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Feb 24 2024

Lower back Pain: 3 BIG Reasons Why!

Are you looking for lower back pain relief? Are you searching through lower back pain exercises, lower back pain stretches, or lower back pain massages for a solution? Lower back causes are a lot, and it’s important to know what causes them so you can know how to fix them. Check out this video to find out more.

Click the image to watch

Lower back pain affects 619 million people and is a leading cause of disability, which is just an astronomical number. And I myself fell into that number about 16 or 17 years ago, and I never got any sustainable results through doctors, PT, chiro, acupuncture, yoga, Pilates, and some of it actually made me a lot worse. But I did get out of it, so I want to stay tuned as to how I got out of it, why a lot of those other aspects didn’t work, and what I did to get out of it.

Greetings, I’m Ekemba Sooh. I own Solcore Fitness and I’m a soma therapist and soma trainer, which is kind like a physical therapist but a little bit more. And it’s underneath the osteopathic model of working with people, which is holistic method. Like I said, these treatments and exercises that people have or options they have for lower back aren’t always complete, a lot of them aren’t sustainable. And like I said, I found out firsthand.

And a lot of my clients over these past 30 years I’ve been in the business have also come to me because they didn’t get exactly what they wanted from their traditional ways of treatment. And once I got them, like I got myself, on just holistic way of working with the body, they started to see results and not only stop having back pain, but more importantly, started to have a better life because it’s not just about the back pain.

So if you want to know more about holistic way of treating yourself, then subscribe to this channel. If you like this video, please give a thumbs up and lets the algorithm know that it’s a good video and that it’s going to share with more people. Then you can also share with people you feel, like me, might be interested in.

Lower back pain is always just sitting there, in the corner in the dark, waiting to get you. And the physical pain of when it happens is terrible obviously, but what’s worse is the anticipation of when it could happen. So you don’t want to set it off because you don’t want to feel that way. But now you’re trying to walk on eggshells in your life to not set it off, but eventually it’s going to because your body never stays statically. There’s no maintaining, right? You’re either getting better or worse. In life, there’s no static. So eventually something’s going to set it off if you don’t take the time to specifically correct it and the cause to make sure it doesn’t come back.

These lower back pains can come from a lot of different reasons, right? It’s not just one or two. It could come from a bunch of different disc problem, a bulge, a herniation, a prolapse. That could be combined with a stenosis, an anterolisthesis, a retrolisthesis. It could be from a pinched nerve, artery, or vein. It could be because of badly functioning tendons, ligaments, and muscles. And outside of an acute injury, usually it comes over decades. So your back pain probably started 10, 20, 30 years ago. And it usually comes from a combination of bad posture, bad diet and hydration, bad training or treatment. So I want you to stay tuned, I’m going to talk about each one of those aspects.

Having poor posture is huge because it causes a lot of issues, in this case lower back pain. But it can cause just issues all over. Andrew Taylor Still said structure dictates function. That means how well my posture is, because structure and posture, same thing in this case, so how well my posture is dictates how well I function orthopedically, how well I move and have less pain, but also how I work viscerally, mentally, emotionally, everything. Like this building that I’m in, if the structure was bad, I would not be sitting here filming and talking to you. I’d be running and dodging because windows and stuff would be crashing down on me, which means I couldn’t properly function in my job right now to educate you ,because the structured building is not allowing me to. Same thing in your body.

Now, posture doesn’t mean just walking around, being tall and looking good. Posture means two things. One, that I have a good plumb line. Plumb line means my ear, my shoulder, my hip and my ankle are lined up. Posture also means I have a good gravity line. So imagine I have a four degree cone around me right now and that my body, via the muscles and postural systems, can keep me in place. That’s having good posture.

If I’m not stacked properly or I can’t maintain myself in this 40 degree cone, the door is open to whatever’s going to happen to my body. In this case, you end up with lower back pain. And so, until you correct the posture, you can correct all the other things I’m going to talk about later on, if you still have bad posture, it’s never going to truly set in and be effective.

The second part that leads to lower back pain is bad training. So bad training is the education I give my body. Now, you’re always educating your body, right? Right now, I’m educating my body to stand and be here. If I were to do this a lot, my body would adapt to this standing posture. So whatever postures or movements you have in your life is what you’re telling your body to do.

Now, the training you’re doing, whatever exercise program you’re on, needs to be a total training, needs to train all your body if you want to stay balanced. But all movement is not created equal. So just because you do something doesn’t mean you’re going to equal what you want. And just because you think you’re working your whole body doesn’t mean you’re working your whole body. You got about 600 muscles and a bunch of different ways those go. You’ve got a bunch of intents and ligaments that combine to them. So you have a lot of different ways you can train your body, thousands of different ways. Just doing a handful is not going to cut it. You need to find out what you need to do for you.

Now, why is this important? Because like I said, you’re always training your body. So let’s take an example. It’s well documented that sitting posture, sitting down is not the best for physically, but also mentally, emotionally. If I sit down a lot, if that’s part of my daily life, them I’m teaching, first, my lower back to round. It goes from arching to rounding just naturally because I’m sitting down. I’m teaching my hip flexors to become tight and weak. I’m teaching my deep rotators, [inaudible 00:06:48], piriformis, what [inaudible 00:06:52] say? A bunch of other ones. All the pelvic rotator muscles to be tight and weak. I’m teaching my glutes to also be tight and weak.

