How to Move the Pain Out of Your Body: A Woman's Holistic Guide to Easing Out of Pain and Getting Strong Again

By Posturally Publications

Tired of living with pain?
Getting relief can be fun...
When you can tap into the creative way movement and exercise can heal.

 

Stop turning to outside help when you can solve most or all of this yourself. Try an approach to exercise that includes simple, refreshing techniques to align joints, relax muscle stiffness and strengthen your core.

 

Pain is typically treated with physical therapy, pills, injections or surgery. But research shows these approaches often do not work as well as patients expect.

And many complain that medicine is a mill. Appointments are 15 minutes and doctors don't listen. So patients remain in pain.

 

If you've tried every treatment you can think of and are still in pain, perhaps it's time to take charge of things yourself. To take a step back and learn about how the body moves and heals itself.

 

Learn short and long term pain relief techniques used by certified trainer and health coach, and award-winning health journalist, Anne Asher to heal her own pain and help her clients do the same.

 

*Gentle, effective techniques to ignite your motivation to move
*Pre-exercise to learn proper alignment and move without stress or judgment
*Build an Holistic Foundation for all types of movement
*Turn a generic back strengthening program into a healing experience.

 

You'll adore this program, because fully doing the things you love - without paying for it later - is a great way to live.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Posturally Publications
• Release date: May 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223409854

Posturally Publications

Anne Asher is a health coach, personal trainer, yoga instructor and workstation wellness consultant. She has 25+ years experience helping people feel better physically and mentally. For over a decade, Anne was also an award winning health journalist for a large website owned and operated by the New York Times Company. Her"beat" was spine and chronic pain management.

Book preview

SECTION ONE

Holistic Pain Relief Begins with You

1.CORE STRENGTH

By now, you've likely heard the buzz phrase core strength.

Strengthening the core has become a common strategy for preventing and managing muscle or posture related chronic pain. It's the hallmark of most types of spine care and back pain prevention programs given by medical and fitness professionals to patients, clients, students, and fitness enthusiasts.

Developing a strong core is a component of other types of therapeutic exercise programs, too. Along with spine problems, it is used to help address hip, shoulder, and knee issues, as well as to address pain conditions such as fibromyalgia and multiple sclerosis.

And in this frenetic 21st century of ours, some people even employ their strong core for emotional and psychic protection. (Think about setting boundaries with others, maintaining your self- assertiveness during challenging conversations and the like. Believe it or not, your abs can help you with this.)

OUTSIDE IN, OR INSIDE OUT?

Often, people who take an outside in approach to strengthening the core are in the habit of paying little or no attention to the finer points of their form.

But as you progress through this book, you'll likely realize that it's the details of position and movement that open the door to vastly increased therapeutic benefits. 

If your goals for exercising include any or all the following:

1-Pain relief

2-Increased flexibility

2-Improved physical functioning

3- Or, simply getting more mileage out of your body,

then taking only an outside in approach may not be in your very best interest. Fortunately, there is another way, and it's aptly named the inside out approach.

The inside out approach does not start with loading your body with weights and upping your reps as much as you can stand.

It starts a mental approach.

INSIDE OUT: THE MENTAL COMPONENT

OF USING MOVEMENT TO HEAL

The training provided in this book has a definite mental component to it.

The mental component asks you to put your attention on your form, your breathing, and on the arrangement of body parts while carrying out movement and alignment instructions.

At first, when you try this, it may seem like a humbling experience. To get the techniques and apply them successfully, scaling movement down - a lot- is necessary.

But in terms of pain relief results, the effects of working small and subtle may prove far more powerful than training with large, demanding movements and heavy loads. Especially at first.

BOTH MENTALLY AND PHYSICALLY CHALLENGING

Employing the mental aspect of movement and keeping movement scaled back can be both mentally and physically challenging. Here’s why:

1-You'll discover posture support muscles you never knew you had. At first, these muscles are weak because you haven’t used them in a while. When you start to move and exercise with extra-good form, as this book teaches you, the new posture support muscles will be drafted for use, and overloaded.

-You’ll likely feel that!

-BTW, I get this comment repeatedly from my clients and students.

Discovering new muscles (and so many other benefits) occurs when you master the next point.

2- Most people who come to this work for the first time are using a no-pain, no-gain approach to exercise at least to some degree. Then, these same people wonder why they’re still hurting, or why the pain is worse than when they started. Isn’t exercise supposed to help?

-My take on this is that no-pain, no-gain habits are too competitive for true pain release.

-When the no-pain, no-gain attitude is brought to an exercise session of any type, chances of automatically veering from good body alignment are very high.

-In this case, movements tend to be bigger and harder than the load the muscles can currently support.

-Also, you won’t be working subtlety and small.

As I mentioned before, subtlety makes all the difference when using movement and exercise to release chronic pain and develop ease of motion.

This work is by no means rocket science, but the people who benefit the most are those who place careful attention on the instructions and apply them exactly the way they are given.

ARE YOUR MUSCLES BALANCED?

I’ve spent many years specializing in movement therapy and exercise - as licensed holistic health practitioner, a licensed clinical and sports massage therapist, a certified health coach, certified Pilates instructor, certified personal trainer, as a health & medical writer, physical therapy aide, certified ergonomic evaluator and coach and as a seeker of my own pain relief.

During that I’ve had the privilege of working with a wide variety of people – all who were slowed down by joint and muscle pain in some way. I almost invariably helped them achieve dramatic pain relief and movement improvement - without the use of drugs or surgery.

