part0018

Nathan hasn’t slept in his bed for the last 5 days. The floor was more comfortable now, and he was getting the feeling that his back pain was serious now. He also has not been to work in the last 5 days either. A single 45-year-old male, if he didn’t work there was no other source of income. A friend of his had come to see me a couple months earlier for a shoulder problem and told Nathan that if he wanted to get better fast, I am the guy to go see. Nathan called me and set up an appointment for that afternoon because he needed to get a ride. His back hurt so bad it actually prevented him from being able to drive. As Nathan walked in he was limping slightly, favoring his left leg. He was tall and lanky, and it turns out he was a collegiate rower back in the day. Golf had become a new passion for him and he recently changed jobs as well. He went from teaching physical education at a local high school to dealing blackjack at a casino nearby. He enjoyed the change in pace, and change in pay, but all the sitting he was doing was starting to destroy his back .

As I assessed Nathan, what we found out was that his newfound golf hobby combined with up to 12 hours of sitting dealing cards was creating tightness in his left gluteal his body was just not built to handle. To this date I have never seen a tighter glute amongst any of my clients or athletes. After out first session together Nathan was already able to sleep in his bed. He worked the next day as well, but only for 6 hours. Nathan was 6’6” and weighed 225 pound. The combination of being tall and thin, while rotating and generating a lot of force on his left leg when swinging a golf club created extreme instability for his lower back. As we loosened up his glute and retrained its musculature, his pain became an afterthought in a little less than 4 weeks. He returned to work, golf, and exercise full-time, armed with a generous amount of knowledge about how the body works, and how to fix it when we create dysfunction.

Did you read and absorb the quote at the beginning of this chapter? If not, go back and re-read it for me. If I were you, I would write it on a sticky note and tape it to the mirror in your bathroom. I tell people pain is a constant reminder of how fragile life is. Hopefully by now you have been trying out some of the movements and putting together a solid mobility practice, if not, you need to get started today! Some of the common struggles I see when people start a mobility practice are consistency, patience, and their nutritional lifestyle .

If you are doing the mobility exercises and are seeing a reduction in pain, or a stoppage in pain altogether that’s great and I’m very happy for you, but this does not mean we stop doing the exercises. I tell people that once the pain goes away, we have probably another month of rolling consistently on our musculature, stretching, and strengthening until we reprogram everything and are finally out of the woods. This means being diligent with our practice everyday. In extreme cases, I may tell someone they need to roll on a muscle 6-8 times a day for at least 2 minutes each time. They look at me with their eyes bugging out in disbelief. The simple fact is when we are not training our muscles to relax; we are training them to re-tighten. Twenty minutes of mobility a day is a small favor your body will appreciate after beating it up for 24 hours.

Another common struggle I see is actually making mobility a daily practice. I get questions like, “How much is too much?” and “Should I do this every day?” My answer is always the same. Your body will tell you how much is enough, and every day you move, you should do mobility. My clients and athletes learn to take mobility as serious as they take their training. The older you are and the harder you train, the harder you have to recover. In your teens, recovery is a some-time thing, in your 20s, recovery should be a part-time thing, and in your 30s and beyond, recovery should be a full-time thing. At 38, my mobility work trumps my exercise 2 to 1. In my mid forties, it may be 3 to 1. All I know is I train every day without pain, and I recover much better when I roll than when I don’t. But I’ve bought in. I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. I’ve recognized the benefit and choose to make mobility a priority in my life. Being consistent means we have to develop new habits. Maybe it’s setting your alarm 30 minutes earlier. Maybe it’s keeping a roller and a lacrosse ball in your car, or in your office as well as your home. Maybe it’s putting it in your calendar every day to help us remember. Hit and miss will not make this program work. Missing one day in 30 is not a very big deal, but doing mobility once every three days, or 3 days on and 2 days off leads down a fast track to nowhere. Movement is never correct 100% of the time, and structure is behavior. Remember these words of wisdom. If we are not working to reverse disease with mobility, then we are inviting it through movement. Something is always better than nothing; just make sure you adhere to the guidelines. A quick mobility session for a tight left glute might look like:

That’s an astounding 8 minutes you were able to use to retrain your neuromuscular system the proper way to fire! Don’t get caught in the trap of, “I’ll do it tomorrow.” That’s taking movement for granted! What if you wake up the next day and the pain has come back, or is way worse than before? We only have the power to control the present; “Tomorrow” is always the fantasyland where a whole bunch of action is supposed to take place. The take home message here is to be consistent. Develop a routine and do not compromise it for anything. If you are in serious pain, getting out of pain is your job away from your job!

