Hello ladies and gents, Robert Sykes, Keto savage.com and today
I've got special guest Jen and Carden and they just recently
published a book yesterday actually at the time of this
recording called The Secret Language of the Body.
We dive deep into the nervous system and how to optimize
nervous system health to truly cope with any lingering
illnesses, autoimmune issues, stiffness, ailments, joint
discomfort, things of that nature.
I mean really just take the focus to the nervous system as
opposed to the mechanistic, you know, muscle or tendon or
ligament side of things. But more so actually going to
the core, to the brain, to the nervous system, to the vagus
nerves, things of that nature. So very interesting
conversation. I need to definitely do more,
you know, self healing work myself as far as like being
proactive with recovery and things of that nature, actually
relaxing breath work, stuff like that.
So this is very insightful. I've got no doubt that you will
take something from it so that further delay, sit back, relax,
do the conversation with Jen and Cardin
and we are live Jen and Cardin. How are y'all doing today?
Very well. Thank you.
For having. US.
Hey, glad to have you. I got to give you all Congrats
because at the time of this recording, it is the 10th of
July. Y'all's book publication date
was yesterday. So congratulations on that.
We'll just hit the guy running with the title of the book.
We'll just start right off the top here.
So the secret language of the body, how long has that been a
work in progress? So we started writing the book a
little over, I'd say a little over a year ago, and the book
actually wasn't in the process of being written until Harper
Collins reached out to us and asked us to write the book.
So that was really interesting and really cool.
A lot of our content was resonating, especially around
nervous system regulation, using and sharing accessible sizes,
vagus nerve exercises, and also just the whole nervous system
regulation accessibility kind of videos.
And they really resonated. And so, yeah, they asked us to
write a book. They gave us literally 100 days.
And, you know, I'm sure we'll talk more about it, but the
language of the body is a secret until you know and learn how to
speak it, and then everything becomes more clear.
Very nice. And I, I know just in the little
bit that we were talking prior to hitting record that you've
got experience as a professional dancer ballerina, correct?
Yes, I was a professional ballet dancer from a very young age.
I left home to go to an Academy abroad.
I'm from Africa, Italy, America, Germany, England mix but abroad
means I was in Germany and I was dancing 8 to 10 hours a day.
I would wake up at 5:00 AM, do Pilates, Feldenkreis,
Gyrotonics, or gyrokinesis, and then we'd go into a 2 hour
class. Then we'd go into the rest of
the day and then, you know, at night time we'd have
performances depending on the season.
And I was one of those people who was often injured.
I am hypermobile, but hypermobility doesn't
necessarily equal injury unless you understand more of how the
nervous system governs muscles and tendon and ligaments and
movement. And from a young age, Robert, I
had anxiety. And I think that a lot of the
anxiety patterns that were keeping my nervous system stuck
in a state of fight or flight was really showing up in my
movements. So some of my teachers were
very, very abusive verbally and emotionally.
And so, you know, my body couldn't be but tense all day.
And, but at the time, you know, I didn't make those connections.
I, I just got really interested in, in, in anatomy and movement
rehabilitation. Later on I went to study
physiotherapy. And for me, it was, you know,
maybe it was my technique, my hypermobility, But I don't know
how much you want to know, Robert.
But, you know, once you dip your toe into the lake of nervous
system regulation and the like, how it all works and how the
brain and body speak to each other, it really all becomes
very, very, very clear. That the root of a lot of my
chronic injuries, especially tendonitis, especially fatigue
around muscles causing ligaments to tear quite often in certain
times of my career. Yeah, how it's all connected to
the state of my nervous system. And once I learned that later
on, it was too late 'cause I had a big injury that unfortunately
made me shift, or unfortunately or fortunately, 'cause now I do
what I do but led me to shift careers.
And yeah, so here we are now with all of this knowledge and
yeah. Well, this is probably the first
time I've ever even heard the term hypermobile.
I'm assuming that's kind of like akin to just extreme
flexibility. Yeah, hypermobility.
There's actually a range of hypermobility.
I have what's called Euler's Danlos Syndrome, which is just a
different way that the collagen protein stacks in my body.
So a lot of people who can bend their fingers all the way over
or can do the splits, but have never really practiced the
splits. Essentially a an extreme
mobility around a joint, not necessarily flexibility of the
muscle, but mobility of the joint is, you know, what a
hypermobile individual has. And when you're a dancer, it can
be an advantage. But when your muscles are not
contracting and relaxing harmoniously, that can lead to
injury and tears and tendonitis and stress fractures and so on
and so forth. Yeah.
Robert, growing up, you and I would have called these people
double jointed. Gotcha OK that makes a lot more
sense. I feel like I I mean I could do
the splits and I've been able to do the splits without any
practice since I can remember, but that's like the only hyper
mobile spot on my body that I'm aware of because everything else
feels relatively stiff most of the time.
Yeah. You know that that can also be
just like if what Jen is definitely talking about the
hyper mobility, the EDS model of that hyper mobility is a is a
body wide phenomenon. But you know also just just
based on movements that we kind of do compulsively or over and
over again as children that can compromise or change some
structure and mobility around particular joint structures.
So it can be kind of imposed or it can be in, I guess, genetic.
Got you. What?
What about you? Do you have any background in in
dancing at that Gordon? I guess no, I, I, I've, I've,
I'd like to date dancers and I that kind of thing.
