Why Stretching Is Causing You More Harm Than Good With Yogi Aaron || Ep. #97

This podcast episode is all about STRETCHING. Yogi Aaron is a yoga instructor and coach teaching people worldwide about muscle activation technique, and how it’s helped transform his own life and get rid of his own back and sciatica issues.

Few years back, Aaron struggled with such debilitating pain that surgeons considered performing a lumbar fusion. After constant trials, Aaron found a system that has enabled him to bypass surgery and stay pain-free with his practice and he’s inspired others to do the same.

If you’ve been someone struggling with pain that has tried constant stretching, or maybe have gone to practitioners to get relief from tightness and pain, I implore you to listen to this episode.

Also Aaron host a 7 day series on his website https://yogiaaron.com where you can try his methods from home.

Privileged to have amazing people like this on my podcast. If you liked this episode, please support by providing a 5 star review! This will help to reach more people who could benefit!

To moving pain-free,

Dr. Jason Won

Transcript

0:01

All right. So welcome to the Won Body Won Life Podcast. Hi, I'm your host, Dr. Jason Won, lifestyle, physical therapist. I speak to you guys, anything in regards to orthopedics chronic pain, helping you to live a healthier, stronger, more resilient and fulfilling life, and I also love to bring on very special guest, Dr. That want to express their expertise and also coincide with my mission to help you live a healthier life. And today I have a very special guest. His name is Yogi Aaron and he come. He's based out of Costa Rica. I think he's for I think you are from Canada. And I'd love to just talk with you about this topic here, which is why stretching may be causing more harm than good. And I know that you have your own journey on how you went through your own journey, but also how you were able to inspire other people to abide by your philosophy. And I'd love to walking man. So yo Aaron, thank you so much for being here. Thanks so much for having me. And when I saw your podcast, I knew right away that we would be a great fit. So we're both on a mission to help people live their best pain free life and having been a person who has experienced so much chronic pain I think the greatest tragedy is people who are living with pain that don't You Have to live with pain. Just with a few either lifestyle tweaks, like when I say tweaks, like small tweaks, like small adjustments, and also bringing in some intelligent movement based exercise, they can get rid of their pain sometimes like in a day. Or two, very seldom. Does it take me a long time to get people rid of people's pain? I work a lot with many people, especially during a, what I call a two week yoga immersion and always by day six, somewhere between day six and day eight, everybody is pain free. So you asked me my own journey. I started off teaching yoga or doing yoga rather because I had really tight Muscles, especially tight hamstrings. I was like a typical, young man who couldn't, bending forward, couldn't get my hands past my knees and without screaming, so I thought I should stretch more and yoga seemed to be a really good way to do that. And like probably most of your listeners, I equated yoga with stretching. So I got into yoga really to stretch my hamstrings shortly after I started doing yoga. When something happened to me, my back went out, like I tweaked my back and that was the first time that ever had happened to me. It didn't happen just for clarity in a yoga was. I bent over to pick something up, but that was okay, I need to stretch more because I've got really tight hamstrings. And I was told that they're pulling on my back muscles and causing a lot of problems, which was about 25 percent true. The remedy wasn't, but anyways, I digress. So I got into yoga more and more. I became a teacher. One of the things just as a side note that got me more and more into yoga was the power of concentration. As I did more yoga, a lot of my symptoms of ADD were dissipating and I was able to really focus my mind. And so there was like a lot of these. Benefits that came up more and more, but I always was hurting my back and then I started hurting other areas of my body which I can get into if you're interested, but I eventually 25 years after practicing yoga and dealing with intense chronic pain. Issues that kind of would go up and down and up and down. And I spent, can't even tell you how much money I've spent with acupuncturist, chiropractors massage therapists, even people waving crystals over anything to get out of pain. When you're in pain, you just want to get rid of it. And so I ended up 25 years later in the emergency room of a hospital with an orthopedic surgeon telling me that I probably would need a spinal fusion in my lower back. And that was a real hard moment to take because I had spent the previous, obviously 25 years. As a quote unquote movement specialist, telling people how to move training people in their body. And here I was, facing the exact same exact thing that I was trying to avoid. So I, at that moment, I asked the question what don't I know? And that led me on this journey of studying a systemology called muscle activation technique. It was created by a man named Greg Roscoff, who's located out of Denver for anybody who's interested. And that right away, opened my eyes up. The very first thing I realized was I don't know anything. I felt like I didn't, I felt like everything I knew. That was in the yoga world was all pseudoscience based, like there was no practical application. The only thing I was concerned about was just different hacks to stretch more, like a lot of what's taught in the yoga world is stretching world is even a lot of smoke and mirrors. Just to be able to get into a posture or be able to stretch more. And so that's what has inspired this journey of bringing muscle activation into yoga to flipping the script on yoga instead of stretching to make it more about