Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1277: How to Eliminate Pain (Low Back, Shoulder, Knee & More)

Episode Date: April 23, 2020

In this episode, Sal, Adam & Justin discuss how to identify the true source of chronic pain and then eliminate it. The most valuable thing you can do as a trainer. (3:58) The differences between acute pain from an injury and chronic pain. (5:35) Why you shouldn’t be in pain when you do normal things. (9:50) How sub-optimal movement patterns create more wear and tear on your joints. (14:57) What mobility aims to do and why it is important. (17:40) The importance of addressing posture to combat imbalances. (18:40) Don’t skip laying the foundation! (22:50) The body will ALWAYS take the path of least resistance. (24:46) Steps to Eliminate Pain. Identify the root cause. (28:05) Prioritize movement. (34:50) Re-gain connection through mobility. (41:40) Frequency is king. (43:50) The value of priming before your workout. (47:52) Related Links/Products Mentioned April Promotion: MAPS Prime/Prime Pro ½ off! **Code “PRIME50” at checkout** Special Promotion: MAPS Anywhere ½ off!! **Code “WHITE50” at checkout** Visit Four Sigmatic for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Code “mindpump” at checkout** CDC: 1 in 5 Americans suffer from chronic pain Prevalence of Chronic Pain and High-Impact Chronic Pain Among Adults — United States, 2016 The ONLY Way You Should Be Doing Dumbbell Bicep Curls! - Mind Pump TV Mind Pump #1275: The Best At-home Workout That No One is Sharing Mind Pump Webinar How to Perform a 90/90 Hip Stretch (HIP FLEXOR STRETCH) - Mind Pump TV Mind Pump Free Resources People Mentioned Justin Brink DC (@dr.justinbrink)  Instagram

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mite, ob-mite, up with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. In this episode, we talk all about pain. We talk about how to eliminate your chronic pain in your body, whether it's your low back, your shoulders, your knees, your hips. We get into ankle stuff. We talk about the upper body.

We talk about why pain is the number one thing you should consider with your training, even if you don't think you have any right now. It's something that is very, very important. We also talk about what to do when you have that pain and how fixing it can help you build muscle and burn body fat. We talk about the different points or the different steps you should take to alleviating your pain. How to identify the root cause, how to prioritize the right movements, how to apply the right

amount of frequency, and then we talk about priming. So you're going to love this mind pump episode. Also this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, ForSigmatic. Now, ForSigmatic has the best adaptogenic mushroom supplements you'll find anywhere. Now, what are adaptogens? Adaptogens help your body deal with stress. Why is this important? Well, exercise is a stress. Every time you lift weights, you're stressing the body. If you take an adaptogen, that means that that signal will work more effectively in your body, potentially allowing you to train harder so you can build more muscle or burn more

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You can do them anywhere, including your home. Hey, you know, I get DMs from trainers and well, people all the time, but one of the number one things, the questions that I get asked of DM to do with revolves around pain. Lots and lots and lots of questions around pain. Well, maybe because that's, I mean, let's be honest, when you are a personal trainer, I would say 80% of my clients, you know, battle the chronic pain for sure. It's actually more.

It's actually a majority for sure. And it's how you showed your value as a trainer. That's like if you got a client fit strong fat loss, it's very valuable. You got your client to just move and feel better. Life, they're with you for life. It's like the most valuable thing that you could possibly do as a trainer.

And hands down more valuable than just losing fat and body mass and everything else. Like, honestly, if you can alleviate somebody's pain, you have a life or client. It's the number one thing you should actually consider with your training, even if you are pain free. And the reason why you should consider it is because nothing will stop your progress in its tracks. Nothing will, has the potential to reverse your progress and send you backwards like pain, nothing. And you know, if you've been working out for longer than a year, you probably know what I'm talking about.

I mean, you get one injury and that's it. You can't work out the way you were doing before. Not. You can't work out the way you were doing before. Not only can you not work out the way you were doing before, but you'll remind it every second, every time you try to move, that's something that hurts. Well, I think it's important that we distinguish the difference between injury, tight pain, and chronic pain because, and then also a lot of people that don't think they have chronic pain just and they attributed to being older, right? Those three things I think of, right? I have either one, somebody doesn't understand the difference of like a cute pain from an injury

to what is chronic pain and then what is, oh, this is just how I feel because I'm older. Because that was one of the things when I, when I would, I would never forget training clients and I would get somebody, you know, remember I started when I was 20, right? So it was just a pup. And you get somebody in your office who's 45, 55 years old, like seems ancient to you when you're 20 years old and they think you're a child at that point.

And I'm assessing them to tell them what's wrong with their body. And they would just look back at me and be like, son, you don't understand. When you get on their scene. When you get my age, you'll feel it. This is, it just, everybody gets this way. Everybody feels this way.

And I remember being so frustrated as a kid because I remember going through all the schooling and education to learn about all this and understand that like, no, this is, that's not why these people feel this way. I can help them. I want to help them, but they would attribute these chronic pain, the sore, the low back

that bothered them later after a long day of work, the knees crackling and aching on some days, the ankles being stiff or the neck being frozen and locked up and causing headaches, that wasn't chronic pain to them. That was just, this is part of getting old. Yeah, there's a big difference between acute and chronic pain and injury because we need to,

and we do, we need to decipher the two. So if your knee hurts because you fell on it or you twisted it and it's torn, that is acute injury type pain. Chronic pain is the kind of pain that is a cute injury type pain. Chronic pain is the kind of pain that just is with you all the time. It's like, oh my knee hurts. When did you hurt your knee?

