Fix Lower Back Pain, Tight Neck & Stiff Shoulders Fast! Stiffness, Mobility & Injury Prevention Explained | Natural Movement, Posture, Hips & Strength | Movement is Medicine

0:04 This is the Fitness Wisdom podcast.

0:09 What are the most common causes of lower back pain? You know, a lot of people are struggling with lower back pain these days, and it's not because of direct physical injury. People might just wake up one day from their bed and all of a sudden they're aching, you know, on their shoulders, their neck or their lower back or their knees. What are the most common? Of lower back pain causes. The most common causes I believe is lack of movement and sitting too much and sleeping in the wrong position. But more importantly, I think it all comes down to any type of injury comes down to the fact that we are neglecting the awareness and the body part that is getting injured.

0:51 And over time, as we age, it tends to the body tends to try to repair it as we are pushing it. But then one time it just says too much. And as we age, we recover less and less in a smoother way. I actually thought about this question as in why do people get hurt and what is the, the true purpose of rehabilitation nowadays? And you see how in the rehabilitation, they're really focusing on each part, each body part. And I, I said that today that the ultimate rehabilitation for human being is literally movement.

1:31 It all comes in like if you don't move, a body part is going to get weak, you're going to lose awareness and control into it. And then future in the future, you're going to get hurt. So you can either spend your time into paying some physiotherapies that is going to precisely work on that muscle on that area and tell you, OK, this is the rehabilitation for your knee, for your lower back. Or you could just move your body in all the possible ways which will develop your awareness and control and will avoid from getting it weak.

2:06 You get what I mean? So the ultimate rehabilitation or prehab is movement. And I'm not talking about just normal movement, but I'm talking about like, you know, common movement. But it's like the exploration movement. And if you look at it in a way, when we were kids, we all explored that. We all went through that exploration. This is how we actually developed our body. This is how we were capable of starting from our life, starting from crawling to then develop enough to stand up and move around.

2:43 And we crawled under that. Even when we were capable of moving on our two legs, we all felt the need to go down the table, pretend to be an animal and crawl down. No one told us to do that. It was a feeling. We all had the feeling to crawl under the bed, to jump from one couch to another, to climb. We had the feeling we had the need in the field to explore our body. And you see it when when a, when a baby is born, the he spent most of his days playing with his body, exploring with his body. And I think this is, this is when we become disconnected to the feeling of youth, the feeling of exploration.

3:25 And do you see it also in animals? Like I made a post that actually went quite successful, but a lot of people didn't get it. It was aging doesn't weaken the animal. And of course I had, I had a lot of people telling me, no, of course it it weakens. What are you talking about? And I'm like, no, no, no, you don't get it. Look at a cat, the beginning of his life and the end of his life. He's not going to lose range of motion. He's not going to be in a wheelchair. He probably will have less energy and less power for sure.

3:55 OK, that's not what I'm talking about. But he's not going to be less movable. He's like, but now when you compare to humans, our life can reach up to, let's say, 100%. And by 30, some of us can't do what we were doing when we were 10. Like that is just 20 years apart. After 30, usually it gets worse. Some people, I mean at 30, some people can't touch their toes. Some people can't even do a cartwheel or explore or get down onto a squat. And you see some people at 50, they already can't move at all.

4:30 And that's half of your life. And compared to that, animals don't have this problem. They don't have this issue because they constantly move. They're either resting, either moving, they're either all playing and exploring their body constantly on a daily basis. Yeah, I think This is why the people get so many injuries. It's not only related to lower back pain, but it's also related to the lack of exploration and awareness and movement. That's all. So she I've I've never seen a gymnast getting hurt or someone getting someone that constantly challenge her body except if she get hurts performing.

5:10 Yes. You know that's this is a completely different matter, but it's not like, oh, I picked up something from the ground and my back went. Guys, if you haven't already, smash that subscribe button and the like button now back to the show. Yeah, exactly from this sort of like not knowing where it came from kind of a reason, but as you. Mentioned there. Just to summarize everything that you just said from the very beginning, you mentioned some very important key points, which is the movement exploration, really to not lose that sense of play throughout our daily life.

5:40 People have definitely lost that, right? Our, our way of living right now is so structured and so sedentary going, you know, sitting, doing everything, sitting, going to the work, sitting at work, sitting at home on the couch, you know, everything is basically sitting down where we've lost that excite excitement for life really. And no one actually does anything in the form of play. And we tend to think of exercise as something that we need to do rather than something that we enjoy to do. So it's also, I feel like there is the aspect effective as well, like forcing the body to do something that maybe doesn't feel like doing versus something that you love and that you enjoy to do.

6:18 Because again, there is that lack of sense of play in the movement. And another important thing you mentioned was about the nervous system state where you mentioned about the overwhelm and the overload, right? You mentioned that, well, you didn't say it in these words specifically, but I'm kind of like reframing it. You were saying that people are just so overloaded in life that they are unaware of their bodies. They are moving with lack of aware and it's due to their mind being stuck on constantly going, going, going and there is no not being in the present moment.

6:48 So no one is aware of their breath, they're not aware of their posture, they're not aware about even what they're thinking of, what they're consuming in their environment. And so therefore when they go to do things, they're moving the body in with lack of awareness. And then that is leading to some form of non contact injury. Now that being said, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's an injury specifically. It could just mean that you're experiencing some pain in the tissues, even though there is no physical damage to the tissues.

7:17 So for example, you know, you may experience some pain or or discomfort or cramping, you know, or spasm. But then that is just because the nervous system is so overwhelmed and so pushed over the edge because your entire life is stressing your sympathetic nervous system or activating your sympathetic nervous system, therefore leading you to have these weird symptoms and issues where you can't explain where they arose from. So those are just really great points that you brought about there, especially about the fact that people are not exploring their bodies like they used to before.

7:51 But before we dive any deeper, do you want to tell people who you are, what you do? And yeah, your your specialization. So my name is MO Mohammed and I'm a movement coach that actually started as an osteopath. And for me being an osteopath was not enough. So I had those clients that were coming to me to get fixed and and I will notice often that they will just come back with the same problem. And then this is when I realized that therapy in its form is only treating the symptoms. It's not fixing the cause, the cause route of any problem.

8:30 And it was just not enough. As a matter of fact, this is one of the reason I also partially stopped being an osteopath. So I, I can give a session to a client, but I often say to them, if you're not going to, if we can either work together to not have this problem anymore and we will work together. This problem is not going to happen ever again. In a matter of a month or two, you will come back with the same problem. If you come back with the same problem, then I'm not interested in that. I, my purpose, my passion is to fix people, to teach them, to educate them, to make them reach the real capability of a human body.

9:19 Not a broken 1, not an alternate version, one that is crowded and sitting and can't move because what is this type of, what is this life if it cannot be fully lived? You understand what I mean. And to be fair, I just want to say a side note about that. I am. I became so frustrated even with the world of fitness for instance, or the exercise nowadays because it just feels like a lie. Show me. OK, bring me someone that has been coming to a class for a year. Ask them just one question. What did you learn?

9:55 Nothing. Exactly nothing you did not learn. The high rocks, CrossFit, HIT classes, all of those classes. They don't teach anything they make you do. And people think that OK, this is going to make me healthy. And the worst is that the coach are promoting it as a way to become healthy. You know, and you just feel like this system is broken. If you were healthy, why so many people are getting hurt? Why so many people are are have are having lack of awareness and can't move? Why we are so stuck into a trend rather than trying to understand how we are supposed to treat this junior mechanic that we have.