So I need to retrain my body if I sit down a lot. I need to give myself a program to say, “Okay, body, I know I have to sit down a lot because of a,” whatever, but I don’t want to stay in that posture because in daily life, sitting posture doesn’t work well if I want to go for a run or go skiing or play with my kids. So at a minimum, just for this one posture, I need to stretch and strengthen those hip flexors, all eight of them, not one or two. I need to work with all those deep rotators to strengthen them, to stretch them, the glutes. I need to bring my curves and my spine back to four because I know that V engineering and equation R equals n square plus one, because it’s science, it tells me that those curves of the spine, I need four of them to be the strongest. I need to work with that.

For me, the best way to train all these things is, like I said, holistically. So for me, I would use [inaudible 00:08:04] for the spine and maybe the hips and maybe the SI joint. I would use myofascial stretching and segmental strengthening, which works not only with the muscles, but the fascial chains from all those different hip flexors, deep rotators and glutes. Because you have to train your body not just where you have issues, but everything’s surrounding the issues and the cause of the issues if you want to have sustained results.

Now, that sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Well, it is. It’s a lot. Your body’s complex, it needs to be addressed as so. But you don’t start with everything all at once. You start with a couple nibbles and work your way up to the full meal. Whenever a lot of people come into me and they’ve done the allopathic way of doing things, they’ve been given a sheet of paper to do some exercises and they follow a sheet of paper, and almost to a person they say, “Oh, it helped for a little bit, got me functional, but now it’s not getting more results.” I say, “Well, okay, you need to do this type of training.” And once I give them this type of training, in small niblets, to work out more, they get that sustained results.

When looking for exercise programs, you always want to think about what’s the main intention of why that exercise program was created? So we’re going to take out all names because I don’t want to trigger people’s ego. If that program was designed to help you become mindful and hopefully be liberated, enlightenment, and they gave a physical way to do that, that it wasn’t designed to correct lower back pain in this case and the different reasons you have it. If that program is designed to connect to your core as you move, which is good, nothing wrong with either one of these things, then maybe it’s not physically designed to have you correct the different reasons why you have lower back pain, same thing. So you want to think about what’s the philosophy of what you do?

For me, the philosophy is medical, right? It’s from a long time ago, back World War II, Andrew Taylor Still. The idea was to correct the body to correct dysfunction, and all the different ways it happens. So I’ll give an example. The scorpion stretch and different ways to twist your spine to help your lower back are totally BS. First and foremost, when you twist, you compress your spine. That’s just physiological. That’s the way it’s designed. So when I turned like that, even if I got tall, my spine compressed. So if I’m doing a scorpion and I bring that leg over, I’m going and twisting, but I’m also going to extension, which also compresses your spine.

So you compress your spine, and because also of Pascal’s law, which means when I put pressure on a spherical ball, it goes omnidirectional and your disc is a sphere. Now that disc is being compressed and being pushed in all of the directions. And if one of those directions you have those herniations or bulge, it’s going to make it worse.

But somebody along the line told somebody else that, “Hey, this is great for your back,” because maybe they felt something. They felt something, they felt better. If part of your problem with lower back pain is in the disc, you’re not going to feel anything until it’s too late. You don’t feel that compression and bulging, like I talked about, until it touches something. It doesn’t mean it’s good, it just means it’s asymptomatic until it becomes symptomatic. And when it’s symptomatic, it’s a whole different reason.

So when looking for exercise, you need to do your due diligence, can’t speak right now, and talk about why does this work? And have that person be able to articulate why it works. Are you working on a way to sustainably get rid of your lower back pain? Let me know what you’re doing. Put it in comments below.

When you go out to find an exercise program for your lower back pain, you have to be very careful with what’s generally out there and what’s popular. It’s out there because it’s popular because of multiple different reasons. It’s popular because somebody decided it was popular. They said, “Oh, this is good for your lower back.” It caught on. Maybe a couple people got results and now it becomes a thing. Usually, it’s a thing because it’s easily digestible.

So if I tell you I’ve got three exercises to cure lower back pain, you’re like, “Thank God. That sounds awesome.” But that’s BS, that’s not true. I don’t know where your back pain’s coming from. I don’t know you. I don’t know how you’re going to react to exercises. Those exercises also are usually laden in partial information. So part of the reason why they work is good, but it’s not the whole reason on why something should work. There’s more information out there.

And unfortunately, they’re given to them by people they trust, their friends and their family. They’ll tell them, “Hey, this is good.” If you search around on YouTube after my video, I’m sure you’ll find a bunch of videos that say that. And it’s usually from a PT or a doctor or something like that, so you trust them. Or it’s from an actual, like it’s a handout, like I talked about before, from a PT or chiro.

But most of these exercises are the same, because we have a closed loop system here. One person tells one person that something’s good, echo chamber, that’s what it’s called, an echo chamber. They all start talking about the same thing and it makes you feel safe because you hear from a bunch of different sources and they’re all saying the same thing. Well, it must be true, right? We’ve all found that to be true. This is sarcasm coming from my mouth right now because that’s total BS. So you have to be careful about that.

You have to, I keep repeating myself, work holistically. That’s the way your body designed. Work specifically for what you need. Why do you have lower back pain? What is the cause? Your choice between cause and symptom training, which I’ll talk about here in a second. And then how do you go about teaching yourself that program?

And the worst thing that’s out there are these tools and gadgets that they have to correct certain maladies. So I’m sure if you search around, you’ll find some sort of gadget, 20 bucks or 50 bucks, to cure your lower back pain. They don’t cure. It doesn’t happen. That’s not true at all. You want to believe it because you want a simple way to correct your lower back pain, and I’m sorry, that doesn’t help. It might cure a couple of symptoms. Maybe you feel better. But ultimately, it won’t correct the cause of why you got lower back pain. That takes a combination, holistic, stretching, exercises, and lifestyle factors. That’s what it takes.

