Ep 269 – Why Everything Hurts When You Lift

Mobility, flexibility, and stability are often overlooked until pain or injuries force them into the spotlight…but they can make the difference between years of productive training and chronic setbacks.

In this episode of Muscles by Brussels Radio, Dani and Giacomo discuss the key differences between these three concepts, why movement quality matters for every lifter, and how small amounts of mobility work can improve performance, reduce injury risk, and keep you training longer.

They also share personal experiences with chronic pain, CrossFit, bodybuilding, rehabilitation, and practical strategies for incorporating corrective exercises into even the busiest training schedule.

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TRANSCRIPT

[Dani] Welcome back to another episode of Vegan Proteins Muscles by Brussels Radio. My name is Giacomo. And I’m Dani.

And welcome to the show. This is awesome. I love this.

Ben hijacked the whole podcast and it used to be this setting and it used to be us. And I love that he’s leading the man in the ship now and leading the conversation and all that. But like, this is old school.

This is the way it used to be. Just you and me over here in our own little quiet little nook. But it’s been a while since we’ve recorded an episode like this.

[Giacomo] I don’t even remember.

[Dani] I think you called that. We have a guest over here. You can’t see him, but he’s scurrying around.

Every single time we come into this office, our cat wants to come in. So we just decide to leave the door open. He comes and goes as he pleases.

I think I want to first say thank you all for continuing to tune in and listen. You were the reason why we do this. And we have a lot of cool stuff to talk about.

I don’t typically like to dig right into the subject.

[Giacomo] It is just always so fun for me when Giacomo does the intro for me to just sit here quietly while he rambles on about nothing. Not that thanking you guys for listening is nothing. Giacomo, what have you been up to lately?

[Dani] Why are you asking that question? I’m boring. I’m not going to have something exciting to say.

We were at a bodybuilding show this weekend. Yes, we were. Yeah, we were.

Alex placed third. He killed it. His posing improved exponentially.

We got to see that post-competition thing when you’re done with your season and it’s time to eat the donut. The look on his face. Oh my gosh.

[Giacomo] Yeah, it was cool. Alex is my client. We’ve been working together for years.

He looked incredible. Just incredible. Probably, I think, the most muscular, natural bodybuilder that I know, actually.

Really? Certainly the most muscular, natural, vegan bodybuilder that I know.

[Dani] He has a lot. He must have had, honestly, one of, if not the best set of pecs and quads out there. It was quite impressive.

[Giacomo] Yeah.

[Dani] And he’s grown a lot since the last season too.

[Giacomo] Yeah. Yeah.

[Dani] So we got a chance to chill and do that over the weekend.

[Giacomo] Yeah. And he and his wife, also Alex, came up here and stayed for the weekend. So that was nice to get to hang out with them.

[Dani] And if y’all are not familiar with Ultimate Werewolf, you need to get on.

[Giacomo] We played a fun board game. Thank you.

[Dani] I was waiting for you to chime in.

[Giacomo] We played a board game called Ultimate Werewolf. It was really, I mean, it’s a hilarious game. It’s very, very funny.

It’s a game of manipulation and lies. That’s the best way to put it without explaining an entire game on a podcast.

[Dani] Right. And I promise this will be the last thing until we find a nice way to segue into what we’re actually talking about here. But we also play this game with our family.

We play this game with our niece and nephew who are nine and seven years of age, respectively. And wouldn’t you know it, whether it was the way that we saw the seven-year-old or whether it was the seven-year-old’s God-given talent to be able to manipulate and lie, he tricked us all.

[Giacomo] He did.

[Dani] Again.

[Giacomo] He was better at it than everybody. And at first I thought it was just because he’s chaos and he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He doesn’t know what he is doing yet.

I said that correctly. But no, I realized very quickly every time we flipped it over and we had decided somebody else was the werewolf and then it was no, he was the werewolf with his little sly smile on his face. I was like, you have got to be kidding me.

[Dani] It was very funny. But this is a fitness podcast and we can only talk about our boring life for so long before you all want to tune out and tune into something else. So we should probably start talking a little bit about what we’re here for.

But before I dig right into it, I want to think about, I want to sort of preface what we’re about to say by looking at what you’ve been up to with your training, because I feel like you put so much more work into prehab and posthab stuff than you have in a very long time, as far as I can tell. Not that I watch your every move when we used to train together routinely, because now you train for CrossFit and I train for bodybuilding. So we literally train at different facilities most of the time.

And yes, we train together sometimes, but for the most part, we train in different facilities. But when I do train with you, what I do notice is that you’re doing a lot of work outside of the exercise. And even the training itself is conditioning you to be able to actually do the workout.

[Giacomo] It’s very interesting. Yes. So I think that what you’re getting at in a very roundabout way is that I’m spending a lot of time warming up.

