Waking up with strange aches and pains is no fun. Want to know what to do about it?

My client Jane (not her real name) logged onto to our Zoom session this past Thursday, and the first thing she said to me was, “today’s going to be a Reset workout Brandon. I had a weird night of sleep and my neck doesn’t feel good.”

So for the next 20 minutes, we practiced the pain-management techniques I taught her. She sighed with relief, and said, “you need to call this the Weird Night’s Sleep Reset. That should be in your next newsletter.”

The Weird Night’s Sleep Routine is at the bottom if you want to skip the rest of the story.

Jane has been working with me for over a year now (mostly virtually via Zoom). When she came to me at my Olympic-lifting gym last September, she was deeply skeptical of mainstream fitness and could not find a way to ENJOY movement without fear of being pushed beyond her limits. She had been through a ton of trainers and group classes.

Like so many people, Jane had a conflicting message inside her. She had the usual aches and pains that come with aging, a busy schedule, combined with a social pressure to “exercise.” She felt like she had to push herself anytime she went to the gym to get the most out of her precious time spent. But the lingering of aches and pains made it unappealing.

So the first session we did, I offered her three choices of how we were going to spent the session: reset, maintain, or build. 

Jane had never been asked what she felt like doing in a training session. Ever.

This shocked her that she could guide her own session. She then asked if we could address her two pain points in the hip and neck. I said, “Of course. I will always give you a choice because I’m not a drill sergeant.”

Let’s look at the three choices I gave Jane, and that you have anytime you are going to train. 

A. Reset – This is mostly about pain reduction and alleviating stiffness that inhibits free movement. This is the best place to start because it’s hard to do athletic movements when your body is saying, “hey this thing hurts in your knee.”
B. Maintain – Nothing new here, just maintaining skills and movements you already know how to do. We call this “punching the clock.” Most workouts will be in this category.
C. Build – Building new skills is hard when you don’t have energy to spend. These workouts are generally for when you have a surplus of energy and doing things that require high levels of concentration.

When I first started training Jane, it took about three hours to show her all the necessary pain-management skills. Then, to her surprise we could begin doing Maintain and Build workouts. 

In our session last week, it took about 20-minutes to reset her weird night of sleep. Then she smiled and said she felt much better. Then we moved on to build some fun skills like front splits training and upper body strengthening.

“Reset” workouts don’t need to take a ton of time. And once they are done, you can move on to exercise without feeling the inner conflict. I would love to teach you how to do this. Just respond to this email with what your pains are and we can talk.

I’ll be sending the companion follow-along video later this week.

In the meantime, here’s a sneak peak at the Weird Night’s Sleep Reset. This routine will only take 10 minutes and can be done anytime.

You may have heard phrases like, “Don’t lift with a round back”, or “You really should only be lifting through the legs.” You have probably heard critics in the fitness world say very bad things about rounding your spine.

In some situations it does make sense to lift with the legs. But being able to round your back smoothly and touch your toes is a primal ability that people need to have. When we reach down to pick up children, we don’t lift like you see on Warehouse Safety posters. We just bend down and grab them – until we lose that ability.

This is why the Jefferson Curl, or “Weighted Pike” is an important exercise. When I’ve introduced people to it with proper care, they have nothing but good things to say. And the Jefferson Curl not only restores your ability to pick up kids, but also allows you to increase your active flexibility without doing any extra work!

Think about our ability to fold over. And what the weight is doing is simply assisting gravity’s pull. Have you ever hung upside down from an Aerial Yoga sling or when you were a kid on the monkey bars? It feels great!

The Jefferson Curl assists gravity by loosening up the spine to give you some space between the little bones in your spine. Since gravity is always pressing your vertebrae down when you’re standing up, it’s a great way to just get a little space between the pieces of your spine. This feeling is probably the most gratifying part of it – feeling loose and relaxed.

All of the movements I do are very slow and deliberate, and that’s the biggest thing to watch for when trying out the Jefferson Curl. Go slowly so you can feel all the small muscles between your shoulder blades stretch apart and give it some space.

This is also why you want to start the movement from a standing position. You want to keep the muscles around your spine squeezed, like you’re bracing for a punch. It’s important to say this because you can’t really see it in the tutorial videos. You’re not just stretching here to maintain what you’ve got, you are actively building mobility that you can control.

It can even help you improve your Forward Fold for free without any extra work.

You are building your ability to squeeze and protect your low-back in a very compromised position. This is exactly the skill that helps when you want to lift small children up without pain, or pick up your car keys without feeling twinges.

The first step to start on is just seeing where you are at with the toe touch. Then picking up a light weight, stand on a box about 12-24” high. Just see what it’s like to bend over with the weight, and be sure to keep your knees straight. This might give you a kind of stretch response. And it is just important to assess your ability before trying to increase anything.

Remember – the Jefferson Curl can really strengthen the hamstrings and low back, as well as decompress the muscles and spine. It can be both strengthening OR soothing, depending on your intention.

