Proper Breathing Equals Proper Movement with Erin McGuire
Proper Breathing Equals Proper Movement with Erin McGuire
– The MOVEMENT Movement with Steven Sashen Episode 139 with Erin McGuire
Erin McGuire PT, OCS, has been a physical therapist for over 25 years. Erin is a Board Certified Orthopedic Clinical Specialist, creator of the core360 belt and a Prague School of Rehabilitation Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization (DNS) international instructor and practitioner. After more than 20 years at her private practice in Los Angeles, Back in Balance Physical Therapy, Erin recently moved her practice to Colorado where she will focus on teaching, the core360 belt and continuing to treat clients.
Her key mentors, Clare Frank PT, DPT and Pavel Kolar PT, PhD, greatly impacted the direction of her professional career and sparked her passion for understanding the nuances, motor patterns and interconnectedness of the movement system. With the growth of her DNS practice, her interest and focus increased on assessment and training of the diaphragm muscle and it’s two key functions, respiration and trunk stabilization, which both play an important, key role in movement.
In 2014, to address the widespread impairment of the diaphragm that is so prevalent within all activity levels of the population, she created the core360 belt. Seeing her clients make quicker gains and progress further using the core360 belt catapulted the diaphragm to the front-and-center of her practice. Through teaching and the core360 belt her passion and goal is to assist other movement professionals in furthering their understanding of the diaphragm’s role in movement and why assessing and training quality diaphragm function is a necessity for everyone whether we are optimizing rehabilitation or performance.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Erin McGuire about how you must breathe properly to move properly.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How your body should expand 360 degrees when you inhale.
– How you need to use your diaphragm to breath sufficiently.
– Why breathing and core stability are one in the same.
– How it’s important for your body to learn good patterns you don’t have to think much about.
– Why physical therapists and chiropractors must be open to learning about new techniques to help their patients.
Connect with Erin:
Guest Contact Info
Twitter
@Core360Belt
Instagram
@core360belt
Facebook
facebook.com/Core360Belt
Links Mentioned:
core360belt.com
Connect with Steven:
Website
Xeroshoes.com
Twitter
@XeroShoes
Instagram
@xeroshoes
Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes
Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
You want to work on your abs, you want to work on your core, maybe the best thing you can do is actually something about your breathing, instead of things like crunches or whatever else you do for your abs. We’re going to find out more about that on today’s episode of The Movement Movement, the podcast for people who like to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body. We usually, starting with your feet, because they’re your foundation, but breathing is kind of your foundation as well, so this will be really interesting. This is also the podcast where we get rid of the propaganda, the mythology, sometimes the outright lies you’ve been told about what it takes to run, walk, hike, play, do yoga, crossfit, whatever it is you like to do, and to do that enjoyably, efficiently, effectively. Did I say enjoyably?
Trick question. I know I did because I always say that, because look, if you’re not having fun, you’re not going to keep it up, so find a way to have fun with what you’re doing. I’m Steven Sashen from xeroshoes.com, your host of The Movement Movement podcast. We call it that because we, and that includes you and everyone else who’s listened to this and more about that in a second, we’re creating a movement about natural movement, about letting your body do what bodies are made to do and the movement part where you participate is really easy. You can go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. You don’t need to join anything, just the URL that I got. There’s no cost for anything. There’s no secret handshake. It’s just, that’s where you can find all the previous episodes, all the ways you can interact with us on different social channels and how to find our podcasts and all the places that you find podcasts.
It’s really simple. Basically, like, share, thumbs up, hit the bell icon on YouTube, whatever’s relevant, you know the gist, if you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe. Let’s jump in Erin McGuire, welcome to The Movement Movement podcast. Tell people who the hell you are and what you’re doing here.
Erin McGuire:
Well, am I supposed to know that?
Steven Sashen:
Oh no, you can make something up for all I care.
Erin McGuire:
I’m Erin McGuire. I am a physical therapist for now more than 25 years. My journey took not a typical physical therapy twist right off the bat and I was introduced to a different approach that had to do with developmental kinesiology, so talking about kind of what we’re supposed to do naturally. The whole approach is based on how we develop and how that teaches us how we’re supposed to move. I’m here because my career path led me. I had a private practice in Los Angeles for many years that I just closed and I’m now in, actually, Colorado.
Steven Sashen:
What?!
Erin McGuire:
Yes. Longmont, very close to you.
Steven Sashen:
Literally up the street.
Erin McGuire:
Right, right.
Steven Sashen:
Congratulations on escaping, but I will say for those of us who’ve been in Colorado for a long time, I’m about 30 years, getting all those Californians just makes us a little twitchy.
Erin McGuire:
I know, I know. I understand. Along my career path, one of the things is when you mentioned both the feet and our breathing and our diaphragm are our foundation is, when we develop, the first thing that we have to have is core stability, which comes to my-
Steven Sashen:
Wait, I’ve got to pause, because for people who are watching, you just put air quotes around core stability.
Erin McGuire:
Yeah. I feel it’s a term that is just used so much and it can mean so many different things to so many different people.
Steven Sashen:
My hunch is we’ll be diving into that with a little more detail in just moments.
Erin McGuire:
I hope so.
Steven Sashen:
Hey, it’s all up to you. I’m going for the ride.
Erin McGuire:
Yeah. The first thing we have to do when we develop as babies is our diaphragm starts out, it is teaching us how like, it is a breathing muscle. By six weeks, we start to have a postural function of our diaphragm, which is what gives us, I won’t use the quotes, but gives us trunk or core stability. It isn’t until that point that we can start to lift our arms and legs off of the surface, and so it teaches us about how important that stability is in order for us to have good, fixed, solid base, to move off of. Through my practice in studying this approach that I studied that has to do with this developmental kinesiology, I have really become obsessed with the diaphragm and breathing and teaching people the proper way to activate it for both breathing and their core function, because it has such huge implications for our whole movement system throughout the chain.
