All right, welcome, everybody. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Let me get this meeting room set up for all of us. Let me turn that off and met all what is going on? Some familiar faces. A lot of new faces today. Awesome. I guess not even faces, just names. Lot of videos are off. You can choose to leave it on or off. It's always cool seeing faces. So I'm not having a total one on one conversation with myself. Here. Welcome everybody. Welcome to our live group coaching call, we're going to get rocking and rolling in just a minute. Let me just set up this meeting room, and while I get this set up, why don't you share in the chat? Is this anybody's first time here today? Had a lot of people join this program in the past week, so I'd imagine we're going to get quite a number of new people. Yeah, you can leave it in the chat. Let me make sure we are recording for the people who can't make it. Everybody can hear me, Okay, coming through. All right. Beautiful, awesome Gordon. First time. Welcome Anna, new to this program. Oh, from last week's hip class. Yeah. How many people are here from the hip challenge? That was, yeah, that was, that was a big group and a great crowd. So, so awesome, seeing everybody here from that. Oh, yeah, first time. Gail, awesome, awesome. Well, welcome, welcome, welcome everybody. Let's just get this thing. I want to make sure, okay, it looks like we are recording. Okay, well, let's go ahead and just get this thing rocking and rolling for those of you. I hope everybody knows me by now, but if you don't, my name is Vinnie, founder of pain Academy. I'm going to be running our group call today. You know, I'm going to start this meeting off like I've started every meeting off for past, almost going on three and a half years, doing these weekly group coaching calls, which is, I host these to help you. My My number one intention of these is to just help and, you know, I, I wish somebody would have just sat down with me to go over a lot of this information. There are a lot. There's already 46 people on the call. Might get up to 100 200 people, which means there's a lot of questions that were submitted ahead of time. I'm going to do my best. Sometimes I like to group a lot of questions because really they're almost all the same. What do I do if an exercise hurts? How do we change this exercise? When can I get back to doing the things I love? I mean, there's a lot of common denominator questions that so many of you are asking in your own ways. So I might not word the question exactly how you asked it, but just try to listen for Oh, yeah. Does this kind of make sense with something that I asked? That being said, sometimes it's just not possible to get to every single question. Maybe the question that you asked was too vague, like sometimes, some people write in and say, Tell me your thoughts on fibromyalgia. Well, I've got a lot of thoughts. What do you want to know? So sometimes, maybe the questions are too vague. Maybe sometimes they're so specific that it's just too heavy to address in a group setting, so I really tried to pull the questions that I think are going to be the most valuable for the most amount of people on this call. I would also ask

that, you know, if I answer your question right away, please stick around. I promise you that somebody. Is asked a question that you might not have actually thought about asking yourself, yet, it massively helps you link some very vital information. So try to stick around for the full call. I also want to be really sensitive to maybe sitting around for a full call for an hour doesn't feel good. I've been there. I've been I've been trapped inside of that body and that problem for a while. So I also want to offer to anybody who wants to just put me on audio and get into neutral position, which is laying on your back with your legs over a couch or a chair, find the easiest, most comfortable way to be here, so that way you can stick with me for as long as possible. I think, I think that's it. You know, if I don't get to your question, it's not despite you, like I said, it just might be a volume question. So please reach out to my team, because we're here to help you, if your question does not get answered in this course. So that being said, let's go ahead and just dive in. We've got a lot of things to cover. I'm going to tackle the more so like program lifestyle questions first, and then I'm going to get into exercise modifications. So that being said, let me pull up my list of pre submitted questions. Probably the question that's on everybody's mind, and I was shocked, only one person asked it this go around is, how long does it take to see progress? And I've been doing this now as a corrective exercise specialist for close to 14 years. I have a textbook answer for that. I could tell you that, on average, it takes a couple days for the nervous system to start changing. I can tell you that it takes a couple weeks to a few months for the muscular system to start changing. And I could tell tell you with a high level of certainty, it takes anywhere from three to six months to get the deeper layers of soft tissue, like the tendons and the ligaments and the fascia to really respond in meaningful ways. So I could, from a textbook perspective, say three to six months. Maybe it's faster for you. Maybe it's two to three times longer. What determines your speed of change is not just the severity of your problem, how severe it is, not just but but also, how long is this problem taken to develop? How strong are your adaptations? How long has your connective tissue and your neuromuscular system had time to adapt to whatever's going on with your body, right? My answer for how long this takes for somebody who's been dealing with the problem for a few years, versus somebody who's been dealing with it for three decades, that it could be the same problem we're just looking at different time spans. And the other reason why that's a hard question to answer is because it also depends on you. What is your relationship with your body? What is your ability to be consistent? What are your coping mechanisms even outside? Let's even let's put a pause and a pin in the physiological processes going on with your body. What is your ability to cope with trauma and stress? How are the important relationships in your life? What is your ability to be consistent when you are consistent and you start to feel better? Is that your first sign of okay? Now I can stop doing my exercises because I feel better. You know? Who are you as a person? This person attached to the body. All of these things massively influence your timetable in terms of how long it takes to get better. So if I thought it could be done in a couple weeks, the program would only be a couple weeks. If what we're doing here, if your North Star is to not just get out of pain, but learn how to fundamentally change your relationship with your body and build a movement practice that gives back to you. Let's look at this as not how long will it take to get results, but what skills can I acquire over the next year? How can I learn how to work with my body? What kind of progress can I make within a year, and it's really interesting when we can shift some of our like deep intentions of doing this. It's like our relationship with needing to get better, it kind of relaxes, and that, ironically, actually helps us get better faster, instead of really trying to force something to happen fast. So that was a really long winded way of saying it depends. And any expert will tell you with a high level of certainty, it depends, depends on your physiology, and it depends on you as a person, and how you approach this. You know, I'll tell everybody that the exercises that didn't work for me were. The same exercises that ended up working for me. It took me five years to figure this stuff out, because I kept getting in my own way. I had a really terrible relationship with my body. Nobody taught me how to work with pain. My only skill, my only tool, was to push through it. My only way was when I felt bad and when I was sad or depressed and in pain and I felt my body was holding me back. Do you think I treated myself with love and kindness and exercises? No, I pushed myself harder. I took out a lot of the frustration I was having with my body on myself. So no wonder

