Pro To Col Sport Systems

What to Expect During Your First Physical Therapy Assessment for Pain Management

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 16:20:46 GMT

Living with persistent discomfort can make everyday tasks feel like overwhelming hurdles. Taking the step to schedule an initial evaluation is an empowering decision toward regaining your mobility and quality of life. Understanding what happens during this initial visit helps alleviate anxiety and allows you to participate actively in your recovery. Targeted therapy offers a structured, non-invasive path toward long-term relief by addressing the root causes of physical limitations.

Preparing Your Initial Health Information

Your assessment begins before you even step into the treatment area. Completing comprehensive intake forms provides your manual therapist with vital context regarding your medical history and lifestyle. You will share information about prior injuries, surgical procedures, current medications, and any underlying medical conditions. Clearly documenting how your pain began—whether through a sudden injury or a gradual onset—gives the clinician essential clues about your underlying mechanics.

Being precise about your daily routines, work environment, and activity levels helps tailor the evaluation to your unique circumstances. Sharing these personal details establishes a baseline that guides every diagnostic step that follows. Accurate documentation ensures that your clinician can design a safe intervention strategy customized specifically to your physiological profile.

Conducting a Hands-On Symptom and Tissue Assessment

Once the preliminary intake is complete, your clinician begins a thorough hands-on physical evaluation. Through targeted palpation and manual contact, the clinician directly assesses your affected tissues to locate exact areas of tenderness, muscle tightness, and soft tissue restriction. By applying gentle, precise pressure, they examine skin temperature, surface swelling, and underlying fascial tension to identify active pain generators and underlying inflammation.

This tactile examination allows your clinician to observe how your tissues respond in real time, noting subtle involuntary muscle guarding or spasticity when specific areas are touched. Experiencing where your pain reproduces under soft tissue manipulation provides essential diagnostic clues that paper forms cannot capture. This hands-on connection establishes physical trust and ensures your therapeutic plan directly addresses the precise anatomical structures driving your discomfort.

Evaluating Posture and Body Mechanics

Following the initial tissue assessment, your clinician will conduct a detailed visual examination of your posture and body alignment. They will observe how you stand, sit, and walk to identify subtle imbalances or movement compensations. Poor posture and altered movement patterns often place unnatural strain on joints, muscles, and ligaments, contributing significantly to ongoing discomfort.

According to April ABA, back pain remains the most common issue treated in clinical movement settings, making up 34% of overall cases. Identifying structural deviations in the spine or pelvis allows the clinician to pinpoint the biomechanical factors driving such prevalent issues. Correcting these subtle physical habits early in treatment prevents recurring stress on vulnerable tissues. This observational phase bridges the gap between what you feel and how your body physically operates.

Testing Range of Motion and Flexibility

After analyzing your static alignment, the clinician will assess your mobility through joint range of motion testing. You will be asked to bend, reach, twist, or extend specific parts of your body while the clinician measures your movement capacity. The clinician evaluates both active range of motion, where you move your limbs independently, and passive range of motion, where the clinician gently moves your joints for you.

Measuring these angles helps identify joint stiffness, muscle tightness, or structural blockages that restrict your natural motion. Identifying restrictions allows the clinician to target specific tight structures with specialized manual therapy and stretching techniques. Tracking these baseline measurements provides a clear standard to quantify your mechanical progress over time.

Assessing Muscle Strength and Stability

Structural support depends heavily on muscle balance, making strength testing a critical component of your assessment. The clinician will apply gentle resistance to various muscle groups, asking you to hold specific positions against their pressure. This process helps identify localized weakness, muscle imbalances, or neurological deficits that compromise joint stability. Core and stabilizing muscles are evaluated to determine how effectively they protect your spine and major joints during movement.

Uncovering hidden weaknesses helps explain why certain body parts are overworked and prone to inflammation. Incorporating targeted strengthening exercises into your chronic pain management plan restores proper load distribution across your musculoskeletal system. Building a strong foundation protects vulnerable joints from future injury during everyday physical tasks.

Performing Specialized Diagnostic Tests

Depending on your specific symptoms, your clinician may conduct specialized clinical tests to isolate affected tissues. These non-invasive diagnostic maneuvers assess nerve function, joint stability, ligament integrity, and soft tissue tension. For instance, the clinician might gently compress or stretch specific regions to determine if nerves are being irritated or pinched.

Testing reflexes and sensation helps map out neurovascular involvement and rule out conditions requiring medical referral. These targeted tests provide definitive clues that differentiate simple muscular strain from deeper joint or disc pathology. Conducting thorough diagnostic testing ensures that your care plan addresses the exact source of your physical limitations.

Formulating Diagnostic Findings and Goals

Once all physical tests are concluded, your clinician will synthesize the collected data to explain your diagnosis in clear, accessible terms. They will explain how structural imbalances, movement habits, and muscle weaknesses interact to generate your specific symptoms. Understanding the exact mechanisms behind your discomfort removes the fear of the unknown and empowers you to take control of your recovery.

Together, you and your clinician will establish realistic short-term and long-term functional goals tailored to your personal priorities. Whether your goal is walking without discomfort, returning to a favorite sport, or sleeping peacefully through the night, these milestones structure your care. Setting clear, achievable targets ensures that your chronic pain management approach remains focused on meaningful progress.

Designing Your Personalized Treatment Strategy

With a clear diagnostic picture and established goals, your manual therapist will outline a customized care plan tailored to your needs. This comprehensive strategy usually combines manual hands-on therapy, therapeutic exercises and posture correction. Your clinician will outline the recommended frequency and duration of your visits to achieve optimal results.

Educating you on self-care strategies, ergonomic adjustments, and activity modification ensures you maintain progress outside the clinic. Integrating targeted home routines into your everyday schedule maximizes the effectiveness of your overall chronic pain management journey. A well-rounded treatment plan provides a clear roadmap from initial discomfort toward lasting physical recovery.

Experiencing Your Initial Therapeutic Exercises

In most cases, your initial assessment concludes with a gentle introduction to your customized home exercise program. Your clinician will guide you through a few foundational stretches or light stabilization movements, ensuring you execute each exercise with perfect form. Performing these exercises under professional supervision prevents movement compensations and guarantees patient safety.

You will receive detailed instructions regarding repetitions, frequency, and proper breathing techniques to follow at home. Starting your exercise program on day one builds momentum and promotes active participation in your recovery process. Embracing these early physical interventions reinforces the core principles of effective chronic pain management from the very beginning.

Committing to Your Path of Long-Term Recovery

Completing your initial assessment marks the start of a transformative partnership dedicated to your physical well-being. Recovery is an active, collaborative process that requires ongoing consistency, patience, and open communication between you and your provider. As your body adapts and strengthens, your manual therapist will continually re-evaluate your progress and adjust your treatment parameters accordingly.

Consistently performing your prescribed home routines and attending scheduled clinical sessions ensures steady movement toward your health goals. Overcoming physical limitations requires time, but guided care provides the tools necessary to restore your mobility, strength, and confidence. Committing to a comprehensive chronic pain management plan puts you on a direct path toward a healthier, more comfortable, and active life. Contact Pro To Col Sport Systems today to schedule your comprehensive assessment and begin your journey toward a pain-free life.

Proper Core Activation: The Key To Alleviating Chronic Back Pain

Thu, 19 May 2022 17:43:00 GMT

Proper Core Activation: The Key To Alleviating Chronic Back Pain

00:01
Hey guys, it’s Julie, over here at protocol sport systems. Today, we are going to be learning about the actual way of doing posterior tilt, working on really effectively using the abdominal area, connecting the deep abdominal core and really firing off the glutes.

Have low back pain that just doesn’t go away?

Now, a lot of people are really interested in doing those hip thrusts. They really have a lot of time trying to work the glutes. The glutes are very popular right now. What we want to do is we want to do it efficiently. We see a lot of clients here who come in with a lot of back issues and a lot of recurring chronic back problems.

Deep Core Work

One of the things that I’ve found is that a lot of people, when they’re doing any type of glute work, they’re completely forgetting to use the abdominal area. So we’ve all heard the buzzword core. We’ve all heard the buzzword doing deep core work.

00:56
Majority of people when they’re doing it are using the upper part of the core or the hip flexors that from the belly button to the pubic bone is usually forgotten about.

Today we’re going to talk about that. First and foremost, there are four abdominal muscles that we have that we’re going to talk about that make up the core. In my opinion, the core actually runs from here to here, front and back.

The shoulder to the upper thigh, front side of your body and the backside of your body, it’s basically, what’s known as the axial part of your skeleton. It’s not the arms or the legs, because if you don’t have a strong structure in here, you’re basically trying to build a mansion of your dreams on a foundation of sand.

In order to really use this part effectively to connect the upper part to the lower part of your body, we’re going to focus on these four muscles.

Rectus Abdominis: The 6-Pack Muscles

01:51
The first muscle that we have is the most superficial of the lot. It’s called your rectus abdominis. That is known as the beach muscles, the six-pack muscles. That’s the one that everybody looks at when they’re trying to get lean.

That’s like the focal point. It actually runs from the bottom of your rib cage and your rib margin all the way down to your pubic bone. It allows you to flex the spine. It allows you when you’re doing your crunches to come up, but it really does. And this is really important. It allows the pubic pelvis to move backwards and go into posterior tilt.

Now, deep to that, you have the internal and external obliques. They are running side to side, that kind of crisscross pattern. They come up and work against each other. You’re working the internal oblique and the external oblique thing, work to stabilize and mobilize each other in the same movement, these guys allow us to rotate.

Obliques & Transversus Abdominis

02:45
They allow us to stabilize. If we’re holding something heavy on the other side and laterally selects really important because they connect right down to the rectus abdominis and to the other.

That’s the most important one that transversus abdominis, which is deep to all of them. Now, the one thing about the transversus abdominis or the TVA is that it actually runs across the body and connects all the way around from the front to the back. It acts as the body’s corset or weight belt.

The only way that we can actually contract this is through a forced exhale because it’s here to stabilize and connect the top part of our body to the bottom corner of our body. Does that make sense? Okay. Now that we understand the anatomy of it, well, let’s talk about the actual movement.

Most people think of core work, they think of doing crunches or they think of doing reverse crunches, or they think of doing like pain crunches.

Connect Upper And Lower Body

03:47
The majority of that will get a lot of your abdominal area. The majority of times, most people forget from the belly button to the pubic bone. It’s often forgotten because we have these big three big hip flexors that are sitting right here.

If we don’t connect this, that directly affects the low back. Today we’re going to learn how to do that. All right. From the records of darkness, from the written margin to the pubic bone, from the rid margin to the belly button, anytime we lift our head up off of anything, anytime you push against gravity, anytime we cough, anytime we sneezed, we’re using this.

This guy is pretty taken care of from the belly button to the pubic bone. This often gets lost. Why? Because we sit a lot. When we sit a lot, we drop in and we can press in and collapse.

04:45
And this tends to not get supported. The other thing too is for women, when we have babies, this gets overstretched and then we lose the ability to be able to contract this also hernias and the alight, the majority of time, we are not using this area.

First the thing we’re going to do is we’re going to think about our belly button and we’re going to take the belly button only because it’s the middle. Everybody knows where their belly button is. Nowhere your belly button is think about the string, going straight through your belly button with the weight on the inside.

I want you to think about pulling your belly button straight down towards your feet. Good. Okay. So what you notice with Ms. Sophie go ahead. Relaxed is that she actually was able to stabilize her belly button right in for the spine. What most people will do is they’ll suck it up into their chest and drive all of the Eric into their chest.

Isolate The Lower Back And Belly

05:42
Like they’re holding their breath. What we want to do is we want to be able to isolate just this area. Take the belly button, pull it down into the spine. Good. What you’re thinking of is a suction cup that comes down and pulls everything in.

Now, the one thing about muscles is they always pull. They never push and they actually contract into one another. Muscles are always doing a pull effect and the body is actually a pulley system. Every time you were pulling, then the joints that the muscles are attached to will then start to move like the bicep attached to the forearm and the bicep contracts move the arm.

Same thing with the pelvis. What we’re working with are the hip joints and then the lower lumbar area. First thing you’re going to do is pull the belly button into the spine. Perfect. Now this is going to be a party just for the belly button to the pubic bone.

Pull The Belly Button Toward The Spine

06:43
What you don’t want is anything from the belly button up to the rid margin plane or the head, and you don’t want the legs to be involved either. Okay? So we’ve gotten step one down. Step two is, think about having two ropes that attach from your belly button to your pubic bone.

And remember we pull from the muscles. The belly button comes down to the spine. You have two ropes that are attached to the piece. The belly button comes down to the spine. You have two ropes that are attached to the pubic bone. Now those ropes are going to actually pull down and back.

If you notice, when she pulled down and back, her pelvis actually tips back because the pubic bone is actually part of the pelvis and that’s creating movement in the spine. Perfect and relaxed. Again, we’re going to do this again, take the, pull the belly button into the spine, take the two ropes and pull the two ropes back.

07:47
Perfect. Okay. So next the body relax. If you want to feel what this is supposed to feel like and what the body does naturally, you’re going to take a deep breath in, through your mouth, around in circle.

You actually worked with a forced exhale. If you want to feel what this is supposed to feel like and what the body does naturally, you’re going to take a deep breath in, through your mouth, obviously.

When you blow out, you’re gonna put your teeth together and you’re going to blow out like you’re shushing somebody very loud. You’re going to blow it, come in, blow out all of the air, escapes out of your mouth.

Go ahead and take a deep breath and blow out. Okay. What I want to hear is I want to actually hear that sh I want you to shush me from the other side of the room.

Shush!

08:40
You’re going to take a deep breath in and you’re going to shush me . If you notice, as soon as she does that, all of the body parts start to work because that’s your body’s natural defense for anything that’s going on is it’s trying to contract the body and support it from the upper half to the lower half. Okay?

So try that at home. Take a deep breath in. I want you to shush. I want you to hear it. Like you’re shushing your child, your husband, your wife, your neighbor, your dog, whoever you want to shush the heck out of them.

Okay. And your body will naturally do that. Once you’ve got that, sheesh, now you’ll feel it should be a really deep feeling in here. Got it. Okay. Now you’ve gotten this, we’re going to move on to the next. I’m going to have you bend your knees.

09:31
Now that we have the knees bent, the one thing that people will want to do is they’ll want to push from their heels. The reason why we don’t push from their heels is because the heels are way farther away from the blues and the hip than the glutes actually are.

Posterior Tilt

We want to think about the joint. That’s closest to the muscle that we’re trying to affect. The two muscles that we’re working with are the abdominal muscles. They’re going to turn on the glues. We’re doing this posterior tilt, we still have to drive from the abs because the abdominal core is what is supporting the glute structure. There.

They jumped in align with one another, right? Their partners, their wind men, their cohorts, whatever you want to say, they work together. This doesn’t get invited to the party. This doesn’t get invited to the party, exclusive party from the belly button to the pubic bone.

Chronic Back Pain Help In San Diego

10:26
That’s it, you guys. If they’re doing this, you’re actually going to be able to notice if your body parts start working and what’s being used more so than the other. This is when parts will start to show up for you.

Again, belly button goes into the spine, then you’re going to use your ropes. You’re going to pull your belly button or your pubic bone towards your belly button. Perfect. Now, if you notice Sophie’s pelvis just rolled along with her because she’s doing it from the abs.

The abs are driving this motion and hit her. Her back would become flushed to the table. Go ahead and relax. Now if I have Sophie just use her legs and press from her heels and push up into a posterior tilt head.

If you notice she goes into an arch and she doesn’t actually use her abs to do it, and you can actually see the difference in there, come back down.

Engage Glutes And Abs To Relieve Back Pain in San Diego

11:24
Now what we’re going to do is we’re going to have Sophie go into the belly button spine. Perfect. Now, as she pulls up now, her glutes are engaged and her abs are engaged.

You’ll notice she comes up in a segment and she’s not actually using for legs to do it. She’s actually engaging more of her glues and her abs and structuring her. She doesn’t hurt her back and come on back down. Good.

In order for us to actually feel better, we must drive some of the abdominal area. First. The other thing to watch out for is the fact that we overload our quads more than using our core. If we’re not using our core and we’re overloading our quads, then our glutes won’t even turn on.

There’s a couple of different layers that are going on in here. You always want to think about the core drives the glues.

Get Your Glutes To Do The Work

12:20
Everything’s a pulley system, correct? You were doing this, I want you to feel the belly button, those just fine ropes come up to pubic bone. You should feel your back getting flushed into the floor and the pelvis should roll as it’s coming up.

That’ll actually allow your glutes to do the work instead of your legs to do the work. Okay? Come on down. Perfect. I hope that helps. I hope you guys figured this one out. If you guys have any questions, comments, or just want to figure out how to find your glutes and your ass.

Hey, give me a call. You made a comment, send me a Dan or come on in and we’ll do a free assessment for you. I hope this helps have a great day guys. Thanks, bye.

Protocol Doesn’t Take Insurance. Here’s Why.

Thu, 19 May 2022 17:42:00 GMT

Protocol Doesn’t Take Insurance. Here’s Why.

00:00
Alright. Alright, you guys today, we are going to talk about why we don’t take insurance. This is Julie and Kara protocol sport systems. We get asked a ton about why we don’t take insurance.

Because people always want to use our insurance for therapy. There’s a really big reason why, first of all, in my opinion, the healthcare system is broken because it’s being handcuffed by the insurance companies.

Absolutely. For sure. Let’s do a breakdown of why we don’t take insurance.

Copays Are Expensive

00:38
I’ve worked on the other side of, with physical therapy and billing through insurance.

Typically, you’re going to come in, you’re going to pay a copay, which is anywhere between 40 to $60 on average, sometimes more, maybe a little less, if you’re lucky, and then you’re going to be with a physical therapist, we are stuck with only treating the one body part that your doctor refers you for.

If you have shoulder pain, that’s where we get to live. We don’t get to look up at your neck, down your back and actually figure out if it’s not coming from your shoulder where the real problem lies. So that’s one issue. Another issue is going to be, we’re stuck with a time code. I can only work with you for 8 to 23 minutes,

01:27
You guys. Not only do you have to have a prescription from your doctor that only allows us to work with what you have going on.

You think you’re $25 or 50 or $70 copay or whatever. It’s cheaper. That way. It doesn’t, it really limits you get eight to 23 minutes, that’s it with a physical therapist.

01:51
Not much time for us to get our hands on you and do something with you and figure out how you’ve been since the previous treatment where we’re going to go next.

If something weird comes up, we can’t really address it because we don’t have the time to.

