 in this episode we talk all about pain we talk about how to eliminate your chronic pain in your body whether it's your low back your shoulders your knees your hips we get into ankle stuff we talk about the upper body we talk about why pain is the number one thing you should consider with your training even if you don't think you have any right now it's something that is very very important we also talk about what to do when you have that pain and why finding how fixing it can help you build muscle and burn body fat we talk about the different points or the different steps you should take to alleviating your pain how to identify the root cause how to prioritize the right movements how to apply the right amount of frequency and then we talk about priming so you're going to love this mind pump episode also this episode is brought to you by our sponsor for sigmatic now for sigmatic has the best adaptogenic mushroom supplements you'll find anywhere now what are adaptogens adaptogens help 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all of their products also all month long maps prime and maps prime pro are both 50 percent off now maps prime takes you through a self-assessment process helps you identify movement issues and helps you design your priming session what's a priming session well it's superior to a warm up a priming session prepares your body to move more effectively connect to your muscles better and fire more muscle fibers if you prime properly for five to ten minutes or 15 minutes before your workout you'll get better squats better deadlifts better bench presses you'll just get better results overall now maps prime pro is about correctional exercise if you have parts of your body that aren't moving well or areas of your body that are preventing you from making great gains let's say your hips are stopping you from doing full squats or your knees are preventing you from doing good lunges or your bench presses stuck because your shoulders tend to hurt you want maps prime pro it addresses all the major joints of the body teaches you correctional exercises for each one you follow the program follow the movements improve your mobility and move better and reduce your pain here's how you get 50 percent off both programs go to maps fitness products dot com and use the code prime 50 that's p r i m e five zero no space for the discount oh and by the way both programs require zero equipment you can do them anywhere including your home hey you know um i get dms from trainers and uh well people all the time but one of the number one things the questions that i get asked loads of dms has to do thanks has to do with um revolves around pain lots and lots and lots of questions around pain well maybe because that's yeah but i mean let's be honest when you are a personal trainer uh i would say 80 percent of my clients you know battle the chronic pain for sure it's it's actually maybe more it's actually majority for sure and it's how you showed your value as a trainer that's like if you got a client fit you know strong fat loss it's very valuable you got your client to just move and feel better life they're with you for life it's like the most valuable thing that you could possibly do as a trainer and hands down more valuable than just losing fat and uh you know body mass and everything else like i honestly if you can alleviate somebody's pain uh you know you have a lifer client then it's the number one thing you should actually consider with your training even if you are pain free and the reason why you should consider it is because nothing will stop your progress in its tracks nothing will has the potential to reverse your progress and send you backwards like pain nothing and i know if you've been working out for longer than a year you probably know what i'm talking about i mean you get one injury and uh that's it you can't work out the way you were doing before not only can you not work out the way you were doing before but you're reminded every second every time you try to move that something hurts well i think it's important that we we distinguish the difference between uh injury type pain and chronic pain because and then also uh a lot of people that don't think they have chronic pain just and they attribute it to being older right those three things i think of right i have either one yeah somebody doesn't understand the difference of like acute pain from an injury uh to what is chronic pain and then what is oh this is just how i feel because i'm older because that was one of the things when i when i i never forget uh training clients and i would get somebody you know remember i started when i was 20 right so it was just a pup and you get somebody in your office who's 45 55 years old like seems ancient to you when you're 20 years old and they think you're a child at that point and i'm assessing them to tell them what's wrong with their body and they would just look back at me and be like son you don't understand when you don't understand when you get my age you'll feel it this is it just how everybody gets this way everybody feels this way and i remember being so frustrated as a kid because i remember going through all the schooling and education to learn about all this and understand that like no this is that's not why these people feel this way they i i can help them i want to help them but they they would they would attribute the these you know this chronic pain the the sore the low but low back that bothered them late after a long day of work the the knees crackling and aching on some days the ankles being stiff or the the neck being frozen and locked up and causing headaches that was just that wasn't chronic pain to them that was just this is part of getting old yeah there's a big difference between um acute and chronic pain and injury because we need to and we do we need to decipher the two so if your knee hurts because you you fell on it or you twisted it and it's torn that is acute injury type pain chronic pain is the kind of pain that is with you all the time it's like you know oh my knee hurts when did you hurt your knee oh 15 years ago and it's funny you almost get removed from it because you've been living with it for so long and these are a lot of clients to to adam's point like on the other end of that where they just don't even bring it up because it's just something that they've been living with so long that they don't even recognize it as a problem anymore yeah and in chronic pain is treated very differently than acute pain if you tore something it broke something you rest it and let it heal that's how you deal with acute pain chronic pain if you leave it alone and rest it and let it do nothing it oftentimes gets worse if you're low back if you have low back pain that's not due to an actual injury that just happened it's just my back hurts just it always hurts if I if I walk too long or I stand too long my low back hurts the the way you solve that is not by okay not standing and not moving anymore temporarily you might not hurt anymore but things