The Connection Between Body Movements and our Emotional & Physical health with Henry Abbott [EP. #1011]

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This Week’s Episode Special Guest: Henry Abbott 

Summary: 

In this episode Kimberly Snyder speaks with Henry Abbott, a former ESPN journalist and physical movement expert, discussing his new book ‘Ballistic: The New Science of Injury-Free Athletic Performance.’ They explore the importance of heart-led living, the connection between movement and emotional well-being, and the significance of understanding our body’s mechanics to prevent injuries. The conversation emphasizes the need for diverse movement practices, the role of weightlifting, and the impact of hydration and nutrition on overall health. Abbott shares insights on how to improve mobility and stability, particularly focusing on the hips, and the importance of trusting our bodies to move freely and joyfully.

About Henry Abbott 

Henry Abbott is an award-winning journalist and founder of TrueHoop. He led ESPN’s Networks 60-person NBA (National Basketball Association) digital and print team, which published several groundbreaking articles on sports science and body injury prevention. He also won a National Magazine Award. Abbott currently lives in New Jersey.

 

Guest Resources:

Website: treuhoop.com

Book: Ballistic: The New Science of Injury-Free Athletic Performance

 

Episode Sponsors:

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Episode Chapters

00:00 Heart-Led Living and Wellness Introduction
00:53 Exploring Athletic Performance and Injury Prevention
03:06 The Importance of Connection to Movement
05:42 Understanding Movement Patterns and Injury Risks
09:01 The Role of Hips in Mobility and Stability
12:00 Weightlifting and Its Benefits for Women
15:00 Hydration and Nutrition for Optimal Performance
17:38 The Science of Movement and Body Awareness
20:50 Fascial Release and Its Impact on Mobility
23:31 The Interconnection of Physical and Emotional Health
26:35 Embracing Diverse Movement Practices
29:31 The Role of Animals in Understanding Movement
32:41 Conclusion and Call to Action

[RESOURCES / INFORMATION]

SOLLUNA PRODUCT LINKS

• Glowing Greens Powder™
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KIMBERLY’S BOOKS

• Chilla Gorilla & Lanky Lemur Journey to the Heart
• The Beauty Detox Solution
• Beauty Detox Foods
• Beauty Detox Power
• Radical Beauty
• Recipes For Your Perfectly Imperfect Life
• You Are More Than You Think You Are 

OTHER PODCASTS YOU MAY ENJOY!

• Wellness Insights: How to Listen to Your Body for Nutritional Guidance [Episode 878]
• How the Power Foods Diet helps with Weight Loss with Dr. Neal Barnard EP. 877
• How Not to Age with New York Times best-selling author Dr. Michael Greger [Episode #873]
• How to eat to reduce anxiety with Harvard nutritional psychiatrist Dr. Uma Naidoo [Episode #867]

 

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Transcript: 

Speaker 1 (00:00.302)
Welcome to the Feel Good Podcast, which is all about heart led living and wellness. When we awaken the power of our hearts and let that guide us through our daily choices and decisions, through our four cornerstones, food, body, emotional well being and spiritual growth, we will experience the most incredible results and create more vitality, health, strength, peace.

abundance and love in our lives. I am your host, Kimberly Snyder, New York Times bestselling author, founder of Saluna, creator of the research-based Heart Aligned Meditation, wellness expert, nutritionist and international speaker. I am passionate about supporting you on your unique heart and wellness journey. Let’s get started.

Speaker 1 (00:57.518)
Hi everyone, welcome back to our Monday interview show. I am so excited for our very special guest. Joining us here today, Henry Abbott, who is a former ESPN journalist, a physical movement expert, and he has a new bestselling book out called Ballistic, the New Science of Injury-Free Athletic Performance. He talks about research on pain, psychology, biomechanics, and neuroplasticity.

And as we all know, this is such an important topic today to increasing our mobility, keeping our mobility going for decades to come, to really enjoying our lives, to living with our hearts, to living with passion, to avoiding injuries and aches and pains, which really detract so much from our enjoyment of life, our spiritual growth, so many things. So Henry, thank you so much for being here with us today.

It’s a delight. Thank you for having me.

And so you and I were chatting a little bit before about your daughter, who I know is involved in soccer, and I was saying, Henry, I love your book. Really cool cover, by the way. If any of you guys are watching this on YouTube or if you’re listening, check out our YouTube so you can see the beautiful cover. And I said, you know, at first, you you say, oh, athletic performance. And some could say, hey, well, I’m not really an athlete. So this doesn’t apply to me. But as I got into the research and the book, and there’s some really interesting things that you’ll talk about here about

glutes, really helping with back pain, hips, like lots of things. I said, you know, this is such an important topic for women and everyday women like me and moms. So that’s, you know, it just, it’s a lot broader. It’s really for everyone actually, we could say.