Steven Sashen:
I can’t think of anywhere I would want to go next other than, oh gosh, say more. Is there something we can get or wrap our hands and diaphragm around, something to experience based on this and then we’ll dive in a little more?
Erin McGuire:
I’m sorry, experience based on it?
Steven Sashen:
Well, yeah. Well, here’s the simple thing, since it’s a Movement Movement, do you want to start with something movementy that you can, so people can get a feel for what you just described?
Erin McGuire:
Yes. With respect to how the diaphragm functions? Is that?
Steven Sashen:
Sure. Again, well, we can talk about that, but also literally, a something that people can do, whether they’re watching this, listen to this, driving, in an airplane, in a blimp, hot air balloon, yeah.
Erin McGuire:
Right, to see if their diaphragm is working properly?
Steven Sashen:
Oh yeah, that’s perfect.
Erin McGuire:
Yeah. One of the things of is I think still out there a little bit is people consider diaphragm, belly breathing. What happens is your diaphragm, when it sits as a dome all the way around your trunk and when it comes down, if you imagine a water balloon as your abdominal wall, is it comes down and compresses all of those contents in your trunk. Well, it’s going to move those organs down, so now your entire trunk wall is going to expand in 360 degrees all the way around. One of the things you can do to just check how you’re breathing is to just place your hands around your trunk and you just make sure that your thumbs wrap around that posterior part in the back. When you inhale, you want to feel that your thumbs and your fingers are moving away from each other in all directions. Quite commonly, what we’ll see is the chest lifting or just movement in the front. That’s a quick, easy way to start to learn how to or just assess, can you even breathe into your back? That back half is generally the hardest part for people to get.
Steven Sashen:
Should people be feeling the back half or the whole thing moving simultaneously? Or is there a rhythm like front goes around to the sides, goes around to the back or some other pattern?
Erin McGuire:
Yeah. It should be pretty simultaneous and symmetrical. It’s much easier like our abdominal wall tends to be the softest part of us.
Steven Sashen:
Hence, the desire to do crunches, et cetera, et cetera.
Erin McGuire:
Right. It’s usually easier for us to go that direction, but it should be pretty symmetrical with just a little bit more expansion around the front half, but timing should be right right at the same time when we have it right.
Steven Sashen:
I’m testing.
Erin McGuire:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting. I don’t know how much has changed from the first breath I took to now, but on the first breath I took, there was less movement in my back. Now, granted, the other day, I did some weird twisty thing and I’m sitting here with a bunch of tiger balm on my lower back on the right side because I don’t know what the hell I did. I know I’m being a little protective, but for people who find that they’re not getting that expansion, especially to the sides and back, and I don’t know, which might be more important, what’s next? How does one move from there?
Erin McGuire:
Yeah. A lot of times you almost have to take a couple steps because for most people, the chest is dominant. It’s like, when they inhale, they’re using these muscles that we call their accessory muscles, which are basically cheater muscles and the diaphragm isn’t working as well, and so now, when you inhale, it’s literally coming up, and that’s what can get you all kinds of, not just inefficient breathing, but also you start to get overuse of muscles in your neck and chest and that can cause issues. Sometimes people just have to work on actually do like to be able to get their stomach to move forward without their chest. Sometimes that can be the first step. But then, they need to start to just work on being able to feel that 360 expansion.
One is you can sit against the back of a chair, try to feel that as you breathe, you’re getting both the pressure into the back of the chair, as well as your hands. I also, actually, because this is such an issue and such a problem created the Core 360 Belt, which actually also cues you. It’s got these little points that go around the back to give you some input into your central nervous system to go, “Hey, this is where we need to expand.” You can work on it by putting your hands and your thumbs there. That’s how I used to train people in the clinic prior to having the belt, and the belt is just a little bit of extra cuing, so that you can work on it when you don’t have your hands available.
Steven Sashen:
Well, what I love about the Core 360 Belt is it is basically, in one way and this may be inadvertent, designed to correct a misunderstanding people have about weightlifting belts where people-
Erin McGuire:
Yes, that too.
Steven Sashen:
Most people think that the whole idea is that you’re supposed to tighten the belt and that that’s providing stability instead of thinking that it’s a queue, so you’re-
Erin McGuire:
Right.
Steven Sashen:
Do you want to say any more about that than what I just did and pull the rug out from underneath you?
Erin McGuire:
Yeah. No, absolutely. We talked about, in the beginning, how breathing and core stability are one and the same, because the diaphragm has to work for both. If you can’t use the diaphragm to breathe, which when it comes down, it creates that pressure inside that we talked about squashing that balloon, core stability is really about that pressure inside your abdomen, it’s called inter abdominal pressure. When you are able to use the diaphragm for that postural strength, then you are creating that stability by using all the muscles in the right coordination. If you have a stiff weight belt on and you’re just butting up against it, you’re actually not using your abdominal wall quite the way you’re supposed to, whereas this belt, because it’s elastic, it’s teaching you how to actively create that. That’s what we need is, we need that expansion of the abdominal wall and then the muscles hold as you lift or as you’re doing whatever activity you’re doing for that stability, for that stabilization function.
