if you have a tight or overactive hip flexor to understand why that is you really got to understand it from a neuroscience perspective from a brain perspective don't think about it from what is the muscle doing you have to understand the muscle's behavior as dictated by the brain so you have sensory input that goes into your brain through your vision through your auditory system through your brain's perception of its own movement or your body's movement and then from signals from the ground these are all vestibular signals that your brain uses to figure out where it is because your brain is blind it's just trying to figure out incoming sensory input so you have the incoming incoming sensory input you have the brain that processes that input and then you have the muscular output if you have an overactive psoas or an overactive hip flexor on one or both sides you have a faulty processing issue which is based off of faulty input the muscles don't tighten up by themselves they don't live in a vacuum so to understand how to inhibit or turn turn off or relax an overactive hip flexor or psoas you have to understand how the brain experiences movement and breathing at the end of this video there is a 20-minute interview that someone did with me where we talk about the impact of Rhythm on the human brain and the human body everything in the body everything in the universe really is governed by Rhythm and I talk about all of this in those in that 20 minute but what you've got to understand is the hip flexors and the psoas respond to Rhythm so the left AIC pattern as discussed in myokinematic restoration is a postural restoration course this left AIC pattern the muscles that you have to inhibit to get the pelvis out of the left AIC pattern to inhibit this position to get someone's pelvis neutral again you have to inhibit the left psoas and the left rectus femoris which are acting in concert with other muscles to hold the left side of the ilium forward which orients the sacrum and the lumbar spine to the right and puts us into this position of right dominance PRI calls it the left AIC right BC right TMCC pattern I'm just focusing on the position of the pelvis right now to get that process to change to get this pelvis back so it can turn to the left so you can get on your left leg appropriately you have to inhibit the left so s and the left rectus femoris and facilitate or activate the left hamstring to do it now this is the thing do you actually need a left hamstring to inhibit the overactivity of the left psoas and rectus femoris which are keeping this pelvis oriented to the right in fact well you do but not in the way you think of it and I'm going to show a typical PRI technique a little bit later that is all about using your hamstrings to pull the pelvis back into a neutral position but the point I'm getting across here I'm trying and I know it's going to be in left out and left field for a lot of people that inhibition of a muscle releasing a muscle releasing a muscle is allowing this is a definition to release allow something to move act or flow freely when you're in this left AIC pattern your body is not flowing freely it's not flowing remember that word flowing inhibit the word inhibit this is why it's a better word to inhibit means to discourage from True or spontaneous activity so if you are inhibited if your Mo if your hamstring is inhibited and your psoas and hip flexor are overactive they are inhibiting your ability to flow freely especially through the operation of inner psychological or external social constraints so your behavior is inhibited by people telling you to shut up to to go to school to learn this and not that to you know to be seen and not heard you're all being inhibited we're all being most of our issues are coming from childhood there's still no doubt in my mind physical pain is a manifestation of what's going on in the mind assuming that there's no injuries remember or illnesses just pain that you can't figure out where it's coming from that it didn't happen overnight it came from psychological processes that probably started way back in your childhood which create tension and more tension in your body the more you're going to go into this pattern because this is a pattern of tension but when you get tense you don't stay in the middle and you don't go to the left you go to the right because of that bigger right diaphragm and how our brain functions we are right dominant humans and this is what the PRI testing is showing all the time and the test that I show this adduction drop test which I've shown a million times on this website are on this YouTube channel that is a test to show that the left side of the pelvis gets stuck forward because the of the overactivity of the left so s and the left hip flexors but that is a neurological phenomenon it is not a physical issue in an in and of itself yes the body changes its position and gets shifted into this awkward posture but it's coming from the brain remember sensory input processing output the input the input does not have to be physical it could be simply mental stress and tension will change your breathing that will if you once you lose your diaphragms because your neck breathing well this pelvis is going to tip forward because the left psoas which is integrated into the diaphragm is going to become tense and it's going to put you in this position so you end up in this position for a multitude of reasons psychological respiratory and also inappropriate compensatory movement there are two stages to changing the behavior of a psoas in a hip flexor first you have to inhibit it or release it that is a neurological