Speaker 2 (02:41.718)
I know this sounds like super salesy and woo woo or whatever, this really is like these people that we’ll talk about have a different lens for looking at the human body. They’re looking at it with biomechanical, granular biomechanical movement data. Who cares? Why is that fun? like, if you look this way, you start unlocking all kinds of crazy stuff about how to manage your body a little better. You kind of end up with a better owner’s manual to your own body.

and get to age better. I’m trying to do it myself right now, right? So I feel like we have MRIs, we have x-rays, they solve a bunch of problems, but they don’t solve all the problems. And a lot of us are struggling with things that we can see in how we move. And that’s kind of, I think, important revelation for all of us moving forward.

Well, one of the things we talk about here so much, Henry, in the community is connection, right? Connection to your heart, connection to your intuition, connection to what foods would best serve you and so on. And I think a lot of us develop movement patterns that maybe we’re not really connected to or fully aware of that form from an early age or some sort of emotional trauma or something can.

cause our feet to turn out, or I know I can dump a lot in my hips, or I lean on one side, and I noticed a lot, you know, I held my babies on one side of my body. And so I think it’s really important to bring that connection back to movement because we’re in this physical bodily temple to house us through. And if we’re abusing it in these microwaves or not really nourishing proper movement, it does have a profound effect on our life’s experience.

It’s super real and your doctor doesn’t know about this, unless you have a really good doctor, right? But like they, there’s a kind of a dumb example in the book of the guy who’s the founder of P3 that the book is about. His name is Marcus Elliott. was suspecting there was a better way to prevent injury while he was training to become an elite triathlete. And he would reach his hand forward in the pool and, you know, end up with pain in his shoulder. And then his coach was like, just move your hand a little bit out to the side, right?

Speaker 2 (04:52.34)
and all the pain went away. We all understand this could happen, right? Of course how you move can have these effects, right? But he was like, well, look at that. That’s kind of like he was going to have an injury and then he moved a little differently and then he was fine. I think so that’s one little super basic example. We all are doing this to ourselves. I think we’re open to the idea that maybe if you jog the way that you land on the ground or the way that you know, there’s

People debate should you land on your heels or on the ball of your foot or on your toes or should you get these shoes or those shoes. Like we’re used to the idea that these things could, with all those steps, pounding again and again, end up with like maybe your knees hurt or maybe your hips hurt, right? And so I think we’re used to the idea that how you move can inform whether or not you get injured. These are the people who are just taking that and really making a scientific approach out of it, making a systematic scientific study of like what kinds of movements tend to connect to what kinds of outcomes.

You know, it’s interesting in the beginning of the book, you say, know, trainers say that we often go back to the type of movement that we did in high school or earlier. And it’s funny because I played soccer, you know, when I was younger and then I stopped. And now my older son is nine and we play a lot of soccer and I’m experiencing some those knee pains. I’m oh, don’t run like this anymore. It’s sort of taking me back to that period in time.

And I just stopped Henry, right? Instead of trying to figure out like maybe I’m not really running correctly or, I did some marathons too. And I don’t know. It was just interesting because it’s like, huh, I don’t know if this is the pounding or my son’s place a little rough, it’s, you know, it’s funny.

He’s a rough nine year old, that’s what’s happening.

Speaker 1 (06:33.422)
He’s a rough nine-year-old. We have a lawn and we love to, know, anyways, sort of rough house. But I think it’s amazing when we can sort of say, like you said, I think what’s interesting is micro shifts. You know, people are experiencing towards injury, but so many aches and pains. As you know, Henry, it’s really common back pain. For me, a lot of women, hip pain. And so

how do we sort of take this research and some of the things you talk about in the book and apply it to, again, the everyday movement and our workouts so we can benefit?

Yeah, so I think there’s so much to unpack there. One for me is just thinking about the goal. And after spending three years marinating in all of this super geeky stuff about, you know, hips and knees and ankles and how we move and all this stuff, you know, I think it was important for me to kind of think about what is the real goal of all this. to me, my personal answer is like two dogs playing on the beach, like off leash dogs just romping around.

maybe they’re in the ocean, maybe they aren’t, they’re covered in sand, they’re throwing each other down, but they’re having the time of their lives, right? And that’s movement, right? That’s really moving, right? And so to me, moving with joy, I’m not a dog, but to me, that kind of fun, driving that amount of fun from how you move is to me the goal. And so I’ve done a lot of physical therapy in my life. I’ve done a bunch of, injured myself a bunch of different ways.

