 Welcome to the Dr. Gendry podcast. Back pain, stiff muscles, achy joints, the list of ailments people experience as they age is a mile long as you're probably nodding right now. And while many believe these sorts of symptoms aren't an everable part of getting older, my guest today says that that simply isn't true. In just a minute I'm going to be speaking with the healthy movement coach Aaron Alexander, author of the upcoming book Align. Five easy steps to transform your posture. As the owner and founder of Align Therapy, Aaron helps people improve their strength, balance, flexibility and structural alignment to live healthier, happier lives pain free. One of his specialties is rolfing, a form of physical manipulation intended to align your body. Now we're going to explain how that works in just a moment. Today we'll discuss how some seemingly normal everyday habits can hurt your body and how rolfing massage and healthy movement can help. We'll also talk about what you can do today to start feeling better in your body and avoid big picture problems down the road. Aaron, welcome to the program. Now I first met Aaron in a very unique way a couple years ago and I want to tell you about that right now. It was by far the most interesting interview that I have ever given. We're in my office with our guest and my guest says I would like to interview you with you being suspended above my body. And he says if you don't mind I'm going to lay down on the floor, I'm going to put my legs and my hands up and you're going to dive on to me and I'm going to catch you. And we're going to do this interview talking with you suspended above me. Am I right? That's right. That's right. And I got to tell you I have never been interviewed suspended above some person's body at least to my knowledge and that's a way to get interviewed. Let me tell you. So Aaron, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having me. And I'm shocked or you know I really thought we'd start this segment with me suspended above you but glad to have you. Thank you so much for having me. Now Aaron, you've helped countless people prevent and reverse the issues that cause pain and discomfort. Okay, what led you down this path and did you yourself have a physical issue that you needed to overcome? Yeah, yeah, all sorts of stuff. So I started from a place like a lot of young people of just insecurity and kind of had like somewhat of an unstable household in certain ways. And the story that I kind of tell along that is that because I felt unstable in my material environment I kind of packed on my biological environment. And so I just started slamming on slabs of muscle the best that I could through imbalanced bodybuilding practices. And then that led into me just focusing on what you could see in the mirror. So like pecs and bies and triceps and abs and just all this kind of like adding on to the forward flexed position, which is already that of what modernity is doing to us anyway. And ever since you're in a cradle or you know in a child's seat and then on these chairs and then on the bus and the plane, it's all pulling us into this position which has all sorts of other implications. And within that from just like a purely structural level you could say like the muscles of the back and the hips and glutes and the legs. Like the parts that really hold you together and give you true strength are typically the parts that people don't really directly see. But most of us focus on the parts that we see only and that's only impressive for a short term but long term it's really unstable. So let's continue on that. So is there such a thing as muscle bound? Muscle bound. There's muscle imbalanced. So you can grow as large as you want as long as you maintain integrity and functionality of what you're doing. So if your person like fitness is based off of what do you fit for? Like that's the relevant question. That's a good point. Like anything with fitness is like well if you wear high heels all the time and you kind of strut around and put your shoulders back and you do business meetings and you stand in elevators. You're fit for that whereas someone like a hunter gatherer if you put them in that situation they would be unfit for that situation. And it would be challenging for them to succeed in that world. Now so you can train yourself. The big question is just like what am I training for? What is the outcome that I'm seeking? Once you figure that out then it's like okay now let's create the program from there. So you're saying you can train for wearing high heels? Yeah, yeah you can. High heels throughout history have been used by Persian soldiers to be able to ride on horseback and be able to sling a bow. And they were used by what was it? Was it King Henry the 14th I think was who it was originally? He was originally like the five inch high red heels that was him and his main crew was an indication of their royalty. And so if you got taken out of those heels it was like oh you've obviously got out of the royal society. So they've been used as tools and as indicators throughout history. So if you use them as a temporary tool for less than an hour then I think that they're fine. There's value to them. It's a power tool. It's power tool. Yeah that's exactly what it is. But in short bursts you can use that power for your benefit. But if you use that it becomes your whole life well then you become kind of consumed by the imbalanced patterns of that. But in short little bursts I think heels are okay. How about for guys? Yeah I think they could go for guys too. I mean that's originally like heels are actually more of a masculine thing. It's soldiers royal. Yeah it's the horse background. It's a hook on a strip. That was one of the original reasons to wear a heel. Yeah that's right. It's amazing how things change. And originally