Apr 18 2024

Do You Know the Truth About The Bend Pattern?

Being able to bend properly will make your life much easier and less painful. But so many people don’t do it well, and it costs their bodies. But just going out and practicing the bend pattern, an RDL, or a deadlift isn’t the best first step. It is imperative to know which muscles are involved in this pattern and how they work together to help with the pattern. Watch this video to find out more.

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The bend pattern, or as we call it in training, the RDL or the deadlift, is a very functional and applicable movement in life. Use it all the time. You pick your kids or get grandkids off the ground, you’re playing golf, uh, you’re moving boxes around. It shows up by itself or in conjunction with other movements all the time. But if you’re not doing this movement properly, or if the chain of those muscles that are involved in that movement are dysfunctional somehow and you’re continuing to do it over and over again, then eventually that’s gonna lead to some sort of dysfunction, pain, or injury. So understanding not only how to do a, a proper bend pattern, but the muscles and and chain involved with it is very important. So that’s what we’re gonna go over with today. Greetings. I’m Ekemba Sooh. I’m the owner of SolCore Fitness.

I’ve been in this health and fitness field for 30 years. And so I started as a personal trainer, but even before that I was into athletics and I got lucky because, you know, in athletics you want to get big and strong and so you work out. And I got involved and learned from some pretty knowledgeable people about strength training and learned to do things like the bend pattern pretty well. Now, after I got out of that and became a trainer, I went even further to become an osteopathic manual therapist and an osteopathic trainer because I wanted to understand how the whole body works and how to train it and treat it holistically because that’s the way it’s designed. So when people come into my, my studio, they’ve gone away from only wanting to work out for aesthetics, right? Or to do something more egotistical. They want to live a good life, they wanna feel good, they wanna move, they wanna maintain their level of lifestyle up until the day decide that it’s time for them to die <laugh>.

And so that means the end goal is that they can do things like the bend pattern proficiently, and the bend pattern is part of the seven primal or basic movements. So you have squatting, you have the bending, pushing, pulling, twisting, lunging, and gait, right? You wanna be able to do these things proficiently and well because when you’re in life and pointing it outside right now, you’ll do these activities to perform your life. So that means I want to get them good at these seven primal movements. But unlike most exercise programs or studios or gyms, I don’t start there because the bend pattern and all the primal movements are what’s called global movements. That simply means globally my body, I have to use it as one to perform one of these movements. So I don’t wanna just start by teaching, uh uh, only how to do a bend pattern.

I wanna teach you, okay, this muscle chain tennis ligaments, these are involved in the bend pattern. Okay? What’s strong, what’s weak? What do we need to work on Once we’re in a better place for that, sure, now we can start to learn the bend pattern. So if you’re interested in hearing things, information in this holistic manner like I just talked about, then subscribe to this channel like this video and share with your friends. It tells a YouTube algorithm. It’s a good video and it’ll also show it to more people. Don’t forget to hit that bell and then stay tuned each week where I come out with new videos. So real quick, your body is a holistic living thing. That means it’s interconnected and interdependent and it’s all linked together. That means your big toe affects your head, your head fix your your fingers, right? So when you first start wanting to work on things like the bend pattern, that sound might sound obvious, but you want an assessment, but you don’t want, just like the basic assessments you get from personal trainer, you need assessment from somebody who understands the different “myo” muscle fascia, fascial chains of your body.

’cause that’s what it is. It’s not just a collection of muscles, it’s how they’re connected and the jobs they have to do along that chain. And it’s not just muscles in that chain, it’s tendons and ligaments and different fascial chains that go different areas. So you get an assessment, you want somebody to understand that and look at your pattern. But in basic, the the, uh, bend pattern, the main, uh, using chain is your posterior chain. That that’s all posterior means the back of your body, right? So from your heel, back of your leg to your glutes to your back up to your head, that’s the main chain that works. Now obviously you need the other chain, the anterior chain to help stabilize it. And those lateral chains also help stabilize it. But we’ll talk about the main chains. So we look at that, what muscles are tight or what muscles are weak or what needs to work well, they start to think about the soleus, the two gastrocs, the three main hamstrings, your glute, your four layers of back muscles, your trapezius, your rhomboids, levator scapula, and your shoulders.

All those muscles, as you’ll see here in a little bit as I do the movement, are involved in that bend pattern. Now, I’m obviously not gonna go over what to do for every single one of these chains for two reasons. One, I don’t know you and I don’t know what I, what I should be giving you because I can’t, I haven’t assessed you or talked to you. And two, it would take way too long. Again, all those muscles I talked about are just the base, the base level. But you have different ways to train different things, different ranges of motion, different, uh, a lot of different things. But it’s a combination of strengthening and stretching in these myofascial chains. What I can tell you is that in this pattern, it’s gonna put more load on your lower back than say like a squat. That’s just by the way it moves, right?

It’s not because I said so, it’s because of math, right? So it’s called a lever arm. So if I’m doing a bend pattern and my torso’s leaning for more far forward, then my shins are moving, then it’s gonna more down to my back. ’cause just try to support my torso. And if I’m reaching my arms out like that, it’s even heavier. So if you’re thinking about that, then okay, I need to train my abs and my back to stabilize my spine as I do the bend pattern. Now this, now these forces that go in your lower back aren’t inherently bad. Again, like I said, it’s just part of the movement. It’s only bad if three things, right? You haven’t trained segmentally, that chain I talked about before. All those different muscles you are, uh, doing too much weight or too much, uh, too much force in the movement or you’ve got something acute in your back.

But if you train yourself properly, those, those forces should move for your body, like all movements nicely. So when you see these reports on this position causes this much in your lower back and this position, this much in lower back, that’s true. But that’s true for a cadaver or for that static just looking. ’cause we move around. So as I do a bend pattern, that force goes into my back, put away from my back into my back, away from my back. So it doesn’t stay there ’cause I’ve got a good chain and I know how to do the movement. Are you working on your bend pattern? Are you trying to go through different progressions to make sure that you’re doing it right? Let me know the comments. So in learning any new skill and the bend pattern, if you haven’t practiced it properly, is learning a new skill. You always wanna start with the most pure movement and that pure movement is a butt back bow forward. What that means is it’s a hip dominant, uh, activity. That’s what they say in training a hip dominant as opposed to a squat, which is a knee dominant, right? So, uh, squat i, i initiate and do the main movement with my

Knees, knees and the bend pattern. I do the main movement with my hips, right?

It’s just what they call it, not big deal. So if I want, if I want to practice that, I’m gonna start with practicing that butt back, back forward in the most easy way possible, right? So as I do the butt back, bow forward as best to start kneeling. Because now when I kneel, I take away a lot more information from my body so it can focus more on what I’m doing. If I’m standing, my body all says the thing about standing. So when I do a, a butt back bow forward that posture, I wanna push my butt back and bow forward. But I wanna bow forward with a neutral spine. I don’t wanna overly tuck my pelvis, I don’t wanna stick my butt out too much. I wanna keep it neutral because as it goes back I want to keep it as neutral as possible without overly rounding or overly arching, which, which bad forces on the back, which means you want those four curves in your body.

