Annick Daigle was ten weeks shy of her thirty-fourth birthday when her doctor gave her the grim news: she had rheumatoid arthritis. “The doctor told me, ‘Pain is going to be part of your life from now on. You’d better learn how to cope with that,’” she said. It was a chilling message for an active and ambitious young woman just starting to hit her stride in the physically demanding and male-dominated railroad industry. “Pain becomes a partner in your life whether you want it or not,” the now fifty-one-year-old Annick recalled.
She experienced her first taste of arthritic pain in college, when her fingers would throb every time she wrote out lengthy responses to exam questions. But in the two years prior to her diagnosis, the pain had escalated. She often couldn’t get out of bed without feeling what she called awful pain. The only way she could manage was to roll out and land on her hands and knees before slowly standing up, one vertebra at a time.
When Annick discusses her disease, she talks about how lucky she has been compared with others with arthritis. A prime example of her good fortune, she says, was finding a skilled rheumatologist who gave her—along with the proper medications—wise counsel about the need to prepare for the challenge of chronic pain and the need to exercise. She was also diagnosed at an early stage. The medication prescribed to her was effective enough to essentially put the disease on hold for about eight years. Annick considers that plateau in the illness, a period that was essentially pain-free, a most wonderful gift.
And then one day the medication suddenly stopped working; Annick’s condition worsened and pain started to roam her body, moving from joint to joint. It woke her up at night, made her cranky and short-tempered and, most problematic, limited how she lived, worked, and played. Annick had officially joined millions of people worldwide who suffer daily from the enduring stiffness, swelling, and pain of rheumatoid arthritis.
Arthritis, a condition that causes severe joint damage and pain, can strike suddenly without warning or sneak up slowly. It is one of the most common health conditions in the world, and it is currently the number one cause of disability in the United States: more than 50 million adults and 300,000 children have some type of arthritis, according to the Arthritis Foundation. There are more than one hundred different types. The most common form is osteoarthritis, a degenerative joint disease. A less common form is rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease in which the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks the joints.
For the eight years between Annick’s diagnosis of arthritis and the onset of her chronic pain, she felt good. During that period, Annick worked for one of North America’s leading railroad companies. When the company announced it was looking for new trainmasters, Annick applied and got the position.
The job was—and still is—physically demanding. The position of trainmaster is a critical frontline supervisory position best suited for those who thrive under pressure. Annick rose to the challenge. In her junior years as a trainmaster, she was put in charge of the fourteen-hour night shifts. It was under those conditions that her initial arthritis medication stopped being effective.
She and her doctor settled on other effective medication, but the disease escalated again. She was now living with chronic pain. Her doctor suggested that Annick use over-the-counter pain medication, up to the maximum daily dosage. She became proactive about pain control, taking Tylenol if she knew she would be doing a lot of physical work or if weather conditions and humidity levels were such that she knew pain was in her forecast. However, she wasn’t as proactive with her nutrition.
“Diet-wise, as a trainmaster, I ate the worst of my life,” Annick recalled. The many years of poor nutrition did nothing to strengthen her already embattled immune system. Annick realizes now how important a healthy diet is to her immune system, but at the time it was not something her doctor talked about. “I was young and loving my job,” she said. “I sacrificed a balanced diet, not thinking of possible health consequences down the road.”
As the pain got worse, Annick developed various ways of coping with it. “When I have a severe arthritis attack my hands can’t move, my elbows can’t bend, all my joints can’t move,” she explained. “I can’t even take big breaths, just shallow breaths. I have trouble breathing because the rib cage is attached to the spine, and when you breathe, the ribs move with the breath whether you want them to or not. When you expand the rib cage to breathe in, all those little vertebrae hurt like crazy. Sometimes the pain is a twelve on the scale of one to ten,” she says. Those occasions are relatively rare now—but Annick knows that her disease will progress. She takes full advantage of the latest technology available to help arthritis sufferers. One device she finds particularly helpful is a transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) unit, which generates painless, low-level electric impulses that stimulate certain nerves. It is thought that TENS may trigger the release of endorphins and may also block nerve pathways that carry pain messages. Annick also started a daily practice of meditation accompanied by regularly practicing qigong, a form of meditation and exercise. Both helped her develop the resilience she needed to accept pain as a constant in her life. “When you can’t control pain, it controls you. That was something that was difficult for me to accept because I’m a bit of a control freak,” she said. “Meditation helped me be more zen about life, about not being disturbed by something I can’t control.”
