Fitness myths. I mean, you know that I talk about these when it comes to footwear, but let's open up to the rest of your body as well. And even just the philosophy is about what you might be doing to get fit and where these myths came from and what's replacing them hopefully and happily. Now and moving forward, this can actually give you the results that you would like.
That's what's happening on today's episode of the movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body usually starting feet first because those things are your foundation. And we break down the prop again in the mythology. Sometimes it's straight out lies you've been hearing about what it takes to run, walk, hike, do yoga, crossfit, dance, revolution, hang like you name it. Basically, the short version is we want your body to be able to move effectively, efficiently, enjoy, and that's what we're doing by breaking all that stuff down.
I'm Stephen Sashan from zero shoes.com, your host of movement movement podcast, which we call that because that was not for sense because we're trading a movement about natural movement and that we part involves you. It's really easy. Just spread the word, share, like, give us a thumbs up, give us a good review. Visit our website at www.jointhemovement.com to find other episodes and ways you can engage with us in social media.
You know, the drill. If you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe and let's see if we can help change the world by re introducing people to letting their body do what it was made to do. And on that note, let's jump in Ryan. Welcome to the podcast.
Do me a favor, tell people who you are and what you're doing here. Yeah, my name is Ryan Walker. I've been a movement fitness nut since a very young age. I was obsessed with martial arts, acrobatics, tumbling, gymnastics.
I eventually found my way into a weight room at a very young age and it was all over from there. Three, four hours in the gym, obsession with bodybuilding culture, competed in CrossFit, coached the sport for a couple of years as well. Eventually, I developed some pretty debilitating hip pain, which made me stop and reassess and kind of reach back in the bag of tools in terms of biomechanics with my education, also being a massage therapist for coming up on nine years now, having been a big fan of anatomy trends, if anyone's familiar, Tom Myers, who's kind of the pioneer of the whole male-facial movement. I started kind of stepping away and kind of from the dogma of the fitness industry and assessing, okay, how am I designed to move?
What does human evolved movement look like standing, walking, running and throwing? And what I'm doing in the gym is that simulating or conducive to improving those biomechanics. Another thing I might like to add to is around the age of 20, I developed a pretty severe amount of depression and anxiety disorder for about two years. And during that time, after having emerged from it, it helped me also realize how much psychological or the psychomotional component plays into wellness and movement as well, right?
There's a whole spectrum of wellness and components to wellness that we need to take into consideration, not simply just biomechanics, but all of these other components. But that's essentially me in a nutshell and yeah, I'm excited to move forward with you. Well, two things. First of all, for anyone who's watching, because I know people will ask, I had some shoulders or his or his or his or his or her.
So wearing, saying blah, blah, blah, that doesn't matter. Although it does relate to something you said, which is this was kind of brought on by an old gymnastics injury. So what did you do gymnastics wise? Well, I say gymnastics, I was kind of more of a pseudo gymnast.
I developed a passion for gymnastics around the age of 13, 14 years old. And I started tumbling at a gymnastics facility in Mobile, Alabama, where I was living at the time. And I remember I would show off in front of the head coach, men's coach, you know, and I would do all these fancy moves. And he thought, oh, you would have been a great gymnast, but you're too old, right?
So I, you know, I go out the yard and I would tumble and, you know, that sort of thing. But more of a pseudo gymnast, a lot of handstands, a lot of kind of the conventional movements you would see in gymnastics. And that's that ultimately a lot of those movements that they accumulate, that joint damage will accumulate over time, as you've just mentioned, ultimately leading to the shoulder injury. And you can only do so many handstand pushups before your shoulder.
This is more like rings and whatnot before, we didn't think about building strength first, but just to give people some inspiration, I'm going to share, do a quick five second screen share. This is something that I did a couple of months ago and to be clear, it says, I'm going to show a video, it'll show it on the video, but I did this when I was, when I turned 61. And here's the screen share. Here we go.
Oh, very nice. So that's my, that's my, that's my inspiring people to keep doing things as they continue to age. My goal is to be the oldest guy to the same back up on the floor. I want that Guinness World Record on my wall.
So back you for the win. So from what you learned from where you were kind of where you're starting, where you went at now, I'm going to put you on the spot. Can you think of, I was going to say like, what's the number one fitness myth that you're dealing with or that you see people, but if you can't do just the number one, what's the map, Mount Rushmore where you're top four? Yeah, I would say isolation.
Learn how to integrate your movements. So again, if people just Google, uh, fashion lines, you'll see the how muscles are actually connected, which they found through could advertise sections that muscles don't work in isolation. So that back flip you did as you were hinging forward and throwing the arms into extension, the back line, which are all the tissues on the posterior line of your body are lengthening and just like a rubber band in order to un-length and we're going to rapidly snap that tissue back, opening up the front line of the body and then tucking, right? So I would say the biggest myth is this idea of isolation and fixation on hypertrophy over function.
That's a good one. I mean, to be clear, if you are for whatever reason, fix that on hypertrophy, isolation is an important thing, but because of which I'm not going to necessarily get the stimulation that you need, but that's a number of people who really need that versus something where you're going to, where if you're working functionally, and I don't like the term functional fitness. I'm not a fan of that. I can ask you your thoughts on that one.
That's a good opening because all I can think of as soon as you said it is just the image from pumping iron of shorts and you're doing bicep curls. And it's like everyone thinks that's what exercise is. Right. Yeah, absolutely.