Again, we go back to the segmental, the chains of the body. That’s something you would do prior to this if you had like a flat back. You don’t wanna do this if you have a flat tight back. Now, once I do it again, I can start my hands here, here, here or here. Gets from easiest to hardest, but I do my butt back bow forward. ’cause now I’m teaching my brain and my body, hey, this is doing a leading this is doing a following and that produces the motion. So you can work with that posture first. Then you work on two a body weight. R-D-L-R-D-L just stands for Romanian deadlift. I have no, I’m sure they, they invented it over there, but that’s just what it’s called. So an RDL is same idea that a butt back and bow forward. So I do a body weight first and then once I get that motion down, then I would choose like a lightweight.

This is light for me. So again, I would do a butt back. Whoop, that’s what you don’t want a butt back bow forward. So that’s a good point to make. As I’m doing my butt back and bowing forward, yes, my weight’s going back into my heels, but like my first one, which is terrible, you don’t want the toes coming off the ground. Yes, you’ll feel some more force going back into your heels because that’s where you’re putting force. But if your toes come off the ground, that’s bad. That po that movement, that RDL or bun bent pattern will encompass a lot of what you do in life, right? But there’s gonna be times when you need to pick things off the ground that require more force. That means you need to get good at a deadlift. So a deadlift is the same as a bend pattern, RDL, but you just add your knees.

So for the deadlift I’m doing the same thing ’cause I’ve practiced that butt back bow forward, okay, I’ve got that down now to to, to make it into a deadlift at the end of my butt, back bow forward. Like I can’t do anymore without cheating. I now bend my knees and then when I push up, I use just as much force to keep my posture. That’s what you want to look like. Now, a couple things you wanna watch out for is that people tend to, the worst thing I see it gives me a cringe face is rounding the back. People post on wherever they post on, on their workouts and look at this deadlift I’m doing and this great workout and this circuit. I’m doing a CrossFit and their back is totally rounded. If you want to kill your back, if you wanna have a terrible life round your back, you need to keep this posture just as much as you need to do the movement.

So when you go up, you need to move as one. Not that’s a good way to come see somebody like me for a long time to correct all your injuries. Now take your time when going through these, these progressions, like I said, like any new skill, it takes a lot of volume and time to do this because you’re not only trying to work your body, what you’re trying to do, do, excuse me, and develop a new motor engram in your brain. That simply means telling your brain, your body, this is how I wanna do things. Once that motor engram is set, you don’t have to think about how to do a deadlift or whatever you’ve practiced. Your body just does it. So take your time. It’s not a race, it’s about longevity. So the slower, the slower you go, the faster you end up in the end and the more proficient you end up at the end.

If you’re looking for support on training, I’d be glad to help. I’ve got a couple free resources. I’ve got a, uh, private Facebook group where we’re talking about how to be strong, mobile and flexible mainly for people in their forties and and above. I also have a free report and I also have a consultation that we can do. If you’re ready to talk about what this means for you, all three links are in the description below and all you gotta do is click on ’em, finish what you need to do and you’ll get instant access or the download or or time with me. But I hope you enjoy this. I hope you learned a lot. I’ll see you next week.

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Apr 18 2024

What are you making it mean?

There is what is factually happening and your perception of what is happening. Being aware and managing these two situations will either lead you to suffering or not.

Check out this video to raise your awareness and help you move through your sticking points.

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When you embark on anything new, it’s challenging to first find the route you want to take. It takes a lot of trial and error, a lot of studying, a lot of introspection, just a lot. And once you find that new way of doing something, it’s going to be challenging and as one thing can really set you back and have you not make results. So I want you to stay tuned to find out what that is. How’s it going? I became a, so I’m owner of SolCOreFitness and I’ve been in the health and fitness field for like 30 years. I’m a Soma Therapist and a Soma Trainer, and those are therapists and trainer underneath the osteopathic model. And so I have a holistic view on how to approach the body. And so when people want more from their workout routines to achieve something different, they usually end up here.

And after I put them in a holistic routine, they start to get results. If they can get past this one thing, this one thing will set them off. Now, before I get into it, if you want to hear more about addressing your body holistically, then subscribe to this channel and click that bell to be notified. Don’t forget to this video at the end or right now and then share it with your friends. That allows a YouTube algorithm to realize it’s a good video so they can show it to more people. Now, the one thing that stops people from making progress is that they make things mean more than they are. Here’s what I mean. So when I put you into a program, if I give you a routine, it is for you. It’s not inherently difficult unless you need it.

If I give people a deadlift to do with hundreds of pounds across the board, it’s going to be challenging just by design. A heavy deadlift is difficult, but if I give you a bicep femoris stretch, which is one of your hamstrings, myofascially, which is an active stretch to stretch your bicep femoris in the chain, it’s involved. It’s only going to be difficult if you need it. So if you start doing this bicep femoris stretch and you start to feel a lot of tension, you have a choice to make it mean just what it is or add on a bunch of layers. So if you start doing this bicep femoris stretch and all of a sudden you’re like, oh, is this too hard and my body can’t handle this and this is torture and all this stuff, then that’s going to be what your experience is. If you start doing this bicep femoris stretch and you feel the tightness and you go, huh, obviously my body’s tight, and that’s where you stop, then you’ll be much more successful in your program doing that. You have to be careful of the thoughts and words you use relative to what you’re doing. And this is not just about working out because how you do anything is how you do

Everything. It’s about the totality. So if I can just take what I’ve been doing in my program and realize it only means this, then I can be successful. If I add on a bunch of layers and reasons why it’s too difficult or I’m not going to be successful, then you’re not going to be successful. And so you have to be aware of what’s going on in your body and in your mind. So some good ways to work with this is first to be aware that you’re about to do something new. So we’re going to stick with the health and fitness, my expertise, but again, if you find anything new, this applies. So I don’t work generally with too many newbies. There are usually people who have been working out for a while, different forms, outdoors, just active like gardening or hiking or biking, or they usually go to some sort of classes or the gym.

If you even sought practitioners like chiropractic or pt, they’ve gotten to the point where that routine hasn’t worked, hasn’t worked because it’s not holistically ingrained. That’s a different story. So they come to me. A good thing to do is to first realize, Hey, I’m about to do something new. Inherently that’s going to be challenging. More than likely you’re not going to be very good at the beginning. It’s going to be confusing, and you’re probably going to feel a little frustrated, not an indictment of you just natural. When I first started, same thing, right? A billion years ago. But you can get better at the beginning by going, okay, I obviously don’t know both body and mind. What’s going on? I need to open myself up for that. So you’re not judging yourself on trying to be perfect. Again, that’s a fear response. You expect to get it right away to be perfect.

