USER RULES

With F5, in the first 10 weeks, or so, 100% intensity is likely too much, unless you’re already well trained. Even 5 minutes total training time can be too long. With L3 in particular, 5 minutes is probably too long for most, so it’s better to start at about half intensity and half the time. This is admittedly a wishy-washy part of the rules, because where everyone starts from is very different, and I have no way of knowing who I’m writing this too.

Not as fuzzy is making F5 a lifetime habit. Research suggests 66 days is the best estimate to form a strong habit, so you don’t want to miss any workouts of those early days. Ten weeks without a miss takes you through that point, to where F5 becomes a normal thing to do. Where like brushing your teeth or wearing a seatbelt, it’s not something you want to do, but you feel weird if you don’t. So if you aren’t motivated, in the beginning I think it’s good to make F5 feel like no big deal, so that you aren’t sore afterwards, and you don’t have the slightest apprehension about doing more next time.

Besides habit formation, going easy lets you concentrate on learning proper technique and determining which level of exercise is most appropriate for you. If in doubt, start at Level-1 and work up from there, getting your mind, muscles and joints ever more ready for max efforts around the 10-week point.

Starting at what feels like 50% of your capacity, straining neither muscles, nor lungs, then adding a rep or few per workout. What’s more, the normal 1-2 minutes each F5 exercise can be surprisingly difficult, so doing only half the time at first isn’t a bad idea either. This is very much how I did it myself, as when I first attempted L3 Lunges, wondering how many I could do, I only lasted 50 seconds, and I thought I was pretty fit, so if you don’t

Notwithstanding Rule 2, best laid plans do go astray, and for some reason people think because they have messed up one day, it’s all over, and they give up. For example, with diet I’ve heard more than once, that a person binged, then quit their diet and return to bad habits for months, or more, only to have way more ground to make up when they try again. With training, I think it’s the same.

I think what’s helped me is that if I do have a bad day (diet or exercise), I do my best to get right back on it the very next day. And when I have missed more than a day, the objectivity of my F5 performance has made very clear that the more days you are off the wagon, the more ground you have to tread to get back where you were.

This gets into “what’s a good pain, and what’s a bad pain?” Which is not always easy to know. It means if you have, say 4/10 pain before an exercise, so long as your pain stays a 4 and doesn’t get worse, thereby increasing, during or soon after your set, you are probably good. And if you judge it wrong and get worse, you probably won’t get much worse.

The next keyword is injurious. Muscle burn (the build up H+ ions) is not injurious, nor is fatigue, nor is delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) that sometimes comes on 1-3 days after a hard workout. Those are usually good pains, indicative of a good workout.

Neck pain, back pain, joint pain, nerve pain or numbness and tingling that extends down the arm or leg, etc., are almost always bad pains. If any of the bad pains are increasing with an exercise you should stop immediately, and consult rule 6.

The bad pains are associated with new or worsening injury, and training through them holds you back in the long term. The quicker you stop an exercise causing bad pain, the quicker you’ll heal, get better, and progress forward.

If you stop a problematic exercise quickly, you can often continue with other exercises in the workout without a problem. On the contrary if you push it, everything afterwards may be a wash, and so might be the next few days, or worse.

After the first couple weeks when you have learned the exercises and situated yourself in the correct exercise level, you want to gradually ramp things up aiming to be at 100% of your ability at about week 10. From then on, barring problems, you are always pushing.

If you can max the goal reps on a given level with no pain and good form, move up a level, beginning again with lesser reps as needed. If you always work out the same, you’ll always look and feel the same, which is missing the entire point of SpineFITyoga.

Strength, and more so endurance, really do protect the spine, and you won’t gain either for long if you don’t continually push yourself to do more than you are used to.

That said, pushing for, and getting, are two different things. Some days won’t be as good as others, and as you get nearer and nearer your potential, gains will slow, but by continually making the 100% efforts you should continue to make long run progress, literally for years, in spite of short term variations.

K.S.W.T. is shorthand for how to assess your performance, individually, on each exercise. It’s quick, simple, doesn’t take up much room on a page or exercise flow sheet. And it records all that is usually needed, without getting into detailed pain descriptions, that can lead to overthinking/ruminating about pain.

K = O(K): K means you did every rep correctly and without any increase in injurious pain. If you did all your repetitions of an exercise with good technique, through a full range of motion, that’s a K. If all the repetitions you did maxes out the level you are on, it means you should advance to the next level and lower the repetitions (often substantially) the next time you workout. Then from the new level, again gradually work your reps, cleanness of technique, and speed up from there.

S = (S)ore during, OK after: If you feel an increase in neck pain, back pain, or arthritic type joint pain, or a ligament strain during an exercise, this is a definitive warning to stop immediately. S is different particularly with tendinitis.* However, in general, and with spine pain especially, if you stop the exercise as soon as you begin to feel an S, you’ll probably quickly recover and be able to do the same exercise with perhaps a few more reps the next time.

