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.

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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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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.

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Ever wonder how stretching could be the missing piece in your strength training puzzle? 🤔 Discover the incredible benefits of incorporating stretching into your fitness routine! Don’t miss out on these game-changing tips! Hit play and transform your fitness journey today! 🚀💥

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Stretching is usually seen as a passive activity to kind of relax the muscles in the body and to kind of feel good. Maybe increase your range of motion, how flexible you are, and there’s an element that it does that. But stretching can also be active and stretching can help with the strength of your body. And so I take people through some of these stretches to help the strength of their body. They’re quite surprised. They’re surprised because they can’t believe how difficult it is relative to how tight they are. And then they can’t believe how much they translate into how much stronger they feel in their life. So how do they do that? Well, good thing you’re watching this video because we’re going to talk about that today. How’s it going? I’m Ekemba Sooh, I own SolCore Fitness. I’ve been in the health and fitness field for like 30 years.

So I’m a Soma Therapist and Soma trainer, which means I’m an osteopathic manual therapist and I’m osteopathic trainer, which obviously is underneath the osteopathic model. And osteopath says holistic and structured dictates function. But I didn’t start there. I started all the regular personal trainers before me by getting certified through whatever body certification that they do. They’re all basically the same, but they have stretching in there. But it’s the stretching that you’ve seen for decades now, the basic stretching. So I do it with my clients because it’s part of the curriculum and it helped a little bit, but it never was sustainable and that type of stretching didn’t lead to them being stronger. When I got into this osteopathy holistic world, I started to see how you can use this holistic model, namely the fascia and stretching to help increase your strength. So I like to talk about things in a holistic manner.

So that’s what I do on this channel. So if you want to hear that, then subscribe and hit that bell where about once a week, we’ll put out a new video. Then please share this video and then like it so that the YouTube algorithm, excuse me, will know that this is a good video and more people can see it. Stretching should not be an afterthought. It shouldn’t be something you do only when you feel tight or when it’s prescribed to you from a PT or somebody like me. It should be worked into your program. Really good stretching has the ability to keep your body balanced and functioning that way you can live the life that you choose. But like I said, the type of stretching you do is very important. The stretching you see from decades ago, like the BS do in the gym and stuff where they grab their foot and or throw the leg up on something or put their arm on to stretch like that, that’s crap. To be honest. There’s very little carry through that really helps your body in doing stuff like that. But if you can dial down the type of your stretching do and the times you do your stretching, your program and your life will explode. But before we dig in, let’s talk a little bit about some differences. Our stretching and warmup are two different things.

A warmup is something you do before an activity to prep your body for the activity, stretching something to help with normalization of the muscles you just use from that activity. A warmup will increase the potential that you already have at this moment. A stretch done right will increase that potential of what you ever want to do. So it’s for that reason that you should not do a stretch before you do anything active. And by active I mean anything outside just hanging out and walking or sitting down, whatever. So if you’re going on a hike, you’re going to go work out, you’re going to do some sort of sport activity. You don’t stretch beforehand. You do the warmup appropriate for that activity. They stretch afterwards. Now I know where that came from. They came from a study a long time ago where they measured stretching and range of motion and range of motions is acquitted to better functioning and all that is true.

But like all studies, it’s done in a little box just to measure that. It doesn’t measure anything else outside that in life. And so you can’t take something that’s measured in a box for this one little area and say it applies to everything. That study they did, they show that stretching increases your range of motion, but stretching increases your range of motion as a defense mechanism. So my elbow is only out able to extend here, but I wanted to get here. And so I put tension to get to that spot. It scares my body. And so I’ve got some prop preceptors, little computers in my body that say, ah, that’s about the tear. Shut that down so it can move further. Okay, shuts down. I now move a little further into the extension of the elbow. I’ve increased my range of motion, but the thing that happened was the body turned things off to get there.

So now I want to increase my range of motion and now I want to play tennis or throw a ball or something like that. Well, that area which is turned off, it’s turned off now when I go to throw the ball or hit with the tennis racket, now my body’s like, I don’t really know what to do now. It kind of just guesses how you want to do it. You won’t have the same type of form. Another point is that foam rolling is not stretching or warming up. I’m putting this in here because everybody lift a foam roll now, but foam rolling is very damaging to the fascia of your body and doesn’t allow for your fascia to function properly, which you’ll see later why that’s important. And so I wouldn’t use foam rolling or I wouldn’t use it for anything, but I would definitely not use it for a warmup.