why things didn't get better for the longest time, because I was fighting my nervous system. And when you fight your nervous system, when you view your body as the problem, when you view your pain as the problem, I want you to 2x or 3x or 5x how long this process is going to take because you don't look at your body as an ally. You look at it as something that you have to beat or conquer or push and force your way through. And that just might sound like a lot of word salad. That might not be real to you, but what is real to you is in this program you are going to run into a dysfunction of yours. Maybe a dysfunction is your hip won't rotate, maybe it's your back won't bend, maybe it's your shoulder can't reach overhead. Maybe it's all of those things for you, this program in the way that it's built is going to have you run into whatever limiting dysfunction is showing up with your movement, how you mentally and physically and emotionally approach that dysfunction is going to determine how fast, how, how much faster you get better it's going to determine the speed of progress? Are we going to barrel through and just create massive symptoms and flare ups, or are we going to learn to gently ease our way through this and work with our body? One of them is going to get you much better, faster results than the other. Hopefully that makes sense. That could be the entire workshops conversation, but we got a lot to get through, so I'm going to keep going. Next question, which I thought was going to be very valuable to answer for the majority of you, which is, hey, then just starting my movement program, should I stop or continue my yoga once a week? Let's make this more helpful for everybody here. What this person is asking is, should I do anything different in my life? I just started the movement program. What should What else should I go change? One of the biggest common denominators of people who come to me looking for help is and I also putting myself in this category too. This is why it took so long to get better, you're starting and stopping so many different things at the same time. You don't know when you're better, why when you're flared up? You don't know. And because there are so many variables changing, that means that you don't know what to do to continue results when things don't work. We don't know what to subtract from our life. And so begins the cycle of just chronic inflammation and pain and the injury cycle perpetuates. So we have to be a scientist if we're going to solve whatever problem that brought you here. We have to be very we have to be very controlled in what we're changing. If you just started this program, don't do anything else different, because if you stop doing your yoga, if you stop playing golf or pickleball or taking your dog on walks, whatever it is, and you start pain Academy, those are two changes. Are you better because you started my program or because you stopped doing the other thing? Maybe, if you getting better is all you care about. It doesn't matter. But how long are you going to stay better? If you don't know why things are better, I want you to change one thing at a time. Don't do anything else different. Keep your activity level as close to the same as it was before starting this program. Do these pain Academy routines, and then use all of the other activities as your control group for the person who just wrote in that does yoga once a week, keep going to that yoga class. Notice if using that yoga class. Notice if your range of motion changes. Notice if your ability to recover changes. Your speed of recovery, notice if your strength and stability. The mobility starts to improve, and when that happens, we can have some really clear information. Well, the only thing I did different was start this rehabilitative restorative program. We can almost be more sure that we're on the right track. Does that make sense? I hope it does same thing for lifting weights. You know, the only thing that I would actually recommend people not do while doing this program is do one rep max training, which is really heavy loads in the gym. I don't think many people are doing that by the time they get into this program, because the compensation and dysfunction is usually strong enough to where we don't want to do that. So as long as you're not frying your central nervous system, and you're completely pushing yourself to your full capacity, as long as you're not doing that, keep doing all of the activities that you're doing, even if it's chiropractic, even if it's PT or massage, keep doing those modalities and notice if you need them less, right? Maybe before joining this program, you were literally counting down the minutes until your next Cairo appointment. And maybe now you kind of have this feeling of, maybe I don't need to go three times a week. Maybe I'm actually okay doing two times a week. So again, to be concise, keep living life the way you are, I believe in healing through addition. Let's add things to your life to make them better. Let's not take away things and change too much at once.

Hopefully that makes sense. Next question, what is a good indicator of progress to be able to take more physically intense activities like dancing, Zumba, cardio flow, yoga. This is, this is a a hard question to answer because there are so many variables so, so let's try to streamline this and make it simple. You'll know when it's time to start doing more when you feel like the basics are getting better. For example, if you join the program and like this was your squat, a basic motion. If that's not better, let's not go do more intense activities. Let's wait until Oh, okay, I'm feeling like my squat is getting a little better. My body's responding. I'm getting a little stronger and more mobile. I'm feeling comfortable with the program now I think I'm physically more capable of handling a little bit more so either and that same goes for any of the functional tests, like bending forward, single leg stands. So when your basic movement patterns get better, that can be a sign of maybe it's time to start adding a little bit more exercise into your life. And when we're very controlled, if you all of a sudden add a bunch of Zumba and things flare up again, we're not changing too much at once. You've got your stable movement practice with my program. Now you can start to see how other things impact you. The second sign, a good indicator that you're ready for more, is when you're consistent. So this is not even a physiological question. This is a when you as a human being, can show up to the rehab exercises consistently. That means that you're capable of doing the basics daily. So when you can be consistent and your body can move on a daily basis, and that's okay, and that's accessible for you, then it could be time for let me go, add a little bit of a longer walk. Let me go back to the gym. Let me go try a group fitness class. That could be a good indicator, because the basics are there. But when you're not consistent, all of a sudden, adding a lot of intensity is probably not going to help, because you're just going to stress the foundation that you have, which is a foundation that lacks consistency. So consistency is really important. And the third thing is, when you can manage your stress, I'm going to try not to go off on a tangent here. I'm not again, look the science, and the data is clear. Exercise can be very helpful for us. Exercise can be very healthy. There are a lot of physiological benefits when we start exercising. But the thing that we have to understand is we've invented exercise because we don't move a lot on our daily basis, on our day to day lives. So this idea of us having to go exercise is to make up for the fact that we don't move enough on a day to day basis. We're not getting enough movement in so therefore, let me go join a facility or gym and go put a lot of. Movement into my day, into really small window of time. And the number one misunderstood thing about exercise is that it's stress. That's what we're doing. Exercise is stressing the body to elicit a change. You stress the body with weights. We get stronger. We stress the body with cardio our cardiovascular system changes. So exercise is an A really good interchangeable word with stress. So the question that we're really trying to ask is, when can your body handle more stress and the challenging part of that question is movement can help us handle stress, right? If you've ever had a bad day, if you've gotten to a fight with a loved one, if your boss is really frustrating, you sometimes