Carol Smith describes herself as having “an extreme personality,” but unlike so many people who make that claim, she has the history to prove it.
In her forties, Carol decided to become a massage therapist and enrolled in a three-year college training program. She had never even had a massage. By the time she was in her sixties, Carol owned a massage clinic. It was then that she was introduced to the Essentrics program. After doing one workout, she knew she wanted to teach the method. Soon she made plans to travel thousands of miles to take a teacher-training course in Canada.
Most of the would-be teachers at the Essentrics workshop she attended had completed at least some online training or had previously attended one or two levels of instruction. Not Carol—she’d only leafed through the course outline before courageously signing up for all four levels of instruction. “I arrived knowing nothing about the program really. I was going to learn it all at once,” she said. “That’s me: Go big or go home.”
Carol said that the day before she went through the training, she tried to buy some fitness clothes at a popular athletic store—but nothing fit her correctly, so she left empty-handed. Only one week later, Carol’s entire body completely transformed—she returned to the same store and bought a whole new wardrobe of workout apparel. The clothes fit because her shape had changed dramatically.
As a toddler, Carol fell down some veranda stairs onto a broken bottle, cutting the nerves, tendons, and muscles of her left wrist. The childhood injury resulted in a lot of nerve damage and permanent paralysis to some finger muscles, leaving them incapable of straightening. To this day, Carol’s hand remains in a permanent, semi-rounded ball shape. The semi-paralysis left her with an imbalance affecting the muscle chains in her left arm, starting at her fingers and going through her wrist, arm, shoulder, and spine into her upper back. Carol compensated for her weak left side by using her right hand and arm to do all the work. This led to major full-body muscular imbalances, with her right side overpowering the left. Her torso was visibly lopsided, with one shoulder positioned two inches above the other.
“I went on with my life, but over the years I had lost the rotation of my arm. Strangely, I never realized that my arm wasn’t working correctly until I came to the Essentrics teacher training,” she recalled. “All my life, I knew I never could get my shoulders straight—but figured if I worked harder at the gym I’d be able to get my shoulders back.”
Little did Carol know that her problem was not simply getting her shoulders back but ungluing locked joints and reversing shrunken, atrophied muscles. She was compensating for the injured hand by locking her shoulder and arm joints and using her back muscles to do their work. “Looking back now, I see that all the experts who watched me for years, doing massages or fitness trainers, couldn’t help straighten me out because they didn’t know any better,” she explained. “No one, not my college professors, not fitness trainers, ever mentioned locked joints, imbalanced muscles, or incorrect body movement.” Her massage instructors looked at her hand as a handicap, not as an opportunity to find a solution.
When Carol became a masseuse, her lack of finger dexterity prevented her from doing a softer, more complex massage. And when the work required that she apply a lot of pressure with her left hand, Carol would put her right hand on top of her left to add to the pressure—but that approach was putting a lot of stress on both of her shoulders.
About ten years into her massage career, Carol developed excruciating pain in her right shoulder, in the area between the shoulder blades. She received regular massage therapy and chiropractic care, but between clients, she remembered, she’d find a corner of a wall to rub her shoulder blades against, trying to get rid of the pain.
At the same time the shoulder-blade pain started, she also began suffering severe migraine headaches. Once the migraines started coming more often, she took frequent sabbaticals, but there was no permanent escape from the physical work, as Carol regularly filled in for staff on their sick or vacation leaves. She was in agony.
Carol’s daughter-in-law introduced her to Aging Backwards and the Essentrics program. The logic behind the program “resonated with me,” she said. Within months of watching the program, she attended the teacher-training workshops.
Strange as it may seem in retrospect, prior to attending the workshops Carol hadn’t realized that her back was lopsided. Most people normally favor one leg or the other. Carol was aware that she had poor posture, but she had no clue why. At the teacher training, I asked her to stand in front of the group and look at herself in the mirror—and she was shocked to see that one shoulder was two inches higher than the other. The mirror pointed out the severe structural imbalances in Carol’s skeletal alignment and the immobility of her joints.
For the first time in her life, Carol understood that her alignment was seriously out of whack. The shocking part was that once she understood, it took her all of 20 minutes to make a physical change. Not only was Carol’s alignment rapidly corrected, she was freed from decades of crippling shoulder pain.
“Miranda brought me to the front of the class and asked that I attempt to rotate my [left] arm in the joint. It was kind of glued. When I first tried to rotate my arm my whole body moved as one giant block,” Carol recalled. “Very, very gently she showed me how to rotate my arm separately from the shoulder. Miranda was trying to get me to unlock my shoulder joint. Suddenly, it started to move separately from my shoulder. I wasn’t up there more than ten minutes when I again looked at myself in the mirror and saw a new me. My shoulders had naturally adjusted themselves to become the same height and my spine had straightened. Best of all was that my stomach wasn’t protruding! It was very emotional for me and everyone there!”
Not only did Carol’s shoulders and back straighten out, her movements rapidly became more fluid. Decades of crippling shoulder pain vanished in minutes, as did the migraine headaches that she’d suffered for years: “There’s no pain in my body anymore! In the past when I got a pain, I would think, ‘Hmm, old age creeping up on me.’ It is so exciting to know that it doesn’t have to creep up on you.”
Carol’s childhood injury to her hand caused nerve damage that led to muscle imbalances that spiraled from her arm into her shoulder and back. With that type of injury, imbalances inevitably place stress on shoulder-blade musculature. The locked, immobilized shoulder joint caused a chain of damage to all her soft tissue, fasciae, and muscles. The immobility of her hand led to congealing of fasciae in her upper back as well as muscular atrophy of her shoulder, back, spine, and arm. The muscular imbalance forced one shoulder to be about two inches higher than the other, leading to permanent side flexion of the thoracic spine. The forward rotation of the left arm led to a permanent forward flexion of the spine. This led her lower spine to compensate the weight imbalance by forcing the pelvic spine to tuck under. It was the tucking under of the lower spine that made her stomach protrude—not carbs!
Simply rotating the arm within the shoulder socket loosened the congealed joint, returning mobility to the shoulder joint. As she rotated the arm within the joint all the other imbalances immediately corrected themselves. The primary technique used with Carol was rotation within a joint, but we also used the other principal techniques of the program to rebalance her muscles and realign her musculature.
Not everybody will get the instantaneous results that Carol did. Remember that Carol had already spent a week doing hours of daily Essentrics exercises in the workshops before she experienced that dramatic transformation. All 650 of her muscles had been stretched and strengthened, and all 384 of her joints had been rotated and loosened for hours each day. Her body was fully prepared for what seemed like a miraculously rapid adjustment. In reality, her body’s change took place over hours of correct full-body exercise—exactly what is possible for you!