10:40 I mean, this is our car. This is our vessel. And people treat it like trash. Yeah. And the fitness world is not fixing anything. It's not. It's just building up trends and making people do things more and more. They spend years and years and years and the only thing they do is ended up moving like a robot. Yeah, they. Don't have any. They don't. And you know, this is what I often said as well, is that crawling, jumping, climbing, moving, exploring our body. We used to call it a game. It was our way to become playful.

11:18 It was our way to be playful, right? But now people call it exercise. Of course it's exercise because you it's a it's a homework. You don't enjoy doing 90 or sorry, 20 squads, 20 pull ups, 20 push ups or something. You don't enjoy doing this. You don't learn anything. You're just repeating over and over. That's why it's that's why people are having such a hard time to, to develop their body and enjoy it in, in the same time with the process. When you, when you work on your handstand, it's so much more than the handstand.

11:58 It brings you to a childhood like feeling. Ah, I'm balancing, Ah, let me move my legs. Ah, let me do the split. Ah, OK, what's happening? My brain has to adapt on my shoulder, on my arm. Ah, I stop breathing. Wait. And it brings you to the same state that you were when you did your first step as a child. And this is so much rewiring that we're talking in your brain. This is not only you training your body, but it's been proven that by doing complex patterns and body working so hard to do them, your body has to create new neural pathways.

12:29 Similar to reversing aging with dancing but doing squats. Doing all of those exercises can be great for strength. Don't obsess about it. Yes like people would obsess and do. I lift 200K Great. Can you do anything else? When people think about energy, sleep and hormones, they think in terms of fats and carbs. But your metabolism doesn't run on macros. Minerals are the foundation for your metabolism and a healthy and well functioning metabolism starts from your mitochondria. Every single biological process inside your body requires minerals.

13:01 When your body is lacking the minerals to run your cellular metabolism, guess how that is going to show up in your body? I'll let you figure that one out. One of my favorite ways to ensure that I get all the minerals that I need on a daily basis is through Shilajit, A herbal mineral substance which is made from the decomposition of plants and bacteria. This process taking place over thousands of years. It is primarily harvested from the Altai and the Himalayan mountains, some of the most pristine locations on the planet.

13:26 The beautiful thing about shilajit, it comes with high concentrations of fulvic acid. This molecule actually drives the minerals into the cells where they can do their work. So basically the minerals come in the most bioavailable form for your body to be able to use. Unlike most supplements which become expensive urine, this one actually does something without the hype. It's not man made, it's produced by Mother Nature herself. Now something very important to mention is the quality of shilajit. Not all shilajit on the market is created equally.

13:53 The one that I use has been tested for heavy metals and impurities, ensuring that you are getting the highest quality shilajit. So if you want to explore the shilajit that I use on a daily basis, make sure that you visit the description below and make sure to use the promo code attached for a nice discount on your entire order. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that was fantastic. That was fantastic. And I think. A lot of people understand that nutrition is important, sleep is important, sunlight is important, exercise is important, but they don't realize how you do things makes all the difference as well, right?

14:24 So you can think that one specific diet is the best for you, but it can be ruining your health. The same thing with exercise as well. You can be doing one exercise program and for some individual that may be good, but if it's lacking the variety and the sensory input like you are talking about, what I understood from what everything that you just said there is that sensory input, movement and exercise are all meant to be connected. And now with exercise these days, we are lacking that sensory input from our body, right?

14:54 We are doing 1 directional movements that are feeling very robotic and very stiff and those may have their time and place. I'm not putting them down because I feel like everything has its time and place, but it's just that do we overuse something? Do we abuse something? And do we think that this is the only way to do things? Because unfortunately, as with anything with nutrition, for example, and in training different cultures like lifting culture, movement culture, everybody likes to bash each other.

15:24 I feel like everything can work together. You can take what's useful from each one and apply into your life. And because as we're saying as well that people are a little bit different, like people might have a little bit different structure, a different background where they came from, different capabilities. So if someone all they can do. Is a leg. Extension machine, Well, that's great rather than not doing anything right, But eventually the goal is for you to be able to do a squat and then eventually from there is to be able to do lunges and keep on moving.

15:54 Do you have anything to add to this? So you said it in a great way. You talked about the diet, and I mentioned this before, as you see everyone with diet people, everyone understood with diet that we can't eat what we want, only between that the body has certain needs and it's not. Why? The way I see it is that people are focusing with one type of vitamin, you see, and they're like, oh wow, vitamin C is so great. So I'm only going to focus on vitamin C and in the meantime, I'm like, look, I mean, great vitamin C is really great.

16:30 I agree with you. But there is all of the other vitamins that you think that you're missing and it turns it's the same thing. Well, orange are full of vitamins. So I'm only going to eat orange. No, when when I come to someone and I say I'm only going to eat orange because it's full of vitamin C, people are going to go call me crazy, right? But what about your training diet? How does it look like? Do you add varieties to your body? I mean don't get me wrong, I'm not a pure mover. Like I'm not only doing movement, I lift weights, I do calisthenic, I stretch, I, I work on my strength with, with certain amount of weights, I try to do the most strength.

17:09 I'm based with a lot of mobility, full range of motion and awareness and everything. But I do lift weights, but I am not obsessed with what I like. I am obsessed with what I need because people are so obsessed with what they like. And I told them I had to give them my passion. So my passion before when I was young was being a fighter, but and I was, I was a competitor in MMA fighter. But I just decided, OK, OK, what do I really want versus to what do I really need? And being in my expertise of work when I received so many competitor and fixing them, you know, they were 5047 and they were competitors in all type of domain.

17:57 Not only fighters, but I had tennis players. I had, I had athletes like running a marathon, atletes as well. I had volleyball, I had martial artists and at the end of their life, when they're 4750, I asked them this. I always asked them this question, was it worth it? And they all answered the same thing. But at time I was stubborn. But now I would give everything I had to go back in the past and do things differently because I wake up every day in pain. And let's talk a bit about longevity here because this is not new trend.

18:37 Longevity. What is the quality of a longevity life? If your body is your own prison, Let that sink in. You live up to 2 to 200 years in pain. Every single day you wake up, you're in pain, you move, you're in pain, you can't move. You need help. I mean, it's great to live long, but that's not the type of life I want. You get what I mean. So everyone is obsessed about longevity and no one is realizing that living longer is great but having a high quality life and having a body that is functional while living longer is even greater.

19:13 And waking up in pain or waking up thinking, oh, I used to do so much with my body, man, when I was young. That's not what I want to. That's not the type of conversation or sentence I want to say in the future. And when you look at Chinese culture with Kong Kung Fu, you can see them that they're 70 year old and they still move like absolute legend. And we have the tendency to be like, no, no, it's their gene. Fucking nonsense. It's not their gene or anything. It's not it's they've done, he's been doing this since he was like 20 years old.

19:54 And he's, he didn't stop. That's why he can do this. Yeah. But it's that's why he's he can do the split. He can stretch, he can do calisthenetic, he can move. You see them, there are 7080 and all of those things and they haven't stopped moving, they haven't stopped exploring, but they are not obsessed like Western culture into let's do more, more reps, more weight, faster, longer time. And it's all a quantity, A quantity number. But we all know more quantity, less quality. You can't have it both ways.