If it doesn’t fall within the one body part we’re working on, we can’t really address it legally.

After you’re with us for eight to 23 minutes, then we hand you off to likely a non-licensed college age kid.

Who’s going to take you through all the exercises and hope they don’t hurt you doing it because they really don’t know the difference.

They’re not allowed to touch you or shift you and make sure you’re actually activating the right muscles. Once you go through your exercises, you get thrown back on ice and whatever.

They can bill you because the reimbursement rates are so minimal that they have to add on all these extra things to even get it worth the time to have you actually see the physical therapist for the eight to 23 minutes.

02:50

It’s really a poor system, but what we do here, I’ll let you go.

Insurance Takes The Humanity Out Of It

02:57

This is one of the reasons why I started this company is because I didn’t understand. I get the other side of things like in order to make any money, the medical institution has to double and triple book.

You are laid on top of one another. If you ever wonder why there’s so many patients sitting in the office, it is because they all have the same appointment time as you do. In order to get the reimbursement, there’s got to be a flow of, come back, come back.

If you’re thinking from the patient or the client standpoint, it takes me an hour over there out of my day to get there. I gotta make an appointment to be there for an hour.

I only get to see a therapist for 20, 30 minutes max, and then I’m getting put into exercises and then I have to pay for parking and then find my way back.

03:49

I have to come for a minimum of six to 12 visits, like it’s over and over again. It’s this crazy cycle.

This is one of the reasons why I decided to start this place, because I feel like there’s a huge lack of being able to actually talk to the client and find out what’s going on. Find out where their history lies, find out really what the depth of their injury comes from.

Because a lot of times it doesn’t come from where they’re hurting. It’s coming from a whole different area like Kara said.

What we do is we spend an hour with you.

04:28

Really get to the depths of what’s going on. Not only that, but we get to touch you the first time we really get to put our hands on you and find out what it is based on.

What you’re telling us is does that really actually correlate with whatever is in what your body is telling us because your body tells a whole different story.

04:47

And that’s a good point. Like when you go to the physical therapy clinic for the first time, you have to fill out all the insurance forms, the myself as the clinician will have to sit through and take all your range of motion measurements, do all your strength testing.

I really don’t get the opportunity to get down to the treatment portion, right? Especially if there’s a lot going on, because we’re looking at, your gait, your posture, this and that, while you’re here, we can do a very quick assessment and kind of get down to the nitty gritty because we don’t have to document all of these things and we can actually get to the treatment and we have the hour to do it.

In the insurance world, they’re so backlogged with all the paperwork that they really don’t get the opportunity to treat you the way you should be treated and fix it the way it should be fixed.

05:35

So that’s a big thing.

05:37
Yeah. Not only that, but because we spend an hour with you, a lot of times we can get a lot more accomplished within that first hour, then the two 12 visits. A lot of times we’re here in like three.

05:50
Yeah. That’s what we’ve been finding is, so what you would have typically gotten taken care of in six sessions with a traditional physical therapy clinic, we can actually get there almost always in three sessions.

You’re getting more time with us, which makes sense. We get twice the amount of time with you and we get to treat you up and down the body. Versus in the physical therapy clinic, you’re only addressing the one area part and you’re getting half the amount of time.

It takes twice as long, which means twice as many copays versus with us. If your copay is 40 to $60, you’re going for six sessions, that’s $240 to $360 for those six sessions. That’s a lot of money versus with us, three sessions is only $375. So there you go. Huge difference with that. You’re getting twice the amount of time.

06:43
That when people ask us why we don’t take insurance and they always want to know if we do take insurance, this is why we want to provide you with the best care possible.

It’s Easier To Go Without Insurance

What we’ve found is that it’s easier for us to go without insurance, because then we know that we can give you the time that your worth, because you guys are very important to us and your time is valuable. I know our time is valuable. I know your time has to be valuable.

We value that time that you have taking out of your day to get better. We want you to get better as fast as possible. That is our goal. The other thing why we’ll say that we do really quickly is we work double and triple people.

We don’t have two or three of us one client almost all the time. You’re going to see the majority of us because we are able to be a comprehensive integrative and collaborative.

07:37
We collaborate on almost everybody that comes in here. You’ll see two and three people co-treating to make sure that we can give you what you need. Yeah.

The next time you think about the insurance company and how your copay works, that’s really the inside scoop on why we don’t take insurance and what what’s going on with insurance. So,

07:59
Why it benefits you to not go through insurance when you see us, because if you do, then we get handcuffed and you’re not really getting treated the way you should.

08:08
That’s true. So I hope that clears things up. Ask yourself before you leave, how do you value your time? Like if you’re currently injured, what, where’s the value in that?

Like how much is it worth you to, for you to like, I don’t take a few minutes out of your day and come and see us. We offer a 15 minute quick fix or quick fix. We offer a 50 minute injury assessment.

15 minute free injury assessment

I wish we were that good and quick to get you a few minutes. Sometimes we are, but we offer a 15 minute free injury assessment. If you have any questions come on in, we would love to be able to see what’s going on, touch your body and see what we can do to help you.

I hope you have a great day and we will talk to you again real soon.

Not Healing From Injuries? Here’s Why.

Thu, 19 May 2022 17:41:00 GMT

Not Healing From Injuries? Here’s Why.

00:50
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
We’re talking about habits today.

Habits, habits, habits, and mainly why do you not really want to get better? Because so, okay, don’t get me wrong. We totally believe that your pain is real and we totally believe that you are in an injury and you have something going on with you.

The question is, why can’t I get better?

Habits Are Key To Healing

01:32
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Why does it keep coming?

01:33
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Why does it keep? We hear this from clients literally all the time. They’re desperate to get better, but they just can’t seem to connect the dots to do it. Now,

01:41
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Spot in my back keeps coming back. It goes away for about a week or two or every year. About this time of year, that pain comes back. Why is it?

01:48
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Well, what if I told you that it’s your fault that it’s not getting better, not your fault, but it’s your.

01:55
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC

Not fault, but it’s your doing? Because it’s your way, rear frame of thinking and your framework over everything as to why you’re not really getting better. Is it confronting? It could.

02:08
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Be triggering.

02:09
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It might be, are you going to turn us off now?

Cause you might or tune us out because we’re used to that. Either or whatever you want to do, but some of us are really stuck in that mindset that we want somebody else to fix us.

We’re not really willing to take it on ourself today. We’re talking about habits. Oh, and why are we in front of a green screen? Might you ask,

02:30
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Would you ask that you should.

02:32
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC

So let’s talk about habits. What a habit, not hamburger habit, but what is a habit? I have, it is a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially that one that is hard to give up.

03:12
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Why.

03:13
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Does that have to do with our bodies? What does it have to do with injury?

Patterns In The Body Can Help Or Hurt

03:16
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
For me, what it is it’s about patterns. It’s about patterns. We’ve put our bodies into habits that we put into our body that we’re not consciously trying to do.

It just ended up that way because of different circumstances led to that habit and it just became ingrained. It could have started as early as zero to five years.

03:35
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah, you get into a comfort level, right? You get into a consistency. So here’s something really cool.

You guys so research from 2012 and it looking at habit information, it suggests 10 weeks or about two and a half months is more of a realistic estimation for people. The main evidence backed timeframe for habit breaking comes from that.

It can take at least between 18 days to 254 days to break a habit rule. It’s generally between 10 weeks, that’s two and a half months. In order to break a habit, you’re looking at 18 to 254 days.

That’s crazy. Right? This goes to show you why things are so hard to change. Like why is it so hard for us to start doing something that we know like eating, right?

Like watching what we, how we work out, making sure we go work out every single day, reading certain books, doing certain things that we know we should be doing.

04:45
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Why does it take us so long to become habitualized? Because it anywhere. Okay.

04:54
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Well, one of the big reasons for me that it doesn’t change this a lot of times we don’t know it’s a problem. We don’t know that whatever we’re doing, that habit is actually what’s causing our pain. Yeah.

Take Responsibility For Breaking Habits

05:04
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah, yeah. The thing is with habits, you need to make them in the forefront of your brain for at least 66 days, at least before things start to become automatic.

You need to take personal responsibility and accountability to create a new habit in your body or to break an old habit. That’s crazy. Right? The thing is this is all neural. It’s all nerve based. It’s all neural re-patterning and neuroscientists have traced our habit, making behaviors back to the part of the brain called the basal ganglia.

And it also plays a role. It also plays a key role in the development of emotions. This is why a lot of us are tied to our habits because it’s tied back to our emotional state emotions, memories, pattern recognition, having crazy decisions to, for us to actually make decisions. There are different part of the brain called a prefrontal cortex.

06:17
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
There are two very different parts of the brains. We’re trying to do things from here and make decisions on how we’re going to do it doesn’t stick because we’re not tying any type of emotion or feeling to it,

06:32
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Which is ironic because the only way to change anything like that is to decide that you want to make that change. You have to make that decision to make the change. That’s the first step, but then it’s what do you need to do from there?

06:46
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right? It’s that decision, but it’s based on that emotion that the habits not working for you because decisions does aren’t made cerebrally. Like we don’t make decisions on that.

The ones that don’t are the ones that we don’t stick is when we tie something to it, I need to change this habit because I don’t like how I’m feeling about myself, because I don’t feel good because I hurt because every time I do this hurts. I need to stop and change how I’m doing things. It’s a direct correlation between emotions and repetition.

It’s really interesting because I think most people, when they’re trying, when they’re injured, they’re tied to that emotion of being injured, right? Sometimes it’s being tied to the emotion of, I don’t want to get out of the injury or I, what am I going to do if I get out of that?

07:39
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
You’re right. If you’ve had that injury long enough, or that situation long enough, it can start to get its talents into your identity. It’s who you are now become. Sure.

Habits Are The Brain’s Internal Drivers

07:49
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
So habits are the brain internal drivers. That’s what they do. They, they drive us. They drive us forward. Hi guys. Hi mark. Hi Charlie. Hi Sadie. To change an old habit, you get to find out how to replace that routine of that old habit, because it’s really how that routine makes you feel.

It’s, it’s how comfortable you are doing it, but you get to look forward to the same reward of a new habit. It can’t, you can’t change one without the other. It’s like, it’s like Indiana Jones.

Remember when he had to take the gold out from the booby trap thing and he had to figure out how to replace the gold with the weight and the weight distribution had to be exactly the same. Otherwise he was going to get killed and shot or whatever happened indiana.

08:39
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Jones. He, no.

08:43
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
You can tell how often I watch.

08:45
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
If you got it right then that wouldn’t be so exciting.

08:51
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
What we’re trying to say is are you sitting on a Shamrock that, or the green screen, if you should have tuned in at the beginning and you were to realize what were doing behind this green screen. Next thing next time, you’ll know, show up early.

09:07
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
You have a puzzle at the beginning too. Yeah.

09:09
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Listen, what we’re doing is we’re replacing one with the other, right? It’s got to have an emotion and emotional tie to the front, a reward base. What are you getting out from the old habit?

How do you replace it with something from this new habit? Being able to be enthusiastic to stick to it? The cool thing is that we can change things. Neural pathways are changed all the time. Good and bad. We’re constantly changing the game with how we move from the brain to the body, from the body to the brain.

Remember the body is constantly sending data up to the brain and the brain is responding. That’s actually how we contract and move muscles. Right? There’s there’s a constant, all of your neuro sensors are constantly going off to tell you if you’re moving. If you’re contracting, if you’re cold, if you’re hot, if you’ve you’re in fear.

Neural Repatterning

10:05
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
If you’re in pain, if you’re overstretching, if whatever, yes.

Let’s keep going on the habit because I don’t know. I don’t know what that is. What is the movie? Any who you guys are so off on that one? Listen, the beauty of neural repatterning is that when we get into any type of injury or any type of thing that isn’t working for us, we get the opportunity to make a decision to change it.

From there, how do we change it to where it sticks? We get to feel it and we get to put the emotion behind it. Right? The brain is an amazing thing. I know I say amazing a lot.

I’m realizing how much I say it, but it’s super powerful in the fact that the one thing the brain knows that the brain does, is it can’t detect the difference between real stimuli and stimuli that we’ve thought up.

11:13
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
In fact, in 2003 study.

11:16
Speaker 3
Was done, wasn’t it?

11:18
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. Good job. Harvard did a study in 2003, shut up. You know what my habit is? Oh my God. In 2003, Harvard did a study on penis.

He brought a bunch of pianists to play the piano pianists, and they hook them up with all the electrodes and they studied their brain and the stimuli of their brain when they played there a specific tune.

What they did is they retested them 20 minutes later. Years later, by having them keep the electrodes in their head. What they’ll do is they think about their music that they’re.

12:03
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Playing.

12:05
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Thinking about the same song and what it does is it stimulates the same parts of the brain. Will the movement habits that are created in your body dictate where your postural imbalances produce pain?

I give up, I give up. Yes, I, yes. It’s exactly true. The, the penis, so going back to this study, the study shows that the brain doesn’t differentiate between stimuli, that’s actually produced externally and stimulated produced internally.

That’s how powerful we are. We can actually create a habit and change how our body feels and moves based on how we’re thinking. To go back to why can’t we get better, because majority of us are thinking about our pain all the time,

12:54
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Stuck in that. And.

12:55
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
We’re stuck in the fact that we don’t, I can’t do this. I can’t do that. I can’t do this. Oh, I can’t. If this, about this hurts, instead of repositioning how we think and tie it to an emotion of, oh, if I do this, I’ll get better. Oh, that feels better if I do it. Oh, let’s move here.

13:14
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Is the outcome.

13:15
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It, it almost becomes like a limiting belief.

13:20
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
It’s pretty much eliminate.

13:21
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. So, and eliminating belief is basically when somebody else has told you can’t, or you have told you can’t and you believe them.

13:29
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Henry Ford mentioned that just the same thing of the candidates, like whether you can, or you can’t. You’re exactly right. If you think you can, you will, if you think you can’t, you’re your exactly. You won’t. So,

13:41
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
The cool thing with the brain is the brain has this thing called neuroplasticity. When you trigger certain things, the brain starts to remember it and starts to create a whole new pathway based around the stimuli that it’s getting over and over again.

And you’ll hear me say it. I’ve said it before that energy flows, where the attention goes. If we’re attention is constantly on stuff that isn’t working, we’re going to be bringing up stuff that doesn’t work, and you’re gonna prove yourself, right.

Over and over again. If we start realizing how powerful the brain and body connection is, we can actually change our pain, level pain pathways, and changing how we get out of pain permanently, which is so cool.

Because remember the majority of our chronic pain that we’re dealing with is like mark said, postural imbalances. It’s me. It means that things that we’re doing have been overloaded in one area and under loaded in the other.

14:53
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
All of the body just starts to adapt and follow.

14:56
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
This is what I was talking about earlier about that learned you didn’t realize you got into this battery at this counter because of things that have stacked up in your life.

This could be over years, decades, like 10, 20, 30 years. Finally, all of a sudden, now I’m getting this pain. Where did it come from? I didn’t do anything. Well, you’ve been doing price up for a long, wrong for a long time incorrectly for a while.

15:14
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right? The other thing too is we get a lot of people who, well, we don’t get a lot. We will get people who come in here and then we’ll give them exercises to do so we’ll show them what’s going on with their body.

We’ll start to tell them how to kind of change things. The one thing that we require is that you be an active participant in you actually getting better and you get to do exercises.

What I mean by exercises is not two sets of 10. I mean, you, what, the thing that we do all over and over again, as we tell people, you get to do these until you feel that you can’t do them correctly anymore because fatigue sets in, right?

We’re trying to do it in a camp three. Think through your exercise, you have to feel the change that comes in.

16:02
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Because as soon as you put feeling into it, the body changes, it really does. What you have to do is replicate that feeling as many times as possible.

Remember, going back to the beginning 18 to 254 days, that means that’s a lot of retracting and pulling back. That’s a lot of pulling your belly button in and pulling your pubic bone up.

That’s a lot, I’m doing the same thing. What we’ll get sometimes is we’ll get, yeah, well, I’ve done it. I did it a couple of times.

16:34
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Didn’t get better.

Train Yourself To Do It The Right Way

16:35
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
And it didn’t get better. Well, here’s the thing. We’re with you one hour, you’re with you for the remaining 23 hours.

You have 24 hours in your day to get things done. If you subconsciously, aren’t connecting to your body’s going to remember what you’re doing, whether it’s right or wrong, because it doesn’t distinguish the difference.

You can train yourself to do it wrong just as easily as you can train yourself to do it. Right.

17:03
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Right. If you’re doing it, if you’re getting sets of Jake, I want you to do 40 of these.

I want you to do four sets of 10 and you do all four sets of 10 incorrectly using the wrong moving pattern. You just keep reinforcing the same incorrect moving pattern. I’d rather you do it twice correctly than 40 times wrong.

17:18
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
And the, yeah, exactly. The thing is too, is that they say change is painful, changes. Only painful because it’s pain.

It’s so hard to set ourselves up to do something different because we’re so used to doing it this way. Yeah. If, and what we have to do is we have to make the decision to change and make a decision that where you are right now in your pain is not serving you anymore.

How do you get out of it? You invest your time and your mindset in changing that movement, you can do it by using someone else to say, like Mike said at the beginning, sometimes subconsciously, we don’t even know what we’re doing. Right. Because it’s become such a,

18:06
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Such a routine that it is. You don’t know what you don’t know. A lot of times what you have to do is you have to create that understanding of like, you’re, oh, I’m not doing it.

Oh my gosh, my, I didn’t realize that I, my shoulder moved forward. I didn’t realize that every time I moved up to do an overhead press or anything, that my shoulders sitting forward and it’s pinching up here, I just noticed the pitch.

Well, once you get the aha of where the shoulder actually is, or the body part or whatever, is happening, the postural imbalance, then we get to take it. What I always say is we take something that’s been subconscious, bring it back to the conscious, smack it around.

We’re, it’s your job to move it back down into the subconscious layer, into more of a habit. It’s painful because that means you get to be uncomfortable in your body, doing something different in order to create a new level of comfort.

Your Form Matters

19:05
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Absolutely. It’s just, but the first step is deciding that you’re tired of having that pain, got to make that first decision, because we can’t do it for you. No one can do it for you. You only, you can make a change. We can only guide you through that change.

19:18
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Know that if you’re doing it’s going to take time.

Most of the time, you didn’t get that way overnight, unless it’s an acute injury where someone you get hit by a car or you fall into something that chances more often than not chronic injury is over use.

That means over time, the same thing is going on over and over again. You’re setting yourself up for bad things.

