Dec 06 2024

Do Actions = Results 🧐

“Do these three 3 things and achieve X.”

“My 10 steps to achieve X.”

“I used this exact system to achieve X.”

These are common type phrases that you’ll see marked toward you in various mediums. And they all imply that if you “just” do what the title talks about, you will get “x.” It seems foolproof that you will succeed if you follow this plan and use a little elbow grease.

And if you have a recipe you’re going to make or a home improvement project you need assistance on, these would be great.

But you are not a recipe. And so if these articles or programs that use these titles are for self-improvement, then….Ummmm Huh! As I say to my kids when they tell me something that isn’t true. 😉

Relying on this “recipe” is just another way to absolve yourself of the responsibility of learning and growing into the person you need to be to achieve X.

If it were as easy as following some steps of a plan, everybody would be rich, with an amazing body and a life seen in movies.

But that is not reality. Nobody is going to do it for you. You have to do it. It’s your life.

The Facts on getting Results

Let’s get an essential points down. Those 3 or 10 steps or the system you are reading about will likely not be the only things you need to do.

Common sense says so.

The main point is that that little “= “sign is not so little in achieving that “X” you want to achieve.

That equals is the changes you need to make to become the person who can achieve “X.” It equals the trial, failure, learning, and adaptation you must undergo to reach “X.”

Working on the equals is the secret sauce.

So any “X” you want to achieve needs to have a philosophy to it to reach this goal. A philosophy allows for learning and adaptation to get you there.

Not some dogmatic steps you take that will lead most people to frustration and self-doubt.

That is why, in my therapy and fitness company, I use a holistic philosophy with thousands of different treatments, exercises, and stretches that allow me to adapt to help people achieve their “X” health and fitness goals.

Example:

Person 1 went the PT route and was told to do these three exercises for it and was given a handout: 1) Mckenzie press-up, 2) the clamshell exercise for their hip muscle, 3) Planks for their” core.”

The person had finished PT but had kept up with the exercises even though they told me they weren’t helping. After an evaluation and watching them move, I can see that they have an unbalanced SI joint, a flat lower back, no abdominal strength, and bad posture. Their only imaging showed what I talked about with their SI joint and lower back, showing some arthritis and degeneration at L4/L5.

With this info, I asked them to stop their current program and incorporate mine, which would take them away from McKenzie press-ups to ELDOA’S, which are spinal strengthening and opening exercises. Mckenzie press-ups are only good in one instance and if your body can properly open in the specific area you need. That is not usually the case. ELDOAs are specific, so I gave them one for the L4/L5, L5/S1, T8/T9 and C4/C5. So that we address the “main” area and other essential parts of the spine as they work together.

I also asked them to stop the planks. In life, your body needs strength, endurance, and mobility. The ab’s two main jobs are strength, mobility, and endurance for the spine. And so how you train your body is how it will react in life. Planks mainly train endurance and a little strength, as it is an isometric exercise. A better idea is to teach the abs and spine to move the way they waere designed. So I gave them a “good morning,” which is an ab exercise where you are sitting, holding your knees, and learning to roll down and roll up. This will lead to the 100s of abs exercises you can do, which is essential to having a good abs and a healthy spine.

I asked them to substitute the clamshell for a more holistic hip-strengthening exercise. You see, the clamshell only targets the middle fiber of this muscle, but there are three. Each muscle fiber needs to be put under tension to make it work. Also, the glute med doesn’t work alone as it is attached via fascia (connective tissue of the body) down to the tips of your toes and the tip of your head. So the posture you take has to put in tension one of the 3 fibers and the connection from the toes to the head.

This will significantly alleviate their back pain, BUT there is no way I would stop there. I would need to treat their SI joint because the lower back will never be balanced if the pelvis isn’t balanced. I would incorporate, at a minimum, some myofascial stretches for some pelvic trochanter (muscles from the pelvis to leg), the Iliopsoas, the glute max deep, and the glute medius. This would allow the muscles to return to normal and balance the body.

They would have to find out how they managed this program by setting aside time to do it and managing their mental and emotional baggage, which always comes up.

I would then adapt to what they were telling me and what I was seeing and feeling.

They would have to go through the pains of unlearning and relearning aspects of themselves and allow themselves to become that person who doesn’t have back pain.

We’ve all been there. You are not alone.

I’ve been there.

I work hard and thought that if I worked hard enough and did the steps, I would achieve my “X” things.

It didn’t for me.

For some, it did.

But in all these programs, the vast majority didn’t.

