15 | Mastering Movement for Life with Jeremy McCann

Unlock the secrets to advancing your fitness journey with insights from Jeremy McCann of Range of Motion Fitness. Jeremy’s story is nothing short of inspiring—transitioning from an aspiring baseball player to a fitness expert passionate about biomechanics. Discover how his personal challenges ignited a dedication to the science of human movement, and learn why mobility and stability are fundamental for everyone, regardless of athletic ability. This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to transform their approach to fitness and daily living.

Takeaways

• Jeremy McCann developed a unique system to assess and improve movement patterns based on mobility and stability.
• His passion for helping people move better stems from his own desire to be an athlete.
• He believes that anyone can improve their movement efficiency and mitigate physical limitations through exercise and proper training.
• Jeremy takes a holistic approach to assessing and addressing movement issues, considering the entire body and its interconnectedness. It's important to challenge the narrative that it's okay to become less active and experience pain as we age.
• Regular exercise and strength training can improve mobility, stability, and overall quality of life.
• The 'Book of Painless Exercise' provides a simple and effective routine of 10 exercises to improve posture and overall movement.
• Belief and mindset are crucial in prioritizing and committing to daily exercise.

Learn more about Jeremy here:
www.romfit.com

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This episode is part of our recovery series. Tune up your body with three of the best in the bizz, Megan Pomarensky, Jeremy McCann and Amie Farmer and be sure to hit subscribe and give them a follow.
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Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:21

Welcome to Uplift you, creating strong bodies and mind. Get ready to power up your day with practical strength training tools, inspiring stories and build resilience of body and mind. It's time to Uplift you, together with your host, Leanne Knox. All right, welcome to Uplift you. Today I'm very excited to have a guest, Jeremy McCann from Range of Motion Fitness, who has actually developed a system in assessing, modifying and uplifting people's movement patterns. It is based on mobility and stability, and Jeremy is very passionate about helping people move better, feel better and not only live better. So welcome, Jeremy, to my podcast and thank you for taking the time.

Speaker 2: 2:12

Thank you for inviting me to be here and being up at this time. My goodness, lady, thank you so much. It's such an honor. I'm going to make this an exciting experience for anyone that's listening.

Speaker 1: 2:23

So, jeremy, let's get right into it, because this is going to be a shorter episode due to time constraints. Now, the first thing I'd like to ask you, which I do ask most of my guests, is can you think about your earliest experience that you can recall, which led you to developing such a passion in helping people move better?

Speaker 2: 2:48

and so, yeah, I mean to be honest with you. I just think I have a nature just to want to help people. But I think, like kind of going back in my history, I always wanted to be an athlete, I wanted to be a baseball player. That's all I ever wanted to do. I. I ate it, I slept it, I drank it. You know it was every day and I think that kind of guided me in life.

Speaker 2: 3:09

The problem was is you can't tell from this video screen right here, but I'm only five foot four and I don't know how much baseball you watch. Them guys are a lot bigger than that. So I knew, like from an early age, that I had to do every last thing I could to be able to even have a chance to live out our dream. So that meant like understanding how to move a little bit better. You know, my my uncle was kind of a mentor, I guess to me says you know, you're going to have to get stronger, you're going to have to get faster. That means you're going to have to start lifting weights. And I had to take a kind of strategic approach with that, you know, and I had to kind of understand, you know, what little things I needed to do to get bigger, stronger, faster, those sorts of things. Well, fast forward.

Speaker 2: 3:49

Baseball didn't work out.

Speaker 2: 3:50

I didn't grow, I didn't drink enough milk I don't know what it was but I didn't get tall enough to play.

Speaker 2: 3:55

So I went to college. I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do because I couldn't play ball, but I had to do something in fitness and I think the natural, that naturally just kind of led me into personal training and I think just kind of combining all of those things that desire to kind of learn the little bits and pieces of movement. You know, that kind of like I almost became a fan of like people and kind of their underdog story and trying to find little ways to get them to their goals. I think that led me to, you know, trying to look for different pieces of biomechanics and human movement that would help people do things that they wanted to do at a much higher level. So I think, in a roundabout way, my own shortcomings, if you will, are an advantage into like how I look at things, how I look at how people move and then almost prescribing exercises that are going to make them feel and move a whole lot better.

Speaker 1: 4:51

Right. So so that piece that you just said, the the underdog story, I do know that that holds a special, special place in your heart and do you, from your experience coaching and helping people out with with their movement, do you believe, um, if, looking back now, do you believe that if a person can get their body to move efficiently or at their optimally, can they mitigate things such as not being quite the right shape or the right height or, you know, having the right morphology to participate in whatever they want, whatever sport or whatever fitness regime that they want in their lives? And I'm talking everyday people here. I know that there's some sports, like baseball, maybe basketball, where you can't change. However, you know, I've, I've when you talk about that underdog thing, I have seen a lot of people who fit, you know, into round, people that fit into square boxes, that actually become extremely, um, successful athletes even though they have, they're, they're, they're the underdog.

