• Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

SOLCORE FITNESS

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

  • Home
  • About SolCore Fitness & Therapy
    • Ekemba Sooh My Story
    • SolCore Fitness Team
      • Elizabeth Quirante – SolCore Fitness Integrator
    • Reviews
  • Services
    • Personal Training and Manual Therapy
      • Personalized Workout Program
    • Semi Private Personal Training
    • Group Exercise Classes
      • SolCore Fitness Group Class Calendar
    • Online Personal Training
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Member Login
  • Take A Trial

Exercise Tips And Support

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.

Click on the image to watch the full video

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.

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

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

Find out more @

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Instagram

Youtube

Written by SolCoreFitness · Categorized: Blog, Exercise Tips And Support

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.

Find out more @

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Instagram

Youtube

Written by SolCoreFitness · Categorized: Blog, Exercise Tips And Support

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.

Request A Free Consultation Here

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

Find out more @

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Instagram

Youtube

Written by SolCoreFitness · Categorized: Blog, Exercise Tips And Support

Mar 09 2024

Unlocking the Power of the Squat Exercise

The squat is one of the 7 primal movements and is the only global movement that can assist in your posture if you do it right. Too often, when watching exercise tutorials, going to fitness classes, or personal training sessions, they teach the squat wrong. Doing the 100 squat challenge will tell your body more times how to squat wrong😑. So check out this video on ALL the areas needed to squat correctly.

Click the image to watch the full video.

The squat. The squat is a very important movement to get down. Not only is it part of the seven primal movements, which take us through life, but it’s also really important for your postural system. Now, I’m not going to just regurgitate information on how to do a squat. I’m going to dive a little bit deeper on all the components necessary for a good squat to do in the gym, but also in life. Hello, I’m Ekemba Sooh. I’m a Soma Therapist and Soma Trainer. I own Solcore Fitness and I’ve been in this field for professionally for 30 years, and I started off as a personal trainer, but I’ve been working out since I been about 16 years old. So tack on another five or six years of experience of being in the gym. At the beginning, I got a lot of hearsay information on how to work out, and I’m sorry to say it was 90% bad.

Most of the information you get in the gym is not based on science. They may have some information, but it’s kind of convoluted in this is what I’ve felt and stuff like that. You need to use experience. This is what I felt with science. Okay? If not, you’re kind of guessing and listening to Joe in the corner who has been working out for a while but doesn’t know the science of exercise. Again, that’s why in school, in class or degree, they call it exercise science. Now I go a step further and I make it holistic because guess that’s how the body is designed. So it’s about combining how everything’s connected with the science and experience so that you can live your best life. That’s what we’re going to talk about here on this channel is more of a holistic way of doing things that is steeped in science.

So if you want to hear more, then subscribe and hit that bell to be notified. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. It tells the YouTube overlords that this is good and I show it to more people. Then share it with your friends. So the squat is part of the seven  primal or basic movements that we do in life. Squatting, bending, pushing, pulling, twisting, lunging, and gait, which is your walk or your run. Those movements are done by themselves or together all the time in life. There’s no getting away from that. You can also talk about global movements. So global movements is more of a broad topic saying I use my whole body to produce a movement. That global movement can be one of the seven problem movements, a combination of the seven problem movements or something just more abstract like dancing, which does use them. But globally, I’m using my whole body to produce a movement now at the squatting. Now when you go to squat, you’re going to be learning to squat consciously or unconsciously, meaning you’re either consciously teaching yourself to squat or you’re just going to a class or a trainer

And learning it kind of unconsciously, kind of just doing it. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen show me a squat that does this, assuming that because the teacher in class was doing that for tighten your booty class or burn body fat, and some of the techniques then seen in some of these functional training classes aren’t functional at all because the function of body will go down. I know because back when I was 16 or 17, whenever it was, I was taught to squat like that head up out. I’m not quite sure what the thinking was back then and why to teach it that way, but that is totally stupid. There’s a terrible way to do a squat, yet it’s still being taught today. Now, there’s a lot more details I’m going to talk about later on what could also be part of a good squat, but just from the standpoint, if I’m sticking my butt out and looking up, that’s a lot of force in my lower back and my neck through gravity and if I have weight on my back through weight.

