Zack Arnold

Let's create things that matter. Together.

The Cure For Lower Back Pain, Tension Headaches, and So Much More

About Episode

If you’re sitting while reading this and grimacing at lower back pain, neck tension, or you experience regular headaches, you’d be surprised at how easy it is to alleviate all of these issues in just a few minutes a day…right at your desk.

In today’s interview I chat with returning guest Dr. Sadie Sanders, a doctor of chiropractic, biomechanical guru, and the CEO of Health & Human Performance in Woodland Hills, CA. For those that know Dr. Sadie, they call her “The Body Whisperer,” and as a patient of hers, I understand why. She is to the body what Mozart is to the piano (She’s that good).

Dr. Sanders and I talk about the many different causes for chronic pains throughout the body and how many of them are caused simply by not moving all day long. But more importantly we dive into how to eliminate your chronic pains right at your desk using very simple stretches and exercises using our brand new “Move Yourself Activity Video Vault.”

And here’s the coolest part for you: Since you are one of my loyal listeners, if you join the 5X Challenge this week I’m giving you 100% FREE access to every single video in this vault through next Tuesday, Jan 17th with no purchase information required and no hidden payments when you’re done.

Click here to get FREE ACCESS to the Video Vault and join the ‘5X Challenge’

Transcript

Zack Arnold: I’m here with Dr Sadie Sanders. And if you remember, I had an interview with Dr Sadie Sanders about six months ago, roughly, which means that you didn’t completely screw up our first interview together. So welcome back.

Sadie Sanders: Thank you. Thank you. I’m happy to be here again. Grace you with my presence.

Zack Arnold: If anybody wants to really get a sense of your background and basically the whole concept between how to diagnose, reduce and eliminate chronic pains, they can go back to Episode 64 and we’re going to link to that in the show notes. So I don’t want to belabor that too much, because there’s a lot of stuff that you and I have to talk about today. You and I have been very, very busy bees since we recorded that conversation together a long time ago, but just super, super quick. For those that are coming new that don’t have the time to go backwards, just give me kind of the the two to three minute elevator pitch of your background and what you do for a living, and then we’re going to go from there.

Sadie Sanders: Well, I am a doctor of chiropractic, which means that I went to a four year undergraduate degree, and then I continued with my doctorate in chiropractic. Chiropractic is based on the philosophy that the body is pretty amazing and it’s a self healing mechanism. So it’s based on the philosophy that if we give the body what it needs, and we remove the toxicity or the stressors from the body, it has the innate intelligence to heal itself. So when I graduated in 2009 I started practicing chiropractic, and at the young age of 24, years old, and I practiced with a lot of athletes. So I worked in Florida, first with a minor league football team. I worked with a lot of rugby players, and I saw some pretty crazy injuries, and I learned that the body has kind of a system to break it down into small movements. And the small movements happen not only in the spine and in the extremity joints, which means the arms, the legs, the ankles, things like that. But it also moves in things like flexion throughout the hip, so bending forward at the waist, being able to extend through the mid back, different small movements like that. And if you analyze each one of those, then you can pretty much unlock the body and all of its little pieces. So I started practicing with a lot of athletes. I’ve expanded my knowledge to pediatrics, little kiddos, geriatrics, grandma and grandpa. I do a lot of family practice now with nutrition, and we do a lot of rehab in my office. Now, rehab is not a big scary word when I’m working with a patient. Rehab means about three to five minutes of exercises a day that are specifically designed to unwind and loosen the body, take a stressor off and to stabilize and strengthen the body, give the body what it needs. So I’ve been able to come at the body from different aspects of the musculoskeletal system, which we just briefly talked about, the emotional system, and then also our chemical system, our nutrition. So I’ve taken all these things, rolled them into a little ball and made a nice little presentation for my patients.

Zack Arnold: Well, I’m really glad that you brought up this idea of rehab, because this is the perfect segue into where I was going to go a little bit later, and we can just kind of go there now. But when I alluded to the fact that you and I have been very busy bees, we have actually built together an entire online version of your rehab program, from what I understand, correct.