process and then you have to retrain it to do the right thing inhibitions let me just go through two different stretching forget about it stretching is dumb to your brain your brain doesn't learn anything from stretching remember to change a muscle's behavior of a hip flexor and a psoas you have to change its input you have to change how your brain is using it simply stretching the muscle won't change a thing what do humans do we walk and we breathe breathe and your hip flexors and your psoas are both directly tied into walking and breathing your psoas is inseparable from your diaphragm so you cannot and I've made videos about this and you can see a dissection when you pull on the psoas the diaphragm moves and we're talking about we're mostly talking about the left side right now but of course on the right side it's the same thing and the diaphragms are two different muscles they're not the same muscle so if you cannot breathe with your left diaphragm which someone in this left AIC pattern right BC pattern that postural restoration is always talking about if you don't know what posture restoration is this might be a little confusing to you it might seem kind of out there but this is how the brain the body exist you have a psoas that is directly tied into the diaphragm if the left diaphragm cannot act as a pumping muscle if you cannot diaphragmatically breathe with the left side the psoas cannot release it cannot let go because the diaphragm is directly influencing the use of that left psoas and the and the hip flexors overall so what we have is we have to inhibit that activity that overactivity of the left psoas and the hip flexors through breathing and movement which is what PRI is all about so to have any understanding of the neurological process that I'm going to show in these videos you have to understand the brain's experience of movement and this is a neuroscience book and I want you to go down to the third part motion is directly experienced by your brain motion is directly experienced from optic or tactile flow and don't worry about the corollary corollary discharge because it's not really necessary for this optic or tactile flow optic flow is your brain's perception of the environment moving past you as you flow through it tactile flow is your feet hitting the ground it's getting tactile flow which needs to be rhythmic people who are in a left AIC pattern which is essentially everyone that comes to see me for pain they are off beat they're they're tactile flow from their feet is not equal on both sides because their body weight is shifted over to the right if if their pelvis cannot turn to the left because they have overactivity of their hip flexors and their rectus femoris they cannot get their pelvis to turn to the left so they don't spend the same amount of time on the left foot as they do on the right foot they're spending a beat and a half on the right foot and a half a beat on the left now you could do a typical PRI technique to inhibit your overactive hip flexors by recruiting your hamstring so you could just put your feet up on the wall like you're going to see in this video I pick my butt up I'm going to squeeze the ball with my knees I'm sensing my heels my heels are pulling down I Breathe Into the nose out through the mouth pause for five seconds after exhalation get all the air out I'm feeling my hamstrings and my adductors that is putting my femurs my legs into internal rotation I'm sensing my heels and that interceptive sense of my own body and my heels pulling down heels allows my hip flexors to turn off you didn't need to stretch them or release well that was releasing the hip flexors because it taught your brain how to do the opposite thing than what it was doing but that's just changing the input I put myself in a position to change the input for my brain to process the position of my body and sensory input differently so I could feel my hamstrings once you do that the hip flexor shut off now you do you can do that it may or may not work because of a multitude of reasons that I've talked about on this YouTube channel for a lot of different reasons there's a whole upper body that you have to deal with so that is a typical PRI technique it's called a 90 90 hip lift but I'm going to show a faster way to inhibit hip flexors without doing a PRI technique that can be used to retrain after you inhibit that inhibits and probably retrains at the same time but I'm just going about inhibition because my focus right now is on changing a behavior of a muscle but to do that you have to inhibit the overactivity by giving your brain something a sense that it didn't have before and that's what you're going to see next so here's the hip flexor test she cannot adduct her left leg her left hip flexors her pelvis is forward on the left side her hip flexors are overactive that's why she cannot adduct I have her walk to music all right I sped it up she's a dancer and now she can add duct because of the Rhythm because she walked to the beat okay so she can adduct now what I'm going to show is I'm going to put her back into this pattern I'm going to re I'm going to turn on her hip flexors on the left side by spinning her to her dominant side which is the right side she messed it up completely but it was good enough and now she can no longer add ducts or hip flexors are on now I'm going to turn her to her non-domining side to her left and we'll see what happens that was a better spin and now she can add duct so that was a neurological process because we have a dominant right side and a non-dominant left side the more you do stuff on the right the more your brain pays attention