Steven Sashen:
What I also find really interesting about what you said with either using something like the Core 360 Belt or just putting your hands down and feeling it or leaning against the chair and trying to feel yourself pushing against the chair when you’re breathing, the number one, obviously, the common factor in all that is awareness. It is just bringing your attention to something that you might not have noticed or can’t notice or some version of that. How much do you find that it really is just the repeated balance of awareness that make the change versus any additional something you need to do?
Erin McGuire:
Yeah. Our movement is driven by our brains. There are patterns of movement that we have so that we don’t have to think about, “Oh, contract this muscle, contract this muscle,” it’s all in our nervous system and it’s a pattern. When you have a good pattern, you don’t have to think about it as much. It’s just like any habit, bad habit that we form. For many reasons, we start out like when you develop, most babies develop the correct way and we have the right movement and that teaches us.
Then, we have these patterns that support our joints that are efficient, that are balanced, but then through our life, things happen that interrupt that, and so now, the habit becomes a poor habit. Now, that’s the wiring in our brain, so that just, if I say no, use your diaphragm or no, expand out, don’t pull in, if your wiring in your brain only knows how to coordinate it that other way, you need some queuing and something to help you recognize how to do it properly. Over time, as you repeat that, then it starts to become more your normal. It’s just like learning any new skill. We need repetition of the right coordination over time and then it starts to become a little bit more normal.
Steven Sashen:
The weird example that I gave about this, I have a fondness for noticing when I’m doing something habitually and then trying to mix it up. My last experiment, this has been going on for a few months, is I noticed that I always put on my pants left leg first. So, I spent a couple months trying to only go right leg first, and I often forget and then it’s like, “Ugh.” Then it got to the point where if I use my left leg, I felt like I was cheating on my right leg, which was so funny. Now, I’m doing it’s like, I’m just aware of which one I start with, but I can do both equally as well, and I’m just interested to find out what happens when I’m totally not thinking about it, what’s the difference between when I use my left leg or my right leg. It’s fascinating watching how these patterns do shift over time and it takes time, takes a little bit of time.
Erin McGuire:
Was it physically awkward to coordinate it at first to, not just?
Steven Sashen:
It was less that it was difficult or awkward than it was that the initial pattern, the left leg first, was so instantaneous that I had to really work to think, “Whoa! Whoa! Hold on,” and then switch. They’re equal. I’m [frazzled 00:14:10] with either, but it just feels weird when I’m doing my left and I feel like, “Oh, wait, am I just relying on a habit again?” I’m still figuring out where that goes. When I crossed my arms, this is one of the first ones that I did. Now, I do both and I switch all the time and I’m literally, I’m not even sure which one was the original one that I did. I can’t tell anymore. I don’t feel the same issue about switching my arms, if I’m starting with my right arm above my left and then I switch the other way around, because I’d switch often. But with pants, you don’t switch your pants very often during a day.
Erin McGuire:
No. Yeah, that’s an interesting one, for sure.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. I have a different experience about that and I’m sure there’s … oh, and eating. There’s a whole thing. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, and maybe I’m just crazy about it, but there have been more British shows, more British TV shows and movies showing up, and so the way British people use their knife and fork is different than the way Americans typically do.
Erin McGuire:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
I’ve been playing with that too. I think, in many ways, the Brits are, and this is a technical term, completely wrong. The idea that you use the back of your fork as the thing to hold something, when it’s pointed down, that just doesn’t make any sense to me.
Erin McGuire:
Right. It’s not just habit, that’s just wrong.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. It’s not a cultural thing. It’s just undeniably wrong. I’ll die with that one. I’m sticking to it. Now that said, I still play with it. But more, what I’m doing is I’m playing around with not being attached to any particular way, which high end is holding the fork, is it up or down and vice versa, just to kind of thing.
Erin McGuire:
Right. Those are just such great examples of how our movement is very automatic.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Erin McGuire:
There’s so much that we do that we don’t have to think about. When you develop something that’s a bad habit, like putting that fork down, it does require some conscious effort to change it, but also even for performance enhancement. Right? Not just changing initially, but the more you improve these things, then the more efficient you are with running with stabilization, with breathing, you just get better at.
Steven Sashen:
Say more about that. Actually, there’s two things I want to ask you about. Now, I have to do them both or I’ll forget at least one. One is, just say more about when people start making this change and breathing better, getting this 360 degree effect, what are the effects that they might see? What are the things they might see? The second one, I’m going to do this one, so I don’t forget is, have you noticed any pattern about why it is that some people are just breathing, they not using their diaphragm? Something, whether it’s something traumatic or something just habitual for some other reason or anything you may have noticed about the cause?
Erin McGuire:
Yeah. There’s a lot of things. Some people just have an abnormal development and it can just be that they were actually accelerated too quickly, they skipped crawling. It can be things like that where we don’t go through the automatic processes that start to shape our bones and bring our joints into the neutral position that allow us to use the muscles properly. That’s one key thing. Another thing is if you were a child and had a really bad respiratory infection, after a while of having to breathe differently and compensate, it starts to become the normal and that can persist.
Steven Sashen:
You see that with kids who are asthmatic, for example?
Erin McGuire:
Yes. That or, yeah, because once we start developing a compensatory pattern or a pattern to help us breathe if we can’t do the normal thing, if we can’t breathe in the normal way, it starts to now become that normal pattern in our brain. We don’t get an email saying, “Hey, just wanted to let you know, you got to now work on your pattern, because it just becomes the normal and you just keep doing it.” Injuries, like you were talking about your back, that can elicit a protective response.
Now, you’re going to start breathing with the wrong muscles. Probably one of the biggest ones is societal influence. People are taught to hold your stomach in. That actually blocks the diaphragm, and so now you’re forced to use the compensatory muscles.