So now the forces aren’t going through my body nicely, they’re stopping my lower back and my neck. And so when I ended up getting an L 4 L f5 pinch of my vertebrae and sciatic pain, a big part of that was a squat that started when I was 16, and so I got the injury at like 35. So it’s a big time in between. So learning how to squat and in particular of the squat, like all global movements is very important. So now the big difference between the squat and the other six primal movements that the squat you can use to directly influence how good your posture is. So the other ones use your posture, but they don’t help it get better. So your postal system is made up of two main components. You have your plumb line, which is your ear, shoulder, hip, knee, and ankle lined up approximately.

And so the squat doesn’t, it doesn’t help that get better, but having a good plumb line helps to squat. So it’s better if I have a posture like that before I put a bar or do a body weight squat. And if I have a posture like most people like that, because if I squat in this position, it’s going to make my plumb line posture worse. The other component is a gravity line as part of the postal system. So you have a plumb line and now you have the gravity line. The gravity line is an inverse four degree cone. So right below my pubic bone as it comes up, it envelops between four degrees. I want to be able to keep myself in that four degree cone. There’s some basic areas of your body that communicate to your brain to tell you where your plumb line, your feet, your spine, your eyes, ears and TMJ.

They all tell the brain, I’m here in space. If one of those is off, your body thinks it’s somewhere else, the squat can help with that gravity line position as a global movement to help keep you in that four degree cone. Now, the squat, like most global movements, is made up of a bunch of different little parts working together to make one big movement. You want to work with your body in all these little individual ones before you try to master big ones. So the easiest way I can tell you about this is your body’s interconnected together and interdependent. That means they all work together. It’s like a links of a chain. So you’re a bunch of links in a chain and you’re only as strong as your weakest link. So if one of my links is a piece of bubble gum, then when I could do is squat my squats only as good is that bubblegum link, right?

And it’s a little silly to think about, but I want an extreme example for you to think about. So in all these aspects I’m about to talk about, you need to trade ’em separately. So with a squat, there’s a thing called the beam phenomenon. It means when I squat, when I do my movement, I want my torso to be like a beam, like a two by four. I want that because as I move up and down, I want it to stay in my beam area and not wobble around as it wobbles around. As I’m going up and down with force, I can even body weight, but even worse with weight on your back, that force goes in weird places, places you don’t want it to go. So you want to have a strong pelvic floor, abs, diaphragm, peck, lats, res, interior and bucco mouth pharyngeal down your throat fascia.

These components keep me in that beam phenomenon and each one needs to be trained separately. But again, you’re squatting, so don’t forget your feet. Your feet are on the ground. They need to push you up and down. So they need to function properly, which you’re going to lead me to a quick side note about squatting without shoes. I’m all for being barefoot and letting your feet do their job. I tell people to walk around without shoes at home all the time to do different things to train your feet. But when you do weighted squats, heavy squats, and you go up and down, your foot’s being supported by your arch, namely your navicular bone on the inside of your foot, the arch part. And so if that navicular arch can’t support the squat up and down, it collapses. So I’m not saying don’t squat without shoes, but there’s a certain limit to the weight that you should be doing.

So if you’re going three, five, even eight reps in a really heavy weight, I probably wouldn’t not wear shoes. I’m going to wear shoes with some arch support. How’s your squat? Are you working on it? Did you know about all those different parts of your body that are involved in the squat? Well, stay tuned because I’m going to go over some more details on how the form of the squat. Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about the form of a squat. So I’m dealing with my hands and then I got my bench here so I can kind of show you a couple reps. But first and foremost, I want my body to be even, and this is from math is not from because Ekemba said. So that’s my upper body, that’s my tibia and my shins, okay? I want my upper body, my shins, to be the same angle as you go up and down.

That means my center of gravity stays below me right here like that. If I don’t do that and I end up bending forward, my center of gravity goes back and I get more tension, my lower back. Or if I too far forward, my center of gravity goes forward and I tip back and I get too much a tension in my knees. So you want to be even, I always tell people kind of like an accordion because to me that made sense. I don’t know why, because you’re folding yourself kind of in thirds as you move yourself down and up. But the whole goal is to move straight down and straight up. So the two areas I see people have issues with are keeping their pelvis tucked and push her knees forward. So a term that was used at some point, I dunno if they still use it now, is that a squat is a knee dominant movement.