And if you look at again, the evolution of movement, standing, walking, running and throwing, right? We go from infancy, crawling around on all fours and then eventually we build the shoulder girdle and hip strength that we need in coordination of reciprocation with arms and legs to get into a standing position. Then obviously, once we can stand, we start initiating gait cycle, running and then throwing. Now, that's not to say that that's all that human beings can do, but that is objectively how we have evolved to move as human beings.
So when we start taking symmetrically loaded ergonomically designed barbells and moving them bilaterally and putting these reciprocating motions that we're designed to do on the back burner, we're essentially taking these arbitrary movements and prioritizing them over evolved movement. Now, what I'm going to say throughout this podcast is going to ruffle some feathers because it is kind of contradictory to what a lot of people have been led to believe about the fitness industry. And I don't want everybody to know that. I hold an ill will to where people who do bodybuilding, who do strength training, I did it for over 20 years.
I'm just here to try and lend my expertise and insight in biomechanics, my background as a massage therapist to the listeners so they can hopefully at least integrate some of these concepts alongside the training that they're doing in the gym. Well, so let's jump into that then. So in lieu of doing some isolation exercise, bicechorels, or biceps, or bench press for your chest, which affects a number of other things as well, that's more compound motion that's less isolation, but still kind of give me some examples or give everyone some examples of what they might be doing instead. And ideally something they could experiment with if they're taking a walk right now or in a place that they do that, and if not, when they get to a place where they can do something.
Certainly well, first and foremost, I always encourage them when I'm working with clients, the first thing we look at is just posture. What is your standing looking like, right? So I try to address any level of pelvic instability, hyperkifosis and the spine tissues that are pulling the skeletal structure out of the line, but that should be people's number one focus through myofascial release, through core integration and level of pelvic stability exercises, just getting themselves actually loaded where their skeletal structure is aligned over itself. So that way they're not fighting against the mechanical tension of gravity and their head being in front of their body, et cetera.
What I would encourage people to think about is, okay, let's take the peck, for example, let's take a peck fly. Now the peck is going to AB duct the arm of the transverse. So I get it. So for people who are listening and not watching, let's describe some of these.
Well, first of all, people who don't know what a peck fly is. So describe that and then describe the abduction as well. Okay. So imagine you're laying down on the bench, you have two dumbbells extended up over your head and you slowly lower your arms out to the side.
You're going to be stretching the pecks and then contracting them back to that initial position. So think about, I mean, the image that I have is, well, flying, but I think of like, be a bird. So line your stomach, lift your arms up, flop them down, flip your whole body over. So that's the picture that I have for what a chest flight looks like.
And the abduction, the ABduction, there's adduction, ADduction, ADduction. The abduction is when you're bringing your arms back from being stretched up to, you know, pointing towards the ceiling, so what you need to be happy. Yeah, I'll try to be more mindful of the term. I'm going to use that using a tent.
No, no, I'm cool. I mean, it's okay. I'll just stop you forget one that I know definitely has a high probability of needing an example of flying definition. Certainly.
So let's take the peck, for example, and let's apply it to more of a functional context. So what I immediately think of is imagine taking, this is just what comes to mind, taking a machete and you're slashing across the body, right? You're doing a swinging motion. Now the peck plays a huge role in that because it's what's allowing again for you to ADduct, bring that hand back in toward the midline.
But if we look at that motion, it's not as simple as just the peck contracting and lengthening. There's a whole core rotation. The obliques need to rotate the contral letter, the lat on the opposite side of you is going into a lengthen position. You're pivoting through the toe and then slashing back in another direction.
So the reason I use that as an example is when you're isolating, when you're doing these isolation movements, a bicep curl, try to imagine, okay, well, how would this muscle function in a more functional context? For another example, great. When is the bicep? The bicep plays a huge role in running.
So when I'm running, it's what flexes my arm up, pulls my lat into a rotation, which pulls my trunk into a rotation. And then now the lat and the opposite glute have to co-contract in order to move my body through space. So there's a number of different exercise variations that you can do, some of them very complex, but just how can people, I think people are moving in a good direction when they do compound movements, so two or more joints moving at one time. But think even further, how can I adapt this more to my human evolved biomechanics?
Well, let's back up the bicep one. So while you said that we might turn into a complex movement, now you got me down to an example of what that would look like, where you're adding those extra joints, but there is, I don't want to say a focus on that bicep, but at least it's attending to it, if you will. Let's take, say, like a medicine ball explosive press, right? So it's very similar to doing a bench press.
My shoulders and my pec, or my shoulder has to go into extension, my pecs need to lengthen in order to contract, but then I take a step forward and explode outward, throwing the ball out in front of me. That would be integrating more of the fascia lines into one movement versus simply just doing, you know, a bench press is an example of a compound movement, but again, you're lying in a supinated, or a supine position on your back, pressing upward, which doesn't really translate as well as it could if we were moving more through the X and Y axis of three-dimensional space. Right. That's a good one.
So anything else on isolation that was one of our big myths, anything more on that before we hit you from the number two? Certainly. I would say, oh, with regards to that, I think we're okay. I can move on to another myth.
So I would say using exercise almost as an addiction to address over consumption. And I think a huge part, you know, fitness is a form of stress. It's a use stress, right? It's a good form of stress.