activation. And it's in the activation realm that we create more. And in harness the power of stability and bring stability into our body. Absolutely. I think we're going to definitely hit on more things. I know we want to. I definitely want to nerd out with you. Cause you even said it to preface this call that I love the anatomy. And I was like, dude I'm totally for that. So I want to share with people about, in general, like muscle activation, especially from a physical therapy standpoint, being stronger within ranges of motion is what creates stability. I've had a lot of even yogis and yoga therapists that they were, there, there's a lot of women and maybe more so women, I would say that Women tend to be more on the hyper mobile side. So I've had a lot of women come to my practice and they're like, man, my hamstrings and my low back is so dang tight. And I'm like, I stretch all the time. And so when you do this test, which we call like the straight leg raise test, you lie somebody down. And you lift their leg up with their knee straight, and you can see you can cram their knee all the way into their nose, right? It's okay you have pretty much limitless hamstring flexibility. And I'm going to say the word flexibility versus mobility, and we can define what that means. I was like, okay, I'm pretty sure that, you're pretty dang mobile. And she's yeah. I work on it a lot and I'm like, so you really believe that more stretching is going to solve your issues. And she's think so. And so when you start to get them into stuff, like you said, like muscle activation, you start to add some strength to the mix. You start to teach them how like core stability and strengthening their hamstrings and putting a dumbbell in their hand and, lifting it up and down and getting the hamstrings actually contract and get more, get stronger. Then they realize whoa, it's like I have the same, they might have the same amount of flexibility because they're born with it. But. They feel so much better. So I'm very excited to enlighten further on the topic. May you define like what muscle activation is and how it worked for people? Yeah, sure. I think I just want to preface this though, like on, on Greg's journey to creating muscle activation technique it wasn't a single line of course, is nothing ever is, but what he started to realize is that Was that muscle tightness in the body? Cause he worked, he, Greg works a lot with high functioning athletes, especially NFL. I hope I said that football players. And right now, like he works with the Denver Broncos. And, but he was asking the question, why are muscles tight? What he came to realize is. Is that they're tight from a neurological perspective, the body senses instability and so it tightens up. For example, with me and the reason why I got into yoga and decided I should stretch is because I had really tight hamstrings that could barely bend forward. Yeah. What was happening at a neurological level was my body was basically saying it doesn't feel stable to go past this point. Tightness is telling you don't go past this point because you're not going to be safe. Or that we don't feel safe. And when I say we, this is of course happening at an autonomic level. Like we're not aware, like there's not a committee like that movie that came out with all of the feelings that have, but so what we need to do is address the instability and instead of me focusing on. Activating my core muscles and activating my hip flexors, I instead went the opposite way and tried to lengthen my hamstrings. And that's why I started to exacerbate my problem rather than fixing it at the source. You just mentioned earlier that you do a standard kind of flexibility or mobility check. I don't remember which one you use. But by having someone lie on their back and then bring the leg up as far as they can. And so a lot of people, when they do that test or checking for hamstring flexibility, what you really want to be doing is checking for how far can this person contract? Like how far are the hip flexors able to bring that leg up? And that's what I should have been doing. So when you talk about muscle activation, when I was bending forward before and could barely get my hands past my knees, that's because It wasn't because that I wasn't strong in my core or in my quads. I had enormous quads. I used to snowshoe for 50 miles. So I have like very strong legs, but neurologically that neuromuscular connection wasn't happening. So what muscle activation is starting to activate that neuromuscular connection so that when the body like needs to contract those muscles, when the neuro what When the brain is like sending messages to those muscles, like contract, they start working properly. So muscle activation is basically rejigging like this telephone line. I sometimes refer to it like a telephone line between the brain and the muscles, and sometimes it's a little weak. And so muscle activation is a way to re. Reintegrate that communication line so that they start working properly when it's not working properly, the byproduct is muscle tightness. And I, that's like the big, one of the big takeaways that I would impress upon people, like when you're tight in your body, know that there's something that's not communicating properly. And so then the goal should be, okay, let's improve the communication system. When we stretch. We do the exact opposite. We actually debilitate that communication system even more. Yeah, I there's a lot of great points that I can grab from what you just said. 1 is something that I call like adverse neural tension. So you may be testing for hamstring length, but realistically, you're also looking for how everything is connected from like the head, the brain, all the way down the spinal canal, which is your central nervous system and how if there's certain brain inputs, like again, you were talking about how your body feels. It feels like a threat to go further is to relieve those threats through again, like muscle activation, or if you can help people to think more along the