getting a workout in and getting exercise in can help us alleviate a lot of that stagnant energy. So sometimes adding stress to the body can relieve of can relieve us of stress, and other times adding stress to a stressed out body sends us into the next injury. So there is a dance between us and stress and exercise, and it is a dance, and sometimes we step on our partner's toes, sometimes we overly stress and exercise our body on days that we should rest, some day, sometimes on days that we need exercise, we end up choosing rest and vice versa. This is a process that is going to take time for you to figure out. When are the days that I should stress my system and when are the days that I need to rest and recover? That could be a whole group chat. So I'm going to try to keep the basic simple. Somebody asked a really important question, so I hope that makes sense before I move on. This next person writes in that, you know, they understand the movement program as one full year. However, they're just starting out. It seems each week only has five days. So this is the fifth version of this online program that I've run. First version came out in 2017 I've had about 16,000 people go through this program. That's a lot, that's a lot of data. And with that data has come a very deep understanding. That's a large sample size. So I get to see from the back end how large groups of people go through a program like this. And one of the things that I've learned is back in the first version, you had seven days each routine you did seven times before moving on to the next seven days in a row. Well, as a

corrective exercise specialist, this makes sense, consistency, consistency, right? Every day as a human being, that doesn't really make sense for a lot of people. Sometimes you just have an off day. Sometimes it's the weekend. Sometimes you're tired from your your eight to six, you know, your 40 hour a week job that you got to commute to and take lunch break. You know, sometimes just doing something every single day is emotionally a lot. And what I found by asking people to do my stuff every day is people did it and then burned out, even though I was checking the mark in a textbook that shows our system usually responds best to movement every day, I ignored the human condition, which is people need a little bit of room to breathe. And when I had a seven day a week program, oh my god, if somebody missed a day, they felt like the program would move on without them. They felt behind. They felt like they didn't have a good week. And so what people did is they stopped. They didn't progress. They would just go try and get that weekend again. And then people got stuck in this trap of just to be consistent every day. They would never get out of phase one. So a few years ago, I switched it to five rounds a week, and the mass amount of people progressed so much more gracefully and better because I accounted for allowing two days off, and those two days are your choice. And if you don't want to take two days off, right, if I've got five rounds, and you do every round, Monday through Friday, and you feel like something's missing in your day, if you don't get your routine in and your movement, if you rely on this to feel better, cool, start, start the next week round on Saturday, you're not going to go by weeks. You're just going to do around a day. But I want you to be as flexible as possible, because this is a life. Long skill that I'm teaching you, which is how to show up long term. So it I only ask people to do five days a week if you want to do more than that great, but don't do it to where you burn out, because that's not going to help you a year from now, and if my goal is to help you be better next year, in five years, 1015, 20 years, it's about learning how to dose this and be sustainable and not have this almost like rigid OCD approach. With this kind of with your body and with your movement, there should be a little bit of flexibility. Be rigid in your game plan to work on your body every week, and sometimes those weeks are going to look a little different. Sometimes you might get seven days in. Sometimes you just might get three or four. And that's got to be okay, so try not to put too much emphasis and pressure on never missing a day. It just tends to create so much friction in this process of restoring your body and your nervous system. Next question, Vin, when you were rehabbing, when did you incorporate regular exercise into your pain Academy type structure, or did you just do the PA type therapy? How did you know when to do more? So I fell under this, it's, it's a little bit of a loaded question, because for the first few years of me doing this therapy, I was only doing phase one type stuff. I never did phase two, which for the for everybody who's News New here. Let me just remind you phase one is like basic foundation. It's simple. Let's just target certain areas of the body and get them to work better. Phase two is doing that, but a little bit beefed up. It's a little bit harder. Routines are a little bit longer. Phase three, four and five are about adding more and more challenge to the body. Phase three is about more muscles and nerves working together. I miss that part. So for the first couple years my therapy, I was just doing phase one and phase two stuff, which was good, right? It took me from this chronic state of disability. I really don't want to be dramatic here, but you know, it felt like life was like I was living at a constant eight or nine out of the one out of 10 pain scale. So things were bad, and phase one or two got me down to like, four or five. I wasn't pain free yet by doing phase one and phase two stuff. I was better. I could like work more consistently. I could maybe take my ex wife now, ex wife, you know, I could maybe take her out on dates. I could maybe hold my son sometimes and play with him. I wasn't great, but I was okay. I was better. And why things were so stagnant for years for me was because of my mindset of being terrified to go into strength. Strength scared the hell out of me, because if I felt bad now, right
a four or five, oh, my God. The thought of doing more strength movement, the thought of even trying to develop, you know, an ability to squat and be comfortable if this hurts now, well, I need to wait for my body to feel better before I go do phase three, phase four and Phase Five movements. And that is the trap that I got stuck in for years. I was waiting to be pain free, to go work out and emotionally, that makes sense, especially when you're faced with maybe a life changing injury, or maybe you don't have a life changing injury, maybe your body just hurts, which could be life changing. You know,

I was just under the impression that, like, I had to be better before I got stronger, and I was stuck for years in that mindset. And it wasn't until I understood I'm not better because I'm not stronger, that's when I started to really ramp up and figure out, what are the next levels of this kind of therapy. You know, if I thought phase one and two was enough, the program would just be phase one and two, but I thought a couple months was enough, it'll only be a few months. So what you're going to find as you go into phase three and four and five is more intense exercise, and if you've had a chronic problem with your body, I want to at least acknowledge emotionally why you might have just recoiled saying more intensity. I'm scared. What if my arthritis gets worse? What if my fibromyalgia gets worse? What if my all of these conditions I need you to understand. Understand that. Number one, it's normal to fear more challenge, because if your life is already challenging, the thought of doing more just probably sounds like an overload, and we're going to work through that. This is how the mindset, this is the human condition, part of this that we have to acknowledge. And it makes perfect sense if you have a history of chronic pain, and when I say a history, I mean more than just a few months, if you have a long standing history of you've hurt yourself in the gym, when you go to work out, when you've done intense things, they've an injury has always followed. That's a very strong conditioning that we have to break, because that's just how things were in the past. That doesn't mean that's what's going to happen this time. So when did I know? I knew it was time to do more when I was just kind of hovering around a four out of five. That's what