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Fixing FORWARD
Everyone asks me, “What exercise is good for me?”
I know what they want to hear: squatting is good, or pilates is good, or “core” work is good. Everyone wants to know what is “good” or “right”.My most important message to everyone, which all DAG exercises are based upon, focuses on one simple idea – FORWARD. This is the main characteristic whether I think an exercise is good or not – does it make the muscles that pull you forward stronger?
Back squat? Too forward. Downward dog? Too forward. If an exercise pushes the torso forwards off the hips, it’s training our muscles to become forward. The problem with that? Everything else we do in life is also going to make us go forward.
Life happens out in front of us. We see everything out in front of us, nothing behind us. You can’t make a more black and white statement than the last one. Those with literal eyes in the back of their head should disregard this whole blog. 😂😂
Where we see is where we will grab objects, pick those objects up, put food in our mouths, text our friends, reach out to shake hands with someone, or pick up a crying child – all making the muscles of forward stronger and stronger.
We go to the gym to make us even more strong so we can stay young and capable, BUT we leave more forward.
So what is the big deal with forward? It’s a literal back breaker!
Let’s look at another story of forward: The Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy. A building should be built in a perpendicular line with gravity or it will collapse. Not “If”, but “When”.
The tower of Pisa will fall. It started tilting while being built in 1173 due to the ground shifting. The builders were either too lazy to start over or really liked a challenge. Not sure what the logic was behind the builder’s thinking, but they kept building their slanted structure by placing the blocks in a way that offset other blocks to face more vertically.
They built a tower trying to account for its slant which made the building more banana shaped rather than vertical! The angle that will cause the tower to collapse is 5.44 degrees of perpendicular with the ground. In 1990, the building should have toppled as another shift in the earth caused the angle of the tower to reach 5.50 degrees of perpendicular.
It took some science and engineering to figure out how to counterweight the tower, dig out some ground, let the tower fall the opposite way a little bit and save the building from toppling. It took a lot of effort, but hard work allowed the tower to settle at its current angle of 3.99 degrees and keep it from collapsing.
Guess what? Even at a 3.99 degree angle the building will still fall in 200 more years. If a structure is not perpendicular with gravity? Then, it is being stressed by gravity. The message?
Straight lines matters.
Why should the human body be any different when it comes to straight lines and being perpendicular with gravity? Why are we so opposed to straight? Why do we think our spines need curvature? I believe it is because that is all we are used to observing rather than imagining what the human body is capable of becoming.
With hard work, I know we have the ability to design ourselves to deal with life’s 5.50 angles! But, every angle in our human body is created by how we train our muscles. We are the architects and builders of our bodies. Do you know enough about your body, or do you follow experts telling you how to take care of yours?
Read this blog about why professionals can complicate things to the point that we are all left more confused about taking care of our bodies. I want to empower people to find “straight”. I want people to stop being in pain needlessly, return to the activities they enjoy, and attain the physique they always wanted. In order for that to happen, we have to rethink what muscles we are working out, and learn how to use muscles I bet you have never felt.
Look at this picture of me using the muscles it takes to create DAG Posture. Can you see the straight line form from my ear to my ankle bone? Look at the picture of the person with “good, balanced” posture. This picture came out of a medical book! A book used by professionals to learn what to look for when assessing you and I. Is the guy on the right straight? Or do we believe he is fine? What angle away from perpendicular with the ground is too much angle for a human being? When will your body topple just like the tower of Pisa? It isn’t a question of “If”, but “When”.
We are trying to build our bodies much like the builder’s of Pisa tried to build their tower. They kept improvising! They weren’t thinking straight enough. When the body improvises, I call it compensation. We are all masters of improvisation and compensation. But we have mastered nothing about building our bodies.
We don’t know what straight feels like. We all know posture is important and good for us. But, what is posture, then? Is it what you see in the picture above? Or do you need to reimagine your body in time and space?
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What is “DAG Method?”
Training is the fun stuff for DAG. You’ve gone through the process of dealing with pain and alleviating it as well as rehabbing your body to better understand how to train without pain and why pain occurs. Now it’s time to put it all together to get you back to playing, moving, and competing at your highest level. DAG training is completely unique — unlike any other technique on the planet. Our approach helps you build upon the rehab strength you’ve been working on and apply it to your game — even at the highest level of athletics.
DAG training principles and movement techniques will keep your body moving effortlessly and pain free for the rest of your career. Keep yourself balanced with DAG and we promise you will stay healthy and productive throughout your career. As you learn all three steps of DAG pain alleviation, rehabbing and performance, you will understand your potential to heal, prevent injury, and play at a level you thought was impossible — even for an accomplished athlete such as yourself. If you aspire to reach a higher level in your sport, DAG can help you get there.
