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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There is what is factually happening and your perception of what is happening. Being aware and managing these two situations will either lead you to suffering or not.

Check out this video to raise your awareness and help you move through your sticking points.

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When you embark on anything new, it’s challenging to first find the route you want to take. It takes a lot of trial and error, a lot of studying, a lot of introspection, just a lot. And once you find that new way of doing something, it’s going to be challenging and as one thing can really set you back and have you not make results. So I want you to stay tuned to find out what that is. How’s it going? I became a, so I’m owner of SolCOreFitness and I’ve been in the health and fitness field for like 30 years. I’m a Soma Therapist and a Soma Trainer, and those are therapists and trainer underneath the osteopathic model. And so I have a holistic view on how to approach the body. And so when people want more from their workout routines to achieve something different, they usually end up here.

And after I put them in a holistic routine, they start to get results. If they can get past this one thing, this one thing will set them off. Now, before I get into it, if you want to hear more about addressing your body holistically, then subscribe to this channel and click that bell to be notified. Don’t forget to this video at the end or right now and then share it with your friends. That allows a YouTube algorithm to realize it’s a good video so they can show it to more people. Now, the one thing that stops people from making progress is that they make things mean more than they are. Here’s what I mean. So when I put you into a program, if I give you a routine, it is for you. It’s not inherently difficult unless you need it.

If I give people a deadlift to do with hundreds of pounds across the board, it’s going to be challenging just by design. A heavy deadlift is difficult, but if I give you a bicep femoris stretch, which is one of your hamstrings, myofascially, which is an active stretch to stretch your bicep femoris in the chain, it’s involved. It’s only going to be difficult if you need it. So if you start doing this bicep femoris stretch and you start to feel a lot of tension, you have a choice to make it mean just what it is or add on a bunch of layers. So if you start doing this bicep femoris stretch and all of a sudden you’re like, oh, is this too hard and my body can’t handle this and this is torture and all this stuff, then that’s going to be what your experience is. If you start doing this bicep femoris stretch and you feel the tightness and you go, huh, obviously my body’s tight, and that’s where you stop, then you’ll be much more successful in your program doing that. You have to be careful of the thoughts and words you use relative to what you’re doing. And this is not just about working out because how you do anything is how you do

Everything. It’s about the totality. So if I can just take what I’ve been doing in my program and realize it only means this, then I can be successful. If I add on a bunch of layers and reasons why it’s too difficult or I’m not going to be successful, then you’re not going to be successful. And so you have to be aware of what’s going on in your body and in your mind. So some good ways to work with this is first to be aware that you’re about to do something new. So we’re going to stick with the health and fitness, my expertise, but again, if you find anything new, this applies. So I don’t work generally with too many newbies. There are usually people who have been working out for a while, different forms, outdoors, just active like gardening or hiking or biking, or they usually go to some sort of classes or the gym.

If you even sought practitioners like chiropractic or pt, they’ve gotten to the point where that routine hasn’t worked, hasn’t worked because it’s not holistically ingrained. That’s a different story. So they come to me. A good thing to do is to first realize, Hey, I’m about to do something new. Inherently that’s going to be challenging. More than likely you’re not going to be very good at the beginning. It’s going to be confusing, and you’re probably going to feel a little frustrated, not an indictment of you just natural. When I first started, same thing, right? A billion years ago. But you can get better at the beginning by going, okay, I obviously don’t know both body and mind. What’s going on? I need to open myself up for that. So you’re not judging yourself on trying to be perfect. Again, that’s a fear response. You expect to get it right away to be perfect.

That’s you not wanting to go through the process and are afraid that you’re not good enough to make it through the process. After you become aware that, okay, I’m about do something new, then doing some sort of meditation, journaling, mindfulness, peace, time, whatever you want to call it, I don’t care, is to give yourself some space between you and your thoughts and emotions. Now, if I can recognize that I’m not my emotions together, that I have some space in between. Now, when those emotions come, which they will because they’re all human, you can be a little more objective about it. It doesn’t mean you can be a robot, but now you start doing, I say that bicep femoris stretch. You go, oh my God, that’s tight. I’ve never felt that before. This is a little confusing. But now you can realize, okay, that’s just what’s coming to me, but what’s the reality? The reality is I’m doing a new movement I’ve never done before. I’m obviously tight in this position and my body is communicating back to me that it’s tight,

Which my body wants more of it. It doesn’t mean that it’s too much or you’re broken or whatever the case may be. All the things that you want to add onto it, it doesn’t mean that. And now when you go into your program, you can be a little more aware of what’s going on and break it down into pieces and be a little more methodical about what you’re going to do because it is more beneficial to go at it that way than to go full force. And then if it doesn’t work right away because of whatever condition thought you had, that you quit because now you just quit on yourself. That’s it. You didn’t allow yourself to go through the process and you quit. So that’s going to make it easier to quit again and also solidify what you think you need. But if you’re trying to do something new, it means you don’t know what you need to do.