I knew. And I just wasn't. I was better, but I wasn't getting better. I just kind of reached this plateau. And whenever you reach a plateau, that's typically sign. It's a sign to do more. Being pain free is not always a sign to do more. So hopefully that makes sense. I'm seeing it does in the chat. Again, that could be a really lengthy conversation, but I want to keep it concise right now. Next person asks, Would you recommend barefoot shoes with a wide toe box to help mobility and balance issues? AB so lutely, 100% where where can I find them? I can't find any right now, there have been so many studies done on shoes and the impact that shoes, the negative impact that shoes have on our body. And I'm going to give you the quick basics of it, very counterintuitive studies like they studied, they put pressure sensors on joints and had people run without shoes and with shoes, which group had more pressure and stress and shock on the joints? The group with the three $400 cushiony Nike shoes, or the barefoot shoes, the barefoot runners had less impact on their joints than the thick shoe runners, which made no sense on the surface, until you understand that. Think about this. If imagine doing cursive, right? You're signing your name, and you're using all of these fine little little motor controls, because you can feel the pen and the paper. Now, imagine putting on a thick glove, thick enough like, Okay, this doesn't count. These are cycling shoes, but even these are small, most shoes have probably double this heel. Imagine putting on a glove that's this thick and then asking yourself to write again. What is your ability to feel your motor control? It's going to be significantly less. So you're going to grip that pen harder to be able to control it. A thick shoe. You have to push into the ground harder to feel the ground. It does it absorb the immediate impact, maybe a little bit. But when we're wearing shoes, we're not just trying to absorb impact. You also have to push through the shoe to feel the ground. It's called ground reaction force. So you can then take the next step. The less the shoe, the better, the more movement, the more you get to feel the ground, the more you get to wake up all of these little arch and toe muscles, which are only going to help. Now the problem is it's like you got to learn how to get into barefoot shoes. So I was always a shoe guy until I read the Harvard research paper that was proposed by Professor Daniel Lieberman, who studies running ergonomics. And I was always a shoot guy until that paper came out. So what I immediately did is I threw out my shoes and I bought vivo barefoot shoes and zero running shoes, X, E, R, O, and, you know, I was running five to 10 miles at this point. I did a two mile run in barefoot shoes, and I had to walk down the stairs backwards for a week. My body had no ability to move after wearing these barefoot shoes because all of like, these little nuance forces and impact vectors that hit the soft tissue structures. They were so not used to that much load because the shoe was dampening a lot of the problems that the barefoot shoes exposed, a lot of weaknesses. Yeah. Patty Born to Run. That book absolutely motivated. That book got me into running. It was awesome. So, so yeah, so check out barefoot shoes. The more your feet can move, the better period. Next

question, Can you recommend a way to sit and read in bed that is consistent with healthy posture and alignment? So this could be a loaded question, but let me make this simple, because you can take what I'm about to share with you and apply it to anything lifting in the gym. Positions in the gym, sitting, standing, whatever. Okay, so the question here is, what is the best position to do something in posture therapy, biomechanic Myth number one, there is no best position. Posture is just position. So like right now, as I'm sitting down doing this whole lesson in a deep squat, my body's making a shape. I'm in a deep squat. If I'm going to sit further on the ground, my body's going to make another shape. And then when I have one leg out, my body's making a shape. Maybe I'm going to spend a couple minutes like this, maybe it's a couple minutes like this. There is no perfect position. The best position is all of them. The only time a position becomes a problem is when you can no longer get out of it, right? So think about the desk worker who's hunched over their heads forward. There's nothing wrong with this position. There's nothing wrong at all. Any position your body goes into is a position your body was designed and fully capable to go into where position becomes a problem is when your body can no longer get out of it. So it's when your positionality gets stuck. That's when posture becomes very problematic. So to answer this question, on a, on a, on a much more thorough, holistic level, I want to bring up a study that was done so we can then answer this. There was a study done on Westerners that looked at how many different positions people in developed countries sit in. So when we sit and work in a chair, there's really only a handful of positions. Right? They're sitting on both legs. There's maybe crossing one leg. Sometimes we cross the other leg. Sometimes we lean over, sometimes we lean over minimal right in hunter gatherer tribes, they studied positions people worked in, and found that, because they don't have these nice, ergonomic working chairs, people sat in over 100 different positions throughout the day, constantly moving their body around. So it's not the position that's the problem. It's the lack of positions that's the problem. So for the people who are reading, you probably have your reading chair that you go to every time your body is not getting better at changing positions, it's just getting better at staying in that one position. So when it comes time to read you, changing positions is the best position. Let me make that real for you. Probably a lot of this is going to look uncomfortable right now, but the only level of discomfort that's going to show up is because your body might not be able to change positions. This is a position, and it's a position babies go into because it lengthens all of these front tight hip muscles and ab muscles and opens up the back you reading a couple pages lying face down your stomach, rolling over, reading a couple pages. Maybe trying the other which also stretches the shoulder and lengthens the side, hip and spine muscles, maybe rolling over. The other way, maybe you sitting upright with your left leg out, reading a page or two, and then the right leg out, and then left leg crossed over the right you see what we're doing here is we're doing a thing that you're already doing. You're just trying to change positions. And if we can get you better at changing positions in normal, routine activities, guess who's going to have a better time changing positions in the real world, because that's all movement is. Movement is just your ability to change positions. And when you have a hard time moving, you've lost that ability to change positions. So the best way to sit, the best way to stand, the best way to lift weights, is not this rigid. Perfect. Everything looks great. It's esthetic, it's biomechanically optimized. It's actually variety. Lift with great, great form, lift lightly with bad form. Challenge the way that your body lifts, because not every time, one of the number one ways people get injured, and these are, like, avid gym goers who are strong, right? If your only way that you lift is always in this, like, optimal, ideal thing, but then all of a sudden, one day you gotta go, like, lift a couch like this, and your body's not used to it. That's how injuries happen. Is because we no longer move in dynamic ways. We're always so concerned about doing something right or wrong that we close ourself off to the idea that movement's very natural. Movement should be very fluid. Movement is not rigid. The way that you sit should have movement in it. It shouldn't be this, you know, rigid, stuck position that never changes. And so the question is really not about, what is the best way to sit or sleep or stand or read, write, draw. That's not the question. The question is, is, how can we do it in more positions so I can get used to it? You know, when you look at I took this course a long time ago, it was a DNS course that that talks about human movement progression, how we develop as human beings and little babies.

