy holistic world, I started to see how you can use this holistic model, namely the fascia and stretching to help increase your strength. So I like to talk about things in a holistic manner.

So that’s what I do on this channel. So if you want to hear that, then subscribe and hit that bell where about once a week, we’ll put out a new video. Then please share this video and then like it so that the YouTube algorithm, excuse me, will know that this is a good video and more people can see it. Stretching should not be an afterthought. It shouldn’t be something you do only when you feel tight or when it’s prescribed to you from a PT or somebody like me. It should be worked into your program. Really good stretching has the ability to keep your body balanced and functioning that way you can live the life that you choose. But like I said, the type of stretching you do is very important. The stretching you see from decades ago, like the BS do in the gym and stuff where they grab their foot and or throw the leg up on something or put their arm on to stretch like that, that’s crap. To be honest. There’s very little carry through that really helps your body in doing stuff like that. But if you can dial down the type of your stretching do and the times you do your stretching, your program and your life will explode. But before we dig in, let’s talk a little bit about some differences. Our stretching and warmup are two different things.

A warmup is something you do before an activity to prep your body for the activity, stretching something to help with normalization of the muscles you just use from that activity. A warmup will increase the potential that you already have at this moment. A stretch done right will increase that potential of what you ever want to do. So it’s for that reason that you should not do a stretch before you do anything active. And by active I mean anything outside just hanging out and walking or sitting down, whatever. So if you’re going on a hike, you’re going to go work out, you’re going to do some sort of sport activity. You don’t stretch beforehand. You do the warmup appropriate for that activity. They stretch afterwards. Now I know where that came from. They came from a study a long time ago where they measured stretching and range of motion and range of motions is acquitted to better functioning and all that is true.

But like all studies, it’s done in a little box just to measure that. It doesn’t measure anything else outside that in life. And so you can’t take something that’s measured in a box for this one little area and say it applies to everything. That study they did, they show that stretching increases your range of motion, but stretching increases your range of motion as a defense mechanism. So my elbow is only out able to extend here, but I wanted to get here. And so I put tension to get to that spot. It scares my body. And so I’ve got some prop preceptors, little computers in my body that say, ah, that’s about the tear. Shut that down so it can move further. Okay, shuts down. I now move a little further into the extension of the elbow. I’ve increased my range of motion, but the thing that happened was the body turned things off to get there.

So now I want to increase my range of motion and now I want to play tennis or throw a ball or something like that. Well, that area which is turned off, it’s turned off now when I go to throw the ball or hit with the tennis racket, now my body’s like, I don’t really know what to do now. It kind of just guesses how you want to do it. You won’t have the same type of form. Another point is that foam rolling is not stretching or warming up. I’m putting this in here because everybody lift a foam roll now, but foam rolling is very damaging to the fascia of your body and doesn’t allow for your fascia to function properly, which you’ll see later why that’s important. And so I wouldn’t use foam rolling or I wouldn’t use it for anything, but I would definitely not use it for a warmup.

So a little science before we start on why stretching helps improve strength. First, know that the way our body is built is called biotin. Tensity is from Buck Meister Fuller, and some really smart people saw that design say, Hey, that applies much to the body. It’s based on tension and compression. Everything has a job and should work together and should be no parts that are kind of on top and rubbing each other. The second is called heal muscle model and heal said that for muscle to work properly to be strong, there’s three components. There’s the muscle fibers, there’s a fascia that surrounds the muscle, and there’s a tendon that’s associated with that muscle. All three factors need to work as high as possible and together for your muscles to work properly. So we’re going to focus on that second component of his muscle model and the fascia that surrounds the muscle to talk about how it’s help increase increased strength.

So that fascia is all throughout the body. You can see if one fascia that connects your entire body. And so those fascial lines need to line up for me to have the best posture and balance. If I’m balanced, I have good strength. So I have good fascia right here. I’m balanced. If my fascia is all jumbled and my posture was like that, I won’t have as much strength because my weight is now asymmetrical. I wouldn’t be using a good balanced position to move from that. Fascia has a bunch of different jobs. I’ll list them here and they’ll pop up thing. But for the purpose of this video, we’re going to focus on structure, neurobiology and communication. So the structure is what I just talked about, your entire structure. Tension compression is based on those fascial layers. Those fascial layers go around those muscle fibers, but then they connect to the ligament.

The ligament connects it to periosteum, which is the bone periosteum to a tendon, tendon to another fascial layer, the entire body. So you want all those lined up so you’re nice and strong for neurobiology. The fascia surrounds your nerves, your epi, so you have that fascia that surround your nerves. If that fascia is not healthy and then nerves can’t do their job, then your muscles won’t get the proper conduction that they need to function properly. And then for communication where your fascia’s alive, it’s not. This is the white piece of stuff that you remove when you’re cutting your meat. It has a lot of jobs, like I said, and it needs to communicate with each other. If that faster can communicate to different chains and needs to communicate, then you move in a more coordinated fashion, which means now those exercises you do to get strong are more coordinated, easier to do, which means you can use more weight or more complexity wherever you need to do to gain strength.

Are you using stretching to increase your strengthening program? Are you using it via the mile fassal change? Let me know in the comments. So to stretch properly, so you increase your strength, you also need to take care of your fascia. So three things will affect your fascia, dehydration, stress, and not working with it, not working properly. So the first step is to, it’s very difficult to drink enough water. So you want at least a liter to two liters minimum of water in your body, depending on how big you are. But you want to work up to half your body weight and ounce of water. You want that to be plain water, which means nothing in it and not when you’re eating food. This plain water goes into your body and goes extra celery into soft tissue of your body and keeps it hydrated. It keeps it smooth, it keeps it liquid that your viscera, your internal organs and your muscles, tendons, ligaments, slide on water-based and not with friction.