But by doing it too consistently, too frequently at moderate high intensities is actually, I think, doing more harm to people than good. And I think people need to start being a little more mindful of getting the parasympathetic nervous system activated a little more, resting and recovering from your exercise. So I think this idea of, you know, and I think CrossFit really kind of brought this culture to the mainstream of just this chronic exercise, two, three-day workouts. And I would argue that that's not sustainable or healthy for people.
I heard, I wish I remember the name of the researcher who wrote this book. I think it's all a dopamine nation. The basic premise is that in your brain, when there's kind of a set point for enjoying that, let's say, and if you do something really enjoyable, your brain is trying to kind of bring things back to normal and it's going to give you something that might be less enjoyable. It could be a fight with your spouse.
It could be a, you know, who knows what. And one of her recommendations for not crashing, in fact, her theory on addiction is that you're not addicted to the substance. What's going on is that the substance is necessary to get you back to some level after. So you take some opioid, you feel really good, then your brain crashes.
And it's not that you're addicted, it's that you need to do something to get back up to normal. And that's going to be that opioid. And so that's where you learn that thing gets you back. And eventually you need more and more and more and more and more.
And she does bring up exercise is actually an interesting thing. How do I say this? So the way exercise can become addictive is very much the same. You'd go to the gym and what you're doing or you go for run, whatever, what you're doing is stressful.
But if you do the stressful thing first, instead of the pleasant thing first, your brain wants to adapt by giving you something pleasant. And so the addictive part of exercise can come from that. You get that pleasant thing. It's like, oh, I need that.
But the only way to get that is by putting myself through that stress. And eventually you need more stress because that first level doesn't work as much. It's a very interesting neurological approach to thinking about these things. And from to your point, think about the knot that you want to stop, but that you want to pay attention to that relaxed and recovered component independent perhaps.
So you're not building this sort of addictive pattern. Absolutely. I actually just read that book. So it's interesting.
You've done a snapshot. Well, when I say just about three months ago, so the details are a little bit of a refresher. But the other thing I'd like to draw to people's attention is a lot of that, a lot of the chronic exercise is coming for a lot of people from a place of overconsumption. So this comes down to a behavioral change that we're using exercise to address overconsuming.
So it's really, like I said, wellness being the spectrum. There are certain behavioral patterns that we want to install in our lives. So that way we can be supportive of the others. So if I'm over consuming, well, then I'm going to have this compulsion to go to the gym and burn calories.
Right? So it's really this nutritional lifestyle balance. There's so many factors that I could go on and on, but that's just one quick point. Well, you know, it occurred to me that's such a puritanical thing.
Like you do something that you think is somehow morally bad over consumed, and then you have to go punish yourself. Right. I never thought of that perspective on exercise, but that's a real one for a lot of people. And that kind of plays into a lot of the bodybuilding culture too.
And that's, you know, I mean, I was as much of a meat head as they get, right? I was eating a huge caloric surplus to support weight on my frame that was outside of my natural point of where I needed to be. So, you know, I think it's more important for me. I've prioritized function over aesthetics, but with the improved function, aesthetics have come.
And now I don't have to worry about counting my macros or maintaining this caloric surplus in order to hold on to all this excess tissue. So you know, a lot of it comes down to what's sustainable for people. Well, I just want to highlight the thing you said that with, and pardon me, if I'm not going to get it verbatim, but with proper function, the aesthetics followed, I think that's something that maybe people worry about that if they're just doing, if they're not going in and doing biceps curls, how are they going to get their biceps bigger? And bigger enough that, you know, in theory, attract someone of the appropriate, the appropriate desirable sex.
And, but the idea that being functionally, I don't want to say efficient functionally, how would you feel that we're about how, you know, how proper functions can lead to the aesthetics that are right for you. And I think that's another piece like there's a comic named Domarara, who does this great bit. I'm going to butcher it just by the intro to it, where he says, you know, he loves when people go into a hairdresser and they come in with a picture. It's like, I want to look like this.
Yeah, that's a male model. You are an ignorant slug. You, and he just goes on forever. It's like, but you know, we do the same thing.
We just assume that anyone can become anything. You see a picture of someone you like, I can look like that if I do fill in the blank. And that's just not the way these things work. There's a great story.
I don't remember who said this one. It was a guy he said, um, Oh, oh, okay, Doug, I'm not going to remember Doug McGuff. You're saying, look, so much of what your body's going to do is genetic. And here's a thing that I can tell you.
There's a bodybuilder that I knew who had like the greatest calves and bodybuilding. He had a twin brother who never left their weight in his life, had better calves. There's another, another athlete who had most incredible biceps in bodybuilding had no calves and could never do anything about it. Training the exact same way, couldn't, couldn't make them work.
So even within your own body, there's going to be some parts that are responsible and other parts that aren't. You're going to look like how you look. And there's some people based on their biochemistry who I had a friend actually like this. This guy was six, four hundred and seventy five pounds.
He was skinny as a rail. We would go to like a Nautilus gym and he would put the, he would lift the stack on every machine. I was super strong. He weighed nothing because he produced so much myosad that he couldn't have any muscle growth, but he got really strong.
So, so I think this is a, it's an interesting highlighting because it's something I don't think about as often as I might think about it this morning that I have certain parts of my body that are just like my dad, certain parts that are just like my mom. There's jokes in there that I'm not going to make. And, and that's just the way it is. You know, I can't train around those.
