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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Whether you’re a man or a woman, your pelvic floor is essential to a strong mobile body. Discover why your pelvic floor is crucial for supporting your body for your entire life, and learn why proper pelvic floor training is often overlooked.

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Your pelvic floor, as the name suggests, should be a floor but not a door. For about 70 to 100 years, you need your pelvic floor to be able to support you, both through descending forces that come down through your body and gravity, into the pelvic floor, but also as you move around ascending forces, as you step and walk around. But I have rarely, almost never seen people train their pelvic floor properly. I’m not just talking about women, I’m talking about men too. Want you stay tuned while I talk about the holistic view, and how to treat and train your pelvic floor.

Greetings, I’m Ekemba Sooh, I’m the owner of Solcore Fitness, and I’ve been in this health and fitness field for 30 years. I started as a personal trainer 30 years ago, but I am now a Soma therapist and a Soma trainer, so I combine that with my previous knowledge of strength and conditioning, to run my business. Back in the day, I never thought about the pelvic floor, to be honest. Before I became a therapist and more of an osteopathic trainer, it never crossed my mind is to do anything for the pelvic floor. I didn’t think anything about it, good or bad. The only thing I heard about the pelvic floor was Kegels for women, and so that was it. Kegels are a part of it, but they need to be done correctly, which we’ll talk about later. But there’s a lot of other places in your body that have direct and indirect connections, that affect the pelvic floor.

It’s a holistic view, and that’s what I want to talk about on this channel. It’s holistic, not just give you a couple of exercises that you can do and feel good about yourself, give you information that actually makes a sustainable difference. If you want to hear more about this type of view and information, then subscribe to the channel, and hit that bell. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up, and then share with your friends. All this will tell the YouTube elder Gods that, “Hey, this is a good channel. There’s a good video, so I can communicate to more people, and help more people.” I’ll put a video up about once a week, and that’s it. See you then.

Having a dysfunctional pelvis and pelvic floor can cause a lot of issues, especially for you women. You guys have very little space in your pelvis, and so if anything’s off or not working properly, it could very quickly lead to some visceral problems. Now that it’s going to happen for men too, but we’ve got more space, so we have more room for error. That doesn’t make it right to be dysfunctional, but we have more room for error. Now, it’s not just visceral problems that can be affected by a bad pelvic floor. Your strength and mobility, and conditioning can be very much affected by a bad floor. Your pelvic floor, your pelvis connects the upper body and lower body. If the pelvis is off, if the floor is off, it’s going to have the lower body come into a bad floor, or ceiling, and have the upper body sit on a bad floor.

The example I was given is this. Imagine you’re in your apartment and you look over and you see that your refrigerator door is slightly ajar. You’re like, “Well, that’s not good.” You go through and try and fix it manually, and you hire somebody, and you do all these different techniques to make sure the door stays shut, but it doesn’t really totally close, and you’re like you’re at your wits end. But all of a sudden you look down, you notice that the floor is slanted. Well, the door was open because the floor was not balanced, and it had the door keep opening. The more appropriate way to address the door being open is to fix the floor. It’s the exact same thing in your body. You don’t want to just think that you can work in a certain area, and not have the pelvis affected. What do you do, right? Do you just do Kegels all day long? Well, no. But before that I want to talk about all the different parts of the pelvic floor, so you can get a bigger view on what to look for.

The pelvic floor is not just your levator ani and your coccygeus. You can in fact break down the levator ani into three muscles, your puborectal, pubococcygeus, and iliococcygeus. Those three, which makes up a levator ani, along with the coccygeus, and then your piriformis and obturator internus, which make up the posterior and lateral walls, all form the pelvic floor. Those are the pure muscles, right, levator ani and those three muscles, coccygeus, piriformis, and obturator internus. But you want to think about the muscles that also work with those. Just outside the sacrum on the backside, is your deep glute max, because the piriformis attaches to the front part of the sacrum. Let’s go this way. Front part of the sacrum, the glute max attaches to the back part. If I want to have a good balancing here, I need to work the glute max as well.

Then you have your iliopsoas muscle. Iliopsoas muscle, part of it is the attachment on the inside the hip, the ilio part. That muscle runs always from your hip into your pelvis, like literally through the pelvis and onto your spine. Now, those are a lot of muscles. There’s not all of them, but those are a good amount of muscles. But you also think about the fascia, which includes the ligaments of the body. The ligaments are the intelligent part of the body. They allow the body to do smarter movements, and perform smarter activities. Some main ligaments you want to think about, one is Cooper’s ligaments. It’s a fascia that goes inside your pelvic floor called Cooper’s, but directly outside the pelvis it attaches to your pectineus, and the pectineal fascia. It’s literally the same fascia. They just change the name as you go inside. That’s an important one. You also have your pubofemoral ligament, which means a ligament that goes from your hip towards your pubis, which goes inside the pubis, also with the Cooper’s ligament.

