Ep.8_Most Valuable Skill for Reversing Back Pain_ CBT
00:00:00 Speaker: This week's topic is going to be what is the most valuable skill for reversing back pain that anyone can learn? Whether you're a core balance training student or not, it doesn't matter. This is a skill that I'm going to talk about that applies to everyone, not just for getting out of back pain, but for many physical, chronic physical conditions of the body. And so I'll be sharing that with you momentarily, and then we'll talk about why I think it's the most valuable skill. And then we'll talk about what it actually means. So the skill that I believe is the most important skill that anyone can learn, that is extremely valuable for getting out of back pain is the skill of listening to your body. And so at face value this may not mean much. I'm sure that everybody with chronic back problems is excellent at listening to their body already, because what they hear all the time is pain, and they're tired of listening to it. So I understand that perspective. But what I mean when I say listen to your body, I mean it in a little bit of a different way. And so we're going to talk about first why listening to your body, why I believe it's one of the most important things. And then we'll talk about what it actually means. What is listening. What do I mean by listening to your body? I got a couple bullet points here. These are the two major reasons why I think listening to your body is so important. So first of all, your body is always communicating to you and pain is simply just communication. That's it. And so what the body is communicating with pain is that something's wrong. Right. That's a red flag. It's sounding the alarm. To be able to hear it is one thing. It's annoying. It sucks. But to be able to listen to it and interpret it is another thing to be able to interpret why your body might be sounding the pain alarms, and maybe to relate it. If you can reflect on what you've done that day or what you're currently doing to an activity so it can help you decide what to do and it can help you decide what not to do. Pain is not the only way that the body communicates to you, so the body communicates with good feelings too. And I believe that these are some of the more important feelings to listen to. Because if you are here and you're someone that's been experiencing chronic back pain, you're presumably inundated with pain feelings and it's hard to underneath all that noise, listen to the good feelings that your body is sending you. But it does send signals communicating to you all the time of when you do something that it likes, when you do something right. And so we're going to talk a little bit about that. So the whole philosophy behind this is going to be that you should be doing less of what hurts your body, that what increases the pain, and do more of what decreases the pain or what gives you good feelings. And it's a skill. This is not something that you can just start to do instantly because you decided you're going to do it. Learning how to listen to your body is a skill that you can develop over time, and it requires in the beginning Reflection time. So to be able to go, okay, my back is hurting worse today than it was yesterday. I need to sit down and take a moment and think about what did I do yesterday that may have caused my back to get worse today and relate this change that you're experiencing to an activity. Maybe you drove a long distance, or maybe you sat at your computer all day. I certainly experience both of those alarms, even though I, you know, I'm this guy that created this program and I've gotten myself out of back pain and I don't suffer anymore. I still get alarm signals when I do something wrong. If I sit at my computer all day long, I'm still going to experience some pain. My body's going to tell me that it doesn't like that because bodies don't like that. And so I am still constantly having to listen to my body, and I think it's the most valuable thing that you can do to guide you in your decision making. If your goal is to climb out of this cycle of pain, because that's all it is, it's a cycle of pain. We are. We get stuck in it and the pain is being it's in a loop. It's in a positive feedback loop. It's being continued by something that we're doing constantly. And in order to get out of this loop, out of this cycle, we have to change something. And it begins with, what should I do? What are the things that I should do instead? And the only way you can know that is by listening to your body, listening to the feelings, the days when you may feel better. All right. Okay. Actually, today feels a little better. I'm not out of pain, but I actually I went for this walk earlier today and my back feels a little better. Okay, that is a amazing communication from the body that your body likes walking. Do more of what works and do less of what's not working. And there's one more major point I want to make about all this. And that's that you are the only person in the universe that can hear your body. Not I, not a medical doctor. Not the best researcher on the planet can hear your body. And so if you're not listening to your body, then no one is. And the best, the closest second to listening to your body is going to a professional that knows things and then trying to communicate to that professional, the feelings that you feel which are not going to