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April 25, 2020

Emmet Louis and Kit Laughlin discuss injuries and how to work with them

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Emmet Louis (he of SilverLeap Project fame) and Kit Laughlin discuss injuries—explicitly, injuries incurred while stretching.

Pretty much everyone who stretches regularly will have hurt themselves at some point – and when that time comes, what is the best strategy to pursue to get past this point? Many people do not, and that's where their progress stops.

Both Emmet and Kit have injured themselves a number of times. They discuss what led up to this—none of us want to hurt ourselves, but many of us do. What were we doing wrong? Why not learn what strategies they have pursued before you hurt yourself?

Read transcription

Emmet Louis:

A few of you may remember that I asked for questions regarding what you would like to hear in a bit of a talking format awhile ago on my Instagram. In terms of response, I overwhelmingly had people asking about injuries while stretching. How do they happen? Why do they happen? What do we do when they do happen? How do we recover? What's the short term? What's the medium term? What's the long term?



Emmet Louis:

I was going to do this myself, but fortunately I'm in Australia visiting my good friend Kit Laughlin who-



Kit Laughlin:

Brother by another mother.



Emmet Louis:

... has a wealth of knowledge on this exact situation, as well as myself, so we're just going to have a bit of a chat about this whole situation today, and hopefully you learn something from it. Kit, how's things?



Kit Laughlin:

Good. We should also I suppose at the outset say that both of us have injured ourselves multiple times, and no amount of theoretical understanding will ever trump that physical experience. Fortunately, we're both well-versed.



Emmet Louis:

Well-versed in messing ourselves up for your enjoyment.



Kit Laughlin:

In injury. We're well-versed in injury, and well-versed with how to manage those injuries because we're still doing the same thing that we've been doing for a long time, right?



Emmet Louis:

Yeah.



Kit Laughlin:

And we expect to be doing them for a long time more.



Emmet Louis:

If I was to ask you a question, Kit, what would you say is the main cause of injuries in the gym in stretching practice? Now, we're going to ignore catastrophic injuries.



Kit Laughlin:

Yes.



Emmet Louis:

Of course.



Kit Laughlin:

Yes. Let's ignore catastrophic injuries, and those catastrophic injuries we can sum up generally as the person who experiences the catastrophic injury is unable to control the impact, or the speed, of the movement being in.



Emmet Louis:

The deceleration.



Kit Laughlin:

Or is actually impacted by another mass, like a body.



Emmet Louis:

Yeah.



Kit Laughlin:

We'll ignore those completely and let's confine ourselves in this little chat to only stretching injuries.



Emmet Louis:

Yeah.



Kit Laughlin:

The number one cause of stretching injuries is your ego's running the show, not the body, and by that I mean you know ... Let's say you say, "I can do front splits. I've got perfect front splits. I'm just working on getting my hips perfectly square." You go into the session. You warm up in the normal way that you warm up, whatever that means. I personally don't believe in warming up as you know.



Emmet Louis:

Yep.



Kit Laughlin:

But let's say you warm up and you think, okay, now it's time for front splits, and while thinking about the idea of the front splits that you can do you ease into that position, or you drop yourself into that position. You're engaged in the doing of the thing that you're doing but you're actually interacting with your conceptual understanding of it, or the image in your mind of what your splits look like, or the idea; again, an image usually for most people, or it could be a word that I can do side splits or front splits.



Kit Laughlin:

I'm the person that can do that, and I demonstrate my flexibility all the time, but on this particular occasion instead of having your awareness on the sensations in the body as you actually get into the position, and to pull a muscle can take literally a split second. It can take a tenth of a second of too much tension, or I would say a tenth of a second where you're not able to relax quickly enough, same thing, for an injury to occur.



Kit Laughlin:

And whenever you ask someone, "You can do a pancake. You can do front splits, side splits, so how did you injure yourself?" "Well, you know, I felt a bit tight today, but I thought I'd just push through it. "Push through." Pushing through is where the mind's idea trumps, or dominates—and trump's a good word in these days, trumps the actual experience where the body is saying, no, no, not today. Not so far, or not so quickly, because sometimes as you know if you just slow the speed of the entry down a bit you can let everything go soft, and you can go into it.



