Top Two Exercises for Shoulder Pain

The Top Two Exercises for Shoulder Pain | EP 87

Live LOUD Life Podcast
Lafayette Colorado

Episode 87

The Top Two Exercises for Shoulder Pain

With Dr. Antonio Gurule


EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

 

[0:09] The anatomy of the shoulder

[1:51] Why is the shoulder joint so important?

[3:36] Banded exercises for shoulder pain.

[4:16] What is the role of the rotator cuff in shoulder pain?

[6:30] Introduction to the TRX Rows exercise.

[8:18] Strength length tension relationship

[10:17] When you deal with proper stabilization, you see shoulder issues melt away.

 

 

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Live Loud Chiropractic and Coaching Top Chiropractor and Physical Therapy in Lafayette Colorado Serving Boulder County Boulder, Longmont, Louisville, Erie, Broomfield, and Arvada Colorado


About Dr. Antonio Gurule

Nutrition Building Blocks Broken Down

Background:

  • Father
  • Doctor of Chiropractic
  • Owner of Live LOUD
  • Personal Trainer & Health Coach

Anthony Gurule  00:00

Hey what’s up guys, welcome back to another episode of the Live LOUD Life podcast. My name is Dr. Antonio, I’m your host of the Live LOUD Life podcast. My wife and I, we co-own Live LOUD Chiropractic and Coaching here in Lafayette, Colorado. We are just outside of Boulder, Colorado in Boulder County. And our mission is to help families. We want to help make families stronger, so that we can build a stronger community. We want to help guide you to the adventurous life that you and your family were meant for. And we do this through chiropractic and coaching. chiropractic, obviously being more of a hands on approach, more of a clinical conversation, clinical diagnostics, but the coaching aspect is really what we believe is, you know, the foundation of what our system methodology, whatever you want to call it is, because a lot of this comes around through just coaching suggestions and recommendations. also, you know, obviously within that comes into clinical prescriptions of certain things to eat or supplements, so on and so forth. But it’s coaching a lifestyle, it’s coaching, it’s coaching a philosophy and a foundation about how to live an active healthy life as an individual, and setting an example of a healthy active life for your family, for your immediate family, for your friends, and more importantly for your community. So stronger families to make a stronger community as a whole would be a win win, right? And that’s what we want to be able to do. we want to be able to help fill in the gaps in the holes that you’re maybe not getting from, from other roles and conditions.

 

Anthony Gurule  01:43

And today that’s in particular where we’re going to talk about. it’s going to be a little bit more of a shorter episode because this is more of a quote unquote, you know, just discussion around how to lay out a framework and a better understanding of how to work out or what exercises are safe or maybe not safe during pregnancy. This is a very, very common question that we get.

 

Anthony Gurule  02:12

My wife Nichelle has created a mini course that has some workout ideas, recommendations, and prescriptions than laid out into a workout. She guides and  educates other clinicians on how to broach this topic as a chiropractor, how to better serve prenatal patients through chiropractic care, but also exercise recommendations and prescriptions, having recommendations with other personal trainers within the community whether that’s CrossFit whether that’s Orange Theory, chatting with coaches and owners and saying hey, if you have prenatal patients and they’re having these types of symptoms, or this has happened, here’s some better recommendations, not modifications. We call them lateralizations–you’re just you know, you’re doing something something different or something else we you know, we borrow that term from Charlie Weingroff, who’s a physical therapist and strength conditioning coach. But it also and also doulas, right, doulas and midwives and OBs who are directly involved with the prenatal process from nearly conception all the way through, having this conversation. we know that exercise is important during pregnancy,

 

Anthony Gurule  03:19

There are so many different studies that talk about the benefits of exercising during pregnancy, not only for the mom, but also for baby, which is quite interesting. They’re seeing increased cognitive-what’s the word I’m looking for? Excuse me, their cognitive output as a as an as a child through as they age is actually better from moms that actually worked out during pregnancy.

 

Anthony Gurule  03:50

Now this is tough, right? How do you define working out or exercise? it’s different for everybody. But we want to, and we encourage that, and yet we’re sympathetic to the different stages of life, aches and pains, so on and so forth, which obviously would limit what you can do from an exercise perspective. So you know, it’s a bit of a gray area on determining what is working out? what is exercise? What are the physical guidelines or recommendations for pregnancy? And without getting into the like, nitty gritty detail of every single thing. And obviously, every potential situation, if you had this versus this, what could happen? we’re not gonna be able to do that. What we just want to lay out is what is what are we trying to accomplish here, and we want to encourage you to stay as physically active as possible.

 

Anthony Gurule  04:41

And one of the things that constantly comes up is, well, should you add something in that you have not already been doing? Let’s say for instance, someone just through the stages of life with work and kids or whatever that is, they were not able to work out as much before they got pregnant, but now that they’re pregnant, whether they have more time or they understand the importance of exercises during pregnancy, well, would we say, “Well, you haven’t been exercising, so you shouldn’t do too much.” No, that doesn’t, that doesn’t really make sense. Now, we would encourage not to do too much, there’s obviously, you know, a too far swinging the pendulum of the other way. But we wouldn’t say “no, don’t exercise because you weren’t doing something before,” we just have to find those first few stepping stones to help them start to gain some momentum. and help hold their hand, if you will, So that their technique and they feel confident about lifting, or how far they’re walking or whatever that is. And that’s an important topic, because a lot of times people want to add things in, but they weren’t quite ready or weren’t doing them before. And they then assume that they’re not able to do them at all. So you do have to take that in consideration, there is a ton that you can do, and that you can still add, even though you weren’t doing them prior to pregnancy.

 

Anthony Gurule  05:54

Now on the big questions is, is it safe? you know, outside to contact sports, or different things like that the majority of what you’re going to do is safe for pregnancy, right? Rock climbing, we have pregnant patients that have been rock climbing before, obviously, there’s a certain inherent risk with certain sports or activities. You know, you could fall off riding your bike, you could fall over running, right, so we’re not encouraging any of these by any means. We’re just kind of, you know, setting some suggestions, if you will. And you have to take into consideration.

 

Anthony Gurule  06:31

Now, there are certain things to consider when you’re talking about like weightlifting, and how heavy and the intensity that you’re doing. And if you’re doing Valsalva movements, which is essentially holding your breath to maintain a more rigid or stiff torso, as you’re seeing changes in blood volume and blood pressure, you know, you do have to take that in consideration. And that is again, of course a conversation with your provider that is managing your, your pregnancy, but we recommend Mama’s weight lift, or do resistance training. During pregnancy, again, we talked about about load management and the intensity and things like that, but you can still lift and do fairly intense things. And it’s a fairly as a you know, as a scale and a wide range during pregnancy and see a ton of benefit from that. Now, are we trying to hit one rep maxes and PRs during pregnancy, I mean, some would argue yes, but I would argue, why, that’s not really an accurate representation of what your strength is anyways. So you know, you do have to to kind of keep manipulating the numbers and the weights and the intensity and the sets and reps in order to do it. But weightlifting and resistance training is safe, and it is effective. Now, outside of that, there’s not a lot of unsafe things to do, again, outside of contact sports, or things that would elicit, you know, potential trauma to you or baby based on impact we’ve had, again, not our recommendations, but some have tried very just easy scheme, because they’re in the winter months, and they wanted to and they felt very confident about not falling. So you know, you have those types of things.

 

Anthony Gurule  08:16

Overall, again, we’re talking about movement. You need to move, and it’s good to get your heart rate up. And it’s good to breathe hard. So that doesn’t mean just because you’re pregnant, you can’t do HIIT training or circuit training or CrossFit or Orange Theory. But you do have to listen to your body and understand certain signs that would indicate that things might be too much, right? Now those are going to be different for everyone, but a lot of this comes down to you know, lightheadedness, you know, breathing too hard. Certain aches and pains within lower extremity, chest, abdomen, so on and so forth would be obviously like your more extreme ones. If you’re becoming pale or anything like that, I mean, again, these are the same criteria, though, that would be if someone else was working out or training too hard. So it’s realistically the same thing. It’s just that your threshold level for all those most likely have gone down. And depending on what type of an athlete you were before, you’re going to be maybe a little frustrated that you’re not able to do the things you were able to do previously, which makes sense. But if you’re someone who wasn’t exercising before, you’re probably going to be a little bit more hyper aware of that, of just feeling that shortness of breath or that uneasiness. So again, we’re not saying you have to push through that because we’re not trying to set yourself up for a strength and conditioning program to increase your metabolic capacity to increase your strength and conditioning during pregnancy. We’re trying to help you maintain a healthy active pregnancy.

 

Anthony Gurule  09:54

Now, walking. walking is great. but in general, we encourage you to do something above and beyond walking. Obviously, again, certain things would dictate that you would not be able to do so. And this is again, any exercise. Any exercise that you do during pregnancy needs to be consulted with and work through and have a conversation with the primary physician who is managing your pregnancy, whether that’s your nurse practitioner, your midwife or your OB or obstetrician, right. But we would encourage more than just walking. walking is fantastic, but that’s kind of like your baseline minimum, right? Just like our activities, or recommendation activity guidelines. We want a few days a week of where we’re kind of just doing this steady state getting our steps in, you know, kind of pushing ourselves, we’re huffing and puffing, but still just kind of at that conversational level, but you’re not really getting a lot of benefits outside of that.

 

Anthony Gurule  10:55

So if you’re just walking, high five. kudos. can you do something more? Can you do some bodyweight squats? Can you do some bodyweight, you know, good mornings? can you do some walking lunges? do you have a suspension training, we’re able to do some bodyweight rows? Do you have some bands that you can do some rows with? You know, there’s a lot that you can do that allows you to get a little bit more out of that. Now, again, this all comes back down to preferences of exercises that you like to do, because that’s gonna allow you to maintain the most consistency, but then also the intensity that you like to do. And we do encourage having an open mind and at least being willing to try some high intensity things that allow you to still get your heart rate up a little bit. And it’s okay to lift more than five or 10 pounds. And not saying that that is a bad thing. There’s programs out there where it’s all directed around that where it’s lighter weight, high rep, but I just don’t want individuals and mamas to feel like they’re not able to do more and or being ashamed because other people are just saying they should back off because they’re pregnant. “why would you need a lift that much?” It fits within your strength, and your comfort, and your wheelhouse, that is totally fine.

 

Anthony Gurule  12:05

Again, you if you’ve been doing that enough, you understand the risk reward ratio and having a conversation with your practitioner has driven us to kind of help navigate and guide as you start to get further through pregnancies, what things maybe we need to change or manipulate. But that’s totally fine. Now outside of that, the question around safe also comes up around core exercises. diastasis recti, pelvic floor strength, so on and so forth, we want to enhance the capability of understanding how to control tension within your abdominal wall and your pelvic floor through pregnancy, because the pressure is increasing due to baby taking up more space. But we’re not we’re not necessarily we’re not gaining more strength, right.

 

Anthony Gurule  12:45

And so what a lot of people assume it’s when we’ve seen this, is “I don’t want diastasis. So I’m doing more core work to prevent diastasis from happening.” diastasis recti will happen in 100% of moms, it’s estimated at the week 35 Everyone will have some form of it. Now it is technically not a quote unquote diagnosis, though, until 12 weeks postpartum, because it is a normal thing that everyone will get. So you can’t diagnose someone with something that everyone will get–doesn’t make sense, right? So after that, though, if you still have weakness or spacing issues, then we can have a you know, a stronger conversation about putting a diagnosis on that.

 

Anthony Gurule  13:26

But what we’re trying to enhance and help is what exercises are quote unquote, not safe versus unsafe, but adding too much pressure or tension into the abdominal wall or the pelvic floor and creating more laxity. again, as that pressure for as baby’s growing starts to put more pressure on the pelvic floor and the abdominal wall. If you’re doing more things that increases the pressure within the within the abdominal cavity that’s going to push on that separation even more and/or push on that pelvic floor even more, creating potential incontinence or prolapse issues and/or more bulging and doming within the abdominal wall stretching out that separation or that gap even further, potentially making the recovery process more challenging or slightly longer. I’m not saying that it will but potentially, so we do have to take that in consideration. So we go through activation exercise of the pelvic floor, of the abdominal wall so that you better understand how to control those pressure increases while you’re lifting or exercising so that you simply can stay at a management level.

 

Anthony Gurule  14:28

And that in turn, helps you get through pregnancy of understanding how to lift up your older kiddo, having to lift up dog food or anything like that. It’s just managing and controlling pressure. So there’s really not anything that I would say that safe or unsafe. Now, things that we would advise against for core exercises is sit ups or crunches. You know a lot of those things that create like hanging knee raises and different things like that during pregnancy. A lot of those things that create a lot of intra abdominal pressure and tension. and especially during a flex position, that tends to put a lot more pressure on the abdominal wall, the separation where diastasis will occur as well as the pelvic floor.

 

Anthony Gurule  15:09

So, you know, while we never say never, there’s definitely a category of things that we definitely urge against because the risk/reward benefit and again, risk not being “injured,” But risk of potentially putting more pressure and making the recovery process  on the other side harder, is not is not something that we find to be as advantageous. But you can still get the benefits of quote unquote, core exercises through full body movements such as goblet squats, such as deadlifts, you know, depending on the phase that you’re in, push ups, which are, you know, a dynamic plank. or being able to do a TRX row, which is a reverse plank as you’re just lifting yourself up. three point rows where you’re on, you know, two hands or doing like a row on a bench, where you’re in a tabletop position that’s adding anti rotation exercises. So there’s a ton that you can do that still highlights and isolates, the core isolates, sorry. that highlights and will emphasize core activation, but through a full body compound movement. And what’s great about that is during pregnancy, depending on your energy levels, it’s hard to do all the little isolated accessory and all these separate exercises as it is. So it’s kind of nice being able to combine everything, so you get more bang for your buck, especially if you’re a parent and you’re on and you’re on baby number two or three, right?

 

Anthony Gurule  16:31

So what exercises are safe for pregnant women to do? All are. reduce or eliminate for sure contact activities, different things like that. the increased risk activities of you know, trauma and things like that. Outside of that you’re managing pressure, I would definitely encourage reducing anything that’s heavy lifting, that’s, that’s requiring you to do Valsalva moves, you’re having to hold your breath for an extended period of time. that changes blood pressure, so on and so forth. But outside of that, Pregnancy is a completely safe time to do all exercises. we definitely as we highlighted, urge and encourage, you know, certain things over other ones just for you know, added bang for your buck or full body movements, so on and so forth. And that, but outside of that you are free to do what you want.

 

Anthony Gurule  17:19

If you want guidance, though, you know, there are there are trainers out there that work specifically with prenatal patients. we would love to be able to have that conversation with you if that’s something you want to bounce back or navigate. Because we do want to encourage as much as we can. A very, very active pregnancy through exercise working out or however you want to describe that. So if you found this beneficial, please like share, subscribe. if you’re pregnant, I hope you can utilize this and take some of the information for you and yourself. If you have anyone else you know… a relative a family member, a friend who is pregnant and they’re unsure they’ve been you know asking this question what things I don’t know what things I can do. I don’t know if it’s safe for baby share this video with them. We’d love to be able to provide a better frame of reference and or context to be able to ask better questions so that they can find the workout program  or the movements that work best for them during their pregnancy. Until next time guys live loud .if you’re currently pregnant, Congratulations, and we look forward to helping and serving in the future.


Building Health & Fitness In Your Life

Building Health & Fitness in your Life | EP 86

Live LOUD Life Podcast
Lafayette Colorado

Episode 86

Building Health & Fitness in Your Life

With Kendra Sato


Episode Highlights 

[0:09] Kendra’s Introduction.