men were more, they would wear more like reds and bright colors and they'd have the ruffles and it was like, then it kind of changed more of like the cillitarian outfits. They were the original metrosexuals. Exactly. Yeah exactly. Alright so you teach people how to care for their joints, develop good posture, improve their balance and achieve proper alignment. So okay so what are some of the bad habits that you see in your line of work? And how do they affect people's bodies? Oh man well the big interesting question is how they affect people's minds and the way they think and feel about themselves. So depression is the number one leading cause of disability worldwide presently. It was supposed to be like by 2020 but it already happened. In tandem as that's happening people's structural patterns are veering towards this hunched over kind of morose type archetypal position. You feel sad, you deflate into this oh man. If you feel like you won this is an integrated pattern throughout millennia. It'd be like oh we did it success. You know you show your vital organs and you express it like cool I feel safe, I feel strong and I feel confident. Throughout culture we're being put into these positions via chairs, via staring into our phones, via the computer, via tables, all of the things even sitting at your toilet. Raising the toilet up off the ground so you don't have to actually go through a full range of hip flexion and knee flexion. That's brand new. And as you go into that range of motion you literally elongate the rectum to allow you to defecate correctly. So our environment's folding us into this position and at the same time simultaneously we're seeing people become a little bit more glum. So I think that the really interesting question, there's so many different ways to look at it but I'm really enamored by how your physical positioning affects the way you think and the way that you feel. And so you see just for example people in this position all day long so the obvious anatomical indicators of that, forward head posture, medial rotation of the shoulders, hyperkyphotic spine, disengaged glutes, valgus knees, it's collapse. Expansion, collapse. But isn't it just so much easier to kind of get into this almost fetal position? It's only easier. I mean why do people do that? There's a lot of reasons. There's nothing wrong with that position. That position is just one of the many colors of your emotional physical palette. This emotional pattern is an indication that maybe you're highly concentrated, that could be a thing as well. Or you're protecting, or you're sad, or you want to guard and hide. So doing body work, manual therapy, roughing, that's with working with people, sometimes really what we want to do is we want to put them into a more closed position because it makes them feel safe. You could also use heavy blankets, put that heavy weight over top of their body and they feel safer so now you can start to kind of Jedi yourself into some of those deeply held patterns. So that position, there's nothing inherently wrong with it. It just has an effect. So if all you paint is with black and gray, your painting will have a certain expression. So if you can change your postural patterns, it's like cool, let's throw some red and some purple and some different colors to change the way that you express. You know, you bring up a good point. What you see on TV and on the internet, they're advertising these really heavy blankets that you can sleep with to make you feel protected. And dog, there's thunder jackets that you can wrap your dog in to make them feel protected. And I actually did this with one of our rescue dogs that I talked about on one of our other podcasts. Poor dog was just scared to death of thunder and he's a very aloof animal. And I got him in the bed and I just wrapped him as hard as I could. And he finally calmed down. It was actually kind of the first, I think, human interaction he felt comfortable with. So are you saying that those sorts of things, that's cool? That's all right? I mean, should I? Those sorts of things are amazing, powerful tools to have access to. But when that's the only tool that you have access to, it's like your only realm of health care is through seeing a surgeon. It's like, okay, cool. What's wrong with that? Hey! I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but no, seriously. So if you're not looking from the other steps before that, then from that perspective, if they're really myopic with their vision, then they don't have any education outside of that, which isn't you at all, then you say, oh, I have this neck pain, I have this shoulder pain, I have this thing. It's like, well, my education is only formed around that one specific solution, so now I see that. So if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. So if all you have is this one position, which is the cultural mold of society, then it becomes potentially problematic, because the fact that depression is a number only cause of disability in the world is astounding to me. And so when you look around the world, just notice people holding their cell phones and staring at the coffee shop and hunching over. Take away, like take it back to hunter-gatherer time frame. They don't know what a computer is, they don't know what a cell phone is. You don't see that, you don't know that they're deeply into their text message or whatever, so you're like, okay, it's fine. You would look at that person and you'd say, oh, what's wrong? You know, so at a physiological level, there's been various different studies that associate those positions into reducing testosterone levels, increasing stress hormone cortisol specifically. They've even shown that being in those hunched over positions helps for you to be able to access more like challenging memories, whereas being in