Joint and muscle pain in active people. How to identify the root cause

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So you’re active and you want to continue being active. You want to live your life. You want to really express yourself physically through different activities and travel and be with your family, but joint and muscle pain is getting in the way. And you’ve tried everything. You’ve tried chiropractor, acupuncture, foam rolling, Graston technique, ART, myofascial release, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And you’re getting ready to throw in a towel and chalk it up to the universe hates me or I’m just too old, right? So let’s not go there. Let’s talk about the reasons why this may be happening. Just stay tuned. Before we get into it, I don’t want to be rude, I want to introduce myself. If you don’t know me yet, my name is Ekemba Sooh. I own SolCore Fitness, therapy and fitness. And I’ve been in this field for almost 30 years and I’ve been a summer therapist and summer trainer for almost 20 years or close to it.

So that means I’m proficient in therapy and exercise in a holistic method, which is, in my personal opinion, the best way to approach things. If you like this content, you want to see more things about holistic fitness and therapy and best way to live your best life, then subscribe to this channel. About weekly, I’ll bring new content to help you with different topics that I think are most important. If you like this video, don’t forget at the end, give it a thumbs up and share with your friends.

So before we begin, I want to take away your condition thinking, what you think you know, and your emotional responses around the subject. It’s not that your emotions aren’t valid, you’re free to have them, but when you react from emotion, you think from emotion, you flinch and you just want to appease that emotion to make yourself feel better, and generally 10 times out of 10, that’s a wrong response, right? It’s not logical. You need to think outside of what you know now.

So I know there’s a lot of different ways of thinking that’s been perpetuated to you for a long time, which leads to confusion. You see these things that tell you, hey, if you do these things, you’ll feel better and you’ve probably done them, like I mentioned in the beginning, all these things you try to do before it hasn’t worked. We need to think outside that. So joint and muscle pain, excuse me, I’ll use my phone because I have a list, can come from a lot of different sources. Can come from overuse, an injury that wasn’t dealt with properly, an incorrect movement, doing more than your body can handle, dehydration and stress or bad body position. If you had an acute injury, something happened acutely, you got hit by something, you fell down, you’re going to know where it comes from. But injuries that happen over time are an accumulation of different things that I just talked about. That’s when you need to detect which one is it coming from, mainly from you, and what’s it causing other things to happen for you.

Overuse injury. Overuse is just like it sounds. You’re using something too much, you’re using it too much and you’re not giving it a love or corrective exercise or treatment or self-care, however you want to describe it that you need. An example is let’s say running and walking. A big thing they say to do is to go walk for 10,000 steps per day. Now that’s healthy. So you go out and walk 10,000 steps per day and you think, okay, I’m being healthy, but after about five years, you go, my knee kind of hurts a little bit, but you keep going, and after a while, like my knee and my mid-back hurts a little bit, but you keep going. You keep going because they told you to walk 10,000 steps. Not knowing that you’re using these areas too much and not giving it love to balance it out. Your body, you could say, wants to stay in homeostasis, it wants to be balanced, but that balance can be adjusted by the way your body moves.

So if I’m walking a ton, I’m putting a lot of force on my quads, let’s say my legs, my thoracic and my shoulders to be general. If I don’t do things to correct those areas, I keep using them without bringing them back to balance. Now my homeostasis starts to feel a little off. That’s why you may not know exactly how you’re imbalanced because your body’s adapted or feeling unbalanced, but you’ll know because you’ll feel little pains. You want to address these things before you feel pain. Unfortunately, people don’t. But overuse injury is a big reason why people feel joint and muscle pain.

An injury that wasn’t dealt with properly is a big way that joint and muscle pain can happen. Now, when I say injury again, I don’t mean acute. You’re going to know when that happens. You fall down, you hit your knee, whatever the case may be, okay, you know I hurt myself. An injury can happen with you lightly rolling your ankle and you kind of going, oh, that kind of hurts, and then continue to walk and not get treatment. A slight injury could be like you tweak something and your back or SI joint and you go, okay, you let it go away. That’s the basic premise that people will feel something and then not treat or train it right away. They think, oh, it’s little, it’s not a big deal. But that little thing turns into a big deal over time.

