The 3 Reasons Why Your Pain Keeps Coming Back || EP 54

Another episode that I have done in the past that I think a lot of people got a lot of value from. So, I wanted to just put this one back on just in case you haven't been following me last year.

In this podcast episode, I'll be highlighting the 3 most common reasons why chronic pain never goes away after treatment, what the most common risk factors for chronic pain are, and I also reveal the best and most sustainable ways to reduce your pain effectively and for good.

Chronic pain affects 1 in 4 people in the world! It affects 80x more people than Covid-19. And it is something I've dedicated my life to solving. I also dealt with years of chronic neck and back issues, and it was so painful, that I contemplated not having kids. Or I thought to myself "if I were to have kids, I wouldn't be a good father cause I wouldn't be able to do things with them without pain".

I'll tell you this...

100% of the time, the long-term solution is never the easy one. And too many people in the world struggling with pain are looking for the 'easy' button.

Even though my solution and how I transformed my life might not have been easy, I've built step by step solutions for hundreds of clients in the Pain Free Academy that have made the harder pain relief route much easier and simpler to follow.

Hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, consider leaving a rating and subscribing before you leave, and turn on your notifications for future episodes.

If interested in applying for the Pain Free Academy and getting long term results, head over to https://go.flexwithdoctorjay.com/apply. We'll review your app within 1-2 days to see if you qualify.