Sadie Sanders: Yes, sir, it’s fairly comprehensive for what my patients that walk through my door get directly from me,

Zack Arnold: And basically, the way that you and I have kind of coined it is, it’s basically having a chiropractor on demand. And I know that we probably need, like, one of those 14 minutes Saturday Night Live disclaimers to roll through here right now. So, you know, keep that in mind when you’re listening where it’s not going to replace the care of a licensed physician. But at the same time, when I had approached you. And first the for a little bit of background for our relationship, you are right down the street from me. I can actually walk to your clinic. I had no idea who you were, and I was a complete and total idiot. And I was doing one of our afternoon exercise breaks when I was still working on Empire, and everybody was holding plank for a minute. And I’m like, I can hold plank for a minute. So I’m, I’m gonna do something different, and I’m gonna hold a tripod headstand for a minute on my head, and it didn’t hurt at all. And then the next morning, I’m like, what? Doesn’t my neck move? And I had a problem, and I had no mobility to one direction, and I couldn’t look over my right shoulder, and I just, it was as simple as, all right, chiropractor, Woodland Hills. Your name came up. I went to go see you, and I had been to chiropractors before, and it’s just kind of what you would picture. You go in and you kind of run through the assembly line of machines, and somebody says, where you hurt, and they Crick crack, crack, and you’re out. And then you repeat the cycle every two weeks for the rest of your life. And the situation with you was very, very different, and I didn’t realize this at the time, but you just have such an extensive background on how the body works, but you’re also very intuitive with individuals. And I actually came to find out that I don’t know if you coined it or somebody else did, but you’re actually called the body whisperer. And to me, that sounds so gimmicky and ridiculous, but oh my god, it’s so true, because it was a completely different experience for me, and I still went through complete hell for like, six months trying to do all these adjustments and just all these little exercises. And it’s not like all of a sudden you touch me with the Vulcan grip, and I was saved, but I really saw that you had a very different approach to the way that you put your treatment together. And I came to you, and I was like, Hey, I’ve got this idea that I wanted to do for a long time, and I’ve never found the right person, and I think that you and I should chat. And I said, I want to build a library. And you said,

Sadie Sanders: I’m on board. Let’s do it.

Zack Arnold: Well, not only that, but the cool thing was, you’re like, Well, I’ve wanted to build a library for my patients forever, but I don’t know how to, like, make videos and edit them and put them on a website. And I was like, Oh, well, I know somebody that can do that part, but I don’t know anything about the body from like, at the level that you do. I know a little bit about biomechanics, but not enough that I’m going to sell it. So I said, I have all these talents. You have all these talents, expertise and education, let’s package those together, and thus the move yourself activity, video vault was born. So we’ve spent a lot of time together over the last six months, and I want to explain to people how this library works from the ground up, how you thought of it, and how somebody can actually get tremendous benefit from using this library.

