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When Pain Becomes Your Teacher: What Chronic Pain Is Trying to Tell You · Making Muscle Memories

• 0:00
  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.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: I will share with you some of the science as well as the stories that have shaped my work.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: We are all building muscle memories.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: One rep, one story, and one day at a time.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: At some point in our 40s, 50s, and 60s, we start to notice that pain is no longer a random thing.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: We start to feel pain consistently in the same areas of our body and in the same joints.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: It starts to shape how we move through our life.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: It even shapes how we feel about our bodies.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it certainly shapes the decisions that we make in terms of what activities we're willing to participate in and what activities that we are not.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: But what if I told you that pain is really not the enemy, it's just information.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode of Making Muscle Memories, I'm going to share with you a powerful client story that forever changed my feelings of pain and understanding why our body deliberately creates it.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: You see, pain is just a protective mechanism telling you that something is wrong.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Our muscular systems are on guard to make sure that we don't get hurt.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: And if we want to get out of pain, it takes a smarter method of training.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: So if you are someone that is currently frustrated by what you're dealing with inside of your body in terms of chronic pain and dysfunction, this episode is for you.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Making Muscle Memories.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Lauren Irk, and in today's episode, I'm going to talk with you about how pain is actually your greatest teacher.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now I want to reframe this word pain.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: I think when you hear hear the word pain, immediately what you think of is, I want to get away from it as quickly as possible.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: And throughout my life working with individuals, what I've noticed is that pain is different for a lot of people.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: I have had people that I've worked with that are like the Monty Python skit where their whole body is falling apart.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: They have multiple joint replacements, they're on multiple medications, they have all kinds of muscle problems, they've had recent surgeries, whatever, and they have a really positive attitude and they just want to get going.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I've had other people that have a very minor thing happen to them and they are literally in tears and feel like they don't want to move forward in life.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Well, pain is definitely something that a lot of us don't want to have, but it's it's kind of a reality as we get older.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: But one thing that I have learned throughout my life is that pain is not necessarily something that we should use to avoid participating in life.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's a way to tell us that what we're doing currently isn't working.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to reframe pain as something that is going to be our teacher versus something that is our enemy.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: When we shut down and we decide we're not going to move, we're not going to participate in life because we have pain, this is when we are in a cycle that we're never going to get rid of it.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to share with you a very powerful client story.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: This is about a client who I was working with years ago, and she was in her mid-50s.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: She came to me because she had some severe scoliosis, and for her, her scoliosis was causing a lot of pain in her back.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: And quite honestly, she had the kind of scoliosis that looked like it would cause her problems.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, her shoulders were very asymmetrical, her hips were very asymmetrical.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: And at the time, she was going to a chiropractor who was adjusting her twice a week.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: She was doing stretching, she was doing dry needling, and she was trying to get massages as much as possible.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: And some of these things were working, but they were very temporary.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: As a matter of fact, sometimes she would come home from some of these appointments and she was a thousand percent worse than when she walked in.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so when she came to me, she was like, I don't know what I'm doing.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like I'm doing all the things that are necessary to rid my body of pain.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: And now my doctor just wants me to go on some pain medication or have surgery.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, well, what are you gonna do with a 50-something-year-old woman and they have severe scoliosis and do something in a surgical situation?
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: I can kind of see that when someone's younger, but now this woman's in her mid-50s, I don't know that I want to mess with her spine at this point.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: So my scope has always been through the muscular system.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I've been working with the muscular system for decades, and I've learned through these, through all of these decades, that the muscular system is the one thing that we neglect the most in the medical community.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: So as I was beginning to work with her, what I started to notice was there was a lot of asymmetries.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: And by default, you would have to have a lot of asymmetries.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: If someone has severe scoliosis, they're not going to be able to rotate to one side of the body as far as they can to the other because their spine is not shaped in a uniform way.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: Same thing with the hips, the shoulder, and on down through the body.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I expected some of that.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: But what I didn't expect is as I was testing her in her MAT session, a lot of her muscles were severely out of balance.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: For instance, one side of her hip was severely limited in one plane of motion and the other side severely limited in another in something completely different.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: And when I would test them, the strength differentials were out the roof.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't believe she was even getting around.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I knew that her way out, her bridge between getting out of pain and getting on with life is going to be through progressive strength training.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: And this is one of the reasons, this this particular experience is one of the reasons that I created what I call the isometric method because I realized that there has to be a staging of how you're going to be putting resistance on someone's body.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now, with this person, having gone through all of this work with her chiropractor and whatnot, she was afraid to exercise.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's where a lot of people come in when they're in pain.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: They don't want to move.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: As a matter of fact, when their back goes out, you're going to see them laying in bed or laying on the couch and skipping work.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: And what I want I knew is that I had to teach her that her way out was through muscle contractions.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where we started.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: We started off with isometrics.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: An isometric muscle contraction, I feel like they are magical.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like they should be the precursor to everything that we do from warming up to cooling down to recovering from an injury to progressing strength training.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: What it is is that I'm going to achieve a joint position, like I'm going to do a bicep curl, and I'm going to achieve this position to a specific length.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, the muscles have to shorten a specific amount.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: As they shorten, they are pushing against an immovable object.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: That could be a wall, that could be a band, it could be something in their body, it could be gravity, whatever it is, it's an immovable resistance force that is pushing it back in the other direction.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when I was doing isometrics with my client, we made sure that the isometrics were very, very light because she didn't have high force output.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: One thing that we know about pain is that when we have increased pain, which we call no susception, we have decreased motor reception, meaning that we don't have the ability to contract muscles efficiently when we're in pain.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: They kind of go together.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you twist your ankle, you notice you don't have very much control over your foot, but your foot holds a whole lot.