Me: People think all they need to do is walk or get on a treadmill. If you are not strength training your body is going to fall apart.
Chip: As you know, when you look at the industry today, and we’ve had conversations about this, when people train, they mainly train in a linear pattern. We don't train in a lateral pattern. Training linear five days week generally is what they do. When you train straight and not left, right, and backward, that's what creates more imbalances, and you been in the gym long enough. The beach body workout does not work for the total function of the body. Some people only train what’s in the mirror and neglect muscles in the back. You have more as many muscles in the back than in the front.
Me: You sometimes train what you see. People don’t crawl anymore and that’s important.
Chip: Which you create massive imbalances especially for the lumbar spine. It’s not your stomach that keeps you up. The hips and low back really keep you up. Low back has serrated and quadratus lumborum muscles and the latissimus dorsi muscle that usually is overacted which makes us round out with a slumped look. It’s very noticeable in our youth. You used to never see it. Now you see it all the time. I was at a seminar six months ago and the PT was saying 75 or 80% of middle schoolers can’t sit flat against the wall with their legs straight out. They have so much anterior hip tightness and thoracic kyphosis or forwardness they can’t do it.
Me: I see a lot of clients that when they lay on the floor they can’t put their head flat on the floor. There is a space between the head and the floor. Sometimes a large space.
Chip: That’s kyphosis which is connected to an overactive latissimus dorsi muscle pulling you down. The latissimus dorsi muscle is compensating for a weakness in the serratus anterior and posterior serratus, and usually the rhomboid.
Me: I saw Coach Eric Cressey with gliders on the wall doing posterior work on the serratus. He works with pitchers. I do more now with clients on posture work.
Chip: I try to work on stuff I can’t see. otherwise, I’m going to end up like my patients. I forget where I read this: Coach Michael Boyle found when he was in Brazil, (he was doing missions work with a tribe) there was a gentleman squatting in a rice paddy. He asked how old he was. He’s 90 they said. Here he was in the rice, back straight. He looked like a toddler sitting there with his hands relaxed. Boyle says I don't know any 90-year-old American man that could do that position. That’s a quality of life.
Me: I learned to squat like that in Martial arts. We would squat down and sit there.
Chip: Boyle said that's the only place you see it is in mixed martial arts. If you want to know how to physically move, go hang out with little kids. Your goal should be to move like that two-year-old.
Me: They squat down and move so easy. We have just stopped doing that. People will say I can’t get on the floor and back up. We need to learn to crawl on the floor again.
Chip: You lose that muscle control. My field, your field, anyone who deals with health finds that the lack of movement is a big problem. Our workforce has become sedentary. That's probably the number one problem in the grand scheme of things.
Chip: I grew up in the era of the Adam Walsh “Most Wanted” show. Because the parents saw the kidnapping cases, you weren’t allowed outside. It did the beautiful job of making parents aware, but it also made them very scared.
Me: When we were younger, we got up every morning and went outside before and after school.
Chip: You burned calories and were out in the environment. You were getting vitamin D. Your body produces it, but it needs one thing, the sun, to help stimulate it.
ME: Now we use so much sunscreen for the ultraviolet UV protection. It’s good and it’s bad, so we don’t really get vitamin D from the sun.
Chip: So, it's good and that that's why you see vitamin D sales go up and depression go down. Also, you can see CoQ10 sales go up the because their cholesterol levels are going up. We not eating a variety of food. I'm guilty of it, too. At our house, we get sick and tired of salads or the same veggies. You start adding variety instead of the same things over and over again. You don't get that variety that we step back to start the reintroduction process over.
Me: I have my kids eating salads. Growing up my grandparent had a farm we ate everything.
Chip: Nutrition is fascinating. We are going back to the basics. This change will start to go back to the fifties diet where everything is back on the table and not packaged. You can’t live off of the protein bars though some think they can. We had a patient with CSIS. (CSID is sucrose intolerance they lack the enzyme sucrase needed for sucrose digestion. They develop GI symptoms after eating foods containing sucrose.) I've never heard of it. I didn’t know people could be sugar intolerant. Since she lived to be 40 years old, it shows how resilient the body is.
Me: The body will repair itself if you let it. You also have to give it the right fuel, nutrients, and supplements. My father opened his first gym when I was 12. He had a sign in his office that said: “If you want to lose weight don’t eat anything with white sugar or white flour in it.”
Chip: He was right thinking about how much-processed foods we eat the get more problems we have. Think about how many chemicals are in the food supply today. I don't want to know but, I do know if I eat good food, take my probiotics, and my fish oils, and I do some chelation stuff every once in a while, I’ll be fine. Make sure you have a good core of foods. If not, you better supplement the heck out of yourself. That can get very expensive to do.
Me: The problem with most people think that the seven-day detox will cleanse the body.
Chip: The body’s cells still replace themselves every 30 to 45 so if you are going to truly detox it better be for 30 or 45 days or your wasting your time. Otherwise, you just wasted your damn time and money. The biggest thing is we need to get back to the basics giving the nutrients and supplements the body needs for optimal health and longevity.
Me: Chip, I want to thank you for taking the time to sit down and giving us some great insight on what you do and what we need to do to stay healthy.