lines of if you can get the body stronger in a certain way. So there's more like the physical side of things is. getting the body stronger, getting the hamstrings to actually contract and to shorten rather than continue to lengthen something. I'm sure you've heard of this. Maybe our viewers haven't, but there's sarcomeres, there's contractile motor units, right? So you have these sarcomeres that are cross links. And when you contract a muscle, they shorten. However, if you're just. doing what Aaron was doing, which was just bending forward, expecting good results. You're essentially just lengthening those sarcomeres. And if you continue to lengthen them, then you actually with excessive lengthening, you actually render the muscle weaker. And I'm sure you've had people that have come to you and all they stretch is their hamstrings or, like they say Oh, my hip flexors are so dang tight. That's another topic where you stretch your hip flexors, which attaches to the transverse processes of your lumbar spine. And all of a sudden you start to build more low back pain. You start to build more issues down the road. And I'm sure you're just, and I had no stability in my lower back. Like I've had, I actually had a few health Experts, wellness experts, movement specialists tell me, Aaron, your glutes aren't working, your psoas isn't working. We need to get those two things working. And one of the things that kind of shocked me as I got into muscle activation is there's like a few, I call them the truths or the facts. In movement, which I don't know why, but a lot of people in the movement world just throw this out and just completely ignore it. So muscles move bones and stabilize joints. And in order to do that, they have to contract, they have to be able to. So muscles don't move bones necessarily by lengthening. They move them by shortening, the old lever pulley and lever system. And I find that really fascinating. And so you mentioned this before The differences between mobility and flexibility. And what Greg always says is cultivate instead of flexibility. Like when you have flexibility, you're, you are always open and vulnerable to injury, stability always leads to sorry. Flexibility always leads to instability, but when we have mobility, we, sorry, when we have stability, we have all the mobility that we want. And so from a, from a. M. A. T. Standpoint. Our definition of healthy mobility is a muscle that can contract and contract on demand. That's the barometer that we set. And so that's part of the training that I do or have done with Greg is that we're able to test a muscles force output. And that muscle should be able to work. It should be able to contract and contract, on demand. And it's fascinating to me to see the sort of before and afterwards of when like you get a muscle, you get it strong muscle strong. And this was, by the way, the big light bulb moment when somebody did this to me. And this is what turned me on to MAT is they got my hip flexor strong. They then stretched my. stretch the hamstring and then they came back and retested it. And it like, not only was it weak, it was weaker than when we started the process in the first place. Like it was weaker than it was before. We got it like at a hundred percent. And. That was like the big aha moment. It was like, I couldn't find the muscle. It was like, you're telling me to hold it. And I just couldn't hold it. And that blew my mind. Yeah. Yeah. It's a great party trick to do on people that are like, Oh, but flex it or stretching helps me be stronger. And I'm like, okay, let's check that out. No it's pretty insane how, there, there was something called that I use, which is it's similar to like muscle activation. It's autogenic and reciprocal inhibition. So autogenic inhibition is where you contract. the muscle you contract the muscle of interest. So if I want to lengthen or get even just get rid of the perception of hamstring tightness, I want to contract the hamstring. So I want to go into hip extension, which is kicking the leg backwards. Or maybe I contract my I bend my knee under high amounts of load, you get the hamstring stronger. And then all of a sudden, Recheck them and they generally, they feel more stable. They just feel like maybe less pain. Reciprocal inhibition is where if you want to lengthen, not necessarily lengthen the hamstrings, but even get the hamstrings to feel better, you want to contract your hip flexors, which is the complete opposite of your hamstrings, and that's going to allow you to, that's a nice part of your trick to contract the crazy out of the hip flexors and then you'll see that they can actually bend forward further. And also you're giving a little bit more stability to the spine. I love how you became more aware, and bringing light to the fact that there is a lot of people that practice yoga, but in a way that I think is. Not as meaningful or effective for the clients and you found like an avenue where, it really yields results. I I believe you when you say I can get results in a day. I've done that before to given the fact that sometimes they have to think completely opposite of the way that they have been perceiving things, which is just. Stretch stretch, or static stretches all day. How, my question to you is like, how do you feel that how do you feel about the word stiffness? I think this is a topic for debate, like tendon stiffness. Is this something where, when you talk about stiffness, is it always perceived, In the negative light, do you perceive that certain stiffness is good and bad and what's your thoughts on that? When I hear the word stiffness, let me know if you're referring to something else. I hear tightness, like muscle tightness, and so the way that I interpret stiffness or tightness is again, it's a protective mechanism. The body is literally freezing up. And the analogy that Greg often uses is imagine if you're walking along, especially I used to live in Vancouver and when the first cold snap happens, you're step out in the morning and you slip a little bit, you