Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1162: Five Ways to Relieve Pain Naturally

Episode Date: November 14, 2019

In this episode, Sal, Adam and Justin give you five ways to naturally relieve pain. How over 100 million Americans suffer from chronic pain DAILY! (2:07) What are the differences between chronic and acute pain? (2:58) HOW you are moving can determine WHY you are in pain. (5:02) The Five Most Important Ways to Relieve Pain. (7:22) #1 – Improve overall mobility to solve the root problem. (9:42) #2 – How your diet can be causing your joint pain. (24:59) #3 – Optimizing your sleep to reduce pain. (33:46) #4 – The importance of getting proper sunlight. (43:11) #5 – Practicing mindfulness to reframe how your body perceives pain. (46:54) Related Links/Products Mentioned November Promotion: MAPS Performance ½ off!! **Code “GREEN50” at checkout** Chronic Pain Statistics: Facts, Figures And Research [Infographic] Report: More than 100 million Americans suffer chronic pain How to Improve Back Pain Flexibility vs. Mobility: The Difference (IT MATTERS!) - Mind Pump TV What is the First Step to Better Mobility? How To Foam Roll PROPERLY (AVOID THESE MISTAKES) | MIND PUMP Is Fasting Effective? Intermittent Fasting Guide | MAPS Fitness Products - Mind Pump Foods that fight inflammation Visit Felix Gray for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! The effect of sleep deprivation on pain. Does fascia hold memories? Mind Pump Free Resources

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. In this episode of Mind Pump, we cover a very important topic. We talk about pain. Now, a lot of you listening may have some form of chronic nagging pain. We know how big of an issue that can be. It definitely reduces a person's quality of life.

At the very least, it can get in the way of your progress. If you're trying to improve your strength or burn body fat or sculpt your body or build muscle, knee pain, back pain, hip pain, wrist pain, any kind of pain can really slow things down. Sometimes it can stop or reverse progress. So in this episode, we cover the five most important factors that we've experienced working with clients for over two decades that really works on chronic pain. So we talk about mobility, of course, everything about mobility, that's the most important thing.

Talk about diet, believe it or not, diet can play a big role in how much pain you're feeling. We talk about sleep, sunlight, and then we even mention mindfulness. Now, before the episode gets going, I want to remind everybody that MAPS performance is 50% off. Now, MAPS performance is actually one of our best mobility workout programs.

Actually, in fact, mass performance includes mobility sessions as part of your workouts, mobility sessions, work on your ability to move through full ranges of motion, which then of course, it alleviates or gets rid of or even prevents pain. But mass performance also improves overall athletic performance. It's an athletic type workout.

So you are using weights in the gym, but it's different from your traditional workouts. It's excellent for fat loss, performance and muscle building. Again, it's 50% off here. So how you get the discount? Go to mapsgreen.com and use the code green50, g-r-e-n-5EN50, no space for the discount.

Dude, you guys wanna hear a crazy statistic? I love crazy. So I was doing, I was writing some content for the website. And you wrote the ton of blogs as we can, didn't you? Well, from last week till the weekend, I wrote about eight. So, but one of the articles I wrote was about pain. You know, our marketing team wanted me to write something about how to alleviate back pain in particular.

And so I'm looking up statistics and I don't realize it was this bad. It's estimated that over a hundred million Americans suffer from chronic pain daily. Wow. Every single day. So that's like one fourth, one at every four, one at every three Americans. So take 10 people and the odds are three of them suffer from some form of chronic pain

on a daily basis. You should describe chronic and acute pain because I know it may seem simple, but there's a lot of people that don't know the difference between the two of them. No, I'm glad you said that. Acute pain is when you hurt yourself. Like a serious injury. Broken bone, torn muscles. Some kind of trauma.

Strain ligament. Yeah, like if you hurt right now, if your knee hurts right now, and I ask you, hey, what happened in your knee? And you say, oh, I twisted it last week. You know, I was water skiing or whatever. That's an acute, that's it, that's it, that's it. It's from an injury, that's acute pain. Chronic pain is the kind of pain

where if I were to ask you, why did you knee hurt? And you were like, wow, I don't know, it just kind of bothers me. I got bad knees. Yeah, 10 years ago I heard it, and then it's never been the same sense or I just have bad knees. I gotta, you know, every time when I wake up,

they're stiff or whatever. That's chronic pain. And there's a, the reason why that's important to differentiate is because they both have different ways of fixing them. Yeah. Okay. Different treatment. Yeah. Like most of the way you fix a cute pain is rest. Like you tore something, you twisted a ligament, you broke a bone or whatever. Extreme case, you need surgery. Yeah. Exactly. Like sit back rest. Like don't do anything. Chronic pain is not like that. In fact, most chronic pain today,

it's very different today than it was 50 or 100 years ago. Chronic pain in the past usually was a result of overuse. So like someone had back pain, you know, my dad's generation, my grandfather's generation, when they had back pain, a lot of it was because, oh, you're doing eight hours of, or 10 hours of hard labor all day long. Today, it's the result of inactivity. A lot of chronic pain comes from

the fact that we're just not moving enough. We're sitting down all day long. Most, gosh, I don't know what these statistics, I haven't looked them up for a long time, but majority of Americans now sit most of the day. And there's not necessarily inherently anything wrong with sitting, but if you do one thing all the time, your body actually starts to form into whatever you do, because it becomes good at it. And when you become really, really good at sitting, you become bad at almost everything else.

Well, I remember reading a statistic not that long ago that said, if you do an hour of vigorous exercise every day, you're still considered sedentary. Totally. That's how little we're moving now that, and that to me is very eye opening because if you ask the average person that makes effort to get to the good drive to the gym, go there, get their hard one hour workout or whatever, and then go back to work or go home, and you ask them, hey, would you consider yourself an active person? They would say, yeah, workout every day.