[1:26] What was your early introduction to athletic training?

[5:50] Gen Pop is one of the more challenging populations to work with from a mobility standpoint.

[11:05] Working out during a pandemic.

[16:14] How do you know if you’re feeling well?

[20:30] The difference between being depleted vs. being lazy.

[24:41] The importance of having a “why” in your life.

[28:00] Why is this important?

[32:12] What’s most exciting to you?


About Dr. Antonio Gurule

Nutrition Building Blocks Broken Down

Background:

  • Father
  • Doctor of Chiropractic
  • Owner of Live LOUD
  • Personal Trainer & Health Coach

Anthony Gurule 0:09
Alright guys, welcome back to the lip out life Podcast. Today. Kendra Sato is joining us from sunny California. They still caught selling in California, right?

Kendra Sato 0:19
They do. And it’s been raining for two days actually Sunny.

Anthony Gurule 0:22
There you go. There you go, which is so funny because Colorado technically, I think it I don’t know if this is just a rumor, but it has the most sunny days out of the year, then I think most states, even the Sunshine State, Florida, which is nice and sunny today here as well. So welcome. Say hello to everyone tell everyone who you are, what you’re doing so on and so forth. Well,

Kendra Sato 0:41
first of all, thank you for having me. I was really excited when you invited me to be on your podcast. It’s been a long time since I’ve done a podcast and I haven’t been very many. So super fun to be here. And I’ve been a fan of your work for. I can’t remember how long it was I’ve been following you. But you put out really great content. So you should. Yeah, um, so about me been a trainer for 10 years and more on the functional fitness side. So I got really lucky when I got into this world. And I started to come up under, you know, a really incredible athletic trainer at a local school here in the area. But then he introduced me to Mike Boyles the world for a better world and never really had to learn from anybody that I later found out wasn’t as incredible as I thought they were so only got to learn from the best. And so here we are, that’s awesome.

Anthony Gurule 1:25
And then so your early introduction was to athletic training.

Kendra Sato 1:29
Initially, I thought I wanted to do maybe athletic training, because I grew up in sports. So I thought I wanted to stay as close to on the field as possible. So I took a I did an internship for the I did Sports Med and then I did human nutrition stuff. And it just didn’t work out like it was a little bit too reactive for me. Yeah. So

Anthony Gurule 1:48
yeah, definitely as I did, at CEU at CU here, I did my last year, I was a student athletic trainer. So I wasn’t nearly as involved as the, I mean, I say this with grace, it was more or less at times a glorified waterboy to a certain extent, but we got a lot of hands on training, right. But some of it, you know, we weren’t as reactive as like injuries happening. But the speed of like, you know, we had to get football team out for practice, and you had to tape a bunch of angles, and then you had to do a hip spike, and then you had to do this. And while that was fun at a certain degree, it wasn’t my it wasn’t my pace at all, either. I think it’s

Kendra Sato 2:22
it’s super fun. I loved being like on the ground floor with the athlete, and especially different ones, but kind of reactive in the sense that you’re reacting to injuries, you’re reacting to issues. And I just same thing with physical therapy like that just was potentially a path and like this, isn’t it for me, I need more involvement on the forefront and less cleaning up a mess afterwards, you’re putting the pieces back together as much.

Anthony Gurule 2:44
Yeah, and I love that. So that kind of segues into the topic that we were chatting about beforehand is kind of you know, what I had asked like, what do you feel people think that you do well, and or what you feel you do well, and or that you enjoy. So a proactive approach. And as we were stating, it’s like how do we integrate, I might be paraphrasing the kind of the terms that we had used, but integrate this quote unquote philosophy model into every day life for for anyone, so I’ll let you kind of, you know, take take it forward and like what, what are you doing from a proactive sense with your clients with your community with your platform? That’s

Kendra Sato 3:19
a loaded question. We have 30 minutes. Yeah,

Anthony Gurule 3:23
I mean, it can be as early as possible, but more so it’s just like, Hey, I like like, I’ll start for example, like, I Live loud. It’s like our goal is to help guide you through adventurous life you’re meant for now we are chiropractors in rehab providers. So we’re also doing pain management. But as you know, through everyone, like I’ve taken as many perform better things as you can, our focus is proactive to like anyone who’s coming in with is realistically unless you just injured yourself from a sport setting more appropriate, but from who we see, most people didn’t just injure themselves, but there was a proactive component that wasn’t addressed with right. And that’s Yeah, absolutely. That’s the key to the puzzle. Yeah,

Kendra Sato 4:01
I think so my approach is very inclusive in a lifestyle so I work with a lot more general population athletes than I do competitive collegiate or professional athletes. And I actually prefer it that way. I do love any athletes we have a lot in common as far as like mindset and realities and all that kind of thing and identities but I feel like you make more of an impact with you know, quote unquote Gen pop athlete and you know, when I got into fitness, I didn’t really like it very much in a sense that I was always very active, but it nothing called me as far as many hours in the gym. Like that was the last thing I wanted to do. So how I actually got into training I could hardly explain but I stuck with it because I started to understand very quickly that you don’t just exist in the gym to people and you’re not just there to make them sweat or make up or make your very you know, rarely do those things happen. Maybe not the sweat but the other two and it was kind of more of like wow, I exist in this world do help people have better lives and it has been this is really just the catalyst for that. You know, so it’s not you have to be a fit person all the time. It’s not you have to love fitness or fall in love with it at the activity that is more of my approach. So you know if being in the gym is only a tiny little supplement, that’s perfect. If you are getting outside playing with your animals, your children, your friends going on adventures doing, you’re helping people move because you are the one that has the truck, like that kind of stuff. Yeah, that all counts, that’s activity that’s a fit, active lifestyle. And I think it usually catches my clients off guard, when they hear that kind of thing. And they hear that I didn’t really have much of a passion for fitness or being in the gym type fitness. You know, so I like to level with people. And I like to figure out like, you know, from their perspective, what is this going to do for them? Are they actually here? How do we weave it into your life instead of I’m trying to shove it down your throat and make it you know, a big huge part of your life? Like, let’s see how it can kind of coexist with you in a little bit more of a welcoming and sustainable way.

Anthony Gurule 5:50
Yeah, that’s such a good point. I mean, and I want to percent agree with you on that we see we see Gen pop. And to be honest, I think it’s one of the more challenging population to work with, just from a mobility standpoint is in and I say, older, because everyone I’m saying is older than me in this category, although I’m closer to getting there, like my our parents age, right? Is because there’s so much impact because they they were thinking like I live life, and I forgot to integrate this into my life. And all of a sudden, like, things just started going downhill. And it’s never too late. But they’re such a fun population to work with a because they see the value of it. But they’re kind of like remembering, I’m like, Oh my gosh, this is what my life was like, and I forgot about it. And it’s just that small integration into it doesn’t have to be a lot.

Kendra Sato 6:35
And I think a lot of people are still stuck on I have to do a lot. It has to be intense, it has to be, you know, really tough and very kind of crazy, I guess for lack of a better term. And that’s very intimidating to step into and deterring for most of us, myself included, you know, so very early on, I was lucky enough to not have a background of being very passionate about fitness, and just be an active moving person. And seeing how it kind of kind of takes the limits off of a lifestyle. And that enables people to kind of get more off the sidelines and into the game, whatever their game is. It’s more impactful, and it’s more sustainable, and it matters more to them. Because, you know, good coaches understand has nothing to do with that’s not our show. We’re, you know, behind the curtains and somebody’s like trying to make it better.

Anthony Gurule 7:21
Yeah, no, that’s so I mean, I think I think was good too. And I don’t know, if you kind of have a similar conversation with people is like, I always use the term context, right? Like everything we do in here, it has to have some sort of context into everyday life. Otherwise, it doesn’t, it doesn’t mean as much for some it might mean more. But if there’s no context output in from a, which I know, kind of similar conversations, you know, people like Capobianco and Dr. Cody and things like that, right, as we allow the same conversation is, when we’re trying to implement a new a new movement, a new feeling a new stabilization structure, it’s like okay, well, when you’re doing hiking, moving a friend, whatever that is, you know, implement this and see how see how it goes. And then and then all of a sudden, your neurons start just putting those pieces together, and it has so much greater impact. Absolutely. What are some of the bias? I mean, I’m biased towards a few tools, what are some of the tools that you find is, as far as you know, lower? Now, I want to say this, maybe that’s an outright term, but lower barrier of entry, but making that barrier of entry into fitness and integration, what are some of the tools and methods, like for me, it’s kettlebells, right? That you like using that you have found to be really helpful for this quote, unquote, Gen population, and in the feeling in the in the problems that they’re having of wanting to do these things.

Kendra Sato 8:34
I’m a huge fan of kettlebells, as well, for so many reasons, I tend towards the more universal tools, you know, barbells are great. I’m also a huge fan of dumbbells. You know, I don’t shy away from weights, it doesn’t matter the age or demographic demographic that I’m working with, everyone I work with is going to work with weights in some capacity. And I do find that while initially very intimidating, when I bring out a big kettlebell or bring out some dumbbells or you know, anything like that, it’s really cool to see a very quick evolution for most people when they see this big huge weight, or what they think is a big huge weight. And their immediate thought is, I don’t know, she might be shooting for the stars here. And once they figure out how their body can handle it, you know, with the right form and the right foundation in place, it’s really incredible. So I really like using weights as much as possible, to kind of empower people as quickly as I can. Because the more confident you are, the more you’re going to be willing to kind of push the envelope a little bit. And then be more, you know, empowered to take on other stuff and be a little bit more open to what else can I do versus I don’t think,

Anthony Gurule 9:42
yeah, that’s a good point. I mean, we just using the term like, hey, let’s just try, right? Yeah. If it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out. And then we know what we need to do, right? But if you just try with those foundations in place, it’s pretty cool to see people light up and they’re like, Oh, I did not think I could do that. Yeah,

Kendra Sato 10:00
Ah, that’s really the best part. And you know, to kind of backtrack a little bit like I never put a weight in someone’s hand, unless I know that they have the range. And they have the foundation of strength and understanding of have enough movement for whatever it is that I’m asking them to do. So I set them up for success, for sure. I definitely hedge my bets. But um, you know, I don’t really bore them with all these details. Like when I’m asking them to do a stretch on the foam roller when we’re starting to begin, I’m looking at do they have shoulder mobility? Does it go straight into their back? Do they, you know, have all these prerequisites? And then once I know they do, I don’t have to tell them that I can just show them. So, you know, it’s a lot. It’s some people come in, and they really want to understand everything that we do and why and I love that. Yeah. But if you’re reading the room, some of the people are not super into it. And they don’t need to know what they’re qualifying for. They don’t need to know what they’re, at the moment like not necessarily appropriate for. So I kind of figured out their foundational attributes. First, I build them up, and I never set them up for failure. But then, you know, they don’t need to know everything along the way, for the most part. And so when they find out what they’re really capable of, it’s pretty incredible.

Anthony Gurule 11:05
Yeah, that’s why a partially like, well, certain kettlebells, like I have, most of mine are rep and I’m looking at it right now is that’s kind of a small kettlebells you can’t always see the weight on it. So sometimes, you don’t even tell them. It’s just like, hey, I know you were able to do this last one, right? And I’m just gonna, hey, we’re just gonna go up one in there. Sometimes I’ll ask like, well, we’ll have a choice. I’m like, doesn’t matter. I’m like, Just do the things that we taught you learn and, and see how it goes. And then oftentimes, that’s when the big they’re like, oh, my gosh, that was way more than I thought it was. But then it’s also cool, because it creates so much confidence. And like, I felt like it was 30 pounds. But yet I did 60 pounds. Like that’s a big discrepancy that they had no idea of their ultimate potential.

Kendra Sato 11:46
Yeah, it really works your advantage to being in the US and most people don’t use kilos of a belt. It’s, like 24 kilo, they’re thinking automatically 24 pounds. Yeah. And then they get after it. You’re like, Oh, that was actually 53. And like, wait, what?

Anthony Gurule 12:03
I think one of the things too, when someone you know, is either looking for a trainer, or they’re trying to find someone who can help integrate this into their life, as they see people and there’s like, oh, well, you’ve been doing this for 10 years, like, I’m not going to be able to do these things. So can you break down a little bit of like, what your training looks like, and in in now, but also like over the years that got you here, because I already shared some nice people with I will say having some kids minds kind of going this way to a certain degree. What is yours look like? What’s been able to give you the strength, the capabilities, dare I say you know, what someone is consider interested in aesthetic appearance of tone and muscle, what do you do for working out.

Kendra Sato 12:50
Um, so it’s had this really incredible evolution, because for the longest time, I did not work out work was working out, I would just set up weights, I would break down weights, and then I would go play outside of did not like being in the gym any more than I had to be. So I literally did not do any formal workouts for years. It just didn’t hold my interest. I wanted to learn movements, I wanted to play with them. And then that was kind of it. And then actually, through the pandemic, so my fiancee is the lead at a facility nearby. And I could go in but only when there were no clients in there at all. So I’d have to go on at five o’clock in the morning and have to be done by six. Luckily, during a pandemic, without kids and animals, that’s a pretty easy thing to do. When you have responsibilities, you can’t go to work and everything else is online. So that was really the first time I’d ever been very consistent with working out on my own. And then I started to realize I really like if I’m by myself or with a friend or something, I really like to do strength training. So bigger, heavier weights, slower movements, a lot more breaks, not necessarily just sitting on my ass, just you know, if I’m doing deadlifts, then I’m gonna supplement it with something else like a mobility drill, or, you know, a press or something that’s slightly unrelated to the muscle group that I’m using. So I’m not wasting time, but I’m also not just hammering myself away. Yeah. And then I realized that I kind of hate doing cardio by myself. And it’s just, it’s the worst mind game I can possibly play. So, you know, I’ll go to kind of more hit or high intensity classes that do a little bit of like lightweight strength, mostly, you know, metabolic training type stuff, because misery loves company, and I just don’t want to be alone. And if I have a little bit of competition with myself, or we have our heart rate monitors on or I have a friend who’s pushing me, I’ll do a much better job than if I were by myself and I’d probably last maybe 10 or 15 minutes. Yeah. Yeah, that’s kind of the split now is during training and then I do a little bit of like the classes and stuff to just get myself through.

Anthony Gurule 14:55
So what are you doing? Do you have like a set amount of like I do three days a car Do three days or two days of strength, two days of hit or does it vary on the week?

Kendra Sato 15:06
It varies a lot. One of my jobs is pretty sporadic. So sometimes they do have to travel last minute, sometimes they just don’t have, you know, the energy that can be extended on workouts, and it kind of throws things off. So I don’t do well with structure and organization, but I don’t like rigidity, especially in the realm of working out. So it tends to work out that it’s maybe two days of strength training, three to four days in the classes, metabolic training, cardio conditioning, whatever you want to call it. And then I try to get my bet outside once a week, if not more, at least for a walk or a hike or something. Bike Ride, what have you. So it’s really just how I’m feeling. And I really base it also off of like, do I feel like I can take this on and do a good job? If not, I’ll find an alternative. Yeah. And what I mean by that is like, did I sleep? Well? Am I eating? Well? Did I actually remember to drink water? It’s not an easy thing for me to do. You know, do I feel like I can tackle this? And I’ll come out better on the other side? Or do I feel like I’ll be destroyed on the other side? And that kind of dictates my answers as well?