A couple of years ago, over her Christmas break, Annick happened to watch the Aging Backwards documentary on her local PBS station. “It struck a chord,” she said. When she sought out more information, Annick was amazed to learn that there was an Essentrics studio within walking distance of her office.
That’s when her life changed. After six months of regular Essentrics workouts, her pain began to subside. “After the first class, I said, ‘This is it. I’ve finally found it,’” Annick recalled. The stretching and strengthening aspect of that first class opened up her body in unexpected ways, relieving her of pain immediately. She told a friend, “It feels like I have more space inside of me. I feel like my organs have been moved around and I have more breathing space. I don’t know exactly what, but something has happened.”
Annick is convinced that Essentrics has helped reduce her chronic pain. “My posture is better, the way I walk is better, it probably helps the joint pain because I’m better aligned,” she explained. “It might be all just psychological. I don’t really care why, but yes, I can tell you, it has helped me reduce pain tremendously. Even my mood is better. I feel like the energy we all have inside of us is flowing again.”
Essentrics helped Annick with her chronic pain for many reasons. Pulling the joints “open” offered immediate relief from the constant compression of inflamed joints rubbing together. The pulling apart of joints is the definition of what an eccentric movement is; Essentrics simultaneously strengthens and stretches the muscles. This technique also lubricates congealed joints in the same way that moving a door joint while oiling the hinge distributes the lubrication through the hinge more effectively, helping the door swing more smoothly.
Essentrics also stimulates the release of endorphins, our natural endogenous opioids, which have many beneficial qualities, including improvement of mood, relief of pain, and increase in energy. Annick commented on an improvement in these three symptoms.
Because Essentrics is a relatively slow-moving workout, it allows you to go to your personal limit and stop when movements become painful or uncomfortable. The slow pace has two advantages: it removes the fear of hurting yourself while exercising, and it prevents injuries. These two qualities are essential in gaining strength and flexibility. Gaining additional strength is a major side benefit of moving slowly versus using momentum. The slower you go, the more your muscles are required to accomplish the movement, which naturally increases your strength. When you move rapidly, you use momentum; not only does it not require strength, it damages your joints and can inflame or increase the chances of tearing sensitive tissues.
By using movements that flow through all the muscle and connective-tissue chains of the body, Essentrics stimulates a powerful flood of messages from all the major muscle, neurological, and connective tissue chains to the brain and into the immune system. The combination of correct full-body exercises, muscle strengthening, and bone alignment together are the most powerful trio to stimulate and feed the immune system. All autoimmune conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis, can benefit from this improved communication between the major systems of our body.
This workout is for all arthritis sufferers. Osteoarthritis, the most common type of arthritis, is identified by joint degeneration; it is caused by muscle imbalance and regular impact on the joint. As you do this workout, try to keep your body in a constant state of motion. Don’t hold any of the movements in positions or poses—keep moving through the sequences. The constant motion will help lubricate your joints. Moving slowly and easily should leave you feeling relaxed and pain-free when the sequence is finished. Make sure to have a chair nearby for support.
The initial pain of osteoarthritis indicates that degeneration is starting, but stretching and strengthening the joint can help stop the damage and relieve the pain. However, if the degeneration has gone unchecked for a long time, the joint may be too severely degenerated to be healed through exercise alone. Even if the pain is relieved through exercise, it doesn’t mean the arthritis has been reversed.
Essentrics helps relieve the pain of arthritis because it strengthens the muscles in a lengthened position, literally pulling the joints apart. In separating the joints, the intense grinding of bone on bone is stopped, and the pain disappears. No actual healing has taken place, only the relief of pain. The squeezing and compressing of the joints is what causes the grinding damage of arthritis. When the compressing and squeezing stop, so does the pain.