What that means is the knees dominate the movement of going up and down. It’s the main area that you want to focus on to produce that movement. Now, it’s not the only area as I’m going to show you here in a second, but think about the knees moving up and down. So I go to squat, ouch. I go to squat. The first thing I want to do is I want to stand like I’m standing on a clock, right? 12 o’clock is my pubic bone. My feet are 10 o’clock and two o’clock. That’s normal physiological position of your feet. People who tell you to turn your toes straight ahead, that’s internal rotation. Standing like that in some varying degrees is normal. That’s your feet. That’s normal. So as I stay in there in 10 o’clock and two o’clock, I want to first think about tucking my pelvis and tucking my chin.

This is part of that beam phenomenon. The pelvis tuck, the chin tucked. Again, those other aspects I talked about before that need to happen. But let’s start with just those. After I tuck, tuck, again, knee dominant movement. So my knees start moving forward first, and because I want my torso and my shins to be same angle, then I start to bow forward. I like to reach forward because I want to have a little counterbalance. Then I move myself down and up. Knee dominant movement, keeping my torso and my tibia, my shins the same angle. Now, if you’re having trouble tucking your pelvis when you do that, couple reasons. One, your abs and specifically your lower abs are not strong enough to keep your pelvis tucked. So you need to train not just your lower abs, please don’t think that train all of your abs, but understand the lower abs or for that tuck.

But it can also be through tight chain, tight myofascial chain. So when I go to tuck, I could have the strongest abs in the world, but if all this is tight and is stopping of the tucking, then I’m going to lose my tuck. So it’s not just the abs you want to think about, am I tight through my lats and S radius and all those thorac or fascia? All that fascia in back for the knees going forward. The big thing I see is tight soleus and calves because as they go down that area, the heel start to come up and the knees stop moving forward. It would stop them moving forward. So at basically need to stretch the soleus in the calves, but you also probably need to strengthen because I can only stretch a muscle that’s there. So if I don’t have muscles in my soleus, in calves, I also need to strengthen because muscle tissue works much better.

Then tenderness type tissue. Now, when you practice that, if you see you have issues with the squat in one of these different areas, you need to stop and deconstruct that and then to reconstruct. Now, that’s difficult if you are in a class or in a training program where the focus is more on body fat loss, which the majority of classes are, or a class that uses functional movement to produce a certain effect for a competition, they’re going to do later on with the same type of movements. Their coaches or trainers might teach you some basics about form. But taking time to learn something takes time. So I can’t just show you a couple of movements and you do four or five reps, 10 reps maybe, and you got it down. It takes some time because if you don’t take time to do it, when you go do that class, so that training session and the goal is to perform or to burn fat, you’re going to lose your form, right?

It’s like if I was teaching myself to type and I didn’t teach myself where the keys were because the goal was to type as many buttons as possible to fill the page. I don’t care about typing it properly, proper words. I care about filling the page with letters because that’s what my coach told me. So if you don’t learn to squat and go through, you’re going to be damaging your body. Now, you may think, Kimba, I don’t feel any pain. I’m not damaging my body. You are. You’re beginning to damage your body. You don’t feel pain at the beginning of damage your body. You feel later on the example I gave myself of being taught a bad squat at 16, but then at about 35 or so get an injury. It’s like a leaky faucet.

So if I have a leaky faucet and the drip starts at the beginning, maybe I notice it, maybe I don’t. It doesn’t mess up the basin of the sink, but after 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, there’s going to be a hole. There’s going to be a rust, right? Because I didn’t fix the link, the link at the beginning, okay? Now that you’ve got this great information to squat, what you need to go do is go practice. One of the greatest gifts exercises can give us is to develop a relationship with our body. Tell us where we’re tight, where we’re weak, where we’re disconnected with, so we can do something about it. So there’s not a curse of your body if you feel tight or weak or disconnected. It’s just your body telling you, Hey, brother or sister, I need a little assistance. Because when we find those things out, now we can do something about it to have it work better.

Because if we can take care of our bodies, our bodies will take care of us. We’ve been given this wonderful gift of a body that we can keep for 70, 80, 90, maybe a hundred years. So as soon as possible, get to know it and take care of it. So can live. You can live a great life. If you want some assistance on this, which most people need, then I’d be happy to help. So if you’ve got a free Facebook group where we can be more interactive to learn about this holistic way of taking care of yourself in description below, there’s a link for it. All you got to do is answer some questions. Let us know a little bit about yourself, and you’re in. You can now participate in challenges and masterclasses and interactions within a group. Or if you don’t want to do that, there’s a book.

