The 8th Rule - From Chronic Pain to Pain Free!

So there is an eighth rule that I didn't include in the original seven rules, and I did that for a couple reasons. The first reason is I need a lot of time to talk about the eighth rule. It can get pretty deep.And the second reason is I like to separate it from the first seven because the first seven are fundamental knowledge in order to get from where we're at to where we want to be. The eighth rule governs movement practice that we're going to do. I find it helpful to separate it from the first seven when I initially talked to people about this.The eighth rule is an acronym that used to be popular among physical therapists, and it is RAIL, R-A-I-L, and it stands for Release, Activate, Integrate, Locomote, and it's the order in which you want to do things so that your nervous system accepts them easily, and then you can get results a lot faster. Our release is important to note. It's primarily talking about fascia.It may feel like your muscle is stuck as you're trying to move through a range of motion, or that you can't use part of the range of motion of your muscle, but if you think about long-term chronic problems, and you think about how your body is guarding the issue, it's not reasonable for your muscle to remain contracted for a very long period of time in order to provide protection to an area of the body. That is very energy intensive, and it will really hamper the use of the muscles around it, and so what happens in your body is when you have the injury or the trauma or whatever your nervous system is trying to protect you from, and it's still in the acute phase like it just happened, the muscle is contracted, and it stays contracted, and so the body, like we mentioned earlier, the fascia is going to support whatever movements the body is doing. It recognizes that this muscle is staying contracted, and so it's going to start to change its structure to hold the muscle in that position or hold the tissue in that position, so the energy the muscle is using can be used somewhere else, and the muscle can relax, but it will stay there, and so those shortened muscle fibers have shortened fascia fibers inside of them because we talked about that the muscle is embedded in fascia, and those fascia fibers are going to essentially reach out and bind onto each other, and so what's going to happen is the muscle initially contracted, and the fascia is going to hold it from the inside from releasing, and so now the body can maintain that position without using the energy of the muscle contraction, and so when we're talking about the release, we're talking about fascia release oftentimes and not muscular release.People, when they're talking about muscles and fascia, often talk about myofascia, which is just both tissues at the same time, but it's going to be very useful when we start working on this, especially with the release, to separate what those tissues are and what they're trying to do because we get to this area where the muscle has handed off its contraction responsibility to the fascia because it wants to maintain a permanent contraction, and so the fascial release is going to be different than if we were releasing a muscle, and it's going to take some time. You can do it with manual therapy. You can do it with massage, but what has to happen is the nervous system has to let go of it.The nervous system has to send a message to it to say, hey, it's okay for you to let go, and then the release itself is going to be very slow. When fascia binds like that and it loses its fluid movement, it changes from a liquid crystal matrix into something that's more like hard plastic, and so that shift back into the liquid crystal matrix will take a little bit of time. Maybe you have felt something like this in a massage, or maybe you can feel it in your own body.For an example, you can take your finger and you can kind of push it into the skin here in between your radius and ulna in your forearm so it won't slide. There's enough pressure so it won't slide, but you're also not pushing that hard, so you want to find the point in which you can push in and then start to move your finger towards your elbow where there's enough pressure so that your skin catches, and then if you just hold it there for a period of time, and if you've never done this, it could be several minutes, you'll start to feel whatever tissue is preventing your finger from sliding, you'll start to feel it let go, and then your finger will slowly shift down your arm, and so that's a way to kind of sense what's happening. You don't have to do that, but it's just to give you an idea of how slow the change is and what you need to allow in your body for the fascial release to happen.When we're talking about this type of dynamic where I'm going to eventually show some movements in future videos about how to get to this point, fascial release has to be subtle. It has to be gentle movement. The nervous system has to be like, I like this, I'm going to accept it, there can't be any resistance, and then when you're talking about releasing fascia too in movement, we're a lot of times looking for rebound.There are 12 different normal lines of fascia in your body. You can imagine like, so we have this three-dimensional net we've mentioned before, grid structure, lattice, and as we move through the normal range of motion in the human body, we get like a tension pulling and contracting over and over again in the fascia, and that will create lines through your fascia that are essentially like giant rubber bands creating tensegrity in the body, and those lines, there's 12 of them, and a lot of them intersect with each other, and there's a bunch of interplay. We'll get into that in the future, but we want to find in the movement looking for release a rebound from one that's like I'm twisting.For example, if you're sitting here twisting, you can twist, twist, twist, twist, and you'll run into a limit, okay, and you can go the other way. You can twist, twist, twist, twist, and run into a limit, so moving like that slowly is not going to give us what we want. We want to move a little bit faster, but softly, and we want to run into the edge, and we want to bounce back to the other edge.We want to find a gentle rebound from fascial line to fascial line, and so we'll talk about this a lot in the movement, and of course, we have to use this. If you watch the video of the first seven rules, we have to use this in conjunction with the spirals, which is a unto itself, and I'll make probably many videos about the spirals in the future. So once we have gotten the release, now we can access the muscle again in the range of motion, but since we're talking primarily about chronic or long-term injuries, that range of motion in the muscle hasn't been used in a very long time, and so using it suddenly or using it at full force suddenly can cause injury.It can cause strain. You can sprain your muscle. You can tear your muscle, and so the activation part is very important after the release.Some of the movements that we do will have a release and activation component in a single movement, so you won't have to separate it, especially in the very beginning when we start talking about how to support the spine, but as time goes