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Gratitude For Your Body. The Door To Freedom.
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“Unlock the power within! 🚀 Join me on a transformative journey as we explore the profound connection between gratitude for your body and crushing your goals. Discover why embracing where you are right now is the secret sauce to unleashing your full potential. Ready to redefine success? Let’s dive in together!”
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When to ‘Lean In’ to Change 💪🏽
Change can be hard. We’ve all tried to fight one change or another, right?
But it doesn’t always have to be an uphill battle. In fact – here’s a big secret – change can be your greatest ally if you take the right mindset about it.
✅ 𝐿𝑒𝑎𝑛 𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑜 𝑖𝑡. 𝐼𝑡 𝑚𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑓𝑒𝑒𝑙 𝑎 𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑙𝑒 𝑎𝑤𝑘𝑤𝑎𝑟𝑑, 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑦𝑜𝑢’𝑙𝑙 𝑔𝑒𝑡 𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑜𝑛𝑔𝑒𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑡𝑟𝑦 𝑖𝑡.
✅ 𝐴𝑐𝑐𝑒𝑝𝑡 𝑖𝑡. 𝑌𝑜𝑢 𝑐𝑎𝑛’𝑡 𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑦𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑛 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑐𝑎𝑛 𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑝 𝑎 𝑟𝑎𝑖𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑚 𝑜𝑛 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑣𝑎𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛.
✅ 𝐸𝑚𝑏𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑒 𝑖𝑡. 𝑇ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑖𝑠 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝑢𝑛𝑙𝑜𝑐𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑎 ℎ𝑖𝑑𝑑𝑒𝑛 𝑝𝑜𝑤𝑒𝑟, 𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑒 𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑜 𝑎𝑛 𝑎𝑑𝑣𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑒 𝑟𝑎𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑛 𝑎 𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑏𝑙𝑜𝑐𝑘.
Now, doing the opposite of what feels “natural” can feel … well, unnatural right? It feels uncomfortable. But that feeling will pass – while your progress can be here to stay.
Imagine your child switching schools, requiring an earlier wake-up time. How would you handle it?
❌ Write an angry letter to the school board saying you’re not going to do it? Nah.
❌ Tell your 6-year-old she’s on her own from now on? Definitely not.
✅ Realize this will give you 30 extra minutes of “me” time each morning to exercise? Yes!
I know it’s a simplified example, but the point hits home. Life happens – change is a constant companion. And you can’t dodge every change that comes your way, nor should you want to.
When you’re the one initiating a change, remember your desire for something new is stronger than the urge to dig in your heels. And that’s enough to tip the scales in your favor to adjust your mindset and take the next right step.👍🏽
Embracing change isn’t just about a mental shift; it’s about action, too. So, when change knocks, open the door and say, “Yes.”
And if you’re still not thrilled? No worries.
It’ll change again, anyway!🤪
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What to do in the gym? For longevity
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Deceptive Promises: What Big Box Gyms Don’t Tell You About Longevity
When searching for a program that’s gonna give you strength, mobility, flexibility, wellbeing, you know, a program for longevity. These big box gyms may look tantalizing. They seem to have everything that you want. You can go to one place, pay one fee, and cover all your bases. Well, that’s not really the case. So I’m gonna go through how you might be deceived in these places and what you really need for a program for longevity. I’m Ekemba Sooh. I’m the owner of SolCore Fitness. I’ve been in this health and fitness field for almost 30 years. I’m a Soma therapist and I’m a Soma trainer. To help you understand what that is, it’s like a physical therapist, but much more within the osteopathic medical discipline. So you use stretches and exercise in therapy to help people live their best life. I started as a regular personal trainer and like most personal trainers, I started in big box gyms.
And so I’ve seen how they market to people and what they offer people, and I’ve seen how they let them down. I believe in more of a holistic philosophy. And so that’s why I talk about here on this channel. If you want to hear more about this holistic philosophy and how, how it can benefit you, then subscribe to channel. Hit that bell and you’d be notified once a week. If you like this video, don’t forget to give it a thumbs up and share it with your friends. Taking a tour through a big box gym can be a tantalizing dopamine field, uh, experience. As that sales professional walks you through, they’re pointing out an area that, Hey, here’s where we can get your strength training in here. You can go do different types of cardio over here. You can take a bunch of classes from everything from mindfulness and yoga to HITT training, to to other strength training and body fat loss.