Your stress is going to be up to you to have some sort of mental, emotional stress reduction time, whether it’s walking in nature, meditating, journaling, it’s up to you, but a little stress is fine. Too much is damaging not only for your fascia but for your life. The third part is you want to work with the fascia. Now you want to strengthen with the fascia mind. We’re not going to go into this too much because it’s about stretching, but when I strengthen, I can keep these myofascia chains in line through specific posture and then work the muscle fibers in all the different directions I go for stretching. You want to stretch these fascial layers in line. So again, we’re going with hill’s muscle model here. And also knowing that our body needs to be balanced. So fascia surrounds all the muscles and in three different layers, I want to take those layers and stretch ’em because fascia surrounds those muscles and it’s the bag of the muscle.

So if that bag of the muscle is all jumbled up in a bad shape, then your muscles are always going to be in a bad shape because the position of your fascia or how it is, will dictate the position of your muscles. So when I stretch your muscle, I’m going to stretch it mild fascially within a chain that it works because your muscles don’t work alone. They work with the rest of your body, but they work in different chains. So it’s called a gain. So gain means that my nervous system, nerves, spinal cords, joint, stuff like that, they communicate to different muscles in that chain to help coordinate them and work them well. So they all happen within this bag, in this chain of muscles. I hope you’re following. So if I stretch a muscle in that chain, then I’m increasing the flexibility of the bag as I talked about, so the muscles form in a better shape. I’m increasing that neuromuscular coordination within the gain of the specific muscle you’re

Working, but also the muscles that are associated with it, which is going to increase my strength. Now the hard part is knowing how to line these muscles up. There’s no easy answer for that one. That’s where you want to see somebody like myself. So you need to find somebody who’s well versed in the fascia of the body and how to strengthen it via these myofascial. But also on top of that, how to do segmental strengthening via the fascia. Work with the joints via the fascia, a bunch of different things with the fascia. So if you want help from me, that can help you out. The best thing to do is to reach out for a consult, right? So in the description below, there’ll be a link to where you can find your time and to talk with me, and we’ll go over what you want, what you need, what you’ve been doing, what you are doing currently, your sticking points, and then a way forward.

And I’m only going to offer my services to you. If I see you’re good fit. I’m always going to try and give you as much relevant information as you need for you. If you’re not ready for that, then that’s fine, right? So I’ve got another option for you. In description below, there’s a link for a free ebook. It’s four steps in how to get mobile, get out of pain, and Live your Best Life. It’s a nice book that talks about a lot of things I’m talking about here, but now you can digest it at your pace. So sign up for that and then just continue watching the video. So I’ll put a video here to watch next, but check out my channel. It’s all dedicated to holistic fitness, and so it’s going to help with your information. So don’t forget to subscribe. Hit that bell like and share. I’ll see you next week. Take care.

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Balance and coordination training is essential and will lead to being stronger and more mobile. This allows the body to function at its best and will enable you to live your best life. But don’t just do any balance and coordination exercises. Watch the video to set up a proper balance and coordination workout.

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Balance and coordination are a huge part to having a healthy, strong mobile body that can let you do whatever you want for the rest of your life. But too often people either try to rush it in with a bunch of other things they’re going to do for the workout or decide that I’m not balanced and coordinated and that’s just the way I am. While that’s just not true and there’s a lot you can do about it. So stay tuned. This video, we’re going to talk in depth about balance and coordination greetings. My name’s EEkemba Sooh. I own SolCore Fitness and I’ve been in the health and fitness field for 30 years. I’m a Soma therapist and Soma trainer, so I’m a manual therapist and I’m a trainer, and I do this all underneath the osteopathic model, which is structured dictates function. Now, it never fails whenever I’m with people or teaching classes, I always come across people who are uncoordinated and don’t have a good balance, and those people either say, that’s the way I am, or stop and take the time to get better.

The people who get better are the ones who realize, okay, I am not coordinated balance, but there’s something I can do about it. The other people are living a self-fulfilling prophecy because if you take the time to do the little things to improve it, your body will improve. And then with better balance and coordination, those same people gain better strength and mobility because the body works holistically. Everything works together to help each other out. And so that’s what I talk about on this channel. It’s a holistic view on the body. So if you’re interested in that, then please describe this channel and then help me out if you could like this video and share it with your friends. It not only shares the video with people who might like it, but it tells YouTube that it’s a good video and it will share it with more people as well.

If you don’t have balance and coordination, then your strength program, your mobility program will be not as effective. Your body wants to self preserve itself. So if I’m doing strengthening exercises and I’m wobbling a little bit, then the body goes, don’t care about the strengthening. I want to not fall. Or if you’re trying to do a stretch, and again, you’re wobbling and it doesn’t have to be huge wobbling, it can be a little micro wobbling. Again, your body goes, don’t care about the stretching. I don’t want to fall. So if you don’t have that good balance, your body can’t strengthen and stretches effectively. And if you can’t coordinate your movements, the movements between your brain and your body, that communication, if you’re not as coordinated, then when you do your exercises again, they won’t be as effective because you’re not as coordinated. So your body’s trying to figure out what you want to do. So it’s trying to figure out what you want to do and instead of doing what you need to do to get strong and mobile, and so it’s for that reason because we all know this, right? It’s for that reason. When you walk into a gym, you see a whole bunch of people stopping, not going to the workouts that were in. The classes are on the machines. They stop and do a bounce and coordination program. They do

Not. Unfortunately, they don’t because one, they don’t know what to do, right? So you as the general public, you go, yes, I need balance of coordination. I don’t know, I can stand on one foot. And then if you go see a trainer, like a regular trainer, unfortunately they don’t know too much more than you do. So they’ll have you stand on one foot and do some movements or maybe have you stand on Bosu ball and do some movements. Well, that’s not the answer. And then the gym, you’re going to obviously doesn’t care about balance coordination. They just want you to pay your monthly fee each month. And let’s say you’re proactive. You’re proactive like, okay, I know I don’t need to do that. Trainer doesn’t know what he is doing. Lemme go find some answers. And when you open the magazines or read the article and the internet, unfortunately it’s the same information, something standing on one foot or standing on a bosu ball.