I’ve got a free ebook. It’s on how to live your Best Life. There’s four steps to it to become mobile and to get out of pain. And then like I said, to live your best life. Again, in the description, there’s a link. All I need is your name and email. We’ll give you an instant access, or if you want to talk about your situation and what you can do, I’ve got a link in the description too. Set up a time to talk to me v Calendly. So I hope to speak to you soon. Good luck to you, 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.

Find out more @

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Instagram

Youtube

Written by SolCoreFitness · Categorized: Blog, Exercise Tips And Support

Feb 24 2024

Lower back Pain: 3 BIG Reasons Why!

Are you looking for lower back pain relief? Are you searching through lower back pain exercises, lower back pain stretches, or lower back pain massages for a solution? Lower back causes are a lot, and it’s important to know what causes them so you can know how to fix them. Check out this video to find out more.

Click the image to watch

Lower back pain affects 619 million people and is a leading cause of disability, which is just an astronomical number. And I myself fell into that number about 16 or 17 years ago, and I never got any sustainable results through doctors, PT, chiro, acupuncture, yoga, Pilates, and some of it actually made me a lot worse. But I did get out of it, so I want to stay tuned as to how I got out of it, why a lot of those other aspects didn’t work, and what I did to get out of it.

Greetings, I’m Ekemba Sooh. I own Solcore Fitness and I’m a soma therapist and soma trainer, which is kind like a physical therapist but a little bit more. And it’s underneath the osteopathic model of working with people, which is holistic method. Like I said, these treatments and exercises that people have or options they have for lower back aren’t always complete, a lot of them aren’t sustainable. And like I said, I found out firsthand.

And a lot of my clients over these past 30 years I’ve been in the business have also come to me because they didn’t get exactly what they wanted from their traditional ways of treatment. And once I got them, like I got myself, on just holistic way of working with the body, they started to see results and not only stop having back pain, but more importantly, started to have a better life because it’s not just about the back pain.

So if you want to know more about holistic way of treating yourself, then subscribe to this channel. If you like this video, please give a thumbs up and lets the algorithm know that it’s a good video and that it’s going to share with more people. Then you can also share with people you feel, like me, might be interested in.

Lower back pain is always just sitting there, in the corner in the dark, waiting to get you. And the physical pain of when it happens is terrible obviously, but what’s worse is the anticipation of when it could happen. So you don’t want to set it off because you don’t want to feel that way. But now you’re trying to walk on eggshells in your life to not set it off, but eventually it’s going to because your body never stays statically. There’s no maintaining, right? You’re either getting better or worse. In life, there’s no static. So eventually something’s going to set it off if you don’t take the time to specifically correct it and the cause to make sure it doesn’t come back.

These lower back pains can come from a lot of different reasons, right? It’s not just one or two. It could come from a bunch of different disc problem, a bulge, a herniation, a prolapse. That could be combined with a stenosis, an anterolisthesis, a retrolisthesis. It could be from a pinched nerve, artery, or vein. It could be because of badly functioning tendons, ligaments, and muscles. And outside of an acute injury, usually it comes over decades. So your back pain probably started 10, 20, 30 years ago. And it usually comes from a combination of bad posture, bad diet and hydration, bad training or treatment. So I want you to stay tuned, I’m going to talk about each one of those aspects.

Having poor posture is huge because it causes a lot of issues, in this case lower back pain. But it can cause just issues all over. Andrew Taylor Still said structure dictates function. That means how well my posture is, because structure and posture, same thing in this case, so how well my posture is dictates how well I function orthopedically, how well I move and have less pain, but also how I work viscerally, mentally, emotionally, everything. Like this building that I’m in, if the structure was bad, I would not be sitting here filming and talking to you. I’d be running and dodging because windows and stuff would be crashing down on me, which means I couldn’t properly function in my job right now to educate you ,because the structured building is not allowing me to. Same thing in your body.

Now, posture doesn’t mean just walking around, being tall and looking good. Posture means two things. One, that I have a good plumb line. Plumb line means my ear, my shoulder, my hip and my ankle are lined up. Posture also means I have a good gravity line. So imagine I have a four degree cone around me right now and that my body, via the muscles and postural systems, can keep me in place. That’s having good posture.