Sadie Sanders: So the way the library works is it’s based off of the generals that I see in my office. And what I mean is this isn’t like you had said earlier, a patient specific, case specific, 100% to a T medical evaluation. But if I took the vast majority of people who walk through my office, these are going to be the most common conditions that I evaluate, that I discuss with my patients, that I break down, make sure they understand and then we work together to correct these conditions. Obviously, the library is lacking the chiropractic adjustment, but it has all the other good stuff, right? It has all the mobility exercises, all the stability exercises, and when you you log into this library, it has a massive platform, so we’ve created a funnel so that you can take this information and answer some questions about yourself mentally and work your way through this funnel to find the solution that fits best for your condition. So very first thing is my lovely self explaining what is chiropractic? Because it’s amazing to me that so many people still don’t understand this, this awesome, holistic approach to healthcare, reducing stress in the body, giving it what it needs by manipulating or adjusting the spinal column, taking some stress off the nervous system and letting it heal itself. And I explain the biomechanics of it, what the adjustment is, why the principles fall into place in our common life, and you just kind of have a base knowledge of where to go from there. After that, I break down the three most common types of pain that I see in my office. So we have acute and chronic pain, which means Ouch, something hurts, or Whoa, this is always sore. We have numbness and tingling, so something just doesn’t feel right. We don’t have full sensation there, and then we have the category of radiating pain. So somebody who has this library says, Hmm, I sound like one of these three categories. Then I go into explaining where acute and chronic pain comes from, the principles of posture, and how not carrying your body correctly can cause damage to certain joints. I actually explain what pain is and how pain works in the body, and give you a general idea of how did I get here, you know? How did I get in this place where I’m really not feeling great every single day? I do the same concept for numbness and tingling. When is numbness and tingling, a very serious problem. When is it something that we can probably manage on our own? And same with radiating pain? When is the radiating pain a situation where you need to go find a doctor, get checked out? And when is it something where we kind of have some budge room, we can work on it, try to get it to resolve a little bit after you’ve decided which of those three categories, there’s even more of a division, and it breaks down the specific condition or specific body area. So if we use the example of numbness and tingling, say somebody has numbness and tingling down one side of their leg and it goes above their knee. Well that sounds like me. You would click on that category. And there’s my lovely face again, explaining how that probably happened, what’s going on in the body to make that there. And again, it’s not specific for every single person that ever clicks on that one specific link, but again, it’s the generals. And then the most exciting part, the thing that we really, really put so much time and effort into is a real time video library where someone is going through specific exercises to start correcting that condition right now, in this moment when you’re looking at that video, doing it with me having having myself or one of my experts explaining how to do the exercise, what it should feel like, what it should look like, so that once you’re done with that segment, you are a little bit closer to being a healthier person. You’ve made a good decision, that your body has gotten some more mobility. You’ve gotten a little bit stronger just from going along with that video. So that’s the main meat and potatoes of what we’ve done there, and I’ve gotten great feedback about it. It’s, it’s just been such a successful venture so far.

Zack Arnold: Well, unfortunately, the best part of the entire video library is a part that nobody’s ever gonna see. Which is, which is you trying to say? And I’ve designed a series of exercises that go into a routine of a series. It was, it was quite possibly one of the the most exciting moments of my life ever trying to record this series of videos. It was amazing. But, anyway, I digress, but, but what I what I really want to impress upon people when I say to them, we have this activity video of all, what people I say to me is, oh, yeah, no, I’ve got like, a seven minute workout app, and, like, I’ll be at my desk and I’ll do jumping jacks or push ups or 32nd plank or whatever it is. Yeah, no, I’ve got something like that. And I’m like, No, you don’t understand. This is the quickest, fastest version that you’re ever going to get of your own personal chiropractic degree in 15 minutes. And it’s going to tell like it takes 10 years of expertise, boils it down to 10 minutes and tells you exactly what button to push. So if there’s anywhere in your body, literally from the top of your head to the tips of your toes, where you point and say ouch, you will walk them through this funnel of specificity in less than 15 minutes and they’re going to know exactly what they need to do, and it works like magic.

Sadie Sanders: Yeah, it’s pretty incredible the way that it’s just it’s very specific. And I personally assume that every single person that logs onto this library is just as busy as I am. So I don’t really have 30 to 40 minutes in my day to do a regular stretching routine, a regular rehab routine. I’m the type of person that I’ve got about five to seven minutes, and that’s pushing it. So if I’m going to take those five to seven minutes, I’m going to make sure that they are the most specific movements that I can do to get the most bang for my buck in terms of time there. So I designed this whole library with that in mind. So if you’re somebody that has a low back soreness or low back tightness, I’m not going to give you 20 stretches that may or may not help. I’m going to give you some streamlined sniper style exercises that are going to get to the main muscle groups that are the most tight on my patients that I see, and I’m going to give you a few minutes to work through those, a few minutes to get stronger, and bang, bang, we’re done.