And for me, it led to frustration and self-doubt.

It was not super fun, but it taught me a lesson I knew I should return to.

You have to grow into a person who can achieve your desires. Your desires are there because you can reach them.

But you must accept the path that takes you there, not blindly follow a “recipe” and get mad when it doesn’t work.

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Nov 22 2024

How To Thank Your Body

We’re approaching the gratitude and thankful season. It’s a time to take stock of your life and think of all the wonderful things in it. In my opinion, your body is one of the best blessings we have received.

This remarkable body of yours allows you to live and experience life. But too often, we take it for granted and expect it to work or are annoyed when something comes up. And in these cases, you are left with somebody to “make it go away.”

But your body is your responsibility. And by not being proactive and taking care of your body, you are leaving your health up to chance or expecting different results from the same activities. This way of working with your body is the norm and is detrimental to your life.

The current system of preventive health is either dogmatic or focused on symptom-based actions.

Think about it. Isn’t it funny that you will go to different people in different professions and hear similar information? This information is generally correct but only part of the picture. But since you listen to it from multiple sources, it seems like it is.

That’s called an echo chamber.

Or you keep returning to the same people at the same frequency to fix the same issue. You may feel slight relief, but it never totally goes away. That is the reality of symptom-based care. The focus is only to have it go away and not on the whole body, and your body functions best holistically. So, while treating the symptom may be necessary, it is not sustainable.

By taking a proactive approach to your health, you gain control over your body’s needs, ensuring it can keep up with the life you want to live. This requires a balanced program that you can follow.

Our holistic program is designed to train your body in a way that’s specific to you. It allows you to focus on the areas that are important to YOU, not just perform random acts of movement.

Now, when something comes up, it won’t be as bad as it could have been, and you will have already been doing many exercises that will help you fix the issue. Seeing a practitioner who understands this way of working with the body will probably be necessary for some hands-on therapy, but now it won’t take as long, and again, you have more control over the outcome because you are doing the exercises you need.

Working holistically doesn’t mean just doing different forms of exercise and focusing on different parts of your body. That is necessary on a broader level, but working holistically means two main things:

1)That the exercises you do complement and build together

2)And the program you use addresses all the different ways your body needs training.

The best way to learn is by doing it. This way, you will not only experience it but also understand it better like learning any skill.

If you are local to Santa Fe, NM, come for a two-week trial. You’ll get two weeks of classes and a one-on-one session. Use this link https://www.solcorefitness.com/a-trial-without-any-commitment-2/ to read more about our in-house two-week trial and sign up.
If you are not local or if you know classes may be too much for you, then work privately with us. You’ll not only get to experience an actual holistic training session, but you’ll also get personalized advice on what is the best way for you to train and then access the exercises that you did via our online portal so that you continue to make sure you’re doing it right. Use this link to schedule a free consult and sign up for individual training/therapy. https://calendly.com/ekemba_solcorefitness/ica-interview

If you’re not ready to jump in yet and want a deeper dive into holistic training, grab our information-packed guide, “Move Better, Reduce Pain, and Live Life On Your Terms: The 4 Steps To Break The Cycle, Fix It, and Keep It! “

Go to https://www.solcorefitness.com/move-better-reduce-pain-and-live-life-on-your-terms-landing-page/and input your information, and you’ll get instant access.

Give thanks that you have your body and show it thanks by taking care of it.

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Nov 12 2024

Boost Immunity By Working Out Like This

Ever wondered how your body’s connective tissue might be playing a crucial role in your overall health? In today’s video, we dive deep into the fascinating world of fascia and its connection to your immune system! 🦠✨

Click on the image to watch the full video

Exercise has the opportunity to make our lives better. We can correct and prevent injuries, we can improve our posture, we can become stronger, more mobile, increase endurance, speed, power, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And we can also use it to be healthier. But it takes a specific program to do. So if you’re performing just random acts of movement, as I call it, which is for a walk here, you do a class there, you do something, you go to a therapist over there like you’re doing stuff, but it’s random, right? There’s no kind of rhyme or reason. It’s almost knee-jerk reaction-type stuff. And you won’t get there. And if you continue doing that, in fact, it may make your body worse. Because if you’re not specifically doing something for your body, well, then it’s being neglected. If it’s being neglected, eventually, it’s going to go downhill.

