That was the email response I received after following up with a new client after her assessment.
She is suffering from an L4-L5, L5-S1 disc herniation.
When she walked into the facility last week, she could barely walk. That's not an exaggeration. I met her in the lobby of the west end of the building and we would take about 10 steps before having to stop and then proceed again when she was ready.
So, how did she go from barely being able to walk to feeling the best that she has felt in over two months?
She learned to exhale more efficiently. Seriously. That's it.
There's a measurement that I do where I can tell:
-how someone breaths
-where they carry tension
-how their body will move with certain movements
Now, it's way more complex than that, but I can get a good idea simply by that one measurement and then I back this up through further testing and intervention strategies.
However, in this one situation, I had a strong feeling that her breathing patterns could be contributing to the pain that she was feeling and we had to decompress her lumbar spine.
This decompression was simply a matter of exhaling forcefully in a specific position which created a pressure shift internally and as a result, repositioned her joints...including her lumbar spine.
It's fascinating stuff!
So, why am I sharing this? My goal is to help as many people as I can understand that the sensations and abilities of your body can be (and are) influenced by more than we think. Your breath is a powerful tool that you have control over of and the more you know, the more empowered you are to create the change that you seek for your body.
In this specific situation, we know have someone who can instantly provide relief to a situation that had been debilitating for her for the past couple of months. The ability to create change with your breath doesn't just lie within fixing aches & pains. This goes for performance measures (i.e. strength, explosiveness, core strength, etc), performance in daily activities, muscle tone, and so much more.
Make sure that you're doing your "Resets" in your program daily as these will help with mitigating the repetitive stress that our bodies endure on a daily basis.