#368 Stop stretching! Revolutionise your approach to flexibility and muscle activation to live a pain-free life, with Yogi Aaron.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION
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Please note that while an effort is made to provide an accurate transcription, errors and omissions may be present. No part of this transcription can be referenced or reproduced without permission.
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Yogi Aaron  0:00  
One of the biggest areas that people are really weak is in their glutes and we hear this a lot like you know, you got to work those glutes and I'm going to do a bunch of squats. Squats do not work the glutes. Like if you really want to work the glutes and get them activated. Stop doing squats, you're probably going to make them worse.

Agi Keramidas  0:22  
Welcome to personal development mastery Podcast, episode 368. I'm your host, Agi Keramidas. And my mission is to empower you with the simple, consistent actions you need to master yourself and create a life of purpose and fulfilment. It's Monday, I invite myself into the minds of remarkable people, and I distil their wisdom to equip you with actionable insights. Today's episode could change the way you think about flexibility, stretching and pain relief. If you're open to challenging the conventional wisdom on stretching, and are interested in a holistic approach to physical well being that aligns with yogic principles, then the following conversation with my guest Yogi Aaron is for you. Let's dive right in. 

Agi Keramidas  1:29  
Today, I am thrilled to welcome Yogi Aaron, a leading figure in the world of yoga who's challenging the norms of traditional yoga practice. Yogi Aaron, you are the creator of a groundbreaking approach to yoga called a Yama applied yoga anatomy and muscle activation. You're the author of stops threats in a new yogic approach to master your body and live pain free and the host of the podcast stop stretching. With a unique perspective on stretching and flexibility. Your teachings aim to liberate us from chronic pain and reveal yoga through purpose. Your mission is to help as many people as possible live a pain free life so that they can realise yoga Stu intentions. Yogi, welcome to the show. It's such a pleasure to speak with you

Yogi Aaron  2:22  
today. Thank you. Okay, it's great to be here. After all this time of us trying to make a time.

Agi Keramidas  2:32  
Sounds a good things take a while sometimes do to happen. So I'm glad we made it. And today we're going to delve into your evolutionary approach to yoga and explore how it can help us live a pain free and fulfilling life. As you said, before we go there. Let's get some background from your show. Tell me about your journey and perhaps a key defining moment that led you to all this that we're going to talk about today. Yeah,