Speaker 2: 6:07

So, yeah, yeah, yeah, I, I think to kind of answer your question. I think, like you know, my journey is has been it's. I started training people in 1999, so it's been a long time. I've seen a lot of people do a lot of exercises. That's a lot of repetitions to kill, and I've kind of understood that like what we do in the gym could actually be practiced for real life. You know, I think there's a lot of people that don't maybe don't go to the gym and they're they haven't really been involved in fitness.

Speaker 2: 6:34

I think that exercise is just exercise, but it's not like a place like this right here. It's kind of like a laboratory, almost like it's to help you pick things up off the ground a little bit better, to help you twist and look over your shoulder a little bit better when you're changing lanes. Those are movements. They require muscles, they require bones. Being in one place and get into another, that revolves your your brain, telling your body how to work. Those are all things that we kind of take for granted, that can be taught right, just like an athlete like you are where you have to lift heavy things off the ground. You could just walk into a gym and your coach could say, just lift that up and you're not going to be able to do it. But if you're given cues, if you're given techniques, if you're broken, if you have movements that are broken down into little chunks, you could piece it together to achieve whatever your goal is. So, whether you're a person that you know has trouble bending over to tie their shoes, or you know to put their bra strap on, those are things that you can fix to a certain degree with exercise and for the vast majority of people, they don't really understand this. I think that the problem that we've had with fitness for the last 20 or so years is we kind of put it in a basket where it's for just one group of people, where it's for that person that always has a bucket of sweat, that always has that heart rate that goes to the roof of the person that's just trying to lift the house. It's not.

Speaker 2: 8:00

There is a blueprint of drills that people shouldn't be doing on a daily basis to keep them in check, to keep them in the same way that you brush your teeth, right, you don't get one cavity and say, ah, that's it. I'm never brushing my teeth again. It's just going downhill from there. You keep working on little things. I can't sit here and tell you that I'm going to give you one exercise and there's going to be rainbows over your head, there's going to be butterflies and stuff like that. But you can make it better. You can delay chronic pain. You don't have to live with so much pain. You don't have to live with that struggle of my God, my shoe's untied. What else am I going to do when I go down there to tie it? I am going to figure out a way to move and feel better. I'm going to help you do that Again. It just starts off with taking a look at a person's posture and giving them the right things to do based on what we see.

Speaker 1: 8:52

Yeah, okay, and before we get into that and how you do that, because I've worked personally with a lot of different physiotherapists and therapists on movement, obviously, obviously over the last 12 years in and also before that in gymnastics, for you know, for like 40 years, wow, your, your process of screening is very unique fact. And but for the audience that I haven't, uh, told, told them yet, but I've worked with jeremy for many years now on little movement deficiencies that have come up and obviously overuse caused from overuse from not only life but lifting. But what I wanted to ask you was how do you think the human body actually gets to the situation where, even if you're not an athlete, you start getting? You know the shoulder issues, the people that try and put their shoelaces on and get a sore back, or you know that tweak, tweak, that's the word. They tweak their back or they bend down to pick something up or they can't. They can't like reach up without and I'm thinking about people who don't even do sport.

Speaker 1: 10:08

There's a common misconception that a lot of injuries are caused by people doing repetitive actions in sport, but then a lot of people that I meet don't do any particular sport, they don't even go to the gym. They might be active around the house and and, but they they have seen to me to have the same, if not worse, injuries. So how, from your knowledge, how does that actually happen?

Speaker 2: 10:36

because they did me look that the common denominator is that we're all on the planet earth right now and we have to deal with gravity and we have to deal with that force, that magical force from above washing us down to the ground. But then, at the flip side of that, since we are on earth, earth is pushing back up on our feet from down below. We're just kind of like a canister that's kind of stuck in the middle. We have this beautiful, this beautiful body that's made of bones that connect the bones and, uh, that form joints. We have muscles that attach over them. We have this, this command center up here, this brain, that allows us all to be able to move. We all have the same basic potential to do things. We're all athletes in one shape or form. But because we have those two kinds of forces, from below and from above, kind of counteracting us, we have to deal with the stresses we're basically all just kind of falling over.

Speaker 2: 11:26

Now, our habits, our injuries, the things that we do, often all lead to imbalances. They lead to compensations in how we move and this could end up being pain. Now, who's suffering the most, you know, is it the athlete who's in the gym, who's working on the same patterns over and over and over? It could be overuse. Could it be that person, maybe, or is it just that that person knows how to deal with those kinds of pains a little bit better than the person that isn't exposed to me?