Transcript

0:02

Welcome to the Won Body Won Life Podcast. Hi, I'm your host, Dr. Jason Won lifestyle, physical therapist. I talk about everything health and wellness related. So you too can have a more resilient body and a more fulfilling life. If you haven't yet, please support the channel by hitting that subscribe or follow button. So you never miss out on another podcast episode. Also, if you could please leave a review or ranking before leaving this episode, that way more people will be able to benefit from the content of my podcast. Today, I'll be talking about the three most common reasons why pain continues to come back today. Over 25 percent of the population in the United States struggle with some form of chronic pain. That means one out of four on the street right now have an invisible problem in their life that they are masking away. The ever more surprising statistic shows that the overall treatment effectiveness of traditional modalities in the United States is extremely inconsistent and only one in three people out of that 25 percent deem their treatment to be effective. So what does that mean to you? If you are somebody that struggles with chronic pain, you are one of the 83 million in the U. S. And you're not alone, but over 55 million, maybe including yourself find that their pain always comes back and they're wondering what is the most sustainable relief solution to their pain? I'm going to reveal the three most primary reasons for you right now. And I'm doing this based off, not just my own clinical experience off of the latest research. But also I was somebody that was also in your shoes. I can totally empathize with what you're going through. I will tell you a little bit more about my story in just a few minutes, but let's start off with number one. And I think quite possibly the number one reason amongst the thousands of people that I've spoken to and that I've helped in the past, why your pain continues to come back is because active treatment is not the preferred treatment. So majority of treatments out there. are actually considered passive. And if you don't know what passive treatments or passive modalities is, passive means that you are being a submissive recipient to the hands or tools of another practitioner. And you're solely dependent on the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of that treatment. In essence, you do not have control over the treatment in itself. So A story that I want to tell you is about one of our clients, Carol. Carol was a nurse. She was a mom of three, and she was one of the proponents to passive treatments. Her story goes that she has three kids now, but during the birth of her second child, she was pregnant. And during, with that second child, after that second child, they told her to simply rest in bed because she had a complicated pregnancy. I believe she had some sort of prolapse. So they said, Hey I, In order for you to heal properly, we want you to stay in bed. And that was the general protocol. There was nothing in regards to any form of strength training or some gentle walking. It was no, just rest in bed and let the let things heal. What happened was after about three months of resting in bed, the doctor said, Hey, you don't need to rest in bed anymore. But what she was left of left was considerable amounts of neck pain. Her neck was so weak that even just sitting at the dinner table for more than 20 minutes was uncontrollable, persistent pain. And she would have to rest in bed, put a heat pack on there, ask her husband to massage her. What she did was she said, Hey, I needed to get back to what I need to do. I have my second child and I need to be a strong mom again. So she started to seek out chiropractors. She started to seek out acupuncture, rolfing. She got a number of different needles and different treatments and hands on therapy. And every single time she came back after 30 minutes to an hour of treatment, she would say the same thing. I felt better during the treatment, but the treatment didn't last. And so when she joined our program, though, she realized, though, that after incorporating more active strategies, addressing her stress levels, addressing the fact that she was doing no form of training or stimulating the muscles in any way. Just within two days, her neck pain was considerably better. She didn't have to ask her husband for massages anymore. She started to be able to participate with her kids and play with their kids again. And so that's one of our greatest success stories in the pain free academy was somebody that literally couldn't sit at a table for longer than 20 minutes. She couldn't even sit. During our first evaluation online, she couldn't sit there for longer than 20 minutes. She had to rest in bed and put her camera right in her face. She was able to finally get back to that. And now training and being more active is actually a part of her long term solution. And this goes the same for me. I was always a decent athlete. I was never anybody that was really super out of shape, but I did have a lot of cardiac neck issues after a couple car accidents. Same thing goes, I sought out chiropractors. I bought basically a 4, 000 package worth of basically chiropractic adjustments, followed by laser therapy and heat therapy. And that did pretty much nothing for me. I never got better. They promised that my spine would look different. They said my spine would be realigned. It didn't really do anything for me until I started to address life stressors. I started to strength train. I started to capitalize on my habits. And these are some things that we'll go through in a little bit. But I wanted to tell you that there is a lot of research out there that shows that majority treatments are relatively passive. Passive treatments are not bad in itself. All passive treatments have some sort of role, but passive treatments do need to be combined with some sort of active treatment. If you don't prefer the active treatment because it's often the road less traveled, it's often harder to do. Sometimes