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.

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Fascia is the connecting link to your body. If you learn how to take care of it and train it correctly with fascia stretching, fascial strengthening, and holistic care, you will unlock the key to a sustainable, strong, mobile body. But are links like foam rolling or myofascial release all your fascia needs?

Well, check out this video to find out what it really takes to train your fascia.

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Fascia is a big buzzword now in the health and fitness field, but the study of fascia has been around for a long, long, long time. But unfortunately, all this great study material about fascia, has not shown up in the exercise and treatment of the fascia.

Just saying the word fascia or listing in your marketing, doesn’t mean you’re working with the fascia. So I want you to stay tuned while I go over some specific things about the fascia to know whether you’re working with the fascia or not.

Greetings, I’m Ekemba Sooh, I’m the owner of Solcore Fitness. I’m a soma therapist and soma trainer, and I’ve been in this field for about 30 years. I started as a regular personal trainer. And when the buzz of fascia came out, and the techniques associated with it, like foam rolling came out, I was a little bit clueless like most people, and believed what the marketing of these techniques like foam rolling, told me, because the information wasn’t the incorrect, it just wasn’t all the information.

And so once I did a deep dive into the fascia world, and all the different jobs it has, and how you can work with it specifically, then it opened my eyes, and it made more sense, because now it’s in a holistic fashion. And that’s how I like to view things, and that’s what I want to talk about on this channel, is a holistic view, not just a couple of exercises for certain maladies, that generally don’t work anyway and make things worse.

I want you to understand the cause and what you can do with it. So, if you’re interested in finding out more detailed information in this holistic fashion, just subscribe and hit that bell. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and lets the YouTube algorithm know it’s good, and it shows it to other people, share with your friends, and then well, that’s it. Thanks.

You can say that you have one fascia that from in utero till now, has split up and differentiated into hundreds or thousands of different directions that encompasses your entire body. An example is, in your muscles you have an epimysium, a perimysium, an endomysium that are fascial layers that surround the muscle and muscle fibers. Those fascias meet at the end of the muscle to form a muscle tendon, which is also fascia. That tendon attaches to the bone, but more specifically the periosteum, the skin that surrounds that fascia.

At some point, a ligament, which is also fascia, will connect to the bone. You have visceral fascia, that surrounds your organs, in a peritoneal, in a serious membrane like the pericardium or the pleura, lungs or heart respectively. So that’s your entire body. You have it all around your body, but a good word for fascia, is connective tissue, because it doesn’t just your whole body, it’s connected like a big spider web, right? Your whole body’s like one big spider web with fascia in different areas in different soft tissues.

Here’s an example of how it connects. The back outside part of my heel is connected to the outside calf, my lateral calf. That is connected to my bicep femoris, which is one of my hamstrings. That bicep femoris connects to my sit bone, my ischial tuberosity, that connects up into my gluteal and thoracolumbar fascia, and then it can go two different ways for this chain. It can go through my lat into my arm, or it can go through my paraspinal muscles, all the way into my head, and even connecting to my eye.

That’s the most important part is the connections that the fascia make, if you’re going to work with a fascia, you have to first understand that it encompasses everything, that whenever you move, you’re using your fascia, but you have to understand how it’s connected and the directions that they go. Fascia is connected in two different ways, in continuity and continguity.

So with continuity, you have to understand that fascia within its structure, has collagen tubes. And these tubes, their job is to transport liquid. This liquid is basically a fascial liquid that’s based on water, that helps with your immunity to transport waste away, to bring in nutrients. Very important. You want those tubes to be open. It’s that the piping of your fascial system. And so in continuity, these fascial tubes are connected all the way through. So, that connection I just talked about from my heel, my calf, my hamstring, my ischial, my glutes, my lats, up to my head and arm, those tubes run the length of that connection. They go all the way up. We’re taught that if you put a dye liquid in one of these tubes, you can see it move all the way up, and all the way down, whichever of these tubes. Different parts of your body, but one chain.

so contiguity means the act of being against something or bordering it, or connected to it. You don’t have the fascial tubes lined up, but they’re connected, so they help support the entire fascial structure. And that structure is your body. Now, the structure of body is called biotensegrity, in these terms. Tensegrity is a term coined by Buckminster Fuller, very famous architect, and some really smart anatomists who knew about tensegrity, when they took a step away from their studies and were coming back from lunch, they saw the body from afar, as opposed to up close.