are gonna get weaker and that crime would cause that chronic pain is gonna get continue to get worse so the way you deal with chronic pain is very very different and chronic pain is a big big problem one out of five this is an actual statistic one out of five americans report suffering from chronic pain now I said report because the numbers higher than that because the justin's point I can't tell you how many this is actually more often than not that's how often this would happen a client would sit in front of me and they'd say do you have any areas of chronic pain they're like no I don't and then I'd say okay and I knew I knew better because I'd been training people for a long time so I'd be like okay and I'd go down the list how's your neck how's your shoulder how's your wrist how's your and before you know I'm like oh my shoulder yeah it kind of bothers me but that's you know that just hurts if I don't move it this way stiff oh my low back yeah it gets really tight but if I don't bend over raise my arm but yeah or you do an exercise and they just told you everything's perfectly fine you do one lunge like oh I can't do that my knee hurts right so so I think there's more people suffering from chronic pain than actually report it and it's just we just accept it and we we actually change how we walk how we move how we sit to try to get around from that and even worse than that 20 million people report suffering from pain that literally interferes with daily life that's how many people in this country have the kind of chronic pain that they actually say listen this is making life suck this is making life very very difficult well to their defense a lot of a lot of the problem is they think that okay if my low back hurts and or it feels that way from a long day of work or whatever but they know they didn't do anything to directly injure it they don't connect that to chronic pain right so that part of the problem is is understanding that no the body you can be believe it or not you can be 80 years old and not have your low back feel terrible all day or your shoulder feel locked up all the time it's what it is is they they don't realize it because they didn't do like a specific injury and listen I'm coming also from a place where I understand because this is even was even me okay and what they do is they avoid things in the gym that they think aggravated or make it worse when there's they're not addressing the root cause so using myself as an example and mine started to creep in like in my late 20s early 30s when I really started nose and I would get low back pain I had low chronic back pain and the mics if I was on my feet all day long or maybe if I played basketball or if I lifted squats I would my back would just be on fire and because I know I didn't do any like a specific injury to my back like my logic to that was like oh it's you know it's just bothering me because I'm not very good at squatting or whatever and I just kind of put it to the side and then and then when it's happening you kind of put it to the side and then it starts to creep up more and more and more until it becomes debilitating until people literally affects their their daily life and then when they decide that they they want to try and do something about it they think it's the the back is the problem because my low back is bothering me but it's really not my low back it's all the things that are surrounding it that are stressing the low back and most commonly when we talk about low back and in my experience it's been the whole hip complex that is really locked up and tight because of the inability of your hips and then that's pulling and straining on the low back to take it a step further it's not even oh it's my low back that's bad it's the oh it's because I walked a lot right because I stood a lot like I'll talk to people and they'll say oh you know no I don't have my knee doesn't I don't have chronic pain with my knee but if I walk longer than 30 minutes it starts to hurt so I just don't walk for longer than 30 minutes yeah you know or oh yeah my yeah my back hurts but that's because I was standing for three hours that's why my back hurts you're not supposed to be in pain when you do regular things now I understand if you go and test the limits of your physical capacity you might have some soreness but if you're like you know if you go to the mall and you're going shopping for four hours and you come home with back pain that's not because you were shopping for four hours that's because you have some issues with the way your body moves what you need to understand is that your body is all connected and if one thing isn't moving optimally because your body by the way your body doesn't understand you know joint by joint muscle by muscle it just understands function so if I get up to walk my body's not thinking hip flexor quad hamstring calf soleus tense up the core it doesn't work that way be a very that would be such an inefficient process what it thinks is propel the body forward so let's say I have a bad ankle let's say my left ankle is bad what will automatically happen without me thinking is a limp I'll change my walking behavior I'll change that movement pattern automatically and this is a wonderful thing that your body does it moves in spite of the fact that you have bad mobility issues or bad connection issues it moves in spite of all of those things so you can still move and so that's why we think oh it's the movement that's causing the problem no no no it's because you can't move optimally yeah and then a lot of times like these little compensations that happen it it goes up the kinetic chain so all the rest of your limbs and you know places where you you'd never think what it would affect like it might affect your neck you know you have an ankle injury things like that so it's just you know these creep up on you and it's it's it's going to be to your benefit to really like do your homework and come back and really try to trace back to the root of all this I didn't experiment with a trainer that worked from a years ago we had this whole conversation and we put a half an inch rise in her left shoe okay so one foot was a half an inch taller than the other foot and I said walk around in this all day long and let me know where you start to feel the pain and you know first it was a hip then it was the low back then it was her shoulder and neck it's all connected all because one foot was a little bit higher than the other one so you're exactly right Justin and now why is this important to know because you may have pain in one area but it's not necessarily because your knee might not hurt be probably it may hurt because you have a bad knee but more often than not if it's not an injury it's not because you have a bad knee it's because your ankles or your hips or something else isn't moving properly so now your knee has to take over and do more than it should that's another really good point to bring up is it's very common that you had somebody who like maybe broken ankle or torn you know