Emmet Louis:

I definitely agree on that one. Just to explain it my own way is that my observation is it's generally the more advanced people, or people who have a longer practice-



Kit Laughlin:

Definitely.



Emmet Louis:

... than the beginners who end up getting injured in positions, because like Kit says you have ... I've seen this so many times, particularly with the area the aerialists that I train around, not so much the contortionists; they're massively flexible, but they would come in, they would do whatever prep or warm up they were doing that day, and then things weren't feeling tight, so instead of accepting that we are not living in a linear progression society and things are never going to be stable. Everything is always changing. You're going to be good some days, bad some other days, whatever it is, but they'll come in and they go, "I normally have a 30 centimeter over-split."



Emmet Louis:

They'll come in, and they're feeling really tight and they can't do their over-split, and their go-to in almost every case was that's when I'll get someone to start pushing on me. That's when I'll get someone to grab some sandbags and try to use some weight to push myself down, whereas in normal practice you should think things are not working today. I'm tired. I'm dehydrated. I've had a rough night, or a big training session.



Kit Laughlin:

Or whatever it is.



Emmet Louis:

Whatever it is.



Kit Laughlin:

The primary datum here is the body is telling you I'm not going into that position today.



Emmet Louis:

Yeah.



Kit Laughlin:

What do you do? You either accept that reality, or you try to push past it.



Emmet Louis:

Yeah.



Kit Laughlin:

Good luck with that.



Emmet Louis:

Exactly. Eventually, you will hit the wall, so I would say in most stretching injuries that's where I've encountered. It's very rare for beginners to get injured with me. I know it's been the exact same with you guys.



Kit Laughlin:

Yes.



Emmet Louis:

ANU and stretch therapy.



Kit Laughlin:

Yes.



Emmet Louis:

Now, when we say advanced just to clear up we're not talking contortionist–advanced. We're talking about people who have a good long training history and should be more aware even if they ... A lot of people I consider advanced, but they haven't got full splits, but I should be trusting them, but they're the ones who will get themselves into trouble.



Kit Laughlin:

If Olivia were part of our conversation she would tell you that the only people who hurt themselves at the ANU in the facility we ran there for I think 27 years, something like that, and in that time we had something like 24, 25,000 students overall. I had lots of teachers teaching for us as well. It was only students in the advanced class that hurt themselves, and not that it was common. I don't want to give the impression that people hurt themselves all the time.



Kit Laughlin:

Here's a classic story. I remember a friend of mine who was doing pancake on this particular day. Like Olivia, she's normally got legs apart, chest on the ground, and just in full position. That's her movement pattern. It's not a stretch for her in other words, but she bent down and she went into the pancake pretty quickly, and she told me after class she felt this little pop right up high in the groin. Just a little pop, so don't know if it's anything, and then for the next six months she could not move forward out of sitting upright with her legs apart. She couldn't move much more than this forward without that hurting quite intensely.



Kit Laughlin:

That's something else we can talk about is actually length of injury. So, about six months, but then another night at the advanced class she went into the pancake again, went into the same position expecting it to hurt, and it didn't hurt, and she went all the way down to the floor and felt that little pop again, and about a week later a little tiny bruise came out on this part of her thigh right up here on one of the high adductors about that big, so the size of a five cent piece. It was there and gone, and she perfect flexibility with no restrictions after that.



Kit Laughlin:

In saying this, I'm not saying that you need to tear things and repair them, but in fact by accidentally tearing herself, and then repairing that, but keeping on working on it that's the way to have a full repair. And in fact, I never spoke about my own hamstrings, but you might recall that I had a problem with this hamstring and that lasted for two years.



Emmet Louis:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).