You need to find a new way of doing it. And so being objective about it, it’s a better way of going about it. You have to allow your new choice here to change you. You’re part of the equation. So it’s not that you stay the same and you just start doing something different and you’ll get that result. You have to allow yourself to be changed by this new experience. And the more you keep layering on more of who you are at this time, which means the less you’ll be able to become that new person because you’re solidifying yourself. This is who I am, this is what I think, this is what I feel, this is what my possibilities are. And you go to the new thing and it doesn’t allow you to change you. Okay, well, it’s not going to work. It’s never going to work.

Nothing’s ever going to work because you didn’t allow yourself to change. Going through this process is very eyeopening. So I tell people when they come here, look, the movement part is not going to be difficult. It’s a little tight, it’s a little weak, it’s a little challenging, but that’s it, right? It is not anything bad to you. It’s how you go about it. Do you leave yourself open to be changed? And if you do, well, from my standpoint, yes, you get a better body, but at the same time, you become more of who you are, you start to realize, oh, I’m more than that. I’m not this thought that said I can’t do it. I could do it. I’m not this thought that says I’m not capable of, this is torture, because it wasn’t torture. It was actually very helpful. And now you have that because now you become more empowered.

We all become more empowered in our lives, and so allowing new situations to change us, it’s a huge part of that. I love to hear your thoughts on this. You can put ’em in the comments below. Have you found this to be true in your life? Have you basically self-sabotage yourself? Are you aware of it? Because awareness now is a first step to change. Have you never thought about this all, but has it piqued your interest? Again, just a conversation I’d love to know, and I want to say thank you so much for watching, and I’ll see you next week.

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Sarcopenia will progressively make your body and life worse. But keeping sarcopenia away is not as easy as going to the gym to lift weights, eating more and taking supplements and medications. Check out this video to find out more on how to keep sarcopenia away for good.

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Sarcopenia. It’s a condition that generally affects the older population, 65 or older, but has been shown to start in the thirties. So what is it and what can you do about it? Stay tuned and we’ll talk about that. Hello? Hello, I’m Ekemba Sooh I own SolCore Fitness. I’m a Soma therapist and Soma trainer, which is a therapist and a trainer under the osteopathic model, and I’ve been in this field for like 30 years. So I use manual therapy techniques, osteopathic manual therapy techniques, osteopathic stretches, osteopathic exercises on top of my base level of strength and conditioning to allow people to live their best life, to help them get out of pain, to increase mobility, strength, whatever it’s they need. I get a lot of people coming in here with sarcopenia or people who are concerned about getting sarcopenia or have it progressed more and they’re concerned because they’ve gone to the doctor, they’ve taken the supplements, they’re going to the gym and working out, they’re active in their life, whatever activities they love, but it’s not getting the results that they want.

I say, well, it’s not for lack of trying, obviously it’s because you haven’t put this together in a holistic method. You can’t just piece things together and then they’ll fit together. You have to understand that everything affects everything else. So if I replace one part, I have to think, did that also affect the different parts down a row? It’s holistic, and that’s how I view health and fitness is through a holistic vet lens. Excuse me, and that’s how I want to communicate to you on this channel. So if you’re interested in a holistic type view to solve your issues, then subscribe and hit that bell. If you like this video, then give it a thumbs up, just got to click it, they’ll show up and then share it with your friends. This allows this video to get it to more people, to benefit more people.