And for bodybuilding training, I don’t want to say you don’t need to warm up, because I think you should warm up, but it looks very, very different. I think for bodybuilding warmups, maybe you put your joints through some dynamic stretches for a minute or two, but then you’re actually just doing the exercise with light weight for a few reps, unless you’re working up to something really heavy. But if you’re doing a 12 to 15, you’re just getting some warmup reps before you put the actual weight on and start moving it.

Whereas in CrossFit, there’s a part of the program where you are doing movements that warm you up to the move, like progressions of the movement that work you up to the full movement. But those full movements are really hard movements that require a ton of range of motion, and you’re putting your joints under a lot of stress. So if you just try to jump into some of those cold, you’re going to get hurt.

Whereas I feel like, I don’t know, I’m 40 years old, and I still feel like I could go do some pretty decent lat pulldowns cold, and I’d be okay. Maybe I could do a little bit better if I warmed up a little bit, but I think I’d be fine. Trying to do handstand push-ups completely cold is tough.

So yeah, I’ve been spending a little bit more time doing that because they’re trying to cram a lot into 60 minutes, so I like to get there early to do some extra.

[Dani] Exactly. But you take what you can get out of certain training modalities, and you can apply it to other training modalities, like taking a page in the book from CrossFit, it’s arguably necessary to be able to do what you do by doing your warm-up properly, whereas bodybuilding, you can get away with it, but at what cost and at what point does the pain become chronic and take you out, or you’re not really getting enough out of the movements, or as much as you could. So what I want to get at is what we’re looking to talk about today, which is mobility and corrective strategies for strength training. That’s literally the name of the topic at hand today.

And the first thing that I want to do, I literally want to read out the definition as it stands from Dr. Google on mobility, flexibility, and stability, so that we can identify the difference between the three, right? So flexibility…

[Giacomo] I could never read your handwriting.

[Dani] Did you hear that? Chicken scratch, I swear. Flexibility is how muscles can stretch, how far muscles can stretch.

See, I wasn’t lying. Mobility is how well joints move freely while under your control. And stability is your body’s ability to control a joint and keep it safe during movement.

[Giacomo] Yeah, so the way that I like to describe flexibility and mobility to my clients is flexibility is if you can grab your foot and pull it up by the side of your head, that is how flexible you are. Like, have you seen dancers hold their feet up by their head? That’s how flexible you are.

How mobile you are, are the dancers that you have seen, without touching their foot, raise their leg up by their head. So it is solely the strength of their leg muscles, their core control that is moving their leg all the way up into space, as opposed to like when you’re kind of if you’re pulling your shoulder across your body, that’s flexibility. Mobility is basically the ability to do work at the end of your range of motion, which, you know, they’re both good, but mobility, I would say, is more important.

Stability. Stability, that’s my probably my biggest weakness. Really?

Yeah. So I’m hyper mobile. So flexibility is not an issue for me.

It’s like every single day, someone is like, wow, you’re so flexible to me when I’m training. And I’m like, yep, I know it’s a blessing and a curse, I guess. There are, you know, you can be too flexible if you’re not stable enough.

So stability is like, can your muscles hold your joints still when they need to? And when you’re very flexible, that’s harder. So they’re almost, I don’t want to say they’re opposite things, but they can kind of be opposite things.

Right.

[Dani] But it all comes together with mobility, because that’s your ability to move your body well throughout your movement patterns, right? And then you can work on the other two over time and get better with them. But obviously, you can get away with a lot for a long period of time until you can’t.

And then, of course, you’re working with what you’re working with before the fact. Something I’ve said many times over, and I haven’t said in a while, is that movement heals. Right.

So in one sense, motion is lotion. I didn’t even want to tell you where my brain’s going right now with that one. We’re going to keep that off the screen.

But so it is true. I do believe that you have to get up, you have to get moving, and that when you do get injured, the last thing that you should be thinking about is, I need to wait till I feel 100% before I move again. Movement heals.

[Giacomo] Absolutely. Yes. So with some exceptions, right, you sprain your ankle, you don’t want to be walking around on it on day one.

But when it starts to feel better, you should be starting to move on it. Back pain is probably the number one place that I see this when somebody is like, I kind of tweaked my back a little bit. The inclination is just to want to lay on the couch and do nothing until it feels better, better.

And I actually threw my back out once, like a decade ago. And I did have to lie on the couch for like a day because I couldn’t move. But as soon as I could move again, you start walking.

That’s probably the most healing thing you can do for back pain. Once the acute pain is gone, is to walk. So movement is very healing.

And I have a joke at this point, because you know, I get tweaks all over my body. I don’t want to say I’ve dealt with any like injuries in a long time. Well, that’s not true.

I busted my thumb back in March. That was a legitimate injury. And I have chronic tendonitis in one of my elbows.

That’s never going away at this point. But I have little tweaks and stuff here and there, there’ll be a part of me that’s like, Oh, maybe you should not do this today, when I see like what the workout is. And then when I go and I do it anyway, I swear to God, that nine times out of 10, I feel better.