Kit Laughlin:

And now, this is back to being my loosest leg, but for two years every time I tried to stretch the hamstring all I experienced was very unpleasant painful sensations. Basically, the body saying don't do it, but I didn't stop doing the things that we do, so work on the other leg, all the other little movement patterns and so on that we do, and what happens in time? By constantly trying it, constantly trying it, every week at least once a week I'd re-stretch to see what it felt like, and then I think what actually was the main way past that problem for me, and Olivia and I were both doing this at the same time was actually single leg Bulgarian deadlifts, so bent and straight leg, single leg Bulgarian deadlifts, only with body weight, or a very light kettle bell, two kilograms or something, but concentrating on the elongation phase and trying to retard the movement toward the floor.



Kit Laughlin:

And that puts the tension in the muscle, and that helps all the fibers, and the fascia in particular to straighten out, and then eventually, and this is the key thing, there was absolutely no difference on the day before when I was stretching my hamstrings, and it was incredibly painful, and just felt unpleasant and ugly, and the next day when in fact it was completely better, and it's been better ever since, and that was eight months ago. No transition.



Kit Laughlin:

No one understands that, but that is reality, and I'm sure you've heard this.



Emmet Louis:

Yeah. seen the exact same thing. I've experienced myself. I've seen it with other people. It's an interesting thing. Let's just go into the acute phase first.



Kit Laughlin:

Yeah.



Emmet Louis:

Say someone comes to, "Kit, I've tweaked my hamstring. I've tweaked an adductor from stretching because I wasn't paying attention."



Kit Laughlin:

Whatever.



Emmet Louis:

No, whatever the reason. "It's catastrophic. I slipped into splits while cleaning the kitchen."



Kit Laughlin:

I slipped into splits once on the back steps of our place that we used to live in. It was an icy morning, and I didn't see the ice on the steps, so I'm literally holding coffee, Olivia heard this scream, this scream. I was staying in the Japanese teahouse that night and she just heard this scream. It was the day I was heading off to a retreat in New Mexico. I had a long plane flight in front of me. But yeah, it is possible to accidentally fall into splits!



Emmet Louis:

These things do happen, so we can ignore that, but someone comes and says, "I've pulled a groin. I've pulled a hamstring." By that, we generally mean a grade one muscle tear, or grade one tear, but just for your science nerds out there. What do we do the first six weeks?



Kit Laughlin:

The first thing is I don't recommend ice, and neither does traditional Chinese medicine. They recommend heat always, and in my own body personally the application of ice onto an injured part has always felt ... The best word I can come up with is wrong. It just doesn't feel right. I don't know if it's the same thing, but heat on the other hand almost always feels excellent. Sometimes even wrapping a bandage around a pulled hamstring high up next to the glute can feel absolutely fantastic, but keeping on moving.



Kit Laughlin:

I'm not talking about stretching now. You've hurt something, so that it's time to back off. You've ignored the first, second, third, and fourth warning sign, because you were paying attention to something else, so you've actually gone past that point and you've hurt yourself, so I would recommend heat. I'd also recommend if you know any skilful massage therapists I'd also recommend getting work done on the part of the muscle that's not injured, but still the same muscle group, and that could include acupuncture too if you know a skilled acupuncturist.



Kit Laughlin:

And in my own body the things that I've used, and I mentioned this before, and I'll mention it again in this context, and that is some kind of stretching which is about more retarding the elongation rather than trying to stretch if that makes sense.



Emmet Louis:

Basically, it was called eccentric training.



Kit Laughlin:

Eccentric and dynamic, so moving into a stretch momentarily, and moving back out immediately. In our system we call that pulsing, and you call it something else.



Emmet Louis:

I call it pulsing or ballistic. I haven't really got a name.



Kit Laughlin:

Look, it's a continuum, isn't it?



Emmet Louis:

Yeah. It's also people associate pulsing with high speed.



Kit Laughlin:

We'll explore that another time. That's a whole interesting area all by itself, but that's what I have found to be the most compatible in my own body. That feels the least threatening. It feels the most controllable, and because I have absolutely no desire to end my life in a wheelchair—I want to be mobile and do all the things that I can do. Plus, of course, we teach these things, how to do that extra little push there.