Steven Sashen:
Sorry, I got to interrupt this one. The thing that I think about with chest breathing is what it also does to your blood chemistry. I think about this because I have a video of my dad from the last 12 hours of his life. He’s breathing super fast only really high in his chest. I know that that basically just does a whole wacky thing with CO2 in his blood and I turned to the nurse and said, “He keeps doing that. He’s got 12 hours to live,” and she goes, “Yep,” and 12 hours later, that’s when he died. He is unconscious during the whole thing, which is fascinating. He’s unconscious and breathing really high, really fast.
Erin McGuire:
It changes everything, and if you’re breathing with your chest, there’s no way that you can be completely utilizing your full lung capacity, right?
If you just imagine that on a daily basis, if you have an increased respiratory rate and it’s more shallow, just the impacts on your overall well-being and health. There’s definitely also those pieces to it, when you talked about what you might start to feel as you start to breathe. There’s two pieces. There’s the 360 breathing and then there’s also the 360 degree core activation, which they look the same. There’s the inhalation, which is just the 360 breathing, that’s more of that natural breathing. Then, there’s the core activation that happens prior to doing a movement or resisting a load. Some of the things that people start to notice right away are that they have less strain in their neck.
Steven Sashen:
I want to back up. What we’re talking about is once we start to feel this 360 degree thing from breathing of engaging those muscles 360 degrees worth, we’re talking not about pulling it in, but again, if we think about using the Core 360 Belt or even of weight lifting belt or anything, it’s like you’re doing this, how much of it is an expansion versus something more isometric?
Erin McGuire:
That’s a great question. The initial phase of this is that the diaphragm, it’s the leader of this whole coordination, and so, whether you’re breathing or whether you’re activating your core, the muscle does the same thing. It’s just that one is more for strength function and one is more for respiration or breathing, and so now, when it comes down and it starts to move those organs towards your pelvic floor, they’re pushing all of it down, the initial piece of this needs to be the eccentric or a lengthening of the muscles of the abdominal wall. Then, as the load is added, now we get an isometric contraction.
It’s an initial expansion and then hold and that’s what connects our upper and lower bodies, so that now, when we’re talking about that foot being that foundation, that support, we’re getting that movement and that power integrated and transferred up through our whole chain. That’s the connection. It is that getting that expansion piece of it.
Steven Sashen:
It’s funny. I just had a flashback as you said that to thinking about, when I started figuring this out and playing with this and deadlifting, when I was doing a lot of heavy deadlifting, which annoyingly, I don’t do any longer because I’ve got a compromised spine, and I say annoyingly, because I like lifting really heavy things, especially because I’m a small guy. There’s something really fun about going to a gym where there’s some guy who weighs 300 pounds and he is got like 400 pounds on a bar and he starts to unload it, I go, “No, no, you can just leave it like that.”
Erin McGuire:
I’m good.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. I can work in on that. But it was very interesting to feel how other parts of my body, I’m thinking about my arms and my shoulders, really did less work. I wasn’t as tight in other parts of my body when my core was really engaged that way.
Erin McGuire:
Right. One of the things that when I first created the belt, I just was doing it to replace people’s hands, so that … because we would try to progress them and what would happen was they’d be like, “Well, I can’t feel if I’m doing it right, because I can’t use my hands,” so I thought, “Okay.” But as I started to watch what happened to people’s movement and how, and it makes sense, but I just wasn’t thinking it would, this simple product would do such a big thing, probably how you felt about yours, right? Both of our products-
Steven Sashen:
Oh, no, no. No, I knew this was a big thing because of my own experience.
Erin McGuire:
Yes. Until you feel it, right? But I would see how the difference of when people would get that expansion, whether it was breathing or the core activation, how their movement pattern would completely change in an instant. It wasn’t that they got stronger, it was just that because they got the correct activation, it helped to improve the quality of motion throughout the whole chain, and there’s just instantaneously and people would be like, “Oh, I don’t have any pain. Oh, it’s easier.” I started to see these changes and it was just so incredibly powerful that it’s what made me fall in love with it.
Steven Sashen:
Well, I must say I’m disappointed that you didn’t design it to just be hands on a belt. I think that would’ve been, just buy some mannequin hands. I think that would be right.
Erin McGuire:
I’ll work on one for you.
Steven Sashen:
I would wear that. I would be that guy. That made me think of two things that are related. One, have you worked with any athletes who used the Core 360 Belt while they’re competing?
Erin McGuire:
Yes. Yeah. I’ve worked, some that wear it while they’re competing runners. Because that’s probably the easiest application. It gets a little tougher. A lot of the major league baseball teams have used the belt for their training part of it. Pitchers and then also just during the gym. There’s some hockey players use it. They, primarily, use it during training, and then what you do is you have a sensory awareness of what that feeling is, and so then you try to implement it in practice and then, when you’re competing that way, you just are going with the motion. You’re not thinking at that point. I think it might get in the way of those kinds of sports, but golf. I haven’t had a professional golfer do it, but some other people who golf regularly use it, and running, it’s really nice to have on to keep that performance aspect of it going, so that you don’t go into your compensatory pattern.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. I was imagining speaking as a sprinter using the belt, but then realizing during a hundred meters, I breathe four times.
Erin McGuire:
Yeah, right, right.
Steven Sashen:
There’s not a whole lot of opportunity, yeah.
Erin McGuire:
Yeah. It’d still be fun to try though.
Steven Sashen:
I was thinking that.
Erin McGuire:
We should go out and just play around with it.
