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The Art of Core Balance

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June 10, 2018 by ryan peebles 2 Comments

The 5 Steps to Reversing Chronic Back Pain

  • Step 0 – Believe

Biggest mindset component: You will get better and you must know it to be true. It’s a prerequisite.

  • Step 1 – Mindset Shift – Adopt a “Whole Body” Perspective.

Look at your body as a whole unit. You may feel that something is wrong with your “back”, but you must begin to understand that this is not entirely accurate. Your back is just taking the biggest hit for something that’s going wrong on a broader level.

Your back is at your core. Literally, your lumbar spine is inside your core. It is central to your entire body. What better place to manifest pain when there is an imbalance in your body? Change your perspective about what your back pain represents. You don’t have a “bad back”. Your core is out of balance.

Further, when you have back pain, you don’t just have an injury to a joint (like an ankle injury), you have an injury to the core of who you are. And it reveals itself that way in your life. It affects your mind. It affects your psychology. So you need to make changes, not only to physical components, but also to mindset components. Look at it from a holistic perspective. This is a whole-body, whole-self mission.

  • Step 2 – Learn Yourself.

You don’t have to get a doctorate in physical therapy like I did. Learn some basic concepts about the body in which you live. In order to reverse your back pain, you need to understand what’s happening in your body that’s causing it. Otherwise you depend on your faith in other people and their interventions to fix your problem. With a little knowledge of what’s happening and how to reverse it, you empower yourself to take things into your own hands. Learn about muscle imbalances, and how they are the underlying causes of back pain. Learn some basic concepts about training to reverse them with therapeutic exercise.

  • Step 3 – Become Aware of Your Core.

What is your core? What does it feel like to use not just your abdominals, but your entire core synergistically? Before you can learn how to use your core, you must become aware of it. What does it feel like to connect with your anchor zones? People with back pain likely have decreased connections to their core.

During my years of struggling with back pain, I compensated for my underactive core by overusing my arms and legs. I’d get up or down from a chair using my arms and legs heavily with my core largely not participating. This is called “limb dominance”. My core was dormant and I didn’t even know it. We need to become aware of this pattern, reverse it, and work towards what I call “Core Dominance”.

First, you need to reactivate your core because it has gone dormant. We have terms for this in the industry: Deep Core Amnesia, Gluteal Amnesia. Yes, the glutes are part of the core. Reawaken your connection with your core, then strengthen the connections.

How do you increase the connection to your core? A guitar player has highly developed neuronal connections to the fingertips in his hand. Was he born with this? No. He acquired it through training. There are specific exercises you can do to re-awaken and re-connect with your core.

  • Step 4 – Balance Your Core.

In a nutshell, the muscles that make up your core tend to get out of balance with each other. Their tone, or resting length, increases or decreases in relation to each other. This is called a muscle imbalance. It happens to virtually everyone to various degrees and is a predictable pattern. This pulls your body out of alignment and leads to things like increased compression, friction, and ultimately pain. Like guitar strings that get out of tune, you can tune your muscles back into balance through therapeutic exercise.

  • Step 5 – Move With Your Core.

Once your core is in balance, you can start moving in a healthier way. Final guitar reference: skipping to this step is like trying to make an out-of-tune guitar sound right by practicing more or playing better. You must tune the guitar first to make it function properly. In the same sense, your body will not function properly until the muscles are in balance with each other.

Learn how to use your core as a foundation to perform basic movements, functional movement training. It’s easier than it sounds when your core is activated. You will naturally start to move in a healthier way as your core becomes balanced.

  • Maintenance

You can do this by going through life with a little bit of a core mindset. Stay conscious of your core as you take your body though the normal movements of life. Reaching in the cupboard, picking something off the floor, sweeping, playing sports, literally anything. Simply living life can have a huge impact on maintaining your core by using it regularly.

Finally, do an exercise every once in a while to stay in balance. This is especially important if you sit a lot, drive a lot, work at a desk, lift heavy things, or your back injury is such that you need to maintain it. Just listen to what your body needs. It communicates to you regularly.

Personally, I just do one exercise regularly and that’s the bridge. But largely, the rest of the time you’re able to just live a normal life. You don’t need to become a gym rat. It takes 2-5 minutes a day, just like brushing your teeth. And it’s not a problem if you skip a day here and there.

Pain-Free is Inevitable

Put all this together and you have a package for an aware person, who knows how to move healthily, who knows how to take care of their body. And the knowledge is yours for life. This is Empowering.

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May 22, 2017 by ryan peebles Leave a Comment

Stress and Back Pain: What’s the Connection?

We hold stress in our bodies.

Stress is a powerful energy. We all have stress. We all process it differently. Depending on how we process it, stress has an uncanny ability to present itself in physical form in our bodies. Whether that be through headaches, high blood pressure, shallow breathing, increased heart rate, fatigue, loss of appetite, grey hairs, wrinkles, or illness. You name it, stress can manifest itself in any number of ways. One common manifestation of stress is muscle tension.

