Seth Oberst’s Stress, Movement, and Pain Course Review

Do you work with people who are stressed? Dumb question, right? Who isn’t stressed today? In fact, stress levels are probably at an all time high, and if you’ve read Robert Sapolsky’s work, is likely responsible for most of the conditions and maladies we face today. The question we must ask though is what role a movement professional has in helping someone mitigate stress? After attending Seth Oberst’s Stress, Pain, and Movement seminar, I think we now have an answer. Now I’ve taken a lot of courses in my day, and much of what I learned is the same poop, repackaged as different poop. That’s not to say that new perspectives aren’t useful, but most are looking at the same thing. Seth’s is the first class that I’ve been to in a hot minute where I had that feeling of “whoa, now this is different.” His approach looks at the struggles our patients and clients deal with through a very unique lens. To me, this course is the gold standard for learning just how problematic stress is for our patients, and what to do about it. Not only will you get an incredibly in-depth look at stress, autonomics, the nervous system, pain, and so much more, but you’ll learn some excellent methods to aid your clients in mitigating stress. I cannot recommend learning from Seth highly enough. If you want to attend, you can sign up here. While I won’t go into the great detail that Seth does on the brain,

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Stress Response, Proximal First, Sensation Loss, and Your Health – Movement Debrief Episode 12

Let me guess, you are devastated you missed last night’s Movement Debrief. You should be. It was by far the most interactive debrief we had yet. Loved how active everyone was, and definitely some people help me get better. Kudos to Steve, Jo, Yonnie-Pooh, and the many others who commented on today’s Debrief. Here’s what we talked about: How the stress response impacts many areas Treatment hierarchies How to restore sensation loss post-surgery Functional Medicine Why taking care of your health helps others If you want to watch these live, add me on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. (occasionally) They air every Wednesday at 8:30pm CST. Enjoy. Stress Response Proximal First Sensation Loss Your Health

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Course Notes: BSMPG 2015

#Bestconferenceevaahhhhh I shipped off to Boston to attend my first ever BSMPG summer symposium. And it was easily one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to. There was an excellent speaker lineup and so much of my family. Art Horne really put on a fantastic show. If you haven’t been to BSMPG before, put it on your to-course list. It is one of the few courses that has a perfect combination of learning and socializing. I hope to not miss another. Instead of my usual this person talked about that, let’s look at some of the big pearls from the weekend.   Why Sapolsky Doesn’t Get Ulcers In one quote Robert Sapolsky summed up my current foundational premise to rehabilitation and training: “The stress response returns the body to homeostasis after actual or potential threats.” ~ Robert Sapolsky   Regardless of what your malady is, it can probably be linked back to the stress response gone awry. The specifics become irrelevant because the stress response occurs nonspecifically. This response works best against acute crises. Guess how we screw it up? Chronic stressors. Human stressors are quite different from other species’ as we have the capability of inducing this stress response psychosocially. Gazelles on the Serengeti don’t have to worry about student loans.   We can see how chronic stress becomes an issue when you look at what occurs in the stress response: Glucose travels to the bloodstream to mobilize energy. Increased cardiovascular tone, heart rate, and blood pressure. Decrease long-term building projects such as

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Favorable Inputs: A Model for Achieving Outcomes

One Hot Model  Louis Gifford’s Topical Issues in Pain has an amazing amount of quality information, and has really inspired many thoughts. I’ve only read book 1 thus far, but this book can generate material to expand upon much like Supertraining does for fitness writers. I’m sure many of you folks have seen this picture before. Gifford called this schematic the “Mature Organism Model” (MOM) to illustrate how pain works. Inputs from the tissues and the environment travel up the spinal cord to the brain. The brain processes these inputs and samples information from itself to generate a corresponding output. These outputs are perceived as new inputs which reset the cycle. MOM was of course used to illustrate the three pain types (read here and here), but it is so much more than that. The MOM is a schematic for how the nervous system works. Any input that is processed by the brain may or may not lead to outputs of altered physiology and/or behavior. Viewing (your) MOM (ha) made me think a lot about working with individuals who are dealing with a threat response. How exactly are we helping these folks? I’ve come to believe that we do not treat outputs. At best we can only provide inputs that we hope are exchanged for new, desirable outputs. In patient care, we are hoping to alter perceived threat. We attenuate threat by giving an individual favorable inputs, which we hope leads to favorable behavior and physiological changes. Let’s look at what these

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The End of Pain

I’m Done Treating Pain. Yes. You read that correctly. I’m over it. Several different thoughts have crept into to my mind sparked by what I have read and conversations I have had. I would like to share these insights with you. I remember when I was visiting Bill Hartman Dad a few months ago and we were talking about a specific treatment that is quite controversial in therapy today. He said something that really resonated with me: “Maybe they measured the wrong thing.” This sentiment was echoed in “Topical Issues in Pain 1” by Louis Gifford. Check out this fantastic excerpt: “Thus, pain can be viewed as a single perceptual component of the stress response whose prime adaptive purpose is to powerfully motivate the organism to alter behavior in order to aid recovery and survive.” Notice what I bolded there. Pain is a single component of the stress response. Not the stress response. Not a necessary component of the stress response. Just one possibility. Why do we place so much importance on pain? Many proponents of modern pain science (myself included) often use this statement against individuals who are over-biomedically inclined: “Nociception is neither necessary nor sufficient for a pain experience.” Agreed, pain is not always the occurring output when nociception is present. That said, pain is only one of several outputs that may occur when a tissue is injured. Just because pain is absent does not mean other outputs are also absent. Many different outputs can occur when an individual is

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