That’s you not wanting to go through the process and are afraid that you’re not good enough to make it through the process. After you become aware that, okay, I’m about do something new, then doing some sort of meditation, journaling, mindfulness, peace, time, whatever you want to call it, I don’t care, is to give yourself some space between you and your thoughts and emotions. Now, if I can recognize that I’m not my emotions together, that I have some space in between. Now, when those emotions come, which they will because they’re all human, you can be a little more objective about it. It doesn’t mean you can be a robot, but now you start doing, I say that bicep femoris stretch. You go, oh my God, that’s tight. I’ve never felt that before. This is a little confusing. But now you can realize, okay, that’s just what’s coming to me, but what’s the reality? The reality is I’m doing a new movement I’ve never done before. I’m obviously tight in this position and my body is communicating back to me that it’s tight,

Which my body wants more of it. It doesn’t mean that it’s too much or you’re broken or whatever the case may be. All the things that you want to add onto it, it doesn’t mean that. And now when you go into your program, you can be a little more aware of what’s going on and break it down into pieces and be a little more methodical about what you’re going to do because it is more beneficial to go at it that way than to go full force. And then if it doesn’t work right away because of whatever condition thought you had, that you quit because now you just quit on yourself. That’s it. You didn’t allow yourself to go through the process and you quit. So that’s going to make it easier to quit again and also solidify what you think you need. But if you’re trying to do something new, it means you don’t know what you need to do.

You need to find a new way of doing it. And so being objective about it, it’s a better way of going about it. You have to allow your new choice here to change you. You’re part of the equation. So it’s not that you stay the same and you just start doing something different and you’ll get that result. You have to allow yourself to be changed by this new experience. And the more you keep layering on more of who you are at this time, which means the less you’ll be able to become that new person because you’re solidifying yourself. This is who I am, this is what I think, this is what I feel, this is what my possibilities are. And you go to the new thing and it doesn’t allow you to change you. Okay, well, it’s not going to work. It’s never going to work.

Nothing’s ever going to work because you didn’t allow yourself to change. Going through this process is very eyeopening. So I tell people when they come here, look, the movement part is not going to be difficult. It’s a little tight, it’s a little weak, it’s a little challenging, but that’s it, right? It is not anything bad to you. It’s how you go about it. Do you leave yourself open to be changed? And if you do, well, from my standpoint, yes, you get a better body, but at the same time, you become more of who you are, you start to realize, oh, I’m more than that. I’m not this thought that said I can’t do it. I could do it. I’m not this thought that says I’m not capable of, this is torture, because it wasn’t torture. It was actually very helpful. And now you have that because now you become more empowered.

We all become more empowered in our lives, and so allowing new situations to change us, it’s a huge part of that. I love to hear your thoughts on this. You can put ’em in the comments below. Have you found this to be true in your life? Have you basically self-sabotage yourself? Are you aware of it? Because awareness now is a first step to change. Have you never thought about this all, but has it piqued your interest? Again, just a conversation I’d love to know, and I want to say thank you so much for watching, and I’ll see you next week.

MOVE BETTER, REDUCE PAIN, AND LIVE LIFE ON YOUR TERMS

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

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Mar 30 2024

Unlocking Sarcopenia: A Holistic Approach to Building Strength and Mobility

Sarcopenia will progressively make your body and life worse. But keeping sarcopenia away is not as easy as going to the gym to lift weights, eating more and taking supplements and medications. Check out this video to find out more on how to keep sarcopenia away for good.

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Sarcopenia. It’s a condition that generally affects the older population, 65 or older, but has been shown to start in the thirties. So what is it and what can you do about it? Stay tuned and we’ll talk about that. Hello? Hello, I’m Ekemba Sooh I own SolCore Fitness. I’m a Soma therapist and Soma trainer, which is a therapist and a trainer under the osteopathic model, and I’ve been in this field for like 30 years. So I use manual therapy techniques, osteopathic manual therapy techniques, osteopathic stretches, osteopathic exercises on top of my base level of strength and conditioning to allow people to live their best life, to help them get out of pain, to increase mobility, strength, whatever it’s they need. I get a lot of people coming in here with sarcopenia or people who are concerned about getting sarcopenia or have it progressed more and they’re concerned because they’ve gone to the doctor, they’ve taken the supplements, they’re going to the gym and working out, they’re active in their life, whatever activities they love, but it’s not getting the results that they want.

I say, well, it’s not for lack of trying, obviously it’s because you haven’t put this together in a holistic method. You can’t just piece things together and then they’ll fit together. You have to understand that everything affects everything else. So if I replace one part, I have to think, did that also affect the different parts down a row? It’s holistic, and that’s how I view health and fitness is through a holistic vet lens. Excuse me, and that’s how I want to communicate to you on this channel. So if you’re interested in a holistic type view to solve your issues, then subscribe and hit that bell. If you like this video, then give it a thumbs up, just got to click it, they’ll show up and then share it with your friends. This allows this video to get it to more people, to benefit more people.

If you want to use one phrase for sarcopenia, it’s use it or lose it. If you don’t use your body in an intentional way to keep it strong, to keep it adapting, then it’s going to go away. Now, sarcopenia is a loss of muscle tissue and the neuromuscular connections that are associated with it. This is going to cause weakness and fatigue and poor balance and having difficulty doing things like walking upstairs. And some of the causes are not using your body properly. Low hormones, bad hormones, bad process of the protein, not enough calories. Now, if you were to hear this, you’d think, okay, well I can test myself. I can just eat a little bit more, take a protein supplement, take some vitamin D or some hormones and then move my body and I should be okay. But it’s a very linear way of thinking about it. Yes, you’re going to need to do those things, but it’s all about how you put together. You want to think about whatever program you want to do is a equation or a formula that you want to put for your body. For you. You need to have the proper equation for your body. Somebody else needs a different equation for their body, same parameters,

But it’s a little bit different because when you’re in sarcopenia or you’re developing sarcopenia, of course you’re getting weak. That means the structure of your body, how well you stay balanced is going to start to degrade. So you’re going to start to get things like a kyphotic curve or your upper back or you start to shrink or you’re going to keep yourself off balance. So that obviously makes it difficult to move, but it also makes it very difficult for your body to function properly because the structure of your body dictates how you function, how well you move and how well you digest, how well you eliminate, how well you think your hormones. Everything in this house can work better if the house is balanced. And so this includes your digestive tract and your hormones because if I’m off balance, my body’s off balance and my GI tract is all twisted up and out of place, then when I have the food or the nutrients go through my GI tract, it’s not allowed to secrete the proper enzymes or the proper amounts.

It doesn’t process the right speed around your GI tract, which means you’re not getting the nutrients you want from this great food and supplements, but you got really expensive pee and if you don’t have a good balanced body, your body can’t make and process hormones the way it needs to. So you can’t just take a supplement or buy fancy supplements of really good food and expect it to just work on its own. So if those good nutrients, those good supplements and that great food that you want to start eating won’t work as well into your body is balanced the house in good structure, then how do you build your house? How do you keep that structure in place? Is it as easy as just being active? Can you just go to the gym and do different classes and do activities to use your body and have it keep it balanced?

