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The Part Nobody Tells you about Exercise Injuries · Making Muscle Memories

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: There is a big part of injury recovery that nobody wants to talk about.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: We all use just feeling better as the benchmark, but it's the maintenance of the muscular system long term that's going to be the very thing that's going to allow you to return to the activities that you love.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: After 40 years of work in the fitness industry, I have learned that real strength isn't just built through exercise, but through experience.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: I will share with you some of the science as well as the stories that have shaped my work.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: We are all building muscle memories.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: One rep, one story, and one day at a time.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Making Muscle Memories Podcast.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Lauren Eark, and in this episode, we're going to be talking about injury recovery and what is required.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I have a business in Louisville, Kentucky, and it's called Fitness Integrated Science.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I see people in one of two ways.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: I see people both in person as well as online.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: Online people obviously don't have to come in and see me, but a lot of the people that I see in person will also use my online platform because I like to teach people how to manage their injuries even after I see them.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: And this is this was a huge thing for me that came out of COVID because I really didn't realize how important it was that people exercise in a specific way.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm a muscle activation technique specialist, so I have the ability to evaluate someone's muscular system at a very deep level.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: I can look at range of motion, I can test muscles, and I can understand for the person maybe what muscles in their body are underperforming due to some sort of an injury or an overuse or something like that.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: If you'd like more information about muscle activation techniques and trying to get in to see me, check out my website, Fitness Integrated Science, or feel free to message me.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now the story that I that I want to talk to you about is a story that has happened to me or I've been witness to so many times that I felt it warranted an entire podcast episode.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this specific incidence was a young girl, and I typically don't see a lot of teenagers in my practice because no one's injured at this time, but this particular one had a really big injury.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: She was 15.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: She came in with her mom.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: She was a volleyball player and she had a knee injury.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: She was jumping for a ball, she fell, she twisted her knee, she tore her ACL, she tore her MCL, and she also uh had tore her medial meniscus, and they had to harvest part of her patellar tendon to repair it.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: So this girl had been through it.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: She was in a recovery for a long time.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: She went through physical therapy and she immediately went into sports.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, when you return to sports, the coach is not going to do what the physical therapist does.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: The coach wants you to practice, they want you to run, they want you to, you know, perform drills.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: And she was actually quite talented, so they wanted her to get back to playing as soon as possible.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I I bet you don't have to guess what happened, right?
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: What happened to her is that when she returned to sport, she was okay for a while.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, when you're 15, you can you can recover pretty easily.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but what ended up happening was her eat her knee started to bother her again.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: And physical therapy was gonna be way too expensive at this point because they were done with it.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: The insurance company had released them, and so they looked up someone like me because I don't deal with that stuff.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: I was doing progressive strength training, and she knew that MAT was really powerful.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: So when we worked on her, when I looked at her and I was evaluating her range of motion, I looked at everything but her knee in the beginning.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: I evaluated her trunk motion, I evaluated her hip motion, I looked at her ankle and foot motion, and then we got into the knees, and I saw a ton of things that pointed to either why the knee injury happened or maybe what was going on as a result of the knee injury.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I explained this in depth to her mom as well as her, and then we proceeded to spend most of the session working on her hip because that ended up being the biggest area that I saw that was limited.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when we finished the session, she felt amazing.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: She got off the table and she was like, Oh my gosh, mom, I feel amazing.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: I have no more pain in my knee.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: And they were really happy, you know, and this can happen.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: MAT is a is a powerful, powerful tool.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: But then as she's getting off my table, you know, what does she want to do?
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: She wants to go right back to returning to her sport.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: And what I said to her, as well as her mom, I said, Well, I know you feel great.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: You're you're 15, you know, we're able to do some things, and you know, I even showed her a couple of things that she could do on her own that were just really simple.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: But I told her, I said, but you know, you are gonna have to maintain your muscles for the rest of your life after having had a surgery like that.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: And her mom and her looked at me like, what?
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: What do you mean after maintain this the rest of my life?