Anthony Gurule 16:14
Yeah. And that’s such a, I think that in terms of the integration to the Gen pop ideas, there’s so many elements, right? You’re you travel from time to time for work, me as a parent, other people as whatever that role is. And the term that we’re referring to is some sort of ready state preparation, right. And it’s integrated by a lot of great personal trainers and coaches and programs there. But that’s something we always try to integrate and tell people is like, hey, how do you know you’re actually feeling well? And I think this is where and I don’t know if you use it, because I think you have an Apple Watch. From what I’ve seen, right? Is it Apple Watch, or Garmin Garmin, right? So I was for a while looking at heart rate variability and stuff to try to see that. But it’s, it’s it’s intimidating, even for someone who me who knows a lot of that stuff. I’m just like, man, it’s a lot to track that stuff. But also then just trying to tune in. So this is where everyone else is just like trying to tune in. Yeah, what was your sleep last night, right? Like, our family is going through a cold, like kids are getting up all these things, I’m not sleeping as well. And so what I had planned today is not nearly what I had intended to be just based on that preparation. And too many people just go in and think and it’s just like, Well, I still gotta get I still gotta check the box, I still got to push myself regardless. And slowly, they just start beating themselves up. How do you? How do you respond to people in that way to help them better understand the physiology and everything that’s actually happening.

Kendra Sato 17:46
So it’s different if I have the control versus if I’m advising if I have the control is in someone’s under my care, as a client. And my number one job before anything else in the world is to keep that person safe. So if I know they’re running on empty, and they’re here to because they either mentally have to check the box, mostly have to check the box, want the time away from whatever it is the live server with them will adjust accordingly. So I may still have them do some strength work, but they’re not going to be allowed to do anything more high intensity, they’re going to be able to do a couple of heavy lifts, they’re going to walk around, we’re going to relax, we’re going to chat, we’re going to do whatever it is that they need to do. And it’s going to be really dependent on their capacity. You can also be very quiet. I have two former clients that just love talking about the day we had a yoga session, not a yoga instructor, but they came in so destroyed, and so over it that the best they could possibly do is be there that day. Yeah. And they luckily it was the end of the day, last session, it was just them and myself, we turn the lights down. And I literally just to I turned on my best version of a yoga voice, and we stretched and rolled for an hour. Yeah. When it comes to advising somebody, it’s I kind of, it seems like the what i The advice that I give them is not really things that they’ve ever heard before, because I get a lot of surprise, usually when I advise stuff and it’s, you get to cheat or do whatever you want, when you go to where it is that you’re gone. So a lot of people who ask or when we talked about this, they’re going to, you know, an orange theory, a local facility, or joining classes, they’re they’re doing this stuff in a bigger setting where they don’t have one on one attention. And then the message is kind of like if it means that much to you to get your booty through the door, and to go to the class and finish it. Then everything else is you know, play your own game. So the coaches are going to maybe recommend me weights, maybe not. They’re going to teach you how to do the exercises. They’re going to time you through whatever it is that’s on the menu for that day. And then you get to cheat your way through it. If it says 15 reps and you can only do 10 Just do 10 Yeah, and no, you know, like the only person it’s affecting is you but you’re actually doing more for yourself doing 10 Good ones, and you’re doing 15 shitty ones. You know, and it’s what’s prescribed by your coach is not prescribed for you specifically. So, cut corners really want to cut corners and just honor where your energy is. And if you start feeling better, you can push a little harder, but if not, dial it back a little bit. And then at least you got it done. At least you started and finished. But you didn’t have to destroy yourself to do it.

Anthony Gurule 20:30
Yeah, and I think what’s so interesting is because we live in, and we live in a hustle culture, right? And I’m super subject to it, right? It’s hustle more and more and more from this for that. And that’s still and this is, I think, honestly, so the hardest because I still struggle with it, right? It’s like, was my body really tired? Or am I just kind of, you know, not wanting to do it today, right? So you know, then just, hey, strap up, let’s go. But you have to enact in only comes I think the biggest thing is it comes with experience, right? So if you’re a novice, this conversation is applicable, but not as much because you’re still in this growth phase, right? Whereas someone who’s in the middle, where you have a you have some reps under your belt, and you’re trying to figure out what am I just lazy? Or am I tired? Because there is a time where you do need to buckle up and strap up? Because we did we did don’t do anything, you’re still checking the box. But that’s it. That’s a hard thing. And again, like because you’re gonna always get the questions like, Well, what about this? What about this complaint, what is all day, you just got to get more reps in, you just got to get more reps in and then you’re gonna know, oh, I actually am tired, broken down, whatever that is. It’s not me just being lazy. I’m like, legit, physiologically depleted. Versus there are times where it’s just like, No, you’re you need to Let’s go Come on. Right. And that’s, I think that’s definitely a hard a hard balance for for anybody, but especially the newer to medium experienced individuals.

Kendra Sato 21:57
It is, but I really liked the word you use just now. And it was depleted. Like anybody whether novice, you know, in the fitness world or complete expert, like we all know that feeling of depletion, that feeling of just like I physically just, it feels like I don’t have anything to draw from and there’s a huge difference between that feeling of being depleted and empty, versus lazy and tired. And, you know, I think it’s, a lot of it is the coach’s duty to explain that those are, those are cues for your, from your internal self to listen to, like, do you feel like you just if I’m asking you to push harder, you really just can’t do anything, you’re already scraping the bottom of the barrel? Or do you feel like if I asked you to push harder and was there with you, you’d be able to dig deep and go for it. And I think that’s the difference between, you know, whether novice or not like if you feel like there’s something there and you know, in your self talk, like, you know, there’s something there or you know, that there’s nothing there. I think that’s a really important distinct distinction to make between the two.

Anthony Gurule 23:00
And again, there are wearable devices, watches, heart rate monitors and things which can help because then some people are just analytical, and they need that kind of like, oh, yeah, I have an elevated heart rate or I know Pavel has, I think it’s a breath hold, you do like a couple you have like one or two inhale exhales and then it’s a breath hold, I can’t remember because I don’t utilize it where the shorter your breath hold time indicates that physiologically you’re depleted. But there are resources out there if people want those specifics. And I think what’s so cool is about all that is like I came across this and I cannot remember who the guy was, I was trying to find it. But it was on a quick just, you know, scroll of a reel, but there’s individual talking about priorities, right? And he used his five by five model, right? The five top five priorities in my life like health, faith, fitness, you know, whatever that is business, and then each one of those have a subset of priorities in order to make that top priority. worthwhile. So in the fitness realm, I’ve been trying to go through this myself, like, realistically, and these are supposed to be actionable, actionable items, right? So when you looking at health, it’s like, like you said, like, I’m trying to get in today’s week of strength training, three to four days of cardio outside a day waters of focus, right? So when you break down this integration into life, it’s not a lack of time, it’s a lack of priority and understanding based on an individual’s goals. Right. But for more for most people, when they’re struggling to get it into their life, I was like, Hey, let’s prioritize, check in a few boxes, right? So when you’re talking about being depleted, I was like, just go check the box, like, get your ass there. It doesn’t matter if you are x, y, do it as best as you will. It’s just like, just go check the box. Don’t kill yourself, and then tell me how you feel the next day. More times than not they’re like so much better. Whereas focus of like checking every single possible thing that I can every single day because that’s a recipe for thinking fast.

Kendra Sato 24:51
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that people need to be able to it seems like there’s this weird expectation that There’s a certain duration and intensity to workouts for them to count. You know, if I moved for 10 minutes a day, and I had a really work heavy day where I was just kind of stuck in front of a computer for most of the time, and I did that 10 minutes of intentional movement, or just went outside for a little bit and just walked up and down my street, and that was it, that counts, that’s checking the box, that’s really, really awesome stuff and getting vitamin D and getting fresh air and moving my hips. Like, there’s so much that goes into that. But it’s not really celebrated in the current landscape. And I would like to see more of that. Also, like if I just, you know, if I did make it to class, and I knew that it wasn’t going to be a great day, and I made it through as much as I could. And I did realize halfway through like, oh, I can’t really push it, I have nothing else to give. And I just kind of sat on the bike for a little bit, or I’m an adult, I can leave whenever I want. I just do what I, you know, everything I possibly could and I decided like, Hey, this is it. I got nothing left and I proud of myself for coming. I gave it my all I’m done. I can go, yeah, it’s not gonna ruin anyone’s day. I’m not, you know, needing permission from anybody other than myself. I can just excuse myself, and I’m done for the day. And that’s good.

Anthony Gurule 26:19
Well, and that’s such a big thing, too, right? You’re in this for you. You’re not in it for anybody. Yeah. You don’t know, the coaches or anybody anything. Right? So as we’re wrapping up, what are because obviously, some of these people are listening, they’re not gonna be able to work with you one on one, whatever that CCAP pastor situation might be, or they’re interested in finding somebody, when you’re talking with someone who’s on the cusp, and really interested of this integration model of how do I fit it into my life? What are either some of the questions or ideas you prompt someone to think about just to help them kind of, you know, find that path or direction? So like, for instance, I might be like, well, what are some of the things you actually enjoy doing? Have you ever used dumbbells you know, about dumbbells you know about this? Or could it be like, hey, I want you to start thinking about, it’s hard to set goals when you don’t really know how to integrate it, right? So is there any kind of prompt people to think about or maybe process through in order to find either the gym, or the facility or the coach to work with?

Kendra Sato 27:19
There’s a couple of different things I would say, when I’m working with someone, and, you know, especially right now it’s December, we’re moving into holidays, Soon thereafter, we’re going to be moving into everybody’s resolution of losing 15 pounds, right? That’s probably going to die by February 1. Because people don’t really get the opportunity to think very much about their why their deep seated, why and I call it more of an anchor than a why. So what I mean by that is, when you make a resolution, that’s something along the lines of I want to lose 15 pounds this year, because I want to look better. Well, that’s not really the anchor, usually, you have to ask the same question or that ask the question, What’s your why? Or why are you here? Why is this important? And then you ask why five more times past that. And this is something that precision Nutrition has taught me. And once you keep digging, digging, digging, then you find out like, Oh, I feel like when I’m lighter and leaner, I stand taller, I walk through rooms with more confidence, I feel better in life, I feel better at work, I feel better. You know all these things. That’s more of a deep seated why. So that would be the first step. And that doesn’t mean that that translates directly to weight training, it doesn’t mean that that translates directly to running or anything else. It just means having a healthier lifestyle gets you this thing. So this is what really means something to you, outside of that you need to find. So fitness is a very weird world where everyone’s kind of expected to know what to do, which blows my mind. We expect you Oh, just do this. Oh, this is super simple. Oh, follow along. It’s like, are you serious? Why do we think people like quit so fast and get so overwhelmed and are completely intimidated because the expectation is completely unrealistic. And a lot of professionals are asking people to be savvy and something that they’ve been studying and they’ve been immersed in, when they’re not when their audience could possibly care less. So I think when you’re looking for someone to follow, learn from be trained by jump in classes with whatever the case may be, find someone you’re comfortable asking questions, and getting really good answers that make sense to you. So it’s very easy, and I still do this too, in realms that are not fitness. If I ask a question and I get an answer. I’m like, okay, cool. And then two seconds later, I’m like, that didn’t make any sense at all. But instead of going back and advocating, like whoo, can you explain it to me again, or say it differently or give me an example or two? Are you really good with analogies or metaphors? because I don’t get it. Yeah, that’s hugely important. If you’re with somebody who expects a certain level of proficiency, and you’re not there, that’s your cue to find somebody else. Yep. And then to find someone who is humble enough to not always have all the answers and give you, you know, smoke when you’re asking for a real. So having a coach who has an air of confidence, but also, humility is huge. Go into the biggest, baddest person who seems like they have every single answer all the time, they probably don’t. Yeah, and they’re probably not wise or safe enough to figure something out with you as an individual, to keep you on the right path. So it’d be another one just like, find someone you’re comfortable with, you can ask a lot of questions, even if you feel like they’re silly. You should never be meant to feel like your questions are done. Yeah. You know, and then find if you want empowerment, find somebody who’s going to help you learn in the long run. Versus you need me. Yeah, gotta be, you know, if you want it to be sustainable, and in your life, you can remember Oh, yeah, okay. So my coach said that, it’s, you know, if I have a heavy workday, I could maybe just do five squat. And he said, my squats are really good. So we’re just gonna do that. And then you have ownership over it, versus someone who’s making you feel like, you need all the bells and whistles you need their equipment, you need their space you need, you can’t really do anything without them. So find someone who can help you weave it into your life. And it doesn’t always have to be fitness movement related. It can also be drinking water, it can be being mindful before bed, or spending some time outside every day, or making sure that you, you know, have something green on your plate always. It can be just about anything that aids in a healthy lifestyle. Just as long as it’s something that is interesting and exciting to us as an individual. So that’s another, I think the last thing I would say is when I’m talking to clients about maybe how we can integrate better habits into their life, or my family or somebody who’s wanting to do something better for themselves like, well, what’s most exciting to you? Maybe they did see an Instagram ad with sandbags, and they thought they were the coolest thing ever. I want to learn how to use sand bags. Awesome. Nobody will use that we’ll start there. Yeah, my favorite tool in the whole world, they do love it. But cool. That’s what you’re excited about. That’s where we’re gonna go. Or I’m really good at eating vegetables. I’m not so great at eating protein. But I do love it. I just don’t really think about it, or I don’t know much about it. Like, cool. We’ll teach you where you can put protein into your meals or snacks or whatever it is that we just find things that like mean something to the person right now. And then we just build one thing at a time.

Anthony Gurule 32:52
That’s probably you wrote context and relevance, right? Yep. I love it. I’m working with I always need to ask this. I got to get it in right. Where can people find you? What’s best if they wanted to reach out with you connect? Are you taking on clients, you do remote coaching? Is it only in person?

Kendra Sato 33:10
No, I am. I am taking on clients, it is going to be remote for the most part unless someone listening happens to be in Santa Cruz area. So you can find me on social media. My handle is just my name at Kendra Sato. And then I also have a website that I’m constantly working on and building but I do now have a training page. So it’s a little bit about me a little bit about my credentials, and a little translation, my credentials. And then there’s a tab that you can click on that actually just emails me directly. So

Anthony Gurule 33:40
yeah, perfect. Yeah, well, I had a great time talking to you. I think that’s such a ton of great information. Again, this is such such important what we’d see as like nuggets of information but can be profound for each and every one of you guys. So if you enjoy it, please share it with someone else you know might be on honestly the struggle bus but the figuring figuring it all out on how to actually live. So thanks again and look forward to connecting again soon.

Kendra Sato 34:09
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Anthony Gurule 34:10
All right. We’ll talk soon. Okay,

Transcribed by https://otter.ai


Did you know this fact EP85 (1)

Did You Know this Fact? | EP 85

Live LOUD Life Podcast
Lafayette Colorado

Episode 85

Did you know this fact?

With Dr. Antonio Gurule


Episode Highlights:

 

[0:10] Today’s episode is about the length tension relationship.
[1:19] There is a position in which the muscle belly can generate the most force.
[2:46] How the length tension relationship can improve lower back pain.
[4:11] What is strength training in the presence of pain?
[6:01] If you feel like you’re stuck, there’s definitely ways for you to start progressing.

 

Connect With Antonio and the Live LOUD team:

hello@liveloudlife.com

Subscribe to my YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/LiveLoud

Visit the website: https://www.lifeloudlife.com

Like the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/liveloudchiropractic/

Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/live.loud.life/

Guiding your to the adventurous life you were made for!