be accurate, your words and your communication is not going to be accurate, because there's no perfect way to describe the feelings that you feel and the locations and how it changes over time and the activities that improve those things and the activities that make it worse. And these days, doctors don't even have time to sit down and listen to all that. And so it's really on you if you are going to give your body the courtesy of listening to those constant communications that it's sending out, you're the only one that can do that. And so that makes this job and this skill not only extremely valuable, but extremely important because nobody else can do it for you. So that is the first bullet point. Okay. That's this concept of listening to your body and being able to know what connect the the communication signals the pain or the good feelings to activities that you do. It allows you to your body to become your guide and guide you to do more of what's working and less of what's not working. So the second bullet point is related to actually the action of getting out of the back pain cycle. I get a lot of questions from students in the program of how much should I do of this exercise or this activity, or fill in the blank how much to do. The answer they're looking for is how many reps and how many sets of this exercise. And probably to their annoyance, I never give that answer. There is no right number to do for any exercise, for any person, for not any person, for every person. There's no magic number. It's going to be different for every person. And so in order to know how much you should be doing, you really need to be able to listen to your body. And so I'm going to give my best guidance for you on when you're doing exercise any exercise. How much should you be doing? Depending on what your goal is and what you will find is that unless you have a professional standing right next to you like a personal trainer or a therapist or whatever, and they can tell you they're watching you actively and they can tell you when to start and when to stop and how many to do. That's the only way that you're going to be able to have somebody to tell you the right number. So I'm not going to be able to ever tell anyone the right number of things to do unless I'm watching them live. Otherwise, it's going to be up to you to know how many to do and how much to do. And that's going to involve listening to your body. And so there's some general guidelines I will give. And this applies to all exercises, all activities in particular the lessons in the Core Balance training program. I strongly recommend this kind of philosophy for when you're trying to guide yourself on how much you should be doing, and also if it's another solution, any solution. If you are doing exercise because you have some goal, you want to get stronger. You want to build your endurance, your training for some event, then this will apply. And so listening to your body to decide how much to do, let's say your goal is to. Let's keep it super relevant and say that your goal is to get out of back pain. And so the goal isn't specific to building muscle. It's not specific to building strength, although building strength is a great thing. But if you were going to get a specific to building strength, then your guideline will be slightly different. And it's not specific to building endurance. It's kind of all three. You want to just kind of generally improve your fitness. Um, we can assume that's going to be targeted towards your core. Then this is my guideline. If you are doing an exercise or an activity and you stop that activity to take a break, say you will call it a set, you do a set and you've stopped that activity after, say, ten reps, and you haven't gotten to the point where you felt a challenge or a sense of fatigue. Then you have more or less not done anything long term beneficial for your body. So the guideline is if you want to improve your body, if you want to inspire your body to make change. And this is how exercise works, right? You break it down, you challenge it, and then you go rest. And during that rest period, your body builds back up. It's been broken down by an activity that you've done. It could be work or it could be exercise or play. It doesn't matter. During that rest period, your body builds back up. And if you've challenged your body enough, the body will say, well, this person is challenging me. The owner of this body is challenging me. So I'm actually going to build up stronger than I was before because they need that. And so the muscles build stronger. But if you are not doing that, if you're not challenging yourself, the body has no reason to become stronger or to build up better, or to be able to do something longer or lift something heavier. And so that's the guideline is you have to challenge yourself. You have to reach a certain amount of fatigue. And it could be challenge and fatigue are not the exact same thing. It could be that you're challenging your coordination. It could be that you're challenging your balance. It could be that you're challenging your ability to focus and stay connected to your core, which is what we train in the Core Balance training program. It's about staying connected to your core throughout the activities. That's a challenge. And so you may not reach muscle fatigue, but you are challenging your abilities and your skills, and