Twenty years ago, I would never have believed it was possible to achieve profound results with only 30 minutes of gentle exercise a day—it went against everything I had been taught about how much time and effort was required to achieve real changes. That was before I understood the science of the human body, and before I understood how to combine anatomy, neurology, and physiology with correct movement. It was also before Classical Stretch had aired on PBS for seventeen years and I had received thousands of emails from people whose lives had been changed simply by doing these workouts.
Since then, I’ve seen many different types of chronic pain be healed by this program. Even when people have the best surgery and medication, I’ve found that exercise is essential to finish the job in bringing about total pain relief. Correct movement plays a vital role in the healing process, and the converse is also absolutely true: when exercise is absent, full recovery and long-term pain relief are rarely achieved.
Chapters 6 through 13 each start with stories about people who’ve used Essentrics to heal their chronic and sometimes debilitating pain. I love these stories; they show the power of courage and commitment, and the determination of the human spirit to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles. They encourage and reassure us that, yes, there is always hope. And after years of working with people in pain, I’ve been surprised and delighted to discover that even when clients are limited in their ability to do the exercises exactly as intended, they’re still able to reap the benefits of this program. Perfect form is less important than the action of movement itself. Every part of the human body just needs to move, it’s as simple as that!
If you are presently suffering from chronic pain, doing the exercises in this book should reduce or completely rid you of pain. But I urge you to always listen to your body. Remember that you are unique—feel free to tweak the exercises to suit your individual needs. Do only what feels comfortable at this moment in your life. Tomorrow you might feel differently; you can continue to adjust the workouts every day.
To start, find a comfortable, flat space with either a low carpet (not pile) or a bare floor. Remove your shoes and socks. (With bare feet you’ll develop greater stability and use more of your full-body muscles.) These workouts can be done in a very small space—just make sure that as you stretch side to side you won’t hit anything.
REMEMBER: Don’t miss a day! Your body needs these movements every day to start to heal. Do these workouts for about 30 minutes a day, and I promise that you will feel a change. Many people feel so good doing them, they’ll do the exercises both in the morning and at night. This is completely safe—the program is that gentle!
HOW CAN I STRETCH WHILE I’M IN PAIN?
This is one of our most frequently asked questions. If you’re currently in pain, you might wonder, “How can I stretch when it hurts to move?” The answer is: Slowly and gently. You should move in the stretch only up to the point at which you feel pain. At that point, stop until the pain subsides, then continue. If you are just beginning, you might want to break up the workouts into three or four smaller sessions and do this process for 5 to 10 minutes three or four times a day. Before you know it, the initial pain will be gone and you should be able to do the full stretching motion.
The trick is never to push through the pain—always stop the moment you feel pain, wait a few seconds for the pain to subside, and then continue. Always move gently. Rough movements will feel like you are ripping something—which you might actually be doing! Slow movements loosen and melt the glued-together connective tissue without tearing it.
When you push your body through pain, instead of stopping at the point of pain, you will actually create more future pain by damaging the connective tissue. Remember: Tearing creates scar tissue that in turn restricts the flow of information and nutrients through connective tissue—all of which leads to more physical restriction and pain.
Patience and gentle daily movements are the fastest and safest way to heal. Haste makes waste.
Warm-Up Guidelines for All Workouts
The warm-up exercises that follow are designed to increase the circulation of blood and connective tissue fluids in your body while increasing your body’s temperature. They gently prepare your muscles for specific movements by releasing tension and improving mobility. They trigger the mitochondria to burn calories, which is what warms the muscles and liberates the joints. Warm-ups loosen tight fasciae, facilitating the layers of connective tissue to glide effortlessly over the natural surfaces of our muscles, tendons, ligaments, and nerves.
Never skip the warm-up exercises, as they are an essential part of every workout. Your body requires this preparatory phase in order to be fully capable of safely completing the routines.