Well, the not so subtle answer is no. Every activity you do has an end purpose. Because I go out and walk and I’m using my legs doesn’t mean it’s balancing my legs and my body. I’m using my body to do an activity. In fact, most activities are actually a little damaging to your body. It doesn’t make ’em bad. They’re good. You want to do these activities, but you have to understand the benefits and the consequences of that action. So if I just use my body in different activities, well then I also need a program to keep my body balanced. Now for sarcopenia, we want to talk about the muscles, but I want to tell you the muscles aren’t the thing that holds my body in place. That is your fascial system. The fascial system is the connecting link that connects all your body. It’s like this big, gigantic great web that holds me in place and for the purpose of this video keeps my structure in place, keeps me this way.

So you can have a good fascial system or bad fascial system that allow you to have a good posture or bad posture. So when you want to work your muscles, you understand that your muscles are surrounded by epimysium, perimysium and endomysium. Fancy names for fascia. They’re around your muscle tissue and they go out and they form the tendons that connect to the bone which connected the rest of your body. So we want to work on building your muscle. You can’t just focus on just your muscles. Yes, you want to build your muscles, but your muscles work in conjunction with three factors. It’s called hills muscle model. So you have a contractile element that’s your muscle fibers. Then you have a series element and a parallel element. The series in parallel, you don’t have to worry about the names are fascia, they’re the epimysium, endomysium and perimysium.

They’re the ligament. It’s the periosteum that connects to the bone. It’s maybe a little bit of the ligament that connects to the bone. They all work together to make sure the muscle functions best. So we want to go train your muscle, train the muscle, but train it within the system of the fascia. Have you been trying to put together the program for sarcopenia? Have you tried different techniques? Has this information have given you open your eyes a little bit more as to what it might entail? Where I want you to stay tuned because I got more to come and an opportunity for support at the end of the video. So to start trending your body to be balanced so you can make it strong and go away from sarcopenia or not even go anywhere near it. You want to start working with two main aspects you you’re going to work with the structure of your body, the balancement , and the efficiency of your neuroendocrine system.

Both these can be trained via the fassal system and that’s supported by science. So the structure of my body is supported by tensegrity. That’s basically what we are. We’re in integrity, structure or just bio. And these fascial systems help keep us in place. So I can train that and I can also train my neuroendocrine system mainly through my spine. Again, this is supported by a theory called pit and dam by Bergmark where it says that the deep muscles are control how well I move. So I get a communication from my brain, it goes down through my spinal cord, out to my body. The more efficient is keeping that communication, the better I move. So I want to start working with the fascia to increase the balance and to increase the efficiency because as we age, again, if we don’t use it, we lose it.

We lose these connections and so our body becomes weaker. But it’s well documented that through exercise and resistance training, it helps increase the nervous system, helps increase the hormonal system. And this training doesn’t have to be outside of us. You don’t have to pick up a weight to do it. You can do it through your own body weight and your own tension within your body. The two best techniques I found to do these to balance your body and increase this neural hormonal system are myofascia stretching and ELDOA. They both work with the fascia system I just talked about the myofascial stretching works to balance that tensegrity structure through the different stretches you can do through different parts of your body to make ’em line up. And then eldoa uses that fascia system to strengthen and open my spine to balance it back out so that communication from my brain through my spine to my body is more effective.

Now as you’re doing this, you’re going to make your muscle strengthening exercises much more effective because now the impulses from the brain to my body, my body to my brain are more effective. The hormones that are going to these areas as messengers are more effective that the bags that surround the muscle tissue and the epimysium perimysium and endomysium are more fluid and are function higher. That ligament that connects those muscle is more aware to give more information. Now, when you train your muscles, you want to think about train your muscles in the specific directions they need to. Here’s what I mean. You can have a muscle go in different directions called different fiber directions. A different fiber direction means that muscle can work different ways. The most basic one I can tell you is your hip muscle. So your hip muscle has three different fibers.

It means it’s three different movements. I have an anterior, a middle, and a posterior. So I can do a posture for all three positions, not just one. So I know we have, I dunno, let’s say two dozen, three dozen exercises. Everybody keeps repeating over and over again. It’s a slight exaggeration, but there’s a lot of different ways you can train your body. So I could put myself into a posture to train the different fibers of my hip muscle, but at the same time keep the myofascial tension in line because you’re not just training the muscle, you train the chain of myofascial that chain together. If I train the chain, I train holistically, that’s where we get the most benefit. Now, this may seem a little overwhelming because we got like 600 muscles and if I got a bunch of different fiber directions for each muscle, that’s a lot of different postures and a lot of different work.

But like anything, you don’t start and try to do everything. You start where you’re at and then slowly add onto what you need. You start with the most pressing area first and then work up. The most pressing area for you is the hardest because that’s where your body is tight, weak, not connected, whatever it is your body’s telling you, ID more work here. And then you work your way from there. Now, once you do that, the biggest determining factor to building muscle and do it properly is to go to and past a little bit exhaustion, not so you are totally worn out, but doing a little more than what you can. So if I do the traditional 10 reps like everybody does, I may sweat, I may feel, I probably feel accomplished both physically and psychologically, and maybe that takes me to my 45 minutes to an hour of working out.

But if I stop at that 10 reps and my body’s used to doing 10 reps, it goes, okay, thanks. See you. If I go and do more, if I do 30, 40, 50 reps and I’m pushing my muscles way past what they can do right now, I’m telling the body, Hey, I need to use this more. And the body’s like, ah, it has to adapt. It’s called compensation, a super compensation. It builds that tissue there. Now, tissue doesn’t mean you’re getting big, it means it’s adding more muscle tissue to the area, which is the reverse of sarcopenia. It’s increasing the neuromuscular connection, which is the reverse of sarcopenia, and it’s telling your body, I want to use this more. That’s exactly what you want because this will bring more blood flow, more connection, just a better quality of life because you’ve pushed yourself past what you can do. Now, this is not only an outline for sarcopenia, these different aspects I just talked about in the video.

It’s an outline for just general training. It doesn’t have to be sarcopenia that you’re working on. You always want to have a goal, assess where you are, work on your structure, especially where it’s difficult, and then build your program out from there. So if you want assistance on this, I’d be glad to help. I have a free Facebook group that you can be more interactive with. You just have to go to description below and answer some questions to sign up or if you’ve got a free ebook, it’s a four steps, how to live the Life of your Choosing to get Stronger, more Mobile and get in the description. And then down there in description two is a link to my Calendly to where we can have discussion about what your goals are, where you want to go. I’ll assist where I can, and if I see a good fit, I’ll tell you about my services. So I hope you find is beneficial. I’d love to hear any questions you have any comments below, have a great week and I’ll see you next time.

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Mar 23 2024

Is Hanging For Back Pain A Real And Safe Solution? 🧐

Are you among the 550 million people affected by back pain? Have you tried hanging to help with your back pain? Hanging for spinal decompression for back pain seems like a sound idea, but what really goes on when you hang? Is it doing what it said it would do, and is it good for you? Well, check out the video to find out.

