Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.

In dealing with pain or suffering (whether it’s from your body’s parts being misaligned, your boss being an inhuman crankcase, or your brand new car falling to pieces), it’s important to remember that your attitude matters.

Now, anybody who really knows me knows that I have long had a bit of a pessimistic, skeptical streak in me, so don’t think I’m a gung-ho super optimistic nut-job.  FAR from it.  But let me share two quick scenarios with you before I tell you that optimism is a necessary part of dealing with chronic pain.

I once encountered a guy in a chronic pain workshop I was co-leading who had knee pain. It had been diagnosed as knee osteoarthritis. The doctors he’d talked with, the books he’d read, and the stories he’d heard all said knee osteoarthritis was hopeless. He asked me what I recommended for it. I told him that getting his hip joints to start moving in a functional way would take some stress off the knees which, it wouldn’t be far fetched to say, would help his knees feel a little less pain.

On a basic level, I was only asking that he believe that having his legs swing forward and backward while walking rather than landing with the knee pointing out to the sides would be beneficial. Walking with your knees pointing out to the side causes an obviously imbalanced impact on the knee joint and a shear at the medial aspect of the knee.  Dysfunctional hips could make his knees bend awkwardly in sitting so that even sitting could be painful…

But on a more important level, I was asking him to believe that a difference could be made to his diagnosed condition.

He responded with incredulity. “There’s nothing you can do about osteoarthritis. That’s what every expert in the world says. I’ve had consults with some of the best doctors.” And there was nothing I could say in that context to change his mind (though I did try and it did make for some awkward tension).

He didn’t believe he could get better, didn’t believe anything could be done, and probably figured I was full of some especially malodorous cow excrement.

I don’t know how he’s doing, but I’m guessing his situation’s not improved all that much.

I’ve also had many people come to my office and say, “I want to get better.  I know this is coming from my compensations around [injury or situation x], but the doctors and physical therapists say there’s nothing wrong with my body even though I can feel the pain.  I know something can be done, I’m just not sure what it is.”

These are the people who get better.  These are the people who figure out what the roots of the problem are and get on the path to solving it.  These are often the people who get better quicker.

So what I’m finding, and you can agree or disagree in the comment section below, is that Thomas Jefferson was right. Facing challenges, whether it be pain or something else is all about attitude.  Whether you believe your problems will end you or make you stronger, you’re going to be right. All you have to do is choose how you want to be right!

When pain is a result of poor posture, sleeping can often exacerbate the pain. Beds often tweak the body in ways that aggravate bad postural habits.

One that I often hear is back-sleepers using multiple pillows stacked up so high that their chins are tucked into their chests. These people generally have lots of neck and shoulder tension throughout the course of the day and have heads and necks that are thrust forward (mimicking their sleeping position!).

That issue has a quick fix, but there are other less well known issues that can hamper a good night’s sleep. Though I don’t have the time (or talent) to draw up a bunch of diagrams, Esther Gokhale has a book chock full of great tips that can help you adjust your sleeping position for maximum rest and recovery. It’s $16 from amazon.  It’s well worth it if you or someone you know needs to try to make their sleep feel a little more restful.

For people with chronic myofascial pain, simple adjustments like those in Gokhale’s book can be extremely helpful.

8 Steps to a Pain Free Back by Esther Gokhale

The veins in my right arm in this picture show you what good circulation looks like for me.

I was a student at UCLA.  I worked in an on-campus computer lab.  One winter, I injured my right shoulder in mid-air while snowboarding.  I struggled to figure out how to help my shoulder heal, but nothing was helping.  Physical therapy wasn’t helping. Sitting on my butt, chatting online, and updating my friendster profile while eating ibuprofen wasn’t helping.

And then the pain in my wrists set in.  At first it wasn’t bad, but it got progressively worse.  My elbows started to get tender.  I could feel tendons snapping and popping every time I straightened my arm coupled with a squelching sensation.  My forearms felt sore — glowing with inflammation.  My fingers began to curl up.  My palms discolored to a sickly purple.  The veins that had once bulged on my forearms — a sign of fantastic circulation — disappeared and were replaced with a cold numbness from just above my elbow all the way down to my finger tips.

So began the struggle.  I started taking supplements.  Vitamins B6 and B12 helped for while.  I don’t know how they helped, but they took the pain down as if by magic.  And then, as suddenly as I’d found that they helped, they stopped helping.