But our jobs today are so different to your point. So then what, you know, what they were 50 and a hundred years ago, that a lot of what we do, including ourselves, uh, sit down at desk or sit down and chairs and are on computers or talking or doing something like this that You know even if you get up for an hour and you work out really hard You're still considered a sedentary person and I think a lot of that has caused a lot of this chronic pain And I remember as a trainer this used to be like the number one thing that I had I used to have to combat with people that would tell me Oh my back. I have a bad back. I have a bad you know, bad knees, bad shoulders, and I'd ask that the follow-up question, what did you do?

And more often than not, it was just, oh, I'm getting old. And they would say, you'll see, you'll see, son, when you get this age, that, you know, this is just, it's part of getting older. And, you know, it was such a hard thing for me to overcome when you're 28 years old, 25 years old, and you old, and you're training these clients that are in their 40s and 50s and they're telling you that. You know, matter how much I try to explain to them that it has to do with their movement or lack of movement

or their bad movement that's causing this chronic pain, you know, they would just look back at you and just kind of like scoff and be like, oh, it's good, you're young. No, the movement hurts. You don't want to do that. You know, like it's asking somebody to then do something that is even more uncomfortable,

but it will provide that sort of medicine and therapy that they need. They need to move and express this move. Well, no, I'm glad you said that, Justin, because movement is definitely generally part of a lot of times how you solve chronic pain, but it's gotta be the right kind of movement, right? Because a lot of people will say, well, I do try to walk, times how you solve chronic pain, but it's got to be the right kind of move. Absolutely. Right.

Because a lot of people will say, well, I do try to walk, but then my ankles hurt or my knees hurt a lot. And so a lot of people don't realize is it has to do with how you're moving has a lot to do with why you're in pain, not just the fact that you're not moving, but then when you try to move, it's how you move. Well, if we were to narrow it down to the five most important things that you should do to help relieve chronic pain, how would you guys list those? No, and we should definitely break it all that down. I remember as a trainer, when I first became a trainer, thinking that the most value that I would bring my clients was weight loss,

I thought for sure that would be the most valuable thing. All right. It was not at all. It was getting people to not have pain. If you're a trainer listening right now and you want to be a valuable trainer, that's where you should place your energy. I tell you what, you get someone to lose 30 pounds, that's great, they're going to love you.

You get someone's shoulder to stop hurting, that's the bothering them for 10 or 15 years. You got them for life. You're a god. And especially if it was limiting them from doing things that they love. And you know what, it's funny, you get into these patterns where you just start to mold your life around your pain and then when you go away, you realize how much you weren't doing. Like, whoa, I don't realize getting out of bed.

I had to move so slowly, not that the pain's gone. I can get out of bed and I feel like I can just bounce up and down. It's funny because I remember distinctivelyively being a trainer that was trying to solve weight issues and trying to create opportunities for him to gain muscle and all that. But then I transitioned into somebody that was more concerned with proper movement and alleviating pain, my business exploded.

Totally. And it was so eye-opening that that, again, to those statistics that you brought up in the beginning, that's the majority of people you're gonna see. Like we need to learn how to alleviate and solve these issues for these people. It is, and if you're, if you have bad movement patterns, you have pain, you're not able to work out the way you want to,

you're not able to build the kind of muscle that you want to build, which means you can't burn body fat, like you want to burn, Your quality of life is reduced. You're limited on terms of your activity. What you can do when you can do it. So this is a big, this is a very important subject for everybody. Even if you don't have pain,

you have to, it's important to consider it now so that you don't get it in the future. And here's the other thing that I learned in the back half of my career. When you hurt, that's one of the, that's like, there's a lot of signals that lead up to that it in the future. And here's the other thing that I learned in the back half of my career, when you hurt, that's one of the, that's like, there's a lot of signals that lead up to that, by the way. Right, before that. Yeah, so it's like the final one

your body's screaming at you. That's right, that's right. You've been ignoring me for the last year, two years, five years, this is me finally saying, fuck you, fix me. Right, right, right, absolutely. So let's break it down. Now the obvious one for me,

and I think probably for you guys is to improve mobility. That's got to be the most obvious number one thing that you go to when you're trying to fix your pain problems. Yeah, that covers a variety of different techniques that we should probably go into. With mobility is I like that as a general sort of overarching sort of topic because you have, you know, static stretching and there you have dynamic stretching in there. You have like SMR kind of techniques where you're like working with soft tissue, you have, you know, all these other like sort of ways of promoting better movement that we need to cover. Totally. And posture,

right? You're touching exactly. Totally. Yeah, so mobility is your ability to move through, full ranges of motion with total control and stability. So that's what mobility is. So what are the components that allow you to move into full ranges of motion with control and stability? Well, first off, you have to have the flexibility to even just get there, right? So if you can't even get, like if you think about extending your arms straight up above your head,

and what's preventing you from doing that are muscles that are too tight, so you're pushing, but you can't really straighten it out because there's muscles that are pulling down they're too tight. Lack of flexibility there is causing problems with mobility. And that's also what's probably causing the chronic pain. Totally. Because the body is supposed to work together like that. And this is where why mobility is so important is when you start to lose the mobility and you want to still perform certain movements, the body starts to overcompensate in other areas.

And that's where a lot of this chronic pain comes from is the inability for a joint to move through its fullest range of motion, like it's supposed to. And then you ask your body to do a movement, and there's a certain pattern it should do, but because we have poor mechanics, poor mobility, the body still tries to do that movement, but then it overcompensates from other areas, and this is what normally causes it. There's a preferred position that your body wants to place, your bones, and your joints. There is an optimal place where it wants to be, to be able to move accordingly, and to be able to address that and to get access to that again is crucial.

It's paramount. That's why posture is something like we need to consider right away. Yeah. So when you're moving, your body does a very good job of, you know, Adam E's the word compensate. Your body figures out the best easiest way for your particular body to move. So let's say you're walking, let's say you're just doing a walk, right? And let's say you, you, you, you have a torn calf muscle or an underdeveloped calf muscle. I use my Achilles example. Absolutely.

For example, what happens? Let's say something there. There's bad neuromuscular connection to the calf. Something's wrong with your calf, and maybe you were born that way. Your body will learn how to get you to walk best with that weak calf. It's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just a part of our body's wonderful evolution's this wonderful evolution where we can continue to move. Now here's the problem.

