How To Never Have Back Pain Again, Starting Right Now

How To Never Have Back Pain Again, Starting Right Now Medium
https://medium.com/@pspfrench/how-to-never-have-back-pain-again-starting-right-now-41d9362a4e7
5/28/15 8:42 AM
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How To Never Have Back

Pain Again, Starting
Right Now
Welcome to the promised land.
MY STORY BEGINS FOUR YEARS AGO. IT BEGINS SOME TIME

after Wired founding editor Kevin Kelly held the rst Quantied Self
Meet-up at his home in Pacica in 2008 but before 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.
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First, a disclaimer: Im going to assume that you have back pain or know
someone who does. Im from the UK, where 8/10 people have bouts of lower
back pain. Thats a lot. What Im 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
dierence 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. Its worth nding out if it can help you
too.
The marker Id like to lay down is this: If you struggle with the sort of non-specic
back pain that the doctor might give you an aspirin for, youve come to the right
place. If youre an athlete who struggles with restrictive muscle patterns, youve
come to the right place. If youve ever been diagnosed with a supposedly structural
condition such as scoliosis, sciatica or a herniated disk, youve come to the right
place. If you feel like you need a massage, youve come to the right place (and will
never need a massage again).
If youve tried everything else, youve come to the right place.
Pain By Numbers
A paper published by the National Academies Press in 2011 put the annual
cost of pain (dened as headache, abdominal pain, chest pain, and back pain)
at somewhere between $560 to $635 billion. Thats 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 doesnt take great insight to work out what causes your back pain. There are
many dierent ways of explaining the epidemic, but this works well.
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Desk works a very recent development in the big scale of human history. So
are cars, aeroplanes, thick-wedged shoes and everything else that doesnt
belong in The Jungle Book. Heres a quick Google Trends search for lower back
pain. Yeah. Ouch.
My back pain began, as youd 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 selfawareness, 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 x me? How was it that weve 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 o.
Mend It Like Beckham
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Mend It Like Beckham

The reason that I found the answer that I had begun to think didnt exist is
simple. Soccer. You see, I really LOVE playing soccer.
And because, in my late 20s, I didnt want to give up playing just because my
body was acting like a brat, I eventually found the answer.
To tell you the truth, Id 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. Thats the day I found the answer. I didnt know it at the time, but I
was about to owe Twitter big time.
s://twitter.com/m_grind
y/statuses/17937205697
Mike Grindy
@m_grindy
Follow
RT @somaticliving: Win a free 1-1 Hanna Somatic session Somatics gave me back my life, find out how it could help
you http://bit.ly/a6ILRa
5:43 AM - 7 Jul 2010
CLICK.
Mikes link led me through to the website of former professional footballer
Jonathan Hunt. As a sports fan, the rst thing you do when you read about a
player youve never heard of is type their name into YouTube.
I found this video.
Its from 1996.
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tch?v=S5gkIG_07tc
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Back to his website. This is an excerpt:

After years of striving to nd freedom of movement following a serious back and
pelvic injury sustained whilst playing professional football, Jonathan Hunts
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 ve years away from the game he so dearly loves,
Jonathan has restarted his playing career at a semiprofessional level for AFC
Hornchurch in the Ryman Premier Division. Jonathan is now training and playing
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games with greater comfort and ease of movement at 39 than he was in his mid to
late twenties.
Id never heard of Hanna Somatics before, but this was the sort of story that
required further investigation. What happened next felt like a miracle. Im
going to tell you all about it, but rst things rst.
In order to understand how to become pain free, you have to understand what
causes it in the rst 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 tness book called Becoming a Supple Leopard. Rogan asked Starrett about
the title.
You dont see the leopard activating its glutes or warming up or prepping. Its just
AWESOME. So why the hell dont you have full physical capacity? Why are you in
pain? The resting state of the human being should be pain free. Youre designed to be
110. Whats going on? Its because you suck at moving. Youre 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 rst momentum for this post.
Starrett had articulated in just ten words what Id tried and failed to explain to
so many people. But Starretts software analogy works. Its simple:
1. Pain occurs when muscles become contracted (through stress or
trauma)
2. Your brain controls your muscles
3. To fully resolve muscular pain, you have to engage your brain
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This scientic reality bridges the gap between quick x 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 Hunts website turned out to
be a catalogue of movement re-education exercises. These exercises use the
brains 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 its nothing new.
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tch?v=cFTCKYrpsHM
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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 rst thing you did this morning? Was it some downtime with the coolest
thing youll 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.
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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 brains conscious control.
Applying force is not going to change that.
Instead, you have to involve the brain through movement. Heres an
alternative. Heres THE alternative to stretching that really works.
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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.
Dont Miss The Golden Moments
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Who can put a price on glory?