Click on the image to watch the full video

Are you hanging? Hanging off a bar for your back pain? A lot of people are, because a lot of people have back pain and so they want a quick, easy fix, and hanging seems to be an answer for them. But like all things for your health and fitness, is that sustainable and is it good for you? And that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Greetings. I’m Ekemba Sooh. I own SolCore Fitness. I’ve been in this field for 30 years, and I work under the holistic osteopathic model. I’m a Soma therapist and Soma trainer, which is kind of like a physical therapist but a little bit more. And I deal a lot with stuff like back pain or sciatica, shoulder, neck, knee, pain wherever you want in a body. But I also use this program to deal with getting stronger, more mobile. The goal is to live your life to the fullest, so you always want to move away from dysfunction and further into function.

Now, back pain affects 550 million people. It’s a lot of people. There’s a lot of different forms of treatments and exercises out there that could work, and there’s also a lot of forms of treatments out there that says it could work but doesn’t really work.

So I want to talk about this through a holistic view so you get a little more information on what all this stuff means so you can be better informed. And that’s what I like to talk about on this channel, is more holistic view.

So if you like this video, please give a thumbs up. It lets the algorithm know that it’s a good video so more people go watch it. Don’t forget to subscribe and hit that bell and then share it with your friends.

So if you want to use hanging for back pain, obviously there’s times you have back pain, but what level of back pain? So let’s just take a four-part scale, okay? You have basically no back pain, maybe something that happens when you work out, whatever, but basically it’s not there. You have a semi-chronic, which means it’ll pop up every once a while with your back pain. You have a more chronic, which means it’s always there. And then you have acute, which means that hurts all the time, really bad.

If I were to hang, I would tell people in the acute and probably the chronic to never hang. Their body is already pissed off. It’s inflamed. It’s non-functional. It’s giving you a bunch of signs that, “Hey, I don’t like where we’re at.” I don’t want to add something not specific to the routine to help with their back pain, right? It’s going to cause more force in their body than needs to be. Would never do it.

If I was in a semi-chronic, which means it just comes on every once in a while or it goes away, maybe if it was for relief. Okay? If something hurts, you want to relieve it, okay, I guess that works. And then if basically you almost don’t have back pain, if you want to do it every once in a while because it feels kind of good, who cares? It’s not that dangerous. Because danger and being sustainable are two things I look at when I give people type stuff for their back pain. I want to correct it, but I also want it to stay and I also want it to be integrated with the whole thing. That’s what I’m going to look for.

So let’s start with the easier part of this and figure out why people want to hang for back pain. So hanging, it got popular because the concept is very simplistic and it’s supported by a lot of physical therapists or therapists on YouTube and stuff who give hanging or some sort of passive decompression motion to open up your spine.

And so when you go hang, again, it makes sense that if I hang, now the top part of my spine, which is my head and neck, and the bottom part of my spine, which is my pelvis and sacrum, are moving away from each other. And I’m getting tension through my arms by holding and down to my legs, which are to relax. Give you a little demo.

Now, I don’t know if you just saw what happened when I just hung, but I was moving, right? I was moving because I grabbed hold and took my feet off the ground, and because of it I had no stability point on the ground, so my body swayed back and forth. That’s the first problem.

Because you may feel tension through your body because you’re holding on and because your muscles are working and because your body weight’s going down. It may feel like you’re stretching and opening, but in actuality, your muscles are doing a lot of microcontractions to keep you stable.

One of the main things your body wants to do for you is preserve you, right? They want you to live. One of those things is to not have you fall over. So when I’m hanging, the body’s like, “Oh, I’m unstable. Let me correct myself.”

That’s why one of the first directions I give people who work with me is whenever you do a stretch, whenever you do a strengthening, you want to be stable. Because if you’re wobbling even a little bit, what your body cares about is not falling down on its face. Doesn’t give a hoot about stretching or strengthening. So that’s the first issue.

So if I were to hang, I would make sure that my feet stay stable. I would keep my feet on the ground. See? Now I can hold myself in place. Now, how much I keep my feet on the ground and how much I take them off the ground is up for debate, because I can’t have my feet too much on the ground, because now the forces start going back up to my body and aren’t being pulled down. That’s a debate if you want to hang.

The second part of hanging is based off kind of a postural stretch. A postural stretch means I get into a posture and I allow my body to relax and adapt to that, which usually means increasing length of muscles and tendons and ligaments to relax my tissue.

But a postural stretch means that you need to sit there for a long time. So if you think about some of the martial artists who will sit with their butt against the wall and let their legs go off to the side and hang out, stuff like that.

There’s postural stretches I give my clients, my students here that are great. They all involve getting into a posture and being as lazy as possible. Because you get into that posture and you get lazy, and now you let gravity and time do its job.

Do you think you could sit here for a long time and hold on? How long do you think you could hold? Right? After a certain point, you’re going to start to struggle to hold yourself up, and now you’re going to force yourself to hold harder like a competition, but that’s not lazy and relaxed. That’s producing force to keep yourself there. That force means contraction. Contraction means not stretching. It means contraction.

Another little bit of info on when you hang. So when you hang, you’re thinking the whole spine is opening up. Let’s just say for argument’s sake for right now, the whole spine opens up. That’s not totally true. I’ll talk about it later. But let’s just say it does. But now, where do you have back pain? Is it T8, T9? L4, L5? T12, L1? Where do you have the issue?

If I hang, I’ve got a lot of joints in between, which means I have a lot of potential for places to move. More potential of places to move means less specificity. And so if you want to correct something, you need to be specific of where you want to correct it. It doesn’t just happen by magic because you do something like hanging.

So when I hang with both arms, I’ve got a wrist joint, I got an elbow joint, I got a shoulder joint, another part of my shoulder joint. I’ve got all the joints from my thoracic and down to my lumbar that are free.

Where is the most free in that? Because your body is going to move to the least available tension. It is not going to go, “Oh, Ekemba’s hanging. I should open up T8, T9 where his issue.” Nope. It’s going to go, “Oh, I’m hanging. How do I hang the easiest possible? I’m going to move where is the most free.” And where’s the most free, generally it’s not going to be where you have the most issue. It’s going to be compacted and tight and all that stuff, and you can’t get to it by hanging.

Again, to be specific, I can give you a demo here, I need to have a fixed point. So a fixed point means that my back left leg and [inaudible 00:08:40] of my front leg are fixed points for me to push on this cage, because I can develop force because I’m being specific where I want it. If I were to jump off the ground and try and push that thing, I’d have no specific force, I’d just be kind of moving around.

That’s the same thing when you stretch or strengthen. You need to have a relative fixed point. That means you’d go, “Oh, I want to work T8, T9. I need to fix above and below. So in between I can open up.” Right? Because I want to take that joint and move it apart. And when I hang, there’s no specific fixed point maybe except for the hands, which has nothing directly to do with the spine, to allow my spine to open up more.

So on top of not being specific, again, you’re not going to sit there all day long and hang, there’s no way. And then if you’re wobbling even a little bit, your actual muscles are actually contracting in your body. Contraction means usually for the spine coming together, right? If it comes together, we’re not opening spine.