And I know that sometimes you have to go, or this place from writing about P3, know, NBA players, NFL players, MLB players, WNBA players, they’re in there doing their prescribed workouts with coaches watching carefully and it’s work, it’s real work. But that’s not the goal, right? The goal is for you to play soccer with your son, hopefully to be feeling great doing that, right? Like the goal is to have this body just move how you want it to move. And so what’s keeping us from that?

Speaker 2 (08:36.662)
And it’s tricky. We all have different bodies and there’s not going to be one answer for all of us. But some big themes do emerge from all of the thousands of athletes that they’ve studied. And one of the big ones is that basically every single one of us needs to work on our hips. Yes. In different ways. your hips, women tend to be more mobile than men, but plenty of women are not mobile enough. And so either your hips need work on mobility or stability.

when mobility is not exactly the same as yoga, but you could think of it as a yoga type move or stability would be more weightlifting. You need to put muscles around your hips to keep them from being dangerously unstable. It’s to know which one of those you’re in.

Yes. when you say that, obviously men, everybody has a different body, but in general, can say women’s hips, you know, kind of go out and they don’t align with your waist and they don’t drop straight down to your knees. So how does that affect injuries for women, whether we’re talking about stabilizing or mobility versus a man’s body, which is more linear.

There’s all kinds of, like we’re hundreds of years into kind of guessing around that issue, right? And one of the big topics is ACL tears, right? This is where women athletes tend to have eight times the ACL tear rate of men. So why is that? It’s like a big mystery, right? And if you want that, you can go and watch like the finest experts in the land have given lectures on this and like they’re all like one theory is hormones. One theory is exactly as you described, like the

just the geometry, right? There’s theories about how big is the actual ligament, right? Women tend to have a smaller ligament or how big is the canal the ligament sits in and on and on. All these things that are easy to study with MRI and x-ray or blood tests, they’ve been studied. if you go and look at these lectures, the answer is everything is wrong. Every single theory has a study that proves it and one that disproves it. It’s all messy.

Speaker 2 (10:45.454)
It’s hard to find a bright thing. So when you just look at movement, you see that there is like 100 % of NBA players who tour the ACL land on the outside of their foot and then roll to the inside. It’s a little movement that no one studies that is 100 % or like another very common thing.

Big theory that’s gone around and probably we all have trainers who will cite this, right, is about cue angles. Do you know about cue angles? Have you heard this phrase before? Okay, so this is exactly what you’re describing with like if your hips are wider, there’s a chance for your legs to like your knees to basically have a can travel in towards each other as you squat. Yeah, it’s like they call it valgus collapse.

Please explain.

Speaker 1 (11:34.177)
I

Speaker 2 (11:37.964)
Right? And so if you were to squat in front of a trainer and your knees were to dive in together, they would like have a cow. They would be very upset about this. Right? So this Q angle thing is seen as like a major risk factor for catastrophic knee injury. what they found in a bazillion, studying thousands, literally thousands of athletes and how they move at P3 is that just having your knees dive in like that is not a giant risk factor. Instead,

Some of those cases where you need to dive in, have something happening that’s very hard to see with the naked eye, which is your femur, your upper leg bone, is rotating. And it ends up being kind of like twisting the drumstick off the turkey. And it like, that tears your ACL, is your upper leg bone rotating. And so when I talked about needing hip stability, this is what we’re talking about, is like, you can literally lift weights to build the muscles to hold your femur in place so it doesn’t rotate.

That’s like the kind of work we should all be doing, but that so far most of us don’t even know to think about.

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Speaker 1 (16:36.012)
the diagrams in the book as well. The visual because unless we’re, you know, a trainer or we studied a lot, it’s like it can be hard to visualize on a level with these detailed bones and the muscles.

Yeah, no, this guy, John Early did these illustrations and they were like, they’re hard to do because they have to be like medically accurate, but also hopefully kind of like fun to look at. Right. This one is I think maybe important. I don’t know if you’re if you’re watching. Yes. OK. So when I mentioned that everybody’s hips need help with mobility or stability, you can do a little test. Right. If you can side plank all 10 toes pointing forward with your leg elevated, your body like in a big X.

If you can hold that for 30 seconds, just lock it out, then they would say that your hip stability is sufficient, right? Like your hips are stable enough. Similarly, if you can do this standing figure four, so you’re like, take your, let’s say your right ankle and hook it over your left knee, rest it on top of your left knee, and then sit down and get so that like your hips are are level with your knees. If you can sit down like that, then your hips are mobile enough. But

If you’re like me, then you can’t do either of those things and you have to work on it. Right? So we all got to work on these things.

Yeah, it’s cool. These are both yoga poses or asanas that can be incorporated in a routine. This is a version of an ukta asana. Yeah, and that’s, I love that. That’s really interesting, seeing the diagrams, because I’m like, hey, I’ve done these movements before. I never thought about them in terms of this language, but they’re kind of fun to do.