But no, I'm not myself. A background in dance.
My, my background, when I first got into this work, I'm a body
worker and I was a body worker and a functional movement
practitioner. And I myself was not a
professional athlete, but worked out CrossFit, had my share of
all sorts of injuries and always trying to find better ways to
recover and heal my body. And of course, as a body worker
whose job was to help people get out of pain because that's what
I really specialized in. I was always focused on
basically structure and quality of movement, right?
And so how can I get a body better aligned so that it's so
that it's the way it's quote supposed to be?
And how can I get it moving cleanly?
Because if it's moving cleanly, then it's not going to get
injured. And so you, you might be able to
relate to this and your listeners, you can be really,
really focused on that good movement, good structure, good
recovery. And you can still get injured
and you can still be in pain and you still have to release your
muscles into your stretches day after day after day.
And where, you know, where my practice started to evolve is
that everyone looks at these problems in the tissue, let's
say just tension or tightness and say, ah, that's just the way
I am. I, I'm tight or it's from, it's
from this like slight deviation and how I'm doing my squat that
my QL or that my iliotibial band is, is getting tight.
And then what are we going to do?
We're going to stretch or like shove massage balls into that
tissue. And although I still actually
really love doing a lot of that work.
And it's where I've come from, the organ that is dictating the
tension levels in your muscles, that is dictating the length of
them, the shortness of them, their willingness to go to a new
range of motion, how they respond after being, let's say,
exposed to workout or difficulty.
The only organ responsible for all of the way those muscles are
responding is your brain and nervous system.
So at if you're working on your tissue as it's as if it's just
some kind of like a mindless mechanical system that you have
to squish and stretch, you're missing like the heart of all of
it. Because what your muscles are
doing, how they're clamping down, whether they're too
elongated, whether they're having pain signals, whether
they're chronically coming back into a contracted state so that
you have to over and over and over and over again mechanically
release them. It's when you start
understanding the secret language of the body and working
from a nervous system centred approach that you can actually
fundamentally and lastingly retrain how that muscle and
tissue is responding to life. OK, on that notes, I just had an
epiphany and I might be totally a bark at the wrong tree here,
but let me know if there's any, any, any truth to this.
So most people as they age, they notice that everything seems
stiffer. They have decreased mobility,
takes them longer to kind of get warmed up throughout the day to
be able to move as they normally would.
And I, I've noticed that myself, like I'm 32 and I've noticed
that I'm not nearly as limber upon waking as I was 10 years
ago. I'm very active, I'm training
all the time. I'm I'm doing all the right
things, quote UN quote. But I've also noticed that as
I've gotten older, my stress and responsibilities in life have
also significantly increased. And that may be the primary
correlative or causative reason I'm having this stiffness.
If if what I'm hearing you say is, is what I'm kind of bleeding
from here, is that more so a result of just my my sympathetic
more so than parasympathetic state right now, which is the
overall stressors that I'm experienced rather than the lack
of mechanical mobility? You know, Robert, I, I, I love
that you, that you bring that up and you're, you're already
thinking from that nervous, nervous system centered place.
So, you know, before we, we started here, you were curious
about like, what, what the heck is nervous system regulation and
what's this all about? And so your brain and nervous
system basically has one mission and one mission only, which is
to keep you safe and not die. That's the if there were, if
there was a binary zeros and ones, a spectrum of the only
thing your Organism cares about is am I safe or unsafe?
Do I need to respond to this as a threat or not?
And whether it be your training regimen, your responsibilities
as a father, as a as a as a husband, your credit card bills,
having to take out the trash. Every single input that comes
into you from the outside or your own thoughts into your body
is passed through the single question of safe or unsafe,
dangerous or not dangerous. And then based on a hell of a
long time of evolution and adaptation.
All of those things, the body only has a very limited amount
of responses. You brought up parasympathetic
and sympathetic, but whether it be your credit, credit card bill
or your spouse being mad at you or not enough time to go to the
gym, the moment that stress hits, it is going to use some
blend of some kind of sympathetic act activation,
which in its most extreme is a fight flight response, right?
Or it's actually going to use more ancient.
Believe it or not, there are parasympathetic survival
responses that go down a different pathway called the
dorsal pathway, the Vegas. And those are going to look more
like shut down, disassociation, low energy, fatigue, depression.
When both are on at the same time.
When you've got the gas in the brake defensive patterns on at
the same time, parasympathetic and sympathetic, you go into
more of a freeze response or a functional freeze where you are
still moving through the world, but your body's almost kind of
stuck and everything takes effort.
So I just want to say again that at 32, the amount of inputs
coming into you from the outside in and from your mind down into
your body that your survival nervous system has to navigate
and deal with has increased exponentially, most likely from
your early 20s. And Jess, Jen and I find
consist. I'm 39, I'm more mobile and
comfortable in my body than I fucking ever have been because
of the quality of the state of my nervous system and how I work
with it. To not always be stuck in one of
these spectrums of a survival response.
That's what I want to get to, so enlighten me on that process.
Oh, I have no idea how to do it, Jen.
Maybe you could tell us? Enlighten you on the process of
survival. Yeah, I want to feel better now
than I did 10 years ago. Or or.
Maybe how? Yeah.
How to get at it. How do, how do we help Robert
feel? Feel 10 years, 10 years less
stressed? Yeah.