Oh, 15 years ago. And it's funny, you almost get removed from it because you've been living with it for so long. And these are a lot of clients to Adam's point, like on the other end of that, where they just don't even bring it up because it's just something that they've been living with so long that they don't even bring it up because it's just something that they've been living with so long that they don't even recognize it

as a problem anymore. Yeah, and chronic pain is treated very differently than acute pain. If you tore something, it broke something, you rest it and let it heal. That's how you deal with acute pain. Chronic pain, if you leave it alone and rest it and let it do nothing, it oftentimes gets worse. If you have low back pain, if you leave it alone and rest it and let it do nothing,

it oftentimes gets worse. If you have low back pain, that's not due to an actual injury that just happened. It's just my back hurts. It always hurts if I walk too long or I stand too long, my low back hurts. The way you solve that is not by okay, not standing and not moving anymore. Temporarily, you might not hurt anymore, but things are going to and that crime would cause that chronic pain is gonna get continue to get worse So the way you deal with chronic pain is very very different and chronic pain is a big big problem One out of five. This is an actual statistic one out of five Americans report suffering from chronic pain now

I said report because The numbers higher than that because the Justin's point, I can't tell you how many, this is actually more often than not. That's how often this would happen. I client would sit in front of me and they'd say, do you have any areas of chronic pain? They'd be like, no, I don't.

And then I'd say, okay, and I knew better because I've been training people for a long time. So I'd be like, okay, and I'd go down the list. How's your neck? How's your shoulder? How's your wrist? How's your, and before you know, I'd be like, oh, my shoulder yeah, it kind of bothers me, but that's, you know, that's just hurts. If I don't move it, this is a stiff, for a stiff. Oh, my low back, yeah, I think it's really tight, but if I

long, I don't bend over. I raised my arm, but it's not ideal. Or you do an exercise and they just told you everything's perfectly fine. You won't lunge. Oh, I can't do that. My knee hurts. Right. So, so I think there's more people suffering from chronic pain than actually report it. And it's just, we just accept it. And we actually change how we walk, how we move, how we sit to try to get around from that. And even worse than that, 20 million people

report suffering from pain that literally interferes with daily life. That's how many people in this country have the kind of chronic pain that they actually say, listen, this is making life suck. This is making life very, very difficult. To their defense, a lot of the problem is they think that, okay, if my low back hurts, or it feels that way from a long day of work or whatever, but they know they didn't do anything to directly injure it, they don't connect that to chronic pain.

So that part of the problem is understanding that, no, the body, you can be, believe it or not, you can be 80 years old and not have your low back feel terrible all day or your shoulder feel locked up all the time. It's what it is is they don't realize it because they didn't do like a specific injury. And listen, I'm coming also from a place where I understand

because this is even, was even me, okay? And what they do is they avoid things in the gym that they think aggravated or make it worse when they're not addressing the root cause. So using myself as an example, and mine started to creep in like in my late 20s early 30s when I really started No, and I would get low back pain. I had low chronic back pain and My ex if I was on my feet all day long or maybe if I played basketball or if I lifted squats

I would my back would just be on fire and because I know I didn't do any like a specific injury to my back, like my logic to that was like, oh, it's, you know, it's just bother me because I'm not very good at squatting or whatever. And I just kind of put it to the side. And then you, and then when it ends up happening, you kind of put it to the side. And then it starts to creep up more and more and more until it becomes debilitating until people literally effects their, their daily life. And then when they decide that they want to try

and do something about it, they think the back is the problem because my low back is bothering me. But it's really not my low back. It's all the things that are surrounding it that are stressing the low back. And most commonly, when we talk about low back, and in my experience, it's been the whole hip complex that is really locked up and tight

because of the inability of your hips and then that's pulling and straining on the low back. To take it a step further, it's not even, oh, it's my low back, that's bad. It's the, oh, it's because I walked a lot. Right, I'll talk to people and they'll say, oh, no, no, my knee doesn't, I don't have chronic pain with my knee,

but if I walk longer than 30 minutes, it starts to hurt, so I just don't walk chronic pain with my knee, but if I walk longer than 30 minutes to start to hurt, so I just don't walk for longer than 30 minutes, or, oh yeah, my back hurts, but that's because I was standing for three hours. That's why my back hurts. You're not supposed to be in pain when you do regular things.

Now, I understand if you go and test the limits of your physical capacity, you might have some soreness, but if you go to the mall and you're going shopping for four hours and you come home with the back pain, that's not because you were shopping for four hours. That's because you have some issues with the way your body moves. What you need to understand is that your body is all connected. And if one thing isn't moving optimally, because your body, by the way,

your body doesn't understand, you know, joint by joint muscle by muscle. It just understands function. So if I get up to walk, my body's not thinking, hip flex or quad, hamstring calf, soleus, tens up the core. It doesn't work that way,

it would be such an inefficient process. What it thinks is, propel the body forward. So let's say I have a bad ankle. Let's say my left ankle is bad. What will automatically happen without me thinking is I'll limp. I'll change my walking behavior.

I'll change that movement pattern automatically. And this is a wonderful thing that your body does. It moves in spite of the fact that you have bad mobility issues or bad connection issues. It moves in spite of all of those things. So you can still move. And so that's why we think, oh, it's the movement that's causing the problem.