Then you have a big gigantic ligament called your sacro rectal Genital vesicle pubic ligament. It’s a white line, so it goes from the spots from the sacrum to the rectum, genital your genitalia, vesicle, your bladder, pubic, pubic bone, ligament across. That same ligament attaches to your ALL, which is your anterior longitudinal ligament. It’s a ligament that runs at the front of your spine. That sacro rectal genital vesicle pubic ligament all runs all the way up to your skull. On the way up to the skull, it also diverts and connects to your diaphragm. You have now a bunch of muscles, a bunch of ligaments, a bunch of fascia that dictate how well the pelvic floor is balanced. Since the health, strength, and mobility of your soft tissue dictates how well your body functions, and stays in place, then all those areas, that I just talked about, need to make sure that they’re balanced.

Now I want to divert a little bit to one main area that involves all these areas I’m talking about, and that’s your SI joint. I did a bigger video on this, and I’ll attach it to the end screen, so you can click on it, and also put the link in the description. But your SI joint, which stands for sacroiliac joint, is a space on either side that looks like two little boomerangs, like that between your sacrum, which is the triangle bone in the middle, and your ilium, your hip bones. That SI joint has a pure movement called positive torsion negative torsion, which is a tilting forward or tilting back, but it has a lot of pathological ways it can move to keep you moving your life. Because the body doesn’t care too much about doing things right, it just cares about doing the activity you want to do, so a cheat to get there. But if your SI joint is off, your whole pelvis, and for this video, your pelvic floor is off.

I won’t go into the deal now, you can watch the video later on about all that, but that’s a very important area to make sure you stay balanced for your pelvic floor. Are you actively incorporating a pelvic floor routine into your strength, mobility, and longevity program? Let me know in the comments.

How do you start working with the pelvic floor? The best place to start is with the ligaments. Like I mentioned before, the ligaments are the intelligent part of the body. The smarter and healthier ligaments, the smarter and healthier… excuse me, your body. It’s important to do this first, because if you just jump straight into some stretch or exercise, without really respecting ligaments, then you’re never going to have the potential really to do that correctly, because the information that’s passing between your body and your brain is not great. It’s not the best. Focusing on ligaments is the best place to start.

Now, I don’t know how other people work on ligaments, but for the osteopathic way, the way I work, is that you have a lot of ligaments. Just quickly, you have your anterior sacroiliac ligaments. You have two of them. You have your posterior sacroiliac ligaments. Yep, basically four of them. You have your iliolumbar ligaments, from your spine down to your hip. You have your pubic ligament. You’ve got that white line I talked about, so you want to be specific, just like the muscles, and work in different ligaments. The best way I know how is through osteopathic manual therapy, using pumping and double TLS techniques. This allows for the restarting, or to make the fluid inside the ligaments better, the fascial liquid, the PRM liquid, and also allows for the proprioceptors, which are little computers in your body, to be turned on. Because with this new flow, to help normalize the tissue, and help bring nutrition and take away waste, and with these smarter computers, now the ligaments become more healthy.

In conjunction, you can also do some exercises with that. The best exercise I know to work with the ligaments, and the joints, is ELDOA. Again, I’ve done a video or a couple of videos on that too, which you can find in my profile. But an ELDOA is an exercise that allows these joints, these ligaments, to open, strengthen, become healthier, and more importantly for now, to turn on these proprioceptors. Now, I won’t get all the ligaments I talked about, but it’ll get a lot of them, and you can do a lot of good on your own. It’s probably best to combine the two, but you can do a lot on your own, just with the ELDOAs.

Now, as you’re working on the ligaments through exercises and through treatment, you also want to work on the muscles, right? All those muscles I talked about, at the beginning of the video, you want to work in your pure movements. You want to work in that piriformis, the obturator internus, the glute max, more toward the medial fibers, the cell-wise potentially, you want to work these both in strengthening and stretching. They work together, so it’s not an either/or thing. Do you do both? This is supported by Hill’s muscle model. Hill’s muscle model says a muscle works best if you work with three parts as one. You work with the muscle fibers… sorry about that. You work with the fascia that surrounds the muscle, and you work with the ligament that is formed from the fascia, that surrounds the muscle, that goes into the ligament. You want to work these with the fascia in mind, obviously. Because that fascia is going to allow you to work that muscle, with Hill’s muscle model, more effectively.

