Big Mistake Foam rolling IT Band

by Patrick LeRouge | Sep 4, 2014 | video tips

What’s up folks! Patrick Lerouge here from Evolve Restorative Therapy. You can find me at livepainfreeprocess.com. Today we are going to be talking about a big mistake I see many people doing. Many people ask why foam rolling your IT band hurts so much. Foam rolling your IT band first hurts all the time. This is mainly because it is doing its job.

It is mainly composed of fascia that is widespread and additionally serves as a reactive device, because it is attached to your quads, hamstrings, and glutes. It has so many functions that if you don’t clear those attached areas first, the IT band will hurt. In Eastern philosophy, an organ similarly designed to keep you compressed, is the gall bladder meridian. The more times you try to expand, the more things will fall apart. The smart thing to do is to clean up the areas around the IT band first. The IT band can cause issues in the knee, the hip, or the quads and can even cause back pain since it’s always pulling on a muscle. This is why many people go after the IT band first. Yet, this is a bad thing to do up front. Everything needs to be worked on, yet you need to be systematic about it. Work with the other areas around it, before you go for the IT band. So let me show you what areas you have to work with first.

The IT band is the fascial sheath that runs all the way from the top of the hip to the knee. Yet if you look at the muscle groups of your lower body, you will notice the glute covers a majority of the IT band.   If you don’t get the glute to stop pulling on the IT band all the time, you’re never going to be able to clean up the IT band on the posterior side. That’s just one of the muscles attached to the band. You also have your hamstring and quad pulling at it. You have to slow that down before can you ever get the IT band to stop reacting.   To start becoming more functional, you have to stop the band from reacting. This is very important. Start realizing that you can’t just work on your IT band without a proper strategy beforehand. Be present to what you are doing and ask yourself, is this working or is it not working? If you enjoyed this tip, share it. I love the responses I’m getting and that people are starting to ask questions. Thank you very much and if you send your email, I can drop all this information into your inbox. See you next time! Bye.

Body Aches In The Morning

by Patrick LeRouge | Aug 28, 2014 | video tips

Hi everybody! Patrick Lerouge here from Evolve Restorative Therapy. You can find me at livepainfreeprocess.com. I help people that need and live an active life, living it to the fullest and improving speed and flexibility. They are amazing people after they start doing the things that make them better. I show you why your body falls apart in the first place and then you just have to clean it up whichever way you is best for you. Today we are talking about body aches in the morning. Today’s tip is more eclectic because we are going to be bouncing between nutrition and how your body functions. I like to mesh these topics together, but I’m not a nutritionist. You have to understand that your body’s prime healing time is when you sleep.

We sleep for 7 to 8 hours in the morning, sometimes 12 hours. I sleep 6 to 7 hours and I’m up at 5:30 in the morning with no alarm clock. I’m just going because my body is running consistently and it knows how it’s functioning. Find out how you’re functioning and how much sleep you get. Now take that timeline of sleep and realize that your body is running overtime as it’s trying to heal. This is what everybody forgets. We all know we are not supposed to eat past a certain time because you’re not supposed to have so much food in your body when you’re sleeping. Please understand that there’s a pro to not eating at that time, because your body starts to burn fat, it’s easier to digest, and easier to sleep. However, keep in mind that your body needs resources to heal.   So if you are sleeping on an empty stomach, what is your body going to work with? This is especially true if you’re not used to burning fat for energy. Your body has to learn how to burn fat to gain energy. Your body will break things down but without food, your body can’t fix anything, so it needs to pull the resources from somewhere else. Thus causing aches when you wake up in the morning. You can start moving around and creating blood flow, so after your shower or cup of coffee, you feel better. This is because now your body has resources to use. One of the reasons you are sore in the morning, is you’re not giving your body the resources it needs to go through the night and heal.

So what is my suggestion? Remember, I could never give you a problem without a solution. You want to eat something that is slow burning, maybe an hour before you go to sleep. Eat something that has some fullness to it, for example, peanut butter. It’s a slow burning carbohydrate and will keep your body functioning while you sleep. Alternatively, you might start gaining some weight so find something that keeps your body burning without causing you to gain weight. You can also eat many vegetables to give you energy for the long term. This is all about giving you resources to help you heal consistently so you don’t feel bad in the morning. So find something that works for you. However long you sleep, you need that time to heal and now you just need to make it more efficient. Eat something that is going to promote healing. Be real cautious about what you put in your mouth, so no fast food and try to eat foods that are nutritious before bed. So until next time, see you later! Bye.

