Your Wellness Nerd

Become a member to see the extended cut of this week's video "The Hidden Cause of Shoulder Blade Pain"!

Would love to have you on board!

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- Grant

1 day ago | [YT] | 5

Your Wellness Nerd

In a perfect world, “moving the wrong way” is a myth.

Now this may sound incorrect in the real world-especially if you’ve ever moved a certain way and instantly felt pain or soreness.

But the reality is that the body is designed to move in an infinite number of ways. The only challenge is that our sedentary modern world may rob us of that luxury over time.

For example, bending over is a common way to injure your back. But, bending over and flexing your spine is not only normal, but crucial for optimal spinal health and function.

But if a large part of your day asks you to sit and potentially slouch through one specific section of your back, then the one time you bent the “wrong way” may have just been the last straw rather than the start of something brand-new.

Remember, our tissue is robust and not fragile. Yet it’s so common to hurt ourselves doing basic, innocuous things that we should be able to tolerate.

And if we can take that small step back and understand that when you’re not moving, you may be planting the seed for future vulnerability, that it may help you get that one step closer to remaining pain-free with optimal function into the future.

When was the last time you felt you moved the wrong way?

- Grant

2 days ago | [YT] | 32

Your Wellness Nerd

When pain and injuries are concerned, the most common action is to try and strengthen our way through it.

This idea suggests that a lot of our ache and pains and injuries happen as a result of a lack of strength, or tissue that isn’t robust enough to tolerate what we’re doing.

And while this can clearly be the case at times, clinically, I find that the missing root ingredient for most people is more often a lack of mobility somewhere rather than a lack of strength.

We can never be strong enough, so there’s rarely anything wrong with trying to improve your strength, especially in the face of pain and injury.

But if you’ve been down that rabbit hole for long enough and you don’t feel you’re getting the results you’re looking for - then taking a small step back and looking at where you may be missing basic ranges of motion may help you find those missing pieces you’ve been looking for.

Certainly explore the immediate area for tissue that feels tight and restricted. But have a look at the tissue above and below that area to see if anything is pulling slack from your affected spot.

Similarly, check out the mobility of the joints above and below. And while this may sound strange, also go looking at the spinal level that is directly or indirectly associated with the part of your body that has become sore.

By broadening your focus and considering more things, you may soon realise that strengthening certainly plays a valuable role in your quest for full health. But it may take eliminating those hidden restrictions to truly catapult you forward and help improve the way that your entire body is functioning again.

Has anyone else found this?

- Grant

1 week ago | [YT] | 40

Your Wellness Nerd

I'm excited to announce I am now launching channel memberships!

I am always working hard behind the scenes as a Physiotherapist in real life, and exploring channel memberships is a great way to help me invest more time into the Your Wellness Nerd channel and give those who are interested a little more access to me.

I ultimately want to be able to help more people than just those I can treat in person, so please consider becoming an official NERD if you're finding this channel helpful :)

youtube.com/channel/UC55cuFWiF1eABqiSyTjgzZw/join

See you on the other side!

- Grant

1 week ago | [YT] | 10

Your Wellness Nerd

… upper back dysfunction.


The chest muscles connect from the shoulder and anchor down onto the front of the ribcage.

This same ribcage at the front obviously connects to the spine at the back. And this upper back connection can often become stiff, tight, and overloaded based on the basic slouchy shapes and postures we tend to get into when doing stationary things - like sitting at a desk, watching tv, using a phone etc.

So if you find chest muscle stretches helpful, try pairing it up with mobilising your upper back with a foam roller or lacrosse ball to get to the root underlying cause of that tightness as well!

- Grant

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 34

Your Wellness Nerd

Hamstring pain and injury is still one of the most common issues athletes and everyday sportspeople face.


And despite so much time, effort, and research into the best hamstring strength and rehab options, we could be missing the bigger picture entirely.

For me clinically, all hamstring dysfunction should be considered back-related - until proven otherwise.

Mechanically our hamstrings are at the mercy of low back function. Whether it’s the sciatic nerve that supplies them/passes through them, their influence on pelvic positioning, or their ability to compensate for poor trunk strength and stability, their hamstrings are conceptually, mechanically, and anatomically linked to the spine.

So if you are dealing with persistent hamstring tears or just have tighter hamstrings than you’d like, consider working on your trunk mobility, trunk strength AND general postures and shapes - especially when sitting.

If you can, you may just give those hamstrings of yours permission to function normally once again.

How are those hammies feeling?

- Grant

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 34

Your Wellness Nerd

If you have neck pain that you just can’t shake, try freeing up your upper back.


This sounds obvious, but with pain it’s easy to lose focus on the bigger picture. Where your pain is - is exactly where it is, but why it’s there may have just as much to do with the tissue around it.

And in the case of neck pain, the neck is just an extension of the upper back, we just call them different things.

Restrictions through the muscles and joints of the upper back can fundamentally change how the neck is loaded - leaving it open and vulnerable to dysfunction.

So grab those lacrosse balls or tennis balls, lie down and see what you can find.

Because you might just find the missing piece you’ve been looking for!

How has your neck been going?

- Grant

#neckpain #soreneck

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 25

Your Wellness Nerd

This is true for so much of pain and injury rehab.


If you think you can get better and improve - you can.

If you don’t think you can improve from your current situation, there’s every chance you won’t.

Amazingly, the human body is like an obedient dog. If you knowingly (or unknowingly) ask it to adapt - it will.


The hardest part of any rehab program is to figure out exactly what your body is missing and why.

If you’ve been banging your head against the wall for a while now and aren’t progressing, there’s every chance you - or more importantly, your health professional is missing something.

And while it’s perfectly understandable to feel flat and defeated from a constant lack of progress it’s just so important to keep that internal hunger for results.

If you think you can, you may just be a small shift in perspective away from unlocking the progress you’ve been fighting for.

What roadblocks have you experienced in your recovery that you’ve yet to overcome??

- Grant

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 34

Your Wellness Nerd

If you’ve ever run before, you’ll very quickly understand how easy it is to associate pain, soreness, and injury with running.

But if you take a big enough step back, you may also very quickly realise that running is rarely the root cause of these issues and more so just the thing that you were doing at the time.

More specifically, runnjng is yet another activity that is very good at exposing hidden dysfunction we unknowingly take into running from our day-to-day lives.

For example, if you’re someone who runs for one hour every day - which may seem like a lot to some, but you’ve already been sitting at work for 7-8 hours that day or the day before, then we already have a potentially bigger culprit to explore.

Instead of blaming your running, it might be better for us to further analyse the sheer amount of time you’ve spent sitting, the types of heeled shoes worn the most throughout the day, the basic neck, shoulder and lower back positions that we leave our body in the most while completing daily tasks, etc.

All of this isn’t to say that running-related accidents don’t occur, but to solely blame the time, distance, and repetition of running as the cause of your lower back, hip, knee, or lower leg pain neglects two very important things :

1. Running is normal.

2. Becoming injured is not normal.

So if you, or someone that you know, is struggling to shake a running-related pain, please take that necessary step back to see if there’s anything throughout the rest of your life that may be asking other parts of your body to become stiff, tight, or restricted. If you can pick up what they are and address them, then it’s very reasonable to expect that running stops becoming the irritant it may have been for so long.

What running-related issue are you dealing with at the moment??

- Grant

#running #runningmotivation #runningcommunity #runninglife #runninginjury #runninginjuries #yourwellnessnerd #fyp #foryou #explore

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 33