But the problem is you were searching for an easy result, and I’m sorry to say it’s never going to be easy and it’s going to be hard on you, on your body, and on your wallet. Because you’ll do one of these little tools and you’ll feel better maybe, hopefully, I hope you do, but eventually it’s not going to work. And then you go and buy the next tool to make yourself better, and eventually you’ve got four or five tools and now you spent two $300, and it sits in your closet. It’s not going to work. You need to decide what you want with your training in therapy.

That leads to the next step, which is therapy. So deciding what you want is a big step in therapy. You want to decide either do you want to feel no pain or do you want to feel functional and get better in your life? It’s a very important question and people look at me with doe eyes whenever I say that, but it’s not obvious. I want to know that because if you don’t want to feel pain, [inaudible 00:16:00] for me, then don’t work with me. Go to a pain clinic, take up on a medication, and throw ice on whatever you’ve got for the rest of your life, and hopefully you don’t feel pain.

If you want to function, you need to choose a program that allows you to function. That’s going to dictate the type of therapy you get and the type of training you’re going to get. If you choose to function, you’re going to not be doing the allopathic way or symptom-based treatments for your body and you can do more of the etiology, cause-based treatments.

So if I go to my doctor, he’s symptom-based. I say, “I got low back pain.” He goes, “Okay.” Takes some X-rays. I’m sure he’ll find something, a disc, a bulge, a herniation, something like that. Generally, he starts with cortisone shots, maybe gives you three to 10 PT sessions, and then you come back for another cortisone shot. And eventually it gets worse and eventually you have surgery. That’s allopathic, that’s symptom-based. Or you take pain medications or you use ice.

If you want to do the etiology, cause-based, you come to somebody like myself and we do an assessment to find out not only what the reports say, but actually how you move. Because you’re not just a piece of paper, you’re also a human being that moves around. And one person, two people can have the exact same imaging, say a disc bulge or herniation, but move completely different and have different symptoms, so you test.

And then you have to be okay with the struggle or the learning process, I should say, of training the cause. So you start with what hurts, but then you build your program out to make sure that all the parts of your body that cause the lower back pain are also trained, not just the area that’s causing the lower back pain.

The last part is your food and your hydration. You are what you eat. If you eat crappy food, non-nutritious, from my standpoint, not organic or the way nature brought it, you’re going to be building your body on crap, which means you’re going to be more susceptible to breaking because you’re not strong. And if you’re dehydrated, then you’re also going to lead to issues. Your body is approximately 70% water, probably a good idea to keep it around 70%. Because your tissues, your soft tissue, move on a watery substance and only move as well as they’re hydrated. And if you think about your disc, which is one of the big things that people have lower back pain width, your disc needs to be hydrated.

Two of its main jobs are to shock absorb forces and to allow your spine to move properly. Well, if it’s dehydrated, you lose space in the joint, which means you lose shock absorber and you lose the ability to move the way it should, strictly because you didn’t drink enough water. Probably a good idea to check what you eat and make sure that you’re hydrated.

Now, I want you to have success, but you need to decide what you want to do. Do you want to feel no pain or do you want to get better? Like I talked about before. If you don’t want to feel pain, then continue along this general allopathic way people work with themselves, and then hope that you don’t feel pain. If you want to correct the issue and find the cause, then you need to use a holistic program like I’ve been talking about throughout this whole video.

If you want more information what that holistic program might look like for you, then I got some support for you. You can join my private Facebook group, the link is in the description below, to join an interactive way to find out not just about correcting lower back pain or pains in your body, but to get strong, get mobile, get flexible. Got different ways, we do masterclasses, challenges, mini trainings, and I interact with people on the site. You get a free download of my free ebook. Again, it’s how to live your best life. There’s four steps to that. And again, in description below, just click on it and you can put your information in, you get instant access.

Or you can reach out and talk to me personally, again through the description with a link, through my Calendly link. You’ll find a time that suits you and we can talk about what is it you want. I will only give you my services or let you know about my services if I feel you’re a good fit. But no matter what, I’m going to give you as much information as I can on the direction I think you need to go and the steps you might be missing.

I know this is long video. I hope you stayed through the end. I hope this was valuable. Put any questions you have down in the comments and I’ll see you next week.

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Written by SolCoreFitness · Categorized: Blog, Exercise Tips And Support

Feb 18 2024

AI and exercise. Is it leading you down the wrong path?

Using AI for fitness may seem like a safe win. Big businesses are putting this technology in their equipment, Peloton and Tonal, in the hopes of having a personal trainer at home. But is the program it’s giving you good for you? Will it get you results, waste your time, or hurt you?

Watch the video by clicking on the image below to find out more.

The idea that technology or AI can, uh, power your fitness programs through things like tonal or the mirror may sound cutting edge, enticing and just what you need. And the, the technology is definitely cutting edge. We’ve never seen anything like it. And what’s to come may be amazing. What are the programs it’s given you, the things to do for your body? Good for you. Stay tuned. Hi, I’m Ekemba Sooh. I’m the owner of SolCore Fitness. I’ve been in this field for 30 years and I’m a Soma therapist and Soma Trainer, which is a therapy and fitness, kind of like a physical therapist a little bit more. And it’s all un the osteopathic model. So osteopathy is a definition of holistic, meaning we got one body, it’s interconnected, interdependent, and there’s a certain way that it should function and a certain place that things should be.

