Bill Daniels shows how to test if an exercise helps your pain using the AIM system: assess your movement, do a quick drill like tracking your eyes while moving your head, then measure again. If pain drops or range improves in 30 seconds, keep it. If not, try something else.
How do you know if the exercises you're doing are helping you or hurting you? There's a real simple way to find out, and I'm going to show you right now. Hi, I'm Bill from Beyond Fitness, and I've been helping people for over 20 years overcome their pain and physical limitations so that they can get back to their normal, healthy lifestyle. So the system I want to show you today is called AIM, but before we get to AIM, I want to back up a little bit and just explain to you how your body works. Our body is a bunch of systems that work together. Your cardiovascular system, for example, Your lymphatic system, and your nervous system. What ends up happening is if you think about movement, right, you're— we are a skeleton that moves. That skeleton moves when the muscles contract and relax. That's the muscular system. Now, the muscular system doesn't work on its own. The muscles contract when they get signals from the nerve. The nerve doesn't decide when you move. That comes from the brain, the CEO of the nervous system. So the brain is really in charge of everything. And when we really dive into pain science, we start to see that if something hurts, say it's your lower back, it's not your lower back that actually hurts, it's the representation of your lower back in your brain. So there's a whole system that works its way through from the skin into the tissues all the way up to the brain, and if things aren't flowing correctly, you're going to end up with Perception of pain or stiffness or immobility. There could be all kinds of different things that happen. Pain is the most common one that we see. So oftentimes people will come to me and they'll say, oh, my lower back's been hurting. I went to the doctor, they did x-rays, MRIs, and they said there's nothing wrong and it still hurts. What's happening? Well, what's happening is that the system from the lower back all the way up to the brain is malfunctioning somehow, and we can fix that by giving the brain different inputs. So we experience everything that's all around us, right? We see things, we hear things, we even have our vestibular system here that tells our brain which way gravity's pulling us. We have what we feel, and even taste and smell can play a role in pain to some extent. What we want to do is take those Things that are coming into the body, let the brain interpret it, and then give us an output. The pain, what you're getting now, is an output. We can change that output by giving it better inputs. We need to figure out what inputs aren't getting to the brain correctly, do the appropriate drills so that they, they do get there correctly, and then from there we can start to heal or fix that pathway. So that everything comes to the brain smoothly, and then your brain can interpret it properly, and then you stop getting that pain response as an output. So this is where the AIM system comes in. It stands for assess, implement, and measure. What's great about working with the nervous system for this kind of thing is that you will get immediate results within seconds when you get the right thing. So what we do is we assess. If we're talking about lower back pain, We're going to talk about how does it move. Can we twist? Can we bend and extend? Can we bend laterally? There's all these different movements. If it's the shoulder, we want to think about internal and external rotation. You know, does it go abduction, adduction, all the different movements? Whatever it is that's bothering you, you want to assess it. Get an idea of how confident are you moving in that position? How far can you go before it hurts? How quickly can you go into that movement? These are all data points for you to measure when we do an input to see if the result is positive or negative. So, let's just use the lower back as an example, and let's just say if someone's in pain and they bend over and they can only get to here and they're like, oh, it hurts. Okay? What we want to do is say, okay, what's happening here? What are the other systems involved? The vestibular system. is one that's a big player in the spine. So we may do some vestibular exercises to see if it helps improve the back. Why do we do that? We do that because the vestibular system tells the brain, hey, this is the way gravity's pulling us, and as a result your brain says, okay, we're going to tighten the muscles around the spine so that we don't fall over. Well, if the vestibular system's giving it faulty information and says gravity's pulling us this way, you're going to try and compensate that subconsciously so that you don't fall over. Then the other systems get involved. Your visual system says, well, listen, this isn't straight up. We're going to fall over this way. So then your brain tries to correct muscles to get you that way, and next thing you know, you've got a really twisted up spine. You might have some difficulty moving. You might have some pain there. There's nothing really physically wrong with you. It's just that the tone in the muscles is not appropriate for where you are. So, what we want to do is start to address that. So, we will try a drill. After we've assessed, we go to the implement stage where we pick a vestibular drill. So, one of the common ones might be a VOR. So, you've got your visual target right in front of you and you're going to keep your eyes on it and you're going to turn your head left and right or up and down to stimulate part of the vestibular system. You may have a target that you're looking at. Right now, I'm looking directly at the camera and you might bounce. This is a common one that also helps the vestibular system. There's many, many drills and exercises for the vestibular system that you can do, and we just have to figure out the right one that works for you. And that's where the measure stage comes in. So we have now assessed, we try a drill. Let's say we did the horizontal VOR, and we do that for about 30 seconds, and then we measure, we reassess. And now you see if you can go further, If you can move with more confidence, if there's less pain, all these different things, if you move into it quicker, all of these things are an indication that that was a positive thing for you. Sometimes you're going to do these drills and get no response, and sometimes you're going to get even worse, and we know that those are not the drills for you right now. Those are something we want to be able to do at some point, but your nervous system is just not ready for it yet. So we're going to go through a list of 3 or 4 exercises. We're going to find some that make you feel a little bit better. We can incorporate those into your warm-up before you exercise. We can also sometimes incorporate these drills into actual exercises. So, for example, if we're finding that up and down works for you, we may have a visual target when we do a squat. And now we're still moving up and down, we're going at a slower rate, but we're still keeping— by using the eyes and the vestibular system together while we move up and down, We're now still stimulating that part of the vestibular system in the appropriate way. So that's just one example of how AIM works. I use it with all of my clients whenever we're trying to figure out if something's good or bad. It's a great tool to give you instant feedback, and it can make a huge difference in your day-to-day life because as the day goes on, you may say, oh, my back's starting to bother me. I know that if I do this one drill, it starts to feel a little bit better for a while, and you can just immediately do it no matter where you are because usually— You don't need a lot of equipment. If you're interested in more of this stuff, I did write this book called Rewiring Pain. It's available on Amazon. I will put the link in the description below, and you can get more information about how all of this works, the thought process. There's a ton of stuff in here about vestibular stuff, visual stuff, standard exercises that you can do at the gym, all kinds of different things. It covers a lot of stuff. So if you're interested, if you're interested, check that out. And until next time, live healthy.
Stop Stretching Your Neck. Try This Instead (It Might Improve Your Vision Too)