You can go over here for stretching. You can get everything you need for this one monthly fee. And you think to yourself, oh my goodness, that’s what I’ve read. I’ve read, I need all these different things to do my body. So if I just pay this one fee and I come here x amount of times per week, I’m gonna get my program. But what is it that you really need for your program? In this case, your goal is longevity. Longevity means sustainability. Sustainability means I can keep moving and doing what I wanna do well into my eighties and nineties until I decide I wanna die and I function properly. So by going to this gym, is that gonna lead me into where I want to go? In short answer, no exercise is not a co a collection of random acts of movement. Your body doesn’t care that you want all these different aspects.
It wants you to follow a path to get there. If I just go to a class one day for yoga, and the next day I sit in the machines, I work out, the next day I come in, I sit around and do some basic stretching that they’ve showed me a while ago. That’s not a collection, that’s not, that’s not a program. That’s a collection of exercises that gets you moving. Maybe get some dopamine. Maybe you have an accomplishment because you felt good. But that’s not a program. A program is one that takes you someplace. Like when you had your, when you got your degree or you succeeded in your, in your endeavor for your, your career, you had a path to get there. You didn’t just go to school and take a bunch of classes that sounded fun and expect to get a lawyer degree or become a doctor.
Cracking the Code of Longevity: Why Big Box Gyms Fall Short
There’s a specific path you need to take there. It’s the same with your exercise program. And so when these big box gyms tell you that you’re gonna get all these different aspects by just paying one point monthly fee, that’s incorrect. You need to know how to put these together. You need to know the progression to lead to these different things. And a lot of the progression factors that leads to all the things they have in gyms aren’t in gyms. They aren’t out there, uh, in the popular type of, uh, education. There’s stuff that you need to find professionals like myself who know how to work you up to that level. We all have a body that, uh, foundationally works its best in a certain place, right? My bones are here, my muscles here, there’s this strong, they’re flexible. My brain’s here, my heart’s here. They all need to work together properly.
Okay, well, if I have a body that’s designed like that, then the most advantageous thing I can do is to train my body foundationally leading up to whatever I want to do. But if I ignore that and just do the gym way of working out, it’s gonna lead to a bunch of different issues. First and foremost, outside of not getting to your goals, it’s gonna lead to overuse injuries. Every activity we do, everything, even me standing here has a detrimental effect on the body. Doesn’t mean it’s standing, it’s bad. I just understand because I know the biomechanics in the body what I need to do if I stand too long, where I need to stretch, where I need to strengthen, how I need to move differently. That’s not incorporated in the gym workout. You have a class that you like, that you go to three to five times per week that moves you in a certain way that feels good to your ego, right?
It just feels good. Like I’m, I’m moving, is not respecting you, which we’ll get into a little bit. And it’s just moving you through a random sets of activities where all these activities you do, all these movements, exercises, whatever, have a damaging effect to your body. Not bad if you know how it’s damaging your body, so you can do something about it bad. If you don’t know how it’s damaged your body and you keep doing it right? So you’re gonna feel good, you’re gonna feel accomplished, but then the silent killer is that you’re damaging your body. And then after x amount of time, it shows up later on. That’s the first step in these gym workouts. Second is how to combine them. If I go do a cardio session on the vast amount of cardio, whatever, whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. And then I go to sitting on uh, uh, gym workouts and using machines.
That’s not comprehensive. That’s attempting to get two aspects via cardio and via lifting. But like I said before, it doesn’t allow for the progression. How is it your body needs cardio? What level do you need? Do you need to work on base cardio, aerobic? Do you need to work on anaerobic cardio? Do you need to work on, uh, what type of strengthening do you work on? What parts of your bodies are weak When you sit in those machines in a, in a gym or you just grab a, a, a, a kettlebell or a dumbbell and just perform some movements that you see in a gym or on a YouTube on a thing that’s not progressing your body to, to lift those weights. But you’re not gonna find that in gym. So I’ve heard the argument, oh, I get two free personal training sessions when I first go there and they set me up on what I need to do and now I’m covered.
