Move Right. Live Right.: What the mind believes capable, becomes capable: Strategies to move towards a better you

By Daniel Joel Craik Cooper

Within this book, you will not only find practical health and fitness tips, but you will also go on a journey of self-discovery for your internal and external health.

Daniel works with you in learning about concepts of:

- Breathing and how to know you're doing it correctly.

- The mind -- how to move from

• Language: English
• Publisher: Move Right EP
• Release date: Oct 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9780645554908

Daniel Joel Craik Cooper

Daniel Cooper is the founder of Move Right EP. He has a Master's degree in clinical exercise physiology and has worked with hundreds of people to transform their health, movement and lifestyle. Daniel and his wife, Sarah, live in Sydney with their family.Check out more of Daniel's work:Website - www.moverightep.comFacebook - moverightcoachInstagram - moverightep

Book preview

Move Right. Live Right.

What the mind believes capable, becomes capable: Strategies to move towards a better you

Daniel Cooper

To Sarah, thank you for always believing, supporting and encouraging me.

Copyright © [2022] by [Daniel Cooper]

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by A.U. copyright law.

Contents

Foreword

1. Compression & Expansion

2. Repeat After Me -- You Aren't a Terminator

3. Preparation Is Success

4. Stability Vs. Mobility (Ding Ding)

5. Learn Thy Principles

6. Motion Is Lotion

7. Creating a Mona Lisa

8. Systems, Systems, Systems

9. Be Plastic

10. See More, Do Less

11. What to Do & What Not to Do

12. Why, Why, and a Dash of Why.

13. Back to Basics

14. Make Your Cake

15. Don’t Wait Till Monday

Foreword

Let me introduce myself.

My name is Daniel Cooper. I am a clinical exercise physiologist, personal trainer and business owner of ‘Move Right EP’. I have worked with a range of people from different backgrounds, ages and medical histories. I am a constant learner, I strive to understand, implement and create programmes to change your movement so you can live the life you want to.

Throughout my life I have been met with injury, questions I had no way of answering at the time. I longed for a book like this to guide me and educate me around the crazy intricacies of the physiological, psychological and emotional aspects that present when working with people.

This is a book from me to you. I want to share my knowledge and experiences through both anecdotal and evidence-based research and implications to allow you to understand your body, how you can improve it and how to take independence with your training. This will also equip you with the foundations towards helping others! Not just a ‘self-help’ book but rather a help book, you or the people you are working with!

Within this book will entail evidence, my own understanding of it and some ambiguity. I want this book to make you question yourself and reflect within.

This book will serve as a guide, a tool for you to keep adherent, accountable and structured on your endeavour to improve your body, your mind and your life.

No matter who you are, this reading will be of use to you.

Are you new to training? Prepare to learn!

Spent a fair share of your time in the gym? You will take something away from this, I guarantee!

Qualified practitioner? You will improve your quality of care for your patients!

The information within this book should be referred to throughout various stages of your life, you will come back to the chapters with new knowledge and this will alter your perspectives of what you read over and over.

1

Compression & Expansion

Breathing, according to me, corresponds to taking charge of one’s own life. - Luce Irigaray

The universe is currently in a constant state of expansion.

We know that everything that exists within our known universe was once condensed or compressed before a massive reaction i.e., the Big Bang, which led to the start of the world we know today.

Everything since the beginning of this universe abides by various laws, some known and I’m sure a hell of a lot remain unknown; these laws govern you, me and everything that is.

Think of breathing like the start of your own personal universe. You inspire or breathe, allowing air to enter the lungs. That air circulates and mixes with blood from your heart before being pushed around to the surrounding organs, tissues and muscles quickly and efficiently. You supply your body with life. Nutrients and oxygen permeate every cell and allow growth.

Then you breathe out, you expire, and the used or deoxygenated air now leaves the lungs and goes back out into the atmosphere, and the cycle renews again, and again and again.

