What’s up? Patrick Lerouge here. You can find me at livepainfreeprocess.com; I’m an intuitive healing expert and the creator of the Live Pain Free Process. I’ve been creating some pretty innovative ways to get you guys to learn how to heal. I’m feeling pretty good about that because I’m getting great responses from all of you. What I’m here to talk about today is realizing the difference between conditioning a muscle and strengthening a muscle. Once you understand the difference between the two, you’ll start being able to rehab yourself properly.
When you are injured, your body will try to constrict movement so it doesn’t hurt itself further. If it constricts itself long enough, you’ll get muscle atrophy, like a withering effect almost dying away. On the short term, you’ll start getting the muscles to bind causing you to not move well. I had a knee injury case that come in; she wanted to rehab herself, and she started realizing that she was on the bike all the time, but she was not getting any stronger. I had to get her to realize that when you’re on the bike and you’re doing something repetitive in that way, your body is actually conditioning the muscle tissue that it already has access to, not building more muscle fibers to get stronger.
If you do this all the time, your body is conditioning itself to do this, and you’re only going to condition the muscle tissues you already have access to. Earlier, I think, maybe a month ago, I did a video tip on you having to stress yourself in going to a safe place of challenging yourself for your body to change, and that’s where strengthening happens. You have to safely challenge yourself by giving it something to restrict against. You have to really push that muscle tissue to understand that it can’t push anymore and that it needs to recruit more muscle fibers, so that’s when muscle tissue starts to tear slightly to start getting more access to more muscle tissue, and that’s where you start to really grow.
It’s really, really easy. I wanted to do this in the gym, but I realize not everyone has a gym inside the house; however, it’s easy enough to get a band, and everybody has a door. You just have to put the band around the doorknob on the inside and close the door, and now you have an instant restriction. That’s what’s the key component is. Your body needs to feel the resistance of it. If I want to work with my bicep or my quad, I would wrap this around my ankle, sit down in a chair facing away from the door, and start doing the quad action, which is straightening the leg from a bent position with resistance, and it needs to be at a pace where your body needs to work, so very slowly.
When you try this you’ll probably try to say, “You need a bunch of resistance,” and you don’t. That’s how you tear too much muscle tissue, and that’s no longer in the safe zone. Your body is going to shred too much, and that’s when people can’t put down their arms or can’t move properly. You have to take your time with it, and you have to remember that conditioning comes first then strengthening. Once you get to the point of strengthening, build that strength, just to get back to conditioning that new place of being. That’s how you safely build a functional body.
Condition, strengthen, and recondition so you consistently keep that strength going. That’s what you have to do when you work with an injury. Condition it to move; strengthen it. After you strengthen it, condition that new area so you’re that much better, and you won’t hurt yourself again later doing the same exact action. Hopefully this helps, folks. Until the next time, bye.