 

 


About Dr. Antonio Gurule

Nutrition Building Blocks Broken Down

Background:

  • Father
  • Doctor of Chiropractic
  • Owner of Live LOUD
  • Personal Trainer & Health Coach

Anthony Gurule 0:10
All right, we’re gonna jump right into today’s episode. Today’s episode is about the length tension relationship. Now, for some of you might, you might be thinking, wow, how is this important? What is this apply to me? Well, to me, this is actually a very important piece of the puzzle when we’re dealing with rehab and recovery that most people aren’t talking about. And this really helps you unlock the knowledge about how your body moves, and operates, especially from just a backing up, especially from just a movement perspective, right. So getting right into it length tension relationship, what that means is the muscle the our muscle fibers generate tension, right, they get tighter when you ask them to work. Now, here’s something important to always note is a muscle can only pull, right, we oftentimes will look at like a pushing motion, even like a squat, like I’m pushing the ground away, your muscle is lengthening as you push away from something it is it is shortening, and that in turn is pulling, that is pulling a body part or another joint or another bone in order to elicit movement.

Anthony Gurule 1:19
Now, what’s important to note about that is there is a position in which the muscle belly, the belly is like the middle part of the muscle, right where most of the muscle fibers are. And in turn, this also is in relationship to the tendon which attaches to the bone. But there is a position in which the muscle belly can generate the most amount of force. And and it’s not, we can’t say it’s like oh, and it’s X amount of length, or whatever that is, right. It’s it’s it’s it’s an inherent thing that is felt and developed throughout your body. And it can change because you can get stronger in positions of shorter or longer positions, right in relationship to the to the muscle length. But more importantly, what we’re looking for is how can you better understand this to help you with leverage? Now leverage is the name of the game when it comes to resistance training, right? Your ability to leverage right to move something allows you to get stronger, the more weight you can move or leverage, then the more adaptation you can have.

Anthony Gurule 2:28
Now that being said, too, we can use the leverage. And the same, the same concept of stretched, the stretch length tension relationship, to maybe elicit more strength, right, if I can generate tension in a muscle belly, that’s longer can I make it stronger in that longer position. Now this is also important because we talk about in previous episodes, as indicated, in alluding to this episode of How length tension relationship can improve shoulder pain. This is also true for like lower back pain, right? When we’re dealing with disc injuries and things like that we’re looking at the muscles are oftentimes in a hyper spasm short position, because they don’t want they don’t want the the joints, the the spine to move because that might elicit more pressure on a disc. And so what happens is they become locked down in tight and their tension is only then generated in a short position. And then when we ask them to elongate to move and trade create tension in a long position, they don’t know how to do it. And sometimes that creates spasm, potential muscle injuries and or they buckle fail and fatigue, which then puts more pressure onto the lower back.

Anthony Gurule 3:37
So understanding the length tension relationship allows you to create this framework of like, okay, well, I feel like I have the most control and leverage within this range of motion. Right now, it’s good because we want to build on that. And then as we build on that we can we can expand upon that. And this is also especially true as we talked about the shoulder, the shoulder while we want it to be strong in various positions. It is strongest in certain positions based on this length tension relationship of having the rotator cuff, being able to control where our shoulder is and how it operates. So when we’re dealing with rehab, rehab, rehab is strength training in the presence of pain so you’re still doing all the things that you should and could be able to do just maybe slightly modified, regressed or lateral laterally changed. But what we’re doing is we’re changing it ever so slightly because there is pain. We don’t want to elicit more pain we’re not trying to push and work through pain, but at the same time we appreciate pain and when we change the the our orientation and position then we’re able to influence the length tension relationship to allow you to generate good healthy tension without eliciting or maybe triggering pain.

Anthony Gurule 4:49
So in my mind, this is a is a is a critical component to the rehab and recovery process. We’re working within a maybe a country rolled a range of motion or a controlled position for this reason. For this reason, it also helps you change how you’re loaning other joints that might be angry, right? Because the muscles are more in control. Or let’s say for instance, you’re dealing with patellar tendinopathy. Right or patellar. tendonitis, right. And we’re doing box squats, we’re controlling range of motion and depth. So we can still load the tendon to create adaptation, and change and improve that tendon. But at the same time, we’re not going too far that might be pulling on that, on that inflamed tendon, or possibly muscle belly or tendon tear, right. So this is, in my mind, a really critical component of the recovery and rehab process, that is not being talked about enough, because we just assume, Oh, you just if it hurts, just don’t do it. Right, we need to maximize on this, we can still find ways to load in in elicit adaptation in response, we just have to know what positions, depth and variables to manipulate and change. So if you feel like you’re kind of just honestly just stuck, you’re not getting a lot out of your movements, or you feel like you’re really limited because because of pain, or because of what someone told you to do. I promise you, there’s definitely ways for us to start progressing.

Anthony Gurule 6:16
You’re planning your program. And oftentimes, you know, when we work with people from a remote setting, or in person, we’re just going through their programming in their planning, right? So if someone’s at a gym, or they’re doing a group class, or even we’ve had people that have, they’re seeing PTS because they want to go through insurance, and they’re getting a lot from it, but yet at the same time, they know they’re not good enough. We help them hey, you let me see your PT program, right. And so we’ll do consultations, we’d say okay, well with this program, I think you’re in the right direction. But I would do this this in this this way, right. So whether it’s us helping you redefine your PT program, whether it’s us helping you with your current group training or your customized programming, helping you change and look at what you’re doing, so that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel, we can keep doing everything, but sometimes just small modifications of changing angles, levers positions, length tension relationships, will open up better opportunities for you to maintain everything that you’re doing, but not regress due to triggers and flare ups of the pain that you might be experiencing. So I hope this was super helpful for you guys. Again, please like share, comment, subscribe, help us get this word out to other people so that we can help others just like you live a loud, adventurous life. Thanks for tuning in guys Live Loud.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai


Pregnancy Vlog: Weeks 16-20 | EP 84

Pregnancy Vlog: Weeks 16-20 | EP 84

Live LOUD Life Podcast
Lafayette Colorado

Episode 84

EP 84 | Pregnancy Vlog: Weeks 16-20

With Dr. Nichelle Gurule


EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

[0:09] Decision to do a birth center again.

[2:06] My Birth Center is closing down.

[4:10] How do you decide where you want to deliver?

[7:25] The importance of finding the right provider for you.

[10:30] Meditation at night is a really beautiful ritual.

[13:02] Mentally preparing your brain and your body.

[16:09] The anatomy nerd in me loves the 20-week ultrasound.

[18:26] What’s the worst symptom I’ve had?

[21:43] What I’ve been eating to help reduce swelling.

[24:33] The best thing we can do for microbiota is to eat 30 plants a day.


About Dr. Antonio Gurule

Nutrition Building Blocks Broken Down

Background:

  • Father
  • Doctor of Chiropractic
  • Owner of Live LOUD
  • Personal Trainer & Health Coach

Anthony Gurule  00:00

Hey what’s up guys, welcome back to another episode of the Live LOUD Life podcast. My name is Dr. Antonio, I’m your host of the Live LOUD Life podcast. My wife and I, we co-own Live LOUD Chiropractic and Coaching here in Lafayette, Colorado. We are just outside of Boulder, Colorado in Boulder County. And our mission is to help families. We want to help make families stronger, so that we can build a stronger community. We want to help guide you to the adventurous life that you and your family were meant for. And we do this through chiropractic and coaching. chiropractic, obviously being more of a hands on approach, more of a clinical conversation, clinical diagnostics, but the coaching aspect is really what we believe is, you know, the foundation of what our system methodology, whatever you want to call it is, because a lot of this comes around through just coaching suggestions and recommendations. also, you know, obviously within that comes into clinical prescriptions of certain things to eat or supplements, so on and so forth. But it’s coaching a lifestyle, it’s coaching, it’s coaching a philosophy and a foundation about how to live an active healthy life as an individual, and setting an example of a healthy active life for your family, for your immediate family, for your friends, and more importantly for your community. So stronger families to make a stronger community as a whole would be a win win, right? And that’s what we want to be able to do. we want to be able to help fill in the gaps in the holes that you’re maybe not getting from, from other roles and conditions.

 

Anthony Gurule  01:43

And today that’s in particular where we’re going to talk about. it’s going to be a little bit more of a shorter episode because this is more of a quote unquote, you know, just discussion around how to lay out a framework and a better understanding of how to work out or what exercises are safe or maybe not safe during pregnancy. This is a very, very common question that we get.

 

Anthony Gurule  02:12

My wife Nichelle has created a mini course that has some workout ideas, recommendations, and prescriptions than laid out into a workout. She guides and  educates other clinicians on how to broach this topic as a chiropractor, how to better serve prenatal patients through chiropractic care, but also exercise recommendations and prescriptions, having recommendations with other personal trainers within the community whether that’s CrossFit whether that’s Orange Theory, chatting with coaches and owners and saying hey, if you have prenatal patients and they’re having these types of symptoms, or this has happened, here’s some better recommendations, not modifications. We call them lateralizations–you’re just you know, you’re doing something something different or something else we you know, we borrow that term from Charlie Weingroff, who’s a physical therapist and strength conditioning coach. But it also and also doulas, right, doulas and midwives and OBs who are directly involved with the prenatal process from nearly conception all the way through, having this conversation. we know that exercise is important during pregnancy,

 

Anthony Gurule  03:19

There are so many different studies that talk about the benefits of exercising during pregnancy, not only for the mom, but also for baby, which is quite interesting. They’re seeing increased cognitive-what’s the word I’m looking for? Excuse me, their cognitive output as a as an as a child through as they age is actually better from moms that actually worked out during pregnancy.

 

Anthony Gurule  03:50

Now this is tough, right? How do you define working out or exercise? it’s different for everybody. But we want to, and we encourage that, and yet we’re sympathetic to the different stages of life, aches and pains, so on and so forth, which obviously would limit what you can do from an exercise perspective. So you know, it’s a bit of a gray area on determining what is working out? what is exercise? What are the physical guidelines or recommendations for pregnancy? And without getting into the like, nitty gritty detail of every single thing. And obviously, every potential situation, if you had this versus this, what could happen? we’re not gonna be able to do that. What we just want to lay out is what is what are we trying to accomplish here, and we want to encourage you to stay as physically active as possible.

 

Anthony Gurule  04:41

And one of the things that constantly comes up is, well, should you add something in that you have not already been doing? Let’s say for instance, someone just through the stages of life with work and kids or whatever that is, they were not able to work out as much before they got pregnant, but now that they’re pregnant, whether they have more time or they understand the importance of exercises during pregnancy, well, would we say, “Well, you haven’t been exercising, so you shouldn’t do too much.” No, that doesn’t, that doesn’t really make sense. Now, we would encourage not to do too much, there’s obviously, you know, a too far swinging the pendulum of the other way. But we wouldn’t say “no, don’t exercise because you weren’t doing something before,” we just have to find those first few stepping stones to help them start to gain some momentum. and help hold their hand, if you will, So that their technique and they feel confident about lifting, or how far they’re walking or whatever that is. And that’s an important topic, because a lot of times people want to add things in, but they weren’t quite ready or weren’t doing them before. And they then assume that they’re not able to do them at all. So you do have to take that in consideration, there is a ton that you can do, and that you can still add, even though you weren’t doing them prior to pregnancy.

 

Anthony Gurule  05:54

Now on the big questions is, is it safe? you know, outside to contact sports, or different things like that the majority of what you’re going to do is safe for pregnancy, right? Rock climbing, we have pregnant patients that have been rock climbing before, obviously, there’s a certain inherent risk with certain sports or activities. You know, you could fall off riding your bike, you could fall over running, right, so we’re not encouraging any of these by any means. We’re just kind of, you know, setting some suggestions, if you will. And you have to take into consideration.

 

Anthony Gurule  06:31

Now, there are certain things to consider when you’re talking about like weightlifting, and how heavy and the intensity that you’re doing. And if you’re doing Valsalva movements, which is essentially holding your breath to maintain a more rigid or stiff torso, as you’re seeing changes in blood volume and blood pressure, you know, you do have to take that in consideration. And that is again, of course a conversation with your provider that is managing your, your pregnancy, but we recommend Mama’s weight lift, or do resistance training. During pregnancy, again, we talked about about load management and the intensity and things like that, but you can still lift and do fairly intense things. And it’s a fairly as a you know, as a scale and a wide range during pregnancy and see a ton of benefit from that. Now, are we trying to hit one rep maxes and PRs during pregnancy, I mean, some would argue yes, but I would argue, why, that’s not really an accurate representation of what your strength is anyways. So you know, you do have to to kind of keep manipulating the numbers and the weights and the intensity and the sets and reps in order to do it. But weightlifting and resistance training is safe, and it is effective. Now, outside of that, there’s not a lot of unsafe things to do, again, outside of contact sports, or things that would elicit, you know, potential trauma to you or baby based on impact we’ve had, again, not our recommendations, but some have tried very just easy scheme, because they’re in the winter months, and they wanted to and they felt very confident about not falling. So you know, you have those types of things.

 

Anthony Gurule  08:16

Overall, again, we’re talking about movement. You need to move, and it’s good to get your heart rate up. And it’s good to breathe hard. So that doesn’t mean just because you’re pregnant, you can’t do HIIT training or circuit training or CrossFit or Orange Theory. But you do have to listen to your body and understand certain signs that would indicate that things might be too much, right? Now those are going to be different for everyone, but a lot of this comes down to you know, lightheadedness, you know, breathing too hard. Certain aches and pains within lower extremity, chest, abdomen, so on and so forth would be obviously like your more extreme ones. If you’re becoming pale or anything like that, I mean, again, these are the same criteria, though, that would be if someone else was working out or training too hard. So it’s realistically the same thing. It’s just that your threshold level for all those most likely have gone down. And depending on what type of an athlete you were before, you’re going to be maybe a little frustrated that you’re not able to do the things you were able to do previously, which makes sense. But if you’re someone who wasn’t exercising before, you’re probably going to be a little bit more hyper aware of that, of just feeling that shortness of breath or that uneasiness. So again, we’re not saying you have to push through that because we’re not trying to set yourself up for a strength and conditioning program to increase your metabolic capacity to increase your strength and conditioning during pregnancy. We’re trying to help you maintain a healthy active pregnancy.

 

Anthony Gurule  09:54

Now, walking. walking is great. but in general, we encourage you to do something above and beyond walking. Obviously, again, certain things would dictate that you would not be able to do so. And this is again, any exercise. Any exercise that you do during pregnancy needs to be consulted with and work through and have a conversation with the primary physician who is managing your pregnancy, whether that’s your nurse practitioner, your midwife or your OB or obstetrician, right. But we would encourage more than just walking. walking is fantastic, but that’s kind of like your baseline minimum, right? Just like our activities, or recommendation activity guidelines. We want a few days a week of where we’re kind of just doing this steady state getting our steps in, you know, kind of pushing ourselves, we’re huffing and puffing, but still just kind of at that conversational level, but you’re not really getting a lot of benefits outside of that.

 

Anthony Gurule  10:55

So if you’re just walking, high five. kudos. can you do something more? Can you do some bodyweight squats? Can you do some bodyweight, you know, good mornings? can you do some walking lunges? do you have a suspension training, we’re able to do some bodyweight rows? Do you have some bands that you can do some rows with? You know, there’s a lot that you can do that allows you to get a little bit more out of that. Now, again, this all comes back down to preferences of exercises that you like to do, because that’s gonna allow you to maintain the most consistency, but then also the intensity that you like to do. And we do encourage having an open mind and at least being willing to try some high intensity things that allow you to still get your heart rate up a little bit. And it’s okay to lift more than five or 10 pounds. And not saying that that is a bad thing. There’s programs out there where it’s all directed around that where it’s lighter weight, high rep, but I just don’t want individuals and mamas to feel like they’re not able to do more and or being ashamed because other people are just saying they should back off because they’re pregnant. “why would you need a lift that much?” It fits within your strength, and your comfort, and your wheelhouse, that is totally fine.