Nice that's going to be our next book feel ten years younger.
Yeah. So I I've been loving this
conversation so far. I love that we're hitting like
all the different aspects of the human body and brain and
everything movement. And so, you know, to get to a
place where you're dipping into a body and a brain and a mind
that is feeling in a state of thrival, a state of balance, a
state of, you know, increased capacity for stress.
Cause what I'm hearing, you know, you say Robert is, you
know, I'm 32 and there's more stuff on the table now, but it's
going to keep getting more and more and more because, you know,
we're going to keep piling up things and we're going to get
older and ultimately there's nothing we can do about that.
What we, we can do is increase our capacity for dealing with,
with it by building better patterns to move through stress.
So right now your nervous system, my nervous system card
and nervous system has a way to deal with stress.
For some of us, that's sending us into a state where when it's
a little bit too overwhelming, we dissociate and maybe we
decide that we're going to scroll on social media or, you
know, distract ourselves with maybe going to the gym for a
long time. Or, you know, these patterns
where we're not actually tuning into the body and checking in
and asking it like, wait, what do I need?
What emotion, what need here is unmet?
What is it that I need more of in order to feel that I can
handle this? And it's interesting 'cause our
nervous system is a energy saving system and it starts with
the brain. Our brain has so much, so many
tasks that it has to carry out in every moment of our life.
So the way in which our brain functions is to save patterns
from the past that have worked and help us, helped us survive,
and then replay them when a pattern that is similar or the
same shows up again. So if we learned that emotions
of or, you know, experiences of stress are too overwhelming for
us to cope with, then our nervous system may have shut us
down. And then we find ourselves at 32
with a lot of responsibilities and financial responsibilities.
And maybe, you know, our, we have our own business and all
those things. Our nervous system is like, OK,
you know what, Robert? This has worked for 32 years.
But now I think I need another strategy 'cause it's getting,
it's, it's getting too much. And the way in which, you know,
whether it's too much or not is your body sends you messages
like you might, you know, you might feel a little bit of brain
fog at times or your performance isn't up to par as it normally
is. Like, wait, I'm training, I'm
doing all these things. And why, why is my performance
plateauing or declining or gosh, I'm, I'm always getting this
headache in the morning or my motivation is low.
You know, there's all these messages that our body sends us
whispers. They begin with whispers and
when we ignore them and we don't know what these are and we we
just push it through. Later on, they become a scream
like, you know, like when someone throws their back out at
the gym. It's like your body is telling
you to either slow down or change something.
So going back to how to feel better and how to be in the best
body and brain, as we age, it's really about increasing our
awareness and tuning into the patterns that we're using.
So Robert, my question for you is, what do you think one of
your patterns is when you feel stressed?
How do you cope with stress? Oh I am 100% a bona fide
workaholic. Like I just don't sleep and work
more which is not good. Yeah, yeah.
And so, so just me asking you that and you sharing that when
you tune into your body for a moment, you know, just just play
that in your in your in your mind, in your mind's eye, like
I'm a workaholic. What that actually looks like,
like waking up early, non-stop, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom,
boom, nighttime sleep, wake up, repeat.
What feelings and sensations does that give to to your body?
If you tune in, does your heart start beating faster?
Do you start to get anxiety? Like, Oh my gosh, you know what,
As I'm thinking about this, there's so much stuff I have to
do and you can go right back into the cycle.
What happens as you TuneIn? I typically just go right back
into the cycle. Like I've had a few legit panic
attacks, not too many, but like I've always trained and eaten
well in the context of that hyper stressed moment.
So that allows me to kind of keep going forward.
If I didn't train or eat right, then I would totally just fall
over in a heap. But that is kind of like my
coping mechanism in those times of extreme stress.
But I, I, I know I need to just remove some of the stuff from my
plate, but I like doing things. I like doing too many things.
Oh, Jen, should we? Should We should.
We should. We blow, should we blow up his
spot for a second? I was never going to say just
want to just want to offer that like we have thousands of
clients who have burned out doing what they love.
Yeah, I totally get it, man. Like I see, I see the writing on
the wall from people. You know, 10 years older than
me. I am I crashed with multiple
chronic not this is not going to be you, Robert.
This is this is my story, not yours, but yeah, I was
definitely one of those people too.
I'm I'm I'm a a pusher as well. Yeah, You know, I just, I don't
want to hop in for a SEC because it's so good.
And Jen, Jen, forgive me because you know, I'm just, I'm just a
bull out of trying to shop sometimes.
But what I like to say, you know, Robert, there's a, there's
a lot of lifehackers and a lot of biohackers who have designed
their life around an endless amount of performance and doing.
And that's, you know, that's incredible.
But it's like for every new Lifehacker biohack that they
gain, instead of seizing back time, life, joy, pleasure,
presence being, they just pack more fucking doing into the same
8 to 10 hours. And whereas like they've
increased their productive productivity by 4X, but they've
seized back zero freedom. And besides that, Robert, the
other thing is I like to say we've had thousands of people
actually like most, like at least half of the people that
are our clients, burned out doing what they love.
If you think of your beautiful, capable body as a bridge, and
that bridge over a river is rated for, let's say 1000 cars
at any given moment, first of all, it doesn't care if it likes
the cars or dislikes the cars. It's just suitable to carry a
load of 1000 cars at any given time.