it takes more time. Realize that it's actually taking you more time. to drive to these different treatments to give them your credit card and to do passive treatments. If that practitioner is not showing you anything active, like an actual strength training protocol, or they're not telling you how to get rid of pain by yourself, then they're really not empowering you to get rid of the pain on your own and to be more independent with pain management. So understand that passive treatments. There is actually a study in 2018 by Kosio et al that actually says that passive treatments are a short term fix at a long term cost. That is one of the biggest quotes and that will always stick with me. It is a short term fix at a long term cost. So it may help you in the short term. It may be the easier treatment to do because All you really have to do is sit on a table and get treatment done. It is not a long term solution. And in fact, it actually takes you more time in the long run, continuing to go these treatments versus thinking about strength training and other things. It might be harder. It might take you a little bit more time. It might make you sweat more and make your heart rate raise, but that is. That is the anti American society. It's to actually work hard towards stimulating your body and making your body more resilient. So number one is just to say that active treatments are oftentimes not the preferred treatments. They're oftentimes not even the more advertised treatments, especially if you go to a primary care practitioner, a general practitioner, a doctor often will give you the pain medication first, maybe prescribe an x ray. But they often won't tell you to go to rehab, to strength train, to get more physically active. They may have some generalized things saying, here's a stretch or two, go ahead and walk, but it's not an actual protocol or program that's more customized to you and that can actually yield long term results. All right, so number two, why your pain continues to come back is you're likely not strength training consistently enough. Now, I want to tell you the definition of what strength actually is first, and I want this to make sense to you in the grand scheme of, let's say, if you have any pain right now, and you have pain with doing certain activities or maintaining certain positions. I want to tell you about the definition of strength. First, it is the capacity of an object or substance to withstand great force or pressure, and another definition by the National Strength and Conditioning Association is the ability of specific groups of muscles to produce max force to overcome a resistance within a single exertion. That is a word that is a mouthful of words right there. In a nutshell, it's basically your ability of your body, your muscles, your tissues, your ligaments to withstand a certain amount of force with exertion. So think about you just grabbing a cup of soup and holding it in your hand. So you're bending your elbow, your bicep, your forearms are active. So holding that cup of soup requires a specific amount of strength. And these are just day to day activities. However, think about Picking up a bag of groceries off the floor or let's say walking for a long period of time going down the stairs. So you start to see some of these activities, these daily activities that are a bit more strenuous and you wonder why are my knees still hurting? Why is my back hurting when I do a specific thing? Why does my back hurt when I'm just sitting at work as well? So traditional treatments again are relatively passive in nature, getting massage, getting your neck cracked, getting needles put into your body to promote blood flow or quote unquote relaxation. It makes all sense. It makes a lot of sense in theory, but we look at the root cause of pain. is not those things. It's not just you have a tight muscle. It's not just, you are really stiff in this area. So let's go ahead and massage this or crack this and hope for the best. Let's generalize a bit for some of the more root cause factors that I address, especially in my programs with the pain free Academy. One of them being. It could be prolonged sitting, it could be inadequate sleep, a recent injury, a longstanding injury that keeps recurring, stress, inadequate coping mechanisms to stress, feelings of being sick, perceptions that you are of poor health. If any of these combination things are the root cause of pain, strength training can benefit you greatly. And a short list of strength training benefits are enhanced secretion of serotonin to alleviate mood, enhanced strength to support bone and cartilage, preventing arthritic degradation, or preventing the speed up of arthritis. It controls and manages weight. It improves tolerance to strenuous activity. It decreases the chances of injury with strenuous activity. It improves blood flow to muscular tissue. It enhances your energy levels. It increases mobility and flexibility of your joints. And the list can honestly go on. The plethora of research has shown that even isometric strengthening, not even lifting weights, but simply, let's say, putting your hand on your head and pushing into your hand, for example, and loading your neck muscles, what that has been shown to do is have extreme analgesic Slash pain reducing effects with a general protocol of two to three reps, 20 to 60 second holds. And this can vary in terms of the time that you hold or the amount of reps. The examples here that I've actually used my own life and I've done with a lot of my clients is I've had actually Achilles tendonitis in the past. When I was during a pandemic and I immediately went back to playing basketball, I started to notice that my Achilles was getting tight in my ankle. So what I did was I simply just started doing heel raises, but I held that heel raise. So basically I'm standing, my heels are off the floor, I'm contracting my calves, hold that for about 20 to 60 seconds. And I did that a few times a day, a few times a day. Within just a few days, my pain was dramatically. Less