Speaker 2: 11:54

Who knows Pain's a tricky thing, and to kind of answer that question of who's hurting the most, you can't really do that. But the common denominators are we all live on planet Earth, we have to deal with gravityators? Are we all live on planet Earth, we have to deal with gravity, and we all have a skeleton. That's why, when we take a look at assessing the person, it's kind of tricky, because you as an athlete I was listening to one of your podcasts earlier you have athletes that figure out how to win the technique when you're on stage up there, when it's your turn to lift something heavy, when you're going for the PR or the PB or whatever you want to call it is not going to be perfect when you're lifting the heaviest thing you've ever lifted in your life.

Speaker 2: 12:32

Your goal when you're up there, when it's your turn, is to get it done. A's down there, b's up there, let's get it to B. And it doesn't matter how we do it right. You, as an athlete, are a master of movement. You have figured out how to compensate your body to get the job done. That's what makes athletes special.

Speaker 2: 12:51

Now, a person that's not an athlete, that's not been really exposed to fitness, they may not do that the right way, they may not do that the same way. They don't have that kind of bailout system and they end up feeling stress and pain in different places because they don't have that kind of memory banks in them. They haven't been programmed in that way. So I think to kind of equalize things out again, when we take a look at assessing it's that skeletal shape when a body is not moving, what does it look like? What's the default position? What is the position that is come, that the muscles are being comfortable, being in the right length, that the joints are in this preferred position. Then what's the norm, and how? What do we have to do to get you back to that norm? That means we have to relax something, we have to lengthen something, we have to activate something, and then we have to program your body how to move once again. Does that make sense?

Speaker 1: 13:41

It does make sense. The insidious thing about you know how these eagles and injuries creep up on them, on us, is if we're not, if we don't have the awareness of our posture, our daily posture and our movement, a lot of people go through their lives doing the the same thing every day and they're not thinking about what posture am I commonly in like? Am I sitting a lot, you know? Am I um reaching up a lot? And you know what's my job? Whatever their job is, and unfortunately these days a lot of jobs are sitting.

Speaker 1: 14:17

So when you know, it makes sense that, uh to me that people don't realize that, um, that the niggle is coming from something because they've been stuck in the same position for too long. And I always say to people when they walk into my gym as a coach, I met a new man yesterday and he was a boxer. His background is boxing and lots of running, so I'm not even going to say anything to you right now, but from your knowledge of those movement patterns, where do you think, thinking about his posture, you could I'm no doubt you could describe to me what his posture would may have looked like.

Speaker 2: 14:56

Without a doubt. So there's some common things that we see with people. Okay, there's an even weight distribution. So traditionally a person is going to put more weight on their right-hand side, particularly if they're a boxer. They're going to end up loading that side because that's where they're going to throw from. If they're right-handed, and we're also going to see a kind of guarded position, a boxer doesn't want to get hit, right? So what are they going to do if they don't want to get hit? You're going to say, pal, the fact that they're going to hide underneath those gloves.

Speaker 2: 15:28

That's the other fact that rounds. Actually, because of that, because they don't want to fall over, they end up tilting their pelvis, they end up shutting off their glutes. If you take a look at their feet, there's a really good chance that one or both of them, the arch is starting to flatten out, probably the one that's on the foot that they're not bearing weight on. Those are the kinds of things that you'd see. But to kind of tie this back together again, look at this posture tab one more time. The person that's guarding, the boxer that's guarding, is also the person that's doing this right here sitting behind a vest. They don't play the same sport but they have the same type of posture. If we take a look at that alignment, there's a really good chance that the exercises that they're going to be given to fix that are going to be the same okay.

Speaker 1: 16:16

So you're exactly right, and this man, although has been involved in sport for like his whole life he's 40 now came to me yesterday with no awareness of what his posture was like. He he had no idea why his lower back was sore a doctor was sore and also why, you know he he was like getting a lot of sort of pain through his you know neck and traps. And you're exactly right. As soon as I looked at him he was forward and the first thing obviously I did was start working on some posterior chain exercises to pull his shoulders, you know, retract him to pull his shoulders back and glute work. Here's something that I come up a lot with, and obviously there'd be some coaches listening here too some weightlifting coaches, some powerlifting coaches, strength coaches, and you mentioned this. The one thing that I come up with um against a lot when I'm first coaching someone, is um, and it's actually present in children as well, as well, as you know, older adults. It's the ability to understand what their pelvis is doing yeah if you ask someone to hinge.

Speaker 1: 17:35

So I got him to do a kettlebell swing.