you may reach mental fatigue because the connection starts up here. The electrical electricity that's flowing through your body initiates up here, and then it goes down to the muscles that you want to connect with. And so you may be the weakest link in the chain may be up here the initiation. And so if you're challenging your mental focus and getting fatigued in your mind, that is also will have the same benefit as challenging the muscles. Because what we are training in, core balance training and pretty much all training is neuromuscular re-education. Neuro being nerve starting in the brain, muscle being the end result, the levers that pull on the weight against gravity. And that's all that's happening. And so the guideline is you have to challenge yourself or you have to reach fatigue. And that's going to be different for every person on the planet. And so that's why in no lesson of the program do I say do this many reps of this many sets, because the person on the other end of that lesson could be a sixty five year old person with a very low level of fitness or a very high level of fitness, or it could be a twenty something who is a professional athlete, or it could be a thirty something physical therapist like me. And so the number is going to be different for each one of those people. And frankly, if you're doing any program, whether it be online or in person, any exercise program and in that program is a protocol and it's saying doing three sets of ten. I disagree with that because that's a very cookie cutter generalized and it's not customized to you. And if you do three sets of ten and it's easy for you, then you're not getting any benefit from that. That's the simplest way I can put it. If you do something and it's easy for you, you pretty much just went through the motions. And maybe you are maintaining what you have, but you are certainly not creating a catalyst for building stronger or more endurance or more coordination or motor control or whatever it is. It has to be to a level that it is slightly beyond your current capabilities. And there is research behind this. There's tons of research behind it. There's actually an ideal level of challenge. And I teach this in the program. It's four percent beyond your current capabilities. That's where you want to challenge yourself. Not two hundred percent. That's going to be detrimental. You want to just go slightly beyond your current capabilities. and they they somehow came up with the number. That four percent is the ideal number to challenge yourself to get the most benefit. And that's going to vary depending on your goal. So I do want to kind of throw a disclaimer out here that if your goal is not what I was just talking about, it is not just to general fitness, but you have a specific goal, such as building strength. You want to increase your, what do they call it, your PR for one rep Max. I'm not into CrossFit or that kind of Olympic lifting. Let's just say a squat. And your goal is to be able to squat five hundred pounds. Then of course you're going to need to challenge yourself, but you're going to want to challenge yourself in a kind of a specific way, and that's going to be minimal reps and super high amount of weight and quick fatigue. You want to be fatigued at one repetition or two repetitions for at the max. You you want to reach fatigue. And so this is kind of getting into another relevant topic is if you are doing reps and sets of something, the number of reps at which you reach fatigue is going to determine the benefit that you receive. And so if you're reaching fatigue between one and four repetitions of doing okay, some some weight lift, say a deadlift, which we teach in the program, then what you're accomplishing is you're building strength. You're lifting enough weight that your muscles are going to respond by building strength. And if you are reaching fatigue somewhere between, say, six and ten repetitions, then this is just general strength. Building a little bit of muscle, building a little bit of endurance building. And if you're reaching fatigue at fifteen reps beyond fifteen, twenty, twenty five, thirty, one hundred repetitions, then your training specifically for endurance, you're not going to be building a whole lot of strength because because it's called specificity and you're specifically doing high repetitions. And the only way you can do high repetitions is because the weight must be a lot lower than the person that reaches fatigue after four repetitions. And so the only consistent thing across the board with all these different goals, no matter what your goal is, is that you must reach fatigue or you must reach a level of challenge, that it is beyond your current capabilities. And so you have to take a break. So the reason for sets is that you're kind of forced to take a break. It's not because you're supposed to do three sets of ten. So you do ten real easy, and then you take a break because somebody told you to. The reason you're supposed to take a break between sets is because you can't do eleven. And so that's why I would disagree so much with any protocol that is specifically outlining a number for a general population of anyone to do reps and sets. And so we're going to, you know, relate this back to the topic. The only way you can know how much to do to reach your goal is by listening to your body. You have to be able to tune in