Transcript of Episode 125: How to Fix Muscle Imbalance
With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra and Special Guest, Dr. Kareem Samhouri
Meredith:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra, and this is episode 125. Of course, we have Dr. Daniel Pompa here on the line, our resident cellular healing specialist. Today we welcome a very special guest, Dr. Kareem Samhouri. We’re going to be talking about a topic that we haven’t broached yet on Cellular Healing TV, and that’s muscle balance therapy. Really excited to dig into this. It’s something I don’t know a lot about, so we’re really excited to learn and share with you guys.
Before we get started, I’m going to tell you a little bit more about Dr. Kareem. As it turns out, you can heal your body through increasing movement while decreasing inflammation, and there is no one more poised to teach you how to use movement to improve your health than Dr. Kareem Samhouri. Dr. Kareem has gained worldwide popularity as the go-to physical therapist and personal trainer for billionaires, professional and Olympic athletes, world-famous authors, and their families.
Dr. Kareem has rehabilitated and trained Olympic and professional athletes, baby boomers with joint pain who want to lose weight, older adults with balance issues, people in comas, others who have had stoke, spinal cord injury, rare disease, heart issues, or lung disease, pregnant women, children, and even babies. He’s worked with the highest and lowest levels of health, and he’s able to achieve shockingly beneficial outcomes in all categories.
He taught his oldest patient, who is 112 years old, how to dance again – love that – and helped his youngest, who is in the NICU and only four days old, to adapt to the world 18 weeks too soon. Your body is designed to heal or decay. From now on, decide on your own health momentum. Regain control while you begin to look and feel years younger. Very impressive bio, Dr. Kareem, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV.
Dr. Kareem:
Thank you very much, Meredith. It’s a pleasure to join you.
Dr. Pompa:
The first question I always like to ask is, okay, you’re an amazing expert in this area, right? I do want to hear more about the 112-year-old and the infant. That’s amazing. How could this affect those ends of the spectrum? However, I have to hear how you got into this. When you end up an expert like you are in one area, there has to be a story to how you got so into this and how you got so good at this. Give us the story before we talk more about what this is.
Dr. Kareem:
Yeah. I appreciate it, Dr. Pompa. Thank you so much for having me, and I would be absolutely delighted to share this with you. Firstly, my mission all started because I wanted to help my mother with her health. I think, for a lot of people, we start inside of our own families. That’s where we want to create the most change. Before I knew it, my life and health took a turn in the opposite direction, as well, from where I had hoped or anticipated. I just had to put the pieces together.
I was a little bit imbalanced. I had to actually straighten out my posture. Before you knew it, I was able to actually graduate from physical therapy school, become a physical therapist, start teaching personal training, and open up the world’s first clinic where this was actually taught all under one roof for the master level certification. That’s what I here to share with everybody today. How do we actually integrate health, make it really, really brain dead simple so people can take one or two small strategies and move forward with them immediately?
This is the stuff that alleviates pain. This is the stuff that brings oxygen to muscles. It helps you heal faster. It improves your mood, your level of focus, your athleticism, and your performance all around in life. This is where it’s at. The body’s meant to move, and it’s a matter of getting it moving correctly.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I think the first question I would ask is this is obviously different than just regular exercise, right? We know regular exercise helps a lot of those things. Why is this different? Exactly what is it?
Dr. Kareem:
I think the long and short of it is we live in a 3-D world, and we tend to exercise in a one- or two-dimensional way, so a lot of forward/backwards movements. You’ll see people do a lot of bench presses in the gym. You’ll see people only go for runs. The end result of that are tiny, little muscle imbalances. These little muscle imbalances mean that your big muscles are getting strong faster than your small muscles, but the small muscles matter, too.
When you actually balance out your rotator cuff, you pull your shoulder back into position, and you take away this tiny, little nerve signal that’s actually shutting down your muscle. When a muscle gets shut down, not only does it stop you from being able to move the way you want to, but it slows down your metabolism. It decreases your mood, or it worsens your mood, and it makes you less effective at so many other things that you want to do.
Dr. Pompa:
We can get into specifics, but I see a lot of people in the gym. They’re doing bench presses, a lot of major exercise like we’ve all done and do. They could be throwing themselves more out of balance because they’re hitting the big ones, and yet they could have some smaller muscles or stabilizers out of balance, so they could be creating more problems?
Dr. Kareem:
Yeah. That’s exactly right. The last thing I want to do is discourage anybody from exercise, but that’s what I find happens. People go, and they work out. They either don’t get a result, or they uncover an old injury they didn’t know they had because it’s been a while since they’ve been exercising, or they get a result, and they plateau. Exercise is really meant to be very simple.