Yogi Aaron  3:09  
I know that our time is a little limited. So if I start talking too much, just cut me off. It won't be authentic. So I you know, I was a very active, youthful teenager, as I think a lot of young boys are. And I was very much into sports. And by the time I turned 18, I started noticing my body tightening up. So as it started to tighten up, I decided that I needed to stretch. And so I started stretching. And in the way that I did that was I got into yoga. So there was like I went to the gym to work out and then I went to yoga class to stretch my body. So sometimes when I use the word stretching in yoga, and this period of my life, it's interchangeable. It wasn't really for about 10 more years that yoga started to become more of a spiritual practice for me. But at that time after I started stretching, one of the things that I noticed was that I really hurt myself. And one day in particular, my lower back kind of seized up on me and it was a weird sensation because I was 18 at the time and I was like what's going on with me this should not be happening Am I turning into an old person right away. So because I was doing yoga of course to do the opposite I was trying to do yoga, to stretch to become more healthy to become more flexible so that I could be more youthful like and this kind of this cycle persisted you know, I would did more yoga, to become more flexible to help me have less back problem And I ended up with more back problems. And it took me, by the way, about 25 years to connect that dot like it just didn't connect. And I'm going to jump ahead, there's my chronic pain story is quite long i There's a lot of other issues that started to evolve, but it sort of all culminated around the age of 45. So about six years ago, now, when I ended up in an emergency room for procedure on my lower back, because my back had had inflamed so much that I, I started to, I couldn't walk. And so when I went into the emergency room, the doctor said to me, we think we might need to do a spinal fusion in your lower back, we're going to try this procedure first. But if it doesn't work, we might need to do a spinal fusion. And that was like the big lightbulb moment for me, because, you know, I had been doing yoga to avoid these problems. And at 45, which, for all intensive purposes these days is kind of a young age, I think as a young. And so I was like, Oh, my God, I need to kind of like reevaluate everything that I was doing. So I, that kind of brought me into this whole idea of muscle activation technique, which is a system and a process of, of really, kind of like looking where there's muscular weakness, what is the cause of muscular weakness, and then fixing it through muscle activation. And so that's where the muscle activation part of the Yama comes into it is looking at like, how do we start to address muscular weakness? So a lot of us think that we need to stretch because we have tight muscles, but we never once consider why is the body tight in the first place? And so, tightness comes from muscles not working properly, it's not real. The body is in a protective state because it doesn't feel stable. So what does it do? It tightens up. And it's kind of like akin to walking on ice. If you walk on ice, your body starts to go into a contracted state of protective state, if you will. And so from a younger perspective, what we need to do is actually address that tightness through looking at where is their weakness, and usually, if we will not, usually all the time, if we take care of that muscular weakness, those muscles that are not working properly, to stabilise joints. If we take care of those muscles and get them working properly, get them fired up, the tightness basically disappears, and we no longer have that tightness. So the tightness is actually teaching us something about our body and if I didn't know that, so when I got into yoga, I was trying to take care of stretching tight muscles tight hamstrings, tight, lower back, tight quads. I never asked the question or nobody ever said to me, Well, you have tight hamstrings, because your quads are not working your hip flexors are not working properly. So as a biomechanical response, your hamstrings are tightening up. And instead, I was violating my body's own protective mechanism by trying to force the hamstrings to elongate by trying to force all these muscles around my hips to lengthen. And what really needed to happen was I needed to start addressing the hip flexors and getting the hip flexors stronger, so that I had more stability in my body. So that was like the big lightbulb moment, I started getting into studying muscle activation technique. And from there, my question was, well, how do I bring this into the yoga world and my intention was never really to go big. My intention was just to create something for my own sort of students and my own teacher trainings. But what started to happen was, as I got into teaching this, and especially my yoga teacher trainings, I noticed that consistently somewhere between day six and day 10 My students pains disappeared. Like they would come in with shoulder problems, back problems, knee problems, and that somewhere around day six to day 10, their pains disappeared. And I was kind of like, okay, we need to bring this to a wider audience, we need to kind of share this more so and they also got really excited about it, I mean, who wouldn't get excited about becoming pain free? So that's kind of what's motivated me to share this a little bit more beyond my own students.

Agi Keramidas  10:19  
See, I am personally I'm blessed to have a body that does not have any, you know, pains of that kind. So there is a part of me that cannot really relate completely anyway, with what you're saying. But I did have a couple of questions coming up while you were describing your story. And so you talked about, you know, my muscle, muscle tightness and weakness. And I and also about that, you were, while you were stretching to alleviate the pain that you had the pain kept on getting worse? There are two questions really that come to mind. First, is it possible that you were stretched in two months for what was going on? In other words, is there you know, a level of stretching that could be beneficial? And obviously, if you overdo it, it could cause problems? And also, that muscle tightness and that weakness? Is that something that, you know, how do I know if if, if I have that situation? How do I know if my muscles are not, you know, operating in the way that they should? That's short will help me to understand that, please. Yeah,