This process taught me that most of the time, underlying most cases of chronic joint or muscle pain is a state of muscle imbalance.

Sometimes such muscle imbalances are the original cause of the pain, but often, they are not.  Either way, in my observation, they are almost always major contributors to chronic pain and decreased physical functioning.

As my clients resolve this underlying state, most or all their pain goes away. They can move and function with ease for the first time in years.  And many report back to me they’re now able to resume demanding activities they love – from farming and backpacking to competitive athletics and more – after having been sidelined for decades.

ARE YOU BALANCED AT THE CORE?

Muscle imbalances that cause or greatly contribute to spine-related pain in particular, but also hip, knee and shoulder pain, tends to occur in the core. 

When this is the case, the strength and flexibility of ab or other core muscles are unequal relative to one another. The result is that core muscles are not able to work together to keep you upright or to move you around comfortably and capably.

The good news is that muscle imbalances can be reversed with an intelligent approach to exercise.

Because muscle imbalances are mostly powered by our less-than-ideal, day-in, day-out posture and movement habits, this is a problem you can do something about – without drugs or surgery!

And it's what this book is all about.

MY STORY

When I was in my 20s and 30s I generally felt and functioned much worse than I do today.

I had (and still do have) lots of things going on in my spine that gave me pain and limited my movement. Topping the list is the presence of an extra 1/2 vertebra and a case of mild scoliosis. But there are other things, as well.

Back in the day, I knew nearly nothing how the body moves, so almost everything I did physically made things worse.

My almost complete lack of awareness posture and alignment, combined with the numerous injuries I sustained along the way - which were mostly due to the abovementioned conditions - meant that I moved through life like a loose bag of disconnected bones with skin and fat around them. 

This put me at risk for injury with nearly every fitness, dance, and sport activity I tried.

I used the techniques I’ll share with you in this book to pull myself together.

Now, decades later, I enjoy all kinds of things: Yoga, tai chi, dance, walking, strength training, cycling, surfing (well, boogie boarding, at least) and a whole lot more. 

Granted, there are instances after a workout or other heavy physical activity when I need to use special techniques to restore my body, but I have the skills to do it.

I live with the confidence that I know what to do for my body – how to get and stay pain free - or at least with pain quite well managed – while most of the time participating fully in my required daily activities, plus the recreational things I love to do.

How did I achieve all this?

In nutshell, I learned, developed, and evolved a variety of holistic movement techniques - I call them Movement and Alignment Experiences - that to this day keep my muscles balanced and my joints comfortable.

I wrote this book so I could share these techniques with you.

My journey to pain relief and better functioning also helped me discover how my body moves and heals itself.  This is something I, personally, find very interesting.  I'd like to share this aspect of the work with you, as well.

A PROFESSIONAL PERSPECTIVE

As I've already mentioned, I’ve also had the privilege of teaching. 

Teaching has helped me expand the work beyond my personal concerns.  It's shown me the fine line that sometimes exists between the method or technique one offers in the marketplace and the actual needs of clients and students - especially when health issues are a part of the puzzle.

I'm a firm believer in "one solution does not fit all". Instead, I take an eclectic approach to movement healing.  Eclectic simply means that I use diverse sources when creating, evolving and/or adapting techniques and approaches.

That said, this book offers the starter program I give to most of my new pain clients. Think of it as a structure from which your movement creativity and individual answers to pain problems can grow.

Also, while the program in this book has helped many people overcome serious pain and dysfunction – even cancel upcoming surgeries in some cases – I know my limits. I’m not an orthopedic doctor, chiropractor, or physical therapist. Because of this, I may counsel you to speak with your M.D. or P.T. before proceeding with my instructions.

My aim in sharing my story and the techniques I’ve developed is to introduce to the wider world the ideas, tools, routines, and encouragements I've found effective in my own pain healing journey and those of my clients.

WHAT THIS BOOK MAY DO FOR YOU

Many of the tools and techniques I’ve evolved over the years were inspired by the best that several well-known (and not so well known) holistic systems have to offer.  The approach to pain relief and movement ease offered in this book focuses mainly on the following items:

1-Body awareness

2-Anatomy knowledge (fun-style)

3-Core activation

4-Body alignment & good posture

5-Core strengthening

6-The ability/willingness to recognize when it’s time to seek medical attention

7-One’s own sense of body empowerment, or skillfully taking ownership of the body

8-Learning how the body moves and heals itself.

So, if you’re wondering whether the contents of this book will do your body some good, the question to ask yourself is:

Is a movement-based approach appropriate for my problem or goals?

If the answer is yes, then you may well be in the right place!

IF YOU HAVE MEDICAL ISSUES

The term muscle and posture related chronic pain, which is what we're addressing in this book, casts a wide net that sometimes includes specific medical diagnoses. 

If you have medical issues and you want to give holistic movement and body healing go, how do you handle that?

Well, that depends. Here are a few things to think about:

1-Where possible, a partnership between medical and holistic practitioners is best. 

-I know this may be a tall ask, given the current state of the medical system and the way in which it relates to its customer, the patient.  But if you can dialog with your providers, do. They have a vast knowledge base that may come in handy as you proceed along your healing journey.

2-If you see a physical therapist, or your doctor has given you exercises, please do them according to their direction if you can.

-If this is too painful, ask for modifications to help get you past the