Eh, no they’re not. No, you’re not. Again, I’ve been in that situation. When you work for, as a personal trainer in these big places, you’re basically a glorified salesman, right? They wanna use those first two sessions to entice you to do more. ’cause their thinking is, oh, they don’t know what to do. If I can lay out an a, b, C program for them and they feel comfortable and have me stand next to ’em as they do A, B, c, tell a couple jokes and have a good rapport, then they’ll continue training. They’re gonna feel good and we’re gonna be making money. But generally, these trainers that start off in these programs are base trainers. You go there when you first start, when you first start is after you’ve taken your certification. So you don’t have a lot of experience. I’m using myself. An example, when I first started training at Gold’s Gym a billion years ago, I had my base training and I went out and trained and I did what I knew I could, thinking back now and what I was doing, I cared, but it wasn’t the best, right?
There’s a lot of stuff that I didn’t know that was not being applied into the thing. So you’re gonna get that level of training we go through. So when they give you a program from one of those trainers, it’s not to, it’s not because it’s the most advantageous for your body. It’s because it’s the easiest to sell. And too often what’s easiest, what sells is what’s popular. Think about it. When kettlebells became popular, everybody does and wants to do kettlebells when HITT workouts became popular. Everybody wants to do these. They see these things in the media. They read a couple of facts that sound like something they want to do, and they think, oh, this is for me. And you walk into the gym and the trainer says, we’re gonna do these things and you feel great. Oh my God, I understand what he is talking about. I feel safe. Now I can do these things. You feel safe because you understand what’s going on, but you’re not the expert in this situation, right? You don’t know all the things you need for your health and fitness. So if you go with what’s safe, then it’s gonna be a
Problem for you. And if the trainer’s giving you what’s safe now, you and the trainer on equal levels, that’s not what you want. You want the trainer to be the professional to have a broader view of what’s necessary. It can incorporate these things eventually, but they, that person should be able to tell you how, why they’re gonna incorporate it. And if you need it, a quick example of the type of information you’ll get from a traditional gym trainer is this story. So I had a friend of mine just recently talked to me about, she’s had piriformis syndrome for, oh God, like three or four years now. And she wanted to come in and help me help her out. And she asked, said, Hey, one of these trainers in the gym I go to told me I should sit on a, a ball and I should foam roll my piriformis.
So for those you don’t know, you get on your forearms, you cross your knee over, you’re sitting down, you have a roller, right? You have a ball right there. It’s supposed to roll and release your piraformis. That doesn’t work When you sit on that ball, you’re sitting right here. If you have the right positioning, that piriformis is below your glute. It’s also around your sciatic nerve and your gluteal artery. So when you sit on that ball, do you know that you’re not sitting in your piriformis? Can you, can you tell, are you pinching your gluteal artery? All these that cause a feeling of doing something because it’s painful, it doesn’t feel good. On top of that, when you treat your and treat your fascia, you want to keep it healthy. Keep it healthy, means I wanna keep the collagen tubes within the fas fascia lined up and flowing.
’cause it brings healing, takes away waste, helps me move. Everything’s connected. It’s proprioceptive, which means it’s alive. It communicates to my body. So if I take a ball and I put it here and I put my weight on there and I crunch it, I damaged my fascia. It feels good afterwards. ’cause you stopped <laugh> and you’re, you’re done. So yeah, but it’s like, oh, that feels fantastic. Thank you. Don’t do that again. But you think, oh, I’m doing something because it’s painful. I don’t quite know where this came from. But more pain does not equal better. If you have to have pain pandemic, that’s okay. But that’s not the only indicator of getting better. So in this instance, they’ve crushed the fascia tubes, they don’t know what they’re sitting on. They’re trying to release the piriformis because they think that’s what they need to do.
Let’s take a quick break here. I just wanna check in. Have you done this? Have you gone to a big box gym and thought you’re gonna be, uh, able to work out in this comprehensive fashion with that one monthly fee? Did it work out for you? Did you enjoy it? Lemme know in the comments.
The Missing Pieces: What Big Box Gyms Overlook in Longevity Programs
So we’ve come to a little bit of a headway here, right? We don’t quite know where to go because when I go to the gym, I can’t rely on the machines knowing how I need to move my body and the progression I need can’t really rely on the trainers there because of, you know, their lack of holistic knowledge. And you obviously can’t rely on yourself because you’re not in the industry. You can’t just take the headlines of what you need for health and fitness and think It covers all. Well, first, you need to know what you need for longevity to be, to have longevity in your life means my body needs to work efficiently.