And I don’t feel that little tweak anymore. Afterwards, that’s not gonna be everybody’s experience, but it has been my experience. So a lot of people that are looking to change their physique, which is the probably the largest part of our audience, they want to build muscle or lose fat or look better, they tend to skip right over flexibility, mobility, PT.

You know, if you have an injury, and you have exercises prescribed to you how many people have been given PT, and they do the exercises until the injury feels better. And then they stop doing it. And then the injury comes back.

Because quite frankly, a lot of this stuff is very boring and time consuming. And we have other things to do.

[Dani] Plus, again, you can get away with avoiding it. And it’s easier to blame isolated things for causing your pain or your injury or your chronic pain or your chronic injury. And then again, we you can encourage yourself to get on and move again as soon as you can.

And you can probably but that pattern will repeat itself if you don’t address the underlying issues and causes.

[Giacomo] If you ever watch kids, just move around. Kids are super flexible and mobile. And yes, part of that’s because their bodies are brand new.

But it’s my opinion, mostly because they move so much. They’re on the floor, they’re up, they’re twisting themselves into a pretzel on the couch, they’re running around. And yes, certainly, there’s something to be said that as we age, our bodies are going to change and have a harder time doing certain things.

But in my opinion, in my experience, mobility and flexibility and the ability to like get up and down off the floor and squat to full depth and reach all the way over your head. These are very, very much if you don’t use it, you lose it. And that’s why regardless of what somebody wants to change in the way their body looks, I am a huge fan of trying to put our bodies and all of our joints through their fullest range of pain free motion that we can.

And if you have pain before the end range of motion, and it’s not structural, I think you should be working on that. What do I mean by it’s not structural, I have a client whose hip like it’s been x-rayed, and it just doesn’t have enough space in it to fully externally rotate that hip. Some people can get their shoulders x-rayed and see there’s just not enough space in that joint for it to move fully.

Now some of that stuff we we could have done by speaking mobility, we could have done by not using it for a long time. I’m sorry, I’m gonna go off on a tangent. This actually happened to me probably like a year ago, my shoulder was bugging me and it had been bugging me enough that I was like, F it, I’m gonna go to the doctor.

And they x-rayed me, and I’ve had my shoulders x-rayed before and they’re fine. They x-rayed me and said, you know, your acromion process is, you know, it’s got like a bump on it and there’s not a lot of space in there. The space in your shoulder is closing up.

And I remember thinking like, well, how is that possible? Like how did my bones change in the last few years that I got this done? But then I really started thinking about it and realized I was kind of dumb for not really putting these things together.

One bone is live tissue, so it changes. We all are familiar with the idea of osteoporosis where the bones, you know, kind of disintegrate, but they can also grow and shift and change. And when bones have ligaments on the ends of them and tendons on the end of them that are getting tight, what are they doing?

They’re pulling on those bones and they can grow and they can shrink that joint down. And it’s just not something I had really thought of until it kind of happened to me. And luckily I was able to, I don’t know if I reversed that bone thing, but I was able to fix my shoulder by doing lots of mobility and PT.

[Dani] Yeah, yeah, trying to think of where I want to go here with this.

[Giacomo] But it’s a tough topic to talk about on aggregate because we couldn’t just sit here and be like, and these are the prescriptive movements for these things.

[Dani] That’s not where I was going with it. My first thought was, okay, so let’s assume we’re not talking to the average lifter who’s been lifting already for like more than one to three years. If you’re newer to lifting routinely and really prioritizing your training, at what point do you start to stack your habits and in addition to your training, you start to focus on flexibility, prehab, posthab, all that stuff?

[Giacomo] I think people should be doing it from the very beginning. Yeah, absolutely. But I think people should be working on building good habits from the beginning and what are good habits?

I think, again, regularly putting all of your joints through their full range of motion. So this could be dynamic stretching that you do before a workout. And you don’t have to do it for very long, doing your workout and then stretching afterwards, doing some flexibility stretching, which are those long, deep, kind of melty stretches that you hold for a little bit longer, whereas the dynamic ones are more moving the joint back and forth.

I would say you don’t have to do a lot of it. If you’re doing it regularly, five minutes on either end is going to be great and probably prevent a lot of problems. So yeah, I would say right from jump street.

You don’t want to wait for something to start hurting to start trying to work on that pain.

[Dani] So something I think about is, and I’m curious to know where you stand in this, because I don’t know. So in my opinion, before you start to really assess true structural imbalances and any potential areas that you’ll need to loosen up before you start training routinely, in my opinion, I think it makes sense to just move for a little bit for like three, six, 12, 24 weeks and like give yourself…

[Giacomo] I want you guys to recognize that range that you just gave us was three to 24 weeks.

[Dani] I said three, six, 12, 24. There were increments in there.

[Giacomo] But three to 24, you will listen to it. Listen to it on other podcasts. Every time Giacomo rattles off a timeframe, it is always the most ridiculous timeframe I’ve ever heard.