It’s the same stuff. Well, there’s a lot more to it than that, and we’re going to dig into it. Let’s start with balance first. So balance and how balanced you are will lead to how strong a mobile you can be. Let’s take example of a house. So a house that can walk, so that house that can walk the walls, floors and roof are in place. Then it functions properly. Functions properly means that the lights can turn on. People can sit on the couch without fear of dying. All the piping works properly, and if the owner of that house wants to put a second level on it, it can handle it because it’s balanced and has enough force aka strength to handle it. If it was off balance, then the lights wouldn’t work. People couldn’t live there. There’s no way you could put a second level in the house, it would totally collapse.

So if your body’s unbalanced, then the more force you put on it and not just with working out, even just with life leads to the potential more of a collapse of your body. So how to have good balance. So first you want to have good balance by a good plumb line. A good plumb line means that my ear, shoulder, hip, and ankle, relatively lineup in one straight line. You can do this with a trasadental reference. So like this bar right here. So I can stand in front of this bar properly, position my feet on the line, and then somebody can look at me relative to this bar, this is straight. Am I straight to the bar? And then when you do it, you want to turn to their side because you very much could have an asymmetry. You could have one side line up properly.

Then you turn on the same line with the same reference trasadental reference, and it could be totally off. That’s going to tell you where you have a good plumb line posture. The second part is a good gravity line. A gravity line is a inverse four degree cone that we should be able to stand in. So here’s my inverse four degree cone. If I’m inside this cone, then things work nicely. I have good balance, I have good posture. I can micromanage myself through the day. If I’m outside this cone, let’s say for example, I’m out in front of the cone, so I’m in front right now. My body has to use all its energy to keep me falling again. We go back to self preservation. I’m outside the cone. My body goes, oh crap, I don’t want to fall. So now it uses all energy to keep me up.

 It cares about not functioning properly. It cares about not getting hurt and be able to brush my teeth and eat my food, look to see where I’m going. That’s what it cares about. Just functioning normal, not in a positive way, just to kind of survive and make it through life. So you want to have a good gravity line on top of that. You also want to have good balancemint in your body. By balancemint, I mean in place and doing its job, your body’s interdependent and interconnected. It all works together. It’s called holistic. And so if everything’s doing its job in a proper place, it keeps me in a solid foundation. A solid foundation allows my body to be strong and mobile as your balance of coordination. Lemme know the comments and then stay tuned. We delve into the coordination part. A coordinated body and brain allows for ease and efficiency in life and in your workouts.

So this coordination is done through afferent and efferent signals, signals ago to and from the brain and body. These are done through proprioceptors. Proprioceptors are little computers. We have thousands of computers in our body. The more these computers are turned in our body and the more they can communicate to the brain and back to the body, the better nuro engram we have of the different activities it movements in our body. So right now, your brain has an idea of how you should move and what your posture should be. It’s right or wrong, we don’t know, but you can change that by learning a new skill to reorganize that map in your brain. Now these proprioceptors can be trained just in general when you do a stretch, an exercise or some tension, or they can be trained specifically to have one turned on. An example is I love skiing.

And so back when I was young, when I first learned skiing, it took a lot of energy and a lot of effort to learn to ski. Now a billion years later, when I go ski, it doesn’t take a lot of effort at all because I’ve dealt with so much load. I went skiing so many times that that neural map in my brain of skiing is very effective. So now when I go skiing, I kind of just know what to do. So when you train your body, that’s what you want to do because the more education you give it for what you want to do, the more it’s going to respond. So this leads to one proper training in terms of starting segmental, which is small and working up to bigger, and also making sure that you train these preceptors if you need to specifically.

So when I train my body, I want to start from small to big, right train from in to out. I do this because now my body will have more balance and more propreceptors from my brain to my body because when I think of a movement for my brain and my body, it goes through the small muscles first, then out to the big muscles. So if I start those small segmental muscles first, like your transversospinalis and stuff like that, then my movements will be more coordinated because the highway, the highway is more open. Now, I could do that through general working out. It’ll turn on a lot of ’em, right? So whatever I do, it’ll turn on some of those because I need to coordinate that area. But if I have an area that say needs more love, then I do a specific exercise to turn that one on more and then bring it back and integrate it back into the body.

I know it’s a lot, but that’s the body. Now, a couple of points on working coordination and balance. You want to start with literally two feet on the ground and a stable surface. We’re obsessed now with circus tricks and working out the crazier, more unstable, it must be better for you. I had a guy telling me, he went to a class up in the local community center and this guy was taking a ball and doing globe trotter type things, and he is like, I should be able to do that. I’m like, why should you be able to do that? He goes, well, it’s better for my body. I’m like, when is that going to show up in your life? Do you play basketball? He goes, no. I’m like, well, general coordination balance is probably better for you than trying to coordinate under leg, through the ear, back behind, all that stuff.

Here’s an example, a better example. So a long time ago I was in a gym and this old man was there with a trainer, and this old man was doing the old man shuffle, right? That’s how he walked. And I’m going for an exercise to exercise, and I was watching him because I was getting a little nervous and I had right to be nervous because he took that man in that shuffle and stood him in a bosu ball. So for those who don’t know, it’s a flat surface with a unstable ball underneath, probably a picture I’ll put for you. And he had him stand on that and start to work out, and they had him get on one foot. Well, you see where this is going, right? The old man fell and really hurt himself. That guy couldn’t walk right? He could barely walk and shuffle.