No, no, no, it's because you can't move optimally. Yeah, and then a lot of times like these little compensations that happen, it goes up the kinetic chain. So all the rest of your limbs and places where you never think what it would affect, it might affect your neck. You have an ankle injury. Things like that. So it's just these creep up on you

and it's gonna be to your benefit to really do your homework and come back and really try to trace back to the root of all of this movement. I didn't experiment with a train that worked from a years ago. We had this whole conversation and we put a half an inch rise in her left shoe. So one foot was a half an inch taller than the other foot. And I said, walk around in this all day long and let me know where you start to feel the pain. And first it was a hip, then it was the low back,

then it was her shoulder and neck. It's all connected. All because one foot was a little bit higher than the other one. So you're exactly right Justin. And now why is this important to know? Because you may have pain in one area, but it's not necessarily because your knee might not hurt,

it probably may hurt because you have a bad knee, but more often than not, if it's not an injury, it may hurt because you have a bad knee, but more often than not, if it's not an injury, it's not because you have a bad knee, it's because your ankles or your hips or something else isn't moving properly. So now your knee has to take over and do more than it should. That's another really good point to bring up is,

it's very common that you had somebody who like maybe broke an ankle or torn, you know, ligament in their knee on one side. And then years, they recover from it. They were young when it happened and now they're in the later advanced age. And now they feel neck or low back. And they don't think it has anything to do with the knee, but this just goes back to the conversation that we had the other day about the importance of rehabbing correctly.

A lot of times what has happened to us is most people have had somewhat of an injury like that, whether it be a major sprain or a break or a tear somewhere on their body. And they rehabbed, recovered at one point, but they never recovered back to where their body was moving and speaking synergistically to each other. It was even on East Side. What ends up happening is to your point you made, Sal, that the body just understands function. So, yeah, if I tore my left knee, right?

My ligaments to my left knee, and I had the brace on and cast on for six months, I rehab, and I didn't do a really good job, post surgery of balancing my left and right side out. I just got better at compensating because of the injury at using my other side. That kind of stays with you even when you get out of rehab. And that's a lot of people don't connect that.

And it doesn't come creeping until maybe years or even sometimes decades later. And then it revealed itself, like Justin said, neck or shoulder pain, but really, it was that broken ankle on your right side, a decade ago that you never rehabbed completely and balanced your body out. It's tricky, because you feel that immediate relief, because the acute pain has gone away.

And you've become more efficient at walking again and doing daily functions and everything, but these compensation, these patterns of favoring aside have really added up over the years. And that creeps up to the point where it becomes its own problem. And so this is something that people just need to realize that that could definitely happen.

And here's what ends up happening. You develop movement patterns that are suboptimal. Suboptimal patterns put more wear and tear on your joints. They tighten some muscles up because you're not moving the best way possible. So some muscles have to overcompensate to correct for that. And so you start to get pain and you start to get problems. Some muscles actually turn off, okay?

So if you never reach over your head. So like right now if you're listening to podcasts, like I'm gonna put this to the test, I'm not gonna reach up above my head for the next two years, you'll lose that ability. Those muscles actually in that range of motion starts to turn off. So what is mobility aimed to do?

Mobility aims to get you to learn new patterns and turn muscles on and ways to support that. That's what mobility aims to do. And this is why working on this is the most important possible thing you can do regardless of what your goals are. Because let's say your goal is to build maximal muscle. Like I just want to build a lot of muscle.

I really don't care about this kind of stuff. Well, here's why it's important. If you want to build maximal muscle. Like I just want to build a lot of muscle. I really don't care about this kind of stuff. Well, here's why it's important. If you want to build maximal muscle, you need to be able to lift heavy, you need to be able to train intensely, and you need to be able to do this consistently. Well, if you're moving sub-optimally, that's a recipe for disaster. Not only that, but let's say you never hurt yourself.

You will never reach your full potential because when your body moves optimally, that's when you build the most muscle and lift the most weight. When it moves sub optimally, you never reach that upper limit of your potential. So this is a very important thing to pay attention to, and more importantly, this is something that you pay attention to always. You never take your eye off of it. This was a paradigm shattering moment for me as a young lifter. So as an athlete, a left-handed athlete,

I was very dominant on my left side. I shoot, throw, do everything left-handed. And so, and this is before I know this, right? So I haven't made this connection yet. And I get into lifting weights not long after when I'm playing sports. And now I'm really like the skinny guy trying to build muscle.

I care less about sports. Now I just wanna build a physique. And I remember like being so frustrated with my chest development. I had a really weak chest. It was like almost concave. And when I started like really lifting a lot and consistent, I started to kind of develop a little bit of a chest,

but what really was discouraging was, it was uneven. Like one side, I had my right pack was like way more developed than my left pack, which, you know, for a young kid at this point, I wasn't making the connection. I mean, this makes sense. My left side is my stronger side. Why is it less developed than my right side? And the reason why that is, and this was this, this was that paradigm shattering moment for me when I started to learn all this and the importance of posture and mechanics and fixing

anything in imbalances that I had. Because I played sports for so long, the left side, I had this kind of, I had more of a rotated forward shoulder on the left side. Now, we know when you get in to do a bench trep bench press or a chest fly, you want to get yourself in that retracted position to engage the chest. If your shoulders are rolled forward and you go to do a bench press, a fly, or a chest exercise, the shoulders take over the movement. So what was happening when I'm doing these barbell exercises and machine exercises is that shoulder on the left side was checked. And I'm talking, you can't, it's not glaring in obvious.

