 So Timbo, today we're talking about, and I've got a real life example for us, but your elbow might not be your elbow. And it's like what? Well, your elbow pain might not actually be your elbow causing the pain. And this is something that, and this is, we've got an example, but obviously it could be relevant to lots of different body parts. But we've got, the real life example was a young man, A.K.A. Rousey, shout out. He came to his first school car sales workshop. Two weeks ago now. And he had an issue with his elbow that in the morning, I used an example to say, well, I don't know what the, I don't know whether this, what the situation is with your elbow was just complaining about it. So just consider that it may be coming from higher up the chain or lower down. So is it, could it actually be coming from your wrist or could it be coming from your shoulder and things unpicked throughout the day and we saw in some muscle transitions like what the actual issue was and actually made to make some quite quick changes right there and then, which was just a nice example for him to feel and see, but for the other people at the workshop to see and experience and wanted to share this on the podcast and we'll go, we'll, we'll let you unpick it a little bit and we'll go into some detail. But for people listening to the podcast, just to consider like, when, you know, we're big advocates of like moving pain-free and enjoying your training and all that good stuff. And so, but understanding that when we're trying to redefine it impossible, we're trying to do some stuff that's difficult at the time. We're trying to push the envelope. Like we're trying to do something we didn't used to be able to do. You're gonna do a PB. Then we're pushing those boundaries that you may pick up niggles along the way. We're gonna try and stay away from it. But when it happens, that just because, and the elbow is a real classic example in Calisthenics, the people experience, just because the pain is, you're feeling it at the elbow is the elbow just getting bullied because you're lacking strength, range of motion, stability, higher up the chain. I think that was an intro. I think that was an intro. I think that was a bit different to normal. I couldn't help but thinking, does he know his arse from his elbow? Which would it have been like? That was a different question. Oh, it's the same more than Jaco. That was a different question. Other than, if you want some of the highest quality coaching available in the world of Calisthenics, like to dive into having your problems solved and what's the right word I'm looking for there? Solve is probably enough. Have your problems solved by our expert team in coaching that you can also come to a workshop. We happen to have one on this weekend in the great city of London. London, UK. As it stands, as we record this right now, there's two places remaining. Now, I don't know, Tim, by the time when this goes live, compared to when we signed it, whether someone signed up, maybe a couple's come along. Maybe someone's pulled out and there's one, another one come available. Maybe there's three. I don't know. I don't know. But if you go... Move quickly. Is that what you're saying? I'm just saying, I don't know. But all I know is I'm going to be there in London, 6th of March this weekend. It's Sunday. Come and have a little bit of a Sunday sesh. A little bit of Sunday work, as the Rock would say. A little bit of Sunday work. We're going to have a good time. It's a full day, the movement strength and play experience, we call it. Full day workshop, which is 125 quid, and there's potentially a couple of places still left. Come and bag those and we'll see you down in London town. Right. I don't know what I'm going to talk about. We're going to go... Yeah, well... I'm going to start... I sometimes say when I go to presentations, they're like, what are you going to talk about? I don't know. I'm going to stand up. I'm going to start talking. I'm going to see where we go. That is exactly what's going to happen right now. There are many thoughts. Jaco, many. Let's have a jingle first and then we should dive into those many thoughts. Okay. Roll that jingle. Listen, players. You're listening to the movement, strength and play podcast by the School of Calisthenics. Here are your hosts, Tim and Jaco. All right, Jaco, do you want some of my many thoughts? That's... Let me give you a little rundown to people. Or some context. Yeah, let me just give you a tiny bit of context. So in the morning, we're doing movement assessments and we're doing this, that, the other, upper and lower body. It's a full body experience at the School of Calisthenics. And young Rousey goes, he's older. You know, when someone's, I've been there for a long time with a bad elbow and you're old elbow and you like rub it and it's like, listen, yeah, I still got something here and he's pointing to the outside of his elbow and it's like, yeah, it hurts on muscle ups. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Was this from Yorkshire? I can't remember. I'm practicing. I'm practicing for a move to Yorkshire in less than two weeks. You'll see the set, those watch on YouTube, you see the setups change because I'm gradually selling everything in the house. So I now, I don't have a desk at the moment. So I'm like, yeah, anyway. We haven't got a dining room table. We eat our meals on the floor at the moment. We're going off piece. So Rousey and his elbow goes, no, so I say to him, well, you know, it might not be your elbow. Could be your shoulder, could be your wrist. If you're talking about when your muscle up transition, like we're probably thinking about shoulder, yadda, yadda, we'll sort of see this afternoon. And I got a little bit excited in this afternoon, in the afternoon, because I did preempt in the morning and say like, look, I've not screened you and I'm not a physio, but just to give a bit of context for everyone else that was at the