So I tried acupuncture. I tried electro-acupuncture. I tried chiropractic. I tried Chinese medical massage, I tried herbal remedies.  I tried acupressure.  I tried shiatsu.  I tried eating a Chinese beef tendon dish (that my mother can cook quite well, thank you). I tried eating more meat.  I tried eating less meat.

I sought help from my doctor who told me my problem was overuse and repetitive motion.

So I cut back on the computer.  I cut back on any attempts to do exercise. I upped the ibuprofen dosage.

And nothing got better unless I kept myself off the computer as much as possible.  Five minutes was all it took to set my hands off into their cold, numb state.  My doctor assured me that it wasn’t carpal tunnel syndrome (the wrong fingers were going numb, after all!), so that all I had to do was wear a brace and rest until the inflammation magically disappeared.

As long as I didn’t need to do anything, this strategy worked quite well.  No computer, no pain. No exercise, no problem.  Until my knee started pinching, my feet started aching and going numb, my hips started popping, my neck started hurting, and my back got stiff…

Which is all to say that resting wasn’t the solution.  Fixing the posture was.  As far as the wrists and forearms were concerned, the problems started clearing up as my shoulders found the right position to be in and learned to maintain that position (with the help of my hips, legs, and back).  As many of my clients will tell you (and my friends and family as well), I now spend a good deal of time typing away on this machine called a computer.

And you know what? As long as I do the work away from the computer to maintain good posture, my forearm veins stay full of blood, and I survive and thrive in the 21st century!

Here are his pictures.  The picture on the left is the first day.  The picture on the right is after one week of doing “some” of his exercises on a daily basis (meaning he didn’t do all of them as he was supposed to).

Can you tell why his pain is getting better?  Just look at the curvature of his spine in the first picture versus the second picture, and it should be a little more obvious.  Look at how the curve of his spine affects the pooching out of his belly.  His body wasn’t working efficiently.  He was getting a lot of extra strain on his back because of its non-ideal position.

Now it’s moving closer to a more efficient posture that means, quite simply, less pain.

We learn wisdom from failure much more than success.  We often discover what we will do by finding out what we will not do.  ~Samuel Smiles

As we age, our bodies cease being able to do certain motions — not because age automatically means we can’t do certain things, but because we aren’t challenging our bodies to do the things we used to do.  Kids, for example, run, jump, skip, hop, climb, crawl, tumble, and roll all the time, and their bodies have no problem dealing with it. 

Over time, as they become acculturated to modern life, told to sit still, forced to slouch in a desk for hours on end, they lose the freedom of movement and the range of motion and resiliency that they had.  Those who remain athletic, keep their resiliency. Those who don’t, lose it.

For adults, the easiest way to test your musculoskeletal health is to see what your body can do!  If you find you can’t even stand up from your chair without pain and stiffness in your hips, you have learned a valuable lesson.  If you find you can no longer reach something in the top cupboard, you have learned a valuable lesson.  If you find you can’t lie in bed for 2 hours without severe pain somewhere in your body, you also have learned a valuable lesson.

For some the lesson is more subtle.  Maybe you can’t twist your upper body in one direction, or one arm just can’t reach over your head like the other.  Or one hip pops and pulls every time you try to do judo throw.  No matter what the “failure” is, the lesson is the same.

The lesson is that your body needs more movement, more testing, and more failure so that you can gradually coach and coax your body back to a healthier, more resilient, more mobile state.  It takes a lot of failure, a lot of time, and a lot of testing of your limits to find how to best work with your body, but ultimately it’s the only way to restore the youthful ease you once felt in your body.

The week leading up to the back pain, I had been sick. Too tired to move.  Too tired to leave the house.  Too sick to do anything but send a few emails, type some things up, and then take a nap.  I contorted myself on the bed, on the floor, and on the couch with my laptop and my iPod touch throughout the week, too tired to do any posture-restoring exercises to counteract all the slouching and twisting I was doing.

So when I woke up that Thursday with back pain, it wasn’t any wonder why.  A week’s worth of lounging, lazing, and generally being miserable had visibly distorted the balance of my muscles.  My posture had changed for the worse.  My shoulders were hunched.  My spine was curved.  My hips were twisted.  Apparently 7 days of lying in bed ISN’T good for your posture.

So I did what any posture alignment therapist would do in my position.  I panicked!

And then I did a few exercises to fix the posture (with what little energy I had).  In under 5 minutes, the back pain was gone, and I was ready to go about the business of getting back to full strength again.