ligament in their knee on one side and then you know years they recover from it you know they were young when it happened and now they're you know later advanced age and now they feel neck or low back and they don't think it has anything to do with the knee but this is just goes back to this the conversation that we had the other day about the importance of rehabbing correctly a lot of times what has happened to us is most people has had have had somewhat of an injury like that whether it be a major sprain or a break or a tear somewhere on their body and they rehabbed recovered at one point but they never recovered back to where their body was moving and speaking you know synergistically to each other where it was even on on each side what ends up happening is to your point you made Sal that the body just understands function so if you got if I tore my my left knee right my ligaments my left knee and I had you know the brace on a cast on for six months I rehab and I didn't do a really good job you know post surgery of balancing my left and right side out I just got better at compensating because of the injury at using my other side that kind of stays with you even when you get out of rehab and that's a lot of people don't connect that and it doesn't come creeping until maybe years or even sometimes decades later and and then it reveals itself like Justin said you know neck or shoulder pain but really it was that broken ankle on on your right side you know a decade ago that you never rehabbed completely and balanced your body out tricky because you feel that that immediate relief because the acute pain has gone away right and you've become more efficient at walking again and doing daily functions and everything but these compensations these patterns of favoring aside have really added up over the years and that that creeps up to the point where it becomes its own problem and so this is something that people just need to realize that that could definitely happen and here's what ends up happening you you develop movement patterns that are suboptimal suboptimal patterns put more wear and tear on your joints they tighten some muscles up because you're not moving the best way possible so some muscles have to overcompensate to correct for that and so you start to get pain and you start to get problems some muscles actually turn off okay so if you never if you never reach over your head so like right now if you're listening to the podcast like i'm going to put this to the test i'm not going to reach up above my head for the next two years you'll lose that ability those muscles actually in that range of motion starts to turn off so what is mobility aim to do mobility aims to get you to learn new patterns and turn muscles on and ways to support that that's what mobility aims to do and this is why working on this is the most important possible thing you can do regardless of what your goals are because let's say your goal is to build maximal muscle like i just want to build a lot of muscle we don't care about this kind of stuff well here's why it's important if you want to build maximal muscle you need to be able to lift heavy you need to be able to train intensely and you need to be able to do this consistently well if you're moving suboptimally that's a recipe for disaster not only that but let's say you never hurt yourself you will never reach your full potential because when your body moves optimally that's when you build the most muscle and lift the most weight when it moves suboptimally you never reach that upper limit of your potential so this is a very important thing to pay attention to and more importantly this is something that you pay attention to always you never take your eye off of it this was a paradigm shattering moment for me as a young lifter so as an athlete a left-handed athlete i was very dominant on my left side i shoot throw do everything left-handed and so and this is before i know this right so i haven't made this connection yet and i get into lifting weights not long after when i'm playing sports and i'm now i'm really like the skinny guy trying to build muscle i care i care less about sports now i just want to build up build a physique and i remember like being so frustrated with my chest development i had a really weak chest it was like almost concave and when i started like really you know lifting a lot and consistent i started to kind of develop a little bit of a chest but what really was discouraging was it was uneven like one side i had my right pack was like way more developed than my left pack which you know for a young kid at this point i i wasn't making the connection like this makes sense my left side is my stronger side why is it less developed than my right side and the reason why that is and this was this this was that paradigm shattering moment for me when i started to learn all this and the importance of posture and mechanics and fixing anything in imbalances that i had because i played sports for so long the left side i had this kind of i had more of a a rotated forward shoulder on the left side now we know when you get in to do a bench bench press or a chest fly you want to get yourself in that retracted position to engage the chest if your shoulders are rolled forward and you go to do a bench press a fly or a chest exercise the shoulders take over the movement so what was happening when i'm doing these barbell exercises and machine exercises is that my that shoulder on the left side was and i'm talking you can't it's not glaring and obvious this is why this is so important to really assess this is it was just slightly rolled forward a little bit more than my right side and then i'm just you know body's just gonna just get the bar up that's all it's thinking so i'm just bench pressing away and the young kid all i'm caring about in my stronger in my stronger putting more weight on and what ends up happening is i get this kind of developed shoulder on that left side chest is never really getting activated very well and all my chest exercises on the left side but the right side is and so now my body looks off and it took years of correcting that after i overdid it the other way and this is the important part in the why i i stress this type of stuff to every single client why under assessing posture and addressing that first is so important because even if you're not dealing even if you're a 23 year old kid right now listening and you don't have you're not battling bad chronic pain but you don't have really good posture which is also changing how good your mechanics are when you when you do the movements you end up over developing one side or the other and then it creates this kind of imbalance and look and now i have a bigger problem to go back in reverse yeah if you were to compare if you had twins and one twin had good movement good control stability mobility and the other one had bad control good bad movement all that stuff but they looked to start off working out identical and then they both start working out here's how the difference