That means the structure in my body needs to be arranged. Like I said at the beginning, if I have, if my body is designed a certain way and it is, and my body and my bones need to operate a certain way, they need to train my body to stay in that way. I need to train my muscles specifically to stay strong. I need to train my muscles and fascia to stay mobile and flexible. Uh, but I need to combine it as one. So you wanna start by, okay, what’s my, what’s my posture? Where am I starting with? Okay, do I have a good plumb line? Is my ear my shoulder, my hip, my knee, my ankle lined up? When I stand straight up, do I have a good gravity line? Can I stand within my inverse four degree cone and manage myself in my, in my seven basic prial patterns?
Am I moving well? Do I squat well? Do I push, pull, lunge, twist gait, think I forgot this one? Do I do these things well, if I don’t, okay, what are the small muscles that contribute to those movements that I need to work on from there? Then you have what you need to do. Now, do you need to do this in gym? No. You can do all this in a, I don’t know, I can’t do measurements. But you can do this in a little area as big as I’m standing right here. You don’t need it. The one thing a gym would be good for is that you have the mindset that I’m going there to work out. So some people can work out at home and be fine. Some people try and work out, all of a sudden realize, oh, I gotta do dishes. My dog needs to be pet.
That TV show looks pretty good. In that case, go to the gym, right? Pay a monthly membership fee and go there. But don’t go there and do gym workouts. Find somebody like myself to give you a routine to do, to go at the gym to deal and then come back and get updates to your routine. For me, that’s what a gym is good for is a mindset piece. I pay a fee and I have a space to go to. That equals me doing something that’s valuable. That’s very valuable because now you can set that in your schedule. And every time you go to a gym, you have a different mindset. Oh, I’m here for working out, hopefully. And then I take the proper workout from somebody by myself and apply that. I just brushed over some of the stuff that you need to have a strong mobile flexible feeling, good body for longevity.
I just brushed over it. There’s a lot of different factors. There’s a reason why people like myself study for decades on the body or why doctors go to school. And for residency for, uh, I don’t know, eight years about the body. The body’s complex. There’s a lot going on with the body. It’s not as simple as pick up a couple weights and move ’em a certain way and then move on to the next one. It’s much more intricate to that and it’s intricate for you. So if you wanna find out more on how to take care of your body, I got some options for you. First and foremost, I’ve got a free Facebook group. It’s SolCore Fitness, strength, mobility, and flexibility for active People. The link is in description. You click on it, you answer some questions. So we find out more about you, agree to the terms, and then we let you in.
From here, you can have an interactive way to find out more and what your body needs in this holistic fashion. I do mini-trainings, two, three minutes on topics I find interesting. We do discussions in the group. I do master classes where I take a topic and I really expound upon it, but it’s an interactive, you ask questions while I give a pre presentation. And also there’s challenges. So we’ll take a time, three to five days I do a, a topic or area body that I wanna work on. I present about that. But then we also do stretches and exercises of what we’re gonna do for that area. So you have a better idea of what, what you need. If you’re not into that, you’re not into Facebook, that’s fine. I always have a free ebook. It’s how to get Mobile and Four Steps to Live in Your Best Life.
So again, in the description, you can click on it. All you can do is put in your information. You’ll get instant access. If you’re ready to go though, if you’re feeling that hunger like you wanna start now, which is always the best time to start, then in the description, there’s a link for a complimentary diagnostic call. You’ll speak with me and we’ll find out what you’re going for, what you’re, what you’re going for, what you’re going through, sticking points you have, and where you want to, where you want to end up. This way I can give you valuable information. I can let you know, Hey, I think you need to go this way. If I see you’re a good fit for a program on only if you’re a good fit, I’ll offer you an opportunity to join us either through our personalized online program or in our studio here in Santa Fe. Otherwise, don’t just settle for gym workout. Don’t treat your body that way. Your body loves you, it just wants some love back. And just randomly going to a gym and doing what you think you need to do for a lifting program is not gonna get you where you want. In fact, it’s gonna take you backwards. It’s going to potentially injure you. So best of luck to you. Stay tuned next week. Take care.
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Posture Corrector Brace. Will It “Fix” Your Posture?