19:42
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
The big thing we look at is sure, you got hit, save, got hit. He got in a car accident. A lot of cards has happened.

What was your body like before that car accident, you could have been pain free, but how, what would dysfunctional patterns were already set in? And now you get slammed. You get, you got it. Now you got a whiplash you’re dealing with your shoulder, whatever.

That shoulder was already in a dysfunctional pattern before the accident right now, you’re going to try to do rehab on it. If you don’t get it positioned correctly, you’re still gonna have the old movement patterns.

Even going through rehab, unless that physical therapist, whoever you’re working with guide you back to the proper movement pattern it’s gonna take, it’s gonna be a long road.

20:16
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It’s a long road. How many of you guys out there, how many of you guys have had something where you’ve been trying to create a new habit? Like this is January. This is when everybody tries to create a new habit, right?

How many of you were like, I’m going to give up this dry January. We’re going to give up sugar sweets and alcohol and bread and all that stuff for all of January. I know a lot of people that do it, but what you’re doing is you’re trying to give yourself 30 days and hoping that you’ll be able to withdraw yourself so much.

The funny thing is about that is everybody. I can’t say everybody. A lot of people that do it are just waiting for February 1st to come around so that they can start it, all that stuff again, because they’re so attached to the emotion behind what they’re doing, the drinking, the eating, the socializing with sweets.

21:11
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Oh.

Changing Habits Is All About Mindset

21:13
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
My God, cookies and all that stuff at night, it’s more of the habit that you are doing to get yourself into that space.

It’s really about that mindset, setting yourself up for what do am I supposed to feel like in perfect movement? What am I supposed to feel like when my posture is correct?

What is my body supposed to be feeling like when I’m out of pain? I will say something that people tend to get upset with me about is that if you’re not getting out of pain, there’s something that you’re attached to on that aside of being in pain.

You get to ask yourself, why do I want to stay in pain? Because truthfully, there’s nothing good for you on that side, except for you get to be right. That you’re always in pain and you get to be in a bad mood and people aren’t treating you.

22:05
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right. Nobody understands you and you’re emotionally attached to it. There’s a lot of that.

You need to start asking yourself where’s the emotional tie to why I’m still in pain and that’s super confronting and super triggering for a lot of people.

We’ve found a lot of times when people don’t want to get better, that’s what they’re still attached to as well. So at least I have,

22:30
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Well, it’s really because you don’t want to say is that as an excuse, that as an excuse, why they’re not getting better, but if they’re really truly doing the work and they put all the time in and they’re still not getting better, that’s when it’s time to investigate, okay, what’s further going wrong.

That might not be, it might not be there. If they’ve had all the tests on, they’ve seen all the doctors and they’re still not getting better. There’s something that are tied to.

22:49
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah, it’s an, it becomes emotional. We’ve found that a lot of people who were still in pain after a while, it’s something deep in their emotions. It’s so deep that they don’t even know about it.

Yeah. Don’t know about Americans, but Irish people love to have something to complain about. So to Americans, we all do. I think that’s just people in general that we, because otherwise, what will we have a conversation about?

If we didn’t spend a lot of time complaining, it’s like commiserating, right? I tell you about my pain. You tell me about yours. I tell you about this pain over here. You tell me, it becomes like this contest of.

23:29
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Who’s in government.

23:30
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Of course, why not? Anyhow. I hope that I hope this triggered you. I hope this got you upset. I hope that you’re like these people don’t know what they’re talking about.

Later down the line, you start thinking about your pain and really what it’s tied to. You get to take a look at what’s happening because pain, the body doesn’t like being in pain. It does a lot of stuff to try and get rid of the pain.

So if you’re still there, why? So something is failing you. This is about you get to chance to create a habit for you. This is about you taking control of your life, both mentally and emotionally and physically, because remember change happens, not just cerebrally, but somatically and experientially.

You have to be able to have a combination of all three to make things stick.

24:25
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Absolutely. The first step in my opinion is deciding it’s time to change.

24:31
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
That’s always, We really somatically experienced actually is doing the work. Think it, feel it, do the work to make it stick.

24:41
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
What would it be like not being in pain. How would that be? How would that show up for you?

24:45
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
How would that be.

24:46
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Something you can’t even handle now? You don’t even know what to do because you are not in pain anymore.

24:50
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. Hopefully you guys, this gives you something to think about. This gives you something to feel and hopefully you’re going to do something about it.

The Most Important Thing Is To Do Something

The biggest thing is to do something about it. Decide that’s a big way. Hey, I hope you guys enjoyed it. I want you guys share this video with somebody who may need to hear it.

Cause there’s a lot of people who are just, you don’t even want to talk to them anymore because you’re tired of hearing about their pain. Send this over to them. We’ll, we’ll talk to them about their pain.

Next week, we’re going to talk to you about different types of injuries that come in here and different types of scenarios that we.

25:30
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
See stories.

25:31
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Fireside chats next week. Look for us on green screen. You’re going to see a lot of really cool stuff for us coming, hopefully in the really near future.

And it’s already started coming. If there’s anything that you guys want to hear from us, want us to look up, want us to talk about, please send us, send it to us, give us some comments.

We’d love to have to hear it. So I am on that note. I hope you guys have a fantastic rest of your Wednesday and we’ll see you next week. Bye.

Hormones And Soft Tissue With Dr. Brook Leverone

Thu, 19 May 2022 17:40:00 GMT

Hormones And Soft Tissue With Dr. Brook Leverone

00:00
We’re a little squished in here today, but it’s okay. We all love each other. We’ve all been around each other a lot. So we’re good.

Today you guys, we are talking hormones and soft tissue. Exciting, exciting. And we have a special guest. I know, right? Dr. Brooke Leverone is a hormone specialist. She has been around protocol family for a long time now, and we love her to death.

She is the one who knows everything about anything, about everything, about anything. She really is, and I love her glasses. I’m going to steal them at some point.

We are talking again, we’re talking soft tissue and hormones and how hormones affect soft tissue. Because as Mark says, hi, Dr. Brooke coming all the way from Ireland.

01:10
Across the pond. Got interesting speakers. Look, what we’re doing today is that we talk a lot here about injury. We talk a lot here about soft tissue. We talk a lot about patterning and compensatory patterning, and we thought about what was really interesting.

Oh, Martez Smith says she is so excited to see. We talk about a ton of different patterning and injuries, but what we fail to see a lot of times is that the inside changes the outside.

Yes. People think about the inside, they think about nutrition and what you put in your mouth. We find that a lot of people, especially in January, are busting their tails to work out, change their world, change their nutrition, and are still having a really hard time with it, right?

Because it might not necessarily be what you’re putting in your mouth, but what’s going on with your hormones and your hormone imbalance.

02:06
We want you to talk to us about hormones. Like really what are hormones? Because people have this misunderstanding that it’s, they don’t really know what it is.

They’ve just been told. It must be your hormones or your hormonal, or you’re getting older, or your hormones are changing. But what does that mean?

02:25
Yes. Yeah. So what are hormones? I think that, especially for women, this can be hard because our hormones are more complicated and in traditional medicine, it isn’t really addressed.

Hopefully I can clear some of that up today. We have, of course we have multiple different hormones. A lot of times we think of hormones is testosterone for men, estrogen for women.

There’s also progesterone as we both have all of those. Men and women both have estrogen and testosterone, right? There’s also the adrenal glands, which is our fight or flight, which helps us with stress management and our thyroid gland, which produces thyroid hormone, which is the pacemaker of the body. Of course, insulin for blood sugar.

All of those hormones come together kind of on a wheel. I like to think that dictates the ebb and flow of the body and the balance of each of these hormones together is really important.

03:19
If something comes out of balance on that wheel, the whole wheel is gonna fall apart. That may be your reproductive hormones or your adrenal hormones, or your thyroid, or a combination there.

Of course, there’s the reproductive hormones that are really important for reproduction sex drive and the reproductive hormones also have a huge impact on our musculoskeletal health as well too. No.

03:41
How does that work?

As far as we have certain things that we are given right in genetically, and then there’s a way where if they are out of balance, I think a lot of people think like men are supposed to have a lot of testosterone and women are supposed to have a lot of estrogen, but there is that balance.

As we age, how do things change? If it doesn’t change just with age, or does it change with how hard we’re working and if we’re working out so hard that we’re not really paying attention to our body, can the hormone shift and, and get off track from.

When Diet Changes And More Sleep Don’t Help

04:13
My personal example of this same ratio, this is how I actually started with Brook. I think it’s about how we really got started as I was hard charging here all the time, going back and forth to LA back in here.

I’ve been able to keep up a hectic pace of traveling all of a sudden I couldn’t. And I tried changing my diet. I tried getting more sleep, but I was just ragging everywhere. Rook noticed this and it was like, okay, let’s just get a blood panel done. Let’s check it out and fed out.

Most of my stuff looked okay, except Doritos were shocked. They were gone. And, and I’m like, okay. We happened to look over that little, a testosterone thing. I was always thinking, oh, I’m good. No, I had dropped significantly.

I’m like, okay, how do we change that? We started on a program and I started changing it, trying to do it without doing too many alterations and with the test or I was wrong.

05:00
Cause I’m trying not to have testosterone injections. I’m trying to avoid that if I can. We know we took another blood test and noticed it actually dropped even further.

We’re taking it another route, another approach, which I feel so far, that’s making a change. We’re going to do another blood test pretty soon just to make sure we’re going up.

That’s how I, but really it was the needles being shot. Yes.

05:19
What was interesting too for you is that after you got that first result, you pushed yourself even harder in the gym thinking, oh, I’m just going to go out more and get those levels up.

And it ended up backfiring. Really important, point to your, to your situation with what’s going on there, which made me lose, of course what the original question was. But were talking about.

05:43
How, like, Can you push yourself hard to really yet drop your hormones? Cause, cause people hear about adrenal fatigue and adrenal. Like I was the same way.

I, my adrenals were, my stress levels were like up here being a small business owner, being older, I’m turning out to turn 50 this year. Things are changing at the time for me. It isn’t always push harder and push more.

That’s, I think a big misconception is that it’s not always how hard you’re pushing and it, sometimes you get to trust your body, that it knows what it’s doing and it’s changing for you specifically to help you. Right?

06:20
Yeah. A couple of things can happen there. Over time, we live in kind of a crazy stressful world, especially obviously the last year and few months.

For most of us normal humans over here, we’ve had some stressful times and in the world that we live in, know that the phone’s going, the emails going, that you’re stuck in traffic, the kids, the work, all these things, Facebook lives.

All of this stress over time can really start to impact us. Some people genetically are more prone to issues with adrenal fatigue than others. Some people can push, push for longer periods of time before it breaks down.

When and when, and if the adrenals start to decline and function, which they just do over time, chronic stress, that impacts that whole wheel I was talking about earlier.

07:10
Exactly.

07:11
That can throw your hormones off and that can affect your performance in your energy levels and your muscle mass. As we age, of course, we go through natural menopause, women and men also go through andropause, sorry, but it does happen.

This is a natural progression of there’s the human nature where our hormones start to naturally decline. Like, what I always like to tell people is, a hundred, 200 years ago, we popped out five kids fought some Moore’s and were dead by 50.

So it didn’t really matter. Right? Now we’re living a whole other lifetime. It’s like mother nature. Hasn’t caught up, gotten the memo yet that we have more life to live and give after the chain, if you will.

What happens is with the decline in those hormones, we just don’t have the vitality that we used to and those hormones directly impact your muscle health.

07:59
With the decline in hormones over age, with the effects of either adrenals, both of those things can happen independently or together with each other to affect how we feel physically in our performance as we’re doing our fitness routines.

08:11
Right.

That brings up a good point because I think a lot of us, I know we get a lot of clients who come in here, we talk nutrition, we talk health, both physical health and emotional health and hormonal health, which we always throw out to other people because that’s your specialty.

Right? At the same time, people assume that they just need to take more testosterone to get more, to get bigger, bigger muscles. They get to take vitamin K because that was the big thing that was a big topic.

Or they get to take whatever it is, magnesium, because they’ve got inflammation. Or now it’s all about drinking collagen and it’s like college and college. What a lot of people have a tendency to go and go onto shows that tell you generalities of things and or Dr. Google. They Google up all of this stuff.

09:04
And, and we tell them like, it’s gotta be specific to you. Right? Like what is a big thing with people Googling or reading up on things that they think that they should take? Like what could possibly go wrong? Yeah.

09:18
Well, yeah. So for one thing, careful with Dr. Google, because he’s a bit of a quick, right? So you’re there.

The problem is there’s so much information out there and there’s a lot of misinformation out there.

I appreciate patients who are trying to be proactive in their health care and go out and try and figure out what can I take? What can I do? Like, what are my options,

09:36
Right. The soaking in it, they’re actually trying to make a difference. Right,

09:38
Right. Yeah, exactly. Which is great.

The challenge is because there’s so much information and misinformation, it’s a really hard to sift through as a lame general layman’s person, which is why people like myself and other functional medicine doctors, this is what we do.

This is what we help to personalize for you, because it could be that, your adrenals are really what the issue is. Maybe you’re just adrenaline tapped and your fatigue, and that’s enabled to be affecting your hormones.

With your adrenals, it could be, is your cortisol too high? Is your cortisol too low? Is it the dopamine? It could also be nutritional status. It could be inflammation. It could be oxidative stress.

It could be a lot of other things that are making you maybe feel like things just aren’t working the way that they should be. You have to be careful with going out there.

10:23
Well, the thing is you may not be hitting the mark, right. If you’re going out there and buying, oh, I heard this is good for me. I heard about B vitamins and deer antler.

All of these things are good for me. So I’m going to take them right. And it may be missing the mark. And then you get frustrated.

You’re not getting any better, maybe even doing more hard.

10:42
Well, and I think what happens is our bodies don’t even, they don’t know how to absorb it.

Like some people just don’t absorb certain things and yeah, some people don’t understand that you actually have to take something that helps. The other thing is actually absorb.

10:54
More synergistic effects.

10:57
I mean, we talk about it a lot in here, Dr. Brooke, I have a question in relation to pain management on the hormonal level, and with adrenal fatigue.

Chronic Pain And The Pain Response

11:08
How does the impact or effect the pain response to chronic and acute pain?

11:12
So really good question. Adrenal fatigue, we, adrenal fatigue is a balance of hormones and neurotransmitters. So we have cortisol DHA.

We also have epinephrine dopamine norepinephrine norepinephrine is the body’s natural anti-inflammatory and pain reliever. Okay. A lot of times when people are adrenally fatigued, they’re actually depleted in norepinephrine as well, too, as part of that picture.

That will directly contribute to being in more pain because you can’t manage the pain and inflammation naturally through your own mechanisms. That’s part of nor epinephrine’s job.

The other piece too, is that without estrogen and testosterone, depending on the patient, then that are balanced, that also affects the integrity of the muscles and the musculoskeletal system.

As that declines, that will also contribute to pain because we’re losing integrity of that system.

11:59
Okay, cool. And that’s a great question. Yeah. Good.

12:02
Question. Really good question.

12:03
That pushes me into the inflammation side. We talk about inflammation all the time, because we talk inflammation all the time, right?

You hurt yourself, your body gets inflamed, your muscles, your soft tissue gets inflamed. What about this inflammation that we are hearing on the inside?

Because people don’t understand that inflammation on the inside and inflammation on the outside two very different things potentially.

12:24
Right.

12:24
So how does that work? What exactly are we talking about when we’re talking inflammation?

12:29
Yeah. So inflammation, we actually need inflammation. Inflammation is a normal part of our physiology.

When we injured ourselves sprained or broken something, or we have a cold or flu that we’re fighting, the inflammation is the immune system’s response to coming in and removing the virus or bacteria, repairing the tissue.

As a result, you get redness, swelling, heat, maybe some mucus or post discharge. Right? All of that is a side effect of the collateral damage of other tissues in the area, from the inflammatory process, which is necessary to heal the injury, fight the cold. But if you’re having that process.

That process is done, you’re over the cold and things healed, then it’s over and it’s fine.

If you’re having it where you’re having inappropriate inflammatory responses go on underlying all the time, then you’re going to have unwanted tissue damage on a regular basis. This is why we want to control inflammation.

13:26
Inflammation often can come from, there can be some genetic variances and other reasons for it. I always look at your diet and the gut first, because you could potentially be eating foods that you’re sensitive to, that you don’t realize.

I mean, and I’ve had people come back allergic to blueberries and broccoli. It’s not just the gluten and the dairy that we all think about, but there could be things that you’re sensitive to, which can change over time.

13:46
Changes like you can be, you can have like no a dairy issue, no dairy problems when you’re younger. As you age, all of a sudden you become lactose-intolerant.

13:56
Lactose intolerant and being sensitive to the dairy proteins are actually slightly different. Okay. I’ll, won’t go into the details. I just wanted to point that out because a lot of people say I’m lactose intolerant.

I’m like, well, that doesn’t mean you can take lactate and be okay. You’re sensitive to the dairy. You shouldn’t be eating the dairy proteins at all. Anyway, I digress.

The food sensitivities, if you’re eating foods that you’re sensitive, that you don’t realize that you are, they’re going to be creating some inflammatory response and triggering a general immune reaction.

Now the body’s running around going, what am I supposed to be fighting here? Also if you have imbalances in the microbiome, which that could be a whole talk, right?

The microbiome, which is our healthy bacteria that helps to control the immune system as well as other factors. That will have an impact on inflammation.

14:37
So there’s imbalances there.

That’s where I always look for patients. We want to mitigate the inflammatory response because when you have that unwanted inflammation, would that tissue damage that can occur, you’re going to get that’s the basis of all disease processes.

That’s what we’re trying to avoid, of course. That can make that can degrade muscle health. I can help that can prevent you from losing weight that can prevent you from gaining muscle and those chronic injuries and that chronic pain that the gentleman was just asking us about can be made worse as well through chronic inflammation.

15:07
Yeah. If you’re all of a sudden, you’re starting a program you’re starting to work out differently, you’re eating differently.

You’re going off of whatever diet is like the big diet in the moment. Like a lot of people are nothing against keto, nothing against paleo, nothing is, but if it might not be for you, right.

It might not be something that is actually helpful for you in order to, you’re seeing somebody else’s affects and trying to create your own effects via whatever their reaction is to it. Right.

You’re seeing somebody who’s gained all this muscle. Who’s only eating like meat and that’s all they’re doing is the carnivore diet. That’s all they’re eating is meat and it might be for you or it might.

15:49
We, how would we, what would be some of the symptoms or signs that we might see if all of a sudden something isn’t going right for us besides just like,

15:59
That was kind of challenging because I feel like it’s like the slow build where you kind of don’t notice it. This is a terrible analogy. Do you guys know about the frog and the boiling?