So in osteopathy and holistic area, we use a bunch of different techniques to achieve that, not just a handful of techniques to get there. That’s kind of what AI is leading to, is it’s using a standard amount of information to get us to a certain level. That’s a problem ’cause there’s a lot more information out there. I love technology, right? I love the fact that we don’t have to file tons of paper now, right? We can do it digitally. I love the fact that I could interact with you right here on this video to where before I couldn’t, I could interact with my clients through Zoom and through fa uh, FaceTime to help them with their programs that I can have spreadsheets that help me do a lot of equations and sorting and things. I love that stuff, but I want to make sure that the human element stays in it.

That we don’t turn into a bunch of robots. So AI artificial intelligence is a semi-autonomous as of right now. <laugh> software that can generally perform tasks that require human intelligence. So I’ve used it like I’ve used chat PPT and I find it kind of impressive. And so if I have like a, a general post or something I wanna say in an article, I’ll use chat gpt, then I always have to modify it for what I wanna say. So it kind of gives me a good outline and I like that it saves me a lot of time with, uh, with the writing. And if I’ll make a post or make a video about specific stuff about health and fitness, I don’t wanna use chat gpt because it’s going to give me everything that we already know, right? There’s stuff that we already know out there. It’s going to summarize it in a post and chat. Bt well that’s a problem because I think we can all agree on, especially in America, our health and fitness is not the best. There’s a lot of different reasons for that. But one of ’em is that we’ve been kind of using the same information, same lessons for a long time, right? And so people aren’t getting fit. It’s not just a matter of uh, motivation and dedication. That’s part

Of it. But you can be motivated, de dedicated. But if you’re using a program that doesn’t work for you, it’s not gonna work for you. But the fitness companies saw this as a easy out and easy way to make money. They go, oh look, I can really increase my bottom line ’cause they want their bottom line to be big and black. I can increase my bottom line by using this AI for personal training. I can put it on treadmills and whatever. And bikes and mirrors and equipment all given the same information to tell people what to do so they can cut out the cost. The personal trainer because the AI is developing a program for that person and it helps ’em a lot. It also makes it easily digestible for the public. The public wants to feel safe. They don’t like to <laugh>, they don’t like to feel challenged, which unfortunately is what you need if you want to achieve a different result.

So they see something that promotes, uh, their fitness and they recognize the exercises and things they do from stuff they’ve done before. They think, oh good, it’s exactly what I need. Not thinking for two seconds. The reason why you want to buy this thing is the classes or trainers you used before that did the same thing, didn’t get to where you wanted, right? So it’s not a different application of the same program, it’s the program that’s the problem. And I wanna seem like disparaging, uh, the general information that’s out there, all the information is really good. All this research and development of exercise science over the years is fantastic. All I’m saying is that’s not wholly information that people need. I’ve been in this field for 30 years, like I said, and for those of you who followed me, you might know that about 18 years ago I made the switch to this holistic therapy and exercise program that I do now, right?

I started using osteopathy for exercise and for treatment. ’cause I find it more effective. I did so because I got hurt and couldn’t get better through the traditional system, which uses the traditional information I’m talking about. But even before that, I was starting to get a little disenchanted with my education. So when you first become a personal trainer, which is how I started, you go through a course NASM as a bunch of others, but they’re, they’re all generally the same information, right? And then you do CCCs continue education credits to maintain your certification along with the CPR certification. It sounds, it sounds good on the outside, right? But the, you get the general information which is necessary. You need that. But then the CECs you take don’t really interact with each other. And I started noticing this over the years ’cause uh, at that point I’ve been doing like 15 years, right? Over the years. You see you take a class on abs, okay great, I get tell information abs then take a class on stretching. Okay, that’s great. But those two classes don’t speak to each

Other. They don’t interact with each other. They don’t come from the same base of information. It’s for me, frustrating ’cause I like to see how things work together. These fitness companies use the idea of the seven primal movements or seven basic movements. It’s called a bunch of different things, but it’s the same idea. We all need to squat, bend, push, pull, twist, lunge and gate. I think I got ’em. All right. Those are seven primal movements. These are good because you want the stuff you do in your workouts to equal what you do in your life. And everybody, everybody will use these movements and a combination of them and whatever sports and activities that they like in their life, everybody’s gonna use them. So you need to be able to do these. But there’s a bunch of other things before that that you need to do to be able to do those movements and then chat GPT using the basic information doesn’t take that in encounter in consideration.

And it definitely doesn’t take take consideration. You when you first sign up, they tell you to do a squat, but is doing a squat the best thing for you right now. So those seven basic problem movements I just talked about are global movements, right? Global means you have to use your whole body to perform one of those movements. The whole body works together to do a squat. The whole body works together to do a bend or a deadlift. The whole body needs to do its job to perform these. But within that whole body you have a bunch of little different areas that need to work together. Which means if one of those little areas is not doing their job or is too tight, it’s going to compromise that whole global movement and cause compensation or cheating on the rest of the the system, right? So if you want to have a good global movement, then you have to be able to train these areas specifically.

And by specifically I mean in isolation, but also at the same time holistically. ’cause it needs to eventually work together. The example I give is for the pecs. So people want to do pushups or chest press to work their chest, but the chest is just one part of that movement. You can say you have, it is off the top of my head, 12 different joints, let’s say 15 different muscles, all of all, all uh, involved with doing a chest press or a pushup. So if I go do just that, I go straight to those, these primal movements, you’re gonna do a pushup, my body’s gonna do it. ’cause the body does it because you want to do it. It doesn’t care how it gets it done. Meaning that in this example as I have almost no muscle fibers in my chest and it’s really tight, which means I don’t have a lot of workers and I don’t have a lot of mobility. So when I go do a pushup, my body, my brain knows that. So it does a pushup and cheats relative to not having pec muscles or flexibility in its pictorial area. We’ll

Still do a pushup but it’s not right. And no amount of coaching, no amount of form work is gonna help you do that properly until you train that pec muscle through strengthening and stretching and all the different angles is not just one angle and just example. Peck goes from here and turns it goes to the arm. There’s a lot of different fibers that are involved with the peck. It’s not just one movement. You need to know that and train it. And from what I’ve seen generally online, which is what AI is taking it from, they’re not doing that. They’re not doing that type of movement at all. And they’re definitely not thinking about training holistically. ’cause holistically it means with the fascial chain and the information we’re coming out with fascia right now here in the United States is almost lower than base level. It doesn’t have any idea how to really work with it.