If we just go back to our ancestors, we’re meant to get on and off the ground. We’re meant to play. We’re meant to move in every possible direction. That’s how you would naturally hit all the different muscles. Fast-forward to today’s world. Now we go into a gym, and we try and simulate those movements, but we’re missing so many different diagonals, rotations, all these different areas that would otherwise balance out our body with real life movement. Instead, we create muscle imbalances that really just destroy our bodies over time. It can be extremely discouraging. It’s just not what I want for anybody.
Dr. Pompa:
Ultimately, the imbalances lead to injury. People watching this that are exercise enthusiasts, they could be getting chronic injuries, and it’s most likely probably from some imbalance that they have. They could be big and strong, and strong in certain areas, but these little stabilizers and little muscles throw the body out of balance, and it’s creating a functional problem of some sort.
Dr. Kareem:
That’s precisely it. Across different demographics, here’s the way it breaks down. In kids, it results in overuse injuries very quickly. It makes them less capable of excelling in a sport. In an athlete or, let’s say, sort of middle-age person, that person in their young adulthood, that person’s going to decrease in performance. They’re going to be less coordinated. They’re not going to be as fast. They’re not going to be able to learn new movements as quickly.
Then if we advance age a little bit, we get into a little bit of an older demographic. The end result of this is decreased coordination, decreased strength, joint pain – joint pain that seems to have come out of nowhere, but in reality, it was based off of a long history of moving with a nonspecific pattern or a less strategic pattern that resulted in this pain.
Meredith:
What are the most common muscle imbalances you’re seeing?
Dr. Kareem:
Yeah. That’s a great question, Meredith. Oftentimes, we’ll see that neck flexors actually end up quite stretched. Neck extensors will end up compressed. We’ll get a chin up position, a rounded shoulder, or even just elevating a little bit. This is kind of a dramatic example. If you really pull your shoulder all the way up as far as you can just on one side, a lot of people are just slightly that way and a little fit forward. Especially if you’re right handed, and you’re always writing with your right hand, or typing in that area, or reaching for a mouse or a stapler, you’re just learning to rotate through your spine in a very specific pattern and move that shoulder forward over, and over, and over again.
Now, when we get lower in the body, you’ll see a pelvis is tipped forward. For most people, that ends up really creating the wrong length of their hip flexors, the wrong length of their glutes or their butts. Those muscles are big muscles, big movers. It creates muscles imbalances at the front of your thigh to the back of your thigh, quads to hamstrings. That’s probably one of the most common things we see that lead to knee injury, low back injury. As it works its way up the chain, believe it or not, it creates a sore neck, as well.
Dr. Pompa:
With that said, you have people at computers all day, sitting in chairs. Obviously, that’s creating a lot of those imbalances. The head goes forward, and people make that adjustment, chin comes up, that horrible position. Now again, I can see, and I think our listeners and viewers can understand how that leads to injury. The structure affects the function. You go into something with this position, your chances of injury are great. How does it affect your general health?
I know because this is work that I used to do, structure affects function. Now, people get it. They look at the x-ray and say, “Okay, I can see how that could erode my discs early and cause injury,” but it was very difficult for me to get them to understand how that affects their immune system. The anterior head position that you just described is epidemic today because of computers, and games, and all that stuff. We see it in children. We know studies show those people die earlier, literally. It’s that traumatic to the central nervous system and their health. Explain that a little bit.
Dr. Kareem:
There’s a lot of different angles we can look at this. I think it’s best to divide between Western medicine and Eastern medicine for different philosophies because both are valid and are based off of different rationales.
In the Western medicine’s side, we know that if we don’t line the body up properly, it’s going to get weak very quickly. Pain signals are going to take over instead of muscle signals and contractions. We’re going to lose coordination. Ultimately, that means we’re going to move less. We’re going to be less motivated to eat right, and we’re more likely to assume fetal position, if you will, which is starting to branch over to the Eastern medicine’s side of really taking a look at how does this affect quality of life? When we’re stressed, we curl up in the fetal position, and that’s a position of self-defeat. That position of self-defeat results in anxiety, depression, and a lot of tension throughout the entire body.
As we take a look further into the Eastern side of things, we really need to consider – and this is where chiropractic nails it in my opinion as it relates to muscle balancing. The central nervous system and cerebral spinal fluid are just so important to overall system health. If you have a block in CSF flow, through your brain, through your spinal cord, and back up, then that CSF flow gets disrupted and ultimately changes the way your entire body communicates.
That, perhaps, linked with oral health are two of the most important foundational things you can do to improve your health, period. If you’re not taking good care of your mouth, and you’re not taking good care of the messaging system for your entire body, those are primitive areas of your body that change everything else. The body’s organized in a way where it’s going to work from the highest priority backwards.