So if I roll my ankle real quickly and I get a little slight pain and I keep walking with that ligament, whichever one in my ankle and I got irritated by rolling it, never got retrained. So it stayed injured. You didn’t feel it because it was asymptomatic, but it still needed to be reeducated, trained, brought back to normal so it functioned properly. But because you didn’t, assumingly in this example, now when you’re walking, running, using your legs basically, that ligament isn’t doing its job, which compromises the movement in this example of the ankle which compromises the rest of the body.

Moving badly. Bad mechanics, bad form is another way that joint and body pain can happen. If I don’t move the way my body is designed or move incorrectly or I put myself in a position that causes strain, undue strain on a certain area, that’s going to cause a joint or muscle pain. The most obvious way that you have bad form is bad form. So an example is I’ll take a squat. I’ll take two examples. First is a squat. Squats global. Global means I use my whole body. So unless I’m taking myself down into a squat where my shins and my torso or parallel, to where I have a nice good position between my head and my butt, nice straight line, and I start doing funny things like everybody else does, stick my butt out or shift my weight or look up like that, that’s going to start to cause me pain. It causes me pain because that’s not the position my body likes to do a squat at. It likes to do it the way it began with not the way I ended it.

And if I have bad mechanics, I end up with pain in let’s say my back and my neck, potentially my knee and all that stuff. I can also have bad mechanics through segmental. Segmental means to do individual exercises. So I’m down on the ground and I want to do an ab roll. If I roll down properly and I use my abs and my spine together with breathing, now I’m using my abs properly. But if I do a sit-up like everybody does and just lean back and sling forward, lean back and sling forward or worse hook my feet, well that’s bad mechanics. Now I start to have pain from moving them properly.

Bad movement can also come from the way your body sends signals to your body is the best way to put it. [inaudible 00:07:47] called PIT and DAM. Prepare, imagine, think. Do, act and move. The deep muscles in my body, say the [inaudible 00:07:55] spinals, my deep shoulders, my deep hips, prepare my body to move and keep it in place. If those muscles are asleep or non-existent or in bad positions. Now it can’t prepare my body to move. That’s a prepare, imagine, think, so that by the time I get to do, act and move, DAM, those movements are bad. So you can take that squat or ab position as an example. I could practice the form all I want with those two activities. If my prepare, imagine, think muscles aren’t trained properly, I’m going to move incorrectly. These are muscles people generally don’t train.

They don’t train them because it’s not exciting. It doesn’t show in the mirror. They don’t feel like they’re circuit stricken, doing a lot of stuff. They’re like these little tiny movements that are really important. So if you haven’t trained them at all, then they’re never going to work properly, which means you’re never going to move properly.

Doing more than your body can handle is a big way that you can get joint muscle pain. It sounds obvious, but people don’t take into consideration. If I go from not moving much to doing something crazy like CrossFit or extreme yoga or some sort of high intensity training or some sort of these Trojan racing, stuff like that, then that’s going to be too much for my body. I’ll give you an example of a guy I trained back in LA and he was overweight at the time. We’re trying to lose weight, trying to balance his body, and the big fashion of the toe shoes came out.

I have nothing against the toe shoes, I use it myself. Big proponent of using your feet properly. But he went from never using his feet and using big, clunky shoes, being overweight, deconditioned, to all of a sudden running with toe shoes outside. Surprise surprise, about a month later, he had plantar fasciitis, complete lower leg pain and had to stop working out. Because he did too much for his body and this is big now because the way people view fitness is that the crazier things that I can do and show off, the better. That’s why CrossFit is so popular. These extreme yoga inversion positions are so popular. It’s an ego gratification. It’s totally fine if you want to do that, but you need to prepare your body to do these extreme movements and then when you’re doing the extreme movements, you need to know they’re extreme. If they’re extreme, I can’t do them all the time and when I do them, I need to make sure I also correct my body after doing them. But your body being prepared for what you can do is a big part of not having joint and muscle pain.

Dehydration and stress. If your body’s dehydrated and you’re stressed out, your body’s going to hurt. It can hurt from not even moving. So dehydration allows the soft tissue of your body to stay soft, not hard. So I give the example of if you’re hydrated the muscles and tissue, soft tissue in your body, specifically your fascia as well, are like supple pieces of meat. If they’re dehydrated, it’s like beef jerky. Dehydration also allows your muscles and your visceral, your internal organs to slide upon each other without friction. If I’m dehydrated, they still slide or they try and slide, but they rub now and now rubbing causes inflammation. Inflammation causes pain.