If I’m not stacked properly or I can’t maintain myself in this 40 degree cone, the door is open to whatever’s going to happen to my body. In this case, you end up with lower back pain. And so, until you correct the posture, you can correct all the other things I’m going to talk about later on, if you still have bad posture, it’s never going to truly set in and be effective.

The second part that leads to lower back pain is bad training. So bad training is the education I give my body. Now, you’re always educating your body, right? Right now, I’m educating my body to stand and be here. If I were to do this a lot, my body would adapt to this standing posture. So whatever postures or movements you have in your life is what you’re telling your body to do.

Now, the training you’re doing, whatever exercise program you’re on, needs to be a total training, needs to train all your body if you want to stay balanced. But all movement is not created equal. So just because you do something doesn’t mean you’re going to equal what you want. And just because you think you’re working your whole body doesn’t mean you’re working your whole body. You got about 600 muscles and a bunch of different ways those go. You’ve got a bunch of intents and ligaments that combine to them. So you have a lot of different ways you can train your body, thousands of different ways. Just doing a handful is not going to cut it. You need to find out what you need to do for you.

Now, why is this important? Because like I said, you’re always training your body. So let’s take an example. It’s well documented that sitting posture, sitting down is not the best for physically, but also mentally, emotionally. If I sit down a lot, if that’s part of my daily life, them I’m teaching, first, my lower back to round. It goes from arching to rounding just naturally because I’m sitting down. I’m teaching my hip flexors to become tight and weak. I’m teaching my deep rotators, [inaudible 00:06:48], piriformis, what [inaudible 00:06:52] say? A bunch of other ones. All the pelvic rotator muscles to be tight and weak. I’m teaching my glutes to also be tight and weak.

So I need to retrain my body if I sit down a lot. I need to give myself a program to say, “Okay, body, I know I have to sit down a lot because of a,” whatever, but I don’t want to stay in that posture because in daily life, sitting posture doesn’t work well if I want to go for a run or go skiing or play with my kids. So at a minimum, just for this one posture, I need to stretch and strengthen those hip flexors, all eight of them, not one or two. I need to work with all those deep rotators to strengthen them, to stretch them, the glutes. I need to bring my curves and my spine back to four because I know that V engineering and equation R equals n square plus one, because it’s science, it tells me that those curves of the spine, I need four of them to be the strongest. I need to work with that.

For me, the best way to train all these things is, like I said, holistically. So for me, I would use [inaudible 00:08:04] for the spine and maybe the hips and maybe the SI joint. I would use myofascial stretching and segmental strengthening, which works not only with the muscles, but the fascial chains from all those different hip flexors, deep rotators and glutes. Because you have to train your body not just where you have issues, but everything’s surrounding the issues and the cause of the issues if you want to have sustained results.

Now, that sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Well, it is. It’s a lot. Your body’s complex, it needs to be addressed as so. But you don’t start with everything all at once. You start with a couple nibbles and work your way up to the full meal. Whenever a lot of people come into me and they’ve done the allopathic way of doing things, they’ve been given a sheet of paper to do some exercises and they follow a sheet of paper, and almost to a person they say, “Oh, it helped for a little bit, got me functional, but now it’s not getting more results.” I say, “Well, okay, you need to do this type of training.” And once I give them this type of training, in small niblets, to work out more, they get that sustained results.

When looking for exercise programs, you always want to think about what’s the main intention of why that exercise program was created? So we’re going to take out all names because I don’t want to trigger people’s ego. If that program was designed to help you become mindful and hopefully be liberated, enlightenment, and they gave a physical way to do that, that it wasn’t designed to correct lower back pain in this case and the different reasons you have it. If that program is designed to connect to your core as you move, which is good, nothing wrong with either one of these things, then maybe it’s not physically designed to have you correct the different reasons why you have lower back pain, same thing. So you want to think about what’s the philosophy of what you do?

For me, the philosophy is medical, right? It’s from a long time ago, back World War II, Andrew Taylor Still. The idea was to correct the body to correct dysfunction, and all the different ways it happens. So I’ll give an example. The scorpion stretch and different ways to twist your spine to help your lower back are totally BS. First and foremost, when you twist, you compress your spine. That’s just physiological. That’s the way it’s designed. So when I turned like that, even if I got tall, my spine compressed. So if I’m doing a scorpion and I bring that leg over, I’m going and twisting, but I’m also going to extension, which also compresses your spine.

