the CRAIG VAN cast
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the CRAIG VAN cast
47 | Understand the Cause of Your Pain (from Professor Stuart McGill)
In this episode, we reflect on a recent interview with Professor Stuart McGill on The Ready State podcast, hosted by Dr. Kelly Starrett and his wife Juliet Starrett. Professor McGill, a renowned figure in understanding lower back pain, provides profound insights into spinal health and its critical role in movement and overall well-being. This episode offers a holistic perspective on health, discussing the layers of movement, the mastery of basic components for complex movements, and how our actions influence our health and life experiences. Join us as we delve into these concepts, aiming to enhance your understanding of movement, health, and the profound wisdom within our bodies.
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A few days ago I was listening to an interview of Professor Stuart McGill by Dr Kelly Starrett and his wife on the podcast the Ready State.
Speaker 1:For those of you that don't know, professor Stuart McGill and Dr Kelly Starrett are primary influences in my foundational movement philosophies how to prepare the body for movement. Professor Stuart McGill is a retired professor emeritus from the University of Toronto, if I'm not mistaken, and he spent the majority of his tenure investigating the causes of low back injury, low back pain. His seminal works, at least in the commercial domain, the non-academic literature, are low back disorders, back mechanic and the gift of injury. At least those are the three I'm really well aware of and acquainted with. What makes his work so relevant is that, as far as I've been able to find, he has shared the best understanding and knowledge of this injury, of this condition of the low back, the single biggest reason that most of us are at risk to lose our movement freedom, the injury that most adults are likely to face, the majority of adults will face. And what makes this really relevant and interesting, and why we're spending so much time talking about the spine and lower back pain, is in large part due to what Professor Stuart McGill has shared, but also why or where this information stands within the broader context of human movement and, of course, our health at large. Initially, it might seem like the work he has done to understand the causes of low back pain might be relevant only to people who have had back pain or are dealing with back pain, but it turns out that what he has shared from a rehabilitation perspective how to properly diagnose low back pain and how to specifically rehabilitate it very successfully Also turns out to be an incredibly useful place for most people to start their movement journey. Now, there are a few reasons for this that the centre of our movement is our spine, both structurally and dynamically. It is central to all of our movement and so anything we can do to improve, optimize our spine is going to have benefits, is going to optimize or positively influence the rest of our movement. It's a really useful, important place for many of us to start our movement journeys and to maintain level of priority throughout our movement journeys. The spine, in a broader sense, is extremely important in the realm of human movement, which is central to our health and our experience of life. But what Professor McGill has been sharing from through the lens of low back disorders. Low back pain turns out not only to be extremely valuable for people who are working with back pain, but also a really intelligent place for anyone to start and actually anyone who is already moving to come back to and make sure they have mastered, if they haven't already. And the reason for this is the layered, progressive development, or the layered development of movement in a proper developmental process or journey.
Speaker 1:I'm discovering this constantly that when I take any movement complex movement and I break it down into its constituent parts, when I break it down into its components, the more basic, the building blocks, I can identify and then spend my time working on refining those elements and then even build the layers progressively. By the time I work my way back to the complex movements that I was initially working with, focused on and then I broke down from my ability to execute or engage with the complex movement goes through the roof. The impact of working with the fundamental components is finding the simplest pieces we can and using that simplification to really hone in and iron out each of the pieces and then building our way back up to complexity. Is the route to mastery of complexity? There's not. I think there is a general misunderstanding that there is some extra ability required to master complex movements, but often it's not. Maybe some people have some gifted talent to more quickly engage with the complex movement, but from everything I have experienced and everything I have studied and witnessed, the true masters spend a lot of time working with the basics, refining the basics, and the basics are a foundation upon which the higher order layers and abstractions depend on, they rest on. And if we look at movement in a broader sense, as this kind of layered, progressive development, and we reverse our trajectory to try and come back to the center, the core of the layered movement onion, what do we find at the beginning?