Due to all of the running and jumping I did when I was younger I started to develop considerable patellar knee pain. This is what most of my next book in this series will be about. The condensed version is me realizing I did not have knee pain, I had quad pain. Every trigger point known to man in my quad was active, and sending pain into my knee. As I released the trigger points and cleared out my muscle, the pain in my knee was diminishing greatly, but there were some very resistant knots that would not leave. I remained patient however, and what I found was quite amazing. In some cases, it took up to three months of putting the same amount of pressure, in the same spot, for the same amount of time for the tissue to release. In other cases, it took 6 months. And in yet other cases, it took up to a year of constant reprogramming for the muscle to finally let go! I have no scientific rationality for it, but this is sometimes the case. You can roll in the proper area, with the proper pressure for the proper time, and then one year later the muscle finally decides to relax and let go. It’s tough to have this kind of patience because at times you just want to give up and convince yourself you are just wasting your time. Don’t you believe it! This is resistance at its finest. Be patient. Relax and breathe through the exercises. Visualize your muscles letting go. Send positive mental energy to every cell of your body. Don’t get frustrated. All good things, and all great changes take time to develop. Adhere to our method, modality, and time principles and if the muscles you are working on refuse to give up that day, save your energy and inspiration for the next day, or the day after that. I promise your patience will pay off!

There are not too many people that take the, “You are what you eat” phrase too literally. But when you look at it, we are all exactly what we eat. To slam-dunk my point, we are going to use NBA all-star Derrick Rose as an example. He is a self-proclaimed junk food addict. He boasted having a custom made skittles machine in his home with three years of skittles inside of it and many of his college and professional teammates comment on never seeing Derrick eat an actual meal, only junk food. In April of 2012, Derrick tore his left anterior cruciate ligament and since then has gone on to have two more knee surgeries on his right knee, and as of the writing of this book he is set to have another surgery on his left knee.

When we look at our body, we see one unit as a whole. When we look under our skin, as mentioned in the earlier chapters, we see our body really is one cohesive unit all the way down to our bones. Dissected, we can see our lovely fascia, blood vessels, nerves, muscle tissue, tendon, ligaments, and organs. What we fail to see and recognize is that we still are not made up of those things. On the most basic level we are a collection of trillions of cells that are regenerating on a daily basis (If you really want to get cosmic with this, we are technically a specific arrangement of atoms, which are mostly space. We are told we are mostly water, which from an observational standpoint is true, but on a microscopic level we are mostly made up of…. space). The cells that make up all of the structures of our body are replicated using the energy we get from the food we eat. If you replace parts on your car from a junkyard, will you expect them to perform like a new part fresh from the factory?

This leads us into the question, “Do I want my cells to replicate using refined sugars, chemicals, and bleached oils as building blocks?” Or, “Do I want my cells to replicate using grass fed beef, wild caught fish, a ton of fresh vegetables, and some fruits and nuts?” To some people fuel is fuel when it comes to their body. But nobody would use the same gas in a jet as they would in their lawnmower. That would be silly. We need to eat what nature has made for us, not what some chemists concocted during a quarterly board meeting. The food we eat literally makes the contents of our cells, which is called protoplasm. Protoplasm is the living contents of our cells. This includes the nucleus and all of the organelles. I hope you’re getting a picture of just how deep our nutrition affects how our body feels, how resilient the structures will be because of it, and of course how much energy we will have for specific tasks or different levels of exercise. Derrick isn’t falling apart because of age, or because he is unlucky, his body is failing him because as a high level athlete (think jet) he is putting fuel in his body fit for a lawnmower. I believe he is getting injured due to malnutrition!

Nutrition is one of the most difficult aspects for some of us to change or control. I have worked with many people over the course of my coaching career looking to lose weight and have a great many success stories. The challenging aspect is mainly peer pressure. The husband wants to lose weight, but the wife does not and continues to fill the house with grains and pastries. The friends you used to go drinking with every Friday, Saturday, and then Sunday afternoon don’t call you anymore because weight loss and alcohol are not symbiotic. Your co-workers egg you on, or think you’re narcissistic because you won’t have a piece of cake for Jane’s birthday at 2 in the afternoon. Changing your nutrition takes a great deal of understanding who you are, and how you want to live. For me, $500 in prevention is worth $500,000 in correction. Is that cake worth the lifetime cost of a heart attack at $130,000? Many of us don’t think like this though. We live in the moment, or figure we’ll just hop right back on the diet tomorrow, but we don’t. Dieting can often be just as destructive with the “lose 30 pounds in 30 days” claims where you drink a solution that was sitting in a plastic bottle for who knows how long. I could go on for a very long time about this stuff, as I’m sure you are starting to notice. If you would like to learn more about food and nutrition, how it controls you, how to make better choices to lose weight, end allergies, and restore strength and elasticity to you muscles and connective tissue, you can pick up my book, The Death of Dietin g on Amazon.