Yogi Aaron  11:40  
I, so there's a lot to unpack in your two questions. And in your statement. So the basic answer is no, I do not teach any kind of stretching at all. And by stretching, what we're talking about is moving the body in a passive way to I'm going to use this word, a lot of people may not like this, but it's essentially what you're doing to force a muscle to lengthen. Anytime we passively start to force some muscle to lengthen, we're going to cause more stress. And anytime a muscle experiences stress, which then leads to trauma, probably because it's been overused, you're over, using or over lengthening that muscle. Anytime you start doing that, it's going to shut down muscles, it's going to create inflammation. And inflammation is going to start messing up the messaging system, it's going to inhibit that neuromuscular connection between the brain and the muscles. And so anytime that messaging system becomes compromised, muscles will shut down, they always will. And I see this constantly all the time. So the question then is, why would you want to stretch, you know, passively stretch, why would you want to passively try to manipulate your body, what we need to do is get muscles working properly. So and this is kind of honouring, if you want to use that word, honouring the muscle function of the body, you know, honouring the process of muscle muscle function. So for muscles to work, they need to shorten muscles don't really work in an elongated state. muscles move bones, okay, and they so they move your body. And they also stabilise joints. And they also do a lot of other things. But those are the two big ones, I think we can agree on that they move bones, I need to move my body go running, whatever it is. go grocery shopping, even driving, even though I'm sitting, I'm using my arm. So we need to use to move our skeleton. And what does that is through muscles, contracting muscle shortening. And so we need to improve that function of those muscles shortening and what improve when I say improve it, we're improving that communication system so that muscles can shorten or contract muscles can contract and contract on demand. That there's not this thinking about it. I mean, I think some people like for example, if you get out of bed in the mornings, some people especially as we get older, have to take more time, because we're kind of like thinking about it like oh my god, I have to think about rolling over I have to think about putting my feet on the ground and wait for my body to catch up. But that should happen instantaneously. Like we should be able to just move the body instantaneously. Why can't wait because the muscles have lost their ability to contract in contract on demand. So the short answer over the long winded answer is that you No, I never there is never an acceptable amount of stretching from this perspective, because you're always going to negatively impact muscle function. Now, I can't quite remember now your second question, why are muscles tight? That's what it was. And so one of the things before I jump into that is that you had said, Well, you don't really have pain. But I would bet either one of two things. And this isn't, by the way, this is I hope, you don't take this in a negative way. Because I told you I'm gonna go down the hallway, but you said like, I don't really have pain. So I'm going to just respond, what I have found is either one of two things, or both, probably both things is that a, you've learned to turn off that part of your brain that acknowledges that you do have pain. So a lot of us are, you know, we've gotten very good at just kind of dismissing pain, or numbing ourselves numbing that conscious part of our brain, like sometimes you hear people say, I have a high top pain tolerance level, you know, and, and so I have a high pain tolerance level. And I think it's one of the reasons why I kept injuring myself and I speaking in personally now is like, I got really good at denying I was in pain, or dismissing it, or just kind of like tuning it out, you know? And so if you had asked me, if I was a person experiencing pain, I probably would say, not really, no, I'm, you know, I'm good. But the truth was that I was in a lot of pain, and which, then I was trying to work through that pain. And you hear this a lot with gym teachers, you hear this a lot with yoga teachers, you know, pain is just a state of mind, we get to work through the pain or no pain, no gain. So a lot of us have a very interesting kind of paradigm around pain. And it's, you know, there's, there's kind of like two schools or a couple of different boats, but one of them is like, you know, ignore your pain. And then the other boat is like, celebrate your pain, but the ignore your pain part side of it is very strong and very endemic. And then the second thing is, like, I'm sure that everybody has some sort of muscle tightness. And this is kind of like, you know, another response to you is that I'm sure like we could find in your body different limitations and range of motion. And because we have those limitations, we now are starting to compensates. And that compensation is what then leads us to kind of stressing out a joint or then thereby overusing a joint or use then traumatising that area. So we muscle tightness, and any kind of level is a signal that there's like a restriction in the body, there's the certain part of the body is in a protective state. So for example, like I get a lot of neck issues sometimes and I'm getting it's getting better and better. But you know, I've been travelling a lot the last week, literally flying all over the place. I've been on my computer a lot. And so one of the negative effects of that is I start to get tightness sometimes in my neck. And right now it's on the left side. And so I woke up the other morning, and there was some tightness there. And so you know, the typical, the kind of the typical, counterintuitive thing that we do is like, Okay, I've got to stretch this neck out, you know, I've got to like elongate these muscles to get rid of the tightness. But from my perspective on kind of going, Okay, where is there instability in my body, the neck is tightening up as a result of muscles not working properly. And so instead of trying to stretch this out, which is not going to deal with the problem, it's going to make me feel good temporarily. But it's not really dealing with the problem. The problem is, there's a tightness or sorry, there's, there's an instability in my body that's causing this to tighten up. So that's where that's where I come in and go, Okay, where is the source of that tightness, and how can I start to address it? And the source of that tightness is the instability that we want to address.