T he Frog And The Boiling Water

16:10
I use it all the.

16:10
Time. Okay. Yeah. The frog and the boy, if you throw a frog in a pot of boiling water, it’s going to freak out and jump out. If you put a frog in water and slowly turn the heat up, it’s not going to notice.

Yeah. So that’s kind of what happened. So it’s kind of hard to tell. This is why I actually like to do detoxes and cleanses once or twice a year because it allows you to step back and reset and go, okay, am I actually feeling as best as I could?

What might be impacting me right now? Because if you’re eating something or doing something on a regular basis, and it’s starting to degrade your health over time, it’s a slow build and you don’t really notice.

The challenge too is in our society is we normalize so many abnormal symptoms like, oh, headache, just take an Advil.

16:45
Oh, DMS, just take my dog. Oh, upset, Tommy, just take some Pepto-Bismol right. These things are all made normal. You just take these things over the counter and it’s fine. Right?

A lot of times we don’t realize when the things come on, but in, and so that’s why I like to have people do an elimination diet, of detox so they can reset and step back and see what’s actually going on.

In general, we’re looking at things like fatigue, headaches, brain fog, changes in digestion, maybe more allergy symptoms, itchy skin, more joint pain.

I find that people who are struggling with musculoskeletal issues who have chronic back pain or shoulder pain or anything like that, if you’re struggling with some of those chronic injuries and the chronic pain, most likely you need to cut down on whatever inflammation is going on in your body to get a, really get a hold of it.

17:28
Yeah. It’s so we, a lot of times what we’ll say here is your pain is your ally and not your enemy, right?

17:34
Yeah. That’s such a good.

17:35
Analogy there. The pain is telling you something. If you’re having symptoms that are coming up that are a little off kilter that are off center, that you’re just like, Ooh, it’s really it’s for you. Your body’s really here to here.

17:50
Yeah. It’s like, if you have heartburn, it’s not your Pepcid AC deficient it’s your digestion is telling you, Hey, I don’t like what you just put in me or I’m I need some help processing what’s happening here.

So, listen to what your body is telling you. That’s the biggest tool that you can gain is understanding that feedback from your body to know that it’s trying to guide you in the right direction.

18:11
Yeah. One of the first steps that we always say is you get to connect with your body because we are very disconnected as a society. We’re here about taking all this stuff on the outside in hopes that it’ll make us better on the.

18:23
Inside.

18:24
It’s just like, and that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to get you on here is not because you’re just out in of information. When we talked to her, literally we hold her up for hours in here where we’re.

18:34
Just like, I’m going to do my workout. And she’s here.

18:36
For hours because we’re going to talk to her all the time. A lot of what we’re doing and what we’re doing is we try to, we want somebody else to make us better. It’s really about you making you better.

As far as soft tissue, in order to create, increase your soft tissue or increase your muscle tissue, sorry, increase your muscle tissue to build more muscle tissue or to work with what you’re having.

You have to first understand what’s working and stop reaching out for any and every other thing other than,

19:08
Yeah, because yeah, it could be that you’re, adrenally fatigued. It could be that you’re having hormone fluctuations.

It could be that you’re having oxidative stress and inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction and nutritional deficiencies as well too, because a lot of times, we’re on restrictive diets, you may be nutritionally deficient, or if your digestion is not working as well, you could not be absorbing the food as well.

There are lots of elements that contribute to the way you feel. I think it’s important for people to understand these elements as we are talking so that you can understand, it’s not, you can’t just go out there and be like, I’m going to take this or this and this, and it’s going to get better.

And it may, band-aid it. You may be like, Ooh, I for.

19:44
A hot.

19:45
Second. Yeah. But then it’s.

19:46
Like, pre-workout, she looked at me when she said that.

19:51
Or the long-term, you’re not, you’re missing the mark. You could be missing the mark and potentially doing some challenges. Right.

19:57
Well, it is something like people will. If you find yourself more sensitive to inflammatory pain, there’s a specific do’s or don’ts when it comes to diet to affect your form on all levels.

20:10
Is that, was that a question or? Yes. Okay. So is there a,

The Dos and Don’ts of Diet And Hormones

20:15
Are there specific do’s or don’ts when it comes to diet to affect your hormone levels when you’re, if you’re sensitive to inflammatory pain.

20:24
Yes. What it sounds like is that you have a chronic pain issue and that there’s an inflammatory process that triggers the pain.

If I’m understanding that correctly, and how is that related to diet and what can you do about it? Typically my patients who are in chronic pain and maybe they have an auto-immune issue, or maybe there’s something else going on, there’s the anti-inflammatory diet and that’s something you can easily Google there’s cookbooks and other books about the anti-inflammatory diet.

I liked the paleo anti-inflammatory and there’s a cookbook called the practical paleo. It’s a whole paleo cookbook. And there’s a section on inflammation specifically. It’s by Diane Sanfilippo or did she write the other one?

I’m pretty sure it’s her. Anyway, the practical paleo, that’s a good resource for you, but it’s the anti-inflammatory diet, which takes away your sugar, your processed food, your packaged foods, your trans fats, your fried foods, food colorings, preservatives, you’re focusing on whole fruits and vegetables, lean proteins.

21:19
You’re minimizing corn, dairy eggs, gluten, because those soy, because those are the known triggers as well too. That’s the general recommendation dietary wise that I tell people to start with.

21:32
That’s a good one. That’s really good.

21:33
Yeah. I mean, it works. I mean, that’s kind of what I was talking about really about going back and resetting, doing an elimination diet detox, which is basically anti-inflammation.

21:40
Because you then discovered through that process, what might be the actual food.

21:43
Triggers?

Trigger Foods

21:43
Yes, exactly. If somebody does the anti-inflammatory diet and you do it for, I recommend at least three weeks, it could end up being a lifestyle as well, too, depending on your situation.

After three weeks, you can start testing to see if there’s a food that triggers you. You do this by testing one food at a time. So say you’re going to test eggs. So Monday’s day one.

I’m going to eat as many eggs as I can stomach, so to speak. Maybe some scrambled eggs for breakfast, maybe a hard-boiled egg on your salad at lunch, maybe, more scrambled eggs or whatever for dinner, you don’t want to mix any other foods that you’ve been limiting at that time.

You just want to test the eggs and then see how you feel. And then wait two days. If by the end of Wednesday, which is day three, you’re like, I don’t feel any different.

22:26
I’m just, my energy is still good. Then great eggs are fine. Keep eating eggs, test the next food item.

If, of course, you eat the eggs in the morning and you instantly feel sick. You don’t have to keep going right. Lunch and dinner, by the way. Yeah.

You just keep doing that for the next food and the next food to the next food.

You can test whatever foods you want. I always tell people, so the top one is the eggs, dairy corn, gluten, and soy. Garlic can sometimes be an issue.

If you have joint pain, night shades can be an issue, which is, your tomatoes and your hot peppers and your eggplant.

You might want to consider cutting those out at, during the elimination and anti-inflammatory and testing those as well, too, or any food that you love and eat a ton of like, if you like, I live on everything Hashi.

Are there any withdrawal symptoms that come from the anti-inflammatory diet?

23:23
There can be two reasons. One is your body, especially if it’s a food that you’re immune to, there’s this feedback mechanism in the brain that you end up becoming addicted to this food. That’s actually not good for you. So when you take that chocolate cookies,

23:41
Do you buck,

23:42
When you take that food away, you can essentially have withdrawal symptoms. Secondly, when you’re taking away inflammatory foods out of the diet, it’s giving your body a bit of a break and so it can end up going, okay.

Now I can actually get rid of some toxins and can move some things out if I want to. You may be detoxing as well, too. You can have things like fatigue, maybe a headache, maybe some brain fog they’re temporary. And these are good things.

This is your body saying, oh God, I’m currently taking out the trash. You know? So these are good things. When you get to the other side, it’s totally worth it. I.

24:17
Probably unusual. Great question.

24:21
So just so listen. One of the things that I love, love about talking to Dr. LeBron, is that what you’re hearing her say right now? She breaks it down to that simple.

Like, I think what happens with a lot of people is we hear all these big words, like oxidative stress. What is that? What is collagen? And really, what is that bone broth? I don’t even know what that is.

What is, like mitochondrial function, what is mitochondrial function? And, and we get intimidated because we don’t have any idea what actually is. We tend to push away from all of that instead of leaning in.

The one thing I will say with this one, especially she breaks it down into like real people talk so that when you walk away, you have an understanding of actually what your body is supposed to do and what it’s supposed to work and how it’s not.

25:16
Like takes really, the one thing I love about people when they’re educating is when they educate from a space of speaking to the person’s listening.

They’re not an intimidating force because I think people will speak in big words because they think it’s what they want to hear that year. It’s like, I don’t understand what that means.

Tell me, do I need to eat more kidney beans? Do I need to eat more red meat? Do I need to eat more asparagus? What’s up. So awesome. Thank you so much for that. I just wanted to give her props for that because she’s so good at that.

25:48
I did want to tag onto that real quick, because I also find that those big words are what people can sometimes gravitate to and then get suckered into like a sales pitch, because they’re like, Ooh, mitochondrial function and oxidative stress.

This supplement is going to fix all that when you don’t really understand what that means, but it sounds cool. Right? So basically it’s inflammation.

26:07
I want to real quick before we end our awesome tissue talk today, and I’m so excited for you guys that you got to join in. What about people who say that they don’t need supplements because they can get it through their food?

26:19
Oh yeah. I wish that was true. I really do.

Eat Your Veggies For Hormone Balance

Here’s the deal is that we need, ideally, if we lived in a world where we could eat all of our seven servings of fruits and vegetables every day, and that were getting quality produce that provided those nutrients, maybe we could get enough.

The other side of that equation that I think is most important is the demand on our body is much higher than really it was intended for our stress levels. Our performance demands that happen every day, we are burning through our nutrients like crazy.

In order to keep up with the demands of the world that we’re in, we just need supplements so that we can maintain, we need those extra nutrients so that we can perform in the level that’s expected in our modern society.

Also have the quality of life that we want to have now that we’re aging past 50.

27:08
Right? These nutrients, I always think of nutrients as the workers in the factory, on the assembly line, they are what help keeps things going.

More workers you have on the assembly line, the more productivity that you’re going to have. I always like boosting people’s levels up because you just, you feel a bit better.

You have more productivity and it’s, you just really, aren’t getting enough from the food to keep up with the demand that’s on our bodies.

27:30
The same thing though, you also don’t want just a whole ton of new workers in there, just working away that you don’t need.

You can have a whole bunch of workers doing all over here. That’s too much and not enough here. So it’s really knowing.

27:42
Which one. Yeah. Don’t just go and take a bunch of vitamin design. You do want it.

You want to get the right form. You want to make sure that you’re getting what’s appropriate for you.

You don’t want to be taking too much of one thing, cause that can be an issue as well, too.

27:54
One more question. If you were training, if you are a training, are there certain hormonal levels that are specific to your body type? Like mesomorph endomorph.

28:17
So, at the end of the day, the answer is balance. I mean, I know that’s not probably as specific as you would like, but it’s about, as far as the levels are concerned, it’s always about balance.

It’s about, there are certain ratios that we look for in certain windows that we look for with both the adrenals and the estrogen and the testosterones and the thyroids.

The appropriate balance is always what we’re looking for when it comes to managing hormone health and that will directly affect your fitness and performance levels. Yeah.

28:49
At the end of it all, basically as we get older, we’re able to put on muscle mass or soft tissue handle our, it runs as efficiently as it possibly, I believe can through a specific age range up until about what twenties and thirties. Yeah.

29:06
That’s probably a good, yeah, we do things start to shift after 30 and women peri-menopause literally can start as early as 35 and our growth hormone.

I haven’t gotten to you yet. Don’t worry. Our growth, our growth hormones naturally, we’re meant to reproduce and then kind of not reproduce our growth hormones naturally started to decline around 30 things, start to shift there.

Of course the big change can happen, which also happens for men too. Adrenal stress can exacerbate that for people as well, too. At what point that decline happens and how much of the decline occurs can vary from person to person based on.

29:43
You’re not going to be holding as much muscle mass as you did when you were younger. It’s something that doesn’t mean that you’re going to lose it completely. It means you just have to adapt and change with your body.

29:55
We’re about 30.

We lose on average about five pounds of muscle mass per year, if we don’t maintain it.

That has been shown in research with the decline in hormones. When we hit menopause enterprise, that’s been shown in reefers to be in research, to be exacerbated. We directly lose muscle mass.

That’s because we have hormone receptors on all of our muscle cells that allow for the hormones to stimulate growth and remodeling. For building and tone, and without that, we aren’t going to be able to achieve those results. Yeah.

30:22
Yeah. There are certain things that we can do, and there’s certain things that are just naturally going to change with us, but it doesn’t mean that we have to give up everything just started eating chocolate for the rest of our lives.

30:35
Well together, nutritional hormonal supplementation can keep things moving fairly well so that you aren’t completely falling apart and wasting. Okay,

30:44
You guys, we want to say thank you so much to Dr. Leverone over here. She’s amazing. If you guys have any questions, feel free. She will be online.

We’re tagging her. She’ll be able to answer some stuff for you, please. If for whatever reason it’s not Brook, let somebody help you because you can’t do it on your own. You want experts in their field.

31:09
All together.

31:10
We’re all about trying to educate and help you as much as possible. Thank you so much for joining us today and we will see you guys next week.

Finding The “Why” Of Your Injury

Thu, 19 May 2022 17:39:00 GMT

Finding The “Why” Of Your Injury

00:54
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Okay. Today we’re actually going to, hi Laurie. Welcome today. We’re actually going to talk about finding your why.

It sounds really random as far as the tissue and soft tissue, but let me explain what I’m thinking about this. So, we have a lot of people who come into this clinic. I don’t know if you guys know, but we always seem to get people who have gone everywhere and tried everything to get better.

They’ve everybody that they’ve tried, nothing seems to work. We’re the end of the road for a lot of people where they jump on and they’re just like, I have to figure this out. I don’t, I don’t actually know what’s happening, but I’m hurting.

Why Are You In Pain?

01:51
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
What made me think of this topic is we had a client come in the other day and he’s got a back injury and he’s had it for a couple of years, but the back injury is actually not what he came in for.

He came in for something completely different, like completely different. The way that we work here is we kind of, we back everything up and kind of go through foundations and we work everything through and we line everything about balance set up and blah, blah.

02:15
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Everybody gets an assessment depending on what they’re coming in for just like it’s mailbox. Well, let’s make sure. We look at the whole body first and then we’ll zero in on what it is.

02:24
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right? In, and I’m really blessed because I’ve, we’ve created this place in here with really comprehensive in all of its inter into its disciplines.

Let’s say that. I have so many different people that come here, all these different colleagues, and then we have so many people that we can talk to about different things. So I was actually chatting.

02:45
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Around the world,

02:46
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right? I was chatting on the phone because this person, when people come in with stuff, it really bothers us to a point where we really, we can’t get it out of our head until we get them better.

02:57
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
It bothers us in a good.

02:58
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Way, in a good way, or so I, it’s a difficult case and I’ve been processing it and processing it through all these different situations that I can do.

I have a colleague in Ireland that I actually was talking to and I shot him out a, a question, and I said, I needed help on this.

03:15
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Market. Someone else,

03:16
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It was a different person in Ireland. It basically what he was doing is he was talking me through it, but he asked me this question, which is interesting.

Cause we ask it of you guys all the time, but I didn’t even think about it. He goes, well, why did he get the hip replacement? Like why? Because I mean, it’s a long story, but he ended up with a hip replacement a while ago that proceeded something potentially.

It came at a very, it was very unrelated. And I thought, well, we’ve asked that. I, then I thought it really stuck, struck me. It stuck with me of like, why did he have the hip replacement in the first place?

I never asked him what led to that actually happening. We pride ourselves on asking a lot of why questions here. We ask a ton of questions, right?

04:09
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
In order to create permanent change, both here in and out of the body, we really need to go digging to find the why.

And, and in that, it’s not us asking the question, it’s you? So it really got me thinking about,

04:26
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Well, what do you mean by that?

Because it’s really, we can ask the question, but you’re the one that has to dive deep and figure out what it is. It’s not just this is not because of anything else.

Well, let’s make sure about that. It takes the person going in.

04:39
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Well, in this case, his why actually led us to a completely different pattern that helped us in his treatment.

Right? It was, it was something that he didn’t think of that we didn’t actually think of. It helped him to get a better understanding of that.

His injury didn’t just happen to him. He actually created the injury that happened to him. Does that make sense? It sounds so counterintuitive.

05:08
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. I mean, it wasn’t a car accident. It wasn’t a major, fall off a three story building, whatever it was, he did something that’s set up a pattern which led to.

Nobody consciously goes out to injure themselves.

Like nobody walks out in the middle of the day. Like I’d like to hurt myself. We hear it all the time. We hear it all the time. When people come into the clinic and swear that their back just went out, my back, just went out. I wasn’t doing anything. My knee just went out.

I wasn’t doing anything, oh, I wasn’t doing anything. All of a sudden I felt all this pain right here, or I literally woke up and I’m like, oh, I must have slipped wrong. Okay. Chances are that didn’t happen that way.

Your, why has actually everything to do with that? Finding your why has also been a huge topic just this year in 2020, right? Because everybody it’s very introspective.

Like everybody’s had to sit down and actually come to terms with not working, being around family more than they needed to being around different things and all sorts of different.

06:14
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Many people have had a complete disruption of their life, of what their life was going. Right.

There’s others that are like nurses and those, they just, they had a hard charged exactly what they’ve been doing even more so, but there a lot of us who got a moment to pause, right.

In that moment we can stop and really take account, take a full stock of what we’ve been doing, how we’ve been doing it and can we change and make a better.

06:35
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. And so such a good point. Really what that means you guys is that in order to create change in your body, we get to be introspective.

We get to take accountability for our body. And, and that were actually probably a big part of the reason why we’re injured.

06:52
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
This goes way back when you were just a kid, especially if you played sports or whatever.

You had that coach that had thought he was a personal trainer and knew everything. We all had that. We both had that and they didn’t know what they were doing.

No, there may have been some that did most,

07:08
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Or they knew only to what they know, what ? Right. It’s like, you don’t know what you don’t know and what but let’s take a look at the why.

Tonight, today is all about the Y comes out the end of the alphabet. There’s a lot of stuff that precludes the Y is the end of the alphabet, right. It’s right before Z and Z Zed. And that is it over and done.