So a little science before we start on why stretching helps improve strength. First, know that the way our body is built is called biotin. Tensity is from Buck Meister Fuller, and some really smart people saw that design say, Hey, that applies much to the body. It’s based on tension and compression. Everything has a job and should work together and should be no parts that are kind of on top and rubbing each other. The second is called heal muscle model and heal said that for muscle to work properly to be strong, there’s three components. There’s the muscle fibers, there’s a fascia that surrounds the muscle, and there’s a tendon that’s associated with that muscle. All three factors need to work as high as possible and together for your muscles to work properly. So we’re going to focus on that second component of his muscle model and the fascia that surrounds the muscle to talk about how it’s help increase increased strength.

So that fascia is all throughout the body. You can see if one fascia that connects your entire body. And so those fascial lines need to line up for me to have the best posture and balance. If I’m balanced, I have good strength. So I have good fascia right here. I’m balanced. If my fascia is all jumbled and my posture was like that, I won’t have as much strength because my weight is now asymmetrical. I wouldn’t be using a good balanced position to move from that. Fascia has a bunch of different jobs. I’ll list them here and they’ll pop up thing. But for the purpose of this video, we’re going to focus on structure, neurobiology and communication. So the structure is what I just talked about, your entire structure. Tension compression is based on those fascial layers. Those fascial layers go around those muscle fibers, but then they connect to the ligament.

The ligament connects it to periosteum, which is the bone periosteum to a tendon, tendon to another fascial layer, the entire body. So you want all those lined up so you’re nice and strong for neurobiology. The fascia surrounds your nerves, your epi, so you have that fascia that surround your nerves. If that fascia is not healthy and then nerves can’t do their job, then your muscles won’t get the proper conduction that they need to function properly. And then for communication where your fascia’s alive, it’s not. This is the white piece of stuff that you remove when you’re cutting your meat. It has a lot of jobs, like I said, and it needs to communicate with each other. If that faster can communicate to different chains and needs to communicate, then you move in a more coordinated fashion, which means now those exercises you do to get strong are more coordinated, easier to do, which means you can use more weight or more complexity wherever you need to do to gain strength.

Are you using stretching to increase your strengthening program? Are you using it via the mile fassal change? Let me know in the comments. So to stretch properly, so you increase your strength, you also need to take care of your fascia. So three things will affect your fascia, dehydration, stress, and not working with it, not working properly. So the first step is to, it’s very difficult to drink enough water. So you want at least a liter to two liters minimum of water in your body, depending on how big you are. But you want to work up to half your body weight and ounce of water. You want that to be plain water, which means nothing in it and not when you’re eating food. This plain water goes into your body and goes extra celery into soft tissue of your body and keeps it hydrated. It keeps it smooth, it keeps it liquid that your viscera, your internal organs and your muscles, tendons, ligaments, slide on water-based and not with friction.

Your stress is going to be up to you to have some sort of mental, emotional stress reduction time, whether it’s walking in nature, meditating, journaling, it’s up to you, but a little stress is fine. Too much is damaging not only for your fascia but for your life. The third part is you want to work with the fascia. Now you want to strengthen with the fascia mind. We’re not going to go into this too much because it’s about stretching, but when I strengthen, I can keep these myofascia chains in line through specific posture and then work the muscle fibers in all the different directions I go for stretching. You want to stretch these fascial layers in line. So again, we’re going with hill’s muscle model here. And also knowing that our body needs to be balanced. So fascia surrounds all the muscles and in three different layers, I want to take those layers and stretch ’em because fascia surrounds those muscles and it’s the bag of the muscle.

So if that bag of the muscle is all jumbled up in a bad shape, then your muscles are always going to be in a bad shape because the position of your fascia or how it is, will dictate the position of your muscles. So when I stretch your muscle, I’m going to stretch it mild fascially within a chain that it works because your muscles don’t work alone. They work with the rest of your body, but they work in different chains. So it’s called a gain. So gain means that my nervous system, nerves, spinal cords, joint, stuff like that, they communicate to different muscles in that chain to help coordinate them and work them well. So they all happen within this bag, in this chain of muscles. I hope you’re following. So if I stretch a muscle in that chain, then I’m increasing the flexibility of the bag as I talked about, so the muscles form in a better shape. I’m increasing that neuromuscular coordination within the gain of the specific muscle you’re

Working, but also the muscles that are associated with it, which is going to increase my strength. Now the hard part is knowing how to line these muscles up. There’s no easy answer for that one. That’s where you want to see somebody like myself. So you need to find somebody who’s well versed in the fascia of the body and how to strengthen it via these myofascial. But also on top of that, how to do segmental strengthening via the fascia. Work with the joints via the fascia, a bunch of different things with the fascia. So if you want help from me, that can help you out. The best thing to do is to reach out for a consult, right? So in the description below, there’ll be a link to where you can find your time and to talk with me, and we’ll go over what you want, what you need, what you’ve been doing, what you are doing currently, your sticking points, and then a way forward.