and know that first of all, you're doing the right thing. So you know, I love the comments that I get from students in the program that when they are referring to how they feel it in their abdominals or they feel it in their glutes, or they know that they're connected to their back anchor while they're doing this. But something else is going on and they need my guidance. I love those questions because it tells me that they're tuning into their body and they're listening to their body. They're feeling where it's happening, where the connection is, where the muscle engagement is. And the guideline for how much to be doing is you want to get to a point of fatigue. And so what I have, if you're not in the program and you're curious, like, how do I tell people how much to do in the program? I have every exercise, you know, there's three generally three exercises a day and it changes every day. It's called the daily routine. And every single day I email you what you're going to do. And it's three generally three movements connection, core connection activities. And each one you're going to do for five minutes long. That doesn't mean that you need to do it constantly for five minutes, or hold the position for five minutes. It means spend five minutes doing this activity, and within that five minute period, go take yourself to a level of challenge. Take yourself to a level of fatigue and if that happens after two minutes, then take a little break and then start again. And maybe you can get two and a half sets in or maybe three sets in in five minutes. And so the idea is that you're spending time training your body and the amount of breaks and reps and sets that you need to do is determined solely based on what your body is telling you. And the only way that you can know that is by listening to it. So that's my soapbox. I'm going to be answering a couple questions today on this. I hope that you can recognize the importance and the value of listening to your body because, you know, in conclusion, nobody else can do it but you on the entire planet, and your body is probably screaming at you. And if you're not listening to it, then you don't know what it's telling you is bad for it. What you shouldn't be doing or what you should do less of, like sitting at a computer like what I'm doing right now. If my back starts hurting after a certain amount of time, what I probably should do is get up and go for a walk. Because I know from listening to my body in the past that my body likes walking, my back likes walking. So that's doing less of what hurts and doing more of what helps. And you would be surprised how many people need to be reminded of that simple philosophy. It's a simple philosophy, but even myself, my colleagues, we need reminders to follow this philosophy. Because if you simply do that change in your life, do more of what feels good and do less of what hurts, you will slowly climb yourself out of the downward spiral of back pain. Simply by following that philosophy. And then there's things you can do to help speed that up. Right? So and that's what is laid out in the program is how can we help you do this as soon as possible. And a very common question I get is how much should I be doing. So that's my answer. Listen to your body. Your body is telling you how much you should be doing, and if you want your body to improve in some way, then you need to challenge it. There's no other way to improve. So let's get into the questions. Christopher Drake so severe DD L5-s1 very thin according to MRI. Christopher, I encourage you to watch the I did this this same type of presentation on imaging and I believe it is very powerful. I've gotten some feedback from people that it was. It was a good message to hear on the psychological effects of imaging. I get some nerve compression from time to time, and burning pain is core balance going to help me realistically. And I love that you added realistically, because that is my answer. And my answer is going to be realistic, is that I have the exact same thing. And I say that in the present tense because I don't imagine that my degeneration went away, but my function in my body returned. And that's because I probably drastically slowed down the degeneration by learning how to move my body in a healthy way. And so everything that I know about this is put into the program. And really, it's focused on you learning how to move your body in a healthy way by connecting to your core, by giving your spine more support so you can slow down and stop that degeneration. Whatever is causing that degeneration, there's a predictable pattern. And so my answer is absolutely one hundred percent yes. This program is designed for you, for people like you because that was me and that is me. I know I still have degeneration, but it doesn't control my life. And I believe with every cell in my body that anyone is capable of improving their situation, reducing their pain, improving their body function by learning how to use your body healthier. A lot of this has to do with connecting with your core, and it certainly doesn't hurt. And in most cases, when I hear back from students, the feedback is is life changing? It really, really has an amazing impact. And so check out the trial. There's nothing to lose. Jimmy's question is, can this help with upper and mid back pain? So like I said it's focused on lower back pain. But because