Infants, they go through very specific movement patterns. Look at them. They're moving around so much, it's their concentrated movement that then gives them the core stability and strength to go do other things. Babies don't have world class, expensive coaches. They're incredible movers because they move often. So that's really the answer. There's no right way to sit. There's no wrong way to sit. But if we can have movement, that's going to be the best way to do it. And maybe for you, movement is setting like a little alarm clock every 10 minutes. You know, put a glass of water on a counter in the kitchen. Don't have it by you. So you're shortening, you're lessening the movement. Get up and go grab that glass of water. Create some more movement in your day, and that should help. Okay, that was a tangent. Let's, let's keep moving this forward. Somebody says, Can you please show me where the hip flexors are? Is it one muscle or a system of muscles? I've got a really simple diagram. This is your hip flexor, your iliopsoas and your iliacus. Really big muscles to show you. Probably a more important view is, let me see the side view. Side view is probably going to be the most helpful. Basically, it's the front of the body. Now the thing that we need to understand the biggest problem and the reason why I was really hesitant on even showing this book, but I figured the only thing that would make it okay, this is your hip flexor from the side view, right? So this is our lower back. This is our pelvis in our hip. Our hip flexor attaches to the bottom four or five vertebrae. Some of you have six it attaches to the bottom third of the spine, wraps in front and through the pelvis, around the front and attaches to the front of the hip. This, in isolation, is a very big muscle. But the problem with looking at what I'm showing you is this is Western medicine. The only reason why we know what this muscle looks like is because we've dissected cadavers and we've looked at non living systems to see the parts and the pieces. This diagram is not going to help you, because this is not how the body works. The brain does not talk to a hip flexor. The brain talks to dozens of muscles. For a hip flexor to work, 58 muscles in the hip, pelvis and spine also have to work and disengage, and there's muscles in the shoulders and the knees and the ankles that are all primed to create movement patterns and the biggest thing that we need to move away from. And trust me, this was so hard for me, too. By the time I got to the therapy that I'm now teaching you, I knew this book like the back of my hand, inside and out almost every single muscle, it's individual function. It's targeted action, how it works in isolation? This is what my education required me to know. Because this is what was on the exams. I knew the anatomy so intimately, yet I couldn't bend over. I could name every muscle in the body, yet I couldn't hold my son because. Because the knowledge of the individual muscles is not what gets you better. You training movement patterns is what gets you better. So at some point, this is really great to teach professionals on gross anatomy, but this information does not equate to you living the life that you want. If anything, it causes you to look at the body through a little keyhole and just chase problem after problem. One expert's gonna say it's your hip flexor. The other one's gonna say it's the glute med, Nope, it's the piriformis. No, it's the SI joint. It's just pieces and pieces and pieces and oh my god, it's so damn expensive to get. Not a lot of help. Your body doesn't work in muscles. It works in movement patterns. This is how the brain and the nervous system communicates. It's almost like trying to isolate an emotion of sadness. It's always a function of something else. And this is how the body works too. All right, I think I've got a couple more use case questions, and then we'll get into some modifications. So this person writes in I'm hearing a lot about gluteal tendinopathy. I can relate. I'm wondering what my thoughts are. Look gluteal tendinopathy, or any kind of tendinopathy, is essentially an irritation or degeneration of the tendons that connect the muscles to the bones, right? That's what tendons are. They're the part that connects the muscle to the bone. And tendinopathy can be really tricky and stubborn to heal, because we often compensate with other muscles for tendinopathy to even be present on an MRI or any kind of imaging or scan. It's there because other muscles have hijacked those muscles functions and they've gotten weaker and they've deteriorated. The doctor who originally came out with the rice method, which was Rest, Ice, compress and elevate, has since recanted his view on how to treat injury and said that's actually not effective. It's actually it impedes your ability to heal, and here's why. And my God, did I get this wrong? For years, I thought I needed to rest my way out of pain. How many of you are stuck in that loop? How many of you are in that loop something hurts, somebody with incredibly decorated wall behind you of doctorate says,

hey, you need to rest. You need to take it easy. There's there's merit to that. If you have an overuse injury, if I'm training Zach bitter, who's the 100 mile world record holder and trains 150 miles a week, there's some times where I gotta tell Zach to pull it back a little bit. You gotta rest. But most of us are dealing with issues because we've rested ourselves into this injury, and if weakness, we're talking soft tissue, the muscles and the fibers not being strong enough to move the joint, which is what's happening when you're stiff, when you're if you don't have the ability to with Feet flat on the ground, squat comfortably and it be smooth. That's a weakness problem. It's the nerves and the tendons and the ligaments not being strong enough to move the body. So what happens is, oh, we get to like, this point your nervous system detects, whoa, I'm not strong enough for this movement. Let me put on the brakes. It is literally your nervous system making decisions for you. Many of you have had this happen. If you've ever touched something hot, you touch something hot, do you think, Oh, my God, this is hot, this is going to burn me. No, you immediately pull away. That's a reflex of your nervous system, because your nervous system is making the decision for you danger, stop, react, tense up, recoil and pull away. Your nervous system is trying to keep you safe. So when you go do a move, a movement, and your nervous system, with millions of sensory cells and receptors, are saying we don't have control and strength to do this range of motion, even though your brain is saying like, hey, I want to go do this, your nervous system is telling you no and it's going to stop you. That's what limitation actually feels like, and that's what limitation is. Is your nervous system pumping the brakes on your movement for fear of injury. Now, why I'm saying this is because, if that's the problem, what is resting going to do? Is it going to get you stronger, or is it going to get you weaker and you. If the problem is due to weakness, it's going to make healing a pain in the ass, and it's going to make healing really tricky. Now the challenge is learning how to work with your weakness, learning how to when is it time to start slowly adding more. Let me make this real for you with a running analogy. Running