Fix Back Pain With Evolutionary Biomechanics

Nick Urban [00:00:01]: You’re listening to High Performance Longevity. The show exploring a better path to optimal health for those daring to live as an outlier in a world of averages. I’m your host, Nick Urban, bioharmonizer, performance coach, and lifelong student of both modern science and ancestral wisdom. Each week we decode the tools, tactics and timeless principles to help you optimize your mind, body and performance span. Things you won’t find on Google or in your AI tool of choice. From cutting edge biohacks to grounded lifestyle practices, you’ll walk away with actionable insights to look, feel and perform at your best across all of life’s domains. Hey, Gabriel. Welcome to the podcast.

Gabriel Saravia [00:00:53]: Hi, Nick. Thank you for having me.

Nick Urban [00:00:55]: So you were an engineer before you became a biomechanics specialist. What’s the weirdest engineering principle you’ve applied to the human body?

Gabriel Saravia [00:01:05]: The weirdest and probably the most useful is to do more with less. It’s called. It’s. It’s a concept from. What is this guy called? It’s the guy who, who came up with the tensegrity concept. It’s Buck. Mr. Fuller is his name.

Gabriel Saravia [00:01:27]: It’s called ephemeralization, which means doing more with less or reducing the design to its minimum. Parts usually works better. That’s a principle in engineering that you want to follow. If you’re designing something, you want to make it with the less amount of pieces so there’s less chances of something to fail.

Nick Urban [00:01:45]: So today we’ll apply that to human movement and ways of navigating that successfully to reduce and hopefully prevent things like back pain, which is one of your specialties. Why did you decide that back pain and biomechanics was a good area to focus?

Gabriel Saravia [00:02:01]: Because actually, when I was in engineering school, I used to suffer from back pain. I was using sports kind of like a way to deal with my anxieties. I was playing squash at a competitive level, and I used to do a lot of bodybuilding, and at some point my body kind of break up and I was suffering from a lot of back pain. So you went to the doctor with back pain, and they always prescribe the same things. You get some painkillers, you get some anti inflammatories, probably some muscle relaxers, rest for a couple of weeks. But that doesn’t really, like, fix anything, right? It’s only treating the symptoms. So that’s how I started studying the body, how it works, and why I had the back pain. So that’s kind of how I got into biomechanics.

Nick Urban [00:02:46]: Do you think that the bodybuilding was exacerbating the anxiety and the back pain, or was it actually helping the anxiety?

Gabriel Saravia [00:02:54]: Probably not, because it’s a way to kind of like flush your anxieties. But the back pain definitely was. And especially with back squats and lifts and heavy lifts and all of that, it doesn’t make it better because the body is not meant to do that in nature. Right. We are at hunters and gatherers, so we are meant to run, throw, and that’s basically it. We’re not meant to do repetitions, to do heavy lifts. We’re meant to carry objects, but not to put like £300 on our spine, crushing our vertebras, and do repetitions for days. And that’s not really what the body is supposed to do in nature.

Nick Urban [00:03:33]: So there’s a whole methodology behind this, because there’s like the two camps, I guess, the people who use these traditional forms of exercise in terms of, like, bodybuilding, Olympic lifting, powerlifting, that kind of stuff, like the classic gym workouts. And then there’s people who completely avoid the gym and don’t do any of those things. There’s also a third or perhaps other paradigms where it’s like, okay, we’ll do some of the movements that are core to human needs and we’ll skip others. What is this methodology that you’re referring to?

Gabriel Saravia [00:04:04]: Well, it’s kind of like the third type of exercise that you’re mentioning. Like, because our body is meant to walk and run as a priority. When you walk and run, your hip is doing a certain movement. At the same time your spine is doing a different movement. So that’s the idea about what functional training really means. Like, your body is supposed to move, like, the same way you walk and you run. For example, when you walk, one side of your hip is doing flexion, the other side of your hip is doing extension. You, your spine is going to do a rotation or a lateral flexion.

Gabriel Saravia [00:04:37]: And that’s how you’re supposed to train also.

Nick Urban [00:04:40]: Right.

Gabriel Saravia [00:04:40]: Because it’s not the same, for example, bending your elbow here when your arm is next to your ribcage than bending the elbow on top of your head. And it’s not the same bending your elbow as your arm raises. So it’s also not the same extending your hip when your spine is not doing any movement as extending your hip when you’re doing a lateral flexion. Like, the tissue length is going to be different for your nervous system. It’s also going to be different. So you need to train it like. Like it’s you’re moving in nature, right?

Nick Urban [00:05:11]: Yeah. Let’s set a foundation for people who have never heard the words extension, inflection. What do these mean and why are they relevant?

Gabriel Saravia [00:05:18]: Okay, let’s talk about the spine. It has three planes of motion. When you bend the spine forward, it’s. It’s a flexion. When you bend it back is an extension. That’s the sagittal plane of motion. When you bend to the side, like when you do side bends, that’s lateral flexion. And then it has a third plane of motion that is a little bit different because there are no bends on the spine, which is a rotation, which, when you rotate your ribcage to one side, like when you’re throwing or throwing a punch, and that’s a rotation.

Gabriel Saravia [00:05:45]: So those are the three planes of motion. And you have different sections of the spine. You have the cervical spine where you don’t have ribs on the neck, you have the thoracic spine where you have ribs. And then at the bottom, you have the lumbar spine, again, where you don’t have ribs.

Nick Urban [00:05:59]: Okay, so that’s a basics of the anatomy that we’re talking about here. And then why does all of this matter?

Gabriel Saravia [00:06:07]: It matters because when you’re training the spine, you have to be very technical in the way that you move the spine. Because a small shift on a vertebra or a small compression on a vertebra can be one millimeter can be the difference between you having pain and you not having pain. So let me give an example of something that happens quite often when you’re training lateral flexion. When you’re bending your spine to one side or the other. People are happy to just do side bends with the dumbbell, but it’s not necessarily about doing side bends, but how you do the side bends. More than likely when you bend, for example, to your right, there is going to be a segment on your spine that bends easier to the right. When you bend to the left is not going to be the same segment, can be the segment above or the segment below. So if you don’t pay attention on the way that you’re doing the side bends, when you bend to the right, you’re going to bend on the same side all the time.

Gabriel Saravia [00:07:00]: When you bend to the left, you’re going to bend on the same side all the time. So that’s going to create something similar like a scoliosis or a shift in your spine, because you are exacerbating the pattern that you. That it’s already easy for you to do right? So if you want to train it properly, you want to bend to the side where your spine doesn’t easily bend. You’re training your, your weak point, you know what I mean? And that’s going to make your spine more symmetrical, like less shifts. If you want to fix a scoliosis, for example, it’s like an S shaped curve, also with a rotation. What you try to do is like you try to bend the spine in the opposite direction of how, of how it is, right? If you have, for example, the thorax, where you have ribs bending to the left, the lumbar bending to the right, you try to bend the thorax to the right and the lumbar to the left and you do repetitions on that. So that’s what you, that’s why it’s so important to know the different segments of the spine, the different planes of motion. And also something that I do quite often when I train, I like to put two mirrors so I can look at my own back, how it’s, how it’s moving and if I am doing the same thing on one side and the other side, if I am doing what I want to do on both sides.