Speaker 1: 17:37

I said, just show me what you normally do yeah and he squatted, the kettlebell swing straight up his knees went over his toes, he kept his back dead straight, um, and he did a squat and then a swing instead of a hinge swing, and then I taught him how to hinge and he honestly cannot feel. They can't feel the alignment of their spine, from their shoulder through to their hip to keep it nice and straight. And and also that man in particular had the, you know the, the posterior, sorry, the anterior tilt. As soon as I got him into that position he said I can feel. I can feel my lower back because he's stuck in that position.

Speaker 1: 18:17

So and I you know. So the funny thing is, children don't also don't have that, not a very good awareness either of of what their back is doing. So that's quite interesting. Have you ever worked with younger?

Speaker 2: 18:29

people. Yeah, I've started as young as like right now I have one that's four and one that's eight. So this is right for sure, because the awareness is something that we have to really work on. Teaching and then the consistency with the training with someone that's that young puts a lot more work on the parent, I think, than anything else. But you're right. I mean, let's just tie this back to your own personal experience and we'll try to jog your memories real quickly. The first time we actually met was probably what, like I don't know seven or eight years ago, and you did the blueprint with me and I had you do some homework at home. Do you remember doing homework?

Speaker 2: 19:08

yes, okay, yeah for for the first, the initial assessment, I have to take pictures at home. It's kind of like a postural assessment. It's front, back, the sides, then we take a picture of your feet. Do you remember taking those pictures and do you remember what the special instructions were before you took the pictures?

Speaker 1: 19:27

I think going back that far was it to, was it to close my?

Speaker 2: 19:33

eyes. Yes, very good, I'll put you on the spot there Very good. So it was close your eyes and it was march in place for 10 seconds and then I'm sure it must've been.

Speaker 2: 19:43

Your husband or one of your kids had the camera ready to take a picture of you right when you were done. What we found out at the end of that march, at the end of that stance, when we took the picture, is where your resting postural position is. Most people take a look at those pictures and they're like, oh my God, I always thought that I was standing straight, I always thought that my weight was even on one side, and what we just learned is what your resting position is, and that's kind of like the starting point for everything that we do after that in terms of how you want to move, how you want to feel and all the progressions you want to make in fitness or just in life in general.

Speaker 1: 20:23

Yes, okay. So is that the? So lead us through? Can you lead us through your, your basic protocol, so so people can get an understanding of? At the start I said you had a very unique approach and I know that a lot of physios not so much physios, physios a little bit from my experience, like chiropractors, people like that I know they do look at your posture, but I personally haven't met anyone who looks at it in so much detail as you do. So can you lead us through your unique process of assessing people?

Speaker 2: 20:58

Yeah, so I guess, first of all again, my population that we work with is just wide range. I mean, they're young, they're old, they're sport, they're not sport, but for the most part, most of them are complaining of some pain. Okay, and I think by going into every assessment kind of the whole scope of my, I guess my thought process with exercise science is where the pain is is not the problem. And this is particularly true for someone like yourself who had probably gone to physio or Cairo or or you know somebody, to get treatment and it just didn't work. And I think that's part of their restrictions. They have to look at that one spot. Me, I opened the door.

Speaker 2: 21:38

I understand that everything is connected and if your foot is hitting the ground the wrong way, that that stress is being sent up to your body in a weird way and muscles are having to turn on that aren't supposed to turn on and some are being turned off. And unless we fix how your foot hits the ground, your shoulder is never really going to feel better. So I take more of a full, full body I guess they would say kinetic chain approach where we take a look at those little pieces and the things that maybe you're not even complaining about, or maybe the things that you didn't even notice. You didn't notice when you stood tall that your right foot was always turning out. You never complained about your right foot, but it was your right foot, that's. That's a clue that there's a bigger problem somewhere else and until we can fix that, everything else is just going to be kind of like trial by fire, if you know what I mean.

Speaker 2: 22:25

yeah, so I think in terms of like the approach to solving problems. It's almost like common sense. You know, first things you have to do is get muscles to turn off. They have to them down, and the traditional person knows this as making a massage appointment and having someone else put their hands on the body to relax the muscle. Well, we know that we can't do that every day, so I'm going to give you the next best substitute the exercise that you need to do with balls or tennis balls or foam rollers to try to calm that down, get us relaxed.

Speaker 2: 23:00

Our first couple of weeks are always dedicated to releasing trigger points and calming muscles down. After we've kind of got that out of the way, our next step is to get muscles longer. So you get a stretching photo, paul, in terms of which parts of your body really need to get longer, so we can start to reset your postural position. And then the part that most people miss is you got to find those weaker muscles and turn them on Again. If you're sitting, if you're in poor postural positions for too long a period of time, your brain is not going to turn those muscles on anymore. It's almost like me to poke the bear just a little bit. And that's really the third stage, the activation portion of it, and really the basis for the book, is really which muscles do we know are going to get weak or going to get underactive, that are not going to do their job, and what simple things can you do to get them to work again?