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The Posture Brace Corrector is another gadget we have here in United States, because we love gadgets, that straps over your shoulders and pulls your shoulders back claiming that that’s going to correct your posture. Is that true? Is it going to work? Is it a waste of your time? I’m going to go over all these reasons and some more in this video. I’m Ekemba Sooh, I’m here for SolCore Fitness. I’m the owner and I’ve been in this field for about 30 years. I’m a soma therapist and soma trainer, which is under the osteopathic model, like a physical therapist, but more. I’ve seen a lot of really crazy things out there in terms of YouTube and magazines about what to do for fitness and I want to impart my holistic knowledge into this platform so people can see that there’s a much more effective way to work with the body.
The body is built holistic, so if you work with a holistic, it responds perfectly. You can follow me, any of these social media accounts, you can meet with me personally. You can see that I not only own a health and fitness business, I also live a life. If you like what I’m putting out and you want to hear more about this holistic method of training and treating your body, then subscribe to our channel, where I put out new videos about once a week, and you can interact with videos. Let me know what you want to see. I’m more than willing to put up videos on topics that you’re interested in.
The Science Behind Posture Corrector Braces: Can They Truly Fix Your Posture?”
The posture brace corrector is a gadget, a tool that they designed, I don’t know how much it costs, I don’t have one, but I don’t think it’s very much, to correct your posture. Now there’s a lot of different forms of posture, one being good and a bunch being bad. The one to try and correct is, what we call in the industry, forward head posture and kyphosis. It’s a pathology. Forward head posture, just like it sounds, my head is too far forward, in front of my shoulders. And then kyphosis is my back is rounded too much. It’s stuck in this. So it’s a combination of both.
These are problematic. It’s not a good position to be in. Your head, if you’re too far forward… You have a law. It’s called the Law of 22 Degrees. We have a straight line here. Once your head hits 22 degrees, and I have no idea if that’s 22 degrees because I’m the model, you can’t come back because when you bring your head forward, your neck flexes forward, but your spine also slides forward. So it flexes and slides and eventually you get to the point where you can’t come back.
That’s why you see the old people and the walkers with their head down. That’s it. They’re done. That’s not good. Kyphosis is an over rounding of the back. My back should be rounded at a normal amount. It’s called kyphotic. -Osis is a pathology where it’s too much. This is also bad. As you can see, kyphosis one leads to forward head posture because as I round my back and this is locked, my shoulders naturally go forward. As my shoulders naturally go forward, my head slides forward because the table that my head is on is tilted. So it ruins my head posture, but it also ruins my shoulder, which ruins my viscera. You know what you got here? You got lungs, you got your heart, you got a mediastinum, you have a bunch of nerves to go through there. If I reduce the space in there… Obviously your heart and lungs need space to move. They need to be a certain position. Well, that’s problematic.
What contributes to bad posture?
A lot of this bad posture comes from bad posture. It comes from bad training, it comes from bad mechanics of your body, a lot of it comes from desk posture. I’ve got a video at the end that I’ll show you about sitting too long in mid-back pain. It’s one of my earlier ones, so I actually have an exercise in there, which I don’t do anymore. But it talks about, no, this posture and what to do about it. Now, there’s a lot of joints and muscles involved in this bad posture, so we’re going to try and keep it simple. But if you look at your forward head, you have five cervical vertebra with the joints from your bottom of your neck to your mid-back. You get a bunch more from T1 to T9. We’re going to go to just here.
Each one of those joints is involved in having this bad posture because each joint should work independently and have different information and things it does. You also have musculature. As I talked about, as you become kyphotic and as your shoulders move forward, the most important thing is your scapulae, your shoulder blades, move. I’m standing facing this way. These are my shoulder blades. They move what’s called protracted. They move out to the side. When they move out to the side, the shoulders go with it. When the shoulders go with it, now your rhomboids are too flacid and tight. Now your levator scapula, which goes from the area to your head, is too flacid and weak.
Now your pec minor, which goes from your coracobrachialis, which is a little bone right here, to your ribs, your pec major, your latissimus dorsi, your interior deltoid, your biceps… There’s a ton of stuff that become out of place. So if I want to correct my posture, and my body works as a interdependent, interconnected being, then I need to think about each one of those joints, each one of those muscles, the ligaments associated with those muscles, the tendons associated with the muscles associated with the joints. You can see where I’m going here. To just pull the shoulders back, doesn’t seem like it’ll correct the whole posture, but that’s exactly what these companies say. They say “If you just take the shoulders and pull them back, everything’s going to magically go back in place.”