Gabriel Saravia [00:08:15]: So that’s why it’s so important to know the planes of motion, to know the different segments of the spine. But it’s also important to know what is not an optimal movement, because there is always room to improve, but like an efficient movement or something that you want to, like a benchmark, something that you want to reach. So here you can use, for example, athletes you can say, I want to run like Usain Bolt. So what does Usain Bolt does when he run that is so special that other athletes don’t do? Why does he run faster than other athletes? But what movements does he does? And that’s how you start, like finding things that you can replicate in your training. So it’s not about how he trains, but about how he moves when he runs. And if you are able to do those things, and more than likely you’re not going to be able to do those things, otherwise you would be the fastest, the fastest guy in the world.

Nick Urban [00:09:15]: So what you’re describing, it sounds like the general approach people train is they choose an exercise. If you’re using an exercise that has like multiple different, I guess you do one set on one side, then you do one set on the other side. Like say it’s single limb movements, single arm bench, single leg squat, whatever it is. And the case you mentioned, the side bends, you’re not going to just necessarily do the exact same number on each side, because you’ll have slight weaknesses in that chain. And so what you want to do instead is, like, figure out where the weakness is and focus on, like, that weakness. It’s kind of like if there’s a garden hose, you want to get the kink out before you work on beefing up the garden hose.

Gabriel Saravia [00:09:59]: Not the best example, but yes, it’s exactly that. But look, people focus on sets and repetitions. You have to do eight repetitions, four sets. But when you’re trying to move a segment of your spine that doesn’t move, if you’re able to do it, you’re going to probably be in the first time. You’re going to probably just be able to do two or three reps, and then you’re going to be done. And then you probably need to rest for a few minutes and do it like two times. And that could probably be it for your. For your workout on that specific movement.

Gabriel Saravia [00:10:29]: Right, but doing the same amount of reps on both sides, probably not. You want to do more reps on the sides. That is more difficult. The side that doesn’t move as well as the other side.

Nick Urban [00:10:41]: Huh. And then over time, as you focus on that side, ideally it should improve. And so once it improves, then perhaps you’ll bring your attention back to the other side, or you’ll focus on them evenly, depending on where the balance level is.

Gabriel Saravia [00:10:56]: Yes, it’s going to become more symmetrical and more efficient, more like the other side. And then that’s why you can. When you can start like. Like doing more repetitions. But what you actually want to do is to do a progression. You start with very simple movements. For example, when it’s the first time that I’m training someone, I start with really simple movements. Do a flexion of the lumbar.

Gabriel Saravia [00:11:17]: Usually you do it by doing a posterior tilt of the pelvis. That means that your lumbar is going to bend forward just to have the lumbar a little bit more straight. And you can have a little bit more length on the lumbar. Do an extension of the thorax. So there are very small movements that look simple, but for some people are not that simple because that’s why they’re in that condition. And then you start building up and adding more complicated movements. So when they can do the lumbar flexion, thoracic extension, and they can get the spine more neutral, you can start adding a rotation. Then you can start adding a rotation with some kind of leg movement.

Gabriel Saravia [00:11:50]: Then you can start adding the rotation with the legs with some kind of a shoulder movement. So you always want to progress in your training. You want to like, practice. For example, the first time that you do pull ups, you’re just able to probably do five pull ups and it doesn’t take you too long to be able to do 10 pull ups. So those first days of training are the days that you get the better, the better returns on investment. Right. At some point you get to the point of diminishing returns and you’re not able to get, for example, when you’re getting to 15 pull ups to get to 20 pull ups, it’s going to take you a lot more time. So you always want to be at that point where your returns are a lot faster and a lot better.

Gabriel Saravia [00:12:40]: So you try to complicate movements and you try to add complexity to the movements so your training gets more efficient and, and as your movement gets better.

Nick Urban [00:12:48]: So what you’re saying is that by adding complexity over time, as you master the base movement, then by adding that complexity, you’re able to get overall gains faster than you would if you were just to keep trying to do the same thing and adding on an additional REP or additional 2.5 pounds or something.

Gabriel Saravia [00:13:07]: Yes, for sure. A hundred percent.

Nick Urban [00:13:09]: To play the devil’s advocate here, if developing, like balance between both hemispheres of the body is so important, why can’t I just do a stretching routine? Why can’t I just stretch and then over time hopefully stretch the one side that’s shorter and tighter or more farther behind and then that will get me back into the optimal state?

Gabriel Saravia [00:13:33]: Okay, look, with stretching, it has the way that people do it, that they use an external force to push the joint to an extreme range of motion. And it has several problems. For one, if you have, if you use an external force to push your joint in an extreme range of motion and you leave it there for a couple of minutes. For a minute. I actually did a post on my Instagram about it where I’m pulling my finger for a minute and then my finger doesn’t snap and it doesn’t go back to its original position when you just pull it and you let it snap on the table, kind of like makes a sound. Then when you pull it and you leave it there for a minute, it doesn’t go back to where it was. So you are losing the concentric capacity of the muscles when you stretch. Concentric means that the muscle has tension as it’s shortening.

Gabriel Saravia [00:14:23]: Right. If you do that enough for enough time, if you abuse stretching Then your, your bones have problems in staying in their place. You’re going to have shifts on the vertebrae, on, on the joints. Right. So that’s, that’s one of the problems with stretching. The other problem that I, that I see with stretching is that if you want to take a joint to an extreme range of motion, you need an extreme amount of force on an opposite joint. For example, when you bend the elbow, your biceps is shortening, you’re using the biceps, the triceps is lengthening. Right.

Gabriel Saravia [00:15:02]: If you want to bend it like completely, you need more force on your biceps. But because you are using an external force, you won’t necessarily have the strength on your biceps to keep the joint there. Right. So there are ways of stretching that are better than others. And I’m thinking about when you use your own force to push the joint into an extreme range of motion.

Nick Urban [00:15:26]: Right.

Gabriel Saravia [00:15:26]: So the joint can stay there. And that’s actually how I, how I train, because a lot of what I do is mobility training, but not by pushing the joint into, from using an external force, but by having the person use his own muscles to get the joint to that place.

Nick Urban [00:15:46]: How would you actually go about doing that as opposed to a normal conventional stretching session?

Gabriel Saravia [00:15:51]: Instead of pushing. That’s one way of doing it. Instead of pushing the joint, you put resistance. So the person has to like, has to resist the force to get the joint there.

Nick Urban [00:16:01]: Right.

Gabriel Saravia [00:16:01]: So when you eliminate the resistance is going to be easier for the person to get the joint there. So if you cannot bend the knee, and this is very common, like when your hip is in hyperextension. Hyperextension means that your femur is moving back and then you make, you have people bend their knee, they think that they’re at maximum knee flexion, but the knee barely gets to 90 degrees. So you put, you can, you can put an ankle weight, you have them bend the knee. And do I usually use a spine movement at the same time? I usually do use, do the knee flexion. I like to do it with a lateral flexion. So you’re stretching the lateral portion of the body at the same time that you’re bending the knee. And if you do it with the ankle weight, when you remove the ankle weight is going to be a lot easier for you to bend the knee.