Zack Arnold: And that’s exactly the way that it works. Is you just you really feel like you become a biomechanics ninja, just by watching this where you you go into the library and you’re like, Oh, I hurt somewhere. And then 20 minutes later, you’re talking about your hip flexors, and you know, reverse flexion. And you’re like, Oh, my God, I know everything about the body. Suddenly, what I really want to impress upon people again. And you kind of alluded to this a bit, but there’s a lot of individual exercises in here that are no more than 30 to 45 to 60 seconds. Some of them are strengthening. Some are actual stretches. Some of them are mobility exercises. But even then, if you were to open up a library and it has 50 individual videos, the response everybody’s going to have is okay, I have no idea what to do, like this is too overwhelming. So not only have you created this nice information funnel. But what you also did, and this was the part that I didn’t even catch on to at first, and you had to keep explaining to me until the light bulb went off. I’m like, oh, that’s brilliant. Is we just recorded all of these individual exercises, but then we rearranged the order of them in like 25 different combinations based on the style of pain that you have. So there are over 100 different video either routines or individual exercises, but it’s they’re designed based on the pain that you have, whether it’s both sides of the body. One side of the body, you might be doing foam rolling, but you might be doing in a different order, in a different time, based on your pain, and that was. Exactly that was the next level for me.

Sadie Sanders: That’s the kicker, and that comes from my clinical experience. I’ll have I like I said, I work with the large athlete base, so a lot of my patients that walk in, and you did too, as well. Zack, you know what a foam roller is. You’ve probably dabbled with it a little bit. I’ve rolled out my glutes. I’ve rolled out my IT band. I hear that a lot coming into my office, but they’re still coming into my office with stiffness, soreness, pain, so they’re not hitting the mark. And what I have found that is helpful for my patients is maybe you need to roll your hip flexor so the front of your upper leg on one side, but you don’t need to roll it on the other side. You actually need to be rolling your glute or your butt on the other side. And so this library makes that more specific. It’s not just, oh, low back pain roll out your hamstrings, your quads and your glutes. No, it’s you have low back pain on the left side that kind of goes down your leg. Here’s where you put the ball to release that muscle. Here’s where you roll out. And then these are the exercises that you do to get stronger.

Zack Arnold: Yeah. And then that’s the coolest thing about it, is that the investment in any kind of technology is almost nothing between the foam roller and lacrosse balls, which you can either keep in your pocket. I don’t really recommend you do it, because you’ll get funny looks like I have a little wooden bowl of lacrosse balls that I keep right on my desk for either doing forearm work, hand work or, I mean, some of the stuff that you do with a lacrosse ball in these videos, I remember thinking, oh, yeah, we’re gonna put these videos together. And, you know, I already know a fair amount about biomechanics and mobility work. And then we started shooting these, and I remember my jaw dropping, and I’m like, That’s awesome. Like, I had no idea you could do that, but it’s such simple stuff, all of which, and I remember this is criteria that we talked about where I said, if somebody can’t do this at work in front of a workstation in five minutes, I’m not going to bother shooting it like it has to fit in that criteria. And you’re like, that’s great, because everything fits that.

Sadie Sanders: And I remember watching you sometimes see me do something, you know, being back on the other side of the camera and then slowly creep over to the corner and try to do the exercise yourself.

Zack Arnold: Yeah. I mean, this stuff was just so good. And that’s the response that I’ve gotten from the members that are in the course and that are using the library so far, is they’re just shocked at how easy this stuff is, but how effective it is. We’re under the assumption that if we want dramatic results, it’s going to require a dramatic investment of both time and money, buying expensive equipment and doing really long, drawn out routines. And it really is kind of the magic button.

Sadie Sanders: The body is kind of like a puzzle, you know, if you find the little pieces that need to be put in the right places, you give the body what it needs, then it just really unfolds. It really becomes something different. And actually, our bodies are these really great machines, and they’re very efficient, and sometimes we just need, for lack of a better analogy, a little oil here, and a little bit of a screw tightening there, and it really runs much, much better.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s the thing that really works in here, is, like you said, I was somebody that came in that I had done lots of foam rolling and just general work, especially when you do the P 90x programs, and especially P 90 x2 and everybody knows that I’m a total fanboy of Tony Horton, and there’s been a bit of man love going on there. But in P 90 x2 part of the routine every single day. It’s a 60 minute routine, but there’s like 15 minutes of foam rolling, and it’s great, but it’s very general. It’s the it’s the gigantic muscle groups. It’s doing the the traps muscles there’s doing the quads, or maybe the IT bands. But it’s not really super specific, and millions of people are doing the exact same routine. So I came in thinking, oh, yeah, no, I know something about foam rolling, sure. And then I was like, Whoa, this is, like, the surgical approach. I was approaching this whole process with a giant AX. And you’re like, No, no, here’s a scalpel. And it’s amazing how effective, how inefficient that process can be,