Speaker 2 (18:21.688)
Do think you can lock out that side plank like that for 30 seconds?

Gosh, Henry, it’s, you I used to have such a serious asana practice. It was every day, hour and a half. And then I started shifting to walking for different reasons, to getting outside. It’s just a break in the middle of my day. And it’s really hilly where I live. I live in the mountains, so it’s like quite a tough walk. But, you know, my husband keeps saying, you know, got to do more upper body lifting, you know, for bone health. And I got some weights. And so I’m…

thinking about shifting the routine. So I’ll report back to you because I don’t know. Honestly, I used to do it a lot and definitely hold it for that long, but it’s been some years. So it’ll be interesting to see what I try.

I’d be interested to know. It’s hard. I mean, it’s hard. My wife is amazing at that kind of stuff. She can do it. She can do all that stuff. she’s very, she can go to any yoga class and just fall right into whatever the teacher is doing and just fine with it. But me, I don’t have that kind of, that’s not my forte.

Well, know, injuries even within yoga in the last few years of my practice, I noticed when you’re doing the warrior poses, because people think, yoga is great for injuries and it doesn’t have slow impact. But I would experience towards the end hip pain from doing the warriors. And again, I don’t know if that’s dumping into my hip or not having enough hip stability, but I did experience some pain from the asanas. What do you think about that?

Speaker 2 (19:54.54)
Yeah, that brings up an interesting point. I grew up, my family, have, parents and sister, we have really tight hamstrings. And so to me, anyone with hip mobility is like a magician. And clearly you’re better off, clearly you’re better injury resistance, et cetera. So I’m always working on trying to get more hip mobility. And so I’ve been to a bunch of yoga classes and

I always think the teacher is probably someone who’s just in a better category than me in terms of injury risk, right? But Marcus Elliott, who this book is largely about, he was explaining that when his first yoga teacher in Santa Barbara, where he lives, she had the most incredibly mobile hips and she would show off. She could do all these crazy yoga moves that no one else could do. But she had both hips replaced in her early 50s. he would explain the reason why is because she didn’t have hip stability.

Right? Like she worked crazy on hip mobility, he’s like, but if she had just done basic weightlifting to just, you know, she could move that hip super mobile, but like she didn’t have the control of it to keep it from getting out of place. And for things like our femur rotating other lots of other things from hips ability, like she didn’t have very stable hips and you want both.

What kind of weightlifting would you do to stabilize your hips?

There’s a fair amount of that kind of stuff in the book. I think there’s different flavors of hip instability, but they do recommend basically for everyone really good form as you squat and do hinging motions. I follow their routines now and I spend a lot of time doing single leg RDLs. There’s also in the book, most of what they prescribe is individual to the athlete.

Speaker 2 (21:44.28)
The warm up is the same. There’s a 13 step warm up, includes a fair amount. Your hips will be like, the hips will notice the warm up. I don’t know, it takes 15 minutes maybe depending how careful you do it. But there’s a ton of like Romanian dead lifts. You know this move, the Romanian dead lift? It’s like the most basic form is you stand on one leg and then you keep your torso and the other leg in a line as you like.

pitch forward and touch the floor in front of you. You’ve done something like this, I’m sure, a bazillion times. And you can do that with a weight, starting with a lightweight, et cetera. But that’s a hinging motion, right? Which will put a pretty good bunch of tension on the back of your hip. I’ll tell you, for me, they obsess about the form of how you do that. And I would tend to do it leaning a little too far forward, which means I wasn’t using the proper muscles in my hip. they have to have me like…

Yes.

Speaker 2 (22:42.018)
I mean now I still as a little cue like when I get in the form for that I like try to really like shift back a little bit so that when I bend over and come back up I’m pulling on like the very back of my glute as opposed to recruiting other muscles from your hips to kind of cheat.

Right. You know, this is so, it’s so interesting we’re talking about this, Henry, because I can say, you for me, I really like walking in nature and it feels good or doing my yoga poses sort of like that teacher you described where I could put both of my feet behind my head and do these crazy poses. But sometimes it’s like what we need is not, not to say our favorite thing or the other thing that we’re most drawn to, but it is the balance. And Dr. Suhas was an Ayurvedic teacher and

doctor came on here and he was talking about how, he talks about in different contexts, weightlifting is really important to women for that cough of that groundedness to balance. we’re in our heads and Vata energy and it actually makes you feel strong so you can feel strong on the decisions you make in your life. And, know, in terms of what you’re talking about preventing injury and just feeling really stable.