Speaker 2: 23:50

And I think the beauty really behind those drills and the drills that I would give a person is a lot of times they're pretty simple. They're the type of things that if you were to watch, like Instagram or Facebook, and you would see a person do them, you'd be like are they even really doing anything? You would definitely sit there and look at it and say that looks really easy and you would also say I could do that because there's no equipment involved. But then you'd also say, well, that looks boring too.

Speaker 2: 24:16

They're the drills that really make people aware of where muscles should be and how they should feel when you're using them. And for the most part, when people do some of these things for the first time, they're like, wow, I didn't even know that existed. And the more that we can get them their brain program to use their body the right way, the easier it makes them to do the bigger things that we like to do the squatting, the deadlifting, or the working on the farm. Things that we like to do the squatting, the dead lifting, or the, the working on the farm, or just being able to cross the street with their, their grandchildren, I mean, it's the.

Speaker 1: 24:46

the spectrum is wide range, but and there are so many little things that we could do and and that's that's a really important part piece that you just talked about then being able to cross the street with their grandchildren. I'm also very passionate about helping people stay as active as they can, and their quality of life is, like, majorly impacted after the age of 65 or 70, based on their mobility and their stability and strength their mobility and their stability and strength. So if we can get people to start looking after themselves as as early as possible, even like the 11 year old that you talked about and moving into, you know, when they move into those years, those older years which, um, unfortunately, a lot of people have the narrative of it's okay, I'm getting old and this is the way it's meant to be yeah, right, yeah that's a story that they've told themselves and it's a narrative that's been learned, but it doesn't have to be that way, so I'm extremely passionate about that as well, and that's the population of people that I normally work with.

Speaker 1: 26:01

My biggest population of people that I work with, from the ages of 40 through to 75, the oldest is my mum. Yeah, right Now, my mum. Just as an example, my mum started strength training when she was 70 because she was always active, right yeah.

Speaker 1: 26:18

So she always used to go walking and gardening. But I said to her that's not enough for your skeletal system, that's not enough for your bone mass, like you need to do some loading. So she came and joined and started doing just some basic strength movements. And my mum is 76, and she can deadlift 90 kilos and she weighs 50 inches right, but what? But? What's more important is her.

Speaker 1: 26:46

Her bone mass has increased as she's gotten older yeah so those narratives that people have of it's okay to sit more and do more knitting as I get older and watch more tv. How often do you you as a practitioner or a therapist hear those narratives?

Speaker 2: 27:05

Oh, okay, quick, I guess, kind of side note story. My business is a hundred percent online. Okay, there's two people that I see physically, that I drive to about an hour twice a week to go see them. Okay, they're ages 71 and I think he's 78. I've been with them for the past I think 16 years. We've had this habit of at least twice a week. Okay, and in terms of backing up the woman, never with the first time I met her did not want to exercise. It was like a fight.

Speaker 2: 27:38

I started off training with her daughter and her daughter says you got to to do this, mom, your blood pressure's going through the roof. This is not going to be good. So we met in her house. We work out in their living room First session she almost passes out at the end of it. I thought that's it Never going to see her again. This is 15, 16 years later. We're still going after it.

Speaker 2: 27:58

They've told me over this time how much they appreciate our sessions together and they are kind of like inventory checks of how a person is supposed to move. They say these things because they see all their peers during the same time span who have had that approach of what's supposed to happen. We're getting older. We're not supposed to move much. We've seen all those people kind of slowly get worse and worse and worse and it gets to the point where it almost can be too late for many of them.

Speaker 2: 28:26

You got to do these little things early on if you could set yourself up the right way. Let's not kid ourselves. I mean, the clock ticks for everybody and there is wear and tear. That's going to happen. But doing nothing, as opposed to doing the little things everybody's like I mentioned, it's like brushing your teeth you are going to get a cavity, there's no doubt about it.

Speaker 2: 28:46

Your, your mouth is not going to be perfect, but if you just stop doing it, a hundred percent bad things are going to happen. If we know there are little parts of your body that are prone to getting weak, to leading to all these bigger and worse things in about 10 minutes every single day, there are tiny little things that you could do to help yourself out. It's just a matter of just doing it and kind of programming yourself to get in the habit and the routine of it. Again, think about it. If this conversation is really about your posture, you live in your posture 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You live in those same bones and if you're not addressing anything on it, bad things are going to happen for sure.