[Dani] Anywhere from like three to 374 days minus a leap year.

[Giacomo] Yes. Yeah, totally. That’s how you, that’s literal.

Okay. Anyway, continuing, you say just move.

[Dani] Move, learn your moving patterns, get stronger in those moving patterns, reinforce the neural pathways, get stronger, live with more intensity. And then after you get the movements ingrained, after some period of time that you’re comfortable with it, then you start to assess and say, okay, well, maybe I’m having a problem externally rotating my hips, or maybe I’m having a problem externally rotating my shoulders, or maybe my posterior chain is tight and I’m having a problem loading my hip hinge. That’s the way that I see it rather than trying to assess everything from the beginning.

More cat hair. You, you big fluffball. What is your take on it?

What is your opinion? So I disagree, actually. I was kind of hoping you would actually.

[Giacomo] Yep, no problem. You need someone to disagree with you? Here I am.

Love it. So I kind of agree. Let me back up.

I do think that if someone’s goal is to build muscle or look better, whatever it is, strength training is going to be the way to go. And if that’s going to be the motivating thing, then yes, we should just start doing that. But if you don’t know how to lift properly, I think that trying to load movement patterns that you actually don’t have yet can lead to bigger problems.

So, you know, if someone has one movement, if you’re learning how to lift, I highly recommend that you have somebody watch you, whether that’s a virtual coach watching your form, like after the fact, or you just hire a personal trainer for a couple of sessions in person to put you through the movements and see where your weaknesses are. If you have a weakness in one of your movement patterns, you probably don’t have a weakness in all of your movement patterns. So there’s still probably going to be some like decent heavy hitters that you can work on right away.

But you know, there’s really not a lot of benefit to overhead pressing, let’s just say, for somebody who doesn’t have halfway decent thoracic mobility. That’s just going to lead to an impingement. So saying, oh, just load it up for the first three weeks to six months.

I don’t think that’s the best way to go. And yes, like I said, that stuff is boring. But if you can weave it in to the things that you’re enjoying as well, I think that’s the move.

And I have some clients that they’re not, you know, if they don’t do their PT regularly, or whatever their corrective movements, stretches, exercises are, I literally will put them in their workouts in between sets of other things. So they kind of are available, right? Like you will do this exercise during your rest period for from this exercise.

[Dani] That reminds me of when I make a cardio sandwich, because I find my client is doing their strength training, but not their cardio. I’m like, how do we make this happen? You love the strength training.

So why don’t we put the cardio before and after? It seems to work, believe it or not, go figure. It’s been a pretty successful formula.

If you want to give it a shot yourself, you’re struggling with your cardio. But I like your, you know, you remind me of like, that approach of like doing things in between how like a bodybuilder like Kai Greene would say, like he would do his poses in between his Yeah, that’s exactly it.

[Giacomo] Because like, yes, you are giving your muscles a chance to recover in between sets, that’s the purpose of the rest. But the truth is, it’s not like in bodybuilding style training, you’re slumped over trying to catch your breath in between sets, like you’re okay, you can do something in that time. Like posing, like doing a corrective exercise for a different body part, I have found that’s the best way to do it.

Or just make a little routine for yourself and do it for 10 minutes before you start training. That’s what I’m doing right now. And it it’s working pretty well.

For me. My other tip is to do it while you’re watching TV at night, which is also something that I do.

[Dani] I haven’t been successful at that. I know. I like to be a potato at night.

[Giacomo] Giacomo’s head hits the couch and he is asleep. But you know, I want to talk about a little bit like corrective exercises, I think was jumping to that part of the topic, a concept that I don’t think that a lot of people understand unless they have like a personal training certificate and had to take these certain tests is that every muscle has an opposite muscle. So using my arm as an example, I have a bicep that flexes my elbow, I have a tricep that extends that elbow, I have deltoids, or I get deltoids traps.

I mean, there’s a lot of stuff working here. So I’m trying to get the right ones. So let’s say my delts extend my arm over my head, and my scapula helps pull them back down, scapula traps, scapula and traps.

So if I shrugged up, your traps would be working. And if I pulled it back down, that’s your scapula working. Every muscle in your body has an opposite.

So when we have injuries or postural problems, most of the time, one of those muscles is weak, and the other one of those muscles is tight.

[Dani] Like, like your pecs being very tight, bringing them in and your rear delts, like being overly stretched and really Yeah, so when we think about classic one for that, and that’s probably that’s one that you can, we can all picture in our head. Yeah, totally. And it can even just be from like occupational stuff by going like this to not even necessarily like a podcast, you must explain things with your words, just visually, you don’t know what this looks like.

That’s that’s the keyboard.

[Giacomo] So my keyboard when we think about poor posture, like classic poor posture, one of the things we think about is shoulders slumped forward, head forward. And when I’m explaining this, like in my posture class on the cruise, I think like, okay, what muscle is weak here, it’s actually a bunch of muscles, but they’re all in your back. And you can think about that rounded posture.