And I’m only going to offer my services to you. If I see you’re good fit. I’m always going to try and give you as much relevant information as you need for you. If you’re not ready for that, then that’s fine, right? So I’ve got another option for you. In description below, there’s a link for a free ebook. It’s four steps in how to get mobile, get out of pain, and Live your Best Life. It’s a nice book that talks about a lot of things I’m talking about here, but now you can digest it at your pace. So sign up for that and then just continue watching the video. So I’ll put a video here to watch next, but check out my channel. It’s all dedicated to holistic fitness, and so it’s going to help with your information. So don’t forget to subscribe. Hit that bell like and share. I’ll see you next week. Take care.

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Balance and coordination training is essential and will lead to being stronger and more mobile. This allows the body to function at its best and will enable you to live your best life. But don’t just do any balance and coordination exercises. Watch the video to set up a proper balance and coordination workout.

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Why balance and coordination should be at the beginning of your exercise program

Balance and coordination are a huge part to having a healthy, strong mobile body that can let you do whatever you want for the rest of your life. But too often people either try to rush it in with a bunch of other things they’re going to do for the workout or decide that I’m not balanced and coordinated and that’s just the way I am. While that’s just not true and there’s a lot you can do about it. So stay tuned. This video, we’re going to talk in depth about balance and coordination greetings. My name’s EEkemba Sooh. I own SolCore Fitness and I’ve been in the health and fitness field for 30 years. I’m a Soma therapist and Soma trainer, so I’m a manual therapist and I’m a trainer, and I do this all underneath the osteopathic model, which is structured dictates function. Now, it never fails whenever I’m with people or teaching classes, I always come across people who are uncoordinated and don’t have a good balance, and those people either say, that’s the way I am, or stop and take the time to get better.

The people who get better are the ones who realize, okay, I am not coordinated balance, but there’s something I can do about it. The other people are living a self-fulfilling prophecy because if you take the time to do the little things to improve it, your body will improve. And then with better balance and coordination, those same people gain better strength and mobility because the body works holistically. Everything works together to help each other out. And so that’s what I talk about on this channel. It’s a holistic view on the body. So if you’re interested in that, then please describe this channel and then help me out if you could like this video and share it with your friends. It not only shares the video with people who might like it, but it tells YouTube that it’s a good video and it will share it with more people as well.

If you don’t have balance and coordination, then your strength program, your mobility program will be not as effective. Your body wants to self preserve itself. So if I’m doing strengthening exercises and I’m wobbling a little bit, then the body goes, don’t care about the strengthening. I want to not fall. Or if you’re trying to do a stretch, and again, you’re wobbling and it doesn’t have to be huge wobbling, it can be a little micro wobbling. Again, your body goes, don’t care about the stretching. I don’t want to fall. So if you don’t have that good balance, your body can’t strengthen and stretches effectively. And if you can’t coordinate your movements, the movements between your brain and your body, that communication, if you’re not as coordinated, then when you do your exercises again, they won’t be as effective because you’re not as coordinated. So your body’s trying to figure out what you want to do. So it’s trying to figure out what you want to do and instead of doing what you need to do to get strong and mobile, and so it’s for that reason because we all know this, right? It’s for that reason. When you walk into a gym, you see a whole bunch of people stopping, not going to the workouts that were in. The classes are on the machines. They stop and do a bounce and coordination program. They do

Not. Unfortunately, they don’t because one, they don’t know what to do, right? So you as the general public, you go, yes, I need balance of coordination. I don’t know, I can stand on one foot. And then if you go see a trainer, like a regular trainer, unfortunately they don’t know too much more than you do. So they’ll have you stand on one foot and do some movements or maybe have you stand on Bosu ball and do some movements. Well, that’s not the answer. And then the gym, you’re going to obviously doesn’t care about balance coordination. They just want you to pay your monthly fee each month. And let’s say you’re proactive. You’re proactive like, okay, I know I don’t need to do that. Trainer doesn’t know what he is doing. Lemme go find some answers. And when you open the magazines or read the article and the internet, unfortunately it’s the same information, something standing on one foot or standing on a bosu ball.