Steven Sashen:
Since you’re my neighbor.
Erin McGuire:
That’s right.
Steven Sashen:
We can definitely make that happen. I want to ask you a question and if you have an answer, you’re going to have to define the term that I will use in the question. Ready?
Erin McGuire:
Okay.
Steven Sashen:
How does what we’re talking about relate to, or not relate to, the Valsalva maneuver?
Erin McGuire:
Yes. The Valsalva maneuver is not only creating pressure in the-
Steven Sashen:
Well, wait, you got to define it because I use that, and of course, anything with the word maneuver in it.
Erin McGuire:
Right, right, right. The Valsalva maneuver is something that when you’re maxing out and lifting a max load, that’s usually what they teach people to do. It’s like an isometric locking down where you close your glottis and you just have this big isometric contraction to stabilize to lift the max load. Is that a good?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, that’ll work. It works for me. The point that you made, that’s the interesting point, is it’s not just a core thing, it’s really starting from the throat down.
Erin McGuire:
Yes, and because what happens is you’re actually, you’re creating pressure in the thoracic area as well as the interabdominal area, and so that can cause big issues when you let go in terms of fluctuations and blood pressure.
Steven Sashen:
Blood pressure, yeah.
Erin McGuire:
Right. Think Elvis for all of us older people.
Steven Sashen:
Oh my God. That’s hysterical. I never put those two things together until right now and that’s going to ruin my lunch.
Erin McGuire:
Sorry about that.
Steven Sashen:
For anyone who didn’t get it, Elvis died on the toilet ostensibly after straining very hard, which is similar to the Valsalva maneuver and then blood pressure dropped when he stopped, passed out, fell over boing.
Erin McGuire:
Right, and that was the end.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. He’s still alive, but anyway, that’s a whole-
Erin McGuire:
Oh, that’s right. He’s like 102 now or something. Yeah. Here’s the thing. Most of the stuff that I work on with the Core 360 and trying to train and help people understand the importance of breathing properly and integrating this into our movement and how much it impacts our movement, most of it is not talking about a max weightlifting. There are many people that I’ve seen online that use the belt as now their weight belt for their lifting, but what happens is with the diaphragm and all of our functions is we need to be able to use it for both breathing and core stabilization at the same time. We’re doing the same things.
Whether we’re walking, we don’t need as much for the core, but we need more for breathing or running. We need a little bit more for breathing. But if we’re carrying something heavy, we need a little bit more of that for the stabilization function, but we still then need to be able to breathe diaphragmatically and get the ribs and the abdominal wall to open up. That’s where it’s different from just a big isometric lockdown holding your breath. We need to be able to have core stabilization and still breathe, even if it’s not to the same degree if we’re carrying something heavy.
Steven Sashen:
In sprinting, and this is not something that I really work on or think about, but they think about the Valsalva maneuver during, out of the block start, those first few steps, because it really is akin to heavy squats in many ways.
There are some debates about the effectiveness of it, but it’s become one of those things. Anytime in highly competitive athletics where someone has something where another person claims that made them better, then everyone starts doing it no matter what, because they’re terrified that if in fact it is something that is performance-enhancing and they’re not doing it, so that’s a-
Erin McGuire:
That they’re going to miss out on that benefit, yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. It’s a bit of a vicious cycle. I’ve watched people do all these ridiculous things that have clearly no value because some crazy famous person did that thing and they think it’s going to impact them as well, and it was never really the limiting factor.
Erin McGuire:
Right. Yeah. What it does for them and their body based on their kinesthetic awareness, based on their overall movement system could be totally different than when you try to implement it depending on where you are, right?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. It’s one of those things where coaches, a coach will hear about it, he’ll start to teach it, and then, there’s usually bad cues, so people misinterpret whatever it is and then they start sharing that and so on and so on, and eventually, you have all these. I remember, one of my best friends, we became best friends, we were working with the same sprinting coach, and I noticed he wasn’t doing some of the warm up drills that I also wasn’t doing, because I knew they were ridiculous and bullshit, and I said to him, “Why aren’t you doing these drills?” He go and he’s British, he goes, “Oh, they’re bollocks.” “You’re my friend.” This coach was a well-known coach, was just getting all these people to do some drills that clearly had no benefit whatsoever. Which is what happened.
Erin McGuire:
Yeah. One of the things I love about the belt and why I’m shifting towards trying to get more information out about it is because there is so much in my opinion and based on this, I study an approach called dynamic neuromuscular stabilization that’s based out of Czech Republic and there’s just so much misunderstanding about what movement is, and that it’s really driven by our central nervous system that we don’t just move by training one joint, so it’s a passion of mine to get a little bit of that out there.
Steven Sashen:
I wonder if this makes your head explode, not what I’m about to say specifically, but the thing I’m going to reference. Boulder is a town, I joke about Boulder, I go, “It’s a town where you can’t throw a tantrum without hitting a therapist” and among the kinds of therapists, I will include people who do Pilates because there’s a Pilates studio every five feet.
Erin McGuire:
Is there?
Steven Sashen:
It seems that way sometimes. Of course, in Pilates, which I played with, oh my God, this is an embarrassing number to say, 40 years ago. Joe Pilates was one of these guys, big barrel-chested guy and in Pilates, they go breathe and then hold, pull your stomach in as you’re inhaling.
I say, “What?” I’m imagining you get people who’ve been doing Pilates who show up with you and it’s almost a religious thing when you suggest that maybe that’s a little upside down.
Erin McGuire:
Yeah. Yeah. I’ve had people cry before when I start to talk about who were, I’m not kidding.