Have you tried using ai, uh, for your fitness with the things at the mirror or tonal? I’d really love to hear your experience with them. Just put ’em in the comments below. So this is where it gets problematic for businesses to use ai. Again, a big business goal is to increase their bottom line. Again, like I said, to have that number on the bottom, big and black. And so you want to incorporate new things into a big business is very hard. Big businesses are like slow moving ships. They take a while to adapt and go. That means in general, they can’t really be on the cutting edge in terms of this for, for health and fitness. They can be on the cutting edge to make money, which is what they try to do. But it’s act it to, it’s to your detriment, right? Since AI uses that general, general, uh, pool of information, it doesn’t have access to that cutting edge information.

And that’s one of the aspects you need is you need cutting information and you also need it to be duplicatable and teachable. So I’ll take what we, what we do. For example, what we do is, like I said, holistic and based on osteopathy, which by definition means it’s based in complexity. It’s complex, but it’s complex. A bunch of different things. He can do different ways. He wants to be educated and treated, not just, not just general. So it makes it more difficult to, uh, accumulate the information for ai ’cause there’s so many variants of how to adapt it that makes it more difficult to be teachable to these big industries, right? To teach them A plus B equal c, A plus B equal C is good for business, it’s bad for your body ’cause A plus B equal equal C could be for me it could be A plus B equals D for you, right? And you find your, your your equation. Now this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use technology, right? We gotta keep up the times. You don’t have to always go in one-on-one or in class to get results from your training program. As I said before, I use

This holistic exercise type program, right? And I use technology to help get my information and my program across. But I don’t allow technology to dictate how I would do my program, that’s a big difference, right? That’s a big difference between telling AI to do something for me and me telling technology to do what I want to do. I want to be the driver because I know more than AI about what people need. Now, if you are okay with just general ways of working out that you’ve seen before and you’re disciplined enough, go for it. Use ai. It’s a, uh, more affordable, more convenient way of getting your workouts in. If you don’t care about deep diving into your body and getting really intricate with it. It’s all you. You can see by the not so subtle words I just used that I don’t believe in that at all.

Alright? If you’ve, I view, I view health and fitness as a relationship with my body. Yes, I want to use my body to do different things to, for me, I love skiing, to ski really well, to feel strong to do these activities, to play with my kids. I want to use it to maybe gain some muscle or increase my mobility, but I also want to use health and fitness as a way to take care of my body. So it’s a relationship. It just, it is not just me Ekemba using my body to do something. It’s me, Ekemba using it and also going, Hey buddy, what do you need? Oh, look, I feel a little tight and my hip. Maybe I need to do these four or five different stretches for this hip to make sure it’s, it stays balanced. Because the more I can use a relationship and a way to empower myself and to get to my body, get get to know my body better, excuse me, better my quality of life.

Now, if you wanna find out more about this holistic way of taking care of yourself, then please don’t forget to subscribe. Put a thumbs up for the video if you liked it and share it with your friends. And then in the description below, you have three options. You can join my private Facebook group and get a more interactive way to discuss different topics through many trainings, through interaction with me, through masterclasses and through challenges where we’ll pick a topic and we’ll not only go through the information, but we’ll go through the stressors and exercises that I go with it. You can also get my free ebook. It’s how to Live Your Best Life. It’s four steps, how to get Mobile, how to get outta Pain and Live the Life You of your Choosing. Again, just click on the link below, put information and get instant access.

Or if you wanna find out more and you’re ready to uh, see if this program can work for you. Then description below. Use the link to schedule a time to speak with me, where first and foremost we’ll talk about your goals, your sticking points, and how you need to move forward. I’m gonna give you information how I view you moving forward, uh, no matter what. And I’ll only bring up my services if I feel you’re a good fit. So I hope this is helpful. Put any questions you have in the description below and I’ll see you next week. Take care.

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Written by SolCoreFitness · Categorized: Blog, Exercise Tips And Support

Feb 17 2024

Do you know how to build the house of your body?🏠

SolCore therapy and fitness

Taking control of your health is always what you want to strive for. But unless you are deep within the health and fitness field, you don’t know everything that you need.

Going to different classes for this and that, a trainer for this, and treatments for that is assuming you are the lead contractor of your body.

Here is an example. I had a lady come to one of my monthly free ELDOA classes. This is a community class I  offer so people can experience what holistic exercise is with this one technique. 

She found it very beneficial and signed up for a consultation to learn more. Once we started talking, I found out she was already seeing a pilates teacher, a personal trainer, and a therapist. 🧐

So I asked her what she wanted from me, and she wanted me to come to her house and only teach her the ELDOA’S.

She was under the assumption that ELDOA worked alone to get the benefit. She also thought that because she was going to different people for different things, she was getting a total body workout. She wasn’t.

She was the lead contractor of her body, but she didn’t know what it took to work on her body. And this is a critical mistake I see with people.