 

Anthony Gurule  12:05

Again, you if you’ve been doing that enough, you understand the risk reward ratio and having a conversation with your practitioner has driven us to kind of help navigate and guide as you start to get further through pregnancies, what things maybe we need to change or manipulate. But that’s totally fine. Now outside of that, the question around safe also comes up around core exercises. diastasis recti, pelvic floor strength, so on and so forth, we want to enhance the capability of understanding how to control tension within your abdominal wall and your pelvic floor through pregnancy, because the pressure is increasing due to baby taking up more space. But we’re not we’re not necessarily we’re not gaining more strength, right.

 

Anthony Gurule  12:45

And so what a lot of people assume it’s when we’ve seen this, is “I don’t want diastasis. So I’m doing more core work to prevent diastasis from happening.” diastasis recti will happen in 100% of moms, it’s estimated at the week 35 Everyone will have some form of it. Now it is technically not a quote unquote diagnosis, though, until 12 weeks postpartum, because it is a normal thing that everyone will get. So you can’t diagnose someone with something that everyone will get–doesn’t make sense, right? So after that, though, if you still have weakness or spacing issues, then we can have a you know, a stronger conversation about putting a diagnosis on that.

 

Anthony Gurule  13:26

But what we’re trying to enhance and help is what exercises are quote unquote, not safe versus unsafe, but adding too much pressure or tension into the abdominal wall or the pelvic floor and creating more laxity. again, as that pressure for as baby’s growing starts to put more pressure on the pelvic floor and the abdominal wall. If you’re doing more things that increases the pressure within the within the abdominal cavity that’s going to push on that separation even more and/or push on that pelvic floor even more, creating potential incontinence or prolapse issues and/or more bulging and doming within the abdominal wall stretching out that separation or that gap even further, potentially making the recovery process more challenging or slightly longer. I’m not saying that it will but potentially, so we do have to take that in consideration. So we go through activation exercise of the pelvic floor, of the abdominal wall so that you better understand how to control those pressure increases while you’re lifting or exercising so that you simply can stay at a management level.

 

Anthony Gurule  14:28

And that in turn, helps you get through pregnancy of understanding how to lift up your older kiddo, having to lift up dog food or anything like that. It’s just managing and controlling pressure. So there’s really not anything that I would say that safe or unsafe. Now, things that we would advise against for core exercises is sit ups or crunches. You know a lot of those things that create like hanging knee raises and different things like that during pregnancy. A lot of those things that create a lot of intra abdominal pressure and tension. and especially during a flex position, that tends to put a lot more pressure on the abdominal wall, the separation where diastasis will occur as well as the pelvic floor.

 

Anthony Gurule  15:09

So, you know, while we never say never, there’s definitely a category of things that we definitely urge against because the risk/reward benefit and again, risk not being “injured,” But risk of potentially putting more pressure and making the recovery process  on the other side harder, is not is not something that we find to be as advantageous. But you can still get the benefits of quote unquote, core exercises through full body movements such as goblet squats, such as deadlifts, you know, depending on the phase that you’re in, push ups, which are, you know, a dynamic plank. or being able to do a TRX row, which is a reverse plank as you’re just lifting yourself up. three point rows where you’re on, you know, two hands or doing like a row on a bench, where you’re in a tabletop position that’s adding anti rotation exercises. So there’s a ton that you can do that still highlights and isolates, the core isolates, sorry. that highlights and will emphasize core activation, but through a full body compound movement. And what’s great about that is during pregnancy, depending on your energy levels, it’s hard to do all the little isolated accessory and all these separate exercises as it is. So it’s kind of nice being able to combine everything, so you get more bang for your buck, especially if you’re a parent and you’re on and you’re on baby number two or three, right?

 

Anthony Gurule  16:31

So what exercises are safe for pregnant women to do? All are. reduce or eliminate for sure contact activities, different things like that. the increased risk activities of you know, trauma and things like that. Outside of that you’re managing pressure, I would definitely encourage reducing anything that’s heavy lifting, that’s, that’s requiring you to do Valsalva moves, you’re having to hold your breath for an extended period of time. that changes blood pressure, so on and so forth. But outside of that, Pregnancy is a completely safe time to do all exercises. we definitely as we highlighted, urge and encourage, you know, certain things over other ones just for you know, added bang for your buck or full body movements, so on and so forth. And that, but outside of that you are free to do what you want.

 

Anthony Gurule  17:19

If you want guidance, though, you know, there are there are trainers out there that work specifically with prenatal patients. we would love to be able to have that conversation with you if that’s something you want to bounce back or navigate. Because we do want to encourage as much as we can. A very, very active pregnancy through exercise working out or however you want to describe that. So if you found this beneficial, please like share, subscribe. if you’re pregnant, I hope you can utilize this and take some of the information for you and yourself. If you have anyone else you know… a relative a family member, a friend who is pregnant and they’re unsure they’ve been you know asking this question what things I don’t know what things I can do. I don’t know if it’s safe for baby share this video with them. We’d love to be able to provide a better frame of reference and or context to be able to ask better questions so that they can find the workout program  or the movements that work best for them during their pregnancy. Until next time guys live loud .if you’re currently pregnant, Congratulations, and we look forward to helping and serving in the future.


neck pain

Fix your Neck Pain Today | Neck Pain Recovery Explained

Fix your Neck Pain Today | Neck Pain Recovery Explained

Are you currently suffering from neck pain?

Neck pain that might be acute, meaning to just happen recently, within the last few days or weeks? Or a chronic condition that you’ve been dealing with on and off for the last few months, if not even years?

Oftentimes, we hear people come into our office here at Live Loud Chiropractic in Lafayette, CO and just say, “oh, I have a bad neck. I have disc degeneration of degeneration of the spine. And that’s the reason why I have neck pain.”

Although neck pain might seem common, it is not uncommon for this condition to be mismanaged. Oftentimes, our patients are being put through the wringer whether that’s with massage, Acupuncture, PT, Chiropractic care, primary care, shots, or orthopedics, without the proper understanding of why the pain is even there in the first place.


PLAY VIDEO ⬇︎


If you’re dealing with neck pain, this blog is for you.

If you have a family member who has been dealing with either chronic or acute neck pain, and they’re looking for some support, please share this with them.

 

What will you get in this blog?

  1. break down the common causes of neck pain
  2. give you the Live Loud approach to handling neck pain and musculoskeletal conditions.
  3. A few of the tests we use to determine what the cause of pain is.
  4. Some things that you can do about the neck pain, right when you’re done reading this blog.
  5. A long-term approach to helping with neck pain
  6. The platform and the philosophy about how a movement-based approach really helps you as an individual deal with any sort of aches and pains that you might be having.

Overuse and Neck Pain

A lot of the issues that you’re going to be seeing with neck pain are overuse in nature, but it’s, almost from a stagnation perspective.

Your head weighs 12 to 20 pounds, and based on our somewhat sedentary lifestyle for Western civilization it puts a lot of tension on the back side of your neck. Thus, those muscles are constantly having to contract and hold crazy tension and tightness. Then we create this negative feedback loop.

Rule out any Structural Issues with your Neck Pain

What we’re going to first and foremost is make sure we rule out any sort of structural issues. Again, outside of you having trauma, an accident, etc the likelihood of this being the case goes down.

 

What we will have you do is:

  • sit up nice and tall, and we just basically push down on the head.
  • What we’re doing here is seeing if there’s any pain or trigger of symptoms.
  • After that we’re going go to the side, and then to the other side.

 

One thing to consider, though, is, in the case of neck pain, if you’re having any sort of ridiculer symptoms, meaning you have numbness, tingling, or maybe pain down the arms, this is what we’re trying to look for. Maybe there is a disc issue or some sort of encroachment on a pinched nerve at the actual spinal level.

If those do not replicate then we’re going to be looking at the soft tissue structures within the super clavicular area. Which is right in the soft part of your neck where all the nerves come out of, but that’s what we’re trying to look at.

Basic Range of Motion with your Neck Pain

Now we’re going to look at basic range of motion:

  • Tuck your chin down to your sternum.
  • Look all the way up
  • Back down,
  • Look over your right shoulder
  • Then look over your left shoulder

 

So active range of motion is good, we would assess passive range of motion as well to determine if there’s any sort of issues. For some people, they get neck pain when they’re working out – this means that there might be a technique flaw that we would have to address.

Commonly, we see this with overhead pressing, where someone is driving their neck through, essentially just creating a pinch point in their neck.

Range of Motion and Mobility in the Thoracic Spine & Neck Pain

The other thing that we have to look at is where does your head attach to the upper part of your back?

We have to address what the range of motion and mobility within the thoracic spine is to determine if that is affecting where the position of the head is. For this we will do a cat cow exercise.

With the cat cow exercise, we’re going to be looking for extension. In doing this we get a lot of spinal motion. To segment off where we want the mid back, you’ll come back to neutral, sit your butt back down through your heels, and do the same cat cow motion.

This way we can isolate more of the thoracic spine and see if there’s any sort of limitations. Commonly we’re seeing an extension limitation, meaning more rounded forward. When we’re rounded forward that’s going to put your head forward putting more pressure on your neck or that CT junction or where your neck meets your upper back.

Is Your Neck Pain coming from a Neighboring Area?

This is an important distinction of understanding. Is the neck issue actually coming from a different neighboring area? Or is it just from stagnation and not moving a lot?

Next, what we’re going to do is have you lay on your back face up. From a manual therapy side, we know there’s a ton of benefit from doing soft tissue work. Soft tissue work is something we at Live Loud like to pass off to you to do at home. This allows you to become autonomous in your care and address the tension that you might be feeling in between our sessions.

We’re going to be doing essentially just basic, pull and stretch motion to help work on any tight spots. This also helps me palpate to determine what areas we need to focus on more. Obviously, you as an individual will be able to feel where you’re tighter in certain areas, and are more tender, and you’ll want to focus on those. We’re just going to work all these different spots within this session, especially the suboccipital.

The Suboccipital and how important it is in affecting your Neck Pain!

The suboccipital is underneath your occiput, which is the base of your skull on the back. Why are these so important?

Well, many of us are doing some form of computer work nowadays, or on our cell phones, reading, whatever that is. These are directly tied to eye righting reflexes and leveling of the head.

So, if I am rounded, I’m going to have to tip my head up to be able to see level to the horizon. Oftentimes, these get extra tight. We’re going to do an extensive amount of work here with fingers, and or maybe dry needling to help relieve the tension here to open up range of motion.

What you can do at home for Neck Pain

Now, these can also be worked on at home. All you need are some trigger point balls and a yoga block. Trigger point balls are two balls that are basically together that are softer than a lacrosse ball and firmer than a tennis ball. These are going to basically cup and hug the suboccipital muscles.

You can take this exact same tool at home, to work on the tension in between our sessions, during your micro breaks, while you’re working on the computer or at work or whatever that might be.

Once you have trigger point balls and a yoga block you can set the balls on the yoga block and lay down placing them where they are cupping your suboccipital.

Once you do that you can start to turn your head side to side, up and down, and  draw different shapes to hit different angles and corners to make sure you’re getting all the areas that you can.

Important note when you establish range of motion with Neck Pain

A couple important things to note, this goes true for any part of your body, once you’ve established more range of motion or decreased pain, you have to put that into context, you have to show the body that the pain that you previously had has improved, or that your range of motion has. One of the movements that I love, especially for the neck is called:

movement mapping for neck pain

What we want to assume is that we have this, imagine a space globe around your head, right, and you have a marker or something on the top of your head. Now, your goal is to cover the inside of the globe as best as you can.

So, you’re basically going to try to paint the inside of a globe and go through all of these different ranges of motion. Now the reason why we call it mapping is you’re going to have a better understanding about where your tight points are. Where maybe we’re getting some kinks in the system as well.

But more importantly, all the range of motion that we’ve been improving through adjustments and soft tissue work, you now can translate into better and more movement.

If you have questions about what this looks like take a look at the video!

Expand with Resistance Training                     

We would expand upon this too, with some sort of resistance training, whether that would be a plank, or even like a bird dog and something where you would have to stabilize and hold your neck and teach it what we want for range of motion and stability.

These are a few important tools that will help you handle your pain throughout the day, if it’s something that’s kind of chronic and or ebbs and flows based on how much you’re either at a computer, or how much you’re driving and commuting, all of which have the effects on how much load or pressure is going on to the neck.

But again, it also creates a frame of reference in context as to how you can improve your range of motion and gain more confidence with your neck rather than just staying stiff and turning your whole body when your necks hurting. If you continue to do that then your neck is just going to get tighter and tighter and build upon itself.

Test it out on your own to Help your Neck Pain!

If this was helpful, this would be a fantastic thing to at least test out on your own. What we’re really looking for as far as this movement mapping principle, right, is it not only helps you take away a lot of the pain and discomfort because again stagnation just makes you tighter.

We want to break up stagnation with movement, that simple. But as you improve range of motion, whether through adjustments, trigger point work at home, or in the office here at Live Loud Chiropractic. We have to create more context, if you don’t use the new range of motion that we’ve just established, then you’re just going to stay tighter, right?

You have to teach the body what you want it to do, as far as from a functionality point and just simply range motion, but also stability.

We here at Live Loud Chiropractic encourage you to take the exploration model that is by far the foundation of every part of my conversation, whether it’s neck pain, knee pain or shoulder pain as it helps you better understand where your sticky parts are, where you’re tight, and where it’s painful.

This way you have a better idea of what to avoid or what to what to dive in a little bit deeper on to see if you can improve it. This also creates a better context for me to have a conversation for you.

Final Thoughts on Neck Pain!

Whether you have a potentially chronic issue or something more acute where maybe you just woke up with neck pain and you feel like you can’t move.

We here at Live Loud Chiropractic in Lafayette, CO are always here to help and support you and your pains. Having more context around your neck pain will help determine what the best course of action for you is to help you get back to all the activities that you want to be able to do and live a loud life.


foot pain

How to Fix your Foot Pain Today || Foot and Ankle Pain Explained

How to Fix your Foot Pain Today | Foot and Ankle Pain Explained

Are you suffering from foot pain?

Foot pain can be a very frustrating injury to deal with. Why? Because it’s our relationship with the ground.

We are bipedal creatures, we walk upright, and our feet are on the ground all the time.

Now, if you’re dealing with foot pain, this, amongst so many other things, are being mismanaged.

Why?

Because you go to your primary care, you go to somebody who’s talking about foot pain; they’re going to send you to a podiatrist.

While there are many great podiatrists out there, the recommendation for foot pain is orthotics or some sort of more supportive shoe without even understanding or doing an evaluation on whether that person would even need supported shoes.


PLAY VIDEO ⬇︎


Similar to how an x-ray and an MRI is overused for lower back pain, we’re looking at scans the feet and arches.

To simply think that’s enough, that is just the wrong solution.

You have to understand because this is our contact with the ground, we have weaker feet than normal.

We’re in shoes that are too small, we’re in high heels, we’re in the stiff soles that don’t allow our feet to actually function as feet, and they become weaker.

When they become weaker, they’re not able to sustain a load of our body weight, not to mention that a third of us are overweight to an obesity level.