Kit Laughlin:

Every week, to 10 days, in the case of a grade one, grade two injury every week to two weeks I'd go back to the exact same movement and expose myself to it to see what the actual reaction of the body is to it. If the body's reaction is frank fear don't try to do anything with it, and it's, as I said, it took two years for my hamstring to come good, and that's a long time. But then, the day when you give the body the same challenge for want of a better word, and it responds in a different way, then you know you're off and running. Two years is a very long time. Most hamstring injuries, and adductor injuries, the longest I've heard of apart from my own two year experience is somewhere between six months and a year.



Emmet Louis:

One thing that took me 10 years to get my flexibility back. We'll talk about that in a second.



Kit Laughlin:

It's very good to know that, but here's what I want to add though at that point. That did not stop you doing what you do for the whole of that 10 years, right?



Emmet Louis:

No.



Kit Laughlin:

That's another thing that we need to impress upon people. It is an absolutely pathetic response to say, "I've injured myself. This is no good for me. I'm not going to do it anymore," and then complain about how you can do X, Y, or Z. You can do that if you want to, but I absolutely guarantee you it will not change anything for the better.



Emmet Louis:

Yeah. My approach if someone comes to me with this stage of injury, just for people out there, Kit likes the eccentrics, which I've used from time to time. What I really like, and now, this is one of the ones that people do fuck up a lot, so just pay attention is I like isometrics just above the pain zone, so let's say my wrist is injured. I've pulled my forearm for example, and let's say the pain comes on here. I'll back out about 20 degrees, and then I'll just apply gentle pressure to the hand to make the muscle contract.



Emmet Louis:

Now, people always go too hard, too fast. And we'll hold those contractions for about 45 seconds. Now, I'm talking we don't want to max it out. 10% pressure is fine. 15%, 20%. You can work up slowly as an injury gets better, but you'll find doing these once a day, twice a day at most, just one set really does help speed up the pain.



Kit Laughlin:

Look, every time you say something, and it's really annoying to hear you say this, I realise that both Olivia and I do exactly the same things, but we just haven't codified it. We haven't said this is one of the techniques we'll pull out of the tool bag, but I was watching Olivia do something today and it's basically putting the body in a position. I'm making this up.



Emmet Louis:

Yeah.



Kit Laughlin:

And you're just exploring what that feels like, and stay there. Contract it a bit. That's what I'm doing now. You can't see it. I'm contracting this muscle back here, and very slowly go a bit further. What does it feel like? On a day when it's not going to go any further, it will say 'stop'. You've got to listen, and when it says stop, guess what?



Emmet Louis:

You stop.



Kit Laughlin:

You have to stop.



Emmet Louis:

Now, this is the thing.



Kit Laughlin:

Yes.



Emmet Louis:

The danger of using movement to help with stretching injuries, or any kind of mobility-based injuries, is it's a double-edged sword. It's great, but you have to go, okay, I was working on this progression here, but now I have to step back a progression, two progressions, regress it to a level that you can do it, achieve roughly the same iteration, or back peddling whatever position we're working on, but then we can work on it in a way that doesn't hurt. This is incredibly important, because what happens after our six weeks when all the tissue damage should be fixed I would think.



Kit Laughlin:

Theoretically, yep.



Emmet Louis:

Then why does the pain remain? This is one of these things.



Kit Laughlin:

It does, and the pain remains for a number of different reasons, but all the proprioceptors and mechanoreceptors information in the muscles, musculotendinous intersections and so on, they're all received in a part of the brain called the somatosensory cortex as you know. And the somatosensory cortex has a perfect map of all the things that you can do with your body, which is why we can close our eyes hopefully and touch our nose with our fingers, because we know exactly where that thing is.



Kit Laughlin:

Now, at a much more subtle level the body knows exactly its capacities in all things, and so this is why someone who's not a stretching person will watch someone go into the splits and their whole body will just recoil . "Oh, fuck, I can't do that." Without even trying it they'll know, they'll tell you, I know I can't do that. That certainty, that's clarity. It is clear, and it's probably accurate, and partly it's because there's a belief there that you can't do it.