So you compress your spine, and because also of Pascal’s law, which means when I put pressure on a spherical ball, it goes omnidirectional and your disc is a sphere. Now that disc is being compressed and being pushed in all of the directions. And if one of those directions you have those herniations or bulge, it’s going to make it worse.

But somebody along the line told somebody else that, “Hey, this is great for your back,” because maybe they felt something. They felt something, they felt better. If part of your problem with lower back pain is in the disc, you’re not going to feel anything until it’s too late. You don’t feel that compression and bulging, like I talked about, until it touches something. It doesn’t mean it’s good, it just means it’s asymptomatic until it becomes symptomatic. And when it’s symptomatic, it’s a whole different reason.

So when looking for exercise, you need to do your due diligence, can’t speak right now, and talk about why does this work? And have that person be able to articulate why it works. Are you working on a way to sustainably get rid of your lower back pain? Let me know what you’re doing. Put it in comments below.

When you go out to find an exercise program for your lower back pain, you have to be very careful with what’s generally out there and what’s popular. It’s out there because it’s popular because of multiple different reasons. It’s popular because somebody decided it was popular. They said, “Oh, this is good for your lower back.” It caught on. Maybe a couple people got results and now it becomes a thing. Usually, it’s a thing because it’s easily digestible.

So if I tell you I’ve got three exercises to cure lower back pain, you’re like, “Thank God. That sounds awesome.” But that’s BS, that’s not true. I don’t know where your back pain’s coming from. I don’t know you. I don’t know how you’re going to react to exercises. Those exercises also are usually laden in partial information. So part of the reason why they work is good, but it’s not the whole reason on why something should work. There’s more information out there.

And unfortunately, they’re given to them by people they trust, their friends and their family. They’ll tell them, “Hey, this is good.” If you search around on YouTube after my video, I’m sure you’ll find a bunch of videos that say that. And it’s usually from a PT or a doctor or something like that, so you trust them. Or it’s from an actual, like it’s a handout, like I talked about before, from a PT or chiro.

But most of these exercises are the same, because we have a closed loop system here. One person tells one person that something’s good, echo chamber, that’s what it’s called, an echo chamber. They all start talking about the same thing and it makes you feel safe because you hear from a bunch of different sources and they’re all saying the same thing. Well, it must be true, right? We’ve all found that to be true. This is sarcasm coming from my mouth right now because that’s total BS. So you have to be careful about that.

You have to, I keep repeating myself, work holistically. That’s the way your body designed. Work specifically for what you need. Why do you have lower back pain? What is the cause? Your choice between cause and symptom training, which I’ll talk about here in a second. And then how do you go about teaching yourself that program?

And the worst thing that’s out there are these tools and gadgets that they have to correct certain maladies. So I’m sure if you search around, you’ll find some sort of gadget, 20 bucks or 50 bucks, to cure your lower back pain. They don’t cure. It doesn’t happen. That’s not true at all. You want to believe it because you want a simple way to correct your lower back pain, and I’m sorry, that doesn’t help. It might cure a couple of symptoms. Maybe you feel better. But ultimately, it won’t correct the cause of why you got lower back pain. That takes a combination, holistic, stretching, exercises, and lifestyle factors. That’s what it takes.

But the problem is you were searching for an easy result, and I’m sorry to say it’s never going to be easy and it’s going to be hard on you, on your body, and on your wallet. Because you’ll do one of these little tools and you’ll feel better maybe, hopefully, I hope you do, but eventually it’s not going to work. And then you go and buy the next tool to make yourself better, and eventually you’ve got four or five tools and now you spent two $300, and it sits in your closet. It’s not going to work. You need to decide what you want with your training in therapy.

That leads to the next step, which is therapy. So deciding what you want is a big step in therapy. You want to decide either do you want to feel no pain or do you want to feel functional and get better in your life? It’s a very important question and people look at me with doe eyes whenever I say that, but it’s not obvious. I want to know that because if you don’t want to feel pain, [inaudible 00:16:00] for me, then don’t work with me. Go to a pain clinic, take up on a medication, and throw ice on whatever you’ve got for the rest of your life, and hopefully you don’t feel pain.

If you want to function, you need to choose a program that allows you to function. That’s going to dictate the type of therapy you get and the type of training you’re going to get. If you choose to function, you’re going to not be doing the allopathic way or symptom-based treatments for your body and you can do more of the etiology, cause-based treatments.