She took her limited knowledge of the body (which was generally based on marketing, hearsay or assumptions) and hired people to get to where she thought it would take her. It won’t.

And unfortunately, the proof was in her physiology. In technical terms, she was “jacked up.” And what she was doing was going to make her worse.

But I respect everybody’s journey, and maybe she had some other lessons to learn, but from a purely physiological point of view, she needed to accept what she didn’t know and allow a competent health and fitness professional to be the lead contractor.

Learn to be the lead contractor of your body. Use the link below to claim your copy of how to:

“𝑴𝒐𝒗𝒆 𝑩𝒆𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒓, 𝑹𝒆𝒅𝒖𝒄𝒆 𝑷𝒂𝒊𝒏, 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝑳𝒊𝒗𝒆 𝑳𝒊𝒇𝒆 𝑶𝒏 𝒀𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝑻𝒆𝒓𝒎𝒔.
𝑻𝒉𝒆 4 𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒑𝒔 𝑻𝒐 𝑩𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒌 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑪𝒚𝒄𝒍𝒆, 𝑭𝒊𝒙 𝑰𝒕 𝑨𝒏𝒅 𝑲𝒆𝒆𝒑 𝒊𝒕!” 👇🏾

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Written by SolCoreFitness · Categorized: Blog, Exercise Tips And Support

Feb 10 2024

The Untold Truth About The SI Joint

The sacroiliac joint, or SI joint, is a complex joint that can lead to holding you back from your goals. And it’s even harder when you look for answers, and the information you get is from sources that don’t have the full picture. Thi sis a problem because a dysfunctional SI joint will inhibit gaining strength and mobility and will cause pain and injury. So, if you’re looking for SI joint exercises, SI joint pain relief, strength, or mobility, check out this video first so you can get the deets on how to work with your SI joint.

The SI joint is not completely understood by a lot of people. You may say it’s problematic because when you want to go to work with it, you can’t work with it properly. If you can’t work with it properly, that leaves the door open to a lot of unbalancement, dysfunction, pain, immobility, all these fun things that nobody wants. So I want you to stay tuned because in this week’s video, I’m going to do a deep dive into the SI joint, but it’s going to be understandable, not too scientific. Greetings, I’m Ekemba Sooh, I own SolCore Fitness. It’s a therapy and fitness company where we work in-house here in Santa Fe, but also through our online program. I’ve been in this field for 30 years and I started as a regular trainer, but about halfway through I realized that I need to find a different way because when I got hurt, the traditional way of doing things, PT, chiro, corrective exercises didn’t produce the results that I knew I could get.

So luckily I found osteopathy and its holistic view of the body. It made total sense to me and so I dived in, I got a lot of results. So that’s what I talk about here in this channel is a holistic view on the body. Not, “I’ll give you three exercises to correct this issue,” Which doesn’t really work. So if you like this, please subscribe. If you like the video, give it a thumbs up and share with your friends. Each week I’ll put out a video so when you subscribe and hit that bell, you’ll be notified to get the new release. So when people come into my studio or I interact with them online, one of the first things I talk about or check is the SI joint. That’s because the SI joint is part of the pelvis. The pelvis, you can say, is the floor of the body or connects the upper half and lower half of your body. So that SI joint is a combination of your ilium, your hip bone, and your sacrum and the space in between. That’s your SI joint.

You have two SI joints because you have two hip bones. So if the SI joint is off, the pelvis is off, which means your whole body is off. That’s why when they come into the studio, it’s a joke with the people who do what I do, we say take off your pants. Now you don’t totally take off your pants, I don’t want to get in trouble here, we’re putting our fingers on the skin in this area right here at the SI joint in different parts and we have to do a bunch of stepping tests. We want to see how that moves. This is going to allow us to understand more about what’s going on with them because that SI joint is usually asymptomatic. They don’t know that they have an SI joint problem. They’re coming in for a shoulder issue or a knee issue or something of the sort and we go, well, let me check this first because if I go directly to the shoulder or the knee, in this example, and I don’t check the floor of the body, I can correct those all I want, the floor is off, the body’s off.

The SI joint is a total joint. By total joint I mean that it has a capsule around it. It has synovial liquid. Synovial liquid helps bring nutrition into that area and do a bunch of good things. It has little Proprioceptors, little computers within it, to communicate to the rest of the body about what’s going on within that joint. There’s ligaments in front and behind that, your sacroiliac ligaments in front or behind, that also have computers in them, that also help to communicate to the rest of your body to help manage that joint. There’s muscles involved in that joint that help stabilize and move that joint, either directly or indirectly, namely the piriformis, the glute max deep, the glute mead, the glute max superficial, and then the obturatorius and iliopsoas for the fascial connections. The SI joint has a lot of different areas within it that are important to know because if you want to be specific with how you want to work with it, you need to know these areas.

So in this SI joint, you have different lesser arm and greater arm and apex and base. The SI joint looks like a boomerang, okay? So in that boomerang, there’s a top part of my body, there’s a bottom part of my body. The top part is your lesser arm, the bottom part is your greater arm. So you have two of these and then within these arms, you have an apex, a base, a base, and an apex, and then right in middle, you have an ismus, means middle. So you have that on both sides. You also have a bunch of different movements the SI joint can make. The only physiological movement it can make is called an oblique axis. Oblique axis means here’s my hip bone, here’s my sacrum. If the sacrum moves forward, the hip goes forward and a little back, it goes back, it does the opposite. It does that on both sides. That’s what happens when you walk around and move, okay? So that happens normally if you don’t have any issues.