We get to figure out what that Y is. It comes to the body and soft tissue, what actually happens, right? At first let’s talk about anatomical position, right? Anatomical position is where the body is at its most relaxed state, right?

It’s everything is in the proper alignment. And so we’re parallel. Everything is aligned, everything’s working. The body is formed with muscles, joints, nerves, all set up in this really cool infrastructure that it’s supposed to work when it’s in the right alignment, correct.

08:08
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It moves best within those positions. What I mean by that is if your shoulder is sitting back where it’s supposed to be, then you have full range of motion all over the place, and you have ease of motion.

If your shoulder is out of position, then your range of motion is limited. You start tugging and pulling on things that you probably shouldn’t be talking and pulling on. Right?

Because the body is really built for movement with that comes that bad posture or bad position.

08:42
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
And it is bad.

08:43
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It’s bad. I’m not going to, I mean, yes, correct. But it’s, it’s bad. Let’s say we sit too much, right? We have uneven weight distribution, right?

Let’s say we’re standing one side more than the other. We stand into one leg. We, we sit into one side more than the other. We sit forward, we drop our head forward, uneven weight distribution, which means the way it isn’t, it’s not, we’re not, stacked is a bad game of Jenga is basically what we are.

Right. That in also pulls it into overuse patterning. Anytime you’re doing the same thing over and over and over the muscles, you’re asking the muscles to work in the same pattern over and over again.

You develop a dormant side and a dominant side. These dominant muscle groups get a lot of attention in the dormant ones. Don’t get any attention at all, then not leads to imbalance and uneven weight distribution.

09:41
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right. Soft tissue at that point gets pulled in different directions than it was meant to go. Right? The, so now my soft tissue is I’m sitting like this all the time.

The soft tissue is being pulled, which I mean by soft tissue is tendons, muscles, ligaments, joints, cartilage, everything. It’s the, anything that isn’t bone is basically what I’m saying. It pulls more than it was meant to.

There become stress into that area because now one side’s being attentive and the other side’s not getting any attention. The joints follow because muscle pulls bone. Anytime that there’s any irregularity where it’s pulling from one side more than the other, it’s going to change the way that the joint loads.

From there’s stress on the bone. That’s where you get all of the osteoarthritis and the different joint deformities and yeah. All of the different poles and yanks that are on the bone because remodeling starts to happen.

10:44
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
If you guys remember anytime you’re getting a lot of attention one side that the body is putting stuff into that side, it’s, it’s modeling it’s like, yeah. It’s like, it’s like a strong beam.

So you’re building your own foundation. You’re only building and one side, all the construction’s just happening over there. They’re pulling it from the other side so that we can make sure that we’re stronger in the area that it sees the most movement. If that makes sense.

Hopefully it does. There’s with that, you have a ton of strength and output changes. Now where you used to be really strong here, now you’re strong just to one side. Now you’re strong one side, but you’re not really strong on the other. Yeah.

The weaknesses become more pronounced on the opposite sides.

11:31
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. And with that, we move subconsciously, right? We’re not thinking like left foot, right foot, left foot, right. Foot left foot.

There’s a blonde joke that talks about the whole left foot and right. Foot thing. But I don’t tell jokes very well. I’m a, I’m a blonde that can’t tell a blonde joke to say my life. We’re just gonna leave that one there.

What that does is we, aren’t thinking about every movement that we make in the world, right? We’re not thinking I’m going to sit in a chair. Now I’m going to get out of the chair.

Now I need to squeeze my glutes to get up out of the chair. In that the body is getting the sensory receptors. It’s having a conversation with your body, right?

Your nerve receptors are having conversations with your brain. Your brain is sending it back to your body, but you’re not privy to the information outright.

12:23
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It’s all very subconscious.

12:24
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
I think the whole point of this is just trying to bring across that you are not, we are all subconsciously doing things that we’re not aware of.

We’re creating patterns in our body from a long time ago that are just progressing through. And ultimately, finally, something’s going to fail. Some of these are going to go wrong and it’s going to show up.

Now it’s my hip, it’s my shoulder or this or that. But it’s not because of one event. It’s something you started a while ago.

12:53
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right? In that, the biggest thing for us is if you start to think about what you’ve been doing in the past, let’s say you come in and you start having an injury, right?

What was I doing in the past week? In the past month? What have I done differently? Have I changed my shoes? Have I been walking different? Have I decided to start running? Have I walked uphill? Have I been walking downhill?

We have to start putting those things back into the why did this happen? Your body doesn’t just break down on you. There’s always a reason. In order for us to move forward in getting us better, we actually have to take personal accountability for what isn’t working for us.

What I mean by that is if you only sit or stand one side all the time, this doesn’t make you wrong because you didn’t know.

13:47
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It really means that we’re trying to go from a discovery to a change pattern. If we can do that, then we become empowered.

Now, instead of standing one side and loading one hip all the time, which gave your back injury to begin with, we can be more cognizant. We can stand in the center of our body or shift our weight back and forth.

So, the body doesn’t get used to doing one thing at a time, right? Really in most cases, when they talk about emotional intelligence, when they talk about a lot of change and like life coaching and moving forward, it’s really, you get to look at the past in order to change your future.

What we’re seeing is in the world of the body, in the world of soft tissue in the world of injury, in order to change the future, we need to look at the past.

14:40
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
This is, this goes for everybody out there. I mean, I’ve come across so many people who are so stubbornly set in their ways and they don’t want to take a look.

I can say, cause I personally am one and that’s something I continue to work on because you’re so set in the way you’re doing it and I’m doing it right.

This is something somebody showed me a long time ago and they’re amazing. Well, are they? And then are you doing it right?

Let’s take a look and it really takes a moment to step back, get out of ego for a minute and see, could I possibly be doing this wrong? And could I do it better?

15:12
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right. And, and ego, when we’re talking about ego within with the whole world of the why the ego is the thing that is keeping you from going to that next level, it’s it is the thing that’s like, I’m not going to change this because I had literally have been doing it all the time.

I did it when I was 20. It worked for me when I was 20. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to work for you when you’re 40, you have to understand that the body does change.

As we age, the body does change as we keep doing the same things over and over again. The biggest thing is the body, as it, the poor guy broke again for scholarly is like he’s falling.

He’s literally falling apart as we speak. Not only that, but the body changes w the big point is what might’ve been a big and popular trend.

16:07
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
The thing to do when you were 20, they have decided that, oh, that doesn’t work. Think about this.

How many times has salt been bad for you? Salt is bad for you. Assaulted. Good for you. Salt is bad for you. Salt is good for you. Every time they come up with a new study, it might be bad.

It might be good, but ultimately you’ve got to figure out what is best for you.

16:25
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Another way. I’ve been thinking about that.

Another way to look at is when you’re 19 20, 25, 27, your disc spaces, joint spaces are help well healthier, but have a lot more play a lot more.

What you’re able to do then is going to dictate how you’re going to be able to move later.

16:41
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
So if you’re,

16:42
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
If you’re a pound in the bench press, and you’re doing all this stuff, and you’re getting big and strongest for guys and women too, and doing all that stuff, you were able to power lift and you all CrossFit and build amazing.

How can you still maintain that when you’re 50?

Finding The Why: What Did You Do When You Were Younger?

16:55
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Not only that, but to that point, like, here’s the, here’s another thing. That the client that were talking about when they came in wasn’t, what have you just done?

It’s like, oh, what did you do when you were younger? Oh, did you fall down a lot? Because, based on where his injury was, did you fall down? Like, no. Well, did you go skiing a lot? No. Did you skateboard? Yes. But you never fell down.

Okay. I fell down. It’s stuff that you really have to you, it’s not that we’re blaming you. It’s like, we’re trying to figure out your pattern. It turns out you did fall down. Oh, and you got into like 15 fights.

At some point somebody kicked, punched you or knocked you out or fell down, or you did this. It might be something from when you were 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, that now as a 40 something or a 30 something or a 50 something, you’re now getting the repercussions on.

17:51
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
This is all about taking a chance to really go in and look back at what may have been the cause of the current situation that you have.

This works in both, like you said, emotionally, physically, mentally, financially, every aspect of your life. As far as soft tissue, it is something that gets forgotten. People think when they hurt themselves, they hurt.

They also really, they think that when they hurt themselves and they get better, then they’re better forever. And it’s like, oh, I hurt myself. In two days I feel a lot better. And is that really true?

Or did it just heal itself in the moment, but it hasn’t healed itself in the big picture because it’s changed everything else that you’ve been doing.

Something that happened to you earlier on could be having a direct influence on something else that you’re experiencing.

It doesn’t even have to be close to where that in-depth original injury happened. Something that happened at your cervical spine when you were 20 and you got hit by a snowboarder, jumped off a jump and landed on your head.

He had a helmet on, say, your helmet cracked in half. Your head took that impact. Your neck took that impact. You’re fine. Cause you were 20 and now you’re 50 and you can’t move your leg for some reason.

It could be a direct correlation to that. It was an old injury that was never addressed properly.

19:07
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. The reason why we’re bringing this up today is because it is a forgotten thing.

People really, they get in a moment of like, I’m hurt now, and this is what it’s got to be.

What we need to do is we need to make sure that you understand that it’s really not about what’s happening currently. Now there are exceptions to this rule. If you get hit by a car, if.

19:27
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Congenital,

19:29
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. If something attacks you, if you get hurt in a game, if you get hurt, if something actually happens and hits you and you break, that’s a chance that was the cause of it was.

19:41
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Even in that, going through the recovery of that injury, now we still get to address that old stuff.

That old pattern is all set in there. Cause we’re trying now to fix this shoulder, but that shoulder won’t completely fix.

Why won’t it be completely fixed when we have old patterns that you’re still stuck with, that we get to address that.

Don’t Let Your Body Lag

19:57
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right? In that finding your why, like were talking about the injury that may come up is something so different than what your original injury was.

The person that came in, fell down and hurt himself a long time ago. Now he’s feeling it in a totally different part of his body, completely unrelated to his original injury. So it’s not necessarily that it’s unrelated.

The big takeaway for today, you guys is we’ve been doing so much introspection and so much thinking and so much figuring out the best for us, hopefully to go to the future, don’t let your body lag.

Don’t let it take the easy route, which means don’t ever let somebody else go and do more of the work you’re willing to do on your own body because you truly hold the key to your health and your happiness.

There’s no questions that we’re going to ask, unless you provide us with the answers that we’re going to be able to get to that next level.

21:01
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right? It’s you doing a lot of the work of the why that will allow you to go to the aha moment of the what?

You can actually take that to the, when I get fixed or when I feel better or that’s going to be the next step.

So it really does. It is all about what happened in the past in order to change your future is where you get to look.

21:27
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
A hundred percent. Yeah,

21:29
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah,

21:29
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. Everybody will get to look at the why, get to figure out why this is continuing.

Continuing Patterns Have A “Why” Behind Them

Especially if it’s a continuing pattern that continues to come up over and over again. Why does my back keep right in that spot? Right back. Just coming up.

21:40
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Well, every time right here. All the time, right. We’re right here. Right here. Okay. Well, when you had a little one, you breastfed every single day like this for like years or at least a year, and now you’ve got this recurring thing that goes on all the time.

Oh, I didn’t even know that because she’s six now or whatever the case is. You still have the same issue going on. There’s so much of that. It’s in your subconscious. So get in.

When you have an injury, go back into what happened in the last week. What happened in the last month? What happened to you when you were younger? What happened in certain areas? Do you do things one way more than the other?

Yes. You’re the reason that you’re my inspiration for this today. We’ll be able to move forward together.

Because you’re doing that, you’re going to help your therapist or whoever your healthcare provider is, move forward to get the best result from whatever it is that we need to do for you.

22:41
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
At here. All we want is for you to be not just better from whatever you came in with, but to be even the best you’ve ever been and to keep striving for more, keep getting better and better.

Like you reached that goal. Find another goal. So now we get the shoulder working. What else can we get to you to better than you?

Why are many evermore promoted back when you’re 19, 20 years old? Get that feeling again? Yeah,

23:03
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Absolutely. Because life doesn’t just get older.

It gets better. If you allow it to, you can be the best you can be every decade and every decade up until the end. It’s just, how much are you willing to work for it? And it does take work.

That’s what it takes, unfortunately. But it does. You, can’t just pretend like it’s all going to be. Okay. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this conversation that we had today. What’s your why?

I’m all about it, please. If you could leave me the comment about what your, why is like, what was your aha takeaway from this today? That would be really exciting for me to read and to find out.

Also, if you have somebody who hasn’t been able to figure out what their injury is, or they keep having the same thing over and over again, pass it along to them, ask them what their why is because really working together is how we make you guys feel so much better.

23:58
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Don’t just ask what’s wrong with you? Yes. I keep asking that about mark and you just, you don’t know yet.

24:04
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
He wrote with what’s wrong with you is not a nice question. What’s your, why is a better question? Okay.

Anyway, I hope you guys had a great one. We will be with you next week and for the last episode of the year, and we hope you’re having a great week until then.

Until then we will see you soon.

Scraping: What Is It, And Should You Do It?

Thu, 19 May 2022 17:39:00 GMT

Scraping: What Is It, And Should You Do It?

00:01
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
To scrape or not to scrape. That is the question. Whether it is nobler to suffer the pain of outrageous techniques. Oh, hi everybody. Welcome to Wednesday tissue talk.

What Is Scraping, or IASTM?

00:23
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
And me. I’m here to I’m nine. He’s not the only one doing techniques. I’m here to dammit. Okay. Today let’s talk scraping. What is scraping?

So what are even we talking about? Like, we don’t even know what scraping is or what, what the heck scraping it is a buzzword. It has been around for a while now, where you’re going to see people walking around with like, not the red cups that the red cup, the red that’s cupping scraping is when they have high Sadie.

When they have really strong scratches and it looks like they’d been attacked by a bear and somebody had been scratching them up and down their legs, their arms, their back.

01:08
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Shareable black and blue are just destroyed,

01:10
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Potentially bloody, but light bleeding. All of that scraping is actually what’s known as IASTM. I’m sorry,

01:20
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
What? R.

IASTM, which means instrument assisted soft tissue mobilization.

01:27
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
I followed that. Okay.

01:28
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. It’s a really popular treatment. It’s growing in popularity all over the place for mild fascial restriction.

Now, what myofascial restriction is myofascial is muscle and fascia. Remember fascia is moved in and out of our body all over. It surrounds everything.

All of our little muscle bundles are our fast tickles, which are a little muscle fibers over into the big muscles and all the way through our organs and everything soft tissue,

01:58
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Right. It’s in there. It’s in there.

01:59
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Too. If I pull one area, I’m going to get pulled on from the opposite side, because fascia is everything’s connected.

Muscle fascia can’t have muscle without fascia doesn’t really work that way. It’s a real popular treatment for this kind of restriction. What that kind of restriction is Highmark. My two favorite fans are now online.

Stop talking to one another and actually talk to us this time. Focus, stop mark. Anyway, what this is, is actually it’s. It’s when we use different mobilization techniques and different instruments that are designed to provide an ability to mobilize scar tissue, adhesions, dehydrated tissue, bring blood to the area.

If we have any knots, we have a tendency to use them. You may have heard this from Graston. Graston is a type of technique that uses these scraping tools and they have trademarked the name.

If you hear somebody saying Graston, they have to actually be grasped and certified in order to do it, but let’s talk about, they are not Jade.

03:19
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
They are green plastic.

03:22
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
I do. I actually, I do have a J when I start, we’re going to talk about somebody when I started with John Washoe, which is where it all originated from. Yeah.

03:29
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yes. So soft tissue mobilization. I S T M it is a skilled myofascial intervention and it’s used for soft tissue treatment. It’s based around the principles of James Siri, ax and James Siri ax actually invented cross friction massage.

Now, what is cross friction? Massage? Cross friction massage is if you have muscle fibers that line up like this, remember where our muscle fibers drop in and contract and elongate. So they actually potentially sit this way.

04:01
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
It’s a little more spirally, but we’ll go with it.

04:04
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Okay. That’s actually how they do it, but whatever.

Scraping Can Fix Adhesions

What happens is you get an adhesion or you get tissue that’s kind of stuck, or you get scar tissue and your fibers ended up looking this, what cross friction massage is having somebody, either therapist or using a tool.

What they’re doing is they’re going in and they’re loosening up all of the fibers that are in between. What that does is it allows it to straighten out and then allows us to move it again.

Because if you remember, if we have it like this, our range of motion becomes very limited.

04:39
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
It’s applied. Can’t get in there as well as my we’re in our normal alignment.

04:43
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right? Cross friction massage is an ability for us to go across the fiber, to open it up then to put it back into its natural resting length so that now the body starts to move. Okay. So what about this?

I S TM soft tissue, the scraping, what these are usually applied using instruments that are made of either stainless steel, plastic. I know people who’ve used spoons, bottle caps, you name it.

It’s usually made of stainless steel or are good plastic with beveled edges. The reason why it contours the body parts that we are using. We can actually get in and go into the area and not be stuck with just a square piece of plastic.

That will allow for deeper penetration into these areas. Now, the reason why these were invented cross friction massage is usually used by manual therapists using their own fingers, elbows, Sophos, and their tools of their own body.

05:53
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
These are used because sometimes the scar tissue and or the adherent tissue is deeper into the body and into the lower layers.

What this does is this allows therapist, the practitioner, whomever is using it to get in deeper and apply more pressure, and also to really spot treat certain areas.

If we have to get into actual scar tissue, that’s used now, the technique itself is said to evolve from gloss Shaw and gloss. Shaw is a method that’s used in Chinese medicine. So talk to me,

06:28
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Been around for quite a long time. Most things that we do and on the Western end, it’s been around for probably 5,000 years, probably before.

06:36
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
A lot of stuff started from China and India. The stuff that we now use was started back then.

What this says is this use GWAS Shaw uses instruments that has a smooth edge to scrape the skin until red blemishes occur.

What that means is the blood flow comes right up into the area. You’re irritating the skin just enough so that the redness comes.

07:01
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Up.

07:03
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. Wash shadow has a different rationale, goal, and application from normal IASTM has been taken into more of a pain movement because it’s not supposed to be painful.

The procedure may change the appearance of your skin because you’re scraping it and you’re scratching it. It involves rubbing or scraping the skin with a massage tool. The blood vessels were what are known as capillaries beneath the surface of your skin can burst.

That’s where the, you get the scratch look and that can result in a skin bruising or minor bleeding, but it’s not necessarily painful. What happens is it has been taken, like you said, and adapted by people who either don’t have the patients don’t have the time or are just trying to get it in bigger, better, faster.