is one of the most highly injurious sports, 90% of runners will get injured, and those 10% of runners that don't get injured, 90% of them will receive a significant injury running, but running is not injurious. Kids do it all the time. The problem is, is that kids are used to it, and adults are not, because we live sedentary lifestyles, and then we go run, sedentary lifestyles, and then we go run. What I'm talking about here is a dosage problem. Most people will ramp up too quickly running and for a good reason, because when you exercise, your cardiovascular system adapts First, your body knows oxygen and blood and vitamins and minerals. The delivery of these things is crucial for our survival. Your body is going to prioritize cardiovascular system changes before it prioritizes muscle growth and tendon strength and ligament fortitude. So when you do a run, let's say you run a mile and a mile is hard, but in a week, a mile feels easy. It's not because you're stronger, it's because your cardiovascular system has improved, your soft tissue. No way Did you get stronger in a week, you're just feeling more dilated blood vessels. You're feeling a more efficient metabolic system. You are not stronger, but people feel stronger. So then they go do two miles. They've doubled their load in a week, and two miles doesn't feel so bad. So then they do four miles, all of a sudden they are doing a mileage far outside of their actual tendon and ligament capacity. Boom. And then running hurts. It's not that running hurts, it's we've done too much too quick. So this program is how I dose movement and strength in a very periodized, structured way to help you go from whatever weakness and imbalance that you have into a loading period where we are working on making movement gentle, simple, safe and accessible, and then we start to just very safely structure it and scientifically add that load gently, week over week over week for a year. This is how we begin to rehabilitate the body and deal with a lot of this weakness problems, the deconditioning problems. I want to pause there. Does that make any sense? Are there any questions about that? Because this is about dose. Movement is medicine, but if you take too much medicine, right? Even if you have diabetes and you take too much medicine, too much of a good thing is not a good thing. Movement's great. It's invigorating. It helps heal our bodies. But if you've ever ran a marathon, you know, too much movement's not a good thing. You know there's setbacks to it. Kelly, brilliant, awesome makes sense. Peg B, I've learned so much from you in the past 12 months. Thank you. You're welcome. So so what I'm trying to do with all of you in this movement program is dose movement. We're going to start off

small, and maybe that small dose in phase one feels like a lot right now, because you're going from nothing to something. That's a lot. But I'm going to slowly give you a higher and higher dose of movement so I can integrate you back into the life that you want. Okay, there are some, you know, lateral meniscus tear issues. Let me get to some of the exercise modifications first, and then I might have time to get into a question about carpal tunnel, cubital tunnel and lateral meniscus, ACL, PCL, tears, and how we can approach those. But let's talk about exercise modification, because 80 of you are on this call. Though every exercise in this program, right? Nothing's wild. There's no like, sexy, cool, weird, wild poses. We're never this program's not flashy. It's why it's the hardest thing to like show online, because it's competing against all of like the yogi, people who can do pretzels, and all of the people who are moving weight around in a really cool, flashy way. It. Not like cool, just laying on the ground and moving a shoulder, right? I digress. Every exercise in this program was carefully selected based on the minimum motion our joints should have. The yogis that you probably see online, those are probably like maximum, and you don't need maximum to thrive, but what we do need is minimum. Right the hip needs a minimum level of internal and external rotation to walk smoothly, pain free. So every exercise in this program has minimum levels of movement, every person here is has probably lost a minimal range of motion. Maybe it's with shoulder, internal, external, overhead, hip function, pelvic or spine motion. You're here because, in your own way, you've lost some minimal level of motion in one or two joins that has created a cascade effect of compensation throughout your body. I say this because there will be an exercise or multiple exercises in the program that have you run into your limitation. I'm asking you to do a shoulder motion, and your body's like, Hell, no, I can't it literally won't happen. That's dysfunction. So you are going to run into an exercise that needs modification, all of you at one point, phase 123, or five, four or five will run into an exercise that needs you to modify it. Here are my rules for modification. First and foremost, I've got a really nice Help feature in the program that little orange box. If you go to that little orange chat box and you type in exercise modification out of the 14 to 16, I forget what the actual number is, right? Now, let's just call it 10,000. Plus people who have gone through this program, there are five exercises that almost they're like the five recurring, right? It's not like the most commonly 10. It's like these five are the top five that most people are missing. I have written an article about each one of those five why you're needing a modification, and here are two ways that we can substitute that exercise based on why you're needing a modification. If, for some reason, you run into an exercise that's outside of those original five, I have five basic, simple exercises, and they don't they might not even have anything to do with the exercise you want modified, right? Maybe for you, you need a modification because you can't do your arm circles like you've got a frozen shoulder. You can't even lift your arm. So I'm not going to go give you another shoulder modification. Maybe some dysfunctions are so severe, we're going to table that for now. Let's get your ankles, knees, hips and pelvis. Let's get your foundation better with a modifying exercise. So let's go add lying on your back, pelvic tilts. Let's go add knee pillow squeezes. Let's not make this complicated. If any of you are running into like an exercise that elicits vertigo, or maybe it's not even a symptom or a non pain symptom, you just hate it. It pisses you off, right? It? It creates frustration. Let's not make this complicated rocket science. Replace it with an exercise that you like. You could double down on an exercise in your current routine. You just do the same thing back to back. If you have a couple weeks under your belt, maybe you really liked on week two, how I showed you this movement. And maybe on week five, you run into an exercise that you don't care for at all. Cool. Swap it out. Let's just replace it with your favorite one, right? Maybe have a little journal of my favorite exercises that's one to 10 exercises long, and if you run into any exercise that really aggressively challenges your dysfunction, what I've learned as a corrective exercise specialist is not every dysfunction needs to be addressed head on, and not every dysfunction will allow us to tackle it head on. Sometimes, when we run into a limitation, that doesn't mean, let's go. We found it. Aha, I gotcha. Let's go blow this joint apart and let's get it to move. Sometimes it's like, okay, that's where a significant dysfunction is. Let's improve the rest of the body. Body, because that joint didn't wake up one day and say, let's stop working. It often does that because the rest of the body fails. So what I want to do in answering these