Speaker 1: 29:25

Okay, yeah, exactly right, so let's lead straight into your. I know you very briefly touched on your book, jeremy. For the listeners, jeremy's developed a book called the Book of Painless Exercise. I've just recently been sent the book from Jeremy, which was very kind, and I went through it the other day. There's 10 exercises, 10 key exercises that basically go from head to toe right To put you in a better posture for daily life. So can you explain to the audience how you've developed that book, so that they can see the value of that and, from my perspective, how simple it is?

Speaker 1: 30:07

If you want something simple. A lot of people have very little, you know. Time is our biggest commodity, so if they can use this book and it's a simple way to help them move and feel better every day, then this is certainly something that people would love to get onto.

Speaker 2: 30:28

Yeah, so I think, like to answer your question. I've kind of been like a scientist, I guess, over these last 15 years. My business, like I kind of subtly mentioned, is 100% online and pretty much what I've done is I've assessed literally thousands of people from all over the planet the same way that I did with you Pictures. It was physical assessment via Zoom, it was kind of understanding pains and problems and I've noticed some tendencies in terms of what people are limited in, and I narrowed it down to 10 different things and then just kind of hearing the complaints, I guess, of people or what they've kind of desired over the years is a small routine of exercises that they could do on a daily basis, and I put it together in a small package of drills that you could just wake up literally with no equipment and no experience and start to do them on a daily and regular basis.

Speaker 2: 31:21

On a daily and regular basis, it's really just about, like you mentioned, using the smaller muscles, the muscles that are responsible for keeping you stable, to give you range of motion so that you can be mobile. Again, it starts off with looking at two main posture types that we kind of capsulated with the boxer style Somebody that puts too much weight on one side of their body, someone that falls forward those are the two things that I see around the world all of the time and narrowing it down to the key parts of those bodies that are going to put you back into better alignment. It's been massively successful with people. People of all different levels of fitness and non-fitness have been able to pick it up and start doing it and put it in their life, and really great things have happened along the way so can you?

Speaker 1: 32:02

can you explain, um the the 10 different exercises from memory? The majority of them are like static. A lot of them are static holds, like holding the position you explain. Let's pick. Okay, I'm going to pick from because I know there's weightlifting people listening. I'm going to pick maybe three key areas that weightlifters have issues with. Number one shoulders. Number two would be knees and number three would be lower back. I know your book's divided. Can you explain what they would do in, like what's in that book, for those three particular key areas?

Speaker 2: 32:43

Yeah. So I think, when we just kind of taking them in that order, I guess, when we talk about upper back, there are two postural deviations that are super common with people who have upper back issues, or upper back that rounds, and shoulders that also rotate. Those are the two things that we see like often. The book is going to help you extend your upper back to get a little bit longer. When we're able to do that, we're able to set your shoulder blades in a better position. We're able to get your head in better alignment. We're able to put your lower back in a position where it doesn't have to take on as much stress.

Speaker 2: 33:16

When we talk about the knees, again we have to remember that our knees are kind of like a slave really to our ankles and to our hips. If our hips and ankles don't move the right way, our poor knee is just kind of stuck in the middle. So in the book you're going to find different drills to help activate your ankles a little bit better. Most people are really good at pointing their toes down, but nobody is really good at pulling their toes back up. That's part of what's going to happen in this book. We take a look at a lot of knee dysfunctions. One of the things that we have to pay attention to is how well the hip rotates. A lot of people can't rotate their hips in, and when we take a look at how I laid the book out, it's in a priority system. The first thing we have to do to save your knees from problems is making sure that you can do what's called internal rotation of the hip. If you can't twist your foot in from your hip, your poor knee is going to suffer. If we can't get that done, none of this other stuff even matters. So making sure the internal rotation is going to be available to you is going to be a big thing.

Speaker 2: 34:14

Lower back again, we have to take a look at the monsters below and the monster above. Right Again, we mentioned upper back. If our upper back doesn't extend real well, lower back is going to take on the stress, but below it, if our glutes can't fire the right way, then our lower back has to take on the stress. And a lot of people will say well, I do squats, I do lunges, I do all this kind of hip dominant exercises. But the problem is, is we look at those big movement patterns? They involve a whole lot of muscle. So for the vast majority of people who are out of position, they have a glute that doesn't work the right way. We have muscles that kind of take over for that and end up creating problems like in the lower back.

Speaker 2: 34:52

Going back and teaching your glutes how to fire so that you can reposition your pelvis relative to your rib cage is going to do wonders for your lower back. Your pelvis relative to your rib cage is going to do wonders for your lower back. There's a drill in this book that's going to help set your pelvis into a better position, to create that what we would call a stack, more appearance, so that your rib cage and pelvis is on top of each other and we can cut the stress down on the lower back Again. But saying all of that, is there just three exercises? You should do no To it. Your body, a plan, a daily plan, has to be head to toe for all the reasons we mentioned. Your little toe, your big toe, could affect how your shoulder moves. If we don't address it or at least do inventory on it every single day, we're going to end up with problems again. In just 10 minutes all of these things could be covered.