Agi Keramidas  19:40  
If you enjoy this episode, can you find one person you think would find it useful and share it with them? I'd really appreciate it. It helps the show grow, and you'll also be adding value to people you care about. Thank you. And now let's get back to the episode I was think If you've got you're saying I mean, the first bit about ignoring my pain, as far as I'm aware, consciously anyway, I don't consider myself to have a high pain thresholds. So then you mentioned the word tightness. And I have certainly what you said with the neck, I can resonate with that. And sometimes I do this and, you know, and stretch my neck or so I can that I get the other thing you said about the limitations in the range of motion? Yeah, certainly. I mean, I haven't really explored that much. But it was, you gave me something interesting to consider at the very least, with that. So let's talk a little bit more about this, you know, this tightness or the instability of the masters? So how does your, your methods the A Yama method? Or what principles it does it follow to address that? If you can, you know, give me a brief overview of which I can understand? Yeah,

Yogi Aaron  21:08  
sure. So what we're looking to do is start to improve the main muscles. So I a lot of what I teach and dive into is addressing the big the big muscles, and getting them to start working properly. And you kind of hear this being echoed in different ways. And so like, for example, we got to strengthen our core to protect our back, you know, I mean, that where I think that I kind of veer off from that path a little bit, is I'm not so much about quote unquote, strengthening muscles, as I am about turning them on. And it's literally like, so many of us are walking around with, like, we have the core muscles, you know, I'm sure that look just looking at you right now, as I'm speaking to you, I kind of can tell you're an in shape person, you probably move your body a little bit. I don't know how much. But I can tell there's, there's some there. But if I went in and tested your core muscles and tested their force output, not how much not how much you can bench, not how much you can lift, but that your muscles can contract and contract on demand. That's our definition of stability. If I tested some of those core muscles, if I tested most bodybuilders core muscles, they would probably always test weak. And I'm not saying that to be facetious or glib, I'm seen as factual because I've done it I've tested like so many people's muscles, and they always test weak. So what we try to do from our perspective is improve those muscles ability to contract and contract on demand. And the way to do that is through isometrics. So I've, you know, I don't know that I've necessarily created anything new per se. But what I have done, which is unique that I haven't really seen other people do specifically, is to systematically go through and start working on getting specific muscles working through a series of isometrics. And, and through the programmes that I've been, you know, working on creating the last few years, that's where it kind of differs a little bit. And we have to be careful, because, you know, a lot of people hear okay, I want to get my muscles strong. That's what Yogi Aaron says. But then they go to the gym and they start benching, you know, 100 pounds or 150 pounds, that actually could actually make your muscles weaker, if your muscles are weak and are not contracting and contracting properly. And then you start putting a load on them, that can actually make them weaker. So we need to start and one of the principles of a Yama is less is more. So, so we need to kind of like approach it with that less is more attitude. So let me give you an example. One of the biggest areas that people are really weak is in their glutes, and we hear this a lot like you know, you gotta you gotta work those Blitz and I'm going to do a bunch of squats, squats do not work the glutes, like if you really want to work the glutes and get them activated. To prove that neuromuscular connection stopped doing squats, you're probably going to make them worse for a lot of reasons. But if you really want to get the glutes activated, one of the muscle, the simple muscle activations is to do bridge pose. Bridge Pose is fantastic. So it's like when you're on your back, you bend your knees a bit, bring your knees up close to your hips. Your feet are about hip a little bit wider than hip distance apart. Your arms are out to the sides and you Use your hip extensors to lift your hips up as high as you can. And so that action is going to start engaging the glutes properly, because now you're bringing them to a greater range of motion, you're using them. There's your there's 100% accountability, you're not passively lifting the hips up with your hands, you're actually using your hip extensor muscles. And you do that for six seconds. And you do that six times. You know, instead of stretching, quote, unquote, before you exercise, which shuts muscles down, instead, do bridge pose, and you'll feel stronger, more powerful and more stable as you start to exercise.