So maybe it’s, you if you’re like me and you’re like, well, I don’t know, like I never, I never go to these like weight, I don’t go to the gym and I don’t really lift, you know, I’m not drawn to weightlifting classes or whatever. But what you’re talking about the book is things that we can incorporate and you can make a huge difference in balance. Because if we’re just doing the things that we like, can, that’s, that’s probably why I started to feel some injuries from yoga because I wasn’t doing the stabilizing aspect.

Yeah, that’s definitely a factor. I think they do. There aren’t a lot of things they recommend for everybody at this place, but like they do recommend there’s some kind of weights in everybody’s program, right? Like it’s just, it’s just maybe there are ways around it, but I think it’s, it’s, you know, your husband’s probably right, which I hate to say, you know what I mean? There’s all these studies and stuff, you know, like,

Speaker 1 (24:40.226)
Right? But then it’s like, again, you’re talking about patterns. It’s making space in our life and creating a new habit.

It’s also I mean, I never thought I’d be a weightlifter. I was a runner and just like never had any interest in that. And then I started having like hip trouble basically. And and a friend of mine, she is a kinesiologist who runs a gym. And so I started going to her gym and it’s I don’t know, it’s 75 % women and like, which matters to me because like, it’s fun as hell to go there because everyone’s very supportive, right? Like, like, it’s just not it is not the like, it is technically a CrossFit gym.

But I don’t know, they got that certification for whatever reason. the fact is, nobody ever makes you feel dumb for not lifting a lot or enough or whatever in that place. There’s all sorts of badass people there. But if everyone’s just doing their own thing and mostly they’re feeling, it’s hard to climb the rope. And if someone comes up with first-hand everybody claps, people are nice. And I think that this doesn’t have to be the picture you have in your head of the lunks in high school who were like,

slamming the weights around on the football team or whatever. That doesn’t have to be what weightlifting is like at all. It can be a lot more personal and friendly than that. My daughter goes to a gym in Boston that’s like, I don’t know that there’s any gender designation, but to my eyes, it’s like 70, 80 % women and like, this is the most badass woman you’ve ever seen in your life. They’re so strong and like, it’s like watching like,

super humans. I don’t know. So to me, I know a lot of people don’t ever really want to lift weights, but I would say, find the place where the nice people do it. And it’s actually kind of fun.

Speaker 1 (26:28.07)
Right. think that brings up a point point is the environment and not feeling intimidated to even get in and learn about, you know, your practices and to make it part of your life. I’m laughing because my husband’s office is next to Gold’s Gym, like the original Gold’s Gym in Venice. And, you know, we were there with the kids the other day and you see these huge muscle men coming out and muscle women. And so then I got

little weights because for this very reason I’m trying to protect my bones and try to incorporate. Both of them were like, no, mama, we don’t want you to turn into a muscle woman. We don’t want you to look like that. I said, what are you talking about? What muscle women? They’re like the ones we saw in their papa’s office. There’s all these ideas that could never happen to me anyway. I’m not going to be in there for hours and hours. Anyways, it’s just funny how-

You know, there can be a bit of resistance to like, this isn’t, know, exactly what I want to look like or I have to change my life. But what I really enjoyed reading about in your book is how it’s just, again, these.

movements and these practices can help us. I see it as enjoying our lives more so I can, like you said, be that dog running, playing on the beach, running around with my kids and, God willing, my grandkids for many years to come and not having the typical aches and pains and so many people break their hip or they fall and then there’s this steep decline in their life expectancy as well as their quality of life.

Yeah, this is the point. You just want to have the best life you can have, right? Yeah. if you can’t move, it gets really tricky to have a lot of fun. Like it just does, right? Like I had a period that I about in the book where my lower back was really bad and I didn’t like doing anything during that. People would be like, oh, you should come over to dinner. And my brain would immediately be like, ugh, I got to sit in a chair for two hours. know, immobility and pain is the WHO says the fourth leading cause of global death, right?

Speaker 2 (28:35.554)
You want to avoid that and movement is crazy, right? Because it contributes to everything. It contributes to a bunch of cancers. It contributes to multiple sclerosis. It contributes to heart disease. It contributes to all of these killers, right? Every kind mental disease, right?

Is that high?

Speaker 1 (28:50.574)
You know what’s so interesting, Henry, as I read also in your book, and this is really unexpected, that something with tight hamstrings can actually relate to heart issues or heart incidences.

There’s so much crazy, like there’s that one. And then there’s this thing that’s my mind all the time, which is they can measure the volume of certain hip muscles, like the glute, mead, or the psoas. And if you have a bigger, stronger muscle, then you live longer. You recover from cancer better, all these things, right? that little fact blew me away. And so I ran it by a bunch of smart people and I was basically like, you what’s going on? I think the answer is that’s just kind of a marker.

if you move a lot, right? If you move a lot and you move well, then you’re probably less likely to have these other things kill you, right? But yeah, or another one that’s similar is there’s, I don’t know if you’ve ever had a so as release.