the solution to lower back pain is connecting to your core, improving your posture. There's a lot of postural training in this program that yes, it does help with upper and mid back pain, as well as neck pain and hip pain and knee pain and Si joint pain. It's a full body program. I just can't say that because it makes me sound crazy. And so if I were to go around telling people that this program helps the whole body, it helps everything. Uh, it's very not believable. And so I don't do that. I can't do that. The program is primarily designed for people with lower back pain, but it just so happens that the problem, the predictable pattern that causes lower back pain, is the same predictable pattern that causes knee pain and neck pain. And yes, that includes upper back pain and and mid back pain as well. It's just where is your weakest link. That's where we break down. And for a lot of us it's lower back because there's very little bony support. There's no rib cage. There's no pelvis. And we lose connection with our core. What makes more sense to start hurting when your core shuts off? The thing inside the core, which is the lumbar spine. So yep, that's my answer. It's absolutely going to help with your posture, which is going to help with upper and mid back pain. Christopher Drake did the first four or five days of CBT. And yes, imaging did cause a lot of anxiety. Yeah. So that's the topic of the imaging stream. But also it is why you shouldn't be worried about your terrible imaging results. And it's pretty amazing. I believe it offers a lot of hope and a lot of inspiration for people to be able to see this data. So check that out. And it could really change your mindset about how imaging is not dooming you for life. Actually, there's a ton of hope for you. I don't know how old you are, but it doesn't really matter. You can improve no matter how old you are, but there's a ton of hope for you to get better, regardless of what your imaging says. And there are people who have worse imaging than you that have no pain at all, and there's really no correlation. So first question is from Marcy. She is in the first week of the program, and she says, this is on the very day zero, very first lesson that anybody sees in the program. Day zero, the enrollment day. The question is, do you feel improvement after this lesson? And she says, yes, I feel the expansion in my low back. How do you feel about inversion tables? It seems this breathing would benefit while inverted. I have never thought about that, Marcy. That's a really good question. In general, my thoughts about inversion tables are that it makes sense to get upside down. It makes sense to decompress, you know, to use gravity in your favor to decompress the discs of the spine. I don't necessarily do inversion therapy on myself, but I do hanging just, you know, from the tree outside my house to get some decompression. And just like I think it's a really great way to get variety in your interaction with gravity. And so I feel the same way about inversion tables. There's a couple of things about inversion tables that I think are not they're not the solution. They're not the standalone solution. And the first thing is that if you have really tight hip flexors or any kind of like general syndrome of muscle imbalances, and then you hang from your feet upside down, it could potentially do a little bit of exacerbation because especially with the hip flexors, it's kind of going to cause a lot of pressure on your spine just because of the biomechanics. And I'm not going to get into explaining that too much, but that's what I will say. It could potentially be pulling on your spine a lot if you're hanging from your feet. And so in that case, it wouldn't necessarily be like the ideal level of decompression because the hip flexors might be doing that again. Listen to your body. Super appropriate if you're going to be doing an inversion table and see how it feels like. If it feels good and you get up after doing the inversion table and your body says good, I feel good, I feel improved, I feel better. That's how you know. And so that's what kind of makes this the most valuable skill you could possibly learn. And anybody can learn it. It's just something you got to develop over time. Because if you get off that inversion table and then you don't reflect on how you feel and and relate back to what you just did, then there's no learning that happens. And and if you log that, you reflect and you and you relate and you learn and you log that, then, you know, for future guidance. Okay, maybe I should make time for some inversion because it really helped. Or the reverse. Man, I actually something feels a little off. Something feels a little wrong, huh? I just did inversion earlier today. Maybe it's possible I can relate those two things. And maybe I shouldn't blindly do this activity because somebody else told me it was good for my back when is not particularly good for my unique individual condition. And so yeah, I don't have a strong feeling about inversion. It's not the solution to back pain. If it were, then they will be selling like hotcakes and they'd be in every house. Eighty percent of households would have one, but it may help. And it makes sense. And particularly with the breathing, why not? Right. Variety is a very healthy thing for the body. A A lot of trauma is caused by repetition. Repetitive