If there’s something more critical going on in your body right now, like for example, your nervous system’s compromised because CSF flow is blocked, then it doesn’t care if you want to lose weight. It doesn’t care if you have a cut or a laceration on your skin. It’s not going to heal it as well. It certainly doesn’t care if you have wrinkles that you want to get rid of or if your energy level isn’t what you want it to be. You got to fix the root cause, the number one priority in your body, and a domino effect takes place. You just feel better.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. You just said it, though. People are concerned more about the wrinkles and the weight loss so all their energy and focus goes there. They’re not considering the fact that root canals, cavitations, and amalgam filling in their mouth that are making them toxic, causing interference into all of those areas, the cells, the nerve system, and ultimately driving inflammation, creating wrinkles, and the list goes on, or the anterior head. They’re not concerned that that’s stretching their spinal cord, interfering with their nervous system. Well said. Well said. Going upstream to those major things first is a very hard message. People want that result down here, the skin, the weight loss.
Dr. Kareem:
Yeah. Thank you. That’s it, though. We are still attacking the skin and the weight loss, and we’re improving in those areas. How do we give it and reposition the methodology to get there? If you want to lose weight, that’s great. What do you do? Do you run on a treadmill? Do you lift some weights? Do you do metabolic resistance training? Do you go on a diet? Do you sleep more? Do you balance your hormones?
I’ll argue. What you do is you work on the number one system first. Your endocrine system’s under stress. Hormones are going to be much more important to you than going on a particular diet that doesn’t affect your hormones in a great way, although diet can certainly affect your hormones. I’ll make an argument that if what you want to do is reduce wrinkles or fat folds, but your pelvis is out of position, let’s just take your pelvis back into position, and you might just find that you’ve uncovered a six-pack or something you missed that you didn’t know you had.
This is one of my biggest lessons and one of my earliest personal training finds. This was an introduction for me to muscle balancing. You see, there was this girl named Lindsey, and she worked as hard as anybody could work. She wasn’t anorexic, but she was borderline at that point where she was just doing everything she possibly could in the gym. She was eating correctly, so she wasn’t really skimming off food, but she just couldn’t get that final six-pack. She just wanted a little bit of definition. She always had the four at the top of the abs, but nothing at the bottom.
Finally, I ended up doing a postural assessment on her. I took a peek. You know what? We just needed to tip her pelvis backwards a little bit. When we tipped her pelvis backwards a little bit, lo and behold, all those folds went away. Her love handles weren’t actually there. There was no extra body fat on her body preventing her from having the body she wanted. She just needed to be in a slightly different position.
Now, the coolest thing is not only did she end up getting the body that she wanted, but she starting moving so quickly, all her results accelerated. It was months of work to get to this point, where then all of a sudden, in the next 30 days, she hit every single one of her goals. Truth was, it only took two weeks to tip her pelvis back into position and a few simple exercises that anybody can do at home with just their body weight alone.
Dr. Pompa:
I want to talk about what people can do at home, obviously. What people have to understand is the brain, that unconscious or subconscious mind, knows all the time when the body’s out of position. If we turned the lights off in the room, you know your arms are behind you. You don’t have to look over to see that. That’s because there’s these little mechanoreceptors in every muscle telling your brain, “We’re over here.”
Same with when the head is forward. These mechanoreceptors are firing. The brain knows it’s out of position. It really just sucks the energy right out of the cell. People have to understand how disruptive that is to your, obviously, your central nervous system, but ultimately, your whole body or how everything works, your immune system, everything. It’s an energy suck, if you will. If you want to suck energy, just walk around with your head forward.
Here’s the problem, Doc. Most people don’t know that. They don’t know that’s abnormal. They look at themselves in the mirror day in and day out. I remember when I did this type of work. Different than you, I was doing it more from a chiropractic standpoint. I think this marries it all perfectly. I would say, “Look at the low shoulder,” and they would look at themselves and say, “What low shoulder?” It was in Young Frankenstein, right? He said, “Oh, where did you get that hump on your back?” He said, “What hump?” The point is this becomes your normal, but meanwhile, that’s major interference zapping your energy. Yeah. That could be the reason why you can’t lose weight. That could be the reason you don’t feel well, don’t sleep well, etcetera.
Dr. Kareem:
Yeah. We’re organized in a smart way that makes this stuff even more confusing at times. You see, we’re not going to walk around with our heads tilted unless we’re actually stuck in that position. Our bodies are going to balance that out. What ends up happening if your shoulder’s actually up this way – excuse me – if your head’s tilted this way, you just raise your shoulder up a little bit to balance that out. That ends up being the imbalance, but in reality, maybe you just need to loosen up your neck a little bit.
I know a lot of this can be abstract. It just needs to be practical and tangible. If you don’t mind, I’ll just jump right into how somebody can assess this for themselves concrete evidence of it, and watch the change happen before them.
Dr. Pompa:
Please. Yes.