If you want to use one phrase for sarcopenia, it’s use it or lose it. If you don’t use your body in an intentional way to keep it strong, to keep it adapting, then it’s going to go away. Now, sarcopenia is a loss of muscle tissue and the neuromuscular connections that are associated with it. This is going to cause weakness and fatigue and poor balance and having difficulty doing things like walking upstairs. And some of the causes are not using your body properly. Low hormones, bad hormones, bad process of the protein, not enough calories. Now, if you were to hear this, you’d think, okay, well I can test myself. I can just eat a little bit more, take a protein supplement, take some vitamin D or some hormones and then move my body and I should be okay. But it’s a very linear way of thinking about it. Yes, you’re going to need to do those things, but it’s all about how you put together. You want to think about whatever program you want to do is a equation or a formula that you want to put for your body. For you. You need to have the proper equation for your body. Somebody else needs a different equation for their body, same parameters,

But it’s a little bit different because when you’re in sarcopenia or you’re developing sarcopenia, of course you’re getting weak. That means the structure of your body, how well you stay balanced is going to start to degrade. So you’re going to start to get things like a kyphotic curve or your upper back or you start to shrink or you’re going to keep yourself off balance. So that obviously makes it difficult to move, but it also makes it very difficult for your body to function properly because the structure of your body dictates how you function, how well you move and how well you digest, how well you eliminate, how well you think your hormones. Everything in this house can work better if the house is balanced. And so this includes your digestive tract and your hormones because if I’m off balance, my body’s off balance and my GI tract is all twisted up and out of place, then when I have the food or the nutrients go through my GI tract, it’s not allowed to secrete the proper enzymes or the proper amounts.

It doesn’t process the right speed around your GI tract, which means you’re not getting the nutrients you want from this great food and supplements, but you got really expensive pee and if you don’t have a good balanced body, your body can’t make and process hormones the way it needs to. So you can’t just take a supplement or buy fancy supplements of really good food and expect it to just work on its own. So if those good nutrients, those good supplements and that great food that you want to start eating won’t work as well into your body is balanced the house in good structure, then how do you build your house? How do you keep that structure in place? Is it as easy as just being active? Can you just go to the gym and do different classes and do activities to use your body and have it keep it balanced?

Well, the not so subtle answer is no. Every activity you do has an end purpose. Because I go out and walk and I’m using my legs doesn’t mean it’s balancing my legs and my body. I’m using my body to do an activity. In fact, most activities are actually a little damaging to your body. It doesn’t make ’em bad. They’re good. You want to do these activities, but you have to understand the benefits and the consequences of that action. So if I just use my body in different activities, well then I also need a program to keep my body balanced. Now for sarcopenia, we want to talk about the muscles, but I want to tell you the muscles aren’t the thing that holds my body in place. That is your fascial system. The fascial system is the connecting link that connects all your body. It’s like this big, gigantic great web that holds me in place and for the purpose of this video keeps my structure in place, keeps me this way.

So you can have a good fascial system or bad fascial system that allow you to have a good posture or bad posture. So when you want to work your muscles, you understand that your muscles are surrounded by epimysium, perimysium and endomysium. Fancy names for fascia. They’re around your muscle tissue and they go out and they form the tendons that connect to the bone which connected the rest of your body. So we want to work on building your muscle. You can’t just focus on just your muscles. Yes, you want to build your muscles, but your muscles work in conjunction with three factors. It’s called hills muscle model. So you have a contractile element that’s your muscle fibers. Then you have a series element and a parallel element. The series in parallel, you don’t have to worry about the names are fascia, they’re the epimysium, endomysium and perimysium.

They’re the ligament. It’s the periosteum that connects to the bone. It’s maybe a little bit of the ligament that connects to the bone. They all work together to make sure the muscle functions best. So we want to go train your muscle, train the muscle, but train it within the system of the fascia. Have you been trying to put together the program for sarcopenia? Have you tried different techniques? Has this information have given you open your eyes a little bit more as to what it might entail? Where I want you to stay tuned because I got more to come and an opportunity for support at the end of the video. So to start trending your body to be balanced so you can make it strong and go away from sarcopenia or not even go anywhere near it. You want to start working with two main aspects you you’re going to work with the structure of your body, the balancement , and the efficiency of your neuroendocrine system.

Both these can be trained via the fassal system and that’s supported by science. So the structure of my body is supported by tensegrity. That’s basically what we are. We’re in integrity, structure or just bio. And these fascial systems help keep us in place. So I can train that and I can also train my neuroendocrine system mainly through my spine. Again, this is supported by a theory called pit and dam by Bergmark where it says that the deep muscles are control how well I move. So I get a communication from my brain, it goes down through my spinal cord, out to my body. The more efficient is keeping that communication, the better I move. So I want to start working with the fascia to increase the balance and to increase the efficiency because as we age, again, if we don’t use it, we lose it.

