What Bowspring Has Given Me

Hey again, Firstly, our YOUR BACK HURTS month in REVIVAL just started and it isn’t too late to join. This challenge is full of the principles you need to even consider starting to push yourself enough to build muscle and bone with this work, so I look forward to seeing you there. repatternco.com/join From part one of this newsletter you know that you can build muscle and remineralize bone through creating tone of your muscles getting longer against each other. What a mouth full. You know that the concept of progressive overload is better applied to form cues than just increasing weight. But how do we actually do this without gaining weight or getting hurt? Learning to do Bowspring as your workout isn’t “I'm gonna do a little yoga” energy. This is “I'm going to lift a car off my child” energy or “I’m going to tone to the point of vibration or tears or shaking” energy. You can’t do Bowspring like it's a casual walk in the park and expect it to change your bones. Because like everything, it isn’t the thing, it is how you are doing it . This is 100% giving the responsibility and the knowledge back to you. It’s important for you to adjust your food intake accordingly throughout this process. It can feel overwhelming or stressful at first (it was to my husband and I, so we get it), but that’s why I want to simply explain to you how this works so you can unemotionally know what to do to get yourself to the other side of a body you actually love being in. If you were lifting weights for 60 minutes at the gym. You are able to eat a certain amount of calories that will be used by that 60 minutes of exercise, so you don’t have extra to store as fat. When you start doing Bowspring, you likely will only be able to do 20 minutes before you neurologically burn out. So, you have to eat less calories or else you’ll store fat. I wouldn’t eat less meat or less minerals but less other stuff. Working out fills more than one need in our life. It’s our postural health for sure, but it is also our mental health, our outside time, our community time and for me, the most potent spiritual time, too. So you have to make your unique transition cocktail of movement that feeds you all of these nutrients. Aka, find something to do that doesn’t hurt you too much, that gets you outside, and/ or with other people, and do that even though it isn’t in “perfect” form… yet. Other popular Bowspring personalities online think they can start you with “bow inspired” strength training with weights – this is a farce that has hurt many of you. I don’t mean to be too blunt, but this is a common experience I hear over and over again and is what caused many of you to subsequently flock to my work. So let’s just call a spade a spade. You have to first lay a foundation without any outside load to safely change that way you move yourself. If you’re changing the way you move with a weight in your hand, don’t be surprised when you get hurt. Your body cannot do those things at the same time. Maybe someday I'll be ready for weights again. Sometimes even now I play with picking up a rock and doing shortened ranges (partial reps) or isometrics with it, and it’s sooo hard to keep good form. I can’t teach you to workout with weights and have a clear conscience at this point. And really there’s no benefit that outweighs the risk. And It’s not like I shy away from the heavy things that need to be moved in real life — like groceries, yard waste or furniture. I use those as moments to see how much I can keep open and still be strong under load. But I never try and adapt this to doing it for reps in the gym because I know I will get sucked into focusing on completing the reps and lose the quality of form I’m desiring. I know not everyone will be down to stop weight training. So here’s the deal. There are things that I'm willing to compromise my form to do. Because I’m a human and there’s no way to do everything “perfect,” especially at first. I’ve decided that things like hiking, surfing, snowboarding and water skiing are times where I’m down to just play. I know that maybe my hip will ache or I won’t be perfectly loading my calf or holding my foot just so, but now, I'm not afraid of that anymore. I know the levers I can pull on to make myself feel better afterwards and I set aside some time to do that. If weight lifting is your fun, or your therapist, or your community, I don’t want to make you feel like that’s not worth it. Because it is. I’m not dull enough to believe that posture is the only thing that matters in life. But you have to know that you are going to have to work 10x as hard to repattern yourself open, because you’re regularly loading yourself closed and teaching your body to be closed more and more with each rep (not just doing unweighted activities to play). Simple as that. So, I’d love for y’all to let go of thinking you need "traditional strength training workouts,” unless you want the traditional shortened, achy body that comes with it. I deadlifted 155 pounds and squatted 135 pounds for reps regularly, and did not grow the bum I have now. Let that sink in. I hope this sets you free. Free to push yourself with progressive form overload, and with tone, and with control, instead of thinking the only lever you have to fortify your muscles and bones is a heavier weight. If you haven’t already, I’d highly recommend starting the FOUNDATION series in REVIVAL, then doing the YOUR BACK HURTS challenge so that when the BUILD MUSCLE WITHOUT WEIGHTS month drops, you’re ready to have the form to safely build. All my love, Dr. Lily