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22:29 The link will be in the description below, alongside with a 15% discount code. Exactly. Yeah, I think you touched on a very, very important point that that more is not necessarily better and that takes us out of tune with our body people have. Are become out, they're not in tune with their body, so they're not in awareness with their body. And because they're chasing specific numbers, always trying to do better, which of course you need in some sense to progressively overload, right? To get stronger or to become fitter, you have to have some form of progressive overload, but within your own body's limits, meaning listening to your body's limits.

23:04 If you're still pushing your body even though you have pain and you say, oh, I'm still going to train anyway, this specific way, even though it's sabotaging the way that you feel or your quality of movement and you just keep on doing it over and over again, Well, do you think you're somehow going to magically fix the problem? In fact, it may make the problem even worse. This is how it was for me in the past when I used to do more conventional training, 1 directional training. I used to do more bodybuilding and powerlifting style and I always knew that the squat and the deadlift are the king of lifts, right?

23:36 Or that's what they tell you. But then even though I was encountering some issues with my lower back, I never had any kind of issues with my joints specifically. But I had like I always encountered some spasm in my lower back once I reached a specific weight on both squat and deadlift. But I didn't want to admit that those movements are actually causing me the issue. I just felt like there is something else I'm doing which is contributing to the problem. But what I actually learned in the end is that my nervous system was not able to handle that load and time when my body would reach a specific load on, on, on the bar, my nervous system would just shut down.

24:11 And that's basically when I would have those issues. And eventually what I ended up doing, I just ended up quitting all of those lifts that bothered me entirely and just focused on the things that made me feel good. And then once I started doing that, all of a sudden I never experienced that anymore. And I just realized that I don't need to necessarily do those movements in order to build strength or build muscle or build capability just because someone online or the research or whatever shows you these are the best movements to develop legs.

24:39 These are the best movements to develop overall power and strength. There is just so many more things that you can do with your body in order to get there. And I just feel like because we have been programmed and taught a specific way, people think that this is the only way to do things. And I guess the reason why people don't explore movement more and mobility and and movement training and playfulness is because it's a little bit more harder to structure into your routine if you don't know what you're doing.

25:07 But at the same time, I love what you are sharing online, like on social media and on your YouTube channel because you're actually showing people simple ways that they can actually move their body in a structured manner. Because many people, for example, wouldn't know how to train their legs adequately at home. And so therefore they would rather go to the gym, which is like, you know, straight lines. I just do this machine, this machine, this machine. And I know I've covered all of my bases. Well, have you really, have you actually trained your body like a system or have you trained it in isolated parts?

25:40 Yes, you may have targeted your quads, your hamstrings, your inner thighs and your calves, but how are all of those muscles working in a 360° free fashion as they should, like in rotation, for example, and, and sprinting and walking and jumping and all of the all of that good stuff. But before we continue down this path, do you want me? Do you want to tell me the downsides of sitting in general? Why should people be conscious and aware of not sitting too long? What are the consequences of sitting long periods of time?

26:12 Well. First of all, sitting is a is a torture device. To just put it simply, sitting is a torture device. When you look at Chinese culture, Thai culture or Asian culture in general, you see them that they never lost the ability to squat down. Most of them will eat on the floor, they will sit on the floor. And the fact that we're sitting, I mean, I understand how convenient it is when you are working in your office, for example, you can't really change that. But I would, I was, I used to work in office at some point and even now I would work on my laptop programming for hours and hours and I would just constantly switch position.

27:07 And I learned that from from my mentor actually, which was quite inspiring because he is a programmer. So he's constantly working on his computer coding, but he's also a movement coach and he doesn't have any chairs at home. He does not have any couch or any chairs at home. And I would ask like, it was not him that told me that, but it was actually his partner. And then I was like, wait, what? And I went to him and I was like, is that true? He's like, yes. And I'm like, but how do you do? And he's like, I have just a small table.

27:48 I put my laptop and I will just program and I'm like, but your body is not aching or hurting like you sitting in a squad for that amount of time. And then he said something very beautiful that's that kind of like stuck in my head. He said yes your body is telling you to move which is great so change position. But he's someone can like open into a split. He would be like I will switch between deep squad to middle split to pigeon to. And if your body is aching from staying in that position, that is literally your body telling you to move and change position.

28:25 Aiming for comfort to numb the sensory output of your body telling you to move is not the right way. I mean look at it for example, you can be laying down on a bed. Let's say I put you in a coma for two months. Are you going to wake up feeling great? No, you're not going to be able to move. You're going to be aching. You're going to have lower back pain. Your hip is going to hurt, your neck is going to hurt. So comfort has never been the solution for growth and health. We, we've made that clear.

28:58 Movement is and we are creatures of motion. And you should. When you look at animals, the only time that they're not moving is when they're resting. We're the only pieces on earth that we work in a static position. So sitting is you working, whether you're on a computer or in office or writing down a book or whatever, you're working in a static position. And that is the root cause of every problem. You're not resting mature static. That's the key difference there. That's a very important distinction that you make.

29:34 And under the hood, like on a on a. Deeper level like you have like decreased blood flow, decreased lymphatic system flow, you're getting less oxygen like to your brain and to your organs. And because as you, as you mentioned, we're static like in nature for example, because we don't have chairs in nature or beds, even if you were to sit down, you would get uncomfortable right, sitting on a rock. So you'd naturally move your bum or something, right? Or if you look at an animal, for example, they are always fidgeting.

30:04 And fidgeting is actually like a good thing. You expend more calories while you're doing that, but at the same time it prevents you from being in pain because you're in that ready state. You're in that ready state. I think that's such an important thing because many people want to be able to get up from a chair and be able to Sprint immediately, right? But so many people can't do that. They say let me stretch real quick, but the. Issue let me warm. Up. Yeah. In nature, you don't have time to stretch.

30:31 If a lion is running after you, you better be able to get away from it, right? So true. Nature is so intelligent. Look at a cat or a dog or any any animal. Look at how many times they stretch per day. They will stretch even when they will be in a sleeping state. Like look at a cat. He will stretch his his legs. He will do like yoga was actually inspired by a lot of animals like that, like you. You can see like yoga was like, that's why they gave the name cobra, downward facing dog, the crane, all of those things.

31:02 And you can realize that well, animals have been way more connected to their body than we are and we've been completely disconnected. So there is a lot of lesson that we can learn, but being be like not moving for me is the biggest punishment someone can have because the moment you lose the ability to move, you regret instantly the moment like I've done a knee surgery, you know, and guess what? I would look at my knee and I would see everyone running, jumping. I would see kids in the park and they would be like, why?

31:45 I never did that, you know? And it's the same for your for lower back. The moment you lower back, you can be as strong as you as like. You can be the strongest man on earth. The moment you have a like a problem in your back, sneezing will kill you. Yes. Yes, you will feel you. You can be the strongest. You can be a fighter, the strongest man or Hurricanes. The moment this happened as a man or as an individual, you're like, if someone pushed me right now, if someone tried to, to do anything to me, I would not be able to do anything.

32:18 Like that's it. You know, you realize how fragile you, you are. And you're not fragile because the human body is fragile. You're fragile because you've been neglecting and you chose to become fragile. You see, this is a very different thing. People tend to say to, to take injuries. Well, now you see, I hurt my, my knee and my lower back. So taking it easy. I don't want to hurt myself. And they identify themselves as I am being fragile. I am, I am weak, I am frail. This is going to happen to me. And I realized that no, no, no, you chose to to become like that.

