Are you frustrated with not being able to perform at your best? Age might not be the main culprit! If you are staying up with your treatments and exercises and are still in a similar situation, discover the real reasons behind your slowing progress and how specific exercises can make all the difference.

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Have you noticed that you’re slowing down your activities, or you can’t do them to the level that you previously wanted to do? That’s a little frustrating. Now, age of course is a little part of this, but it’s not as big as you think. Now there are a lot of factors involved with why you’re slowing down, and not having specific exercises after your treatments is a huge part of it. I’m going to tell you why in this video.

Hi, I’m Ekemba Sooh. I’m the owner of SolCore Fitness. I’ve been in the health and fitness field for 30 years. I’m a Soma therapist and Soma trainer, so for those of you who don’t know, it’s a osteopathic manual therapist, and you can say an osteopathic trainer. And prior to that, I started as a personal trainer, and before that, I’ve been in sports my whole life. So in all this time, whenever I wanted get treatment, up until I found my recent profession, I was never really given something specific for my issues that I went there for. I was either given treatment and then nothing else, or treatment and then exercise that everybody did that, I’ll be honest with you, helped a little but not a lot, and actually led to more issues than good, which we’ll talk about later.

But it wasn’t until I found out that the body wants to be stimulated, educated in a lot of different ways, that treatments and exercise go hand in hand. They have to work together. It’s a holistic view of looking at the body, not just, I’m going to do this one thing for you and you’re good. The body doesn’t respond that way. So in this channel, I’m going to talk about things holistically. I’m not going to give you one or two, three exercises to do something for something you want to accomplish. I want you to understand what’s going on so you have a better approach, so you can get sustainable results. So I’m going to talk about that in this channel. So if you want to hear that, then subscribe, hit that bell. We’re about once a week I put in new videos, please like and share this video so that I can reach more people and help them.

Wear and tear, and then next level injuries always need some sort of therapy. And therapy, we usually think of as going to see somebody like myself, an osteopathic manual therapist, or a chiropractor, or doctor, or a DOM, or a massage therapist, or fill in the blanks here, some sort of therapist who can take care of the symptoms that we feel. But the best form of therapy is stretching exercises, a consistent stretching and exercise program specific to what you need. But when you go to these therapists, most of them, not me, you’re not given a program for these specific issues. You’re either giving no program at all, or a handout of exercises with people with similar symptoms, but you’re a different person, so it could come from a different cause.

Now, it’s not the practitioner’s fault. Sometimes they’re just not taught this, so they can’t give you what they don’t know. Or if they’re taught this, they’re taught this in a system that’s not the best. It’s symptom-based learning. If you have a symptom, here’s what we do for the symptom. And then you also need to teach it in a cookie-cutter way because for business, like McDonald’s, you want things to be repeatable, right? I want to be able to teach this to each person so they can do similar thing and get hopefully good results. Well, it doesn’t really lead to good results, and unfortunately this system, and the fact that people don’t know what to give you, is not advantageous to you.

Now, don’t get me wrong, hopefully, and more than likely you’ll get some results from these practitioners you find, right? You’ll feel better, you’ll move better, you have less pain. That’s good, we want all that stuff. But unless you’re giving yourself a stretching exercise program that corrects the issue, you can say that your results, lack of pain and movement, are on top of an asymptomatic issue. You still got it, but you don’t feel anything. And the problem with that is you think you’ve solved it, but you haven’t. Now you go back out into your day and then you go back to your life, and then depending on your level of activity, it’s going to come back again somehow, whether right away, or I’ve seen over the next couple months or a year. But it’ll come back. And when it comes back it’s worse, and it’s worse for the symptom that you feel, but it’s also worse for your body because your body accumulates, learns about the different changes in your body. Good or bad, it’ll adapt to bad changes.

And the longer you have these changes and the body adapts these bad changes, the harder it is to get out of this issue that you’re having. Now, these issues come from wear and tear. Wear and tear just happens in life, and then also the activity of sports that you like. Depending on your level of life and activities of wear and tear will depend on how much wear and tear you get on your body. So you need to understand what you’re doing in your life to correct these issues. But we don’t think about it that way. We think about, okay, I’m going to use my body to live life and to do my activities.