modification questions is lighten this burden that I think a lot of people have, and I had it too, because I was terrified of moving. I didn't know what I was doing. I was lost, stuck and confused. I was afraid of doing the wrong thing. Therefore, when it came time to choosing my exercise, I was like a deer in headlights. I was stunned. I couldn't make a choice. I want to empower you to not make it that complicated. Let's do any exercise that elicits a huge pain response. If you're not willing to pull back on the intensity and ease your way through it and work through it, then let's make it a little bit more fun. Let's make it a little lighter and replace it with any other exercise. Okay. Now that being said, let me see there were specific. Okay, so you always have the right and the option to swap out exercises. So now let's talk about, if you don't want to swap out an exercise, what can you do? And you don't need to be a corrective exercise specialist to be able to be playful. So the first thing I want everybody to do any exercise that you're having a problem with, let's find a way to be playful with it. I'm going to give you an example. Somebody wrote in this is, this is like phase four and Phase Five stuff. So don't let this like overwhelm you. This is at least like in month eight or nine. So one of the exercises is a close foot lunge, being able to do a lunge, and the knee comes on the ground, basically about halfway through the arch, and us having the strength and mobility to do this. Well, this is obviously really intense exercise that requires everything. I just said, strength and mobility. If this exercise seems like a hell no, well, we can be playful with it by maybe this range of Motion's too intense, so let's step back. Okay, the wider My feet are, notice how the less range of motion I have to go through. There's not as much bending as there is here. So sometimes changing, like a foot position could be a way to make an exercise more accessible. When I teach these lunges, I'm not holding on to anything, so I'm literally using my full body weight. Maybe that's too much for you, so let's be playful with it. All right, I got this chair here to help me. This is all I got. This is you being playful with that exercise. Meet your body where it's at. And that's one of the biggest things that this program has got to teach you, which is how to actually meet your body. Maybe for you, all you have is the ability to hold on to something. And this is you for a couple weeks, and then all of a sudden, it's like, okay, I feel better at quarter. Let me try to go down a little bit further now. And we're just being playful. And once we've got, like, some good range, okay, now only one hand on it, and now my fingertips on it, and now I don't need it again. There's so many ways to progress and regress these exercises. If you're somebody who thinks that lunge is too damn easy, hold on to a gallon of milk. I mean, go, go. Grab weights, grab a kettlebell. Do the same movement, and we can make it harder by holding on to something heavier, grab a dog or a kid. You know, we can be again, playful with these things. Whenever I work with somebody who an exercise hurts, my number one advice is, try it half as hard as you think you should. Right when I've got when I teach these overhead motions, and somebody's got a frozen shoulder, right? So just use your imagination here. Pretend I'm on the ground, laying on my back, and I'm teaching overhead motion, and somebody's like, oh God, but it hurts here, all right, well, don't take it there. Maybe this is literally all you have. Maybe this is your window of function. If this is where pain is, and this exercise hurts your shoulders, it's not the exercise, it's that we just keep throttling ourself right to the edge of discomfort and dysfunction and pain. Pull back half go half as hard as you think you need to go do half of the volume, half of the intensity, half of the repetitions and durations. Again, every movement in this program is going to teach you a lot and is an opportunity for you to meet your body where it's at. And I promise you that if we can do that, we're on our way. Let me make this even more real for you. I'm going to use another example. There's a there's an exercise, and this is one of the top five, so I've got a whole article written about it. There's an exercise in the program that is face down with your arms on this and people like, Man, this hurts my shoulder so much so this is the modification. Maybe, this is the modification. Maybe, if your arms have a really hard time being out the side, this is a modification right now. I'm just laying on my back. It's the same position. I'm just getting a little

like, creative and trying to increase my my physical IQ here with like, what can I do to kind of try to create something similar, and how can I be playful with it? And again, movement's not wrong. There's no movement that's bad for your body, but I understand why you might feel that way when you've been very limited with your movement. And every other post online is, do this. Don't do that. Hold your body here. My God, never let your shoulder. I mean, the amount of like fear mongering with

movement is crazy. What did people do without trainers for 1000s of years. How did we even make it on the savannahs and the planes walking around and carrying animals and equipment? It's, it's it's wild, you're fine and you're a lot stronger than we think. It's time to be playful with our bodies again. And if we can do that, if we can have a little bit of childlike playfulness. Watch how we move away from this, like, fear of, I'm broken and I'm fragile and, like, I can actually start doing more and being more. It's, it's truly incredible. Okay, Lenore, i i got these blocks. Look these, these stupid things were like, 50 bucks a block. Now, granted, I will have these for decades. I think many people's shoulders and bodies have been helped with just this block, but that's expensive, like you can just use a yoga block, you know, a yoga block. We can, we can make it have the same dimensions. So it's just, this is it's just, it's a lot, it's a lot of block. I think we can only get creative with with yoga blocks, and we don't need to go spend probably 100 bucks on on stuff like that. But if you do, this is the website. I got it from, crooked human.com kind of a pretty good kind of a pretty good name. Let me share it crooked. Okay, it might have gone out of business because $50 for a phone block. My god. Okay. Cox family, is there any hope for hamstrings that have been tight and trigger points for years and years? How many of you your hamstrings are tight? Oh, we're Michael. We got double hands over there, huh? All right. I let's approach this a little different. If we look at this problem classically, as the hamstrings are tight. Where does that lead us? Well, it leads us to think the hamstrings are the problem. We pay massage therapists, acupuncturists. We go on stretches