They say youre a long time retired in the sporting world. Anyone whos given
up playing a game they love because their body said no will tell you that. But it
doesnt have to be this way.
Before meeting Jonathan, Id seriously considered giving up playing football.
Id had some injuries. Id ruptured a tendon in my shoulder, blown both ankles
out, a broken leg. My body just didnt feel how it used to. It didnt respond to
my brain the way I wanted it to.
Training and playing wasnt fun anymore. It felt like a struggle.
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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 didnt play. That I did, and was able to share the glory with my
teammates is because of Somatics.
Dont 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 dicult to avoid the bad type. Our ability to cope with stress will
separate those who ourish from those who wither.
Stress, as the experience of lab rats everywhere has repeatedly testied, is a sign that
a living thing is growing increasingly unt 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 buttery-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 blearyeyed, 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 dierent
modern world. Challenges are everywhere: overwork, sedentary living, toxic foods,
social chaos and habitat destruction surround us. This is what I call The Primates
Predicament.
And now were suering. Our bodies are suering with lifestyle diseases, our minds
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are stressed, our spirits are confused. And our primitive, habitual responses just
arent working. What we need is a practice, not just to alleviate our suering, 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, Id been watching an episode of The Random
Show, in which the Silicon Valley inuencers Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose
exchange insights, books, gadgets, hobbies and F-bombs. I love that show.
In that episode, which Ive embedded below ( just hit play and youre within
ten seconds of the right place) Ferriss mentioned that he had been involved in
an app designed to help people with behavioural modication. I found the app
and started to log my daily somatic exercises.
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://youtu.be/gHaMAlvzT
pM?t=17m46s
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Lift made Somatics a habit. That

sounds straightforward enough,
but anyone whos ever tried to set
o on a path with good intentions
knows how dicult it can be to
develop new habits that stick.
Lift just works. Its an elegant,
eective willpower hack that
turns good intentions into real-world achievements. Now, I use Lift for all
sorts of things. I use it for ossing my teeth and for learning German vocab.
Others use it to lose weight or start conversations with strangers.
Its the ultimate self-improvement app.
The premise is very simple. You sign up for a habit and every day you check
in once youve completed it. You nd yourself loathe to break a successful
streak, so you develop great habits. You cant 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. Its got a built-in
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support system.
uantied Self Side Note:

y Nike+ pace trend data
ndicates that Im getting
quicker, despite running
less. With Somatics, my
body is working more
eciently.
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 whos 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
dont more people know about Somatics? I have a strong theory about this,
but thats 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 civilisations stress-frazzled apex:
Know Thyself
For more information about Jonathan Hunt and Somatics, visit painfreefootball.com
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Paul French
5/28/15 8:42 AM
Follow
@pspfrench
Published on Feb 19, 2014. All rights reserved by the author.
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How To Never Have Back

MY STORY BEGINS FOUR YEARS AGO. IT BEGINS SOME TIME

Why Did This Happen?

Mend It Like Beckham

Mend It Like Beckham

Back to his website. This is an excerpt:

How Did This Happen?

A Primer In Sensory Motor Amnesia

Sorry about that.

Stretching vs. Somatics

Pulling on a tight area and expecting it to naturally lengthen is wishful

Dont Miss The Golden Moments

Who can put a price on glory?

Dont Avoid Stress, Handle It

Making Somatics A Habit With Lift App

Lift made Somatics a habit. That

uantied Self Side Note:

Together, Somatics and Lift App

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