In today’s episode, my guest Annie Forest and I talk movement. Annie is the owner of Forrest coaching and studios. She is a 200-hour registered yoga teacher, a Strong First level two kettle bell instructor, and a certified TRX instructor.
Movement isn’t just about fitness, it’s a full brain, body, mind experience that opens us up to deep connection, healing and growth.
We’ll dive into the ideas of mind, brain, and fitness, how increasing your understanding of your body is empowering and how to show up for your whole self in and outside of the gym.
Annie. Welcome. Thanks for having me.
Let’s talk about the new type of fitness experience, being a person instead of just a body.
The fitness industry developed as an anatomical experience. Over the past 40-50 years it has shifted into a subset of the healthcare industry. In the last two years, we’ve developed an awareness that exercise will change brain chemistry. We are starting to look at people as people. If we’re really going to help, we have to acknowledge people have a heart, a life outside of the gym, hopes and dreams, and all of the other things tied up in and creating barriers to, and creating pathways for, your fitness or exercise experience. It’s important that, as professionals, we recognize that and honor it.
For quite a while, I had an injury which caused a lot of psychological distress, pain, and limited my mobility and movement. I had been trying to navigate that path by myself and kept hitting walls. Then, when our friend and colleague, Kristen Radtke referred you to me, I knew it was the right fit. You considered that I wanted to be able to squat again, but also what my nervous system is feeling all day long. What is my brain doing? Am I feeling safe? Who am I as a person? How can I adapt and change my world in a way that supports my body?
Let’s talk about how neurology and fitness go together.
It’s twofold. Movement professionals know a lot about bodies. Most of us are highly trained in anatomy and physiology and movement and function and how the human body works. Somewhere along the line, we forgot that there’s a brain that controls, what I call, the ‘meat puppet’.
You’re always practicing neurology; you just don’t always know it. When you’re doing a squat, you’re not just strengthening your glutes, you’re also triggering reflexes in your eyes and your inner ear and your tendons and ligaments. You’re changing your gut function. Even if you don’t know anything about neurology, you’re practicing it all the time in the gym.
What does it look like when you’re not going in the right direction?
Frequently it will look like one of three things.
- It will create frustration. You won’t see results. People will come in and they’ll try to get stronger, or they’ll try to get leaner, or they’ll try to get out of pain, and just plateau. I remember a moment training with you and you asked, how are you feeling? And I was like, angry getting really, I get angry sometimes when I’m lifting. And you said, let’s not do that. The fight response is not where you want to be when we’re moving our body.
- We’ll see emotional responses. Your brain is wired for survival by prediction. It wants to know what’s going to happen so it can keep you safe. If you’re doing something that it can’t predict or thinks isn’t safe, based on the previous experience, it’ll kick you out and we see emotions. We see people cry for quote, unquote, no reason. We’ll see people get really angry. We’ll see people laugh inappropriately, for no apparent reason, hysterical or maniacal sounding laughing. That’s a really clear indication to us that their brain is not okay with what you’re doing,
- We see pain responses kick in. Back pain, knee pain, etc. Pain is a request for change. It’s an indication from your brain that something could potentially go wrong or that something is about to go wrong. There is something going on that your brain considers threatening.
Can you describe the concept of the threat bucket?
You’ve got a bucket. At the base level, this bucket always has some water (threats) in it. We were mammals living on a planet that at one point was full of tigers and famine and lack of water, etc. Over the course of our lives, more threats go into the bucket. You fall off your bike when you’re a kid and you hit your head. Over time, they accumulate. Especially when there’s childhood trauma or acute trauma of any kind. Trauma events put a lot of water into the bucket. Now, your brain believes the world is not a safe place and operates on that understanding. The level of water keeps rising closer and closer to the top of this bucket. When the last thing goes in the bucket, you’ll get overflow. That overflow is a pain output that varies from person to person. The pain output could be mood disruption, metabolic disruption, or actual physical pain. It is your brain alerting you to too much threat.
What can we do? If I introduce a midday snack, that decreases the water level in my bucket. If I meditate for five minutes in my car before going into the house, that might decrease the water level in my threat bucket. When we have pain from a squat, most of us think, I hurt something. What if you just don’t have enough fuel or you’re dehydrated or need to sleep more. I love the idea of considering all the different influences of your pain output and exploring if it’s pain or our body is telling us it needs something. All of a sudden, your exercise and movement practice becomes, how can I better inform my nervous system about the world around me?