the upright position helps for you to be able to access more, you know, beneficial, stimulating, good time memories. So, okay, why, other than we're reading or looking at our cell phones all the time, why is that the default position that everybody ends up in? And I know you're going to tell us why that is and how we can get out of that default position. Yeah, I mean, it's the way that your car seat is formed. It's the way that your couch is formed. It's the way that, again, your toilet, your bed, you're only getting down to about 90 degrees at hip flexion. So a really beautiful, easy, simple, accessible way that people can start to shift that is to just add a small dose and it will start to expand because it comes kind of addictive because you can feel the effects, but of spending more time on the ground throughout the day. You know, so I'm sitting on this chair essentially as though I'm on the ground. You know, as we're doing this, this is helpful because it's beneficial for my circulation. You know, so I'm bringing my legs closer to my heart. True, that's convenient, which is beneficial for digestion, for example, i.e. most cultures around the world eat from the ground. You know, so why would I want to have my legs so far away from my vital organs so that blood can just start to kind of pull up in my lower compartments? I want to be easier. If I could, I would do this interview with my feet up the wall. You know, so we can just lay down and hang back and really like that would be super medicinal for both of us. It's a little, from a society perspective, it's a little funny, but from a biological perspective, it's really exactly what your body needs. So spending just a little bit of time on the ground each day. Throw your legs up the wall to kind of bring that circulation back to the heart and then we can expand on it from there. But that's just one thing. There's a lot of things you can do. Okay, so we're talking about kind of simple things we can do and you ought to put your legs up on a wall, which is actually a classic yoga position that we use in yoga all the time. And I think you're right. People don't realize that we should have been built with a heart down in our lower extremities. We actually have no heart to pump blood back to our heart. And we actually depend on muscular action to make that happen. And people often don't realize that there is no pump except your muscles to get blood back to the rest of you. And we do neglect that area. Because you're right. Back when we were all hunter-gatherers, that muscle was working all the time. Or if it wasn't, we were in a position like this. Or, you know, so many of the third worlds I visit, everybody is sitting on their, you know, hunched over, sitting on their feet. And everything's compacted in a straight line beneath them. Okay, so what are, what can they do? So we've got one idea. Put your legs up. Or get on the ground. What are your thoughts about Pilates and yoga? I think they're both great. I think Pilates has a tendency of focusing on integration. And yoga oftentimes, integration being like activation and finding neutrality through the spine and finding core engagement and engaging with your breath. Which is like, you know, Iangar said breath is the king of the mind. You know, it's the king of the nervous system. If you can engage and be aware of that inhalation exhalation, you can literally see in real time the status of your autonomic nervous system. And you can start to create power through compression with your breath. So I think Pilates is awesome for that. What it lacks is it lacks dynamic, ballistic, like expressive movement. You know, yoga is kind of similar, but yoga is going to be more towards, like, oftentimes people end up going too far in the mobility realm in yoga. And they lack that tension aspect that Pilates does a really good job with. But both of them are just, again, different tools. What if I'm valiant both? Yeah, I do power Pilates on an active reformer. And it's really funny. You know, you mentioned, you know, really muscle-bound guys. And we'll see big-time weight-lifters come in and start doing power Pilates. Yeah, it'd be hard. And yeah, and the instructor usually gives us all a wink and says, watch this. And these incredible muscle-bound guys are just reduced to a sweating mass of, you know, a jelly because they can't move through these actions. And it's always... Yeah, it's coordination of the parts. You know, so if you start, it's kind of like being very wealthy. You know, when you're very wealthy, you just become more of yourself. You know, so when you become very muscular, those imbalances start showing themselves more. So now you have these huge slabs of muscle that you have to integrate back together. It would be almost easier for the person that just takes walks each day to start from that baseline of, okay, here's how you integrate your parts. Because you haven't expanded yourself out into this mutated form. But again, it's not mutated. It sounds like it's like a bad thing. It's what you want. If your goal is to stand up on a stage and oil yourself up and like that's what your goal is, you're doing a great job. It's beautiful. But there is a way to actively integrate your parts as you choose whatever it is you want to do with your body, including bodybuilding. Okay. So can people injure themselves by doing Pilates or yoga? You hear that in the news all the time. Oh, for sure. Yeah. So yoga, the big thing, within anything, if you follow basic, there's a few simple baseline fundamentals of movement mechanics that are consistent throughout any practice. And you'll see them throughout Pilates and yoga and martial arts and dance and weightlifting, Olympic weightlifting, all of that. If you follow those basic fundamental principles, it's really challenging to injure yourself