So I want you to stay tuned today when we talk more about being specific with your program to improve your health and immunity. Greetings. I’m Ekemba Sooh, and I own SolCore Fitness. I’ve been in the health and fitness field for like 30 years. I’m a Soma therapist and Soma trainer, which means I’m an osteopathic manual therapist and I’m an osteopathic trainer. And combine these two to help my clients live their best life. So we all know that exercise can help increase not only strength, endurance and speed and power and all that stuff, but it helps increase our health. We can become healthier by working out. This is not new information. There’s tons of studies on it, but these improvements generally are general, right? General meaning there’s a limit to how much you can improve ’em, right? So if I just go for a walk and take a class, I’ll improve my immunity, right?

But there’s going to be a limit to how much I can do that. If I have a goal to really increase my immunity, to make an active actively better, I have to have a program just like I have to have a program to get stronger. I have to have a program to get more endurance. I have to have a program to gain speed, for example. But too often the protocols we’re given are general, right? So what do we do if we want to increase immunity more than generally? Well stay tuned. I’ll talk more about that. The body responds best if you give it specific actions to achieve a goal. Like any goal you want to achieve, you want to take that specific path to get that goal. So if I had a goal to get through the forest and there’s a path they got me through the forest, I want to walk down that path.

I don’t want to just walk into the woods and just randomly move around and hope I get there. It’s the same thing, right? You want to do specific actions and the body’s built a certain way, and all these tendons, ligaments, muscles, bones, organs, they all have a job. So if I can use exercise and treatments to keep myself in place, so they do their job, I function well. I function well by not only moving well and being strong and mobile and good posture. I function well by thinking better. My heart pumps better, I digest better. And oh, by the way, I have a better immune response. So I have to have a goal to improve my immune response to achieve the goal. Then I have to have specific actions to do. Now, some parts you want to be aware for immune response are one, obviously the lymph system, right?

The lymph system carries lymph, which helps fight immunity and your body, there’s specific structures in your body that help with that. You have your clavicles, you have a big ganglions here, especially on the right side. You have your ci, ae, Kylie, I dunno how to say it, ci achille right here. You have your cloquet ganglion right here, and then you have a bunch of limb through your body. Your fascia houses, a lot of this a immune response. And so you also want to take care of your fascia by taking your fascia. I don’t mean foam rolling or some sort of aggressive technique, because that will actually degrade your immune immune response. As an example, if you’ve got a bunch of immunity immune lymphs on your inner thigh a lot, if you take a foam roller and you foam roller your inner thigh like a rolling pin, you’re crushing that immune response.

I actually told that to my teacher one time and he looked at me like I was crazy. I said, I’m totally being serious. And in true fashion, he goes, stupid than that is hard to find because you’re sacrificing your immune response. I don’t know what you’re, you’re trying to roll something out, but it’s not going to work anyway. But now you’re also sacrificing your immune response. What are you doing to help with your immunity? Are you actually using exercise along with the healthy life to increase your immunity? Lemme know in the comments. So helping with your immunity obviously comes down to also how you take care of yourself. So outside of exercise, the basic stuff you need, drink enough of water, half your body weight, an ounce of water. It’s kind the standard. What you want to work towards. You want to eat healthy, plenty. Fruits and vegetables, good meats.

You want to do more pasture raised, organic. You want to eat as natural as possible for you. So however you mix those things, that’s definitely empty to you. It’s different for everybody. But once you have that down, it comes down to the structure. Your body. You may think, oh, I take these supplements to have an immunity, that’s fine. But a couple of things come into play. What supplements do you actually need? That comes down to how’s your microbiome? How well does your GI tract process the food? If I have a bad body because of bad exercising or lack of exercising, then maybe when I eat that food, that GI tract doesn’t work the way it should. So it goes down and it should be absorbing these nutrients and breaking down food properly. But because it’s all twisted and out of place, it can’t secrete the stuff it needs to, can’t absorb what it needs to, which means those supplements you’re eating are very expensive pea.

Now, it also comes down to your food too. So you can eat all those super healthy foods. But again, if your body can’t process it, it can’t process it. This is why exercise is so important to help increase your immunity. We start with structure. If the structure of my body is good, I function well. If my functions off, that means I can’t digest and produce a good immune response like I want. I’ll give you an example. So a big thing with people is forward head posture. Let’s say desk posture. We call it forward head posture, right? Your head’s forward, your back’s rounded, your shoulders are protracted. So you kind of look like that, right? So I would say it’s bad for your structure of your body. You can’t move well, you don’t feel strong, you don’t feel mobile. But like I said, you have a big ganglion.