There's a optimal way to move and then there's suboptimal ways to move. So just because my body figured out a way to get me to walk even with an underdeveloped or disconnected calf, doesn't mean that now other parts of my body aren't gonna have to work in suboptimal ways and I can start to cause problems. And there's this chain effect where problems down on my ankles can start to affect my knee,

which thing can affect my hip, which thing can actually affect my shoulder and my head. So there are optimal ways to move and that's what mobility is all about. It's figuring out how to get your body to move optimally. And there's different ways of doing this. One of them, the most basic one, which is what I mentioned earlier, which is stretching. Stretching improves or increases the range of motion. Now, you don't have ownership over that range of motion when you stretch. Doesn't mean that just because now I can touch my toes and I couldn't before, that it's safe for me to do stuff in that stretched toe-touch position. It just means now I have that range of motion. So now that I have that range

of motion, I want to connect to that range of motion. So now that I have that range of motion, I wanna connect to that range of motion. And that's where strengthening comes in. Strength is a very important part of mobility. If you get like somebody's like Gumby, who's like hyper flexible and just everything's loose and you think, oh, that person must have no pain. Actually not true. Some of the people who suffer from the most pain

are weak, hyper mobilemobile individuals, people with hyper-reflexibility. Well, this is why certain types of yoga is just not enough, either. I mean, if you're doing a certain yoga classes where you are not actively stretching and you're just kind of lying there in positions, holding positions for a long time, and you're increasing range of motion and flexibility, but you don't have strength in that new range of motion. It's not as beneficial as somebody who is working on mobility or staying active throughout

that. There's a massive difference between that active and passive flexibility. And that's something that was, I mean, it's very enlightening when you have somebody else or a coach to be able to take your joints through, even further range than even knew you had the capacity to do. And it just sort of proves the point that like there's more progress to be had in terms of like now I can connect to that part of it

and build strength in that direction. So if I get in a situation where I'm moving and I'm in that position, I'm less likely to be hurt. Yeah, now I like static stretching for immediate pain relief. It's actually one of my favorite techniques to get someone to feel better right now.

Now it doesn't produce permanent pain relief, but let's just say your lower back is tight and it hurts and it's kind of chronically sore. And let's say part of the reason why your lower back is tight and it hurts and it's kind of chronically sore. And let's say part of the reason why your lower back is in pain is because you have these really, really tight hamstrings that limit your pelvis for moving the way you want. If I took you through some static hamstring stretches,

like an example of that would be, you lay on your back and I'd lift one leg up and hold the other one down and stretch your hamstring. Or you could do this on your own, you could lay on your back and I'd lift one leg up and hold the other one down and stretch your hamstring. Or you could do this on your own, you could lay on your back, grab a belt, put it around your foot, kind of straighten your leg out and pull it back and hold that stretch.

What the static stretch does is it sends a signal to the central nervous system that says, hey, let's let this muscle chill out a little bit. We don't have to be so tight and so tense. Now, immediately what you'll notice is some pain relief. Like, you'll stand up and be like, whoa, I feel less pain because now those muscles aren't so tight. They're not pulling on the pelvis as much which was causing the back pain. Same thing with the hip. Like, if you have sciatica pain, for example, a real easy cross leg stretch

where you're sitting up real tall, cross your leg, place one foot underneath, bend forward, hold that stretch, immediate pain relief, but that's not enough. We need to then get strong within those ranges of motion and prevent whatever was causing you to get tight in the first place. Oftentimes muscles are tight because the body is sensing some kind of danger or weakness or instability. So it's keeping everything tight,

and although you may be in chronic pain, it's actually preventing you from getting a really bad injury. Well, it could be that way too, because it's overactive and it's being overused, because it's overcompensating like the point I was making earlier. And to that point, you have to, if you throw that in there, that static stretching is one of the best ways

to relieve immediate pain, I would argue that soft tissue work and foam rolling is right there also. So, but it doesn't end there. I think that's one of the things that you always have to teach clients is, I teach something like, you know, South Mile Fashion release, or the foam roll, right,

to somebody and show them how to roll their IT or something that was causing, which is a common area, right? A lot of people pronating their feet, their femur's internally rotate, which tightens up that fucking IT like crazy. And then they feel that pain all the way up from their hip or down by their knee or the front of of their knee and that's that IT that's all tight and you can roll that and instantly like right away feel a difference.

You spend five, ten minutes rolling like your IT for a lot of people and instantly they can feel better but that's not it. Like you can't just stop there and then go back and then get on a treadmill and run and then call it a day. It's like you're going to be constantly doing you're just putting a band-aid over something. If you don't address the hip mobility and the ankle mobility that you've just now relieved some of the pain right away so you now can now go work on taking those joints

through the full range of motion and strengthening the muscles that support those joints. That's what's gonna, for long-term use, it has a tool to unlock better movement patterns. Right. And then start, you know, really building and forging better movement patterns by first, you know, kind of addressing that, yes, this is giving me pain. I can alleviate this pain, but then now work towards a better direction.

Now, I remember the first time, so for the listeners who don't know what the IT was, there's a big fascia that runs along the side of your thigh, okay, and it starts up at the hip, and it comes down, it kind of wraps around your shin, and if you have bad movement patterns, that fascia can start to feel tight and start to get tight, and the muscles that attach to it kind of get tight. And so then it further causes worse and worse movement patterns. Now I remember for me the first time I got on a foam roller and with my leg straight and laid on the side of my thigh, which is the IT band, it was the most painful thing I'd ever experienced in my entire life. Now when I did it the second and third time, it didn't hurt

quite as much because things, you know, whatever the terminology you want to use, loosen up or whatever, don't know quite what happens to tissue when we're pressing on it real hard. We just know that it actually does alleviate pain and tells the central nervous system to chill out a little bit. And then it lets you move better. I'm glad you went there too though because this is a part that annoys me about our space is, you know, a lot of the experts like to debate over the terminology that we've used

to explain a tool like that. And what's happened is something that could be very useful for a lot of people is now disregarded because there's this debate and argument over the science of what's really happening there. At the end of the day, the relief that somebody can get by rolling instantly is incredibly beneficial, especially if you do your due diligence of the work afterwards. Totally, so excellent point because, yeah, we don't know what is really happening when we're doing deep tissue work.