It’s the same stuff. Well, there’s a lot more to it than that, and we’re going to dig into it. Let’s start with balance first. So balance and how balanced you are will lead to how strong a mobile you can be. Let’s take example of a house. So a house that can walk, so that house that can walk the walls, floors and roof are in place. Then it functions properly. Functions properly means that the lights can turn on. People can sit on the couch without fear of dying. All the piping works properly, and if the owner of that house wants to put a second level on it, it can handle it because it’s balanced and has enough force aka strength to handle it. If it was off balance, then the lights wouldn’t work. People couldn’t live there. There’s no way you could put a second level in the house, it would totally collapse.

So if your body’s unbalanced, then the more force you put on it and not just with working out, even just with life leads to the potential more of a collapse of your body. So how to have good balance. So first you want to have good balance by a good plumb line. A good plumb line means that my ear, shoulder, hip, and ankle, relatively lineup in one straight line. You can do this with a trasadental reference. So like this bar right here. So I can stand in front of this bar properly, position my feet on the line, and then somebody can look at me relative to this bar, this is straight. Am I straight to the bar? And then when you do it, you want to turn to their side because you very much could have an asymmetry. You could have one side line up properly.

Then you turn on the same line with the same reference trasadental reference, and it could be totally off. That’s going to tell you where you have a good plumb line posture. The second part is a good gravity line. A gravity line is a inverse four degree cone that we should be able to stand in. So here’s my inverse four degree cone. If I’m inside this cone, then things work nicely. I have good balance, I have good posture. I can micromanage myself through the day. If I’m outside this cone, let’s say for example, I’m out in front of the cone, so I’m in front right now. My body has to use all its energy to keep me falling again. We go back to self preservation. I’m outside the cone. My body goes, oh crap, I don’t want to fall. So now it uses all energy to keep me up.

 It cares about not functioning properly. It cares about not getting hurt and be able to brush my teeth and eat my food, look to see where I’m going. That’s what it cares about. Just functioning normal, not in a positive way, just to kind of survive and make it through life. So you want to have a good gravity line on top of that. You also want to have good balancemint in your body. By balancemint, I mean in place and doing its job, your body’s interdependent and interconnected. It all works together. It’s called holistic. And so if everything’s doing its job in a proper place, it keeps me in a solid foundation. A solid foundation allows my body to be strong and mobile as your balance of coordination. Lemme know the comments and then stay tuned. We delve into the coordination part. A coordinated body and brain allows for ease and efficiency in life and in your workouts.

So this coordination is done through afferent and efferent signals, signals ago to and from the brain and body. These are done through proprioceptors. Proprioceptors are little computers. We have thousands of computers in our body. The more these computers are turned in our body and the more they can communicate to the brain and back to the body, the better nuro engram we have of the different activities it movements in our body. So right now, your brain has an idea of how you should move and what your posture should be. It’s right or wrong, we don’t know, but you can change that by learning a new skill to reorganize that map in your brain. Now these proprioceptors can be trained just in general when you do a stretch, an exercise or some tension, or they can be trained specifically to have one turned on. An example is I love skiing.

And so back when I was young, when I first learned skiing, it took a lot of energy and a lot of effort to learn to ski. Now a billion years later, when I go ski, it doesn’t take a lot of effort at all because I’ve dealt with so much load. I went skiing so many times that that neural map in my brain of skiing is very effective. So now when I go skiing, I kind of just know what to do. So when you train your body, that’s what you want to do because the more education you give it for what you want to do, the more it’s going to respond. So this leads to one proper training in terms of starting segmental, which is small and working up to bigger, and also making sure that you train these preceptors if you need to specifically.

So when I train my body, I want to start from small to big, right train from in to out. I do this because now my body will have more balance and more propreceptors from my brain to my body because when I think of a movement for my brain and my body, it goes through the small muscles first, then out to the big muscles. So if I start those small segmental muscles first, like your transversospinalis and stuff like that, then my movements will be more coordinated because the highway, the highway is more open. Now, I could do that through general working out. It’ll turn on a lot of ’em, right? So whatever I do, it’ll turn on some of those because I need to coordinate that area. But if I have an area that say needs more love, then I do a specific exercise to turn that one on more and then bring it back and integrate it back into the body.