Sadie Sanders: Yeah, and that comes from that clinical background, my education, my years in practice, my athletic background, you know, everything kind of rolled into one. And I do think that it was, you know, a fake that we found one another. Because you had mentioned earlier, I had said, oh, I want to make this library. It was on a to do list that I had on my computer, find someone to help with library, you know. And I had all of this in my head. So when we designed this library, we had all of the information. It was just taken straight out of my clinical practice, because this is the stuff that we use most often in our day to day practice. So the things that we see the most often, the exercises that we prescribe, the most often. And it just made sense to put it in a format where we could share it with more people than just those that are fortunate enough to be able to walk right in through our doors.

Zack Arnold: Well, one of the things that I really want to hit a little bit further, and I know you touched on it, but this is a giant revelation for me, is this idea that it’s not just about finding the pain points and treating them, it’s also about strengthening. Certain parts of the body. So when we were talking about this whole ninja approach in the scalpel, it’s not just, oh, here’s the pain, and I need to massage it with a lacrosse ball. It’s there might be a point like 12 inches further away in your body, or on the other side of your body where you’re like, we’re going to strengthen this so this pain doesn’t continue. That to me, was the game changer.

Sadie Sanders: Oh, absolutely. And that’s based off of Long, long, long time knowledge of yoga, of different body movements, of Eastern medicine, and we know as chiropractors, we took the knowledge of, hey, the body works really well if you just give it what it needs. And one of those things that the body needs is stability and strength. So for example, if somebody has a lower back issue. Let’s say you have low back pain on on both sides, right above the glutes, right at your waist. And as a chiropractor, I teach you how to stretch out the muscles that are pulling you into a strange position and causing stress, if I don’t teach you how to strengthen up your core muscles and how to strengthen up your glutes, then the likelihood that your body is going to stay in that correct position is much, much less. And I think you had said earlier with your chiropractic experiences in the past, you know, it’s it’s crack here, stretch here, you’ll have to see me again in two weeks. You know, if you’re not getting that strengthening portion, then it’s true your body is going to bounce right back into that kind of twisted area, because there’s nothing stopping it from going back into that incorrect position. There’s no stability, there’s no strength that’s holding you in that aligned, strong posture. So when we progress somebody through a course of care in our office, the very first thing that we have to do, we call it unwinding somebody. So we get them out of that twisted position. So maybe one hip is higher up than the other. One shoulder is rolled in, maybe both shoulders are rolled in and the chin is poking out. And we we do the stretching, we do the lacrosse ball, we do the foam roller, so that they become even right to left. If I kicked you out of my office then and I said, bye, bye. We’re done the things that you do in your day to day life, because we all do them. It’s called this industrialized nation that we live in. We sit in a car, we sit at a desk, we walk on hard cement. We wear the wrong shoes, not just ladies with our sexy heels, but men with unsupportive shoes. We end up putting too much stress on the body, and so we need some strength to kind of balance that out. Our lives are these big, huge balance scales. If you have too much stress, then you’re going to end up moving away from wellness and towards sickness. So one of the ways that we can kind of tip those scales, and I talk about this in an introductory to the library, is to give ourselves a fighting chance by adding strength to the body. And in the library, I’m talking mainly about musculoskeletal strength. So good core, good glutes, good upper back strength, but there’s also chemical strength, nutrition, getting rest and emotional strength, making sure that we’re giving our body some time to decompress, positive thoughts, giving ourselves good mantras. But you know, everything that the body needs are these strengths, and so we hit that in our office as well,