 

So, if you’re dealing with foot pain, in this blog, we’re going to share a couple of the ways that we test, evaluate, and assess here at Live Loud Chiropractic:

  • What’s going on in the feet to determine is it actually a support issue?
  • Is it actually a mobility issue
  • Is it actually a strength issue
  • and they’re going to give you a couple of solutions that will help you determine what you need to do

Let's Dive in to Address your Foot Pain Problems:

A couple of typical foot pain issues:

  • Achilles Tendinitis (heel pain)
  • Plantar Fasciitis
  • Toe Pain
    • What we commonly see here at Live Loud is big toe pain
    • Potential Bunions

Keep reading or watch the video as we’ll address how we look at foot structure and function and a few things that can help you NOW.

Just like with everything else, load progression has to be the forefront of this, especially when you’re talking about plantar fasciitis, and or some sort of Achilles tendonitis or Achilles pain.

A Story of Foot Pain from Dr. Antonio

This is a true story based on me, I wanted to start running, and I was doing a particular challenge of which I was running 45 minutes a day. I had not ran in years and I decided to start running 45 minutes a day, about four miles a day.

 

After one week, I had extensive tendinitis issues, not because something was wrong with my tendons, I just asked them to do more than what they were capable of.

 

Simply put, I started to regress and went back to walking and some other forms to let that calm down, and then restructured my running back appropriately, thus not having any more issues.

One of the Biggest Issues We See that Causes Foot Pain

So, you have to have that conversation of understanding what’s realistic to expect, based on the condition of your anatomy and your physiology.

Now that being said, one of the big issues that we see with feet is the shoes that you’re wearing. More often than not, our shoes are too small for our feet, especially where the toe box is, and then they taper forward.

What happens with that is you change the structure of how the foot should function when it’s weight-bearing. So, we have to look at shoes, not that I want you to go buy a whole new wardrobe, but understand that this is directly affecting how your foot functions.

Now, even more importantly, your feet are what’s connecting you to the ground. Naturally, we ebb and flow and sway, giving you good contact to the ground, this improves your proprioceptive input of where you are in space, thus improving function in the knees and the hips and everywhere else.

Foot Pain Can Cause Other Issues Throughout Your Body

So, if you’re not having good contact with the ground, whether through poor feet or not understanding how your feet work, this could be part of what’s causing even issues upstream.

Now, we have already addressed some of the foot issues with our knee pain exercise or knee video, as well as our hip video. Because what you have to understand, especially when we’re talking about squats, is that the positioning of your feet will change the angle of your knee and the internal or external rotation of your hip.

So simply changing your foot patterning while doing certain exercises can also help you better stack the structures above, leading to better improvement in those movements as well. When we’re talking about feet, it’s not just about the foot pain, but we’re seeing how it affects other things up and down the chain.

How The Foot Functions And What We’re Looking For With Foot Pain

Squat

We’re going to have you go hip width apart and feet straight. From this perspective we can the toes are on the ground and if you have a good arch. Paying attention to if the arch is collapsing or not.

As we narrow the squat we’re looking to see if the toes start to flare up a bit, or if you’re not able to go as deep.

What we want to see is that you are anchored, your feet don’t move, your knees track well, over toes, and you’re getting a lot more depth and range of motion out of the hips.

Sometimes, it isn’t a foot pain issue, because you often have the necessary range of motion and control. It can be a technique issue. For this instance, just widening your squat stance might give you the range of motion and control you needed!

 

Step Forward

Now we’ll have you put your feet together and do a lunge pattern. You can step back or forwards.

Here we are looking at how the front foot is controlled. Not only that, we watch on the back side tow extension, which is critical.

Next, drop down on to her knee. We call this a tall kneeling position. Tall kneeling position is important to determine if you have the necessary toe extension.

Lastly, we’ll expand upon this and ask you to sit butt towards your heels. This puts a little more pressure. If we’re seeing sensitivity in the toes in this position, we know that we’re lacking extension.

 

Why is this important?

Well, you need great toe extension because the majority of your propulsion comes off your bigger toe when you’re running, and walking.

 

Now, this is just a few of the functional assessments that we do for feet and foot pain here at Live Loud Chiropractic.

A Few Ways To Enhance Foot Function After Foot Pain

One of the issues that we see with the foot is we’re actually lacking rear foot inversion and eversion. We need that calcaneus and subtalar joint to rock back and forth.

One thing you can do is build your arch. Watch how your ankle shifts side to side. In this rocking motion, what we’re creating is better inversion and eversion. Now, this helps you gain more proprioception.

If you were to stand on your, left foot, bringing your right foot up, you can see how that ankle has to rock back and forth. So, this helps you with balance and control you need inversion and eversion of the ankle.

If you are lacking great toe extension, we would essentially give you a tall kneeling type of movement to help train and then some sort of a lunging pattern to help improve.

From an aerial view, what we’re looking for is do you have the ability to widen the toe box.

Shoes play a huge role in shaping our feet. Often, they put more pressure on the first metatarsal phalangeal joint. This is how Bunions are often created.

We need the ability to spread out our feet. If your shoes don’t allow you to do this, then you’re scrunched in right so you need a wide toe box to be able to better function.

One of the easiest remedies for feet is rolling them out.

We get so caught up and tight shoes and just so much movement that our feet do not get a lot of love.

So, one thing that everyone should and could be doing is simply rolling out with a lacrosse balls. You need something that allows you to dig into a lot of the intricate muscles of the foot that oftentimes get very neglected.

Foot Pain Conclusion

Alright, so I hope that was helpful again, when we’re dealing with the feet, because we have so much time on them, you really have to look at the loading progressions to better understand what’s the actual cause.

More times than not, we’re actually not doing enough for our feet from a very direct, intentional perspective. And then we just go out and run or walk a lot and then expect it to do what we want.

So, by simply taking one step back and addressing a lot of these issues, you’re able to go three, four-fold forward, because you’ve set yourself up for success. And you set your foundation (pun intended) to be adequate enough to be able to handle everything that you throw at it.

If you’ve been dealing with foot pain, ankle pain, Achilles issues, plantar fasciitis, and especially big toe pain, and you’re tired of it, and you want to deal with it, please reach out to us! We’ll be able to set you up with a proper evaluation and assessment to determine what areas of the foot are actually tight.

Then what needs to be mobilized and what areas actually might be weak that need to be strengthened or improve its stability.

Let’s get you back to all the activities whether that’s pickleball, tennis, volleyball, or even just simple things such as running and walking! So, if you’re tired of this foot pain, and you want to get some answers, please come in and see us here at Live Loud Chiropractic in Lafayette, CO.

We’d love to help you out so that you can live a loud, adventurous life.


Live Loud Chiropractic

Fix Your Hip Pain Today | Hip Pain Explained With Sports Chiropractor

Fix Your Hip Pain Today | Hip Pain Explained

One of the more challenging aches and pains or conditions to work through is hip pain.

What makes it so challenging?

Well, for one the nature of the joint itself. It’s a big ball and socket joint set up structurally to sustain a lot of impact and load. But! We run away from that as a solution when we’re talking about dealing with hip pain.

You have to understand and have a provider that knows:

  1. Mechanics
  2. Loading principles
  3. Rehab principles

These three things are KEY to helping you best find a solution for dealing with your hip pain.


PLAY VIDEO ⬇︎


Now, if you have hip pain, we’re going to walk you through (make sure you watch the video attached to see this live):

  •  A couple of reasons as to why hip pain might be generated
    •  Especially certain regions
      • Front of the hip
      • Back of the hip
      • Side of the hip
  • A few tools that you need to understand to help you deal with pain immediately
  • Foundational principles about why it happens so you can have a better conversation with your provider about dealing with hip pain

Running away from Load vs. Loading being the best for you Hip Pain?

Again, running away from the load is not the solution!

Loading is actually the best thing that you can be doing if done appropriately. So, if you’re dealing with hip pain, whether again, it’s on the front side, or maybe even something in the back, and you want to get back to your activities, like running, CrossFit, hiking, or anything like that, this blog and video will be very helpful for you.

I’m Dr, Antonio Gurule with Live Loud Chiropractic and Coaching. We’re based here in Lafayette, Colorado, in Boulder County.

We LOVE helping individuals such as yourself, overcome the fear and anxiety of having pain, and gain more confidence and understanding about how your body moves so that you can go out and live the loud adventurous life that you are made for!

Let’s Dive into Hip Pain

The hip is a very robust joint, it is intended to be able to support your full body weight down into the ground, whether you’re walking, whether you’re running, whether you’re jumping.

Note: It is very, very hard to damage anything within the structure, but it can happen.

Our goal is to help you determine:

  1. Is there something actually that’s damaged within the hip that’s causing your hip pain?
  2. Or is it something that kind of built up as maybe an overuse injury
  3. Or maybe it’s just a technique issue

What we’ve determined with some of our other condition videos like Shoulder Pain or Back Pain and if you have not seen those, please be sure to go check those out!

Real Life Hip Pain Scenario and Solution

I just had a conversation with a mom the other day who is postpartum and wants to get back to running. Previously, before pregnancy, she was running anywhere between three to six miles and so she wanted to go back to that immediately. But she was pregnant and postpartum. Her body went through a lot of changes, not knowing that we needed to regain a lot of the progressions that got her to three to six miles before.

She thought, “oh, I used to be able to do this before I could just go back to that.” She came in having a lot of hip pain, not because something was wrong with her hip, but because she got back to three to six miles, way too soon.

So, we have to understand there’s a necessary progression and where most people are having issues like in the side butt area, this is where all your hip stabilizers are.

When you translate weight from one foot to the other, you’re going to feel that side butt area and those hips engage, that’s what helps stabilizes your ball and socket joint when you transfer your weight side to side.

So, this is one of the main areas that we’re going to be dealing with when we’re dealing with hip pain. Fortunately, these are fairly easy fixes, you have to understand the whole loading progression.

We’re going to have an extensive conversation around that. If you need help coaching or reprogramming that we can also help you with that here at Live Loud Chiropractic and Coaching.

 

A Couple of Things to Assess for Hip Pain 

  • First, we have to look at the range of motion.
    • So, we’re going to look at the squat stance, and we’re just going to watch the squat. Right, we’re looking for any sort of shifting discrepancies, pain that might be occurring from that.
  • Second, single-leg lunge
    • So that we are biased, only loading one side more than the other
  • Next, single leg arc pattern
    • You’re going to do lift one knee, slowly kind of tilt back into a single leg RDL and then come back up
    • We’re looking for if you have strength but also stability

Necessary Progressions for Hip Pain

The assessment above is important to determine the necessary progressions. We might have to take a step back and work on balance control and proprioception before getting you back into all the impact stuff that you want to be able to do.

 

Now, strength is a component of that. On top of that, though, we also have to look at dealing with some soft tissue. As we indicated already, sometimes your hip pain is an overloading issue and the muscles might just be sore.

Soft Tissue Work for Your Hip Pain

Having strong able-bodied manual therapists to understand where to work, whether that’s with our hands, dry needling, or cupping, to help you basically work on the soft tissue structures because you do want to work out hard, you do want to do all these activities. Sometimes it’s just supportive nature, nothing’s actually wrong, you just need someone to know how to work into the area.

At home, you can do a lot of this yourself! You can stand up against a wall and explore the hip bone and different parts of the hip.

So essentially, we’re just trying to get into all of these nooks and crannies, and all these areas with the soft tissues and the muscles to help alleviate the symptoms of these muscles is grabbing and working hard.

Addressing Load Progressions with Hip Pain

Now, that’s the best-case scenario, let’s say for instance, it is something a little bit more in-depth, we have to address the loading progressions then that are directly affecting the pain you are feeling.

When the femur and the socket are pinching up against each other, we refer to this as FAI or femoral acetabular impingement.

Now, the reason why I’m addressing this is this is my soapbox, too many people are being told to squat with their feet, shoulder or hip-width apart, and their toe straight. Certain anatomy will just not dictate and allow you to do that. For some, it might work well; for others, it does not.

You have to determine the best squat stance based on your anatomy so that you’re not jamming your hip into the front.

Squat Pattern and Your Hip Pain

Typically, this presents as pinching in the front of the hip or a very tight psoas which gets blamed for way too much on the front side because it’s guarding and protecting your hip from being jammed up.

When we’re squatting, you can see if a person is off balance. If the toes want to raise up a little bit and they can’t get down very far. Now, this is for other people because you will look at this and say,

“Oh, well, you know, lift your chest more, let me see more of your chest. If you had like your name on front of it, all that would do is force her to crank or backup, creating issues in the back. Or they’ll say they have ankle range of motion limitations because it doesn’t look like the ankles going far very far for those are neither nor the case.”

It’s just that the way you might be stacked, your joints can’t work together. The solution could be to open up your stance simply.

Conclusion for Hip Pain

So, we have now determined that it wasn’t a mobility issue at all, we were just simply using the wrong pattern. Now, what this also does is it clears the hip. If we’re too narrow, again, that femur runs into the socket. Whereas if we go wider, and now allows your hip to deepen its amount of flexion.

If you’re having a pinchy hip when squatting or doing something like that, I almost guarantee you that going slightly wider will improve your symptoms, if not improve your squat pattern and in general, allowing you to lift more.

So, at home a few things that you want to do basic soft tissue, your hip, being how big it is, it’s usually just that it’s getting overloaded, and the muscles are just generally a little bit tight. And a little bit of trigger point work goes a long way. But if you’re dealing with the more pinchy front hip issue, a wider stance will be a game changer for you.

Now, many of these conditions are somewhat acute in nature, because we either had this rapid increase of load progression, or we just started squatting more, we now feel this.

Having someone help you navigate that will make a big difference so that you don’t have to take a lot of time off. You don’t have to take a step back. But if this is something that’s chronic, and it’s really been hindering what you’ve been able to do, don’t wait any longer come in and see us have a proper assessment and evaluation done to determine if it’s soft tissue if it’s structural, or if it’s just simply we need better load progressions or understanding how to get stronger without irritating.

If you’re ready to deal with your hip pain once and for all come in and see us get a proper assessment done! Get a proper evaluation done to determine if it is soft tissue, structural, or simply just a lack of understanding on how to load through a progressive way properly.

Whatever it is we here at Live Loud Chiropractic and Coaching in Lafayette, CO are ready to help serve you and your hip pain!


Shoulder Pain

Are you Dealing with Shoulder Pain? Best Shoulder Pain Relief Exercises!

Are you dealing with shoulder pain? Best Shoulder Pain Relief Exercises

Are you currently dealing with some sort of shoulder pain, whether that’s pain in the front of the shoulder, the top, or the back? Or is it a shoulder pain that only really comes around when you’re exercising or doing some sort of physical activity?

Shoulder pain is a very common condition, especially if you are an active person with a busy adventurous lifestyle.

For those of you who are dealing with shoulder pain, and who want to lead a LOUD, active life, this can be a big hindrance that prevents you from doing all of the things that you want to be able to do.

So, if you’re interested in:

  • dealing with your shoulder pain
  •  fixing your shoulder pain
  • understanding how shoulder mechanic’s work
  • what can you do to make your shoulders more bulletproof and stronger

This is the blog for you!


PLAY VIDEO ⬇︎


Now, shoulders, because of the nature of the ball and socket joint, it allows for a lot of free range of motion, a lot of active range of motion, but because of that, many of us lack the basic stability that allows our body to move. Now, this is an important concept that we’ll discuss throughout the video.

Many become biased to only thinking physical therapists or orthopedics might be able to help with shoulder pain. But here at Live Loud Chiropractic in Lafayette Colorado, we are able to help you test and diagnose what is causing your shoulder pain. So if you want to once and for all fix your shoulder pain and issues please do not hesitate to reach out and schedule you initial consult and assessment. 303-717-6323.