Speaker 1: 35:40

Yeah, that's absolutely amazing because in the modern day, like in our modern day sort of social media world, when you look at like if you go on Instagram or even YouTube, for example, and you know you're looking for a solution, there are so many different solutions and, to be honest, honest, that is overwhelming for people. So what I love about your resources, and especially this one, is you you can um go through those 10 order in the correct order exercises, but you also have a couple of um exercises that will help that if that's a particular like painful or sticky or weak area for you.

Speaker 1: 36:26

And that's even better because then you don't have to spend your valuable time looking around the internet or going to five different physios, or whatever it may be, to try and find a solution when it's right there in that progression of exercises. However, I will say this one thing Do you find that people who come to you may do? You know you'll give them the exercises and they'll do that for a month or two and then they'll slowly like, let that slip? Then you know how do you educate people that this is an ongoing life for life process? So, just like you said, brushing your teeth, can't brush your teeth for two months and think that'll be okay for the rest of your life. And this is something that I struggle with as a coach, because people will get out of pain. Then they'll stop doing the exercises that got them out of the pain. So what's your experience with that?

Speaker 2: 37:29

well, I mean, again, it takes people like you and it takes like having that, I don't know. I guess wealth of knowledge and be able to to for lack of like better terminology lead the horse to water all the time. Again, this is our life, this is our passion. This is what we believe in. You have to constantly, as a coach, give them the same thing but a little bit different. People get bored with this. They don't love it the same way that we do. They don't love it the same way that coaches do, and we have to understand that as professionals. That's why, if you go to my page, people always say, oh, I love all this stuff, but there's so much I don't know what to do. Yeah, I try to stress upon people in our sessions that we're going to almost like, categorize your, label you where your postural issues are, so that when you see the drills, when you hear me talk about the drills, you're going to know that this is that I'm talking to you as well and I keep to see these things and to try to new things. I like them to be excited about it because, honestly, the drills in the book are boring, right, most of the drills that I gave you to help you get out of pain. They're boring. It's not fun to pull out a tennis ball and put it on a spot that hurts and lay there for two minutes. That is not fun. We want to be done with that as soon as possible. But two things come from that experience we know that it works, so that if I do have that problem again, I can always go back to it, and that we've mastered it. We own it. It's something that we're able to accomplish and achieve to help us do what we want to do.

Speaker 2: 39:00

I want people. I can't expect people to be on the same level of knowledge that I'm at in terms of exercise or fitness or any of this stuff. I can't expect them to be enthused about it. But understanding people and knowing that if you're constantly giving them something new, something to kind of progress and to make a part of their life, it leads them into the direction of. I'm going to do this all the time, and I think that that's been the thing for me. I get bored giving people the same thing all the time too. So I try to take a personal interest in what they do, what they love, and try to create new things that adjust for them and once they can kind of see the tie-in, it makes it more likely that they are going to do it. And I think that the other thing too and this is probably speaking to coaches who are wanting to kind of prescribe exercises for people keep it simple, right For the people that are just joining fitness and trying to get out of pain.

Speaker 2: 39:57

You can't expect people to go out there and buy a whole lot of equipment. You can't expect them to, like, spend a whole lot of time into this or really compromise their life so much. If they're telling you they can't get to the ground to do a particular drill, bring the ground to them. Give them drills that they could do in their bed. If they're telling you that you know, and like it hurts to stand for too long, give them drills to sit in a chair.

Speaker 2: 40:21

If they're telling you that they have to sit all day, don't tell them that they can't sit. Give them things that they could do in the chair. Meet them where they have to be met and as soon as you can get that compliance, as soon as they can say hey, wait a second, this guy's a real person and he's not just reading out of a book and he's going to do something for me and I'm going to have success from it. Why am I not going to do the next thing right? And I think that's kind of where I came from is more of a realistic approach to just how people think and what they want to get out of this yeah, yeah, that's that's fantastic, because I mean, that's great coaching, that's understanding the person right, because we're doing, we're dealing with people, we're not dealing with robots.

Speaker 1: 41:02

Um, and the human body and the brain connection um is is such a, such an amazing um, uh, like variety it gives. Every single person that you work with is slightly different. Oh yeah, everyone's body is different, everybody's movement is different, but also everybody's way of uh, of conceptualizing what their body is doing and even their perception of pain is different. You know, like, athletes, in particular, are very good at what I would say ignoring some smaller, like pain, because they want to do the big movement yeah right.

