Today we are going to talk about motion. More specifically, we are going to talk about how to use motion in its various forms to nourish your mind, body, and overall well-being.
At times that motion is going to seem very slow, like when we are controlling our breath to alter our physiological states of being. Other times that motion is going to seem fast, like when we’re getting our heart rate up to circulate blood and vital nutrients throughout our body.
Sometimes that motion is going to seem very small (almost imperceptible), like when we’re talking about the ways that we create and send various signals (like pain) throughout our body. Other times that motion is going to involve big, full-body movements that take our muscles and joints through their new (and fuller) ranges of motion.
Above all, we are going to be changing the way that we move (and think about movement) in order to affect positive change in ourselves. Whether that change is overcoming years of imbalance, rehabbing an old nagging injury, embarking on a fitness journey for the first time, or reaching new performance levels as we enter older stages of our lives, it is my hope that you will leave here more empowered to take the lead on improving your body and reclaim the joy that can come with healthy, pain-minimized movement.
Before we get into all of that, I want to tell you a little about myself. My name is Dodge McIntosh and I am going to be your partner and your teacher in all of this. Like nearly everyone that is drawn to this kind of work, my motivations are *almost* entirely selfish — I want to feel better. I don’t want to feel stiffness or discomfort in one of my ankles more than the other. I don’t want to feel persistent and sometimes debilitating pain in my hips and low back. I don’t want my left shoulder to be clicky and the right side of my neck to be tight. I don’t want to feel “off” or like something is out of place on many days.
But here we are.
Things weren’t always this way — things used to move better. Over the course of my life, my body has taken me to some pretty incredible places and enabled me to do some unforgettable things. In high school, I was an above-average basketball player and dedicated hours of my life every day to the work and fun of improving my game. In college, I took up weightlifting and discovered new ways to work my body and took my strength to levels I didn’t think were possible for my frame. In the summer of 2016, my dad and I thru-hiked the entire Pacific Crest Trail, 2,650 life-changing miles from Mexico to Canada, a feat that had only been a daydream at one point. Throughout all of that, my body (like many, but not all, young bodies) held up great. No major injuries, no structural imbalances, nothing held back.
There are a lot of times that I lie to myself and say that I can still remember what that feels like. That I can remember in my body what it feels like not to consciously think about how to walk. Or what it feels like to jump into a new activity without fear that it will aggravate an existing condition. Or what it feels like to wake up in the morning and not immediately start taking inventory of what is sore or tight or stiff or needs attention.
But the truth is that all of those things have largely been my normal routine and emotions over the last 6-ish years. It’s true that I’ve continued to do things over that time — I’ve logged hundreds of miles on my feet in the mountains and thousands of miles on the bike around San Diego, among other things that still look good on paper. But in my body, things felt off. It felt more like I was dragging my body along for the ride and not like it was a seamless celebration of all the things I loved doing.
At some point around that 6-year mark ago, I developed a pretty bad muscle imbalance in my hips. The more I’ve grown in this journey, the more I’ve realized that the exact details of how the imbalance developed are less important, but basically, it involved using one leg to stabilize and the other to kick every day for multiple miles at a time every day. As we’ll learn, chronic overuse like this is one of the really common ways that a muscle or structural imbalance can occur (another being acute injury itself). While imbalance can frequently be enough on its own to cause pain, it can also make you much more likely to suffer specific, acute injuries. When we talk about acute injuries, we mean something that happens suddenly, such as a bad fall, twisting a joint, or being in an accident. Many times we’re not even aware of the overuse injury until one of those bad falls, twists, sprains, or strains happens. And that’s how it was with me when one day I got off the train for my daily commute and POP — a sharp pain in my low back and down my left leg. Fast forward to more attempted training sessions (with nothing changed) and more of the same. Eventually, during a routine pickup basketball game, I also had one of the worst (and first) bad ankle injuries I’ve ever experienced.
The overuse injuries and the acute injuries started to pile up. SI joint dysfunction, sprained ankles, and chronic pain were some of the names of things that I was tagged with as I sought to better understand what was going wrong. Although I didn’t know or realize it at the time, depression and anxiety also attached themselves along with the other seen hurdles I was facing. I was no stranger to lying on the floor of my apartment or bedroom in hopeless tears or waking up and feeling defeated before the day even began.
To try and alleviate all of this, I tried everything. Physical therapy? Routines from 3 different ones that I stuck to diligently. Chiropractic? Of course — when you can’t figure out what’s wrong with your back, eventually all roads lead there. Reiki? Yes, at that point whatever else I hadn’t tried. Along the way I also spent untold amounts of money on stretching and mobility devices, each time convinced that *that* was the one that would finally solve my one issue with my bad back. Or my “one” bad hip. Or my bad psoas. And in between all of this, I also attempted many of the self-paced fitness programs floating around the internet, with varying amounts of success and setbacks.
