SolCoreFitness

Oct 18 2023

The Importance of Rest and Recovery

Standard thinking used to tell us that we had to push ourselves relentlessly to be in good shape.

But here’s the scoop: We’ve evolved from that, and we know better now.

Rest and recovery are essential to living a truly healthy lifestyle. We all need downtime to recharge and come back stronger than ever. But taking off is only one way.

Rest and recovery should be incorporated into the routines you do.

Have you heard the phrase “active rest” yet?

Now, it’s not as contradictory as it might seem. Active rest simply means incorporating lighter, gentler activities into your routine on “rest days”, between your harder days.

That could mean going for a walk or taking a relaxing swim. These activities keep you moving without too much strain. To maximize these active rest days, do exercises and stretches that rebalance your body from the harder workouts you did before.

If you went for a big hike or run the day before, do some exercises and stretches that balance the chains of your body from your legs, pelvis, and spine.

If you gardened hard the day before, work the chains of your body of your different back muscles and shoulders.etc.

You’re looking for the right balance, the perfect harmony, to optimize your life. Your body is this wonderful gift that allows you to do amazing things. Give “it love” by incorporating active rest into your routine.

Embrace the power of rest and recovery as essential pillars of a healthy lifestyle.

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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Oct 14 2023

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.

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

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Oct 10 2023

This is very unfortunate. 🤦🏾

Beware the information you take in on Social Media and the interweb(slightly ironic)…

I saw a post from a “trainer” I know wasn’t certified and had recently started in the profession proclaiming that you don’t need to stretch.😳

Ummmm…..

Science says yes for multiple reasons:

✅ “Hills Muscle Model”

✅ Bio-tensegrity (how the body is balanced

✅ The health of your soft tissue, especially the fascia

✅ The range of motion(ROM) of your soft tissue and joint

✅ Etc

This person didn’t intentionally do something devious; they didn’t know. It doesn’t make them bad people, but for those who listen to this info, they will suffer.

I get the struggle. You want to be of service, and in this day and age, you have to put yourself out there with relevant, helpful information.

But for your information to be relevant, you must deeply understand what you are discussing. So much so that you realize how much you don’t know.

But for some reason, people don’t view it this way within this industry. Information is passed down as fact from hearsay, random things people read, or ideas that pop up in their heads.

#truth

And workouts are devised from a couple of partial facts and put together as a “total body workout.” Just because you are using your body doesn’t mean it’s totally what it needs.

The desire to “be seen as…,” trumps presenting a full and accurate picture as to what people really need if they are looking for a full holistic program.

Instead of trying to piece together information from random posts, videos, and hearsay, study it.

You can start by grabbing a copy of my ebook, where I curate some of the most helpful information that you need. This is from almost 30 years of experience and degrees in training and therapy.

If you have an interest in longevity, mobility, functional strength and getting rid of back pain, si joint pain, muscle pain etc so that you can have a body that can keep up with the life you want to live, this will be an excellent resource.

The link to the book is below.

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.

Find out more @

Oct 08 2023

It’s All in Your Mind

It’s All in Your Mind

I used to dislike the phrase, “It’s all in your mind.”

As I used all the most important techniques for manifestation and achieving goals, I would run into mental and emotional challenges.

Well-meaning people around me would drop the classic line, “It’s all in your mind,” and it just made me want to roll my eyes.

This phrase is used as if I should change my mind. Like a switch that I had forgotten to pull. 😵‍💫

But then I had an “ah ha” moment. I started viewing it as a powerful, positive mantra, and it became a secret weapon.

“It’s all in your mind” is like a magical gateway to turning things around. It’s about connecting the amazing thoughts we have with the powerhouse actions we take.

It’s all about embodying the positive truths while still respecting our humanity and the negative thoughts that we all have.

Now, when I reach a roadblock, I do some introspection while limiting my judgment and figure out the problem.

👉🏽 Why am I not doing what I intend to do? I look for an ACTUAL answer, like I’m not leaving enough time between work and home, rather than something punishing like, “I never follow through on anything.”

👉🏽 What’s missing in my approach? Should I try something new, rather than repeating the same mistake over and over, perpetuating the negative thought in my head that says “I can’t do it.”

👉🏽 Can I be more effective about setting a goal and an intention and supporting myself in taking the right steps? For instance, if I’m having trouble working out when I plan to, can I find a different time to workout?

