 Our next caller is Arondu from Arizona. Arondu, how can we help you? Hey, what's up, Sal? What's up, man? So, I have a question for you guys. I guess I've always been prone to injuries. It's a nice way to put it. I currently have a shoulder injury and a hip injury. But I mean, I think I've heard every joint in my body. I don't know why, I guess, from having the wrong movements is what you guys say. So, I heard myself doing, I don't even know what I was doing. Honestly, I think it was deadlifts maybe. Maybe sled pushes is right now. What's really killing me is my hip flexor. I actually couldn't walk for a few days. I iced it and then it was good. It's been a few weeks since and now I can walk, but I'm scared to go back to the gym. I just started doing a Maps Prime Pro. Now, there has been one other time that I started doing that and it felt like the injury actually came back and it was doing, I had thrown out my back and I think I did windmills. Windmills and it hurt my back again. So, I was wondering if you guys have any, I know you guys aren't doctors or anything, but I'd appreciate you guys' advice. Should I rest or should I jump back into Maps Prime Pro? It has been a few weeks and I can walk now, but after like a full day of the work, I know my hip will be inflamed. I've been trying to do, I do 90-90s, and my thoracic spine mobility is not the best because I'll wake up and it's really aggravated. So, yeah. Okay. Well, okay, so a few things that I'm hearing. One is that you, it sounds like you said you're prone to injury. You've injured yourself quite a few times and you are trying to figure out how to prevent that from happening again. And then the second thing you said was, I did a mobility movement, but I hurt my back doing it. So what this tells me is a couple different things. One, I think you should focus on improving your movement patterns for a long time. I think you should give yourself at least six months of just learning how to move better. But there's one other thing I'd like to add, which is start to listen to your body, right? So can you hurt yourself doing a mobility movement? Of course you can. If you push yourself past the point of your control and your stability and your mobility. So what that means is you're going to have to approach these things a little bit more carefully and err on the side of caution, all right? So when you're doing these movements, ooh, that feels a little bit tight. Okay, don't go that far. Find the edge and play with the edge, but don't go past the edge. But I definitely think you should make this your entire focus for at least six months, okay? Because the pain going away doesn't mean you're done, right? Oftentimes when you hurt yourself, there's a lot of things that happened until you hurt yourself. So just because the pain goes away doesn't mean that the problem has been solved. I'm hearing a potential strong anterior pelvic tilt. That's what it sounds like to me. When you feel the hip flexors really inflamed and tight like that, you got low back stuff that's going on. Have you taken the MAPS Prime zone test? Have you done that? I haven't done the zone tests. I know since I had injuries, I kind of just jumped straight into MAPS Prime Pro. I mean, I would encourage you to do the test just because I'd like to see where this breakdown is happening the most. So an anterior pelvic tilt looks like where your hips are rotated. It almost looks like you're sticking your butt out a little bit and you have more of an excessive arch in the low back. Do you know if you have this? Yeah, I've heard you talk about yours. I've kind of been trying to fix my gait because it feels like as soon as I wrote, I mean, to fix it, I kind of just, you know, brace my core, I guess, and rotate my knees and that'll fix it. But I mean, I can only remember to do that like for 30 seconds and I'm sure it goes back. I'm just unaware of it. But yeah, I do have one. So yeah, what I want you to do is to lay down on the ground on your back, bend your knees at about 45 degrees and then see how much of a gap you have between your low back and the floor. If you can reach all the way under there with your hand all the way into your forearm, you probably have this very similar to I do. And some of that is core control, right? And core strength, so working on that. So the back presses on the ground and then of course like doing like the hip flexor deactivator exercise at Sal's taught on the YouTube channel. But I would go through the prime zone test and see where you have the greatest challenge. If you see that when you go to do like a windmill, like you have a hard time performing the movement with no weight or anything just performing the movement, then I would stick with all the exercises and fortification sessions that are around those zones. So more than likely you're going to have break down in windmill and more than likely you're going to have break down in the squat. That's what I'm guessing from what I'm hearing. And Maps Prime actually guides you in like what movements you should be primarily doing. And I would be doing mostly that and any sort of training I'm doing would be focused around mobility and stability type training. Yeah, I would definitely regress. It just sounds a lot like, you know, you really need to get in tune with body control and really like take your time with each joint. And so Prime Pro is great for that in terms of, you know, understanding joint function, understanding, you know, your range of motion where your limitations lie. Sal kind of talked about the threshold. So you're going to find sticking points. You're going to find areas where either you feel like, oh, I can't have access to that. So it's too loose or it's too tight and too restrictive. And then there's a pain signal. You need to pay attention to all that. Find that threshold. Try and stay close to that threshold and really squeeze your muscles, squeeze your body. Try to connect to that. So then now you can start teaching your body that you have stability. You have regained that ability to, you know, really control your body in that position. Then we build off of that. It's really not going to be advantageous for you to focus on, you know, adding load to any of these movements for a while. Okay. So are you guys saying I should do Maps Prime Pro and Maps Prime? Maps Prime, do the fortification sessions that are in the program. That's your workouts. Do the tests that are in there so you can find the best movements for you in Maps Prime. And then use Maps Prime Pro to supplement with joint specific movements. And do this for a while. Give yourself a good amount of time where you're just focusing on this because it sounds to me like it's going to take a good six months before you can get back into the more heavy traditional resistance training. And then even when you actually start back into your resistance training, I would caution you to not be really pushing the weight, right? Really I would do some stuff like Justin was suggesting earlier, like isometric stuff and really controlling the tempo, slow and control. Your focus needs to be around control, stability, perfect the form, a lot of unilateral type stuff. When you do transition out of Prime and Prime Pro movements and you start to get back to traditional weight training, I would do a lot of unilateral stuff. I would do a lot of stability, control. Don't think about loading the bar like crazy. Think more about perfecting the form. Raps literally don't matter to you at this point. It's all about quality and intent of what you're doing with your body. So if you can get into that mindset, you're going to be a lot better off. All right. So I think what I'll do is I'll probably I had already told myself this but because yes, you guys are hitting the nail on the head. It feels like I hurt myself like really bad. You know, last time I was benching, I hurt my shoulder and I couldn't move it. And I think a month later I was already benching because it felt better, but obviously I hurt it. So like Sal said, I guess I have to go longer than when it feels okay. I gave myself till 2022 before I touch your weight. I really just want to focus on my mobility and it's good to know that I can also intertwine with Prime Pro. Excellent. Thanks for calling. No problem. That's a rough one. I think people think that when the pain is gone, the problem is solved. No, you've solved the problem enough to get rid of the pain but the problem is probably there and it will cause pain again. You've got to go past that point. What's the root of it? It's a hard thing to do to really regress and pinpoint it back down to what angle, what function of movement is it specifically stemming and where that pain is stemming from? This is also why in-person training is so valuable too because we're guessing right now. It's hard to say without really seeing the way he moves. I'd be able to give him way more specific answers of like, I want you to do this exercise and this exercise based off of watching him move but having him try and articulate what he feels or thinks is wrong and then us try and troubleshoot and guess what we think is wrong is really, really difficult because when I hear really type hip flexors, I hear someone's low back while I'm on time. I default I think anterior pelvic tilt. It's close to home for me. Those are my issues. I know too that if I were to go load windmills in a position like that with an anterior pelvic tilt and rotate like that. Rotation is another one that's very much of an exposing type of a movement to any inadequacies of the kinetic chain. It's just those things in the shoulder injury all these types of things. We just need to address a lot.