I know it’s a lot, but that’s the body. Now, a couple of points on working coordination and balance. You want to start with literally two feet on the ground and a stable surface. We’re obsessed now with circus tricks and working out the crazier, more unstable, it must be better for you. I had a guy telling me, he went to a class up in the local community center and this guy was taking a ball and doing globe trotter type things, and he is like, I should be able to do that. I’m like, why should you be able to do that? He goes, well, it’s better for my body. I’m like, when is that going to show up in your life? Do you play basketball? He goes, no. I’m like, well, general coordination balance is probably better for you than trying to coordinate under leg, through the ear, back behind, all that stuff.

Here’s an example, a better example. So a long time ago I was in a gym and this old man was there with a trainer, and this old man was doing the old man shuffle, right? That’s how he walked. And I’m going for an exercise to exercise, and I was watching him because I was getting a little nervous and I had right to be nervous because he took that man in that shuffle and stood him in a bosu ball. So for those who don’t know, it’s a flat surface with a unstable ball underneath, probably a picture I’ll put for you. And he had him stand on that and start to work out, and they had him get on one foot. Well, you see where this is going, right? The old man fell and really hurt himself. That guy couldn’t walk right? He could barely walk and shuffle.

He needs to learn to walk and move those muscles better and to do a regular squat or whatever you want to do before he stands on the unstable surface. But we have an attention span issue here in the United States, and so people don’t want to take the time to do the basic stuff to move on to the other, what they call fun stuff, right? They want to just jump to the crazy things they see in these magazines and on Instagram, and as a wrong way of going about it, that’s what you need for bounce coordination. Now, I know it didn’t give you those proverbial two, three exercises that everybody wants to correct what they got going on, because again, that doesn’t work. I mean, just think about all the things I just

Told you. How many parts of the body are involved in what I just told you? Pretty much the whole body. So I don’t know what you need for your balance of coordination. What I do know is that everybody needs a holistic fitness program that works you from the inside out builds a foundation which allow you to do more of whatever you want to do. If that’s working out hard or great, if that’s gardening, if that’s skiing, if that’s playing with your kids or whatever it is, that’s going to allow you to do more. Now, unfortunately, you can’t do this by just going to different classes and trying to piece it together. You can’t do it by reading an article or a book and follow along with the pictures. You need to be taught this and then also learn by doing, by being taught you understand the philosophy and what you can do.

And then by learn, by doing, you go and practice and learn what to do. By practice, I mean you try, you get it wrong, you try get it wrong, then you try and get it right. It’s all good on the process of learning, and that’s what you need because eventually you want your body to just be able to do it. Now, I could help you with that. If you’d like, I could help you with a free download book, the Four Steps to a Strong Mobile Life Inde description below. Again, you’ll find a link, or I can help you with a consultation, which you can reach out and talk about where you are now, where you want to go, and your sticking points. Then I’ll offer you advice no matter what, and if I see you’re a good fit, I’ll offer my services, but no obligation. So I hope that you got some good information about this. Stay tuned for next week for the next video.

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Gardening is an activity that brings people tons of joy. But it’s also an activity that is very damaging to the body. People end up with back pain, neck pain, and muscle pain, and it’s all totally avoidable. Knowing how gardening affects your body and how to take care of it, you can continue growing as you age. Learn how to take care of your body like you take care of your garden.

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Spring has sprung, and because spring has sprung, all the gardeners are out gardening, but this gardening is producing a lot of load on people’s bodies and damaging a lot of people’s bodies to the point where a lot of them aren’t having as much fun gardening because they’re in pain all the time. Gardening needs to be looked at like any other sport. It’s very strenuous, so you have to understand what gardening is doing to your body and how to prepare it so you can garden effectively and not have so much pain afterwards, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. I’m Ekemba Sooh, I own SolCore Fitness. I’ve been in the health and fitness field for 30 years. I’m a soma-therapist and soma-trainer, and I work under the osteopathic model. Osteopathy says structure dictates function. It simply means how structured my body is, means how functional I am.

Function means how will I breathe, think, digest, eliminate, pump blood, fight infections. It also means how well my body can move and function in life and the activities that I love so that I could have a fulfilling life. Gardening isn’t really looked at as something strenuous. It totally is, and people don’t think about how should I prepare my body before and after so I can garden for the rest of my life because that’s what gives them joy. You have to look at the body holistically. Like all activities, how has this affected my body and how can I work with my body the way it’s designed so I can continue to garden, or whatever you love, for the rest of my life? That’s how I like to talk about things in this channel, holistically. I don’t talk in one, two, or three exercises to fix X, Y, Z. It’s all about how can I best balance my body to do my life, whatever your life is.