And then when it starts to have 2000 cars on it again, it
doesn't care if it likes the make and models of the vehicles
driving over it or hates them. It's begins to stress that
structure, stress that structure.
And it holds on more and more and more.
But then there begin to be cracks and cracks and cracks and
we hold on tighter and tighter and tighter.
And I think where where we come from is that no matter how much
a human being wants to ignore their Physiology, their
Physiology and their nervous system will make it very clear
in the end what it's capable of and what it does and doesn't
want to do. Yeah, no, that makes total
sense. And I feel like now I don't know
if y'all have kids or not, but like I've got a 2 year old and
having a 2 year old kind of brings light to that reality as
well. Because like, I love business, I
love entrepreneurship, I love bodybuilding, I love, you know,
networking, brain creation, all of those things.
But he doesn't know what any of that stuff is and he doesn't
care yet. So like when I sacrifice time
with him to do those things, I'm taking away time with him and I
care about that more than anything at the end of the day,
so. That.
Brings me. Yeah, that brings.
Me, I, I. Didn't make catch you out there,
Jane? Go ahead.
No, no, sorry. Go ahead, Go ahead.
Yeah. I was just saying that that that
brings me that kind of grounds me because at the end of the
day, like I, I'm not going to be on my deathbed wishing I had
made another business deal. I mean, maybe, but probably not.
But I could definitely see myself wishing I had spent more
time with my son when he was still living with me, you know,
So I, I can't that that is always kind of like the rock
that I have to question things with now, which I think is.
Good. I love that too.
Love it. We're both parents.
Yeah, Robert, I have a 2 year
old and actually today I spent a moment to, you know, just
acknowledge and be grateful for my husband on this journey of,
you know, writing the book and our business.
And you know, when Harper Collins DM Ed me, I was three
months postpartum and I was like what, where do I go from here?
Like how what happens next? And, you know, it, it all worked
out in the end. And we have this amazing book,
but it took a lot of support. And I think that in every
moment, I just love what you said so much because in every
moment that I have felt some form of urgency or some, you
know, like deep dysregulation in the moment when I switch off and
I go and be with my son and my husband.
Do you know like 99 .9999% of it melt away, melts away
completely. And I have a 2 year old as well.
And it's just just learning to be present and being with them
in those moments is so precious. And, and I hear you on that, you
know, on, on what you shared with wanting to be with your
with your child. And yeah, I think that there's
definitely a good balance to strike there.
And it's, it's interesting, 'cause like if, if it wasn't for
having him, like I would never be able to justify sitting on
the couch and doing nothing for 30 minutes like that, that would
never fly. But now that I have him, if I
just sit on the couch with him for 30 minutes and like read him
a book or, you know, do something, doing nothing but
doing something with him, like I could easily justify that as
time well spent. So it kind of like secondarily
forces me to actually take a minute, which is probably an
advantageous physiologically for me.
And if I'd say so that's that, that's, that's actually the
biggest flex, right? Like you are crushing it as a
human, a man, a father, a husband, an entrepreneur, when
you can actually have unpolluted time with your children or
anybody that you love. And what I mean by unpolluted
time is like, you also know what it's like, Robert, when you're
really with your son versus when you're with him but thinking
about work. Yeah, totally, totally.
And it's easy to do. Like if you're, I mean, as you
all seem to be on this conversation, like when you're
a, you know, type A very much go, go, go type of person.
Like there is no shutting down. Like there is no clocking out
for the day. Like it never stops.
Like I wake up thinking about things I've got to do.
I go to sleep thinking about things I have to do.
But being with your son, daughter, child like you, you,
you recognize that there's no use in thinking about the bills
you got to pay or the the books you got to reconcile in that
very moment. Love that.
Yeah, that's so true. So, so true.
I love where this this conversation is going even more,
Robert. I mean, connection and movement
and body and nervous system. So great.
Yeah. I am going to jump in and also
say, you know, Robert, we the the children are a really
amazing access point. But what you just said about
being a type A go, go, go, it doesn't stop.
So, you know, we, Jen and I are very similar or we're
recovering. We are recovering incessant, you
know, productive perfectionists. And what we find with people is
that although they, the, the people that do that end up they,
they often have a lot of energy that they want to distribute,
distribute. There's there's a question of
like, why can't we sit still? And the why, why can't we sit
still is largely because our nervous system is using an
endless amount of productivity as a coping strategy to help us
deal with dysregulation and the experiences inside our bodies
that we can't be with, that we haven't ever been able to be
with, that we've been sort of contorting and avoiding around
our whole lives. And that is something that we
support people in in that awareness step of really getting
to feel like, like for me, I the more question is like, why?
Why is it so difficult for me to just sit here doing nothing with
my child sometimes? Why is there this endless draw
to the other thing, the next thing and seeing sort of not
only how dysregulated that is, but we are most of what we're
teaching our children is non verbal.
Most of what we're teaching our children is in the our tone,
our, our, our, our posture, the movements of our body, just our
resonance and our vibration. And you know, my kid knows when
I'm when I'm actually present with them or not.
And so a big important part of I think that we try to bring to
people is that when you can get down into the language of your
body and you can actually be like, whoa, what happens if I
were to really question this pervasive behavior of endless
productivity and, and look at it and see like, what is it instead
of what is it trying to do? What is it trying to avoid?
There's there's a lot to be discovered.