It’s right here at your clavicles. Well, if my shows are protracted, which means this, and my head’s forward, I get a lot of tension through this area. If I have tension to this area, that means this space that these ganglions should be in goes from this to that. So you’re not asking something to do its job with less space and less mobility than it’s used to, which means it can’t do its job, it can’t respond. So you have to go through your body and say, okay, how’s my posture? And you need to correct wherever posture deviations you have in your body. So relative to immunity, your shoulders can’t be protracted. They have to be back and retracted with good posture, heavy between shoulders. For your cys, Achille, it’s about T 12. I can’t have weak abs or compressed spine in this area because it won’t function.

I can’t have tight and out of place hips because my cloquet ganglion can’t function well. So you want to make sure the structure body is there so that they function. The structure body also helps with the flow of the immune response. And immune response is inflammation. And inflammation shouldn’t be a bad word. It’s the first line of defense for all pathogens. So for all, any type of cold or flu or covid, but also injuries, the first line of response is inflammation. So I want to keep that flow going. I want to keep that flow going by keeping my fascia healthy. If I keep my fascia healthy by again being hydrated, reducing overstress and taking care of it via exercises and treatments, keeping the instruction in mind is going to allow that flow to go. So I want to speak a little bit about the flow.

Think about the flow is like a little river that goes through your body. You got a bunch of rivers that go through your body. They want to keep moving. They help with immune response. They bring nutrition, they keep you healthy. If those rivers turn into ponds, then those ponds turn into festering disgusting ponds. That is the opposite of healthy. That becomes sick, a sick river, a sick pond. So by keeping structure in place and exercising with your fascia mind, you keep those rivers open. So to excess your fascia, you have to understand the fascial lines. For example, your fascia connects your whole body, right? Everything from in utero to now. It’s one fascia that is split in 2000 different directions. But you have different chains of the fascia. So like a spider web that goes out. So if I want to exercise with a fascia mind, I need to know these change.

So if I want to work my hip muscle, right, I pick those three fibers of my hip muscle. I want to know that that fascia line goes down my leg via my practice. Ieo tibial band, namely it band that goes down into my fascia, curious of my foot into my foot, plantar fascia that goes up into my thoraco lumbar ab fascia that goes up into my fascia to connect to my arm, out to my hand, and up to my head. So there’s a chain, right? So these muscles don’t work in isolation. They work in chains or gains, right? It’s a gain. They all function together to perform an action. So if I strengthen my hip muscle and I can keep tension along that chain I just talked about, now I exercise the muscle locally, but holistically, I work with a chain and namely the fascia that keeps the fascia healthy because when I stimulate tissue, I keep it alive because fascia is not inert.

It’s not just the white stuff you remove when you’re butchering, right? It has a bunch of jobs. So if I stimulate this fascial tissue, I keep it healthy. And one of the actions, the jobs of fascia is defense and protection. Now, I increase how much my fascia can defend and protect me from whatever. Now, I know you’d love for me to give you some sort of formula to follow, to increase humidity or recommend some sort of supplement that’s going to correct all your woes, but that’s not what I do here. I want to give you the information to it so you can enlighten yourself a little bit more as to what it takes to do what is needed for your body. And so I don’t want to do that, probably have a lot more subscribers if I did, but don’t care. I want the people who are really interested in that to really get the good results, which means you need be specific with your program for whatever you want.

So I encourage you to look around this site more. My YouTube channel, I talk a lot about a lot of different topics, all with the idea of holistic without being too formulaic. So you can get more information if you want to know more. Then in the description below, I got a free little ebook handout. All you got to do is click on the link, put your information in, you get instant access, and you get a bunch of emails that are going to help with that. Or if you want to talk to me personally, click on that link down below for a calendar schedule. Find your time, what book of time? We’ll talk about what you’re going through now, your sticking points, what it means to you to get your goals happen. And if I see a good fit, I’ll recommend my services, but it’s not an obligation. I want you to have good information first and foremost. So I hope this is helpful. Put any questions you have down in comments and I’ll see you next time.

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

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Jun 22 2024

Mastering the Push Pattern: It’s Not Just For Your Pecs

The bench press, chest press, and push have a lot of different names, but it is essentially the same pattern. But it’s working a lot more than you think. This compound movement isn’t just about working your chest; it engages multiple muscles and joints, requiring a holistic approach to prevent injuries and enhance performance. Check out this video for a deeper dive of this primal movement.

Check out the full video by clicking on the image below.