32:54 This is just the result of your lifetime. It's not we. We have all the same DNA right about 98% and yet somehow identify themselves as prone to injuries. I know. Yeah, which which is not the case. And so movement is key to everything again and again. And I think people would if people were spending more time learning about their body. I mean, look at look at you, for example. You, you, you told me you started as doing conventional training. Then you, you discovered mobility and then you discovered movement.

33:31 Then that led you on the path of longevity of nervous system of sarcanium rhythm. And you're like, because you open that door of exploration that led you to so many different paths. You get what I mean? While when, when people are just stuck in one discipline, one thing, they never reach that. Like, look at it. Have you ever met a Yogi person that is passionate about yoga that talks about all of those different subjects? No, not that yoga is bad and I'm not passionate, but because they're stuck in it.

34:09 Yes, yes. I am a Yogi. Yogi is the yoga is the answer. No, it's not. It might be part of it, but it's not. Yes, and while movers have the tendency to not take anything as a master and just be I'm going to take everything. So we learn more, we educate, we explore, and that's how that that's what it laid like. It led me to read so many research about things that are not even related to movement or mobility. But because for me, it was about understanding this, this what I have, what I'm going to spend the last day of my life with either my biggest enemy in trauma or either my biggest life to experience life to the fullest without holding back, without being afraid of a lower back knee or anything.

34:59 And this is so important for people to realize that what type of life do you want to live? It all comes down to this. It's not about you living and saying I am healthy. It's about you living to your fullest. And a real coach doesn't add, doesn't make you fit. He adds years to your life. He gives you the capacity to experience more to live life without worrying about anything, to avoid surgeries to to be confident to to build awareness, to think to. It's not just about muscle. While when you that, that's real, that's a job of a real longevity coach and mobility coach that he gives you so much more than just training and exercise.

35:44 And in the, in the other side, you have the people that just train 1 discipline one thing and the only thing they give you is a burnout of calories and maybe a good diet. And hey, you have 6 packs. Be happy, you know what I mean? So man, it's I mean, the six packs are going to come, the muscles are going to come. And people are, people think that, I mean, yeah, they they think that it has to be this certain way only to reach the goal that they want to to have. But as a matter of fact, no, it's not.

36:15 It's so much more fun, like to explore your body and learn more about it. Everybody knows about vitamin C, but have you ever heard about vitamin G? I'm talking about grounding. We know that oxygen is important for our survival, but what if I told you that grounding is just as foundational for our health? Your body is literally a battery and needs to be recharged every single day. Modern life depletes it. Fatigue, insomnia, brain fog, and restlessness. These all sound like a charge deficiency to me.

36:44 You see, grounding is not optional, it's foundational. This is why I make sure to get my bare feet on the ground every single day and to ensure that I stay grounded 24/7 like our ancestors did. I use my favorite grounding sheet as I sleep to keep me connected to the earth at all times. Check out my favorite grounding mats and sheets that I use on a daily basis by heading over to the description below. And make sure to use the promo code attached to get a massive discount on your entire order. Yeah.

37:11 For now, everything that you said, there's so many important points. I think that so many people are fixated on the end goal, right? Once they achieve something like you mentioned there, like a specific aesthetic outlook or a specific strength goal that they will be happy or satisfied. But the truth is that I can tell you for myself, and it's probably the same for you, that once you get there, you're like, well, there must be more to this, right? That so you're always searching for. We are never satisfied as human beings.

37:37 So I always tend to think about muscle mass, fat loss, capability, and all this as byproducts of just living life and trying to be healthy and moving in ways that is actually serving my body rather than destroying my body. Because again, at the end of the day, if you're not listening to your body, what you're doing is causing you discomfort and pain and it's not making you feel good. Maybe it's that what you mentioned earlier, maybe it's a sign for your body that you should do something different, even as simple as taking the resting posture that you mentioned there sitting in a squat for so long.

38:10 Well, maybe now it's time to move into another position, you know, and the same thing with training. It's time for you to explore other forms of training, other forms of movement. For me, how I actually go introduce more into movement actually was because that again, that story which I mentioned to you, but then the very first thing we actually opened my eyes was when I started wearing barefoot shoes. I started exploring the idea of being not with cushioned shoes and tight toe box on the front and starting to go to without shoes and then barefoot shoes in general.

38:40 And now for seven or eight years now, I haven't worn any conventional shoes at all. All my shoes are bare shoes or I don't wear any shoes at all. Like now these days I just wear my earth runners like barefoot sandals because here in Cyprus like OK, the weather is, is pretty good pretty much 365 days a year. And even in the winter time I still wear them even though my toes are cold because they are still my favorite pair and it allows my toes to function as they should. And then I understood how important the feet are for connecting my entire body and sensing and feeling my entire body through my feet and how impacts my hips and my lower back and my shoulders and my neck and how I move in general.

39:22 And now I have better sensation of an awareness of where I am in space. Another good thing that you mentioned previously about the Tai Chi and the Qigong, which I wanted to retouch on was that type of movement because it's not like all out and it's only like, you know, a little part of your day, let's say 1020 minutes every day. Again, going back to the idea that more is better. Well, actually doing something that's not all out, but just moving your body and feeling good. People have lost this understanding that maybe you don't need to walk your 10,000 steps.

39:54 Maybe you can move your body in other, in other ways, for example, which doesn't stress you out where because people are obsessed with goals, right? They're obsessed with getting steps. And of course, that's the easiest way for the body to get movement in is by walking. But there are so many ways that you can explore moving. Like I love doing rope flow and I'm sure that you do rope flow as well. And rope flowing is. Incredible. I do that. You know, I'll do that overwalking any day. And I'll spend half an hour, one hour doing that continuously and not get tired at all.

40:25 Because there is this sense of play, exploration, change of direction. My brain is constantly being stimulated. And by the end of that I feel like I want to fall asleep. Not because it made me tired, but because it stimulated my brain so much that now my body has to rewire itself. It's crazy. You said something that was so funny because Oh my God, like this 10,000 steps a day. I don't know who brought that up. I really don't know. Nice. But it's so silly. It's so silly. Like first of all, I never count how many steps I do and I never cared, OK.

41:04 Second, I would rather spend time working on my mobility movement, explore my body, juggle rope flow like you said, rather than focusing on achieving metrics. I said that today actually. It's funny, I had to work really hard on myself to not chase metrics or performance and chase well-being. And those are very different points, but people think that they're the same direction. They're not the same direction. So chasing Matrix and performance is always making you push. But that also means that, well, OK, well you had a bad night of sleep or you didn't sleep good or you think you're slept good, but your body didn't recover and you still push while chasing well-being is actually, well, like I brought the subject before, which is having a diet that is actually healthy and eating a little bit of everything.

42:04 You see. Well, OK, I don't feel like I can push today. Very like strong. So I'm not going to lift weights. Let me play a bit with a bit of movement. Oh, well, no movement. No, I feel like my joints need a bit of rest. Let me do movement, floor, floor. So it will be like lighter. It will work more on the joint mobility and everything like that rather than and some certain patterns rather than actual pressure on certain point and more or less muscularly demanding. Or sometime I will just have fun and play with the ball or I will just work on different skills.

42:41 And there is so much more that the human can do. We can do so many things that sometimes people are surprised when they tell me. But wait, you train every day? I'm like, not really the type of training you will do, but yes, I try to do everything. Like I try to do something every day, you know, Do you stop breathing one day? No, you don't. You know, you don't stop breathing, you don't stop eating. So for me, OK, maybe today I didn't train, but I'm going to explore something else. I'm going to work.