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: Because that feels really, really daunting, and they didn't want to hear that.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: They probably thought, well, she's just trying to take my money.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: She wants me to come back in and make more sessions with her.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, I didn't because it's like uh that's the last thing I want.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: I want her to get better.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: But I had to spend some time allowing them to understand the reality of what just happened.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now, before I I get into this, because I do want to talk a lot more about injuries and and what we have to do, I feel like the backdrop of this story makes a lot more sense if I talk about cars.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so here's the car story.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: So my dad worked for General Motors for gosh, five decades, something like that.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, when I was growing up, we are not allowed to get anything besides a GM car.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I've definitely had my share of driving in and BMWs and Corvettes and things like that, but I had a lot of GM cars growing up.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, my dad really drove home the point from my brother and myself that we had to maintain our cars because as you know, he was in commercial sales, but you know, talking to a lot of the mechanics, my dad is like a wealth of information when it comes to cars.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: We had it just drilled.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: You have to maintain your cars because I am not going to be buying you a new car.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now, my brother drove his car a lot harder than I did, but I tend to have, I when I was growing up, I had a lot more wrecks, and I've talked about a couple of the car accidents that I've had on this um on this uh podcast.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: However, there are certain things that my dad told me that you know you have to do.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, you had to get your oil changed every 3,000 miles.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't, you burn up your engine really, really bad.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: So we were always told to check our oil.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Number two, we had to check our fluid levels.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: This not only meant our oil levels, because we have to make sure that our oil is not you know getting low, we also had to check our brake fluid.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: We had to check our windshield wiper fluid, especially during the winter months.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: We also had to check our tire pressure, and we had a tire gauge that he would put up in our glove box, and I was taught how to check our tire pressure, because if we ever had one that was losing air, that's bad, right?
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's gonna make other tires wear unevenly.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: That being said, we also needed to check our our um the tire tread, making sure that you know we had a certain, you know, there's a certain amount that we had to look at to make sure that didn't get below that, because if one or more tires was was sort of treading out, we lost some tread, then we needed to definitely think about first of all balancing our tires and secondly replacing tires as needed.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: There's a certain tire life, and we don't want to get down to the to the you know the where the tires is stripped because that's so hard on a car.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: We also had to replace our air filters on a regular basis.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: My dad taught us how to test our battery strength and also to check our lights.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: I can't tell you many times my dad was like, Do you know your brake lights out?
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, No, I didn't know.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, brake lights, um, parking lights, our dash light, making sure we can we closed our car that we knew that the car was actually the glove box was open or something like that and our light was on.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: So all of these things are just basic things that we can do to maintain our cars.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I think most of us know this.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: We know if we buy a car and we want that car to last, these are some basic things that we need to need to do to maintain our cars.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now, a lot of people don't do this because it costs money to get your oil changed, it costs money to get your brake lights repaired or whatever.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: Or it's just it's a it's a bother.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: But if you drive your car in a really hard way, you know, let's say you're you know you have to travel for maybe you're an Uber driver and you're constantly getting in and out of your car, or maybe you take a lot of road trips and you're, you know, put a lot of miles on your car.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you've had a couple of accidents in your car, you got them briefly repaired, and then you just, you know, you wanted to drive it as hard as you did when you first, you know, got the car.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's not gonna last.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so an older car, that's why they say, show me the car facts, right?
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: An older car is not gonna have the same life as a newer car.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: And we're not gonna be able to drive it as hard if we have an older car because of maybe the way the car was made.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe the car doesn't have the capabilities.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, some cars are able to just turn a corner really fast and they have a lot of pickup speed.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: Other cars don't have as strong of an engine.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: Their driving is different, they don't have the same kind of steering mechanism.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe their tires are their body, or maybe they sit lower to the ground, maybe they're higher to the ground.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: All of these things dictate how we drive the car and how we maintain it.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so we know this.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Are you bored yet?
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you haven't logged off because this is really important.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: What about us?
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: Did you ever stop to think that we're all made a little differently?
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: That we all have a specific injury history, that we're all at a specific age, and that we all need to maintain our muscles.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: But why is it that nobody wants to sign up for muscle maintenance?
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: One of the biggest things that I dislike about being an MAT is that I only get to see people when they're hurting.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like I have literally become the girl that that fixes injuries, and I don't necessarily see people that want to just maintain their muscles.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: I love it when someone comes in and they go, I go, Oh, how are you doing today?