trauma super common. And so the opposite of repetition is variety. Yeah. Why not get upside down and do some breathing and train your body in a different position while gravity is acting on you in a different way? So yeah, fully support that. Just tune in and see how it feels while you're doing it and afterwards. And remember that sometimes the body can react in a very delayed fashion. So it might be the next day. You may not even feel like if you're going to react negatively from some activity, it may not get that negative feedback until the next day. And that's an odd thing that that happens, especially in the back pain population. But it makes it harder to do that reflection and relate back to activities when there's that gap, that delay in time. So great question, Marcy, and we'll keep moving on. So Chris. Yeah. So farming. Yeah. It's super important to be able to move in a healthy way if you're going to be farming. Let's get into the next question. We're going to do a question from Bridget in front anchors awareness. This is in module two, week two. And I believe it's the first lesson in module two front anchors awareness. So we're introducing the front anchors. And so it's just awareness is not strengthening. It's not anything. But hey meet this part of your body and meet this connection. It's pretty cool. It's going to take you a while to get the hang of this. But once you do, something magical is going to happen. You're going to experience a breakthrough, and it takes everyone a different amount of time to make this connection. It's one of my favorite lessons weeks. Module two is probably my favorite of the program. So hi Doctor Ryan, this was interesting in that my neck and head were the most uncomfortable. Any tips? I could feel my front anchor points and could feel the push away for both points of contact. We'll keep working with intentions for both back and front anchors. Thank you. So the question is, do I have tips for when your neck and head were uncomfortable? And it's going to depend on how you're coming into this. You know where you're at when you're coming into this. I have never met you, so I don't know your posture. But if there's a lot of, you know, forward head, rounded shoulders, posture coming into this, there's going to be a little discomfort. There's going to potentially you know, it's it's on a scale. So the more extreme that type of posture, which is really common, the more it's going to be uncomfortable. When starting out with this I will give you a tip. There's going to be a lesson on day two where we help you to open up the posture. You know, the the rounded forward posture is self manipulation is self myofascial release. It's using a foam roll. So we kind of do some manual therapy on your thoracic spine to open you back up. And so in the meantime I would probably recommend to loosen up your body a little bit before getting into this position. And I'm just guessing that that's the cause, that it's kind of a bit of a forward head, rounded shoulders. It becomes uncomfortable when you're laying in the prone position or the face down position. And so kind of loosen up your body maybe a little bit. Do an activity that kind of loosens it up. So if there's any stiffness it'll be lessened. It'll be decreased. So maybe go for a walk, maybe do the other exercises in the daily routine before getting into the prone position I often recommend that. Anyways, so doing the bridge, doing the back anchor first. Just getting your body warmed up and then get into the prone position and just breathe and try to relax. Spend like two of the five minutes just breathing and relaxing into the position and letting your muscles relax and adapt to being straight because your ground, your floor and your home, wherever you're doing this is flat, right? So is putting your body into a straight position. And that's good unless your body is really, you know, accustomed to being in a curved position, then it's going to be uncomfortable. So we got to relax into that and allow the spine to kind of drop down the thoracic spine to drop down and open up the front of your body. And the floor is really good for that. That's how we originally learned posture in and human development, right? As infants and babies. That's what this is all modeled after. So there's going to be a bit of reversing the impact of going through life in this process. And so my kind of like last message I would want to leave you with Bridget is that uncomfortable is not always a bad thing. I would want you to listen to your body and differentiate between good pain and bad pain, because sometimes we need to go towards some discomfort. Go towards some good pain to achieve the goal that we want to achieve. And if it were a sharp pain or just like intuitively felt bad and wrong, like it was hurting you, I would say stay away from that and then you're going to have to use your own judgment to determine that. But if it's like discomfort and you're like, maybe it's not so bad, it is uncomfortable, but I feel like I should be doing this. It just kind of feels like maybe I need to be doing this, even though it's not pleasant. Then I would say it's okay. It's not necessarily wrong. And that might be part of the process for you. And just go gentle. You'll never hear me say go harder or turn up the intensity to anyone, especially in this first module, this first phase of the