When they saw it from afar, they go, “Hey, look at that. It’s tensegrity.” And they’re right, but now it’s biotensegrity because bio, biology, us, tensegrity. So if we want to work with a fascia, and we’re a tensegrity structure, then we need to know what a tensegrity structure can do, to effectively work with the fascia.

So check out this little slide on all the different things a tensegrity structure, and us, because we’re tensegrity, can do. Are you wanting to work or are you working with your fascia in your health and fitness routine? In the comments, let me know what you’re doing. But then stay tuned for some more information to understand if you’re really working with your fascia.

Now, fascia is not an inert piece of tissue that connects things, right? It has a lot of different jobs. It’s alive and works with your body. See this little insert to see all the different jobs that fascia does. On top of that, your fascia is made up of cells, fibers and matrix. And it’s a differentiation, or different combination of, these cells, fibers and matrix, that tell the body different parts of fascia. So a tendon, ligament and aponeurosis, which is like a sheet of fascia, are all fascia, but I mix it up differently, to form a tendon.

Then I mix it up a little bit differently, to form a ligament, and I mix it up differently to form the aponeurosis. Same fascia, just different jobs, because they’re in different places of the body. If I want to work with the fascia, I have to understand the jobs, and the fact that fascia is the same, just a little bit different, in different parts.

To work with the fascia, you also have to understand that the fascia is affected by three main components; first, nutrition/hydration, second, stress, third, the training, whether it bad or good. Nutrition/hydration, pretty easy to understand. If you eat a bunch of crappy food, then your body, includes your fascia, is made up of crap. If you’re dehydrated, then your fascia, like all soft tissue, is going to be more like beef jerky, and less like a fresh cut piece of lean meat. So if I try and move that beef jerky, it doesn’t function well.

Water’s also important because all soft tissue, including fascia, slide on this material of water substance, to move because we’re mobile and motile, so we want to be able to move. But if we don’t have that water substance, we get inflammation, because now I get rubbing. You also want water because that fascial liquid that goes through the tubes is based on water. So if I want to have all that fascial liquid with the immune response, and takeaway waste, and bring healing, then I need that liquid to have in my body.

The third is a little more complicated because you get stuck in a lot of dogma and false information. That’s the training of the fascia. To train the fascia, you want to first think about what do you want? Like any exercise program, what are you trying to do to fascia? Am I trying to be symptomatic, and just get rid of something? In this case, let’s take a trigger point, that’s a big thing with fascia, or am I trying to restore and improve function with the fascia?

Now I know, everybody’s going to say both, but that’s not what everybody’s doing. They’re mainly only doing the symptom one, through different forms of techniques with tools, or with manual therapy. Now, one way people work with their fascia and their symptomatic care, through trigger points, is by foam rolling. So we’re going to talk real quick about that. Now, foam rolling has been around for a long time, and at some point, I don’t know when, it got associated with the fascia.

And there’s some great studies about foam rolling and benefits. I’ll post them in the description below, but your life is not in a controlled study like these are done before. When they do a study, they’re saying, “Does A+B=C?” And they test it a bunch of times, and they say yes or no. Either one’s fine. But life is not A+B=C, life is the whole alphabet, all the numbers, the Roman numerals, it’s everything.

So when you go to foam roll, because you want to get rid of that trigger point wherever in your body, you may or may not be getting what the study says, and the benefits, but you’re also getting everything else that goes with it. And in terms of fascia, when I foam roll, I crush those collagen tubes like a rolling pin. And I’ll smash it. I’m not against doing things for trigger point, I do it myself. I do it with my hand though. So I do it, in a controlled environment as the therapy, and I know that I’m going to crush the collagen tubes, but I need to get rid of that trigger point.

But then because I know I crush the collagen tubes to get rid the trigger point, I also know how to do treatment, stretches and exercises, to reform those change of collagen tubes, after I crushed it. It’s like getting rid of a piece of a street that doesn’t work and repave it and bring it back. It’s the same idea. But people will feel a difference when they foam roll. Now they’ll feel something for a couple of different reasons. They’ll feel something because you are putting pressure on a part of your body, so that immediately brings blood, so you bring blood and warmth. That makes you feel a little bit better. Then you’ll also feel better because now when you stop foam rolling, which is inherently painful, you’ll feel better, because you get a bunch of hormones, they go, “Oh, we’re done. Thank you so much.”