08:01
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Well, w were speaking earlier about this and I, I brought up a point that whenever it seems like a whatever little bit is really good for someone, we think if we do more, that’s better. Right. We found out what the body less is more.

08:14
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right,

08:14
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Right. We don’t need to take it to that extreme to get more out of it. Right. You actually can get a less of effect. Right.

08:21
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Remember you guys, the bigger picture is you have to know what the objective is that you’re trying to hit. If you’re breaking down scar tissue, it’s not just scratch to break down scar tissue.

You have to actually move it. So you realign the fibers. You actually doing all of that together. You’re not just taking your instrument and going in off on somebody. So wait, which does happen. Now, instruments, what they do.

They effectively break down fascial restrictions and scar tissue. A fascial restriction is normally we’re moving like this. All of a sudden we have adhesion and now you’re not moving anymore. Inflammation comes up and all of a sudden you have knots and pain and all of that restriction and late lack of range of motion.

The ergonomic design of these instruments allows whoever is working the clinician, therapist, whomever. It allows them to treat the effect of area with the appropriate amount of pressure.

When scraping, be aware and diligent not hurt the tissue

09:19
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Now, one thing I will say is these don’t have nerve endings on them. You guys, these don’t. If we’re using these, we can actually go too deep into somebody or put too much pressure into somebody and actually do the tissue more damage than good.

We have to be aware and diligent in what we’re doing to not hurt the tissue when we’re working it, because these are going to be pinpointed, but it’s really easy to take them and start cranking in on somebody which I’ve seen people do.

And it is super painful. What, actually happens when we’re doing this all right, when you scraped somebody and you’re taking your instrument and you’re moving it back and forth, you’re creating what’s called microtrauma to the effective soft tissue structure.

Right? What that does is it causes stimulation of a local inflammatory response. I’m going to work on Mike’s forearms being really tight.

10:20
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
I’m going to scrape him. What’s happening in that is the body is getting a lot of stimuli and it’s starting to get inflamed. The inflammatory response comes in the microtrauma.

What it does is it initiates the reabsorption of all of the access of scar tissue or fibrosis or whatever is adhering into this area. And it moves it back in. It creates all of this healing that rushes into the area and starts to actually help with regeneration.

10:51
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
The healing factors that are naturally floating around on a blood go,

10:55
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Hi, Matt. It’s been forever. So nice to see you. What that does is now the body. Remember, as we’ve spoken before, the body is constantly remodeling whatever is being pulled is actually the stuff that’s being pulled and being tight.

It’s remodeling the bone, it’s remodeling the joint, it’s remodeling the tissue, it’s remodeling everything. As we’re doing this, we’re releasing that area so that it can kind of go back and start to regenerate.

Now collagen can actually come in and help to re load this tissue, so to speak. What we’re doing is we’re helping the body to reabsorb stuff that isn’t working, but also to bring all these new nutrients and collagen to come in and start redistributing.

11:47
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Restoring the balance back into the tissue.

11:49
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right now, your body has these things called fibroblasts. Fibroblasts and fibro class break down the body fibroblasts build up the body.

We’re doing a lot of this scraping and scraping and scraping, what happens is the, the idea behind it is that you’re creating fibroblasts to go into effect. They’re going to start rebuilding all of the area that has been damaged either through injury, through tearing, through repetitive motion, through, like I said, getting kicked by a horse or falling into a pool, or whatever happens.

You fall on a, you fall on a bird scooter, and you get a dent in your, in your soft tissue. We get to put it back together. What it’s doing is it’s actually helping to benefit you on a cellular level, which is really kind of amazing that we have things that we can use to help somebody kind of get through that, that space where they’re not there yet.

12:56
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Where you can’t heal on your own, these will help aid in healing.

13:01
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Well, why don’t mention all the time and you can listen, you can look back all the time is that our bodies are amazing. These things that we’re in are absolutely outstandingly, amazing. They function so well.

Sometimes they need a little help. That’s what we’re here for is that give the body that little extra help to clear things out. Yeah.

13:18
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. Not only is it doing this in a cellular level, right.

Where we’re rebuilding and we re nourishing and bringing the college and back in it’s like, this is why a lot of women will go in for the laser peels because it damages the skin on a cellular level and then the college and we’ll come back and start rebuilding. What we’re doing is we’re doing it on the body.

They’re doing it for more aesthetic purposes. We’re doing it for more functional purposes, right. To get the body moving and, and going again. Using this technique, are you using lubrication?

No. No lubrication. The reason why is because you want to actually scratch the skin. If you use lubrication, a lot of the grass dinner, I S T M. Thanks, mark. Mark is going to answer all the questions for Sadie.

Thank you for just talking and we’ll just go on about our day.

Scraping stimulates the mechano sensitive neurons

14:15
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
The reason why you don’t want to use a lot of lubrication is you actually want to irritate the skin.

That’s the whole point of it is to bring irritation into that area so that it starts to rebuild it. You start to break down the scar tissue and all of the bound tissue in there. Remember, it doesn’t only work on a cellular level, but it also works on a neurophysiological and as a neurophysiological effect.

Let me just say that. What that does is that stimulates the mechano sensitive neurons through all of the skin deformation by the instrument. What’s, it’s making the brain now work.

It’s now connecting the central nervous system down into the skin, and it’s sending data back up like, Hey, this is hurting. Hey, this isn’t hurting. Hey, this is a lot, Ooh, this is an override override.

The mechano sensitive neurons, that includes all the mechanical receptors, which are important, responsible for pain perception.

15:16
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Now hurt, hurt, hurt, drop the pain, overloading it. Essentially you’re kickstarting and whose new healing process.

Absolutely. Yeah. That’s exactly it. In order for us to heal, sometimes we have to do damage in order for that to happen. And that’s just kinda how it is.

That’s like, I mean, there’s a lot of conversations on that going on right now with all of the new stuff going on with the knee replacements and building new cartilage into the joint, because they’re doing microtrauma into the area to build new cartilage, because that they’re finding out that if they keep it within that area, it starts to grow on itself.

But back to scraping. Cause I digress cause you guys got me there. So, so what’ll happen is you overload the body and then the pain level drops. Now we, the healing process can start, right?

16:14
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
We are finishing a hill across because sometimes the body doesn’t complete the job all the way, because how it goes, we usually, we don’t allow it.

16:19
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
To.

16:21
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Bounce back in something way too soon. We scar over an area that should’ve healed out.

16:25
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. Why would we do that? Humans? How silly are we? We would never want to do something like that. That’s craziness, perfect. Find out.

Also doing assisted soft tissue mobilization, it also affects the vac vascular response. What vascular is it brings blood flow to injured tissue that isn’t getting the blood flow. Because remember when things are injured, they’re not going to get the blood flow that’s needed necessarily.

If you have scar tissue is not going to get the blood flow that isn’t needed necessarily. If you’re having a Hegelians, it’s not going to get anything that’s being compressed or pushed. The blood is not being able to get into. By scraping it, you’re actually bringing blood into the injured soft tissue.

What they found is they found that there’s more healing that happens when you bring stuff in and the swelling goes down and all of this starts to happen at a faster rate than if you didn’t do it at all.

17:27
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
What does that mean in the big picture? Now we’ve told you kind of what scraping is. We’ve told you what Graston is. We’ve told grasses as a technique that is trademarked underneath the whole idea of scraping.

Can you, do you have to have a specific tool to scrape? No, you can use this. If you need to. I know people who have used kitchen tools, You can use the back of a butter knife as long as you’re not cerated and you’re not stabbing people.

There a risk of damaging the dermatomes with this technique? Yeah. Here’s the difference. You guys, you can easily go too deep, too hard, too fast and scratch the bejesus out of somebody. Do.

18:13
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
You need that? But Jesus, in that,

18:15
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah, we need some Jesus in our life. Don’t wait don’t we all need Jesus.

Listen, the other thing with this is you, you want to scratch the surface so that you get the healing. If you go too hard, you can actually do damage to the area.

How many of you guys have seen people that are like screaming for their lives as they’re getting it done? This, this shouldn’t really, in my opinion, it shouldn’t hurt.

18:42
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
One spot on a body that doesn’t apply to as the bottom of the foot plantar fasciitis, get in on bone spurs. Only way to make a difference there is to get up on it. And I’m just saying,

18:55
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Get.

18:55
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Up. We only do it for about five seconds. It’s a quick release technique for the plantar fasciitis. And then you’re moving on. It’s not something you’re going to duration, no duration like an hour.

19:04
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Well, this isn’t straight. You’re not scraping somebody for an entire hour. That’s what doggone sure. It should be small areas. Not necessarily the whole entire back, either. In my opinion.

Now I know people have differing opinions on that. I know that there are a lot of people out there who use these tools as a way of like some I torture because they scratch the heck out of people and it really actually doesn’t do better.

It actually makes them worse because now it brings into not just the inflammatory effect, but it brings in, it triggers the pain responders and to, well, now they’re going to be guarding and they’re not going to be actually getting better because their body is overloaded with too much pain.

You want to, it’s a fine line that you get to play in with that.

19:51
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
If you’re, if you’re out there and you’re finding that this works for you. Okay, good. You’re entitled to that.

19:56
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Unfortunately, this goes along with the whole no pain, no gain. Some people really feel like in order to make it a difference in somebody or make it a difference in their themselves, they have to actually see the pain happening in their body.

They have to see the redness. They have to see the scratches. They have to see the marks. The perceived idea of collateral damage being acceptable as a product of IAS, TM may not be great.

You got it. Exactly. Th the idea too, is we get to educate, and that’s why we’re doing this. We get to educate people that it doesn’t have to hurt in order for you to get better. It actually shouldn’t hurt.

The reason why you’re hurting now is because something wasn’t working. We need to make sure that we change the listening. For most people, we got to change their listening so that they understand that you guys get to be pain-free by being pain-free you.

It Doesn’t Have to Hurt To Make It Better

20:55
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
I mean, it doesn’t have to hurt for you to make it better. It’s a hard conversation to have with a lot of people, because they feel like it’s got to hurt for me to feel better.

Remember, if you go too hard on somebody that respect pain response that you’re feeling is more of like a dopamine response, because your body is like, get rid of it. It’s going to try and push it away, whatever it can.

So it hurts for a second. It’s like, oh, I got, feel so much better. As soon as it stops, you feel so much better, but you do your ongoing, it’s an ongoing process of injury that you’re actually giving up.

21:30
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
You have to see is, do you have a net gain?

Do you actually see an improvement and it improving so that you don’t need to have it done again or less and less, or is it, you have to keep doing it over and over again and not seeing any change.

21:42
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right. The other thing to you guys is if you are doing, if it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t work. Yes. That’s not how it works at all right.

It should be, if it works, it doesn’t hurt. If it’ll work and not hurt. I mean, there’s a thousand of those that you could do, right?

Here’s the thing half of the time when we’re doing this, if we have an objective to why we’re doing, and we have a game plan, like I’m going to go after Mike’s forearm, because Mike’s forearm has, has an adhesion in here has some scar tissue.

This is pointless. If you don’t do this and move it and put it back together. You gotta put Humpty Dumpty back together, again, you can’t just scrape and then expect the results of that to be the end, all the end game.

You got to think about range of motion and actually, what are we doing with our bodies to move them?

22:33
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Because the body is meant to move. We were born, drew moves. The whole point of it is that if we can create more range of motion in the body, then the body has a chance to actually get better.

22:47
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
That’s it?

22:48
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
And that’s it. I’m done.

22:50
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Drop the.

22:50
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Tool I’m done. That is your IAS TM go-to to scrape or not to scrape. Do you scrape Mike is Humpty Dumpty.

23:02
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
I’m your home D The full wrap, but,

Choose a Certified Person To Perform IASTM

23:09
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Oh my God. This is where the wheels fall off.

You guys, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. I hope you guys, if you do decide to do this, make sure you get somebody who’s qualified to do it. The thing is anybody can pick up a tool.

Any tool can pick up a tool and scrape people. What you want to do is you want to make sure that this person is certified to do this or understands and has been trained in how to do this kind of work.

What that’ll do is that’ll make everybody’s process yours theirs, much easier. So I hope that this has helped.

We will see you next week at 1230.

24:04
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Bye let’s go get scraped.

Walk This Way: Why Your Gait Matters

Thu, 19 May 2022 17:37:00 GMT

Walk This Way: Why Your Gait Matters

00:16
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Today, welcome to Wednesday. And today we are talking about gait.

00:21
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Gait. Putting one foot in front of the other.

00:32
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
I get joy out of these programs just for that alone today, we are talking about gait. Why is gait so important? gait is actually how we walk. It is actually ambulation, which means moving literally one foot in front of the other, our gait cycle.

Ambulation = Gait Cycle

00:52
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
I can see it again. No.

00:53
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Okay. We’re good on the singing you’re okay. Got it. Yeah, we’re good. So, so you guys, so today, why gait is so important is because our walk determines if we could be in pain or not, and being in pain changes the way we walk.

How we walk is really a huge part of, I mean, being human, obviously we are built for movement. That’s what human beings are built for. The whole point in balance and homeostasis is balanced and of stability and mobility.

That leads to balance and coordination, which allows us to walk. It allows us to stand on the earth and allows us to move through the earth without falling over all over the place.

01:40
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Actually it looked like we know what we’re doing it somehow. I mean, we can move there’s we watch some gaits out there. It’s amazing that people can get around yet. They do. They find a way to get it done.

01:51
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
You do. Everybody does. Even if you are, you, have you ever seen that person who is walking and they’re just all hunched over and their head is like all tipped up.

It’s called the righting reflex where their eyeballs are like tipped up. They’re just, they’re shuffling along very small. Or you have one person who’s got that little lamp. Who’s got that little kind of shuffle that’s happening.

You have people who do a March where they tend to bring their knees up really high. There are some who walk mainly on their toes. Have you seen the toe walkers that don’t even put their heels down on the ground?

There’s so many different ways to walk so many different ways. It is so important for us because as we age, as we get older, as we move forward and do and sit more and move more, like things really come up for us in a balancing coordination.

02:48
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It can be just one small movement then boom, we’re out in the pain cycle all over again. So today we’re talking about gait.

Ambulation is actually the way you walk, right? It’s really, it’s activating, you’re standing posture, how we stand and then pudding movement to those muscles. It’s really your posture in motion.

That is what walking is, how you stand, truly affects your walk. This is why we get on people about their posture so much, because if you’re a standing off monkey, you’re not going to walk very,

03:25
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
It actually starts with sound. How you sit? It going to be how you walk as well? If you stay in that hunched position? Well, chances are, you’re not gonna be able to straighten up very quick. It’s true.

03:33
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It’s true. So here’s the cool thing about walking. One of the cool things do with walking each step that you take, you intentionally lose your balance and then have to regain it again. That’s walking,

03:46
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Right?

03:47
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
You’re taking all of the body weight off of one part of your side of your body and then dropping it into the other side and then lifting the other side up off of the earth and then dropping it into the other side. Well.

03:58
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Controlled fall.

03:59
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It, it really is walking is a controlled fall. We seem to do it most of us so effortlessly, right? We don’t even think about it.

We’re just one foot in front of the other. And that’s how we’re rolling. Hopefully we’re not rolling because we haven’t fallen over. Parts of ambulation or your walk, right, is the smallest component is literally your left foot and then your right foot.

It’s one foot in front of the other. That’s why it takes forward movement. Forward movement is always one foot in front of the other, right? Your step length is the distance between your heel strikes.

As you put your heel down and we’re going to show this later, we just want to talk about it first, as you put your heel down and strike the ground, the distance between your heel strikes is your stride. So some people have a long stride.

04:54
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Some people have a tiny little stride. Some people have a decent stride and some people have an offset stride where one leg reaches out farther and the other one doesn’t come as far.

It throws everything off because remember how you strike the earth comes right up into your body. Your gait cycle is actually two steps together, which is your stride. No. Nice try. Nice job.

In a stride, in a gait cycle, you’re going to go, let’s say we start with our left. We’ll go left heel, right? Heel left heel gait cycle. As soon as we put the foot down, the other foot down and the other foot comes back down, that is one cycle of your gait.

Your stride is all of the events that happened between the time that one foot touches the ground and then the other. And then it touches the ground again.

A Lot Is Happening When You’re Just Walking

05:46
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
There’s a lot that actually happens in this body. It’s not just think about when we’re walking, how much actually goes on in the body to allow us to take your foot up off the ground, move it forward, and then take the other foot up off the ground and move it forward.

06:02
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
It’s something that seems seemingly so simple. We can break when you break it down, it is immensely complex and it little pieces can fall apart anywhere along the way and create all these moon patterns later on. Yeah,

06:16
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah, absolutely. 100%. It doesn’t take much, it takes rolling your ankle. It takes stepping on a rock.

It takes, it takes stepping off a curve. Funny. It, it takes all sorts of stuff. Like it doesn’t take much to really mess up your entire gait site. Oh yeah. Bird. Yeah. Those things, those things are a mess.

We saw somebody get really messed up by it yesterday. Okay. Your gait cycle is actually divided into two phases, right? It’s your stance phase? What that is, and your swing phase.

So your stance phase is during walking. What that happens is that occurs when one foot is actually on the ground, hence the stance your foot is on the ground.

And that is your stance phase. The other foot is swinging forward in order to move you forward, the stance phase actually accounts for 60% of your gait cycle. So you’re on the ground a lot.

07:10
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Thank goodness. Thank goodness. What your stance bays is it begins when the heel strikes and ends when the foot becomes airborne, pretty hard, not too hard.

Actually the swing phase actually is the 30% of the stride, right? That’s actually the activity that occurs when the foot is off the ground.

As we’re swinging our body forward to the next step, that is your swing phase. You have your stance phase.

07:36
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
It’s amazing how much can happen in that 30% of time that can go wrong.

07:40
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Oh my gosh, 100% immediately. You’ll see it all the.

07:44
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Time. It’s on the ground.

07:45
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
You guys. So here’s the crazy thing. Okay. We are normally a very supported human being, right?

When we have double support and both feet are off the ground or off the ground, both feet are on the ground. We’re if we’re off the ground, then we’re usually jumping. That’s a non-support versus a double support.

Two feet are on the ground, that’s really a double support. That’s when we are the most balanced. Hopefully it occurs twice during that stance phase of your gait cycle. It’s like 10% of your gait cycle when one foot is on the ground at single support.

When nonsupport is when no feeder on the ground, that’s, you’re jumping, you’re hopping. You’re skipping. That’s it? That’s when everything starts to really play. No, probably not gallivanting.