And they just feel plain good! That’s reason enough to try them.

So now I’ve talked about two movements that can help you with strengthening the lower-back and hip region:

1. Pigeon Squat

2. Jefferson Curls

How about we teach you about how to improve your shoulders next?

Talk to you soon,

          Brandon

Have you ever had a mysterious pain in your “low-back” after hard exercise, lifting weights, or trying a new sport/activity? Or how about sitting for too long in an airplane or car? And in the morning you find it hard to bend over and touch your toes? And maybe you find yourself twisting side to side and find that nothing really seems to make it feel better?

And here’s what do most people try to do when they get stiff low-backs or feel pain that’s hard to trace.

They try to stretch it. Apply ice or a heating pad. Or worse, leave it alone because some “professional” who has never lifted weights meaningfully scared them out of activity.

If this is you, I’m going to say two things that might sound far fetched –

1. The low-back is not a region on the body. It is a conceptual idea.
2. Low-back pain is actually four muscle groups that intersect near the tailbone and hips that are stuck “frozen”, and they want to be either lengthened or shortened.

Here’s the way out. Are you ready?

The way out of this pain is to strength train with the “Big Four” muscles. Let me explain.

The “Big Four” are two pairs of muscles, the first is the Quadratus Lumborum and Obliques, and the second is the Hip Flexor/Psoas and Piriformis.

When these pairs are “frozen” we tend to register that as “low-back not feeling good”.

What if I suggested that the muscles in the areas near your tailbone and butt were just “stiff” to protect you? That your nervous system was guarding the muscles in your hips and won’t let you touch your toes.

the Big Four muscles are frozen in one position (like when sitting), the nervous system sends the message to the surrounding muscles in your lower spine and hips to not budge.

Our nervous system guards us by not letting us move in ways we cannot control. It tells us through light pain signals or making us move slowly (think getting out of bed slowly with a sore back). Low-back pain and not being able to touch your toes are warning signs from the nervous system. So how do we convince our nervous system to let us move freely again?

This means that the Big Four muscles are “frozen” at one length, and cannot shorten or lengthen properly. So the way out of this pain is to BE ACTIVE with the Big Four!

Enter the Pigeon Squat

I can tell you from personal experience that I used to have low-back pains that I couldn’t just shake. I thought I was doomed to love Olympic-style Weightlifting and have to deal with nagging aches and pains. But I found a way out and it was NOT what I expected.

It wasn’t until 2017 that I accidentally discovered the way out of low-back pain. I was mindlessly scrolling through my teacher Jon’s Instagram and caught him doing a variation of a movement I’d never seen before. I hired him for a few months to coach me and I recommend following if you don’t already (@yuenjon on Instagram).

He called it the Pigeon Squat.

So I decided to try it for myself. I was in an exploratory mood and was surprised by what a unique sensation it was. After I tried it, I reached for my toes and noticed that my low-back felt really loose and easily palmed the floor.

Position 1

Position 2

What in tarnation was going on? Looking at my past experiences, anytime I had low-back pain I could trace it back the Big Four muscles being knotted like cords and the surrounding back muscles. So I did some homework and it turns out that these in the area and found this surprising discovery:

The Pigeon Squat requires the active engagement of the Big Four of the muscles that contribute to “low-back tightness”. So it turns out that I had very little Range of Motion, or ability to lengthen and shorten these muscles on command. They only knew two commands – be the proper length for me to sit in a chair or lift heavy weights. Nothing in between.

I was shocked at how this movement associated with Yoga poses could be turned into a strength training exercise. And of course I tested it with a few friends who were shocked at how quickly they saw a difference in their mobility.

It’s the easiest move you can do anywhere to reverse low-back stiffness and aches. It’s the Yang brother to the Yin Yoga pose known as the Pigeon Stretch.

The Pigeon Pose that is popular in Yoga is meant to relax the nervous system. It might relieve pain in the short-term, but if you want to stop low-back pains right in their tracks, I can’t recommend this movement enough. Not only can you relieve pain now, but you can build resilience for the future so your nervous system doesn’t limit your movement so much.

The Pigeon Squat is a better option because it causes us to first ACTIVELY contract the muscle, which, combined with our special breathing pattern, will relax the tightened muscles, and also strengthen the Big Four Muscles.

TIP: If you combine the Pigeon Squat with taking a full breath and exhaling like you’re fogging a mirror, while relaxing a contracted muscle – you will be able to increase your range of motion.

Man, I can’t tell you how counter-intuitive that was for me at first.

How could such a simple move be both a relaxing pose AND a strength training movement?! It depends completely on your intention. If

The best part is you can do this just about anywhere or anytime. Start with your couch or chair and you might be pleasantly surprised.

Fly like a pigeon,

Brandon

“Oh my god. What was that? I heard a pop! Is that normal?!” she gasped.