He needs to learn to walk and move those muscles better and to do a regular squat or whatever you want to do before he stands on the unstable surface. But we have an attention span issue here in the United States, and so people don’t want to take the time to do the basic stuff to move on to the other, what they call fun stuff, right? They want to just jump to the crazy things they see in these magazines and on Instagram, and as a wrong way of going about it, that’s what you need for bounce coordination. Now, I know it didn’t give you those proverbial two, three exercises that everybody wants to correct what they got going on, because again, that doesn’t work. I mean, just think about all the things I just

Told you. How many parts of the body are involved in what I just told you? Pretty much the whole body. So I don’t know what you need for your balance of coordination. What I do know is that everybody needs a holistic fitness program that works you from the inside out builds a foundation which allow you to do more of whatever you want to do. If that’s working out hard or great, if that’s gardening, if that’s skiing, if that’s playing with your kids or whatever it is, that’s going to allow you to do more. Now, unfortunately, you can’t do this by just going to different classes and trying to piece it together. You can’t do it by reading an article or a book and follow along with the pictures. You need to be taught this and then also learn by doing, by being taught you understand the philosophy and what you can do.

And then by learn, by doing, you go and practice and learn what to do. By practice, I mean you try, you get it wrong, you try get it wrong, then you try and get it right. It’s all good on the process of learning, and that’s what you need because eventually you want your body to just be able to do it. Now, I could help you with that. If you’d like, I could help you with a free download book, the Four Steps to a Strong Mobile Life Inde description below. Again, you’ll find a link, or I can help you with a consultation, which you can reach out and talk about where you are now, where you want to go, and your sticking points. Then I’ll offer you advice no matter what, and if I see you’re a good fit, I’ll offer my services, but no obligation. So I hope that you got some good information about this. Stay tuned for next week for the next video.

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Gardening is an activity that brings people tons of joy. But it’s also an activity that is very damaging to the body. People end up with back pain, neck pain, and muscle pain, and it’s all totally avoidable. Knowing how gardening affects your body and how to take care of it, you can continue growing as you age. Learn how to take care of your body like you take care of your garden.

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Spring has sprung, and because spring has sprung, all the gardeners are out gardening, but this gardening is producing a lot of load on people’s bodies and damaging a lot of people’s bodies to the point where a lot of them aren’t having as much fun gardening because they’re in pain all the time. Gardening needs to be looked at like any other sport. It’s very strenuous, so you have to understand what gardening is doing to your body and how to prepare it so you can garden effectively and not have so much pain afterwards, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. I’m Ekemba Sooh, I own SolCore Fitness. I’ve been in the health and fitness field for 30 years. I’m a soma-therapist and soma-trainer, and I work under the osteopathic model. Osteopathy says structure dictates function. It simply means how structured my body is, means how functional I am.

Function means how will I breathe, think, digest, eliminate, pump blood, fight infections. It also means how well my body can move and function in life and the activities that I love so that I could have a fulfilling life. Gardening isn’t really looked at as something strenuous. It totally is, and people don’t think about how should I prepare my body before and after so I can garden for the rest of my life because that’s what gives them joy. You have to look at the body holistically. Like all activities, how has this affected my body and how can I work with my body the way it’s designed so I can continue to garden, or whatever you love, for the rest of my life? That’s how I like to talk about things in this channel, holistically. I don’t talk in one, two, or three exercises to fix X, Y, Z. It’s all about how can I best balance my body to do my life, whatever your life is.

If you want to hear more about this holistic way of addressing things, then subscribe to the channel and click that bell to be notified where each week I put out a video. Don’t forget to like this video and share it with your friends. That way, the YouTube algorithm will say, “Hey, this is a good channel. This is a good video. Let’s find more people to show it to,” so I can help more people. Before we begin, I just want to make a quick note here that I am not a gardener at all. I don’t understand why people were to take their free time and perform manual labor willingly. I love nature, but I’d much rather run, walk, or just ski or lay there in the grass.

I know people love it and I had some members ask me to do a video and it’s something I’ve been wanting to talk about anyway because of the story I’m about to tell you. Four years ago, I had a teacher come to me and she was an art teacher and she had a hard time just living her life. It took all her effort during the day to stand there or to sit, but she could barely sit, to teach her students. It took so much of her energy and she had to be so cautious of what she did, and that by the end of her day, she was shot mentally, emotionally, physically, and she had enough. She came to me, we had a consult. I told her, “Yes, it’s going to help you,” and she got into the classes. Because I guess she could move, so she didn’t need treatment.

After about, I don’t know, four to six months of being in classes, she was looking and moving great. She had no pain. She could perform her daily activities at school. She went for bike rides. She was having a great time. Then one day, she walked in and she was like, literally 10 times worse than when she first came in here. I was like, “What did you do? What happened?” She goes, “Oh, the weekend was nice and I went and garden for like, I’m guessing a little bit, but like five hours.” I’m like, “Oh, God.” I said, “Did you warm up before or stretch afterwards?” “No.” Ding, ding, ding. What she had done is she did too much for her body. To give an example, she had prepped her body and got it strong enough to where she could perform her life. If she prepped her body to lift up 100 pounds, good, she can lift that.

That’s her daily life, is lifting 100 pounds, but then she wouldn’t garden for five hours. Well, the example is now she wants to lift 500 pounds, but she never prepped her body to do to lift 500 pounds. These are stupid numbers. Don’t get caught up in this. She never got her body ready to garden for five hours. She never warmed her body up before the strenuous activity and she never did any corrective/normalization exercise after her gardening. With all those three factors happening, the body is like, “All right, dude, that’s it.? Tightened up and a bunch of pain. Life, your sports and your activities, all have a damaging effect to your body, AKA, wear and tear. How much you become damaged depends on three factors. Your genetics, how balanced you are and the amount of load you put on of your body during life and your activities.