Down there, No, I totally agree. So, So what are some like
actionable, you know, routines or practices that y'all
incorporate on a regular basis to make sure that you keep
things in the rails and you don't, you know, kind of resort
back to your never ending To Do List ways.
I'm going to, I'm going to pass it off to Jen in one SEC because
we kind of both have different elements.
But, but what we teach people is a framework first, right?
Because I, I love framework because there's something that
people can really adapt for their own needs and bring them
into their lives. But the framework we teach is
called the AIR approach, which is AI IR, which is awareness
interruption and redesign. So the techniques we teach is
that you know you cannot manage or change what you're not aware
of, what you're not clocking, right?
You can't the first step in recovery is acknowledging that
you have a problem, right. So awareness is the first step
of actually as Jen kind of guided you a little bit earlier.
Like if I just have you close your eyes for a moment, Robert
and everyone can who's on unless you're driving can do this.
You close your eyes for a moment and I just have you notice your
chest. Only your chest, which concludes
your breath and your heart. And I have you think about your
e-mail inbox. Did anything happen in your
chest when you thought about your inbox?
I mean, a little bit of stress, but I've, I've really committed
to getting that knocked out every single day.
So inbox zero has been my daily goal for quite some time now.
I've been successful with it. So my inbox isn't my main
stressor, but it it often times is.
So I totally get where you're going there.
Right. And but that's actually
interesting, right? So you've come up with a
behavior Inbox 0, which helps you eliminate the implicit
stress that comes up when you think about it.
Yeah, totally. Right.
So although I really applaud inbox Zero and sometimes I show
off, sometimes I'll get to inbox zero, right?
Like two or three times a year I'll screenshot it and put it on
my Instagram. Like, it's a fleeting thing,
right, 'cause Inbox zero is like a hamster wheel and and our
brother would be like whoa for someone to even notice that
their chest constricts a little bit, that their breaths, their
breath tightens and their heart rate increases just when they
think about their inbox. That's where we start.
Then in the interruption step, instead of taking on a behavior
immediately like inbox zero or crushing through the emails,
it's like, whoa, what happens if we actually use some vagus nerve
techniques, some breathing techniques to get the body out
of the stress response that was initiated by the stimulus and
bring and start teaching the body that it doesn't have to go
into a fight mode or a freeze mode or an immediate behavior to
solve what it's feeling. It can actually just feel safe
and OK. Now to regulate.
Now to down regulate in the moment.
That's the interruption step. And then from the interruption
step, we move on to redesign, which is how can I teach my
nervous system ongoingly to not respond to these everyday
stressors as if my life depended on it?
Yeah, so. That's the AIR framework.
But Jen, do you want to speak a bit to some of your routines,
your processes? Yeah, that was great.
What, what Cardin shared is, is the approach that's in our book
and it's a really complete work to helping you not just
overcome, but really rewire that pattern so that you're
automatically connecting and you know, and doing the new way.
Once you've practiced that the new the new pattern.
So, so basically, if you can check in with yourself a few
times a day and ask yourself, you know, am I meeting all of
my, am I meeting all my basic needs?
Have I had enough water today? Have I had too many coffees?
Do I need to slow down a little bit?
Do I actually just need to sit down for a moment and just take
a deep breath? So right now, Robert, I'm going
to ask you take the deepest breath you've taken all all day
and let me know how it feels once you've taken that big
exhale feels. Pretty good.
I should probably do that on a regular basis for sure.
Yeah. What did you notice about your
body, Your posture? Maybe your breath?
Every time I actually mindfully focus on breath work, I noticed
just much more clarity. Like one thing I've been
incorporating is after I train every day, I try and have a like
10 minute moment of meditation before I eat my first meal.
And I kind of incorporated that when I was in my prep and I was
super depleted and hungry all the time.
But just like allowing myself to, to center and relax has a
pretty, pretty monumental impact on just the stress, anxiety
levels, you know, acutely, but then also throughout the day.
So that that's been key for me. I love that they're also some
really good vagus nerve exercises.
I don't know if your audience is familiar with them, if you've
talked about them on your your podcast, but there are some
really great simple ones that can really help you sort of
discharge that pent up energy in the body that leads to anxiety
or leads to, you know, a coping mechanism or spiraling,
especially when you're triggered.
So one of these is just a vocalization.
So when you have a moment to yourself and you have space to
to breathe loudly and say things like vuh ah EE, the invitation
is to inhale through your nose in one exhale, say vuh ah EE,
and whilst you're saying it, tapping on your chest.
So inhaling vuh ah EE. And you're more than welcome to
try this as I'm explaining. But what happens is the vocal
cords, which are innervated by the vagus nerve, stimulate the
vagus nerve, stimulating that parasympathetic response in the
body, allowing your body to go from a state of sympathetic
activation or shut down, bringing about that ventral
vagal parasympathetic. Because although the shutdown
response is a parasympathetic response, what Cardin was saying
earlier, there's the dorsal and the ventral.
And when we use our voice, not just breath work, but actually
the voice, as we exhale, we're stimulating the ventral state
inner body, which allows us to not only feel calm, connected
and grounded and empowered and and centered, but also helps
release that pent up energy in our nervous system.
So those beautiful vocalizations, you know, we
recommend to do them a few times a day, especially if you're
feeling particularly stressed or activated.