workshop to say like, his elbow pain might not be coming from his elbow. If he was complaining about from handstands, it could have been a risk, but it was like the context of that. So when we got to the afternoon and we were like doing some stuff towards the ring muscle up and we were in the bottom of a ring dip where your transition ends and his right elbow was the issue, his right shoulder, or his right elbow was like right out to the side and his shoulder was in a bad, like in a compromised position compared to the other side. And clearly he was lacking some like range of the shoulder going into extension. So we went back and I went back and like with one-on-one with him, like just looked at some of the movement assessments to do around the shoulder. And it was like, okay. I thought I was tight, this is it. And so he felt it and he had a bit of an appreciation of that. And ultimately it seemed very much like the, that posterior cuff capsule area was like mingos to be technically correct in that sense. And then, and this is actually to throw this in there. I didn't mention this necessarily too that much, but like we didn't get into the chance to go into these like, so why is that so tight? We just released it for him. He did, he just used a massage ball, just got in there, released it off, redid some movement tests and he had a load more range, checked the bottom of his ring dip, looked loads better. And then it was like, right. He wanted to have a cracker his ring muscle up and he literally pain-free did like three reps in a row and was like, that's ridiculous. I was like, well, it's not, it's just that you were tight. We found out what the problem was and we sorted it out. In the short-term, in the longer-term, this is maybe a good place to, maybe you want to see where, you start wherever you want, but in the longer-term it's okay to then go like, okay, so why was that so tight? Like, is it because it's weak, had he previously injured? What's going on in there? And find, like, try and get a little bit more root cause, but in the short-term it was like, release it so you could feel what it was like to actually have a little bit of a better function around that shoulder and actually nicely, it doesn't always happen like this, does it? But in that scenario, you gave some range to the shoulder, the slack in the elbow, or the elbow stopped getting bullied, no more pain in the elbow, happy days. Hold on. Hold on nice. Well, he did it, Rousey did it, good luck. Give him a shout out to Rousey, hope he's listening. Strong intervention, Jaco, identify the problem. And I think that's probably where I'm going to jump on with this one, is go, I kind of hope this is kind of commonplace in the industry, but I'm not sure that it is. If someone comes into you with pain with elbow pain, the question needs to be, why is it hurting rather than what is injured? So if the elbow pain or the elbow is a source of the other side of the injury, coming in and just going, I'm going to treat your elbow because that's where it hurts, it's a really short-sighted way because the body isn't designed like that. There's one big system all integrated together. Now to give an illustration of that, if you, let's take the lower body because people will probably have a bit more context around that, the body tends to, is designed in a way where it alternates for mobility and stability. So if you take the foot, the ankle joint, that is a joint designed for mobility. The next joint is going to be the knee, which is designed for stability. And then you have the hip, which is designed for mobility. And then you have the lumbar spine, which is designed for stability and thoracic spine mobility. You get my point, right? Like a zebra. Yeah, black, white, black, white. So the other, so if you take the elbow, the elbow is designed predominantly for stability. It has like these rotational capacities, but it's sat between the shoulder and the wrist. Now most people, if they have a problem with the knee, it's going to be the cause because there's a hip problem or an ankle problem. The knee gets bullied by the joints above and below it. And in calisthenics, we have the same problem with the elbow. So if someone has golfer's elbow, for example, there'll be lots of people going, yep, that's me, being on the inside of the elbow. That is typically because we've done a lot of wrist flexion-based work, and we've now gone and shortened the flexors of the forearm, basically doing ring-muscle up kind of stuff, which is causing tendinopathy around the inter or the inside bony prominence of your elbow. If we flip the other way around and go to the shoulder, well, let's think about the tricep and the long heads of bicep. So the long head of tricep attaches onto the scapula, as does the long head of bicep. So if we've got an issue around the elbow, where both of those two muscles are going to come in and attach into, it's quite possible that it's being caused by the muscles attachments or some dysfunction around the shoulder, which is causing additional stress to be placed on the elbow because the shoulder's not moving properly. So if you often find people have got elbow pain and they go on the prominence point of the actual elbow, the lecranum process itself, on the bony bit, I don't know if it's the lecranum. I think that might be muscle. I might have just randomly thrown a bit of terminology out there that I was going to say. I was going to say, I think it's called the funny bone, Tim. The funny bone. Yes, the technical name is the funny bone, lecranum process. Anyway, and then you go and dive up right underneath where you think you're going to go and release lats. If you come a little bit more underneath into towards the armpit, you're going to get a long head tricep. You're going to roll that little puppy up at the shoulder and the elbow pain will start to drop off because you're taking some tension out of that muscle. It's a really important thing to zoom out and go rather than what is injured, why is it injured? But what you've shown with that case to these is that a relatively simple intervention of two-minute little bit of a massage on the posterior shoulder, which can hit and release, if you think like all the fascial stuff which connects in there, there's lots going on. We don't exactly know what it was that was tight, but the principle was it hurts a lot and when you released it, the pain went away. And you're right and after that, you then need to go and stabilize the joint in a better position. But yeah, I think people fall into that chap all the time, it's my elbow, my elbow, my elbow. Well, it's actually probably, you need to look somewhere else if you aren't getting any success of treating the elbow directly. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. That's what we do assessments, right? We look into what's the whole system look like and then we treat where we think the dysfunction is. I'm glad you said that because I was going to say that if, particularly if someone's listening to this and they've had an injury, whether it's the elbow or not, you've got something that you keep treating that area and you keep doing the thing and doing the thing but it is not getting better. Then either your intervention isn't the right thing for that area or it actually isn't that area. And if you, again, this is one of the things where if you, you don't have to be a coach to watch a video back of yourself and see and go like, all right, my right side there. Like, so this example with, with young Browns who was like, his right side did not, you don't need to be a coach to see his right side when he was trying to go into the bottom of a dip or through that transition, his right side did not look the same as the left. And when it, and it just looked like the right shoulder was having a hard time and struggling to get into, have any of that like interneutation and extension at the shoulder. And if you, and if you break it down and go like take away any sort of technical or fancy terms go, okay, so his shoulders got to move. We appreciate his shoulders got to move through that transition. And then you go, the hand is staying still on the ring and the ring isn't really moving like it. And it's hanging from the thing, but it's not moving. It's like, well, if that's having a really hard time and that's not going to move, there's only one other thing that's trying to twist itself to make up for the tightness there. And you go, okay, that's actually makes, makes, makes a bit of, makes a bit of sense. And, and hopefully for people genuinely if you like, particularly in kind of Stenex where you probably, it's not that you're doing bicep curls in front of the mirror and you can check that stuff is looking symmetrical and in line. You might, you're upside down or you're doing this or you're doing that and you can't see, but if you video yourself and watch your back and look, look a little bit closer, look for, look for a little bit more detail, try and find those things if you've got an issue and start to think that principle that Tim mentioned all right from the start, think of that principle of like, is it, is it actually coming from there or is it coming from higher up or lower down in the chain potentially? I think the interesting one for me around this is just recognizing the patterns that you're trying to get into and then when you understand that, the complexity of what happens when you put that under a higher intensity or load. So for example, if you're trying to do a ring muscle up which involves a dip position, you'll try, you have to go into shoulder extension so the elbow moving behind the body. Now, Jack had mentioned me, gave me a little bit of a heads up on this case before we started. If you've got a pole, you hold like a pole behind your back so it's resting on your bum, palms facing forwards. If you can't extend and lift that pole away from your body, which will take you into shoulder extension without the head of the humorous here and the shoulder diving miles forwards and rounding through and looking all kind of like it's about to pop out of the front of your shoulder. Like that's gonna be a problem when you go into a dip position. And when you go into a dip position and muscle up on a rings, if you, that's now unstable and under body weight. So you've got a lot more to do than standing on the ground, lifting a plastic pole behind your backside. And you're potentially Tim, you're potentially like shifting relatively quickly between two positions, particularly on a bar muscle up where you're actually creating that like weightless feeling then you don't leave the bar and hit it again, but you sort of are in a way of like, there's a sudden like reactive contraction and that is gonna place, that's challenging more so. Yeah, and you've got to go from that pole position to then into dip position. So your sensor of mass and where you're under, if you get into the biomechanics around that, where you're pulling through and the levers and everything, that all changes very, very quickly. So you all of a sudden have to catch yourself in a deep, deep, deep dip position. So if you are struggling with elbow extension, either your body or your brain is gonna compromise by going, fine, I'll let you have that elbow extension, but I can't create it through a good position. So to do that, I've got to let this humor or head dive forwards. I saw like an Instagram, a very well-known and popular Instagram account that should remain nameless. So just talking about like. You've been following my Instagram account, my personal account. Have you done anything on the shoulder recently? And they were just talking about like, basically treating mobility in the upper body like the lower body. And that annoys me because the hip is a completely different, it's a ball and socket joint, but the architecture of it is completely different to shoulder. So we can't just go and