If you want to hear more about this holistic way of addressing things, then subscribe to the channel and click that bell to be notified where each week I put out a video. Don’t forget to like this video and share it with your friends. That way, the YouTube algorithm will say, “Hey, this is a good channel. This is a good video. Let’s find more people to show it to,” so I can help more people. Before we begin, I just want to make a quick note here that I am not a gardener at all. I don’t understand why people were to take their free time and perform manual labor willingly. I love nature, but I’d much rather run, walk, or just ski or lay there in the grass.

I know people love it and I had some members ask me to do a video and it’s something I’ve been wanting to talk about anyway because of the story I’m about to tell you. Four years ago, I had a teacher come to me and she was an art teacher and she had a hard time just living her life. It took all her effort during the day to stand there or to sit, but she could barely sit, to teach her students. It took so much of her energy and she had to be so cautious of what she did, and that by the end of her day, she was shot mentally, emotionally, physically, and she had enough. She came to me, we had a consult. I told her, “Yes, it’s going to help you,” and she got into the classes. Because I guess she could move, so she didn’t need treatment.

After about, I don’t know, four to six months of being in classes, she was looking and moving great. She had no pain. She could perform her daily activities at school. She went for bike rides. She was having a great time. Then one day, she walked in and she was like, literally 10 times worse than when she first came in here. I was like, “What did you do? What happened?” She goes, “Oh, the weekend was nice and I went and garden for like, I’m guessing a little bit, but like five hours.” I’m like, “Oh, God.” I said, “Did you warm up before or stretch afterwards?” “No.” Ding, ding, ding. What she had done is she did too much for her body. To give an example, she had prepped her body and got it strong enough to where she could perform her life. If she prepped her body to lift up 100 pounds, good, she can lift that.

That’s her daily life, is lifting 100 pounds, but then she wouldn’t garden for five hours. Well, the example is now she wants to lift 500 pounds, but she never prepped her body to do to lift 500 pounds. These are stupid numbers. Don’t get caught up in this. She never got her body ready to garden for five hours. She never warmed her body up before the strenuous activity and she never did any corrective/normalization exercise after her gardening. With all those three factors happening, the body is like, “All right, dude, that’s it.? Tightened up and a bunch of pain. Life, your sports and your activities, all have a damaging effect to your body, AKA, wear and tear. How much you become damaged depends on three factors. Your genetics, how balanced you are and the amount of load you put on of your body during life and your activities.

Genetics, it’s pretty simple. You can enhance your genetic profile or enhance… Sorry. You can enhance your positive genetic profile or enhance your negative genetic profile by how well you take care of yourself, what you eat, the water, your mental, emotional, and your physicality, stretches, exercises and treatments. How balanced you are is the structure I was talking about before. Structure dictates function. That’s what I mean by balanced, not circus tricks. How well you’re balanced is again, part of your genetics, but very much is affected by what treatments, exercises, and structures are you doing on the daily to keep your body as balanced as possible or not doing to let it go wherever your body is going to go. Then a load on your body is two parts. You have the load if something’s just really heavy. If you’re gardening, you’re picking up trees and gigantic rocks, that’s load, it’s hard to do.

The load is also time under tension, meaning how long are you in a posture? If I’m in this position for a long time, even without weight, well, that’s a lot of load through my structure because I’m holding in position. For gardening, in terms of load, you got both. You’re picking up trees and rocks and you’re in a long-time position for three to five hours. That’s a long time to have your body, very strenuous. For the purpose of this video, to keep it short, because your entire body is being stressed, let’s focus on three areas, your knees, your back, and your spine. As we go through these different areas, I want to give you a little bit of science relative to the area we’re working and how that’s working because it’s not because Ekemba says it, it’s because, oh, look, this really smart scientist discovered this great rule and here’s how it applies to your body.

With the knees, there’s a lot of squatting, a lot of dynamic squatting, up and down. A lot of static squatting, squatting down, holding position. What you want to know about a squat is as you start to squat down, so this is your thigh-bone, so your thigh-bone starts to move down. It goes from vertical on down. Your knee cap is here. As the thigh goes down, at about right before 90 degrees, your knee cap and your thigh are perfectly lined up. It’s like a puzzle piece. They’re good. That continues to about 90 degrees right there, and then once you get past 90 degrees, now you don’t have full contact and now you have a little bit of rubbing, potential rubbing right there because it’s not even right there. We have a law called Delpech’s Law, which means hyperproduction from hyper pressure.