Genetics, it’s pretty simple. You can enhance your genetic profile or enhance… Sorry. You can enhance your positive genetic profile or enhance your negative genetic profile by how well you take care of yourself, what you eat, the water, your mental, emotional, and your physicality, stretches, exercises and treatments. How balanced you are is the structure I was talking about before. Structure dictates function. That’s what I mean by balanced, not circus tricks. How well you’re balanced is again, part of your genetics, but very much is affected by what treatments, exercises, and structures are you doing on the daily to keep your body as balanced as possible or not doing to let it go wherever your body is going to go. Then a load on your body is two parts. You have the load if something’s just really heavy. If you’re gardening, you’re picking up trees and gigantic rocks, that’s load, it’s hard to do.

The load is also time under tension, meaning how long are you in a posture? If I’m in this position for a long time, even without weight, well, that’s a lot of load through my structure because I’m holding in position. For gardening, in terms of load, you got both. You’re picking up trees and rocks and you’re in a long-time position for three to five hours. That’s a long time to have your body, very strenuous. For the purpose of this video, to keep it short, because your entire body is being stressed, let’s focus on three areas, your knees, your back, and your spine. As we go through these different areas, I want to give you a little bit of science relative to the area we’re working and how that’s working because it’s not because Ekemba says it, it’s because, oh, look, this really smart scientist discovered this great rule and here’s how it applies to your body.

With the knees, there’s a lot of squatting, a lot of dynamic squatting, up and down. A lot of static squatting, squatting down, holding position. What you want to know about a squat is as you start to squat down, so this is your thigh-bone, so your thigh-bone starts to move down. It goes from vertical on down. Your knee cap is here. As the thigh goes down, at about right before 90 degrees, your knee cap and your thigh are perfectly lined up. It’s like a puzzle piece. They’re good. That continues to about 90 degrees right there, and then once you get past 90 degrees, now you don’t have full contact and now you have a little bit of rubbing, potential rubbing right there because it’s not even right there. We have a law called Delpech’s Law, which means hyperproduction from hyper pressure.

If I’ve got pressure, I get hyperproduction of the tissue that’s being rubbed. In this case, cartilage. It could be bone or tissue. That production of that tissue is anarchic. It’s random. Well, not random, but it’s not smooth and nice. That once smooth surface of your trochlea and the back of your kneecap, the posterior kneecap, which was once smooth, is not smooth anymore. Now it becomes bumpy. Now, even with a good squatting from to 90, now it’s rubbing because it’s bumpy. Now you have a bumpy surface which exasperates that Delpech’s Law. On to your back, so your back has two factors you want to think about in terms of the load on your body so you can pay attention to it. The first is the lever arm. Archimedes said, “Give me a long enough lever arm and I can pick up the world.”

Unfortunately, for your back, that means there’s more force. Lever arm, as I hold here, I don’t know if you can see the whole thing here, but the end right here is a lot of force to hold that. As I lean over a lot, so imagine this is your lower back right here. Big boom. As I lean forward, maybe I’m guarding or picking stuff, whatever, that lever arm, mainly in your back, there’s some tension here, but mainly in your back, increases. As it increases, then you’re using either static force holding yourself in place or that dynamic force, your back is going to take a lot of that load. It’s not bad if you knew how to do to prepare, but you understand that there’s a lot of load. The second part for your lower back is that you need to understand that from your belly button to your pelvis right here, there’s no real bony structures.

You do have a spine, I realize that, so from L3 down to L5, but your spine is not a column, like the Roman column. It’s not a column, it should be four-degree curves. Each segment is not load bearing. In totality, it helps, but it doesn’t hold like a column. If I don’t have any bony structures to hold me in place, from here to here, it’s all soft tissue. That soft tissue is done through, not just a musculature, it’s part of it, but mainly through the fascia layers. You can say you have different layers, like rings of fascia. Let’s say you have hundreds of them to hold yourself in place. That way when the forces come into your body, those layers of fascia and soft tissue can attenuate, move the forces away. Are you a gardener whose body hurts really bad after gardening? Are you starting to realize a little bit about how strenuous gardening is to your body? Let me know in the comments.

Last but not least is your spine. Your spine, outside of pathology, has a bunch of different ways it can move. It can move in flexion, it can move in extension, it can move in rotation and translation and then all combination of all four. In reality, in osteopathy, what they talk about is everything happens mainly rotation. You can’t do any of those moves without any type of rotation in your joints. Not bad if you have good joints, but rotation, when I rotate a joint, if I turn right there like that, then my upper vertebra and my lower vertebra come together because of ankylosis fibrosus, so when I turn, they come together. If I have enough space and my disc is fluffy, who cares? If I don’t, then as it rotates down, and I get fun things like disc bulge, herniation prolapse, arthritis, pinched nerves. All those wonderful things that everybody loves.

The two main movements you have to be concerned about with gardening is flexion and rotation and extension and rotation. With flexion and rotation, like I’m scooping the dirt, and I’m doing that, you have that lever arm I talked about. First, I’m statically, for the most part, kind of dynamically, out here, and I have a lever arm of my body and the shovel and how much dirt I pick up, multiply that. Then I take that and I, whatever I do, I do that. Then when I do that, I get some rotation in my trunk, and if my body, my core, my total core, not just my abs, can’t stabilize my spine and move my spine properly, that’s bad. That’s where you get all those things that we don’t like.

The second is extension and rotation. You have the same basic idea. If I extend and turn, I’m getting that compression, but extension is a little bit different because in the back of your spine you have thing’s called facet joints. Your facet joints are like the little steering wheels of your FSU, your functional spinal unit. A functional spine unit means the joint between my upper vertebra and my lower vertebra, that joint between, the totality, the whole thing, front and back, insides. You’ve got a bunch of them up and down your spine. Those little facet joints, they’re total joints, like your elbow or your shoulder or your spine.