And you can see how your whole back is stretched out, your rear delts are stretched, your rhomboids, your traps, everything is stretched. And then what is tight, everything in the front, your pecs, your front delts, everything really in the front. And when you have the combination of those two things happening, you have these pulling forces on joints that force you into positions and also don’t allow you to go through full ranges of motion.

So if you’re stuck in that position, try to raise your hands up like if you’re listening to this, get into a forward slumped position. Now try to raise your hands straight over your head without straightening that out. You can’t.

So you know, that’s an example of how these imbalances, which we all have, like that’s very important to know, is like everybody has an imbalance somewhere, or like almost an imbalance, and they’re just a couple workouts away from like flaring something up. The reason why we shouldn’t just overload right through these is because we’re going to cause an injury. Yeah.

[Dani] Yeah. So I’m going to circle back to my original thought after you mentioned start in the beginning with the flexibility, mobility, and stability work. And my initial original thought was that when you have some, and I’m going to play to your point over here, have someone evaluate you if you can.

Have someone watch you move, or even if you can, some yourself and watch yourself move. That’s really helpful, by the way. I don’t care.

Like mirror is one, aside from my pet peeve, and I’ll try not to go off on too much of a tangent here, about you not being in the proper posture because you’re staring yourself in the mirror, you’re also focused on your movement, so you’re not going to really be able to assess your form. But if you record yourself, you film yourself, you can watch yourself when you’re not focused on your movement, and you could pick up on things too.

[Giacomo] There are actually some apps, and don’t ask me the names of them because I don’t know, but there are some apps that they’re paid. When you sign up, they’ll have you video yourself doing like an overhead squat, for example, and probably some AI will analyze your movement patterns and tell you where some of your trouble spots are. I’ve not actually done them, so I don’t know how good they are, but I really like the concept.

[Dani] Well, it could be more accessible that way, as opposed to it being hard to find a personal trainer and pay for that daily whatever.

[Giacomo] One of the things, can I, sorry, can I talk about mobility? We talked at the beginning about mobility. Flexibility is passive.

Mobility is active. Everybody wants to learn how to gain more mobility, and what I see is people doing these long, deep stretches trying to become more mobile, and that’s not how that works. That’s how you become more flexible.

How you’re going to become more mobile is going to be getting to the end of some muscle or joint’s range of motion and working there. And it could be either range of motion. So an example, if you guys want to try this, those of you at home, sit on the floor with your legs out in a V, back nice and flat, sitting up.

Now with your legs straight, try to pick one, and without leaning too far to one side, try to pick one of your heels off the ground a couple of inches. That is mobility. So an example would be doing something like that, you know, 15 times or eventually being able to kind of move it over like a water bottle or a yoga block back and forth.

And that stuff is really, really hard, but most of the time when we’re going to get hurt, it’s going to be in one of the end range of motion, either all the way flexed or all the way extended. So that’s just one example, but you want to be thinking, okay, how can I do work at the end of this range of motion?

[Dani] You’re inspiring me to get into mobility work too, because I know what I need to do. I just haven’t gotten too deep into it yet. But the flexibility work I’ve been working on for quite some time.

[Giacomo] Mobility work is brutal.

[Dani] Yeah, yeah.

[Giacomo] Because it doesn’t, you watch it and you’re like, that doesn’t look too bad. That should be easy. And then you start doing it and you’re like, what the actual hell?

In our Muscles by Brussels membership, one of the things that we have is we have a bunch of mobility workouts. And my favorite one is this half an hour full body mobility workout that I put together that I happen to think is quite good. Bear in mind, again, I’m a little bit of a freak in this department because I am hyper mobile.

And it was challenging for me even while I was doing it. But some of the feedback I’ve gotten is like, no, too hard. Why did you make this?

And I’m like, I’m sorry.

[Dani] We’re having a hard time getting people to do it, right?

[Giacomo] Yeah. And I have to say in my voiceovers, just like they’d say in a yoga class, don’t compare your body and the shapes it can make to the shapes of the people around you because it’s the same way you wouldn’t compare you being able to dumbbell curl 30 pound dumbbells to the person next to you that can only curl 15 pounds. Can you make these shapes and move in them or not?

Everybody’s going to be at a different spot.

[Dani] What I was thinking though, and I think I’m going to get to it now. Sorry. Tip of the tongue that you can still that after the assessment, you can find movements that you can do safely and well while you’re working on your imbalances and doing the other work.

That’s what I was thinking. That’s like a good starting point.

[Giacomo] Say it again. I don’t think I understood.

[Dani] So you can assess all your movement patterns and find the movement patterns that you can do safely and well, despite.

[Giacomo] Yeah. That’s what I was saying when you were like, I feel like you should just move in the beginning. Context.

Yes. Context.