Speaker 1:What are some of the most basic components that we can work to master, to isolate and hone in and refine so that as much of our broader, more complex movement can be benefited as possible? One of these components turns out to be the philosophy, the practice that Professor Stuart McGill is sharing. It's this ability to activate, stabilize and control the spine in its neutral position. End. From then on I've seen it myself and I've witnessed it. Everyone I've shared this with. Everything else we do on top of that becomes improved, is benefited, and of course, this is not to be all an end. All the spine is designed to do so much more than be stabilized in a neutral position, but this is the most basic building block we can come back to to work on, to then progress onto the more complex elements. I struggle to believe that anyone who doesn't have a serious proficiency in being able to stabilize their neutral spine, I will not believe that they have a high degree of ability to stabilize their spine in any more complex position than that. So these are the reasons that I consider the work that Professor Stuart McGill has done and the information that he is sharing, why I consider it to be so important for all of us, and it really does form the foundation of movement, or it can enhance everything we build on top, and this is why I have built the Canary Keystone course.
Speaker 1:First, because it is a good place to start. The third reason for me is that it is a good place to start if you are in pain. It is a really good place to put energy into, no matter where you are on your movement journey, unless you have already put a lot of energy into mastering this thing. A third reason that is worth mentioning why this is also a really good place to start is. It is, by definition, being a sound rehabilitation protocol for the most common injury. It turns out it is incredibly safe, a really safe place for most people to start developing control and awareness and confidence around their spine. All this to say that I really value Professor Stuart McGill's work and in listening to this podcast with Kelly Starrett and his wife, julie Starrett the podcast being the ready state they asked him the question like how he would define pain they are busy with a season with a theme is pain on the podcast and his answer was so insightful for me, so resonant with what I inherently believe and preach on many layers, whether it's the spine, whether it's the movement, whether it's nutrition, psychology, health at large.
Speaker 1:His response, after some contemplation, was that he doesn't really find defining pain, the actual phenomenon that is pain. He doesn't find that to be a very useful thing to do. He's built his career around understanding what causes pain and we can leave it up to the neurologists to define pain what is actually going on in the body that gives us the experience of pain, whether there are strange chemicals or neurotransmitters or structural changes or inflammatory responses. These are cool, these are interesting, but they are not relevant, not nearly as relevant to our movement journey as is answering the question what causes pain? Now, this is built on the premise, the foundation, that we already have the understanding. In order for this question to be relevant, we have to have already acknowledged that pain always has a cause that can be understood, a cause that we can identify.
Speaker 1:And a lot of his method has been based on identifying what are the behaviors, what are the precise triggering movements which are eliciting the pain, which are creating the structural breakdown. And then oftentimes, he shared these beautiful anecdotal stories of how many, how often he was able to revolutionize someone's experience of their pain the debilitating back pain, the depressing back pain by identifying the specific mechanical cause, movement cause, the trigger, and making them aware of that, making them connecting the dots between something they're doing and this experience of pain that they're having. And in that light bulb moment that he would give his patients, he gave them the power to take control of their situation, to one see that it is not an inescapable experience of discomfort and depression, but rather that it is just the consequence of inefficient, ignorant, unintended movements. And by changing those movements they then become able to change their experience of pain, and that's what we really want. Defining pain is interesting to some people but not relevant to all of us, like understanding that pain has causes and what are those causes, and, in doing so, these patients spending time observing the connection between their movements and their pain and then, over time, modifying their movements to modify their pain and, in the long term, really taking control of that process, developing not only just the direct understanding of this cause and effect between their actions and their experience, but also an intuitive understanding for their efficient or non-efficient movement and the results, which are, of course, healing or harming. And this ties in so much with the philosophy of intuitive health intelligence or intuitive health practices that underpin so much of what we're talking about.
Speaker 1:At the centre of what I'm trying to share is that everything we need to experience health is inside of us, fundamentally intrinsic to us. The body is a self-healing marvel, a miracle, and it is intelligent beyond our comprehension. If only we learn to listen to it, to analyze it, to have a conversation with it, to be guided by it, and then, because of what becomes possible, then we move far beyond what we understand now as health. Health we don't realize, but we genuinely, if I say to most people I don't think you're that healthy. They're going to look at me.
