The lifting sessions are geared toward building or maintaining strength in a balanced way for me.
Everyone is going to have different requirements.
In other words, nothing is skewed toward one particular outcome like endurance or strength or power.
And I think most people probably want something similar because they'd like to be able to meet the various demands of life.
So I frame the question I'm about to ask that way because as people start to assess themselves, The question arises again, should we try and compensate for our weaknesses by emphasizing a certain style of training a little bit more?
And if so, what does that look like for the spine?
You said earlier, and I love this quote, and I want to make sure I attribute it to you now and going forward, that all systems in the body require stress for better health.
Optimal health. Thank you.
For optimal health.
So assuming that somebody has a thinner stature, they're more bendy, would they be wise to build up the muscles of the core, not just the abdominals, but the obliques and the lower back muscles, you know, all around the spine in order to give it more stability?
And would the person who has a thicker torso, thicker spine, thicker joints do well to emphasize some additional yoga training, some additional anything that allows them to be more bendy?
I'm going to go back to the fact that they're coming to me with pain.
We are going to figure out through the thorough assessment what triggers their pain.
Most people, it's true, don't want ultimate performance.
They're not being paid $10 million to be able to throw a fastball or something like that.
They want to enjoy life.
Let's say they love golf.
My job is to get them sufficiently robust and out of pain to go and play recreational golf.
So it becomes a moot point now, whether they have a willowy spine or not.
I will look at their basic golf swing.
If I can divide that up to just binary.
Some people are what we call twisters.
They don't have a lot of hip mobility and they twist their spine.
So it's called the X factor in golf and they store and recover elastic energy.
Again, it is an elastic athleticism.
But the next person isn't so much a twister.
They're a turner. They have what we call quick hips.
So their hips turn and their spines don't sustain as much twist. And then we measure, well, when they impact the ball, if they have a hundred percent violent lateral crunch and then we measure them and assess them and that turns out to be their pain trigger, What we do is we don't allow them to go to 100 % in lateral crunch at impact.
They go to 95 % and that just moved them off the tipping point.
So they're not stubbing their toe or slamming into the pain sensitizer.
They just stay off the desensitizer now.
So backtracking a little bit, but making sure that I'm doing that with purpose.
You need to know what generates the pain in order to try and localize.
It all comes back to the assessment.
But then the goal is not to repeat whatever creates the pain.
Correct. Perhaps what I'm hearing, the goal is to get near the proximity.
What are we actually pushing to 85 %?
Is it a distance on a run?
Is it a deadlift weight?
That's pretty heavy.
Yeah, here I'm thinking about intensity, meaning, well, for resistance training, let's say that one could uh complete six repetitions at a given weight um but if they had a gun to their head they could complete nine right um okay well then you're doing six again this is crude crude calculations right but six maybe seven maybe cheating a little bit on that seventh repetition if it's a run and like for me on sundays typically there's a long slow jog jog.
But the slow in that component is a little bit subjective.
So am I pushing a little bit harder than I'm comfortable or am I hitting kind of a cruising pace?
Okay. So 85 % of max intensity for me would be staying at cruising pace and occasionally bumping up the speed a little bit.
But on all out day, if it happens to be one, then it's long, quote unquote, slow distance, but I'm trying to increase the speed of what I'm referring to as slow.
So again, this is all very subjective, but we know on a given day whether or not we're pushing past our comfort zone or not.
And I'm not somebody who relies heavily on heart rate monitors and things like that.
What I rely on is my consistency.
This is the way that I've decided to stay in all around shape for more than three decades.
I feel like I'm in decent shape.
I'm not a great athlete.
I'll never be the strongest person in the room or have the best endurance or the most speed or explosiveness, but I'm pretty sure I can keep up with most things pretty well.
And I don't have pain and I feel very grateful to not have pain.
And I think it's because I've adopted a stance of, I don't want to call it moderation, but of modulation.
Well, I appreciate all what you've said.
In my world, everyone has a back pain history.
history so it's always i just let the god it's it's the information that we gather from the assessment that guides our decision on how we're going to a get them out of pain build some base resilience which is tuning their body strategic mobility strategic stability now if one thing we haven't talked about is is various types of pain and how yet that impacts on how we're going to approach their programming for life.
You did a podcast with somebody, I can't remember what their name was, but it was a pain podcast. And you were developing this idea that if the mechanism of their pain was really part of the changed engram, they were traumatized at the time of the event, or maybe it was a history of sexual abuse or whatever.
But I can detect that person almost always.
I'll start to put my hands on them to feel, oh, is there any intelligence here?
And they recoil. That's an abused person.
That's a very characteristic response.
So you start putting together some of these reactions, and you know that there's something deeper than.