Okay. Let’s talk. I’m going to break down the gait cycle in a few minutes, but I want to show you like, why is this such a big deal?

08:38
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Why is how you walk such a big deal? It doesn’t sound like much, but it actually is huge.

Remember, we’re big on posture and we’re also big on the kinetic chain. If you remember, the kinetic chain is comprised of your muscles, your nerves, and your joints up and down your body, the bones act as cool levers to that. Everything attaches to in order to create that movement.

But movement has to come. When the brain decides it wants to do something and it sends the nervous system a message. The nervous system starts to activate and activates the muscles and the muscle fibers shorten.

And then it attaches across the bone. And then bingo, bingo. We have nerves and we have joint movement. So why is this so important? As we’re walking, we remember are a big relationship full of stable and mobile joints.

The ankle being mobile, the knee being stable, the hip joint being mobile, the low back top of pelvis being stable, mid thoracic, the middle of your back, being mobile and the neck being stable and the very top of the base of your head.

09:43
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
That’s your mobile spot, right? So what about gait and your hips? Now the key player in the game of walking that links the upper and lower body together is that pelvis, right?

It’s the hips, the pelvis needs to mobilize. Remember in our pelvis talk, they needs to mobilize in three directions. If I pull my skin, my Skully over here, the pelvis needs to also, it needs to go superiorly and inferiorly.

It goes up and down. It needs to go forward and backwards. It also needs to slide side to side in order for us to actually create good movement and mobility and stability when we’re walking so that we don’t fall over.

How many people do you guys know that actually move their hips side to side forward and backwards and up.

10:37
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Down full circular motion.

10:39
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It really doesn’t happen as much as you guys think it does because in this game of walking and movement and posture, we have compensatory patterns that come in and change the game for everything where one side moves.

The other side might not move as well. Right? Normally when one hip raises the opposite hip lowers, right? The highest point is during that hip strikes. So as we’re walking, we’re doing this.

It’s an undulation in movement. So, well, what will happen is if you don’t move your hips, then down this, down that chain, into the knee joint and into the ankle joint things, aren’t going to work and all the way up into,

11:23
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
What happens if something’s not moving in the foot or moving at the knee, The hip joint, it’s not going to move there.

11:29
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Exactly. We’re walking, if you’ve ever seen some people will drop in and pronate with one foot and Eva with another foot.

You’re actually walking one outside of one foot. On the inside of the other foot, there also have a tendency to bend one knee and go onto the toe.

The other foot is doing a full stride. How’s that going to affect the knee and the hip joint. It throws everything off, up into the body.

11:56
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
You sit and you sit in your chair and you sit off to one side for days on end. Right?

A Healthy Pelvis Is A Moving Pelvis

12:01
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right. A healthy pelvis should be moving, but if you’re not walking all that well, and you’re not doing a true cadence, right.

Which is how long you’re walking in your stride. If your stride isn’t balanced and your cadence isn’t like, even the speed of your stride, let’s say you will, you’ll throw yourself completely off.

You’ll actually be worse for the wear, instead of better. The other thing that we need to worry about when we’re walking and we need to pay attention to that, most people forget is their upper body actually gets to move when we’re walking.

A lot of times what will happen when we see people walk is they’ll walk with either one arm moving and the other arm completely dead or the walk with no arms moving whatsoever.

12:54
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
You don’t wanna move any. And.

12:55
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Have you ever not walked with a PR with your arms? It’s so odd. I don’t, I don’t understand how you guys stay balanced in a non-farm walk.

If you ever, if you guys ever know Bigfoot, has anybody, are you familiar with Bigfoot? I mean, you have big feet.

13:09
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
I know what it’s like to be a little squatting.

13:12
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Very, in fact, he’s hairy and he’s got big feet. It might be the guy for you. Big foot actually walks or windows of you see it, he has a giant stride, but he moves his arms back and forth.

What he’s doing is every time he takes a stride, the opposite arm moves forward from the leg opposite leg. That is going backwards. In that what’s happening is you have a counterbalance of limo, motion and torso rotation, which is what we need.

We like corkscrew, everything is, everything moves up and down and undulates. Right? Right. We were a spiral and we’re a Slingshot. As we move one area, it directionally diagonally directs it to the other side of the body.

Up and down until we have something that doesn’t work. If we’re, if we have something that isn’t working in our gait cycle, in our walking pattern and it’s challenging us, and we can’t have the movement that’s associated with us, we can actually create eight pain with that.

14:22
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Narrow. We’re going to be mobility or movement, pattern, or instability patterns all the way through the body. Yeah.

14:27
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
You want the upper, if you’re sitting here right now and you’re sitting in a chair, swing your arms back and forth and notice how much your upper body, see, Mike’s got a really funky gait pattern because he’s like trying to do the, I don’t even know what dance you’re trying to do, not the Macarena, but something completely off.

14:49
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
So.

14:50
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It’s not this, it’s not, this is not a weird walk it’s here. If you’re moving back and forth, actually, if you ever run, you have to use your arms to the arms, actually drive the legs in the movement.

The reason why is every time we move our arms, we’re rotating our pelvis. We’re con we’re making a compensatory patterning with our arms, into our shoulders.

That actually forces this corkscrew effect of the pelvis and upper body, which then allows the balance to happen from step to step so that we can actually take our foot off the earth and balance and maintain that balance.

Before we put it back down. How weird is that? Does it, I mean, is every already NFL? Does anyone ever think about that when they’re walking? No, they just do. I want to show you guys a couple of different gait patterns.

15:47
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
I want to show you the normal gait pattern. I want to show you what it looks like to walk with.

Arms to either side. I want you to see how it changes up and down the body. I’m going to pull back for a second so we can actually,

16:08
Speaker 4
Can you still see us? Are we there? Can you see them?

16:14
Speaker 5
Okay. So I want you guys using Mike. Mike is going to walk up and back three or four steps.

How To Walk

16:23
Speaker 5
Good. Turn around, Come back. Good. Now I want you to walk towards the camera. Good.

Mike does his first step, the first step that you make in your gait cycle is called your it’s your stance base.

This is when you do a heel strike of foot flat. That’s when the mid stance, the middle of the foot drops down.

You start to shift your weight over to the front leg. The back leg, the heel comes up. The front leg goes down into the foot to the two rolls over into a mid stance. I’m going into a swing phase where I pick the other light up and drop it down.

The back leg now becomes a heel off my reach shifts into the front. I told off, moving into the next to the next move. Go ahead and do that under slope.

Yes. Okay. Heel strike, foot flat, mid stance, swing phase to the other side, heel off toe off.

17:35
Speaker 5
When you were walking, you want to have your full he’ll come down and then you’re rolling the weight outside.

It’s the outside of the foot, back down into the toe. As you come off of your foot, you should actually feel your big toe pushing off the earth.

If you feel that, what you’re also going to feel is your glutes are going to fire up and you should be able to feel your butt pushing you forward. This is a push through. As we walk onto the earth,

18:05
Speaker 6
We want to push ourselves through this world. Now,

18:08
Speaker 5
Go ahead and walk again. I want you to see Mike walking with normal arm stance though. Your arms swing.

18:15
Speaker 6
Over here. Yep.

18:16
Speaker 5
Mike’s going to walk with a normal arm swing. Try it again. That was not normal. So I know him.

I want you guys to see walk towards the camera and I want you to walk now doing. Normal.

18:38
Speaker 6
It always gets weird.

18:40
Speaker 5
I mean, is this normal? Go ahead and watch it. So do your big foot.

18:47
Speaker 6
Walk, big foot walls general. I got it. I got a long stride, big.

18:58
Speaker 5
Foot come up.

19:01
Speaker 6
And my research of a squat. They’ll go up that high. Come.

19:05
Speaker 5
On. What I want you guys to see now is now do same arm. Same like.

19:17
Speaker 6
It’s like a March. Yeah.

19:19
Speaker 5
Now I want you to do one dead arm and one normal arm, And then come back in and do no arms.

You guys are doing a normal walk, as you step forward with the right leg, your left arm is actually coming forward to counterbalance. Your right arm is going backwards to counterbalance and you’re rotating into your leg.

Your pelvis is rotating in towards the leg and your upper body is rotating in towards the light. So the pelvis is rotating. I’m sorry. The pelvis is rotating out in the torso is rotating in.

So I’m here. I shift my weight and I move. I shift my weight and I move and I shift my weight and I move the biggest thing with walking that we see. The biggest imbalances that we see are when people don’t use their arms.

It’s really hard for you to balance all the way back down, because remember the joints take the impact of the earth and the weight of our body.

20:30
Speaker 5
If we’re not doing anything to balance it, then we have to actually really watch how we walk so that we don’t fall over.

It becomes more of a challenge for us to actually create a healthier, balanced walk that will allow us to actually pick everything up and move. We’re talking gait cycle, when you are walking, you really want to think about your heel striking.

You’re dropping in around the foot, into the mid stance. As you toe off with the back leg, the way to shifting from the backside of the back of your body, to the front of your body, it shifts from the heel over to the toe.

And this is how we work. If you were marching and you’re walking this way, which a lot of you do, first of all, you’re not using your glutes at all. Second of all, you’re overusing your quads, right?

21:27
Speaker 5
Third, when you’re doing this, you’re actually trying to lean back to counterbalance the weight that’s being put on you, which will actually make you to potentially fall even more.

The other thing too is when you don’t use one arm, are you only using one arm, just swing one arm and tell me how that feels, and then try to walk forward.

As you’re swinging it all over the place, you have to use so much more of your body in order to hold yourself in balance. Does that make sense? So the ideal walk, go in,

22:01
Speaker 6
Here we go. Here.

22:01
Speaker 5
We go, mine. So I want you to, There.

22:04
Speaker 6
You go. I can be normal.

22:08
Speaker 5
Back it up again.

22:11
Speaker 6
Try this at home. Try walking with a normal status and face. See how it is to walk slowly and feel what your body’s actually doing.

Feel what your feet are doing, feel what your hands are doing, what your upper body is doing.

What’s your midsection is doing, and then try and do the Sasquatch walk. You really feel that rotational or lack of rotation as you do that. Yeah,

22:30
Speaker 5
100%, 100%. If nothing else, I just want you to sit here and move your arms. If you can back and forth and watch what the lower part of you does. Not that mic.

22:42
Speaker 6
This way,

22:43
Speaker 5
This way, gosh, forwarding back forward and back so that you can, All right, we’re going to go back to the table. So finish up,

22:58
Speaker 6
Just sit down with yourselves.

23:02
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Okay. You guys. I, hopefully you guys could see us. That was pretty far away. We were like a far, far away.

What happens when there’s an abnormal gait, When there is an abnormal gait, is when there is an atypical walking pattern, right?

It was like what Mike was doing, walking with both one arm at the same time, and trying to rotate himself around, walking with no arms, marching, not actually putting your heels on the ground.

Usually there could be some kind of a neurological effect. There could be a joint range of motion, joint limitation. Let’s say, you’re walking in your ankle, our ankle, we have this cool dorsiflexion and plantar flection in our Sculley here, come over here.

Let’s pretend these just aren’t his feet that are doing it. It’s from his ankle that his ankle drops back and up. We want to pull our foot up and we want to push our foot down.

24:04
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
If we can’t at the ankle, if we can’t do that dorsiflexion.

If we can’t do the doors of flection and the plantar flection broke Scully’s hip, then we have to actually figure out the rest of the body, the knee.

The hip has to do all of the work in order to get this to move. So, and truthfully, just in walking, it takes 18 degrees of dorsiflexion.

Dorsiflexion is when your ankle comes up, when you’re pulling your foot up towards your knee at the ankle, it takes 18 to run. If you can’t even get up to here, you have to figure out a different, even a different way of walking or moving or a run past.

24:49
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
This is one of the big reasons why we’ll have people just walk to a Y analyze their gait pattern.

You see the subtle little changes, sometimes not so subtle that are making imbalances go all the way up.

24:58
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. Now there are a lot of different types of abnormal gait patterns, and there’s a lot of different types of muscle weakness, balance imbalances that give into that glutes, glute max, gluteus medius, which is more of where you have a hip drop, like a Trendelenburg there’s a hamstring weakness.

There’s a quadricep weakness. There’s a core weakness. We are going to go into that at a different time. That we can actually really drop into what we’re talking about, but the reason why I’m a big believer in we’re a big proponent on gait.

We really want you to understand gait is walking is powerful and you need your walk to not only create confidence in who you are, but when you walk, you’re actually pushing off the earth to move you forward.

You, you want to make the movement happen within your body. Not just allow your body to be pushed off from the earth.

Your Gait Matters Because It Affects How Everything In Your Body Moves

26:00
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
When you stepped down, you propel yourself forward. In doing that, you’re actually creating balance. You’re creating coordination within stability and mobility and the Body is made for movement.

We have to move. How you walk now is indicative of what’s going to happen down the line with different potential pain points and injuries for overuse.

A lot of this happens within pain, changing the way that you walk or walking, changing the way that you were in pain or not.

I want you guys to really pay attention and take a couple of minutes to take a couple of strides back and forth, walk and watch yourself, walk in the mirror, watch yourself walk, have somebody watch you walk.

Do you feel your heel? Do you feel your big toe pressing down? Do you feel like you’re actually moving forward? Do you notice if your arms are moving?

27:00
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Are you doing a shuffle step where you don’t even you just doing a flat walk?

27:02
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. Do you feel your glutes fire when you’re walking and I don’t mean not old man pants where you tuck it in and suck it down.

We’re not talking about that. We’re talking about actually contracting and extending your leg where you can, where you contract that glute and extend it away from your pelvis.

Like start noticing what your body is doing and start connecting with your body and how it moves. It will be more empowering for you down the line.

27:30
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Really. You gotta keep your body moving. We want, we want you to keep moving for as long, as much as possible for as long.

27:35
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right. And remember only you can fix you. You are in your body more than anybody else’s in your body, right?

The more that you pay attention, you notice what’s happening. You can make tiny micro corrections that can make major changes down the line.

If you have any questions, feel free to give us a comment, feel free to let us know if there’s anything in particular that you were interested in learning about.

We’re all about trying to make science simple for you and trying to take the intimidation out of all of your overuse issues. So hopefully that helps.

If there’s anybody who has a funky walk, a crazy walk, a silly walk, let them see this. Cause Mike’s got one too. So.

28:23
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
We’re.

28:23
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
All about it. Yeah. If you want to see Mike floss, then that’s one for you too.

I hope you guys have a fabulous rest of the day and we will see you again next week, Wednesday at 1230. All right.

Ankle Pain And How To Work With It

Thu, 19 May 2022 17:36:00 GMT

Ankle Pain And How To Work With It

01:49
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Hi guys. Welcome. Today we’re going to talk about all things, foot and ankle, because you can’t have one thing without the other.

We’re going to go into depth of the foot bones and all the bones that make up the foot and all that cool stuff next week.

Today we need to know about what makes up this cool ankle joint. So the bones are still in there. Okay.

02:11
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
What’s amazing to me, as you can see, just take a quick look at that.

How much goes into this, the structure right here and what, how much it has to do and just to keep us upright and stable.

And when it works properly, it’s great. We don’t even think about it.

The Foot And Ankle Structure

02:25
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
How much everything moves together, but then separately as well.

02:29
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Absolutely. So all has to work just right. We’re all, we’re good if it doesn’t we find out quick,

02:37
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
We’ll find out quick guys. Alright, let’s talk to the ankle.

The ankle joint is actually formed by three bones. You got this big tibia, which is your shinbone. You got the little fibula, which is the side of the bone that comes off of this other bone. Right?

You’ve got your tailless and the tailless is actually this bone that’s actually sitting in the foot right underneath the tibia. If you notice this fibula comes all the way down and comes past the actual ankle joint and actually puts that.

That is the outside of your ankle bone. It’s called your lateral malleolus, but it’s your ankle bone, the inside forms, the inside of your ankle bone. We have two bones in here that are really important for ankle movement and stability.

The ankle itself is a mobile joint. We, it goes up, it goes down, it goes in and it goes out.

03:32
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
This would be dorsal flection because it brings it up like a dorsal fin. It goes into plantar flexion, like planting your foot into the floor.

It goes into inversion in the E version, which is in and out. So it goes up, down in out. The reason why we have to have that much movement in this ankle joint is because it’s got to move the rest of our body because we wouldn’t walk very well.

If all we did was just move up and down, it would be kind of a Frankensteiny in our walk, I would guess.

04:04
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
If you didn’t need to have that dorsiflexion, plantar flection is just as stiff walking pipes, pounding into the ground rather than having a nice, smooth, rotate, circular motion.

04:12
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right. Right. Remember, human beings were made to move. We have to have joints that support it. Why do we talk about this ankle joint so much?

Because this ankle joint doesn’t move very well for a lot of people. It’s the cause of a lot of pain. Remember, we’ve got these two big bones, well, one big tip, one little fibula.

We’ve got the two ankle bones that go to the bottom, right? The malleoli. You’ve got this tailless, which is underneath. Now, the way that the ankle actually works is if you think that this bone glides back and forward as we plant and dorsiflex so as we plant our foot and as we flex our ankle, it moves up and back.

If you think of, I was always taught that this is a coin slot, and it sounds really funny, but as you push your foot down in the ankle, down this slides out, and then when you pull this up, this is supposed to slide back.

05:21
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
What happens if you ever have a coin that you try to put in the coin slot and it gets stuck in the coin slot, you don’t have any more movement. The movement stops with the coin.

05:31
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Deals or whatever you’re trying to get home. What kind of coin slot I got like snack machine,

05:37
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Totally different type of coin slot, like, okay, whatever. Let’s talk here, the tibia and fibula, it’s not just bones that we’re working with, right?

Because if we just had bones down here, then sprained ankles and strained ankles, wouldn’t be an issue. We’ve got these really strong ligaments that are there to stabilize and help with movement to stabilize the movement.

Because remember, this is a big movable joint down here. We’ve got big ligaments that attach from the bones to the feet and from the bones to the feet.

We have these four big ligaments in the inside of our ankle, that are attached from the bottom of our tibia down into the bones.

They’re called your deltoid ligaments mainly because they go into a full, they fan out into the foot and then they converge at the top. So they’re called your deltoid ligaments.

Now, the thing about these guys is these are very strong because we have a tendency to drop in to our ankle, way more than we tend to drop out.

06:41
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Even though this is the side that we tend to roll more. This is the side that gets a lot more attention based on all of the pressure that we’re putting on into our foot.

When you pronate, when you drop into your toe, when you bring your ankle in these take a lot. Now, if you guys remember from our older talks or other talks, I guess what ligaments do is they attach bone to bone and ligaments.