I explained, “that’s just the joints in your knees farting. You’re going to be fine as long as it doesn’t hurt.”

This was my third session training the MD, who I will call Judy. We were taking her through her first set of Barbell Squats, going full depth and knees past her toes. She heard unfamiliar pops and I assured her that was normal and actually beneficial. It was the first indication of her fear of squats and knees exploding.

Judy was a successful Indian woman in her 40’s. She was an Interventional Radiologist in the UC medical system. Judy had knowledge of human anatomy, but admitted that she was taught almost nothing about nutrition and human movement in medical school, confirming what I always suspected about the current healthcare system. I was glad to have her in my care so I could bust some myths that were keeping her from better flexibility and strength.

When Judy approached me about personal training at the gym, she said she had observed me doing full depth squats with seniors over 60, and asked me how could I do something so risky with seniors despite published research and fitness folklore that says, “squatting with your toes past the knees is dangerous.”

Even the average physical therapist, fitness professionals, and people we are supposed to trust with caring for our bodies say, “no squats past parallel or knees past toes.”

How I busted the myth and took action

In some ways it makes sense why people would believe aging simply makes the knees “bad”. I would buy that. But when I started to research while I learned Olympic-lifting, I discovered that knee and hip problems weren’t really an issue until the advent of two things:

1. Sitting a lot during the day
2. The shape of chairs.

Sitting isn’t a problem, toddlers do it all the time. So what happens to us that makes sitting a problem later?  We started putting children in chairs at school to train to be factory workers who sit in chairs for long chunks of the day without moving.

One aspect of the problem began with people sitting in chairs for factory work in the early 1900’s. Gradually, people lost the ability to bend their knees without feeling “pain”. This pain generally comes from not bending the knees regularly, and these people were the participants in these studies! Their knees were not used to being at anything other than a 90 degree angle – similar to how our bodies look when we sit in a chair.

And that’s why we are taught to squat that way in modern Personal Training certification books. The studies for this evidence were conducted on people who sat on chairs. So the myth of not squatting knees past the toes originates from a negative adaptation we created for ourselves. And now this is common knowledge discussed by the average person.

Social Proof and Eating My Own Medicine

Even after getting my Personal Training certification, my real life experiences of squatting conflicted with the research literature and the methods of my co-workers in the commercial gym I worked at.

I began to see this myth busted when I training in Olympic Weightlifting, which was an underground sport until CrossFit made it popular again. CrossFit was the first experience I had squatting with weight or my knees passing my toes. Even though I had youth on my side, I saw it with my own eyes and it blew my mind. I saw adults over 40 years old ALL doing some form of a squat. Squats with kettebells, barbells overhead, or even just their own weight.

In fact, I began to research Olympic-style Weightlifters from the 1900’s that squatted with knees past toes before the advent of chairs. It was normal for people to squat or “deep knee bend” with weights and they did this to maintain healthy knees for leaping and bounding.

The “Deep Knee Bend” featured as a part of the “Bodybuilding and Muscle Developing Exercises” pamphlet issued by the Milo Bar-Bell Company in 1915 (7). Used with permission from the H.J. Luther Stark Center Ottley R. Coulter Collection.

What’s interesting is that although common folklore says “oh man, weightlifting looks dangerous”, it is statistically the lowest injury rate of any sport available. Much lower than soccer, basketball, and football – which all report ACL tears as the norm. (See footnotes.)

Squatting made my knees feel better than ever. And my knees never exploded and I never had surgery. I have never iced my knees either. 

In fact, I could do extreme things with my knees and I wouldn’t even flinch because I had prepared them for odd positions ahead of time – and I did this by gradually loading myself with weights. And I’m not special, in terms of body mechanics. I did all this with slow-progressions in my training.

When I started exploring training methods outside the Weightlifting world in 2017, I came across the Split Squat. I never thought about them much, until I came across this version of the Escalator Split Squat. If you recall my desire to do the Front Splits and getting bendy, apparently this movement was a basic one that could help with that.

The Escalator Split Squat is a halfway point in challenging the biggest fitness myth that just won’t die.

But here’s the payoff. Your knees will not explode. They will be best friends with your ankles and hips.

It will make your hips more flexible if you’ve been sitting for long periods of time. It will also strengthen your knees to be able to handle odd positions you will encounter in life like during basketball or hiking. It will even help your balance in yoga poses.

All in one movement. Yeah, it’s that simple and effective.

It is meant to harmonize the ankles, knees, and hips so you can run wild like a kid in the grass. You can ski without feeling like something is going to snap suddenly and leave you stranded. So you can move without doubt and trust that your body can handle shifting shapes.

When you give this a try your knees and hips will thank you. It might even help you finally figure out what those low-back pains are telling you as well. That’s also what the Pigeon Squat will do for you.

More next time on the Pigeon Squat,

Brandon

P.S. Tell me about your relationship with your knees. How well do you guys get along now, and what do you want for your future?