And then let me go one step further. I watched some videos before this to see, and some people even recommend hanging and twisting. That is ridiculous. I don’t agree with that one bit. Your spine, biomechanically, the way whoever you believe designed us, designed it, said that if I twist mainly, but even if I flex or extend, my spine compresses because my body doesn’t do pure movements, it always happens a little bit in rotation. All right?

So if I rotate my spine, it comes together. That’s from the anylosis fibrosis. When one side tightens, the other sides relax, it brings things together. That’s physiological, not because I said so, you can go look it up. So if I hang and twist, now I get all the bad things I talked about before and I’m compressing my spine even more.

Have you tried hanging for your back pain or are you going to try hanging for some back pain relief? Well, stay tuned, because I’m not done talking about all the different things that happen when you hang. Why don’t you stay tuned to hear about that and also what’s a better way to approach this? And then stay tuned to the end because I’ve got some great free resources for you to participate in to learn how to train your body holistically to get rid of back pain or any pains you have, but also to increase the functioning, strength, mobility of your life.

So hanging uses basically a closed kinetic chain. Not totally closed, but I’m going to keep it easy, it’s basically a closed kinetic chain. So you have four kinetic chains. Kinetic just means how you move, right? You have an open kinetic chain, a closed kinetic chain, a semi-open and semi-closed.

Open kinetic chain means the last joint is free, it can move. Closed kinetic chain means the last joint is fixed. So if I want to open my body and develop space in my spine, which is what hanging, the principle’s based on, I want to have an open kinetic chain because I can keep it free. But if I’m holding on, it’s a closed kinetic chain.

So if I’m holding on, it’s kind of like a pull-up, right? I hold on, and because… I don’t want to… The microphone. I hold on and because I can’t pull that bar down, I move up, that’s closed. If I was holding on and that was a pull-down bar, I’m pointing over there because that’s where my pull-down, my cable machine is, if I hold on and I can pull down, that’s open because it’s free, I can do something about it. So I want to have something that’s more open and free, along with all the other things I talked about prior.

The last point is that hanging is assuming that your back pain is only coming from your back. Obviously some of it’s coming from your back because you have back pain, but why do you have back pain? Is it because a classic back pain, a bulge, a herniation, a prolapse, anterolisthesis, retrolisthesis, stenosis, think that’s it, arthritis, which kind of goes along with that? Or is it from a pinched nerve, artery? All these things can cause, vein, can can cause back pain.

So don’t assume that your back pain is only from the back. What people do is they think very linearly, back equals back. And the body’s not linear at all. It’s complex. And everything works together, so everything is going to affect each other.

So with the back, you want to make sure the spine is balanced. You want to have four curves. That’s from engineering, that’s not because Ekemba said so. Four curves, not too big, not too small is a stronger position for the spine.

So I want to make sure that curve stays. And sure, working with the spinal muscles, the paraspinal, the transversospinales muscles is going to go a long way to that. If you’re thinking about just the back muscles, well, just outside the back muscles I’ve got my longissimus. And just outside that I’ve got my iliocostalis.

But that’s only the back muscles. Don’t forget the front. I’ve got my abs, it starts with my TVA, which is a horizontal muscle that’s deep inside my body. It’s the deepest ab muscle. Then my external and internal obliques. Then I also have my rectus abdominis.

But I also have other parts that connect to the spine. I’ve got my ribs. They literally attach to the spine, right? And then on top of that I’ve got the intercostal muscles, I’ve got my diaphragm, I’ve got my pec, I’ve got my lats, I’ve got my traps, I got my serratus anterior, I got my serratus posterior, inferior, superior. I got my deltoids. Right? All those, some more muscles, contribute to my trunk, or as a lot of people call it, core muscles. Core muscles don’t only mean abs doing planks, it means all those muscles.

So in basic, I want the front part of my body and the back part of my body to have even amounts of strength and mobility which help keep my spine in that S shape, which it will help me not have pinches, herniations, bulges or pinched nerves, arteries or veins. So it’s going to help with, big time, not having back pain.

In short, you need to re-educate your body to where you want it to be. If you have back pain is because your posture, your physiology is off-center. Things aren’t balanced, things aren’t working the way they should, things are turned off.

One way to go is the other way, to be balanced, strong and mobile, is you need to tell it what to do. So hanging, in essence, is passive, right? You’re not telling your body to do anything different than what it does. When you hang, even if you feel a little decompression and pain relief, as soon as your feet go on the ground and you start to walk, it’s going to come back, right? It’s going to go back to what it knows, because you haven’t told it to do anything different.

So you need to be specific in where you have the back pain and tell it more what you want to do. If it’s too compressed, “Okay, I want you to open up.” If it’s too asymmetrical, “Okay, I want to balance you out.” You need to use stretches and exercises that re-educate your body to where you want to go.

If it sounds too good to be true, it is, and so that’s where hanging for back pain falls in. I wasn’t too subtle. As I talked about before, you probably noticed I’m not a big fan of it. If you’re basically not in pain and just kind of want to do it to feel a little something, that’s fine. But don’t think it’s sustainable, it’s going to give you the results you want and it’s something you can do to lead you to a different level. It’s not. It’s just there. If you want to sustain results, you have to be very specific with the exercise you give it.

Each joint in your body, each muscle, each tendon, each ligament, they all have different exercises you can do to make sure your body’s balanced. You don’t have to do all at once to make sure you’re balanced, but you have to do an assessment, start where you most need, and then slowly build out to whatever your goal is with training.

If it’s just to hang out and play with your kids or grandkids, it’s going to be less. If you want to go and be Olympic athlete, it’s going to be a lot more. But you got a lot of stuff in between. But everyone wants to live their best life, and using a holistic health and fitness method is by far the best way to get there.

It’s not about what one and two things can I do for this area of my body to get this? Right? The body doesn’t work like that. It may make you feel safe because you can understand it and you can duplicate it, but it won’t get you results.

Now, the best way to get there is with support, and that’s what I’m here for. So I got a lot of free resources that can help you along the way. If you want to be more interactive, ask questions and do, then join my free Facebook group. Right?

All you got to do is answer some… Well, sorry. In description below, that’s a good place to start, click on it, you go there, you’re going to answer some questions, agree to the terms and you’re in. This way I can interact with you personally on the group. We’ll do little mini trainings that I give you some information. We do some master classes on different topics, and we also do challenges where I take a topic, talk about it. We also do exercises and stretches. It’s a good way to be more interactive.

If you want to just read more about what I’m talking about, in the description below I’ve got a link for a free ebook. It’s basically how to live your best life, there’s four steps to that, through stretching exercises. So you click on that, put your information in, you’ll get the ebook.

Or if you want to talk more about your situation, what you should do and how it relates to this type of holistic training, then schedule a free consult.

Use the link below to schedule a time to speak with me, and even if I feel like you’re not a good fit, I’ll give you a bunch of good information. And I’ll only recommend my services to you if I feel you’re a good fit. I’m not going to just tell you to do it because I think it’s for you. I want you to understand what’s best for you, and if that’s working with me, then great. If not, also great.

So I hope this is helpful. I’ll see you next week. Put any questions you have down in the comments. Take care.