Zack Arnold: Well. And what I can tell you, the greatest drawback of all this to you is that you have, for the most part, lost a client. Because I don’t really need to go in anymore, because I’ll just say, man, you know, I’m a little tight here. This is kind of weird. Oh, I’ll just go to the library and I’ll take 10 minutes, like, oh, yeah, no, I’m much better. I don’t need to go see them. So I still also go down the street because, you know, I’m just like, a total glutton for a massage. So I love doing deep tissue body work, and it’s not like the the touchy feely Swedish massage with the candles. It’s like screaming and tears in my eyes,

Sadie Sanders: Like you’re used to the wall.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, exactly. So that’s, that’s the kind of stuff that I’ll do to kind of work out all the kinks from all the the training that I’m doing. But I don’t really have to go in for adjustments, because I wasn’t, like you said. I wasn’t going through that, that treadmill assembly line. It was a matter of, rather than, it’s kind of the same approach, like, if you’re looking at it the way that the medical system works nowadays, and that’s a whole different rabbit hole we don’t have time to go down. But they’re not trying to fix the source of the sickness. They’re saying, How do I cover it up with a pill or prescription? And they’re medical doctors. They’re doctors of medicine. So that’s their job. They’re not holistic wellness practitioners. But I feel like chiropractic has gotten a bad name, because there are a lot of people that treat chiropractic with the exact same philosophy, saying, Well, yeah, I see that you have lower back pain and whatever, and I know what’s going to happen. I’m going to crack you here, and I’m going to stretch you here, and you’re going to walk out and you’re going to feel like a million bucks, but you’re not going to change any of your habits. You’re going to sit the same way, you’re going to behave the same way, and I’ll see you again in two weeks. And that is a terrific business model.

Sadie Sanders: Well, you know, in just a brief glancing over medical doctors versus chiropractors is our training is completely different in the sense that as. Chiropractor. I believe the body’s pretty cool. I believe that it does what it’s supposed to do if we give it the materials and medical doctors come at it as we’re doomed. There’s something wrong. We’re missing a medication, we’re missing an enzyme. We’re missing something. We need to put a drug in there to give the body what it needs. And so if you come at it like that, then you you are dependent on the system, because you don’t believe that your body can do it on its own. And with chiropractic, we believe the body can as long as we give it what it needs. And you know, in your case, and in a lot of my patients case, it needed to stop being so darn stressed out, and it needed to be strengthened. And my goal with my patients is that they don’t need to see me every two weeks. I mean, I live an active lifestyle. I personally get adjusted every three weeks because, as Zack and I were talking about earlier, I own more than one business. I am a CrossFit athlete. I’m Olympic weightlifter. I put a lot of stress on my body, so my stress levels get tipped, and adjustment brings that stress back down. And some people don’t need that very often. They’re able to manage their stressors on their own. And some people they might have a chronic short leg, they might have a chronic disease, and they’ll need an adjustment more often because their stress levels are higher. So everybody’s different, and we try to give you the tools that fits your body, your lifestyle, your needs.

Zack Arnold: Well, speaking of the word stress, the last place that I want to go, this is one of the most common questions that I get that I’m unable to answer, and I’m very candid that when somebody asks me something and I don’t know the answer. My response is, I don’t know. And I am asked all the time about repetitive stress injuries. I see this question come up in Facebook groups all the time from completely unqualified people answering them that are just other people that are like, Oh, well, I read this on a blog, or I saw that, or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Let us dig into this idea of repetitive stress injuries. And for those that don’t know, and you can kind of go into this further, but kind of the layman’s version of it is, well, I have my arm in one position all day, and I’m clicking my mouse over and over and over, or I’m reaching over to this lever all day long, whatever it is, just this repetitive stress creating damage to your body. So can you go a little bit further into what a repetitive stress injury actually is how it forms, and then what you can do about it,