to the right and that's going to bring that pelvis forward on the left because the brain is saying well you're always going to the right so let's keep those hip flexors on that's why dancing and rhythmic movement in general just walking to a beat where your heels can hit the ground with the beat that will never not work I'm telling I've done it with every I do it with everybody I can do it with everybody there's only two instances where it may not work the last one the first one is when you don't sense all your teeth particularly your left molars and that was my last video and I got a lot of comments a lot of people that some people were pretty nasty because they didn't understand a thing about it and they thought it was Hocus Pocus it's not the individual could not sense their left molars they could not sense lateralization of their body to the left because they didn't have a left heel left molars and left peripheral space all aligned which is what you need for your brain to understand remember your brain is blind it needs appropriate sensory inputs for your body to actually stay over the non-dominant side doesn't have to work too hard to stay on the right side it's going to do that pretty well but the last video that person could not inhibit their hip flexors same test because they couldn't sense their molars all I had to have him do was sense his molars and his hip flexor is turned off and then I did a session with him and by the end of the session his hip flexors stayed off he was no longer patterned there's one other instance where this may happen and it's a visual issue where someone will not this what I just showed will not work and it's because their vision is holding them in this pattern and this is what you're going to see now so with this individual when I have him look close he can adduct when he looks in the distance he can't add duck so his hip flexors turn on he has a visual Behavior where his left eye loves to pay attention to the distance but doesn't love to pay attention up close when that happens that puts us over on our right side and our hip flexors get overactive in the second half of the video it's all sped up in the second of the video I just put glasses on him that take off his left that take away his left distance because I make it blurry and he can add duck no problem so he has a visual issue he can see 2020 but his brain has adopted a visual issue probably through compensation because he is unstable in the front of his left hip and his lower back as a way to stabilize his body over on his right side because he can't trust his left side and we can't get past that so what I just showed with my friend the walk into the music not going to really work too well with him or it could but it won't last long once he comes to rest into a stop when he stops moving he'll go right those hip flexors will turn on again because you've taken away the brains those that optic flow relaxes the body tactile flow relaxes the body he can get tactile flow but his visual system overrides that every single time so he's going to need something probably a special prescription that gets his brain to stop paying attention to the distance on the left and to keep it more aware on the on to not focus in the distance but become more aware of his left periphery because teeth have to alternate right so it's called chewing right side left side right side left side your brain uses that information it's a rhythm right side left side we have to be able to that just like our feet have to go right side left side our body has to go right side left side but our visual system also has to alternate from distance to near distance near distance near and this happens as our head is rotating and our body's rotating as we walk very naturally periphery no periphery no periphery periphery the peripherals are still there but it's what your brain is paying attention to so this your visual system has to be rhythmic your masticatory system has to be rhythmic your body has to be rhythmic a pattern a left AIC pattern is simply a non-rhythmic pelvis it's a body that's stuck on the right side and that's what this interview is about keeping rhythm in your life one way or another to keep your body more relaxed to inhibit over inappropriate overactivity that's keeping you tense that does not mean you're stable I'm not saying you're stable I'm you still need to do a PRI program to restabilize everything but if you kept more rhythm in your life and more walking in nature and environments that you felt comfortable in you'd have a lot less tension and these patterns that pure eye is trying to address would resolve way more easily if you're still with me and you like this video please give it a like a comment or share it that'd be appreciated thanks yeah it's funny you went on the Journey of PRI thinking about Sometimes some pain you had in yourself oftentimes I do the same with with me yeah but um so I know I'm very right side dominant yeah and I think about the join the rest of humanity you're right because because we all are could this lead to overuse injuries so yeah I'm definitely leaning towards pain and some people may be right side dominant and never experience pain yeah in their whole life and then some might so I guess those that are experiencing pain or you know is it from right side dominance is it from not being able to stabilize on their left leg or right that's that's really what it's going to come down to for the most part so right side dominance is completely natural there's books written about this even if you're a lefty yes because you're the bigger right diet there's two primary reasons yeah that