Keep it simple. You take a breath in; you expand and give your body nutrients. You take a breath out; you compress and get rid of waste throughout the body.

What’s the fuss with all this breathing talk? You buy a self-help book expecting to learn about essential training and health concepts, and you’ve just read a spiel about breathing?

What the hell, you’re thinking.

Please, let me explain why this is such an important concept to movement, training and your life.

Breathing is integral to living. As you’re hopefully aware by now, if you don’t breathe you will die.

We take approximately 23,000 breathes per day, every day.

Breathing is no different to anything else we do, whether it's writing, driving or exercising: there is a technique that creates an optimal pattern, allowing us to take fully efficient and effective breaths. If this optimal pattern is not achieved, then our body in its entirety will change. A common compensation arises in the form of movement – our range of motion can decrease, restricting you from touching your toes or reaching your arms above your head.

Many aspects influence our breathing. Our response to situations can change – our breathing reacts to anxiety and stress, either accelerating or decelerating, which can alter our mood.

This change in frequency often leads to subtle alterations until the point that you can no longer move properly. This may lead you to see a practitioner like myself.

A lack of movement can influence the body’s tissues and, due to the relationship between breathing and the nervous system, painful symptoms can also arise. This may lead to debilitation, an inability to carry out simple daily activities like carrying your shopping inside or unloading the dishwasher.

Will this happen to everyone with a movement deficiency? Not necessarily, but given enough time and compensations in movement, pain often creeps up on us.

What factors influence our breathing?

Well, simply put, life.

We get stressed

We get injured

We get excited

We aren’t conscious of how we breathe in particular circumstances

Posture

We favour a particular pattern more than others

Sport

Work

What does changing our breathing rate do to us?

A range of physiological processes are influenced by the rate of our breath.

Before we delve into this, we should first understand our nervous system.

Enter … the autonomic nervous system (ANS). This in-built system is within you, me and every other human being; all animals, in fact. The ANS is controlled by an area of your brain called the hypothalamus – a key regulator of multiple parts of your body, such as the cardiovascular system, respiratory system, reflexes and other processes such as coughing and sneezing.

Have you ever thought to yourself about breathing? The fact that we breathe approximately 23,000 breathes a day and barely think about breathing should blow you away. This is the result of your ANS, working tirelessly to keep you alive. Our breathing can bias us towards the sympathetic or the parasympathetic – we can use this to our advantage, but the fact that breathing is largely autonomous can also be disadvantageous.

Now, the ANS can be further broken down into two subgroups or systems.

These are:

The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) – fight or flight.

The parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) – rest and digest.

The PNS, or the catchy term ‘rest and digest’, controls a host of functions around your muscle tone, specifically reducing it. Inducing relaxation and decreasing your overall energy expenditure, it is often known as an inhibitory pathway within your body. This is what we tap into when we practice relaxation techniques – yoga, meditation, mindfulness, tai chi, deep breathing, grounding. These all work on the predictable pattern that occurs within our brain as a result of slowing down our breath, biasing us towards our PNS.

Another way to think about this is after a stressful day. You know, you sit down on your lounge and take a deep breath out or sigh. This is you compressing your body, allowing everything to be expelled, relaxing it from the previous stresses.

Our second system, the SNS, is often associated with the phrase ‘fight or flight’, meaning we use this to either amp up our energy and fight or to run away.

Our brain is unable to perceive our external environment visually; instead, it receives feedback from a range of different sources or senses – sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. Meaning your brain recognises a stressful situation but cannot see it.

What does this look like? you ask.

You may be sitting behind your desk with work piling up around you, making you feel like you will be stuck in the office for a lifetime, or you may literally be running from a lion in the barren lands of Africa after a trip went horribly wrong (I know, I like to exaggerate with extreme examples).

In each case your SNS will be called upon. You will increase your muscle tone, narrow your focus, increase your energy expenditure by changing the pace of your breathing i.e., your heart pumps faster to get those much-needed nutrients and oxygen to your organs and muscles so you can fight or run.

Can you see how this situation can be beneficial but also determinantal?

On the one hand, we are sitting behind a desk, on the other fighting for our lives, yet we have the same response. If we live in this state for a chronic period, that is when we wreak havoc on our bodies. Letting this go unchecked will affect you physiologically in a multitude of ways.

Now, inhalation is classified as an SNS-based process while exhalation is the opposite, focusing more on the PNS processes. We need both of these states for functioning; one is not more important than the other. It is when we are biased towards a particular one over a long period of time that we adapt our way of living and make this our normality.

Do you see the problem in living in a perpetual state of stress?

Inhalation is an element of the expansion movement strategy, and exhalation is an element of the compression movement strategy. Both inhalation and exhalation can be attributed to everyday bodily functions. These two strategies, when viewed from either movement of joints or a biomechanical point of view, display opposite motions.

Bear with me.

The expansion movement strategy may be viewed in terms of flexion, abduction, external rotation, supination and plantar flexion. The element is associated with eccentric or lengthening of a muscle. Think of turning your palms forward and straightening your arm.

The compression movement strategy may be viewed in complete contrast. It involves actions of extension, adduction, internal rotation, pronation and dorsiflexion of the joints. As you may have guessed, the compression strategy is associated with the concentric or shorting of a muscle. Think of this like turning your palm towards the floor and bending your arm towards your face.

We will delve into this later, but for now, this basic understanding should stay in the back of your mind.

In an ideal skeleton, we can achieve both the expansion and compression of a joint. Movement limitations will more than likely occur due to breathing. The breathing cycle cannot be understated when trying to make noticeable change with movement.

Some questions to consider when looking to change your movement:

Have you ever tried stretching to improve your flexibility or mobility?

Have you noticed how you breathe?

Do you hold your breath or breathe fluently?

This is, again, a nervous system response. Through the holding of our breath, we are in a state of inhalation; upregulating our sympathetic activation of ‘for flight’. If we have not exhaled, we have not tapped into our parasympathetic state. This is an error commonly seen when people are being told how to stretch.

A classic example is giving someone a stretch and telling them to hold it for 30 seconds, only for them to rush through the counting, hold their breath and strain themselves. Their face ends up looking similar to a tomato. Do you think this is productive?

To make meaningful steps in accessing desired ranges of motion, fluent movement and a healthier way of living, we need to teach people how to move into new joint positions while regulating their breathing in a conscious, controlled manner. This is how we create lasting movement change. Rather than giving people a timeframe to hold a stretch, try asking them to hold a stretch for a number of breaths, say between five and 10 deep ones. You will be surprised by how much easier these positions become when the position of the bones is coordinated with breathing.

It is evident that our breath can change a multitude of physiological processes within our body, ranging from cortisol levels (stress), blood flow mechanics (vasoconstriction and dilation), heart rate variability, blood pressure control and more.¹,²

The effects of breathing have barely been uncovered and recognised within the world of modern medicine. However, research exists promoting the influence that it can have. Eastern cultures, for example, Tibetan monks, have controlled their breath for millennia, creating amazing feats of regulating their core body temperature even within extreme environments such as the icy heartlands of Mt Everest.

Now, let’s get you up and moving. Grab a camera, and set it up so you can see your thorax or midsection.

Test yourself – Are you compressed or expanded?

What you should be looking for is expansion (like a balloon inflating) around your rib cage – front, side and back during the inhalation – as well as a healthy compression of the ribcage coming back in after the exhalation.

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Figure 1.1

Next, let's pay attention to how long you are breathing. For the purpose of this test, I want you to pay attention to how long you are exhaling.

Is this happening? Great, you’re alive!

Now actually think about if you have an even ratio for breathing in vs. breathing out.

Look at your stomach, your chest; what is moving in and out?

Are you elevating your ribcage, depressing your ribcage or keeping your ribcage normal as you can see in Figure 1.2?

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Figure 1.2

The centre image is ideal.