We lose these connections and so our body becomes weaker. But it’s well documented that through exercise and resistance training, it helps increase the nervous system, helps increase the hormonal system. And this training doesn’t have to be outside of us. You don’t have to pick up a weight to do it. You can do it through your own body weight and your own tension within your body. The two best techniques I found to do these to balance your body and increase this neural hormonal system are myofascia stretching and ELDOA. They both work with the fascia system I just talked about the myofascial stretching works to balance that tensegrity structure through the different stretches you can do through different parts of your body to make ’em line up. And then eldoa uses that fascia system to strengthen and open my spine to balance it back out so that communication from my brain through my spine to my body is more effective.

Now as you’re doing this, you’re going to make your muscle strengthening exercises much more effective because now the impulses from the brain to my body, my body to my brain are more effective. The hormones that are going to these areas as messengers are more effective that the bags that surround the muscle tissue and the epimysium perimysium and endomysium are more fluid and are function higher. That ligament that connects those muscle is more aware to give more information. Now, when you train your muscles, you want to think about train your muscles in the specific directions they need to. Here’s what I mean. You can have a muscle go in different directions called different fiber directions. A different fiber direction means that muscle can work different ways. The most basic one I can tell you is your hip muscle. So your hip muscle has three different fibers.

It means it’s three different movements. I have an anterior, a middle, and a posterior. So I can do a posture for all three positions, not just one. So I know we have, I dunno, let’s say two dozen, three dozen exercises. Everybody keeps repeating over and over again. It’s a slight exaggeration, but there’s a lot of different ways you can train your body. So I could put myself into a posture to train the different fibers of my hip muscle, but at the same time keep the myofascial tension in line because you’re not just training the muscle, you train the chain of myofascial that chain together. If I train the chain, I train holistically, that’s where we get the most benefit. Now, this may seem a little overwhelming because we got like 600 muscles and if I got a bunch of different fiber directions for each muscle, that’s a lot of different postures and a lot of different work.

But like anything, you don’t start and try to do everything. You start where you’re at and then slowly add onto what you need. You start with the most pressing area first and then work up. The most pressing area for you is the hardest because that’s where your body is tight, weak, not connected, whatever it is your body’s telling you, ID more work here. And then you work your way from there. Now, once you do that, the biggest determining factor to building muscle and do it properly is to go to and past a little bit exhaustion, not so you are totally worn out, but doing a little more than what you can. So if I do the traditional 10 reps like everybody does, I may sweat, I may feel, I probably feel accomplished both physically and psychologically, and maybe that takes me to my 45 minutes to an hour of working out.

But if I stop at that 10 reps and my body’s used to doing 10 reps, it goes, okay, thanks. See you. If I go and do more, if I do 30, 40, 50 reps and I’m pushing my muscles way past what they can do right now, I’m telling the body, Hey, I need to use this more. And the body’s like, ah, it has to adapt. It’s called compensation, a super compensation. It builds that tissue there. Now, tissue doesn’t mean you’re getting big, it means it’s adding more muscle tissue to the area, which is the reverse of sarcopenia. It’s increasing the neuromuscular connection, which is the reverse of sarcopenia, and it’s telling your body, I want to use this more. That’s exactly what you want because this will bring more blood flow, more connection, just a better quality of life because you’ve pushed yourself past what you can do. Now, this is not only an outline for sarcopenia, these different aspects I just talked about in the video.

It’s an outline for just general training. It doesn’t have to be sarcopenia that you’re working on. You always want to have a goal, assess where you are, work on your structure, especially where it’s difficult, and then build your program out from there. So if you want assistance on this, I’d be glad to help. I have a free Facebook group that you can be more interactive with. You just have to go to description below and answer some questions to sign up or if you’ve got a free ebook, it’s a four steps, how to live the Life of your Choosing to get Stronger, more Mobile and get in the description. And then down there in description two is a link to my Calendly to where we can have discussion about what your goals are, where you want to go. I’ll assist where I can, and if I see a good fit, I’ll tell you about my services. So I hope you find is beneficial. I’d love to hear any questions you have any comments below, have a great week and I’ll see you next time.

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

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