43:11 Sometime it's even visualization, just visualizing a type of pattern or movement in your head. You know, like it's not just doing, doing, doing, but it's so much more. Like again, we go back to the exploration, but the 10,000 steps yet. I mean I get why people are saying this is because we used to run about 20 to 30 kilometer a day because we were hunting, we were hunting and we were hunting not on the Flat Earth we were we were crawling when we were hunting. We were sometime climbing trees. We will Crouch down so our prey doesn't see us.

43:50 We would jump, we would Sprint, we would throw the spare to to to hit. We will hit the arrow. We will we will do so much more than just a well before our ancestor used to walk 20 to 30 kilometer because they were hunting. That's the only part they took. They forgot about all the rest that involve hunting, which is so much more skills. Again. Like sometime I go and I shoot some arrows because I want to learn. This is a beautiful skills. Sometimes it's shooting range. It's not just about doing one thing, but it's about exploring the body, exploring your capacity and ability to do things.

44:28 And the more you do it like this, the more you become playful. I remember the first when I stopped fighting, I actually felt guilty because I felt happier even though it was my passion. But I had to stop because of also certain things like certain reasons the doctor told me look like those weight cuts. It's really not healthy for you. And I had a really bad one as well. And I just took the radical decision and it was really hard for me. But what I did, I started to go to Samsung dancing. I started to go rock climbing, I started to go hot yoga and I felt so much happy to explore so much different fun and and I was like, wow, it's so much fun when you just can do anything you want and you're not stuck into one obsession.

45:22 I mean, I get it. We all develop certain obsession, but you grow, you grow out out of it at some point and you realize, or if you don't and you take that radical decision and thinking and you're like, it's actually fun. I'm having fun right now. Like rock climbing was so much more than rock climbing to me. It was my insecurity, my doubt, commitment issues. Every time I will try to reach, but you're always on the edge of falling. So you're always doubting yourself, all of you insecurity. It was a psychological treatment in my head.

45:55 And I realized like if I had to jump, take the leap and grab something, if I did have a jump, I would fall and then I would have to start all over again. And it was a body human puzzled. I was, I would look at the trail and be like, maybe I should do this, maybe here, pull, push. And it was like, yeah, it was so much therapeutical for me to face my own self, face all of my issues. It's not about the trail of climbing that is hard that is stopping you. It's you and yourself. And that's the beautiful thing about climbing.

46:29 So every every sports, every discipline has something to teach her. And I think people need to realize that we're here to learn. That's that's what made us evolve, actually pass down knowledge. That's that's why people knowledge is has been passed down over and over again. We haven't evolved. We didn't we actually regressed. The only thing that is that allow us to but it's true. It's true. Put put, put the homo sapien in front of a human nowadays in front of the best Crossfitter. You know what? You know what?

47:03 He will smash him on all domains. 1000%. Period where you have all the nutrition machine diet steroids even if you want Yeah, the homo sapien will like is a hunting survival machine. We haven't evolved. We regressed. We change our environment and the only reason why we did that at the end was because we were capable of passing down knowledge. So what is the answer? Learn more. Are you interested in smoother skin, better recovery from workouts, improved energy levels, and an overall feeling of vitality?

47:44 Listen up. You've probably heard about the benefits of red and infrared light. And This is why I love to use my red light therapy mat every single day. And the reason why red and infrared light is so powerful for our health is because it targets the mitochondria, which is the foundation of cellular energy. When our body is able to produce energy efficiently on a mitochondrial level, we have better energy levels, better cognitive function, better hormones, better sleep, basically every aspect of our life is improved.

48:08 Red and infrared light is not something optional, it's foundational and it's something that we are meant to get in our lives every single day. Sunlight contains red and infrared light at all times of the year. Unfortunately, most people are not getting outside and This is why it is essential for red and infrared light to be supplemented back into our lives because it's not something nice to do. In my opinion, it's a biological necessity. Think of light as an instruction manual for your metabolism.

48:32 Without that light, your body starts to fall apart. So if you want to check out the Red Light Therapy mat, which I love to use on a daily basis, head over to the description below and make sure to use the promo code attached. For a nice discount on your entire order keep stimulating keep stimulating your brain. I think like the important reframing there like what you mentioned was really really good about the importance of moving daily. I think a lot of people, they just confuse movement and exercise.

48:59 Something which I love to tell people is that movement is a biological necessity, something that your body requires every single day, as you mentioned, as breathing in order to stay healthy. It's not optional. Like just because you can't like sit down and do nothing doesn't mean that you should. And your body is asking you to do something. OK, maybe some days, as you said, like you may wake up and you may feel tired and you may not feel like doing something, but you should still do something. But just it's more gentle, right?

49:29 Listen to your body, listen to your inner promptings and follow that. Of course, some days you have to have some discipline and structure and say, OK, no matter how I feel, I should do it. Because always I've never met a single person right now who has done a workout or a movement session and feels bad afterwards. Most people feel very happy that they trained and move their body right. So so. True. Yeah. So basically if you don't do that, then you will always feel like crap and you keep on dwelling in fascinating.

49:58 Or maybe I should do this instead of thinking just do it anyway. But of course you should always listen to your body. Like for example, I say another thing is that like movement is essential, but exercise is nice. So meaning that structured intentional hard exercise, which is deliberate taking you towards a specific goal. Yes, it should be in your in your weekly routine if you are serious about reaching specific goals. But movement is something that you need to do every day on top of that. So moving, you would be moving around to go and work out, right?

50:34 It's not like you're going to just sit all day just because you're going to go and do a workout later. And unfortunately, working out one hour doesn't, you know, replace sitting 23 hours. It actually doesn't give you like all the benefits that you may think it does. And there are some, there is some great research to support this, that actually people who move more throughout the day are way better off metabolically compared to people who only work out one hour a day. Even though maybe that one workout may give you maybe some more muscle because you've stimulated your muscle in a specific way, but the amount of movement that you're doing, doing is really enhancing the quality of your life in every single dimension.

51:13 And another thing that you said there was about that how movement and function or movement is always tied to a specific purpose. Like we used to move to do things like we didn't used to move to expend calories. That would be stupid in the past because that means you would die faster because you are burning your body fat and you don't know when you're going to find food next. So it would always, movement would always be tied to either hunting, gathering food, building your, you know, your house or whatever, you know, gathering wood for a fire.

51:46 It would always be tied to a purpose. But now, because we have to do the exercise, because our modern world is so convenient, we have everything at our fingertips that we don't need to move anymore. So now we have to add in the, in our daily life, deliberate structured exercise to compensate for the lack of hunting and gathering. But as you are saying, it's like you have to still mimic that hunting and gathering state every single day, even if it's not something very, very hard on your system. I want us to move on a little bit to towards mobility.

52:19 What are the worst ways that people are training mobility these days? I know that you've probably seen online, you know, some crazy things. What are the worst ways that people train mobility? And we're going to talk about the best things after. That I mean, I will start with the one that the one thing that I've noticed because I've, I've met a lot of mobility coach and often those mobility coach will be girls that are extremely already flexible. And for me it's funny. It's really funny when I see someone that you want to look at the person and say, did you ever experience tightness in your life?

52:58 But do you know how it feels like to be 100K? Because I do, you know, I do. I am 100K and I used to be extremely tight and none of the things that you're doing with ease that OK, you've done it because it was like some something that you were predominant very good at. It is going to help me because you don't know how to get from B to A, you know what I mean? But what I've noticed about that is when I meet a person, whether it's a man or woman, that are doing mobility training and they promote it, which I think it's great, but then you ask them to move and they still can't move.