But it’s also going to allow you to work holistically. Because as that fascia goes out, so if it goes from the muscle fibers, the fascia out into a ligament, that ligament connects to a bone. But it doesn’t connect to the bone, it connects to the periosteum, which is the skin around the bone. Now you can extrapolate that out, because as that bone goes out, you have more ligaments that connect to it, which go to more muscles. You have tendons that connect to it, which is also fascia, that go to joint, which is also fascia. Just keep thinking about expands out, because you can say you have one fascia that connects all your body, then goes a bunch of different ways. You want to work on the ligaments, you want to work on the muscles, but via the fascia, by strengthening and stretching. That’s how you start to work with your pelvic floor.

Now as you work through that, now you can do Kegels. This includes everybody, men and women. But now you want to do Kegels by just doing a Kegel. When you contract your pelvic floor, you want to contract just it. For women, when you contract your pelvic floor, it’s like you’re trying to stop your pee. For men, it’s a little bit grosser. You have to imagine you’re taking a suppository up your rectum, so you want to squeeze it, to pull it up. It’s not me, it’s the way the anatomy is. That’s a pure Kegel pelvic floor contraction, whatever you want to call it. But just like any muscle, when the body can’t do it properly, it wants to cheat, right? It wants to cheat, because it thinks that the cheat will accomplish what you want, but we know differently.

When you do a Kegel, or pelvic floor contraction, you want to make sure you’re not using your glutes, or your adductors, which is your inner thigh muscles, or your abs or your diaphragm. You want to go through a little program to teach yourself to only use the pelvic floor. A good basic outline of that program is, you do a pelvic floor contraction, and you learn to do that. You hold it for like five, 10 seconds. You do that for a while. Now you’ve learned to just that. Now you want to separate the pelvic floor from the different areas. As an example, you contract your glutes, then you contract your pelvic floor, then you release just your glutes, then you release just your pelvic floor. You’d move onto, after you master that, you’d move onto your adductors, abs, and also diaphragm, to separate all those together, because now when you go to contract your pelvic floor, you contract just your pelvic floor. That’s very important, because now your body’s not cheating, and putting yourself in a position.

Then a little side note, that’s very important for women, because when you’re trying to give birth, for the pregnant women, now when they want you to contract or just release your pelvic floor, you’re using just that, and you’re not using something else.

I hope you got some good information on this video. I know it was a lot. I’m trying to condense it into easy pieces, and you don’t need to remember all the different muscles, and all the different fascia. What you need to remember is, “Oh, look, it’s more than just my pelvic floor.” It’s all these other muscles, these fasciae, all these different parts of my body that contribute to the pelvic floor. If you want more support on not just pelvic floor strengthening, but to strengthen and mobilize your body, to get out of pain, and further into function, then I’d be glad to help.

I’ve got a private Facebook group, where you can use the description and the link in description, to sign up. It’s an interactive way to participate. I also have a link in the description for a free download, a free ebook. It’s The 4 Steps, How to Live your Best Life to Balance Your Body. Again, in the description. Then also in the description, I have a link for a complimentary consultation with me, where we talk about where you want to go. I try and show you where the holes may be in your program, and only if I feel like you’re a good fit will I offer my services to you, either in-house here in Santa Fe, or I’ve got a personalized online program that’s helped a lot of people too. I hope you liked it. Give it a thumbs up if you do. I’ll see you next week

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Being able to bend properly will make your life much easier and less painful. But so many people don’t do it well, and it costs their bodies. But just going out and practicing the bend pattern, an RDL, or a deadlift isn’t the best first step. It is imperative to know which muscles are involved in this pattern and how they work together to help with the pattern. Watch this video to find out more.

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The bend pattern, or as we call it in training, the RDL or the deadlift, is a very functional and applicable movement in life. Use it all the time. You pick your kids or get grandkids off the ground, you’re playing golf, uh, you’re moving boxes around. It shows up by itself or in conjunction with other movements all the time. But if you’re not doing this movement properly, or if the chain of those muscles that are involved in that movement are dysfunctional somehow and you’re continuing to do it over and over again, then eventually that’s gonna lead to some sort of dysfunction, pain, or injury. So understanding not only how to do a, a proper bend pattern, but the muscles and and chain involved with it is very important. So that’s what we’re gonna go over with today. Greetings. I’m Ekemba Sooh. I’m the owner of SolCore Fitness.

