Strength Training: The Best Pain-Relieving Tool Of All Time || WBWL Ep 93

I want to share a quick 12-minute spew of why strength training is the best and most effect long term tool for chronic pain relief. 

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Transcript

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So I want to share a quick excerpt about why strength training, in my opinion, is the most potent form of pain relief. So we all know that strength training is something that's been done for centuries. However, strength training has been over overly looked as something strictly for the aesthetic purposes either aesthetics or performance, but people don't really relate strength training specifically to chronic pain. When we think about chronic pain, we're oftentimes looking for quick solutions like either pay medication, the latest quick fixes, There's massage creams out there, there's theracanes, there's a lot of different types of treatments around like chiropractic care versus rolfing versus massage, acupuncture, and there's a lot of different modalities that are specifically for pain. But strength training is never really in that conversation. So I'm gonna share with you specific strategies that have helped me to overcome my own chronic pain issues through strength training. And I'm going to hopefully put proof to the pudding on why strength training, in my opinion, should be at the forefront, should be at the absolute first thing when it comes to getting rid of your pain. So looking at the fact that when we injure a specific tissue or when a tissue has become deoxygenated, there's really two forms in which people can have pain. One is through deoxygenation of tissues. A lot of times tissues can get injured. Tissues can often get weak, right? I'm specifically I'm talking about muscular tissue and when muscle tissue gets weak or we start to see some imbalances, we start to see that our body is more susceptible to stress. Gravity is consistently put upon us. We're constantly doing chores and we have a lot of to do's and we're picking up our kids. We're taking the groceries out. And so a Looking at all these different factors is that all of these require strength. However, when our body is not strong, then our joints, ligaments, muscles, nerves, and everything is more susceptible to stress. So we're more pers we're more susceptible to injury or hurting a specific ligament in the body. And that's sometimes what ends up happening. We repeatedly hurt ourselves to the point where eventually it hurts our, not just the tissues at hand, but it starts to affect our mindset. We start to perceive ourselves as fragile and if we want to be anti fragile and we want to be at a place where we can perform and do things without injuring ourselves we need to put strength training at the forefront. Strength training is not just necessarily to get areas stronger. There is a lot, there's a plethora of research to show that when we are doing specific types of strength training, it can actually reduce pain. So for example, if you had some form of neck neck tension, for example. Did you know that you can actually just, simply just fold your hands put it behind your head, and then simply just push backwards and load up the muscles of your neck. Do that for about 20 to 60 seconds and breathe through it. Now, when you do that, you'll notice that the muscles in the back of your neck are clearly being contracted. You're strengthening, but you're not necessarily repping things out, you're not using dumbbells, but you're simply performing what we call an isometric. Isometric, isometric by, by, by by Greek terms or Latin is constant length. So when we're putting a muscle under constant tension, but also constant length, what we're doing here is we're sending signals to the brain that it's okay to actually load up these muscles. We shouldn't perceive this as a threat or any fear. And what ends up happening is you can dramatically feel increases in range of motion. You can also start to notice reduction in pain as well. And one other, one other way that you can do that is through. For example, if you had knee tendinitis, if you had quad tendinitis, or if you had some pain in the front of your knee, try holding a squat for a given amount of time. You can hold that for 30 to 60 seconds, the same way that would hold that contraction with my neck. You're still strengthening. It's an isometric, but isometrics held for 20 to 60 seconds have been shown to have certain analgesic properties and analgesic effects. Analgesics means pain reducing, okay? Not just that though, once you get into isometrics, then you can start to rep things out. When you actually have certain pains in your body, you'll be surprised how a little bit of movement, specifically with holding a dumbbell, doing some form of strength training, using cables at the gym, that it can actually have a huge impact on your pain levels. I've seen that constantly before. Everything that I do, pretty much six days a week when I'm working with patients and clients, is that I simply just teach them the right strength training exercises that they can do for themselves, and they're always extremely surprised. Some not, some have an inclination that strength training does have those pain reduction properties, but they're oftentimes leaving Those sessions as if they feel empowered because now they don't just they have these tools in their hands that they can Simply just go to the gym go home Simply just do some strength training and they can simply just reduce it their pain over and over again And that's free, right? You don't have to pay somebody to continue to do that obviously you would pay potentially a coach or a physical therapist like myself But once you learn those tools, you simply can empower yourself to fix the pain yourself. Okay? I literally just had a client Come into my gym here and what actually happened was they were having some low back pain And I simply just got them onto the Roman extension machine So if you don't know what that machine is, it's simply this Slanted machine where you can put your hands you can essentially fixate these pads onto the front of your thighs and you're simply just folding over the padding and then coming back up. So you're essentially going back up into lumbar extension and they're strengthening your lower back muscles, your glutes as well as your hamstrings. So if you're somebody was really had a really irritated lower back or they're having a huge flare up, that doesn't mean go home, rest, take pain medication and hope for the best. Or take some ice. Put some ice in heat packs, and just simply let it go. That's what majority of people do. What I had that person do, that had a pretty irritable body, is I got them onto the Roman extension machine, I had them hold their body up against gravity. They were clearly feeling some fatigue in the muscles of their glutes, their hamstrings in the lower back. But when they got off, be you'll be surprised, within 60 seconds, they got off, they