Steven Sashen:
Wait. Cry, because?
Erin McGuire:
Well, not because so much their Pilates instructor told in full, but because they really felt aesthetically, it was such a powerful thing. Yeah, when I get those people who have been taught to really draw in, it is a tough sell, but one of the greatest things about this approach is, and what I was talking about how, when you just change the coordination, it changes how it feels, is that as soon as you get someone to feel inside themselves the difference and they just are like, “Oh, that’s so much different. It’s easier. I don’t have strain,” then you can get the buy-in. It’s one of the things that makes it a little tougher too, because just to hear about it and for me to tell you, “Yes, do it this way,” I’m sure you maybe experienced some of that with the shoes as well, like what? You’re supposed to run in these?
Steven Sashen:
It’s all about the experience. Our number one goal is just getting people to get them on their feet and feel the difference because until then, there’s just a lot of cognitive whatever going on. In fact, what it really is, this may be interesting or maybe not, because people believe things about footwear, because of what they’ve been told for 50 years the best thing we can do is give them an experience that undermines what they believe, because that puts them in a state of cognitive dissonance where they have to reconcile it one way or the other. Some people will go, “Wow! What I just experienced?” and actually this reminds me of something from the past, seems better than what I’ve been told and some other people just latch on even more firmly to the thing they were told, because it’s part of their identity in some way. I have an idea that many of the beliefs we hold that are not about anything we can physically test are held neurologically the same way we hold our very sense of self.
Which is why when you challenge something like that in someone, they act like you’re trying to kill them, their children, their grandchildren, and all their future descendants. It’s a weird phenomenon.
Erin McGuire:
It is. Because my career’s always been this different path, and again, I think you’ve probably experienced a lot of the same, it’s like, this is the part of it that’s the challenge. It is getting someone to just question it enough to go, “Okay. Yeah. I feel that.” There is something about breathing that’s so innate and that when you and people do seem to get disturbed when they realize that they’re doing it wrong, even beyond the feeling it. When you show them, “No, you should be able to breathe here,” and they’re like, they can’t do it, they can just keep doing this, it disturbs them a little bit, which is a good thing.
Steven Sashen:
Well, that’s a really interesting point. I’m just imagining someone who is discovering that they’ve just been breathing in one way and they can’t do it another way. Again, I can really see how that could mess with their very sense of who they are and a whole bunch of things about shame or about accomplishment. I can’t even imagine the list of things that might come up for someone.
Erin McGuire:
Yeah, and identity, like you were talking about too, but I’m an athlete. Or I’ve always been able to do things without having to work at them that hard. I do things naturally well, so yeah, that’s a good point.
Steven Sashen:
Well, to your point about this whole idea of people learning to suck it in and that’s the thing to do and the aesthetic of that, I wish I could remember where I saw this video, but in my YouTube feed where it’s recommending things, there’s a lot of stuff from people who like to debunk stuff about fitness not surprisingly.
I wish I could remember whose video it was, where Mark Wahlberg was with somebody else and was just showing just how he was really lean and just had a six pack and the whole thing. Then, for some reason, he said, “and if I relax,” and his belly went out and he looked like normal people.
Then hold it in again to show off and the guy went, “See? This is the thing about Hollywood, that when he’s not working, it looks normal.” He’s 10% body fat, you don’t see a six pack, you can tell that he’s lean, but he’s not doing this thing that looks like when he was doing Calvin Klein ads and everyone thinks you should look like him when he is doing the Calvin Klein ads, and it was-
Erin McGuire:
Right, which is actually dysfunctional.
Steven Sashen:
Right, right. It was such one of those moments where my hunch was that he didn’t even, it was like maybe he was a little tired, maybe he was doing it just not thinking, because it’s not the kind of thing you would want people to see given you are as a Mark Wahlberg. But it’s one of those things that every other human needs to see, so they stop thinking that they should use this idealized version as a goal.
Erin McGuire:
Right. Yeah. To me, actually, this is what we should look like.
Steven Sashen:
Wait, describe what you’re holding up for people who aren’t watching.
Erin McGuire:
It’s a round cylinder, right? If this is our trunk, we should just look evenly rounded and distributed all the way throughout. There shouldn’t be indentations and bones sticking out, that’s not good function. Now, it’s not attractive.
Steven Sashen:
Well, your cylinder may have different dimensions, but cylindrical nonetheless. It’s something, I get very cylindrical, I did it this weekend a couple times when I ate a pound and a half of grapes, because I just, they were really good. Well, I just couldn’t stop eating them and the next thing I knew I had … a pound and a half of grapes is a large volume and it was pretty comical, I had to loosen my belt after that.
Erin McGuire:
Well, as long as your cylinder is distributed evenly all the way around and not bulging in one direction.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, that was a bulgey cylinder. Actually, wait, we did something else, I think it was last weekend where, for some reason, it was like a bunch of parties and that was a bulging cylinder. But given that, I knew that that was a temporary thing. It was not a big deal, it was entertaining. It’s like, “Hey, look what just happened.” Is there anyone, any other groups of people, and I’m thinking of physical therapist when I say this to be candid, that you come up against where you’re really going uphill to get people to understand what you’re talking about?
Erin McGuire:
Yeah. At this point, I’ve seen a little bit of a shift in some of the queuing to pull the belly in like over the year since. I first created this in 2014, so it’s been a little bit of time, but I think it’s still a little bit dominant in the normal physical therapy. I did it again, the normal physical therapy world.
Steven Sashen:
It’s okay. I use air quotes way too many times during the day, so your secret is safe with me.