MOVE BETTER, REDUCE PAIN, AND LIVE LIFE ON YOUR TERMS

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

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Mar 16 2024

How To Work With Your Fascia

Fascia is the connecting link to your body. If you learn how to take care of it and train it correctly with fascia stretching, fascial strengthening, and holistic care, you will unlock the key to a sustainable, strong, mobile body. But are links like foam rolling or myofascial release all your fascia needs?

Well, check out this video to find out what it really takes to train your fascia.

Click the image to watch the video.

Fascia is a big buzzword now in the health and fitness field, but the study of fascia has been around for a long, long, long time. But unfortunately, all this great study material about fascia, has not shown up in the exercise and treatment of the fascia.

Just saying the word fascia or listing in your marketing, doesn’t mean you’re working with the fascia. So I want you to stay tuned while I go over some specific things about the fascia to know whether you’re working with the fascia or not.

Greetings, I’m Ekemba Sooh, I’m the owner of Solcore Fitness. I’m a soma therapist and soma trainer, and I’ve been in this field for about 30 years. I started as a regular personal trainer. And when the buzz of fascia came out, and the techniques associated with it, like foam rolling came out, I was a little bit clueless like most people, and believed what the marketing of these techniques like foam rolling, told me, because the information wasn’t the incorrect, it just wasn’t all the information.

And so once I did a deep dive into the fascia world, and all the different jobs it has, and how you can work with it specifically, then it opened my eyes, and it made more sense, because now it’s in a holistic fashion. And that’s how I like to view things, and that’s what I want to talk about on this channel, is a holistic view, not just a couple of exercises for certain maladies, that generally don’t work anyway and make things worse.

I want you to understand the cause and what you can do with it. So, if you’re interested in finding out more detailed information in this holistic fashion, just subscribe and hit that bell. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and lets the YouTube algorithm know it’s good, and it shows it to other people, share with your friends, and then well, that’s it. Thanks.

You can say that you have one fascia that from in utero till now, has split up and differentiated into hundreds or thousands of different directions that encompasses your entire body. An example is, in your muscles you have an epimysium, a perimysium, an endomysium that are fascial layers that surround the muscle and muscle fibers. Those fascias meet at the end of the muscle to form a muscle tendon, which is also fascia. That tendon attaches to the bone, but more specifically the periosteum, the skin that surrounds that fascia.

At some point, a ligament, which is also fascia, will connect to the bone. You have visceral fascia, that surrounds your organs, in a peritoneal, in a serious membrane like the pericardium or the pleura, lungs or heart respectively. So that’s your entire body. You have it all around your body, but a good word for fascia, is connective tissue, because it doesn’t just your whole body, it’s connected like a big spider web, right? Your whole body’s like one big spider web with fascia in different areas in different soft tissues.

Here’s an example of how it connects. The back outside part of my heel is connected to the outside calf, my lateral calf. That is connected to my bicep femoris, which is one of my hamstrings. That bicep femoris connects to my sit bone, my ischial tuberosity, that connects up into my gluteal and thoracolumbar fascia, and then it can go two different ways for this chain. It can go through my lat into my arm, or it can go through my paraspinal muscles, all the way into my head, and even connecting to my eye.

That’s the most important part is the connections that the fascia make, if you’re going to work with a fascia, you have to first understand that it encompasses everything, that whenever you move, you’re using your fascia, but you have to understand how it’s connected and the directions that they go. Fascia is connected in two different ways, in continuity and continguity.

So with continuity, you have to understand that fascia within its structure, has collagen tubes. And these tubes, their job is to transport liquid. This liquid is basically a fascial liquid that’s based on water, that helps with your immunity to transport waste away, to bring in nutrients. Very important. You want those tubes to be open. It’s that the piping of your fascial system. And so in continuity, these fascial tubes are connected all the way through. So, that connection I just talked about from my heel, my calf, my hamstring, my ischial, my glutes, my lats, up to my head and arm, those tubes run the length of that connection. They go all the way up. We’re taught that if you put a dye liquid in one of these tubes, you can see it move all the way up, and all the way down, whichever of these tubes. Different parts of your body, but one chain.

so contiguity means the act of being against something or bordering it, or connected to it. You don’t have the fascial tubes lined up, but they’re connected, so they help support the entire fascial structure. And that structure is your body. Now, the structure of body is called biotensegrity, in these terms. Tensegrity is a term coined by Buckminster Fuller, very famous architect, and some really smart anatomists who knew about tensegrity, when they took a step away from their studies and were coming back from lunch, they saw the body from afar, as opposed to up close.

When they saw it from afar, they go, “Hey, look at that. It’s tensegrity.” And they’re right, but now it’s biotensegrity because bio, biology, us, tensegrity. So if we want to work with a fascia, and we’re a tensegrity structure, then we need to know what a tensegrity structure can do, to effectively work with the fascia.

So check out this little slide on all the different things a tensegrity structure, and us, because we’re tensegrity, can do. Are you wanting to work or are you working with your fascia in your health and fitness routine? In the comments, let me know what you’re doing. But then stay tuned for some more information to understand if you’re really working with your fascia.

Now, fascia is not an inert piece of tissue that connects things, right? It has a lot of different jobs. It’s alive and works with your body. See this little insert to see all the different jobs that fascia does. On top of that, your fascia is made up of cells, fibers and matrix. And it’s a differentiation, or different combination of, these cells, fibers and matrix, that tell the body different parts of fascia. So a tendon, ligament and aponeurosis, which is like a sheet of fascia, are all fascia, but I mix it up differently, to form a tendon.

Then I mix it up a little bit differently, to form a ligament, and I mix it up differently to form the aponeurosis. Same fascia, just different jobs, because they’re in different places of the body. If I want to work with the fascia, I have to understand the jobs, and the fact that fascia is the same, just a little bit different, in different parts.

To work with the fascia, you also have to understand that the fascia is affected by three main components; first, nutrition/hydration, second, stress, third, the training, whether it bad or good. Nutrition/hydration, pretty easy to understand. If you eat a bunch of crappy food, then your body, includes your fascia, is made up of crap. If you’re dehydrated, then your fascia, like all soft tissue, is going to be more like beef jerky, and less like a fresh cut piece of lean meat. So if I try and move that beef jerky, it doesn’t function well.

Water’s also important because all soft tissue, including fascia, slide on this material of water substance, to move because we’re mobile and motile, so we want to be able to move. But if we don’t have that water substance, we get inflammation, because now I get rubbing. You also want water because that fascial liquid that goes through the tubes is based on water. So if I want to have all that fascial liquid with the immune response, and takeaway waste, and bring healing, then I need that liquid to have in my body.

The third is a little more complicated because you get stuck in a lot of dogma and false information. That’s the training of the fascia. To train the fascia, you want to first think about what do you want? Like any exercise program, what are you trying to do to fascia? Am I trying to be symptomatic, and just get rid of something? In this case, let’s take a trigger point, that’s a big thing with fascia, or am I trying to restore and improve function with the fascia?