I was able to resume playing basketball and running, and that's the power of exercise. You could have massaged it. You could have gotten some metal tool and scrape it and say, we're getting rid of scar tissue. You could have had some needles being put into that area. And again, Just a disclaimer, these are not bad in itself. But when you do that and you only seek out the passive treatments in isolation, that is not going to help you. If you do get a massage or you do any form of passive treatment and you're a recipient to that, you then need to follow a protocol of strength training. in order to make the Achilles and anything that attaches to that tissue more resilient to stress. And that is the definition of strength right there is making your tissues more resilient. And one of our clients actually who enrolled in Painting for Academy, she was an exact proponent to this. A few weeks ago we enrolled a client who is actually a 20 year experienced yoga teacher. Let's be serious about that. Yoga, has been shown to promote relaxation. It is one of the most. I would say it's probably the most popular, it's probably the most popular exercise out there known to man, right? It's very popular in Asian countries and Indian culture and in many different cultures. Yoga withstands time and it will never go away. But she, what she believed was that in order to live a pain free life, she simply just stretched. Stretched her hamstrings constantly, stretched her lower back. She only promoted range of motion stuff, right? Stretching, as you might know, she joined the Pain Free Academy. She was having well over a decade of persistent hip and hamstring pain. Her hip pain would rise up when she had to do something strenuous. Her hip pain would always show up when she had to walk with her husband and they had to do, let's say, anything longer than a two mile hike. Her hips would be screaming at her. And she tried to stretch it out, do her classic pigeon stretches. She tried to stretch out her hamstrings. And her hamstring pain, her hamstring tightness would never go away. Until she joined the Pain Free Academy, we realized that we ask her a lot about her history, what started the pain, what she does for a living, what her current prior level of activity is, what her current level looks like, and her current level was very much diminished. She couldn't do a lot of things that she wanted to do. She was waking up with considerable amounts of pain. Until we started her on some general isometric protocols, we started to strengthen her hip muscles. We started to put a little bit of stress towards her core and those muscles as well. And then she transitioned to actually for the first time in literally 30 years. I kid you not, she's like 50, 60 years of age. And the first time that she put dumbbells into her hands. The next couple weeks, she was like, I walked 12, 000 steps over 5 to 6 miles of hiking. Steep incline, steep decline, and I had no pain whatsoever. And did we give her a pill? No. Did we massage her? No. I actually have never met her in my entire life in person. I actually just treated her remotely in the Pain Free Academy. And she was able to get rid of pain by herself from the comfort of her home. All we did was we guided her in the right direction, gave her a strength training program that was specific to her weak points, and as well as her goals. And she was able to walk 12, 000 steps pain free. So what does that say to you? Is that if you believe that even Let's say just you thought that stretching was your only go to. That is not true. If you're totally fine, let's say you are doing some sort of calisthenics, or let's say some sort of body weight training, but you're still having pain, maybe add a dumbbell or add a band to that to add some external resistance in order to make those tissues stronger. Don't just think that body weight training or sticking with the same, let's say two to three pound weights. I've seen that again. a lot. I've seen that also with my mom who all she had in her house was five to 10 pound weights. And you know what we did? We bought her a set of 50 pound weights, adjustable of course. And so that way now she is able to progress load ever since she's picked up heavier weights. She has a current meniscus tear right now. That pain was there for over two years and she couldn't do a lot of walking or squatting. She couldn't deep squat now with getting on a slant board and actually doing weight training for those legs. She's doing pretty damn good. And she babysits my kid three to four days a week. Is able to pick up my, my, my son and bring her up and down the stairs. So I'm getting a little bit carried away. Ultimately, you get what I'm getting at is that body weight training, stretching, passive modalities. These are all not bad. It's better than doing nothing, right? Bedrest is the absolute worst solution to your pain. So if you are bedresting, stop doing that, but even just body weight training, or if you're constantly stretching and the pain is not going away, I highly suggest that you incorporate some form of strength training at even just the typical bands. Bands are super cheap. They're like 10 to 20 on Amazon, and if possible, invest in a set of weights, adjustable dumbbells or a rack of dumbbells. And start actually providing that stimulus, it might be harder, you might be thinking, you might have the objection of Jay. I've tried to do strength training. I've tried personal training. They pushed me too hard. My pain got worse. Or let's say not just your pain got worse, but let's say you injured yourself while weight training and that's to the fault of either the personal trainer or to yourself. The personal trainer might you. Be inadequate in prescribing a proper Strength pro program that it, that fits your baseline level of strength and mobility. So they might have pushed you too hard and injured you, or you might have been under recovering to, to be honest, you might not have been having the adequate diets. Your current job conditions of sitting at your desk, that