Erin McGuire:
Okay. The group that, and the DNS approach that I study, the dynamic neuromuscular stabilization approach, which is the one that is based on the developmental kinesiology, it is spreading. It is growing, and so people … that’s available to physical therapists, chiropractors, trainers, both movement professionals and healthcare practitioners. That is growing, and so those people who have taken those courses are now more aware of how important it is to even include breathing in the rehab and training and that it should be more of this eccentric expansion, this 360 degree expansion. In the realm of the physical therapy and chiropractor world, who hasn’t been exposed to that, I think it’s still a large percentage and that’s who I’m trying to now get out and target a little bit more.
Steven Sashen:
What are you finding is the most or least effective ways of getting, spreading the word and getting people to have the experience?
Erin McGuire:
Yeah. Again, I feel it is getting them to a course and trying to get them because, again, when you feel it on yourself too, it’s not just the client feeling it, but when you can feel inside yourself how most of them, when they come to the courses are not doing it correctly either. When they can feel the difference, it’s pretty powerful, and then you get them again in, so that they’ll want to come back for more and to continue to learn this approach.
Steven Sashen:
I wonder if you have an experience that I’ve seen, Dr. Irene Davis, who, pardon me, all of a sudden. Irene was at Harvard, now she’s in Florida, and she and two other research docs, Brian and, oh my gosh, I always forget the third guy’s name. Anyway, people who, the science of running medicine. It’s a course that’s done for physical therapists to get continuing education units. Irene does the most linear, logical, lucid, brilliant demonstration and explanation of here’s how modern footwear causes the problems they claim to cure and just getting people out of that is 80% of your work. Then there’s some gateway training to activate some muscles they haven’t been using et cetera. I said to Irene after one of these, “You got 150 people in a room, after your presentation, where you’re basically saying they should be wearing something like Xero shoes. In fact, she often does say exactly that for those people, they should come and tackle me and steal all my product.
But only half the room comes to check me out at all and only half of those people, typically the younger physical therapist, really get engaged. I said, “Why do you think that is?” We were playing with this idea, some of it is that these people, they believe they made rational choices to put the shoes they’re wearing on their feet and recommend them, and they’ve been telling their patients for years, “Here’s what I recommend,” and to go in and say, “No, I’m mistaken,” is too much for them to do. There’s probably … the simple thing is that you just typically can’t convince people with data. That’s just not how human beliefs change with information as we may have noticed in the last couple of years.
Now, but the thing with footwear, there’s so much more connected to that in those three things that I just described, where you might not have to run into all of those. Do you see similar kinds of response when you’re dealing with a group of physical therapists, where there’s some of them who are, for whatever reason, is like, “I just can’t go there”?
Erin McGuire:
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. My first nine years in my career before I was introduced to this other approach and the way I then took my practice, I taught all the Australian research was saying, pull the belly in.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting. Well, that’s because they’re on Australia and everything’s upside down.
Erin McGuire:
Exactly. That’s a good point. I was really good at it. I did it. Whatever I teach people is what I put into practice. Nine years of that, where I would write on people’s home exercise program, pull your belly in towards your spine. The first time that I went to Prague to start to listen to this man, Pavel Colage, who is the creator of DNS, and he started talking about this expanding out and pushing out, and I was like, “This is nonsense. Why did I come all this way?” I was just like, because I didn’t want to believe after nine years of teaching people something that I was wrong. But then, he kept talking and he was, “When you look at a baby, no one has taught this baby to do anything. No one has said for this baby to do anything. Their bellies are completely expanded. That’s how they get their strength,” and I was just like, “Huh!” It just made so much sense that you couldn’t deny it.
I get the impetus for when you’re at these courses for PTs, chiros do not want to believe that they’ve taught people incorrectly for so long. But I just said to my clients, I said, “You know what? I had to be open to this and I can feel the difference on myself,” and then the difference in how people progressed was just completely.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, that’s the significant difference. It’s like a half a joke that I make. It’s actually not a joke at all, but I try to do it in a somewhat comical way, is with the footwear brands who every X number of years, they have some magic new cushioning technology. They never say, “Hey, sorry about that crap we’ve been selling for the last five years.” It’s always, “Hey, it’s magic and new,” and the amazing part to me is it’s like the boy who cried wolf. It’s the shoe company that cried cushioning or our support. In the original story, the villagers stopped coming when the boy cries wolf. But amazingly, for the last 50 years, every time the shoe company boys cry new cushioning, we just run to the store. It’s incredible that people haven’t noticed some obvious thing. Running injuries have not gotten any better in the last 50 years, and you would think that if they had something that was actually better, that would show demonstrable improvement.
Erin McGuire:
Right. We should be seeing incremental improvements in, yeah.
Steven Sashen:
No, it doesn’t happen. It’s funny, I have a video script that I’m working on about this. I was actually talking to Irene just recently and she said she met some guys who were runners in the late 60s, early 70s, before padded elevated motion control running shoes. She said, “What did you guys do about running injuries?” They said, “What are you talking about? We weren’t getting injured. We had legs of steel.” People just don’t have enough history, enough memory to be able to compare. This is where that’s tricky in my universe, but enough about me, back to you for the win.
Erin McGuire:
No, no. It’s very much the same. We are both fighting the same battle.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Erin McGuire:
But to me, with Irene, with you, with me, each time we get, if I have 20 people at a course and I get seven of them into it, they’re now passing that onto their clients, that’s going to be how it has to build.
