64 to 77% of Americans experience pain that returns after treatment. The culprit is often muscular imbalance from prolonged sitting, which pulls joints out of alignment. Three corrective movements—hip-flexor lunge, Spider-Man stretch, and glute bridge—can address the root cause.
Ever wonder why pain just keeps coming back? At ResetU, we see thousands of clients who are complaining about how they would go to the chiropractor, the doctor, get injections, and the pain would return. Well, in fact, the CDC stated that 64 to 77% of Americans deal with pain and then have it return after treatment. Today in this video, I'm going to show exactly why that happens. This is one thing that's never being taken care of. It's actually the cause, the root cause of all the pain in the first place. This is exactly what we fix at ResetU. And, you know, reset with our thousands of clients. They never have to deal with the pain ever again. Today we're going to talk about muscle imbalances or muscular imbalances. So imagine this red band here is a muscle. Well, over time, that muscle is going to grow. It's going to stretch, tear, repair, and grow and start pulling on your joints and ligaments. See, as we move, when we walk, our muscles are pulling things out of alignment, just like we're gonna talk about with the back. And I'll show you a couple of stretches and workouts for you to fix it as well. So imagine this muscle over years and years and years of time develops and becomes stronger than the opposite side. Well, now you've got a tug-of-war game going on with the muscles. Each side is pulling. That moves the joint out of alignment and creates friction. That friction gives the pain response. The pain response is basically like a check engine light for your car going off. Now, as we know, when your check engine light goes off in your car, you have to take it to the dealership, get it fixed automatically. It's the same thing with the pain response. Pain is a human's way of telling us, this is the check engine light, you gotta fix it. It's a great thing. Pain is an indicator to tell you that something is wrong. Now let's talk specifically about the lower back. What's most common— see, we are hunter-gatherers, we're supposed to be walking around hunting and gathering, right? Hunting, gathering, picking, whatever hunting and gathering looks like. What it doesn't look like is sitting in a desk in kindergarten all the way through college, then getting a desk job and just sitting on a computer hunched over, rolled forward. This creates muscular imbalances. Now, the most common one that we see here at Reset U Fitness is an anterior pelvic tilt, or just your pelvis tilts forward and down. See, your pelvis is like your center of gravity. As you walk, it's supposed to shift and sway. and it's supposed to stay level. But what happens is over time from sitting in a chair, those muscles in front get super tight and start to pull you down and forward, and the ones in the back stop activating. This is also the reason for pancake booty as we age, because they're just not activating anymore. So as you can see in this position, which is, I know, obviously dramaticized, there's a lot of tension on the lower back. These lower back and the spine, if you want to stand straight up, it creates a lot of tension on every single one of these vertebrae, creating the pain response telling you the check engine light's on. So I'm going to show you 2 stretches and the activation to fix it. Now, this being said, every single person's pelvis is different, so the treatment is most likely going to be different too, and it has to be on an individual level. That's why at ResetU we do this weekly assessment called an overhead squat test, which we can talk about later, but that will tell our fitness professionals which way your pelvis is out of alignment and how to activate it, which muscle should be activated, which leg is stronger than the other, so that the program is specifically customized to you so we can guarantee it to work long term. So these are just basically cookie-cutter stretches that hopefully work for you and should. It's like the, the 80/20 approach. So the first one we're going to do is just a hip flexor lunge. You want to make sure your knee is padded. If your body ever feels pain What's going to happen is it's going to lock up and we want your body to release. You want to make two 90-degree angles, put your arms above your head, and then shift your hips down and forward just like this. As you do this, do not lean back and hyperextend your back. Keep your back straight up and down, and you should feel a stretch here in this hip flexor region. Do this for about 30 seconds and then rotate over the side. And obviously we don't know which side of the pelvis is tilted more, so do both sides. The next one we're going to do is called a Spider-Man stretch. Now for this one, you want to kind of open up at a diagonal angle from this heel to this knee, and then begin with lowering your body weight and pushing this knee externally, which just means away from your center line. You're going to push the knee away and look away about 3 times. And what this is doing is basically warming up the back of that hip capsule. Then take your elbow, place it right next to the heel, and sit here for about 30 seconds. Now, if in your case you're only getting this far, that's completely okay. You just want to get to where you can comfortably manage. The next thing you want to do is we want to activate the glute muscles that have been turned off for so long. So what we're going to do is a glute bridge. It's a very simple exercise. You just lay on your back, drive through your heels, lift your hips up, and hold your glutes and your hips up. You want to do about 3 of these for 30 seconds and just activate the back part of your hips. And what this is doing is strengthening the hold on those lower spine, lower vertebrae, hip area, part of your core. Now, if any of those movements cause pain or more pain than what you're dealing with right now, don't do it. That means you need something much more specific than what we're giving you right now. This is just a cookie-cutter helpful thing for most people that have that anterior pelvic tilt from sitting at a desk or having a desk job, going through college, and not being a hunter-gatherer. Now, if this was helpful, make sure you share it, and then be on the lookout for more Reset U videos.
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