An article I found about the parasympathetic nervous system and recovery talks about people who are more likely to experience challenges with recovery due to their nervous system state.
In polyvagal theory, we have this ventral vagal state where we feel calm, safe, grounded. Then there’s a danger in our state shifts in this sympathetic. Then, if the danger becomes life threatening, we either freeze or shut down.
This article talks about sympathetic dominance and how chronic, physical and mental stress can overtax the body and its ability to adapt and maintain homeostasis and feel safe. For example, athlete’s training for an event and performing multiple training sessions a day, or clients with a more stressful home or work life or who have chronic psychological or emotional stress. What are your thoughts?
The terms we often use are adaptive or maladaptive stressors.
Adaptive stressors are where we push the physiological systems enough to force a change. That’s the whole idea of fitness. You want to stress the system enough that it adapts and steps up.
Maladaptive stress is when you’re pushing the system so hard that it cannot keep up with the demands that you’re putting on it.
Today there is a lot of focus on how hard you’re able to work to achieve change. What happens, though, is you end up in a maladaptive stress response where your nervous system literally doesn’t have enough resources to get through the day so it leans on adrenaline. It’s not even a cognitive process, your system just starts this adrenaline cortisol cycle to meet the needs or the demands that you are putting on your system.
We start thinking, can we get you to a parasympathetic state by the end of your workout? Can we keep your system in a place where it feels safe enough to complete the rest and digest and rebuild processes? When you’re in adrenaline and cortisol cycles, all you’re doing is surviving. Your resources are going towards survival instead of towards recovery and healing.
The goal would be to set up a workout that is hard enough to create a bit of stress so your system adapts but not so hard that your brain kicks into too much adrenaline.
A workout to help your system feel safe enough to sleep well and allocate resources to recovery and metabolic resets. We want to create an environment in which you can actually rewire the neurological structures to put more muscle there or create strength here.
If lifting a barbell, kettlebells, going for a run is your jam and it’s done mindfully, it is practicing for life. I can meet resistance and I can do hard things and come back down and feel peaceful and joyful and engaged and ready for the next thing.
Let’s talk a little bit about behavioral neurology, something my clients want to know a lot more about.
This really goes back to the threat bucket. It’s this idea that change is really expensive. Making a change in your life, stepping out of your habitual way of being requires resources. It requires prefrontal cortex activation, the part of your brain that gets fuel lasts and uses the most of it.
We hear people say I really want to do this thing, but I just can’t seem to get myself to do it. I’ve tried so many diets, so many exercise things and I just don’t have enough discipline.
Willpower is often the language that we’ll hear. And when it comes down to it, you’re making the decision to expend resources on discomfort instead of reserving resources. Recognizing that gives so much grace and eliminates a lot of shame.
If it’s going to be one of those expensive days, instead of making it a big thing, make it smaller. Make it the smallest, most non-threatening change possible. Can you change into fitness clothes when you get home for a week? Don’t even work out, just change your clothes. Proving to yourself that you can do something out of your normal routine can actually push your brain into a space where it is safe to take care of myself in new and exciting ways.
Often the advice is to workout three to five days a week for six weeks, and then talk about it. That’s a lot, especially if you’re going to go to a gym where there’s bright lights and loud sounds and smells and weird equipment and people staring at you. It can feel like a life threat to walk into a place that you don’t know. Our nervous system is continually scanning, trying to decide if you’re safe. 60% of people never go back into a gym after they purchase a gym membership. Start with non-scary, non-hard changes and build a little bit at a time.
Patterns are a big part of how the brain makes that decision.
The Forest Method helps teach freeing up the body to move and freeing the brain to allow the body to heal well.
Three skills:
- Sensory before movement.
- This is the idea that freeing up your brain to allow your body to move. If you’re going to move something, especially if it has had a previous injury, touch it first. Maybe use your fingernails, a paint brush, washcloth, to brush your whole body before you start a workout. It gets blood flowing to the part of your brain that preempts your movement patterns. If you’re struggling with movement, add some sensory to it and see what happens. If touch doesn’t feel good or is overwhelming, breathing is also a nice sensory experience.