DAG will change your life by changing your view of what is possible.
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The DAG Approach to Pain
PAIN ALLEVIATION
Injuries and pain can be devastating not just to an athlete, but to anyone experiencing restrictions in movement. And when we experience pain, the traditional approach to relief is visit a doctor. Too often and too quickly, however, doctors rush to prescribe rest, ice, compression and elevation (RICE), or pills. And that prescription can lead to immobility without fully understanding how to correct the underlying issue.
The DAG approach to pain relief puts you on the path we call “The Place Where No Pain Exists.” And we can help you get there immediately.
We believe that if nothing is STRUCTURALLY inhibiting your movement (broken bones or fractures) then there are many ways to alleviate pain AND begin rehab right away. Whether you sprained your ankle, twisted your knee, or have plantar fasciitis, DAG techniques help you better understand the source and cause of your pain and alleviate it on the spot. DAG proprietary techniques have been proven to help recover from injury and alleviate pain faster than any physical therapy or training methods known.
We have worked with professional athletes experiencing everything from sprains, back pain, knee injuries, hip pain and more. Imagine the response when your team doctor says your 2nd degree MCL sprain will take 4-6 weeks to heal. Now imagine healing in a week. A DAG assessment and blueprint allows you to begin working out immediately after your injury so you can get back in the game faster than you ever imagined. No other training or physical therapy methods are capable of achieving this level of recovery because traditional methods view the injuries through the wrong lens.
DAG views rehab and performance enhancement in a radical new way. We know which muscles need to be stretched, which ones don’t, where knots will form, where tightness develops, and how all of that affects the body and the mind when directing movement. We’ve extensively studied the traditional approach and, in many ways, take the exact opposite path — for faster recovery.
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The DAG Process
DAG uses a three-phase approach to get you back to performing pain free and at peak performance.
Pain Alleviation consists of a series of non-invasive techniques introduced during your very first meeting to immediately get at the root of your issues. This phase works to help you resolve the immediate pain at hand.
Rehab corrects the imbalances that prevent your body from performing as a stable functioning unit, while also training to keep your body from repeating the same habits that first took you down a path of pain, injury and dysfunction.
Training consists of the exercises outlined in your DAG blueprint that will help you reach your athletic potential and tap into new strengths and athleticism you never knew existed – even if you think you’ve reached the pinnacle of your performance and your career. Yes, even you LeBron and Tiger.
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The DAG Assessment
Every exercise and every movement you make provides a visual assessment and blueprint that helps us track your biomechanical pain to its source.
With every movement you make, professionals trained in DAG Method and Philosophy can gather insight to the strengths your body possesses. More importantly, it will be easy to see which muscles and movements are causing your body’s restrictions. We can determine what’s causing your injuries and preventing you from performing at peak performance by assessing your movements and muscle strengths in a way so simple, yet equally unique. Once your movements have been assessed, it will be a simple outline to which muscles you will need to develop and guide you down a personal path to pain-free performance.
Looking at movements through DAG’s eyes will allow you to see WHAT needs change and HOW to change it. Understanding where you should start is all determined by where you currently are in the Pain Cycle. Being bullet proof while still performing at the highest level has never had such a logical blueprint.
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The Story of Gravity
The impact of gravity isn’t obvious until we see how our bodies respond to weightlessness. In outer space, our joints expand allowing us to be two inches taller. On earth, gravity exerts over 3,000 pounds of downward force on our bodies every second of the day. Thankfully, our hips are designed to handle 6,000 pounds of pressure. However, through poor posture and bad habits, most people — especially athletes — leverage the strains of lifting and movement by using their backs, which are designed to handle a mere 400 pounds of pressure.
The skill to properly compensate for gravity during high-performance movement is what separates a good athlete from a great one. It’s also a good predictor of how often and to what degree an athlete suffers injuries — and, therefore, how long their careers might last. Unfortunately, due to improper guidance or training, the muscle structure of most athletes is not conditioned to properly handle gravity. This puts the back, knees, hips, ankles — and ultimately all joints in the spine, shoulders, and arms — in a less than ideal structural position. It then becomes not a question of “WILL” the athlete encounter injury or pain, but “WHEN?”
The proprietary DAG approach helps the athlete realign the most critical body parts and engage the proper muscle groups, forcing the hips to carry the burden of gravity, as nature intended. The knees, ankles, and back are relieved of unnecessary weight and unintended overload, allowing you to regain your natural and optimal range of motion and athletic abilities.