might actually keep you stiff. So when you string train, that actually leads to an injury. You have to think about your perception of health, your sleep quality. Sleep is actually where you gain muscle. I know a lot of people have the perception that you actually make muscle while strength while actually lifting the dumbbells. You're actually breaking down muscle while in the gym and then you rebuild that muscle in the kitchen. So when you eat lots of protein and when you have good sleep, that is actually where you build your tissues back up. So if you're trying to strength train, you're saying, Jay, I understand your second tip. I want to strength train, but it's hurt me in the past. Consider. your sleep quality, consider your stress levels, how you manage stress, consider your diet and whether you're getting enough carbohydrates and protein. So a big mistake that I often see is people are trying to lose weight and lose the pain at the same time. So they're under eating. And they're sharing train at the same time, which is not giving them the right feel to actually recover from those strenuous workouts. Okay, so that is a huge one. Number two is all about string training. And lastly, number three is not addressing life stressors and other modifiable risk factors. So there is. There, there is truth in saying that certain low back pains, or let's say knee pain, I know that a lot of people say my mom had bad knees, so I was bred into bad knees, or my dad had a bad back, so now I have a bad back. So that's not typically super true. There is very little research that shows that Genetically, people are more predisposed to pain, but I think that actually 97 percent of our genes is actually modifiable, so I think what the research shows is that 3%, 3 percent of our genetics will actually predispose you to a certain disease or certain pain, but 97 percent of our genes is actually we can modify a lot of the. Things within our environment and that are within our control. So you look again at the things I just said a few minutes ago. Looking at your diet, looking at your job conditions. So if you sit a lot and that actually causes pain, consider getting a sit to stand desk. Consider taking more breaks outside and walking outside to get some movement into your legs. Consider also your relationships. A lot of times people with poor relationships or people that are divorced oftentimes have more pain. Your perception of health. If you think that I have bad health because my dad or mom had bad health that is actually going to weigh into your mindset. It leads into different thoughts and different negative actions within your brain and your central nervous system. And that actually leads to you having more pain because when your brain tells you that you have poor health because your dad had poor health, you will start to act. In the way that of poor health, you'll start to make worse or decision. You'll say since my dad had bad health, I'm going to eat this and that, and I'm not going to make huge changes and try to reverse or try to overcome my own genes, consider again, your sleep quality, and quantity seven to nine hours of sleep working and actually reassessing your sleep habits is absolutely critical. When I had a lot of chronic neck issues back in my early 20s, I prided myself on being an insomniac. I prided myself on being able to watch TV shows till two in the morning, wake up at six and be perfectly fine for my job or my studies. And that actually led to a lot of chronic neck issues until I started to look at my sleep rituals, realized that I'm not getting any younger. I started to change my mindset around sleep. Every couple weeks, I'm actually reassessing my sleep habits and that actually has led to feeling it. Phenomenal. And I actually have more responsibilities and a lot more things to do, but I'm still getting adequate sleep. When you look at a lot of these factors here and let's go into the last kind of modifiable risk factor, your habits. I would consider habits as something, in a nutshell, that's something that we repeatedly do. And that doesn't take a lot of subconscious effort or that doesn't take a lot of conscious effort. It actually is subconsciously done because it's automated into our life. And so I would consider that majority of Americans out there and people in the world don't have the best habits. They don't have the best eating habits, not the best workout habits. They don't have the best mindset habits. We're oftentimes so driven in a tech driven society and things move at a million miles an hour that many of us really crave the quick dopamine release. That means that we're so driven to open our smartphones 200 times a day. We watch Netflix shows at the end of the day. We, when we get home from work, all we want to do is rest and we don't want to exercise. Or let's say we have the power to exercise in the morning, but we choose not to. And so these are all habit and mindset hacks that can be changed over time. Is this easy? No, I wouldn't consider this kind of like a rocket ship. Rocket ships are Thousands of pounds of heavy metal, and so when it is taking off from the ground, it, if you guys didn't know this, it actually takes thousands of pounds of feel in order to get the rocket even an inch off the ground because the rocket is so damn heavy, right? This rocket is massive. I don't know the exact weight of rockets, but there are thousands of pounds of pure metal. So once that's similar to the way that we perceive our habits, if you're. Looking for a quick fix. It's like trying to find like a smaller rocket ship and thinking that's going to take you to the moon. A smaller rocket ship is less stable. A smaller rocket ship is more volatile. It's more subjected to winds and turbulence and different weather conditions. So when you're looking at you seeking out the easy things in life, let's say getting that massage and hoping that it's going to like just get rid of your pain temporarily. Seeking out the pills, seeking out the heat packs. So you're seeking out all the