Speaker 1:I was thinking about this yesterday or the day before at work and I saw one of my beautiful colleagues, a woman, and I thought, wow, what a specimen of a human that she would be if she were healthy. And I'd also cross my mind that if I had to challenge her on the idea that I don't think she's healthy, she would be flabbergasted, because she seems to be somewhat skinny and she probably implements a few popular health practices, but she is so far from her health potential. All she is if she had to look at herself and she doesn't realize she consciously believes this through and through is that there is no sign of clinically diagnosable condition, there is no symptom that suggests she has some illness or disease, and because of the absence of any of those problems, because her slate almost appears to be clean, she must be healthy. But health is so much more than that.
Speaker 1:Health is something that stretches just as far as disease and illness and injury stretch in the one direction Health if we move to the middle of the spectrum where we are absent of any of the problems, and then we move in the opposite direction towards health and vitality. It stretches, I think, much further than the pathological side of the spectrum stretches, because the pathological side eventually comes to an abrupt end we die, we are disabled, whereas our experience and our potential for vitality seems to have no end. But the only way we can get there. So one first point we have everything we need inside of us. We have everything inside of this body and its mind to guide us with all the information we need away from injury, away from illness, away from depression and beyond that, the only way I believe and have experienced and have witnessed in the healthiest people I know, the only way we can get to that extreme other end of the spectrum where we experience a spiritual kind of health, is by listening to our unique individual system, body-mind system. We are so individual in each moment, never mind compared to anyone else. There is no other way, there is no other source of information that can guide us as perfectly as our own system, in real time, from moment to moment.
Speaker 1:And so this philosophy was summarized in a movement sense, in a low back pain sense, by Stuart McGill when he was asked to define what is pain and then understanding that it's far more relevant to answer the question what causes pain? And all of us have within us the capacity to reflect on what are the causes of our problems. And if we're honest with ourselves and we observe critically enough, we can understand those causes, we can change those causes, because we are almost always the cause. I would argue we are always the cause to our effect. And if we are willing to look at that, if we are willing to take the fullest responsibility, that we are the cause of this problem, then we are able to move ourselves into far higher states of life experience. By taking that complete responsibility, we directly tap into the power to change our situation.
Speaker 1:But we cannot change our situation. We do not have the power to change our situation if we believe the causes are somewhere beyond us, because then the control is outside of our reach. We've literally put it there. We need to take it within our reach by saying it is us, we are the cause, thank you, and we will experience the consequence of our own actions. We will change our consequences by changing our actions. We can modify our pain by understanding our causative actions, not by seeking some external surgery, some external therapy or some external intervention, of course, some guidance and some help to help us change our actions is extremely valuable, but they're only useful to the degree that they help us change our actions. A mentor and a coach, a therapist, can be extremely valuable in a sense, but as long as we rely on them to change something for us, we will fail.
Speaker 1:So I had to share this amazing parallel that Professor Stuart McGill was able to summarize in a much simpler way than I have now, but this is what I love to talk about, and I wanted to also just connect that to something I heard Dr Mark Hyman mention recently on his podcast, and he's the founder of the Institute for Functional Medicine. Basically, what I have come to understand is the place that's fighting for a rebirth of medicine, the re-application of everything we've managed to learn through scientific medical research and applying it through a new lens functional medicine. Check that out if you haven't. And what he said was, I believe, something along the lines of most people simply have not connected the dots between what they eat and how they feel. Most people have not connected the dots between how they eat, what they eat and how they feel, and I will say this in another way Most people have not connected the dots between how they move and how they feel. Most people have not connected the dots between how they think and how they feel. Most people have not connected the dots between their actions and their health, or the absence thereof.
Speaker 1:Until next time, I wish you wellness. Like this discussion, this video or audio, wherever you're listening to it, like to the channel I recommend your future self or thank you. I'll do my best to make sure it's of the greatest value. If you know anyone who might benefit from this, please share it with them. Let's do our good deeds and help everyone out. Share the message Very well.