Dr. Kareem:
First thing is this: Take a string. Hang it from the ceiling, or have somebody hold it for you. With that string, what you’re going to do is divide your body between right and left sides. You’ll start to see when we take a picture of this whether or not one shoulder’s up a little bit more, whether or not you’re side bent a little bit, whether or not your head’s tilted just slightly. You’ll notice these sorts of aspects, not initially, but when you look closely at the picture. You might notice that one hip’s raised a little bit. If you’re taking this picture in a bathing suit or with your shirt off, you’ll notice whether or not you have a little bit more of a love handle on one side or whether or not it looks like one hip’s tighter.
Now, take a second picture, this time with the string dividing the body from front to back by taking it with the string at your side. When you take it from this angle, you’ll start to notice is your head forward? Is your chin tipped up? Is one shoulder a little bit higher or rounder than the other one? You can start to see that from either side. Is your pelvis tipped so that your low back is actually arched a little bit, and your belly’s sticking out? Maybe you’re working on your belly, and that’s not the problem.
Maybe you’re a runner or an athlete, and every single time you take a step, it pounds all the way up from your ankle to your knee to your hip and right into your low back. You keep wondering, “Why can’t I get my hamstrings stronger? Why can’t I get faster?” Bent-leg lifts are a great way to build speed. The only reason you’re not getting the signal there to begin with is because your back’s arched, and you’re tipped out of position. Work on those things first by identifying them with a concrete image that you can reference. From that point on, repeat it. It only takes 30 seconds to take these pictures. Set up a tripod, or have a loved one do it for you. It’s really, really simple.
Now, regardless of what you find, we need to tap into something that is being termed personalized health. That is adapting to your specific body. A lot of people say, “My right bicep is stronger than my left. Should I just lift heavier on my left and try and make up for it?” No. You actually want to back down. You want to cater to the more limited side of your body. Symmetry comes first. The fastest results come from slowing down to balance your body’s strength, and then everything accelerates from there. You want to back off from your weights on both arms to match the strength of your left, and then you would increase.
The same thing reflects ability and mobility in tissue release. If you can raise both arms up into the air, but one of them, the shoulder’s hiking up a little bit, don’t go quite as far. Cater to the more limited side just before your shoulder hikes up, and come back. Work on your mobility just here, opening up your chest, increasing your ability to take a deep breath through your diaphragm. Then what happens is before you know it, even just a few reps in oftentimes, you’ll start to get a little bit further. If you just keep pushing past that point of resistance, sure, the left can keep going as far as it wants, but the right’s never going to get any better. That just results in more twisting through your body.
More often than not, these twists, these rotations, these imbalances, they represent a little bit more than what’s tangible in the physical world. A lot of times, they have emotional root causes, spiritual root causes, psychological root causes. When you release them, wow, that’s kind of the biggest benefit. You start to feel optimized. You feel amazing. I teach five exercises that I find to be the absolute easiest for people to work on. These exercises are meant to be exercises that force your body to move symmetrically. If you tire out on one side of your body, you’re just going to back off and let yourself rest.
Generally, we say do 50 seconds of work and 10 seconds of rest before you transition to the next exercise. Everything’s one minute, and it’s a total of five minutes every other day. These exercises are squat, push, lunge, pull, and plank. Very simply, what we’re doing is working diagonal pattern in the body. It’s forcing you to pull into alignment. Naturally, what’s going to happen is your body’s going to do that. It’s going to crave that.
If you notice that there’s a particular area of weakness or a lack of flexibility, you can work on that independently. More often than not, it’s not a stretch and hold position; it’s a move into or out of. Take a tennis ball and a firm wall, and release it. For example, the pecs get really tight. If you just lay on the tennis ball or put your arm against the wall, you can release pec minor here, the whole chest is going to open up. When your chest opens up on the left, guess what? The right goes with it.
Now when you go to do those pushes up, either to push up, or you bench press, your incline bench press, and more often than not, you want to be weight bearing, you’re going to have a lot more success. That’s where the metabolic effect takes place. The coordination effect takes place. Ultimately, coordination leads to strength, and strength leads to speed. It all kind of fits together.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s amazing. It’s a completely different approach. These five exercises, where can people go to see them? Obviously, people are going, “What? You just went through that.”
Dr. Kareem:
Yeah, sure. DailyPosture.com is just a quick link to a specific blog post that I have. It goes through these five exercises. Again, it’s just DailyPosture.com. You go there. It’s just a free, five exercise circuit that you can do. In the beginning, just do these five exercises. As you get used to them, and you want to challenge yourself, start to move in different directions. Instead of just squatting forward/backwards like this, consider moving side to side. Consider moving with rotation instead.
What’s going to end up happening is your body will learn how to challenge these smaller muscles, as well.. In the beginning, just follow these five exercises. Do them every other day. Let your body balance itself out by recruiting the big muscles to then send the signal to the small. I always teach, “Train a nerve, not a muscle.” A nerve has a distribution that starts, actually, all the way up in your head.