When I rotate backwards and those joints compress, because they do, and they start to, oh, my God, I can’t think of the word, they start to rub each other, then you get that Delpech’s Law again. Because now I’m leaning back, the facet joints are the being compacted and then I’m rotating for further compaction and I get that anarchic bone cartilage production. I hope you see now how much gardening does to the body, but you love gardening, you want to keep doing it. If you want to keep gardening, you want to do three things, you want to have an exercise program that in totality makes your body strong and mobile enough for the level of gardening you want to do. It’s like if I want to learn to deadlift 500 pounds, I need to train my body to learn to deadlift 500 pounds.

Same thing for gardening. I want to program that holistically allows my body to do that. The second thing you want to do is you want to warm up before the activity. Like all sports and activities, you want to prepare your body before you do activity. Our bodies, no offense to anybody, are like those old cars. We need to turn it on and rev it up a little bit to get it going before we take it for a drive. Then after gardening, you want to take the areas of your body you use most and stretch them, correct them, normalize them, whatever word you want to do. I want to do something for you. I don’t show a lot of exercise in this program because there’s too many, I don’t know what you need, I don’t know how you’re going to take it, but I can show you a warm-up.

A quick note, a warm-up is something you can do, obviously, before gardening, but you can do anytime. A warm-up has no contraindications outside of injury and stuff like that. A warm-up is great for turn your body on. As I warm up, I wake up the computers in my body and now the computers in my body communicating my brain, I get a better body-mind connection, which means I move more effectively. A warm-up warms up the liquid in your body. Like I talked about with the car, the oil and blood and, not the oil, the blood and lymph and all the fascial liquid inside your body is more viscous at the beginning, it’s thick. When I do a warm-up, I now make that more liquid. Now my tissues can slide and move much easier. With the warm-up, we’re going to stick with those three areas.

I’m going to back up here. Warm-up where you want to work with the knees, pelvis, and spine. With your first one to warm up, like a walk around the block just to get yourself warm. Not long, two to five minutes, at a decent pace. Then you want to take your knees in a circle, that’s a circle. That’s what I want to do with my knees. The reason I start with circles in the knees is because the micro movement manages the macro movement. The little tiny movements of circles with my knees and other things I’m going to show you, helps manage how much I flex and extend, so when we’re squatting down and picking up trees, let’s reverse directions, these little circles, movements I’m going to show you, help manage how well you can flex. Now I’m keeping it small here. If you can go deeper, go deeper.

Then now I’m done with circles, now I want to do a figure eight. Figure eight is vertical, vertical means up and down. Like my finger, watch me, I want to draw with my knees a figure eight. Don’t worry if it’s confusing, I know you can get it. You keep trying and thinking, eventually you learn the skill of it. Now you want to reverse directions because I want to go both ways, like I do the circles. 10 reps is the general rule of thumb for warming up, but as much as you need. Now I want to take that eight and turn on its side. Now I want an infinity symbol right. Now I work my knees in an infinity symbol one way and then the other way. Now by doing the circles and the two figure eights, I’ve essentially warmed up all the tendons and ligaments in my knees.

Now I want you to take this funny position with the legs, wide toes and knees bent, and I want your ear, shoulder, hip lined up and I want one hand in front of your pelvis and one hand behind like that and I want you to do pelvic rocks. You’re going to breathe out, tuck your pelvis, breathe in, untuck. Breathe out, tuck as much as you can. When you breathe in, you go as much as you can, but not too far if it hurts your back. I want you to feel that motion as you keep your legs in position and torso tall. Then I want you to tuck the pelvis. I want you to hold it. You can tell it’s tucked if you reach your hand back and your lower back is flat. Now I want your arms up and I want an external rotation, which means the crease in my elbow wants to look at the ceiling with my hands open, they want to touch the walls. I want to move just my torso left and right.

Now I’m mitigating how much my spine compresses by doing translation because translation doesn’t rotate a lot. Now I don’t compress my spine, but I bring a lot of blood and liquid and I warm the spine up and the ribs up so I can move better. Then when it finished by doing like a seesaw. Now I tilt left and right. I tilt. I’m tilting from here. My arms and head follow, my legs do nothing. That little warm-up, I encourage you to practice it, it’s great before gardening. Like I said, do it whenever. You want to wake up and do it, go for it. I don’t care. Go slow at the beginning. Watch that part again and then think and try to do the exact movements because if thinking and trying to do the exact movements will allow, again, that body mind connection to happen, so when you go garden, you’re smarter. Your body is smarter, it can move more effectively. Now what I can’t show you here is the total program for your body. What I can do is help you out with that. I’ve got three options for that.

I’ve got a private Facebook group where you can join and be more interactive with challenges and master classes and interactions with me. In the description below, you’ll find the link. I’ve got a free download of a four steps to a mobile pain-Free life, so you can live the life you’re choosing, again, in the description below. I’ve got a consult with me through Calendly, so the link is below. You click on the link, you choose a time and we’ll talk. We’ll talk about where you are now, where you want to go and where I think you should go. Then only if I see you’re a good fit, will I offer my services to you. I hope this is helpful. Go have fun doing manual labor all you want, but make sure that you start to teach factors into consideration so you can keep gardening as long as you want.

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Whether you are feeling hip pain or want to increase your hip strength or mobility, knowing which hip strengthening or hip mobility exercises to do is imperative. Physical therapy will give you basic hip strengthening exercises but are only designed to allow you to live a basic life. if you have goals to use your body to keep doing the activities you love, you must trane it a different way. Check out this video to find out more.

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It seems to me that people just expect to end up getting hip surgery, to have hip replacement. They usually go through the process of not feeling anything, to feeling a little bit, to getting some sort of 10 pack of PT and taking some pain meds and anti-inflammatories, to eventually cortisone shots, to eventually hip replacement. And I think that’s a fix. But hip replacements aren’t a fix. They’re not real and they don’t have an exponential life. They have a finite life, 15, maybe 20 years, and if you’re young enough, you have to do it again.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Your hips can be strong and mobile for your whole life, if you’re proactive and take care of them and if you have the right program. So just stay tuned. We’re going to talk about that.

Greetings. I’m Ekemba Sooh. I own Solcore Fitness. I’ve been in this health of fitness field for like 30 years. So I started as a personal trainer, but then over time through my studies, I became a soma therapist, and a soma trainer, which is kind like a physical therapist, but more it’s all under the osteopathic model where we say structure dictates function. And once my eyes were opened up to this osteopathic, holistic way of viewing the body, I realized the potential that we could do for ourselves, to be our own best therapist and trainer. We can take care of ourselves to not only dramatically negate instances of injuries or dysfunction or pain or mobility, but to also take the same framework and propel our bodies into more strength, more mobility to the level that whatever we want, but still keeping your body in a functional way.

So I’d like to talk about things like this on this channel in an integrated, holistic, specific way. And so if you want to hear more about that, then subscribe to the channel and hit that bell.

If you like the video, please give a thumbs up and share it with your friends. It will tell the YouTube gods that this is a good video, this is a good channel. Please share it with more people who’ll be interested. I usually do a video about once a week and stay tuned.

Your hips get a lot of load, a lot of forces in it just in regular life, just standing, walking around, sitting down, standing up. Just basic stuff, you get a lot of load in your body. You get a lot of wear and tear. And those hips take a lot of it because they have to move you around, right? They’re the end part of your legs.

But very few people proactively take care of their body. They’ll usually wait till they feel a lot of pain and now it’s probably too late and now they have to get surgery, hip replacement surgery.

544,000 people per year get hip replacement surgery. That’s crazy. That’s definitely a choice, but that’s not the only choice. You can avoid the hip replacement surgery and also keep your hips really strong and mobile if you’re proactive and if you use the right program.

So you got three factors that leads to having weak, immobile hips that can eventually lead to the surgery I just talked about. You have total load on your body is one factor. How balanced your body is, is a second factor. And then just time is a third factor.

So we’ll start with load. Load just means the forces going through your body. Like you’re always having forces through your body, but your body should be able to handle it. In terms of your hip, I want to talk about an equation called Powell’s balance. I’m going to put the image up here. So you can see there’s an image. There’s an equation that says, “How strong my hip muscle needs to be relative to the force of my legs and my body weight.” If you use this equation with walking, and I’m an average size person, whenever I walk, I step, I’m unipodal, which means I end up being on one leg, right? So I step. And I have those forces going through that leg. Are those forces equal if I do 10,000 steps? Tons of force.

So now if I’m walking, average-sized, I give several tons of force through my body. So that’s a load. You always have that load going through your body. Now, in terms of the hip, you want to be aware of the cartilage. So I’ve got that force going through my body and I have cartilage. So all cartilage, your body has four levels. To keep it easy for you, you can say the outer layer is the adult layer. Right below that is the teenage layer. Below that is the kid layer. Below that is the baby layer. Then you have a natural process in your body of using that cartilage. So normally just naturally as the adult cartilage works and then the ones below mature, they push off the adult cartilage to where it switches. Now the teenager became the adult. The kid became the teenager, the baby became the kid, and new baby cartilage is born. That’s the natural process. That’s what happens.

But now if I don’t have a good hip because of being off balanced or because of different factors, then that cartilage starts to rub, right? So now my hip becomes compacted because I haven’t proactively done anything to keep it de-coapted and balanced, and it starts to rub. Now it screws up that process I just talked about. Now those loads that are going through your body is starting to have the hip rub. Okay? That’s your thighbone. That’s your hip bone. That’s a capsule here. That should be some space. There’s no space. Now it’s rubbing. Now that adult cartilage, which should go off naturally is being scraped off, and now the teenage cartilage that comes up has to do the adult’s job.

But there’s two problems there. One, a teenager can’t do the job of an adult. So now, it’s not as functional in cartilage. Two, that teenage cartilage, which should have been the nice teenager down the street, is now the teenager across the tracks. Because now it’s all anarchic production. Now it’s not smooth anymore. Now it’s bumpy. And now when it’s moves with no space, now it’s not smooth, it’s bumping and grinding. Then over time, you extrapolate that and you get lower and lower.

Now the teenager gets rubbed off by rubbing, and now the kid cartilage needs to do the job, and then eventually the baby cartilage needs to do the job. And truthfully, by then, you need surgery. That process of being rubbed and being anarchic production is basically like forming a callus. It’s arthritis. So arthritis is just extra production of bone cartilage because it’s rubbing.

But unlike the cartilage in your hand, that extra bone production, or in this case, cartilage production, screws up the movement, so the movement becomes even worse. So now it speeds up the process of that degeneration process that I just talked about of the adult, teenager, kid and baby. This system is simply called clasts and blast, and all your tissue in your body goes through it. So in this case there’s chondroclasts and chondroblast, but you have osteoclast, osteoblast, fibroblast, fibroclast, it’s in your body. It happens naturally if you allow your body to do it. And this whole example was based on being of normal weight. If you’re overweight, then those forces are exponentially multiplied. And then the damage I just talked about is exponentially expedited.

Are you looking for ways to keep your hips strong and mobile? Let me know in the comments, and then stay tuned for the other two factors that lead to weak and immobile hips and some opportunities for you.

Second factor is being balanced. Now, when I say balanced, I don’t mean that you can stand in one leg and rub your stomach and pat your head, although I’m pretty impressed with myself by doing that. What I mean by is do you have a good plumb line, ear, shoulder, hip, ankle lined up? Do you have a good gravity line? Can you stay within your inverse four degree cone? If you can do that in basic, you’re going to be balanced and it’s going to allow those forces to go through your body to go through nicely. At your hip, you want some specific areas to be balanced. So we’re talking basic here. You want your glute med, your pelvic trochanter muscles, which would be your obturator, internus, externus, your piriformis, your gemelli, I can never say that word, muscles, your quadrice femoris, those four main ones. And then your adductor muscles, specifically your adductor longus, right?