step out on a little bit of ice. What does your body do? It immediately freezes up. It tightens up. And so our neurologically, when we. Sense instability when we sense something bad is going to happen. We just tighten up, we freeze up. And I can relate that to my own journey because I'll wake up sometimes and my back will be stiff and I'll be like, what on earth is going on? And that's telling me. That something isn't working neurologically. And because I've, I ended up in the hospital, one of the reasons why is I have disc issues in my lower back, herniated discs. And so a lot of the messaging system between my central nervous system and the muscles is not happening. That gamma, I'm going to geek out, gamma motor neuron co activation is not happening. And so that's telling me I got to address this issue. Before it becomes like a big problem, I feel like the two check engine lights in the body there's a couple. If you're talking to Greg, he would say just pain is like the serious check engine light. Something is happening. Something is wrong for me. I also put muscle tightness in there because if I'm reaching up or this happens to me a lot, cause I've had serious neck issues, I'll turn my head one way. And then all of a sudden, like it all kink up, like you, you'll feel like a kink and you're like, Oh, something needs to be worked out here. And then I would proceed to just stretch the hell out of my neck to get rid of that kink. But that's actually the wrong thing to do. The best thing to do is if there's a kink there, That's telling me there's some muscles, my right side rotators. If I'm, if it's going on the right side, my right side rotators and my neck are not working properly. And so that kink is telling me, Hey, it doesn't feel safe to go past this point. There's it's my body telling me there's a protective mechanism. You mentioned something about tendons and I don't know if you were going down the lane of fascia and I know that's a huge buzzword right now with, Oh, the fascia needs to be stretched out. I'm not on board with that at all. I think it's, first of all, I think it's really crazy to see if you can lengthen your connective tissue. If your connective tissue is tightening up. That's not necessarily a bad thing per se, but second of all, if it's like locked in, is it really the connective tissue that's locked up or is it the muscles that are locked up either way? That tightness is telling you again. There is something that's not working properly. So we need to get like the muscles working. So if you've got stiff knees per se, that stiffness is going to be related to the, the knee extensors may not be working properly or the knee flexors are not working properly. And there's a lot of muscles down there. Also, just since I brought up the knees, Is it really to do with those muscles or is it like the hip flexors and hip extensors that aren't working properly? I have filmed in my own sort of journey and then working with people that I would comfortably say 60 to 70 percent of knee issues can be traced back to the glutes, not doing their job properly. And of course there's a lot of other. Areas that could be contributing to it. Are your pronators and your feet working your supinators and your feet not working? So it's, that's my feelings about stiffness. Again, it's just a protective mechanism. Yeah. The last point that you hit on is something that I call regional interdependence. So just cause the knee is wonky and it's painful physical therapists back in the day would just say. Move the decap around and think Oh, I'm doing my job. That's what I'm supposed to do, but they're not checking out what's going on at the ankle and foot. They're not checking out what's going on at the hip. So it's it's something that hopefully has been a topic where, nowadays people understand that. Yeah, good quad and hamstring strength is part of the equation to help with knee pain. But then you have to look at what the glutes are doing and seeing if it's controlling what the femur is doing in space. The, I was visiting my movement specialists. I have a, there's a, in Dallas, there's a great place called the move project, but I was complaining to him. I, he was asking me if there was any issues and they do all my MAT in there as well, but I was saying that my left side. Protractor protraction of my shoulder. My scapula wasn't working properly as well as my right side. And he traced it right down to the supinators in my right foot, not working. And I was like, it blew my mind. Cause he could actually show me like, he's yeah, it's like happening here. And so instead of focusing on what's going on. Going on in my shoulder and trying to improve the protraction. It's I've got to deal with what's going on my foot first. The whole body is extremely interconnected. They, there was one point that you hit on around the body is in a protection phase, right? It's stuck in a fight or flight or stuck in a place where it's fearing movement or it feels fragile. So the body starts to freeze. When it comes to let's say like isometrics, right? So do muscle activation is, I'm sure it's like you're pushing against certain amounts of resistance. They're trying to overcome that. And then it starts to create a certain sense of lengthening and perceived less pain. So how do you relate, using forms of isometrics in order to facilitate. Greater degrees of movement, and having them feel like, after working with Yogi Aaron, I can move more freely. Yeah, sure. So the two things I, two things to say about that one is you were talking about this earlier. So if you want to improve hamstring mobility, let's just say, or hamstring flexibility, where I would approach it from is improving the hip flexors ability to contract properly. For me, the hamstring tightness is more of a symptom of The agonist muscles not working properly. And so that's where I would come into it. I would work on improving the hip flexor mobility. And so just a simple way to do that would be to raise the leg up as high as you can. So doing it