What’s up, everybody? Patrick Le Rouge here from Evolve Restorative Therapy. You can find me at livepainfreeprocess.com. I help people understand that everything is connected in the body. We have to use that connectivity to eliminate pain for the long-term and to do it rapidly. The only way to do that is by balancing out the physical, mental, and emotional sides of yourself. What we’re going to be talking about today is gall bladder meridian issues and IT band pain. We spoke about this last week, and on the emotional and physical side, I realized people with this issue are trying to be reined in everything in the outside world. That reining in could be triggering a blockage in that highway system.

This is what you have to do on the physical side.  For IT band pain, I find everyone makes their humongous mistake in my head and my heart, when people go after the IT band head-on. I tell everyone whenever you have a pain, never go after it head-on. You will lose 100% of the time because the body will  allow you to think that you won, so it’s going to calm down in that area for the time being and then flare up even harder later because you never addressed the true reason as to why you have pain in that particular area. So the next time you go after it, the next time it flares up, it’s either even harder to get rid of or you get no response. It just gets madder and madder, and you make it worse by locking it into a little protective little nut that you can’t penetrate and feel because now it’s also defending itself against you using the other musculature around it. It’s trying to hold on for dear life, and it’s very good at it, so you will lose all the time going head-on to an area.

In the restorative therapy world, I have to get my students to acknowledge all the other variables that are in play so they can see the bigger picture, calm it down, and start focusing on what they’re going to do to clean everything up. I also have to get them to realize that their IT band is reacting to something. Find out to what it’s reacting to, what’s guaranteed is the quad, as well as the glute insufficiency. So remember: the gall bladder also protects you from energy from moving outside. If you’re doing a lot of outside activities with lateral movements, you’re going to have a lot of tightness throughout the hips just based off of that alone. So a lot of that action is done by the glute, the side of the hip, right? That is going to be the cause of why your IT band is going to be flaring up in the first place. Go after the glute first. If you get the glute to start working, the IT band doesn’t have much of a reason to really flare up because the glute pulls up on the IT band. So if you stood up, grabbed the side of your pants, and just scrunched them, you’re going to feel your pants pull up right by your knee, almost exactly where people get their knee pain when they have ITB syndrome. You get that pathway to stop, the IT band just calms naturally. So it’s all about getting your glute to start working properly.

There are many trigger points in the glute that runs on the outside of the hip – just one point of the lower glute runs pain outside the hip, starting at IT band. Another one, slightly higher in the hip, runs down the back side of the leg into the calf. Finally, the biggest one is right in gluteus minimus that runs all the way through the whole lateral side of your leg. This one is key; getting to that area simply is not going to happen. You have to work through the big protective, non-sufficient, non-efficient glute. You have to work through those areas, and you have to do that calmly and passively.  So, take your time with this, and I tell people all the time, “If you haven’t gotten to the program, get into the program, and I’ll show you how to do this, what you need to do. Get in there! Right!” All you need is a hand. You just have to take your time to get through that glute and take your time to get into these different worlds of how to affect these areas to get your IT band to clear up. If you start cleaning up the glute, I guarantee you everything else will start relaxing. So folks, if you’re not part of the program and you want to learn all these different aspects, please get involved. If not, it’s okay. It’s fine. I’m not mad at you. Until next time folks, I’ll see you later.