I’ve been in this health and fitness field for 30 years. And so I started as a personal trainer, but even before that I was into athletics and I got lucky because, you know, in athletics you want to get big and strong and so you work out. And I got involved and learned from some pretty knowledgeable people about strength training and learned to do things like the bend pattern pretty well. Now, after I got out of that and became a trainer, I went even further to become an osteopathic manual therapist and an osteopathic trainer because I wanted to understand how the whole body works and how to train it and treat it holistically because that’s the way it’s designed. So when people come into my, my studio, they’ve gone away from only wanting to work out for aesthetics, right? Or to do something more egotistical. They want to live a good life, they wanna feel good, they wanna move, they wanna maintain their level of lifestyle up until the day decide that it’s time for them to die <laugh>.

And so that means the end goal is that they can do things like the bend pattern proficiently, and the bend pattern is part of the seven primal or basic movements. So you have squatting, you have the bending, pushing, pulling, twisting, lunging, and gait, right? You wanna be able to do these things proficiently and well because when you’re in life and pointing it outside right now, you’ll do these activities to perform your life. So that means I want to get them good at these seven primal movements. But unlike most exercise programs or studios or gyms, I don’t start there because the bend pattern and all the primal movements are what’s called global movements. That simply means globally my body, I have to use it as one to perform one of these movements. So I don’t wanna just start by teaching, uh uh, only how to do a bend pattern.

I wanna teach you, okay, this muscle chain tennis ligaments, these are involved in the bend pattern. Okay? What’s strong, what’s weak? What do we need to work on Once we’re in a better place for that, sure, now we can start to learn the bend pattern. So if you’re interested in hearing things, information in this holistic manner like I just talked about, then subscribe to this channel like this video and share with your friends. It tells a YouTube algorithm. It’s a good video and it’ll also show it to more people. Don’t forget to hit that bell and then stay tuned each week where I come out with new videos. So real quick, your body is a holistic living thing. That means it’s interconnected and interdependent and it’s all linked together. That means your big toe affects your head, your head fix your your fingers, right? So when you first start wanting to work on things like the bend pattern, that sound might sound obvious, but you want an assessment, but you don’t want, just like the basic assessments you get from personal trainer, you need assessment from somebody who understands the different “myo” muscle fascia, fascial chains of your body.

’cause that’s what it is. It’s not just a collection of muscles, it’s how they’re connected and the jobs they have to do along that chain. And it’s not just muscles in that chain, it’s tendons and ligaments and different fascial chains that go different areas. So you get an assessment, you want somebody to understand that and look at your pattern. But in basic, the the, uh, bend pattern, the main, uh, using chain is your posterior chain. That that’s all posterior means the back of your body, right? So from your heel, back of your leg to your glutes to your back up to your head, that’s the main chain that works. Now obviously you need the other chain, the anterior chain to help stabilize it. And those lateral chains also help stabilize it. But we’ll talk about the main chains. So we look at that, what muscles are tight or what muscles are weak or what needs to work well, they start to think about the soleus, the two gastrocs, the three main hamstrings, your glute, your four layers of back muscles, your trapezius, your rhomboids, levator scapula, and your shoulders.

All those muscles, as you’ll see here in a little bit as I do the movement, are involved in that bend pattern. Now, I’m obviously not gonna go over what to do for every single one of these chains for two reasons. One, I don’t know you and I don’t know what I, what I should be giving you because I can’t, I haven’t assessed you or talked to you. And two, it would take way too long. Again, all those muscles I talked about are just the base, the base level. But you have different ways to train different things, different ranges of motion, different, uh, a lot of different things. But it’s a combination of strengthening and stretching in these myofascial chains. What I can tell you is that in this pattern, it’s gonna put more load on your lower back than say like a squat. That’s just by the way it moves, right?

It’s not because I said so, it’s because of math, right? So it’s called a lever arm. So if I’m doing a bend pattern and my torso’s leaning for more far forward, then my shins are moving, then it’s gonna more down to my back. ’cause just try to support my torso. And if I’m reaching my arms out like that, it’s even heavier. So if you’re thinking about that, then okay, I need to train my abs and my back to stabilize my spine as I do the bend pattern. Now this, now these forces that go in your lower back aren’t inherently bad. Again, like I said, it’s just part of the movement. It’s only bad if three things, right? You haven’t trained segmentally, that chain I talked about before. All those different muscles you are, uh, doing too much weight or too much, uh, too much force in the movement or you’ve got something acute in your back.