dynamically, that's actually, by the way, One of my favorite I call it kind of general hacks or just general overall movements because it hits so many muscles all at once, but just lying on your back and raising your leg up as high as you can, and then creating your own resistance just by pulling the leg, that's going to create some isometric movement or sorry, isometric contraction. And that will start to engage all of that. The sort of magic number. There's a couple of magic numbers, but one is less is more. So we're not going for broke. It's not weight training. We're not trying to see how much we can bench or how much we can squat. We're just trying to neurologically reconnect the central nervous system to the muscles and improve that communication line. So sometimes if we. add too much force. If we just like, if we're just trying to go for broke, we could actually cause more stress, which is going to then in turn debilitate the muscle function. So that's really an important thing. We're not trying to add load per se. We're just using our body to create this and using gravity as well. And then the other magic number is six seconds, times. So if I'm doing that movement on my own, I'll bring the leg up as high as I can and hold it there while intentionally pulling the light closer to me for six seconds. And then I'll slowly lower the light back down and then just repeat that six times. So six seconds, six times. One of the things that, just leave with people and you probably work a lot with this yourself is just really slowing down movement. As we slow down movement, we start to strengthen. The slow twitch muscle fibers, which is the domain that we're talking about. When we talk about building more stability is strengthening those slow twitch muscle fibers, constantly see people in the gym. And this is why you and I need to get our messaging out there. Cause there's so much bad training going on. I see gym teachers or gym instructors like doing warmups with people. You see this like when you are standing on one leg, maybe you're supporting yourself and you just. Kick the leg up as high as you can, as fast as you can. And it's doing absolutely nothing. The way to do it would be to slow it down. And then that way we can start to build those slow twitch muscle fibers. So that's where we're working on. Yeah. You're, you hit around the nose where like muscles and tendons respond to also speed. So sometimes velocity dependent, very ballistic movements can create more spasticity, which then creates more of a perception of tightness. But yeah I agree that sometimes like it's, I always say this term or this phrase, which it's the dosage that makes the poison. So it's if I told you like, you're going to die in five days, but if you take this heart medication three times a day for seven days, you'll live. Okay great. What do you think you're going to do? You're going to do exactly as I say, three times a day for seven days straight in order to live. But, but if you're like I'm just going to go about trying to do more than you're going to do you take the medication seven, then you're overdosing and you may create and perpetuate it. More symptoms, more tightness or, things might not go your way. So I like the fact that, yeah, we, we want to start off with body weight movements, muscle activation, things that feel to the brain, that things are within your control, but just again, the person that created MAT. He works with the Broncos. So clearly, there's going to be some MIT, then there's going to slowly progressively overload the body with training, but you have to start again, you can't skip from first grade to eighth grade. You got to start with the basics, get the body to perceive less tightness and a better neurological input. Then you can start to add load to the system. One of the things that Greg says constantly, and this is burned into my brain now, is if you start from a weakened place neurologically, meaning that the muscles are not responding neurologically and then you add load. You're going to make yourself much weaker. You're going to come out much weaker, which is why we see so many people that get into bodybuilding, have serious shoulder issues and other issues. They're putting muscle on, but they're not like neurologically their muscles are weak. But one of the things that Greg says, if you start from a strong place, neurologically, meaning that muscle is connecting and then we gradually start to add load to it, we're going to. actually get a lot stronger. So a lot of my workouts, like I'm a huge advocate of doing strength training, huge advocate. But I'm also a huge advocate of making sure that you do your proper isometrics and slowly take that time to build it up. And so I'm a yoga person. So when I say Connect it at an unconscious level at the level of the autonomic nervous system, but also consciously do it. So if I'm warming up my biceps, like there's yes, I'm bringing it there and I'm holding it for 6 seconds, 6 times, but I'm also feeling it. And sometimes I'll even put my other hand on it. So I'm, There's a tactile proprioception going on as well as an unconscious one. And so I think all of it is good. One of the best pieces of advice that was ever given when I started working out, I think it was like 16 or 15 at the time. But I remember the guy saying, use really small amounts of weight. And do it really slowly and do lots of reps on the first round. And that will start to prepare the muscle. And it's something that I as always stuck with me, but then I lost it. But as I've gotten more into muscle activation, realizing that was really the advice was, Just doing something small amount first, and then building up that, that neuromuscular connection will then help your workouts later on. And that was like the best piece of advice I can give to anybody when you're working out. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to test you a little bit because I'm sure that you see again like how I seen, like you see people across the spectrum from women that are genetically very hyper mobile. And they really need that stability. And then you have people like in the NFL where things actually feel physically tight, you test them out and it's they really can't even get there. So I'm sure across the spectrum. What do you think about, what do you think about higher level athletes, right? Higher level athletes that tend to put their body through a lot of strain and a lot of eccentric output runners that are or sprinters that, they, this perceived tightness. Do you still employ the same M. A. T. techniques that you would for a person that again, it's like more on the genetically hyper mobile side or does your or does the M. A. T. and some of the variables. The protocols is that somewhat very. Between those two types of archetypes. Not necessarily again, tightness is just the protective mechanism with high functioning athletes, they're very good at hiding their, let's call them disabilities for now. Their weaknesses. They're very good at it. They're whole as a whole entire system, high functioning athletes. Are really strong and they if one little system isn't working properly, there are other systems will start to pick it up. The problem starts to become eventually everything is going to start shutting down, the guys that are the muscles that are doing the compensating are finally going to tap out the reasons why from a, from our perspective, muscle stop working is due to stress, trauma, and overuse. Those are the big ones. And of course there's a couple of others, but those are really the big ones at the top of the list. And so if you just overuse a system, it's going to break down eventually. And that's why we see like these high functioning athletes, all of a sudden get rotator cuff surgery because their shoulders are a mess or knee surgery or something like that. And. I'm going to speak as a yoga person. One of the, I call it an epidemic of yoga. People are so fascinated by gymnasts, like they look at gymnasts and they go, I need to do what those gymnasts do to a large degree. But if you look at gymnasts, most high functioning gymnasts. By 22, 23, 25, look at Simone Biles, 26 years old, tapping out and there's a 93 with gymnasts who are high performing. 93% of them need some sort of surgical intervention. So I don't think that we need to look to those kind of people necessarily as the end goal. To shoot towards that the, a lot of these high functioning athletes are not high functioning past a certain age. And I think that's something to really glean. I, myself at this moment, as I'm speaking to you, I'm turning 53 in two months. And. I don't know that I ever really considered having a functional body and the, in the ramifications of what that really meant until I ended up in the hospital at around 45 with the. Orthopedic surgeon saying, Hey, we might need to do a spinal fusion. I'm way too young to have this. Come on. And so a big part of what I try to really leave with people is instead of trying to shoot towards looking a certain way or being able to touch your toes. Or whatever it is in your mindset, I want you to have a functional body enough that you can get in and out of your car with ease that when you're driving, you can look over your right shoulder with no problems or without the fear of creaking your neck. Like I know so many people when they get to be a certain age and it's different for a lot of people, but it's usually around somewhere between 45 and 60. That a severe fear, literally a palpable fear kicks into your daily life where you're like, Oh my God, I got to be careful or I'm going to hurt myself. And that's not a great way to live. And so my goal is to remove that fear just by cultivating more stability and the stability brings more mobility and freedom in movement. Yeah. So many good points. The first one that I want to just reiterate is like you, we both, I think, focus more on like being functional and being able, it's more important to be able to pick up your child, which is a very meaningful task and have the mobility to do so versus strictly like making it a goal of yours to touch your toes. Yeah. One is one is just much more purposeful. And one is just like a flexibility goal. But a lot of people are still in the mindset of if I Improve my flexibility. If I can touch my toes, I'm, I was going to say all my dreams will come true, but oh yeah, everything will feel so much better. I will be able to like function more. I think it's just better to again be more, more stable and more proficient, stronger, more resilient as you get older. And that is about through techniques such as MAT. Being on a good strength program. I was going to hit a little bit on you, you said it managing your stress because there's physical stress, but there's also psychological and emotional stress that perpetuates tightness as well. So yeah what, how do you go about some of those people too? Are, I'm sure you have seen people that yes they respond to MAT, but then sometimes we have to sometimes go beyond that, right? There's the central nervous system. The brain is in a severe stock fight or flight where. They're in abusive relationship, or they have PTSD. And, people don't really take into account the fact that there is indeed a mind body connection when the body goes through so much emotional trauma. And there's a certain amount of that they can tolerate is that those emotions eventually spill over into physical stress and they start to perpetuate this. This discomfort that some sometimes admittedly, so it requires a multidisciplinary team, or we have to take into account the emotional side of things. Do you mind maybe seeing do you, are you somebody that maybe you refer out in those instances? Do you collaborate with people that, they literally tell you These are some of the traumas that I've been through. Somebody passed away or other things. How do you go about with those types of clients? I think so. I think you and I can both objectively agree that stress there, there's not enough emphasis in our world, in our, the wellness world, the