Now, I’m not saying that physical therapists, chiropractors, reiki and energy healing, stretching devices, and self-paced fitness programs can’t work or are bad. In fact, I believe quite the opposite — they can all be incredibly helpful tools on the journey to recovery and toward less pain. But crucially for me, they each offered an incomplete view of how to put all of the pieces together, and how to minimize the persistent pain that was a part of my life. For PT, we worked almost entirely on the one “problem hip.” For chiropractic, adjustments with short-term relief became the norm. For reiki, the compassion and empathy my practitioner sent me provided some ease, but I couldn’t see a way to progress it. And for the many, many one-size-fits-all online programs and mobility tools, I had no idea why I was doing the things I was doing and why some things helped and others created flare-ups of my back, hips, etc.
It’s hard to choose where to head next in my personal journey, but maybe we can take a look at when things started to change. In the summer of 2022, after a little bit of powerful plant medicine and a lot of therapy (both can be tremendously helpful in overcoming persistent pain but we’ll talk about that later), I quit my job at the time and went to go do some more backpacking. When I got back, I realized that I had enough money saved up to not have to immediately jump back into the work that I was doing — so I made a commitment to myself — it was time to “figure out” all of the problems that my body was having. To “get better” now and set myself up for a more pain-free life for the rest of my years, however long that might be, because the notion of 50 or 25 or even 5 more years of dealing with things how they were going felt crushing.
Not knowing exactly what next to do, I enrolled in yet another online program. This one was a relatively obscure one called Pain Academy and run by someone who I knew pretty much nothing about named Vinny Crispino. The program caught my eye because of the Instagram teaching that Vinny had produced and how the focus of the program was not himself as some all-knowing master or wild promises of unattainable athletic feats. Instead, the issues that he was talking about seemed mind-blowingly like mine — hiked hips on one side, crooked spines, movements that just felt “off.” All of these ambiguous-sounding things that I had struggled to find help with were suddenly presented in a new and approachable light. I felt seen and I had hope that he would be able to help me.
Ultimately, his approach to resolving these issues with empathy, with gentleness, and with structured functional anatomy and science helped me more than I’ll ever be able to say, and have greatly shaped the way that I like to teach these topics. To this day, if someone wants to get from feeling broken back to a healthy baseline and beyond (and only has that hour max a day to dedicate to working on themselves, and prefers that self-paced approach / schedule), I recommend Pain Academy every single time.
In a certain sense, Vinny actually taught too well. And by that, I mean that like any great teacher, he encouraged me to fly beyond what he was teaching specifically in that program and to develop the knowledge I needed to stand on my own again. The way that he could explain why we were doing the things that we were doing from an anatomy standpoint was transformative. I came to understand why it was important for specific joints to move through their full range of motion, the compounding issues that arise when they can’t, and a marriage of the concept and practice that helped me feel better than I had in years.
After a particularly impactful session, I was lying on the floor and moving into a position that I hadn’t been able to in years. After successfully doing so, a wave of release washed over me that was so powerful that I fell into tears of relief and solidified an idea that had been forming in my head for a long time — I also wanted to help other people feel that redemption. I wanted to help people move better and free themselves from the physical, mental, and emotional shackles of persistent pain.
Luckily, Vinny is an open book during the coaching sessions he hosts and has shared so many of the foundations and resources that helped him grow in this space. One of those resources was the National Academy of Sports Medicine (or NASM) certification on Corrective Exercise Specialization. Here, finally, was a tangible step for me to make this career change a reality. What I didn’t realize was just how much that certification would give me a deeper understanding of human movement and anatomy, to accurately analyze movement patterns, and to identify overactive and underactive muscle groups and compensations.
And so over time, while completing that extensive certification, I started to do Vinny’s very excellent program a little bit less each day and to focus more of my time and physical energy on all of the nuances and issues unique to my body that I was uncovering. I was reading the latest research on understanding how pain works in our body and ways to overcome it with neurological conditioning, including taking courses on breathwork to do so. In short, I was diving all in. And now, being on the other side of that early and impactful part of my journey, I want to share those same helpful principles with others. I want to give you the tools and understanding to take the reigns on your own journey. What I am going to teach is NOT something that is uniquely contrived by me, or is some convoluted approach to wellness that I have developed in secret. Thankfully for everyone involved, I am not a guru. I am just bringing together lots of different research-based information from people a lot smarter than I am in a way that I think will be the best for you.
The things I want to teach are simple on the surface but have implications for your life that go much deeper. We are going to unlearn some things that we thought were true and going to learn some new things that should be taught to every student in every school in the country. We are going to learn about some of the ways that our brain tries to protect us from getting hurt after we experience an injury. We are going to learn how information, both good and bad, moves throughout our nervous system. We are going to learn how manipulating our breath actually triggers physiological and chemical changes in our bodies and minds. We are going to learn about our joints and muscles — why it’s important to be able to move them through a full range of motion, and what happens when we can’t. We aren’t going to remember exactly what it feels like to have the same bodies that we had before — even without injury or imbalance, we’re never the same as we were before. But we are going to learn how to use motion in its various forms as a remedy for many of the things that ail us. And we are going to do all of this in a way that is gentle, that is approachable, and will be memorable for years to come.
Let’s get started.
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