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: Those things are not random.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: They are strategically put there by the body to keep us from getting hurt.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: So when I would put my client in a position to where she would have to perform an isometric against me or against the table I was on or against a piece of equipment, I made sure that the resistance that we were using was extremely low because she didn't have the strength necessary to push against it.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I wanted to isolate those weak muscles.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now when we did these isometrics, we did them at a 15 degree intervals because I knew that when we perform an isometric, your body is being taught that, hey, you're safe here.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: If I do a contraction here, it's okay, nothing's going to hurt.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: So the body does what's called a carryover effect, and it will give you more range of motion, about 15 degrees above or below that position, that positional angular, angular, isoangular position.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: We're improving the state of the muscular system, its neuromuscular capabilities, and we're kind of calming the nervous system.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what we notice with her sustained muscle contractions is over time we were getting her better at contracting her muscles, not only within the sessions with me, but also when she was at home doing things.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when she was performing these isometrics at the time, she was working within my app doing what's called the isometric boost videos, which happened to be the largest or the most popular set of videos that I ever have on my app.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: And she was telling me over and over, I feel better when I do these isometrics.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: I have less pain.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: I have less inflammation, I have more energy, I can do things during the day, my blood pressure goes down, I feel less anxiety about moving.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: And all that is wonderful.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I and I loved watching her get stronger.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: But what I didn't expect as we were going through the isometrics is that the isometrics were actually eliminating her pain, giving her the desire to do more things.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now, we know that research says that with an isometric with sustained muscle contractions, this creates an analgesic effect on the body.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, we don't feel pain, and this helps us to restore muscle function.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I was definitely seeing this on my client.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when we look at a lot of the research studies that have centered around isometrics from about the year 2015 and on, a lot of these studies are done with athletes because they're trying to figure out, you know, how can I get this athlete back in the game again?
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: I was working with a mother of two that was in her mid-50s that literally just couldn't participate in her life.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: And she got to the point where all she wanted to do was isometrics.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then I noticed that she went stagnant.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: She needed to progress to the next level, and she became afraid again.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: She was afraid that if I start going from non-moving to moving, doing some body weight training, that her pain would come rushing back.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we had to do this in a really slow manner.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: And this next part of her training, this body weight training, what she realized is that by doing these isometrics for months and months and months and really learning about where her weak links are in her body and how to contract her muscles and isolate them, when she started moving and started actually going from point A to point B, she was actually able to target those weak links better and squeeze her muscles more efficiently.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: So, like when she would exercise before, she would do something like a sit-up or a crunch or a push-up or whatever it was, a lunge, a squat.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: And she would quickly try to get past the ranges that were uncomfortable, and she wasn't really engaging anything.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: She was just counting repetitions.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: When she started adding movement into her plan, she became aware that what was missing was muscle contractions.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: So she would go through the range a little more slowly, a little more mindfully, and start to contract muscles.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I was really, really happy with this, and we kind of kept this going for a while.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: Now at the time, she was on my app, which is called FIS on Demand, and I was running a challenge.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: That challenge was called the Ignite Challenge.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: She came to see me one week and she walked through the door, and for the first time I had seen her in a really long time, she said, I feel amazing.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, Really?
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: What did you do?
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I was expecting her to say she was doing her isometrics, she was doing her calisthenics and whatnot.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: She said to me, She goes, I'm doing the ignite challenge.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I went, Whoa, you're doing the ignite challenge?
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because this is a tough challenge.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was like designed for adults over 50 who are looking to build muscle.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I was doing a lot of compound hinges and squats and rotations and pushing, pushes, and pulls.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: And she actually said that lifting weights helped her feel better.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then I started to recognize that wow, it's all about strength.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: Her body really craved load, and it was accomplished by squeezing the muscles during her isolated and integrated isometric stage.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: She was getting really good at controlling her body.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: But if we didn't continue to progress this, her body would start to adapt, and then we would start seeing some of the old things come back.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: When she started actually adding load to her body, we realized that's what her body was craving.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: Her muscles started to generate force because they had to.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: There was a resistance on the other side.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: And now she was starting to create even more purposeful, muscle-driven contractions.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: So guess what happened?
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: My client learned how to climb better, walk upstairs better, get up and out of chairs better, get out of bed easier, have more energy and not have pain at the end of the day.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: So what did I learn from this experience?
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what I learned is that we as a society really need to change our mindset where pain is concerned.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: I get it, nobody wants to be in pain.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: But if you are masking your pain with continuously taking injections or medication, doing some sort of therapy where someone has to do something to you, like an adjustment or a massage or a dry needling technique, those are only going to be temporary.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: Your body will soon adapt to those, and you're going to need to do them more often.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: The only way that we are really going to address pain is twofold.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, we need to learn where our body's limitations are.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's where isometrics can come in because when we're doing an isometric, we learn about where our joint limitations are, where our weaknesses are, and how to work around them.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: But number two, we need to learn how to contract our muscles better through progressive strength training.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: You see, we have the ability to heal ourselves from the inside out.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I have seen this so many times in my life, working with all different kinds of clients from in their teens all the way up into their 80s.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: Muscles want to contract, joints want load, they want compression, they want shear, they want distraction.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: And when we don't move enough, when we don't engage our muscles enough, we actually feel worse.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: We are all making muscle memories.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: One story, one rep, and one day at a time.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to learn how to get out of pain, get stronger, and get on with life, please keep listening to Making Muscle Memories and check out my fitness app, FIS On Demand, where I have thousands of videos, hundreds of programs, and certainly progressive strength training to help you go from isometrics all the way to the most advanced resistance training.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: Your key to getting out of pain lies in getting stronger.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you next time.