This is why this is so important to really assess this, is it was just slightly rolled forward a little bit more than my right side, and then I'm just, you know, bodies just gonna just get the bar up. That's all it's thinking. So I'm just bench pressing away in the young kid. All I'm caring about in my stronger, am I stronger putting more weight on, and what ends up happening is I get this kind of developed shoulder on that left side. Chest is never really getting activated very well and all my chest exercises on the left side, but the right side is. And so now my body looks off. And it took years of correcting that after I

overdid it the other way. And this is the important part and why I stress this type of stuff to every single client while I under assessing posture and addressing that first is so important because even if you're not dealing, even if you're a 23 year old kid right now listening and you don't have, you're not battling bad chronic pain, but you don't have really good posture which is also changing how good your mechanics are

when you do the movements, you end up over developing one side or the other. And then it creates this kind of imbalance. And now I have a bigger problem to go back and reverse. Yeah, if you were to compare, if you had twins and one twin had good movement, good control, stability, mobility, and the other one had bad control, good bad movement, all that stuff. But they looked to start off working out identical, and then they both start working out. Here's how the difference in terms of the development will start to play out. The person with the poor mobility and poor connection is going to develop imbalances in their muscles.

They're going to develop a physique that doesn't look as pleasing. It doesn't look as balanced. They don't have as much symmetry. It doesn't develop as well. They also won't build muscle as fast because they're pressing the limits of the hinges without the good mobility. Now, the person who can move now well progresses faster because they can maximize the effectiveness of each exercise. They're balanced in terms of their development. They look more aesthetic and then the obvious, the person who has poor mobility, probably going to get hurt, which will slow them down even more, while the other person probably won't get hurt.

It makes that big of a difference. And again, this is something you have to or you should pay attention to always. If your goal is to have maximum results consistently, this is number one. There isn't that's in the above it. Upmost importance, especially in that athletic realm, I'm always stressing that, like assessing movement, assessing movement with the athletes,

that's first and foremost, are your joints able to do what they're supposed to do? Are you set in the proper ways where you're allowed to distribute, you're allowed to, you're able to distribute force correctly through your body. There's what, if you think of a house, a house has a structural foundation a way that everything is aligned so that it can withstand

the amount of force that's coming down. And when that's just a little bit off, it may not be immediately, but over time, it's gonna really affect the foundation, the way that the house is standing up still. So that's something that we have this preset way to move with our joints that's gonna be able to distribute this force and with stand force

at its most optimal points. Well, that your analogy with the house is exactly what I used to use with clients who would come to me so focused on the way they looked or the scale weight. Like, oh, Adam, I just want to lose 30 pounds. I don't care about anything else. Just keep me there. I just want to build this. And when I hear that, the analogy I'd give them is that you're coming to a contractor,

okay, on the construction worker now, I'm not your personal trainer. And you want me to build you this beautiful house that you have this vision of, and you want me to skip laying the foundation. You want a Hollywood shell house is what you want. Yeah. You ever go to those sets where they have like the fake house or whatever?

Yeah. That's what they want. Yeah, and you know what? And here's the reality of it. That's possible. You know, I could throw up, I could frame up some walls and throw a roof on it and everything like that, but it's not gonna last forever.

You know, it definitely is nice and nice initially. Right. If you look at it from far away, right. Right. And so that's why I love that analogy when you're talking about getting somebody to move optimally and teach them about posh here and be able to, right, here's another one.

So, and I know I'm gonna try and be able to, here's another one, so, and I know, I'm gonna try and give as many as as I can or go into this, because I know this will make connection with the younger crowd. It's very easy to talk about chronic pain to someone who's 55. It's very easy, but trying to get this point across to somebody who's 23 right now in the importance of it,

that's fucking hard, and I know that because it was been hard for me. Now, somebody who's, can relate to this, bicep curling. And this is why I did this YouTube video, that's controversial, that's done really well in our YouTube channel that I got a lot of trolls that hated me for this. But I teach this bicep curl.

And I make clients do a split stance and put their weight on the front foot and pull their shoulder blades back. And I do this little balance thing. Of course, I got hammered for teaching this. But I'll tell you why I teach this, because a lot of people are just slightly off enough on their mechanics of bicep curling and one shoulder is a little more forward. The anterior delt takes over a little bit more on the left side than it does the right

side, which is just enough of over years of bicep curling two or three years to have one side more developed the other or one dramatically stronger than the other. You can curl 35 pound dumbbell with the left arm, but the right one you can only do 25. And then what if they their answer is just curl more with the opposite side? No, that's not. There's a breakdown mechanically somewhere, and I'll tell you the most common area that I have found when doing bicep curls is exactly what I said. It's because all of us tend to be right or left side dominant, because we, we write with our right hand or we brush our teeth, comb our hair, we do a lot with one side more than the other, and guess what? That over time will cause this imbalance. And so then when you go to do these movements

and these exercises, if you're not conscious of that, your body is always gonna take the easiest path. And so if that means it cheats up with the shoulder a little bit more on that more dominant or forward side, then what ends up happening is you get an imbalance in the bicep. And then you think it has something to do with, oh, I just need to do more on the other side.

Like, no, there's a root cause for that. And the earlier you become, okay, the young kids that are listening right now, the earlier you become aware of this and become conscious of your training, the less work you'll have going down the road, and the more results you'll get if you lay that foundation. No way better results.

I remember when I would train some clients who couldn't get full extension of their arms up above their head. That's actually a tough one for a lot of people. A lot of people think they can get really good full extension, but in reality what they're doing is arching their back and doing all kinds of weird stuff. And I have them do a shoulder press,

and I tell them to push the dumbbells up a little higher, push them up a little higher. You know what they do? They come up, they come up on their toes. They come up on their toes. And the reason why they come up on their toes is because their mind, again, your body says, move the dumbbells higher, arms can't do it,

I'm coming up on the toes, it's automatic. This is automatic. This is why you train movements. This is not why I'm going, this is why mobility's not treated like this. Oh, I have a weak, you know, glute, just work out my glute. No, no, no, work the movement. Your body doesn't understand that way.