Like, facial release?

Yeah, so yeah, there’s a very emotional experience for most people is this. Yeah, well, they somebody the first time I had done this, guy Mike put his eight fingertips in a row into my hip on the right side. And I mean, it was just like, it’s so wildly uncomfortable. A lot of people just get up and walk away. They can’t handle it. So no bursting of tears like it’s a and as I’ve had it explained to me.

Speaker 2 (30:21.758)
non-scientifically, but just like the theory is that like the psoas apparently, it’s a very big muscle, but it also forms incredibly early in the womb. so it holds all of the experiences and memories of your life. also has all these nerves running through from your spine as they go. So it’s like when they’re putting those eight fingers in there, they make your hips feel way better. It’s an amazing thing. But B, they’re pushing on some…

heavy stuff and like yeah

I I’ve done some of that work and it feels emotional and painful and releasing and yeah, what do you think about fascial release? Because I remember I’ve done it for my hips and it feels good, but then it kind of for me, kind of went back.

Yes, that’s the thing. So the trainers at P3 use a lot of it, but not thinking that alone it does much of anything. The research is that maybe it buys you 15 minutes of increased mobility. And so their idea is do that. So I do it every day, and then you immediately go into other exercises to capitalize on that increased mobility. So for instance,

doing it.

Speaker 2 (31:38.016)
In the book, there’s a story of this young basketball player who some real backsliding in his flexibility, mostly this one test where they… It’s really the most basic test they do, which is when you lie on the table, how close can they touch your heel to your butt? A, they do want you to have some mobility so you can do that, but B, they don’t want to see a big decrease in that. That’s a big injury warning sign. So he’d had a decrease.

It might have been because all his muscles were tight, but it might have been because of a myofascial kind of gripping thing. So they thought that maybe his quads were just kind of gripping onto his hips. they had him sit on the floor and they got a 70 kilogram kettlebell, which is a very heavy thing, and just place it on his quad for two minutes while he sits there. And you can see him like all of the joy is drained from his face, right?

But they’re very happy up B. The coaches are like, you know, give him high fives and stuff. And then as soon as they finished that, they go over and give him like this unbelievable quad stretch where they put a huge band around the front of his leg while he kneels in front of the big squat rack thing. And so basically they’re pulling his quad into a huge stretch and then immediately he goes into hinging movements like I was describing earlier. So he’s going to like not just get the release of this myofascial thing, which would immediately probably

return if they didn’t do anything else. But then they’re going to stretch the hell out of it. And then they’re going to have a move in his new range of motion. And they’re going to go through all that multiple times so that they’re going to kind of like pattern to his brain like, Hey, you can move in this range and you can control your muscles in this range and you can in this kind of movement. And if you keep that up over time, like I think you can see real measurable changes in a range of motion.

has interesting like the repatterning because we get so used to moving. And this was surprising too, where you talk about core, you know, the relationship between our core and back pain, which I’d always thought was this, you the main cause and then you say glutes and back. Every time I’ve ever held my child or held something like, you engage your, engage your core, engage your core. But can you talk about glutes in that?

Speaker 2 (33:54.894)
So this is one of their big findings. These guys in Santa Barbara, they bought force plates and then these infrared cameras in the ceiling and they started assessing the fine grain detailed movements of all these athletes. They didn’t really know what they were going to learn, right? They just kind of wanted to see how like A plus B equals C kind of thing, right? And one of their big early findings was that NBA players, about a third of them land. like one of the tests is they’d have you like step off a box and then land on

And

Speaker 2 (34:24.065)
your two feet on the ground and then jump again. But about a third of NBA players, when they landed, didn’t really use their hips at all in landing. in a good, healthy landing, your ankles, knees, and hips are going to all flex together. And if you do that, you can handle a huge amount of force of landing without an elevated injury risk. Some of us don’t do that. Some of us have like, maybe you have limited mobility in your ankles, or maybe you have limited mobility in your hips, et cetera, and you don’t really

Okay.

Speaker 2 (34:54.24)
doesn’t give as much as it should. And it’s pretty common. A third of every population they test, frankly, comes up with this, like, the hips don’t flex. what’s happening, and then those players in that category have a 300 % higher likelihood of lower back pain. And what seems to be happening, it’s pretty clear once you study it, is the force that was supposed to be absorbed by your glutes on landing, because your hips are bending.

Wow.