Agi Keramidas  25:44  
That's great, then well, one thing I understand now with conversation is that we have time mainly to scratch the surface. It's a huge topic. I know. And you know, the bridge pose, which I'm familiar with it, I was I'm trying to understand, what about the bridge pose is not stretching, because in my mind, I am stretching myself when I do the bridge pose unless I'm doing it the wrong way. So So

Yogi Aaron  26:19  
let me ask a question, though. What part of your body do you think you're stretching? When you do bridge pose?

Agi Keramidas  26:27  
Instinctively? The answer that comes to my mind is the shoulders that you know support my my weight. Current? Yeah, maybe also my, I'm trying to think now I don't want to take my headphones off and try and do it now. So I can use that feedback. I could. But yeah, their shoulders is the first thing that comes to my also the the back end onto my glutes now that you say that hadn't noticed it, but now I'm adding member how my body feels when I do that.

Yogi Aaron  27:01  
Okay, so that's interesting. And like you said, we're just scratching the surface, but I'm just gonna point out and you kind of like enunciated this, a lot of us a lot of people don't understand what stretching and contracting is. So when you come up into bridge pose, is your glutes shortening, or lengthening?

Agi Keramidas  27:24  
And shortening, I

Yogi Aaron  27:25  
think shortening. So is that a stretch? I don't stretch is normally when a muscle elongate? Yes. So yeah, so part of it is just changing our perception or understanding, you know, what we're talking about in Auggie, in my opinion, and I don't know if I'm going to change the world. But I'll keep like doing my best that we're also doing is educating people, a lot of people don't use words, and they don't understand the meaning of those words. You know, words, words are important. So what you said was, Oh, I feel my glutes stretching. But what you really meant was you feel your glutes actually engaging, which is a very positive thing. Now, what I want to point out to you is that there is a part of your body that is, for lack of a better word stretching, but the better word to use is relaxing. So as you engage your glutes and lift your hips up, there's a reciprocal muscle that's now elongating and those are your hip flexors. So some people might say, Well, my hip flexors are now stretching, it's actually not true. They're just relaxing because and the more your glutes engage, the opposite muscle will relax. So if you have tight hamstrings, the reciprocal muscle is the quads. If you get the quads engaging properly, they are activated properly. Now the hamstrings are going to naturally as a reciprocation elongate and if the funny thing to me is that when you and I were in grade school when all your listeners were in grade school, and we were learning biology, simple, simple, simple biology, we learned the function of muscles we learned that muscles are supposed to contract to move bones to stabilise joints. We also learned at that young age that this you know muscles work in opposites there's an agonist and antagonist relationship. And, you know, somehow we've just forgotten this ancient wisdom I find that really hysterical and and perplexing at the same time.

Agi Keramidas  29:41  
You're it's certainly something to consider and you know, I took and I really am going to reiterate and what I really got from this last comment you said that myself and if it's To me, it's not just me, other people are the same, they use the terms threads without actually referring to what threads actually is. And I mean, it was obvious with my misconception of God, but you explain it. So that's something that I'm going to personally keep in in mind from now on and think or being become more aware of what my body does in a posture, whether it shrinks or elongate. So thank you for that. Can

Yogi Aaron  30:33  
I just say one little thing, and I know that we're running out of time, but it's important, like for people listening, I think, like, I think one of the most damaging things that, you know, fitness trainers, and especially yoga teachers, you see this epidemic a lot, say to us is like, listen to your body, you you know what your body is saying? The problem is, I can listen to somebody speaking Japanese. And I can I can listen to them, I have no idea what they're saying. And so in vice versa, like, you know, we don't understand the language of our body. And part of my, what I'm passionate about is actually teaching people the language of our body, for example, we were just talking about muscle tightness. I'm trying to teach you okay, the muscle tightness is a protective mechanism. What's protecting itself, that's like the first acknowledgment, right? So where before, you might go, Oh, my body is tight, I need to go and stretch it. So you're misinterpreting or don't know the language of our body. And I think that's part of the problem, too, is like, we were using the wrong words, or incorrect words to put, you know, to work. Somebody is saying hi to us in Japanese, but we're actually thinking, Oh, they want to know if we want to eat. You know.

