What If Your Pain Wasn’t About Weakness?
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 4 June 2015
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
You wake up one day with pain in your lower back. Happens to the best of us.
Popular wisdom says, “oh, you’ve got lower back pain, you need to strengthen your abs to support your back and it’ll go away.” Or you need to strengthen this or that or the other muscle, your problem is weakness.
A similar thing tends to happen across all parts of life. You've got a problem, it must be caused by some weakness somewhere. Easy fix, find the weak link, strengthen it and build around it.
Problem is, there's often something much deeper going on. A level of misalignment and dysfunction that's causing the pain. In your body, and yes, even in your life. And when you try to strengthen into that more fundamental dysfunction, very often you end up making the pain even worse. It actually deepens the dysfunction.
So, what do you do instead? That's what this week's short and sweet Good Life Project Riff is all about.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey there, this is Jonathan with another Good Life project, RIF. |
| 0:08.2 | The name of today is RIF, a line, then build. |
| 0:12.0 | It's 2007. |
| 0:14.5 | I'm devouring every fitness and therapeutic certification that I can find. |
| 0:19.4 | So I stumbled upon this thing called the Agoscue method, who's created by a guy named Pete |
| 0:24.7 | Agoscue. |
| 0:26.4 | His pain, says Pete, is the result of what he calls postural dysfunction. |
| 0:31.2 | There are eight major load bearing joints in the body. |
| 0:34.7 | Your ankles, knees, hips, and shoulders. |
| 0:37.9 | When those don't stack on top of each other properly, they load the muscles and connective |
| 0:42.1 | tissue in a way that they were never intended to be loaded. |
| 0:45.5 | And that puts stress on them. |
| 0:48.2 | Sometimes immediate and acute, but more often is this slow chronic build of that stress. |
| 0:54.8 | More time, things start to twist and torque and rise and rotate all in an attempt to keep |
| 1:01.4 | you upright and to keep your head looking forward. |
| 1:04.2 | Now that puts even more strain on muscles and connective tissue that have to work harder |
| 1:08.7 | and harder in ways never intended. |
| 1:11.1 | Eventually, this becomes pain. |
| 1:13.3 | Now here's where it gets interesting. |
| 1:15.8 | A lot of people will say, oh, you've got lower back pain, you need to strengthen your abs |
| 1:20.0 | to support your back and it'll go away. |
| 1:22.2 | Or you need to strengthen this or that or the other muscle. |
... |
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