in in terms of the development will start to play out the person with the poor mobility and poor connection is going to develop imbalances in their muscles they're going to develop a physique that doesn't look as pleasing it doesn't look as balanced they don't have as much symmetry it doesn't develop as well they also won't build muscle as fast because they're they're pressing the the limits of the the hinges without the good mobility now the person who can move now well progresses faster because they can maximize the effectiveness of each exercise they're balanced in terms of their development they look more aesthetic and then the obvious the person who has poor mobility probably going to get hurt which will slow them down even more while the other person probably won't get hurt it makes that big of a difference and again this is something you have to or you should pay attention to always if your goal is to have maximum results consistently this is number one there is nothing above it the utmost importance especially in the athletic realm i'm always stressing that you know like assessing movement assessing movement with the athletes that's first and foremost are your joints able to do what they're supposed to do are you set in the proper ways where you know you're allowed to you're you're able to distribute force correctly through your body there's there's if you think of a house a house has you know a structural foundation a way that everything is aligned so that it can withstand the amount of force that's coming down and when that's just a little bit off you know it may not be immediately but over time it's gonna it's gonna really affect the the foundation the the way that the house is is standing up still you know so that that's something that we have this this preset way to move with our joints that's going to be able to distribute this force and withstand force at its most optimal points well that your analogy with the house is exactly what i used to use with clients who would come to me so focused on you know the way they looked or their the scale weight like oh adam i just want to lose 30 pounds i don't care about anything else just get me there i just want to build this and when i hear that the analogy i'd give them is like you know that's you're coming to a contractor okay i'm the construction worker now i'm not your personal trainer and you want me to build build you this beautiful house that you have this vision of and you want me to skip laying the foundation you want a hollywood shell house is what you want yeah you ever go to those you ever go to the sets where they have like the fake house or whatever yeah that's what they want yeah and and you know what right and here's the reality of it that's possible you know i could throw up so i could frame up some walls and throw a roof on it and everything like that but it's not gonna last forever you know it definitely is not nice like initially yeah if you look at it from far away right yeah right and so that's why i love that analogy when you're talking about getting somebody to move optimally and teach them about posture and and be able to bring you know here's another one like so very and and i know i'm gonna try and give as many as you can or go with this because i know this will make connection with the younger crowd it's very easy to talk about chronic pain to someone who's 55 like there's it's not it's very easy but trying to get this point across to someone who's 23 right now in the importance of it that's fucking hard and i know how that because it was been hard for me now somebody who's uh can relate to this bicep curling and this is why i did this youtube video that's controversial that like it's done really well on our youtube channel that i got a lot of trolls that hated me for this but i teach this bicep curl and i make clients do a split stance and put their weight on on the front foot and pull their shoulder blades back and i do this little balance thing and i get of course i got hammered for for teaching this but i'll tell you why i teach this because a lot of people are just just slightly off enough on their mechanics of bicep curling and one one one shoulders a little more forward and so the anterior dealt takes over a little bit more on the left side than it does the right side which is just enough of over years of bicep curling two or three years to have one side more develop the other or one dramatically stronger than the other you can curl 35 pound dumbbell with the left arm but the right one you can only do 25 yet it's and then what are they their answer is just curl more with the opposite side no that's not there was there's a breakdown mechanically somewhere and i'll tell you the most common area that i have found when doing bicep curls is exactly what i said it's because all of us tend to be right or left side dominant because we we write with our right hand or we brush our teeth comb our hair we do a lot with one side more than the other and guess what that over time will cause this this imbalance and so then when you go to do these these movements and these these exercises if you're not conscious of that your body is always going to take the easiest path and so if that means it cheats up with the shoulder a little bit more on that you know more dominant or forward side then what ends up happening is you get an imbalance in the bicep and then you think it has something to do with oh i just need to do more on the other side like no there's there's a root cause for that and the earlier you become okay the young kids that are listening right now the earlier you become aware of this and and become conscious of your training that the less the less work you'll have going down the road and the more results you'll get if you lay that foundation way better results i used to remember when i would train some clients who couldn't get full extension of the arms up above their head that's actually a tough one for a lot of people a lot of people think they can get really good full extension but in reality what they're doing is arching their back and doing all kinds of weird stuff and i'd have them do a shoulder press and i'd tell them to push the dumbbells up a little higher push them up a little higher you know what they do they come up they use their heels they come up on their toes and the reason why they come up on their toes is because their mind again your body says move the dumbbells higher arms can't do it i'm coming up on the toes it's automatic yeah this is automatic this is why you train movements this is not why i'm going this is why mobility is not treated like this oh i have a weak you know glute just work out my glute no no no work the movement your body doesn't understand that way now i know bodybuilding is around developing individual body parts nothing wrong with that but proper mobility is about training movements in connection because your body doesn't understand muscle groups it only understands movement so all right what's the first step first step in getting