Speaker 2 (35:20.994)
doesn’t get absorbed by your glutes. And so it passes upstream to like the next available thing, which is your lower back. And those muscles are not designed to take the force of landing, right? Not when you’re running, not when you’re jogging, but a lot of us put, I’m one of these people, I tend not to bend my hips. And so that’s what I work on. But like I have had lower back pain from running and basically landing a gazillion times and having the force of the earth. I was absorbed by my ankles. Some of them were by my knees, almost none by my hips. And it goes right into my lower back and it damages stuff there.

Yes

Speaker 1 (35:49.346)
Wow. Yeah, it’s really interesting because you talk about so many different movements and different body parts. And I think about the hamstrings, for example, and I think about my husband who has really tight hamstrings and for me, hips. It just creates a lot of awareness. because I think we don’t think about these things usually in everyday life. We get into our patterns, we get into our habits, the ways that we move. I like to do my walks, but it’s like, hey,

It’s important to enrich and increase our awareness and understanding so we can live these really full lives with lots of movement, which is really

Yeah. Obviously. And you want to move like it’s neurological, right? The way that you move the 600 muscles and the conductor is your brain, right? And your nervous system. And it’s like a big orchestra. It has to work with all incredible timers, very high level stuff. The idea that your PE teacher knew how this worked was like crazy, right? It’s like way more complicated than that, right? And you can’t really have the orchestra work without practice, right? And, and

One of the ways our brain likes to get better at this is with these sort of snappy movements, right? It does a lot for us. So if the way that you’re comfortable moving, I mean, I’ve spent so much time walking and hiking and stuff and my back was bad and that was just all I did. I more than understand that. I love it. I wish that’s all we had to do. there’s nothing bouncy, right? And like you want to be a little bouncy. A lot of people are discovering pickleball now. this like really super fun thing? Like I think because it’s a chance to be

like moving laterally and bouncing and extending and moving through all three planes. Our bodies want to do that. We evolve doing that. so I think if you don’t have habits that get you moving in those exciting ways, then you’re not firing up the neural system of movement as much as you could. I think that you want to get that going. Younger rather than older. It’s hard to start that when you’re 80. So I think it’s important to have a diverse set of movement and to

Speaker 2 (37:53.144)
put your joints through their full range of motion and to use some muscle and to be a little bouncy and snappy because we’re designed for that.

It also creates, it’s fulfilling. I don’t know how to explain it. I played pickleball, it’s funny you say that, with my son this summer in Hawaii. He loves tennis and then we got a pickleball set and it’s so out of the ordinary of what I usually do in my everyday work life here. And I felt strong, fulfilled, resilient. So I think it’s sort of how we get into the habit of maybe buying the same vegetables.

or doing the same things over and over again. And we know our gut health is strengthened with diversity. And it sounds like some of the practices that you’re talking about here involve that stability, which maybe we’re not called to. We like the mobility and just more of a well-roundedness.

Yeah, for sure. think we all, I feel like everybody I know has some sort of movement thing that they think they could probably do. Right? You what I mean? Everyone’s like, could probably ride my bike to my friend’s house that’s super far away. I could probably, there’s some sort of little challenge in your head. I think that’s probably your next best diversity move in movement. Right? It’s probably like, maybe you’ve thought about getting a kayak. Maybe, I don’t know what it is, but

Right now, not a great lap swimmer, but I think I want to add that to the mix as I age because it seems like a pretty good thing to do. I’m like, part of my… I was just at a friend’s house with a pole. like, I guess I got to figure that out. I want to add that. I think your brain wants you to add stuff like that.

Speaker 1 (39:39.8)
Well, I think that we like natural move like moving is so important. You know, my my good friend Dan Booner was come on here a bunch of times. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Blue Zones, but he talks about, you know, gardening and because it’s natural squatting and going down and up. And then in our life, we’re sort of just, okay, we pick the one thing that we’re used to. And a lot of times we’re driving in the car, we’re sitting or whatever. But

Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 (40:05.282)
You know, have to say, Henry, when I was reading your book, there was just a lot of movements, a lot of things where you just made me think, wow, that’s really interesting. And I think that’s one of the gifts of what you’re bringing here is awareness and curiosity. And for everyone, including women, including busy moms like me, that can really benefit from

little bit well-rounded, maybe it doesn’t have to feel scary or like this huge lifestyle shift. Just a little bit more awareness of how we’re moving and how we can create that stability and strength, which isn’t just physical, it’s also mental and emotional and spiritual as well.

And your body is super well designed, right? Like, there was a moment where my son had gone out to Santa Barbara with me and Marcus, who the book is largely about, us to the airport and got out. And I don’t know what prompted this, but Marcus was like, you hey, like this thing, and he’s pointing to my son. He’s like, this thing’s better designed than like any iPhone, any Tesla, any F40, what’s it, F14, I guess. You know, like it’s super brilliant. He’s like, we only understand like 1 % of it, right?