The push pattern also called the chest press. Bench press or pushup is one of seven problem movements. People generally do this to work on their pecs, their chest, but it’s not just a chest exercise. So knowing this, the other muscles that contribute to this movement and the progression in this movement is very important to be able to do the movement properly. So stay tuned. We’ll talk about that today in this video greeting. I’m Ekemba Sooh, I’m the owner of SolCore Fitness. I’ve been in the health and fitness field for about 30 years. I started as a personal trainer. I am now a Soma therapist and Soma trainer, which is like a physical therapist, but a little bit more underneath the osteopathic model. But in the beginning, when I was a personal trainer, the chest press or push pattern was a big part of the program.

I put for myself and all my clients, and I used all the available tools. I had dumbbells, barbells, cables, pec deck, body weight, you name it. I knew all the techniques and all the forms, but I noticed that some people and a little bit myself, we start to get a little bit of shoulder pain and at that time they’re taught how to do it and some stretching for it, but it’s not a lot. It’s not very in depth. And so the best he can do is lay off this movement pattern until it got better. But as I delved into becoming more of a osteopathic therapist and trainer, I started to see the biomechanics of his shoulder and I equate that with the push pattern and what it took. And I saw, man, there’s a lot missing in teaching you how to do this movement because it’s more about holistic, not just about technique.

So on this channel, that’s the way I want to present information is holistic. I wanted to tell you about all the different factors involved in whatever we topic we’re talking about, not just give you three steps or three things to do to fix all your problems. So if you’re interested in hearing that, then subscribe to the channel. I put a video about once a week, so don’t forget to hit that bell. Please like and share this video. It tells the YouTube algorithm gods that it’s a good video and I can help more people, it become shared and stay tuned. As I said in the beginning, the chest press is not just for the chest. It’s a compound movement. Compound movement means there’s a bunch of different muscles and joints that are involved in producing a movement. And so the chest press, however you do it, involves the pec, the lats, the shoulders, the biceps, the triceps, the forearm muscles, the hand muscles, the wrist, the wrist joint, the elbow joint, the shoulder joint.

They all need to coordinate themselves along with the rest of your body to produce a movement. So if you’re looking for something to just focus on the chest, you want to work the chest muscle, then you have to work it segmentally. In this case, you want to work it with a peck fly, right? You want to do a pec fly, but you want to do it for more of a diagonal angle, the way the fibers run at different angles. By doing this enough times, I now increase how much I use my pec. So let’s take a stupid example. Let’s say I have not a lot of pec muscle and I go to do a push movement. Doesn’t matter which one, my body will still do it because I’m talented to do a movement, but it does it by compensating the movement so it knows that, oh, look, I don’t have a lot of pec muscles, so that means I need to use more of my latch shoulders, whatever, right?

To produce a movement. That’s just a fancy way of saying you’re cheating. So you’re cheating to do the movement. And so if you don’t care about cheating, then go for it, right? But if you want to do it right, you need to also train all these muscles involved with the push pattern segmentally. By training segmentally, like the fly I talked about for the chest, I now increase how much muscle tissue I have in a certain area. By increasing the muscle tissue, I now increase the neuromuscular coordination or information for my body and also increase the vascularization. There’s more arteries. Now I have a fully functioning pack. Now when I go through and I do the chest press along with all the other muscles I segmentally, did, I now can produce movement much less likely to cheat because it has more available tools. This is because we are a collections of muscles, bones, tendons, ligaments, joints, all connected organs, all connected by fascia as one cohesive machine.

So we’re only as strong as our weakest link, and so if I have no pec muscle, then I’m only strong as that, and so I can work out. But eventually that load will break that link, which means it’ll break my body and force to force it for you to have to pay attention to it. So it’s a very good idea. Do first before we get to the pattern, turn your body segmentally in the areas that you need assistance on. So you’ve gone through your body, you’ve trained it segmentally to work on those weak links. You’ve stretched your body to make sure it’s nice and balanced, and now you want to work on the push press, the push pattern. So there’s a lot of different ways you can do this. You can do it open chain, which means that the last joint is free, like a barbell dumbbell.

You can do a closed chain like a pushup because the last joint is fixed and you push yourself away from the ground. Again, like I said, you can do with barbells, dumbbells cables. You can do a bilateral with both arms. You can do unilateral with one arm, you can do it with rotation. There’s so many different ways you can do this and also combine it with different movements and all that is good, but it’s best to start with the basics because the basics will lead to being able to do these more complex movement more effectively. If I jump too quickly in these complex movements, my body’s going to start to guess how should I do this? Which is going to a hundred percent lead to bad form and complications. So when you’re working on the push pattern for open chain, start with like a chest press with a barbell barbell’s, a little bit easier to control than two dumbbells because you have one bar When you do the barbell.