Kit Laughlin:

Getting back to the actual injury that you're talking about your flexibility is nothing more than a constantly evolving map of what the mechanoreceptors and proprioceptors are telling the brain you can do, and so all the things that you can't do are part of that map. We like to say basically when you go outside the known world if I can put it that way, if you step outside the known world into the unknown world the body's primary, and this is hardwired in the system, and all living things are wired this way, if you poke an amoeba with a probe it will recoil from it, and so the fear response is about , protecting, and withdrawing from the thing that creates that response.



Kit Laughlin:

Pain and an injury is nothing more than that, just strengthened, and so unless you actually change the shape of the map, and the only way it will ... I should say the crucial thing you have to understand is this map is created only by mechanoreceptors and proprioceptors information, so you have to change the shape of the map and the experience of the map by actually doing the things which up until now have been horrifying, or terrifying, or whatever.



Kit Laughlin:

For an injury until you stress that part past the point that before caused that injury the brain will not trust that part, and you'll be working with someone and you'll be saying, "You're looking a little bit worried here," and the person will always say, "Yes, I'm worried about pulling that thing. I've had that injury there for a year," so I pulled that hamstring, or the adductors you injured for example. "I'm worried about those." And the worry increases the tension in the muscles and makes the injury more likely, so it's a vicious cycle.



Emmet Louis:

Yeah. is one of those things because we have the raw sensory information going from the muscle group or whatever to the brain, and then our pain in some ways is our interpretation of what is going on.



Kit Laughlin:

Absolutely, it is.



Emmet Louis:

And then, people get attached at a subconscious level to I bend forward, touch my toes, pain occurs, so then the expectation of this pain occurring makes the pain occur.



Kit Laughlin:

It's a negative feedback loop.



Emmet Louis:

Yeah.



Kit Laughlin:

And what we are hopeless at—and human beings are very self-protective by nature, and also we're intelligent, and we can reflect on things and project into the future, so it's not just a simple, single reflex at all. It's actually doing work on the experience, which then ramps up the fear response, or the pain response, and yet nothing's actually changed say that way, or any other way in the body. This is very real.



Kit Laughlin:

We say this to our students all the time. We must contrive over time to re-experience the original phenomenon that caused the injury with full awareness and for that not to actually have that effect, and then, and this is amazing, you cannot remember that pain again. Once that experience has passed you can't bring it back into your mind. You try to think of the injuries you've had, and you're thinking I can't actually bring that back.



Emmet Louis:

Yeah.



Kit Laughlin:

The thing is this, it's an unfolding thing constantly, and once you've actually gone past that point, that experience, that event into this territory where the stress is actually greater than what caused the original injury the whole system relaxes, and your experience is I used to have that hamstring injury and now I don't anymore.



Emmet Louis:

Yeah. I can say it's almost universal with these long persisting things. It is like a switch going off.



Kit Laughlin:

Yes.



Emmet Louis:

I've had the exact same thing, so... .Serge spoke about this online. I had both my adductors torn with grade two tears at the same time. I was doing a middle split on yoga blocks, and one of the coaches in circus skills just slammed me into the ground, or tried to. Now, knowing my hip structure at the time, or how it is now, I don't have a hip that is capable of an over middle split. I didn't know better. I was 19 at the time.



Kit Laughlin:

And you know what everyone watching out there? Full middle splits is just a beautiful thing all by itself.



Emmet Louis:

Yeah. That's all you need anyway. But I got slammed, and from this person putting contact on me, and weight. I didn't even know. I'd say if I'd known I could've handled it, or digested it better.



Kit Laughlin:

Yes, or you could've actually braced yourself being in that position and not being able to push you past that point.



Emmet Louis:

Whatever. We can go on with this, but that's what happened. I contracted in response to this and pop, pop.