Gabriel Saravia [00:16:46]: You know what I mean? So that’s, that’s a way, That’s a way to do it.

Nick Urban [00:16:49]: Yeah. So you’re not advocating people do long static stretching sessions, obviously not prior to workouts, but it sounds like not in general. And instead, perhaps like adding some, some weight to the stretching improves like the, I guess reduces the potential downsides of the stretching.

Gabriel Saravia [00:17:08]: Yes, most definitely. And, and actually look the worst type of hip pains, the worst type of back pains that I’ve seen is usually on yoga teachers that have abused the stretch for a long time. So when you try to do myofascial release on them, you apply pressure on their muscles to get like a little bit more mobility. You cannot even press with one finger because they are screaming out of pain. It’s too painful. And it takes more time in taking a person from a hypermobility to a normal range of motion than taking a stiff person to a normal range of motion. It takes a lot more time. So that’s why I don’t, that’s why I don’t use that stretching.

Gabriel Saravia [00:17:52]: The thing is that it doesn’t happen. If you stretch once a week, you’re probably not going to see any downside. But if you stretch for two hours, five or six times a week, after five years you’re going to start look seeing the drawbacks of that and you’ll

Nick Urban [00:18:11]: see the extreme examples on either side. The muscle bound bodybuilder who does minimal range of motion, you know, body older like power lifter, Olympic lifter or something like that, power lifter, I guess. And people will look at them and be like, okay, this person should do more stretching. They should increase their range of motion because they’re very muscle bound. Then on the other hand you have the yogis who are the exact opposite and they have like extreme range of motion, extreme flexibility, but then they can’t hold or sustain like force under underload because they’re, they’ve lost that ability from all of the extreme flexibility they’ve gained. Where is like the middle point? Is there like a way to know? Okay, I’m a little less, I’m a little too far to this side or not quite enough on this side.

Gabriel Saravia [00:18:58]: I wouldn’t look at it as a middle point, but the optimal point. It’s like you take athletes like for example Usain Bolt, Marshon lynch or something like that. They’re very resilient, they are very explosive live. I will take also even some, somebody like Ryan Garcia, he’s very athletic, very fast, very fast twitch muscle. And he’s not necessarily like a midpoint. It’s, it’s something, it’s something different, right? It’s not in the midpoint between being stiff and being flexible. He has both. He has the strength and he has the flexibility under a wider range of motion.

Nick Urban [00:19:40]: Okay, so that’s obviously an ideal place to be. How do you know if you have the both or if you’re on one side too far or the other side too far, but you don’t have that, like, dynamic combination of the two that is ideal?

Gabriel Saravia [00:19:55]: How do you know by looking? I used the benchmark. And. And the. The. The benchmark mark of every exercise of human movement is. Is the gait cycle. So by looking at someone’s sprint, you can definitely tell if somebody’s there. The thing is that not everybody knows what to look when they analyze gate mechanics and running mechanics.

Gabriel Saravia [00:20:20]: So there are a few simple things that you can look at. The first thing is asymmetries. One side is working different than the other side. One side has to be stronger. One side has to be more efficient. So that’s something that you can look at. Something else that you can look on the gait cycle is the amplitudes of range of motion. You can see how much the person does knee flexion, how much hip flexion they do, how much hip extension, how far the femur goes back when they run on their stride.

Gabriel Saravia [00:20:48]: And you can compare it to a benchmark you can use. For example, you can look when Usain Bolt is running and he’s doing knee flexion, his heel gets almost all the way to his glute. He’s touching almost the glute with his heel, right? So if you’re not able to get as far, probably you need to work on. On your knee flexion. You can see how much he does lateral flexion with the spine. You see how that his head shifts from side to side when he’s running, and that helps with the weight distribution on his legs. But for your head to shift from side to side, your spine has to do a lateral flexion, right? So if you’re. If your head stays in the center when you run, that means that you’re not doing lateral flexion enough or not enough lateral flexion.

Gabriel Saravia [00:21:35]: That’s something else that you can look. Something that is more difficult to see, but you also also have to look for on the gait cycle is how the forces are transferred in the body. Let me give you an example. The rotation when you’re running, it starts at the ribcage and then it moves down. That’s called bottom down kinetic sequencing, right?

Nick Urban [00:22:02]: The.

Gabriel Saravia [00:22:02]: The kinetic sequencing starts at the bottom and then moves down to the top. So your thorax starts rotating, then your pelvis rotates, and then your femur rotates as you leave the ground with your stride. So you need to, if you, if you do it, if you look at someone’s running at a very slow motion, you’re going to see that kinetic wave starting at the bottom and then starting at the top and moving to the bottom. Right. The rib cage rotates first, then the lumbar, then the pelvis and finally the femur rotates. But if you look at the extension, and this is weird because the extension is, is the opposite, it starts at the bottom and moves up. So you start by doing hip extension, then lumbar extension and then the thoracic hyperextension extension means that the spine is bending back, right? So the hip extension means that the femur is moving back first. So the joint between the femur and the spine is opening back, then the lumbar is bending back, then the thoracic is bending back after.

Gabriel Saravia [00:23:02]: Right. So that’s a kinetic sequencing that goes in the opposite direction. So you need to see if there is a breakage on that kinetic sequencing if that force is actually moving from the foot all the way to the thoracic or vice versa, from the thoracic all the way to the foot.

Nick Urban [00:23:18]: How do you know if there’s a breakage?

Gabriel Saravia [00:23:20]: If you look at, in slow motion, you’re going to see it. And there is a video of a Safa Powell running from behind at a very slow motion. And it’s the very first steps of his running. So you have the camera from behind and he’s running and it’s like a very high speed camera. And you can see the thorax start to rotate first, then the lumbar, then the pelvis, then the femur. And you can clearly see that he does extension with his femur first, then the lumbar does extension, then the thorax does extension. And then as he goes to, to step with his other leg, he gets into flexion first because he doesn’t, he cannot keep doing extension, right? And he has to go into flexion. So he gets into flexion and then he’s doing that, the same thing on the other leg.

Gabriel Saravia [00:24:03]: So you can, if you know what to look for, you can identify those things happening in the gait cycle.

Nick Urban [00:24:08]: I think it’s a important point in general that like when something is happening on one side of the body, in order to stay in balance, the opposite has to happen on the other side of the body. And that can be between muscles that are adjacent to each other, or it can be on different legs, different arms. Do you see that?

Gabriel Saravia [00:24:28]: Yes, for sure, for sure. Because run, especially running, running is the way That I look at, it is like a harmonic oscillator. I don’t know if you, if you have, like, study physics at some point, but explain that. Okay. It means that in the body, it means that your joints are going to oscillate from a range of motion to the other, from flexion to extension, from rotation to one side to rotation to the other, lateral flexion to one side, lateral flexion to the other. Because you have two sides, because you have two arms, two shoulders, two femurs, when one side is doing extension, the other side is doing flexion. Right. So that.