If you have issues, you have 20 more pathological axis that can happen, and then you have a bunch of combination of these pathological axis and more stuff to equal… A lot of stuff that can go wrong with your SI joint. So again, it’s important to know all that because you’re not testing all of them at once, but you want to understand that there could be many different reasons why you have an SI joint problem, not one or two. So you can’t tell me it’s not a complete joint. I say that because there’s a lot of practitioners out there who think that it’s not a total joint, that it’s fused or that the actions it has are more basic and not as intricate as they’re going to go into here in a little bit. It’s just problematic because if you go to one of these people and they don’t know all this information, then they’re either going to give you something simplistic expecting a result for a complex situation or just ignore it all together because they say it’s not there and your body doesn’t use it at all.

As I said before, the SI joint, an SI joint issue, could be asymptomatic, but it could still be a symptom of what’s going on. I’ll use me for example, and I’ve said this before but I’ll repeat it here. So I got L four or five compression, disc bulge and sciatic pain. I had no idea I had an SI joint issue, which was in combination with other things, because of that problem. But because my SI was off, my spine couldn’t sit in a good place and couldn’t operate from a good place, which then caused me to have, again with other things, to cause to have that issue. But I didn’t know what an SI joint was back then. I didn’t really know what it was and how it moved. And then all the practitioners I worked with afterwards, chiros, doctors, acupuncturists, PTs, they had little or no knowledge of the SI joint, which means they couldn’t really help me to get better. An SI joint issue could lead to a false short or long leg, it could lead to pelvic imbalancements, it could lead to tight muscles in the front or back of your hip and leg, it could lead to pelvic visceral problems.

Your issues don’t have to be orthopedic, it could be visceral. It can lead to hip pain on the inside or outside, it could also lead to pain away from the pelvic area. It could be knee pain, it could be upper thoracic or shoulder pain. Again, if the floor of your body is off, just think about the floor in your house, wherever, if that floor is off and dysfunctional, then everything associated with that floor, in this case above and below, it’s also out of balance and dysfunctional. Are you working through SI joint issues or after hearing me now, do you think you also need to incorporate some SI joint work into what you’re doing? Well, let me know what you’re doing. Put it in the description below. And then stay tuned, we’re going to talk about how I would work through the SI joint issues. For the first step in figuring out your SI joint issues is to have an assessment. I know that sounds basic, but you need to assess where in the SI you have issues. You can’t just say SI joint issues and then do some basic protocol.

People think, “Oh, I’ve got SI joint issues.” They type it into YouTube and all of sudden they get a bunch of videos saying, “Hey, do these three moves or this one move to get rid of your SI joint issues.” One, at best, it’s not specific enough, it won’t give you lasting results. At worse, it can make matters worse. So within the SI joint, like I talked about, there’s different areas. Again, you have a lesser arm and greater arm. Is your issue coming from the apex of the lesser arm, the base of the lesser arm, the ismus, the base of the greater arm, the apex of the greater arm or, more than likely, is there a combination of these and the other pathologies, the 20 pathologies that I talked about? First find that out or start where you think mainly it’s coming from because you’ll never be a hundred percent correct at the beginning, but you’ll get an idea of which way to go down. And then you train and treat that area specifically.

So whenever you have a dysfunction in your body, something goes out of place, then the area around it, namely your soft tissue, becomes dysfunctional. So I have an issue with my SI joint and then the ligaments around that area become confused. They start to have different information or bad information or no information because they get shut off, they become dry or too tight or too loose and then the muscles associated with that area also become too short or too weak or too less mobile because the muscles are told to do, by the fascia, because the ligaments are also the part of fascia, so they go with the fascia tells them. So you have to start working with those different areas. For me, I would start working with the ligaments first because the ligaments are the intelligent part of the body. They tell the body what’s going on. So I work with techniques that I would use like double TLS, which means I’m going to turn a ligament on, I’m going to wake it back up.

I’m going to use pumping to increase that flow of fascial liquid through those collagen tubes again because when I hurt myself, I stopped the flow of liquid, which means I stopped the flow of information, healing and waste removal. They’re going to work with the different fascial connections with fascial normalization because, again, it’s not just the area working, it’s the fascial chain that’s also being compromised, so I do fascial normalization and I take that exact same concept into the exercises I use. So again, with those exercises I said before, piriformis, the glute max, deep and superficial, the obturatorius, the iliopsoas, what am I forgetting? Did I say piriformis? I forgot what I said. But all those muscles I said I’m going to work not with just the muscle, but with the myofascial chain that’s involved because the body’s built holistically. Everything has a place, everything has a job, they all work together. So it’s not just about the issue I have with my SI joint or the surrounding areas, it’s about the chain that’s involved.

So I’m going to work within that chain, therapy wise, but then also exercise wise while I strengthen and while I stretch altogether. Everything combined, holistic. If you want to find out more on how to work with your body holistically because you now understand that that’s the most advantageous to work with it, because that’s how it’s built, then I’d love to help you. You can join my private Facebook group. So in the description below, there’s a link for it. It’s an interactive way to find out more. So you just click on that link, you answer a few questions, you agree to the terms, voila, you’re in. You can interact with me, you can take part in challenges where we take a topic, say SI joint and I talk about it, but also show you exercises you can do for it, you can participate in masterclasses where I’ll talk more in depth about whatever topic comes up or I just do little mini trains, like a little one, two minute, three little minute videos to let you know more about different topics that have come up in the group.