in literally any kind of movement practice. What happens is yoga is an easy example where people kind of let go of some of those fundamentals because they want to get their head back or they're laying behind their head and they want to be able to lick their knee and it's like, okay, it's cool that you can do that, but what's your goal here? So when you start to blow out some of those fundamental principles to be able to lick the back of your knee, that's when injuries start to pop up. Should I be able to lick the back of my knee? If you want to, I think that's great. But it's not necessary, though. It won't help you hunt, gather, work, do anything. Well, it makes me a better person. I don't think it'll make you a better person. Unless it brings you more self-worth, in which case it gives you that temporary validation to get you the next step in life and maybe licking your knees exactly what you need. All these things are based from a psychological perspective. What is it that makes you feel the need to lick your knee in the first place? What makes you feel the need to pack on all of this muscle? I think asking those questions specifically just makes fitness a lot more interesting. Well, you know, you mentioned bodybuilding became a way of you, you know, I guess reacting against the tensions in your family life and all that, but growing up, back in the 50s and 60s, there was this advertisement in all the magazines of this kid being kicked sand in his face in the beach, a skinny, scrawny guy, and he was going to become a great bodybuilder and go back to that guy. And so that, you know, clearly, even back in those days, that was... Oh, yeah. It's all about what you're, like, the word trauma is a word that gets used a lot. And sometimes when I hear trauma, I'm like, ah, trauma again. But I think trauma, it's all your filter of that experience. What's your perception of that experience? So if you can retool your perception of getting sand kicked in your face or your childhood fill-in-the-blank thing or the girlfriend or the boyfriend or the death and change it and say, wow, since that experience, it caused me to take care of my body. I lost all that fat. I started reading all those books and I started this business. I became an entrepreneur and I gained all these new relationships and, like, now here I am. You know, so that trauma in quotations was actually an opportunity for me to do, like, a fast-forward education and to getting me to the point that I'm at. As opposed to looking as, like, oh, woe is me. Like, my family life was tough. You know, as long as you hold on to that story of, like, I'm a victim, I have it tough, I think it spills into the way that you move through the world. Very true. You know, it's like Tony Robbins always said, you can't keep playing old movies. Yeah. It's like the definition of depression. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't say that's the definition of depression, but I think it's a big part of it. No, it is a big part. Your mind is all these other places thinking about that and then anxiety, you know, they say, is, like, your mind is in the front. And even as you're doing that, actually, there's a structural effect. Chronosteja is an unnecessary fancy term for, like, internal time travel. You know, so when you're doing that, chronosteja and you're thinking into the future or you're obsessing over the past, you'll literally, your postural patterns will start to go forward a few millimeters when you're in the future. They'll drift back a little bit when you're in the past. You know, and so when you're actually completely here in the present moment, your body almost like a compass, kind of like... comes back into being in a more upright position. Yeah, it reminds me of one of my favorite reggae artists who's now dead in Lucky Dubé from Africa. And one of his songs, he throws in a line that objects in the rear-view mirror appear closer than they really are. And, you know, it's on your rear-view mirror thingy. And his point is, which was very well taken, is those things are actually way in the past, but they appear closer and bother you more than they really could. And that was a great line. So just objects in the rear-view mirror appear closer than they really are. And then it sabotages your present because you're stuck there, and then you keep on potentially sabotaging this present experience because your mind's not with it and then your world doesn't come together because people don't want to be around a distracted mind. It's the worst. You know, when someone's looking down at their phone and you're talking to them or you just know they're not there with you, I'm just like, get the hell out of here. And if that's the way that you lead through the world, things probably won't work the way that you would prefer them to, and very likely you may fall back on that victim story and just keep spinning your wheels in that. But that's kind of maybe separate from the classroom conversation. But I don't think it is. So, yeah, let's pull you back. So are there any bad forms of exercise? Are there really, you got any that you don't like? No, I don't like it. I think everything's good. It's just following the basic fundamental principles within it. CrossFit's an easy one to like poop on. But the issue with CrossFit is that it's time to do competition with really complex movements. But really complex movements are great for the human organism. It's just a matter we need to be focusing on, instead of it being get this time or do this much weight, we need to be focusing on the quality of the movement. So if instead of it being that you did it in this amount of time, it could be like, oh, you did it with this, you know, you did it with zero movement faults, you could call it. Like your positioning was immaculate the whole way through. You