That’s when “It’s all in your mind” made sense! It doesn’t mean, “Stop feeling sorry for yourself.” It doesn’t mean, “You just have the wrong attitude.” It doesn’t mean, “You’re just not smart enough to succeed.”

It means “mind over matter” is a game changer. Its away to learn and grow:

✅ Setting the right kind of goals, rather than ones that are rooted in fantasy
✅ Making a plan based on my desires and values
✅ Applying those desires and values to each step along the way – like making a daily intention for each workout instead of just showing up.

Aligning your thoughts and actions is the key to unlocking the door to your dreams — whether it’s smashing your fitness goals or anything else you desire in life!

Where your mind goes, your body will follow.

Try it!

Request A Free Consultation Here

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

Find out more @

Oct 07 2023

Facia Stretching The what, why and how

Click on the image to watch 👆🏽

So fascia has become a very big buzzword in the health industry lately, and it’s a great thing because it’s a very important piece of tissue that’s got a lot of jobs that need some love and care like the rest of your body. But unfortunately, the information out there is completely not so great. I just did quick searches on YouTube about different fascial techniques, and the stuff they show you is either incomplete or completely wrong. And articles that go out there aren’t totally onboard too. So, I read an article on how to exercise your fascia. I don’t remember where I read it, and they had some great information about what fascia is and all that stuff, which is really good. But in the protocols they gave you to take care of your fascia, were the same protocols for general exercise that I’ve been seeing since when I first started eighties and nineties. There was no difference of information and that’s crazy because it’s a different tissue, so it needs different love, needs different exercises. Now, fascia can be exercises and can be stretched. We’re going to focus on fascial stretching today. So I’ll give you a little information about fascia and the best way to fascial stretch properly.

Hey, if you haven’t met me, my name is Ekemba Sooh. I’m the owner of Solcore Fitness and I’m a therapist and I’m a trainer and it’s under the osteopathic program, which I’ve been involved with now for Jesus almost 20 years, and I’ve been in the field for almost 30 years. So I’m very into fitness. I view health and fitness as a vehicle for a better life. Not just to get stronger, more mobile or whatever stuff you want to accomplish. It’s a way to challenge yourself, to better yourself and to have your body keep up with the way you want to do.

Fascia is a big part of how I approach fitness because I view it from a holistic sense, not just a macro sense. So if you’re interested in hearing more about that, subscribe to the channel, click the bell, be notified, and I’ll get out videos about on ce a week where I’ll talk all about different aspects I think are important.

So what is fascia? So fascia is a living tissue. I know prior to all the fascia fame for most traditional forms of information, they talked about fascia is just like the white stuff over the meat that you pull away to investigate the muscles and all that stuff. But fascia’s been around for a long time, especially in the osteopathic paradigm, which I’m a part of, and they’ve talked about fascia for a long time in terms of treating and training it.

Fascia is a combination of cells, fibers, and matrix, and it has a system within it called gel and sol. Gel and sol is your PRM. PRM stands for primary respiratory method. Before you’re born, inside your mama, your cells breathed by gel and sol. It’s a breaking up of cells and bringing back together. I’m not going to go too in depth of this, but it’s basically a breathing pattern that happens kind of in a figure eight or [inaudible 00:03:07] fashion. It’s very important because if you don’t have it, you’re dead.

The most important word you want to understand with fascia is connective tissue. Fascia is called connective tissue. It’s called connective tissue because it connects everything. Everything in your body is connected by fascia. You can say that from in utero to now you have one fascia that’s split into thousands of different ways, different chains in different ways. Fascia is tendons, fascia is ligaments, fascia is your periosteum, the skin around your bone, adventitia, epineurium around your arteries and veins and around your nerves. It’s your pericardium. It’s connected to all, and most importantly for this video, it’s around your muscles through different layers. Epimysium, epineurium, paramecium. Oh my God, I can’t get that.