But people take this basic feeling, which is very subjective, and the partial information from studies, or marketing, they go, “Oh, success.” Then they attach it to things like, “Oh, look, I’m so bruised.” And, “It’s so sore afterwards.” And they say, “Oh, it must be doing something,” because I guess here in America, I’m not quite sure anywhere else, the more pain, the more gain, right? That’s not true in this case, because when you see the bruises or soreness afterwards, in that case, you’ve now caused trauma to your body.

And then again, in true American fashion, well, foam rolling is not enough. Let’s foam roll on PVC. Let’s add spikes. Let’s add something else we can do to torture our body in the name of working with my fascia, but it’s not working your fascia at all. And then you have other techniques like guns that blast your fascia, or the Graston Technique which scrapes the fascia to get rid of it.

I’m not a fan of these at all because the cost benefit does not equal what the benefit may be. It’s way traumatic to the body, than what it could get out of it. But it’s not just these inanimate objects that are causing damage to your fascia, it’s also therapists who don’t know how to work with the fascia, but say they do. I was just talking to a lady at a consult, and she had a massage therapist that was working with her fascia. She took her finger and started digging into her psoas and inguinal area. That’s basically this area right here. So she’s digging into it. I don’t know why, to release it or whatever, but she pushed so hard, she traumatized the tissue. So it’s like somebody was just hitting you constantly. It’s not helping you. It’s starting to hurt and it’s going to piss you off.

Well, the tissue got pissed off, and when it gets pissed off, it inflames, it turns off. It’s not functional, and so when this lady did this to this other consult lady I was talking to, afterwards, she tried to take a step off the bed and her hip totally didn’t work and caused another issue.

Now, you can work with the fascia, you can work with pumping the fascia, if it’s in a joint, to help bring this fascial liquid and synovial liquid into the joint to normalize it. You can work with the fascia gently, through a fascial normalization technique, to increase the flow through these different collagen tubes I talked about. You can also do, in my case, techniques like double TLS, to turn on a ligament, or turn off and diffuse a tendon, to do different things with a body.

But you have to understand all the different functions, the tensegrity structure, and how it works best. Along with treating your fascia properly, you want to train it properly. So if you want to train your fascia, you have to understand all these different things I’ve talked about. Understand that we’re built as a biotensegrity structure, and there’s different aspects as to what that structure can do.

Understand the roles that the fascia play in the body, and how it basically helps control almost an entire body. And so if I want to train the fascia, I need to decide, do I want to stretch it, or do I want to strengthen it? But in either case, it needs to be put in tension. So, take that example from before, where I said that line of force from the back of my heel, my calf, my hamstring, my glutes, my lats onto my arm, or my spine to my head, I can take that chain, and I can put it in tension, that automatically tells the body, “Hey, this person wants to work that more,” because I produce tension in that chain. I produce a little bit force, which tells the brain, “Hey, this is ready to work a little bit more.”

And then I want to decide, do I want to strengthen in that position, or do I want to stretch in that position? Still using the fascia chains, which different parameters and different things you do to strengthen or stretch, but it’s the lining up of that chain, and knowing which way you want to go, that’s the most important part. Because, anywhere along that chain I keep talking about, you can produce tension to work that specifically, while still respecting that chain. So, there’s a posture I can take to stretch, in this case, my lateral gastroc, myofascially. There’s also a posture I can take to stretch my bicep femoris, in a posture, but also respecting this chain. Same thing for my glut, for my thoracolumbar fascia, for my transverse spinalis.

I could even put myself into a posture, to strengthen my spine, while still respecting this chain. It all depends on what you want to accomplish while respecting the chain, and where specifically you want to work on that chain. Because, we’re basically a bunch of links put together, and if one of our links is weak, we’re only as strong as that weakest link.

So you want to work holistically, which you also want to work specifically, to make sure each one of your links is strong, which means there’s a different exercise or stretch, or whatever, for each link. Because again, the fascia connects all the body, if I train it with the fascia in mind, that makes my training more effective.

Now, I’m not just working on just the muscle, I understand that the muscle and the chain involved, which makes the totality of my movement better, which will lead to getting stronger, more mobile, less pain, better posture, all those benefits are multiplied, because I’m using my body holistically, as one. Okay? That was a lot of information on fascia. I try to keep it brief, but it’s difficult, and I personally view working the fascia, as one of the best ways to work with the body for sustainability, for balance, for strength and mobility.