So let’s take me for example. I have this business, I have two kids, young kids, and I like to work out. I like to ski, I like to run, I like to do things. That’s a lot of wear and tear on my body. I understand that though in the profession I have now, and so there’s a lot of things I do, just continuously over the week to do to normalize, as we say in my profession, my body. I always want to bring my body back to normal. But we don’t think about that way. We think about using our body as a tool to accomplish what we want, right? To live the life we want. There’s nothing wrong with that, but we don’t think about the other aspect that I want to use my body, but then I also want to give my body, as I say, some love, to keep it as balanced as possible.

You can say that you have a body that’s meant to be balanced in place. And let’s say by, it’s good balanced until, I don’t know, let’s say college. So you start going to college, when’s that, like 18, 19? And then you start to sit a lot, you do activities, you go out, you have some fun, your body starts to slowly become unbalanced. You won’t feel anything, because you haven’t had enough damage to your body to feel anything at that time, generally.

But over the decades, you go from college, and you get a desk job, and you continue this type of activity, you’re using your body to live your life, and then whatever activities you love, and you’re slowly… You can see I’m leaning. You’re slowly taking your body more off balance. At a certain point, your body’s going to tell you, “This is too much.” And it starts small by tightness. And there may be some immobility, there may be some intermittent pain here and there. Then consistent pain. And then you’re on the track of progressive medical intervention, all because you didn’t think about taking the time to do some stretches and exercises with a therapy to keep yourself in place and balanced, so that you give your body that love, so you can continue your level of life until you decide one day to die. Here’s some examples.

So let’s say you are in your 20s, you’ve just graduated college, you found a desk job, it’s your dream job, but you know you’re going to be sitting at your desk for 34 hours per week, and the load that happens. Well, if you understood this concept I’m talking about from the very beginning, you would seek out a practitioner like myself. I’d go, “Hey, I’m going to be at my desk for this long. I also like to go to the gym to work out, I like to go ski, I like to run, walk. I like to be active and I want to stay active.” Okay, great. If you see me, I say, “Okay, come to me once a month, once every three months, do some treatment for these tendons and ligaments that stretching exercises can’t get to, and then here’s your exercise program for you to do about three days a week, along with whatever exercise program you want to do.”

If you did that, then your body would stay basically balanced, outside of something acute, for a long, long time. You adapt as you go along, but for the most part, this potentially 15 minute program that you do three days a week would stave off the bad things are going to come which is this example, what I normally see. You graduate, you have a desk job, here’s your desk job, and you don’t do anything about it. You just power through this desk job because you want to get good at your job, you want to make more money, you want to have money to live more life. Great. So you use your body continuously, never stopping to give it love. You’re working out, you think you’re doing the right thing for your body, but that working out actually compounds the issues you’re getting from sitting at a desk. Tight hip flexors, lower back pain, forward head posture, things of this nature.

When you exercise, you are reinforcing this bad posture. And then 20, 30, maybe 40 years down line, you’ve got an awful posture. You have chronic back pain, and now basically you just want that pain to go away. Now, going through a corrective exercise program seems too much because it is a lot, right? It’s going to not feel great. Because you’re working through all these levels of dysfunction and bad tissue over the decades. So you just want it to go away, but now you’re at the subject of the medical community. Now you get a cortisone shot or they want to cut something out or scrape something through here. That’s their solution, but that’s not a solution. That’s an expensive Tylenol. You just want to get rid of the pain, but it’s really invasive. So you can correct these things at the beginning, but you want to correct them with specific exercises.

I’ll give you an example of me now. If you’ve been watching for a while, you know that back in my 30s, I got a disc compression, L4, L5, and I got sciatic pain. And prior to that, I did what I thought I was supposed to do, right? I did exercise I was supposed to, I went and saw a chiropractor, a DOM. What else did I do? I did everything I was supposed to. I ate plenty of good food, I drank tons of water. But I ended up getting this anyway because I wasn’t specifically doing what I needed to do for my body. I had played tons of sports in my life, hardcore sports. I’d worked out very hard all my life. I had never been given any type of reasonable corrective exercise program to do with it. I was given the BS shoulder thing when I hurt my shoulder, which didn’t help anything.