Gabriel Saravia [00:25:08]: It’s exactly what you were mentioning, right? The other side is going to do almost all the time, the opposite, because you need to reset the movement right after you have taken your hip into extension, it needs to go back into the flexion.

Nick Urban [00:25:21]: That’s what I thought it was. And so if someone’s sitting at home and they’re like, this sounds interesting, this sounds nice, but how do I actually apply this? Could they just take their phone, record a slow mo video of them running, say, on a treadmill, and then look at the different angles that they’re seeing in the video. For example, the angle at their ankle, the angle at their knee, the angle at their hips, the way their head sways back and forth or doesn’t sway back and forth as they’re running. Are these things that they can do? And of course, everyone’s anatomy is going to be a little bit different, so you won’t see exactly the same thing. There’ll be compensations and everything from a lifetime of, of living and injuries and stuff like that. But, like, can you do anything with this? As a layperson who doesn’t know all of the extensive anatomy we’ve discussed so

Gabriel Saravia [00:26:11]: far, yes, you can do it. But before looking at the ankle, before looking at the legs, because this is what most people do when they try to analyze their gait cycle. They take like the side view and they try to see the angle of the legs and all of that. That makes it too difficult. The easiest way to, to, to look at that is to start from the center. What is closer to your center of gravity, which is going to be the spine. And look at the spine first. So you probably want to take the back view.

Gabriel Saravia [00:26:40]: And if you can do a shirtless, it’s better. So if you can take a video of yourself running without shirt from the. From behind, take it at a slow motion, you can start looking at what your spine does when you’re running. And that’s the first thing that you want to address is how your spine moves after the limbs are going to follow, right? It’s like when you’re learning the technique of any sport. When you’re learning how to throw a ball, how to throw a punch, how to do a suplex, you learn the technique when you learn how to move the spine. People focus too much on what the feet do, what your hands do, what the head does, but it’s not as important as what your spine is doing. So if I am teaching, because I practice boxing, also if I am teaching someone how to punch is just transfer your weight to like throwing a cross, for example. I’m a right handed, I want to throw a right cross.

Gabriel Saravia [00:27:35]: Transfer your weight to the left leg, rotate your pelvis and then rotate the ribcage. That’s a cross. Don’t worry about the foot, don’t worry about twisting your back foot, don’t worry about what your hands are going to do. Transfer your weight. First rotate the pelvis, rotate the ribcage, then you just need to extend the arm and that’s it.

Nick Urban [00:27:55]: What I didn’t hear you say though is focus on your spine. So you’re indirectly addressing the spine by focusing on other things. Because across pretty much all sports you hear hip this or rotate this. And that seems like that’s going to be having an impact on the spine specifically.

Gabriel Saravia [00:28:15]: Yes. You always have to give cues to people what they have to move because it’s very difficult for someone who is not paying attention to, I cannot tell them, look, do lateral flexion more on the thoracic. So they’re not going to understand if you tell them that. So you can tell them, for example, give me more space between your lower ribs and your hip bone, right? So they understand the lower ribs, they understand the hip bone. And by lift the lower ribs and keep your hip bone in the same place. So that’s going to make them do lateral flexion. So what I just described with the right cross is how you are doing a bottom up kinetic rotation, right? So first you need to rotate the pelvis. That’s going to start the rotation on the bottom of your spine and then by rotating the ribcage after you move that, that sequencing up.

Gabriel Saravia [00:29:06]: But when you rotate the pelvis, don’t rotate the ribcage. The ribcage is staying as a fixed point and that’s the trick of it. The ribcage stays at a fixed point. Rotate the pelvis. So that’s going to make your oblique muscles length. You’re going to create length on your Oblique muscles and then rotate the ribcage, you’re going to use that length to deliver the punch. And that’s what a lot, even, even elite boxers don’t do that. Some elite boxers don’t do that.

Gabriel Saravia [00:29:36]: They rotate everything at the same time. So they are not even using their spine to punch. Right. So the sequence matters. And the sequence is almost one of the most important things when it comes down to movement. How do you sequence what initiates the movement, what follows, what finishes the movement?

Nick Urban [00:29:54]: And the reason that boxers and all athletes or weekend warriors want to do this is because if, say, you’re boxing or you’re doing whatever sport, you’re creating more force, more efficiency by doing it in the sequence that you just mentioned.

Gabriel Saravia [00:30:09]: Yes. And I will dare to say that if you, if you turn your pelvis and your, for example, when throwing same, same example throwing a straight cross, if you turn your pelvis at the same time that you rotate your ribcage, you’re not going to have the, the power. It’s not, it’s just not going to be there.

Nick Urban [00:30:23]: Well, if that’s the case, then wouldn’t this be something that athletes intuitively pick up or they get coached on immediately

Gabriel Saravia [00:30:29]: because they need to generate power intuitively pick up? Yes. After a lot of repetitions, you’re gonna, you’re gonna figure it out. Some coaches, they, they, they, they teach it. Not every coach they teaches, teaches that. But after a lot of repetitions, you’re going to, you’re going to, you’re going to find it out. And actually I, I remember that when I was playing squash, I didn’t know that. And it took me, it took me years to figure out how to hit the ball hard. If I don’t delay my ribcage rotation, if I rotate everything at the same time, the power is not there.

Gabriel Saravia [00:31:03]: If you just keep the ribcage still, rotate the pelvis first. And everybody has a different timing. Right. Is the pelvis rotation, ribcage. So you have to wait a little bit. And the timing depends on how much tension you have on the muscles, how heavy you are and how long your bones are more than that. Those are the variables. So everybody has a different timing.

Gabriel Saravia [00:31:28]: Everybody has to wait probably like tall people have to wait probably a little bit more. If your muscles have less tension, you have to wait a little bit more. If you’re more like, like if you have stiffer muscles, you don’t have to wait as much. So you need to find, you need to find your timing. So eventually you’re, you’re going to get to that, but it’s going to take you a lot of repetitions. And if somebody that knows how to punch teaches you from the beginning, it takes a lot less time. And you’re already like, like punching hard, throwing hard, or hitting the ball hard, it’s a lot faster. And it can take you years.

Gabriel Saravia [00:32:02]: If nobody tells you, like, three years, four years, five years just to find something like that.

Nick Urban [00:32:07]: If someone comes to you and they want to become more athletic, immediately, obviously you’re going to look and do a gait analysis and check out a bunch of different things and figure out where they’re struggling. Are there any areas in particular that you find almost universally need work?

Gabriel Saravia [00:32:22]: Yes, a lot of them. A lot of them. A lot of them universally. And this is what we were talking about earlier, the knee flexion. People need knee flexion. A lot of knee flexion. And it’s not knee flexion when your hip is inflection, like when you’re, you’re sitting down, everybody can bend the knee more than 90 degrees. But when your hip is in hyperextension, when you take the femur back, is very rare.