- Visual resets with movement.
- Vision influences our brain and safety. Our eyes are flooded with unnecessary information, especially today. If you’re moving and notice something’s starting to ache, it can be useful to stop, get to a safe place and close or cover your eyes. This allows that bandwidth requirement to drop for a little bit. If closing your eyes doesn’t feel good, putting on dark sunglasses so you can still see your environment.
- 20-20
- Every 20 minutes, look 20 feet away for 20 seconds. You have two sets of muscles in your eyes. The oculomotor muscles move your eyeballs around in your head. The ciliary muscles that control the shape of the lens, getting clearer or less clear based on distance. By changing your eye position, you give new and novel stimulus to the ocular motor muscles which allows the ciliary muscles to relax a little bit.
You have an X-axis and a Y-axis that your brain constantly calibrates from. The horizon line and then a vertical line of gravity that’s in your inner ear.
If I’m walking forward outside, I see things coming toward me and then they go past the sides of my eyes into my peripheral vision. On a treadmill, things move up and down, but they don’t come towards you and go past you. There’s nothing moving past your horizon line. That triggers a sensory mismatch. For some people, it’s not a big deal. Other people don’t want to use the machine ever again.
It really is individual to each person’s neurology. It’s important to pay attention and create awareness around what’s happening and what information you’re getting from your body.
Chunking. Chunking goes back to behavioral neurology. It’s the process of taking something really big, not understood, or not safe and making it small enough that you can do pieces of it.
A kettlebell swing is one of my favorite examples. We break it all the way down into its smallest components. Start with a hip hinge. When that movement pattern has been established and they can do it without thinking, there’s no threat, there’s no pain. Then, let’s give you a little bit of weight and see what happens. We stay with that chunk until such a time that the brain is doing it with safety. Here’s the next chunk.
The hardest part about chunking is that we don’t do it as adults. We don’t ask a kid to write their name. We teach them how to write the first letter of their name and then the second letter. As adults, we somehow expect ourselves to just understand this massively complex movement pattern or complex behavioral pattern. Give yourself permission to take the smallest piece and spend some time with it and then plug it back into the larger puzzle.
Annie, you coach and teach from a place of radical acceptance, and grace. Focusing on how vulnerability, consistent skill development, and a focus on the whole self leads to places of deep healing and strength. You founded Forest Coaching on these practices and your mission is to teach your staff and your clients the importance of the whole self. When people are feeling better and living from their whole self, they go out into the world and do what they’re meant to do.
What does that actually look like?
It looks like accepting and embracing every single human as separate and beautifully different from every other person.
It’s also recognizing that we are working with bodies and primarily people who want to move it or change it.
We are neurologically informed, recognizing that there is a central processing unit controlling the thing that they are asking us to change. We step back and look for areas that may not be safe, may not move well, may be hitting the brakes or in bucket overflow response.
We look at movement patterns in anatomy, at neurology, and why it may or may not be allowing the anatomy to shift.
It’s our job to teach you that you have the capacity to hold space for yourself so that you can do it forever in every area of your life. It’s our job to be emotionally and trauma informed as professionals. Reminding a client, you’ve got some big freaking stressors at home, please give yourself the grace to miss a workout.
Will you speak briefly on feeling your heart as much as feeling your body?
You have optimal foods that, for your particular physiology, feel best and you’re able to metabolize and integrate them. Everyone is different. There’s no one way to do it.
Then, you have your easy go-to foods. This is quick and is low stress. You get calories in and you keep moving throughout your day.
Then, you have your joyful foods. These are foods that your body can relax. For example, I sat in my car before this and I ate an apple cinnamon muffin and I drank a decaf latte with whole milk with the windows open. Muffins are not an optimum food for me, but they’re fricking delicious.
If you are eating an optimal diet all the time and never nourishing your nervous system, you might get optimum performance but be unhappy.
For all our listeners out there, what can we take from today? Please consider your brain and your nervous system. Practice those drills. If they help you feel safe, integrate them. If not, it’s okay to set them down and honor your emotional experience.
Annie, I don’t want to let you go, but I’m thankful you were here. Thank you. Yeah, you as well.