Stress these days is much different than the stress our ancestors evolved with. Today stress is everywhere from the TV, to our work schedule, to an impending divorce, to something we see on Facebook. It could be the light in our bedroom, or the noise coming from a neighbor. Sometimes it can be your own family creating a lot of your stress. To combat stress, many of us are encouraged to exercise, which does have its benefits, no doubt. But the fact is that exercise too can be a stressor, and because it is a catabolic activity means that it is breaking down our body’s structures, not just building them up. One of the other ways for us to combat stress—one that is gaining popularity these days—is meditation. I mentioned it already in chapter one, and gave some recommendations, but would like to state my case clearer here because I know it can be of benefit for you.

A simple Google search will return a laundry list of benefits that meditation provides for the mind, body, and soul, so it need not be repeated here. One thing we do need to understand is that meditation has been very successful in helping people get rid of—you guessed it—chronic pain. This is because meditation actually increases the amount of stress our body can handle naturally. If your stress levels remain the same, but you have a greater ability to handle it, it will feel as if your stress is actually diminishing. Many people have trapped emotions they have not worked out for many, many years. This trapping of emotions can be deadlier than any cancer, or virus, because it affects every cell from the inside out; especially the way we think. When we change the way we think about pain, and realize it may be coming from somewhere else besides our muscles, we can cure pain instantly in some cases. This is what Peter Levine and Maggie Phillips discuss in their book Freedom from pain: Discover your body’s power to overcome physical pain. Although they don’t directly talk about meditation, they do recommend a lot of meditation-like exercises. They talk about clearing bad energy, and bring in good energy. They explain how the chemicals formulated in the brain by a bad thought can manifest themselves in the body within 20 seconds! When we are in pain, we see our body as the enemy. Once again using a mechanical reference, if our car breaks down, we don’t think our car hates us. I have listened to my clients tell me all about how they think their body actually hates them. They are their body! Neurons that fire together wire together and the more they fire, the more we strengthen the signal. Thinking that our pain is “killing” us provides a lot of negative feedback strengthening the pain signal.

Meditation will work in several ways, but none more so than our breath. Stress constricts our ability to breathe and open our lungs fully, which keeps us in a heightened, contracted state. For some people, one of the simplest things they can do before going to bed to help them sleep is blow up a balloon. Sounds silly right? What this does is get us out of that stressed out position where we are always inhaling or gasping in short breaths. Blowing up a balloon shifts our body from a tense inhalation, to a relaxing exhalation. There are many guided meditations you can find on the Internet, especially YouTube, and this is where I recommend you begin. Most people who have not meditated before lose interest if there is nothing to follow. Guided meditations are like having your own personal coach, and it also gives you a fixed amount of time to meditate. This can be for as little as 5 minutes, to as long as 30. Pick which best suits you. Often times the hardest thing for us to do is get out of our own way. Some of us fear losing control over what we perceive, or have come to know as true. Who will we be without this pain? What will people expect from us now? These are all things meditation helps us with. Meditation increases our awareness we have in our life, which increase the amount of choices we see available. Nobody consciously chooses to be in pain, but when we think all hope is lost and give up, we start to recognize the pain as being a part of us, which it is not.

One of the easiest meditations we can do for 5-10 minutes after waking up is called a Vagus nerve meditation. Our Vagus (Vagus means “wanderer”) nerve is the longest nerve in our body, is connected to the most organs, and also stimulates our vocal chords as well. Our Vagus nerve is very closely tied to our emotions, especially traumatic events by stimulating norepinephrine production in the amygdala, the survival part of our brain. When we have chronic pain, we may have a decreased vagal tone, which is not allowing our body to return to a normal, relaxed state thus allowing pain to persist. When vagal tone is high we have less stress, a better mood, decreased pain, and better digestion. To increase your vagal tone you can do what is called a “loving kindness” meditation. There are several of them on the Internet, but here is what I do. The first five minutes of my meditation I do everyday includes feeling a deep sense of gratitude for my entire Vagus nerve. Start at the base of your skull and then pretend to trace your Vagus nerve all the way down your body. Have gratitude for your speech, your heart, your lungs, your diaphragm, your pancreas, your kidneys and all of your digestive organs. This sense of gratitude or thanks that you perpetuate into your own body is like getting a thank you card from your boss for a job well done. It’s great to give thanks to God or the Universe for all of the blessings in your life, but what about your own body? Your mind will achieve what you believe, remember.