Gabriel Saravia [00:32:45]: To have someone who can almost get the heel all the way to the glute, that’s one of the things.

Nick Urban [00:32:51]: Well, how do you work on that then? Let’s give some people a treat they can use to improve their athletic ability.

Gabriel Saravia [00:32:56]: Right now, if you want to train inflection, this is the way that I do it. You have to stand up. You have to stand on one leg. Probably use an ankle weight, so you’re going to need a couple of sticks or something to hold your balance. You can use a pair of crutches. That’s what I use, because they are light and they’re like, they have a good grip on the ground. So stand on one leg. You need to have one leg in the air and the other one on the ground.

Gabriel Saravia [00:33:21]: The leg that’s in the air, you need to take it as far back as you can without leaning forward. So that’s the hip extension. So that leg is going to be behind your support leg. Right. Okay. Without letting your knee come forward, and without leaning forward, you can use the ankle weight. Try to get your heel all the way to your glute. And you will have to use a mirror because you’re going to get a 90 degrees and you’re going to see, okay, I’m very close to the glute, and you’re like this far away.

Gabriel Saravia [00:33:50]: You know what I mean? So that’s, that’s Something they can do if you want to make it better. And it gets a little tricky because you, you, you’re gonna probably have to look at what you’re doing. Try to do the lateral flexion. Lateral flexion means that you’re going to lift one side of your, the same side of that. You’re doing e flexion. You’re going to lift the ribs on that side without lifting your hip bone. The difficult thing here is that your knee has more than 90 degrees of knee flexion, probably 110, 120 degrees of knee flexion. But your thorax is going to have like 40 degrees of lateral flexion.

Gabriel Saravia [00:34:26]: So both of them have to start and have to finish at the same time. So at the same time that you’re doing deflection without letting your knee come forward, without leaning forward, you need to do the lateral flexion. So that means that your lateral flexion, you have to do it like three or four times slower than the knee flexion. And all of this because it’s corrective work. You need to do it like you were moving in slow motion, the slowest the better. If you do it fast, you’re not going to even realize what you’re doing. Right. So if you can do it very slow and very controlled movements, this is when your body learns how to do that movement.

Gabriel Saravia [00:35:05]: So that’s, that’s, that’s the way that I use to train deflections on, on people that don’t do much knee flexion. If you’re having knee pain, this is going to work probably really good for you, depending on how your, how your knee shifts.

Nick Urban [00:35:16]: Right.

Gabriel Saravia [00:35:16]: Because usually the knee pains are, can be different, but most of the times this is going to, this is going to help you with any pain.

Nick Urban [00:35:24]: Okay. And with all these types of corrections, it’s important to go slow, as slow

Gabriel Saravia [00:35:29]: as possible, essentially, the slowest the better.

Nick Urban [00:35:34]: Any other great tips like that about actually executing this and doing it effectively? I’m guessing that there’s a diminishing point where if you do more than that, you’re not going to get as many benefits, but like most people, I would assume aren’t going to that level to begin with.

Gabriel Saravia [00:35:48]: Okay. Yes. For back pain, there is a little movement that people, a lot of people don’t do. It’s called a ribcage elevation. So it means that your spine is not bending back or forward, but you’re lifting your ribs. And that, what, what, that, what’s that going to do is that is going to create a little bit more space between Your vertebras. So how can you practice that? You can lean against the wall, but don’t put your feet too close to the wall because it’s going to be more difficult. So you can leave like probably like half a foot between your, your, your heel and the wall and you, you can lean against the wall and just look at what happens with your back.

Gabriel Saravia [00:36:27]: You’re more than likely are going to have two gaps. One on your lumbar spine here, where you don’t have ribs, your lower back, and one like here under your neck. So the first thing that you want to do is that you want to get a neutral spine. Neutral spine means it’s also called a J spine, that you’re going to reduce the curvature of your spine and that’s going to also give it a little bit more length. So, so to fix the lumbar spine, you can do it by doing a posterior tilt of the pelvis. So imagine that your belt is a glass of water and that you’re trying to empty the glass of water behind you. That’s called a posterior pelvic tilt. What that’s going to do is that that’s going to get your lumbar close to the wall or even touching the wall.

Gabriel Saravia [00:37:12]: And in the beginning it doesn’t matter. Like if you’re touching the wall, you’re probably doing it a little bit too much, but it’s fine. It is fine. Okay, so that’s the first thing. Do it slowly, like posterior tilt. Empty the glass of water behind you and try to touch the wall with your lower back.

Nick Urban [00:37:28]: And do you just hold that for a while?

Gabriel Saravia [00:37:30]: You can hold that for a while, yes. But it’s very important that when you’re trying to do that, that you don’t squeeze your abs. You want to do that more with your glutes than with your rectus abdominis, which is the six pack muscle. So what you want to do next is that at the same time that you’re doing that, that you inhale and retract your abs. Try to pull your belly in. Try to get your spine as close to your, try to get your belly button as close to your spine as possible. So you’re doing three things at the same time. Now you’re doing the posterior tilt, emptying the glass of water behind you, retracting your abs and inhaling at the same time.

Gabriel Saravia [00:38:11]: So your abs have to be soft. Right? Don’t squeeze your abs. Just let your, let your belly come closer to the, to, to the spine. And it has to be Soft. Once you can do that, the next thing that you want to do is that you want to extend your thorax. So keeping your lumbar against the wall, you’re going to try to lift your sternum or try to get your clavicle as close to the wall as possible. But because usually your body doesn’t do one range of motion by itself, it does it together with different ranges of motion. And your cervical spine, your neck usually does the opposite of your thoracic spine.

Gabriel Saravia [00:38:47]: So when you’re doing extension of the thorax, you might want to bring your chin down. That’s, that means cervical flexion, right? So you keep, you always look forward with your neck. So I don’t know if you have seen you grab the chicken. And when you move the chicken, the head stays in the same spot, so it’s similar to that. So you’re going to do the shaking neck with your, with your thorax. So you’re going to lift your sternum and bring your, bring your chin down so the head, you’re not looking up, right? You’re, you’re looking forward. Okay. If you’re able to do that, keep your lumbar against the wall, lift your sternum and, and do the extension of the thorax, where you have ribs is bending back.

Gabriel Saravia [00:39:23]: That’s a neutral spine. But then you have to do something else by keeping the neutral spine. What you want to do is that you want to try to lift your ribs, but keep your lumbar against the wall. And that’s the ribcage elevation. And that’s what actually, actually is going to give a little bit more space in your vertebras. Because if you, if you like, separate your lumbar from the wall, you’re probably giving more space in the frontal, the anterior part of the vertebras, the frontal part of the vertebras, but the back of the vertebrates are crushing, right? So want to keep the lumber against the wall and lift your ribs. It’s difficult to do it, but you can use some help. If you have like a pair of like some sticks or I use some crutches, you can press the sticks down with your, with your arms and let your ribs come up.

Gabriel Saravia [00:40:16]: And if you feel a stretching sensation on your abs, that means that you’re elevating your ribs.