STABILITY OR STRETCHING For Your Shoulder Pain

Stability is what is needed to allow your body to express mobility. So oftentimes, we’re stretching and stretching and stretching, hoping that that will help with our shoulder pain, when in fact, it’s not really getting us anywhere.

Now, while stretching might be beneficial.

You have to understand who, what, when, where, and why.

Who would benefit from stretching?
Why would you need to stretch?
What are you actually stretching?
And again, what’s the outcome we’re trying to get out of that?

Now what you need to understand is a proper assessment and an evaluation to determine the cause of shoulder pain.

Unfortunately, this is oftentimes mismanaged through simple diagnostic procedures, such as X-ray and MRI, assuming that there must be some form of a soft tissue injury or damage, that is eliciting the shoulder pain that you’re describing.

When many times this is, in fact, not the case. It usually breaks down to some sort of overloading principle, whether that is an overuse injury due to improper mechanics, due to an increase load variation that you just came across, or just not using it enough.

In this video, we’re going to break down and show you some of the common causes of why shoulder pain might be occurring, some of the neighboring attributes such as the spine that might be contributing to why there might be some shoulder pain, and more importantly, a few things that you can do that will help the shoulder pain that you currently have, whether it is acute or chronic. Now again, this is just a very sneak peek of what’s to happen. Because of the complexity of the shoulder, the shoulder issue, we really have to dive in to determine what’s best for you.

The Key to determining an overuse injury, for shoulder pain

As we were saying, in the intro, shoulder pain, outside of trauma, you’re going to be dealing with usually some sort of an overuse type of injury.

Now, the key to determining an overuse injury is having a very in-depth conversation to detail the programming or the load progression that might have led to the pain your shoulder has.

Right?

If you are someone who is doing Orange Theory, or Group Fitness, here are some questions to consider.

  • When did you start?
  • Is this something new?
  • Did you increase your weight?
  • Did you increase your reps?
  • Was there an immediate spike in your loading progressions that might have just caused more acute overuse injury?

More commonly, we see nothing changed, but it was over months, if not years, the shoulder injury just started acting up more.

What this tells us is that there’s probably some sort of a range of motion, stability, or movement discrepancy that was adding more load to a particular area over time, thus creating this overuse injury.

It’s important if you are having shoulder pain that you go through an in-depth conversation with whomever your provider is to determine what that progression might have been like to better direct you.

Common Areas of Shoulder Pain

For the shoulder, we see a couple of common areas as your main hub of where the pain is:

  • Front of the shoulder
  • Top of the shoulder
  • Back of the shoulder

Three Usual Main Causes of Shoulder Pain

When we’re looking at shoulder pain, there are three usual main causes that we will try to rule in or out during our evaluation at Live Loud Chiropractic and Coaching.

  • When you have pain at the back of the shoulders it is usually some sort of rotator cuff, irritation, capsular tension, and or some sort of maybe tendinitis
  • On top of the shoulder in the front of the shoulder, we’re going to be seeing the impingement type of issues. Whereas when you go to lift the shoulders, it pinches at the top here, creating pressure on tendons or other soft tissue structures and pain. And then bicep tendons similar could be part of that impingement syndrome process.
  • But we also see this as a loading discrepancy meaning how you’re pressing, or loading the shoulder is causing more load to go to the bicep tendon, creating tendinitis and irritation

Movement Criteria to Determine the Cause of Shoulder Pain

At Live Loud Chiropractic, here are a few of the different movement criteria that we use to determine what the cause of your shoulder pain might be.

Basic range of motion

  • Stand tall (this is important to look for cheats in other parts of the body)
  • Bring arms up overhead
  • Arms up from the side
  • Arms reaching behind you

This is where we look to see if you have adequate range of motion to be able to perform an overhead press or other movements required by the shoulder.

Oftentimes, when people were performing either a stretch or something that they feel to be beneficial, and they have their arms turned in, that’s actually creating an internal rotation of the shoulder. That’s going to enhance impingement symptoms, which could then make something worse. So, we have a conversation around positioning based on the movements that you’re doing.

 

Push-Up Mechanics give a good look at loading mechanisms of the shoulder

Another movement that we want to test at Live Loud Chiropractic is a push up. You’ll want to do a push-up at an incline. This gives us a regressed format, especially if you’re having pain. This allows us to look at your position in a push-up type of holding pattern or even a plank.

What we see very commonly is a “dump” of the shoulder, that creates more tension on the bicep tendon. I.e. then creating bicep tendonitis. When you have tendonitis of the shoulder, it gets super irritated through almost anything you do.

 

Modified Cat-Cow to assess back mobility which may be the cause of your shoulder pain

We also talked about this with the neck pain video, if you have not seen the neck pain video and you’re dealing with neck pain, be sure to go check that out HERE.

The neck, like the shoulders, are directly attached to the mid-back.

So, if we’re dealing with a shoulder issue, we have to look at the thoracic spine and determine if there’s movement, range of motion discrepancies, whatever that might be, that might be creating our issue.

Here we will have you start on your hands and knees and sit back towards the heels. This is a modified cat cow. We’re going to do cat cow here, then extend now so we’re looking at mobility to determine if there are any catching spots.

Globally, it might look fine. From an isolated perspective, we might see some areas that need either more flexion or extension. Then we might do a kind of “Wag the Tail” motion. So that would be a side-to-side motion. This allows us to see how well the spine flexes laterally.

Then last but not least, we’re going to put one hand behind the neck, and then rotate up towards the ceiling. With this motion we can assess rotation. While rotation and lateral flexion might not seem directly correlated to the shoulder, we have to look beyond just our basic segmental sagittal pattern.

We know that sports, athletics, and even just training, there’s rotation and side to side movement involved, that would affect the position of the shoulder.

Impingement Syndrome Diagnosis for Shoulder Pain

So, impingement syndrome, again, is one of the main issues that you’re going to see in the front of the shoulder/top of the shoulder. When we’re dealing with this, similar to our movement mapping with our shoulders, we have to teach the body what we want and that is usually directed towards mobility restrictions.

Very commonly, people are coaching and queuing you to pull your shoulder blades back, back and down.

This is important for rows and pulling types of motion. When we are reaching forward and up that is actually counterproductive. If you are pulling your shoulder blades down and back that is opposite of the direction of up and over.

So, the main issue with impingement syndrome is the roof of the shoulder called the AC joint, creates impingement syndrome.

So when are thinking or cueing down and back you are restricting the AC joint and the roof of the shoulder creating more compression of the soft tissue under the AC joint.

Conclusion

If you’ve been dealing with some sort of form of chronic shoulder pain, or you’re just at a management level, “eh I can do most of these things…”

But there are certain things you just don’t want to do.

If you want to get back to those, please feel free to reach out to us here at Live Loud Chiropractic in Lafayette, CO.

I know these tools will help in the short interim, of helping with this kind of immediate pain. Still, shoulders being as complex as they are, you have to set up a framework in a progressive loading pattern to gain more confidence around various positions that are more challenging.

We’d love to be able to help you out with dealing with that shoulder pain issue that you’ve had for maybe even years.

Please feel free to reach out.

Let’s get you back to Living Loud with all the activities you want to be doing.

We’d love to help you!

BOOK NOW!

Low Back Pain Explained

Low Back Pain Explained! If you are Suffering this is for You!

Low Back Pain Explained! If you are Suffering this is for You!

It is estimated that 80% of the population at one point in time, will sustain or suffer some form of lower back pain. 

 

Understanding how the back pain was generated is the MOST critical component of understanding the solution to your lower back pain. 

 

This blog post is for you if:

  1. You have dealt with lower back pain in the past
  2. You are worried, apprehensive, or not confident about your back
  3. You are refraining from doing certain activities that you want to do because of your back
  4. You just sustained an injury


PLAY VIDEO ⬇︎


After having low back pain explained from this post you will know how lower back pain occurs, the proper way to go through a cause of pain evaluation, as well as going through movement assessments and orthopedic assessments to determine if there’s actually structural damage.

 

Simply looking at Xrays and MRIs to determine what’s causing pain from a structural approach is not enough!

 

If you want to deal with your back pain once and for all, if you need a solution, if you want a plan, Live Loud Chiropractic in Lafayette, CO has your back! Dr. Antonio’s specialty is lower back pain. He loves explaining lower back pain and helping individuals who are feeling defeated by lower back pain gain more confidence, strength, mobility, and ultimately gain more life! 

 

If this isn’t for you, but you are researching for a family member or a friend, we appreciate you putting in the time and effort to share this with them. This is such a prevalent topic and again unfortunately it is being mismanaged across the board. 

 

We at Live Loud Chiropractic want to be able to help you out by having low back pain explained to you!

What's the majority of Low Back Pain Caused by?

Back pain is one of the most prevalent musculoskeletal conditions across the world. It’s estimated that roughly ⅓ of individuals are dealing with some sort of lower back pain. The majority of lower back pain is almost always some sort of flexion intolerance. 

 

Flexion Intolerance is when your body doesn’t tolerate bending forward well. Now, knowing this really helps us determine the best course of action for you. Flexing forward is normal, and you should be able to do that pain free and with enough stability that you’re in control. Often there are times where we have to manage that. So a lot of our conversation, depending on how acute the individual is, will determine what the immediate course of action is! 

 

First and foremost, our goal is to just help you get your pain down. Because if you’re in pain, you’re not able to do a lot of stuff as it is. We need to break that cycle and understand what your lower back pain triggers are! We want to understand what keeps causing you pain and then we can figure out where to go from there.

Functional Approach Vs. Stagnant Approach

Now, more times than not if you have a good clinician and they’re asking the right questions, we’re going to know right off the bat, right? A good clinician can see it in how you move and see it in the description of what your symptoms are. When things are being mismanaged people are looking at a stagnant perspective of your pain. This means they’re taking an X-ray or an MRI to determine what the cause of pain is. 

 

What we need to do is look first and foremost functionally at what’s causing the triggers of your lower back pain. This will tell us the issues or the site of pain that we need to be more cautious of, but then also the area we need to focus on and strengthen afterwards!

 

We’ve got the solution about how to deal with your lower back pain.

Examination Process for Low Back Pain

Touch Your Toes

We are going to want to start off with a basic toe touch, this will help us determine if you are flexion intolerant.

  1. Bend down and attempt to touch your toes. Does this create any symptoms? Does it cause any pain? 
  2. Now take your arms overhead, come back up, and extend back.

Something to note here is, oftentimes when someone is flexion intolerant they actually become extension intolerant for a while too. This is a possible cause if when you are coming back from the toe touch position you feel pain as well. The exercises Dr. Antonio is going to give you today help soften a lot of your lower back tension. These exercises give you your mobility back in a subtle way that won’t trigger your pain. 

 

Again, understanding the triggers of your pain will help you get out of pain sooner than just putting some proactive exercises toward it. 

 

Compression Test 

The next thing to determine the extent of flexion is a compression test.

  1. Find a chair or stool to sit in
  2. Sit up nice and tall and grab the bottom of the chair or stool
  3. Then with your hands grabbing the chair or stool, you will pull yourself into the chair

 

What this does is create compression in the spine. Does this create any issues for you? When we are in a neutral stacked spine, more times than not, this does not create the issue. If you had a plate injury, meaning you fell some sort of distance or took a hard landing, this might aggravate you. 

Next we’re going to repeat the test but this time instead of sitting up nice and tall we are going to tuck the lower back. This causes us to slump in flexion, meaning we are creating compression under flexion. 

Does this create any issues for you?

For those of you who might be having acute pain at the middle of the back, that tells us one thing. However, if you get some sort of shooting pain down your legs, that tells us something else. 

 

We’ll have a separate condition video tailored towards disc injuries and sciatic injuries. Where we will further explain your low back pain.

This compression test for your lower back pain allows us to determine the extent of how flexion intolerant you are. 

 

How Live Loud can help your Low Back Pain

Dr. Antonio specializes in low back pain here at Live Loud Chiropractic and Coaching in Lafayette, CO. He knows exactly what patterns to look for that are associated with flexion intolerance. What Dr. Antonio does is secondary to what we’re about to give you today. He tells every single one of his low back patients:

 

“If I can help reduce your pain without me touching you, that creates autonomy in your lower back pain. Then all you have to do is rinse and repeat when you get at home to help decrease your pain. Like compounding interest, the more you do it, the better it gets.”

 

Now we are going to give you the exercises we give to help you decrease your lower back pain once and for all. We want to not only have low back pain explained for you, but also give you the tools to do something about it too.

At Home Exercises to END Low Back Pain Once and for All

Hip hinges

The first one is understanding how to hip hinge. 

  1. With soft knees, hinge your butt straight back
  2. Notice we’re getting the torso down towards the ground, but all the load is going into the hips and the hamstrings
  3. If you need to get lower, all you do is simply bend the knees a little bit

 

Supported squats

The next exercise is supported squats. If you have a TRX or suspension trainer you’re going to do this. 

  1. Depth does not matter here, you’re just going to squat up and down
  2. The goal here is to give the hands the majority of the weight

What this exercise does is loosen up the hips that are oftentimes very tight from holding down and guarding. This also helps stretch the lower back a bit. Most importantly, what we have found is it provides mild pumping decompression in the lower back. This really helps decrease a lot of the pain that you are having in your low back.

 

Hip Drops

Exercise number three is hip drops.

  1. Start on your hands and knees (This is going to be like an upward facing dog but instead of being super active and prying up all we’re going to do is shift forward and let our hips sink down.)
  2. Shift forward letting your hips sink down
  3. It’s okay if you don’t get very far. Each time you want to focus on going a degree further
  4. If it hurts going forward, we’re going to go backwards to soften and work on our mobility

 

Now outside of that, there’s obviously many more stages into getting you back to all the activities that you want to be able to do. Seeing a low back specialist such as Dr. Antonio at Live Loud Chiropractic in Lafayette, CO. He’ll take you through the appropriate progressions from day one!

Conclusion

If you can do hard things or lift heavy things, you’re gonna have a lot more confidence in your back and not only from your acute injury you might have now, this is especially important for all having chronic lower back pain. If you’re afraid of picking up your children or even a bag of dog food let’s get you confident in your back!

 

So if you’re tired of dealing with low back pain, stop waiting, come in and see us and I guarantee we’ll be able to help you deal with this either chronic or acute injury to get back to all the activities that you love to do!

Thanks for following along with us as we get your low back pain explained!


The one question your healthcare provider should be asking you

The One Question Your Provider Should Be Asking You EP|73

Live LOUD Life Podcast
Lafayette Colorado

Episode 73

The One Question Your Provider Should Be Asking You

With Dr. Antonio Gurule


Sometimes we’re unable to do the things we want because of pain, being out of shape, or simply lacking energy. Therefore, we need help from a professional. With many chiropractors and physiotherapists to choose from, sifting through to find the right one can be difficult.

In this episode, I uncover one way to tell if a chiropractor, physiotherapist, and healthcare provider truly cares about your interest and will get you the results you’re looking for.

Episode Highlights

01:13 – Alarming musculoskeletal pain stats in the US
02:03 – The pain management crisis
06:10 – What’s your motivation for dealing with pain? What do you want to be able to do?
07:44 – My problem with functional improvements and assessments
10:23 – The question your provider must ask
13:00 – One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to achieving your pain treatment goals
14:50 – Trustworthy coaches, personal trainers, physiotherapists, and chiropractors are an investment, not an expense.