But if you train yourself properly, those, those forces should move for your body, like all movements nicely. So when you see these reports on this position causes this much in your lower back and this position, this much in lower back, that’s true. But that’s true for a cadaver or for that static just looking. ’cause we move around. So as I do a bend pattern, that force goes into my back, put away from my back into my back, away from my back. So it doesn’t stay there ’cause I’ve got a good chain and I know how to do the movement. Are you working on your bend pattern? Are you trying to go through different progressions to make sure that you’re doing it right? Let me know the comments. So in learning any new skill and the bend pattern, if you haven’t practiced it properly, is learning a new skill. You always wanna start with the most pure movement and that pure movement is a butt back bow forward. What that means is it’s a hip dominant, uh, activity. That’s what they say in training a hip dominant as opposed to a squat, which is a knee dominant, right? So, uh, squat i, i initiate and do the main movement with my

Knees, knees and the bend pattern. I do the main movement with my hips, right?

It’s just what they call it, not big deal. So if I want, if I want to practice that, I’m gonna start with practicing that butt back, back forward in the most easy way possible, right? So as I do the butt back, bow forward as best to start kneeling. Because now when I kneel, I take away a lot more information from my body so it can focus more on what I’m doing. If I’m standing, my body all says the thing about standing. So when I do a, a butt back bow forward that posture, I wanna push my butt back and bow forward. But I wanna bow forward with a neutral spine. I don’t wanna overly tuck my pelvis, I don’t wanna stick my butt out too much. I wanna keep it neutral because as it goes back I want to keep it as neutral as possible without overly rounding or overly arching, which, which bad forces on the back, which means you want those four curves in your body.

Again, we go back to the segmental, the chains of the body. That’s something you would do prior to this if you had like a flat back. You don’t wanna do this if you have a flat tight back. Now, once I do it again, I can start my hands here, here, here or here. Gets from easiest to hardest, but I do my butt back bow forward. ’cause now I’m teaching my brain and my body, hey, this is doing a leading this is doing a following and that produces the motion. So you can work with that posture first. Then you work on two a body weight. R-D-L-R-D-L just stands for Romanian deadlift. I have no, I’m sure they, they invented it over there, but that’s just what it’s called. So an RDL is same idea that a butt back and bow forward. So I do a body weight first and then once I get that motion down, then I would choose like a lightweight.

This is light for me. So again, I would do a butt back. Whoop, that’s what you don’t want a butt back bow forward. So that’s a good point to make. As I’m doing my butt back and bowing forward, yes, my weight’s going back into my heels, but like my first one, which is terrible, you don’t want the toes coming off the ground. Yes, you’ll feel some more force going back into your heels because that’s where you’re putting force. But if your toes come off the ground, that’s bad. That po that movement, that RDL or bun bent pattern will encompass a lot of what you do in life, right? But there’s gonna be times when you need to pick things off the ground that require more force. That means you need to get good at a deadlift. So a deadlift is the same as a bend pattern, RDL, but you just add your knees.

So for the deadlift I’m doing the same thing ’cause I’ve practiced that butt back bow forward, okay, I’ve got that down now to to, to make it into a deadlift at the end of my butt, back bow forward. Like I can’t do anymore without cheating. I now bend my knees and then when I push up, I use just as much force to keep my posture. That’s what you want to look like. Now, a couple things you wanna watch out for is that people tend to, the worst thing I see it gives me a cringe face is rounding the back. People post on wherever they post on, on their workouts and look at this deadlift I’m doing and this great workout and this circuit. I’m doing a CrossFit and their back is totally rounded. If you want to kill your back, if you wanna have a terrible life round your back, you need to keep this posture just as much as you need to do the movement.

So when you go up, you need to move as one. Not that’s a good way to come see somebody like me for a long time to correct all your injuries. Now take your time when going through these, these progressions, like I said, like any new skill, it takes a lot of volume and time to do this because you’re not only trying to work your body, what you’re trying to do, do, excuse me, and develop a new motor engram in your brain. That simply means telling your brain, your body, this is how I wanna do things. Once that motor engram is set, you don’t have to think about how to do a deadlift or whatever you’ve practiced. Your body just does it. So take your time. It’s not a race, it’s about longevity. So the slower, the slower you go, the faster you end up in the end and the more proficient you end up at the end.

If you’re looking for support on training, I’d be glad to help. I’ve got a couple free resources. I’ve got a, uh, private Facebook group where we’re talking about how to be strong, mobile and flexible mainly for people in their forties and and above. I also have a free report and I also have a consultation that we can do. If you’re ready to talk about what this means for you, all three links are in the description below and all you gotta do is click on ’em, finish what you need to do and you’ll get instant access or the download or or time with me. But I hope you enjoy this. I hope you learned a lot. I’ll see you next week.

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