movement world, about the detriments of stress. I don't think even the medical profession world really grasp the detriments of stress and how to get rid of stress, like all the causes of stress, and then of course we look at food. Sleep quality. And then of course, what I'm talking about is stress. One of the words that we use sometimes is unresolved stress or sorry, I didn't say that correctly, unresolved inflammation. And of course, for stress that's. Causing more unresolved inflammation that's basically stuck in different areas. And that's why I ended up in the hospital cause I had so much unresolved inflammation in my lower back. It was stuck in an inflammatory process. I, so to answer your question, like when it comes to emotional stuff, I think that the two are very interlinked personally. This is just my personal opinion now where, If we have stress, take someone that's got sciatica issues. And by the way, I can speak from personal experience. So both looking at people and also from my own experiences, like if I've got sciatica, that's going to affect me in how I'm responding to people in my life and how I'm responding to certain events. And do I handle those events with ease and comfort or ease and continuity? Or am I like aggressive with them, which then is going to exacerbate more problems. So I think that addressing it all, like always, I'm a yoga person. Go for broke, tackle it on all fronts. And but I do see an enormous shift in people moving from a fight or flight emotionally to rest and digest. When I get people doing muscle activation stuff, it's quite profound. And one of the reasons why I would say that's happening is I use this word before unresolved inflammation that a lot of us are carrying around this inflammation. And when we get the muscles working properly, remember muscles, what's connected to the muscular system? The lymphatic system. What is the lymphatic system do? Moves unresolved stress. I'm sorry, unresolved inflammation. And so as soon as we get people's muscular systems working properly and pumping properly The change in them, moving from that fight or flight to rest and digest is quite profound and quite rapid. And to answer your question, yes, I do often refer out like there's sometimes I'm like, have you ever considered therapy? But I also want to bring in the yoga techniques of relaxation, which doesn't get enough press. I think in the world as whole, a lot of people think of yoga as going, turning, going to a place where the temperature is 110 degrees, banging out of practice, sweating a lot. We don't really think of yoga as a place of relaxation, but relaxation is Paramount in the practice of yoga. So I often find, and there's been a lot of research done on people, for example, with PTSD and the benefits of yoga nidra and how it can help people with PTSD it's quite profound. There's been a lot of studies done on that. So absolutely. Multi pronged approach. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm glad that we both can understand, like, where's our scopes of expertise and when they need to refer out when there needs to be some collaboration. And yeah, lymphatic drainage is, or lymphatic system is often very overlooked. And, one of my sayings, especially because I've done a lot of postoperative care is what's one of the best things to improve lymphatic drainage? It's actually muscle activation because the muscles literally. The lymph. The lymph flows through the muscles. So when you're contracting muscles, the stronger your calve is, there's less likely, there's less, a less likelihood of a deep vein thrombosis in your leg. So getting muscles to activate will improve your lymphatic drainage and will clear out any sort of inflammation in the body. I'll tell you a story, and I think hopefully this can maybe help you, but even help our audience there. There was a client of mine. She had 25 plus years of back pain, but it wasn't because of necessarily inflammatory markers, although there probably was some present, it was more so because of the authority figure. So it's something that I think really helps people with. Unresolved tightness is assurance, right? So when people go to you it's more than just muscle activation. They're coming to you with a sense of confidence. Hey, this person can help me. If they seen your testimonials, they gain assurance from it. And this person got no assurance for 25 plus years. A doctor said. Girl you have a herniated disc. You should keep your core tight at all times. You should stop bending. And I'm sure you've heard that before, stop bending and twisting. And she was like you know what, I'm going to stop bending and twisting and her back was hard as a rock when I first met her. And when she bent forward, there was so much fight or flight. She literally just bent forward 10 degrees and she's there's the pain. And I'm like that's not possible. But a lot of neurological tightness and protective mechanisms were going on. So we essentially, I gave her assurance that, Hey, tire shoe right now. Pick up this pen, see what happens. I guarantee like my assurances, if you just do it, nothing's going to happen. And she was just assured try to bend sitting down and twist, see what happens. And she's she was really fearful, but eventually she gained the bravery, the confidence to do it. And all of a sudden, 25 plus years of neurological tightness gradually went away. And again, it's because of assurance and maybe a little bit of accountability, but the assurance piece just saying your body is stuck in a fight or flight if you do this, I promise you. You'll be fine. And I think that's what people look towards us as leaders and leaders of movement in our industry is there's always a psychosocial component to it. And there are a lot of doctors that are purely bioanatomical, meaning that, they really scare the shit out of you saying you have a herniated disc and stop bending twisting. But yeah, I think that's why muscle activation works too, because It really does give some sort of like really positive neurological