hang out in long extension stretch positions and go, that's fine because I'm increasing range of motion because whatever happens in the elbow is going to have a direct effect on the humor head. And if you can't stabilize the shoulder and maintain in a good position, then we're just, okay, you're getting range, but how you're creating that range could be because you're compensating up top. You can't, it's just, the shoulder is so mobile that you can't just affect it and go worse. Absolutely. The hip, if you go and manipulate the ankle, the hip is largely going to say rooted in the socket. It can't go anywhere. The shoulder doesn't work like that. So like understanding what are the movement patterns that you're trying to get into and then have you got the basic fundamental movement ability to be able to create those shapes? So if you want to do a handstand, can you get your hands overhead? If you can't and you do it with a straight back against the wall, then you're going to have a really hard time creating a straight back in a handstand and getting into a good balance position, upside down, unstable, brain having a bit of a word with itself because you've now completely flipped its word upside down. The vestibular challenge is different. All this sort of stuff is going on. So you've got to go and do the work to understand how to actually create the fundamental positions which I want to move into and then you have earned the right to then go and play around with the actual loaded version of that. Now, not to say you can't do some handstand work while you're working on your shoulder mobility, of course you can, but you can't ignore these things. Just expect it to happen because one, you're going to end up in pain like Rousey did or two, you're just going to hit a plateau where you just can't, you can't get through that ring muscle up transition. And the solutions that might be just do some elbow extension because you're strong enough, you just can't get, you kind of get into the shape that you need to get into. It's not a strength, it's not a specific exercise, not a technique problem, it's a movement problem. Yeah. And, you know, if you end up there in that problem, well then you can come to our workshop where you can join us online and you can take advantage of all that educational content, particularly in the, we address all these things with assessments and movement preparation exercises to ensure that we don't end up in these positions. One final thing from me, which I don't want to open up a rabbit hole, so feel free to just go, yes. Can I sidestep this one? But then you can just go, yes, that is really interesting and let's talk about that in another podcast because it's potentially like very crazy. I thought it was 20 minutes. So when we did that test of, I said to him, look, holding the stick behind me, I guess I'm not a flexible, I'm not a really flexible guy, like I'm not, I'm not, you know, when Tim does this, you will get up to like a parallel to the floor, like with your hands close together on the bar, relatively comfortable. So I come and show him what's sort of relatively normal and he's like, crikey, because when he was doing it, I'm not even joking, he nearly couldn't move it off his bum. It was like, and watching it, having, I wouldn't have ever thought of this before, but over the years, we've been exposed to more of like the neurology training side of stuff, with the guys at the National Circus, stuff with Dr. Cobb, his EHR performance. And I was like looking at him going, and with my hand, like trying to help him do it, like just assist him, like going like, can you, I wasn't trying to rip it, I was just like, can, can you? And looking at him, guy was well put together, is well put together around so, you know, I was digging you, is well put together. And part of me was watching it going like, I believe that it's like your body can do it. It's like your brain is currently just like not letting you, it was just like, it was just shut off. It was like, and this is where we come down to like, what's governing that joint being able to move or not? How much of it is like, yes, it's length tension relationship. Yes, something was obviously tight, and some inhibition going on, and yes, all those things, and all those things come back to like the brain, and his brain was just not letting him do that. It wasn't like he didn't have a bony block at the back of that shoulder that meant that it couldn't do that, but that's almost what it felt like. And I just find that fascinating. I think the interesting thing there, the backs that up for me is that you didn't do a lot, and you get three pain-free repetitions. So it wasn't like all of a sudden we've done loads of stretching, lengthened loads of stuff out, you basically told the brain to back off in this area, give me a little bit more room to play with, and now actually when you do that, you allow the strength that he did have to come to the fore and actually do what it wanted to do. It means you roll the back of his shoulder, which is an exercise, which is in pretty much all of our programs. For two minutes, it was super sore, but it did something, I would imagine from a neurological perspective, which gave him the range of motion, which was required. And if someone says that's a placebo, it's not. This kind of stuff does work. It wasn't some magic that happened. But and also, news for you, placebo also works. That's that person who's saying this, placebo. There's some very interesting stuff around that, actually, about the neuropsych... The biopsychophysical model in physiotherapy at the moment is a real kind of talking point of pain manifestation, and I've done some stuff with Ian Halsey before, and he's like, oh, I just... So when I come in and go, oh, I hurt in this position, I hurt when I do a pull-up, and he was like, can I show me a pull-up then? And I just don't hurt, and he's like, well, but it's just, it's the belief that it