program, the first month. So just go easy. And with the push away, just be real low intensity and in tune with your body and make sure you're not over tensing anything. We want to relax into this. And then really get a pure push away from the deepest muscles in your core. Next question is from Tamara or Tamara. I've noticed that my shoulders tend to tense up and round forward whenever I try to do the back anchor awareness, progressions and the bridge, I end up dividing my focus between my back and my shoulders because I'm constantly trying to relax my shoulders. Any suggestions? Seems like the only way to interrupt the cycle is to reduce the amount of effort I put into my back, until it seems like I'm putting in pretty much no effort at all. And so that is often the answer that I would give Tamara. So that's the often the suggestion I give is to turn down the intensity so low to you feel like you're almost doing nothing. But since it sounds like you've already tried that and that's not may not be working for you, nothing's popping out at me. This is kind of a hard question to answer. It sounds like it's a compensation to me. You're tensing muscles, so the goal is to send all the energy down to the core below. Right? And it sounds like tension is happening up here. And so that's part this is part of the predictable pattern is that we are compensating with global muscles, power muscles around the outside of the body. The limb muscles. Shoulder muscles. Muscles are limb muscles. They lift the arms. Right. And so they are not going to be supporting your lumbar spine. And so we want to kind of be able to like narrow our focus into the muscles that support the lumbar spine without turning on the other stuff. And so it's possible tomorrow that you are in this pattern, this predictable pattern that so many people are in. And it's going to take time and repetition of you getting familiar and changing the firing patterns that happen in your body, the electrical impulses that flow from your brain down into your body change those pathways. We want to narrow that and target that focus into the muscles in your core, and that can only really happen through focused meditation on this stuff. And it may be that we have to apply. The second tip that I gave. When you first start the program, I give the three tips for success. And the second one is to be patient and stay the course. Just keep at it because you know it's the right thing, and it may take more time than you want to achieve the goal, but it sounds like you're doing the right thing. Turn down the intensity. Narrow the focus. Focus on your core. See if you can turn only that on. And then once you learn how to do that, turn it up a little bit and see if you can turn it up a little bit without turning your shoulder muscles on. And if you can, then the next day see if you can turn it up a little more without turning your shoulders on. And then that's progress. And so you continue the progress that way. That's the best thing I got for you. That's my suggestion, is be patient and stick with the process. It sounds like you're doing it, and it's just going to take a little bit of time to break out of this pattern, this firing pattern that has become the default firing pattern of your nerves and muscles. Next question is from Ed. So Ed says, when I do the bridge, my outer hips start hurting and then I struggle with sleep. It was really amplified when I added the band around my knees. Any thoughts? This is not something new, especially on my left side. Yes, I have immediate thoughts. So first of all, this is very telling to me and I appreciate you sharing that this is not something new. I also really appreciate you sharing that. It was amplified when you added the band around your knees, because that confirms my thoughts. So what this tells me is that you are overusing your quads, specifically your vastus lateralis. The quad is four muscles and there's the outside one, which is the vastus lateralis is the outside quad, and it's very commonly overused along with a muscle above it called the TfL. You don't need to worry yourself with the names of these muscles just where you're feeling that hurting. And yeah, I'm guessing a little bit of like burning, just overuse type feeling. Those are the muscles that you're overusing. And so what I'm going to recommend we need to break you out of this pattern. This is just like what I was talking about in the last question. My last answer. This is a predictable pattern that you're in, and it's a firing pattern of nerves to the muscles. And what is happening is you're stuck in this and you need to break out of it. You need to break the pattern and what your body told you when you added the band around your knees is that's not good. And so we need to listen to your body and stay away from the band for a little bit. And you're overusing the quads in doing the bridge. And we need to turn down the intensity. We need to focus our intention on just the core muscles, then bringing in just the glutes and maybe the hamstrings too, and see if you can do the bridge without heavily using the quads. And I'm going to give you a cheat on doing that. So there's two things that you can do. I'm going to give you two tricks. You can do them separately or simultaneously. So the first one is going to be probably a lesson you've already had, which is where you put your feet on the