input that allows them to move more freely. So not sure if you have heard stories of that and but I hopefully that can help, somebody that maybe has a mixture of like psychosocial issues, but also has some sort of like on, unresolved inflammation. Or some built up tension that seemingly feels unresolved. Yeah, absolutely. I people, one of the biggest comments I think that I get from people that do this work either from me working on them doing muscle activation technique or using the Yama methods of isometrics that They constantly will say things like I've never felt so much in my body, like at home in my body. And so a lot of this work just gets people into their bodies and and definitely, absolutely. There is a huge psychological component I'm sure going on as well. The stories that we tell ourselves and the belief systems that we have about our body I think for example, a lot of men just say I'm tight because I'm a guy my business partner Adam has really gotten into bodybuilding and range of motion decreases. And he's saying to me like my muscles are I'm becoming muscle bound. And that's another story that a lot of bodybuilders end up telling themselves, not realizing that it's just, they're building up a lot of unresolved inflammation. Working on it, many prong approach is always a great way. And checking in with our stories about ourselves. Yeah, I did a dissertation or a research study before I left PT school about positive versus negative coping. So you alluded to it where when you have a certain belief about yourself, a certain negative belief is going to reflect a negative action. So you're going to potentially. Perseverate, feel more helpless. You might stress out more. You might start to more so curl up into a ball and just lie down and hopefully the pain goes away versus do something more proactive, like muscle activation. So it's, it is really about how can you replace and start to identify as a person that does something more proactive and maybe doesn't seek out the medication and the manual treatments first. And instead maybe start to empower yourself through muscle activation, strength training. And which, which is going to yield longer term results and more sustainable relief from pain as well. With that being said, I feel like we can, me and you can probably talk for days about many different topics. We probably didn't hit on everything that we wanted to, just for time purposes, is there. Is there maybe one or two things that you want to leave our audience with that maybe can either one hit home, like a good fact that like really can hit home with them or maybe even compel them to take some action from here. Yeah, sure. Compel them to action when you were just talking. One of the things that went through my mind was a study that Greg was referring to with the Mayo Clinic. And. That they are starting to, the information that's starting to come out now is saying that loss of muscle function is the greatest contributor to aging. Therefore, if you want to, that goes ahead of heart disease and cholesterol and all of these other things that a deterioration of muscle function. And so if you guys want to stay young. The key is improving muscle function and check out, the work that we're doing, because that's the greatest thing that you can do to turn back the clock. And if you look at old people, older people that look old, especially what do you constantly see? Like limitation and range of motion, like barely able to move. And so if you, if we want to turn back the clock. Improve muscle function. And I just want to say if people want to check out the work that I'm doing, I have a free gift for people that go to my website, yogi iron dot com, and it's a great way for people. But I, there's a few. Things that I try and endeavor to do other than making people pain free. But one is just teaching people about their bodies and like where their hip flexors, where the back extensors, what are the key things that we can do to get them activated? So there's a free seven day series on there. People can access if they want to learn more. Beautiful. Thank you so much. And I will definitely leave that in the description. A great way to end this podcast is about literally the role of muscle and its function. Muscle will help with lymphatic drainage. It'll help with longevity. If you ever get a certain disease, what's going to help You survive potentially that fatal disease is still muscle function and muscle mass. So that's why I, that's why even in my own, not in my own practice, but for my own fitness endeavors, it, bodybuilding, strength training, running for cardiovascular purposes, but also I like maintaining my mobility through, I'm sure that there's some carryovers, some certain muscle activation stuff that I do for myself. So with that being said, yeah, definitely check out yogiaron. com. I'll link that into the description down below. And I want to thank you so much, Aaron, for providing your input, your expertise. Yeah, just, everything that you stand for, it's amazing. And I know that you're inspiring a lot of people to change their lives and to change the way that they feel. So with that being said Aaron if you have anything else you want to say, definitely like mine here, but I feel like we hit on so many great notes and I'm sure that a lot of people get some value from this. Just thank you so much for having me on and continuing this conversation. Yeah, for sure. So yeah, that's what I got for the one body one life podcast today. If you have any feedback from you and Aaron. I'll link again, Aaron's contact and his website down below. But also if you want to support us, leave a five star review and and also give us some feedback and that will allow me and also Aaron's message to get across to more people. So I'll leave it. I'll leave everyone here with the quote that I always leave people with. You only have one body, one life, make every action you take be one that makes you a better version of you. Take care. And thanks so much, Aaron. Appreciate you. Thank you.