Nick Urban [00:40:21]: So do you need something external to elevate your ribs? Because I was just playing around over here while I sit down trying to elevate my ribs without using anything. And I think I’m doing it, but I’M not really sure how to know if I’m elevating my ribs successfully.

Gabriel Saravia [00:40:34]: It’s, it’s, it’s easier when you use something external. That’s why I use the, like the crutches or the sticks so you can push down on the crutches and let your ribs lift. And that’s going to work. If you have back pain, that’s going to do wonders for your back. Usually people who have back pain, they tend to crush their own vertebras with their abdominal muscles because a lot of times it’s very common that they tend to squeeze their abs all the time. So the rectus abdominis that comes from your sternum to your pelvis is pulling the sternum down. If you, if you’re squeezing your abs, you’re not going to be able to lift your ribs.

Nick Urban [00:41:08]: Right.

Gabriel Saravia [00:41:08]: So when you’re able to lift your ribs, you already have half of the decompression on your back. The other half is usually done with the glutes.

Nick Urban [00:41:16]: I know back pain is super common. You’ve already hinted at some things that can cause it. What are the big things that you find are causative in terms of back pain? And I’ve also know that like imbalance between the abs and the back can cause back pain. What else are you seeing?

Gabriel Saravia [00:41:35]: Okay, the biggest thing is the vertebra shifting in a direction or another. Usually when they shift laterally, that’s very common. They can shift forward like some vertebra. For example, you have the lowest vertebra, L5, and then you have a vertebra above shifting forward too much or shifting laterally too much.

Nick Urban [00:41:56]: What causes that?

Gabriel Saravia [00:41:57]: It’s usually repetitive movement patterns. Lateral shifts is because when you see someone where their pelvis is shifting in one direction, the repeated is shifting in the other. When you see them walk, their right side is going to behave completely different from the left side. So if you repeat that, you are supposed to take 10,000 steps a day. If you repeat that for 10,000 every day, then your spine is going to get crooked.

Nick Urban [00:42:25]: So you’re saying 10,000 or more steps per day causes your spine to become crooked?

Gabriel Saravia [00:42:30]: If you do it asymmetrically, definitely yes.

Nick Urban [00:42:35]: And how common is asymmetric walking?

Gabriel Saravia [00:42:39]: It’s very common, but depends on the degree. Right. It’s very common for people to have an. Everybody has an asymmetry. I would say that nobody is completely symmetrical, but depends on what degree. Right. If one side behaves completely different than the other side, then the spine is going to start shifting or twisting in one direction. But it’s actually very uncommon to have someone that doesn’t have asymmetries.

Gabriel Saravia [00:43:04]: That’s very uncommon.

Nick Urban [00:43:06]: Yeah. And I think people have generally heard about scoliosis or an abnormal side to side curvature of the spine. But there are other common spinal, I want to call them abnormalities but curvatures that can exacerbate issues, right?

Gabriel Saravia [00:43:23]: Yes, definitely. Something that you cannot really, I mean you can see it, but you cannot. It’s not as, as obvious. It’s like vertebral compressions. Right. When the vertebrates are shifting not side to side but up and down. And if you compress enough your discs, you’re going to have like a rupture and you might have a herniated disc or something like that.

Nick Urban [00:43:43]: So that’s like a compelling argument against a lot of the common like heavy weightlifting things like for example, a barbell back squat is a big example that I’m sure. I know from your training and your background that you’re not the biggest fan of those. But for people who like those because they’ve done them for their entire athletic career, myself included, what do you recommend as a good substitute for, for them? And of course like there’s all I know that the gate related things such as proper sprinting with proper biomechanics is a great option. But with sprinting, as you know, a lot of the world doesn’t have the requisite level of fitness and or of like the, the bio, biomechanics to make it safe. And so if you don’t do it safely, you predispose, you predispose yourself to a much higher risk of injury. So what are some like lower risk things that we can do?

Gabriel Saravia [00:44:44]: You can do some plyometrics like jumps or stuff like that. But what I’m thinking is that if you are not able to sprint without hurting yourself, how likely it is that you’re able to deadlift, not that heavy 200 pounds or 250 pounds without hurting yourself. It’s also not very likely. Right. So if you’re able to lift a lot of weight, 300, 400, 400 pounds, like more than likely you can do a sprint without hurting yourself or more than likely not if you have, not if you have never done it, if you’ve only done weight, the weight lifting, probably not. Probably you’re deconditioned your body to run. But you can get a lot of benefits from doing some type of plyometrics or like you said, sprinting, sprint. The sprint is for me the sprint is king, right? It’s the best exercise.

Gabriel Saravia [00:45:34]: It involves almost every range of motion in the body. Your spine is moving, your legs are moving, your arms are moving. If you sprint fast enough, even the ground forces, I think that they are even higher than doing the deadlift. I haven’t researched that too much, but I’m pretty sure that 100% sprint has higher ground forces than a deadlift because of the speed, right? Like the force that you put on the ground to push yourself. So you don’t really need to compress your spine that much to have a good workout on your legs. And also the problem with those lifts is that for example, when you’re doing a deadlift, the weight is too close to your center of gravity because you’re lifting a man made object, right. When you’re lifting something heavy in nature is very rare that you have its center of gravity as close to yours. So what you usually do, for example when you have to lift an atlas stone is that you’re going to start in spine flexion and then you’re going to extend your spine as you lift the object to put your center of gravity under the object.

Gabriel Saravia [00:46:48]: Center of gravity. You know what I mean? That’s not a deadlift. That’s very different than doing a deadlift because your spine is going from the flexion to extension. The extension is going from the bottom to the top. Right. So for me, if you want to lift heavy stuff, it’s better to lift atlas stones than doing deadlifts with a bar, right? Because you are forced to do a movement with your spine that you’re not, that you don’t have to do with a deadlift.

Nick Urban [00:47:14]: Okay. And it’s also like, it sounds good on paper like the deadlift. Then you can carry things, you can move things around more easily in the everyday world, but you’re not going to have it as conveniently loaded in that pretty much one plane. Of course it’s, it’s, it’s a free weight, so it’s not really one plane. But at the same time, like it’s very conveniently set up and it doesn’t really mimic like, okay, I’m going to move a fridge, I’m going to move a bed or whatever. These things are not like nicely distributed and it’s not as convenient. It’s much more difficult on the body. And if you don’t have any practice with unwieldy objects like that, with different like centers of gravity, all that kind of stuff, it’s not going to translate and you might be really Strong when it comes to the deadlift.

Nick Urban [00:47:56]: But then when it comes to actual application or the functional side of things, it might not carry over at all.

Gabriel Saravia [00:48:02]: I wouldn’t say it doesn’t carry over at all. It does carry, but not to the degree that people think it does. Right. Like the thing that I was telling you, when you’re picking something heavy from the ground, you need to start in spine flexion. Like your spine is bending forward and, and as you lifted, you’re doing extension. You’re not learning that on the deadlift. So if you try to lift an object that is far away from your body with your, with your spine straight, you’re going to probably hurt yourself. I would say so if you’re not.