get the gold star. And then I think CrossFit's like a tremendous movement practice. Yoga, it would be another easy one to poo poo on because people focus on hyper mobility and just like getting their joints in these weird positions. But the truth of yoga, like it means union or connection. Yoke, yuj is the Sanskrit terminology for it. And so connection is a synonymous with integration. And so if you're focused on integrating your parts through a wide range of movement, your yoga practice is great. So within anything, anything that would be easy to crap on, it's you're going to the far ends of the spectrum where people start to tear themselves apart. But like the center point of any movement practice, I think there's value. It's just following the basic fundamentals of movement. All right. People who aren't familiar with roughing, I think it sounds a little wacky. So what the heck is roughing? Yeah, it's not the best branded name. So it sounds like rolling on the floor laughing. Structural integration is what Ida Rolfe, the founder of it originally called it. And a similar... So anyway, there was a Joseph Pilates and now you're trying to convince me there was an Ida Rolfe. There was an Ida Rolfe, yeah. Didn't consider changing her name. Yeah, right. So she didn't like it called roughing. Like that wasn't her prerogative. So it was after she was on her way out that people started saying like, oh, you got rulfed. So it was like if you had a special practice with patients and be like, oh, you got gunjreed. And then eventually it's like gunjreed. Yeah, I believe it. Yeah, I believe it. So that's originally what that is. And the main focus of structural integration, which is a better umbrella term for what it is, is you're integrating your parts through manual hands-on manipulation. And so essentially you're looking to align your feet to your knee to your hip through your spine to the top of your head. And then if you can find that alignment within the field of gravity, then your existence, your inhabitants in your body, it makes you healthier because you don't have these little forest fires that are manifesting in all of your joints because of all the friction. So what we're looking to do from that perspective is looking to align the joints via the connective tissue so that just the way that you move through the world heals your body. So how's that different than what a chiropractor would do, for instance? Chiropractors are focusing on more high velocity adjustments and they're focusing more on a bony perspective, whereas a structural integrationist is focusing on fascia or connective tissue and slow adjustments. People have the impression, and I've certainly had a lot of people who have been rulfed, that it is incredibly painful because you're breaking down fascia. Is that true or is that a old-school rulfing has the tendency of being a little bit more that and they're kind of really going for the cathartic, like hurah, present-day approach. It's like going to one Chinese restaurant and being like, oh, I know what all of Chinese food tastes like now. You're like, well, you just had one angry chef that put too much hot sauce in the noodles. So then what we end up doing is we attach to that kind of it-bleeds-it-leads kind of thing. It's easier for our minds to process that. Really working effectively with the body is being able to be sensitive enough to feel exactly where there's resistance in the tissue, which is the form of tissue dehydration, agglomeration, and being able to just essentially almost sit right at that. It's just like if someone has a door closed, you go and you sit right at the door and you say, okay, we're just going to be right here at the door. It's okay, as opposed to me slamming against the door to try to get it open. It's like a good rolfer. They would be able to just find those closed doors and then bring your attention to them. And then through a slow, subtle, typically like shearing type force, we rehydrate those cells and re-alive in that tissue. It shouldn't be an overly painful process. But I'm not completely against experiencing pain in order to experience some type of healing. I think that sometimes life is painful. So if you're always trying to resist that, it's like Rumi said the cure for the pain is in the pain. I think that sometimes it's okay to actually go into your pain in order to actually fully experience it out. This is how we're often gets a bad name. No, no, no. It's just be accepting of the full scale of the human experience. But the pain should be a pain something that you can enjoy. If it's like a hurt so good because you know you're at the edge of something, imagine getting a splinter pulled out of your hand. You can feel it. You see it. You're like, I need to get that splinter out. The sensation of someone actually finally touching the splinter that you've been feeling for the last 15 years and saying, oh, that's it. You're just like, yes, pull the splinter. Please, please, please pull. It's like, yeah, that was painful. You activated sensory receptors and you felt sensation but it was in relief of something a greater pain that you've been holding for however long you've been holding it. So a truly artful, tactful, any person, any talk therapist, any manual therapist, what they're able to do is they're able to create an environment or a container for that person's nervous system because that's what you're working with in order to feel safe enough and serving them in the best way. But as long as you put them into a place where they feel like they need to protect and guard up, they'll go back to what they know. And so in that situation, if you just inflict pain upon a body that is now protecting and guarding, you're only going to make things worse, for the most part. So it's being sensitive enough this relates to any conversation