You won’t hear this from the doctor.
MY STORY BEGINS FOUR YEARS AGO. IT BEGINS SOME TIME
after Wired founding editor Kevin Kelly held the first Quantified Self Meet-up at his home in Pacifica in 2008, but before self-tracking app Lift was launched to the public in 2012. It is a story about the human body meeting with technology, philosophy and self-knowledge. A blueprint, if you like, for what man might become. It is my hope that your story starts in 2,738 words time. If you take the time to read this post, most of you will have everything you need to never have back pain again.
First, a disclaimer: I’m going to assume that you have back pain or know someone who does. I’m from the UK, where 8/10 people have bouts of lower back pain. That’s a lot. What I’m not going to do is pretend that I have THE answer for everyone. I am not a doctor. I do not pretend to be a doctor. I appreciate how complicated the human body is and the magnitudes of difference that may separate your symptoms and experiences from mine. I am just someone who searched high and low for a solution until I found it. When I did, it changed my life completely. It’s worth finding out if it can help you too.
The marker I’d like to lay down is this: If you struggle with the sort of non-specific back pain that the doctor might give you an aspirin for, you’ve come to the right place. If you’re an athlete who struggles with restrictive muscle patterns, you’ve come to the right place. If you’ve ever been diagnosed with a supposedly structural condition such as scoliosis, sciatica or a herniated disk, you’ve come to the right place. If you feel like you need a massage, you’ve come to the right place (and will never need a massage again).
If you’ve tried everything else, you’ve come to the right place.
Pain By Numbers
A paper published by the National Academies Press in 2011 put the annual cost of pain (defined as headache, abdominal pain, chest pain, and back pain) at somewhere between $560 to $635 billion. That’s greater than the annual costs in 2010 dollars of heart disease ($309 billion), cancer ($243 billion), and diabetes ($188 billion) and nearly 30 percent higher than the combined cost of cancer and diabetes. An earlier article, published by the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2008, estimated that the cost of treating back pain alone had risen to $85.9 billion.
Why Did This Happen?
It doesn’t take great insight to work out what causes your back pain. There are many different ways of explaining the epidemic, but this works well.
Desk work’s a very recent development in the big scale of human history. So are cars, aeroplanes, thick-wedged shoes and everything else that doesn’t belong in The Jungle Book. Here’s a quick Google Trends search for ‘lower back pain’. Yeah. Ouch.
My back pain began, as you’d expect, at the same time that I took a desk job. No mysteries there. And, like most people, I tried everything, both within and without medicine, from movement to manipulation. Pilates. Yoga. Massage. Heat. Cold. Acupuncture. Osteopathy. Chiropractic treatment. Active-release technique. Whatever.
With all these things, there was a pattern. They yielded short term results. While I was searching for independence, freedom of movement and self-awareness, everyone else wanted my time and my money. NO DEAL.
And when I thought about it, none of this made any sense. Why did I need someone to fix me? How was it that we’ve survived as a species for this long and now suddenly, I have to give someone money at regular intervals to make we work properly? Have we become that weak? Something was off.
Mend It Like Beckham
The reason that I found the answer that I had begun to think didn’t exist is simple. Soccer. You see, I really LOVE playing soccer.
And because, in my late 20s, I didn’t want to give up playing just because my body was acting like a brat, I eventually found the answer.
To tell you the truth, I’d stopped looking.
Somewhat appropriately for this Medium, the answer found me on Twitter. This took me a while, but I went back and found the exact tweet. It was July 7th, 2010. That’s the day I found the answer. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was about to owe Twitter big time.
https://twitter.com/m_grindy/statuses/17937205697
CLICK.
Mike’s link led me through to the website of former professional footballer Jonathan Hunt. As a sports fan, the first thing you do when you read about a player you’ve never heard of is type their name into YouTube.
I found this video.
It’s from 1996.
Back to his website. This is an excerpt:
After years of striving to find freedom of movement following a serious back and pelvic injury sustained whilst playing professional football, Jonathan Hunt’s discovery and experience of Hanna Somatics brought about a profound healing of himself and others today.
Jonathan achieved Premiership status in a career spanning over a decade. He spent two successful years at Derby County in the Premiership as well as three seasons with Birmingham City, collecting a player of the year and top goal scorer awards along the way.