[Dani] And then you work on the other things and then you work on the stuff on your own. And then, so my next thought here is at what point do you decide to involve a physical therapist?

[Giacomo] Good question. And I would say it’s probably different for everybody depending on where the pain is, where the problem is, how long it’s been going on, what kind of insurance you have, like there’s going to be a lot of factors involved there. But usually for me, if I have a problem and I’ve done all the things that I think make the most sense, I’ve stopped doing exercises that specifically hurt it.

Maybe I’ve done a few rounds of taking some ibuprofen or icing and I’m doing what I believe to be corrective exercises, which I’m lucky enough to know what a lot of those are. And it’s still not getting better than I go see somebody usually. But again, I don’t have great insurance, so I’m really putting it off if I got to get there.

[Dani] But you can also find a way to strategically pay for a session every month or every couple of months or whatever and do the work in between if you but you got to do it.

[Giacomo] One thing that has been popping up, and I know we have a couple here in town, but I’ve been seeing them in a lot of places in the country are kind of like sort of like PT clinics, but they’re not although they might be run by a physical therapist. Like the one in town, it is a physical therapist, like a licensed physical therapist that runs it, but they kind of treat it more like I don’t know, like a barbershop or something. Like you walk in and you’re like, my shoulder hurts.

And they put you through a couple of quick tests and I don’t know, give you a few exercises, massage it, maybe give you some like E-Stim stuff for it. And they’re like, that’ll be 50 bucks. See ya.

Or, you know, they’ll put you through stretches, like they will stretch you. These stretch labs, maybe you’ve heard of them where you go in and again, you pay like you would pay for a massage. And they rather than massaging you, they are stretching your body out.

I haven’t done that one. But we have done the former. If like something is kind of bugging us, go see this particular place.

And yeah, it’s like around 50 bucks a session. And it’s like a one-off. So you don’t have to worry about going through your insurance or anything.

And usually the people that run those type of places are athletes themselves. Because I noticed something, this is a side note. Often when you go in, when you are somebody that lifts and you go into an orthopedic specialist, a sports medicine doctor, whatever, they run you through all these tests, right?

I want you to put your arms out with your thumbs up. And now I’m going to push down on your arms and I want you to resist me. How well does that work if you’re just stronger than them?

Period. You know what I mean? Like I recently, it was like getting something looked at in my hip and he kind of had me do like a leg extension against his hands.

So his hands were on my shins. He was like a 70 year old man. And I was able to do it very easily without pain.

So he was kind of like ship shape. And I was like, no, but how do I say it? I’m just, you need someone stronger.

I need more force to make that pain happen. So you can actually feel the weakness, which is why I like some of these other clinics because they are generally run by athletes.

[Dani] So here’s another thought. So you are lifting, you are experiencing discomfort, right? What’s difference between let’s say soreness and pain?

We should probably not be doing this movement anymore until we find a way to correct.

[Giacomo] You know what? I actually think most people can feel that. I don’t think that really needs to be explained a whole lot.

Like people know when they’re doing something and it hurts in a bad way or like inside of the joint or in like a very pinpointed way in a particular muscle. And I usually tell if there is an exercise that is doing that, stop doing it. I don’t care if your program says you’re doing four sets of this today that happened on set one, you’re done with that for the day.

And maybe we can come up with a different exercise. Maybe we just take a week off from that exercise and that’s enough. But pain is a message.

When you have pain in your joints or your muscles, your body’s sending you a message and it’s not always super straightforward to figure out what that message is. Like I’m not a physical therapist, but I think I’m fairly knowledgeable in some of these arenas and I get stomped regularly. You know, my client’s dealing with shoulder pain.

I’ll run them through some tests myself and I’m like, okay, well I think maybe it could be this. But the fact of the matter is like there’s a lot, there’s a lot of things that can go wrong that can cause shoulder pain that somebody on the internet can’t just like diagnose, not even chat GPT. Sorry.

I’ve seen so many people try to diagnose themselves with chat GPT and it is so confidently incorrect.

[Dani] Yeah.

[Giacomo] So sometimes, yeah, you just need to see a professional. And also, you know, some of the different things that can go wrong in a shoulder joint, for example, the physical therapy is the same for it regardless. Yeah.

[Dani] It is hard to remain curious when you don’t have answers and when you’re frustrated and when it’s ongoing, but that’s the way to do it, to find out what is the actual root of the problem, but it can take a while to get there. Yeah. And it’s like knowing there’s something fundamentally wrong with you and not being able to screen just did a thumbs down, by the way, I cannot believe that just happened here.

No, no. Is it me too? No.

For some reason, our technology moving on. I’m sorry. That’s distracting me at a squirrel moment.

So, but anyways, yeah, no, it’s like knowing when there’s something fundamentally wrong with you and not having the answer. And then finally you get the answer and it’s like, wow, okay, I’m frustrated, but at least have the answer. And I think it’s a similar thing when it comes to whatever pain you’re experiencing.