Sadie Sanders: Absolutely repetitive stress injuries are, I would actually say more than the majority of my practice. I would say upwards to 75% 80% of my practice. There’s two reasons that people have a huge shock to their musculoskeletal system. It’s either a macro trauma or a micro trauma. Now, a macro trauma are the big ones, a sports injury, a car accident, a fall down the stairs holding a tripod for 10 minutes. You know, whatever it might be, but the other side of it is a micro trauma, so something small, and you use the example of clicking a mouse all the time. With my runners, it’s coming down hard on one knee again and again and again. With my CrossFit athletes, that might be doing a press overhead a lot, and they use one arm stronger than the other or somebody that you know gets in and out of a chair the wrong way again and again and again. How many times a day do we go from sit to stand, and if you’re not doing that correctly, and by the way, that’s what a squat truly is. A sit to stand, then you’re going to end up with a micro trauma, or a synonym for that is a repetitive stress injury. Now, in the body, think of that not as something being completely smashed into a million pieces. That’s a, like I said, a macro trauma. But the analogy that I like to think of is taking a wire hanger and bending it 100 times up and down. That’s a very small movement, but if I do that up and down, up and down 100 times, the hanger is going to break. If you do the same thing to your body, if you hinge your lower back incorrectly by getting out of that chair, up and down, up and down 100 times in that one spot, the low back is going to break. So it’s a mass sum of a very bad habit again and again and again. Now, with my people that sit at a computer all day long and you’re clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, you have to continue to do that, right? That’s your job. You’re clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking. Well, when you’re doing a repetitive stress injury, and I’m going to use the mouse as an example, because it’s very realistic, you are essentially strengthening one very specific part of your forearm every single minute of the day. And. And I can’t have you stop doing that, because that’s your job, that’s your livelihood, that’s your living. But I can explain to you, Hey, look at this muscle. Look how overused this muscle is. To fix this, we need to remove the stress from that muscle, whether that’s through stretching, whether that’s through self massage, getting a professional massage, having a chiropractic adjustment to the elbow, the wrist, the hand, to bring that stress down. And then we need to strengthen the opposing or opposite muscle group. So if you’re clicking, clicking, clicking, then I need to work on the muscle on the other side of the forearm. And this always blows Zack s mind every single time he’ll say, I have pain here, and I’ll point to the opposite side of the body, and I’ll say it’s because you’re weak here. And then I give exercises to strengthen up that opposite side of the body so my patients learn to kind of look at the opposite side when something’s uncomfortable. But think of the wire hanger. We go back to that stress in one area over and over and over again. If you’re not using that area correctly, that’s going to end up popping, cracking, breaking. So we have to just basically disperse that stress equally throughout the body and bring that strength level up so that it doesn’t really irritate the body as much. Is that a pretty easy way to make sense of it. RSI,

Zack Arnold: Yes, I think that the hangar analogy is fantastic. I’m totally going to steal that for the rest of my life and use it like I designed it myself. And I’m an expert

Sadie Sanders: I stole that from somebody.

Zack Arnold: The hanger is the perfect analogy. And what I will tell people just from a layman’s perspective, not knowing as nearly as much about biomechanics as you do, but I’ve learned enough to know that it really doesn’t matter what your posture is, what your position is it there, you could have the best ergonomic mouse on the planet, but if you’re doing the same action all day long in the best position on the planet, you’re going to develop all the same issues. So my advice is always, just switch up your environment, so you’re not doing the same activities all day long. And if we’re talking about the mouse, you can get a vertical mouse, you can get a horizontal mouse, you can get a track ball, you can get a keyboard mouse. Like there’s so many different things you can get, but if you only have one tool, you still have to perform the same action. So like you were saying, if you’re clicking with your index finger over and over. If you’re going to go ahead and get a different type of mouse, that’s say, a track ball, and now you’re spinning the track ball with your middle finger over and over. The problem is just going to migrate. You’re just moving it. It’s like, basically, you have this giant pile of garbage in the middle of your kitchen floor. You’re not taking the garbage out of the house. You’re just taking a broom and putting it in one corner of the room. Then you’re sweeping it under the oven for a while, then it goes behind the fridge. The garbage isn’t gone.