Stress PhotoA lot of the symptoms I listed above are actually a result of stress induced muscle tension. You may have heard of tension headaches? This is from the tension people hold in their neck muscles. Personally, I tend to hold stress in the front of my hips, or my hip flexor muscles. This is a common area and has a direct impact on the lower back.

Let’s go deeper.

Hopefully you’re on the same page with me that stress makes us more tense. Well over time, chronic stress leads to more long term changes in the tension (tone) of our muscles. When a resting muscle holds more tension (think of a guy wire), it becomes out of balance with the other muscles around it. This is called a muscle imbalance. Muscle imbalances lead to improper body mechanics and pain. Let me explain this a tiny bit more.

Your muscles all work together to hold your bones and joints in place by the amount of tension they hold at rest (called tone). With muscle imbalances, your joints are no longer being held in the most optimally congruent position. This leads to increased friction with movement. With increased friction, your joints wear down quicker than usual (aka. arthritis or degeneration). Your body tries to communicate this to you the only way it knows how, through pain. That’s how stress can lead to back pain.

“You’re only as strong as your weakest link”

There’s one more point I’d like to make. The lower back is one of the most common sites of pain, but these same muscle imbalances could lead to pain anywhere in the body. Your weakest link is what takes the biggest hit when there’s an imbalance in your body.

The lower back is so common because it’s intimately connected with our core, which is highly prone to muscle imbalances. The discs in your spine are each joints and undergo a lot of strain when your core is out of balance. However, these same muscle imbalances are what could be causing someone else’s knee pain, hip pain, neck pain and so on. Wherever the pain is, the root cause and the solution may very well be the same. Balance your core.

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May 22, 2017 by ryan peebles 1 Comment

Surgery: To Be or Not To Be?

If you have non-specific back pain and surgery is something you are considering, there is something very crucial you should know. Ready? Here goes… Whether you get surgery or not, you will still have to undergo a lengthy rehabilitation program. That’s because back surgery doesn’t get to the root of the problem. It addresses the symptoms, or results of the problem. Either way, you must put in the hard work of addressing the underlying factors that caused problem in the first place. Otherwise the downward spiral continues. So why not commit to a solid rehab program before surrendering to the knife.

Still Unsure?

When making a decision, it’s really about how much the pain is a limiting factor. If it’s manageable, I would try an honest attempt at getting your core back into balance which can actually encourage healing of the disc. If it’s intractable back pain then surgical intervention might be necessary to allow for rehab (note: if you can lie on your back or stomach, then you can complete the first 2 phases of Core Balance Training). My suggestion is always to choose the most conservative option, which is therapeutic exercise. If surgery is absolutely necessary, then choose the most conservative surgical option.
Surgery Photo

Microdiscectomy

Microdiscectomy surgery is a minimally invasive option that can reduce neurological symptoms such as burning, shooting and other nerve type pains. If it’s just back pain you’re having and no nerve symptoms, there’s no benefit. If you are having nerve pain, and it’s preventing you from participating in rehab, then this surgery should be used as a tool to allow for better participation in a solid rehab program.

Again, this surgery is not a long term solution alone. Lots of people get a microdiscectomy and feel better thinking the problem is solved. However, because the true cause of the problem was not addressed (core muscle imbalances), the dysfunction continues and the pain eventually comes back. Then, they get the surgery again and the spiral continues often leading to spinal fusion. I never recommend spinal fusion surgery unless there is profound structural damage due to trauma. For non-specific back pain, studies show fusion is less effective than therapeutic exercise. Again, a solid core balancing program is incredibly important no matter which option you choose.

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September 1, 2013 by ryan peebles Leave a Comment

What Is Your Core

First, I’ll say that your core is much more than muscles, but before we get weird, let’s talk about your core from an anatomical prospective. Many people tend to think of the abdominals when they hear core. That’s not wrong, but your core also includes the rest of your trunk muscles: front, sides and back. If you want to get technical, it’s any muscle group that has a direct influence on the positioning of your spine, pelvis or ribcage. This includes hip muscles like your gluteals or “glutes”, and even some shoulder muscles. Note: the glutes are one of the most important core muscle groups, and one of the major focuses of Core Balance Training.

side plank sunsetLets get weird.

On a deeper level, your core is much more than that. It’s energy. It’s a source of power. A mindset. A foundation. It’s being grounded. It’s coming from your center. It’s your network of neurons connecting everything together and is centered in your gut.  Your intuition. The connection between your central nervous system and your autonomic nervous system. In Yoga, it’s your solar plexus representing your identity and confidence. The connection between your conscious and subconscious minds. In Pilates, it’s your powerhouse. In the Taoist practices of Tai Chi and Qigong, your core is your dantian or energy center. In Japanese traditions, it’s your hara or ocean of energy. Your connection between you and the environment around you. It’s a lot! When you are coming from your core, you are centered and balanced. You are grounded, sending and receiving vibrations that resonate in a positive way. You are flowing.

Absolutely!

Training your core back into balance not only improves your posture, reduces pain and makes you feel good, but it also has an impact on your energy, confidence and connection with everything (and everyone) around you.

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With a little knowledge of what's happening to your body and how to reverse the problem, you become EMPOWERED

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