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: And they go, Oh, I'm feeling pretty good.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because they are doing what's called muscle maintenance.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: So for my next point.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: So let's say that we have an injury, like this girl, let's go back to my volleyball player.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: We have this injury and she feels better, she's, you know, the PT has said, you're you're done, you're recovered, you can go back to playing volleyball.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: Is this mean that she gets to return back to full-on volleyball?
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna say no.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: Because her lifestyle choices and what she has done to prepare herself for getting back to playing again, those steps have not been taken.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: She might have done things in PT.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe she did some, I don't know.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm making this up.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: She, I think she told me they they, I'm not making all this up, but um some of the things that she told me, if I can remember, I think she was standing on a wobble board catching a ball, which I don't know what that does.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, she was doing some stretching.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: They were trying to force her knee to bend and straighten.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they were doing some massage.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: They told her to do some foot and ankle drills.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: They were having her do some mountain climbers and some explosive things with her knee.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's great.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: But when she got to practice, there was like a huge jump.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like when she got to practice and started playing games, she realized that her lifestyle to recover from that injury did not dictate the activity that she was doing.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: So the first question is always you know, I know you're 15, you love playing volleyball, but is this the best sport for you?
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Specifically since you've had this big injury to your knee.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: And you have to remember when if you've had something like a total knee reconstruction like she did, I don't know if your doctor has told you this, your knee is not the same.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Do you remember back in the 70s, the bionic woman and the bionic man, they said we can rebuild her, we can make her better than she was before.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: Better, stronger, faster.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: I watched so many of those episodes, and I love the bionic woman and the bionic man because we all had this mindset that, yeah, we recovered and now we can leap off of buildings and we have hypersensitive eyesight and ears and whatever, right?
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: This is not how humans are.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: Once, just like cars, once you've had a big injury like that and your knee has been reconstructed, it is never going to be the same.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's never gonna be the same.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: You are never going to return back from the factory, you know, out on the parking lot.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: I bought a new car and I'm driving online.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's out the window.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: As a matter of fact, it's so far out the window.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're somebody that's had this happen to you when you're not 15, maybe you had this happen to you when you were 30 or 40 or 50, you are really never gonna return the same.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: As a matter of fact, you're gonna be probably less than you ever once were before.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: So, does my lifestyle match the things that I am getting ready to do, right?
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now, we all tend to use feeling better as the barometer.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: We say, I feel better, so therefore I should be able to return.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: But realize that someone's injury, someone's condition of their joints is going to dictate what they're able to do.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: So let's take the girl as the volleyball player.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: So one thing I noticed on her was her from birth, she was we talked about this, from birth, her knees hyperextended.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever seen girls like this where they kind of stand, they kind of stick their chest out and they shove their pips forward and their knees just go backwards?
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: That was her normal stance.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what we noticed after the surgery was that the surgery that had all the reconstruction done, her knee did not hyperextend.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: But the other knee was actually hyperextending more.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: Now that's significant because that changed, changes the relationship at the hip, and it also changed the relationship at the foot.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: So what we noticed that even though the knee on that surgery side was for her stiffer, her foot and ankle below that was more mobile.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I noticed as I was I was kind of just very lightly moving her tibia because we do have some motion.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: The tibia does rotate a little bit on the femur, especially when we go from a flexed knee position to an extended knee position in the screw home mechanism.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: She had a lot more tibial rotation on that surgery knee than she did on the non-surgical knee.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: So it's kind of funny, the knee's still hyperextended, but her foot and ankle was very stiff on the non-surgery knee.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: So what does that say?
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: When she goes to walk, she's transferring forces double-time from one foot to the other, potentially, and it's going to affect how her knee wears.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now she's had all this reconstruction on one knee, but how does that translate up into her hip?
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then if her hip starts changing motions, which we did notice that for her, the surgery knee started, we looked at her turning inward.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: We call that an MAT internal rotation.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a lot of muscles that do this, particularly her hip flexors, her quadriceps, her TFL, her rectus femoris, whatnot.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: She had let a lot less on that side than she did on the other one.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: Then when we looked at rotation in the opposite direction, which would be the natural progression, well, that was just the opposite.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: The non-surgery knee could hardly externally rotate, but the one that she had the surgery on did.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, when we see this kind of imbalance, we know that her trunk rotation's off.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: Is there rotation in volleyball?