Gabriel Saravia [00:48:32]: If the deadlift didn’t teach you that movement, you’re going to try to lift it like you’re doing a deadlift. And if you try to lift it with your spine straight without going from the flexion to the extension, try to trying to move your center of gravity under the object’s center of gravity. But like you’re doing a suplex. Right. You’re trying to put your center of gravity under the other person, you’re more than likely going to hurt yourself. And the problem is that because your deadlift is training you to lift things with your back straight, that’s what you’re going to want to do. When you lift heavy stuff from the ground, instead of doing deflection and extension, you’re going to want to lift with your back straight.

Nick Urban [00:49:11]: Yeah. So how do you bridge those worlds? Say someone has been doing deadlifts. They recognize there’s value in doing other things. Perhaps they can deadlift 600 pounds, but when it comes to actually functionally moving things throughout the world, their cap is around £300. How do you go from that deadlift over into like a more functional skill that carries over? And like, I think people generally are starting to recognize that, yeah, there’s not complete carryover. But I also don’t want to just like completely neglect that movement. I want to be able to do these things and train these things to be better prepared for real life.

Gabriel Saravia [00:49:46]: There are a lot of ways to do it. Like an atlas tone is a way to do it. But you can do something similar to, like a shovel shoveling with a steel maze with a heavy steel mace. That’s going to start teaching you how to move a weight that is away from your body. You can use a cable bar. But I would say that if you’re able to lift £300 on an atlas stone that I think is pretty good. That’s a good limit. I don’t think that you’re going to go that heavy, like a lot heavier than that.

Gabriel Saravia [00:50:13]: But because the problem is that you’re creating a torque. Right? The torque, it has two components. It has the weight, but it also has the, the arm. Right, but the thing is that when you’re generating a torque, the radius of the arm is times square. So the distance has twice the weight. I mean weight on the equation as the weight itself, right. Is twice heavy, twice more important, not more important. You say twice the weight on an equation.

Gabriel Saravia [00:50:45]: Right. The distance is like you have two times the distance times the distance times the weight when you have a torque. Right. So just by getting a little bit of distance between you and the weight is going to make it a lot heavier. A lot heavier.

Nick Urban [00:51:02]: Right.

Gabriel Saravia [00:51:02]: And that’s the thing about the deadlift, that you don’t have that, that that moment arm is too short and that’s why you’re able to lift a lot, a lot heavy. But there, there are a lot of ways to make the deadlift safer. Even if you like to do the deadlifts, if that’s your thing, why don’t you just do a single leg deadlift? You need to use half of the weight. Your spine is going to get compressed by half because Instead of lifting £400, you’re going to lift £200 because you’re using only one leg. That’s going to be a lot safer. Right? So, so there are, there are a lot of ways you can lift Atlas stones, the, the cable bar, you can use steel maces, you can lift those dummy that the dummies that they use for wrestling, right. That they do suplex and stuff like that. So you can do, you can do that.

Gabriel Saravia [01:51:51]: There are a lot of ways. Sprinting also, I would say it’s a, it’s a good substitute for deadlifting. They’re doing jump squats or splits, jump squats or something like that. Also it’s a good substitute for deadlifts.

Nick Urban [00:52:07]: So is one of your main theses that instead of loading the, the spine or any parts of the body with like, lots of very heavy weight, we should look for more natural movements that carry over more to like the rest of life and that won’t have the same potential risk?

Gabriel Saravia [00:52:26]: Okay, yes, but that doesn’t mean that you have to like use lightweight or, I mean if you use lightweights and if you have a long enough moment arm, it’s not going to feel light. Like I mean, it’s going to be, it’s going to feel, it’s going to feel heavy. Like, then that’s why I like the cable bar. I don’t know if people are familiar with that, but it’s when you attach like a bar to a cable machine so you have a little bit of a longer lever arm and, and when you’re doing rotations, it’s a lot more difficult than doing a rotation with a handle. That’s why I like the cable bar, because you’re not really adding more weight, but you’re adding more moment arm. And it makes rotations, extensions also lateral flexions also more difficult. But it doesn’t mean that you need to, that the resistance is not going to be there. Like, I mean, I’m not against using heavy resistance, but when the resistance itself doesn’t translate into you having more load on the exercise is when, when, when I’m not really, I’m not really in favor of.

Gabriel Saravia [00:53:31]: And, and, and one of the best examples is the deadlift.

Nick Urban [00:53:36]: Okay, yeah, yeah, that makes sense to me. For say someone’s a crossfitter and they’re working out, doing their routines, their wads, five days a week, they, they feel good. What would you say to them in that scenario? Would you give them some additional pointers about like, hey, here’s how you protect yourself and would you also recommend them a different course of action?

Gabriel Saravia [00:54:00]: Look, if I have to train like a power lifter or a crossfitter and they have to do deadlifts in, in their competitions, right. I would try to reduce the damage that the deadlift already does in their training.

Nick Urban [00:54:15]: Right.

Gabriel Saravia [00:54:15]: So when they do their sports, they’re going to do deadlifts anyways. You don’t want to do more deadlifts, right. So you want to, you want to do the opposite. For example, when you’re doing deadlifts, the weight is coming down. They’re training your posterior chain, glutes and hamstrings. What about your anterior chain? Because the weight is, is pushing you down, is doing the work of your interior chain. Anterior chains are the muscles in the front of your body, your quads, your abdominals. So people who do a lot of lifting, they are usually bad in doing hip flexion because the weight is helping them do hip flexion.

Gabriel Saravia [00:54:56]: So you want to also balance their training by doing some type of work with the anterior chain. Right. That’s one thing that they don’t do well. They’re not going to do well. You want to also work on decompressing their Spine. Because what’s going to happen if you put a lot of weight on your spine? Axial actual loading, right. The adaptation is that the cross section of the vertebras, the area is going to become wider. Because if you have a wider area, you have less pressure.

Gabriel Saravia [00:55:27]: That’s been documented. Like you’ve seen that there are people who lift a lot, that they have a more cross sectional area on the vertebras. What’s going to happen when you have a wider cross sectional, more area in your vertebras? You have less range of motion. Look at the vertebras in your lumbar spine. They have, they are wider. And look at the vertebras in your, in your cervical spine, they are more narrow, they have less area. The cervical spine moves a lot more than the lumbar spine. So if you’re creating that adaptation on your spine, you’re going to have less range of motion.

Gabriel Saravia [00:56:00]: You know what I mean? The spine is not going to bend as easy as when your cross section is smaller, especially in your lumbar spine. So that’s something that you want to, that you want to address. You might want to decompress your spine also. That’s something.

Nick Urban [00:56:17]: How do you recommend that for decompressing the spine? Would you have them just hang from a bar or something or do inversions or what would you recommend that they do to actually improve that? Decompression?

Gabriel Saravia [00:56:29]: No, active decompression. Have their own muscles to do the decompression on their back. And it works. You are a Czech practitioner, right?