Now, I know bodybuilding is around developing individual body parts. Nothing wrong with that, but proper mobility is about training, movements, and connection, because your body doesn't understand muscle groups. It only understands movement. So, all right, what's the first step? First step in getting somebody to work on chronic pain. Obviously, it's got to be identify the root. What is the root cause of this pain? Now, it is important to note that there are certain joints of the body that oftentimes are not the problem. What I mean by that is if you have low back pain, knee pain, elbow

pain, neck pain, sometimes, many times, it's not because you have a bad problem with your knee, low back, elbow, or neck. Oftentimes, it's because of the surrounding joints. Oftentimes, it's because those joints or areas are overcompensating. The low back is a very, very common one. You can definitely have low back pain because you actually have issues with your low back, slip disc or pinch nerve and that kind of stuff. Yeah, but even those things, right? Over time, it's caused because of a dysfunction

in the hip complex. Hip. You've got an anterior pelvic tilt or you have lack of mobility in the hips and the years and years of that being compressed is now compressed the disc and now you have this. And you know, it's funny. I would, again, I train lots of surgeons,

you know, as a trainer and many of them would tell me, you know, Sal, if you took 10 people off the streets and you image their low back, you would see lots of people who have discs that are out here and there and very few of them would have any symptoms. They don't even realize that. And it goes in some, and many goes, many times we have people coming in with severe low back

and we see nothing on the images. We can't find any problems whatsoever. And there are a lot of people, most of the clients I ever had would come into me brand new with some kind of chronic low back pain. And nine at a 10 times we could alleviate it tremendously by getting better with their hip mobility, getting better with their core stability. Those two things right there, oh boy, that used to handle so many people's

low back pain. Well, and you had to dress knee like that too. You name the four big ones in my opinion too. We get lots of people, one of the most common areas to foam roll is your IT. Even if you're relatively new to health and fitness, you've probably seen a foam roller and the probably the most common area that people have to foam roll is the IT, right? The side of your, it hurts the most, right? Right, right, right.

You feel either one, you're somebody who feels the pain in the front of your kneecap and that's related to the IT or you feel that in the hip and it feels like a sharp pain is, or knife is being stuck on the side of your hip. Now the reality of that is the foam roller is not fixing the problem. It's giving you temporary relief and so, oh my God, right, if you do it, it's like it feels better. But it's the movement patterns that's causing it to keep getting tight again.

And if you just foam roll it, you're going to be right back in that situation every single time you come back to work out again, unless you start to address move. And because of it, the most common, okay, even though there's always exceptions to the rule, but the most common thing that I've seen is related down into the foot ankle area, or all the way up into the hip area. Either one, their feet are pronating really bad, and they have limited ankle mobility and control. And so the femur is internally rotating, which is like twisting the IT band, like ringing it out and twisting it,

which is causing it to get really tight and knotted up and gives you that pulling sensation. Or it's the inability to control the hip through its full range of motion and just the muscles in that whole hip complex are being pulled and tightened because they're overworking because the hip's not moving properly.

And then that all leads to this knee pain problem. And it's not you have bad knees. I mean, how many times have you heard that? Oh, I can't do this because I have bad knees. Like, no, you don't have bad knees. It's everything that's around it that we're not taking care of. And so your knees are bothering you.

And so learning how to assess that. And this really was, I meant to me, you know, we talk a lot about the programs that we've created and the ones that like have made us most proud. And for sure, prime and prime pro for me are those programs because it just took a lot. It took a lot of thinking for us like, okay, now how do we take all the collection of experience that the three of us have of all the different types of bodies and issues and pain and so that people dealt with. Now how do we simplify this so we can help the average person that's suffering from this,

but then not oversimplify it that we're not doing much good whatsoever. That was where we had this idea of like, okay, what we're gonna do is, we're just gonna have a pass or fail type of test for every joint, the major joints, right? So we take you through seven of the major joints in the body that are most commonly causing dysfunction or aches and pains in the body. There's a test that's in it, and you do the test.

And we met it cut and dry, like we, I remember we went back, I remember arguing back up, oh, should we do, you score a seven or a 10? We a 10? No, you know what? Here's the deal. We're just going to make it very simple for people. They either can pass it with flying colors. They got great mobility. Well, there's work to do or there's work to do. And if it's so if you have, if you struggle with it, add in the slightest bit, there's always work to do. It's no matter how much work it needs to be done. If you can barely move it or do anything, there's a lot of work to be done.

So it's a passer fail. If you fail that joint area, oh, it looks like I have bad ankle mobility, then it points you in the direction of mobility movements that are specific to that joint to help that. And then the recommendation, obviously in the blueprints we tell everybody what to do, but then the recommendation that I normally give aside from our blueprints is, listen, this is going to seem overwhelming because a lot of people are going to feel so broke in the first time they do this because they're going to fail so many tests. So the idea is you pick a couple of these that are giving you the most relief or making

the most change. If you have low back pain, you have bad knees, you got neck, all the issues, pick a couple of the movements that are really going to alleviate that and practice them as much as you can. And we get a lot of questions about like the difference between the two programs. I think for me, it's more,

if you look at prime is more of a broad stroke. So now if it's not so obvious, like it's my ankle, that's the problem in like you go through the assessment and the seven different joints and you're going through that process in Prime Pro. But really, you're just going through our three movements that we've identified as our upper extremities, our torso and then our lower extremities and then how they all function and how they all do what they're supposed to do in movement and space.