Do Your Legs Feel Heavy And Tired

by Patrick LeRouge | Aug 14, 2014 | video tips

What’s up folks! This is Patrick Lerouge here from Evolve Restorative Therapy. You can find me at livepainfreeprocess.com. I’m here to help you live an easier, pain-free life, help active people live and stay active, do the things they love, and do it well – more efficiently with power, speed and grace! Today what we’re going to talk about is increasing the speed within your legs and the hip itself. In short, we will be talking about speed, strength, and power within the legs. What you want to first ask yourself is whether you are functional? When it comes to building speed, your body needs to be in a balanced state. What does that mean? Are the muscle tissues moving properly? Does the fascial system have enough glide? Do your muscle tissues contract and communicate with the whole body? All three of these questions must be addressed to decide if your body is in a balanced state. So one muscle must communicate with the next muscle, and so on and so forth. In the case of speed, everyone has front muscles, the hip flexors, which are contracted. Everyone understands that these muscles are tight but this is actually slowing the legs down. You need to really focus on getting that hip to open. So let’s actually start showing you what’s happening.

What you need to know is that the body is designed to have something in the back turned off if something in the front is on. We are an anterior driven society so the front of our body is working overtime, at all times. Consequently, this will get tightened and turned on, eventually getting harder and preventing the hip joint from opening completely. As a result, the posterior part of your body, your butt, is going to turn off. I’m going to show you how to make that backside functional, but first, let’s find out what it looks like.

In order to push your leg backwards, your glute and hamstrings need to work. So you need to focus on foam rolling, trigger point work, and stretches for your glute and hamstrings. First, you must get them to learn how to move, then get them to contract with trigger point work or squats. It is also important to get them to communicate, by using fluid motion in your stretches. Once you do that, you must then understand the hip flexor area. This area will be the next tricky part. This gives the glute and hamstrings a reason to stay working. There are many muscles in this group and so much happening in this area. However, what you want to focus on is getting the hip to open in the backwards direction. Once we get the muscles to stop working so hard, your body will take over and start doing it on its own. This is where people make their mistake. They think they need to get faster and stronger yet what they don’t realize is that the body naturally wants to become more efficient. You don’t have to try so hard if you focus on the basics of getting the muscle tissue to start moving, contracting, and communicating. Watch how it moves then feed that movement. Afterwards, it’s just a matter of practicing that speed and efficiency in a non-focused way. Usually, if you are doing this right, you won’t even see the positive effects coming. You will notice that you are running faster without even trying.

So when we are talking about increasing speed, we are talking about increasing the functionality of your body. Getting it to move, contract, and communicate through foam rolling, trigger point work, and stretching is the key point here. You just need to do these things and focus on the balance between the hip flexors and extensors. Then it’s just a matter of practicing and you will realize how much easier you can move and how you can move. If you liked this tip, share it and comment on this. I love the feedback I’m getting. I’m getting a lot of emails asking to provide different tips on various topics. If you haven’t yet, please join the newsletter and you’ll get these tips right in your mailbox. Until next time! Bye.

The Pain In Your Butt called Sciatic Pain

by Patrick LeRouge | Aug 7, 2014 | video tips

What’s up folks! Patrick Lerouge here from Evolve Restorative Therapy. You can find me at livepainfreeprocess.com. Today, I want to talk about that pain in your butt that tends to run down your leg, also known as sciatic pain. I am going to show you what you are dealing with so you can clean up the pain. Therefore, I won’t be going into detail on how to clean up your pain. Instead, I’m going to make you aware of what’s happening. So when people get sciatic pain, it may not always be a nerve issue. Many things, such as trigger points and hamstrings that run along the leg, can give you similar sensations to sciatic pain. For this tip, I am going to show you where your sciatic nerve is, what can be clipping the nerve, and where you could be clipping it.

So where is your sciatic nerve? It runs from your lower lumbar vertebrae all the way through your sacrum. However, when you have pain, the areas you want to focus on are your lower back, hip, sacrum, the length of your leg, and the arch of your foot. There are many muscle tissues that run through there so you can be clipping the nerve at the butt or in the lower back. How do you distinguish between a muscle and bony impingement? That’s very difficult to discern without an X-ray. So instead, focus on where you are getting the most tightness and where the symptoms begin. This will give you the best indication of what kind of impingement you may have. If it’s in the lower back, your entire butt will ache down to your leg and foot; this indicates a bony issue. If the pain is just in your butt cheek and runs down, the problem is muscular in nature. This also means the muscle in your butt, the piriformis, is not aligned.   This muscle can get overused due to the kind of lifestyle we can have. If you stand up straight and see one of your feet slanted out, your muscle is not doing its job. Since it has a different job from the glute, it starts to get more active because your foot is pointed out. This leads to a tighter muscle and decreases the room the sciatic nerve has, causing inflammation where the nerve and muscle conjunction is located. Consequently, you now have two issues with your butt pain: the piriformis muscle is down and the sciatic nerve is inflamed. Let’s show you what I mean by this.