If you want some assistance, I’d be glad to help. I’ve been doing this type of training for a long time now. I’ve been in the field for 30 years, but I’ve been doing fascial type training, therapy and exercise, for 17, 18 years, and I’ve got a free Facebook group where I talk about the training aspects about it. You can do live calls, master classes, challenges, all within this Facebook group. In description below, you can sign up. You can sign up for the free ebook, which talks about the different training aspects, but it has fascia in mind. There’s four steps to this proper training program that leads to a good life.

Or, you can reach out to me for a consultation where we can talk about what you’re doing now. I can give you some information where I see the holes of your training, and then if I see it’s a good fit, I’ll recommend my services, but I’m always going to give you some good information. But, I hope you start thinking about all this information, to see are you working with your fascia? Because it’s very important not to say fascia, and do the opposite. So have a great week, and I’ll see you next time.

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The squat is one of the 7 primal movements and is the only global movement that can assist in your posture if you do it right. Too often, when watching exercise tutorials, going to fitness classes, or personal training sessions, they teach the squat wrong. Doing the 100 squat challenge will tell your body more times how to squat wrong😑. So check out this video on ALL the areas needed to squat correctly.

Click the image to watch the full video.

The squat. The squat is a very important movement to get down. Not only is it part of the seven primal movements, which take us through life, but it’s also really important for your postural system. Now, I’m not going to just regurgitate information on how to do a squat. I’m going to dive a little bit deeper on all the components necessary for a good squat to do in the gym, but also in life. Hello, I’m Ekemba Sooh. I’m a Soma Therapist and Soma Trainer. I own Solcore Fitness and I’ve been in this field for professionally for 30 years, and I started off as a personal trainer, but I’ve been working out since I been about 16 years old. So tack on another five or six years of experience of being in the gym. At the beginning, I got a lot of hearsay information on how to work out, and I’m sorry to say it was 90% bad.

Most of the information you get in the gym is not based on science. They may have some information, but it’s kind of convoluted in this is what I’ve felt and stuff like that. You need to use experience. This is what I felt with science. Okay? If not, you’re kind of guessing and listening to Joe in the corner who has been working out for a while but doesn’t know the science of exercise. Again, that’s why in school, in class or degree, they call it exercise science. Now I go a step further and I make it holistic because guess that’s how the body is designed. So it’s about combining how everything’s connected with the science and experience so that you can live your best life. That’s what we’re going to talk about here on this channel is more of a holistic way of doing things that is steeped in science.

So if you want to hear more, then subscribe and hit that bell to be notified. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. It tells the YouTube overlords that this is good and I show it to more people. Then share it with your friends. So the squat is part of the seven  primal or basic movements that we do in life. Squatting, bending, pushing, pulling, twisting, lunging, and gait, which is your walk or your run. Those movements are done by themselves or together all the time in life. There’s no getting away from that. You can also talk about global movements. So global movements is more of a broad topic saying I use my whole body to produce a movement. That global movement can be one of the seven problem movements, a combination of the seven problem movements or something just more abstract like dancing, which does use them. But globally, I’m using my whole body to produce a movement now at the squatting. Now when you go to squat, you’re going to be learning to squat consciously or unconsciously, meaning you’re either consciously teaching yourself to squat or you’re just going to a class or a trainer

And learning it kind of unconsciously, kind of just doing it. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen show me a squat that does this, assuming that because the teacher in class was doing that for tighten your booty class or burn body fat, and some of the techniques then seen in some of these functional training classes aren’t functional at all because the function of body will go down. I know because back when I was 16 or 17, whenever it was, I was taught to squat like that head up out. I’m not quite sure what the thinking was back then and why to teach it that way, but that is totally stupid. There’s a terrible way to do a squat, yet it’s still being taught today. Now, there’s a lot more details I’m going to talk about later on what could also be part of a good squat, but just from the standpoint, if I’m sticking my butt out and looking up, that’s a lot of force in my lower back and my neck through gravity and if I have weight on my back through weight.

So now the forces aren’t going through my body nicely, they’re stopping my lower back and my neck. And so when I ended up getting an L 4 L f5 pinch of my vertebrae and sciatic pain, a big part of that was a squat that started when I was 16, and so I got the injury at like 35. So it’s a big time in between. So learning how to squat and in particular of the squat, like all global movements is very important. So now the big difference between the squat and the other six primal movements that the squat you can use to directly influence how good your posture is. So the other ones use your posture, but they don’t help it get better. So your postal system is made up of two main components. You have your plumb line, which is your ear, shoulder, hip, knee, and ankle lined up approximately.