And seeing that, oh my God, I can't reach my arm back as far as I could and I can't touch my elbow back. What does that mean? And why am I restricted and all that? So we had to try to make it because like we initially brought up in the beginning of this episode, a lot of people like, they just don't realize that these restrictions are going to become a problem. And so to be able to identify that and find the root of,

your movement issues is gonna be very beneficial for you to then bring back into working out. Well, there's a natural range of motion that your joints are supposed to have. The really is. And what I mean by supposed to have is not just that, it's not like I could just take Justin's arm and move it through this range of motion.

That's part of it, but really what it is is he should be able to do it himself. Control. He should not just be able to do it himself. It should feel strong and stable the entire way. Now think about it this way. Is there a position you can bend your body where it feels like if I just poke you

and push you a little bit, it's gonna tear a muscle or hurt you? That means you don't have control or strength in that particular range of motion, okay? You wanna have control and stability in all of the range of motions that your joints provide. That's what true mobility gives you. Now why should you prioritize that?

Like why should you prioritize that over the goals of fat loss and building muscle? I'll tell you, if you want to burn body fat on the most effective way possible, or you want to build muscle in the most effective way possible, you probably are going to exercise, okay? You're going to work out. You're going to use movements to get the body

to adapt and respond. Now, in order to utilize these movements effectively and to reap the potential benefits that these movements can provide you, you have to have good movement. Good movement is what makes a squat so damn effective. Bad movement is also what makes a squat so damn dangerous or any exercise for that matter.

Any exercise has the potential to have a certain level of effectiveness, and any exercise has a potential to be have a certain level of risk of injury. Your ability to move is what determines that. So if you wanna go into the gym or your garage or into your workout, and you wanna have an arsenal, you wanna have a full category of movements, and not only that, but you wanna be able to reap

the benefits of all of those exercises on your body. You have to be able to move well. If you can't move well, your arsenal shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, if your lower back prevents you from doing barbell squats, you can never reap the benefits of one of the best exercises for the lower body. If your shoulders prevent you from doing an overhead press because they hurt,

well now you can never reap the benefits of that phenomenal exercise. So that's why prioritizing movement is the most important thing, because if you wanna walk into your goals with all the tools you possibly have have that you can have at your disposal with all of the potential of those things can provide you you have to be able to move well and what you don't want to do is this

this is a big mistake a lot of people make they train for fat loss they train for muscle building and they never work on movement and as they get older more and more exercises get taken out of their arsenal. You know, oh, I used to be able to squat in my 20s. Now I can't, now I just leg press. Oh, I can't even leg press anymore. Now it's just leg extensions.

And before you know it, I can't even work out my legs anymore. But by the way, this is very common. So it's not just about what hurts me right now. It's about, do I want to be able to do these amazing exercises? And by the way, being able to do these amazing exercises, do you know what that means? You're gonna feel like when you're not working out? Amazing.

Yeah. That means you're gonna move around, you're gonna feel good, you're gonna move, you're gonna have all those abilities that you have right now. Absolutely. Well, talking about fat loss and muscle building, we touched it on this a little bit the other day when we talked about isometrics.

And there's that point, too, to be made, that the better that you can move, the more muscle fibers you can recruit to aid that movement and that exercise, which then results in more muscle and burning more body fat. Performance enhancement. Right, so the ability for you to connect,

and I did this in the webinar, right? So I think Sal was teasing me, right? I love when Adam talks sciencey. And this is just, I've, a part of what the success I've had as a personal trend, for sure, has been able to take really complex things like this and really simplify it for the average person. And it pisses academia off all the time

because I don't say it exactly how they want to or exaggerate something to make a point across. And I don't give a shit because my point is to help the average person really get grass the concept of something that is extremely complex and nuanced. And what we're talking about can be very complex and nuance, but a simple way that I explain to people, when we try to do one of these mobility exercises

and you can't perform it to a certain extent or you have limited range of motion. It's not just a muscle thing that's going on there. It starts on a neurological level, and Sal alluded to this earlier that the body is just going to take the easiest path, it's just going to, it's just designed to do function. If you stop doing something, it would not be advantageous for the brain to send neurons over to those muscles you're not using. It says, okay He's not using it. So let's pretend in a perfect world you can use everything right?

You're super limber. You're super strong everywhere the brain fires neurons to all these different muscles to activate and move around Well, as you get older and you stop using them you lose that you and it starts at the neurological level It says, okay, we used to use, let's just say for this argument, say, you used to use one million neurons to get the hand to be able to lift above the head. I no longer do that anymore. I haven't done that for 10 years. So now the body says, well, that's inefficient for me to send a bunch of neurons over to those muscles that aren't being used. Let's send them to other places of the body that we are using because it's more efficient to do that.

And so that's the connection that you lose. You think that what adapts as you work out are your muscles, which is true, but what Adam is saying is it's your brain and central nervous system that adapts, and just like your muscles can adapt in the opposite direction, where if I don't work out, my body will actually shrink my muscles. It'll adapt in the opposite direction, because it doesn't need to have this extra energy going to something that it's not using. Your body will actually do that with your brain and your central nervous system as well. It'll adapt in the opposite direction. Your body only is ever as good as it needs to be. It's never gonna be any better.

You ever see those videos of like, videos of kids who maybe they grew up and they didn't have any arms so they do everything with their feet. You ever see the articulation of their toes? Oh yeah, the dexterity that they have. They control, it's unreal. They can handle fork and spoon and breast or feet.