53:43 Yeah. And by that I don't mean that they can move their joint. Yes. By that I say, can you connect dots? Yes. No, you can't. That's the thing. It's like when you look, when you will look at them, you will be like, Oh well, yeah, we can isolate this and we'll do that mobility exercise for the hip. We can do this for the shoulder. This, this, this. They will have great mobility, but they will be the shittiest mover ever. They will have no sequencing, no, no movement, no art, no flow, nothing. But the, the whole purpose of working on your mobility is to open your joints so you can move really.

54:18 But then you don't know how to move. You don't know how to dance, you don't know how to flow. You get what I mean? So for me, this is one point that I want to to say, if you, if you don't, if you're a mobility coach or you're into mobility and you can't move, what is the point of mobility if you can't move? That's true. Just liberating your joints because we go back to no, but we go back to you are going still to get hurt. Even if you do mobility, you are still going to get hurt because we don't hurt ourselves when we are in those specific position.

54:54 We hurt because we are in motion. And when we're in motion, we're not like, OK, let me no, we don't, we don't do those things. You know, we don't, we don't, we don't prepare for something. Your phone will fall, will fall. You're going to try to grab it to catch it. You're running after your child, You're running, you're playing and everything like that. You are in motion. And if you don't know how to move in motion and build awareness, I mean, nobility is a great foundation, but people just stop at level 1.

55:23 It reminds me a lot of what the fitness world did. Yeah, they stopped at squat and deadlift. It's the same thing. And they were like, Oh well, squat and deadlift, squat and deadlift and and you, you come and you're like, when you actually study the book, you realize that way. Single leg then the lift is the strongest form of leg exercise. Who of you can do a pistol with weight? Nobody's nobody's talking right now. But when you ask about squat, which is like actually one of the most basic level 1 move, everyone is is like bragging about how much squat or how much deadlift they can do.

56:02 How many how much can you do of a dragon pistol? Because I can do 20K of a pistol squat, sometime 24 I can do a dragon pistol, but no one is trying to venture there. They all stopped at the base foundation and I feel like it's kind of the same for mobility. They've all stopped at the base foundation now. The worst thing that I've seen for people that are training mobility is when they confuse mobility with flexibility. And you probably have seen that. You probably have seen that they will call it mobility because the trend is mobility.

56:34 And then you're like, but that's just flexibility. I mean, I don't mind you talking about mobility, but and and you want to add flexibility, but at least like flexibility slash mobility and then show the, the, the you know, the contrasts, you know, you can do it. I believe in you. But no, the words that I can see is like people calling it a mobility class. And all I see is a stretching. It's just stretching. There is nothing about mobility. And again, you, you face those very basic mobility that almost don't help the individual.

57:10 You see the way I've done my class in the future and sorry, in the past, it was very interesting because I would have about 10 people or 12 people and I will know each individual what they need to work on. And sometime during the class there will be a Group A and a Group B Group B has a very flexible spine. You get what I mean there. They can do bridge very easily. Group A are have a very tight spine. So you're going to work on opening your thoracic. You're going to work on actually making your core and your thoracic being able to hold itself because there is no point for you working on opening your thoracic classic.

57:52 It's already opened and it's a class. The class way will be still structured in a way that certain exercise, they will do it together, but certain, which I call it the accessory exercise where people need to work on certain things will be very different. They will have either you need to open or you need to learn to control it and vice versa. And often you see the people that have a very strong opening, flexible thoracic, you know, the people that can do the bridge like that and everything when you ask them to do hollow hold or to do like any type of holding, reverse hollow hold on yoga block, it is extremely hard for them because it's so much open.

58:33 And on the, on the opposite, on the contrast, the people that have very hard time to go into a bridge and open their thoracic, then they will need to work on that. And this is what I would love to see more. But a lot of people when they do class, they have one thing and that's it. One structure, one thing, you're good at it. Well, keep working on it. I didn't prepare anything else. It is what it is. You know, like it's the same when people go to yoga to, to tell me, I, I started yoga to become more flexible.

59:00 Well, that's not really the good approach because I know some people that have done yoga for the last four years and they still are not flexible. Yoga is, if I put it in one sentence, yoga is the way to hold a complex position and keep balance in it. Now certain of those complex position, are you stretching a muscle? That's what makes it complex. So certain people get the ability to get flexible doing yoga right because of those certain position. But when you do hand standing yoga, you're not stretching anything.

59:35 When you're balancing on one leg, you're not. When you're doing a Hawaiian squad, you're not. You know, So yoga is not all about stretching. It's just that it's holding certain complex position and keep balancing in it while keep on breathing, to put it in a simple word. But it's not a stretching system. And I've met certain people that hurt themselves during yoga. I had even yoga teacher that came for therapy and I will just fix them. And some, some most of the yoga teacher that I fixed, I would tell them, no therapy will be able to help you.

1:00:11 The only reason why you're hurt is because your muscle is weak, because you've never you've never strengthened your muscle and. They, they, I will send them to do certain exercise and it would get better. And the moment they will stop doing those exercise, they will come back and say, well, it started to hurt again. Did you stop doing the exercise? Yes. There you go. You know, like it's not rocket science, you know, but like it's, it's, yeah, it's, it's the same thing again and again. A lot of people are confusing mobility with flexibility and vice versa.

1:00:43 No matter how much you see online, I think there's two type of mobility. There is mobility and there is strength mobility, and I don't see enough strength mobility. I see a lot of mobility and mobility is like very light, controlling your joints, moving your ankle like that. So you know, you work on your on your maybe on your kneecap and I'm going to focus on the car, hip or shoulder car, all of those things. But in terms of actually building strength in those range of motion, it's almost nonexistent.

1:01:26 It's it's not. And I think this is the way I do my strength training. I would war. I will develop the range of motion, but I will still make those range of motion strong. And that's what you don't see. Most people chase energy, performance and good cognitive function through stimulants, but that only gets you so far and depletes your system over time as it doesn't address the foundation of cellular energy, which is your mitochondria. One of my favorite tools to boost cellular energy, mitochondrial function, reduce inflammation, and is also a potent antioxidant that's methylene blue.

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1:02:27 I love that. Yeah, so, so basically there I think what was very important you tie together the the difference or rather the importance of the reason why you actually want to work on mobility is to be able to move better and then it but then you need to actually do the movement, which again you said that no one is actually proceeding to do. And because those of two those two modalities are separated, unfortunately then they are not ever like putting it into practice. And so I'll tell you one of my personal stories as well.

1:03:00 In the past when I started doing mobility training and flexibility training, I didn't really used to understand the difference, but I understood it very, very quickly because I started to get aches and pains from becoming too flexible. So what happened was I started stretching a lot and I started mobilizing my joints without strength so passively, right? Because that's what they teach you. Everyone is like, do this stretch if you want to loosen up your hips or your glutes or your lower back or whatever.

1:03:28 But eventually I got to a point where I was hyper mobile and I couldn't control that range of motion. And what that taught me was I ditched that all together, the approach, and I started moving my body more in full range of motion as you just mentioned. So I started doing all of the dynamic movements like moving my body with strength, with intention, with control. And then I all of a sudden didn't need to do stretching anymore because I realized movement is the stretching. Like if you actually move your body with capability.

1:04:00 For example, if I take a Cossack squat as an example, maybe at the beginning someone may not be able to sit fully all the way down by keeping their legs straight. They may need to go with a half half a knee bent and touch the floor with the hand and come back up. Eventually you can slowly build a trust with your nervous system and with your body and with practice through a couple of sessions, maybe 4 weeks time and eventually you are in a full Cossack squat and you're able to slide from side to side and move your body effortlessly.