A few more things to keep in mind as you start your workouts:
NO PAIN, EVER. If at any point a knifelike pain sensation kicks in, immediately stop and return to where you were prior to feeling the pain. Never push through a sharp pain. Always stop and go back to the point where you were just before the pain sensation kicked in. Give your muscles a few seconds to let the pain signal subside before moving again. I can’t repeat this critical aspect of healing enough: Always exercise in a pain-free zone. Only after you have become pain-free should you change your mode of exercising from protection to full energy. Listen to your body. It will tell you when you are ready to work harder and with more intensity. And when your chronic pain has gone, you can and should work to your full safe capacity. When you are pain-free, you can go back to doing any sport and activity you love, as long as you continue to do regular rebalancing exercises.
STAY RELAXED. Warm-up movements should be performed in as relaxed a mode as possible. Be careful not to hold your joints stiffly. To avoid stiffness, release any grip that the muscles might have on the joints that will prevent the joints from moving loosely. Focus on relaxing, bending, twisting, and moving every joint possible. One good trick in helping relax the full body is to focus on relaxing your fingers. If your fingers are relaxed, it is difficult to tighten your shoulders and upper-back muscles. Look at yourself in a mirror to check that you are actually twisting, bending, and rotating your spine, and you’re not moving it as one rigid rod. (Mirrors can be excellent teaching tools!) Most people have a great deal of trouble relaxing; it can be more challenging than strengthening is. But only when you can easily relax your muscles will you be able to completely strengthen them. So spend as much time as you need focused on relaxing.
KEEP THE ENTIRE SOLES OF YOUR FEET ON THE GROUND. Most people walk with their ankles rolling toward the inside or outside of their feet. Before you begin your exercises every day, look at your feet and make sure that the full soles are flat on the ground. Being aware that correct alignment of the bones of your feet will help you slowly rebalance your full body. You will find that standing flat on your feet is not as easy, and will not feel as natural, as it sounds—some muscles will pull you to one side, making it challenging to get the feet flat. Take your time; it may take several weeks before you rebalance the muscles of your feet to the point where standing flat is comfortable. As you place your foot on the ground during the side-to-side steps, check that you actually put the full sole of your foot flat on the ground. Standing correctly on your feet will change how your knees, hips, and spine feel. It will also help you gain more energy and control your weight more easily. The benefits of standing flat on the soles of your feet will ripple throughout your entire skeleton, relieving pain all the way up your spine through to your hands and fingers.
USE THE CHAIR SPARINGLY. While you’ll notice that many of the exercises feature the use of a chair for stability, the less you rely upon the chair, the more likely your balance reflexes (the nerves that trigger muscle reactions and balance reflexes) will strengthen. If your reflexes are not stimulated regularly, they will shrivel and atrophy. “Use it or lose it” applies to our nerve cells as much as to all other cells in the body! The best way to regain poor balance is to stimulate the balance reflexes. Just let yourself wobble a bit and even lose your balance slightly, as the wobbling sends valuable balance messages to the brain.
KEEP YOUR STANCE WIDE. In side-to-side steps, also check the width of your stance. Try to avoid short sideways strides, unless a wider stride is painful—but that’s not likely to be the case for most of us. With every passing decade, we tend to use our body a little bit less, and that includes shortening our strides, whether side to side or front to back while walking. Remember: Your muscles will shrink if you don’t use them. Consciously work on getting back that youthful stride!
USEFUL EQUIPMENT
For all of the Essentrics exercises, you may want to gather the following to have on hand close by:
• A CHAIR. If you are unstable on your feet, need a cane while walking, or generally have a fear of losing your balance, please have a chair nearby. Use it only when it is specified in the exercise description, or when absolutely necessary. Relying upon a chair when you don’t really need one will lessen the effectiveness of the exercises.
• A THICK (A-INCH), FIRM MAT. Avoid a mat that is too thin, too soft, or too squishy. You may not need this in a carpeted room. Use only if you are uncomfortable standing on the bare floor.