So like you go to a massage therapist, you have a knot in your muscle. Is there really a knot there? I don't know, I mean, you can feel it, but if we looked at it, if we took that muscle off and looked at it in laboratory, it would look no different than another muscle. What's probably happening is that your CNS,

which is the controller, right? The CNS is what tells muscles to squeeze or relax or stay tight. I was a bearing mother is what I call. Yeah, so the CNS may be telling that muscle to kind of stay a little bit tense, and that's what feels like a knot. So then when you push on that knot,

by adding pressure, that sends a signal to the CNS that says, hey, chill out a little bit, and then you feel the, and if for anybody who's ever had a massage, you know exactly what I'm talking about, all of a sudden you feel like, oh, that muscle's not tightening more, it feels so much better. Now, how does that help you with mobility?

Okay, for first off, immediate pain relief, yes, it feels good right away. But if we don't fix what caused it to get tight, you'll gotta go back to the massage therapist every single week. So I'll give you an example. Let's say I'm taking somebody and I'm having them do a cable row. So it's where you sit down, you grab the cable and you pull it towards your midsection. And the goal of the cable row or proper form, part of it is to pull the shoulder blades back and down. Not let them shrug up near the ears, but rather pull them back and down. But let's say I'm working with someone who's got really, really tight neck muscles near

the traps or the trap muscles. This is where the shoulder meets the neck, which a lot of people have, right? Let's say those muscles are really tight. That means that those muscles are kind of turned on a little bit. When I have that person do a row, what you'll find is that they'll shrug. They won't be able to pull their shoulders back really tight. That means that those muscles are kind of turned on a little bit. When I have that person do a row, what you'll find is that they'll shrug. They won't be able to pull their shoulders back really nicely. They'll shrug a little bit.

So then what I'll do is, as a trainer, is I'll push on those muscles, get the CNS to relax a little bit, then we go back to doing the row, and now they have a better chance at doing the proper movement. And the proper movement is what prevents them from getting tight in the first place. This is the right way to use soft tissue work.

Well, there's another personal story myself with this that was such a game changer. I had Bersitis in my hips forever, and I always, I had the same experience as you did when I foamrolled my IT. Now, what I did poorly was I never followed the kinetic chain all the way down to my feet and recognized that this was a breakdown from the feet that was running all the way up into my hip. And what I had, that's really common and I've had to fix this in many people going forward because now I'm way more aware of it because of my personal experience, is when I would squat, my feet would pronate in. Well, the pronating in also rotates the femur, so my thigh turns in a little bit, which is twisting that IT, and then it's pulling on right where the hip where it runs into. And then like an asshole, I was competing and trying to look amazing, so I was pushing the weight on the bar and continuing to squat heavy. And so this is where

this brositis started to kick up. And I would just, unless I would just completely stop squatting or doing leg stuff heavy, I couldn't eliminate this brositis. And it wasn't until I would roll it out to get the immediate relief, then I would address what was going on in my feet and start to work on my feet staying stable, and then work on better range of motion and deeper squats.

So my hips were getting more mobile from going deeper and long, that now it's gone, it's completely gone. I don't have to foam roll anymore because now I have a much better squat, my feet are planted on the ground like they're supposed to. I have way better depth and so that pain has completely gone away

just by me continuing to squat. And so if you put it and you pick up on that pain signal, because if you don't, if you don't like address that fact that this is a sign that something is off, and you're just gonna go through the movement and try and improve the movement and the technique and then load it accordingly, you're just gonna exacerbate the issue down the road.

And so that's why it's important to listen, listen to your body, listen to these signs, signals of pain. It's trying to help correct course what your programming. So the other day I went to go replace my screen door and I'm trying to, it slides along the track and it's really doesn't slide very well. And I'm looking at the track and the track is kind of, it's like grind it up a little bit,

because it's sliding on it not 100%. So it's grinding it up. So we would change the track and the track is kind of, it's like grind it up a little bit, you know, like because it's sliding on it not 100%. So it's grinding it up. So we would change the track, but then it would happen, over time it would happen again. We'd have to change the track. Finally, I'm like, let's figure out the root cause of this. And so we had to look at the whole thing and it just wasn't aligned properly. And so it was okay for a few months, but eventually, going back and forth on that track, the track continues to get ruined. So what mobility work does is it solves the root problem of your pain, and that's why that's the number one thing I would say, or the number one factor.

But it's not the only thing that you can do to help alleviate pain. And usually it does the job though, I'll be honest. Usually that alone will fix it, but I've had clients and I do this for long enough. I'm sure you guys have to where you do the mobility work. You do the correction. I was like, you're moving better. The pain is, you know, 50% or 70% gone. But it's like still remains. Yeah, still there. What's going on?

The next place I always go, because that's, I think the number one, and that's why I'm glad we started that place. The next place I typically look into, if I'm not doing it at the same time, because I mean, now as a trainer, you probably address, we've done this long enough that you know better, so you probably address all these points together. But if I'm still having a problem, it's nine times at a 10, it's related to diet now. Now we probably have a word. And that's such a controversial thing to say, isn't that funny? Yeah. It's so controversial to say that diet could be causing your body, your joints pain.

Now I'm going to give you a very basic example that I think is more clear because we're going to start talking about diet and it's going to be a little bit more vague, maybe a little bit more on the fringe, although more and more health practitioners are agreeing with this. But I'll give you one that's more, just much more clear. Now years ago, I had a personal training facility, a studio, and in there, I had other health practitioners. And they all specialized in different things.