That's the way this thing is fundamentally built. And I don't think we really pay enough attention to that and tell me if I'm wrong. From what you're talking about functional movement and we're going to dive more into that, you can end up being sort of being arguably what's, I don't want to say the best you can be because that's going to take a lot more attention. But you'll certainly start to optimize the parts of you that can be optimized and you'll, you'll end up being a better version of you if not the best version of you.
Certainly. And, you know, I think people have become kind of used to the idea of having aches and pains, joint aches and pains. And certainly as a massage therapist, you know, it's become so normalized, but it's not the inherent condition of a human being. We're not supposed to be walking around with knee pain and hip pain.
And if you're experiencing that, which I'd imagine a majority of people listening right now are experiencing some sort of chronic acre pain or injury that if you optimize, you focus on optimization of biomechanics, your body should be, and I say should, right? Because I don't want to make any guarantees, but should be moving without pain and you should be able to move freely through three-dimensional space without limitation. So that's, you know, it's something I want to get across to people because it's having that mid-shoulder, you know, the pain between the scapulas, you know, that could be something excessively protracted scapulas, right? If you could get into some alfalfa released to the pecs to get the scaps to sit neutrally over the rib cage like they should, you'll start to see those things go away.
Well, and back up to the very first thing you said about posture, one of the things that we hear all the time when people put on pair's shoes like, oh, it feels like my posture is just like, yeah, we're not elating your heel and shoving your pelvis forward and then you don't have to adjust. And so there are a lot of people who've had tremendous benefits from just getting out of something that just gets in the way or just alters things in a way that's unnatural, that we've been sold literally and sold bill of goods about for the last 45 to 50 years. So that's it. Now, and of course, we're also doing things now that are adding a level of stress.
I'm going to be the first one to admit it. I mean, running a rapidly growing business, not the most relaxing thing in the world. And if it weren't for my hot tub, I'd be dead. So, so no, that's a really, that's another very interesting point.
I mean, do we have a number three in your Mount Rushmore? That was kind of numbers three is the normalization of pain and dysfunction. So, yeah, no pain in the game, baby. Yeah.
And then just to kind of touch on number two, what we talked about is kind of identifying these arbitrary standards of aesthetics, right? Because if we look at these bodybuilders and I think it looks awesome, right? It looks great to be jacked. But we also have to realize too, like where is this paradigm coming from?
And I just want to encourage people to step back and kind of ask questions, why does having 20 inch biceps, why is that considered aesthetic? And if you look at sprinters, I'm actually starting to think that track and field athletes are something most functional. I know we don't love that word. It's only one of the things.
Functional athletes, they're running, they're throwing, they're jumping and they look great. Well, I can tell you about sprinters. Sprinters bodies have changed a lot in the last 20 years because a lot of sprinters A came out of football or were doing football as well. And a lot of sprinters, I'm just spending a lot of time in the gym doing kind of everything you can think of.
And if you look at them lately, they have much less many of them, much less developed our bodies than they used to. And many really, really good sprinters right now. A lot of us, for example, if you bumped in on the street, you would never think he's the fastest man in the world. He doesn't look, he's not big.
He's not jacked. He's not huge. I mean, he's wearing normal pants. You want to see, you know, these legs a little bit.
So it's, but it's really changed. Now, of course, the joke is a couple of years ago, right before the world championship trials, I'm watching the world championship trials for the US team. And these guys were huge. And then two weeks later, the world championships are too much later, not so huge.
So clearly, whatever they were taking for the nationals, they were not taking for the world because they were having a different type of testing going on. So there is that. And again, some of that really is just body dependent. Carl Lewis was not a big guy, but he was running us really big guys who were pretty close to as fast as he was.
So that's the guy that I train with a guy named Sean, who he probably was about 225 right now. He's about how Sean, let's say 35 fish. I'm not sure. Still incredibly, and I don't mean like, you know, 230 pounds of his muscle.
The guy has got some serious body fat. He's the first to admit it. And it's not going away. And he still runs unbelievably fast.
He's that strong and his form is that good, that efficient. And he can still run really well, even at that weight with all that extra baggage. It's wild to see. Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. But we can jump into it or you go ahead and take away. No, I'm saying jump away. Yeah.
And that's why I talk about prioritizing posture first, because we were saying about the friend who's running with good technique, right? Because if, for example, what you typically see in people is a kyphylordosis. It's very common. It's part of the slouching culture, right?
And that is going to be when the thoracic spine is in an excessive forward flexion. And the lumbar is in a hyper lordosis, a hyper extension. So let's do that for people. So the thoracic part is your shoulders around it over basically what you're like when you're hunched over looking at your phone.
And the lumbar part of that is the opposite. So you're over arched is that combination. And then often, like you said before, often that's also going to have your head way in front of your body, typically as well. Right.
And why it's so important to first address those postural distortions first is let's say you don't address those and you go straight into running. Well, I see and a lot of people is if my thoracic spine is locked into a forward flexion position, I can't one I can't get enough rotation through that thoracic spine because in order to move myself through space, there needs to be a counter rotation of the hips with a thoracic spine and that creates almost like an unwinding through space. Right. So if I'm stuck, I can't rotate my scapulas also can't move into flexion efficiently either.
So I give that example for people to understand that why it's so important to first address posture, like in a consideration, the shoe where you're using just and I'm sure your listeners know all about this. But you know, if I want to just kind of for the listeners explain axial loading and how important that is. So axial loading is essentially when our when our skeletal structure is aligned over itself, right. So I like to use the analogy of taking a two by four and standing it on end.
It would take very little pressure to knock that two by four over. So my brain's not going to let me fall over my face. Right. So if there's let's just say my head comes on from my body, even if it's an inch, what's happening is my body naturally wants to fall forward.
But again, my brain's not going to let me do that. So what's going to happen is unconsciously I'm going to create a hyper extension, right? Like a butt sticking up in the air kind of position to push my body back over an aligned position. So it's very important for people to understand that and especially with shoe where with elevations on the heel, what that's doing is it's pushing the center gravity forward, which wants to fan into zero shoes and minimalist shoes.
And you know, obviously we could get into the foot pronation and how that translates up the kinetic chain as well. And more of kind of you start to see more of these S shaped curvatures, these scoliotic curvatures and people's fine as a result of over supination or over pronation in the feet. There's something I was going to add to or ask you about that. Well, the pronation thing is an interesting one because there's there is appropriate pronation part of the spring mechanism of your lower leg.
And then there's the part where you're not strong enough and therefore, or your hyperpronation is wearing a shoe with a sole that stiff and has a flared and is flared. So you're hitting an outside edge and it's making your foot kind of flopping. You don't have the time to then accommodate that and sort of adopt a strong position. When you're if you're running with natural form and you're landing mid for four foot, it's almost impossible to pronate because you're landing in a strong position.
And even if you're when if your heel comes down to the ground, it's doing that with your arch fully loaded and something's wrong. So there will be some pronation. That's a natural thing. In fact, it's funny.
There's a number of world-class world champion and distance runners who when they're running, you can see their inner ankle bone practically hit the ground, massive pronation. But ironically, it's under control for them. That's just the way their body works. But I was in the lab with Dr.
Bill Sands, who used to be the head of my mechanical assembly committee, and he talks about the hyperpronation where you just can't adjust fast enough. And that's the part that becomes problematic. And people who are wearing normal shoes have this problem because if you're wearing a shoe where it's going to be the heel, the lens and your heel, then your heels are ball, you're unstable. By the time your foot comes down, your arch is not engaged unless you're perfectly aligned with which no one is, then you're going to end up falling outside, so it's going to be inside and pronation.
One or the other, and you're saying that's going to work its way up the chain and have impasse all the way up to your neck. Right. And that's why I'm such a huge fan of taking care of myofascial elasticity. So Fasha has a viscoelastic quality.
So if we break that down viscoelastic and elastic having an elastic quality to it, and it just give you a lot of play-doh, it'll hold its shape. But if you lay it on the table over time, it will start to melt and flatten out. And if your fascia is healthy, it should have this rebounding effect where it's very adaptable. But so many people have gotten stuck in postural distortions where the tissues, those myofascial tissues, have become dehydrated and adhered to one another.
And that's where you get fibrotica, knots, trigger points, things like that. And this is why with so many clients, I put them on a very aggressive, myofascial release protocol, because if you have an adhesion in that tissue, what it's doing is it's distorting your length-tension relationship in the muscle. So now the muscle, let's say you hit midfoot strike, your acupculic, your calcaneal tendon is going to lengthen, and then along with that is the calf is obviously going to lengthen as well. But if there's an adhesion in there, just like if you took a rope and you tied a knot in it, well, it's not going to get the length potential that it could have.
So that's another one I really encourage people to do is explore, get it across, get it tennis ball, explore areas where you have a lot of hypersensitivity, spend some time on that. And the other thing that I see a lot of people doing with foam rolling is they'll get on a foam roll and they'll roll their quad out back and forth for 30 seconds and call it myofascial release. But it's not because fascia is made up, again, it's the viscoelastic and it's made up of the thixotropic protein. So if you take cornstarch and water and it holds, again, that hardened shape, you can tap it, you can punch it, it's not going to move.
But if you put your finger on it, your finger will slowly sink into that material. So when you are doing your myofascial release, it's really important that people spend a minimum. This is what you see with a detissio massage or structural massage is that slow deep compression into the tissue, even getting all the way to the bone where the periosteum is right, the fascia that encases the bone. And I think that goes along with what you were saying with the people who pronate, but there's a spring effect that happens if the fascia is healthy.
And just to highlight that, because people do myofascial release incorrectly more often than obviously one of our other, this is a subset of our top four, not much more of mythology. But yet, rolling over something can be a little bit not actually doing the thing you want just by staying on that point. And what I tell me if this is something similar to what you do, if I'm like finding some spot in, I'll send a hamstring for lack of a better example. The thing that I'm going to do is like gently, well, at least if you can be gentle when you're shoving all across, you're almost down your femur, but I'll flex and extend that leg.
So I'm basically staying on that point while moving that muscle through a range of motion, which is part of what seems to actually have an impact. Do you disagree with that idea? No, I think that's good. A little bit of active lengthening really really helps.
It helps kind of create a flossing effect over that tissue. Yeah, yeah. It's very similar what you'll see with A.R.T. for the release technique.
You'll have a practitioner grab onto your pack and they'll say, okay, extend your arm up over your head slowly. It's not at all comfortable. But what you're going to do is you're going to pull that myofascial adhesion through that pressure, breaking it down. And then as they bring their arm back, it's going to floss over that tissue.