Steven Sashen:
I think that there’s a combination. I think of that grassroots groundswell component, which is really big and huge for us, but there’s also that top down thing and finding the people who have real influence for whatever reason, we had a really fun thing. I’m trying to think if I’m allowed to say this. Yeah, I guess I can. There was a picture in the Daily Sun, UK Paper, whatever it’s called, I’m blanking on it. Two weeks ago with Billy Eilish wearing our shoes.
Erin McGuire:
Really?
Steven Sashen:
That was great. We’re super excited. We’re still trying to get through to her. If someone like Billie came out and said, “Oh my God, you got to wear these,” other than having them on her feet, where people don’t know what they are, that would make a huge difference in the number of people who could have the experience, and then just like you said, they tell two friends, they tell two friends.
Erin McGuire:
Right.
Steven Sashen:
Then there’s the critical mass point, where there’s just enough visibility about the idea or the experience or the product where then the doubters have seen it around enough that they go, “Hell, let’s give it a shot.
Erin McGuire:
Maybe, right.
Steven Sashen:
Again, because the experience is so consistent and so sells it, that’s where ideas like what we’re talking about can really take off. If we’re lucky, we’ll see a change before we die.
Erin McGuire:
Right. Or at least some, right?
Steven Sashen:
Well, we’re already seeing some, and I say we, with both of us. People have asked me, they go, “What if one of the big shoe companies rips off what you’re doing?” I went, “Great! Then we won.” I’m not trying to beat them up, I’m trying to change the world, and that means everybody comes along for the ride in some way. Not everybody, but more people.
Erin McGuire:
No, absolutely. Like you said, someone like Billie Eilish, that’s a normal, right? That’s not someone who’s a crazy runner or a crazy physical therapist, it’s easier for people to relate to.
Steven Sashen:
I’m sorry. Wait, were you just implying that either or both of us were crazy? Is that what I heard?
Erin McGuire:
No. No. I’m not talking about us.
Steven Sashen:
Those other crazy runners.
Erin McGuire:
Yes, those, right.
Steven Sashen:
Okay. Just wanted to see if that was a little backhanded. Well, is there anything that we left out of this other than telling people how to find you and what you’re up to?
Erin McGuire:
There’s so much to do, but I think, if we can just get people to just open their minds to the possibilities and just to understand that these are like, you talk about the natural way we’re supposed to do things with the feet, this is when we watch a baby develop how we should be.
Steven Sashen:
You’ve stopped saying how you should be, because I made a face. I want to ask you a question about that, because it often comes up that someone will show pictures of baby’s feet and say, “This is what our feet are supposed to be like.” It’s like, “No.” Look at a baby’s head compared to its body. That’s not the way we’re supposed to be when we get older. Clearly, there are changes, morphological changes as we mature, as we go through puberty, et cetera. Is there anything similar to that on the breathing side that we need to be aware of?
Erin McGuire:
Yeah. When you don’t have … when you look at a baby, their chest is very short on the top and their ribs are lifted up and their bellies are long and that’s because their diaphragm hasn’t developed the postural function yet, the core strength function. As that develops, it starts to pull the rib cage down and into the shape that it is eventually how we want it to be in normal posture. Sometimes you’ll see someone with that short chest and that’s because they didn’t have a normal development. The muscle pull as we develop is what helps us shape our bones and that’s included in the foot. The arch isn’t fully formed for many years until, I think, seven, right?
Steven Sashen:
That’s actually … I love the developmental aspect of muscles moving bones. There’s movement aspect of muscles moving bones that people don’t think about a whole lot. Joe Rogan had one of my favorite lines ever about that. He described fighting as the act of using your muscles to throw your bones at people, which I thought was brilliant.
Erin McGuire:
Yeah. That is funny.
Steven Sashen:
I love that developmental component about what your muscles are doing to your bones. That’s super interesting. Cool. Well, on that note and yes, we could go on forever, but I’ve got to pee. We’re not going to do that. Tell people how they can find out more about you and what you’re up to.
Erin McGuire:
Yeah. You can see me on Instagram @core360belt and ErinMcGuirePT, I’m on there. The website is core360belt.com. Then also, I have a YouTube, Core 360 Belt channel, and that’s going to be, we’re going to be starting to roll out a little bit more, the educational videos there coming up. It’s a good one to tune into.
Steven Sashen:
Quite. For everyone else, please do tune in and let me know what you discover when you start experimenting with this. That’ll be really, really fun and yeah, we’ll have to find a time to rendezvous somewhere between where we are. This will be a blast.
Erin McGuire:
Yes, I would love to play around with that for sure.
Steven Sashen:
We can make that happen.
Erin McGuire:
Thank you.
Steven Sashen:
For everybody else … oh, no, no. Please, my pleasure, of course. For everyone else, thank you for being here and spread the word, feel free. Again, go to jointhemovementmovement.com to find the previous episodes, all the social channels, there’s links to all of that as well. Of course, if you have any questions or feedback or request for someone who you think would make a great guest on the show, including someone who might think that I have cranial rectal reorientation syndrome, AKA my head up my butt, I’m always up for a conversation even with people who disagree.
There’s a guy who I’ve been having this conversation with on YouTube, where I got to just share this. I was showing him all the research backing up everything that I was saying both pro-natural movement and against modern footwear, and he’s a footwear designer in Europe and he said, I’m paraphrasing. Basically, he accused me of being an American and trying to use science to prove a point.
Erin McGuire:
Oh my gosh.
Steven Sashen:
I thought it was too brilliant. I’ve invited him to be on the podcast, he just refuses, which I think is equally hysterical. I’m up for the conversation is the best thing I can say. You can drop me an email MOVE@jointhemovementmovement.com. But as always, most importantly, just go out and have fun an
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