So if I go to my doctor, he’s symptom-based. I say, “I got low back pain.” He goes, “Okay.” Takes some X-rays. I’m sure he’ll find something, a disc, a bulge, a herniation, something like that. Generally, he starts with cortisone shots, maybe gives you three to 10 PT sessions, and then you come back for another cortisone shot. And eventually it gets worse and eventually you have surgery. That’s allopathic, that’s symptom-based. Or you take pain medications or you use ice.

If you want to do the etiology, cause-based, you come to somebody like myself and we do an assessment to find out not only what the reports say, but actually how you move. Because you’re not just a piece of paper, you’re also a human being that moves around. And one person, two people can have the exact same imaging, say a disc bulge or herniation, but move completely different and have different symptoms, so you test.

And then you have to be okay with the struggle or the learning process, I should say, of training the cause. So you start with what hurts, but then you build your program out to make sure that all the parts of your body that cause the lower back pain are also trained, not just the area that’s causing the lower back pain.

The last part is your food and your hydration. You are what you eat. If you eat crappy food, non-nutritious, from my standpoint, not organic or the way nature brought it, you’re going to be building your body on crap, which means you’re going to be more susceptible to breaking because you’re not strong. And if you’re dehydrated, then you’re also going to lead to issues. Your body is approximately 70% water, probably a good idea to keep it around 70%. Because your tissues, your soft tissue, move on a watery substance and only move as well as they’re hydrated. And if you think about your disc, which is one of the big things that people have lower back pain width, your disc needs to be hydrated.

Two of its main jobs are to shock absorb forces and to allow your spine to move properly. Well, if it’s dehydrated, you lose space in the joint, which means you lose shock absorber and you lose the ability to move the way it should, strictly because you didn’t drink enough water. Probably a good idea to check what you eat and make sure that you’re hydrated.

Now, I want you to have success, but you need to decide what you want to do. Do you want to feel no pain or do you want to get better? Like I talked about before. If you don’t want to feel pain, then continue along this general allopathic way people work with themselves, and then hope that you don’t feel pain. If you want to correct the issue and find the cause, then you need to use a holistic program like I’ve been talking about throughout this whole video.

If you want more information what that holistic program might look like for you, then I got some support for you. You can join my private Facebook group, the link is in the description below, to join an interactive way to find out not just about correcting lower back pain or pains in your body, but to get strong, get mobile, get flexible. Got different ways, we do masterclasses, challenges, mini trainings, and I interact with people on the site. You get a free download of my free ebook. Again, it’s how to live your best life. There’s four steps to that. And again, in description below, just click on it and you can put your information in, you get instant access.

Or you can reach out and talk to me personally, again through the description with a link, through my Calendly link. You’ll find a time that suits you and we can talk about what is it you want. I will only give you my services or let you know about my services if I feel you’re a good fit. But no matter what, I’m going to give you as much information as I can on the direction I think you need to go and the steps you might be missing.

I know this is long video. I hope you stayed through the end. I hope this was valuable. Put any questions you have down in the comments and I’ll see you next week.

Request A Free Consultation Here

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

Find out more @

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Instagram

Youtube

Written by SolCoreFitness · Categorized: Blog, Exercise Tips And Support

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Page 1
  • Page 2
  • Page 3
  • Page 4
  • Page 5
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Page 41
  • Go to Next Page »

Footer

disc hydration ELDOA

Why Your Spine Isn’t Rehydrating Overnight — and What to Do About It

💡 Your spinal disc doesn’t just “recover” with hydration while you sleep. It responds to what you do … [Read More] about Why Your Spine Isn’t Rehydrating Overnight — and What to Do About It

Man meditating SOmatic Pride

Somatic Pride: Finding Strength in Feeling at Home in Your Body

We often talk about self-confidence or resilience like it’s just a mindset — but your body has to … [Read More] about Somatic Pride: Finding Strength in Feeling at Home in Your Body

Mens Health. Your Body is not a tool - tensegrity system body

Your Body Is Not a Tool: It’s a Tensegrity System

Your Body Is Not a Tool—It’s a Tensegrity System Most men treat their body like a tool.Use it. … [Read More] about Your Body Is Not a Tool: It’s a Tensegrity System

  • Bluesky
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • Phone
  • Pinterest
  • Threads
  • YouTube

© 2025 · SolCore Fitness · All Rights Reserved · Privacy Policy · Terms & Conditions