Sadie Sanders: Yeah, yep. And the garbage is the stressor. You know, if we get too much of a stressor, and we don’t just take a little piece of garbage and get it out of there every once in a while, then that that piles up, and that’s where our trauma comes from,

Zack Arnold: Exactly, and that’s one of the reasons that I have the lacrosse ball sitting on my desk, so I can always be doing these different exercises, like you show the wrist extensor strengthening exercise, which is just using a rubber band to do the opposite of what a hand gripper would do, where you’re actually doing the opposite exercises. And that was one of those jaw dropping moments where I started doing it. I’m like, oh my god, I can already feel my pain going away. It was that simple.

Sadie Sanders: The rubber band right out of my hand and did it right then and there. And you were so impressed with that one, I will never forget that.

Zack Arnold: Yeah. And now that’s that’s part of my toolkit. I take it everywhere that I go, where, like right now I’m looking at my desk at home, and I have a couple of those kind of gooey, squishy stress balls. I have lacrosse balls, which are very, very hard there, but for anybody that doesn’t know, they’re about the size of a tennis ball, but they’re much harder. So it’s like, just imagine the equivalent of somebody digging their elbow into you during a massage. That’s a lacrosse ball, but then I have a whole set of rubber bands that have different levels of tension with different colors. So that’s one of my habits that I’ve developed. Is when I’m watching footage, if I’m watching a video, whatever it is, I’m doing that wrist extensor strengthening, and I have not experienced any pain in my forearms or my elbows or my wrist for months. And I was one of those people that I got to the point where I was seeing, I don’t even know the name of the type of doctor, but somebody that specializes in the hands and the wrists, and I was told that I had cysts in my right wrist and I needed surgery. They said the only way we can solve this problem was with surgery. With surgery. And I said, There’s got to be a better way. Like, there I didn’t injure it. It’s not like somebody took a sledgehammer and hit my wrist. Like, I know this is from some type of repetitive stress. I just didn’t know enough about how to reverse it. But as I started to reshape my environment, change the tools that I was using, I have zero pain. I was at the point where I couldn’t even do a single push up because I couldn’t put any weight on my right hand, and I couldn’t even put it in push up position with any weight on it, and now I can bust out 100 push ups, and I don’t feel anything in my wrist, just because I know where those specific buttons are that need to be pushed to reverse these effects,

Sadie Sanders: Decrease that stress and. Increase that strength, you just got to make it specific to the body area, just like we do in that video library,

Zack Arnold: Exactly. So we this has basically just been a 45 minute long giant infomercial about the move yourself activity video vault. But I really wanted to have a resource that I could send people to, because everybody just assumes the activity videos are no different than any other seven minute or 10 minute workout where you just do this or that in front of your desk, and you’re more active, and it’s so completely different. It’s so much more scientific. So I just wanted this one stop shop where people are like, Oh, now I get it. Now I see how this is so different and so useful. So that, having been said as always, whether via Skype, that works when it chooses to, or in person, in you know, my back office shooting a bunch of videos, it is always a pleasure to chat with you

Sadie Sanders: Absolutely. We’ve had some good times, and I can only see many, many more to come as we bring education information to so many people out there that really, really just need it

Zack Arnold: Absolutely. And before I let you go, I want to make sure that people know where to find you, because you’ve just created this brand new, handy dandy, awesome website. So where can people go to learn more about you and see your new cool website?

Sadie Sanders: Well, my office is located at Woodland Hills, California. Woodland Hills is in the Los Angeles area, and we are called Health and Human Performance. So to find me online, the best way to find us is HHP, chiro.com HHP is for Health and Human Performance. Chiro is short for chiropractic.com Great website. Looks great. We are so excited to launch that one.

Zack Arnold: Yes, as you should be. And for anybody that’s listening that did not come through my podcast or my website to have a crack at the move yourself. Activity video vault, you can just visit optimize yourself.me. And you’ll get everything you need there to get started. So it has been an absolute pleasure. So thank you so much for being on the show.

Sadie Sanders: Absolutely anytime you need me, I am here.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Zack Arnold

Learn

Connect

The Cure For Lower Back Pain, Tension Headaches, and So Much More

About Episode

Episode Highlights

Useful Links

About Guest

Transcript

Episode Credits