Agi Keramidas  31:59  
That's also a great point, what you said about, listen to your voice? And do you actually understand what what it says? So there are very subtle nuances, I suppose there that maybe you can understand some very major things, but certainly. So yeah, thank you very much. That's, that's also a great point to take from this. I do have a couple of last final quickfire questions that I always ask my guests. Before we go there. Can you please share? How can people find out more about you and connect?

Yogi Aaron  32:40  
Yeah, absolutely. If people want to learn more about this, just go to my website, Yogi aaron.com YOGIARO and.com. And it's a gateway to everything that I'm doing. When there's a tonne of free offerings on my website. One of them is the seven day pain free series. So seven days to becoming pain free. They can also get my book checkup, the podcast series, etc, etc. And also, I have a huge YouTube channel with over 200 practices on there. So there's a lot of free offerings that people can take advantage of. Thank

Agi Keramidas  33:21  
you. Let me ask you then my quickfire questions. And the first one is What does personal development mean to you?

Yogi Aaron  33:32  
If you ask, if you ask my I know this is a fire fire round. But that question has changed so much from 30 to 40, to 51. I think, for me, personal development means the process of letting go of my attachments to pain, and opening up to purpose and intention.

Agi Keramidas  33:58  
Great, and a hypothetical question. If you could go back in time, and meet your 18 year old self, what's one piece of advice you would give him?

Yogi Aaron  34:08  
I have two piece of advice. The first one is stop stretching young man. Because I could have avoided so much future pain in my life from stop stretching. And the second piece of advice is just chill the EFF because I think in 18, I was so stressed out about feeling like I needed to, you know conquer the world right away. And you know, it just I wish I could just say hey, enjoy the journey a little bit more.

Agi Keramidas  34:47  
Great piece of advice indeed. I want to thank you very much for a really intriguing and thought provoking conversation for sure. I really appreciate it. I want to wish you all the very best with your mission in sharing your message. And, you know, making an impact with your teachings. As I was telling me, before we started recording, there is this notion that I believe also that all the popular opinions in some way or another are wrong. And we'll leave it to that. But I would like to end by giving you the mic for some parting words. In particular, if you could say something actionable, maybe what is one simple practice that our listeners can do starting today, as a result of this conversation we had? Yeah,

Yogi Aaron  35:45  
I mean, I've helped so many people that have had back issues, just with that, the to a couple of exercises, but one of them is the one we were just talking about doing bridge pose, do bridge every single day, it only takes one minute, one minute a day to do bridge pose, you come up for six seconds, hold it, you know, come up for six seconds, hold it for six seconds, sorry. And then come down and repeat it six times. It's sort of the magic number of muscle activation, six seconds, six times the other one. And I know that people go, Oh my God, I want to do that. And then they don't, but I'll say it anyways, is Superman pose. So like kind of like a locust pose. You come on your stomach, and you lift your legs and you lift your chest up as high as you can, again, six seconds, six times you do those two times or do those two exercises every day. Take you two to three minutes to three minutes a day. And you're you know yourself 10 years from now will thank you so much. Because if we look at like how people age, look at people's bodies, what do we do when we get older, we start hunching over, we stick out our butts and we start hunching over, because those muscles are losing their ability, they've lost their ability to contract properly to work properly. You don't need to go to the gym and do a tonne of, you know, weights, great if you want to do that. But we need to get that neuromuscular connection working. And those are the two areas that people are usually compromised. The most, I think, is in that area. So you do that yourself. 10 years from now will thank you an ounce of cure is equal sorry, an ounce of prevention is equal to a pound of cure.

Agi Keramidas  37:44  
And before I close today's episode, an open invitation to you listening right now. I invite you to find me on Facebook or LinkedIn or Instagram and send me a direct message about anything you want. You can tell me who your favourite guest has been so far or tell me who you would like me to interview next, or anything else you would like to discuss about the podcast and how we can serve you better. So this is an open invitation. Drop me a line and we'll have a chat. Until next time, stand out don't fit in!