You start thinking about a movement, and already, nerves are firing. In fact, just thinking about a movement, visualizing that – elite athletes use it all the time. They’ll see an entire race happen before they actually go and race.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.
Dr. Kareem:
The effect is – and it’s really well documented by some of the best sports psychologists in the world – up to 30% more contractile strength. That’s how much more strength you get from every rep of every exercise in every set of every workout. We’re talking about exponential benefit. When you think about things from that perspective, and you think about a movement first, visualize in your mind’s eye, then go and try the movement. Now you’ve created a feedback mechanism for your body to evaluate, “How did it go?”
The first thing is watch somebody else do it who knows what they’re doing. They know how to move their body correctly. That’s where DailyPosture.com is going to come in and help you out. They’ll have some exercise demos. Hire a trainer, hire a physical therapist, hire a chiropractor, somebody that can teach you movement correctly, that’s already aligned properly. What that movement. Then picture your movement in your mind’s eye. Do the movement, and then ask yourself, “How did it go? Did it actually end up the way that I envisioned it would end up?”
If that’s the case, great, continue what you’re doing. If that’s not the case, make a small correction, and evaluate it again. As time goes by, ask yourself that question less and less frequently because that’s the fastest way – is to just fade your feedback over time.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I know my kids, they’re skiers. Their coaches have them visualize the line. Of course, they show them. They have exactly what they should be doing, how to do it, and then it’s the visualization of them doing it just the way they were told to do it perfectly, and the body creates it. That’s what you do with your clients. You have them actually visualize themselves doing the movement first after they see it done right, and then actually do the movement, and then assess how they did it and how they felt. That’s kind of the pattern?
Dr. Kareem:
That’s exactly right. It’s the fastest way to learn any movement. I did a graduate school term project where I actually taught people – where I had to learn how to throw darts the most effective way I possibly could learn. Sure, there’s little pieces of, “Tilt your wrist this way,” or “Have your elbow close to your body,” or “Tilt your head.” Those matter, how you stack those pieces together. The number one thing that actually determines dart precision when you’re throwing darts is just simply visualizing where that dart’s going to go before you throw it.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. It’s so true.
Dr. Kareem:
In the same way, visualize how your body’s going to move. How many people get up from a chair, and walk across the room, and have no idea how they’re actually supposed to move, and give absolutely no thought to it whatsoever? I’m not saying you have to think about it every time. I’m just saying in the beginning, until your body moves the way you actually want it to move, take the time to learn it, how to visualize it the way that you intend to.
Hold that for six weeks, and your brain will actually create a plastic change. Your nervous system will create or a permanent change that represents this movement, a new pattern of movement for your body, and you’ll hold onto it forever.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no doubt. All right. These are the five exercises people start, but you’re, most likely with your clients, doing more than that. Where does it go from there? Where does it progress? These five exercises, they could be for the trained athlete, or they could be for the person who’s just getting chronic injuries, or wants to be healthier, or hit a different health goal. Am I right? Where do you go from there?
Dr. Kareem:
Yeah. Generally what you want to do is back off initially from whatever you’re doing. You don’t have to get rid of it completely, but you want to lower the intensity so that you’re not overtraining, you’re not overly sore, and you actually give your body a chance to learn something new. Depending on your level of movement, it’s kind of the same prescription anyways. If you really are the weekend warrior, and you’re not moving at all during the week, then your weekend warrior activities are going to back off a little bit in intensity. If you’ve been playing two hours of basketball a day, cut it down to one just for a few weeks until you get the postural piece right.
If you’re an elite athlete, maybe you’ll cut out a little bit of the time that you’re spending in the gym weight training. What you want to do is just use these five exercises initially, and then replace them over time. Use these five exercises. Do your workout, I want to say, so you’re still playing basketball, or you’ll still play your sport. Then over time, within a few weeks, you’ll notice that your posture’s improved. Do that plumb line test, and you’ll see, “Where do I stand?”
Once you know your body’s moving the way you envisioned and it looks right in the camera, after that, you can replace the five exercises with something different and something more powerful for you whether it’s going to be coordination training, speed training, balance reaction training. If you’re an older adult, avoiding falls is going to be the number one predictor of your longevity and quality of life. You replace it with these activities. Take the same five minutes and use it as your five-minute mini circuit, if you will, or five-minute circuit in anything that you’re doing to enhance your health.
If movement isn’t something you need to work on anymore, then think about the five minutes as something that you can do to balance out your diet, to balance out your gut, to balance out your hormones. What can you do in five minutes for meditation to be able to get a better night’s sleep?