Quite amazingly, after almost five years away from the game he so dearly loves, Jonathan has restarted his playing career at a semi — professional level for AFC Hornchurch in the Ryman Premier Division. Jonathan is now training and playing games with greater comfort and ease of movement at 39 than he was in his mid to late twenties.
I’d never heard of ‘Hanna Somatics’ before, but this was the sort of story that required further investigation. What happened next felt like a miracle. I’m going to tell you all about it, but first things first.
In order to understand how to become pain free, you have to understand what causes it in the first place. You need to know how your pain happens.
How Did This Happen?
Last year, I was listening to one of the many fantastic podcasts produced by the comedian Joe Rogan. The particular episode I was listening to had San Francisco CrossFit founder Kelly Starrett as a guest. Starrett had just released a fitness book called Becoming a Supple Leopard. Rogan asked Starrett about the title.
“You don’t see the leopard activating its glutes or warming up or prepping. It’s just AWESOME. So why the hell don’t you have full physical capacity? Why are you in pain? The resting state of the human being should be pain free. You’re designed to be 110. What’s going on? It’s because you suck at moving. You’re a human being and you make a ton of movement errors. Nobody ever gave you the software for your beautiful hardware.”
Nobody ever gave you the software for your beautiful hardware.
When I heard those words, they gave me the first momentum for this post. Starrett had articulated in just ten words what I’d tried and failed to explain to so many people. But Starrett’s software analogy works. It’s simple:
Pain occurs when muscles become contracted (through stress or trauma)
Your brain controls your muscles
To fully resolve muscular pain, you have to engage your brain
This scientific reality bridges the gap between ‘quick fix’ remedies that yield short-term results and an independent, long-term solution that gives individuals the skill set to be self-governing, self-sensing and self-healing.
Now, in the words of Jennifer Aniston, “Here comes the science bit.”
A Primer In Sensory Motor Amnesia
The ‘Hanna Somatics’ I read about on Jonathan Hunt’s website turned out to be a catalogue of movement re-education exercises. These exercises use the brain’s neuroplasticity to reduce and, with practice, eliminate the physiological memories of stress caused by accidents, injuries, surgeries or repetitive movements.
To describe how stress and / or injury replaces normally functional movement patterns at a neurological level, he coined the term ‘Sensory Motor Amnesia’. If you have recurring pain in the same place for which no amount of manipulation provides long term relief, it is likely that you have Sensory Motor Amnesia.
Somatic exercises work through a series of conscious contractions of muscles, followed by a slow, gentle release. This hits the reset button at a neurological level and encourages the brain to restore full muscle function.
But it’s nothing new.
Sorry about that.
Cats and all other vertebrate animals know what we, the supposedly highest primates, have forgotten amid the pace and stress of modern living. What was the first thing you did this morning? Was it some downtime with the coolest thing you’ll ever own? Or was it locking eyes with your phone, laptop, telly?
Stretching vs. Somatics
This is what a typical hamstring stretch looks like, accompanied with the instructions: Hold for 10-30 seconds, relax, repeat.
Pulling on a tight area and expecting it to naturally lengthen is wishful thinking. The brain, for whatever reason, is causing that muscle or muscles to hold tension. The muscle is no longer under the brain’s conscious control. Applying force is not going to change that.
Instead, you have to involve the brain through movement. Here’s an alternative. Here’s THE alternative to stretching that really works.
www.painfreefootball.com
Jonathan showed me how to perform not just this movement, but a whole suite of exercises designed to stimulate the brain and reset tight muscles. I felt immediate relief. Within days, my pain was gone. Within two weeks, I was playing football with no discomfort whatsoever.
I will always owe Jonathan for what happened next.
Don’t Miss The Golden Moments
Who can put a price on glory?
They say you’re a long time retired in the sporting world. Anyone who’s given up playing a game they love because their body said no will tell you that. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Before meeting Jonathan, I’d seriously considered giving up playing football. I’d had some injuries. I’d ruptured a tendon in my shoulder, blown both ankles out, a broken leg. My body just didn’t feel how it used to. It didn’t respond to my brain the way I wanted it to.
Training and playing wasn’t fun anymore. It felt like a struggle.
The following year, my team secured the league and cup double in our most successful campaign ever, winning 22 out of 27 games and scoring 102 goals along the way.