looking for how to relax the hamstring. What? Let's change how we're approaching this. What if your tight hamstrings are your body's solution? Muscles work in teams. Right? Your hamstrings are are synergistic in helping the hips. So synergy right hamstring should work as a good team to help out your hips when your hips lose the ability to move well, when weakness starts to set in, when the hip joint stops moving. Well, these little synergists, these hamstrings start to go through a process called synergistic dominance, which means the hips kind of shut down, and now the hamstrings take over. The hamstrings, which should be like secondary or traditional muscle groups are now your primary muscle group. They're the muscle primarily responsible for helping you walk and bend forward and sit and stand. No freaking wonder why they're so chronically and. Severely, stiff and tight, intense and painful, and no wonder why stretching them doesn't work because you're stretching a muscle that needs to work. Remember, your body's not dumb. Your body's brilliant. If your hamstrings are tight, they're doing that because your hips have a set. I could call it relative weakness, because your hips are weak, your hamstrings have to be tight. My God, the last thing that I want for you is your hamstrings to be loose, because if you had loose hamstrings and weak hips, what would happen in the hip and the pelvis and the spine? You'd fall over. We wouldn't have the ability to walk for any period of time. So the first thing I want everybody to do with tight hamstrings is thank you for working so desperately hard because my hips haven't you're not the problem, and I appreciate you for working overtime. I need to learn how to strengthen my hips so I can reduce the synergistic dominance. I've got to put the ball back in the hips court. I've got to get the glutes and the hips and the core muscles to work better. I got to get the front thighs to work better. So these muscles are like, Oh yeah, I should just assist motion. I shouldn't dominate motion. That is the only time the hamstrings will actually meaningful change, meaningfully change. And you know you have synergistic dominance. If you stretch your hamstrings and they're tight again the next day, you know you've got synergistic dominance. If you go to get a massage and that massage therapist works out all the trigger points, and they come back within, like, a day or two or a week, because we're just going after the reaction, not the underlying problem. What the hamstrings need is the larger muscles of the hips, the glutes. So the exercises in the program that work your hips, let's favorite those, the routines that use bridges that strengthen the back and the hips. Let's favorite those, because those exercises are what's going to help us start to work through the synergistic dominance of the hamstrings. And only when we can do that? Will those hamstrings really meaningfully respond? Great question, by the way. Great question. And, and it's a, it's a loaded, okay, cool Cox family. It makes so much sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'll take one more question, and then we'll probably just call it for the class. There's always so much to talk about, and I think we could literally do this for hours and barely scratch the surface. So please come next

week, I'm gonna be running it if you just didn't get your question answered. So the next question is, you know, any thoughts on modifications for people, people with hypermobility? It's a little bit of a loaded question, because there's a difference between genetic hypermobility like EDS, where there's an actual genetic structural difference, where the joints are just very loose, and then there's people who train themselves into hypermobility yogis who were a lot of my clientele for a while, these people who could bend and twist their bodies were in incredible amounts of pain because of their relationship with their body, has trained hypermobility. Typically, people who are hypermobile, they at some point, liked stretching. At some point, they related that sensation of stretch to good. So what they did is they found that sensation daily, and as their body starts to open up, they kept having to push harder and harder and harder to get that stretch sensation. Therefore, they've trained themselves into hypermobility. So I want everybody to think about movement on a spectrum. In the middle,

we've got neutral, middle, balanced. You've got a good combination of strength and mobility. You know that you're in the middle and you're good, because chances are we don't really have a lot of pain on one end of that spectrum, we've got hypermobile people, super loosey, goosey, ton of movement. On the other end of that spectrum, we have hypo mobile people. We're talking about stiff, rigid, like you can't move. Everything is just stuck and stiff and tight. For the people who are hypo mobile, we need to improve range of motion so we can get back to the middle. For people who are hyper mobile, you've already got the range. What we lack is control. What we lack is stability, so you. You are not doing your maximum expression of movements. I would, I would argue that hyper mobile, mobile people, the challenge of this program is discipline, having the discipline to pull back. You know, if you're somebody who can do a full thoracic rotation, and that's easy. Can you actually be okay with doing half of what you think you should do? And actually telling yourself there's value in learning how to moderate my motion, you've got to learn how to put the brakes on your body, because your nervous system is not putting the brakes on it for you, you have created such a high conditional environment of internal movement that, like a ballet dancer, you can just move in any way you want. And because of that disorganization, we have a lot of movement complications that come from that so hyper stiff people need to learn how to gently work through that stiffness. If you force it, you're going to hurt, right? You're going to push the body too fast and too far, hypermobile people, you already have the full range of motion. You gotta learn how to get stronger and dial it back and be okay with movements at half of the intensity. Okay. Oh, yeah. Cheryl, former gymnast, have been learning to go medium. You know the saying, Cheryl, go go hard or go home. We need, like, paint Academy shirts. That's just like, Go medium, and sometimes stay home and that's okay. You know you're going to be all right. God, if anybody's like an embroidery, if anybody can help me with that? Please. Please help me bring this shirt to life. That would be amazing. And only our crew would get it, and it would be like our own internal thing and and that'd be lovely. Would be one step closer to a cult here, and that'd be great. That's what we're looking for. You know, good, tight knit community. Stay home some. Go medium and stay home. Sometimes. That's it. That's our brand slogan. From now on, that's hilarious. All right, everybody was so great connecting with you. I hope you got something of value from from this meeting today. If not, please reach out to my team. I'm here for you, and I'll see you all next week. Until then, everybody talk to you later. Bye. Oh, awesome. Love hearing this was great. Go medium sometimes stay home. That's gonna make me laugh today. All right, bye, everyone talk later next week. Bye.