If you wake up shunning your pain and being depressed over it, your brain will reinforce the pain believing that is what you want, but if you wake up everyday giving thanks that your body is doing its best for you, a much different signal is being sent. A 2010 study by Barbara Fredrickson and Bethany Kik found that increasing positive emotions led to increased social closeness, and an improvement in vagal tone. Not only will you deal more pleasantly with yourself and your body’s shortcomings, but you will be able to deal with others much more easily as well .

To me it all makes sense. Treat yourself poorly, and you get poor results. Treat your body with kindness and positivity and you will get positive results. Is meditation a silver bullet? No. But it will help you not only with your pain, but also with a lot of other things in your daily life. Meditating for a minimum of 10 minutes a day can change the way you think and feel tremendously. I call it taking out your mental garbage because it allows you clear all of the worry, and negative feelings out before your day begins. Others call it Zen. Some call it clearing your mind. Whatever label you give it, meditation has been proven effective for thousands of years now; maybe you should start giving it a try!

I’m not a massive fan of supplements because people feel they can be a replacement for actual food, exercise, or proper rehabilitation. The way I see it, if there’s a pill, there’s still a problem. Having said that, there are some supplements that are necessary because no matter how well you try to balance out your diet, or no matter how much sun you try to get, our food, and your position from the equator just will not allow you to get enough. Thus, some supplements become necessary, but with all of these supplements companies out there selling us snake oil, who can you trust not to make your money disappear, rather than your pain? Below is a short list of trusted supplements I use and what I use them for. For a more complete list you can go to https://influentialhealthsolutions.com/chris-approved-products/ .

How to use it – Spray 10-15 sprays on any area affected with pain, stiffness, or common cracking and popping. The reason I love this product is because of the ease of its use. Spray on 5 minutes before climbing into bed and forget about it. Magnesium oil works better than pills because you are not losing any through the process of digestion. Taking too much oral magnesium will also cause disaster pants (a.k.a. diarrhea), but this will not happen with magnesium oil because the skin will regulate the uptake. When your body has enough magnesium it will simply stop absorbing it. This product is a necessity because sadly, there is no longer enough magnesium contained in the food we eat. Nearly everyone is deficient in this mineral and these deficiencies can be pretty epic in our body because magnesium is responsible for energy production, protein formation, gene production, and it calms the central nervous system. That’s a lot of important stuff I just don’t want to mess with. Ease Magnesium is a mainstay in my program, and it should be in yours too.

How to use it – While the verdict is still out on curcumin scientifically, I have had tremendous results with it when it comes to managing pain, and inflammation in the human body. I have seen post surgical knees get reduced by half their size just a day or two after surgery even without the use of ice! Curcumin come from the root turmeric and is also being looked at as an anti-carcinogenic. Most studies show 1,500 mg per day before bed to be giving the best results. Getting it with Bioperine increases its effectiveness and many manufacturers are already selling a combination of the two.

How to use it – A fat-soluble vitamin, it turns out Vitamin D actually acts like a hormone in the body. It is released by the skin when we are exposed to the sun, but most of us are not exposed nearly enough to reap our body’s own manufacturing of it thus supplementation is the only viable option. There has been much debate over the safest amount to be ingested due to the fact that fat-soluble vitamins tend to stick around in the body longer than water-soluble vitamins like Vitamin C. The FDA bumped its recommendation from 1,000 IUs per day to now 5,000. I recommend 15,000 per day. Don’t be worried about toxicity, some studies have shown no ill effects on 25,000 IUs per day for up to 3 years. Studies have also shown that a majority of athletes that have reoccurring soft tissue injuries end up being tested to have low vitamin D levels. This information alone made Vitamin D a mainstay in my supplement cabinet, and it should be in yours as well. Make sure to take it in the morning time, because Vitamin D is contraindicated with melatonin production—our sleep hormone—so taking it at night might cause you to toss and turn and not sleep very well.

You see, after a long day of trivial tasks, your brain is full of bits and pieces of information. Some need to be organized and kept; some need to be thrown out. Your brain is the best computer in the world... tomorrow! Not today. If we don't sleep we eventually lose space to store new information. When this happens our body begins to malfunction in the following ways:

Let’s face it: we are a nation that prides itself on its busy-ness. We think 2 hours of sleep and 16 hours of work is going to get us to where we want, but the body has its limits. What we fail to do is make sleep a priority. We know it’s a necessity, but so is food. Eat bad food and we get bad energy. Sleep poorly and your performance will drop eventually. When we are in pain we need to make sleep a priority. Sleep is when we recover. Sleep is when you allow the body to heal itself. From this day forward, I urge you to make a conscious decision to not only get more sleep, but better quality sleep as well. You won’t regret it!