So if those muscles are in balance and working together, then the forces in your hip will be nice. So we go back to the Powell’s balance. If I have those good muscles balanced and I’m not too overweight, then my hip is okay.

Now, being balanced can also be structural, and I won’t go too much into this, but you can have a coxa valga or coxa vera. That’s just the angle at your hip. If you have that, okay, you can’t do too much with that without surgery. But you can also understand that I have that and I can do these things, maybe surgery, maybe not, for the rest of my life to keep my hip balanced.

But too many people don’t proactively keep their body balanced. And again, they wait too long. When they wait too long, their body starts to tell them things like, “I’m imbalanced,” by being tight, being weak, having some pain, immobility.

And then unfortunately people take that as a curse to them. “Look what’s happening to me,” right? Instead of being objective about it. If it’s tight, it just needs stretching. If it’s weak, it needs some strengthening. If you have trouble coordinating, connecting to your body, you need some proprioceptive type exercises that increases your body-mind awareness. And these things that your body’s telling you that you want to do the opposite to go away from it, to get stronger, more mobile, should be done in a holistic fashion with your fashion mind.

If you don’t objectively go through it like this, then you’re going to lead to victimhood. Now, the actions or inactions you take are going to be totally off balance. You’ll be inactive because you think, “I can’t do anything. I’m a victim,” or you have a knee-jerk reaction to do something totally doesn’t work for your body because you just want it gone.

So taking a little more proactive approach to balance your body is huge to keeping not only your hip, but the rest of your body in a place where it can be there for your life. Your body can keep up with the life you want to live. That’s longevity.

The third way that you can avoid losing strength and mobility in your hip and potentially getting a hip replacement is to think about time. So through the days, weeks, months, years, you’re getting wear and tear in your body and it accumulates over time. But because you don’t feel anything, you don’t do anything. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people come to me, said, “Man, I was doing something. All of a sudden, all of a sudden…” quotation alert, “all of a sudden my hips started to hurt.” I’m like, “Okay, well…” Ask him questions, say, “What did you do?” All this stuff.

If I don’t hear anything traumatic, anything acute, something that’s obviously the cause of the hip pain, I go, “It’s wear and tear. For some reason, the movements you’re making, the balance for your body, you’ve worn and torn that muscle.” Right? So again, I’ll give the example of the walking. So if I’m a walker and I walk a lot and I slowly wear and tear my hip down, so now the pelvic trochanter muscles get tighter, which means I pull my hip closer. I don’t have a space, so it rubs more. Now those layers of cartilage start to go down until the kid cartilage is now starting to do the work. But now you need surgery, right? That happened over decades, not just something you did the other day. So you want to holistically work with your body to keep it balanced.

So what does that mean to work with it holistically? So it means two things. You want to first treat your body in total. So you want to work your body actively. Think about the whole body, because I want the whole body to be in place because your body is connected via fascia, and it’s all interconnected and interdependent. It simply means everything has a place and a job, and they work together. So when you go to your routines to be proactive with your body, okay, “What can I do in my routine to keep myself balanced holistically with my whole body?” That’s the first step.

Second step is to have a little, so you can call it the macro program. So the total body’s a macro. The second step is a micro program. So we all do activities that produce more wear and tear in our bodies. So those areas need to get a little more love because they’re getting a little more wear and tear.

So again, still with the walking example, as you walk, use your legs a lot, use your deep hips, your pelvic trochanter muscles a lot, use your glutes a lot, your hip flexors a lot, and you get a lot of tension in your mid-back by the alternate arm, alternate leg movement of walking. So if I want to keep my body as balanced as possible to normalize it, I want to do some sort of stretching and strengthening program of those muscles, right? I want to keep those muscles strong and loose. I want to keep my spine nice and open, because I’m moving, because if I don’t, I slowly over time wear and tear my body from walking, and then all of a sudden one day you have hip pain or back pain or whatever. So that’s how you want to think about moving through.

Now, there’s a lot of muscles involved. There’s like 600 muscles. There’s a bunch of different ways that these muscles go. So you have to be specific, integrated, and holistic when you work with your body. So an example I give is toward the glute med. Again, that’s your hip muscle. Your hip muscle has three different direction it goes, anterior front, middle middle, posterior back. So if I want to train my glute med in a proper holistic way, I want all three of those fibers to be strengthened. But I also want to do it with my body and mind, because again, I want it to be specific and I want it to be integrated in a holistic manner.

So instead of doing the clam, like a lot of people are given in PT or doing the squat with the mini band and going back and forth, I want to be specific with that hip by lying down, getting my posture, and then going through the three different angles of my leg to lift up and down. That way, I’m telling my body, “Hey, I want all of the muscle to be strong.” At the same time, I want the rest of my body to also understand what I’m doing in this good posture. That’s how you have to go through your different parts of your body to work them out.

Now, I know that’s a lot, but I’m here for you if you need to, and I’ve got three different sources of support that you can use. So I’ve got a private Facebook group where it’s more interactive. So in the description below, you can just click on the link, answers a few questions, agree to the terms, and you’re in to where you can do challenges, you can look at some of the free video sources I have there. You can interact with me as much as you need to because I want you to start to understand this more from a interactive standpoint.

If you’re not into that, you’re not into Facebook, that’s fine. You can get a download of my free ebook. And again, in the description below, you click on it, simply put in your information email, you’ll get instant access. And the third way is to have a talk with me. So in the description below, click on it, choose a time for you, and we can go through and have about a 20 to 45 minute conversation about where you are now, where you want to go, and what your sticking points are.

And I’m going to give you valuable information no matter what. I tell you what I see and what I see the direction you should go. Only if I feel you’re a good fit will I offer my services, only if I feel you’re a good fit.

So I hope this is helpful. Again, please like this video if you liked it. Please share it to your friends. Don’t forget to subscribe and click the bell and I’ll see you next week.

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