Unveiling the Truth About Posture Corrector Braces: Myths vs. Reality”
That is not the case. I’ve heard arguments about “It reminds me to pull my shoulders back” and stuff like that. Okay, I accept that. But as I mentioned before, there’s a whole bunch of other things that need to happen. It’s not just a shoulders back. It’s more important to get the shoulder blades back, the scapulae. It’s the articulation, the movement of the thoracic spine to allow my shoulders to go back. It’s the strength and articulation of the C-spine, the neck, to go back and to be aware. It’s the loosening of the tight, possibly weak muscles in the front of your body, your anterior muscles, that need to be worked. I don’t see how one thing put on your shoulders, pulling back, can do all those things. It can’t. There’s no way that happens. But like most things, they take one aspect of one thing you need to do and they go, “Okay, if one thing happens, everything else should fall in place.” That’s not how the body works.
The body works as an interconnected, interdependent thing. That means it needs to work together. It needs to communicate. They need to be a certain place. Everybody needs to do their job, communicate to each other that I’m doing the job, to help everybody else doing their job. Having an external source on your body stops that from happening. Did you shell out some money for a posture brace corrector? I generally want to know how it went for you. Did it work? Did it not work? Just let me know in the comments.
Where to focus when correcting your posture
If you really want to work on your posture, if that’s a goal of yours, then it needs to be a multifaceted, holistic activity. First and foremost, you need to be aware of your posture. You need to be aware of what your body’s doing. Whatever you need to do. If you have a desk job, you need to make sure that you’re looking at the top third of the screen that you’re sitting ergonomically, that you’re not slumping over or sitting in a chair with your laptop. As you sit in your chairs or walk around in your life, you need to be aware of your posture.
But that’s not enough because you need to retrain your body to have posture. Exercise is there to educate. To educate means to tell the body what to do, because you shouldn’t have to think about your posture all the time. It’s good to be aware. But if you’re constantly telling yourself to pull your shoulders back and to sit tall, that’s going to last for… I don’t know, a minute? Because eventually it’s going to get tired, you’re going to forget, you’re doing something else, you’re going to lose it. But if you tell the body what to do in different parts, which I’ll talk about here in a second, then it just does it naturally. That’s what you want. You want your body to just do its job.
Before you work out though, you want to be hydrated. Because if I don’t hydrate my tissue, because soft tissue, if I exercise it, it makes things worse. So you start by hydration. You need to make sure you have plenty of sleep because if my cortisol levels all over the place and I’m stressed out and I’m not repairing myself at night, it doesn’t matter what you do. You’re going to be all jacked up. Once you do get to working out, then you need to go through each of these different areas to educate them, to strengthen them, to loosen them.
I want to do an exercise for each one of my joints of my spine. Each one should be a different one, not one for all. The best I’ve found are ELDOAs. They’re an exercise to open up, strengthen, wake up, make more aware each joint. Now it’s smarter, now it moves more. I need to strengthen my rhomboids, both of them, major and minor. I need to strengthen them, though, with my arms above the glenohumeral joint because biomechanics says that when I have it above, my shoulder blades move together, which allows my rhomboids to stay fixed and to work. I’ve seen a lot of videos where they have them down below. That doesn’t work as well. Works your lats more.
You need to strengthen the levator scapulae because after I strengthened my rhomboids with the butterflies, my shoulder blades will go back. Great. Now I need to strengthen my levator scapulae to pull my head back in place. With that in place, with my joints open in my spine, now I’ve taught my body, but more importantly my brain, what I wanted to do. Because when you train, you want to develop what’s called a new motor engram. When you develop bad posture, you develop a motor engram, an idea in your brain, of how your body should be.
I see this all the time in my studio. I’ll have somebody set up for a posture and their head is off to the side. They think that’s straight. I’ll move their head straight and go, “That’s where your head should be.” And they’re like, “I’m going to fall off to the right.” I’m like, “No, you’re not.” Because that motor engram in the brain said, “This is straight.” So you need to train your body to go, “This is straight.” This is what I was talking about before, that the body should just do its job.