Start light and have a good posture. Make sure your feet are planted. You have a good posture on a bench. You’re not arching your back or letting your head go backwards. You’re nice and solid on that bench. You can also do it close chain, like I said, like a pushup. So a pushup. You can start anywhere from leaning against the wall to work your way down to the ground to end up either on your knees or on your toes doing a push pattern. But again, it’s best to start with the basics and when focus on the form of this push press or chest press to make sure you have that down first. Have you taken the time to go through your body segmentally and strengthen and stretch it to prepare yourself for this push pattern? Have you worked on working on the basics? First, lemme know in the comments.

So like I said, it’s important to practice this with good form. Now, there’s two big places I see people screw up in this pattern all the time, and they’re very important. The first is posture. The second is the movement between their arms and shoulder blades. So first with posture to break it down simply, if one of your goals of working out is to have good posture and to not get injured, then training your body with good posture is very important. Because simply, if I train myself, I load myself, which is an education to my body with good posture, I will educate and train myself to have good posture. If I turn bad posture in bad form, then I get a bad body, bad form injuries, immobility and weakness. So you want to have a neutral posture when working with these different postures. A neutral posture simply means you keep yourself neutral, which should be good curves in your spine and a nice good posture. So whenever you do it, so when you do a pushup, you’re not leading with your head or dropping your pelvis down, right? You’re going down, up and down evenly, not changing your posture. When you’re doing a chest press, you’re not overly arching your back or taking your head off the bench, right, because pulling you out of posture in that position. The second part is that movement of the arms and shoulder blades. So whenever I do a push pattern, whether open chain or closed chain with a dumbbell or a

Barbell or it could pushup as I do the negative, which would be the weight coming down toward me or me pulling myself down to the ground or whatever surface I’m doing a pushup on my show blade need to retraced. It means come together. So as I come down or bring the weight down, my shoulder blades come together, and then as I do the concentric movement, which is pushing weight away or pushing me away from the surface, I’m doing a pushup with my shoulder blades need to protract, which means go back out to the side. The main muscle involved with that retraction protraction is your straights interior. It starts here on the side of your body, kind of below into the side and in line with your pec and goes around and attaches to your shoulder blades. But like the rest of your body doesn’t work alone.

It works intimately with your rhomboids muscles between your S show blades, and then it works with your satic joint, which is joint behind your S show blades. There’s more. But those three basic areas are involved in the retraction and protraction of the S show blades. This is important because if I can’t allow the force to move into the shoulder blades from the arms and back out, then I get bad forces on the shoulder. That’s a big part. That’s why people have shoulder pain is because they can’t retract ProTrac their shoulder blades. So again, I go back to it again, you want to train these areas segmentally, you want to make sure there Sera interior and all the different fan positions are strong. So when you see a interior exercise, either I call it a shoulder blade pushup, a shoulder blade pushup, or you can do a push plus push press with a dumbbell, you want to work in different angles, right?

Because the Sera interior is a fan. So it’s not just this plane. It works. It works in different planes. Then you also want to train the rhomboids. You want to train and make sure you train them in the above glen humeral angle. Then you want to train the psoriatic joint and also get treatment in that area. So it’s very important, like I said, to train yourself in these primal movements, right? These primal movements, squatting, pushing, pulling, bending, lunging, twisting, and gait are involved in what you do outside of here. I’m pointing to outside my studio. What you don’t want to just jump into those movements because again, those are compound movements, which means they’re involved. There’s a lot of muscles and joints involved in these movements. If you don’t take the time to segmentally, go through your body and train these areas, you will 100% eventually lead to some sort of pain and mobility and weakness because you’ve jumped steps, you’ve ignored your body and what it needs and just gone done what you want to do. So if you’re looking for help on this,

I’d be glad to help. In description below, I’ve got a free ebook is four steps in How to Live a Strong Pain-Free Body to Live a Life of Your Choosing. So I have to do is go to that link, click on it, put information, you get an instant access, or if you want to have more of a conversation in description below, again, you can click on it to my calendar link. You choose a time we’ll talk, and then I’m going to give you valuable information no matter what. And if I see you’re a good fit to work with me, I’ll let you know and how you can, but I want to make sure that your questions are answered first. So thanks for watching. I’ll see you next time.

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Jun 15 2024

The Critical Link Between Therapy and Exercise for Peak Performance

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.