The message is like, trust it. It can do a ton of stuff. It can do a lot more than you think it can. So don’t limit it with your own habits of buying the same vegetables. I love that analogy. We all know these stories of the kid is threatened and so the mom lifts the car up or whatever. We have these weird latent superpowers in us and they’re mostly to do with movement because that’s what our ancestors did. That’s in our DNA. It’s like we were nomadic or we had to

make it across the mountains before the snow or we had to kill a giant sloth or all these crazy things that are in how we evolved. It’s not in our DNA to watch TV a lot. We’re not really designed for that. We can do stuff and it might seem kind of scary and it might seem kind of not how we grew up doing certain activities, but I think there’s a lot of power in just giving yourself permission to…

Speaker 2 (42:09.23)
Maybe you need a coach, maybe you need some training, maybe you need some prep, like, just believe in your body, right? You can, you can go do a whole bunch of cool stuff.

Wow. And as we get into it now, setting that up for years, decades to come, which I think is really exciting.

It is. We have a bunch of friends of ours. I don’t know how this started, but we go not far from here, hike 20 minutes, then you can jump off this 10, 11 foot waterfall into this water down below. everybody is a little nervous walking out there and everybody is high as a kite coming back. Everybody’s just so excited and elated. Maybe the water has been cold or maybe you were scared about jumping off the thing, et cetera. But I feel like that little model of

take a thing that you were a little scared of. That’s more searched and perfectly, in fact, perfectly safe. And then turn something that was the funnest part of your weekend. That’s a really fun emotional pattern to get in. It’s to give your body more trust in your body.

I love it. I love it. Is there anything Henry that we didn’t cover in your fabulous book, which has a lot of information here? Share with us today before we sign off.

Speaker 2 (43:23.886)
That’s it.

Speaker 2 (43:27.586)
I think honestly to me, one of my favorite things I learned in this book is that the best movers are animals. Watch animals. Watch an owl or watch a squirrel. Squirrels are amazing. Think about how they move and how we have a little bit of that in us. They’re just absolutely freaky how incredibly athletic they are. More than any NFL player or whatever.

And they’re right around us all the time surviving on their wits and their ability to evade and catch and do all this crazy stuff. I find it kind of inspiring. Like, look, look how well these things can move.

Wow. And even lizards, we have a lot of lizards here in Hawaii and just, and also the centipedes, like a smoothness in how they move. That’s so cool. Yeah. I love that.

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:23.976)
Those are like moms feeding their kids and they have to like use those movements to like every day survive. Awesome. Right? Like an incredible, it’s incredible accomplishments that they have. That’s like. Yeah.

When the centipede gets older, maybe it moves a little slower, but not necessarily more disjointed or stiff. Their body probably carries them through.

Once I started thinking about movement, started just noticing, I mean, animals are just, they’re all like Michael Jordan. know? Like they’re all just wildly good at this. it’s pretty cool.

Wow. Well, thank you so much, Henry, for sharing some of your wisdom, your incredible research, your new book again called Ballistic, the New Science of Injury-Free Athletic Performance, slash I would add anyone and everyone, all us everyday folks. Where can we learn more about you and where can we get the book?

So you can buy it anywhere. There’s a whole list of places on my little author website, which is Henry Abbott.com and Abbott. always people don’t want to give me that last T, but it’s to tease it then. But that’s where you can see a lot of what’s going on in my life and writings and that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 (45:34.446)
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (45:38.179)
PERFECT

Speaker 1 (45:43.296)
Is there an audiobook as well?

Yes, there’s an audiobook. This wonderful guy whose name I’m blanking out right now, he read it. My friends who are really into audiobooks were like, hey, you did a good job. So that’s good.

Yeah, and was great about the audio book. I’m sure just like my books, there’ll also be a PDF where you can see the beautiful diagraphs, of course.

I do want to see that guy’s diagram. She did a good job. Show you how to move your body.

Well, very inspiring, Henry. I’m inspired to increase my mobility and definitely my stability from reading your book. So thank you so much for sharing with us and congratulations on your new book.

Speaker 2 (46:25.592)
Thank you very much. Thank you so much for reading and taking the time and talking to me.

Yeah. And thank you everyone for tuning in on our show notes, mysaloon.com. We will have direct links to Henry’s work and direct links to his book, as well as other articles and shows I think you would enjoy. We’ll be back here in a few days for our next interview. Till then, I’ll also see you on socials at underscore Kimberly Snyder. Thanks so much for tuning in. Be sure to share this episode with anyone that you think would benefit from more mobility, stability.

because this is a really important topic. Sending you so much love and we’ll see you back here soon.