Are you ready with a quick, simple plan of action for the next time you wake up with back pain (that does NOT involve pills!)?

What is it? Well, it’s when a bunch of things in your leg and into your hip joint are misaligned. Your knee rotates in, your lower leg rotates out, and your arch collapses.  But according to the medical community, there is an easy fix!  What is it?

According to this website, it’s a screw/bolt looking thing.  It looks like this:

from curemms.com

Now, yes, it does look like it can be had from Home Depot for 25 cents in the bottom drawer of aisle 17.  But what in the world would you do with that screw/bolt looking thing?

You would have it surgically implanted in your ankle!  Why? According to curemms.com:

realignment of the foot under the leg (elimination of excessive pronation, or flattening and turning out of the foot) is what is needed. The HyProCure® device is made to address this need.

So think about this.  Your hip joint gets out of alignment because of what’s happening at your ankle.  And apparently your ankle gets so under the influence of mysterious forces that you need a screw/bolt looking thing to stop it from getting out of line. Does that make sense?  At all?  Any?

That screw/bolt thing sounds like a quick fix to me (sort of…), but doesn’t it make more sense to be trying to reprogram the muscles of your body to align your bones better?  You know with some hard work, a little problem solving, some exercise?

That’s what I think.  That’s what my physical therapist client thinks.  But we are extremely biased.  And neither of us are trained surgeons, so take what we think with a grain of salt.

What do YOU think?

Look at what he accomplished after 6 days (yes, 6 calendar days) of 30 minutes of exercises that were tailored to his needs.

After only six days, "the Killer" made significant changes to his posture and pain.

There’s no posing or posturing for these pictures.  These are the real deal.  This guy simply did his exercises, made a small adjustment to the way he was sitting every day at the computer, and in one week, he made a huge change to both his relaxed standing posture and the recurring pain that was plaguing him.

Of course his posture’s not perfect yet, but the Killer is moving quickly in the right direction!

What part of your body does the tire represent?

For some, it’s that knee that goes out every few months and keeps them out of their running shoes.  For others, it’s the lower back that goes wildly into spasm, keeping them from playing tennis.  Or perhaps it’s the elbow that flares up after two hours of tennis and won’t settle down for weeks.

There is something that sets the body apart from a car that makes the metaphor fall apart, makes it a little hard to recognize exactly what’s going on, but ultimately means you can beat your pain.

Your body HEALS.  That’s right.  Your body’s way more complex than a car because it actually regrows bits and pieces of itself (bet you wish your car’s paint would do that!).

When a car tire goes bald, you have to replace it.

When your knee aches, you don’t get to replace it (unless you’re old and the doctor says so).  You rest it, and, over time, it heals enough that you feel comfortable using it again.  So you think everything’s fine.  The tread grows back on the tire.  But then you wear down the tread, and the knee hurts again. So you rest, and the tread grows back, and you wear it down.  And it grows back.  And you wear it down.  Eventually, you run that tire ragged to the point that your body CAN’T heal it fast enough and thick enough and then you REALLY need to replace that knee/tire.

But what if you fixed the alignment from the outset? What if you made sure that the knee wasn’t being used in a way that wore it down?  What if you straightened things out so that the tire could keep its tread at a healthy level so that you don’t end up with bald tires, bad knees, and a bunch of pain?

If you’ve been experiencing intermittent pain and are wondering what your posture might have to do with it, feel free to give me a call or book a free consultation by using the online booking tool on my website!  Your tires will thank you!

According to some doctors, 11 million Americans have email addictions that interfere with their lives. It happens to all of us, and it’s definitely something I struggle with!  Enter Google Labs and the new Take a break! feature.

When you activate the Take a break! feature, Google actually locks you out of your email for 15 minutes so that you can “Take a walk, get some real work done, or have a snack.”

To get access to the Take a break! feature, log into your Gmail account (as if you aren’t already), go to settings, and then click on Labs.  You’ll find a list of cool little productivity tools and Take a break will be one of them.  Once you’ve activated it, go back to your Gmail inbox.  At the top right, you’ll see a link next to your name that says “Take a break.”  Click that and you’ll be locked out for 15 glorious minutes from your email!

For those of you without Gmail, there’s an old-fashioned workaround: get someone to stand behind you all day and monitor what you’re doing.

Do you have a better idea of how to break the email addiction that leads to forward-head posture?  If so, leave your comment below!