They can treat the cereal with their toes. All kinds of stuff with their toes. And you think yourself, well, that's crazy. Well, you are capable of that too. They just practiced and practiced and their brain and their central nervous system developed all the connections to be able to do that. Now, if they stopped doing that,

they would lose that ability as well. So a lot of the reasons why we have these mobility issues is we lose these connections. And a lot of the ways that you train in mobility is to regain these connections. You know lot of the ways that you train in mobility is to regain these connections. You know, I remember one of the first times we went to see Dr. Brink. Dr. Brink is a movement specialist

that actually helped us with maps prime pro because maps prime pro goes much more in depth with correctional exercise. And we went into a list, the help of somebody who we thought we really respected. And I remember we went to go see him and we did somebody who we thought, you know, we really respected. And remember, we went to go see him and we did, and he was walking us through the 1990 position, which if you don't know what that is,

you can go on our YouTube channel, we have videos on the now- I do this a year about to explain. I do this in the webinar too. Oh, and by the way, there's a webinar you can go and watch actually where Adam takes you through five of his favorite mobility movements. And Adam actually, he's an exceptional teacher because he's got phenomenal cues.

So I suggest everybody go check that out. That's a mind pump webinar dot com. But I went to go see Dr. Brink and he puts me in 1990 and he says, okay, now I want you without lifting your back knee up, I want you to take your foot off the floor. And I looked at him like you're crazy, that doesn't even exist. It would be like asking me to fly, like that movement, that connection doesn't exist.

I can't just do it. And he says, you have the range of motion, and I said, no, I don't, and he goes, yeah, you do. And he takes my foot, picks it up, rotates my back leg, my knee's still on the floor, and brings it up next to my head. Yeah, you can touch the back of your head with it. And you know, it's weird, I looked back,

and it felt like a dummy foot. It was like somebody grabbed someone else's foot and put them, it didn't even feel like it was mine. It just sawed your leg off. It did not feel like it was mine. It was a very strange feeling. The reason why it felt so weird is because I had zero connection to that movement.

I had no central nervous system connection. Now, the muscles exist that could do it. I still have them to that movement. I had no central nervous system connection. Now the muscles exist that could do it. I still have them on my body. So the muscles can do it, but there's no signal. There's no instructions coming from my brain. So how do I gain that? How do I gain that connection?

Through practice, through mobility, through trying to connect to those ranges of motion. And when it's up happening, it's little by little by little. I start to be able to control that weird range of motion that I felt so strange. And to that point, that brings me to the next thing that's important is the frequency of it.

Is because, and I love you, I'm glad you went that way because it transitions perfect into what I want to explain is that you take something like that, somebody who can't, because I was in the same boat as Sal, I couldn't even get my leg to move. Like I remember we were all together and bring said to do this, and I was just like, yeah, not happening. Like it just, there's, there's,

there's, it's not even, it's not even not happening. Like I don't even feel, you don't even know how to make it. Yeah, exactly. It just feels so foreign to me, but here's the thing like, and what he would do is he would, he would lift it a little bit off the ground, and then, you know, try and get you to hold it there, and then it was like hovering by an inch

And then I'd start to kind of feel something but it just it took Practice of doing that every day three four times a day and then before you knew it it went from I couldn't move it to now I could kind of move it and activate it Then it was like I could lift it an inch and then two inches and then three and then before you knew it I could lift that thing off by a foot off the ground Something that I had no control whatsoever But it was the the amount of frequency that I was doing it It wasn't like I did two mobility sessions or saw a break three or four times and then all sudden

I've got this great control my hips like no I had to really like learning a language again I had to practice and practice and practice and practice and get this connection going before I could really start to improve on it, but holy shit, once I did, it was a game changer for me on the relief that I got. Yeah, so to put it plainly, rather than doing one hour mobility workout twice a week, which that'll bring you value, okay? I'm not gonna lie, that'll still bring you lots of value. You're better off doing, you know, four, 30 minute sessions in the week, or even better, eight, 15 minute sessions, or in the same total time.

Just practice, practice, practice. I've had probably the best response from clients that have taken it into chunks like that, where they do 10 minutes, they do 15 minutes, and it's very specific to their individual issues. And that's why the assessment part is so vital to then being able to create this sort of ritual

that you just plan it out to do whenever you're brushing your teeth or you're watching TV or you're just doing your regular everyday activities, but now you just put that in there as a new thing. Right, so let me break it down, right? So here's what you're looking to do. First off, strength is a function of both muscle and the central nervous system. Central nervous system sends this signal.

If the signal is loud, you're going to be stronger than if it's weak, and of course, you're going to be stronger than if it's non-existent. The muscle itself is what performs the movement, and the bigger it is, the stronger it is. Okay, so when we're doing mobility, step one is just to get a connection. That's all we're trying to do. I'm trying to get, I can't even focus on building the muscle doesn't get a build because there's no connection whatsoever. So step one is getting a connection.

The best way to get a connection is to practice a lot frequently, not hard, not long. In fact, if you sit there and practice for three hours, you're gonna get worse and worse at it. Practice it frequently. 15 minutes every single day is better than, like I said, an hour twice a week. Even if you add up the same amount of time,

it's that frequency that, because you're gonna get more, you're always practicing getting connected. Then as you get connected, you practice on developing a solid connection. Then when you have a really solid connection, okay, fine, you have, now you have a solid connection

to internal hip rotation that you didn't have before. All right, you wanna build really big internal rotators on your hips? Now you could train it more traditionally where you train with resistance and that kind of stuff. But that's different. Now you go do your squats, your dead lifts, and stuff like that.

But if you want to improve mobility, you got to work on connection and frequency is king. So that's the way you treat this type of training. It's not like you're normal training. You're not doing this for an hour at a time. Now the mobility webinar that Adam does, he takes you through full, a full hour because he's teaching you how to do all these things.