or anything that you're doing, business, relationships. If you're sensitive enough to know what's the temperature in the room, what's the texture of the couch that they're on, all of those send signals to your nervous system whether you feel safe and you want to respond in an open way or whether you want to protect and guard. What's the difference between rulfing and massage and how are they complementary? Are they, you know... Typically if you tell a rulfer that they're a massage therapist, like all their sphincters clench up and they're like, no, but realistically if you would look at it from the outside perspective you're getting like a slow massage. But one of the differences, key differences from like structural integration to typical massage, massage is such a big word. So that's the issue with a word like massage. It's under this umbrella that relates just so many modalities. So it's really just semantics. But typically people's ideas of massage would be more of like an efflerage kind of like soothing, rubbing, oil, whale sounds in the background, spa. Rulfing is you're not using much oil of any and it's just slow sometimes deep, but not always deep pressure. It's focusing on muscular septa, which is the space between the muscle bellies. That's the highest concentration of mechanoreceptors and all the parts that make your muscles change, your connective tissue change. And so that's kind of what it looks like. It's slower, oftentimes deep-ish work, not a lot of oil but the goal is to integrate all the parts together as opposed to just rub everything. Good. Description. All right. So now we're talking about all this. People I'm sure have said or behind your back, maybe to your back that the Rulfing is pseudo science and pseudo-scientific. What do you say? Yeah, for sure. There's a lot of pseudo-science and most of the practices I think that end up actually being really beneficial. The information that we're going to in textbooks in a western doctor's office, from my understanding that information is founded originally like 30 years back before it finally makes it in. The practicing doctor is 20 years behind current research. I was in a group a number of years ago called the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and the research had shown that the practicing physician and this is not to belittle any practicing physician their current treatment practice is 20 years behind current knowledge in all disciplines. So that would probably put that whole 20 year gap into a large container of pseudo-science because it's not fully founded, established. So there's a I don't remember who the quote was but science describes the experience of the body from the outside and poetry describes it from the inside and I think that we can become too founded on its only scientific measurable beaker, double-blind or I don't trust it and then there's this other end of the spectrum that is just feeling more intuitively and feeling more they want you to paint as a means to work with your depression. Science, I don't know, it was like well try painting, see how it affects you. I like to kind of dance between both of those worlds. If I hear the word pseudo-science I'm not like no, I'm like tell me more let's see how the effects are. That's a great segue and I happen to think that a great deal of depression and anxiety is caused by an altered gut microbiome and a leaky gut and there's actually some pretty cool science that backs that up. So I know you're an ambassador to several nutrition brands and we probably both agree that nutrition is a critical part of how our bodies perform. I absolutely agree and I think it's interesting from I think often times with nutrition an underlying root of seeking out really positive nutrition is having a level of self-worth to believe that you're worthy of the highest quality nutrition and I personally sometimes feel like if I'm in a lower place I'm like screw it, the cookies and the ice cream and whatever if I'm in a place where I feel really strong and confident and like you know what I'm worth it and I have to show up and I have to do this interview thing in the best version of myself then all of a sudden I start to feed myself the highest levels of quality so I think that's an interesting topic with it as well building blocks of your connective tissue. Yeah, I'll bring you an example from just this week I think nutrition has so much to do with joint muscle pain and with auto immune diseases things I've actually written about and presented at national meetings but just this week I met a woman for the first time I had seen my PA six months ago and she was on five rheumatoid arthritis medications including two immunosuppressants and very dynamic woman fascinating meeting her she's a coach for major corporations to get along with each other in meetings so anyhow she in six months is now off of all of her rheumatoid arthritis medications she's negative biomarkers they're all markers of rheumatoid arthritis and she actually was motivated because she was helping corporations have a better culture by teaching them how to interact with each other and she says you know I should be able to teach my body to interact with each other and I should be able to get rid of rheumatoid arthritis and my name popped up whenever she keeps searching and so she fixed it by changing the food that she ate yeah I think it's just one of the spokes on the hub you know nutrition there's so many different spokes need to tend to and you know inflammation is like the root of you know fill in the blank any kind of disorder you can look up there's like oh inflammation of the fill in the blank you know so if at that including depression you know so if you are eating foods that are inflammatory to your system it's not just that you're not going to perform well at your sport it's