I was the fitness person, so I did the exercise stuff. Back then, I wasn't very well versed on anything else that had to do with health besides working out and cutting calories and macros. So I didn't understand wellness very well, I didn't understand inflammation very well, all the meditation, anything like that. So I remember I had a client, he had back pain

and I did all the mobility work, we worked on his flexibility, we did, I mean, we did this for a while, like six months. And after about six months, his pain was largely reduced, but it was still there a little bit. It was still kind of there. Now this client also had lost some weight, but he always had kind of this kind of big belly. And I remember one of my staff members

I was having this conversation with him about his pain. He was telling me, you know, it's almost all gone, but it still bothers me here and there. And I'm like, well, you know, my answer was, well, I think maybe we got it to the best that we're going to continue working on mobility. Hopefully it'll keep getting better. Well, anyway, my staff member overheard us talking and he leaves and she comes up to me. She says, you should talk to him about his diet. I'm like, I rolled my eyes.

Like, what the hell is diet? I have to do with this. I mean, sure, if he loses weight, you know, maybe that'll help. She goes, no, no, no. It has to do with the way he's activating his core. I said, what? And he goes, look, she goes, his pain is in his lower back.

What supports the spine in the lower, in the lumbar region? I said, well, the core muscles do. She said, that's right. She goes, take a muscle and stretch it out. Is it stronger as a weak? I said, well, it's weak if. She said, that's right. She goes, take a muscle and stretch it out. Is it strong or is it weak? It's a lot of it's weak if it's really, really stretched out. Right? So if you're listening right now, if someone takes your arm and stretches it to its furthest ability, try and activate your muscles of your arm and try and apply some strength, your weak. Your muscles are strongest in the mid-range emotion. When they're fully

contracted or fully stretched, they're not quite as strong, especially when they're really, really stretched. You just lose connection and strength. So she said, his gut is constantly inflamed. You can see it in his belly. We would talk about his nutrition habits. She says, if his gut's inflamed, it's pushing out all the muscles of his midsection, of his core. And now those muscles can't activate and stabilize well enough. And it was like a light bulb when off of me. I said, that's 100% I bet you that's the issue. He comes in the next time I talked him again about his diet. I said, look, we don't need to cut calories, but there's definitely foods that cause digestive issues and bloating with you, right?

And he goes, yeah, I said, let's cut those out and see what happens. Sure enough, digestion gets better, bloating goes, bloating goes down, less back pain. I believe it had to do mostly with the fact that now he was able to activate those muscles a little better. This is why, and we actually don't talk about this very often, but this is also another really cool benefit and a way that I used to use fasting with clients to prove this point, to show that to them. And that makes my job easy too, because one of the hardest parts about going the direction that you're going so is like what food is causing the inflammatory

signal. What is, what is their body reacting to that's inflaming their body that's now causing the joints to hurt even more? We'll find the needle in the haystack. So one of my favorite ways to show that that's the problem or that could be the problem that we're dealing with is throwing my client on a 24 to a 48 hour fast and no Exercise and then getting the feedback of how they fill and you'll be blown away This is you or you're somebody who this could be the problem. That's a great way to test that by Fasting for 24 to 4 hours not exercising during that time and pay attention how you feel when you wake up and how you when you walk around and you move around

And you'll you'll see and you move around and you'll You'll see the people that are that that's the offender of why they're having a lot of chronic pain It's normally greatly reduced or completely eliminated in a fasted state Totally yeah, and I noticed too and I love that because it what it does to is it promotes more hydration Along that process and I've I've, because this kind of falls in the category of diet, making sure that my body's properly hydrated and lubricated in the joints, oftentimes, that by itself tends to bowed well

for lowering the pain signals as well. Totally. And by the way, this, if your diet is causing you to be inflamed, either through the systemic inflammation from eating foods that don't really agree with your body, because what happens when you eat a food that doesn't really work with you, is you get this mild immune reaction.

You get this mild, your body mounts this offense, and it can feel like bloating, it can feel like indigestion, it can feel like bad skin, or whatever, or just can feel like pain. But when this immune reaction is mounted, inflammatory markers go up a little bit because these inflammatory markers are signolars

to the body. They say, hey, let's be on guard. Nothing wrong with that process, by the way. The inflammatory process is a very important process in the body, but if it's too far, it promotes muscle growth, it promotes healing, but too far in one direction, and you start to feel more pain.

Now, here's how it's connected to bad mobility. You've got more systemic inflammation because of your poor diet. Now you're not moving optimally. The poor movement patterns now become your default movement patterns, which then cause more pain. And this is why these are both so intricately connected.

There are foods that even Western medicine has identified as anti-inflammatory, a great example, omega-3 fatty acids. People who eat more have a diet that's higher in omega-3 fatty acids, those are the ones you might get in fish, for example, tend to show systemically less inflammation. Heavily processed foods have also loosely been connected to more inflammation. Now it can either be from the foods themselves or it can be from the fact that heavily processed foods tend to make us overeat.

And there's the other thing that causes inflammation. Overeating. If you're always overeating and you're obese, you tend to have higher amounts of these inflammatory factors in your body. So to give you an example, when you take an ibuprofen or an anti-inflammatory pill and you feel less pain, let's say your knee hurts and you take it. Now your knee doesn't hurt as much. Did the ibuprofen travel to the knee and work just on your knee? No, it worked systemically. It's so that's systemic inflammation

and that's what a poor diet can cause. It can cause higher amounts of this kind of systemic inflammation. Well, you alluded to obesity, but I mean, it's just overeating period. So you could be somebody who manages your weight relatively okay, or you're maybe your only 15, 20 pounds or weight, but if you have a habit of binge, purge, purge, purge type of mentality the way you eat.

Or restrict. Yeah, restrict. I always say purge, sorry. I know. It's a bad habit. It's like the third time I've said that. You know what I mean though, right? If you're in the habit of where you over consume and then you restrict, you over consume

and then you restrict, which it's how a lot of people tend to eat is because they don't have a great relationship with food, you absolutely could be having these issues from your diet, too, just because you're not, you know, obese does not mean that the over consumption in a day or two could not be making some of this worse for you. And then for people listening right now, we're like, I don't think diets making me my back hurt or making my knees hurt. Look, here's a good example. You ever been hung over, okay?