Your glute is a massive superficial muscle within the butt and the piriformis is the muscle underneath that runs diagonally from your hipbone to your sacrum. It starts to get bigger and then pinch the sciatic nerve that is underneath it and in rare cases, right through it. If you are getting symptoms lower in the leg and not in the butt, you have a problem with piriformis and thus it is a muscular issue. At this point, we are racing to stop the piriformis from working so hard, because it is not functioning properly. Whatever is happening is happening for a reason. It’s not wrong or broken, just doing more than it has to. Now we know it’s a bony issue, with pain in the lower back. If this occurs, your back will be tight all the time and you will start leaning to one side. The majority of the time, it’s opposite from the side where pain resides, to prevent the nerve from being pinched and putting pressure on the leg. Eventually, if the pain clears up on one side, the same thing will occur on the other. This is called the ‘chicken or the egg’ syndrome because it keeps happening around the body.

To clean up pain in your lower back and butt, you have to get the area to stop doing what it’s doing. In my routine, I like to get your hip flexors to start working first. By getting them to open with your foot straight, your glute can start moving properly. This is where most people make their mistake. They instantly start going into stretches when the area does not want to move. Yet you give it a reason to move by removing its blockage, in this case, the hip flexors. You can then get it to start moving, increase the blood flow, and eventually heal. This is the key.

First, find out what is happening. You can get symptoms all the way down your leg and behind your knee. Focus on getting something to move first, then learning how to contract properly. Afterwards, you can start foam rolling and stretching. When you do those stretches however, do them with a fluid and slow movement. Don’t push your body to do the things it doesn’t want to, because then it is going to protect itself. So that’s our tip for this week. If you have any thoughts or comments, please respond. I will see you next time! Bye.

You Don’t Have To Worry About Pain When You DO This

by Patrick LeRouge | Jul 31, 2014 | video tips

Today, what I want to talk to you about is having fearful thoughts. Many people think that they are going to get hurt if they just do things, and that is correct, but if you do something you love, the likelihood of that occurring drops dramatically. That’s what our tip is about today. If you do something you love, it will never truly hurt you.

Now, if you do something that you love in a careless manner, then yes it will hurt you. For example, if I decide to go running in the outdoor terrain or I’m hiking, but not wearing the proper shoes, that can hurt my body. If you’re working at your body’s capability, don’t do anything that your body is not ready for. Do it at a slower rate, but still do the things that you love because that’s what is going to get you out there and moving. Yet there are so many reasons why you can get hurt.

Now, let me tell you some of the things that will make you understand why you wouldn’t get hurt. There’s a beautiful thing that happens when you have an internal smile. When you smile internally and you’re doing the things that you love your body functions ten times better. It’s aware of what it needs to do and how it needs to do it. What you don’t know is that your body is already in that place of effective functionality.

So if you’re out there running, biking, or swimming, and you’re in the zone thinking that you love doing it, you’re not worried about anything and your body is going to function better. However, that internal smile is key. You have to start learning how to do that and one of the best places to do so is out in nature. I love walking in the spring because you see flowers blooming, and there is an entire earthing component that comes with it. Once you connect with nature, the world, the universe, your body is already in its prime. It’s already doing the things that it needs to do and that’s where you’re going to get so much more power of happiness. Once you’re happy, that’s where things start venting and your body literally starts letting go of all the negative things because you are bringing in so much positive energy. That’s the key to everything.

It’s not always about going to the gym. The gym is great but if you don’t like the gym and you’re just going through the motions, it doesn’t work effectively because your body will fight it so much more than when it is in that internal happy place. Within that space or zone, there is least resistance. I’m not saying it won’t work, but you will have to work harder to get your body in a happy state. Your body is designed to shed pounds, look toned, and be fit. Yet the key is finding the place where you’re doing it in the happiest state. In this state, you will shed pounds faster than ever and your body will show you the things that it needs. If you are walking around or running and having trouble getting your leg up over a boulder or bending, your body is going to show you instantly.

So once you start doing things that you love, it all balances itself out. The body shows you what you need and then it gives you what you want. If you want to lose weight, or continue to do things that you love, then it will never be a job. Do what you love and you will never think of it as a chore because you will want to do it more. The body won’t want to work so hard, so it will make things more efficient. That’s the way the body works.

It’s that easy, but you have to find that internal happy place first. The tip for this week is finding something that you love and then doing it as much as possible. Your body is going to move into equilibrium without you even trying and that’s the key to happiness.