Kit Laughlin:

Now, we should explain something here. It's actually the involuntary stretch reflex and the tension which causes the tear, not the actual force that the guy applied to you necessarily. The muscles actually tear themselves, and that's true for hamstrings. We were talking about that another time.



Emmet Louis:

Yeah .



Kit Laughlin:

We were talking about hamstrings. Yeah.



Emmet Louis:

What happened for me after this is I had the psysio and circus skills. Just to clarify, it's not the physio, James Wellington, who's there now, who's fantastic. I just don't want to end up putting him in the shit, but the physio they had at the time in Circus Space was-



Kit Laughlin:

Who will remain nameless.



Emmet Louis:

Who will remain nameless, yes.



Kit Laughlin:

A good hearted human being, who no doubt loved his mother.



Emmet Louis:

No. It was someone who had all the best intentions, but I'm bit over that. That's fine. But their advice was, "Oh, you've torn your thing. You must keep stretching it and re-tearing it." Now, I follow this being a bit stupid, not paying attention to what I was feeling in my body.



Kit Laughlin:

Just stop there for a second. more operating there than just what you're saying. It was actually an authority figure told you that, and it's a very human thing to do this, and particularly when you're in a hierarchical situation like that. It's absolutely normal when an authority figure, when someone who you trust in particular says, "Keep on doing this." At the very least, you suspend disbelief, even if you're own body is saying no, no, no, I say again no, Cyrano de Bergerac-style, even though it says that,



Kit Laughlin:

You're still inclined to go with that, and I can tell you from watching sumo wrestlers train in Japan a couple of big guys will get on those 10-year-old kids, and 12-year-old kids, and they will literally push them into side splits, and they do tear them again, and again, and again, and what they say is if you survive that training you will have perfect side splits all of your life, and that is true. You do.



Emmet Louis:

I'm sure you will, but how will you survive it.



Kit Laughlin:

The attrition is very high. The attrition rate is very high. And we believe, both of us believe, that it's completely unnecessary to do that. You can still have advanced flexibility without those tearing things.



Emmet Louis:

Definitely. The left side healed up. It took about a year. But the right side because I kept tearing it and re-experiencing this injury constantly got to the point where it just wouldn't, going legs apart, as I got more to know myself better even the thought of trying a pancake or a side split would kick off the involuntary fear response [Kit and Emmet talk over each other! ].



Kit Laughlin:

You ought to repeat that because that's gold. The thought of the movement was enough to kick off the fear response, and also those same muscles would be contracting too—



Emmet Louis:

Yeah. I can feel like that.



Kit Laughlin:

It's the whole recoiling response. No, no, no. Yes.



Emmet Louis:

This was I didn't know much as I do about functional neurology, but this is like it embedded the pattern of pain-



Kit Laughlin:

Very deeply.



Emmet Louis:

... in there to the point where the scar tissue was also very immense after these multiple, multiple tearings. I probably tore another 12 times that year trying to get past it. Just a bit stupid in hindsight, but we do these things. And then, because this pattern of pain and fear was built in so much it took a long time. Now, what it took was the novel stimulus of ballistic stretching, so it took the pulsing stretch.



Emmet Louis:

You remember when we were in the forum awhile ago we had the big conversation thing, but it took that of doing it on a different plane in a very similar, but not as extended motion as the side split that it gave me this novel sensation of moving in this area without pain.



Kit Laughlin:

That's the goal. The experience of moving in the direction or the region without pain. That changes the experience.



Emmet Louis:

That changed it. And then, it happened. Now, like that adductor lady the pain kicked off much worse in my scar tissue and I was like, "Okay, I need to give this a break," so I gave it a break for about a month or two, and then I came back and I was just testing my side splits, and then I was paying attention, or I wasn't really paying attention. I was like something's happening. So then, I was like, "Okay, what do I feel now?" I was like, "Hold on. The pain and fear is gone."



Kit Laughlin:

I don't actually feel what I expected to feel what I expected to feel.



