Why You’re Stiff, Tight, and in Pain — and How to Move Right Again

In this video, I'm going to talk about how proper mechanics and programming can make it so that you are indestructible and never have to worry about pain again. And I'm going to show you how to do it with a broomstick. Hi, I'm Glenn Dawson, a functional trainer here at Reset U Fitness. And with this broomstick, we can identify all of your muscular imbalances. If you haven't seen that video on muscular imbalances, it's basically a tug-of-war game on your joints and ligaments. Once we've identified those, and we've got them corrected a little bit, then it becomes a mechanic issue and a firing issue and a sequence issue or programming. So what am I talking about? Let's hypothetically say— put your broom aside for a second— you're just doing an air squat. You put your hands forward, you squat, and you have a perfect squat, and you come up. Now with this perfect squat, mechanically there's muscles that are flexible enough for you to drop down below parallel, and then when you get to the bottom, your glutes and hamstrings take over the weight and the load, and they transfer it to your quads as you get higher. So it starts off as a quad dominant movement, transfers to a glute movement here, goes to a glute movement again, and then goes back to a quad movement. Now that Firing sequence happens on every single muscle. It happens too if your knee goes in or if your knee goes out, and all that programming creates stability. Now, why would you need stability? Let's hypothetically say you were cutting in soccer and you cut and there was no stability, or this outer glute didn't fire and the knee collapsed in, or you were going to go pick up an object off the ground and your lower back is supposed to hold in place and your glutes are supposed to do the work and you lost your lower back and your glute turned off, you're going to have a huge lower back injury. So you want to have your body fire in the right sequence at the right time to create stability. So all of that being said, at ResetU, we do a simple broomstick squat test where you put the broomstick over your head and squat 3 times to the front and then 3 to the side. And with this, we can see every single muscular imbalance in your body and then program your workouts. So let's just say hypothetically, for instance, you have lower back pain. Pain in the lower back usually comes from tight hips. So on your test, you would squat and the broom would go forward a lot. It wouldn't stay straight up and down. It would tilt forward because those hips are tight. Now, once we've loosened the hips, we have to program how to actually get those to fire. So in your workout, we would focus on 3 different things. The first thing we would do is activate the weaker muscle. For the person that's bending forward, the weaker muscle is the glutes and hamstrings. All of your weight shifts forward to your quads and you don't use your glutes and hamstrings to the bottom of the motion. So we can identify and say, hey, this person specifically is quad dominant. You may be quad dominant yourself. Most people are. We need to activate their glutes and hamstrings. So the first thing in your workout program would be an isometric hold of a glute bridge. A lot of science behind this, but the isometric hold is so that everything stays in place. That's step one, is get everything to stay in place. So you would do a glute bridge for a long hold and you would hold this glute bridge for like 30 seconds until complete failure and exhaustion. And you would do this at the beginning of your workout. So you would always want to program your workouts with your weakest muscle groups first. And something we do in every single reset you program, because at the beginning of the workout, your body is— and your blood is fully oxygenated. Your body isn't exhausted, you're not tired, and you can tear more muscle fiber. So that way we can catch those weaker muscles up to your stronger muscles. So we're not going to work your stronger muscles till the very end when you're already tired. So that way you have that perfect tug-of-war game. Now once we've done that, the next step would be to mobilize the hips, right? So once we know those glutes are activated and they're holding, then we can throw in a Spider-Man like this and mobilize those hips, stretch the hips out, create mobility. So then in your workout, we've done a couple of things. We've activated your weaker muscles, got them to hold on and pull. Then we mobilize the hips. Your squat test, if you did it right now, would already be better. Than what you started with. And that's the key to a good workout. You shouldn't leave feeling like you got hit by a bus or that your joints are achy. At the end of your workout, you should feel better than when you left, but sore everywhere. That's good. If you're sore everywhere, we did our job. Now, last but not least, we would go back to that squat. Now that we've got the weaker muscles to activate and we got you opened up, your squat should change. Now, With better range of motion, you can actually use the depth that you're supposed to because we open up your hips. Your glutes and hamstrings are turned on and activated, so you're actually using them in the squat. Now we can practice neurologically timing when your glutes should fire, so that way every single time you put in a repetition of these squats, you're creating new neurological patterns for when you're not thinking, for subconsciously. This is perfect for when you go pick up a heavy object. Your muscles will already fire the way that they're supposed to. They won't turn off, turn down, and create an injury. Or let's hypothetically say that you had an imbalance in your shoulder and you were bench pressing and that elbow went up, created a lot of tension here in the shoulder. Well, now that we've created the neurological firing in the right sequence, you don't have to worry about that. It gives you the most confidence every single time you lift and everyday activities. So that same analogy where this person's cutting, they can cut, put all the weight here, and shift their weight back. Whatever it is that you're doing in life, if your body is programmed correctly, it basically gives you the invincibility pill to make you unstoppable, make you bulletproof. Now guys, if this was something that was helpful for you, make sure you subscribe because you don't want to miss what we do next. And if you haven't done that broomstick evaluation I was telling you about earlier, where you squat with the broomstick over your head 3 times to the front, 3 to the side, in the comments of this video we created a PDF for you to do it at home. Do your own evaluation and get started on your own reset protocol. See ya!