1:04:28 You know, and that takes patience and persistence and structuring. Now most people don't want to, you know, take the time to structure things into the routine. They want everything now. So yes, of course, if you stretch your hamstrings for 5 minutes, they will be maybe loose for an hour, but then tomorrow they'll be tight just as they were now, or maybe even tighter as a compensation response from your nervous system because it doesn't feel safe because it thinks that that new range of motion that you have, it understands that you don't have control over it.

1:05:03 So as a compensation for that, you become tighter and it causes aches and pains, which is what happened to myself. This is why I never teach, you know, passive stretching anymore to people. I only teach dynamic stretching, which is basically moving your body through full range of motion in and out of the position and not holding the position for prolonged periods of time. Now, I'm not saying that stretching doesn't have its time and place. Maybe in some situations it may be useful. But the majority of the time people benefit more from discovering and exploring new range of movement and ways of moving their body, which is going to help unlock and connect to different parts together.

1:05:44 Which will help to eradicate the pain. Because the pain may not be arising because you're tight, but it may be arising because your hip flexors and your lower back and your glutes, all of those are not communicating with each other. And because you've isolated them and you've done like hip flexor stretch and glute stretch and all these different stretches, but you've never actually moved your body, Now you're actually tight and you're worse off now than you were before. This is why so many people are left confused and discouraged because there is just so much misinformation out there and it's leaving.

1:06:18 And because social media, you know, you find everything for free online. This is the unfortunate thing. You need to test and decipher for yourself what actually works and what doesn't work. But what you are saying, really, it's just all about the whole message of this entire podcast discussion is about listening to your body going within. What does my body need right now? Moving my body in different ways. Moving there where it feels like your body is craving because your body is telling you constantly.

1:06:46 Oh, yeah, maybe I should move, bend my body more. Maybe I should fold forward. Maybe I should move in different directions. Your body is telling you all those things. But most of the times you're not listening and so therefore you are stagnant and then there and therefore you are, you know, getting all kinds of other issues as well. Exactly. I mean, this is well said. And to come back to the point that you said that everyone wants things now, my answer to that is nothing with value comes now, nothing in life.

1:07:17 And that is not just about the human body. That can be even in your work, in your company, in your love story, nothing with value comes now. And unless you accept it, unless you're never going to have anything with value. So I think it's it's it's well said the way you said it, as in you need like people need to realize that there is so many, so much information out there. There's so many things going on out there that is making us confused about what really works and what really doesn't doesn't work.

1:07:59 So it's a lot. And This is why you should always find someone that speak not speak. But that is I mean you know the the old saying walking the path and knowing the path is two different thing. 100%. And there is a lot of people that walk the path and try to take people with them. And there is a very few people that know the path, yes. And it's very hard to do to differentiate, to differentiate between them. But I guess in the long term, you, you kind of know, you know, I mean, when I coach people, whether it's via call or even online purely or even one-on-one physically offline, the first thing that they tell me, I never had anyone coach me like this before.

1:08:54 I never had someone coach me like this before. And I wouldn't tell them then they were not. They were just, they were training you. There is a big difference, you see, like making someone move and educating someone and explaining someone. Empowering. Yeah, not just empowering, but take it for example, today I had a first session with someone physically and he's been complaining about his shoulder that he can't, he can't press anymore. And he said, what do you want to do? What, what are we going to do today?

1:09:27 I was like, well, we're going to, we're going to do push. We're going to do push and pull. He's like, but what about my shoulder? And I said, well, that's exactly why we're going to do it because we need to fix that. We're not going to avoid it. Avoid fix it. It's causing the issues. Yes, and and and he had a few coaches before you know, so he he and he's been like training for very long time. He, he had like he's an athlete and everything like that. And, and then I told him like remodeled his entire way of doing a push up, just a simple push up.

1:10:06 And he said, wait, how? And I said, you've been doing a push up for the rest of your like you've been doing a push up wrong all your life. You might have gotten lucky because your body is always healing itself. So before you were kind of like loading 60% maybe on your chest muscle, the rest on the shoulder, you know, But when you're doing a push up, you're not pushing yourself or the floor away. You're compressing the floor between your hands. The extension of your hands is happening naturally because it has nowhere to go.

1:10:42 But, and I just like completely. He was baffled. He was like, wow, I don't feel pain anymore in my shoulder. And I was like, yes, because you're rewired all of the, and shifted the stress and the pressure on your chest and you put 0 on your arms. And because you were not focusing on pushing, you were focusing on compressing it. It just loaded everything there. And even the pull up everything we did everything from the ground up. And he was baffled by how, yeah, how basically his, his, the technique was completely different.

1:11:25 And he was like, no one ever explained me in such detail of you should feel your joint like this. You should feel as you descend your, your, your pegs stretching and carrying the stretch and the tension and then you contracting and compressing rather than just feeling the movement in your arm and initiating by the arm. And you can see also when I coach people, I would just like over scan them. I will be like constantly turning around them like a predator or looking at every angle and they will be like, I remember when I used to work in a place, someone, someone said I did a technique.

1:12:09 I did a squad, but I did a little bit of a mistake. And then someone said if you did this in front of more, then it's wrong. And I was like, look, I'm not that straight, but I was well known as like the person that it has to be perfect. You can mimicate the the the movement from the outside and it looks like you're meet you're doing the movement right. But on the inside I see which movement, which muscle is being activating and which muscle is generating the movement and which is not. Connect with the like minded community.

1:12:48 Get ad free episodes. Submit your burning desire questions to the guests of the show to just topics and guests that you would love to see on the show. Get access to my programs, protocols and blogs as well as exclusive discounts on my one-on-one coaching programs. Get access to the Fitness Wisdom Podcast community starting from just $2.00 a month. The link is in the. Description. I look forward to seeing you in there. Yes, yeah. Oh, wow. So, so important. Yeah. I think it's, yeah, just important for people to feel their body to understand that difference between like, understanding like movement quality over just doing reps.

1:13:21 I think so many people are fixated on just doing reps of something specific and reaching again, going back to reaching a specific goal, but then in the long run, not caring about how that's going to impact their joints in general. And, you know, willing to compensate even to reach a specific goal. And that is the issue where eventually you will hit a wall because your body will stop you and you will be in so much pain and discomfort that you do not have a choice put to listen to your body. And eventually people think the option is stop using that muscle or area altogether and it will magically heal itself.

1:13:58 Well, what if you've taken 4 weeks off and you go back and you still have the issues That means you now it's not rest that you need, it's movement that you need. Of course, in some rare situations you may need to rest a specific area if it's like, you know, inflamed or over stimulated. But in most cases, movement is medicine. Like the more you move your body, you don't have to specifically put extreme loads on areas of the body to get it to, you know, open up and start to work together. And again, like you said, they're very important is rewiring and re teaching the body how it should move and how it should work.

1:14:34 Because we've taught the body compensation patterns because we put too much load on the body. So the only reason why we go into compensation is because when the nervous system gets so challenged, it tries to use muscles which are not meant to be utilized in specific movements, right? And then therefore compensation presents itself and then we load and load and load more and then that causes a potential damage even to the joints. What kind of qualities do you think are the most important for a human in order to have healthy and pain free movement?

1:15:10 What are the most important qualities? Well, I will get back to the to, to actually a point that you're taking that you just said about, well, you lift weights and then it hurts, then you're stopped and you lift weights again. And I just realized that this point is, you know, when you see people that are so obsessed about how much deadlift or back squad they can do and they would say, oh, I can do 230 now, I can do this amount of number. Then you will ask the the question that I will come to will be, do you need to be able to do 230K?

1:15:53 What for what what's the use of it? Just give me except you in the gym right now lifting lifting the bar. Are you flip a car? Are you gonna flip a car and save someone? Are you gonna like no, no, no. Are you gonna move a concrete of earth like are you gonna save someone from a building that is collapsing that way. But when you ask me about the usefulness of being flexible, mobile, being able to move even actually one of the the the first question, the most question that I received is I don't think I need handstand.

1:16:28 Why would I need handstand? I don't care about handstand. And then I will my first thing will be look at people that are over 506070 ask them to do this. Yeah, they can't. Why we never push up. We never do anything up, even people and don't compare handstand with you taking two dumbbells or barbell and doing military press. Do not ever ever wear this because those two are completely different. I've seen people that are that did that all their life with weights and still somehow has a problem in their shoulder and we're never and then lost range of motion and lost the ability to raise their hand up.

1:17:11 So there is a use to handstand not it's not just about the tricks. There is a use to be mobile, to be flexible, to be strong, relatively not extremely strong. You don't need that extreme strength. You don't need that strength that oh wow, you can do, I don't know, 200 or 150K. I, I ventured that way at some point I've, I was able to do a back squat for 170. It was interesting, you know, and then people that were, you know, in that domain, they tried to push me. They were like, oh, you can do, you have so much potential you can do and everything, you know, like that vicious circle.

1:17:52 And they were trying, trying. And then I was like, but I don't need to and I don't want to, so I'm good. You need to be strong relative to your body weight. I think that's the key, like to be able to handle your own body weight in space. I think that's like literally the only strength that you need. If you can, do you know if you can do pull ups, hand stands, push ups, like move your body confidently in extreme ways and unpredictable ways, then you are less prone to experiencing injuries. But if you never move your body in ways that you know your body is not expecting, then of course, if you explore a range of motion suddenly where your body is not expecting, well, most likely you will have some tweak or something because your body wasn't expecting that because you haven't been training movement, you haven't been moving your body in all planes of motion.

1:18:41 And that's why you and me, we both love ground based movement, right? Moving close to the floor. And you mentioned a couple of the qualities there, right? You mentioned like mobility, you mentioned strength. What are some other qualities that are important for healthy and pain free movement for people to to keep in mind for the rest of the light? What? What they should they be training? I don't want to label it. That's the thing. I think labeling it will be wrong either either, but I will, I understand back to developing awareness and exploration.

1:19:12 So it's not a specific thing. It's not a specific thing. It's awareness and exploration. And unless you keep those two, the main, the main direction where you're you want to go, then you will always leave an area that is unexplored and an area that is having having build awareness. Yeah, I think it's not a certain specific sports or something that they have to develop. It's a direction. It can be in anything. But as long as you keep exploring, you're going to somewhere along the way explore what needs to be explored because you're going to be.

1:19:52 Oh wow, this is something I never tried. I don't have any awareness into that. Let me develop it then. You develop it, you master it, you understand it, then you move on. You explore something else. Not obsessed. Not obsessed with anything. So with that, basically you're saying with awareness and by being present and exploring, it's like automatically you will be exploring new ways of strength, new ways of function, new ways of mobility, new ways of agility, speed, explosiveness, all of these qualities that we talked about, you know, that humans really wants that they are chasing.

1:20:30 They will be able to achieve those as byproducts of being aware and conscious and exploring. That's basically what you're saying, right? So it's just, again, not focusing constantly like, you know, on the end goal, but just like aiming to, you know, keep on improving yourself in every single dimension. Are you OK on time or? Do you need to go? I think I have to, yeah. Yeah. Because my my girlfriend is looking at me and she's like I was supposed to take her. That's why I sent your message. Sorry.

1:21:01 OK. No, no worries. Do you have like 5 more minutes or or not? Yeah, OK. 5 minutes. 5 more minutes. Yeah. OK, last second, last question, last question. OK, let's talk a little bit. I wanted to ask you actually about, you know, because people say, well, maybe you can't build muscle successfully, maybe you can't lose body fat efficiently by doing movement training. What do you say to people, you know, who question this? Because they may, they might have that as a goal, right? They maybe want to build muscle, they maybe want to transform their body.

1:21:30 Is there a way for them to do that with movement training or not? Of course, of course, 100%. I mean, look at me. I'm not. I'm not skinny. I'm not a small dude. Yeah, yeah, 100%. Weight loss is about calorie deficit. Anyone that comes to me, I tell them weight loss is a calorie deficit and building muscle is making sure that you have enough protein intake and you can still do those movement in the hypertrophy style, which is like constantly, constantly. So yeah, you, this is not training for small skinny people only, you know, you can still develop muscle, you can still develop a big body or lose fat and everything like this.

1:22:12 So I'm, I'm 100K again. So otherwise I would be skinny. Yeah, I'm not. I'm actually, yeah, I'm so and I don't do, I don't do body weight lifted like I don't do weight lifting that much or like hypertrophy training. I just move a lot, but I don't stop. I literally feel the pump in my muscles when I do that. Maybe I will do a bit of strength, but even my strength will be 6 reps with weights. So I don't think it brings much of A hypertrophy game. But the one thing that I don't stop would be the constant movement, even though I feel like a pump and my muscles are about to to burst out a bit like hypertrophy because I'm trying to push it more and more and more.

1:23:01 So yeah. Accept you're building function at the same time. That's the beauty. At the same time. Yeah, because a lot of people when they see movement training, for example, or mobility training, you know, with strength, they just automatically think, oh, that's not going to help me get to my goals. But actually, most individuals don't understand the foundational principle of what actually gets you stronger and bigger and maybe and leaner is the fact that you are pushing yourself sufficiently or doing enough work and putting enough load on your body a little bit more than last time.

1:23:34 What we talked about the progressive overload principle. If you don't have that in mind, of course you're not going to improve and build muscle, right? Of course, if you just do one Rep of something, it's not sufficient to stimulate growth or change in your body. You have to show your brain that what you're doing, it has to adapt. So therefore you stimulate, you know, you breakdown muscle, you build the strength, the fat loss happens as a byproduct. And as you mentioned in alongside with the diet and the lifestyle.

1:24:00 Anyway, MO, I don't want to take too much of your time. I know that you are. Yeah, you're busy now and you need to run. But thank you so much for this incredible discussion. I did have one more question question, but maybe I'll have you back on in the future for that to talk about. Ground based. Movement and nervous system state, I think that would be amazing, but where can people find you, connect with you and reach out to you if they wish to do so? I really enjoyed this discussion and these are some of my favorite talks, as you can tell because I'm also a movement coach and, you know, movement specialist.

1:24:32 So thank you so much. So where can people find you? On Instagram well, limitless dot sapien, that's my brand and my name on Instagram. I also have a YouTube channel, same name and on TikTok same name as well Facebook page as well. Same name. It's everything limitless sapien. I think that's actually my dream to create humans without limits. That's beautiful if you guys enjoy the topics and guests I bring on the show. I would really. Appreciate if you left me a five star review on Spotify and subscribe to Fitness Wisdom Podcast on YouTube as well.

1:25:02 This helps to spread the knowledge and wisdom with the world. Until next time.