About Dr. Antonio Gurule

Nutrition Building Blocks Broken Down

Background:

  • Father
  • Doctor of Chiropractic
  • Owner of Live LOUD
  • Personal Trainer & Health Coach

Antonio 00:00
What’s up guys. Welcome back to another episode of The Live Loud Life podcast. My name is Dr Antonio, your host of The Live Loud Life podcast. happy that you’re here. I’m happy that you’re listening and you’re jiving with our content and our message here.
00:25
What we’re about. If you’re new here, our role is to help guide you to the adventures that you’re made for. Obviously being chiropractors and coaches, we do that through a multitude of different approaches, but we try to meet you where you are. And that’s a little bit of foreshadowing into what we’re talking about today.
00:45
What we have found is families deserve more from their healthcare providers, and we hope that we can fill in the gaps of the message and the questions that you are not getting answers to through the knowledge and expertise that we have. And we do this in a subset of different niches and specialties of which is, primarily prenatal, postnatal, and pediatric care, which is what my wife Dr. Nichelle does. But then outside of that is just musculoskeletal pain. And I heard a stat the other day. This was kind of a reflection off of COVID 2020 and 2021. This is not what we’re referring to, but it started with the mental status of the United States adult. This was just the adult population, not to mention what was happening on with adolescents, teens and, kids is that 40% of them were at an elevated stress level, compared to what they were previously. It just added so much more stress on that.
01:46
But on top of that in, and stress having part a play in that, is at any given point in time, it’s estimated that 35% of us are dealing with some form of musculoskeletal pain. That’s a lot. When you look at the total population of the United States, we’re just talking about United States stats, 35%, a third of you, one out of three, is dealing with some form of musculoskeletal pain.
02:11
Now we know that a lot of this is being mismanaged. i.e., there’s an opioid in pain medication crisis. That’s been what’s going on with fentanyl from just a drug perspective of what’s being prevalent on the streets as well, is there is a crisis around how to manage pain. And most of this is dealt with a numb suppressing sort of approach. In reality, when we have a better understanding of what pain actually is and what’s happening, we can take grasp and form some form of autonomy around our pain.
02:50
Now, there are a subset of cases. I always say this because someone’s like, oh, what about this? What about this? There is obviously a subset of pain that needs a multifactorial approach that might include some form of medication. But as seen this week in particular with three hot low back cases. When we say hot low back cases, this is your typical, I bent over and my back went out situation. I can’t walk. I’m about to go to the hospital to get medication, but I don’t want to.
03:20
It was all dealt with a movement approach, of which we were able to retrieve 50% reduction in pain mitigation with a few basic exercises, explained in a certain context and form to help these individuals get control of their pain in this immediate set so that they can start gaining some momentum in a positive direction rather than going through a negative feedback loop. So what we’re seeing is this approach of not understanding how to actually manage musculoskeletal pain.
03:55
Now, when you’re in this world, as obviously most of the listeners are not, is you see this constant battle of- and this is true in any industry, to be honest, of like how to best approach these. You know, you have one side that thinks this, you have another side that thinks this. Look at just how our nation’s run of just a two-party system, and then the complete opposing views of those and realistically not getting a lot of stuff done in that, but this is not a political show is.
04:25
But that’s what we see. We can’t find a middle ground of understanding that you have to have a patient-centered approach. And that’s what today’s show is. If you feel that you have been, or your case or your musculoskeletal pain or your injuries have been mismanaged, because you got one person saying this, you got another person saying this, you want conservative methods, but you don’t want to take medication, but yet at the same time, they’re not getting you anywhere because you’re self-reliant on not only medication, but maybe physical therapy or chiropractic adjustments. If you feel that your case has been mismanaged, this is the show for you. This is how to manage musculoskeletal pain. And this is through one question and one question alone.
05:07
Now this is a ‘who’ not ‘how’ question. Meaning, this doesn’t necessarily tell you the how; this just indicates the appropriate question to determine if you have the right provider who will provide you, who will be the ‘who’ for you providing the how, the means, so on and so forth.
05:29
And this is a question that we’ve heard in multiple different areas from multiple different people in one way or another. Some have obviously coined the term to be theirs, but it’s something that’s been around coaching and marketing and advertising. Realistically, this comes down to the trust factor and the trust factor is whether you as the client, patient, or member trust the individual.
05:56
And if the individual is asking this question and they’ve gained your trust, then you know you’re on the right path. But the question sheds light to the underground or the underlying truth message or goals that you’re trying to accomplish. So it’s really more about you as the client and patient as a self-reflection, but it’s hard to know that if you’re not being asked the question.
06:30
A thought process is important because when you’re dealing with musculoskeletal pain, if asked incorrectly, the answer is, well, I just want my pain down. Well, why is that important? This has been asked, like the five whys. You just keep asking why, you keep asking why until they finally break down and cry because they know the real answer.
06:58
I’m just kidding. They don’t always break down and cry. They know the answer because you’ve dove in far enough to determine their true motivation. Now, when we’re dealing, obviously, with musculoskeletal pain, it’s less about immediate pain. It’s more about, well, I can’t do X, Y, and Z, which are important to me. And I would like to do that.
07:22
And to name off a few of these most recent back cases is I love gardening. It’s summertime in Colorado. I want to be able to garden. I want to be able to enjoy my yard. I want to be able to enjoy the outdoors. And I can’t do that right now because of my pain. Or I lead an active lifestyle. I want to be able to go paddle boarding. I want to be able to go hiking. I want to be able to do those things. I want to be able to get down on the floor with my grandkids or my children to enjoy time with them, but I don’t feel comfortable about that. I want to be able to sit in a meeting and not feel like death when I get up.
07:55
And this is more of a motivating factor for vocational improvement, whatever that might be. And in reality, what it looks like is it’s very draining mentally and you want your energy back.
08:09
And so we now start to see a different criteria on what goal outcomes we should be looking for. Many a times, providers, such as myself are looking for “functional improvements”. And this is dictated by the insurance model. Meaning they want you to go through a checks and balance list to determine if there is functional improvement to understand if your treatment is showing improvement.
08:42
Now, there is validity to that. Meaning a lot of times these functional assessments are based on, well, getting dressed in the morning is easier. I’m able to do more activities, but from a functional improvement, what others are looking for is just like, I’m able to measure your stability or quantify your stability or quantify your range of motion.
09:08
And that has improved. Thus you must be improving. And I think there’s a time and place where that could be important, but for me, I hate that. I don’t think it’s valuable. I don’t think there’s a lot of great carryover to the conversation to you as a client, member, or patient of really understanding what that even means.
09:28
Now I could say, yeah, you look like you have about 30 degrees range of motion, and I can ballpark that and describe it, but it has to be put into the total narrative of what we’re actually trying to do, i.e., your goals of getting back to X, Y, and Z.
09:42
So I always ask, what are the things that you want to be able to return back to? That gives me a clear, defined movement pattern or criteria of which we’re trying to achieve. And then we mold and blend our treatment approach to be able to do that. So if you want to be able to do gardening, oftentimes you have to pick up a bag of mulch or some compost or something like that that could weigh anywhere between 30, 50, or maybe more well. Here’s a kettlebell. I’m going to teach you how to pick up an odd object or a box or something like that that weighs a certain amount. And that way, you gain a specific parameter idea and feeling and more context – again, context, context, context – around how to move, navigate, and manage the pain that you currently have, but then also in the future to reduce it.
10:32
Now, coming back to the question. So the question that we ask on every single new patient that comes in the door that we’ve been treating and, or if there was a new issue or a new problem that we’re trying to solve is, Hey, if we’re sitting down here now, depending on obviously the length of what we’re talking about. Sometimes this length will change, whether it’s three, six, a year, or three years. We’re just going to pick three to six months to just start the narrative.
11:05
I’m just going to read you here to make sure I kind of get it right. Obviously this speaks off differently depending on the person. But if we’re sitting down here having the same conversation three months from now, and you’re looking back over the past few months, what has to happen for you to actually feel confident or happy about the progress that you’ve made in your recovery to make that this was a successful investment in your time, energy and money.
11:43
This is an open-ended question to allow you describe what’s important in your life. What are the things that you can reflect upon that you really want and that are really important. And oftentimes this is described in a way that is not forced upon, but someone will ask you like, well, do you want to be able to do this? Yeah that would be nice. That’s not motivating enough for you. And it’s not that motivation is the key to this, but if I’m able to tap into and understand realistically what things you want to be able to do, I can better approach that.
12:26
Now this is the question, again, that every single healthcare provider should be asking whether you’re coming in for cardiac support from your cardiologists, maybe your rheumatologist, so on and so forth, so that they can navigate not only the management of that, but then address it appropriately with maybe medication, but also with an appropriate referral, not just the standard cookie cutter.
12:51
Well, you need physical therapy. You need to get your heart stronger. You need to get your joints stronger. More times than not, musculoskeletal conditions should be managed on, we’ll say a progressive subset of physical therapy in chiropractors and rehab professionals, but personal trainers and strength conditioning coaches, with the caveat of understanding about pain management. I think there’s obviously a subset of personal trainers and strength conditioning coaches who are just kind of the same run of a mill. Hey, we’re going to put you in a group, bootcamp, doing this and make you stronger. Things need to be tailored.
13:29
That’s the approach that we’re trying to get to is when you’re dealing with musculoskeletal pain, unfortunately, and I do apologize that this is the way it oftentimes goes, is unfortunately this changes the narrative and context about how things should be approached. And some get more musculoskeletal complaints than others. And that’s just the nature of it.
13:55
But I always try to emphasize the gift of injury. Be blessed that you’re able to actually move and navigate through a lot a lot of these situations. Many people are actually not able to do that. But be blessed in understanding that your body’s trying to tell you that, Hey, what we’ve been doing in the past is not working. And if you want to live a long, loud, active life, something has to change, and this is your body’s way of telling you, just like I wish I was able to have a certain thought process that I see others are able to accomplish. It’s just not the way that my brain thinks. And I have to go through sometimes along the route in order to achieve a certain goal, results, or just even a mindset and thought process that I’m trying to go through where others it just seems to click.
14:44
It’s just how it is. And unfortunately that takes more time, energy investment. Based on my knowledge, I don’t have to invest as much time, energy, and money in coaching from a health perspective as far as like nutrition and personal training, so on and so forth. But for me, I have to invest more time and energy on someone who can help me navigate my thoughts and mentor and coach from that perspective.
15:15
It’s based on our strengths. The question again, helps you navigate well, what are the important things? This same question is asked in a different context professionally and personally. Well, what has to happen if I was to go with a coach? What has to happen in my life?
15:33
For me, reflecting back, that would say this was a successful investment of time, energy, and money, both professionally and personally, over the next three, six months, year or three years. I would answer with, well, I want to be able to be here. I want to be able to do X, Y, and Z. I want X amount of revenue. I want to diversify into maybe other investments or something like that.
15:57
So you just have to understand that the friction that you have in your life, whether it’s mentally, whether it’s musculoskeletally, whether it’s, a form of health cardiac– but basically just your lifestyle, your health. We all have some friction at different points of life. And your investment is an investment. Your payment is not a cost, it’s an investment, but the due diligence of making sure investment is properly allocated should be navigated through questions such as this.
16:40
If someone’s just going through this, you know, checking on the box and saying, yeah, we can help you. This is pretty standard. Here’s our protocol. So on and so forth. That’s not what you’re looking for, right? You’re investing a lot in this and your provider should be diving in and trying to understand what your goals and motivations are in, in relation to musculoskeletal pain and why that’s preventing you from being able to do that so that they can bridge and connect the gaps to get you back to that quickly.
17:09
Obviously it’s very motivating, but more importantly is getting you back to that with the utmost confidence in whatever you were dealing with before. So for instance, in that case before of gardening and lower back pain, my patient Michelle, that was dealing with, it was not about getting her back to gardening.
17:27
It was getting her back to a point where she felt confident in any sort of gardening task that she would come past: picking up a bag of mulch again, picking up a bag of compost, picking up a large rock that needed to be moved from A to B and having the knowhow of how to pick up odd objects, but also how to leverage her body to be able to do it, but also have the strength and capacity to be able to accomplish it so that she didn’t fear having a recurrence or something like that.
17:57
So, once again, the question that I want you to consider, not obviously asking, but if someone’s not asking you, this is like, Hey, this might not be the person to team up with you. This might not be your who for your how, is if we were sitting down having the same conversation three months ago, and you’re looking three to six months ago, and you’re looking back over the last few months, what has to happen for you to feel confident or happy about the progress you’ve made and the investment of your time, energy and money and your care. And then you share it.
18:39
So if you’re not getting these questions as described previously here, it’s a thought-provoking question. It’s intentionally framed in a way to have you reframe and reference what is actually your goals outside of just pain reduction and management, when we’re talking about musculoskeletal pain and finding the right person and provider.
19:11
Oftentimes while, as we know, manual therapy is very beneficial, oftentimes it’s just having someone work through these questions with you to help you get the right answers and the right direction. In this same example, obviously Michelle, who saw me with some lower back pain for gardening. She was nearby and she was able to come see me and the power of manual therapy and adjustments provided a catalyst to the system.
19:42
But we have worked with other individuals from San Diego all the way out to New York that are going through the exact same thing. And we simply frame the same question and did an evaluation virtually to help guide them. Hey, this is what I’m seeing. This is where you are. This is how your pain’s being described. Based on that history and examination of what I’ve asked you to do, I have a strong feeling it’s this. And if you want to get back to X, Y, and Z, gardening, snowboarding, hiking, riding your horse, whatever that is, here’s the best approach that we can do, that we’re going to build mobility around these joints because it’s really important for you to have mobility here and here to reduce added load onto your lower back, as an example.
20:24
It’s really important for us to go through stability exercises, oftentimes seen as core exercises when we’re talking about the lower back, but here’s how I want you to approach it. So more times than not, this is a conversation of navigation, not essentially implementation. And then finding other obviously resources if manual therapy or adjustments or something like that might be needed.
20:45
So, we always say the foundation of recovery is that narrative in that conversation of understanding that, and there are obviously proper diagnostics of knowing the context of the situation. And then the manual therapy is simply a catalyst. It does help you get there faster if someone knows what they’re doing and they do it well, but it’s not always needed.
21:07
So I implore you to dig deep. You are vetting me as a provider. Obviously, if they’re a referral, they come trusted from obviously who referred you, but it’s still, in my opinion, your responsibility to vet your providers. I encourage anyone coming in to ask questions about what we do so that I can get them to get to this, so I can have a conversation and be able to ask these types of questions, so that I can know if they do trust me. Because if there’s no trust in that relationship, it’s not going to be a successful relationship. You’re not going to see the amount of success that you could see if you’re working with someone that you actually trust.
21:52
So, if you don’t trust your provider, I encourage you to find a new provider. There are plenty of providers out there. Now, those trusted providers sometimes come at a premium, and that premium should not be again as a cost. This is an investment, and oftentimes it saves you actually time, effort, and money in the long run because you’re able to get the results that you want based on that question a lot sooner than if you were to go with your standard run in the mill situation.
22:21
So if you are digging this, please share it with someone else who’s been frustrated of going through the system. We appreciate if you’re digging this to give us a comment, to like, to subscribe, to share this so that we can get this message out that there are providers out there that want the best for you, and that are not just trying to push you through the system and push you through the wheel.
22:44
And if you have any questions specifically about certain topics, we’d love to be able to address those. So please shoot us a comment and you can shoot us an email at hello@liveloudlife.com. Our social media is @live.loud.life on Instagram. And then we have you can check this out on YouTube. We have a number of different pieces of content and videos on YouTube, helping you deal with musculoskeletal pain from a number of different issues, prenatal, postnatal, pediatric care, so on and so forth.
23:17
So thanks again for tuning in, guys. Live loud. I hope you have a wonderful week, and we’ll see you next time.