Emmet Louis:

Yeah. I thought I was going to expect fear. Now, when I do my side splits it's at this fluctuation stage where it's flat and not flat anymore.



Kit Laughlin:

I was watching you do side splits a moment ago. That looked fantastic. Way better than when we met, which was only three years ago.



Emmet Louis:

That was at the tail end of the injury. No, that was about five years ago now.



Kit Laughlin:

That long?



Emmet Louis:

Yeah.



Kit Laughlin:

How time flies when you're having fun.



Emmet Louis:

I know. For me, it was providing a novel, a new movement I've never done before in a plane that was kind of similar that got my body going, hold on, it's not the side split, because if I said side split then it still would've kicked off, but I'd done something that was very side split like.



Kit Laughlin:

Yes. We did something else. Olivia and I, for different reasons, we were playing with something else. I got myself an Olympic barbell set again, as you do.



Emmet Louis:

Boys and their toys.



Kit Laughlin:

Boys and their toys. But I realised, or I remembered I should say, that my Romanian deadlifts were particular stronger compared to normal deadlifts. In the Romanian deadlift I've done five reps on 140 for example, which is a fairly heavy Romanian deadlift, but the mechanics for that movement are in my body and I remembered that, so part of the hamstring recovery process I went through, and this didn't hurt the hamstring at all, and in fact it contributed something like the same experience you were talking about.



Kit Laughlin:

Once I got up to I think in this recent cycle I got up to 100 kilo Romanian deadlifts, so not heavy-



Emmet Louis:

Not so heavy, but still good.



Kit Laughlin:

But they're still reasonable, and I was also still very aware that I was using that hamstring to do that, and it felt good, and all of these things, that, and not exceeding what it was telling me it was capable of doing over that two-year period those two things together is what created that situation where one day it just felt right, and it's felt excellent ever since.



Emmet Louis:

That's very interesting. I had another girl contact me. I refer people to this physio called David Mc Gettigan. He does voodoo as far as I'm concerned.



Kit Laughlin:

Voodoo. I like that.



Emmet Louis:

There was one girl who contacted me, and was just like, "I injured my hamstring." I don't remember exactly how she'd done it, but my pike was normally fantastic." I checked her Instagram, and it was a very, very good pike, like a high level, and was like, "I haven't been able to sit on the floor with my legs straight since this injury," and it'd been going on a year.



Emmet Louis:

I said, "Go to David. His whole thing is basically working with mechanoreceptors. That's his whole thing is that, providing novel stimulus and experience to them." He went in and he made the girl do so movements. He'd done some of his voodoo. Bam. The pike is instantly fixed.



Kit Laughlin:

Thanks for reminding me. Here's another example of a instant fix of a pike. Olivia. You know how Olivia's flexibility; it's excellent—



Emmet Louis:

Yeah. Yeah.



Kit Laughlin:

But when we were working, and I can't remember how long ago this was, probably I don't know, three years ago. That's probably wrong. Some time ago. She was sitting forward in a pike on the floor, and holding her feet, and her back was something like that, so I'd say rounded spine, and about 45 degrees from vertical, so nowhere near a pike, and so I said where do you feel that, and she said I feel that in my hamstring. I'm thinking to myself I know what this girl's hamstrings are like. They're fantastic, loose.



Kit Laughlin:

I don't know where I got the idea from, but I just had a bit of a feel around her back and I could feel that the fascia here over her middle back when I tried to move the skin and fascia with my hands it was stuck on the muscles. I thought, "That's a doozy. I wonder what would happen if I do this," so I did some friction massage along the line, the longitudinal line. I did some cross work, until, and I used both hands and pulled the skin apart, until I could move the skin in all directions on the muscles underneath, and she went slam straight down into a perfect pike, face on shins, back almost straights, and her experience was her hamstrings had let go.



Kit Laughlin:

Of course, the fascial body, the whole superficial fascia, it's all one thing, right? That's something else to consider, and it could be your voodoo guy has clicked into this. You might ask him next time you speak with him.



Emmet Louis:

He teaches a whole system of positional tendon ... PTD, or I can't remember the full acronym.