If I’ve got pressure, I get hyperproduction of the tissue that’s being rubbed. In this case, cartilage. It could be bone or tissue. That production of that tissue is anarchic. It’s random. Well, not random, but it’s not smooth and nice. That once smooth surface of your trochlea and the back of your kneecap, the posterior kneecap, which was once smooth, is not smooth anymore. Now it becomes bumpy. Now, even with a good squatting from to 90, now it’s rubbing because it’s bumpy. Now you have a bumpy surface which exasperates that Delpech’s Law. On to your back, so your back has two factors you want to think about in terms of the load on your body so you can pay attention to it. The first is the lever arm. Archimedes said, “Give me a long enough lever arm and I can pick up the world.”

Unfortunately, for your back, that means there’s more force. Lever arm, as I hold here, I don’t know if you can see the whole thing here, but the end right here is a lot of force to hold that. As I lean over a lot, so imagine this is your lower back right here. Big boom. As I lean forward, maybe I’m guarding or picking stuff, whatever, that lever arm, mainly in your back, there’s some tension here, but mainly in your back, increases. As it increases, then you’re using either static force holding yourself in place or that dynamic force, your back is going to take a lot of that load. It’s not bad if you knew how to do to prepare, but you understand that there’s a lot of load. The second part for your lower back is that you need to understand that from your belly button to your pelvis right here, there’s no real bony structures.

You do have a spine, I realize that, so from L3 down to L5, but your spine is not a column, like the Roman column. It’s not a column, it should be four-degree curves. Each segment is not load bearing. In totality, it helps, but it doesn’t hold like a column. If I don’t have any bony structures to hold me in place, from here to here, it’s all soft tissue. That soft tissue is done through, not just a musculature, it’s part of it, but mainly through the fascia layers. You can say you have different layers, like rings of fascia. Let’s say you have hundreds of them to hold yourself in place. That way when the forces come into your body, those layers of fascia and soft tissue can attenuate, move the forces away. Are you a gardener whose body hurts really bad after gardening? Are you starting to realize a little bit about how strenuous gardening is to your body? Let me know in the comments.

Last but not least is your spine. Your spine, outside of pathology, has a bunch of different ways it can move. It can move in flexion, it can move in extension, it can move in rotation and translation and then all combination of all four. In reality, in osteopathy, what they talk about is everything happens mainly rotation. You can’t do any of those moves without any type of rotation in your joints. Not bad if you have good joints, but rotation, when I rotate a joint, if I turn right there like that, then my upper vertebra and my lower vertebra come together because of ankylosis fibrosus, so when I turn, they come together. If I have enough space and my disc is fluffy, who cares? If I don’t, then as it rotates down, and I get fun things like disc bulge, herniation prolapse, arthritis, pinched nerves. All those wonderful things that everybody loves.

The two main movements you have to be concerned about with gardening is flexion and rotation and extension and rotation. With flexion and rotation, like I’m scooping the dirt, and I’m doing that, you have that lever arm I talked about. First, I’m statically, for the most part, kind of dynamically, out here, and I have a lever arm of my body and the shovel and how much dirt I pick up, multiply that. Then I take that and I, whatever I do, I do that. Then when I do that, I get some rotation in my trunk, and if my body, my core, my total core, not just my abs, can’t stabilize my spine and move my spine properly, that’s bad. That’s where you get all those things that we don’t like.

The second is extension and rotation. You have the same basic idea. If I extend and turn, I’m getting that compression, but extension is a little bit different because in the back of your spine you have thing’s called facet joints. Your facet joints are like the little steering wheels of your FSU, your functional spinal unit. A functional spine unit means the joint between my upper vertebra and my lower vertebra, that joint between, the totality, the whole thing, front and back, insides. You’ve got a bunch of them up and down your spine. Those little facet joints, they’re total joints, like your elbow or your shoulder or your spine.

When I rotate backwards and those joints compress, because they do, and they start to, oh, my God, I can’t think of the word, they start to rub each other, then you get that Delpech’s Law again. Because now I’m leaning back, the facet joints are the being compacted and then I’m rotating for further compaction and I get that anarchic bone cartilage production. I hope you see now how much gardening does to the body, but you love gardening, you want to keep doing it. If you want to keep gardening, you want to do three things, you want to have an exercise program that in totality makes your body strong and mobile enough for the level of gardening you want to do. It’s like if I want to learn to deadlift 500 pounds, I need to train my body to learn to deadlift 500 pounds.

Same thing for gardening. I want to program that holistically allows my body to do that. The second thing you want to do is you want to warm up before the activity. Like all sports and activities, you want to prepare your body before you do activity. Our bodies, no offense to anybody, are like those old cars. We need to turn it on and rev it up a little bit to get it going before we take it for a drive. Then after gardening, you want to take the areas of your body you use most and stretch them, correct them, normalize them, whatever word you want to do. I want to do something for you. I don’t show a lot of exercise in this program because there’s too many, I don’t know what you need, I don’t know how you’re going to take it, but I can show you a warm-up.

A quick note, a warm-up is something you can do, obviously, before gardening, but you can do anytime. A warm-up has no contraindications outside of injury and stuff like that. A warm-up is great for turn your body on. As I warm up, I wake up the computers in my body and now the computers in my body communicating my brain, I get a better body-mind connection, which means I move more effectively. A warm-up warms up the liquid in your body. Like I talked about with the car, the oil and blood and, not the oil, the blood and lymph and all the fascial liquid inside your body is more viscous at the beginning, it’s thick. When I do a warm-up, I now make that more liquid. Now my tissues can slide and move much easier. With the warm-up, we’re going to stick with those three areas.

I’m going to back up here. Warm-up where you want to work with the knees, pelvis, and spine. With your first one to warm up, like a walk around the block just to get yourself warm. Not long, two to five minutes, at a decent pace. Then you want to take your knees in a circle, that’s a circle. That’s what I want to do with my knees. The reason I start with circles in the knees is because the micro movement manages the macro movement. The little tiny movements of circles with my knees and other things I’m going to show you, helps manage how much I flex and extend, so when we’re squatting down and picking up trees, let’s reverse directions, these little circles, movements I’m going to show you, help manage how well you can flex. Now I’m keeping it small here. If you can go deeper, go deeper.

Then now I’m done with circles, now I want to do a figure eight. Figure eight is vertical, vertical means up and down. Like my finger, watch me, I want to draw with my knees a figure eight. Don’t worry if it’s confusing, I know you can get it. You keep trying and thinking, eventually you learn the skill of it. Now you want to reverse directions because I want to go both ways, like I do the circles. 10 reps is the general rule of thumb for warming up, but as much as you need. Now I want to take that eight and turn on its side. Now I want an infinity symbol right. Now I work my knees in an infinity symbol one way and then the other way. Now by doing the circles and the two figure eights, I’ve essentially warmed up all the tendons and ligaments in my knees.

Now I want you to take this funny position with the legs, wide toes and knees bent, and I want your ear, shoulder, hip lined up and I want one hand in front of your pelvis and one hand behind like that and I want you to do pelvic rocks. You’re going to breathe out, tuck your pelvis, breathe in, untuck. Breathe out, tuck as much as you can. When you breathe in, you go as much as you can, but not too far if it hurts your back. I want you to feel that motion as you keep your legs in position and torso tall. Then I want you to tuck the pelvis. I want you to hold it. You can tell it’s tucked if you reach your hand back and your lower back is flat. Now I want your arms up and I want an external rotation, which means the crease in my elbow wants to look at the ceiling with my hands open, they want to touch the walls. I want to move just my torso left and right.

Now I’m mitigating how much my spine compresses by doing translation because translation doesn’t rotate a lot. Now I don’t compress my spine, but I bring a lot of blood and liquid and I warm the spine up and the ribs up so I can move better. Then when it finished by doing like a seesaw. Now I tilt left and right. I tilt. I’m tilting from here. My arms and head follow, my legs do nothing. That little warm-up, I encourage you to practice it, it’s great before gardening. Like I said, do it whenever. You want to wake up and do it, go for it. I don’t care. Go slow at the beginning. Watch that part again and then think and try to do the exact movements because if thinking and trying to do the exact movements will allow, again, that body mind connection to happen, so when you go garden, you’re smarter. Your body is smarter, it can move more effectively. Now what I can’t show you here is the total program for your body. What I can do is help you out with that. I’ve got three options for that.

I’ve got a private Facebook group where you can join and be more interactive with challenges and master classes and interactions with me. In the description below, you’ll find the link. I’ve got a free download of a four steps to a mobile pain-Free life, so you can live the life you’re choosing, again, in the description below. I’ve got a consult with me through Calendly, so the link is below. You click on the link, you choose a time and we’ll talk. We’ll talk about where you are now, where you want to go and where I think you should go. Then only if I see you’re a good fit, will I offer my services to you. I hope this is helpful. Go have fun doing manual labor all you want, but make sure that you start to teach factors into consideration so you can keep gardening as long as you want.

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