It can take a long time to actually get the thing you’re looking for.

[Giacomo] My experience often going in to seek medical help for problems like this has usually been incredibly frustrating. So if anybody’s listening to this and they’re like, God damn it, I tried that. I went to the professionals and it didn’t help and I didn’t get answers.

I hear you. I’ve been there so many times, just left one of those offices, just absolutely super duper frustrated.

[Dani] The very first time it happened to me, I was say in my early twenties and had an acute injury. And I went to the doctor and they were like, well, your hips torn, but you’re too young to get a hip replacement. So just go ahead and just let it heal over.

And just, I don’t know, here’s a thing for rehab and me. And I went to the rehab place and they were like, well, just do these three exercises a couple of times over the course of like the next six weeks. And you’ll be fine.

I came back and I was like, is there anything else I should do? And they, they’re like, well, you’re doing those three exercises that I gave to you. I’m like, yeah.

And like, like, well, you’re good. And I’m like, really? But then of course, later on in time, I found that I couldn’t run when I’m my IT band hurting me.

And I found that I, you know, I couldn’t get to my goal to do a marathon. I had to stop at half the time and I was so frustrated and blah, blah, blah. And I went to a running specialist and my, I noticed that my mobility was a lot less on one.

And to this day, I still have problems. So it’s, it’s one of those things where, yeah, it is an incredibly frustrating process to actually understand what happens when you have not just an acute injury, but just general structural imbalances. And it’s like a lot of time to get the information that you’re seeking out on what to do and what’s actually going on.

[Giacomo] If you can find a professional that works in sports, like really works in sports in some way, either they are an athlete themselves, or one of the only times I haven’t dealt with crazy frustration was I went to this guy who happened to have been one of the doctors for the Celtics and he wasn’t working with the Celtics anymore, but like he had worked with athletes. Now I don’t consider myself to be an athlete of Celtics caliber here, but he got it. And there’s just, there’s a level when you’re talking to a medical professional, when you can tell if they get it or they don’t get it, like how important this is to you.

And, uh, that’s one of the only times was with him. Anytime it’s just been like more of a general orthopedic type of doctor. They’re like, well, you are 40.

This might just be the way. And I’m like, I do not accept that. No, thank you here.

I do not accept it. Take it back. I would like to find out what is actually going on here.

So yeah, I just want to, you know, I know people are listening to this getting, being like, I’ve done this and it’s frustrating. It is frustrating. Why do you think I know so much about this stuff is because of how many dead frigging ends I’ve come up against over the years.

And I’m like, I guess I just got to learn it myself. So certainly not to say I’m an expert by any stretch stretch, but yeah, I do really, really like this stuff. I actually think it’s kind of fun.

I think the corrective exercises are fun. If I had more time, I would do them more often. And I know that puts me in the minority.

Something that I can’t put my finger on is what to do to work on stability, specifically outside of lifting anything that puts that joint in a position where it has to resist wobbling.

[Dani] Would you recommend training for that weekly?

[Giacomo] Yeah.

[Dani] Yeah.

[Giacomo] Especially if you have a problem, if you know you have a joint that struggles with stability. So for me, it’s my hip joints. Those, those loosey goosey hips, they wanted, they will just, the second I get fatigued, they’re just splayed in all the different directions.

I can feel it. So doing things like a good example would be like a single leg dumbbell Romanian deadlift because you’re not balanced. You have one foot up and it’s not, I mean, I’m not talking about heavy, five pounds, like whatever.

It doesn’t matter what it is trying to hinge all the way back and then come up. So that hip is moving, but it’s got to stay really stable or you’re going to fall over. But something as simple as trying to stand on one foot while someone tosses a ball to you would also work.

Anything where you’re trying to resist rotation, you know, like a Palov press, that’s like core stability. Planks, side planks, that’s shoulder stability you’re working on. In one of our prehab programs for the shoulders, there’s a lot of plank stuff in there and people are like, why?

And I’m like, well, you’re, you’re kind of wobbly when you’re up in that and your shoulders have to stay like strong and sturdy and you don’t want to sink into them. So regular planks, side planks, side plank with a rotation, that bottom shoulder has to stay really, really strong. So those are some examples, but yeah.

[Dani] Yeah. I’m trying to think of like, how much time are we looking for an average lifter who’s training three days a week, 30 minute sessions? How much time are we looking to add to that total for flexibility, stability, and mobility?

[Giacomo] It depends on the person. It depends on the person. I should not do any flexibility training, period.

I shouldn’t do it. Mobility, yes. Flexibility, none.

[Dani] Zero.

[Giacomo] But I still do it because it feels so freaking good, but really I shouldn’t be doing it. Some people might need to do a lot of that kind of work. Some people might need a much longer warmup than other people.

And by warmup, I mean, warming up the actual joint to do the full range of motion. Because if you like, let’s say you had poor thoracic mobility for a long time, but you’ve been working on it and it’s been getting better. And now you’re going to start incorporating some overhead pressing movements again.