are easily explainable the bigger right diaphragm every time you take a breath there is more of a twerk where there's more of a pull from the bigger right diaphragm on the lumbar spine so if I took your lumbar spine and push it in One Direction or another the rest of your body will Orient that way that's nice they talk about what is it uh L2 no no L for l5s that areas and the sacrum is kind of the mid the middle of your body well that's where the diaphragms are kind of influencing so where that area goes the body's going to follow so that bigger right diaphragm has more of an influence in the lumbar spine and sacrum to the right that the left side can't compete with so that's that's a mechanical thing that's built into the way that we simply exist but the other part is and it's fascinating that both hemispheres of our brain pay attention it has nothing to do with visual Acuity what your brain pays attention to out in the visual World both hemispheres pay attention to the right side only the right hemisphere pays attention to the left side it's in the literature that's not a pure eye concept but we use it because we know people drop off their left peripherals we have to get them noticing the left side again right but I would say those are the two biggest and then the way that the hemispheres differ in their in their function there's a lot of overlap but there's also specialization particularly the left hemisphere for speech and how it how it sequences things how does it pay how it pays attention to sequences and then emotion and all these other things like when you read brain science atmosphere simply aren't the same right there's a lot of overlap right but there are some specializations for each hemisphere that will influence the way that we move and this right side abdominance and 90 of the world is right-handed the vast majority will kick with their right hand there's a reason for that so right side dominance is the norm it's not a problem until something happens that you become so right dominant that you're no longer really getting on your left side anywhere close to appropriating right and at that point you start to develop uh instability particularly through the left hip and at because you're never fully on it because your pelvis never fully goes to the left you'll put your weight on your left leg but until you can now this is where you could kind of talk about biomechanics right if you can't get that pelvis congruent with the femur right you're not really using your left side the way it needs to be used and over time as you play sports and you develop a lot of force to push forward but you on your left leg you never use that left leg properly you're going to start to overuse the compensatory muscles to help stabilize things those will be the hip flexors and lower back muscles on the left side and eventually the neck and that's where things become dicey because you're gonna the more you overuse those hip flexors and your lower back it holds you rigid um but not stable and there's a difference as we were talking about before and and that's where the so the more unstable that left hip becomes the more pain is likely going to occur so I often talk about like yin yang accessing the Spectrum it almost sounds like just having access to that left side it doesn't have to be equal yeah and it will never be equal but having access to it and being able to access it uh in some form of way um I think would be the key yeah with the appropriate muscles right and we know because you can you that's buying mechanics you can go there right what are the what are the muscles that have to be used appropriately right in left stance you need a left hamstring the whole the whole complex yeah the left adductor the left glute meat is particularly the anterior portion yeah and you're left uh abdominals your left internal obliques that's what's going to stabilize the pelvis on top of that femur as you swing the right leg forward yeah and that's what we lose ever since I took PRI I've always had it in the back of my head and still even when I'm doing dishes if I'm having a conversation if I and I I'm like wow I can shift onto my right and I can feel it I mean I'm also an athlete who's right side dominant yeah so I might even be more right side dominant than the average absolutely and so I think if you throw a lot with the right hand yeah that punch I do martial arts yes but um and then I go to shift to the left I'm like oh it gets me so frustrated because I can feel the big difference I'm not able like I really have to focus to get like an adductor on I have to focus to kind of like my foot is always kind of um you know I don't know if the camera could see this but I'm forgetting the term where you're supinated right correct supinated I'm always I feel like supinated on the left a bit where I'm not able to really kind of pronate enough to get the knee to line up over the ankle yeah and I'm kind of like pronating and abducting shifting back and I'm like oh it's in my head you're trying to get the sequence of events to occur right but something on the dominant side letting that occur okay it's not an issue of the left side not knowing how to work okay the issue it will work it will work without a problem right once the dominant side lets go fully it's never about the left side working harder it's about inhibition of the overactive of the overactive right side and then there's one area on the particularly on the left your left lower and middle back that has to be inhibited also and inhibition is really a neurological process of the brain learning to not use something inappropriately it's not about