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Summary
On episode 133 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan sits down with Meir Schneider, founder and head teacher of the School for Self-Healing in San Francisco, who was born blind, taught himself to see, and has spent more than 40 years developing a program of healing and recovery for the sighted and the blind.
Meir argues that most of us only use a fraction of the more than 600 muscles in the body, and that the muscles we neglect are exactly what causes stiffness, back pain, and immobility as we age.
The conversation covers how to prevent back injuries by using muscles you never use, the emotional side of physical tension, and how touch and movement work together to restore mobility, even in people who’ve been told they can’t get better.
Links
- https://www.self-healing.org
- Episode 105 – Vision for Life with Dr. Meir Schneider
Key Takeaways
- We have over 600 muscles but most people only use 50 to 75 of them with real intensity. The muscles we rely on constantly grow tight and the connective tissue around them hardens, while the muscles we never use stay weak and disconnected from the rest of the body.
- Unused muscles create a chain reaction up the body. Weak, shoe-confined toes lead to stiff ankles, then stiff knees, hips, lower back, middle back, upper back, neck, and jaw, since each joint ends up compensating for the one below it.
- Modern life trains us out of natural movement. Shoes on concrete, sitting in chairs, and repetitive fine-motor tasks like writing all shrink our range of motion, so the fix is deliberately using muscles that have gone dormant: walking barefoot on sand, moving sideways and backwards, climbing.
- Tension, not just impact, determines how badly a fall or injury hurts you. Meir contrasts a sober person’s likely fatal fall from a bridge with a drunk, relaxed person’s survivable one, arguing that a tense body absorbs force worse than a loose one.
- Long-haul travel doesn’t have to wreck your back. Meir flies enormous distances without back pain by using tennis balls for self-myofascial release against his lower, middle, and upper back and feet, and by running barefoot on the beach four to five times a week.
- Back pain can carry an emotional component. Meir describes clients whose physical tension traced back to specific emotional events, and says releasing the physical tightness can surface memories and feelings the person didn’t know were stored there.
- Touch and movement work together, not separately. Meir says passive massage alone isn’t enough. He has clients get up and walk in the middle of a massage session so the movement makes the touch more effective and helps them feel the tension they’re releasing.
- Standing and stretching regularly beats staying in one position, even at a desk. Standing up periodically, looking into the distance, and rotating the feet while working at a computer counters the tightening that leads to slouching and eye strain.
- Mobility can be regained at almost any age or condition. Meir describes a client with multiple sclerosis and osteoporosis who couldn’t get up on her own, and through consistent movement work regained enough mobility to stay in her own home instead of moving to a nursing home.
“We need to stretch all the time and to move all the time. Because life doesn’t expect or request it from us. We have to really do it.”
Meir Schneider