If you’re stressed out, your body’s always contracted. It’s not relaxed, it never relaxes because it thinks a tiger’s going to eat your head off so it’s ready to do something. So if I’m overly stressed, then my body’s going to hurt because I’m constantly in this sympathetic state. Never allow myself to become relaxed. So this one’s an easy fix. I can tell you what to do right now is that you need to drink enough water. Ideally you’re working up two at minimum a liter to two liters per day. And if you can, up to half your body weight in ounces of water, but you have to account for activity level, where you live.

Like here in New Mexico where I live, in Santa Fe, I am 7,200 feet up. I’m going to need you to drink more water. And then for mindfulness, for your [inaudible 00:12:08], for your stress, do some sort of mindfulness practice, some sort of meditation. That can be something as easy as walking in nature, sitting down and breathing for five minutes, watching a candle. Whatever you want to do, it doesn’t matter to me, but you find some way to reduce that stress and to separate yourself from all those crazy thoughts and feelings that we all have.

Bad body position. Bad posture is a big way while you have joint muscle pain. So your body should function on a couple of different ways in terms of posture. One is your plumb line. Plumb line just means this line. You want a straight line up and down. Do you line up that straight line? Do you line up with your ear, your shoulder, your hip, your knee and your ankle in one straight line in different points? You can tell. A lot of people will look like that or back, forward. So you look yourself in a plumb line.

Then the second is your gravity line. You can’t really look in the mirror for this one, and you might need some help. You probably need help, but you can also just tell. So your gravity line is an inverse four degree cone that starts right below my pubic symphysis, on the ground, comes up around me in a four degree cone. You want to be able to stay in that cone. If I stay in that cone, my body was relaxed. If it’s relaxed, which means I’m not having any undue pressure. But if I’m in that cone and I have bad posture, then my body goes outside the cone, which means that my body’s constantly trying to be active to keep myself in the cone, which will cause you pain. So if you stand there, if you’re just aware, you can feel yourself moving too far forward, too far back, left or right. This will tell you which way your body’s leaning and if you feel yourself leaning, chances are you’re going towards or maybe outside that four degree comb.

The third is one that you need assistance in. The third is your SI joint. That’s your SI joint. That’s your SI joint, that’s your back. I want to say that because everybody says I got back pain and they point to here. That’s your SI joint. Now the SI joint comes into a big position here with your body position because you can think of your pelvis as the basement of your body. Basement meaning it connects the upper part of the house, your upper body, and the lower part of your house, your legs, and one balanced area. If that basement is off, namely through the SI joint, is my pelvis is off, then my upper body and my lower body are also off.

If those upper body and lower body are off because the SI joint I have bad body position and posture. And if you have bad body position and posture, there is nothing you can do besides correct it because it’s always going to lead to joint and muscle pain. Because whenever you move, you’re going to move badly. Whenever you try and do things, you’re not going to do it properly and it’s never going to go away until you correct that. So let’s slow down just a little bit. I just gave you a lot of information on why you might be having joint and muscle pain, bunch of different reasons and explanations of the reasons why. Just take a piece of paper or in your head or your phone, doesn’t matter, just think about for a second where your joint and muscle pain may be coming from. Write it down, put in the comments too. This is going to help you as we go further into the video to try to assess a little bit more on where your joint muscle pain might be coming from.

So the most effective way to get at these joint and muscle pains is to find the root cause, to find that initial area that started all the cascade of issues that you’re now having. Now, if you were aware, you could address a root cause right away. So like the example I gave with the rolling the ankle or the bad movement patterns, if you knew about that stuff before, you could dress it right away. Specifically for the ankle, getting specific treatment for whatever ligament. With the movement patterns, change your movement patterns. Understand that your pit muscles need to be stronger, whatever the case may be, you could address it right away, but people don’t do that unfortunately.

One just because of lack of information. Hopefully this helps. Two, because people like to power through and if it’s not really extreme, they don’t want to think about it. So now you have to sort through the trash. Your primary lesion, your root cause is at the bottom of a trash can and you know it’s at the bottom and inside a trash bag that’s covered in trash. So it’s down there. You have to sort through all that to get it down. So how do you as a layman start to do that? Well here’s easy ways, you as a layman can go through. First you give yourself an assessment. So you take that easy postural assessment. You take that postural assessment and go okay, get somebody to take a picture of you. Then look, are you lined up? It’s best if you take a picture with a straight line, like a door hinge or something, something that’s straight, that you know it’s straight, that you stand in front of so you can see am I lined up or are you in front or behind?