And so the squat doesn’t, it doesn’t help that get better, but having a good plumb line helps to squat. So it’s better if I have a posture like that before I put a bar or do a body weight squat. And if I have a posture like most people like that, because if I squat in this position, it’s going to make my plumb line posture worse. The other component is a gravity line as part of the postal system. So you have a plumb line and now you have the gravity line. The gravity line is an inverse four degree cone. So right below my pubic bone as it comes up, it envelops between four degrees. I want to be able to keep myself in that four degree cone. There’s some basic areas of your body that communicate to your brain to tell you where your plumb line, your feet, your spine, your eyes, ears and TMJ.

They all tell the brain, I’m here in space. If one of those is off, your body thinks it’s somewhere else, the squat can help with that gravity line position as a global movement to help keep you in that four degree cone. Now, the squat, like most global movements, is made up of a bunch of different little parts working together to make one big movement. You want to work with your body in all these little individual ones before you try to master big ones. So the easiest way I can tell you about this is your body’s interconnected together and interdependent. That means they all work together. It’s like a links of a chain. So you’re a bunch of links in a chain and you’re only as strong as your weakest link. So if one of my links is a piece of bubble gum, then when I could do is squat my squats only as good is that bubblegum link, right?

And it’s a little silly to think about, but I want an extreme example for you to think about. So in all these aspects I’m about to talk about, you need to trade ’em separately. So with a squat, there’s a thing called the beam phenomenon. It means when I squat, when I do my movement, I want my torso to be like a beam, like a two by four. I want that because as I move up and down, I want it to stay in my beam area and not wobble around as it wobbles around. As I’m going up and down with force, I can even body weight, but even worse with weight on your back, that force goes in weird places, places you don’t want it to go. So you want to have a strong pelvic floor, abs, diaphragm, peck, lats, res, interior and bucco mouth pharyngeal down your throat fascia.

These components keep me in that beam phenomenon and each one needs to be trained separately. But again, you’re squatting, so don’t forget your feet. Your feet are on the ground. They need to push you up and down. So they need to function properly, which you’re going to lead me to a quick side note about squatting without shoes. I’m all for being barefoot and letting your feet do their job. I tell people to walk around without shoes at home all the time to do different things to train your feet. But when you do weighted squats, heavy squats, and you go up and down, your foot’s being supported by your arch, namely your navicular bone on the inside of your foot, the arch part. And so if that navicular arch can’t support the squat up and down, it collapses. So I’m not saying don’t squat without shoes, but there’s a certain limit to the weight that you should be doing.

So if you’re going three, five, even eight reps in a really heavy weight, I probably wouldn’t not wear shoes. I’m going to wear shoes with some arch support. How’s your squat? Are you working on it? Did you know about all those different parts of your body that are involved in the squat? Well, stay tuned because I’m going to go over some more details on how the form of the squat. Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about the form of a squat. So I’m dealing with my hands and then I got my bench here so I can kind of show you a couple reps. But first and foremost, I want my body to be even, and this is from math is not from because Ekemba said. So that’s my upper body, that’s my tibia and my shins, okay? I want my upper body, my shins, to be the same angle as you go up and down.

That means my center of gravity stays below me right here like that. If I don’t do that and I end up bending forward, my center of gravity goes back and I get more tension, my lower back. Or if I too far forward, my center of gravity goes forward and I tip back and I get too much a tension in my knees. So you want to be even, I always tell people kind of like an accordion because to me that made sense. I don’t know why, because you’re folding yourself kind of in thirds as you move yourself down and up. But the whole goal is to move straight down and straight up. So the two areas I see people have issues with are keeping their pelvis tucked and push her knees forward. So a term that was used at some point, I dunno if they still use it now, is that a squat is a knee dominant movement.

What that means is the knees dominate the movement of going up and down. It’s the main area that you want to focus on to produce that movement. Now, it’s not the only area as I’m going to show you here in a second, but think about the knees moving up and down. So I go to squat, ouch. I go to squat. The first thing I want to do is I want to stand like I’m standing on a clock, right? 12 o’clock is my pubic bone. My feet are 10 o’clock and two o’clock. That’s normal physiological position of your feet. People who tell you to turn your toes straight ahead, that’s internal rotation. Standing like that in some varying degrees is normal. That’s your feet. That’s normal. So as I stay in there in 10 o’clock and two o’clock, I want to first think about tucking my pelvis and tucking my chin.