And three minutes of vu ah E and tapping on your chest at the
same time is so, so powerful. Another one that is really easy
is just stomping. So literally standing up and
taking a minute to stomp your feet on the ground and then
shake your body is if you had water, you know, after shower
and you're like shaking your hands and your legs as if you
didn't have a towel. That shaking and the stomping
sends messages to the brain that stimulate the nervous system to
again release that pent up energy, bringing you in a state
of regulation. So there are many exercises that
you can do, many accessible free things that you can implement in
your day, as well as the very powerful holistic framework that
Cardin was talking about earlier.
I. Feel like a good sledgehammer on
a tire in the gym would would probably emulate that in some
form of fashion. I might have to throw that into
my mix as well. But now and Robert, when you do
it, I'm we're we're very serious about this, like to actually
allow the emotional messages from the body to hold the
hammer. Yeah.
Right, There's something about South exercise is just such a
phenomenal way to process and metabolize emotions, but we
actually have to be present and feel some of those.
But I would, I would, I would invite any of your listeners who
normally, let's say, have tend to have a lot of chronic tension
and will, you know, do foam rolling or lacrosse ball work or
whatever that here's the invitation instead of doing that
next time. Focus on the areas of your body
that tend to be tight. Just take my word for it.
When you're noticing the tightness, ask yourself, does
this area of my body does this piriformis muscle?
Does this quad? Does my tight shoulders?
Do they have a mood to them? Do they have an attitude?
If they were, if they were a Pixar character, what would they
look like? What's their facial expression?
And then let that attitude, that mood, that sense of emotion or
sensation in that part of your tissue, let that pick up the
hammer. Let that move you.
Let that do 10 to 15 minutes of a workout.
Don't let your mind get in the way.
Let the emotional experience in the body lead and the tension
will be gone when you're done. Yeah, 100% Think that like
resistance training in which you allow your body to just act in
its native emotional state is probably the most therapeutic
thing I've ever experienced. Like if I did not have the
ability to do that, I would be, I, I don't even know what I'd
be. I'd probably be like suicidal or
like a threat to society or something.
Oh. Hell, hell yeah.
Having that is is, yeah. So I, when I, when I was a, a
personal trainer and I would get clients, you know, all ages.
But there was this particular man who I remember he was Aceo
very high up in a, in a very, very famous television
production company in, in the world.
And he would walk in we, we, I had a session with him every
morning. And when he first came to me, he
was like, I, you know, I just, I just want to, I just want to put
on some muscle, OK? And he was in his 50s, late,
late 50s. And then I couldn't help but
notice whenever he walked into the gym, he was, he had slouched
shoulders. He just had this look about him
that, you know, it was like I, I had to pull him off the ground,
you know, through the exercises. My goal was always like, right,
let's lift him up, let's get his body to shift the state in his
brain. And whenever he would pick up
those heavier weights, whenever he would get his full body
moving, you know, I, I'm, I'm talking like dead lifts and just
the heavier weight moving through the whole body.
He would actually have a little bit of this response where he
would be a little bit angry for maybe like 20 minutes.
He would. I could see it.
He was furious, not necessarily at the he thought it was at the
exercise I was giving him, but it wasn't, I could tell it was
from it was his body. His muscles were like, wow,
there is a lot of anger in here. There is this emotion that is
coming out right now. And as we were moving through
the exercises and then coming down towards the end of the
session, a couple of times when especially when we were by
ourselves in, in, in a part of the gym where no one else could,
could see him because he was, you know, he's that type of man
that wouldn't want to be seen crying.
And he, he, he bawled his eyes out and he was so confused and
he didn't understand why. And you know, those moments when
he did it was this full body restoration.
It's like, you know, through movement.
And I know you know this, Robert, because of what you do
and how you use your body. Like there's so much unconscious
unraveling of the brain of emotions.
And you know, it's it's great when we have that awareness on
top of it to know what's actually happening.
But sometimes a lot of healing can happen just through our
body, through movement, through letting what Cardin was saying
earlier, our muscles, you know, really express that emotion that
is being repressed in our body and that hasn't had a chance to
come out. So yeah, I thought that was such
a powerful moment for for this man.
Yeah, I feel like a lot of people that I mean, we all, we
all have some stressors in life. We all have responsibilities, We
all have things that weigh heavily on us.
And for those that don't have an outlet, they don't train, they
don't have, you know, some, some medium to release that energy,
those are often times the ones that I see turning to some form
of dissociative behaviour like substance abuse.
And then it just becomes this downward spiral of pent up
energy that eventually, you know, breaks them.
So I think if you have that ability to release it in a
healthy manner, IE weight training or something similar,
you can just bypass or mitigate the need for that, you know,
addictive in a negative sense, dissociative behaviour.
I totally I, I totally agree. I I really do.
You know that we had a when I was in massage therapy school,
the kind of covert slogan was move or die.
Yeah. Right, just move or die.
And we are an Organism, one could say organized completely
around movement as like our primary means of being in the
world. And so yes, yes, yes to
movement. And I don't think these are your
listeners, but like, cardio ain't enough, right?
As Jen just expressed, as you expressed, those muscles need
something juicy and resistant and meaningful to interact
against. Yeah, 100%.
So when it comes to I mean, y'all have quite a bit of
experience in, you know, body therapy, V card and Dance Gin
and then all just the cumulative experience that you'll have when
it comes to people that are, you know, doing weight training,
that they are using resistance loads, they are working out.