• A RISER. Useful for elevating your sitting height during some floor exercises, lightweight, wide, firm foam risers are available at fitness supply stores or websites. However, several thick encyclopedias could also serve as excellent risers as they are wide and solid. The height of risers changes according to each student’s needs. Some people need to elevate their sitting position by only 2 inches while others need as much as one foot.
• A HEMORRHOID CUSHION. This round, ring-shaped cushion has a hole in the middle. Do not purchase the inflatable ones. The correct ones are made of a firm foam.
• A FIRM STRETCH BAND. Stretch bands—also called exercise bands, sports bands, or resistance bands—come in different levels of resistance.
BEND YOUR KNEES. Always bend your knees when shifting your weight in Essentrics, from lunges, warm-ups, steps, or any other weight shifts. Never step on straight legs. Not only is landing on straight legs hard on the joints, it also puts unnecessary stress on your spine. I promise that your knees won’t break if you bend them carefully.
Bend your knees as deeply as possible when doing all the exercises that require bending your knees. Without even thinking about it, most of us try not to bend our knees, because bending them is more tiring than keeping them straight! The deeper we bend the knees, the harder we are working—but human beings instinctively look for the easiest way to move. Both athletes and seniors are equally guilty of this, so be vigilant with yourself and bend those knees. Find the degree of knee bend that doesn’t hurt, and use that as your normal level. This counts even if you have chronic knee pain—you will never get rid of knee pain if you don’t bend your knees when exercising! The less you bend the knees, the faster the muscles around them will atrophy, causing even more pain. The bonus for bending your knees is that you will burn more calories and gain more muscle tone!
DON’T FORGET TO BREATHE—AND KEEP BREATHING. Before starting to exercise, take a few slow, deep breaths. Count to 6 slowly as you inhale and exhale. This simple exercise will calm both your muscles and your mind, preparing them to work in a relaxed state. While doing your warm-up exercises, continue to be aware of your breathing. As you focus on moving, make sure you aren’t holding your breath. Lots of people unconsciously hold their breath while exercising! Breathing deeply will drive oxygen into your bloodstream so that it can be absorbed into the muscle cells, giving them and you additional fuel. Within seconds, you’ll feel the energizing effects of the extra oxygen. Your brain will light up and your energy will increase!
A Word about “Repeated” Exercises
By now you know that correct exercise is not only about the exercises themselves, but much more about how you actually do the movements. In order to maximize your benefits safely, you need to know exactly when to relax, stretch, contract, or release tension, and so on. This complex approach is one reason why the Essentrics program is so effective in relieving pain and rebalancing the full body. The human body is complex!
In the chapters that follow, you will notice certain exercises that may seem similar to exercises in other chapters. However, the specific instructions for each will vary based on the focus and intent of that sequence. For example, in a hip sequence, you may be instructed to contract, relax, align, inhale, move slowly, wiggle and twist, and pull different parts of your body—all at the same time. Exercises with the same gross motor movements may appear in other sequences, but the specific technique instructions may be slightly different.
The best comparison to be made for understanding the value of using a multitude of techniques is of cooking with exercising. When working with identical ingredients, a chef has a wide variety of technical choices. A potato, for example, may be boiled, baked, roasted, fried, or sautéed. The techniques used in cooking the potato give different results. With Essentrics, the benefits in each sequence rest not in the overall movements but in the technical instructions that fine-tune the sequences to each condition or body region.
The second reason that we often use the same exercises for seemingly separate body parts is that Essentrics is a full-body program. We know that every muscle in our body is either directly or indirectly related to every other muscle. If the muscles of your calf are tight, then the stiffness will spiral from your calf up your leg and tug on your spine, shoulders, and arms. If your knees are in pain, then you must exercise the chains of your muscles up and down your leg, which include your ankles, knees, hips, and spine. We work the full body to include all muscle chains, because only when the full chains are balanced will the pain be permanently relieved.
Remember, these exercises will wake up your muscles and get your body ready for the more focused workouts. Please do this every time and don’t skip your warm-up if you are short of time—do only the warm-up if that’s all you have time for. This warm-up sequence is an essential component of every workout in chapters 6 to 14.