And when I hurt my back after sports, I was given the same thing everybody gets. You go to a PT, and they’re getting the same exercises, right? Here’s your piece of paper. Do Mackenzie press-up, do a clam exercise, and that’s all I got. I got that. And that’s what I see, people who come in here, they get this same thing. Now they can work for maybe 1% of people, for the 99 other percent of people it’s not going to work, because it’s not specific to them.

Let’s go a little more in depth on how using treatment and specific exercises work hand in hand. Let’s say somebody comes in with IT band issues, right? So IT band is your here, your Tractus iliotibial band. But your IT band is made up of three muscles, your TFL, your glute med fascia, your glute max muscle. This is called your deltoid [inaudible 00:11:40]. TFL, glute med fascia, glute max muscle deltoid of the shoulder, [inaudible 00:11:46]. I don’t know how to spell that. But it goes all the way down to your leg, down to your knee, and has a bunch of insertions, not just one insertion, has like three or four. But this is also part of your whole leg. So it’s not just your IT band, it’s your tractis iliotibial band. So we have those fibers of the IT band in conjunction with the horizontal fibers of your fascia latae, your thigh fascia. And they intertwine, they go together.

So somebody could come in and go, “Oh, my leg hurts here.” And they go see a PT, for example, and PT goes, “Oh, you have IT band inflammation. You have a tendonitis of your IT band.” Okay, great. And they give them, maybe they do some stem or whatever they do for therapy, and they give them the clam, the clam exercise. So the clam exercise, I don’t want this exercise at all, but the clam exercise, it only works, to a little bit, one of your fibers of your glute med.

So your glute med has three fibers up front, more toward the TFL, a middle, middle, or back, more toward your glute max, which is part of that deltoid [inaudible 00:12:59]. So the clam will work mainly just the middle one, but it doesn’t totally work it by itself. It works in conjunction with your piriformis, because they allow for extra rotation. It means the hip is going out. If I want to be specific to the glute med, I need to maintain internal rotation. And if I want to work my middle fibers, I have an angle. But if I want to work my front or posterior fibers, there’s different angles. It’s not one exercise for all three.

But let’s say that IT band issue is coming from tight middle fibers, right? And I’m giving a clam, and even though it’s not specific, it’s causing tension down that chain. Well, if it’s tight and I have inflammation, I have a tendonitis there, it’s going to make it worse. So I don’t want to give them that. I’m going to give them a specific stretch for the glute med. Because I want to loosen those fibers, I want to release the fascia and the tubes that are within the fascia to normalize it. I don’t want to put tension on it because it’s already tense and congealed. I don’t want to do more of it. So that’s an example of how a specific exercise program can be dealt, right? There’s more factors involved, but it’s not just one thing for one thing.

If you’re at the point where you’re kind of acute and you’re before you need really big medical intervention, then please seek a therapist that also knows this kind of specific stretching exercises. The best for me that I’ve found so far has been a Soma therapist and a Soma trainer combined. They’ll be able to give you the therapy, and the exercise is specific to the therapy that you need for your issue. If you don’t know anybody, if you can’t find anybody, put where you are, let me know the comments below. I’ll see if I know somebody in your area and try and help you out best I can.

If you’re not super acute, or if you don’t want to even get to the acute, you want to learn these things to take care of yourself, to give yourself some… Buy some love, so you can keep this body and use it and give it love for the rest of your life, then reach out for a free diagnostic consultation. We’ll talk about where you are now, where you want to go, what you’ve done, what you’re doing, issues you’re coming across, and I’m going to give you valuable information no matter what, no matter what. And if I see you’re a good fit, I’ll offer my services here in-house, or online program. It just depends on what works best for you. So if you have any questions, please put them in the comments below, I’ll be glad to help and answer as quick as I can. Stay tuned for next week. Have a great day.