Episode 14 – How to troubleshoot your own body - a podcast by Upright Health: Think Right, Move Right, Feel Right

Learn how to identify issues and possible solutions for your aches and pains, and then discover how to gauge progress. 

Partial Transcript: Hey, everybody! It's Matt Hsu from Upright Health. Welcome to Episode 14 - How to troubleshoot your own body. So, today, I want to help you learn how to identify issues and possible solutions for your own aches and pains and also, how you can figure out whether what you're doing is the right thing. You'll have to excuse my voice today; a cold is attempting to take root in my sinuses and I am doing everything I can to destroy it and excise it from my body. So, I do still want to share this information with you, however, so just bear with my voice. Now, to talk about this, I wanted to start with a real life example.

So this is a situation that I actually had personally. So I used to find it extremely, extremely uncomfortable to lie on my side whether I was on a hard surface or a soft surface. I had a couple of things that hurt actually: if I lay down on my right side, then my right shoulder and my right hip would hurt; if I lay on my left, it will just be my left hip. So, today, I wanna focus a lot on the hips since that is a big thing that a lot of people struggle with. So, lying on my side, if I was on the floor, I would feel like it's as if the bone was really, really sensitive.

So the bone that actually sticks out and hits the floor around the hip joint area is actually your greater trochanter. It's not where your actual hip joint. It's where your femur, the thigh bone, actually just sort of jets out a little bit. It's also where you get a lot of attachments for muscles, so the muscles that do influence your hip joint movements, there are many that actually attach to the greater trochanter. So, if I went and lay in bed, then I would have less of the sharp pain but still get a lot of this very hard to describe kind of achy, gnawing kind of, agitating sensation in my hips. So it wasn't like there was pinching happening.

It wasn’t like there was sharpness that a hard surface would give me, but there was definitely this internal sense, like, “Good Lord! I need to get out of this position.” And I would turn up, you know, face up and I would still have this odd, achy sensation. I didn’t know what to do about it. I tried to do some different things. We’re going to go through some of those options today, in discussions with clients and with people who've been trying to train their bodies to feel better. I've kind of narrowed it down to very simple three things that you can do to try to help yourself when something hurts. So, we can look at those three things and those three things are: stretch, smash or strengthen. So, “stretch,” I think everybody is familiar with. That's when you are trying to make a muscle used to stretching, in getting used to a different range of motion. You can “smash,” which is like form rolling. If it's a ball, you can have somebody give you a deep tissue massage. And you can “strengthen,” which is to attempt to make something stronger by training it, by making it do a certain motion with some resistance. So with my hips, what I ended up doing was trying to stretch the areas that were uncomfortable; so that includes the again, the outer area of my hips, so that's sort of like the proverbial “side butt”, it's the side of your thighs. So I tried some things that stretch there. I did some glut stretches. I tried to do some IT Band stretches. And those actually really did not feel good.

They did not help anything. And actually, they tended to make my hips feel less stable and more sensitive. So that did not work very well and that was easy for me to see. The stretching even immediately, didn’t seem to help. I tried smashing, so I’d use a ball. I used a Lacrosse ball or foam roller and that kind of helped a little bit....

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