So yeah, I like the active flexion and extension over that pressure. There's a guy that I'm blank on the name of this company, unfortunately, I'm going to have to find it who does a similar thing to A.R.T. If like, let's find where something's stuck, I'm going to press on it really hard and I have have to move your arm through range of motion, although he doesn't have electricity. So he makes them also contract more than you could on your own with electricity and then move your body.
And same thing, it is incredibly unpleasant while you're doing it. And the moment you're done is like, holy crap, that was the greatest thing ever. So it's back to that double-nurging effect. It's like you put yourself through something unpleasant, then there's this great release.
And then actually it's like, right now, work on this spot. So it's very entertaining. And it is strangely addictive, myofascial release work, because I have clients who at the end of our session and say, okay, we're going to form all the quads. And they're just like, oh, God.
But when they get up and they feel that their hips are able to get into extension more, their knees are able to flex more freely, you think, oh my gosh, imagine if I spend an hour doing this, how am I going to feel? And I always, I love sitting down, put a podcast on this one, of course, and get into those tissues, listen to a podcast, put something on the background. And it's hard to get yourself to do it initially, just like anything that's hard to do. But once you get about five minutes and you start feeling these releases, almost like these kind of twitching in the muscle fiber.
And to me, that's success because that's a renuralization back to those myofibrils that were once stuck in not getting the neural input and feedback that you should have gotten. Well, that's an interesting point, actually. I wonder how much of it is, excuse me, actually impacting the fascia versus sending a signal to your brain that it doesn't need to be sending a signal back to the muscle, spindle fibers to contract that muscle. Because it may be, I'm not saying it to one or the other, it's maybe that there's an overlap between some habitual tightness because your brain has habituated to sending out signals and keep this thing tight.
And it relates in my head to when I watch people running, I've got a lot of really good runners in my neighborhood. And I watch them running a big, thick elevated heel shoe, but they have really good form. They're landing midfoot, everything, landing under their body, everything looks good. But their heel can't come down on the ground.
And when they put on something minimalist, like, oh, see, it's hurting my Achilles, it's like, no, no, your brain has basically, you've taught your brain not to let your Achilles stretch fully. Now you have to slowly just teach your brain. It's not changing the tissue. It's just teaching your brain that it's safe to do this.
And then it will be, you know, then it will be. Yeah, absolutely. All right, give it a number four. Number four, this kind of goes on, are we still on myths or?
Yeah, let's do if you have one more, we'll do one more myth and if not, we'll go into the anti-mythology. Okay, let me think. I know there's tons that I'm on the spot right now. So obviously I'm reaching, let's see.
Let me just let me whistle the Jeopardy theme song. That'll help. Thank you. Okay, so I've got one of this kind of falls back in line with weightlifting and a lot of the movements, conventional movements that people are doing in the gym is if you look at the way people are loading their bodies, they're loading their bodies in this kind of Z axis for this vertical up and down.
But if you look at a majority of moment, especially running, right, it's happening again through through space, through a horizontal plane. So what I would encourage people to start considering doing is moving loads through that range of motion through a horizontal plane of motion versus actually loading. And another reason why I've deviated from a lot of the conventional training is I'm not a big fan of loading up the spine. And I know that's going to be really controversial for people.
But like if you go to see a doctor because you have back pain, typically there's something happening in the nerve or in the spine, maybe it's a disc vole just laying on a nerve and that's creating a problem. So what do we do? We encourage people to traction that, right? Let's take pressure off of that nerve.
So once I step back and I started looking at things in more of a functional training lens, I started thinking, well, why would I voluntarily compress my spine? And because ultimately I'm doing the opposite of what I should be doing for spinal health. So again, I know that's going to ruffle some feathers, but since I've gotten away from that. Why do you think that's feather ruffling?
Because it seems so obvious that you don't want to put an excessive downward force on the distance and the nerves in your spine. So what kind of people find that getting their panties in a wad and things in a twist and feathers in your ruffle and et cetera? Well, and that's where the dogma with the fitness industry comes in, right? When you do something for so many years and you tell people, hey, that's probably not the best thing for you.
There's going to be this cognitive dissonance, right? It's like telling a kind of causal, you know, Christian, hey, God doesn't exist, right? Like what are you talking about? I've invested all this time and energy and really what it comes down to is having a sense of humility and openness to learning.
Like I'm after objective truth. What works? If somebody can prove me wrong, I'll do it. And I'm totally fine with being wrong.
I just know that I went from debilitating hip pain a year ago, not being able to get out of a chair to no pain, right? So I'm going to be decompressing my spine with the movements. And if you're moving in a way, again, that word functional way, movement should actually decompress up to your joints and tears. I mean, if your posture is where it should be and you're running, when you hit the ground, a pressure wave moves up through the body, right?
So if my fascia, viscoelasticity is where it should be, I'm going to be distributing that shock wave through the body in an equal way, right? But if I don't, let's say I don't have lumbal pelvic stability, I have hyper extension in the spine, I'm going to basically be taking that pressure wave right into the lumbal pelvic hip complex. I'm kind of going off on a tangent here. I'm not sure why I brought that.
I'm going to bring you back. So then give me an example of how of some movement thing. Well, there's two things that I have. So for a lot of people, it's like, hey, I've got a squat, I've got a deadlift and there's going to be a lot of spinal loading there.