has, who are the people you... It's mad. It's like down above. There gets to a stage of things where we are really, it is not always about the mechanical approach to a movement. It can sometimes be about whether you believe that you can do that movement or not, and so that puts it back firmly into the neural system. I wanted to wrap up with one final, because it's a nice message that would always end up coming out in a workshop of strength underpins everything in calisthenics, and the case study example, where I say, me saying he's well put together means that there was some junk on that trunk. He's trained. He had some muscle mass, and he was strong, and so the strength wasn't an issue at all, and allowing that freedom of movement allowed the brain to access, or allowing to use that strength they had. If we aren't strong in some of these positions, then we're gonna have a trouble. It's not that solution's gonna work for him, but he had that underpining strength. So going back, then it's putting, going back into that snow, checking that everything's all right, checking that position that was causing him discomfort at the bottom of that ring dip, and then him going, oh, I'm gonna try it for you. He does like three ring muscle ups in a row. That's because he can do 10, 12, 15 pull-ups comfortably. He can do 20 dips on the rings comfortably. He'd like to do them for fun. He had that strength underpining it, and so that's something that always comes out, and is a message to sort of keep banging. I've personally been doing, we've talked since before Christmas, without doing loads of sort of basics, and loads of just like general strengthening work, and just like my own training right now is feeling good off the back of like, having just been consistently working a lot of like, just being strong in like those patterns that I wanna be good at, in lots of different pounds and range and did it, but just being strong. And if you wanna be strong and flexible, well, then you need to be strong through those ranges that you're trying to go in. It might not be that you need to be like crazy strong, like 200 kilo strong, might be two kilogram strong, because you're in a compromised position, but the fact that you're building strength underpins everything. Do you want to look at what this jacket is for me? Don't ignore your weak links. I've had a lot of conversations with the guys I'm doing an education course with around the shoulder, around the stuff that you don't wanna do is stuff that you actually need to do, because you're not very good at it, you don't like it, you don't enjoy it, so you don't do it. If you had nothing else in your philosophy about training apart from training things that you weren't very good at, you'd probably get a lot better than most people would do when they're in a much shorter period of time, but we don't do it because it's hard. So if you feel like, God, just don't do that position and avoid it, you've missed the point. Go and do those bits and work out how to make those things better, and you'll get better all around, as you've proven with your great case study today. Nice, thank you team. Team me. Well, I'm a team. How's he? How's he in the team? And listen, I'm gonna clean the listeners in the team. It was like, thanks for listening. And we hope that that has been, I feel like that will be one of our most helpful, well particularly that anyone's been struggling with any elbow pain. If you're off the back of that, you're like, I just don't know what I'm doing. Hear what you're saying. I don't know what to do. Get in touch. Yeah. David at schoolcasts.com or Tim at schoolcasts.com is the email. You can get yourself involved in a seven day free trial of our online memberships. We've got the workshop at the weekend. New workshops will be announced soon. There's a movement of mobility, six week online course. What's the place to start? Exactly. That's been changed to the fifth of April now. So we've let's make a change on that. It's told you going to snowboarding again. Yeah. So she's back from snowboarding so that we can do that. That's starting the fifth of April. That's a great place to get started with. They're understanding your body. We do lots of assessments on that, but there's obviously the focus on movement and mobility. So getting into better positions, getting into better postures, creating more adoration, but being strong and stable and your brain being happy in them to make some long-term change over six weeks and beyond. Do you know what we do really well, Jacko? We actually have like, you know, blur and trumpet. Go on, you do it, blow it. We like our online program. Our online program is like, we cover all this stuff off. You know the problems that people come to as we have, like we have a solution for them. So if you are having a problem, we have undoubtedly got a solution for you. So get in touch. We are here to help. We genuinely care about you moving free, freely and having fun and enjoying your training. And we are big advocates of not being in pain because pain is miserable. And remember, your pain is your brain's way of telling you that there's a problem because that's the best way that it gets us to listen. So take action, people. That's what I'm saying. I'm going to wrap the podcast up by blowing my own trumpet. Ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba. That's like a Vuvuzela. Remember that? Shout out to Africa. Right, I'm going to go. I think that's it. Yep, keep exploring. Are you going as well? Don't stay without me because then it's just become the Jacko podcast. It won't be like, it won't be it. Oh, I'm sorry. You know, you do. You're, but I don't really have to do the rap of other than class dismiss. So I'll, well, that wasn't it. That wasn't it. That wasn't me saying. False alarm. Until next time, keep exploring your physical potential with movement, strength and play. Take some action. Be pain free. And we'll see you next week. Class dismiss.