on and we get farther and farther into extremities, a lot of times the release is going to happen separate from the activation, so the activation is just how do we start to turn that muscle on and off in that range of motion, and since it hasn't been used in a long time, we have to do that, and we have to figure out how to turn the muscle on consciously because when we want to use it in our real life for the first few times, we're going to have to stop. We're going to have to bring our awareness to the muscle, and we're going to have to turn it on consciously, and we're going to have to be able to support it with the fascia, and so the activation is essentially a re-syncing of movement in that specific area with the fascia and the muscle. Sometimes, a lot of times in the beginning, those first two steps are quite emotionally taxing, and they can be physically taxing, but oftentimes in the very beginning it's not because we're doing subtle things.It's mostly emotionally taxing, and so it's okay to stop there and come back later, and you'll do your release again, get farther into it because we're not going to get through the release completely from start to the end in the very first time we do it, and even if we do, the nervous system might not allow us to keep it all, so as we revisit the release, we might have whatever we've gained, we might have lost like 90% of it, and we have to regain that 90%, and then we move a little bit farther, but as we get deeper into it, it'll go release, activate, and then integrate, and then integrate is a more complex, more dynamic movement where we're practicing getting that activation part integrated with the tissues around it, so it's no longer just how do we activate this, it's now how do we activate this in conjunction with the tissues around it, so that our body creates one contiguous support structure, so oftentimes we're moving into whole body movements, and we are talking about all of the spirals that we mentioned in the previous video in an isometric hold, so oftentimes we're moving into a more dynamic movement, or we're in an isometric hold, and we're talking about how do we become consciously aware of all eight sets of spirals, which were mentioned in the first seven rule video, and we're following another one of those first seven rules, which is that we first ask ourselves how much soft tissue can we activate, and then we ask ourselves how subtle that activation can be, and we want to spread that through our entire body, so the integration phase of the RAIL exercise, or of the RAIL rule can be very long-lasting, you can be working on the integration phase for the rest of your life with chronic pain or mystery pain, but it is something that with time will start to feel really good, so when you do it, it won't be like, ah, I have to do this, it's going to hurt, it's going to be hard work, it's going to be like, I'm going to put myself in this position, and then the pursuit of alignment and activation in the body is going to move you into a positive emotional state, because, and we'll have lots of videos on this, but it's essentially because of that alignment will start to circulate cerebral spinal fluid a lot faster with a pairing of the pelvic floor and the diaphragm function, and that is going to have many videos on it, and so you don't have to worry about the fact that you might be working on the integration phase, while you'll be doing that all four, but the integration phase might become a significant part of your movement routine for the rest of your life. The L locomotion moves us from a dynamic movement, a stationary dynamic movement, or static or isometric hold, like we were just talking about, into the movements we want to do in our life, so almost always we're talking about how do we get this release, then how do we get the activation integration, and how do we move that into walking first, but everyone has different activities and different hobbies or whatever, and so a lot of times from here it starts to branch and becomes extremely specialized, like if you're swimming, the movements from activation integration to how do you do this in swimming, what we're going to work on might be very different from if you're an endurance runner, and we're going to ask ourselves how do we go from the release to the activation to the integration to the endurance running, so you can imagine that the locomotion part of this is where it becomes extremely specialized based on what you want to do in your life, and so it's kind of hard to go into farther detail with that other than just to say when we get to the L we're going to start talking about first how do we get these things into walking, but beyond that then we're going to start to look at really specialized things, and so we're going to talk about how do we move the knowledge from the first seven rules into the locomotion of the movement that you want to do. If you have any questions be sure to ask them below, so from here I'm going to have two different types of videos I'm going to start making.One of those is going to be an educational course on fascia because we need to really start to understand it on a very deep level in order to facilitate faster recovery from what we're working on. The more like we talked about in the video with the seven rules, the more we understand what's happening in our body, the more appropriately we can imagine or visualize it, and that's really important because like we mentioned before the subconscious is going to try to make us move the way we think that we move, so it's going to be very important to learn more and more about the fascia, and so I'm going to have a whole series of videos coming out probably for a very long time about getting deeper and deeper into the fascia and having a better understanding of what it's doing and what it can do, its potential, and so in the description I'll post a link to a resource which is very good to learn about the fascia. You don't need to get it, it's just there if you're looking for a resource to read on your own time.It's the best thing I've ever read about it. The second series of videos I'm going to be releasing is going to be about how do we take this knowledge from the first seven rules and then this eighth rule and how do we apply that to the movements that we want to do, why do we want to do these specific movements in these orders, and then we just start making progress moving forward. Very quickly you should start to feel better.It may be a while before you get full range of motion back or before you get out of pain in that range of motion, but as we mentioned earlier with isometric holds over time, the practice of pairing your diaphragm and pelvic floor, the movement together to support the spine starts to create positive emotional feelings and so that's something that can be encouraging that you can look forward to and like we mentioned earlier in this video, starting with the spine is almost always necessary to create the foundation for whatever we will also move in the body. So if you have any questions, please feel free to ask below. If you like this video and you're looking forward to hearing more about what I'm talking about, please like and subscribe to help support the new channel and get the message out.