In this monologue, Ekemba Sooh (speaking as Akim Busot, owner of Soulcore Fitness) argues that true freedom in life depends on having a free, functional body. He shares his own experience of a severe back injury (compressed L4‑L5 vertebrae and sciatic pain) that halted his ability to train and work, illustrating how loss of bodily freedom limits everyday activities and passions like skiing, hiking, and playing with children. Sooh critiques standard physical‑therapy handouts and generic corrective‑exercise programs as insufficient, advocating a more holistic, osteopathic approach that views structure as dictating function. He outlines practical, low‑time‑commitment routines—15‑30 minutes of targeted stretching and exercises—to maintain balance and prevent degeneration, emphasizing the importance of early, consistent care. A significant portion of the talk focuses on mindset: viewing body care as an empowering, accepted part of daily life rather than a burdensome curse, which fosters self‑reliance as one’s own therapist and trainer. He concludes with a call to action, inviting viewers to explore his channel for more content, contact him for personalized guidance, and consider his services, underscoring that while body freedom requires work, the payoff is a liberated life.
Chapters
Freedom isn't free. A Body edition normally hear the phrase freedom isn't free relative to our country, USA here and democratic type of rule. But I want to talk about in terms of your body. Freedom in your body equals freedom in life. However you want to live your life, your body obviously is an integral part of that. But if your body isn't free, you're now limited in how to live your life. This is especially true for people like myself who are pretty active. They like to do different activities like skiing, hiking, biking, swimming, playing with their kids. You want to use your body because it's a fulfilling activity in your life and you want to keep doing it. I often hear the phrase with people all the time. I. I just want to fill in the blank. Whatever activity they want to do, they're a little frustrated that their body isn't free to do so. But it's because you haven't taken the time to give your body love. So I'm going to talk a little bit about being free in your body, which means free in your life. How's it going? I'm Akim Busot. I'm the owner of Soulcore Fitness and I've been in this field for like 30 years. So I got into the health and fitness field mainly because of a love of using my body and how people could use their bodies to get stronger and do different activities that they love. Like, I love that connection. I've always connected to it. I've done sports all my life. And some of the favorite parts of sports were the off season when I was like running to get faster or more endurance or lifting gets stronger. Like, I really enjoy that process of like using my body and improving. But unfortunately, around early 30s, I hurt my back and I was not able to use my body. So I compressed my L4, L5 vertebra. I got sciatic pain and it was terrible. So I couldn't run, I couldn't lift. I could barely work. At that time. I was just a personal trainer and so I couldn't. It was very difficult for me to even perform my job. And so I got to feel all of a sudden what it felt like to not use my body, to not have a free body. Because having a free body is not obligatory. It doesn't just happen because you want it to keep going. And so I was uninformed at that time as to what it took to keep my body going. I was informed on what people said was good to take care of your body, but it didn't equal success for me in my 30 years, it doesn't equal success for most people. There's a different way of doing it. But I understood that if I want to be free in my body, I need to actively give my body some love, as I call it, with this wonderful body that allows us to live whatever life we want. All the body asks is that we take care of it properly so it can function. Because all that stuff you love to do, all those activities and sports and whatever else, even if it's more passive, like sitting and reading or stuff like that, right. It still taxes your body. We say it damages your body, right? Big or small, it's still damaging. So I can go out and do Olympic lifting type stuff. It's going to damage my body more than sitting down. But prolonged sitting will also damage my body, as we all know. So the body, to allow you to live your life, wants you to take care of it. If you ignore taking care of it or if you put it off, you will eventually not be able to use your body for what you want. I just had a lady come in and she's got massive sciatic pain and she's probably going to have to have her hip replaced. And prior to that, she kind of just powered through those feelings she had in her body. Her body was telling her, hey, something's wrong. And she didn't listen. She kind of do different things. She would either power through it or back off a little bit, or try and do different things, but she never really listened to try and take care of the body. Now she's at a level where, again, like I said, more than likely going to have to get her hip replaced. And that sciatic pain that she has is coming from multiple different places. And then on top of that, the rest of her body is literally twisted. So right now her body isn't free. And she told me all I want to do is hike and bike and all these things. I said, I understand that, but you're at a place now where you can't do those things, where you have to dramatically scale back because your body is acute. It's not free at all. So if you want freedom in your life, you have to do these activities to move yourself forward. So what does it mean to take care of your body, to give it some love? Well, it means to keep it as well as you can the way it's designed and put together. Your body has a specific posture as best. All those tendons, muscles, ligaments and viscera have actions and places they need to be. And the more you can give it Exercises and some treatments to keep it there. The more you keep functioning, you can say you want to keep your body as balanced as possible. So here's good, right here's nice and balanced, fully functioning, living