Today, we’re going to be talking about first loves and pain.

Hopefully, I got your attention with that little intro, the title, we’ll get to that in just a second. Before we jump into the first loves and pain, I wanted to say thank you so much for all the comments, emails, etc, that we got after Blog 150. I asked you guys to send me models that you enjoy. I got tons of different ideas, everything from bodybuilders to mixed martial artists, the dancers.

Thank you so much for sending that information. I also got some requests for things the people would like to see on the blog. If you send me a request, hopefully, in the next few months, you’ll see some stuff coming out from us to help answer some of those questions.

One of the things that struck about a lot of the viewer request that we got was the wide diversity. I had people asking for more neurology about some of the stuff that we do, people asking about, “Hey, how can I learn more quickly? How do I deal with this particular problem, this particular issue?”

It just speaks to me because one of the things that we know about the Z-Health system is that people from many walks of life, many different pursuits use Z-Health, so the challenges of doing a blog the general Z-Health community, I want to make it helpful for you, just stay tuned and hopefully I’ll get to everyone’s request soon.

Now, for today’s topic, I said, we’re talking about first loves and pain. To explain this, I want to talk about one of my patients from many, many years ago. Not long after I’ve gotten into my first practice, I had a great guy come in. He was a former, not professional athlete but Division One Football player. He was a quarterback at a big school in the SCC. He had played many years before. When he came to me as a patient, he came in with a little back pain and also some shoulder issues.

One of the things that was problematic for him was he’d gone through treatment for cancer years before with lots of radiation. His body was pretty messed up. He had been a, again, Division One Football player, then he had all these other things happen along with all of life. He was in his mid-50s when I first met him.

When he was seeing me I was a young guy out of school, I didn’t know all the stuff that I know now, I was using my traditional bio-mechanical model at that point, didn’t know about neurology but I tried to be very creative in trying to help people. What happened in working with him is, the first few times I saw him, we were working on his back pain, I was able to help him with that.

We got him through that fairly quickly but what was really bugging him was his shoulder. I did everything that I knew to do. We did soft-tissue work, immobilizations and all kind of things. I gave him home exercises to do, nothing was working. Anytime he came up above 90 degrees, he had shoulder pain.

One day, he came in to the office. I was working on him on the table. I got him up, I said, “How is he?” He’s like,”Yeah, it’s a little bit better.” Something hit me. I said, “Chuck, when’s the last time you threw a football?” He looked at me and he went, “What do you mean when’s the last time I threw a football? I can barely move my shoulder.”

I said, “Well, let’s just try it.” Me being me, I had lots of sports equipment at the office because I love sports. I said, “Let’s go out on the parking lot. We’ll just go out there. We’ll just actually start off with a soft toss of the football. We’ll just try to move your shoulder in a way that yo haven’t moved it in a while.”

We went out in the parking lot. We started a little bit of soft toss. Within 15 minutes, he was back throwing, spirals. He was throwing football really well. Now obviously, he was a Division One quarterback. He hadn’t thrown a football in about, he told me, 15 years because of all the stuff that he had been through.

The most fascinating thing in that whole process was watching this big smile creep up on his face. It was one of the most powerful moments to me to remind me that a lot of times, whenever we think we have to follow one route to get to an endpoint, in other words, he came in wanting to get rid of his shoulder pain, I did all of the traditional stuff that I knew to do, but what really mattered was actually engaging him in something that he enjoyed and reminding him of things that he used to love.

One of the things that I talk a lot about in our courses, and I see this more and more because a lot of the people that come into our professional training courses, they’ve been in the industry for awhile. They see a lot of clients who have maybe been in the fitness industry for a long time or who are frustrated because they’re trying to do all the fitness things.

They’re trying to do their cardio work and their strength work and their rehab work, etc, and they’re getting frustrated and often bored.

My suggestion to you in today’s blog is just to answer the simple question of what was your first love in terms of movement? Did you, as a child, love football or baseball or softball or volleyball? Did you just like walking in the woods? What was the first physical activity that you enjoyed?

For me, I’m a martial artist. I was a martial artist from the time I was 5 years old. What I’ve learned is that when I grow frustrated with any fitness pursuit, I need to put it aside and go back to the thing that I love the most which is training in martial arts. That restores my motivation and very often if I have something that’s bothering me, maybe my knee or my back or whatever and I’ve done all my other rehab stuff and it’s not working, doing something that I enjoy is often the most powerful medicine.

For you guys, I just wanted to throw that out to you today. If you have something that you haven’t explored in a long time because you were afraid to do it or you didn’t think you should, just start off slowly, take it easy, be prepared to be surprised because oftentimes, engages what we know now about pain and how our brain works, whenever we can move doing something that we enjoy, it is incredibly powerful.

If you have any questions about this, please let me know, otherwise, have a great week.