I nearly didn’t play. That I did, and was able to share the glory with my teammates is because of Somatics.
Don’t Avoid Stress, Handle It
You know what stress feels like. You live with it, the good type and the bad. The problem is that the way our world is currently set up is making it increasingly difficult to avoid the bad type. Our ability to cope with stress will separate those who flourish from those who wither.
“Stress, as the experience of lab rats everywhere has repeatedly testified, is a sign that a living thing is growing increasingly unfit for the world in which it lives, and as Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace astutely observed more than 150 years ago, when a living thing and its environment are no longer a good match, something has to give, and it is always the living thing.
Our demise may be a butterfly-like metamorphosis. How are we handling our stress? Not too well. Rather than relaxing or getting more exercise when pressures mount, studies show that we instead skip meals, spend more time online or in front of the TV, then overeat and lie awake at night perfectly prepared to enter the next day bleary-eyed, short-tempered, and exhausted. What triggers this behavior? Those old primal drives and appetites we struggle so mightily to ignore.”
From Last Ape Standing, by Chip Walter
“We are stuck in the middle of a mismatch. Our ancient bodies, wired by evolution for survival in a wild, natural habitat, are struggling to live in radically different modern world. Challenges are everywhere: overwork, sedentary living, toxic foods, social chaos and habitat destruction surround us. This is what I call ‘The Primate’s Predicament.’
And now we’re suffering. Our bodies are suffering with lifestyle diseases, our minds are stressed, our spirits are confused. And our primitive, habitual responses just aren’t working. What we need is a practice, not just to alleviate our suffering, but to live the beautiful adventure we call life.”
From The Exuberant Animal, by Frank Forencich
For me, and hopefully for you, this practice is Somatics.
Making Somatics A Habit With Lift App
After the glory and silverware, it was time for a break. I quit my desk job and packed my bags for a year of exploration and travel with my girlfriend. We volunteered on an organic farm in Portugal, drove across the US, went to Burning Man, learnt to surf in Brazil and visited the Orient. Needless to say, routine was not high on the agenda. My somatic exercises fell by the wayside. Twelve months later, back working long stretches at a laptop, pain crept in.
I needed to make Somatics a habit.
I remembered that in late-2012, I’d been watching an episode of The Random Show, in which the Silicon Valley influencers Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose exchange insights, books, gadgets, hobbies and F-bombs. I love that show.
In that episode, which I’ve embedded below (just hit play and you’re within ten seconds of the right place) Ferriss mentioned that he had been involved in an app designed to help people with behavioural modification. I found the app and started to log my daily somatic exercises.
Lift made Somatics a habit. That sounds straightforward enough, but anyone who’s ever tried to set off on a path with good intentions knows how difficult it can be to develop new habits that stick.
Lift just works. It’s an elegant, effective willpower hack that turns good intentions into real-world achievements. Now, I use Lift for all sorts of things. I use it for flossing my teeth and for learning German vocab. Others use it to lose weight or start conversations with strangers.
A Quantified Self Side Note: my Nike+ pace trend data indicates that I’m getting quicker, despite running less. With Somatics, my body is working more efficiently.
It’s the ultimate self-improvement app.
The premise is very simple. You sign up for a habit and every day you ‘check in’ once you’ve completed it. You find yourself loathe to break a successful streak, so you develop great habits. You can’t fool yourself into justifying skipping a day and because many people are signed up for similar habits, you can take part in discussions about your targets and goals. It’s got a built-in support system.
Together, Somatics and Lift App are the two most powerful tools available for taking control of your present and future self. My thanks go to Jonathan Hunt for introducing me to Somatics, to Lift CEO and co-founder Tony Stubblebine for building the app and to Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone for backing it.
Closing Thoughts
To end, as it were, at the beginning:
This story speaks, I hope, to everyone who’s tried everything. It speaks to the challenges that face an ageing population and for the role technology might play in overcoming physical blockages and unlocking human potential. Why don’t more people know about Somatics? I have a strong theory about this, but that’s a post for another time. For now, I will leave you with the words that were inscribed in the Temple of Apollo in Delphi at the foundation of western culture. They surely bear repeating here, at civilisation’s stress-frazzled apex:
“Know Thyself”
For the full suite of somatic exercises, download the Kindle book Back Pain: Simple Exercises That Will Cure Back Pain in Just 15 Minutes.
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