stretching you're right it's a neurological it has to resense how to be in a position appropriately but to do that sometimes something on the right side is just not letting go completely because the brain is still saying I don't trust it right that left hip a little too unstable right so I'm not going to risk it I'm just going to stay over on this right side right which is it'll work but it doesn't work optimally right it's still keeping you up right and you're moving forward but not optimally and that's the problem and that's when you start to have to use a compensatory strategies not something the brain is using a strategy it's just moving you forward on a body that's still just over to the right so when it comes to Rhythm and dance so a big part of the conversation I wanted to have you today is around that um in a couple of my last podcasts I uh or you know often ask questions such as like should people experience the world more than be in a gym setting and you know things in that realm and but so bringing on the perspective of Rhythm and dance I saw some of your posts it looked like you were speaking to the value of it how could um dance in particular help to I guess maybe fix some of these common malfunctions or just help people to be better movers or how does dance play a role in that so it is complicated it's actually very simple from a big picture perspective the original the the human body is governed by rhythms how we breathe is rhythmic our heart rate is rhythmic our hormonal fluctuations through the day is rhythmic and they know that's a very good point yeah certain at times of the day you'll produce more cortisol right like I think it's early in the morning but it's it's your your sleeping is rhythmic everything is rhythmic yeah these are patterns there's an up and a down a left and a right there you go everything and our brain and trains with that sunrise and sunset now sunrise and sunset does not exist because if you go out to out to space that sun is gonna be at you you know there is no sunset or something we're just looking at the sun the entire time right right so that doesn't exist out there right however our brain and trains with sunrise and sunset because it's a cycle because of where the where the Earth is in relation to the sun but our brain entrains with those cycles of light and dark for Sleep patterns even nocturnal animals they just do it opposite way so everything in the human title The Tides it's rhythmic Gravity from the Moon everything is rhythm right ups and downs lefts and rights all right so everything floats it can't flow if you're only on one side you have to have two to flow if the body doesn't have two sides it can't flow right so if you understand that from the big perspective the human brain that the whole body is governed by Rhythm rhythms various rhythms all at once and the Brain the oscillatory activity of the neurons is rhythmic wow different hurts different speeds all different there's there's books written about this but that gets way too complicated just the point that the brain is also responding to rhythms and it's run on rhythms so the auditory system and the motor system are intimately linked and I have a I could just read it if I can find it um [Music] all right so this is from gate and posture uh Journal Whitworth 2013. music and metronome cues produce different effects on gate spatial temporal measures but not gate various forget about the title but he says sound and human movement are closely linked due to extensive connections between auditory and motor brain regions this is typified in the spontaneous synchronization of rhythmic bot rhythmic body movements such as foot tapping and head knotting to rhythmic music this connection has been exploited in studies using using rhythmic music or simple beats to cue rhythmic movements such as gate gate is a rhythmic movement any physicist any neuroscientist will tell you if they talk about movement in the context of Neuroscience or physics of you know objects that fall they won't say that it's planned falling and catching right it's rhythmic though right it should be rhythmic but a pattern someone who gets too stuck on their right side is no longer walking in a rhythmic way that's what the left that's what these patterns are so if you can't get on your left leg appropriately anymore and your internal metronome is now arrhythmic you don't know that you're not on your left leg appropriately but you're not on your left leg for the same amount of time that you're on your right leg you see it constantly because you see left shoulders higher than right shoulders no matter what foot they're on if you go to your left foot the left shoulder should drop and the right shoulder should come up but when you're looking at someone with a higher left shoulder which is completely normal yeah there's no way if they put their if you watch them walk and there's no alternation between shoulder height they are not rhythmic they are not spending the same amount of time on the left side as they are on the right what happens when you're not rhythmic your extensor muscles will turn on your all the things that cause US problems that hip flexors the lower back and the neck the extension fight or flight muscles will turn on to try to control that a rhythmic forward movement now you can't get out of that because you don't even know you're in it yet I know I'm doing what I do right I can change all these ostensibly biomechanical tests like shoulder internal rotation hip abduction and abduction tests I can change all that by having an individual listen to music four four timing something with a strong beat that can