This article covers the nuts and bolts strategies to fix muscle dysfunction and muscle imbalances.

We will cover specific sensations that arise when fixing dysfunctional muscles and what to do about them. The strategies in this article are based on observations and experiments over thousands of client sessions at Upright Health. 

There are no placebo-controlled clinical trials to point to, and there probably won't ever be any that are useful. Your body is a complex nonlinear system that requires observation and calibration on an individual basis. This article will give you understanding and tools to explore your own body's limits and to expand those limits. These are strategies that have helped people avoid...

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You probably came here because something in your body doesn't feel right. You probably have chronic pain in one or multiple joints.

You came across this "muscle imbalance" term and are pretty sure it applies to your achy-breaky body.

I've been in the same situation. I suffered for years with chronic pain in my back, hands, wrists, shoulders, hips, knees, and feet. Conventional medical advice and physical therapy were a dead end for me. Acupuncture, chiropractic, and massage all failed to give me lasting results.

What gave me freedom and confidence was learning how to move my body right. As I started to move right, I started to feel right. 

Let's start...

"I spent my Thanksgiving break in bed crying and researching surgery options..."

I want to share an important story with you today. Here's the background.

I've been coaching a young woman named Erica online for the last couple of months.

She has hip dysplasia. Doctors often claim that hip dysplasia is a guaranteed path to hip pain and arthritis. The only solution for hip pain from dysplasia, they say, is drastic surgery.

The other week, Erica was over-the-moon excited about what she'd accomplished in such a short period of time - especially because of what her well-renowned expert hip surgeon in Los Angeles told her.

Let's set the stage.

I am 30 years old and for my entire adult life I have been physically active without...

You are building a self-feeding, self-maintaining machine. 

You give it feedback mechanisms that enable it to regulate and meet its own needs. It senses when it needs to ingest fluids and solid matter in order to fuel further operation. After ingestion, observation, and analysis, it determines which solid matter and fluids are acceptable for future use as fuel. Solid matter and fluids that are unacceptable are ejected promptly and avoided. Any resulting damage is assessed and repaired quickly.

The machine senses when and how often it needs to power down so that it can run through a lengthy checklist of system fidelity checks and maintenance processes for its locomotive system, its external environment observation...

Today we are looking at the story of BK – his life during and after the NFL, and how hip pain drastically affected his quality of life.

As personal trainers who specialize in working with people with hip pain, back pain, and shoulder pain, we get clients from all walks of life.

A lot of times we work with desk jockeys – the ubiquitous tech workers of Silicon Valley.

Sometimes we work with pro and former pro athletes. The athletes with pro experience are quite interesting because they give us an inside perspective on the inner workings of the big leagues.

Oftentimes, the average Joe believes that NFL athletes are getting the best care money can buy. Team doctors give the NFL players the best pain killers and surgeries...

In a previous article, I talked about phone and internet addiction being a major contributor to my own history of chronic pain.

I addressed the ways in which constant compulsive phone and computer usage can lead to a heightened statute of stress - which can exacerbate pain and get you stuck in a loop of chronic pain. We also discussed simple steps to loosen the hold your phone has on you, and how to eventually break your phone addiction.

In today’s article, I want to address something that comes up when you’re trying to break your phone addiction. If you follow the advice I gave in the previous article, you’ll find you have a lot of time to fill. All those hours you would normally being spending on your phone...

If you are an athlete with recurrent or chronic pain or hang around people with recurrent or chronic pain, you’ve probably heard of cortisone injections. They’re these wonderful injections that (when they work) take away pain. However, before you get your next shot, you might want to know that the world’s most respected medical journal just published a study that shows that cortisone shots actually HARM you more than they help you.

The study looked at a large group of randomized trials looking at recurrent and chronic tendon injuries, and what they found was about what you’d expect:

…cortisone injections did, as promised, bring fast and significant pain relief, compared with doing nothing or following a...

A lot of times people with back, shoulder, or hip pain are thinking about what they need to cut. Medical articles written by or inspired by surgeons promote the idea that surgery is the best answer to all kinds of chronic pain conditions.

So people are led to believe they need a surgeon to cut some bone, some ligament, some tendon, some muscle...

This comes from the medical/orthopedic model of chronic pain: if something hurts, it's because something is malformed or permanently damaged.

But this orthopedic model ignores the regenerative capacities of the body AND ignores an even bigger issue.

Scientific research consistently shows that "damaged" or "deformed" structures that allegedly cause pain are - wait for it - NOT...

If you’ve been told you have femoroacetabular impingement (FAI, femoral acetabular impingement, or hip impingement), you have probably heard that arthroscopic hip surgery is the only answer. The conventional medical approach to hip pain associated with femoroacetabular impingement bone shapes is surgery, after all.

We’ve successfully helped countless people beat their hip pain without surgery - despite having femoroacetabular impingement bone shapes. In this article, we'll look at how this is even possible. And we'll see why you and your doctors should be skeptical of the entire theory of femoroacetabular impingement.

An overview of the medical theory of hip impingement

In short, surgeons claim that misshapen bones lead...

If you have snapping, popping, and other cracking noises in your shoulders, you might be wondering what’s causing these sounds and what you can do to get rid of them.

People often get worried when they start experiencing clicks in their shoulders. They sometimes read stories about how the source of the clicking could be labrum tears, inflamed tendons, damaged muscles, etc.—all things that sound very serious and involved to fix.

First of all, you don't need to worry. Even babies get popping and snapping in their shoulders. As a newborn, my son had audible noises come from his shoulders - but they were not at all a sign of joint problems. And he STILL gets occasional noises!

What most people (including many doctors) don’t...