the CRAIG VAN cast
Hey, I’m Craig. I've dedicated more than a decade to understanding the human spine. Now I’m sharing what I’ve learnt. Get started with my SPINE STRENGTH project - Part 1 is free. Subscribe and you’ll receive my work as I release it.
the CRAIG VAN cast
56 | How to unlock Back Pain breakthroughs
We craft a roadmap for synchronizing your nutrition, exercise, and psychology to create a symphony of health. Uncover the power in aligning these vital aspects of life for peak performance and resilience. This isn't a health trend—it's a revolution in taking ownership of your vitality. Join us and be inspired to invite miracles into the healing process, and step into a life teeming with wellness and strength.
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Everything we want must be caused into existence, and the most powerful forces shaping our lives are our choices and behaviors. When it comes to back pain, some behaviors play a much bigger role than others. So how can we know which behaviors to prioritize? I have a framework that answers that exact question. When it comes to our body and mind, there are three domains of behavior which stand out far beyond the rest. Three domains of behavior which contain our greatest opportunities and our biggest threats. Do you wanna know how you can recover from anything and reach a potential you didn't even know you had? Because I'm gonna describe a framework for healing that will make this possible for you.
Speaker 1:Our body is a complex and interdependent system. Every cell, tissue and organ is interconnected, working in harmony to maintain our health and vitality, or disharmony that causes disease and injury. This intricate system is largely controlled by our genes, which, in turn, are controlled by the various inputs from our choices and actions. This interactive interdependence between our daily habits and our genes is the lever with which we drive our body to freedom or despair. But three domains of activity that play the leading role in our epigenetic story, three domains of behavior that shape our genetic expression. These are eating, moving and thinking. As a result, all three are non-negotiables on the path to health and recovery. And there are three significant reasons for this. All three are far reaching in their effect on us, each influencing every aspect of our health. Combined, they determine everything we become. The second reason is that they are inescapable. We eat, move and think all day, every day. Making these actions or these forces are a constant and compounding part of our lives. Most importantly, these elements are controllable. This is the third significant factor. These elements are controllable, so, as significant as their impact on us is, we are still able to control and direct them. Let's unpack each of these reasons a bit further, the first one being how far reaching they are, and this first fact prescribes these domains of behavior as non-negotiables Because of their seemingly limitless reach and influence over our internal universe.
Speaker 1:Eating provides the very building blocks for everything happening in our body, from signals to structures. Every atom our body needs to complete its tasks must be consumed in one form or another. Beyond providing substance, the nutrients in our food are a form of information rich with instructions for the genes throughout our body. What we eat regulates our hormones, inflammation and immune system. Food is much more than simply fuel or calories to keep the machine moving.
Speaker 1:Movement goes far beyond exercise. It's the continuous physical activity or inactivity which our body performs, activity which does or doesn't apply mechanical loads on the structures of our body, driving their growth or deterioration. Movement is also the main user of our body's energy, dictating the story of our body's metabolism. The quality and quantity of our movement are pivotal in steering how most of our body develops or doesn't develop over time. Every bone, muscle and connective tissue, plus all of the structures which play a role in providing the energy for movement, are regulated by the movements we do and don't perform. How we move and how much we move are central to the development of the structures and metabolic engine which support and drive our body. Plus, everything from our brains to our bones receives a multitude of benefits from healthy movement and an avalanche of issues from the lack of it.
Speaker 1:From the lack of healthy movement, the state of our mind is like an amniotic fluid which embraces all of our body's activities, from stress to relaxation, from love to fear. Our body's operating system colours and controls every molecular and cellular process. In every moment, we are somewhere on the spectrum between recovery and urgency. The instantaneous state of our psyche governs whether our body feels safe enough to regenerate or if it believes it is in a state of emergency. Even the slightest agitation is enough to tip the balance marginally towards stress, which most people don't realise is enough to switch off many channels of rejuvenation. Resource allocation, hormonal balance and immune function are intimately tied to our immune, to our mood fluctuations.
Speaker 1:Recent research has also deeply implicated our state of mind, with our motivation and willpower, the necessary drivers of all improved behaviour and thinking, like any action, has the tendency to form deeply ingrained and compounding habits over time. This brings us to our second significant reason that all three of these forces must be a part of our plan, which is that they are inescapable. There is no off switch for the influence of each of these activities and the effect they have over our body and mind. It is simply impossible to avoid being shaped by the presence or absence of any nutritional movement or mental action in any given moment. The state of activity within each of these three domains is permanently sending ripples of consequences across the fabric of our body, mind, all the time, always and without end. The development or deterioration of our entire being is being molded by these three forces, consequently, due to a few forces or a few faces of the same force, our behavior has a strong tendency to reinforce itself.
Speaker 1:Repeated actions become habits. Habits become difficult to break programs. If behaviors repeat, then their results must accumulate. Like steadily slipping coins into a piggy bank, the collection of consequences deposited into our savings account must also grow Then. Like any other system, if our body and mind are repeatedly nudged in the same direction, a point must be reached when those nudges start to compound. Compounded results are the key to our highest aspirations and our most inescapable nightmares. No matter how insignificant something might seem at first, when it patiently accumulates and then unexpectedly compounds, it will produce results that can transform or tear apart any system.
Speaker 1:However pervasive and inescapable these forces of nature are, the most important characteristic which makes them central to our recovery and health is that we can change them for the better, and this is the third significant reason all three of these forces are a part of our health and recovery plan, because we can absolutely change the way we eat, move and think. In fact, these are part of a small collection of things we can truly change, but through changing these behaviors we can change everything. We can change anything beyond being the most practically useful place to put our attention. There is an opportunity waiting for us if we choose to perceive that the only forces which matter are those which we control, even if there is something that is very convincingly important and lies outside of our control. If we believe that we depend on it for change, then we stop noticing the opportunities that we might have to do something for our better. The more strongly we believe that it is our responsibility to change our situation, the more powerfully we become aware of opportunities to change it. Our greatest liberation and our greatest imprisonment is our perception. If we wish to shape our destiny, then we must perceive that it is us that shapes our destiny. We must know with certainty that things change as we change. In summary, our eating, moving and thinking are limitlessly influential and irrevocably inescapable, but by having or by being controllable, we can use their power to shape our recovery and health destiny. Then, by pushing the limits of what we take responsibility for, we become powerfully capable of changing ourselves for the better. We can transform a life sentence into the opportunity of a lifetime.
Speaker 1:It should now be blatantly clear that leaving even one of these domains out from our pursuit of vitality is to cause a black hole of difficulty. There is no way to ensure that we will get to where we choose to be if even one of these domains is not geared towards it. Each is simply too powerful. Out of necessity, we must optimize all three towards our health goals. What follows then is a radical synergy Three monumentally powerful forces aligned in agreement towards a common goal, a deliberate goal. The power of each of these three parts can be imagined to some degree, but all three together lead to an experience far beyond their sum. One plus one plus one becomes a hundred and eleven. This is how miracles can be invited into our healing.
Speaker 1:I've been referring to this triad and I'm just wrapping up now. So, in conclusion, I've been referring to this triad as eat, move, meditate for a long time. Now. I do not even try to achieve anything in my healing or fitness without aligning all three towards my goal, and I have managed to take my body and mind exactly where I have wanted to, over and over again, overcoming challenge after challenge every single time. And man, I have faced some challenges. By focusing on what we eat, how we move and the way we think, we take full responsibility for our health. This framework takes us beyond treating or preventing injuries and diseases. It's about revolutionizing ourselves with possibility. We will use all three opportunities to move us away from back pain and towards spinal stability and strength. Activating, fully activating our kinetic keystone.