going to be performing well in your emotional life in your relationships in your business brain fog you know so that ends up translating directly into your into more like my world like your movement practice like I find just simply fasting for a short time is one of the most beneficial things that I can do for joint mobility like if I eat a late meal with you know whatever BS 11 p.m. I wake up the next day like my mobility is crap you know verses if I eat an early dinner of meaningful food because I have the self-worth to do so the next day sure enough my mobility is dramatically better and then if you can move into your movement practice with that newfound mobility you're able to create these new ranges of motions that you never had access to because you're always too inflamed to do so so it's just one of the one of the spokes that I think it's like a crucial part yeah and you know in my book the longevity paradox we really urge people to have preferably a four at least a three hour window between your last meal of the day and going to bed that makes such a difference among other things in brain cleaning so because the longevity paradox I've asked all of my guests to give our listeners one thing that they can do today to start having a better longer life one thing I think if I give 1.5 things okay 1.5 you're allowed to be an overarching really meaningful one but it's a little bit more pseudoscience but not protecting yourself and your ability to give and receive love I think that that's something that we move through the world with this kind of protection and we don't want to truly be seen so we kind of show people this like artificial sense of ourselves because if somebody doesn't love and appreciate that part it doesn't really matter because it was never really you but at some point you'll be at the point where maybe you're not in this body anymore and you look back and be like oh my god what the hell was I scared of so I think the sooner that you can just move through the world completely honest with where you're at and who you are with all of your relationships I think the healthier person you're going to be structurally that's going to affect you but something to be really simple is just hang each day as another just take away easy go to thing there's a whole book called shoulder pain by a guy called Dr. John Kirsch is orthopedic surgeon and showed that just through a simple hanging protocol I have a chapter in my book just simply reaching up get like a pull up bar in your doorway and as you're walking through that doorway give yourself a little 5 to 10 15 second hang and you're going to decompress your shoulder girdle literally changes the shape of your shoulder girdle we typically have more of this meter rotation which is impingement so you just go up into that position decompress that shoulder girdle start to open up the lungs reengage that diaphragm open up your heart all your whole cardiovascular system and bring you back in a more confident position if you're in this position all the time it starts to hijack the way that you think the way that you feel and the feedback that you send out to the rest of the world so a simple act of just hanging each day can have dramatic impact in your whole life believe it or not I wrote about this for my thesis at Yale University we are a hanging great ape and we are the only great apes are break-yaters they hang yeah monkey bar is a misnomer human bars are eight bars yeah they are they're eight bars and that's actually what differentiates us from all other monkeys our ability to hang and you're right we should be hanging I'm glad you brought that up it's an important point and I've kind of forgotten okay I'm going to go hang okay Aaron it's been great to have you on the podcast so how do our listeners find you how do they find more information about you and your work probably most people just go like Instagram and you know Align podcast is the easiest place but my website is also Align podcast if you just look up Align podcast that'll be the thing what's your Instagram Align podcast everything's Align podcast and then on there there's just a really simple 5-video breakdown of simple fundamentals that I know everybody can benefit from hanging is a part of those spending more time on the floor is a part of those and there's a few others and that's just a great example for people to start embodying themselves and you have to pay to play no no no that's that's I have so much content that is of high quality at no cost and then at the very end of that there is a deeper online program that exists but there's I mean you could spend a good chunk of your life just exploring the free stuff great alright very good so before we end we always have a great part of the podcast audience question Alisa Marie 022 on Instagram asks is carob powder allowed on the plant paradox diet I want to make sure I'm not eating the dangerous lectins so those of you who are against chocolate think that carob powder is probably a pretty good idea there actually is some evidence that carob has a lectin in it so I don't use carob powder my point would be to you there is so much benefit from cacao in terms of building nerves building connections between nerves in in dilating your blood vessels that I think go for the real chocolate and don't go for carob that's my humble opinion there actually is no demonstrable health benefit from carob over chocolate and the studies keep rolling in and if you want to keep your brain great get chocolate in your life so I'll end with that so if you listeners are enjoying this I want you to stay tuned because Aaron is going to do a posture assessment on me and you're not going to want to miss that in fact I think my wife Penny is going to tune in because she's always correcting my posture and Penny tune in Aaron is going to