somebody to work on chronic pain obviously it's got to be identify the root what is the root cause of this pain now it is important to note that there are certain joints of the body that oftentimes are not the problem what i mean by that is if you have low back pain knee pain elbow pain neck pain sometimes many times it's not because you have a bad problem with your knee low back elbow or neck oftentimes it's because of the surrounding joints oftentimes it's because those joints or areas are overcompensating the low back is a very very common one you can definitely have low back pain because you actually have issues with your low back slip disc or pinch nerve and that kind of stuff yeah but even those things right over time is caused because there's a dysfunction in the hip complex hip you've got an anterior pelvic tilt or you have lack of mobility in the hips and the years and years of that being compressed is now compressed the disc and now you have this and you know it's funny it's that when you i would again i train lots of surgeons you know as a trainer and many of them would tell me you know sal if you took 10 people off the streets and you image their low back you would see lots of people who have discs that are out here and there and very few of them would have any symptoms they don't even realize and he goes and he goes many times we have people coming in with severe low back and we see nothing on the images we can't find any problems whatsoever and then a lot of people most of the clients i ever had would come into me brand new with some kind of chronic low back pain and nine out of 10 times we could alleviate it tremendously by getting better with their hip mobility getting better with their core stability those two things right there oh boy that that used to handle so many people's low back pain well and we had to dress knee like that too like you you name the four big ones in my opinion too like how we get lots of people like one of the most common areas to foam roll is your it even if you're you're relatively new to health and fitness you've probably seen a foam roller and the probably the most common area that people have to foam roll is the it right the side of your it hurts the most right right right you feel either either one you're somebody who feels the pain in the front of your kneecap and that's related to the it or you feel that in the hip and that it feels like a sharp pain is is our knife is being stuck on the side of your hip now the reality of that is the foam roller is not fixing the problem it's giving you temporary relief and so oh my god right if you do it's like it feels better but it's the movement patterns that's causing it to keep getting tight again and if you just foam roll it you're going to be right back in that situation every single time you come back to work out again unless you start to address movement and because of it the most common okay even though there's always exceptions to the rule but the most common thing that i've seen is related down into the foot ankle area or all the way up into the hip area either one their their feet are pronating really bad and they have limited ankle mobility and control and so the the femur is internally rotating which is like twisting the it band like like ringing it out and twisting it which is causing it to get really tight and knotted up and gives you that pulling sensation or it's the inability to control the hip through its full range of motion and just oh the muscles in that whole hip complex are are being pulled and tightened because they're they're overworking because the hip's not moving properly and then that all leads to this knee pain problem and it's not you have bad knees i mean how many times you've heard that oh i can't do this because i have bad knees like no you don't have bad knees it's everything that's around it that we're not taking care of and so your knees are bothering you and so learning how to assess that and this really was our meant to me you know we talk a lot about the programs that we've created the ones that like have made us most proud and for sure prime and prime pro for me are those programs because it just took a lot it took a lot of thinking for us like okay now how do we take all the collection of experience that the three of us have of all the different types of bodies and issues and pain and stuff that people dealt with now how do we how do we simplify this so we can help the average person that's suffering from this but then not oversimplify it that we're not doing much good whatsoever and that was where we had this idea of like okay what we're going to do is we're just going to have a pass or fail type of test for every joint the major joints right so we take you through seven of the major joints in the body that are most commonly causing dysfunction or aches and pains in the body there's a test that's in it and you do the test and you i and we made it cut and dry like we could we i remember we went back remember arguing back oh should we do you score a seven or a 10 we're like no you know what here's the deal we're just going to make it very simple for people they either can pass it with flying colors they got great mobility what does work to do or there's work to do and if it's so if you if you have if you struggle with it add in the slightest bit there's always work to do just no matter how much work it needs to be done if you can barely move it or do anything there's a lot of work to be done so it's pass or fail if you fail that joint area oh looks like i i have bad ankle mobility then it points you in the direction of mobility movements that are specific to that joint to help that and then the recommendation obviously in the blueprints we tell everybody what to do but then the recommendation that i normally give aside from our blueprints is listen this is going to seem overwhelming because a lot of people are going to feel so broken the first time they do this because they're going to fail so many tests so the idea is you pick a couple of these that are making the that are giving you the most relief or making the most change if you if you have low back pain you have bad knees you got neck all all the issues pick a couple of the movements that are really going to alleviate that and practice them as much as you can and we get a lot of questions about like the difference between the two programs i think for me uh it's more if you look at prime is more of a broad stroke so now if it's not so obvious like it's my ankle that's the problem and like you go through the assessment and the seven different joints and you're going through that process you know in prime pro but really you're just going through our three movements that we've we've identified as uh you know our upper extremities our torso and then our lower extremities and then how they all function and how they all do what they're supposed to do in movement and space and seeing that oh my god i can't i can't reach my arm back as far as i could and i can't touch my elbow back what does