Speaker 1: 41:42

Unfortunately, a lot of times, that leads to their detriment, because their body's trying to tell them something and they're ignoring it. Right, they're ignoring it until there's a big it's too late. They've torn something, they've torn a tendon. So I think that is how your resources are so valuable, because you are giving people a system of of of movement exercise that is actually mitigating future injuries, without that person even knowing. So I know, I know, we've only got a couple of minutes left. You've got your book, you've got, obviously, your Instagram and Facebook sites. What else do you help? How else do you help people?

Speaker 2: 42:25

That's it. I mean, like I said, my business. I work with people one-on-one, everything's via Zoom. The Body Blueprint has been what you've been experienced. It's a three-step plan where I'll assess people from head to toe, give them a soft tissue plan to follow, give them a stretching and mobilization plan to follow and an activation plan, and the goal is, at the end of those three sessions, to kind of combine it in one package that ends up being your exercise that you're going to do the rest of your life. I mean my dream, my goal, the direction that I want to head is is really, I want to be able to give people a plan to follow. That's similar to brushing their teeth. Like you said, it's all preventative.

Speaker 2: 43:04

I think we've kind of done it wrong with what we've done in school with kids in school. I think we've taught them baseball, we've taught them basketball, we've taught them football, but we haven't taken the time to teach them how to move, like we shouldn't be sitting here and people shouldn't be in their 30s and 40s wondering what hip internal rotation is, what shoulder external rotation? Those are things that we should have learned at a young age. We should have learned the basics on how to keep those muscles active so that our bodies can be in a good alignment and we don't have to suffer the stresses of pain. My goal is to help people, help the next generation not know what chronic pain is, to be able to look back one day and say, wow, people used to just suffer for no reason. Why is that? You know, like that whole thing that you said earlier about, that's just the way that it should be. I don't believe that that's true. I just believe that we haven't known another way until we're kind of on the cusp of it now.

Speaker 2: 44:01

The boat of functional fitness, biomechanics and kind of linking it together in a personal trainer or a strength coach or whatever you are, has grown immensely since 1999, when I first started, and I think, moving forward, we could eradicate a lot of those pains and injuries that we're talking about as commonplace nowadays. We just have to change how we think just a little bit, and I think that this book and giving the people who bought it a simple plan that they know they have to follow every single day is taking steps in that direction. What comes after that was going to be even better than that, but for now, this is leading us in the right direction.

Speaker 1: 44:42

Yeah, well, that sounds exciting. It sounds like you've got some more future exciting plans up your sleeve. So, um, thank you. Thank you so much for your time, and I know that in the show notes people are going to be able to find um, find you, um follow you.

Speaker 2: 44:59

This is the best place to go to. I don't really touch Instagram as much Like. I'm 100% Like everything that gets posted on there comes out of these fingertips, kind of the leftovers get sent to Instagram, but there's a wealth of stuff on there. I spend time every day trying to comment and interact with people. I'm trying to make it almost like the world's largest gym. So even if you never want to talk to me, there's some really cool stuff that I put up there that could definitely change how you move and feel.

Speaker 1: 45:29

Yeah, that's fantastic and I know it's going to be a great resource for my whole audience. And just to wrap up today, what message would you like to convey to listeners, as like the most if they could do one thing to make them feel and move better and become better humans, because I know that's one of your, your mottos what would be the one thing that you would recommend?

Speaker 2: 45:57

That's. That's a really tough one, man. I think, like we're talking a lot about exercise. To be honest with you and I, I think you're kind of asking for one movement or or one exercise and I'm not gonna say there is one. Um, I'm gonna say that probably the one thing I want you to do is believe.

Speaker 2: 46:18

Okay, again, like and not to like toot my horns, but I really literally have met with thousands of people from all over the planet, people that I'm on the other end of a camera sitting in my garage and my home with my kids inside and I'm listening to them talk and I'm thinking when I see them, wow, I mean, you don't have to do this, like you've been through enough. You could quit and them tell me with with all their heart and all their brain that there's more I could do, and I believe in you and I want people to have that same kind of feeling. You know, I want you to wake up and know that there's a lot of answers out there. Sometimes we have to look a little bit harder for them, but unless you have your eyes open and your heart full of belief, it's not going to happen. So you have to believe.

Speaker 2: 47:08

I'm going to keep looking. I'm going to keep doing my best to give you the little things that are going to help you move and feel better, but it takes your ends. You have to believe that it could be done. You could do it, and I think that's, I guess, the take home thing that I want people to to be inspired by. You know is there's tons of exercises out there, there's tons that are going to work and it's just a matter of time before we find the one that helps you a little bit more Right.

Speaker 1: 47:33

Yeah, thank you so much, jeremy. Wise words we no doubt We'll catch up again soon. Thank you very much Right Thank you very much.

Speaker 2: 47:41

All right, thank you for your time.