Once you have the new motor engram, I now have a better plumb line. Now my ear, shoulder, hip, knee, and ankle line up. I now have what’s called a better gravity line, which is an inverse 40 degree cone that goes around your body because now everything is doing its job. Everything’s stacked in place where it’s supposed to be. And now I can manage myself in this four degree cone. Because when I have bad posture, I’m outside that cone, which means all the musculature needs to work. So in general, for a gravity line, when I’m here, my body’s not lazy, but it’s working not a lot. It’s just managing a little here, a little there, a little here to keep me in place. It uses less energy.
If I’m out with this bad posture and now I’m a little outside of four degree cone and I’m more anterior, which means forward, now all these muscles here are trying to hold me up because I need to walk forward, because I need to see where I’m going, because I need to eat my food. I need to drink my water. The idea of the body is like, “I want to survive. If my head’s too far down, I’m going to end up dying.” But now you’re making all these postural muscles, which should work a little here, a little there. You’re making them work with a bigger action, more than they should be doing, which causes more dysfunction.
There’s a lot of other places you need to work too, because again, the body works holistically. It works as one. It is not just about those little areas I just talked about. You need to train your feet because information from your feet to your brain to tell you where you are in space. You need to train your costovertebral and your sternocostal joints, your ribs, basically. Because if my ribs are tight and compressed, it won’t allow my thoracic cage to move. You need to myofascial stretch. I choose myofascial stretching because it works holistically with the body, the different muscles the pec minor, that pec major, the latissimus dorsi, anterior deltoid, the biceps. Because again, I want to train my body where I have dysfunction, but also respect the connections and the rest of my body. That, for me, is a good way to correct your posture.
Exploring the Effectiveness of Posture Corrector Braces in Improving Posture
Now we go back to do I think the posture-based corrector is good? I would say no. I would say no because even if it does remind you to pull your shoulders back, it’s a false hope. Like, “It’s reminding me to pull my shoulders back,” but it’s not doing anything else. And the further you stay in dysfunction, the harder it is to get out of this dysfunction. The longer you stay in this position, the more your body adapts to that position. Even if I remember to pull my shoulders back a little bit, the rest of my body is not being trained, and truthfully, my shoulders aren’t being trained to pull back the way they should be pulled back via the scapulae and the rhomboids. So I’m making the dysfunction worse.
I know people like these gadgets because you don’t have to work, and I could pay 20 bucks, whatever it is, and I can put it on and all of a sudden, magical fairies sprinkle dust on me, and everything happens. But that’s not the case with the body. You have this beautiful body. It is here to do these beautiful things. All it wants from you is to show a little love back, a little love to keep itself in balance, and it’ll keep doing whatever you want in your life until you decide to lie down one day and die. For me, personally, I am not going to leave my life and the way my body is up to some gadget that does this much of what I totally need.
Phew. I got a little more fired up about that than I thought I would. It’s just that I really believe in living this life to its fullest. And I don’t like when people sell products, purely to make a buck, with partial information and false hope to people. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen who come in after using these gadgets, not just a posture brace, but that the psoas one and the FasciaBlaster and all these things. These people make good money. It doesn’t help you at all. In fact, it takes you backwards. I really believe in training the body holistically.
If you like what I said, if you’re more interested in finding out information around that, then I’ve got some options for you. First and foremost, I’ve got a free Facebook group. It’s SolCore Fitness, my business, Strength, Mobility, and Flexibility for Active People. It’s all about learning how to train your body holistically so it functions at its best so that your body can keep up with the life that you want to live. It’s an interactive group, so people ask questions. I put out mini trainings, two-minute videos on different topics I find interesting, I put out blog posts and stuff like that. And then I also do challenges which are three to five days, interactive. I pick a topic, I go through information and we go through specific stretches, exercises relative to that topic.
I also do master classes. So again, I take a topic and I really go in depth about it, but it’s interactive. People are asking questions, we’re trying to go back and forth so I can try and enlighten you more as to the way that I think you should work your body. If you’re not into that, you’re not into Facebook, no problem. I also have a free ebook. It’s called Get Out of Pain, Get Mobile, and Get to the Life You want to Live. Four steps. You can download it with the description below and you get instant access.
Or if you’re ready to go, if you want to talk more about what this training is like, then schedule a call with me. Use, in the description below, the link to schedule a time with me. We’ll go over what you’re doing, what your sticking points are, where you want to go. And if I see you’re a good fit, I’ll mention how you can work with me. But if not, no matter what, I’m going to give you valuable information as to what I view is a way forward for you.
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