foam roll. If you've already done that, I'd be curious to know how that felt. If you felt a decrease in the amount of pain in your quads, how much you were using. It sounds like it's not just your quads. I'm going to kind of go back on this because I'm reading this a little more closely. Outer hips it sounds like it's heavily your TfL, which is that other muscle I named. And you don't still don't need to concern yourself with it, but uh, very common muscle to be overused. And so it's not just the quads. It seems like it's going to be a very similar issue answer, but a little higher up. And so I'm going to focus more on this other one so you can try the foam roll under your feet. And I'd be curious to know, like I said, if that reduces the hurting or the burning that you're feeling and then the other one is going to be place something between your knees. Ideally it would be like a like a playground ball, like a handball that you can squeeze between your knees. And I'm not telling you to like do squeezes or anything. Just hold it between your knees and try the bridge that way and see what I'm trying to do is activate and turn on your inside thigh muscles. And what would happen is through something called reciprocal inhibition, the opposite muscles, the outside thigh muscles would have to shut down a little bit and just see if it changes. And if it does, if you feel it less in your TfL, which is what I'm going to assume that this is, and then we're going to do a little bit of bridging like that for a while, until we can break you out of the pattern of overusing these. These really says outer hips. I need you to get a little more specific with me. And if it's outer hips in the front or outer hips in the back. Because now that I'm reading this over and over again, I'm not exactly sure where in the outer hip that you're talking about. So let's go back and forth about this and try those two things, because I still recommend both those two things. We'll figure out how you can try and start using these muscles a little less. Um, okay. We're moving on. We're going to Julia. This is going to be my last one. I'll just read it. So, uh, this is Julia. She says, hey, Ryan, I'm finally going to try your program between when I contacted you and now I've had a serious injury. Right. Si joint. Right. Low back. I really suspect a disc injury. And my whole pelvis is off, and I'm getting referred right. Hip, groin, quad knee and anterior tib pain. I'm actually really nervous to go get examined. Do you think I'm still a candidate for the program? If you remember, I'm a PT so Julia si joint, I'd like to know a little more about this injury. Was it traumatic? Was it a fall? Was it caused by a mechanical cause, or did it just kind of like you. Like your body broke down one day, and maybe you were picking up a toilet paper roll. It wasn't really like the toilet paper roll that caused the problem, but something just happened in your body and that was the cause of your injury, like internal causes. So I would like to know that because if it was like a traumatic mechanical cause, like a car accident, it gives me a lot more explanation that it wasn't exclusively, you know, muscle imbalances that brought your body out of this, you know, out of this equilibrium. So right as I right low back pelvis feels off and you're getting referred pain right hip groin knee and hip. So that's within the pattern of lots of spinal nerves. So that would point to like a stenosis or like a broad disc pressing on multiple nerves. It's not just one pattern of one spinal nerve. I still think you're a good candidate for the program. Absolutely. I think that depending on how acute this is, like if it happened last week or if it happened last month, we would approach this differently. But what I can tell you, Julia, is that nothing in the program is going to hurt you. The stuff in the program cannot hurt you. So you're going to be okay doing the stuff I would recommend doing the first week, the free trial, because you're going to get a great idea of what the program is all about, and you will probably get benefits from that most likely. And if not, then either you'll want to wait and see if, like if it's super acute, see if things can settle down, like if it happened this week. Or we can try and figure it out. Because I do these weekly lives, I interact with the students and sometimes we got to work through things like this. So that's my answer is, yeah, you're still a good candidate. And I would strongly recommend to do that first week and see how it feels, because it's not going to hurt you and it'll probably help you. And there's only one way to find out. And I think that's it for today. I appreciate everybody that showed up. Thank you all. And as you move on through your day from this, I encourage you to do something for your body and listen to your body while you're doing it. And afterwards, and maybe tomorrow too, and take some time to reflect back on some things that you have done recently and how your body is feeling in relation to those activities. And so you can learn and log that for learning in the future, what to do and what not to do. So go do something that you know is good for your body and make it feel a little better, and then do it again tomorrow. So thank you all again for being here. And get down on the floor and connect to your core. I'll see you guys next time.