Where else can they place emphasis?
I mean, what what, what is the most bang for their buck?
Is it getting routine deep tissue massage?
Is it going to a chiropractor? Is it doing, you know,
structured mobility work? What are some tangibles that are
low hanging fruit that are going to provide, you know, the the
most bang for the buck? So not my sorry, this is almost
sort of, I'm almost say not my sort of outside my scope of
practice, but I'm going to say it anyway.
So I'm always looking for is there something that I can
remove or not do for example, that will then as a result mean
that I don't have to add practices to compensate, right?
So. So what I'm getting at here is
when I do exercise with those loads, I tend to, you know, I
don't go to failure or quite to Max.
I don't go to failure. I don't go to Max performance
too often. I almost always leave enough in
the tank at the end of any session because I know that if I
take, if I go to the end of my tank, either in terms of my
strength or or my cardiovascular capacity, I've now just put a
really big recovery demand on my mind and my body, which either
needs. Which means I'm going to need
more rest, more nutrition, more body work, more something
because because I went past a limit.
If you look at animals in nature like I, I loved Kelly Starr.
It's book, I don't know if you've ever heard of it, called
Becoming a supple leopard. Are you aware of that one,
Robert? Yeah, so it's called becoming a
supple leopard. And when you think of the
mightiest predators in nature, they only go to their maximum
capacity when it's absolutely necessary either to hunt and
kill, to flee and survive, or to beat a competitor.
And the rest of the time they are moving, well, they are
resting. And so I like to think of myself
as that supple leopard. So for me, I just want to say
like the thing that I really want to offer is if your
training revolves around too much fatigue, whether it's in
again, your strength capacity, your power capacity or your
current vascular capacity, there are ways to design your
programming where you get a huge amount of benefit and forward
progress and growth and whatever, you know, kind of
metric you're trying to increase without always taking the body
to a place where it's in deficit.
And that's that's what I would say.
Yeah, that makes sense. I feel like they're like I, I
try and train with a really high degree of intensity, but I try
to exclude excessive, you know, quote UN quote junk volume
because I feel like that is often times what leads to, you
know, increased recovery times. So like I've structured my
training around like a five day full body split, but I'm only
training like I'm training everybody part once a day, five
days a week, but I'm only doing one exercise for that body part
as opposed to doing, you know, 6-7 exercises, 4 legs in one
session. And I feel like the increased
frequency is beneficial, but I'm having ample recovery time from
a given session that it's not overloading things, so that
makes sense. Yeah, yeah, totally.
I I love what you shared. Cardin and Robert, what do you
do for self-care to to feel good, to feel better, to feel
good? Like what really sort of refills
your tank other than spending time with your your child and
yeah. I'm pretty bad about self-care
honestly. That is definitely one of my
short stroll. I do like I'm actually getting a
deep tissue massage tomorrow. I do that like once a month, so
probably not frequently enough. I during the winter time I have
a like a stock tank that I do cold plunges and I love doing a
daily cold plunge. That's probably more from a
psychological standpoint than a physiological, but that that's
pretty much it. I don't really have any, you
know, structured self-care routines, per Southeast.
Yeah, and if you could like what?
Let's say you had the time and it was necessary and you had to
choose one thing. What would it be?
I would go outside in the morning and sit in the grass
barefoot, drink a cup of coffee and read a book unrelated to
anything to do with work or business or just like a pleasure
read basically. That's probably.
Oh man, how good is that? How good does that sound, Jen?
Yeah, Robert, you just made me smile ear to ear.
So, but for me, you know, how did your body, you know, I, it's
so funny, Robert, as you were saying that I, I didn't even
have to see your face or look at your body posture, but I can
tell that it something shifted you the tone of your voice.
You were talking slower. You were like on a different
sort of a different level. And what happens when we commit
to self-care? You know one thing a day or you
know, if you don't have anything ever, you can start with one
thing a week and see how you know how you can try and fit it
in. But committing to self-care
means committing to your nervous system.
It means giving your nervous system the chance to like slow
down and actually restore. You know, be the orchestra
director of all of the organisms in your body that it wants to
be, not just at night when you're sleeping, which is super
important, but also in these pockets in your day where you're
actually telling your brain now we can restore now.
We can relax now. And because, you know, for a lot
of us, it's hard to just relax by relaxing, right?
Because it's really hard nowadays, especially when you
have your own business and you have goals.
And you know, as Carden said was saying, when you're not
necessarily aware of why you're pushing so hard, it's hard to
just relax by relax. Yeah, no, I totally agree.
I think you've got in. Your day, Robert.
I Yeah. Oh, we were cutting out a little
bit there. What was that last thing you
were saying? No, no, I was, I was just, yeah,
if you could commit to the that one thing, you know, your
nervous system will really, really have the chance to find
some ease in your day. And that's really important for,
for everything for muscle growth and repair, you know, from that
to your heart, to your brain health, to your organ health, to
your hormone levels, cortisol, just everything in your body.
No, I totally, completely agree. I'm actually, I'm going to
Brazil for 10 days on Saturday and I'm going to bring a lots of
work to do there. But I'm going to actually bring
a pleasure book as well and try to carve out some time to
actually do something relaxing so I can hopefully use that trip
as a catalyst to just set the right routines in motion for
when I return. Yay.