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm hitting things, I'm turning, I'm twisting.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe it's not going to bother her at 15.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: But somebody's going to be working on her at 30 when her back starts hurting her, or her hip, or whatever.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: And this is what we don't understand.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody told this girl at age 15 that she is going to have to maintain her muscles forever.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: And she's also going to have to make a decision as to maybe volleyball is not the sport.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: For me, when I dislocated my shoulder at age 13, I don't dislocated, it was like an open AC joint.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: It was an open shoulder.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: I separated it.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: I guess that's a dislocation.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't think about anything.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: I just wanted to go out and play volleyball or play play baseball or whatever it was that I wanted to do and I did nothing with it.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now in my late 50s, I have arthritis.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: I have limitations.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: My clavicle is not placed in the same position as it is on the other side.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I know that like doing the butterfly in the pool is not going to be an option for me.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to do that.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to do things that require me to hold things over my head for a long period of time.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like I don't really enjoy painting ceilings.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: I really don't.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I have to do things to maintain it.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now on my platform, I you know, I use a lot of isometrics, and I think that that's really the first place.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: And this is what I told the mother, you know, before we do anything, we have to realize that when an injury has happened, the first thing that our body does is it shuts muscles off.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: And what I what do I mean by that?
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: It means that as I start to move into ranges that my body is protecting.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: So, like for her, her knee was protecting, straightening the knee.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: She couldn't fully extend her knee after the injury.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: So her body started shutting off muscles that cross the knee that would facilitate knee extension, right?
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so when she was, she was she was telling me that as she was recovering, it was really hard for her to squeeze her muscles.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I told her, being able to squeeze your muscles and understanding how they work is like the first step before you do anything.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: We have to make sure that muscles are activated.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: This shows up as I'm tight, I'm not able to fully extend my joint.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: I have lost range of motion, I feel stiff.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: All of these are indicators that I have lost range of motion.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that she thought that I would just, you know, we would just get these muscles working again and they would just stay forever on.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: Your central nervous system is like the great mass supercomputer and it knows everything that's ever happened to you.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: Her central nervous system will know forever in her body that at age 13 or 15, I guess it was, she had a significant knee reconstruction.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: And her nervous system will always be trying to maintain it because the goal is don't die.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: Please don't die.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to do everything we can to protect the knee.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: So she's going to have to struggle not only with muscles that are surrounding that knee, but all the other things that I described that are now happening as a result of that.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: And we tend to think, well, I can go back to playing sports and I look like I'm able to do this activity.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm able to, you know, jump again, I'm able to hit the ball again.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: What you don't see is what's happening beneath the surface.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: Because muscles have to take on more than one role.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: And this is in my FIS on-demand platform, this is what I call step two, integration.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: Integration is the integration of holding muscles still.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: Certain joints have to have a certain amount of stiffness to allow for other joints to be able to do their job.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: So we don't see when someone is hitting a volleyball that certain muscles in the hip, for instance, or in the core have to brace so that we can hit this moving target and move through the shoulder or whatever to be able to hit the ball under the opposite side.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: And she doesn't have the ability to push off the floor as much because of the patellar tendon and because of the ACL reconstruction.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: So where is that going to be transferred?
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: It could be transferred just about anywhere.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: So on a given day, let's say that she wakes up and she hasn't lack of sleep, or maybe she's depressed, or maybe it's cold outside, or maybe she's practicing in the morning versus the evening.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: There's so many different factors.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: The muscular system has to respond to all of these on a regular basis, knowing that this knee is never going to be the same.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe even at 15 everything feels great, but she cannot let go of the fact that these muscles will always need to be maintained.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: Just like on the car, if we don't pay attention to the tread on the tire, eventually we're gonna be knocking that front end out of alignment.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna have to be looking at our brake system, we're gonna have to be looking at all kinds of things structurally to the car that could have actually been prevented had we caught the uneven wear pattern in the car, right?
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: So it sucks when you're young and you have an injury.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: I think a lot of people that have written to me on this podcast and a lot of people that I speak to on and in person, we all have a story, and that's why this particular episode is a part of making muscle memories, because it is these memories that our brain has remembered that is dictated to our current state, what we feel now.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: So being able to make sure that we are aligning our activities with our injuries, we may have to support something more than otherwise.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: We may have to change activities.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: We may have to move in a specific path of motion now because our joint history has changed.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: I know for myself, anything that requires me to go into more shoulder flexion than my shoulder will allow, I'm not gonna be a part of that.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I would have to predict that this girl is going to realize that anything that's gonna require a lot of explosive jumping for her knee eventually is gonna have to go away.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: Now that doesn't mean that she can't do things.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean that she can't be active.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: Heck, that doesn't mean that she can't be a badass at age 60, right?
