Adverse Neural Tension

This was a quick video I made after work last night regarding a patient with symptoms of adverse neural tension of her right arm. Adverse neural tension means simply that the nervous tissue is being compromised somewhere along its span in the body to the point of expressing symptoms of numbness, tingling, or even pain. In this case, the patient had been to several medical specialists and had plenty of diagnostic work-ups that were all without any answers.
Enjoy...

Oil Pulling: Clean your mouth!

Here's a video from an osteopath and CHEK Holistic Lifestyle Coach, Alistair McGee, from the UK about oil pulling, a potentially effective, and yet simple technique for oral hygiene.

Bodywork at Michael Jocson Physiotherapy

When one thinks of "bodywork"there's usually images of the client lying on the table while the bodyworker paves away at their body leaving them feeling like mush, relaxed, and rejuvenated. This conventional way of thinking of what bodywork is has more of a passive priority where the "bodyworker" does most of the work in realigning and affecting the neuromusculoskeletal systems while the client basically lays there and does relatively nothing. In our modern-day, stressed-out society, the "passive-biased" bodywork is needed in a de-stressing capacity and it's preferred by the public since who wants to have to think more about anything in addition to the daily grind BS we all deal with everyday? To actually have to pay Attention to our own bodies and to actively do something to change our habitual ways of moving for the greater good of our Health takes a lot of commitment and most would rather pay money to have someone else make them feel better.

Perhaps it's time for a paradigm shift? There's nothing wrong with passive bodywork; it can help, and it does feel good, but for many of us, learning about ways in which we can sort of be our own "therapists/bodyworkers" by being more aware of our postural tendencies and movement habits and their consequences and taking Responsibility to make the appropriate changes at each given Moment....wow. Imagine that: being able to unload overly loaded aspects on the fly so as not to go beyond the given capacities of the soft tissues to the point of compensation into an injury.
In other words, injury prevention through enhanced Awareness.

In my practice, I assess your alignment/posture in three planes in various positions, and during various movement patterns as well as at rest. I teach you about what I find as far as where you are right now with how you are presenting to me how you stack your body up and willfully move from there. It becomes more of an art rather than a science because there are several variables that can affect how you move and my job is to expose as many of them to you so that you can make the appropriate changes. For example, what you do for the majority of the day (as far as movement) does affect the structure and function of your body. Your body adapts to whatever stress you place upon it. So if you sit at a desk all day, your body will conform to make sitting as easy as possible; the same goes for if you're very active, where the body (actually, your nervous system), will attempt to be as efficient as possible where the brain is not so much concerned with specific muscles as it is with movement patterns and will choose the easiest path to get the job done. The problem arises when we've adapted so much to a sedentary lifestyle that it accelerates the breakdown of our tissues and a "forgetting" of primal movement patterns, and prevents us to do more than what we're used to. My take on this is that it's never too late to make beneficial changes once you understand where you presently are, what faculties are available, how to use them effectively, and a vision of where you want to realistically be.

In other words, I help You earn the right to carry your Body throughout Life.....

So if you're looking for a "massage" and don't want to take any Responsibility for your Health,...please do not call me for an appointment. But if you want to be your own therapist,....I've got an appointment waiting for you ;-)

Pelvic Floor Question

Nanna from Iceland sent me a question recently regarding the pelvic floor and training. Since I haven't been making videos lately, I decided to film a quick response. Enjoy!

Got Training?

I don’t just treat patients; I train clients as well.

And when I train clients, I teach them awareness of their body with movement. And with that awareness, they discover what areas tend to work more and what areas tend to work less. For example, everyone knows about running, right? Maybe not, but when you observe someone who says they “run”, they’re actually “jogging”, which is a slower pace form of running. And when they run, there’s actually specific areas that take more stress then others. For example, it’s common to see the calves, shins, heels, and/or lower hamstrings do a lot of work and the glutes sent on vacation somewhere. Where’d they go? I don’t know, but they’re not functioning on that “runner”. My point is that most people go on auto-pilot when exercising and when they over-do it, they start to experience some kind of discomfort and/or pain that may “go away on its own”, or actually worsen over time if they keep ignoring it.

One simple test I do with clients is to have them perform an exercise, such as running, and to stop when they start feeling an increase of muscle activity in a predominant area such as the calf or even when they start noticing an increase in pressure on the heel, etc; The point is to have them stop when they reach a point of excessive demands on a specific area not to the point of discomfort or pain but when it grabs their attention more than when rested. This point would be what I call their threshold and I would design a program with the goal to increase it so that they could do more of their activity but with less chances of overuse to a specific area.

Obviously there’s more to it than threshold testing. Once I’ve examined their mechanics and tweaked variations of their movements to pin-point what I call the “Golden Nugget”, or primary area of dysfunction, I further investigate specific muscle imbalance relationships in a more stable, less-threatening to the nervous system position such as lying on the table. From here, we work on any specific relationships that may be affecting the client’s movement capacities. In other words, I guess you can say we work on their “weakest links”, improve them, integrate them with the whole body & movement skills, and then challenge them to sink it into the nervous systems movement repertoire.

My take on training (in no particular order) is Awareness, Variety, Consistency, and Newness.

Yes. I do train clients.