They help with stabilization. There, they get pulled from all different directions. If you think of a hammock and as a hammock kind of sits there and it kind of holds everything together.

When you put pressure on it pulls from all areas and it goes taught, and it allows for pressure and strength to hit it.

The ligaments are kind of crossed that fibers like this, and they’re being pulled all the way so that we can keep these bones hopefully all together, because we need that right now.

07:41
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
On the lateral side, we have ligaments that also attach from this fibula to the heel, from the fibula to the midfoot and from the fibula all the way over to the front of the foot of the four foot .

Because if you also know if something about the lower leg, it’s a lot of smaller muscles and a lot of long tendons.

We want to make sure that we are, we’re working within all of those areas too, because we got attendance polling all over the place with our.

08:10
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Legs, shearing forces going through onto the lower leg as well.

08:14
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Now, when we get to the bottom of this, and we look at this, if you notice the bottom of the Tibia hits into the tailless in between this tailless and the tibia it’s, what’s called this joint is called your mortise joint or your mortis joint,

08:31
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Your mortise.

08:32
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Aura. Wow.

08:34
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Anybody get that reference? Anyone Martin,

08:36
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Steve Miller band, were just talking about.

08:38
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
It. He thinks.

08:39
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It’s so funny anyway.

08:42
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
So.

Dorsiflexion And Plantar Flexion

08:42
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
The reason why it’s called a mortise joint is because it’s like a mortis muscle, a PESTEL and mortis where you’re moving it in and out, it’s grinding and moving and grinding.

If you’ve ever, if you’ve ever, if you ever been yeah. Guacamole or making mojitos where you’re grinding and pummeling the leaf, whatever it’s called.

Anyway, the bowl is like this. It moves in this way kind of how your ankle joint works. It’s called a mortise joint and it feels fits very snug inside there, or it should. Again, the movements that we have, Dorsiflection, the ankle comes up, plantar flection.

The ankle goes down, right? This is when we’re jumping. This is when we’re attempting to run side note. In order for us to actually run, we need at least 18 degrees of dorsiflexion, which means if this is zero, you got to come up pretty far in order for your foot and your toes to clear the concrete and the ground.

09:51
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Otherwise you drag your feet around and you’re going to fall over and it’s going to make running challenging.

09:56
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
This is something that one of the things we look out all the time to see what kind of doors selection somebody has, if they’re having knee problems, ankle problems, hip problems, even neck problems, we’ll come and see, where does this door’s reflection going? Yeah.

10:05
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
I will say a lot of times when there is an overuse injury, when we’re getting into sprains and strains, the lack of dorsal flection can actually lead into potential injury in and of itself.

If you’re not getting the doors of flection, it’s got to come from somewhere, which means now your foot is doing a lot of this or the legs doing a lot of this to make up for the fact that you can’t get the ankle to actually come up.

What happens there, let’s go into sprains and strains. Let’s go into what symptoms these are, right? If you guys have been with us before, you’ll know that a strain refers to tendon, right? So strain with the T.

10:50
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Muscle.

10:50
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Muscle and tendon where the muscle belly comes in and then it pulls into a tendon at the bottom.

The tendon attaches to so that it can pull the joint because that’s how we make Joe bones move.

The strain would be a strain to the fibers where some of the fibers have been torn into the tendon.

11:10
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Well, quite often to sit that where the muscles bellies becoming the 10 in the muscular myotendinous junction is where it happens a lot, but it can happen anywhere along.

It can happen at the attachment point or anywhere in the muscle belly itself.

11:21
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. So let’s talk about ankle strain. What actually happens when we strain the ankle,

11:26
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
You put too much load on that 10 and that it cannot handle. The fibers are gonna start to free up,

11:32
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right? Does this happen at once overnight or is it acute?

11:35
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
It can be very much a cute, what I mean? You can’t have it once or can come over time.

11:39
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right? Most of the time, it’s an, it’s a overused thing. Most of the time it’s been ongoing and it’s layering.

Where it may be acute, it’s been happening for a while. This also happens a lot with runners. This happens ballet. This happens with anybody who is on their toes all the time basketball.

It happens with a lot of people who do a lot of sports that got, are requiring for you to be on your toes, off your toes, on your toes, off your toes, all the time over use injury.

What are some of the symptoms that come up with a strain,

12:15
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
The civil strain that you get you’ll get acute, or you’ll get some acute pain. You’re getting maybe a mild amount of swelling or inflammation.

That’s why the inflammation. Sure. You will get you. What else are we gonna get? We’re gonna get.

12:28
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Inflammation. You can get a little heat. You can get swelling. You can get limited range of motion,

Strains and Sprains In Foot And Ankle

12:35
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Pain with resisted resistance.

12:38
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
And, and sometimes pain.

When movement, if you’re going into a drawing to go into dorsiflexion and plantar flexion, and you’re actively trying to recruit the muscle fibers, those muscle fibers are strained.

They’re like, no, we’re not doing it. They’re on strike. What’ll happen is sometimes it’ll appear warm and will get flushed with blood because you’ve injured the tissue.

Where the tissue of the muscle fibers, like we said, run like this. It may be just a couple of ’em that are torn, but it’s a strain that is actually injuring those tissues. It’s going to take awhile for us to get it back.

So let’s talk about a sprain now. The difference between a muscle strain and a muscle sprain is that P stands for pain in a passive movement. That is where we work with ligaments.

Now, a ligament, like we said, attaches to the bone, attaches to the bone.

13:35
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It’s there to stabilize that big range of motion and movement and to provide mobility, but stability to a mobile joint. Right? And so let’s say Mike’s running.

All of a sudden, he’s got of an acorn that he steps on and re there goes his ankle. He takes it down and it is an acute pain. What I mean by acute is it’s not cute. There’s nothing cute about that pain.

It is out there sharpness, there’s tenderness, there’s swelling instantly. There’s heat. The difference, a lot of difference between a tendon strain and a sprain is bruising. You may hear a pop too.

You may hear a pop. That’s when, instead of over use where it’s like, eh, and they start to get a little frayed. It’s like, oh, not worked on or not. We’re gone.

There’s only a few tendons left, but a bunch of them left the scene at the same time.

14:32
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. It’s still being overused. It can be an overused. That’s what finally a final that final roll or that final pressure is what gateway and in the ligament now ruptured,

14:42
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right? There’s going to be swelling at the side of the ankle.

There’s going to be pain. There’s going to be weakness. You could potentially have not a lot of movement at all because of pain. It’s more called pain inhibition where your brain is just like, no, we’re done with that.

Or now you’re going to also potentially have muscle cramps and weakness because of secondary muscle guarding and splinting in the area. Putting your foot completely down will be a bad idea.

And it’s just pain with passive movement. When the, when in somebody else’s trying to move, you hurts like crazy.

If it’s a strain, when they’re doing it, initially it may hurt when they’re swelling, but unless there’s resistance placed, it’s not going to hurt as much.

There’s a difference between a muscle strain and a muscle sprain. One of the other things in a sprain is the bruising over the side of the spring.

15:38
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
In addition to swelling, you’re going to know blue, red purple skin discolorations.

A lot of times, if you’re got a sprain here, it’s going to be down in here where the attaches, because it’s the ligaments that are being potentially torn as well.

Instead of the tendon, just the fibers of the tendon, kind of getting frayed and torn those ligaments now, which are like, this are like, and so you are tearing some of the ligaments and that’s more traumatic.

You’re going to have the inability to bend, turn flex the foot. You just can’t move it any other way. Walking is just not going to be a no-go. It’s going to be like difficult or impossible for a while.

Remember too ligaments take a long time to heal because they don’t have a lot of blood flow freely, like a tendon pumps blood in and out with the muscle.

16:33
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
The ligaments are not supposed to have a lot of blood flow in them because they’re just there to stabilize.

This is your cable. Your cable and your hammock are just going to be sitting there and it’s going to take you awhile to get those things to feel better.

Unfortunately, when we have anything like that, any ankle trauma to the ankle in the list, soft tissue department is going put injury into or changes into the bone department.

Because remember you can’t have just soft tissue injury at the joint without potentially moving the joint. Now this joint that was really mobile is now not moving at all. Now, even if we do get our soft tissue to start feeling better, moving better and healing.

Now we might have a secondary injury in here where we’ve had changes to the joint of the ankle in and of itself.

17:31
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
And it’s stuck. Remember this bone needs to glide forward and needs a glide back.

And he needs to glide forward. It needs a glide back, but now we’ve been sitting like this for so long because we can’t put pressure on the ankle.

We can’t put weight into the angle and or the foot we’re not walking. We’re just leaving like this. Probably the majority of us, or if we are walking, we’re walking with one big club foot, and we’re just doing this a lot.

If we’re doing that, this is now getting stuck, or this is getting stuck. Even this big fibula that big long bone gets stuck down there. Now you can’t move in and out.

18:09
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
To glide up and down and it was not gliding. Yeah.

18:12
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
We’re now missing the ability to do this and to do this with the ankle, which then what happens in.

18:19
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
It’s going to create all different kinds of movement patterns, even down further down the foot or all the way up the chain to the neck.

18:25
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah, absolutely.

Here’s the thing that sprain that we had remember an acute injury, it takes up to three months or to six months, depending on how severe the trauma is to the ankle for the tissue to fully heal, depending on what it is.

Now the tissue is healing, but now the joint is not working correctly. Do you think that’s going to give more or less opportunity for the body to have another secondary injury?

They always say, and they, by they, I mean, they, cause we know they are correct. The best indicator of an injury is.

19:05
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Previous is.

19:06
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
A previous injury. Because every time you injure yourself, your body changes.

19:11
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
For a roll that ankle chances are unless you had proper therapy and gone through the healing process and allowed it to heal, probably going to get that ankle roll again sooner. It could be more severe than the first time.

19:22
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right? Not only that, but when we’re talking about ligaments, remember ligaments, they don’t have a lot of contractile property, meaning they’re not shortening and lengthening a Bustle’s job is to shorten and lengthen, right?

The S the ligaments job is to stabilize. Now all of a sudden you’ve done this right into your ligaments. Now your ligaments have a lot more laxity, which means they got a lot more play in them.

Now a muscle, a joint that normally would have movement in a normal range of motion is now all of a sudden, it’s like, oh yeah. Now where you’re not stable as much as you should be.

You have the ability to give yourself even more of an injury, because those are the people who ever sprain your ankle. You literally just roll your ankles.

Like every time you’re like, I just looked at the rock and boom, my ankle rolled over, I just looked at this, I could wear 18 inch heels and then take my shoes off and go into flats and roll myself down the hill.

20:25
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
And that happens all the time. It did it,

20:29
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
My heels off. And,

20:30
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Oh my God, I hate when that happens every time, all the time. Here’s the other thing that we need to talk about with the ankle.

Can we mobilize the joint back to where it needs to be once it’s stuck?

20:46
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Can we move, but are we gonna be holding stable in that area once it’s moving again? Can we hold stability right with that? Because that’s the big question.

20:53
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. We’ve gotten a lot of people who have come to us with previous ankle injuries.

Remember you guys, if you’re holding in your foot is like this, and it’s not doing flexing. Plantar flexing and dorsal flexing, right? It’s not moving into inversion E version. It’s not rolling this way, and it’s not moving this way.

What else? Isn’t working them, big muscles that are actually controlling the movements. If they’re not moving, these don’t get to work. Remember Wolff’s law says what?

21:25
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC

The body is going to change depending on the demand placed on it.

21:29
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. If you don’t use it, you lose it.

Now all of a sudden the muscles aren’t working as hard as they have to, because they’re not getting the attention because the joint doesn’t move.

Remember muscles, pull bones. If the muscles are contracting, but the bones aren’t moving, these guys, aren’t going to get to where they need to be either. It messes everything up in your kinetic chain, the nerves get overridden.

They don’t know what to do. They’re like, I just, I dunno, I keep calling out sick suggestions and nobody’s following suit. The muscles are like, dude, I can’t, I can only do so much in the joints.

Like, dude, I’m stuck. So we need to help everything out. Right. Everybody’s I mean, the body’s a very needy body, especially ankles who are very needy.

Yes, you’ve sprained or strained your ankle. You’ve injured your ankle, but is it just your ankle that you’ve injured?

22:21
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
No. You can’t just wait for your ankle injury to get better. I know you, and I’m talking to all of you guys that roll your ankles and then you’re like, man, I’m going to be fine.

I’ll just tape it, put a brace on it. We’ll be fine because you have no patients to actually go through all of the stuff that you need to do in order to get that guy back.

22:40
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
I find by next week, and then I’ll go, do jujitsu, have somebody crank on my ankle. Yeah.

22:45
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
They go to see somebody and, or they can’t do it. Somebody just cranks on their ankle and pulls it. Boom starts a process all over again.

We do see that quite a bit. The reason why I’m telling you this is there’s more to it than just an ankle sprain. You have to determine whether it is from the tendon or the ligament as to how you’re going to treat it.

Is there bruising? Is there not bruising? Is there heat? Is there not heat? Was this time for you to see the doctor or not see the doctor and how are you going to treat it after the soft tissue heals?

Because when the soft tissue heals, it still leaves behind the bones. If these bones aren’t moving, the soft tissue is going to get injured again and, or is the ligament too lax and you got too much movement in there and then you gotta strengthen it.

Lengthening & Strengthening The Foot And Ankle Ligaments and Muscles

23:37
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
So do you lengthen, do you strengthen? Do you move it? Do you not move it?

23:41
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
How to strengthen a ligament or put that intention back into ligament? That’s another.

23:44
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Show. Yeah, for sure. For sure. The thing is that we need to understand is when you’re talking ankles, there’s way more to it than meets the eye.

It doesn’t mean that just because you sprained ankle, your daunted sprained ankle for the rest of your life. Because once you do it, you can get it back. You get to go to the right people and have them work with you as far as how to move it.

Because this ankle does like to move the heel, likes to move. The fibula likes to move the tibia. Doesn’t like to move so much in this aspect, but it does love here. Without this, then we’re working into the foot.

Remember if this is a moving, these have to move way more. We’re about to get into the foot next week. If you have ankle sprain, you probably have a foot issue.

24:35
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
If you have ankle sprain or a strain, you may have a knee issue. If you have ankle sprain, you might have a hip issue.

Remember it goes up and down the chain, because if you can’t walk properly and you can’t do this, your body’s going to figure out how to get it done and adjust it. It may not be right, because remember that gall goes back to compensation and compensatory patterns.

The thing to find out with the ankle is a, is it a sprain or a strain? It attendant or is it a ligament? Is there bruising his or not? Did I hear a pop? Did I hear or not? Can I move the ankle? Can I not?

From there, move into how to get it feeling better, get a stable again, but make sure that no matter what you’re doing, you know that your hip, your knee, your ankle, your pelvis, your back, your upper back, your shoulder, your head, your neck, all of these kids would be affected because we move all the way up and down the body.

The Ankle Joint Is A Key Player In Proper Form And Movement

25:37
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
All of our joints look at Scully. Scully’s a mess back here.

Where it started from ankle sprain, swear to God. He was just walking along and then this ankle doesn’t move. Bam, next, his leg fell off and now he has scoliosis. That’s exactly how it has exactly how it happened.

Don’t be a Scully, check your ankles. Listen, if you have anybody that’s ever rolled their ankle, that’s ever torn their ankle. That has a high ankle sprain versus a low ankle sprain that has ankle sprain versus a strain.

Pass this along to them. Hopefully it will help if your yes, if your ankle sprain is not going away and you keep doing it over and over again, check your ligaments, but also check the ankle joints.

The ankle joint is a big player in the game to.

26:25
Speaker 3
Check yourself before you wreck yourself,

26:27
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Literally little rolly.

Let next week we’re going to get into all the bones of the foot and why the foot is so important and that little like plantar fasciitis that all of us get and where it might actually be coming from.

All right. I hope you guys enjoyed this week. If anybody that needs a, of help with their ankles or any other body parts, please pass this video along to them.

If you have anything that you would like to hear from us, please connect with us. We would love to hear from you. If you’re having a great one, we’ll see you next week.

Pro To Col Sport Systems

What to Expect During Your First Physical Therapy Assessment for Pain Management

Preparing Your Initial Health Information

Conducting a Hands-On Symptom and Tissue Assessment

Evaluating Posture and Body Mechanics

Testing Range of Motion and Flexibility

Assessing Muscle Strength and Stability

Performing Specialized Diagnostic Tests

Formulating Diagnostic Findings and Goals

Designing Your Personalized Treatment Strategy

Experiencing Your Initial Therapeutic Exercises

Committing to Your Path of Long-Term Recovery

Proper Core Activation: The Key To Alleviating Chronic Back Pain

Proper Core Activation: The Key To Alleviating Chronic Back Pain

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Have low back pain that just doesn’t go away?

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Obliques & Transversus Abdominis

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Protocol Doesn’t Take Insurance. Here’s Why.

Protocol Doesn’t Take Insurance. Here’s Why.

Copays Are Expensive

If something weird comes up, we can’t really address it because we don’t have the time to.

Insurance Takes The Humanity Out Of It

What we do is we spend an hour with you.

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It’s Easier To Go Without Insurance

15 minute free injury assessment

Not Healing From Injuries? Here’s Why.

Not Healing From Injuries? Here’s Why.

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Patterns In The Body Can Help Or Hurt

Take Responsibility For Breaking Habits

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We lose on average about five pounds of muscle mass per year, if we don’t maintain it.

﻿

Finding The “Why” Of Your Injury

Finding The “Why” Of Your Injury ﻿

Why Are You In Pain?

Nobody consciously goes out to injure themselves.

The weaknesses become more pronounced on the opposite sides.

Finding The Why: What Did You Do When You Were Younger?

Something that happened to you earlier on could be having a direct influence on something else that you’re experiencing.

﻿

Don’t Let Your Body Lag

Continuing Patterns Have A “Why” Behind Them

Scraping: What Is It, And Should You Do It?

Scraping: What Is It, And Should You Do It? ﻿

What Is Scraping, or IASTM?

IASTM, which means instrument assisted soft tissue mobilization.

Scraping Can Fix Adhesions

When scraping, be aware and diligent not hurt the tissue

Scraping stimulates the mechano sensitive neurons

It Doesn’t Have to Hurt To Make It Better

Choose a Certified Person To Perform IASTM

Walk This Way: Why Your Gait Matters

Walk This Way: Why Your Gait Matters ﻿

Finding The “Why” Of Your Injury

Scraping: What Is It, And Should You Do It?

Walk This Way: Why Your Gait Matters

Ankle Pain And How To Work With It