The ribcage elevation is a sign that you are expanded in the front of your ribcage, and compressed at the back. With the ribcage depression, you are compressing the front of your ribcage and expanding at the back. Again, there’s a time and place, but during rest, we should have a decent expansion around the whole ribcage like our image in the centre.

If this compression of the posterior or back side of your rib cage occurs, chances are you will exhibit a very shallow exhale and an anterior pelvic tilt; the drill below will enable you to allow the ribs to descend down and in (like they should).

A useful drill – Joint Stacking

What we are looking for is something called ‘stacking’ – simply put, if we start at your head and work our way down, we want each major bone stacked on top of one another in a line. If we look at the image below, we can see a centred rib cage on the left, where my shoulder girdle (the centre of my shoulder) and ribcage sit directly over my hips (pelvis), which sits directly over the knee, which sits directly over the ankle – almost like a straight line through the centre of our joints.

In the image on the right, compensation is apparent in the position I alluded to earlier. In this position, we have a change in the centre of gravity expansion on the front of the body and compression on the back of the body. The ribs are flaring upwards, causing the bones below to become ‘unstacked’ e.g., the hips move forward past the knee, and the knee moves off centre with the ankle. To prevent us from falling forward now that our hips are past our knees, we will instinctively lean backwards with our torso, leading to the image you can see in Figure 1.3.

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Figure 1.3

Why is it important to keep a stacked position?

Well, as our bones shift and move, our muscles react by shortening and lengthening. Our muscles and joints each have an optimal position in which they can do what they are meant to do (make us move). If the bones move out of position, so do the muscles, leading to compensation which may present as muscle tightness or pain, lack of energy and so on.

This is known as the length-tension relationship – much more on this in Chapter 3.

So … How do we reset our breathing?

Try the steps below:

Lay on your back, and place one hand on your stomach, and the other on your chest. What we would ideally see is the hand on your chest rising and falling as you breathe in and out.

Take a deep breath in through your nose. Now, focus on the exhale: try breathing out of your mouth; imagine fogging up glass with your breath.

While doing this, try and push past the point that you would normally breathe out. Generally, research suggests that the optimal time for a breath is 5.5 seconds in and 5.5 seconds out.

What you should feel is your rib cage compress down and in, and your stomach muscles switch on.

Focusing on a quality exhalation (outward breath) allows your bones to drop down (compress).

Now, the above steps are focused on compression; suited more for someone who lives in an expanded state. We do not need to breathe (trying to fog up glass forcefully) with each exhalation; this technique is more of a resetting, giving us joint and body awareness (proprioception) and allowing us to find our centre. People will often start in a state of imbalance, relying on compression or expansion for too long and becoming fixated in this posture. Use this tool as a reset and work from there.

This is a conscious effort at first. It will feel strange if you have not been breathing in this particular way. There is an element of skill involved, and it should not be rushed.

To begin with this will take a lot of focus and attention, so best to do it while you are in a quiet place and not distracted – so performing this while driving is off the table! Sorry to all your multi-taskers out there.

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Let’s recap

1. Breathing affects our autonomic system (sympathetic and parasympathetic).

2. Sympathetic is associated with inhalation (fight or flight) and parasympathetic is associated with exhalation (rest and digest).

3. People tend to breathe poorly more often than not due to their lifestyle and various other factors.

4. If we breathe poorly, we change our physiology – movement, stress, mood and a multitude of other physiological processes.

5. If we wish to see meaningful movement change, we need to encourage breathing in a conscious, controlled manner.

6. We need to expand our ribcage (like a balloon) 360 degrees with each inhalation.

7. We need to compress our ribcage with each exhalation.

8. We should be ‘stacked’ when undertaking the majority of activities, meaning our bones are in alignment (think hips over knees in a standing position).

9. The optimal breath is 5.5 seconds in, 5.5 seconds out – this equates to 5.5 breaths per minute.

2

Repeat After Me -- You Aren't a Terminator

"The