a good life. Wear and tear in life happen and it starts to take us away from that center. If we don't do anything to bring ourselves back to center and keep taxing our body either fast or slow. Eventually he's pulled out of position once it gets all the way to the end. Now you're more in that cute phase, like this lady I was talking about right now. It's very difficult to pull yourself back to that center part. Now you're forced to do things just to keep yourself going, to be able to walk properly, to brush your teeth. Right now you're looking just to survive, not thrive. So you're doing so means that you need to go beyond what we have now that's generally available. Go beyond the half truths you find in gyms about taking care of yourself, like with foam rolling and these different corrective exercises that are out there. Go beyond just getting a handout from a PT that he's given or she's given to everybody else for similar situations to different people. We have to go beyond that. There's a lot more out there. There's a lot more ways you can move your body, a lot more ways you can treat your body to keep yourself in place. For me, that comes down to osteopathy, because osteopathy thinks about that. It says, look, our whole goal here is that your structure dictates your function. Okay, here's all these stretches, exercises and therapies to keep yourself as balanced as possible. Let's combine that with whatever you need, not just a handout to keep yourself there. That's what I found works best. There's a lot more complication involved in that, but I'm trying to break it down as easily as possible. I found that after suffering through going through traditional methods for a while, and once I found this more holistic, integrative complexity type way to address it, got tons of results. And I've given that to hundreds and hundreds of clients as I've gone through my professional career. Most of them come to me the same idea. Here's a handout that PT gave me. Here's what I'm doing. I say, is it working? I say, it worked maybe for a little bit, but now it's not working. And they just do it because they think they need to. Okay, well, we should want more of that. Because if we want freedom in our life, we need freedom in our body. We can't just do activities that waste time and don't move us forward. So I learned that lesson and people who've gone through my program, who've been successful have learned that lesson that's allowing the body to be free. So now it comes a question, well, how much do you need to do it? Well, well, if you catch, if you do before anything happens, not a lot, 15 minutes a day or every other day, maybe 30. Just enough to keep your body balanced. So whatever parts of your body use most, you do some sort of stretching for it. For areas of your body becoming compressed, you do some exercises for it. For whatever you need to do, you do that. But now if you allow yourself to go further down, you need to take some time. It's going to come down to your mindset as to when you go through this. Do you view this as a curse on you, Some sort of unnatural obligation that you have to do for yourself to bring yourself back? If you view it that way, then it's going to be torture. And also you're going to limit how much success you get. If you view it as like an acceptance, like, okay, this is what I have to do because of where I'm at or because I want to do these things, then it becomes part of your routine. Now you're like, okay, I'm doing these things because I want to be this person, right? I'm making a choice to be this person and not succumbing to the situations that happen to me. It's a very big choice. I can't explain to you how important that is to do so, because I've seen people derail themselves very quickly into that negative mindset. Oh, I don't want to do this, it's going to take too much time. Why is this happening to me? Okay, I mean, you're an adult, you have a choice to do that. Or you can say, okay, not great, I'm in this situation, but let me do these things to bring myself out. But again, if you can catch it before, if you could just integrate it right away, like if I was in my 20s, I can import this self into my 20 year old self and I got into this program right away, I more than likely would never end up hurting my back. That's a different conversation in terms of where I am now. But the earlier you can start this, the better. So if you take this mindset of acceptance, if you take this mindset of working with your body to Give it love. You become empowered because now when you find out what your body needs to stay balanced, to stay free, you have the potential to do it yourself. You now are your best therapist. You're your best trainer. You, which is the way it should be, is if you see a therapist or trainer, maybe you're going to therapist once a week, once a month, maybe you're going to a trainer or a class two, three times a week. There's a lot of time in between, there's a lot of time in between to give your body what you need, what you have your body subjected to, whatever's going to happen in your life, if you want to be empowered, taking this stance, realizing that freedom isn't freeing your body, accepting it and doing what you need to do is an amazing process that will open up your world to a whole new you. If you want more information on this holistic method, well, dive into this channel more. Right. I'll link another video here for you, but then just go through the different videos and kind of get an understanding on what I'm talking about. If you see my videos or this sparked some attention to you, if you and you want to have a conversation, then in the description below, I've got a link to where you can reach out and talk to me personally. And let's have a conversation about where you're at, where you want to go, your sticking points. I'll give you information no matter what. And if I see you're a good fit, I'll offer my services to you, but no obligation. But freedom is not free in your body. It takes work. It takes you intentionally doing something for your body to keep it free. But the outcome is you now have a free life. So you have a choice. I hope you choose what's best for you. Have a great day.