I'm trying to avoid spinal loading as much as I can because I've got a grade two L5S1 spinal elosis thesis with a partial effect level. Basically, I've got to run spine. So I try to do as little as I can, which is sad because I really loved when I was squatting big weights and deadliding big weights. It's fun.
But that's what most people think, if you're going to work your body, you've got to do squats, you've got to do deadlifts. One aspect of what people be doing other than something like that and to add that horizontal movement component, describe something that you would be doing or having people do to have that decompression happening through movement. The best way, the most basic one I can explain without the visual element is one that I'll have a lot of clients do is stand with feet hip width apart and reach out in front of them, grabbing a cable or a handle and then kind of mimicking the reciprocating arm motion you would see during gate cycle running. So right now my shoulder is being tractioned.
I'm opening up the scapula. I'm rotating to the thoracic spine. So let me describe what you're doing. So you have your right hand extended just straight out front of your body and you're rotating your arm counterclockwise.
Yeah, almost into an internally row, the thumb down. Well, I was going to say, it's internally rotating, but I was looking for people who don't know that is staying rotating your whole arm by rotating it counterclockwise. Right. So right there, I'm allowing that to pull my spine into a rotation all the while maintaining good lumbal pelvic stability, right?
I'm keeping the quote unquote core activated, right? So then what I'm doing is I'm reciprocating, I'm pulling and reaching simultaneously, creating a counter rotation and then opening up my spine in the other direction. But now I'm getting a resistance load in conjunction with this tractioning that's happening. So it's just going to be, would you be using?
So if you've got a cable, for example, for the resistance part, would you be having that using the cable to some one arm or doing or both? Just one arm. I mean, you can do, you can do both. There's nights not right or wrong.
It's just when I'm trying to improve. Oh, sorry. I keep cutting up. When I'm trying to improve people's gate cycle mechanics and getting that reciprocation between the arms.
That's what I'm trying to because again, there's so much happening. People are so fixated on this sagittal plane movement bilateral movement. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. So I'm doing the watching you to English translation. So you've got your arm standing in front of you as you're doing that information as you're rotating your arm counterclockwise. It's also your twisting your torso, keeping your pelvis stable, twisting your torso so that your arm and shoulder moving forward, basically because of that twist.
And as you pull back, you're keeping your arm straight, you're rotating it the other way. So now you're going clockwise, you're rotating your torso the other way. So now your right shoulder is coming behind you as you're now taking your left arm and having it go forward in front of you and rotating inward. So it becomes this this multi-planar rotation thing starting with your arms and your upper and your thoracicoid.
Perfect. Yeah. I'll tell you what to say in the chat. So no, that's a really good one.
So in the time that we have left, and frankly, just going over the myths, what I like about looking at mythology is it almost automatically suggests whatever the opposite might be, whatever the more correct way of doing something might be. So getting past terminology, what do you want to tackle next? The flip side mythology? Sure.
I'm hoping to wherever you'd like to say. No, no, no, this is all you. I was trying to, I was doing a mediocre attempt at leading based on where I thought you were going. Yeah.
I kind of like to return to the fashion lines for people because I feel like it's such an essential piece in our movement. And what I would encourage people to do is, again, Google fashion lines. Take a look at the different ones. We've got the superficial front line, the lateral line.
We've got the spiral line, which is really, really complex, interesting fashion line to look at. And what we talk about fashion lines, what a fashion line essentially is, is it's a sequence of muscles that are tied together through fashion that are also supposed to co-contract simultaneously to drive global movements, big movements, right backflips, running, throwing. So nothing again is working in isolation. So I would encourage people to Google it up and then pick one line that you like and start doing my own fashion release through that chain.
And watch how global movements will change. So let's say you have lateral knee pain on the outside of your knee. Well, most people are probably going to go and foam roll the IT band or the TFL. But don't stop there.
Work on all the other lateral line tissues. Work on the lateral compartment of the lower leg where the tibialis interiors and the perennials. Work up into the obliques and the lats. And then watch how that whole movement will just open up because you've released the tissues that are all supposed to work in unison with one another.
That's a good one. And then I imagine I've brought up Feldenkrais working a number of times. I haven't done it a long time. It was really fond of.
You open up one side and that kind of makes your brain almost wake up to what it forgot was possible. And then the other side often comes along with the ride. It's like, no, I'd like to say my second barefoot run. When my left leg was injured from my first barefoot run, I had a big blister.
I was paying attention to the good side during that second run. Eventually the bad side figured out what good meant and got on board and suddenly everything was fast, easy, light, enjoyable in a way that wasn't a second or a year. Right. Yeah.
And another thing I like to have people do is go for a walk. And it actually kind of becomes a walking meditation as well because you're drawing your awareness to how does the force being distributed through your body feel. So for example, the other day I went for a walk and my TFL is tend to get really tensor fascia lot of muscles on the front and lateral side of your hip. I tend to get really tight from all the years of martial arts and doing side kicks and loading up that muscle over and over again.
So I was walking and I thought, wow, you know, when my leg swings into extension as I'm walking, that left TFL is really locked up. It's keeping me from getting into sufficient extension, putting my leg behind me. So I'll come home and I'll make a mental note of that and I'll get down on that lacrosse ball and I'll just isolate that tissue for five, ten minutes. However long you feel you need to obviously, you don't want to do it for an hour on one spot because then you're also becoming a schemic in that tissue, you're drawing blood out and fascia works like a sponge where we push blood out and then the blood comes back in.