It surrounds your muscle tissue from the smallest to the biggest, right? So you can say that the muscle is a stupid piece of meat, okay? It does what the fascia tells it to do. It tells it because the bag around the muscle needs to be in a good place. If the bag is nice, well, the muscle’s nice, the bag is all jacked up. Well, the muscle’s jacked up. Fascia has a lot of different roles. Again, it’s not inert. It’s not just the white stuff that covers your muscles. It has a structure job, circulation, neurobiology, communication, energy, defense, protection and scarring. That’s a lot of jobs. Again, it’s not inert. It has stuff to do in your body, and so it needs to be respected because if you just go about it in a bad way, you’re going to stop it from doing its jobs, which means it stops your body from working properly and it’s going to make you worse.

If you like to read more on this subject of fascia, you can go to “Strolling Underneath The Skin.” It’s by Jean Claude Guimberteau. It’s a great video that kind of just shows how the fascia is organized and how it lives in the body. He also has a great book that I recommend you reading if you really want to dig into the things. But I gave you the basics, but that’s a great resource to dig in a little bit more.

Let’s take a quick little break because I want to hear from you. Have you ventured into the fascia world? Have you tried different fascial techniques hoping to help your body? Has it helped? Has it made it worse? I want to know. Just use the comments below to let me know.

Let’s talk a little bit about how not to work with your fascia. So let’s go back to the information I gave you, how your fascia’s connected and connects everything. It connects through two different systems. Continue… I got to do it again. It connects through continuity and contiguity. Okay, big fancy words. Continuity means it’s continuous. In your fascia, those how it’s made with the cells, fibers and matrix. There’s collagen and tubes within the fascia, little tubes, and it connects all through the tubes. It looks like a little spider web at times. Those tubes carry liquid. That liquid carries nutrition and carries away waste. It does good things for the body. So it’s like you have a spider web through your body that’s connecting. If I have a continuity to the body, that means that line of fascia, irregardless of what different areas of your body or muscles it touches, continues all the way to the end. So that liquid I talked about can continue all the way to the end.Contiguity means it just kind of like it runs into it, but the tubes don’t line up, but it helps hold it in place. So it’s an important job too.

If I approach fascial stretching or any type of things to do with the fascia and it’s aggressive and it crushes those tubes, that’s not a good thing. So if you try to stretch or treat it by foam rolling or aggressive techniques like the Graston technique, things like that, that damage those tubes, you’re not treating your fascia, you’re damaging your fascia. So if you want to stretch the fascia properly, you need to make sure you stretch it in line with those tubes so you can loosen up the tube.

I’m going to give you an example. Let’s see if you you guys can see me.

From the back of my heel to my outer calf to one of my biceps, my bicep femoris, which is a lateral part, up to my issue of tuberosity through my glute and pelvis and into my back, I can go up my spine to my head or out into my arm for two big chains of that continuity. I’m never going to get that right. Continuity all the way through. It goes all the way through up to the spine, to the head, out to the arm.

So there’s a lot of different muscles involved with that. Let’s just take from the calcaneus, your heel, all the way up to your arm. I’ve got one of my calf muscles, my gastroc, my lateral, one of them. I’ve got one bicep femoris. I’ve got my glutes, I’ve got my thoraco lumbar fascia, which is basically into my lat all the way out. So I got a bunch of different names there, but that’s one chain. So if you want to start stretching the fascia properly, you have to respect the chain. You have to know which muscle you want to work. A lot of muscles, 600 of them, okay? So you have to understand which one you want to work, and you have to know which chain is involved with that muscle.

Then on top of that, you have to know how to one, stretch the muscle in the opposite direction. So if my bicep femoris helps me to bend my knee and extend my hip, I want to extend my knee and flex my hip. That’s opposite actions of the bicep. There’s a bunch of more, but what happens is when I contract the muscle, it gets shorter. When I stretch it or extend it, it gets longer. So I want to make it longer because I’m trying to stretch it. I’m not trying to strengthen it. So I want to do the opposite action of that muscle, whichever one you choose to start with in that chain.

And then I’m going to line up the fascia from, as I tell people all the time, from the tip of your toes to the tip of your fingers, from the tip of your head to tip your tailbone, your butt. You want tension throughout your body because fascia wants to work globally. That’s what it likes. So if I don’t work it globally in that chain specifically, it’s not going to listen.

The two best techniques I’ve come across, in my almost 30 years now, for fascial exercise in terms of stretching are myofascial stretching and global postural stretching. Myofascial stretching will stretch the way it just told you in this specific chain. Global postural stretching, which you do a different time, is more globally through the body, through different chains. You can stretch different areas of your body, so it’s not just one area of the knee. You can stretch the lateral knee. The medial knee. I don’t want to get too deep in depth there, but they all respect the facial change and the globality, have no idea if that’s a word, but it sounds good to me, the globality of the body that you put into tension.