That’s great, but you don’t want to walk in there and just start overhead pressing out of nowhere. You’ve really worked hard for that thoracic mobility. You’ve got to warm up to it again.

So it could be as little as five minutes at the beginning and end of each workout, all the way up to 20 minutes at the beginning and end of each workout, or an entire separate day dedicated to it as well. It could be as much or as little as you can fit in, but not everybody has to do everything on that list.

[Dani] I’ll use myself as a working example. So I have been punished for, I would say, the greater portion of maybe five to seven years of being unable to overhead press. And most of it has to do, I think, with a lack of flexibility.

My muscles have been so tight that I literally had to stop overhead pressing. And now after introducing flexibility routinely for upwards of 45 plus minutes a week, for almost a year straight now, I’m at the point now, finally, where I can confidently say to myself, I think it’s worth the risk to start overhead pressing again because I think I’m going to be okay with it. I can literally feel my body being able to have the thoracic mobility it needs to be able to overhead press.

But again, I mean, 13 years lifting consistently, the first whatever, I’m not mathing here, but you figure a long chunk of time getting away with it, getting stronger, then all of a sudden one day, I’m taken out of the game. I have to find a different way to train my shoulders. And I do, but I’m missing out on the overhead pressing.

And it’s been five years straight and there’s just no going back to it. And I think to myself, is it age? Is this my fate?

[Giacomo] No.

[Dani] Because I realize now after stretching routinely for almost a year straight, every week, religiously, all of a sudden, I can feel my shoulders and my thoracic area, everything opened up enough where I can actually try it again. And so you can get away with something for a while until you can. And then at some point, you’re at the point of no return and you have to start introducing yourself.

So like Danny said, if you can start early and prevent these things from happening and also get yourself stronger so that it’s not only prevented, but you can actually strengthen yourself up to be able to do more over time, you’d be in a good place.

[Giacomo] If I could give everybody one piece of advice, get on the floor every day. Get down on the floor every day, young, old, everybody, because you need to be able to get up off the floor for the rest of your life. And I don’t want to say it’s crazy to me because it makes sense with the way people’s lives are set up, but a lot of people can’t get down and up off the floor.

So how do we fix that? By doing it more often. I was even reading about this older person in her 60s, I think she was 64, who was telling her doctor that she moved her mattress to the floor so that she can practice getting up off the floor every single day.

[Dani] I love that.

[Giacomo] And it’s so many of these things that we lose. They’re not loud. We lose them quietly.

We don’t even notice that we’ve lost them until one day someone says, hey, can you do booboo? And you’re like, I can’t actually. Thumbs down, Drew, again.

I don’t know why. Hamstring flexibility, I think a lot of people recognize when that starts to go, but one day you can’t sit crisscross applesauce anymore. And the shoulder, the overhead stuff, that one really sneaks up on people.

You want to see if you have decent shoulder mobility, go stand against a wall with your butt, your head, and your arms out in like a scarecrow position with your elbows and the backs of your hands against the wall and try to reach overhead while keeping all of those points of contact in the wall. It’s really hard, but if you can’t do it, you don’t have good shoulder mobility. So you don’t have to end up here over your head, but you want to end up kind of in a Y at the top.

Go try it. Let me know what happens.

[Dani] Get yourself a nice mat and meet us on the mat. I do feel like I want to end it here, but I don’t want to abruptly hit the…

[Giacomo] No, that’s fine. I have been incredibly scattered.

[Dani] I’ve been known to take books and just read the last page and say the end. So I want to make sure we’ve covered all of our…

[Giacomo] We need you, Ben. Don’t do this to us again. Ben keeps the conversation from being stupid and weird and chunky like this.

[Dani] This is what happens, buddy. This is what happens when you’re not here to lead the show. It’s all bad news.

[Giacomo] Yeah, pretty much. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Apologies for being all over the place.

I think we said everything we wanted to say just in a weird order. That’s fine. It’s fine.

It’s a podcast.

[Dani] It’s supposed to be this way.

[Giacomo] If you guys enjoyed this, be sure to leave it a… Thumbs up. Be sure to leave it a good review.

It really helps get the podcast out so that more people see it. If you’re interested in any kind of one-on-one coaching, we’ll leave the link for that in the show notes. You just fill out a little assessment and you’ll hear back from Giacomo within a business day.

And if you want to follow anybody on the team, we have at Muscles by Brussels, at Vegan Proteins. Ben is at Ben A. Mitchell.

Sawyer is at Soyboy Fitness Coaching, and Alice is at Vegan Proteins. Alice, if you reach out to any one of us, we will be the ones answering you. So once again, my name is Dani.

[Dani] And I’m Giacomo.

[Giacomo] And we’ll talk to you soon.

[Dani] Later. Bye. You got to fix that, Dani.

You got to fix it.

[Giacomo] I love it. I will not.