things that are going to give you quick relief. This is like you going into a really small rocket ship that you can barely fit into and trying to take off and hope that it gets you to the moon. When in fact, the rocket ship is probably going to combust. It's probably going to break apart and you're going to fall to your early death. Okay. That was a little bit dark, but let's be serious about this. You want to ride the large rocket ship. The large rocket ship is going to take a lot more Mental and physical effort and a lot more fuel to get it off the ground. Now, once you get it off the ground, though, let's say you're 100 feet in the air, 200, 000 feet in the air because you've been consistently capitalizing on all parts of your health, all the modifiable risk factors that you can change your diet, your sleep, your stress management, your exercise habits. Once you modify all those and you start to capitalize on those things. Then eventually that rocket is going to be in the air. In fact, it might actually be in space. And if when a rocket ship is in space. The astronauts actually turn off the feel and guess what happens that thousands of pounds of rocket, including their own bodies and everything that's within that rocket actually stays in the air with no feel. And that's the definition of mindset and having productive, healthier habits. When you have habits that are built into your subconscious, when you subconsciously take a walk early in the morning to. to start your day off right when you subconsciously build yourself a great breakfast instead of seeking out like the donuts for example or in the morning you are being mindful you're meditating and then followed by some form of strength training and you're doing that on a consistent basis that takes a crap ton of effort up front it takes you thousands of pounds of fuel to do so But in the long run, if you want sustainable pain relief in your life and you want to get your health back on track, try to take the hard route, try to add that look, that mental effort that you need to get yourself out of pain. Once you build these habits in like I have, and that a lot of my clients have, they built in such strong habits that they don't think about stretching anymore. They don't think about strength training anymore. It's just built into their life. They schedule things out. And it's complete and they're consistent without any more willpower. That is the definition of habits right there. I hope that if you're watching this right now and you're saying, Hey, I don't want to turn back towards the life of pain. I want to live like my life more fully then consider. The biases of where we seek out these treatments and consider the three things here that I said in terms of why your pain continues to come back. Okay, so let's recap on that. The three primary reasons are number one you're active treatment is not the preferred treatment in your life. Number two, you're likely not strength training consistently enough. You want to make your body so resilient that things of, that things that strain your body, things that are stressful, they no longer become stressful because you're that much stronger for it. And then number three, you're not addressing and putting enough emphasis towards addressing life stressors and managing those effectively. When you can start to realize these three mistakes and start to not make these mistakes anymore, that's when you'll start to see how easy it is to control your pain. Sometimes pain feels extremely uncontrollable. I've been there before, where every single time that I got a treatment, every single time that I tried to get out of pain, the pain would always come back. Pain would always come back. It was like a shadow just continuously following me and that I couldn't escape. But the things that I did in my life and the things that a lot of my clients do in the Pain Free Academy is they realize that they need to take the harder route. They need to drive the larger rocket ship, the one that takes thousands of pounds of fuel to get off the ground. And that once they realize that they put in that mental effort to build those habits, then they can turn off the fuel and now everything's automated. Now pain is that simple. Simply just brushing your teeth, for example, the quote that I want to leave you with right now. And I think that sticks to me the most is that it's like brushing your teeth. We often brush our teeth to prevent cavities, but we don't move and strength train enough. To reduce pain or to get rid of pain. So I want to leave you with that because the things that our parents brought us to do, because we see our parents brushing our teeth constantly, they brush your teeth at least one or two times a day, that's become an automated behavior in a life. And for a lot of people, brush your teeth. It's super easy. Automatically buy a toothbrush, you automatically buy toothpaste, and it's super easy, but we automatically don't strength train, we automatically don't do the necessary things to keep our joints and muscles healthy, and I think that's a serious problem on why 55 million people in the United States and growing are still struggling with chronic ailments, nagging aches, and pain. So hopefully this can inspire you and that's what I got for you today. So if you enjoyed this episode, definitely hit that subscribe button or follow button. Cause I do release episodes every Wednesday morning, and I'd love if you can leave a rating in your podcast app, my content will reach more people who could benefit from the tips I put out. If you subscribe or follow and rates. this podcast, and if there's any feedback or content that I'm not putting out, please let me know. You can either send me a quick text 415 965 6580, or you can email me at jason@flexwithdoctorjay.com I reply to all my messages and I'll leave you always with these last words of advice. We only have one body, one life. Make it your mission to take every action to make you a better version of yourself. Take care and have a beautiful rest of your day.