Hey you, I’ve been wanting to write about how I’ve grown to think about weight lifting and open posture for a few reasons: One, we’ve been brainwashed to believe that THE only way to remineralize bone and grow muscle is through heavy lifting, which simply isn’t true. Two, you guys, like me once upon a time (last year lol), are always asking me how to fit this work into your weight lifting program. Three, when you guys do the “bow inspired” weight lifting challenges done by others on social media, you get hurt and ask me about why & how to heal by the hundreds. Let me help. This became extraordinarily long, so this will be a two part newsletter and eventually an entire month’s theme in REVIVAL. Let’s start with the first point. There are a couple main levers you can pull if you’re looking to grow muscle and increase/protect your bone density. But first you have to understand that your bones are literally regrowing every moment depending on the load the muscles are putting on them. I’m talking like you can change not only the shape and density of your bones but also how your joints fit together with your muscles – it’s wild. We have usually only been taught about one lever, heavy loading. Which of course can build muscle, but also strengthens you into your compensations to accomplish the goal and won’t leave you with a supple, happy body unless you’re a gifted, freak of nature. The other levers for building your tissues are speed and self generated resistance. Speed is why jumping classically remineralizes bone - you’re putting high load into your tissues over a shorter period of time. Your body responds by making you stronger to take that load. The often forgotten lever is self generated load. Your body doesn’t actually care what number is on the bumbell, it responds to how much load it feels. This is where Bowspring shines. In this work, we are learning how to contract our muscles against each other (but long contraction, not making the muscles shorter which is why I like to call it toning because contraction makes us think shortness). This means that your bicep feels like you’re lifting something heavy and so does your tricep, at the same time. Said another way, you can put 100 pounds on your glutes (usually actually loading most of that onto quads or hip capsule because of our traditional alignment) or you can create 100 pounds of resistance with your hamstrings and glutes engaging against your quads and hip flexors. It’s like you are your own weights. But this isn’t an easy thing to feel, let alone teach. So like so much of traditional medicine, we’ve just made a blanket statement to everyone that lifting heavier is the only way to be healthy, losing the nuance of reality. I woke up this morning with the sorest triceps of my life. This isn’t because I've never tried loading them in the gym. This is because I never had the alignment of my bones to actually get the load on them. My other parts just compensated. We all know this experience – the person who lifts heavy but still has small legs, the woman with osteoporosis who lifts but still doesn’t get meaningfully denser bones or the many exercises tried to grow glutes that just won’t listen. It’s neither because the exercise chosen is inherently wrong, nor is it solely how heavy you do it that brings changes to the body, it is how you are doing it. And you can imagine why that complicates things. It needs to be said that if you don’t have enough minerals or protein, no amount of anything will grow muscle because you don’t have the building blocks for it. I say this because there’s many women who are casually restricting their intake of nutrients but see it as normal. You have to eat a lot of meat and minerals to thrive. To my second point above, this stuff can’t fit on top of your weight lifting plan. I know it’s sad. I fought against it for months (my husband fought it for years) and thought I could create a way to lift and still open myself. I truly loved to lift. But here’s the truth. Your body cannot and will not change the way you are moving and also be able to lift something heavy (even 5 pounds). As soon as you load yourself, your body goes back into the way that it knows it can accomplish the task, simple as that. What this doesn’t mean is that weight lifting is bad, or that you can’t do it forever. And your goals should change what you do. If you want a power lifter’s body where you have super big, super short muscles, and you’re willing to have joint pain – this advice doesn’t work for you! But if you want to be long and lean, more like how all nourished animals look, with amazing feeling joints long past 50 years old – I'm talking to you. Set the weight down and realize how insanely hard focusing on form over load is, and watch your body transform. I’ve named this focus on form ‘progressive form overload’. As many of you know, the traditional principle in strength training that we use to build ourselves up is called progressive overload. It’s simply where you have to continually increase the weight to continue to make changes. This is true. But not the only way. How I think about my workouts now is with progressive overload of form cues, not