Then you can have somebody watch you move. It’s better if you have somebody watch you move in these different activities you do than you because again, you’ve been doing this movement so long that even if you’re unbalanced, your body thinks it’s balanced because it’s not only your body that’s unbalanced, it’s your brain, because your brain has gone, oh, I thought this was balance, but because you move badly, now it thinks that this is balance, but it feels normal to you. I see it all the time in my studio. I’ll go to correct somebody’s head. It’s all the way off to the right. I move it to the left. They go, oh, I got a leaning left. It’s because your brain thought that was straight.

And then start to think about the different activities you do. Do you run a lot? Do you ski a lot? Do you swim a lot? What are these activities that you do a lot that begin causing these areas of pain? So there’s a really easy way for use a layman to go through. You start to check what’s my primary root cause. Once you have an idea where that might start, well then you want to be specific with training and treating that area so that it goes back to normal. We call it normalize. Normalize means it’s back in place. It’s mobile, it’s strong, it’s aware, it’s doing its job. If you pick right, then everything’s going to be much easier. Then all the accessory areas that are caused by the root cause will be much easier to correct because that root cause is back in place. If it wasn’t the root cause, well that’s okay because now you can go, okay, well I did what I could for that. Now I’m going to move to the next area that I think might be causing the issue. That’s the only way to go about it.

Me as a therapist, it’s a little more detailed, but that’s essentially kind of what I go through. Now, speaking of which, most effective way to treat this, to see somebody like myself, a therapist and trainer who use a holistic model, this is the most effective way for you to address your body and find your root cause. So let me explain how this works. How to be more holistic with your training, to find this root cause so you can get rid of those joint pains, muscle pains, so you can continue to be active and live your life. So prior to this, I’m going to make some assumptions, prior to this, you took a linear view stuff happened to your body. All of a sudden you have all these joint pains, muscle pains, all through your body because you didn’t address it when it first happened because you didn’t know, it’s not your fault. Hopefully you’ll know better going on.

And you went to a PT for a 10 pack or you went to a chiropractor for some sessions or you went to some [inaudible 00:20:15] or massage therapist for some sessions for body work. None of these are wrong. It’s just not the complete picture. You do need to work with your muscles to return your body. You do need to realign your body. You do need to have some sort of manual therapy, soft tissue, realignment, fascial therapy type thing. All these things are true, but they need to be true in one model. When you work with one model, in my case, osteopathic holistic model, you look at the whole person.

So when I go through, when I look at you, I go, okay, first I do an intake. I say, what’s going on? Your history, your health history, and I start to dig into, this is how this person was moving. This is what they did prior. This is what they’re looking for. But then I do some movement tests. I do some movement tests of your SI joint. I check that gravity line like I talked about. I check your plumb line and I check how you move because the assessment doesn’t stop at the assessment. The assessment continues into what I think might be happening. So then I go through and I go, okay, I think you have this and either I give you some exercises here or I tell you what to do on my online program, and we start to go down that road. From there it’s going to tell me and you, what’s going on, what’s tight, what’s weak? That’s going to give both of us more information. This is a holistic model.

Then you start to piece together more what’s going on because then we didn’t address it right away. We did not, which means we need to address the whole body because now it’s all contributing to joint and muscle pain. So I hope this information was good for you. I hope it wasn’t too confusing. Generally you have more questions than answers after these type of videos, which is good because I’m not here to give you a linear prescriptive, do these three things and everything is solved.

So to help you learn more, I got some options for you. You can join my free Facebook group for active people, how to get strong, mobile and live life you want. Here’s a more interactive way to get more information. Interactive means you can interact with me with questions. You can attend my mini trainings. You can attend my free challenges where you can go through information and different techniques relate to it, or you can join my masterclasses. If you’re not interactive, you just want to read more. Then I’ve got a free ebook, which I can send you. All you have to do is put your information in or you can reach out for a free consult to talk to me. All three options are down in the description below. Choose which one and fix for you or multiple and then you’ll be on your way.

In the meantime, check out this video on how to work out for a better life. So again, thanks for joining me. I really appreciate it. If you’d like this, please give me a thumbs up, it lets the algorithm know that this is a good video. Share with your friends who might need this information and I’ll see you next time on a new video.