Dr. Pompa:
You’re suggesting all of us start this? Whether you’re a trained athlete or not, start this, and no matter what your goal is, you’re going to get better at it. The trained athlete, or the person who’s getting injured, or just wants to be healthier, add this five minutes three times a week to your program now. That’s what you’re saying, correct?
Dr. Kareem:
Yeah. I would start with it. Make sure your body’s properly heated or warmed up, and then go through this five minutes because you’re going to preset your body to get a better training effect from everything that follows. If you align your body before you start your workout, now your body’s going to get a better effect from that workout.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay. What’s different about these exercises? In other words, why does it align your body? Why does it bring balance? Why does it fix the posture?
Dr. Kareem:
There’s a lot of different theories and philosophies out there. Overall, what I can offer you is sort of clinical experience and expertise. I think that’s the number one place that I can answer this question intelligently. The rationale. We want to create diagonal pull. If we’re firing our glutes, we want to fire our. The next thing we want to do is get our chest because that’s a diagonal. We want to pull our body into alignment first in one direction, and then secondly, in another direction.
By trading between front of body, back of body, lower body, upper body, what ends up happening is we’re really stimulating all of our nerves. That’s also forcing us to get the smaller muscles involved. Most of the time, people are plenty strong enough to be able to do a pull-up, but just have no idea which muscles to recruit and when.
What are we going to train? We’re not going to train the big muscles, like your lats. That’s the biggest muscle in your body. We’re going to train your middle trapezius and lower trapezius, specific fibers that get missed all the time that set your shoulders down and back, that open up your rib cage, and let your diaphragm get a better breath. When you do that, and you just focus on the small stuff for a few minutes a day, the end result of it is better muscle contractions, better oxygenation, and faster recovery. That, of course, leads to a better training effect over time.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Okay. It’s focusing on different muscles, obviously, and doing it in a specific order to create that neurological component that activates these muscles. By getting these muscles right, then, now, training the bigger ones makes a whole lot more sense.
Dr. Kareem:
Yup. Another thing is, really cutting down the time and the dose – a lot of people are used to three sets of 10, three sets of 15, or five sets of whatever. Whoever proved that that was the right number? I’ve never seen really good evidence that says that that has to be the number instead of three reps or instead of six. The best experts I’ve spoken to and worked with, they don’t think so. The reality is your body just wants the cue in the right direction, and let it take over. Nature’s really powerful. We can self-optimize, just small cues to say, “Hey, body, I want to do this now.” When we send that signal for the first time, the body will understand, and it’ll start to superimpose it onto our lives and our body.
Dr. Pompa:
You’re doing something for 50 seconds, and then you’re taking 10 seconds off, right? Fifty seconds, ten seconds, there is the five minutes. Got it. Meredith, you had a question.
Meredith:
Yeah. I’m just curious, too. Have you seen any conditions specifically to be really impacted by the muscle balancing therapy?
Dr. Kareem:
Yeah, great question. It’s pretty limitless. From arthritis, that’s a really big one. Speed in the athlete, that’s huge. This is really a fast way to build speed, and speed builds reaction time and everything else that athletes tend to really want. I’ve seen the difference between people with chronic pain and disease having a lot of muscle pain, and the muscle pain going down to two out of ten, or even in some instances, it’ll get down to a zero.
Chronic fatigue syndrome, this is something that really plagues more people than generally is acceptable to talk about. Most people feel really self-conscious about that. What ends up happening is there’s so many factors that play in. There’s hormonal balance; there’s oxygenation; there’s all these different things. When we get right down to it, that’s just kind of working back to the point of working on the most critical element first, improving cellular health based off of the cells that need your attention the most.
If we take a look at it, what could be a higher priority than your circulatory system and your nervous system? How does your circulatory system get blood to the rest of your body? Those red blood cells carry oxygen, and that oxygen mitochondria to create energy production for every other cell in your body. What we want to do is allow that oxygen to get where it’s going.
On the nervous system level, how is it going to happen? Muscle pumps this, and it’s going to feed that blood. If we learn how to contract a muscle at the right time in the right sequence by targeting our nerves instead of our muscles, then we’re going to create a pump effect that allows all that deoxygenated blood that stuck in your ankles and your fingertips to find its way back to your heart efficiently and easily. Then your heart can focus on getting nice, rich, oxygenated blood back to the rest of your body.
Nerves need that blood, too. When your nerves get fluid, and they get that blood, they fire really easily. When they fire easily, the synapses improve in their speed and in their precision. That speed and precision through your nerves leads to all of the other benefits.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. That makes complete sense.
Meredith:
I’m curious, too. You had mentioned before about utilizing a tennis ball in some of the exercises. Do you recommend foam rolling or other tools to incorporate in the exercises?