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's just that she's going to have to come up with a certain routine.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: And this is where this is my last point.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: I have two points left to make.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: If we're gonna think about the word maintenance, what is maintenance?
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's boring.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: Who wants to remember maintain the car?
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: We got to empty our trash in our house, we gotta vacuum, we gotta floss our teeth, we gotta eat our vegetables, we gotta, you know, perform isometrics.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: These are all maintenance, but we have to learn how to love maintenance.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: One thing that I do on my platform, I make a lot of my maintenance videos very short, 10-15 minutes.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: And without a doubt, they are the most watched videos on my platform.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody loves the boost videos because they know they can do this as a warm-up, as a cool down, they can do this when something starts to feel stressed, and they know if they pop that in there and do it, boom, they can go and they can do other things.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I oftentimes in my curated programs, let's say I'm working on a task, I have a lot in there that are associated with knees.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: You know, ACL repairs, uh knee replacement themselves, meniscal tears, where I take someone on from point A to point B, going from isolation work to integration work, from non-moving to moving, from body weight to weight, from isometric to concentric, eccentric, where they can sort of get a curated amount.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: I always pepper in these isometrics.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: And what's funny is that people will watch these over and over because they work, right?
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: They can actually recover from injured from exercising in a very specific way.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: So we have to wrap our main our mind around maintenance.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: You're never going to get away from it.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: You just aren't.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: What was the Buddha?
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a Christian, but there's a Buddhist saying, before enlightenment, I chopped wood and carried water.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: After enlightenment, I chopped wood and carried water.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: And there's something to be said for that.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm going to counter that by a little bit of, I guess, encouragement from you.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to take this from Galatians in the Bible.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to read this from you.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: This is chapter 6, verse 9.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: It says, Let us not become weary doing good.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: For at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this has been a verse that I have lived by my entire career.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because there's been so many times during my career that I wanted to give up.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: When is anybody going to listen to me?
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: When is this going to start popping off?
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: When am I going to be successful?
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: But this has also been a big part of all of the injuries that I've been very transparent about.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I wish I would have had this Bible verse in my hand when I had that woman in the office because this is the thing I wanted to tell her.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes when we're dealing with injuries, it's going to feel like a grind.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to be boring.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to feel like, oh, how many times have I done a leg extension?
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: How many times have I done planner flexion isometrics for my ankle?
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know, how many times have I worked on my glutes?
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you're going to do them the rest of your life.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I think that's one of the hard things about being a fitness professional.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's always, how do I make exercise interesting when they've done this exercise a million times?
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: But if you can wrap your brain around the fact that if I just allow myself to do these maintenance things, I'm going to feel better tomorrow.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to feel better in the next hour.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: There's been so many times when someone's done an isometric routine with me, and right when they finish, they go, oh my God, I feel better, right?
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: Don't give up.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: You just because you've had some sort of injury in your body, it doesn't mean that you're done.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: This just means that you get to maintain it.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: And if I I could do a whole episode on what I have learned about maintenance, what I've learned about moving through an injury, what I have learned about patience, what I've learned about altering force production, altering how much my muscles contract on the days that I didn't exercise and then I did and how that made all the difference in the world.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: But you guys, it's just you versus you.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: There's nobody out there that's going to ever have the same experience as you.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: And your injuries, I bet, if you look back on them, you're going to be grateful for them at some point because this humility that injuries teach us, this can be carried on throughout our life.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: So again, don't give up.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: We will reap a harvest if we don't give up.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I hope this episode has helped somebody.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: Please, if you're listening to this on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or something like that and you loved it, give me a consider giving me a five-star rating and share it so that I can get this message out to more people.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: I don't make anything off of this.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: This is something I'm doing because I want to.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're listening to this on YouTube, please put in the comments something that you would like to share that we could all learn from as far as recovering from an injury.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you so much for listening, and I will see you on the next episode.