Did your body hurt more? Of course it does. Food definitely plays a role in your overall pain, which then can play a role in how you move, which then can cause poor mobility. The reverse can also be true. If you have pain because of poor mobility, you could be trying to self-medicate with food,

that makes you temporarily feel better, like cupcakes or whatever, which then can cause more inflammation, which then can cause a poor mobility, and it becomes this kind of vicious cycle. So diet definitely should be the second, most important way that you can reduce pain on your body. Now the third one, and this is another one that I didn't learn until much later, but this

is an obvious one, poor sleep. Studies show conclusively that people who are even mildly sleep deprived perceive much higher amounts of pain. Now this is also true for your heat and cold tolerance. If you're really tired, you might find that your body gets cold easily or you can't tolerate the heat as much. You may also find that you can't tolerate your friends as much or people around you as much.

You got a bit of short fuse. Yeah, your body overall is just higher, it's more inflamed and then studies also show that. They show that inflammatory markers go up when you have batslead. Well, you know, it's funny you brought this one up is that this also feeds back into the food thing too. I just had this experience the other night or the other day, I had really bad sleep.

I mean, I was exhausted. I probably got two hours of sleep one night, was up all night, my brain wouldn't stop, had an early morning and then a long day. And man, I had these crazy cravings for just not idea. I did. Yeah, bad food. And I was like, where is that coming from?

And then I thought, I was like, oh fuck, I better have some to do with my poor sleep. So it's funny, as we're moving down this list, and it wasn't like we ordered them like this, but you talking about this just reminded me of that, that that feeds into that. Now you didn't sleep very well, and now you start to lean towards these processed foods

or foods that are high inflammatory foods, which then infects the chronic pain, which then affects the mobility. So they're all connected to each other. So studies are pretty good at showing that too. They show that sleep deprivation. People just, they tend to become more impulsive with their choices.

These are all different spirals that, if you don't address it, it's just gonna get worse and worse and worse. Now here's the thing with sleep. Sleep is alone. If you're not getting good quality sleep, if your sleep is below optimal levels for yourself, optimizing your sleep makes a tremendous difference.

Now, if you're getting great sleep right now, you get the right amount of time, it's good quality, then good for you. But if you're like most people, because this is a lot of people, most people optimizing your sleep will make a huge, huge, huge difference in every aspect of your life, but definitely in terms of pain.

Now, a lot of times people say, well, how can I optimize my sleep? Like, I feel like I go to bed and I just crash out. I think I'm sleeping good or whatever. Okay, how much time do you put into optimizing your sleep? Or what, or I should say, how much value or respect you give it? Do you just work and watch TV

and then just jump in bed and expect yourself just as fall asleep and have great sleep? Or do you treat it like a lot of fitness enthusiasts treat their workouts? It's so fun. It's like for the workouts, they'll get the right clothes, they'll get the right pre-workout, do the stretching, the warming up.

They know their workout ahead of time, they visualize it. You know, there's like the 30-minute process before they actually do the workout. But then when it comes to sleep, it's like, they just expect to turn off the computer, put their head on the pillow, and boom, they're in this amazing slumber. Try this. Try a sleep routine. This is something that I implemented myself not that long ago that's had a tremendous impact on my personal, personally,

on my sleep. And I always thought I had good sleep, and I don't realize how bad it was until I started doing this. You got a cool nightie. Yeah, about two a good. About two hours before I want to go to bed, I either turn off the electronics in the house, or I wear a blue light blocking glasses. And there's a lot of different brands out there for blue light blocking glasses. We work with one called Felix Ray, but all any glasses that block blue light

will actually do the job. And what it does is it tells the brain, okay, it's nighttime, or at least at the very least, it doesn't think that it's as bright of a sun as it does when you're not wearing blue light-blocking glasses. Well, the close you can get to that circadian rhythms where the sun comes up, the sun comes down,

like that's gonna be the most optimal for you. Right, and so then you do that about an hour or two before bed, your brain's getting ready, and studies show that you produce more melatonin, which is the sleep hormone, and you get better quality sleep. There's another part to this, by the way. Besides the sleep routine, getting sunlight during the day has been 100% connected to getting better sleep at night, which is funny because,

you know, every single time I've ever been in the sun all day long, I always get... Oh, you're exhausted. Yeah, phenomenal sleep. But I don't even have to do anything. It's not like I'm not even running. I'm just getting sunlight. And it's because it sets that circadian rhythm. This is one of those things that I think that a lot of,

I feel like if you're in your 20s, this kind of goes in one year and out the other year. Because you're already doing all that. I mean, like you're outside a lot more. Yeah, and you just, you know, at that, I get away with a lot more. I had a mantra when I, in my early 20s, that was,

The same one I had. Yeah, you know, sleep is overrated or I'll sleep when I'm dead, you know, sleep is for pussy. I said all of that shit. I did, I did. I said all of that stuff because, you know, up into that point,

my experience in life was, I was fine, I still want to work, I crushed work, I still worked out. I still could be fit and so you know, I didn't care what people were talking about sleep and the studies and the books that were being written about this This didn't impact me. I didn't give a shit about it And so I'm in long and then life happens, you know, you get a little bit older and then you start to notice things or Maybe I just become more in tune with my body and notice these things have been doing this for a very long time now and start to pay attention to it.

And it's probably more so that, that now in life, I'm really more in tune with my body speaking to me, letting me know when things hurt or just like I was mentioning, I noticed I had poor sleep and right away my brain starts going like, how is this affecting me? One of the things I noticed right away was the cravings of the food that I had. So I'm just more aware of that. And I think when you're younger you kind of ignore a lot of these signals that are being already sent to you. You just didn't give a shit about them.

And you start noticing that I can't stress how important the sleep routine is. And I love that you compared it to the getting ready for the workout because we all tend or even getting ready for your day. Like everybody showers brush their teeth, puts their clothes on, thinks that you know, looks at the opens their calendar, looks at base camp, like figures out maps. I mean, we put all this energy into mapping out. And the irony is, there's enough research and studies out there to show the importance of sleep that arguably it's the most important part of our day when it comes to recovery, building muscle, hormones,

all these things. And it's like, how funny is that? That there's just not a lot of conversation around that because we're asleep, so it's boring, it's not fun to talk about. Well, like a lot of things in modern life, we have to come up with a routine and structure. So you think to yourself,

well, humans, when did they have a sleep routine? Like, well, yeah, that's because we were outside. And the sleep routine was the sun. The sun was up, and then when it was up, we were up, and when it went down, here's the thing about humans. We don't have good night vision. And here's the other thing, a lot of predators do. So it's 100% pretty sure that ancient humans

weren't like up all night doing work on computers. Sun went down, they're like going to cave and then they probably would go to sleep, have some sex, go to sleep or whatever. Well, now we got electric lights. So it's dark outside, bright in the house. Your brain is perceiving that as the sun being up. It's not getting prepared for sleep.