Dr. Kareem:
Yeah. Actually, there’s a lot you can do in terms of myofascial release, which is really what we’re getting at with this tissue release stuff. Most people think of it as the good hurt when you get a massage. It’s kind of like, “Oh! Just keep rubbing in that one area.” That one area is one of two thing. It’s either your rib’s stuck up, which is a total muscle imbalance. Your joints are out of position. The second thing is you’ve got a knot in your muscle. You want to release that knot because your muscle’s moving up until the point of the knot, and then it’s kind of skipping over it, and then it’s lengthening the rest of the muscle or contracting the rest of the muscle.
When you release it with a tennis ball by putting pressure on it, with massage techniques, hands on yourself or with somebody else’s help, you have myofascial release, which is an option, with a foam roll, with many other devices, you’re ultimately doing the same thing. You’re taking something that functions almost like scar tissue, and you’re giving it more slack. When you give your body more slack, you give it more forgiveness. Ultimately, that leads to a more effective, younger-feeling body.
Meredith:
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I got to ask. The infant that Meredith read in your bio, how old was – four weeks? Was it four weeks or four months?
Meredith:
Four days old.
Dr. Kareem:
About 21 weeks, actually, 21 ½.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay. What did you do? How’d you do it, and what happened?
Dr. Kareem:
The thing is in the NICU, the place where they have the preemies is so loud, and it’s so intense for these babies. This baby, it was actually a record at the hospital – and I happened to be working there – the youngest baby that they had ever had born there. They didn’t think this baby was going to survive. It was one of those desperate situations where everybody’s idea was a valid idea.
What we did is we positioned the baby in different positions. Instead of it cringing into fetal position because of all the noises, and sirens, and bells, and whistles going off, we would open him up, and let the baby’s chest breathe a little bit. We would move the baby’s arms in diagonal patterns for the infant so the baby could actually get at the breath. We would put a little pressure on the diaphragm so the baby could get a bigger, deeper breath. Then we would just take that pressure off as the belly would expand and contract.
We learned to work with the ribs a little bit, too. It’s really the same principles, but in the end, there was a lot of hands-on care that went with it, as well. All of these factors led towards the baby really just developing a little bit more easily and a little bit faster. Of course, in an infant that’s that young, you really just have to be as gentle as can be. Oftentimes, instead of a hand, it’s just barely a fingertip touch that you’re going to do. When it came to actually moving the baby’s muscles, light, little taps in the areas where the nerve ties into the muscle to say, “Hey, right here. This is what needs to happen next.” Sure enough, baby got better, grew up totally healthy, and ended up living a healthy life.
Meredith:
Wow!
Dr. Pompa:
What about the 112-year-old guy that learned to dance or could dance again? What did you do with him?
Dr. Kareem:
Yeah. Actually, it was a woman. She’s one of my favorite patients I ever had in all time. She just had this great spirit about her, but she was stuck in a wheelchair. She couldn’t get up. She just didn’t have the strength or coordination. We started with really simple exercises. “Pick your foot up, and put it back down. Step on the gas.”
Then once she figured out how to do that, we said, “Squeeze your knees together; move them apart.” At first, we kind of had to help her. I would help her move in both directions. Over time, it was, “Lift your knee up towards your chest, and then go ahead, and push back down against the floor.” Before you knew it, it was, “Rotate your shoulders.” She had a bit more mobility and strength there. “Go ahead and push against me. Push against me. Push against me. Okay. Now the other way. Pull against me. Pull against me.” We just started to really get her muscles and nervous system to fire coordinatively again.
Then we worked on pulling her up out of the chair with her doing 10%, with her doing 20%, with her doing 30, 40, 50 until she was at 100%. Then she got up out of the chair. Her first request was, “Is there any way that I can dance?” We turned up the volume on the music, and we got her going. I helped her, and we just started moving through the movements. You know what?
Something that she enjoyed that much made it all fall together for her. It was like she had to think about all these different, individual movements. Once she just had 50% or 40% of it helped dance, it was like she – her body was already organized. Her nervous system was organized to be able to do her absolute favorite thing that she had done for her entire life. It was the thing that she missed the most. Gosh! The smile on her face, it was incredible. I’ll never forget her. She was just a wonderful woman.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. That’s amazing at 112.
Meredith:
That’s awesome!
Dr. Pompa:
How much of chronic low back pain and chronic neck pain is this imbalance of these little muscle groups, do you think?
Dr. Kareem:
Gosh, that’s a great question. The reason I find it to be such a fascinating questions is because where does pain come from? Is it emotional, is it physical, is it spiritual, or is it psychological?
Dr. Pompa:
Yep.
Dr. Kareem:
It’s all of it, right? Okay. How does that mean we should approach it? Should we approach it from the physical pillar, from that world, or should we approach it from the emotional side? Oftentimes, people get results from both, and it can be confusing. “Which way do I go about it?”