Or you can get my free ebook if you don’t want to be interactive. So in the description below, again, just click on it, put in your information, get instant access. It’s how to get strong and mobile and live your best life, those four steps. In there, I’ll talk more about what those four steps are and I’ll just start to work with it. And if you want to start now, then interact with me, schedule a consultation with me, use the link in description below to set up a time to talk with me personally where I can talk you through what you’ve been doing, your sticking point where I see you should go and only if I see you’re a good fit will I offer my services to you, either here in-house or with my online program. But I hope this allowed you to see a little bigger view of how you should be working with the body. Please stay tuned for next week. We’ll talk more about some holistic fashion and have a great day.

SI joint is not completely understood by a lot of people. And this may seem problematic because when you want to go to work with it, you can’t work with it properly. If you can’t work with it properly, that leaves the door open to a lot of unbalancement, dysfunction, pain, immobility, all these fun things that nobody wants. So I want you to stay tuned because in this week’s video, I’m going to do a deep dive into the SI joint, but it’s going to be understandable, not too scientific. So you can’t tell me it’s not a complete joint. I say that because there’s a lot of practitioners out there who think that it’s not a total joint, that it’s fused. This is problematic because if you go to one of these people and they don’t know all this information, then they’re either going to give you something simplistic expecting a result for a complex situation or just ignore it altogether because they say it’s not there and your body doesn’t use it at all.

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

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

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Written by SolCoreFitness · Categorized: Blog, Exercise Tips And Support

Feb 06 2024

𝑻𝒊𝒑𝒔 𝒕𝒐 𝒃𝒆 𝑴𝒐𝒓𝒆 𝑷𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝒊𝒏 𝒀𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝑳𝒊𝒇𝒆 

SolCore Therapy and fitness

It’s so easy in our busy world to constantly be thinking about something other than what you’re doing.

To distract yourself with social media or news stories.

To text a friend instead of talking with the person in front of you.

To worry about tomorrow, or that time last week when you did or didn’t do that thing…

It’s all part of the emotional disjointedness of modern living. But when you’re not mentally present in each moment of your life, when your bodies are here but your thoughts are anywhere else, then you’re missing your true potential.

➡️ 𝗬𝗼𝘂’𝗿𝗲 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗯𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗱, 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗻𝗲𝗿, 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗼𝗿 𝗰𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗴𝘂𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗯𝗲.

➡️ 𝗬𝗼𝘂’𝗿𝗲 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗲𝗻𝗷𝗼𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝗮𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗳𝘂𝗹 𝗴𝗶𝗳𝘁𝘀 𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗻𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂.

➡️ 𝗬𝗼𝘂’𝗿𝗲 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗻𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗯𝗲 𝗮𝗱𝗱𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴.

If you realize that you only get today – that yesterday’s gone and tomorrow isn’t promised – then you can try to focus even more narrowly on each present moment. Here are some ways to do it.

✅ 𝑩𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒕𝒉𝒆: Nothing brings you back to the here and now like closing your eyes and taking three deep breaths. You don’t have to stop at three.

✅ 𝑮𝒐 𝒅𝒆𝒆𝒑𝒆𝒓. You can meditate, use an app to help you focus, or practice yoga.

✅ 𝑼𝒏𝒑𝒍𝒖𝒈 𝒇𝒓𝒐𝒎 𝒔𝒐𝒄𝒊𝒂𝒍 𝒎𝒆𝒅𝒊𝒂. Nothing takes you OUT of the here and now as quickly. Plan times each day to catch up and scroll. Set notifications for anything that’s important. Otherwise, forget it.

✅ 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒏𝒆𝒘𝒔, 𝒕𝒐𝒐. The advent of 24/7 news makes you anxious that you’re missing out on something important. Or that everything’s going to come falling on your head. Like social media, the news business benefits from your continued watching. You do not.

✅ 𝑬𝒙𝒆𝒓𝒄𝒊𝒔𝒆 𝒓𝒆𝒈𝒖𝒍𝒂𝒓𝒍𝒚. And purposefully move on those days when you’re not actually exercising. A 15-minute walk on your break can clear your mind and bring you back to the present.

✅ 𝑷𝒓𝒂𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒄𝒆 𝒈𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒕𝒖𝒅𝒆. Write in your journal each day a few things for which you are thankful. Express gratitude every day in some way large or small. Smile at someone; everybody needs that.

✅ 𝑺𝒆𝒕 𝒃𝒐𝒖𝒏𝒅𝒂𝒓𝒊𝒆𝒔 𝒂𝒕 𝒘𝒐𝒓𝒌. That might mean pausing between tasks, turning off your phone at night, or declining to take on more than makes you comfortable. 

✅ 𝑭𝒐𝒓𝒈𝒆𝒕 𝒎𝒖𝒍𝒕𝒊-𝒕𝒂𝒔𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒈. Some people insist it’s the way to go, but it can also keep you from doing your best on the task at hand.

✅ 𝑭𝒐𝒄𝒖𝒔 𝒐𝒏 𝒘𝒉𝒂𝒕’𝒔 𝒓𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕 𝒊𝒏 𝒇𝒓𝒐𝒏𝒕 𝒐𝒇 𝒚𝒐𝒖. What do you see? What do you smell? Do you taste anything? Is your mouth moist? Are your feet touching the ground?

Some people say they get frustrated with these kinds of focus techniques because it’s hard to STAY focused. And they’re right. In fact, it’s IMPOSSIBLE to stay focused. Our minds are always wandering – and that’s OK. Don’t fight it or get distressed.

Just do what you can to bring yourself back to right here, right now. Over and over. It’s an endless task, and there’s something profound and reassuring in that, since the next moment inevitably replaces this one. This is an exercise to stay present in your life. And like all practices, it takes time, but it also gets easier to do as you go along.

Just breathe. Take it easy. And pay attention. You’ll get the hang of it in no time.

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

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

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Written by SolCoreFitness · Categorized: Blog, Exercise Tips And Support

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