Kit Laughlin:

Don't they love acronyms?



Emmet Louis:

Yeah, it's some acronym. But I sent so many people to him, but it's this giving people something new for their body to digest to help them take the fear out.



Kit Laughlin:

Yeah. To experience the position without the fear changes the experience as I said—



Emmet Louis:

Or the expectation of pain. He's also very good at the pain science side of things of educating. If we educate people of the nature of their injury then the injury will seem less worse. If you tell someone, "You've torn your hamstring. You'll never walk again."



Kit Laughlin:

Well, you know I've done a lot of research in this area. I won't go into the details of it, but that process is called nocebo, which is Latin for "I hurt" and it's the opposite of placebo, which is Latin for "I please." Those effects are in no way subtle. They can be enormously powerful. When some authority figure shows you, let's say an MRI, which shows the tissue damage and says you'll never walk again because of X, Y, or Z then a fraction of the population will adopt what a medical anthropologist called Conrad called "the sick role", and they will never recover. That's it. Game over.



Emmet Louis:

It's very interesting.



Kit Laughlin:

It's very powerful.



Emmet Louis:

It almost strays into the line of hypnotherapy.



Kit Laughlin:

It does. It does.



Emmet Louis:

There's one thing, and I'm sure you've got a lot to say, but we are running out.



Kit Laughlin:

We'll do this again.



Emmet Louis:

Yeah, we'll do this again.



Kit Laughlin:

And we'll do it via Skype.



Emmet Louis:

This one, because it came up with me, is I know you're a Buddhist, and I'm sure other people do, is people get attached to the form, what is presented to them, of their injury. They're giving this form that you are the patient. You become attached to the role of the patient, and that becomes a lot of your suffering I suppose.



Kit Laughlin:

The process is this. It becomes your identity first. I am the one who has back pain, or whatever it is, and then the ego gets involved to protect, to protect that identity. It is so sneaky. It's so sneaky.



Emmet Louis:

Incredibly sneaky.



Kit Laughlin:

That's why we've got to watch what's actually happening in our own mind all the time if we're interested in growing because I would say 95% of the stuff your mind throws up at you is nonsense anyway, and if we're actually hooked into believing that what the mind is giving us is actually true our doom in assured to be honest. It really is.



Emmet Louis:

I'm going to stop you there because we are reaching the end of our talk.



Kit Laughlin:

We'll just ask the person who's observing please to put the center of the camera that shows the two of us to line. It is already? Thank you.



Emmet Louis:

First off, thank you Kit.



Kit Laughlin:

No, thank you. Thanks.



Emmet Louis:

Great. I hoped all of you guys learned something. I just need to plug this, so Kit and Olivia have just recorded what they call Absolute Beginner Stretching [now called the Starter Course]. I've seen a couple of samples of it, and when they say absolute beginner's they literally mean people who have never stretched before, and feel lost, and maybe go 'Ah'!.



Kit Laughlin:

All the people that you know who say, "I know I should stretch, but I don't know how to start," or "I know I should be doing more stretching. Where they got that idea from, who knows? It's probably some chiropractor or someone." Anyway, it's for people to begin at the very beginning with.



Emmet Louis:

It's one of those things. We teach the flashy stuff in some ways. We can split, some pancake, but there's a lot of people who are probably listening to this, even your parents if you're a bit younger, around my age, you're probably going, "I feel tight. I'd like to stretch more, and I don't know what to do."



Kit Laughlin:

Look, I'm ancient. I'm a pensioner now. I'm 65 I think, at least chronologically, but my body doesn't work that way. So yeah, we commend this to you, and we will definitely pick up a part two and a part three on this, because honestly we have only scratched the surface on this.



Emmet Louis:

Yeah. Cool. Anyway, thanks Kit so much.



Kit Laughlin:

It's a pleasure man.



Emmet Louis:

Thank you all for listening.



Kit Laughlin:

Thanks Olivia and thanks [Aleesa 00:32:54].


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