Now I know, everybody’s going to say both, but that’s not what everybody’s doing. They’re mainly only doing the symptom one, through different forms of techniques with tools, or with manual therapy. Now, one way people work with their fascia and their symptomatic care, through trigger points, is by foam rolling. So we’re going to talk real quick about that. Now, foam rolling has been around for a long time, and at some point, I don’t know when, it got associated with the fascia.

And there’s some great studies about foam rolling and benefits. I’ll post them in the description below, but your life is not in a controlled study like these are done before. When they do a study, they’re saying, “Does A+B=C?” And they test it a bunch of times, and they say yes or no. Either one’s fine. But life is not A+B=C, life is the whole alphabet, all the numbers, the Roman numerals, it’s everything.

So when you go to foam roll, because you want to get rid of that trigger point wherever in your body, you may or may not be getting what the study says, and the benefits, but you’re also getting everything else that goes with it. And in terms of fascia, when I foam roll, I crush those collagen tubes like a rolling pin. And I’ll smash it. I’m not against doing things for trigger point, I do it myself. I do it with my hand though. So I do it, in a controlled environment as the therapy, and I know that I’m going to crush the collagen tubes, but I need to get rid of that trigger point.

But then because I know I crush the collagen tubes to get rid the trigger point, I also know how to do treatment, stretches and exercises, to reform those change of collagen tubes, after I crushed it. It’s like getting rid of a piece of a street that doesn’t work and repave it and bring it back. It’s the same idea. But people will feel a difference when they foam roll. Now they’ll feel something for a couple of different reasons. They’ll feel something because you are putting pressure on a part of your body, so that immediately brings blood, so you bring blood and warmth. That makes you feel a little bit better. Then you’ll also feel better because now when you stop foam rolling, which is inherently painful, you’ll feel better, because you get a bunch of hormones, they go, “Oh, we’re done. Thank you so much.”

But people take this basic feeling, which is very subjective, and the partial information from studies, or marketing, they go, “Oh, success.” Then they attach it to things like, “Oh, look, I’m so bruised.” And, “It’s so sore afterwards.” And they say, “Oh, it must be doing something,” because I guess here in America, I’m not quite sure anywhere else, the more pain, the more gain, right? That’s not true in this case, because when you see the bruises or soreness afterwards, in that case, you’ve now caused trauma to your body.

And then again, in true American fashion, well, foam rolling is not enough. Let’s foam roll on PVC. Let’s add spikes. Let’s add something else we can do to torture our body in the name of working with my fascia, but it’s not working your fascia at all. And then you have other techniques like guns that blast your fascia, or the Graston Technique which scrapes the fascia to get rid of it.

I’m not a fan of these at all because the cost benefit does not equal what the benefit may be. It’s way traumatic to the body, than what it could get out of it. But it’s not just these inanimate objects that are causing damage to your fascia, it’s also therapists who don’t know how to work with the fascia, but say they do. I was just talking to a lady at a consult, and she had a massage therapist that was working with her fascia. She took her finger and started digging into her psoas and inguinal area. That’s basically this area right here. So she’s digging into it. I don’t know why, to release it or whatever, but she pushed so hard, she traumatized the tissue. So it’s like somebody was just hitting you constantly. It’s not helping you. It’s starting to hurt and it’s going to piss you off.

Well, the tissue got pissed off, and when it gets pissed off, it inflames, it turns off. It’s not functional, and so when this lady did this to this other consult lady I was talking to, afterwards, she tried to take a step off the bed and her hip totally didn’t work and caused another issue.

Now, you can work with the fascia, you can work with pumping the fascia, if it’s in a joint, to help bring this fascial liquid and synovial liquid into the joint to normalize it. You can work with the fascia gently, through a fascial normalization technique, to increase the flow through these different collagen tubes I talked about. You can also do, in my case, techniques like double TLS, to turn on a ligament, or turn off and diffuse a tendon, to do different things with a body.

But you have to understand all the different functions, the tensegrity structure, and how it works best. Along with treating your fascia properly, you want to train it properly. So if you want to train your fascia, you have to understand all these different things I’ve talked about. Understand that we’re built as a biotensegrity structure, and there’s different aspects as to what that structure can do.

Understand the roles that the fascia play in the body, and how it basically helps control almost an entire body. And so if I want to train the fascia, I need to decide, do I want to stretch it, or do I want to strengthen it? But in either case, it needs to be put in tension. So, take that example from before, where I said that line of force from the back of my heel, my calf, my hamstring, my glutes, my lats onto my arm, or my spine to my head, I can take that chain, and I can put it in tension, that automatically tells the body, “Hey, this person wants to work that more,” because I produce tension in that chain. I produce a little bit force, which tells the brain, “Hey, this is ready to work a little bit more.”

And then I want to decide, do I want to strengthen in that position, or do I want to stretch in that position? Still using the fascia chains, which different parameters and different things you do to strengthen or stretch, but it’s the lining up of that chain, and knowing which way you want to go, that’s the most important part. Because, anywhere along that chain I keep talking about, you can produce tension to work that specifically, while still respecting that chain. So, there’s a posture I can take to stretch, in this case, my lateral gastroc, myofascially. There’s also a posture I can take to stretch my bicep femoris, in a posture, but also respecting this chain. Same thing for my glut, for my thoracolumbar fascia, for my transverse spinalis.

I could even put myself into a posture, to strengthen my spine, while still respecting this chain. It all depends on what you want to accomplish while respecting the chain, and where specifically you want to work on that chain. Because, we’re basically a bunch of links put together, and if one of our links is weak, we’re only as strong as that weakest link.

So you want to work holistically, which you also want to work specifically, to make sure each one of your links is strong, which means there’s a different exercise or stretch, or whatever, for each link. Because again, the fascia connects all the body, if I train it with the fascia in mind, that makes my training more effective.

Now, I’m not just working on just the muscle, I understand that the muscle and the chain involved, which makes the totality of my movement better, which will lead to getting stronger, more mobile, less pain, better posture, all those benefits are multiplied, because I’m using my body holistically, as one. Okay? That was a lot of information on fascia. I try to keep it brief, but it’s difficult, and I personally view working the fascia, as one of the best ways to work with the body for sustainability, for balance, for strength and mobility.

If you want some assistance, I’d be glad to help. I’ve been doing this type of training for a long time now. I’ve been in the field for 30 years, but I’ve been doing fascial type training, therapy and exercise, for 17, 18 years, and I’ve got a free Facebook group where I talk about the training aspects about it. You can do live calls, master classes, challenges, all within this Facebook group. In description below, you can sign up. You can sign up for the free ebook, which talks about the different training aspects, but it has fascia in mind. There’s four steps to this proper training program that leads to a good life.

Or, you can reach out to me for a consultation where we can talk about what you’re doing now. I can give you some information where I see the holes of your training, and then if I see it’s a good fit, I’ll recommend my services, but I’m always going to give you some good information. But, I hope you start thinking about all this information, to see are you working with your fascia? Because it’s very important not to say fascia, and do the opposite. So have a great week, and I’ll see you next time.