Pain.

It follows you everywhere.

No matter where you go, pain follows.

It drags you down, preventing you from enjoying life.

It holds you back, sucking pleasure from your favourite activities.

Pain traps you in place, allowing no action against it, and tying you to misery.

The experience of pain is a small room that you struggle to escape.

Doors opened lead you right back to where you started.

Your own body, a prison of suffering.

Pain is paradoxical.

Pain is a Paradox

How to Break the Cycle

That’s enough poems for… maybe ever. Now to the secrets!

I truly believe that any human can discover pain-free ability through 3 things:

1. Targeted exercise

2. Diet

3. Supplementing for deficiencies
   

With those 3 things where they should be,
You don’t have bad days.
You don’t hurt.
You don’t want for better mobility and strength.

Your body is in perfect balance, and conditioned for all aspects of your life.

The problem is, when you’ve lived with pain for so long, it becomes a paradox. Allow me to explain:

The Pain Paradox

This problem starts with pain.

Pain is your body’s way of telling you something is wrong, or something is dangerous.

• If you pull a muscle, pain is your body’s way of telling you to limit your activity while the injury heals.

• If your knee or elbow is hyperextended, bent too far the wrong way, pain will force you to stop what you’re doing before injury.

The above 2 problems are common understandings of pain, and those problems do not lead to the paradox I’m attempting to describe. The follow examples of pain are far more problematic:

• If you have a muscular imbalance where an unnatural pull misaligns your joint function, pain will shoot through the affected area

• If you have a loss of blood flow and nutrients due to decades of misuse or underuse of a joint or area of the body, causing pain and lack of function in the affected area

• If you have an injury that did not heal properly and now causes pain and poor mobility in the affected area

Avoidance

For the above 3 examples, most normal humans don’t understand the methods to go about fixing their pain. So the most common thing people do is to avoid the pain at all costs, even if that means never using a joint for the rest of their life…

This is absolutely the WRONG way to go about handling pain and imbalance.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the phrase: USE IT OR LOSE IT

Well, there’s serious truth to it.

Loss of Function

If you continue to avoid use of the affected joint or area of the body that suffers from pain, it leads to a few things.

1. Your body thinks, “oh! they don’t need function of this joint/part of the body. No need to send resources that could be better used elsewhere”

2. The affected area becomes blood flow and nutrient deprived from lack of use and lack of need

3. Pain-free ability drops to an all time low

4. Lastly, eventually, whether it be a slip, fall, trip, or just some everyday normal activity like putting on your socks or walking down the stairs, you suffer from…

Further Injury

Now that the area is suffering from even MORE pain, the avoidance game will only increase in intensity! And so the cycle continues.

I’ve witnessed this paradox happen again and again to SO many people in my life:

• My mom

• My sister

• My friends

• My mentors

• My heroes

Everyone is so susceptible to this paradoxical method of dealing with pain, that it’s leading me to think that it’s almost a fundamental human thought process 🤔

How to Break the Cycle

If you live with pain long enough, your mind will start to play tricks on you. You’ll start questioning what it is that your capable of, and pain becomes your new normal.

The absolute best way that I’ve found to fight this (possibly fundamental human thought process) is the same for everyone I’ve worked with. Pain has a mental blocking effect that prevents you from doing something that would otherwise cause more pain. It’s a built in defense mechanism against injury.

So the best way to fight against this self-limiting defense mechanism is to:

Find a Movement That You Love, And Do it Backwards

This is going to be controversial, I’m sure, but hear me out.

For example, a client of mine LOVES to hike. I mean truly loves it. Brings them absolute joy no matter what day of the week they hike, no matter where they hike, or who they’re hiking with.

Of course, the problem was, they couldn’t hike without pain. Knee pain and back pain, to be exact. (although the details don’t matter as much for this discussion) This client has found themselves DEEP in the Pain Paradox, and they’d lost the ability to do the thing that brought them the most joy. Here’s how they broke through.

They started “hiking” backwards.

Their main motivation is to once again hike pain-free, and so the act of hiking backwards, progressing from whatever level they can that’s most painless, provides a few key things:

• Motivation and a path forward

• More blood flow to the painful area

  • More nutrients and synovial fluid to help heal the painful area

• Balanced restructuring of muscles and connective tissues from the ground up allowing for better function of the joints

• Stimulating adaptation in the resistance (or reverse) of their favourite exercise allowing for more pain free ability with their favourite exercise

• and more.

Of course, in this case, walking or hiking backwards is most effective in rehabilitating the lower body, and so if the client was suffering from neck or shoulder pain then backwards walking might not be the absolute best targeted exercise for those areas.

BUT, if their favourite exercise was hiking, then I would all the same get them started with the reverse of their favourite exercise; I.e. backwards hiking. The motivating factor of finally having an actionable path forward towards being able to do the thing you love pain-free again, is enough by itself to have a HUGE benefit. Let alone all the actual physiological benefits!

Concluding Thoughts

If you’re struggling with pain, and that pain is preventing you from enjoying your favourite activities to their fullest, then I challenge you to think hard on what the REVERSE of said activity would look like.
Odds are good, based on my research, that you’ll be on the right path to pain-free ability.

Of course, if you need help in visualizing and understanding the reverse of your favourite activity, or if you have any questions your want to go over, then book a free call using the link below and I’ll provide some clarity over a video call:

And if you feel it’s right, and you’re interested in knowing more about my Pain-Free Movement Protocol ^tm then book a discovery call below where I’ll happily set you on the path to enjoying all of life’s activities pain free: