OneBody - Live a Healthy, Pain-Free Life Proactively

By Micheal Okumura

He began as an active and athletic child, then trained as a dancer, and ultimately built up his physique lifting weights. Now Micheal Okumura is a 50-something health coach who found his way back from a worn out body to a healthy one.

In OneBody, Micheal shares how he came to realize what worked—and what didn't—in his struggle to guide his body and his many clients to a healthy place. And he shows you how to take control of your health to live your best life free of pain well into your 90s.

OneBody delivers safe and effective low-tech tools to improve your health, including exercises that can be done in the comfort of your own home. It covers:

• Employing the six priorities of health—breathe, hydrate, nourish, rest, move and de-stress;
• Nourishing and cooking for a healthy body;
• Evaluating your current physical health status;
• Creating an exercise program that allows you to move your body pain free; and
• The essential ELDOA poses.

This is the story of one exercise and health coach's fitness journey and how he can guide you to a pain-free life in your one body.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Micheal Okumura
• Release date: Apr 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781777118310

Book preview

PART

ONE

Getting Myself to Healthy

I was a very active child and young adult. Exercise, either formal or informal, has been familiar to me my whole life. I liked pushing the limits with my body.

By the time I reached my 40s I had high mileage on my body that presented with injuries and worn out joints. I started to break down. The exercises and methods I was using became ineffective. After much trial and error I realized that following the trends and advice of many of the experts in the fitness industry had caused many of my injuries and various body issues. I began to look deeper and unravel why mainstream exercise is not the path to follow for long-term health.

Coaching others is a craft that has evolved from teaching exercise to instructing people to understand their own bodies and its many systems. At 51 I still spend a considerable amount of time and money to upgrade my skills to be a better coach and problem solver for the people I get the opportunity to work with.

Exercise and health have become big business and where there is money there are brands, influencers, trends, and a rush of people looking for easy money. For me, helping people feel better is what gets me up before 5 A.M. six days a week. I hope to be helping people well into my 80s, perhaps even into my 90s.

Some people work for a paycheck. I work to be inspired.

1

Dance – Cross Training – Healthy Kids

I remember the rush of performing in front of hundreds of people, the piercing bright lights cast upon me and the other dancers as we looked into the audience which returned only shadowy silhouettes of heads and shoulders. The orchestra below the stage was alive with a symphony of sounds that carried the rhythm we danced to. Turning, jumping, bounding and moving without ever missing a beat, our bodies were one with the music and choreography.

I was 11, and years of preparation brought me to this point. I had only been classically trained in ballet for two years, shocking to many people. But my body had been conditioning itself in an informal way since I was old enough to run.

I was a climber. I was the kid who climbed in and out of his crib. I was the kid whose mother received a call one day to rush over to the school to see her son climb the rope that went from the gymnasium floor to the 30-foot ceiling. My mother was shocked to see me inch my way up with relative ease, while older kids could barely hold on.

We moved to a new neighborhood when I was six and it was a young boy’s dream come true. A huge, circular, well-kept green field surrounded by apartments and townhomes with a school at the center of the outermost edge. Baseball diamonds, soccer fields, tennis courts, basketball hoops – all near the school. There were playgrounds and a sidewalk that circled the park doubled as a jogging path, and most buildings had swimming pools. My days started with a sport and ended with a sport. There was no drop offs or organized team sports. It was just boys and girls playing and organizing on our own. Two rules were proclaimed by most parents – be home for lunch at 12 and come home when the street lights turn on.

CHILDREN NEED TO EXPLORE ALL DIFFERENT TYPES OF MOVEMENT AND THEY NEED TO TAKE RISKS IN THEIR PLAYING ENVIRONMENTS.

From 6 to 9 years of age I had been cross training, without knowing it. Every school year I was one of the boys in the top ranking for the annual ParticipACTION awards. My friends and I always got awards of gold or excellence. If you did not receive at least a silver badge, you were left out of all the sports or picked last for any teams. None of the boys would get a participation pin.

My third grade teacher, Miss Macizack, preached how important fitness was to your health. I remember her saying that Canada’s children were going to be out of shape and overweight if more attention was not paid to physical fitness. At that time there were perhaps two kids in the entire school who were considered obese. It’s fair to say that she made an unscientific prediction that turned out to be fairly accurate.

I fell into ballet by observing my sister’s dance class. My father had split from my mom and met a woman who had danced. She had an eye for dancers’ characteristics. My sister, Michelle, and I had good feet and symmetrical bodies. Lynn, our father’s new partner, thought we had dancer’s bodies. Michelle was first to take dance lessons at George Brown College on King Street. I followed six months later because my head voice escaped through my mouth. Watching 20 girls dancing a large circle in pink tights and unitards, I suddenly heard myself say, That looks like fun. I was enrolled a week later.

Next thing I knew I was dancing in black tights in a circle with the 20 girls.

My mother was a little shocked when she heard my dad’s girlfriend had enrolled me in ballet classes. In the 70s the notion was that if a boy was interested in ballet, then he must be gay. My mother was concerned that I would become a faggot’ which was considered a socially acceptable term at the time. I remember feeling I had to keep the ballet classes on the down low from my friends and family members. Billy Elliot wasn’t around to help break the stereotype of dance being only for gays.

Ironically I was girl crazy! I liked them all – blonde hair, black hair, red hair, skinny, pudgy; yes, I found the heavier girls attractive – I think it was their softness, soft skin, and femininity that had me at Hello. I was like the fox in the hen house dancing with all these girls. The music and choreography moved us across the room, arms floating above our heads and legs carrying the lines of our bodies down to pointed toes that elegantly sprung us to the next step.

2

National Ballet School

One of the teachers at the George Brown College dance program noticed how fast Michelle and I progressed and suggested to Lynn, my dad’s future wife, that we should try out for the National Ballet School of Canada. It started with home pictures of a few ballet poses in front of a homemade backdrop – a white bed sheet hung from the ceiling.

Those pictures garnered my sister and I a one-day audition at the world-renowned National Ballet School of Canada. It was a cattle call. There seemed to be hundreds of kids, all dressed alike with a number pinned on their chests, like marathon runners. At a long table in the center of the studio sat a bunch of adults in dance attire, taking notes. We were split into groups and asked to do odd activities, such as pretend to walk through a wind storm, pull a heavy object with a rope, along with a few simple dance moves. We left not knowing if anything we did got us into summer school.

Months passed and we all forgot about the day we auditioned. Finally, Michelle and I were invited to the summer school, which in reality was a month-long audition in July, full of intense physical training. We came home physically and mentally exhausted every day.

PARENTS’ EXPECTATIONS CAN OFTEN BE THE DRIVER FOR YOUNG PEOPLE’S MOTIVATIONS. EVEN FRIENDLY COMPETITION CAN DRIVE A WEDGE BETWEEN SIBLINGS.

We were used to playing and being active but nothing like learning the controlled precise movements, focus and deep concentration that was required for ballet. For the month of July we danced intensely – ballet, jazz, and character. Three to four classes a day shaped our bums into perfect looking half cantaloupes. I remember one of my friends commenting how lean and muscular my legs looked. I started to really like the jumping and pirouettes.

Michelle was very good, especially having had only about a year’s experience in ballet, but the ratio of girls to boys was about 15 to 2 so boys were in much more demand. There was much more competition for girls to be accepted into the program. In August we found out the good – and bad – news. I was asked to attend on a full scholarship, however Michelle was not invited back.

This was tough because I wanted to be excited but I knew my sister was disappointed.

3

Burn Out, Booze, and Hookers

For the next five years my life at the National Ballet School (NBS) became a bubble that at many times was a pressure cooker of anxiety and never feeling good enough. I learned to become a perfectionist and understood at a young age that talent was just practice repeated over and over until it became as close to perfect as you could achieve. (Later I would understand the science of myelin, and its ability to improve skills with repeated practice.)

By 15 I was danced out. The environment was extremely competitive and the stress had started to build and impact me – from both school and home.

CHRONIC HIGH STRESS ENVIRONMENTS AT A YOUNG AGE CAN CREATE A LIFETIME OF ANXIETY.

My father had a complete meltdown when his marriage to Lynn fell apart. The tension in their marriage was due partly to the real estate bubble that created a downturn in the economy and affected several sectors of industry, including his restaurant. Interest rates climbed to 14 percent and investors in real estate were leveraged beyond what they could pay back to the banks.

My father had opened a French bistro called Café De Halles with three other seasoned restaurant workers a few years earlier. The restaurant did very well for a few years and the Eglinton strip was known as a hot spot for dining and entertainment. Hectors, a popular place for hooking up, was right beside my father’s restaurant. Friday’s at the end of the strip was the other popular hot spot. From 1978 to 1982 people were disco dancing, partying like rock stars, and fornicating like porn stars. The cash that flowed in contained remnants of cocaine – the drug of choice as the Me Decade made its entrance into the 80s. By 1982 my father and Lynn had managed to buy out the other partners. He was working around the clock so much so that he slept on a pull-out bed in the basement of the restaurant many nights.

The crash hit.

Business stopped like a red sports car slamming into the back of a parked 18 wheeler. Executives stopped having $600 lunches that ran into $700 dollar dinners. People just stopped coming.

I would go by the restaurant on my way home from school to see my dad who would be playing cards or backgammon in the front table window. Looking back, I don’t think he was equipped to deal with an abrupt downturn; in fact, many people were in dire straits financially.

During his separation from Lynn my father chose not to return my half-brother Ken after a particular weekend visit. Lynn publicized that her son had been kidnapped by her ex-husband in a full page announcement in one of the papers. Today an Amber Alert would have been issued.

The whole school was talking about it and some kids made cheap remarks about my dad. For months I hated going to school to face the shame I felt every time another student gave me that look that said your family is messed up. Eight months later my father was caught in the interior of British Columbia. Through this difficult period I had suffered my own kind of breakdown. I had stopped caring about what I loved to do and the school suggested I take a break.

Lynn had moved to North Vancouver to start fresh. She suggested I come out to Vancouver to have three months off dance and bought me a plane ticket. I flew out to Vancouver with a BMX bike and a duffle bag of clothes. The first week was great; then Lynn’s aunt showed up. Mavis had danced in the American Ballet Theatre and was a dancer through and through. She still looked like a dancer even though she must have been in her 60s. Mavis started giving me private dance lessons in the living room after dinner. I had a hard time focusing because the hair on her forearms was so long that when she moved her arms through different poses the hair floated along like feathers in a gentle breeze.

By week three I was enrolled in a morning dance class, and soon I was in two or three dance classes a day. I was onto Lynn and the adults back at the NBS – they didn’t want me getting out of shape. In defiance I stole hard alcohol from Lynn’s liquor cabinet and befriended a few locals who introduced me to the best weed Canada had to offer. I returned back to Toronto for summer school with a rebellious attitude and burned out from not really having had a break from dance.

I was rooming with Philippe, a guy one year older than me, who entered the core at the National Ballet of Canada the following year. We were sneaking out every night, shimmying down the eaves trough on the side of the older house – our residence on Maitland. Walking up the Yonge Street strip, we got street people to buy us booze or beer at the store on Church Street. Yonge Street was an interesting cornucopia of misfits and night owls looking for excitement. Muscle cars would drive up and down the strip and the bright neon and light bulb storefronts, like Sam the Record Man and A&A records, shone while the pinging and dinging noises of a few arcades popped out into the street. Even at 1:00 the morning there was still lots of activity.

We would return at 2 A.M. passing the drag queens and prostitutes that were working the corner of Maitland and Church. They never bothered us. In fact it was an unwritten rule that they would tell the new street walkers to leave the NBS kids alone. The walk from Wellesley station, down Church to Maitland, was a safe haven for an NBS student. Every shopkeeper, street walker, and homosexual could identify the NBS kids. We all walked with slightly turned out feet, erect posture, and the girls usually had their hair in buns, and we all wore the standard uniform of green blazers, grey slacks for boys, skirts for girls and oxfords for all. Philippe and I would go to dance class having had only a couple of hours of sleep.

I had missed a bunch of Character dance classes, mostly because Miss Chadwick, the vice-principal, was teaching them. She became very angry when I skipped her third class in a row. I was called to Principal Betty Oliphant’s office to explain why I had failed to attend Miss Chadwick’s class. My lack of enthusiasm and I don’t give a shit attitude forced Betty to lean over the table and, piercing me with her beady eyes, ask, Do you still want to be here?