weight. Each time I workout, I push myself to a high (8-9, 0 being none, 10 being the hardest thing imaginable) "rate of perceived exertion” or RPE through more nuanced alignment and more tone on each side of my joint. This isn’t simple to write out or do at first, so if you’re curious i’d enroll in REVIVAL and start the foundation series (you won’t be able to even tone this hard for a while, you have to earn the alignment first). It is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life and it has caused me to look and feel truly better than I ever thought was possible. As I wrote this newsletter it hit me that this needs to be the next theme in REVIVAL. There is just so much to say so you understand what we’ve spent our entire professional careers figuring out. Respond to this email with your favorite name for this theme: Strength From Within Build Without Weights Bodyweight, Built Different Strong Without Heavy The No-Weights Strength Month & what questions you have about this theme. Keep your eyes peeled for part 2 next week where I get more into the nuance of how to shift your workouts, your diet and not get hurt in the process. All my love, Dr. Lily

Hey love, ​ I get asked a version of this question almost everyday: “Are your workouts good for a person with significant Diastasis Recti or should I focus on fixing that first?” asked a postpartum mama of three this week. This is what is so profound about this work. This is the healing. This work applies to every ailment. Yes, even degenerative disc disease, prolapse, scoliosis, the list goes on and on because all those diagnoses are simply telling us that the tension of our fascia in a specific area isn’t right. You aren’t broken, you just need better alignment (there are metabolic diagnoses that are exceptions here, of course). You, and every body that wants healing, needs to start with the natural foundations of alignment. Then you increase your capacity and those same healing movements turn into your workout. And yes, when you’re doing this correctly you can generate enough stimulus for muscle & bone growth (more on that next week). Let’s dig deeper into Diastasis Recti, which is when your ab muscles separate, specifically. Usually when someone goes about trying to heal their diastasis, they find a PT or class that instructs them their deep core is just too weak and that’s why the muscles are separated. You’ll heal through “specific” activation training, hypopressives, and finding your “deep core.” This is a myth and if you go down this road of tighter core = better, you’ll have to un-pattern it all to open your posture later because they are diametrically opposites. Blunt, but the truth. Firstly, all babies and all moms have diastasis in the postpartum period. It is a healthy, normal way for mom to make space to grow a baby (doesn’t have to happen as severely if your rib cage isn’t collapsed), and for a baby learning to have a body. There’s no amount of tightening that makes diastasis not happen. A tighter core actually has a harder time morphing shape to accommodate baby and then go back together. Add this to this list of reasons why I'll never cue you to tighten your core (if you haven’t, you want to read the 45 page long posture pdf I made on my website repatternco.com ). Almost all babies throughout history have healed their diastasis, not through a “deep core” program like women have been sold, but through tummy time, crawling and rolling around (NOT in carriers or bouncers most of the day, but that’s a topic for another time). Now, the reason this works for babies is because there is a natural alignment hardwired into them. They move with a taco foot, they stick their bums out, they breathe with their diaphragm and they never tighten their core. These principles are entrained out of us by the time we are doing the birthing. And we need to get them back. So that all the daily movements we do are healing our diastasis, just like babies. Here’s the deal, sometimes these deep core programs work for women. But this depends on what your definition of “work” is. For one, almost every case of diastasis heals with time, no matter what you’re doing (unless you’re tightening your core all the time, then sometimes it never will heal). Secondly, if the gap in your core closes but now you pee when you laugh, have regular low back pain or constipation, did it really “work?” My definition of work is instead of teaching you how to tighten your core more (which actually often pulls the diastasis wider because you are tightening the fabric that’s already being pulled apart), teaching you how to take up all the space you were made to. This looks like an expanded ribcage that looks confident and magnetic. Easy breathing that heals your pelvic floor. And the principles of tone that babies naturally do. So that you don’t pee yourself, ever. Your ribs aren’t flared but you didn’t have to contort yourself tighter to make that happen. And you feel like a literal spring inside your body. And this is never easy. Repatterning back to factory or “baby” settings doesn’t feel like an exercise, it feels like an expansion on every level of your being. And when the basics start getting easier, we increase the intensity until you get ripped muscles like all wild animals that never touch weights. So, when you think to yourself, “should I heal this issue before I do Dr. Lily’s