So the routine is silly as it sounds, try it out. Just try it out and give it about a week and watch what happens. And when it comes to pain, the studies are conclusive. Lack of sleep causes higher amounts of pain. In fact, even if you don't have chronic pain, when your sleep deprived, you may actually find that your body is achy and hurts anyway. Now, you love talking about evolution all time and bringing up points like that. Do you think too that this is something that's getting worst every day or every year

that goes by it, that we continue to evolve our technology? Like, you think about the TV lights now. Like part of the advertising is how bright the LED is and that it's pretty like, and just 10 years ago, you would not have been laying, 10 years ago, I would not ever caught myself doing this bad habit that I catch myself doing all the time, which is having my phone right by my bed

and picking it up because of a notification from email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whatever, and I look at it and I pitch black in my room, I grab my phone and now I'm staring at this bright screen. Do you think that this is getting worse and worse as time goes on? And that's maybe why we're hearing more conversation like this or you're seeing brands like Felix Gray that are coming out of nowhere and really blowing up because they're truly making it a

huge impact on people are aware now because I remember when I was a kid, it's so funny, like, you know, mom wisdom, you got to listen to your mom's and tell you what, I remember my mom used to be like, don't stand too close to the TV, don't stare too close to it, it'll ruin your eyes. And then I remember getting a little older and reading some science articles and they're like, ah, that's a myth. And I tell my mom, ah, that's a myth. I have a pizzeria palms. Yeah. It's just that one. That one. That one thankfully is a myth. Like, yeah, that was a miss. Yeah, whatever. You know, and then you start, that's because they didn't know the impact of blue light on the eyes. Now we're starting

to learn. And I think you're going to start to see a reversal. I think you're going to start to see kids are going to probably be required to wear blue light on the eyes. Now we're starting to learn, and I think you're gonna start to see a reversal. I think you're gonna start to see kids are gonna probably be required to wear blue light blocking glasses while they're looking at computer screens in schools, and people are now realizing it's impact on sleep. And then we're also starting to realize the impact poor sleep has just on our overall health. It's actually a carcinogen. People who have like, sweet shifts or whatever,

they've actually labeled that as a carcinogen, like anything else, like smoking cigarettes, for example. That's great. That's not bad of an effect it has. Now the next one that goes close to it, and I kind of mentioned it earlier when we were talking about sleep, is sunlight. Sunlight, and it's so funny, you know,

long time ago, one of the prescriptions for pain was to go out in the sun. That was also the prescription for illness. That was that true? Yeah, I didn't know that. No, I know talking to my wife is a, you know, for pain was to go out in the sun. That was also the prescription for illness. That was true. Yeah. I know talking to my wife is a pediatric nurse forever and like they were always taking their patients out to get outside in the sun as much as possible.

It could be just because of that fact that it made them feel better, their moods were elevated, all kinds of benefits. Well, I do notice that. I mean, Rachel and I were literally just talking about this yesterday and she went out, she was like, I gotta go get out for a walk. And we she was like, you know, can we talk about getting like a picnic bench outside or do some walk in meetings? And I'm like, you know, you're we're all in the same page because this is new to me.

I've never worked in a fucking dungeon like we are now and had days where I could be in here all day long. And I feel it. I feel after about four or five hours I could be in here all day long. And I feel it. I feel after about four or five hours when we're in here and we're under floor essence. That I can feel like I feel lethargic, I feel tired. And it's really hard for me to motivate to get my workout. If I go outside literally and just walk for 15 minutes outside

and it's pushing on a nice sunny day here, instantly I can feel this dramatic shift the other direction. It's like I just, it almost feels like I took a pre-workout shake or something that that's how much I was being suppressed from being in here under fluorescent lights all afternoon and sitting on that and not getting sunlight

and then also getting sunlight. Oh, that's why I have my sun roof open all the time. Even if it's cloudy, whatever, I mean, I don't open the window part but I open the shade part so the sun comes through because we're always stuck in here. There's a couple things that we can say about sunlight. Obviously the vitamin D part.

Now, some health practitioners will say that vitamin D deficiency is chronic in modern societies. I would agree, I would say it's probably low and most people from all the articles that I've seen. Now low-vitamined D, it's well-established, is what caused pain, bone pain and muscle pain. That's actually one of the common signs I actually didn't know that.

Of low-vitamined D is increased inflammation, but definitely bone pain. Because remember, vitamin D is important for bone health, but muscle pain as well. There's some studies that show the knots that people get and the tension that people get. Increases quite high when people are low and vitamin D. So sunlight obviously gives you vitamin D.

If you have an office job and you're not out in the sun, that could be one of the issues. Go out there and get some sun. Now besides that, studies actually show that sunlight, the independent of the vitamin D boosting effects has pain relieving effects. There's actually many studies you can look them up, but they find that going on the sun increases things like an actric oxide, there's viso-dialatients of the blood vessels, so it improves your heart health, improves your-mobilizes killer T cells, so it's got some benefits for immune system.

And then there's these other studies that were people go outside and they just generally feel less pain. Now maybe from the physiology changing in your body from the sunshine. You're psychological. Or maybe you're mood. You know, that's a big one.