be counted easily one two one two or one two three four but one two one two it doesn't matter as long as they can time their heel strikes with the beat hip flexors are off lower back is off neck is relaxed I do it all the time it's almost like I even did it with someone who had one functioning eye and that's not simple wow you were hurt that one functioning eye is going to put her right back in the pattern the moment that beat goes away right which I showed in my video I have a video on this but I can use it on my YouTube channel right I was kind of shocked that it worked right she called me from Connecticut she's like you worked with my sister I only have one eye that works I don't know I think it could help and I said I don't know but we can experiment it is actually came down and it worked and I was kind of shaking I can't believe it's actually working that week we got her brain to sense something different and her body completely relaxed now the problem was the moment we took away either the walking part or the music part and I'll go one step further all she had to do was hear the Rhythm and visualize herself walk into the deep all her tests changed wow she didn't even have to move yeah all she had to do was visualize it and I've done this with other people also I even had a friend who's a trained dancer salsa dancer all he had to do was watch me walk to the beat and he was neutral wow yes yeah so what do you think that's uh attributed too it's killing it's it's rhythmic that's what the brain works on right so this is so another thing uh our brain does not the way that our brain makes sense of space or makes sense of where we are in space it's getting cues from the visual system from optic flow so that's your brain it's not about seeing clearly that's the important thing to remember it's not about 20 20 Vision it's about where your brain is paying attention to in space but also as we move forward through the world the world is passing us live that's called optic flow our brain gets signals our blind brain remember the brain is blind it doesn't see like you're not seeing me right your brain is guessing as to what I look like based on the reflection of light off of me I love it and then past memories because you can't your brain cannot you can't process anything without casting memories past instances working on that visual system so only 10 of the neurons going to the visual protons is actually from the retina vast majorities from other regions of the brain so when the brain is getting these these these visual cues it's automatically being mixed with what is this where was I the last time I saw this I'm trying to put this into context so most of the connections to the visual cortex are coming from other areas of the brain at any rate so that's a fascinating aspect it's really not about what you're seeing in that moment of time everything is being it's mixing it with what it's hearing at the same time you cannot separate experience and past experiences memories it's a threat right is this threatening or not or is it relaxing depending on what music you're hearing it's going to be threatening Our Lives if it's threatening none of this will work I've done this many times with people right make them walk to music they do not like they will not go neutral their hip flexors will stay on Wow even if they are walking down deep so what you like what you enjoy it's huge retention for a decrease in tension so it's because all these things are part of it exactly um and I'm okay with the tangents and wherever we go with this but so it almost seems as though rhythmic patterns are predictable if something's predictable yes that's comfortable yes so it is it that the body recognizes Rhythm as something comforting in a sense that it can relax if it's the right Rhythm right yeah so if I had to listen so different so this is interesting so different cultures have different uh structures of music and I'm not a musician I've just studied a lot about music but right I I don't know the proper music terms for it but the scale in Indian music is not the same as western music so if you're if you're listening to unfamiliar cultural music coming from a culture it's not the cultures well the culture probably unfamiliar also but if the music is unfamiliar to you your brain may not pick up the Rhythm that's interesting yeah and so your brain may have to work too hard to try to figure out the algorithm because your our Rhythm and there's a great book called your brain on music yeah your brain on music and he just talks with science he's a neuroscientist and a musician and he talks about out how our musical tastes are pretty much set in our younger years definitely by our teenage years that's why when people it's like oh for me the only good music was in the 80s and 90s right right right and for my parents like the only good thing was in the 50s and 60s right so you're and they don't really change right like that's where your musical tastes are pretty much set so if if music that you're exposed to when you're like 45 if you're exposed to it for the first time when you're 45 and it has no relation to what your musical tastes were set at when you were you know in your teenage years it may be hard to either like it you personally might not like it or it might be hard to pick up that Rhythm even if you are rhythmic so it so everything I'm talking about right now how it puts a body at ease may not actually happen it actually might stress you out good point so it has to be familiar with comforting music that you find confidence well two people find comforting and light enjoyable may be completely different right