programs?” Remind yourself that these programs are how you truly heal. The principles I teach help close diastasis, while healing your pelvic floor, while supporting scoliosis, while making you stronger. Because a body that works well is a body that looks and feels well. If you enroll in REVIVAL, you would start slowly building on the FOUNDATION series and skip the strength training (RETRAIN) sections for a while. If you enroll in REPATTERN, you’ll go step by step through your healing journey over the 8 modules. You can use this quiz to see which is the right fit for you ​ https://tally.so/r/LZ4pkv ​ ​ REVIVAL Short, guided movement practices you can come back to again and again. ​ → Explore REVIVAL ​ ​ REPATTERN My deeper, structured course for understanding your body, movement patterns, and the principles behind my work. ​ → Explore REPATTERN ​ ​ Work with me 1:1 For more individualized support based on your body and what you’re working through. ​ → Explore 1:1 ​ ​ All my love in your healing, Dr. Lily

Hey love, ​ Your gut– the literal way you metabolize the outside world to create yourself. It is our lifeline to the nutrients all around us. Like so many of you, I struggled with stomach aches, bloating, and digestive issues for most of my life (I’ve yet to meet a hypermobile, sensitive feeler that doesn’t). And while my gut isn’t perfect now (unlike my husband who can travel across the globe with great bowel movements the entire time – #goals), it is light years better than ever before. And honestly, it wasn’t changing my diet that made the biggest impact. Like Danielle told me as she started to do this work, I’m “in awe that so many years of bloating can simply have been something with my breathing/mechanics.” So let’s break this down. Clinicians are starting to realize that the digestive system isn’t just about the chemical abilities of our gut, but it is the tension surrounding our gut, too. This is why when they hit a block in helping someone with digestive issues, they refer them to a Pelvic Floor PT. It turns out the tension of where we empty ourselves matters a lot in our ability to empty ourselves – makes sense right? But this is one small part of the holistic story of our gut. Our entire fascial fabric web, and the nervous system housed in that web, matters when it comes to our gut health. Now, what I’m not saying is that this work will heal everybody’s gut issues. I’ve worked with people that have extreme gut issues that this helped a bit, but was nowhere near everything they needed. But what I am saying is that this work is non-invasive, pretty cheap and has helped thousands of women have a better feeling gut. And here’s why: Learning how to keep your pelvic floor open and long improves your ability to easily release bowel movements. What I teach about learning to live with an anterior pelvic tilt made from moving the top of the thigh bones back, worked much better for me than Pelvic Floor PT. This is because changing the way you hold yourself goes beyond trying to manually release your pelvic floor muscles (they just tighten again) or heal them in the traditional “neutral” pelvic position that keeps the pelvic floor short and everything tight. (I love you Pelvic Floor PTs and know my intention is to lift us all up and make us better at helping women. I like you, was trained into thinking neutral pelvises are helpful, turns out, they aren’t!). We don’t tighten the core back here. When you’re constantly sucking the core backwards to “protect your low back” or “get rid of your mom pooch” or “connect to your deep core” you are strangulating your gut. That sounds dramatic but once you feel it, you can’t unfeel it. Your gut gets its nutrients (blood and nerve supply) through a curtain-like structure coming off the front of your back. When you tighten your core it's like bunching up this curtain and wondering why the flow decreases. This leads to feeling like you can’t digest anything well or fast (slow digestion is a main reason for bloating because there’s more time for bacteria to accumulate and make gas). This is why you can restrict all types of food (trust me i’ve cut EVERYTHING out) and still have the same symptoms (so annoying!). This work gives you more stability and control of your body in general which signals to the nervous system that we are safe and can focus on things like digesting food and pooping, instead of fighting the threat that is constant joint instability or tight muscles. Your nervous system is inside your fascia which wraps around and in between every structure of your body. When the fascia has the right tension to it, the nervous system and body work better. As always, this isn’t personalized medical advice, as maybe you’re straight up allergic to some things, but a permission slip to consider loosening your grip on food restriction and focusing your attention on how you’re holding yourself and thus you feel inside your body. With that said, the two diet changes I’ve found extremely helpful for my gut are taking magnesium (at least 300 mg and increasing it until you have perfect poos) and eating something fermented everyday. This video is a good place to start if you’re new to this work, and the diaphragmatic breathing & ribcage expansion videos in the FOUNDATIONS section of REVIVAL is where to go if you’re refining this work. ​ All my love in gut healing, Dr. Lily