Like just how your mood is also dictates. Well, we talk all the time about the import, how you perceive pain. And we thought, we had an episode not that long ago, we were talking about the, you know, the monks that have trained to perceive pain differently and just the big, big component. Right, just think of the positive effects

of going out and seeing how often you hear this sky is clear and it's a sunny day and you go, oh, it's so beautiful out like, say that without smiling, right? How many people do that? And that, just that pattern of like, oh, it's so beautiful out of you. Say that without smiling, right? How many people do that? And that just that pattern of like, oh, having a positive attitude about it, I would think that in itself would make a difference

in the pain. Well, mindfulness is, it would be the last thing that I would say. And in mindfulness, and this is a tough one, that's why it's last, because you try telling someone that their pain is not physical. In the sense that the pain is physical, but the cause is not physical. In the sense that the pain is physical, but the cause is not physical.

You try telling someone that. Very, very difficult discussion to be had. It's very, very hard to even comprehend, but it's very true. Sadness, depression, trauma, we can feel it as physical pain. Now, those are the extreme cases, but if you have chronic pain

that is causing a decline in your quality of your life, sometimes mindfulness practices like meditation, prayer, or a spiritual practice. By the way, I'm not making this up. Look it up. There's many studies that support this. People will actually start to feel less pain. Now, maybe that the pain itself is gone because it was manifested from their mind, or maybe that the pain's still there,

they just perceive it as much less. And there's studies on monks, what they do this, where they do these tests, where they'll take them through different, pain parameters or whatever, and they'll find that they feel their body's registering the pain just as much as a normal person. They just don't perceive it nearly as bad.

It is such a hard concept to wrap, you know, your brain. I've had clients that have had, still had issues with pain, but have done all the work and have gone to all these different levels and links to alleviate it, but have gone to body workers and therapists and they've found a lot of that was stemming from psychological issues. They're carrying in their body. Dude, I've had clients who, I had one client who hurt his shoulder and it really, really had a detrimental effect on his quality of life because he was a very active individual. So he came to work

with me. We worked on the mobility of the shoulder, did it for a long time. He was very, very diligent and his mobility became excellent. Like, for all intents and purposes, I would watch his shoulder move and everything, and I even had my physical therapist on staff look at it, and we both agreed, like, the kind of pain that he's feeling shouldn't be coming from the physical component. I mean, he's the idea, the image is done,

and everything couldn't figure out what was going on. So finally, I had this conversation, and luckily he's a very open-minded person. I said, do you think maybe that your body's holding onto this pain because it was such a traumatic experience for you? And so he started doing this mindfulness practice and he said there was, now he did this for like a month or two,

there was a moment where the pain literally went away. He was thinking about it, being mindful and the pain gone. And then it didn't come back. And it was so crazy for someone to experience that that I trained. Well didn't we didn't you talk about a study a couple of years ago came out when we were in the beginning the middle of podcasting it was definitely after that talked about how they now have science to prove that memories are stored in muscle. Oh well, I mean this funny that we need studies for for this, but picture in your mind a depressed young lady. She has a depressed looking posture, doesn't she? She's got a shoulders rolled forward, head down a little bit.

Can her depression show up in her body? Yes, now think of someone who's happy, someone who's confident, someone who's scared, those all reflect in postures. So yes, it definitely shows up in the body. Now maybe subtle, you might not obviously see it, someone's stress might not like obviously show, but do you think that in subtle ways,

their muscles are holding those memories, are protecting their body from whatever they are feeling, and then that could cause mobility issues, which then can cause problems. Absolutely. And then of course, there's studies that show that antidepressants. There's people with, there was several studies I read where people had back pain that they could not diagnose.

They did MRIs and imaging and movement specialists. And they just couldn't figure out why the hell these people's backs hurt. Then they put them on antidepressants and the back pain was gone. Absolutely. People who are depressed, in fact, do clinically show more pain in their bodies. Then there's a studies where people with knee pain, where they operated on half of them, the other half of them, they just cut the knee open, so the back up did no surgery, and the people who had the fake surgery had just as much pain relief as the people

who had the real surgery. So don't knock the mindfulness part. It's definitely a very, very important component. It's just one of the more difficult ones, I would say. It's explained to people, right? Absolutely. Isn't it really just the practice and the skill and ability to reframe every situation?

Make friends with it. Right. Totally. I mean, I feel like it's the same thing that when and the skill and ability to reframe every situation. Make friends with it. Totally. I mean, I feel like it's the same thing that when I talk to people about overcoming fear or how I dealt with certain things in my life, and I really think that it just, it train me to have this skill to look and reframe the situation.

Like, what's that saying? There's no such thing as big problems, only problems that we make big. And so it's that saying? There's no such thing as big problems, only problems that we make big. And so it's that ability. And I think that's when you're learning to meditate, learning to be mindful of situations, what you're really learning to do is to look at it and just reframe it differently.

Like, yeah, you get hurt somewhere and it was painful as an injury, it is. But learning to have a different attitude about it really makes a huge difference on how your body will then perceive it. And that practice of meditation and mindfulness, that's what you're, it's really like, that's the practice and gain time is when you get hurt. I'm practicing every day to be kind of more mindful to meditate on these things, reframe all my daily stuff, have gratitude, all those things, and then those moments come where now you're challenged

and that's where all that practice comes to navigate through. Right, that's where all that practice comes in is that I've been practicing this skill to be more mindful, to meditate, to not react right away, to learn how to reframe things for those moments in life that happen

when injury occurs or shit happens. Now I have the tools in my tool belt to be able to reframe the situation. And mindfulness, I would say, is the most important for the kind of pain that you just can't seem to figure out with everything else. The kind of pain where you're just like,

man, I've done the mobility, I've done diet, sleep, I've done everything, and I've made some dense in it, but it's still there. You know, the mindfulness piece, that's the piece that then starts to make a big impact. And by the way, I'm not speaking, you know, just out of the air, I've read lots of literature on this and the studies show that it actually,

and that's why I would say it's one of the more important components. So if you listen to this episode and you follow some of these things and kind of maybe even follow them in order, I think we name them pretty much in the order that we think they are in terms of importance. I think many of you listening will be solving

a lot of your pain issues. Now we have free resources. If you wanna read more information from MindPump, just go to MindPumpFree.com. You can also find all of us on social media. You can find us on Instagram. You can find Justin at MindPump Justin. You can find me at MindPumpSal and Adam me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam.

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