Amazing. I think that's terrific.
That was such a nice thing. But yeah, I would I would agree
with Jen to the the way the entire body responds to actual
pleasure and rest and joy is probably better than any kind of
like other recovery technique we could suggest.
Yeah, no, that makes total sense 'cause I mean, I'll do these
things like I'll do stretch work and I'll, I'll, you know, use
the cross balls and I'll foam roll.
I'll do stuff like this sporadically whenever I feel the
need. And it's, it's always fleeting.
Like, yeah, I probably should be more consistent with doing it,
but I don't ever really feel, you know, significantly
different afterwards, if that makes sense.
And and one more thing, have you know, have you all ever met an
an animal other than a human that needs to stretch or use a
foam roller? That's a good point.
Right.
So I just just want to put it out there.
It's usually because it's the only animals that are actually
stressed out and have physical problems like humans are ones
that live with humans and especially dysregulated humans.
And you've seen it. Who here knows that anxious
person who has an anxious dog? Yeah, no, it's a good point.
It's a good point. I feel like we as a species have
we're we're so smart and so dumb at the same time.
Yes, Sir. That that is the truth.
Well, tell me. I want to be respectful of
y'all's time. We're almost an hour in here,
but tell me about so you got the book, but you've also got a
program course. Like talk to me about y'all's
umbrella of different activities.
Yeah, so we have. We had.
Cardin, did you want to go? Nope, Nope.
I'm happy to listen. We have a company called Somia
Robert, and it's this wonderful platform for healing.
You can find us on Instagram at Somia International and at Somia
we have a program called Heal and Heal is a nervous system
regulating program that gives you all the knowledge and tools
and healing that you need to recover from a chronic illness
like anxiety, depression, chronic fatigue syndrome,
fibromyalgia, autoimmune disorders, long COVID, chronic
Lyme, chronic headaches. So from a chronic actual
diagnosis to to chronic symptoms like gut sensitivities, you
know, not responding to supplements or being really
sensitive to certain foods all of a sudden not knowing why.
Also things skin things like acne or psoriasis flare ups and
all of these illnesses and symptoms are under this big
umbrella of nervous system dysregulation.
So rooted in that mind body connection being out of balance.
And we teach you everything you need to know in 10 modules, how
to heal yourself. And we've had over 2000 students
take the program and countless hundreds and hundreds of full
recoveries. And then we have our book, The
Secret Language of the Body, which just came out.
And it's already a number one best seller in the US, Canada,
UK, and it's being translated in a bunch of languages.
And we couldn't be more excited. And you can find Carden and I on
Instagram. I'm I am Jen Man, and Carden is
Carden Rabin. Awesome, awesome.
I probably should have asked this in the very beginning.
I'm kind of going backwards here, but how did y'all's two
paths cross? Like how did y'all get in
contact with each other? Oh, oh, this one's this is a
good one. So, you know, it's, it's made,
you know, we've, we've been talking this whole podcast a lot
about, you know, nervous system, but also about being type A,
being workers, being people that achieve all the time.
And something that I, that I also love to reflect on is how
many of the most special things in our lives kind of happened to
us, arrived, stumbled into US instead of us just like kind of
grasping or seizing, you know, like that's just those, those
synchronicity moments that propel us forward.
But it had nothing to do with kind of what we were doing.
And I find those moments to be magical.
And so back in 20 in the winter of 2021, Robert, do you remember
the, the, the app clubhouse that was around for a hot minute?
Yeah, yeah. Is it still around?
Who knows, right? Obviously, I mean, it may be,
but it doesn't exist in any meaningful way anymore.
But during that, during that time where it was sort of the
the IT thing, I was on there with a colleague of mine,
wonderful man named Charlie Merrill.
And we were hosting a, a room called Ask the Pain Guys where
we were discussing and helping people solve their chronic pain
issues from this nervous system and brain centred approach.
And I'm here in America and Jen is over in London and she
happens to log into the app and find her way into the room that
Charlie and I are having our chat with.
And she's like totally on board with everything we're talking
about. She has her own experience of
how nervous system centred work is, helped her recover from
being literally bed bound for a year and a half of the
constellation of chronic illnesses to having her life
back. And so we bump in, we bump into
each other absolutely randomly in this brief moment on
Clubhouse. And then we end up following up
with each other on Instagram in Adm just to continue to kind of
talk shop. And literally the rest is
history. Went from this random, never
should have happened in a million years encounter on an
app that barely exists anymore to becoming friends, partners,
colleagues, business owners and authors together.
Awesome Fate is pretty cool like that.
Totally unpredictable, but moves mountains.
Yes, I love it. I love it.
Well, I will most definitely link out to everything that you
threw out there. Make it easy for people to find.
Y'all. I'm going to be following along
as well. I'm super excited about the book
launch. Congrats again on that.
I published a book as well and it's no small feat.
So kudos to y'all for putting that together.
I hope it's a wild success for you.
Amazing. Thank you so much.
Thank you and congratulations on your book as well.
I'm I'm definitely going to check that out.
Appreciate it, appreciate it. Well, until next time, y'all
have a great one. There's everything I can do for
y'all. Definitely let me know.
Keep me in the loop and keep keep changing lines.
Keep keep being the supple leopards.
Heck yeah. And you keep being present with
that son. Will do 100% and y'all as well
take care.