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Why Traditional Rehab Isn’t Working
Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results
NOT Albert EinsteinWhen it comes to the traditional approach to rehabilitation, nothing works because we keep doing the same thing. After three failed attempts at rehab and sitting out for two seasons, you might think even the wisest athlete would try a different approach to healing. But traditional methods hold strong in the current medical culture, even when we get the same inadequate results.
Sadly, traditional thinking can also lead us to accept pain as a natural part of getting older. We think our knees hurt because we’ve been hard on them. We get sore after workouts, often to the point of not being able to move, because we don’t know there is a better way. But to reach proper healing, it’s as much about believing in the possibility of healing and the competency of our practitioners as it is about the willingness and ability to do the necessary work to heal.
The DAG approach to healing is like no other method practiced in the world. Once you follow our proprietary approach and methods, you will better understand what is possible for your body to achieve and how broken the traditional medical approach is. After just one DAG session you’ll see the possibilities are endless — for your future, your body, your career, and the rest of your life if you are willing to walk away from the complex traditional theories, outdated procedures, and archaic science we call movement training.
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No Pain No Gain is Outdated
It’s time to retire the dangerous and outdated saying, “No pain. No gain.” Recurring pain is the body’s way of saying, “STOP! Or I will stop you myself.”
Which muscles you are training could be the problem. The way you move could be the problem. I believe it will be one of those two. I call them the “M&M’s of pain”. Muscles or movements cause almost all injuries. If there are only two culprits to most joint and muscle pain, then that’s good!
When your body feels pain, it is saying, “DON’T MOVE this joint/area of your body! It’s being damaged!” Pain is the most honest and accurate teacher you’ve ever met. It never lies, and it will tell you things you may not want to hear. It’s time to listen. If you don’t, your body will naturally enter a very logical pain cycle that forces the body to go through a progression of changes that can lead to chronic pain, repeated injury, and impeded performance.
It also will keep you from using the muscles you want, which will keep you from looking the way you want, feeling the way you want, and moving the way you want. UNDERSTAND pain. It can help you do more, but society is so against it that we only strive to get rid of it. Ice, Advil, rest, slowing down are all about pain avoidance instead of learning to build muscles and movements that turn off the body’s need to signal pain.
Have you accepted that having pain is a part of being an athlete? Has your performance been hindered because of pain? Do you feel that you just have bad body parts? That is not the case, and we’re not just telling you — we can show you why. The DAG proprietary philosophy, techniques, and training will not only help you gain a better understanding of your body and why you have pain, but they will also give you the tools and training to get rid of pain permanently.
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The DAG Cycle
You’ve read about the Predictable Cycles of Pain, today I want to introduce a completely new way to achieve optimal physical health and pain-free performance – the DAG Cycle. I built the concepts and techniques from my own experience, obsessive research, but, most importantly, studying the exceptions, not the norm. I found that medical studies were more often than not studying “broken” subjects. They weren’t really trying to answer the question of how to “fix” pain, they were only offering observations of things that may work for some, but not others.
I was the “others”.
It was a journey; an experience, instead of an education. And out of my pains, successes, observing other pains and successes, and ultimately throwing out every concept I had about training a “healthy” body, I started to see a completely opposite way of looking at the body, training its muscles, and teaching movements. If you can’t figure out your pains or reaching your success story or goals, isn’t it possible that you continue to work hard to change your body, but you need the opposite work to set you free? That’s what I found.Muscle become imbalanced because we don’t understand simple, life changing concepts. DAG Method recognizes that muscle imbalances are keeping you from using ALL of the muscles of your body due to the fact that most people assume they are working everything when, in fact, they are only working the muscles they are good at using. An example would be getting your core stronger, because the doctor or therapist says you need a stronger core, in order to relieve your back pain. They aren’t wrong! But, what if the exercises they are giving you can’t work the one muscle you need without working out all the other ones you don’t?
That’s what I realized was the problem. The Pain Cycle can’t be broken without being able to workout certain muscles while avoiding working out other muscles. That’s how the body works. The body uses one muscle and indirectly uses an opposite muscle. In order for me to fix myself, I needed to isolate the muscle being used. DAG Method was my solution. I realized it worked for EVERYONE, not just me! It was too good to be coincidence, and thus too important not to share.
It is so frustrating knowing you are going in circles. Wasted time relying upon a group of experts who might agree on the source of your pain, but disagree on the approach to fixing it is an exhausting and painful process. I didn’t have time for HOPING that anything will ever be normal or possible without a reliance on more doctors, Eastern medicine, a change in diet, medications, resting and waiting for results. I know if you reading this, you can share that emotion.
DAG Method delivers predictable results because it is the only technique that can predict which muscle in your body gets stronger, but, as important, which muscle does not!