But what you should do is take movements specific to your body, practice them every single day. And now this is where Maps Prime came in. The priming concept is at the bare minimum, what you should do is at least prime the areas that you have deficiencies in before you go into lift weights and potentially make that worse. So for example, if you're somebody who is rounded shoulders and forward head, and I love to pick this one because I know fucking everybody listening, this is you, all of us are.

And it's just how- You're not seeing these as podcasts like that right now. Yes, right? So at the bare minimum, you before, okay, if you're not going to spend an hour long session or doing it three times a day for 15 minutes of the bare minimum before you go lift weights and potentially make a postural deviation worse, you prime yourself to at least get you into a more optimal position. I'm gonna go over and do like band pull-aparts or seated row type movements. And what I'm doing is I'm waking up all those muscles in my upper back that are responsible for pulling my shoulder girdle back, which is where I wanna be before I go do an overhead press,

before I do a bench press, before I do any of these pushing movements in front of my body that could make the patterns worse if I don't address. At the bare minimum, I want to prime that. Now in a perfect world, you do those things. And then in addition, you have these little mobility moves that you're sprinkling throughout your day and workout all the time. And then you can progress over time.

That's a good way to look at it is really cementing your optimal posture. Before you get to loading all the joints, you want to make sure that you are a nice rigid structure, everything is stacked properly and then you go in to do your major lifts and there's 100% less likelihood that something bad is going to happen or you're going to perform a lot better too, having everything aligned properly. Yeah, it's like when you were trying to client and you'd going to perform a lot better to having everything aligned properly. Yeah, it's like when you would train a client and you'd have them do a cable row and you'd say, pull your shoulders back and they'd be like, I am, you're like, no, you're not.

And then all you would do sometimes is you touch the mid back and you let them have that feedback. They'd feel it. And then, oh, there it is. Now I can get the good form. What priming is doing, Adam uses the term waking up. I'm sure there's some, you know, some some academics like, oh, there it is. Now I can get the good form. What priming is doing, Adam uses the term waking up. I'm sure there's some, you know, some, some academics like, oh, the muscles aren't right way.

I know, they hate that one. Uh, what's happening is you're, you know what it's supposed to feel like. That's what priming does. You know now because I'm doing these movements that are activating. Now I know what the position feels like. Now I can go into the exercise with proper positioning.

Good priming just destroys what a warmup typically does. A warmup just gets you to move and okay, I feel better, maybe a little more limber or whatever. Priming allows you to perform your exercises much better. And remember, somebody who deadlifts well is gonna build more muscle and strength than someone who deadlifts poorly. And what's gonna help ensure that you do the deadlift better

or the bench press better or whatever lifting you do better, proper priming. Well, I remember the evolution of this as a trainer too. Like, before I understood priming and mobility, I understood that we have overactive and underactive muscles and I have tight muscles that I want less tight, right? So that was the beginning of the trainer. So what I would find out,

so I remember when I first started doing like assessments and posture and knowing that, okay, a lot of people have these rounded shoulders. Okay, if you have rounded shoulders, the chest is tight and the shoulder, the front shoulder or your anterior delt is tight, right? That's part of what's causing this rounding forward because you use it so much, it's overactive, it's tight. And so as a young

trainer, my way of addressing that was, oh, I have this client that's told, so I'm going to stretch the chest and stretch the shoulders before I do a workout. That was like very typical of most trainers. That was the level of understanding of what they needed to do. And it wasn't until later in my career that I understand that I couldn't stop there. I couldn't just stretch and relax the tight muscles. If I didn't train the antagonist muscles, the ones on the back side that are responsible

for pulling the shoulders back, otherwise all I did was kind of relax the shoulder and chest a little bit, and then I go right into an exercise, and I still are gonna have poor mechanics. What I really needed to do, and what actually allowed me to completely eliminate the stretching the chest and shoulder part,

was just focusing on the muscles that were dormant, needed to wake up, the pattern that was... Whatever you wanna say. Yeah, whatever you wanna say to appease everybody, I needed to get those primed and working and firing and those would hold me in that position when I go to do an exercise like a bench press. And so I then eliminated these static stretches

I was doing with clients like, oh, you know, go against the bench press and hold the chest open stretch for the 15, 30 seconds, go to the other side. Yeah, drop the head below the shoulder stretch, stretch the shoulders out, 30 seconds, go to the other side. Yeah, drop the head below the shoulder, stretch the shoulders out. Okay, now go to bench press. No, all I had to do was take that person through band pull-aparts and rows, and not only to that kind of open the chest

and stretch it out naturally, because you're doing a row, but then it also primed all those muscles that I need to be firing and strong and active before I go into a chest. Whatever movement you train is the movement you strengthen. And if your movement is bad, you are strengthening bad movements. The bottom line is this, okay.

I know mobility isn't, it's sexy is telling you to train your butt or your delts or your chest, but here's the bottom line. If you prioritize it, you will develop muscle faster. And indirectly it will cause you will develop muscle faster. Indirectly, it will cause fat burn to happen faster. And from an aesthetics standpoint, a body that moves

well is put together better and gives you better aesthetics. So all of you who are interested in just getting better performance, looking better and looking sexier and all that stuff, you still need to make mobility a priority. And with that, go to mindpumpfree.com and download all of our guides and resources. You can also find the three of us on Instagram. You can find Justin at Mind Pump, Justin, me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy

and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at MindPumpMedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps and a ballad, maps performance, and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased, expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels and performs. With detailed workout blueprints in over 200 videos, the RGB Superbundle is like having foul Adam and Justin as your own personal trainer's butt at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle has a full 30-day money bag guarantee and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at

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