So now we have this nutrient rich blood and hydration getting back to the tissue and then go walk again. So like a test and retest and just try to draw your awareness. So you know headphones, no music, just go walk, draw your attention to how you feel and kind of develop an inner body experience and or an awareness and then address it and then retest it. I like it.
I'm going to give you one to play with. I've been using a lot lately, but I discovered accidentally this related to what we just said. So when I'm walking up a hill, and I can do this when I'm walking like on a flat as well, but especially when I'm walking up a hill, my left foot is on the ground behind me. I'm pushing forward.
So my left foot is behind me and I twist my upper body to sorry, my right foot is behind me. Let's do that way. My right foot is behind me because it's on the ground. I twist my upper body to the left.
And so there's a stretch in my hip flexor. And then as I'm about to switch legs, when I start twisting my upper body towards the right, I don't need to do anything. My hip flexor is it was stretched already and just by letting go is sort of like the rubber band releases and my leg comes forward just enough to end up right underneath my center of mass. So by just twisting my upper body and getting my hip flexor to stretch and release and stretch and release, I end up like like twisting my way up a hill.
It takes no effort. There's like almost no exertion at all. It looks dorky as hell. You look like, I mean, you look like you're doing some bad dancing, but it's really interesting to play with.
And I'm thinking about the whole fascia line thing because what's going on in that twisting, I mean, you could do the same thing without twisting your upper body, but it doesn't really work the same. So that whole fascia line thing literally, because I can feel it from my shoulder all the way down to my heel when I do that. It's really, really fun. So you have to do it and let me know what happens.
Yeah, that's an interesting one. I like that. And what it also does is it draws awareness to how the kind of synergistic relationship between antagonistic muscles are working together. So, so an example of an antagonistic muscle would be my bicep flexes my forearm and my triceps extends my forearm.
And that's how the body moves is it technically undulates. So as I'm stepping forward and my spine is rotating and my hip flexor is flexed, the muscles that are antagonistic to that are all contracting simultaneously as the other set of tissues are lengthening. And it is so complex when you start going down this rabbit hole. And I think that's a great exercise to draw awareness to how that functions.
It's really, it's really fun to just experiment with finding ways to move that just take less effort with the parts that you think need to have effort. So you think walking and running all about your legs, what happens if you start thinking about it from a different place from your hands, from your shoulders, from your hips? This is my wife and I, we got our first ever dog about a year and a half ago. And so I have a lot of time every day, where I'm just walking the dog and just playing with these movement patterns on our, and there's different ones that I do downhill versus uphill.
So there's things to explore downhill as well that are very entertaining. So that's my entry into the sweepstakes for this one. So what if anything were missing before we start to find our way to a landing? Yeah, let me think about that for a second.
We've covered Malefast release, very important, Fast Alliance again. You know, nothing's coming to mind right now, but I'm open to questions to help stimulate any thoughts. I got nothing. So let's just do the easy thing.
If people want to find out more about everything we've been talking about and more about you and the work you're doing and how to work with you, possibly, how would they do that? Yeah, I'm kind of casual laid back. I, you know, just reaching on, you know, a DM on Instagram at coach Ryan, the number one coach Ryan one. I just recently launched a comprehensive 3D movement course where I run people through the entirety of everything we talked about the Malefast release, the current integration exercises, the foot restructuring protocols over 70 lessons there.
So people are interested in that. They can just find me on Instagram and find a link there with access to that program. Perfect. Well, that's, I hope people take you up on that because this has been super, super fun.
And you brought us some things that again, I think are obviously highly misunderstood and defined alternatives that are not only, let's say better, but can feel better. And I mean, I was going to say functionally better, but also just, you know, feel better. Just something that we're talking about. We didn't even get into this.
It's just when you, you know, when you start using your body, the way it's made, it just feels good. Exactly. And in my final thoughts on that is our bodies, we still have the evolutionary biology and biomechanics designed to operate within a natural world, but we don't live in a natural world, right? We live in a world on top of the natural and modernized world.
So not only do I encourage people to start moving away, that's consistent with your evolutionary biomechanics, but start behaving in a way that's consistent with it as well, right? Sleep as the sun goes down, wake up as the sun comes up, get morning sun on your skin, right? Don't over consume, surround yourself with peers in an environment that is conducive to good health. You know, it's a full spectrum and it's easy to get myopic on the movement when there's so many other factors to take into consideration.
Yes. Yes. And that's a great vote. Hey, dark, that's great, right?
Exactly. Yeah. Well, Ryan, thanks. It's been a total, total pleasure.
And everyone do please check them out on Instagram at coach Ryan one. Let me know what happens when you guys do get in touch and start exploring some of these things and have some fun doing that. And once again, a quick reminder, head over to www.jointhemovementmovement.com to find previous episodes all the way you can ways you can interact with us on social media, all the other places you can find the podcast if you don't like the one you're using right now. And if you have any recommendations or suggestions or who should be on the show, tell me I've got a case of cranial reorientation center and whatever you want to say.
You can drop an email to me. I'm at move M-O-V-E at jointhemovementmovement.com. But most importantly, of course, just go out, have fun and live life. First.