that mean and why am i restricted and all that so we had to try to try to make it because like we initially brought up in the beginning of this episode a lot of people like they just don't realize that these restrictions are going to become a problem and so uh to be able to identify that and find the root of uh you know your movement issues is going to be very beneficial for you to then bring back into working out well there's a natural range of motion that your joints are supposed to have there really is and there's a and what i mean by supposed to have is not just that that you know it's not like i could just take Justin's arm and move it through this range of motion that's part of it but really what it is is he should be able to do it himself control he should not just be able to do it himself it should feel strong and stable the entire way now think about it this way is there a position you can bend your body where it feels like if i just poke you or push you a little bit it's going to tear a muscle or hurt you that means you don't have control or strength in that particular range of motion okay you want to have control and stability in all of the range of motions that your joints provide that's what true mobility gives you now why should you prioritize that like why should you prioritize that over the goals of fat loss and building muscle well i'll tell you if you want to burn body fat in the most effective way possible or you want to build muscle in the most effective way possible you probably are going to exercise okay you're going to work out you're going to use movements to get the body to adapt and respond now in order to utilize these movements effectively and to reap the potential benefits that these movements can provide you you have to have good movement good movement is what makes a squat so damn effective bad movement is also what makes a squat so damn dangerous or any exercise for that matter any exercise has the potential to be have a certain level of effectiveness and any exercise has a potential to be have a certain level of risk of injury your ability to move is what determines that so if you want to go into the gym or your garage or into your workout and you want to have a arsenal you want to have a full category of movements and not only that but you want to be able to reap the benefits of all of those exercises on your body you have to be able to move well if you can't move well your arsenal shrinks and shrinks and shrinks if your lower back prevents you from doing barbell squats you can never reap the benefits of one of the best exercises for the lower body if your shoulders prevent you from doing an overhead press because they hurt well now you can never reap the benefits of that phenomenal exercise so that's why prioritizing movement is the most important thing because if you want to walk into your goals with all the tools you possibly have that you can have at your at your disposal with all of the potential of what those things can provide you you have to be able to move well and what you don't want to do is this there's a big mistake a lot of people make they train for fat loss they train for muscle building and they never work on movement and as they get older more and more exercises get taken out of their arsenal you know oh i used to be able to squat in my twenties now i can't now i just leg press oh i can't even leg press anymore now it's just leg extensions and before you know it i can't even work out my legs anymore but by the way this is very common so it's not just about what hurts me right now it's about do i want to be able to do these amazing exercises and by the way being able to do these amazing exercises do you know what that means you're going to feel like when you're not working out amazing yeah that means you're going to move around you're going to feel good you're going to move you're going to have all those abilities that you have right now absolutely well talking about fat loss and muscle building we touched on this a little bit the other day when we talked about isometrics and there's that point too to be made that you know the better that you can move the more muscle fibers you can recruit to aid that movement and that exercise which then results in more muscle and burning more body fat performance enhancement right so the the the ability for you to connect and i did this in the webinar right so uh i think sa was teasing me right i love when adam talks sciency uh and uh this is this is just i i've um part of what the success i've had as a personal train for sure has been able to to take really complex things like this and really simplify it for the average person and it pisses academia off all the time because i don't say it exactly how they want to or you know exaggerate exaggerate something to make a point across and i don't give a shit because my point is to help the average person really get grasp the concept of something that is extremely complex right and nuanced and what we're talking about can be very complex and nuanced but a simple way that i explained to people like when we when we try to do one of these mobility exercises and you can't perform it right to a certain extent or you have limited range of motion it's not just a muscle thing that's going on there it starts on a neurological level and sal alluded to this earlier that the body is just going to take the easiest path it's just going to it's just designed to do function if you stop doing something it would not be advantageous for the brain to send neurons over to those muscles you're not using it says okay he's not using it so let's pretend in a perfect world you you can use everything right you're super limber you're super strong everywhere the brain fires neurons to all these different muscles to activate and move around well as you get older and you stop using them you lose that you and it starts at the neurological level it says okay we used to use you know let's just say for the this this argument sake right used to use one million neurons to get the hand to be able to lift above the head i no longer do that anymore i haven't done that for 10 years so now the body says well that's inefficient for me to send a bunch of neurons over to those muscles that aren't being used let's send them to other places of the body that we are using because it's more efficient to do that and so there's that's the connection that you lose well you think people you think that what adapts as you work out are your muscles which is true but what adam's saying is it's your it's your brain it's your central nervous system that adapts we're along with it and just like your muscles can adapt in the opposite direction where if i don't work out my body will actually shrink my muscles it'll adapt in the opposite direction because it doesn't need to have this extra energy going to something that it's not using your body will actually do that with your brain and your central nervous system as well it'll adapt in the opposite direction your body only is ever as good as it