retested, the motions that were causing them pain before, and then they were completely pain free. free. It's pretty exciting and then therefore once we did that then we simply just gave them a plate We gave them some dumbbells and they simply just start to rub it out. So they started to do the actual Hyper extension where they repeatedly bent forward over the padding came back up They did that for two to three sets of twelve and their pain got even better. Okay, you'll be surprised that if you had low back pain Specifically on one side of your body like your right side Try to put a weight on the opposite side and just walk around because when you put a weight in the left hand you're stimulating the right trunk muscles to contract and then you'll be surprised that like bending to the right or like Shifting to the right that pain goes away or you can simply do a side plank Do a side plank on that right side the pain that the side that's painful load up the muscles of your lateral hip Your lateral thigh as well as your core muscles on that right side like your obliques And again be honestly surprised. I want you to actually try this. Do your best to actually do these exercises. Hold them for 30 to 60 seconds. These are all forms of isometrics. And see how this actually helps you. Once you can rep out things, once isometrics are being utilized. Isometrics would be something to reduce the intensity or even the perception of that pain and then therefore start to actually rep it out into actual movements. Okay, so side planks might become a side plank leg raise, maybe you're dropping your hips back and back towards the ground and then lifting it up. So that'd be like a side plank hip raise. There's a lot of different variations to strength training, but that's all I'm saying is that strength training you're not just using it as a mechanism of just looking better or it's not just for athletes. Strength training is literally for any person in the world, including people that supposedly they suffer or they deal with chronic pain on a daily basis. You'll be surprised that these people that initially suffered with chronic pain can get rid of their pain simply through strength training alone. Okay. And I'm just going to show you or share with you other statistics around strength training because you're looking at, if you want to live longer, you want to be there for your family. You just want to, in general, just have a healthier. Life or even have a better quality of life is that if you don't strength train, your body does become weaker, it becomes more decrepit. Once you become weaker, you lose the ability to do these normal day to day activities. You're looking at people with chronic shoulder pain, the inability to take off your clothes or to put on a jacket because your shoulder hurts so much. If your knees hurt, the inability to walk down the stairs, to get up off a couch, your low back hurts. So the inability to Take the trash out or to pick up your child off the floor as you pick up a grandchild off the floor Okay in order to achieve these things in order to have a longer and a healthier quality of life Strength training has to be a part of that Okay, you can still get your you can still do the other things like maybe massages I would even throw stretching in there. You can still stretch you can still try to improve your range of motion But without strength training at the forefront You're expecting that you might get some relief, but you're you probably are going to experience that pain again Okay, unless you're gonna get that similar treatment the rest of your life If you simply just get stronger you progress those exercises you make those exercises harder more complex You increase the weight on your squats. You increase the weight on all these exercises you there's actual measurable progress in terms of you getting stronger Then you actually can notice that over time that pot that area becomes More resilience. It becomes more resistant to stress. It becomes more resistant to gravity. It becomes more resistant to you doing heavy activities or doing any sort of activities that stress out your body and see how your body responds. I would assume that your body would respond in a way where it feels less pain because you have better muscular constraints and you have better muscular support for those specific joints and ligaments. Okay, now this is specifically anatomical. You're strengthening your joints and yeah. You're strengthening essentially the muscles in order to support the joints and the ligaments that may be injured and that this hopefully should make sense to you. However, when you are getting stronger and you actually are doing strength training, that can battle depression, okay, strength training can alleviate your mood, strengthening can relieve tension in your body. Okay, strength training actually gives you something measurable to look forward to so for example Like if you're just getting like repeated massage treatment massage repeated chiropractic, you're not really even if you get some relief You're not seeing measurable progress in and how you feel However, if you actually do strength training and you're actually seeing that you're measurably making gains in terms of increasing the Amount of reps you can do eventually increasing the weight. You're increasing the complexity of the movement. That's something to look forward to, especially if you're logging that on a note section and logging in the journal or logging in an app. I provide app to a lot of my clients and I actually have been tracking my own strength progressions for the past 10 years. If you actually measure that out, that's something to look forward to. You feel fulfilled. Okay. So all these different benefits of like longevity, quality of life preserving your function, you're looking at in the gym, being able to have some sort of measurable goals that you can try to achieve. Okay. Okay, which is a product of quality of life when we're actually progressing We're happier when we're not progressing and we're essentially we're dying We're not very happy when we're just maintaining or declining so seeing these progressions over time Gives you a sense of certainty gives you a sense of fulfillment And it actually gives you something to look forward to so that's what I got for you today If you have questions around strength training, please let me know the ways that you can reach out to me I'm on all major platforms. Just search up flexwithdoctorjay feel free to DM us also at the same time, if you want to send us a direct text message, feel free to text us 4 1 5 9 6 5 6 5 8 0. Feel free to text us, let us know, give us feedback on this podcast. Also at the same time, if you felt like you're getting a lot of. Joy and you're getting a lot of value out of my podcast. Please feel free to give us a five star review, write a review that way more people are able to search up this podcast and this can impact more people in the world. So that's what I got for you guys today. I'll see you guys in the next one.