Betty Oliphant had the most intense look – white hair, piercing eyes that could laser through your soul and make you want to confess sins you hadn’t even committed. Her look would usually reduce me to tears and for five years I cried almost every day at that school. Sometimes I didn’t really know what I was crying about but my eyes would well up and the floodgates would open. I took a long pause and thought about her question, and delivered a reply that pushed her back into the seat of her chair.

No, I don’t want to be here anymore!

She responded, in a dismissive tone, Pack your bags and leave. I was packed and on the northbound train on my way to my mother’s place at Sheppard and Don Mills in less than an hour. There were a lot of surprised and disappointed relatives; some urged me to apologize my way back into the school.

I felt relieved and I had mixed emotions because I wanted to be a great dancer, I just didn’t want all the stress and pressure of never being good enough. I had performed in The Nutcracker four times and played all the lead parts – Fritz, center courtier, center clown, nutcracker boy, and even a small company part as a rat (or was it a mouse?).

A LEARNING DISABILITY IS SOMETHING THAT CAN BE OVERCOME IF YOU FIND ANOTHER WAY TO LEARN.

I was being groomed to enter the core at the National Ballet Company. My dance curriculum had been intensified the last two years I was at the school and my academics had been reduced to only a few subjects. I had a learning disability that the school was not equipped to deal with. I would eventually learn that I was dyslexic and had problems organizing information. The adults in charge determined that because I was going to succeed as a dancer in the company that would solve the problem. It was a shock when I decided to call it a day.

When I left I knew I would miss the physical aspect of dance, and within a few weeks my mind and body were craving exercise. I started running with John, my mother’s boyfriend, and eventually her life partner, to get that runner’s high every runner craves, like heroin to a junkie.

4

Pumping Iron at Gold’s

John and I ran the jogging path that surrounded the local park. I remember John was a good runner. He had finished army training five years earlier and was still in relatively good shape. He was only 24. That’s the peak testosterone age, where it’s fairly easy to build muscle and keep it on.

One day he introduced me to weights. He had this cheap Weider bench with plastic weights. We did chest presses and arm curls, causing a gorge of blood that made my chest and arms tight and puffy. I was familiar with lactic acid buildup in my legs but not so much in the upper body. The pump, as many refer to it, grabbed my attention. Arnold Schwarzenegger talked about this same pump in his movie Pumping Iron. I felt like I was coming all the time. I was hooked and within a few months my upper body transformed. I suddenly had pecs and guns. That summer I worked out and ran as my physical replacement for dance.

When September came I switched schools and met a few guys who were just getting into working out. We all decided to join a gym and start going in the evenings, after school. This activity also kept us out of trouble. We were living just on the border of a bad neighborhood where gangs and drug dealing was commonplace.

BEING A DUMB JOCK IS NOT DUMB AT ALL, IF IT KEEPS YOU OUT OF TROUBLE, AND HELPS YOU USE DOPAMINE FOR MENTAL HEALTH.

Alan Berry Gardens sounds like a gated community, but was far from it. A labyrinth of government housing townhomes formed a maze with secret escapes; it was the perfect spot for the Alan Berry gang to deal drugs, steal, and commit various other gang-related activities. The leader was Shawn O’Brien, older brother of Darren O’Brien (aka Snow), whose 15 minutes of fame came from a song he wrote while in prison about someone who informed on him. Informer was a popular hit among white guy wannabe rappers, a new thing at the time thanks to Vanilla Ice. I always found it a parody to see white youth acting like they’re from the hood, talking with Jamaican accents, speaking a language of defiance.

The Alan Berry gang was made up of primary school kids all the way up to unemployed adults who made a living selling drugs and stealing. If your bike was missing chances were it was being peddled around Alan Berry. Nobody would go back to get their bike as more than likely it had already been stripped or spray painted.

George Vanier Secondary, the high school we attended, was not known for producing Rhodes scholars. There were two main subjects – skipping and cafeteria. The cafeteria was similar to a prison court-yard. Different gangs of people had their turf. The Afro-Canadian population