Nick Urban [00:56:36]: Yeah.

Gabriel Saravia [00:56:37]: Yeah, that’s what you were telling me before. So you know what tensegrity is, right?

Nick Urban [00:56:41]: Yep.

Gabriel Saravia [00:56:42]: Okay, for, for people who don’t, don’t know what tensegrity is. In a tensegrity structure, you have two elements. You have compression elements and you have tension elements. And the compression elements are suspended in the tension elements so they don’t touch each other. Right. You have, for example, a compression structure which is the opposite like a building. You have the brick that is under and the brick on top. And the brick under is going to have the weight of all of the bricks on top.

Gabriel Saravia [00:57:08]: The compression is continuous. Right. On the segregated structure, the compression is isolated, but the tension is continuous. Right. The way that you create more space in the vertebras is by changing the relation between the length and tens of the tension structures of your muscles. If you play with the length and tension of your muscles, connective tissue, so it’s fascia, tendons, muscle ligaments, you should be Able to create more space in the vertebras, right? But you, you need to know what to do. It’s not like not releasing everything, because if you release everything, the structure is going to fall apart. Not tensing everything, because if you tense everything, the tension itself is going to compress the joints.

Gabriel Saravia [00:57:53]: But some muscles are going to need more tension and less length. Some other muscles are going to need less tension and more like. So you need to. Everybody’s different. So you need to, you need to know what to do. But if you, if you, if you optimize the relationship between length and tension of the muscles, you can create more space in the vertebras and more space. Not only the vertebras, any joint. More space in the joint also means more mobility.

Gabriel Saravia [00:58:21]: If the bones are too close to each other, you have less room to move. If you give a little bit more space, you can also move more. So that’s why you don’t need, you don’t necessarily need more longer muscles to have more mobility. If you have more space in the joints, you can also have more mobility.

Nick Urban [00:58:40]: So this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is the functional antagonists of the body. And so you have the one muscle that’s long and weak, so to say, and then you have the other that opposes it, that’s short and tight. And by looking at your body, your unique, like, balance and imbalance profile, you’re able to create that, like, relaxation, that decompression, by working with what you currently have. But it’s not one of those things that you can just generically throw out. Oh, do this one thing and it’s going to work perfectly for everyone. Is that what you’re saying?

Gabriel Saravia [00:59:14]: Yes, it depends on the individual. But what you say, it’s interesting that there is an antagonist relationship. When one muscle shortens, another one stretches. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be an antagonist. Muscles in the same chain, they create that inhibition. So, for example, you have your calves that are connected to your plantar fascia and that are connected to your hamstrings. If you have tight plantar fascia and can pull the muscles on your calves and can create a long calf, for example, what usually happens, it’s more. And you see it very often that when you have people with a kyphosis, right, that the thoracic is bending forward too much, that they have tight hamstrings almost all the time.

Gabriel Saravia [01:00:02]: Almost all the time. So muscles along the same chain can also create that, that same inhibition. They don’t have to they don’t necessarily have to be antagonists.

Nick Urban [01:00:10]: Okay. Yeah. So what you’re saying is that if certain parts of your spine are tighter, those can refer that tightness and cause imbalances in other parts of that same chain. Above or below?

Gabriel Saravia [01:00:24]: Yes, yes, most definitely.

Nick Urban [01:00:26]: Okay. Yeah. So what you’re saying is that if certain parts of your spine are tighter, those can refer that tightness and cause imbalances in other parts of that same chain. Above or below?

Gabriel Saravia [01:00:24]: Yes, yes, most definitely.

Nick Urban [01:00:26]: Awesome. Well, Gabriel, you have a ton of resources. We’ll definitely link these in the show notes if people want to learn more about this. Because the body is fairly complex, safe to say. And you’re doing a great job of simplifying that. Before we part ways, I have some rapid fire questions for you and I also want you to let people know where they can go to connect with you, to follow your work and to check out what it is that you have going on.

Gabriel Saravia [01:00:49]: Okay. They can go to my Instagram. My Instagram is parable P A R A B A L L. That’s one of the inventions I made to work out. If they want to participate, they have a series where I analyze their gate cycle. And if they want to send me their gate cycles, I can also do it. And I do a reel. So that’s something that’s working really nice lately.

Nick Urban [01:01:11]: How are they sending you their gate cycle? Is it from a video recording on their phone?

Gabriel Saravia [01:01:15]: A video recording? Yes, on the phone and preferably on a treadmill, preferably from behind. If they can do it shirtless, it’s better. If they cannot do it shirtless, I can like, I mean, it’s fine. Just like have the video have like a nice quality so I can make some content about it because people are really interested about it. So I usually have a reel reel because it’s short and I don’t have the time to do the whole analysis. I take them to like a longer format video, like usually a 10 minute video where I analyze in more detail the gate cycle. But it just gives me the chance to let the audience participate a little bit more. A little bit more interactive.

Nick Urban [01:01:52]: And that’s how you can see their spine as they’re moving to understand. Okay, first of all, what’s their baseline like resting state, and then also as they move. Since you said the spine is the first place you want to look before you look at all the different angles, you’re able to see that from the back profile view.

Gabriel Saravia [01:02:08]: Yes, that’s probably the most important thing or the thing to watch first.

Nick Urban [01:02:13]: Nice. Okay, I’ll put that link to that in the show notes onto the quick rapid fire round. What is one exercise that we haven’t discussed yet that you tell every human to do every single day?

Gabriel Saravia [01:02:25]: I would say walking.

Nick Urban [01:02:27]: Ah, Love it. What is the biggest waste of time in a typical gym routine?

Gabriel Saravia [01:02:34]: Stretching.

Nick Urban [01:02:35]: If you could only train one body part for the rest of your life, what would it be?

Gabriel Saravia [01:02:40]: I wouldn’t do it. I would just not train.

Nick Urban [01:02:42]: What is a belief you hold about movement that would get you kicked out of a physical therapy conference?

Gabriel Saravia [01:02:48]: Deadlifts are bad for your back.

Nick Urban [01:02:51]: All right. And then finally, what is one thing that you’re working on right now that no one knows about yet?

Gabriel Saravia [01:02:57]: I’m working on a course to teach people how to fix their own gait cycle.

Nick Urban [01:03:02]: Beautiful. Very nice. That will be linked as soon as you have more detail for me in the Showrots.

Gabriel Saravia [01:03:07]: Okay, thank you.

Nick Urban [01:03:08]: Gabriel, thank you so much for joining the podcast today. It’s been a pleasure.

Gabriel Saravia [01:03:12]: Thank you for the invitation, Nick. The pleasure is mine.

Nick Urban [01:03:15]: And thank you all for tuning in and sharing your time, your energy and your focus with us today. Hope you have a great rest of your week and be an outlier. Thanks for tuning in to high performance longevity. If you got value today, the best way to support the show is to leave a review or share it with someone who’s ready to upgrade their health span. You can find all the episodes, show notes and resources mentioned@outlier.com until next time, stay energized, stay bioharmonized, and be an outlier.