The Connection Between Body Movements and our Emotional & Physical hea

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

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

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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

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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, no

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