This is part of that beam phenomenon. The pelvis tuck, the chin tucked. Again, those other aspects I talked about before that need to happen. But let’s start with just those. After I tuck, tuck, again, knee dominant movement. So my knees start moving forward first, and because I want my torso and my shins to be same angle, then I start to bow forward. I like to reach forward because I want to have a little counterbalance. Then I move myself down and up. Knee dominant movement, keeping my torso and my tibia, my shins the same angle. Now, if you’re having trouble tucking your pelvis when you do that, couple reasons. One, your abs and specifically your lower abs are not strong enough to keep your pelvis tucked. So you need to train not just your lower abs, please don’t think that train all of your abs, but understand the lower abs or for that tuck.

But it can also be through tight chain, tight myofascial chain. So when I go to tuck, I could have the strongest abs in the world, but if all this is tight and is stopping of the tucking, then I’m going to lose my tuck. So it’s not just the abs you want to think about, am I tight through my lats and S radius and all those thorac or fascia? All that fascia in back for the knees going forward. The big thing I see is tight soleus and calves because as they go down that area, the heel start to come up and the knees stop moving forward. It would stop them moving forward. So at basically need to stretch the soleus in the calves, but you also probably need to strengthen because I can only stretch a muscle that’s there. So if I don’t have muscles in my soleus, in calves, I also need to strengthen because muscle tissue works much better.

Then tenderness type tissue. Now, when you practice that, if you see you have issues with the squat in one of these different areas, you need to stop and deconstruct that and then to reconstruct. Now, that’s difficult if you are in a class or in a training program where the focus is more on body fat loss, which the majority of classes are, or a class that uses functional movement to produce a certain effect for a competition, they’re going to do later on with the same type of movements. Their coaches or trainers might teach you some basics about form. But taking time to learn something takes time. So I can’t just show you a couple of movements and you do four or five reps, 10 reps maybe, and you got it down. It takes some time because if you don’t take time to do it, when you go do that class, so that training session and the goal is to perform or to burn fat, you’re going to lose your form, right?

It’s like if I was teaching myself to type and I didn’t teach myself where the keys were because the goal was to type as many buttons as possible to fill the page. I don’t care about typing it properly, proper words. I care about filling the page with letters because that’s what my coach told me. So if you don’t learn to squat and go through, you’re going to be damaging your body. Now, you may think, Kimba, I don’t feel any pain. I’m not damaging my body. You are. You’re beginning to damage your body. You don’t feel pain at the beginning of damage your body. You feel later on the example I gave myself of being taught a bad squat at 16, but then at about 35 or so get an injury. It’s like a leaky faucet.

So if I have a leaky faucet and the drip starts at the beginning, maybe I notice it, maybe I don’t. It doesn’t mess up the basin of the sink, but after 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, there’s going to be a hole. There’s going to be a rust, right? Because I didn’t fix the link, the link at the beginning, okay? Now that you’ve got this great information to squat, what you need to go do is go practice. One of the greatest gifts exercises can give us is to develop a relationship with our body. Tell us where we’re tight, where we’re weak, where we’re disconnected with, so we can do something about it. So there’s not a curse of your body if you feel tight or weak or disconnected. It’s just your body telling you, Hey, brother or sister, I need a little assistance. Because when we find those things out, now we can do something about it to have it work better.

Because if we can take care of our bodies, our bodies will take care of us. We’ve been given this wonderful gift of a body that we can keep for 70, 80, 90, maybe a hundred years. So as soon as possible, get to know it and take care of it. So can live. You can live a great life. If you want some assistance on this, which most people need, then I’d be happy to help. So if you’ve got a free Facebook group where we can be more interactive to learn about this holistic way of taking care of yourself in description below, there’s a link for it. All you got to do is answer some questions. Let us know a little bit about yourself, and you’re in. You can now participate in challenges and masterclasses and interactions within a group. Or if you don’t want to do that, there’s a book.

I’ve got a free ebook. It’s on how to live your Best Life. There’s four steps to it to become mobile and to get out of pain. And then like I said, to live your best life. Again, in the description, there’s a link. All I need is your name and email. We’ll give you an instant access, or if you want to talk about your situation and what you can do, I’ve got a link in the description too. Set up a time to talk to me v Calendly. So I hope to speak to you soon. Good luck to you, and I’ll see you next week.

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