Here’s a quick example of how not to train your fascia. So I had a client come in over the summer and she had really bad achilles tendonitis, tension in her calf, plantar fasciitis, and up in Toronto, she went to go see a physiotherapist, and what they did was the Graston technique where you take a big piece of metal and you kind of just dig into your body to try and release the fascia. It made her issues 20 times worse, and when she came here, I said, “That’s actually an easy fix. It’s not a big deal.” I gave her some gentle fascial treatment for her plantar fascia, for her calf and soleus, and gave her a couple of stretches for her soleus and calves. 90% better the first day, a 100% better within a couple of weeks. Because we worked with the fascial chains. We worked the way that fascia is designed, not aggressively try to force it to do something different.

Once you’ve decide which technique you use, myofascial stretching or GPS, and you find the areas you want to work, basic parameters are three times 30 seconds each side if you have to switch. A bunch of studies on how most effective to stretch the muscles. Some muscles work better on like 45 seconds. Some work better on like 15 seconds. To go through and know which each one in the body is maddening. So they said, oh look, here’s a good average, three times 30 seconds. That’s what you want to do.

Then you want to build out your program. So if you started with, let’s say, the bicep femoris as your main stretch because your hamstrings were tight, okay, great. Now I need to incorporate the lateral gastroc and you incorporate a glute stretch, either inferior or superior, and incorporate my lat stretch and incorporate spinal stretches. Whatever the chain you want, you have to incorporate those stretches, but then you also have to build out the rest of your body. Because if we’re balanced, bio integrity, which we are, if bio integrity is dictated by proper tension and compression, which it is, and if bio integrity is also based off interdependent, interconnected areas doing their job, which it is, then you need to work with rest of your body.

Because if you have an imbalancement on, let’s say, that bicep femoris on one side, well, it’s going to unbalance the rest of your body. Maybe it’s not as acute, but it still needs love. So you can say you have A program and a B program. Okay. My A program is to work with these three areas, bicep femoris, lateral gastroc, glute. Maybe lat. Okay, four part. Okay. 15 minute program. Okay. On the other days, okay, well, let me balance the other side of my body with a global thing for my transverse spinalis or my other lat or my other glute. I don’t know. It depends on your body.

But you need to build out that program so your body stays balanced. Now you’ll never stay totally balanced because we’re always making ourself being out of balance just from life, from work, from the activities we do, from just what we do. So we always need to keep up with our stretching. Myofascial stretching, GPS, are a great way to respect the fascia, balance the whole body, so you live a great life.

Okay. I’m done talking for today. So I hope that’s very beneficial for you. I hope you got a lot of information about it. Generally when this happens, you have more questions than answers, so I want to be able to help you out. So I got a couple of different options for you to further your information so you can help to develop a program that works for your body. I’ve got a free Facebook group, I’m going to put the link in comments, where you can be more interactive with your educational process. You can talk to me, you can watch my mini trainings, you can participate in our masterclasses, participate in our free challenges. All within this group specifically. All you have to do is click that link, answer a few questions, agree to the terms, poof, you’re in. Happy times.

If that doesn’t work for you, if you want to just read a little more material, then I have a free ebook. It’s how to get out of pain, get mobile, and have your body keep up with the life you want to live. I’ll put that link again in the comments. Not the comments, in the description. You click on that link, put your information in and you get instant access.

If you’re ready to go though, if you’d like what I’ve said here and you’ve watched some my videos and you like my approach, this holistic approach, then reach out for a consult. You’ll speak with me personally. You just click on a link, you find a time that works for you, schedule it, and we talk. If you don’t find a time, you can email support@soulcorefitness.com. But it’s a way for me to get information about you so I can give you helpful information. I can tell you, “Hey, I think this is the best way for you,” or “Be careful this” or whatever comes up. And then only if I see you’re a good fit for our program, I’ll offer you a place in our program. If you’re not, then I’m going to give that information. No obligation, you’re good to go.

So I hope you enjoyed this training. Check out this video here on how to stretch properly for mobility. Stay tuned for more information on this channel and have a great day.