Where is memory really stored? Is it stored in our muscles? Where is that tissue holding emotion, anyways? Is it stored in our tissues? A lot of times, they say the issues are in the tissues. I think that’s accurate. If we get the body moving again and we balance out these muscles, we’re just reverse engineering the pain in a different way because it led to this imbalance, even if it was emotional, even if it was spiritual, even if it was psychological. Oftentimes, we can get a result from the physical realm.
The opposite can be true, as well. If it is just a physical issue, of course, this is what leads to the result. Balance out the body. It’s meant to be stacked on itself in a very specific way. When it is, it gets really happy, and it starts moving well, and pain resolves. Pain’s simply a signal that something’s wrong that we have yet to address. When you learn how to address that simple thing, the body stops screaming at you.
At first, it might just be a little bit of joint pain. Then it might be a headache. Then it might be a lack of focus. Then it might be a temper tantrum or a loss of – or an increase in anxiety, let’s say, that you might be feeling. Before you know it, it could just be something as serious as really walking through life depressed. Every single one of these things – or a gut issue. Every single one of these things is your body saying, “Hey! Check me out. I got something going on.”
I like to use, as a physical therapist, the tools that I have. Movement is one of those tools, and it’s really addressing any one of those categories why pain initiates or exists to begin with. It’s important to take a look from all different categories because it’s not like movement’s an end all/ be all. It’s just something that our bodies are meant to do, that does a great job of healing. It does a great job of education and makes it easier for us to remember.
You see, there’s ancient philosophers like Aristotle and Socrates that used to actually have their students walk backwards while they learned. They would walk around, walking backwards where I studied abroad at one point in time, and they would read to their students, and have them read back the information. Why? Their nervous system had to organize the information. They understood memory was stored all over the body, not just in the brain. That’s not where it was.
When you have to coordinate movement with a particular feeling, with a memory, with information, the body can integrate it. That sensory integration changes things from short-term memory to long-term memory and makes it more accessible from both directions. That’s what we’re talking about with movement, and that’s what we’re talking about with pain. Get rid of the pain signal. Send those mechanoreceptors back into the blood stream to be absorbed, and then take a look at the end effect. It’s wonderful.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Interesting. Just how simple, doing just five exercises five minutes three times a week can change your physiology at the cellular level. My gosh! It really is remarkable. I hope people listening and viewing this do it. Oftentimes, the risk is that, “Ah, it sounds too simple.” People want the complex answer. I know. Yet, this isn’t just five movements. That’s why I asked the question. What’s special about these five movements that really coordinates the central nervous system into bringing balance?
Balance is homeostasis. If you look at what all disease is, dis-ease, it’s a lack of homeostasis, meaning balance in the body. This neurological imbalance represents itself in our structure. I love it. You said, “Start with that plumb line. Put up the plumb line. Take your pictures because that’s a key.” You’re used to looking at yourself in the mirror all day. Start there to look for balance represented in our physical structure. It’s really representing an imbalance, to me, at the cellular level.
Dr. Kareem:
Absolutely. Well said.
Meredith:
I’m really excited to try out these exercises. What were your websites again, Dr. Kareem?
Dr. Kareem:
The easiest way to find those five exercises is at DailyPosture.com. If you would like to take a more comprehensive look at your health, we have those tools, as well. ReadyToLookYounger.com is a great place to find those.
Meredith:
Great. We’ll include those in the show notes. Wow. Thank you. This has been so informational. I’m so excited to go home and try the exercises. Five minutes every other day, there’s no excuse to not do that.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I think it’ll benefit every one of the clients that our doctors have because this is – it’s a missing link. We have to bring balance to the body in every possible way, at the cellular level, neurologically, which it ultimately represents in here. Great stuff, man. We appreciate you coming on. We appreciate the knowledge. This is something that I know people are going to utilize.
Dr. Kareem:
Dr. Pompa, it’s my pleasure. If I could just add one closing thought – a lot of times, health can be overwhelming. You’ve already learned just one, little thing that you can work on. Work on that one, little thing. See what kind of profound effect a few minutes of your time can have just every couple of days. Then as that becomes easy and normalized, and you reach that homeostatic state, that equilibrium in your body, replace that five minutes with another thing that you work on for five minutes that can have a profound effect, whether it’s to improve your sleep, your hormones, or anything else. That five minutes that you spend today that’s strategic and targeted can completely turn around your health. Most people just need the time to think about it before they get started.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s great, great advice. Something so simple, everybody should do it. I’m going there next. I’m going there after the show.
Meredith:
Yup. I’m inspired. All right. Thank you so much, Dr. Kareem, for bringing your wealth of knowledge to Cellular Healing TV. It was just such a blessing to have you. Thank you, Dr. Pompa, as always. Thanks, everyone, for listening and watching. We so appreciate you. Hope you have an awesome weekend, and we’ll see you guys next Friday.