needs to be it's never going to be any better you ever see those videos of like there's the videos of kids who maybe they grew up and they didn't have any arms so they do everything with their feet you ever seen the articulation of the dexterity that they have the control it's unreal they can handle fork and spoon and brush their teeth cereal with their toes all kinds of stuff with their toes and you think yourself well that's crazy well you are capable of that too just practiced and practiced and their brain and their central nervous system developed all the connections to be able to do that now if they stopped doing that they would lose that ability as well so a lot of the reasons why we have these mobility issues is we lose these connections and a lot of the ways that you train in mobility is to regain these connections you know i remember when the one of the first times we went to see dr brink dr brink is a movement specialist that actually helped us with maps prime pro because mass prime pro goes much more in depth with correctional exercise and we went on to enlist the help of somebody who we thought we you know we really respected and then remember we went to go see him and we did and he was walking us through the 90 90 position which if you don't know what that is you can go on our youtube channel we have videos on on 90 90 i do this and now the analogy you're about to explain i do this in the webinar and by the way there's yeah there's a webinar you can go and watch actually where adam takes you through five of his favorite mobility movements and adam actually he's an exceptional teacher because he's got phenomenal cues so i suggest everybody go check that out that's a mine pump webinar dot com but i went to go see dr brink and he you know puts me 90 90 and he says okay now i want you without lifting your back knee up i want you to take your foot off the floor and i look down like you're crazy like i that doesn't even exist like it would be like asking me to fly like that movement that connection doesn't exist i can't just i can't just do it and he says you have the range of motion i said no i don't and he goes yeah you do and he takes my foot just picks it up picks it up rotates my my back leg my knees still on the floor and brings it up next to my head yeah you can touch like the back of your head with it and you know it's weird i looked back and it felt like a dummy foot it was like somebody grabbed someone else's foot and put him it didn't even feel like it was my you sawed your leg off it did not feel like it was mine it was a very strange feeling the reason why it felt so weird is because i had zero connection to that movement i had no central nervous system connection now the muscles exist that could do it i still have them on my body so the muscles can do it but there's no signal there's no instructions coming from my brain so how do i gain that how do i gain that connection through practice through mobility through trying to connect to those ranges of motion when it's happening is little by little by little i start to be able to control that weird range of motion that i thought felt so strange and and to that point that brings me to the next thing that's important is the frequency of it is because and i love you i'm glad you went that way because it transitions perfect into what i want to explain is that you take something like that who somebody who can't because i was in the same boat of sal i couldn't even get my leg to move like i remember we were all together it's so weird and bring said to do this and i was just like yeah not happening like it just there's there's it's not even story it's not even not happening like i don't even feel you don't even know how to make yeah exactly it just feels so foreign to me but here's the thing like and what he would do is he would he would lift it a little bit off the ground and then you know try and get you to hold it there and then it was like hovering by an inch and fight and then i'd start to kind of feel something but it just it took practice of doing that every day three four times a day and then before you knew it it went from i couldn't move it to it now i could kind of move it and activate it then it was like i could lift it an inch and then two inches and then three and then before you knew it i could lift that thing off by a foot off the ground something that i had no control whatsoever but it was the the amount of frequency that i was doing it it wasn't like i did two mobility sessions or saw a break three or four times and then all of a sudden i've got this great control of my hips like no i had to really like learning a language again i had to practice and practice and practice and practice and get this connection going before i could really start to improve on it but holy shit once i did it was a game changer for me on the relief that i got yeah so so to to put it plainly rather than doing one hour mobility workout twice a week which that'll bring you value okay i'm not gonna lie that'll still bring you lots of value you're better off doing you know four 30 minute sessions in the week or even better eight 15 minute sessions in the same total time just practice practice practice i've had probably the best response from clients that have they've taken into chunks like that where they do 10 minutes they do 15 minutes and it's very specific to their their individual issues and that's why the assessment part is so vital to then uh being able to create this sort of ritual that you you just plan it out to do whenever you're brushing your teeth or you know you're you're watching tv or you're just you're just doing your regular everyday activities but now you just you just put that in there as a new thing right so let me break it down right so here's what you're looking to do first off strength is a function of both muscle and the central nervous system the central nervous system sends the signal if the signal is loud you're gonna be stronger than if it's weak and of course you're gonna be stronger than if it's non-existent the muscle itself is what performs the movement and the bigger it is the stronger it is okay so when we're doing mobility step one is just to get a connection that's all we're trying to do i'm trying to get i can't even focus on building the muscle isn't gonna build because there's no connection whatsoever so step one is getting a connection the best way to get a connection is to practice a lot frequently not hard not long in fact if you sit there and practice for three hours you're going to get worse and worse at it practice it frequently 15 minutes every single day is better than like i said an hour twice a week even if you add up the same amount of time it's that frequency that because you're going to get more you're always practicing getting connected then as you get connected you practice on developing a solid connection then when you have a really solid connection okay fine you have now you have a solid connection to internal hip rotation that you didn't have before all right you want to build really big internal rotators on your hips now you could train it more traditionally where you train with resistance and that kind of stuff but that's a different now you go do your squats do deadlifts and stuff like that but if you want to improve mobility you got to work on connection and frequency is king so that's the way you treat this type of training it's not like your normal training you're not doing this for an hour of time now the mobility webinar that adam does he takes you through full a full hour because he's teaching you how to do all these things but what you should do is take movements specific to your body practice them every single day and now this is where maps prime came in the priming concept is at the bare minimum what you should do is at least prime the areas that you have deficiencies and before you go into lift weights and potentially make that worse so for example if you're somebody who is rounded shoulders and forward head and I love to pick this one because I know fucking everybody listening this is you all of us are and it's just listening to this podcast like that right now yes right so so at the bare minimum you before okay if you're not going to spend an hour long session or doing it three times a day for 15 minutes the bare minimum before you go lift weights and potentially make a postural deviation worse you prime yourself to at least get you into a more optimal position so let's use the rounded shoulders so I'm going to go over and do like band pull apart or seated row type movements and what I'm doing is I'm waking up all those muscles in my upper back that are responsible for pulling my shoulder girdle back which is where I want to be before I go do an overhead press before I do a bench press before I do any of these pushing movements in front of my body that could exactly make the patterns worse if I don't address at the bare minimum I want to prime that now in a perfect world you do those things and then in addition you have these little mobility moves that you're sprinkling throughout your day and workout all the time and then you can progress over time that's a good way to look at it is really cementing your optimal postures before you get to loading all the joints you want to make sure that you are a nice rigid structure everything is stacked properly and then you go in to do your major lifts and there's a hundred percent less likelihood that you know something bad is going to happen or you know you're going to perform a lot better too having everything aligned properly yeah it's like when you would train a client and you'd have them do a cable row and you'd say pull your shoulders back and they'd be like I am you're like no you're not and then all you would do sometimes is you touch the mid-back and you let them have that feedback they'd feel it and then oh there it is now I can get the good form what priming is doing Adam uses the term waking up I'm sure there's some you know some some academics like oh the muscles aren't right I know they hate they hate that one what's happening is you're you know what it's supposed to feel like that's what priming does you know now because I'm doing these movements and activating now I know what the position feels like now I can go into the exercise with proper positioning good priming just destroys what a warm-up typically does a warm-up just gets you to move and okay I feel better maybe a little more limber or whatever priming allows you to perform your exercises much better and remember somebody who deadlifts well is going to build more muscle and strength than someone who deadlifts poorly and what's going to help ensure that you do the deadlift better or the bench press better or whatever lifting you do better proper priming well I remember the evolution of this as a trainer to like before I understood priming and mobility I understood that we have overactive and underactive muscles and I have tight muscles that I want less tight right so that was the beginning as a trainer so what I would find out so I remember when I first started doing like assessments and posture and knowing that okay a lot of people have these rounded shoulders okay if you have rounded shoulders the pec the chest is tight and the in the shoulder the front shoulder your anterior delt is tight right that's part of what's causing this rounding forward because you use it so much it's overactive it's tight and so as a young trainer my way of addressing that was oh I have this client that's told so I'm going to stretch the chest and stretch the shoulders before I do a workout that was like very typical of most trainers that was the level of understanding of what they needed to do and it wasn't until later in my career that I understand that I couldn't stop there I couldn't just stretch and relax the tight muscles if I didn't train the antagonist muscles the ones on the backside that are responsible for pulling the shoulders back otherwise all I did was kind of relax the shoulder and chest a little bit then I go right into an exercise and I still are going to have poor mechanics what I really needed to do and which actually allowed me to completely eliminate the stretching the chest and shoulder part was just focusing on the muscles that I that were dormant needed to wake up the pattern whatever you want to say yeah whatever you want to say to appease everybody I needed to get those primed and working and firing and those would hold me in that position when I go to do an exercise like a bench press and so I then eliminated as it eliminated these static stretches I was doing with clients like oh you know go against like you go against the bench press and hold the hold the chest open stretch for the 15 30 seconds go to the other side solution yeah drop the head below the shoulder stretch you know stretch the shoulders out okay now go to bench press like no all I had to do was take that person through band pull-aparts and rows and not only did that kind of open the chest and stretch it out naturally because you're doing a row but then it also primed all those muscles that I need to be firing and strong and active before I go into a chest whatever movement you train is the movement you strengthen and if your movement is bad you are strengthening bad movements the bottom line is this okay I know mobility isn't as sexy as telling you to train your butt or your delts or your chest but here's the bottom line if you prioritize it you will develop muscle faster and you indirectly will cause fat burn to happen faster and from an aesthetic standpoint a body that moves well is put together better and gives you better aesthetics so all of you who are interested in just getting better performance and looking better and looking sexier and all that stuff you still need to make mobility a priority and with that go to mind pump free dot com and download all of our guides and resources you can also find the three of us on instagram you can find justin at mind pump justin me at mind pump sal and adam at mind pump adam