fix everything don't worry so Aaron give the folks viewing a couple of tips that they can do at home to assess their posture yep absolutely so the first thing is just before you we're going to go for this overhead shoulder range of motion and before we do that you can just look at yourself in the mirror if that works and just bring your hands one hand up to the top of the ribs and then bring the other hand down to around the pelvis here ideally you want these hands both to be facing straight typically for many people in modern culture we'll have this tendency of that rib flaring position and the hips just forward so just start off and I want your hands to be facing straight ahead like that the way that you can do that is you can blow all of your air out keeping your ribs so that they're on top of the pelvis and then from here we're going to just start to bring our arms up overhead as high as you comfortably can reaching high through those fingertips and not allowing the ribs to flare up the tendency for people as they go up overhead range of motion they just blow out their lower back we want to avoid that keep that strength and integrity through the midsection as we go up through overhead range of motion so first thing I would be curious to check out your shoulder range of motion you mentioned you have some frozen shoulder stuff yep yep okay so let's just see first of all what's your standing position that look like before we actually go into the shoulder range of motion there it is so if I push down on Dr. Gundry's shoulders what we want to have happen is that I can actually drive that weight straight from the shoulders all the way down into the feet the typical tendency for so many people is we'll have the tendency of bringing our hips forward like this which is just kind of setting the stage for some type of instability in the lower back so what we're going to do is just start to bring a little bit more of that yes boom so what we did is we started almost imagine like you're wearing like a corset in a way we started to bring a little bit more support through that midsection and we brought the ribs just down just just a little bit so as opposed to the ribs typically people have this like flaring rib thing happening oh yeah I'm told that boys stop flaring your ribs stop playing your ribs yep so what we're going to do is as you're standing moving around the world just give yourself you can literally bring your hands around your abdomen and just blow all of your air out you'll feel those deep intra-abdominal muscles start to come online and that will start to deflare those ribs now I mean you can notice the difference with that is pretty dramatic I can start to really straighten the legs a little bit more yep now I can really drive that weight down through Gundry's shoulders compared to a second ago let the hips go forward and it's interesting that hurts when you do it like that and when I was like this it didn't hurt so multiply that times 9.8 meters per second square gravity all day long and you're marching and stomping and all that it's just boof boof boof and that's where most of the disc herniations manifest is L5 S1 territory so the first thing is just thinking about okay let's find that stability through the midsection step from there is we're thinking about okay can we raise those arms up overhead and I want you to start reaching the fingertips down low towards the ground so you're already almost like tractioning lengthening those shoulders out and now from here keeping that length slowly start to raise your arms up and maintaining this is what we're looking at we're maintaining this stability through the midsection that's not bad and now we can feel you starting to want to take from there that's where we stop so something that would be of great benefit to you is like we mentioned in the podcast is start hanging if hanging just free hanging is too much to start you can literally simply just like get at the edge of a chair and just start bringing yourself into these positions or you could hang and put a chair like a stool down low to just start flirting with that process of being in a hang way quicker than you anticipate I'm sure you'll actually be able to comfortably do a free hang while maintaining the support through your lower back and I could use a band like that you could use a band like this so this would be something that I would recommend as well to actually start to activate the backside of the shoulder girdle so try it one time really quick so just something you can do is start you're going to start imagine you're breaking the band while you're keeping this midsection engaged exactly now from here you're starting to turn on that those posterior delts those muscles in the back good and then slowly coming back down and then you can start to rotate the band off to the side and off to the other side and up around and then something that would be a benefit is using the band to actually go and start to decompress that shoulder joint so attaching it to a door and then starting to exactly hinge yourself forward yep and then starting to raise that right arm up overhead yep and so now we can actually traction that joint good beautiful and then back down yep and so now we're tractioning the joint we're creating a little mild fascia release while we're creating decompression of that joint at the same time and a little bit of that I'm going to let go of it a little bit of that times hanging would literally change the whole shape of your shoulder girdle so you've just listened and watched Aaron Alexander from alinepodcast.com show me how to fix my posture listen to us over on Dr. Gendry podcast to learn a whole lot more see you next time find the show on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcast because I'm Dr. Gendry and I'm always looking out for you