W = (W)orse after: Meaning you did the exercise and you feel worse after. This unambiguously (with any type of injury I can think of) means that you went too far. The exercise level, reps, or exercise itself were too much for you for now, and you need to reassess and back it down the next time. You might need to omit the offending exercise for a few sessions, weeks, or forever. While I think all the SpineFITYoga exercises are, in general, fantastic, they are not all great for everyone all the time, and knowing when to stop is a big part of what makes SpineFITYoga work.

T = poor (T)echnique: It means when you did the exercise your technique wasn’t perfect. This can be for a few reasons.

It could be you don’t yet know what good technique is, and you just need to practice it. In which case continue to focus on doing the exercise correctly, perhaps in a mirror or video yourself, before moving up.

T can mean that you aren’t strong enough to maintain the good technique that you know. If fatigue makes it so you can’t work through a given exercise with full range of motion, within reason this is fine, and in fact desirable to train through. That’s because partial repetitions, after you are unable to do full ones, increases intensity by allowing you to continue to work when you would have otherwise have stopped. However, if most of your reps on an exercise are a T, you might consider backing it down.

If, however, you are breaking form by bending and twisting your spine, this is the bad kind of T. You can generally safely train up to, but not beyond this point, as you are both risking injury and reinforcing bad movement patterns. So don’t move up from a Level-1 to a L2, and then L3. on an exercise until you can max the previous levels number of reps with good form and full range of motion, replacing that T with a K.

Rule 6 is in my mind the most absolute of all rules, and based on the most experience I gathered as a physical therapist.**

*Tendinitis exception to rule 6: Tendinitis (more correctly termed tendinopathy) is an exception to the don’t train through pain rule. While treating tendinitis is not a primary focus of SpineFITyoga, it is a very common injury and one of my areas of intense study and practice. You can read my specific thoughts in relation to tennis/golfer’s/shooter’s elbow, trochanteric or gluteal tendinopathy, or coracoidopathy, etc., in my older blog entries, all written pre-SpineFITyoga, but all have held up both in research and in practice.

Unlike neck pain, back pain, or deep joint pain, with tendinopathy you don’t want to be afraid to train in the “S” zone, as it usually takes that level of intensity to get the tendon to remodel and heal. As the tendon warms up with the exercise it should actually feel better within minutes, as well as immediately afterwards, so it should still never be a W.

As SpineFITyoga matures I hope to add additional blogs/articles on how to self treat other tendinopathies, such as Achilles, patellar, and rotator cuff with SpineFITyoga and/or weights. So if anyone has specific questions feel free to ask in the comments, and time permitting, I’ll do my best.

** I’m not sure exactly when I came up with the K.S.W.T, notation, but I’m sure it was more than ten years into my career in my physical therapy practice. It was so that my PT techs, taking patients through and exercise program could easily and succinctly assess the response of each exercise. If there was a problem, I could come back, look at their chart and discern why. I’ve yet to see a better system of how to decide whether you should move forward or back off. And with spine pain, few decisions are more crucial.

Keep a notebook, day-timer, google document or similar and record your

• bodyweight
• what exercises you did
• what level
• how many reps you got
• and response (whether each exercise was a KSWT) every day.

Tracking your progress is a great way of ensuring progress. Recording your KSWT will, over time, give you a very intuitive sense of your body, what pain there might be, spine pain or other, so you’ll truly learn how hard you can safely push to avoid injury and see progress.

When I was rehabbing people in physical therapy I, or my techs, would write down every set, every weight, and whether it was a KSWT, and this helped me tremendously to make good decisions after the fact, particularly in a patient who did maybe a dozen exercises. And while F5 does become a full 5 minutes of exercise, it’s still only 3 exercises in a day, one set each, so recording what happens should be no great burden.

Writing down your bodyweight each day, in relation to the reps you get, will hone you into what’s optimal for you. Probably it will be within ten percent of ideal weight. Will you get more Pushups, Lunges or LoBrids if you lose three pounds of fat, or gain one pound of muscle? Probably you’ll find it’s best top do both. Are you dieting so hard you are getting weaker, or not dieting enough? Do you need to eat more to gain muscle and get stronger? What about your macros? These are all things your logbook will answer in a way that’s likely true to you. My logbook very much guided me with both my diet and exercise, as I was developing F5, and it was not always what I expected.

The scale is probably your most honest friend, and the only one that won’t mislead you, trying to be nice, or wondering if your inquiry is a trap. When I was overweight, with high blood pressure, and high cholesterol, my own mother was telling me how great I looked.

At the time I had the “dad bod”, I wasn’t a slob, but definitely a gut forming and measurably less healthy). So get a scale, and for starters target your ideal weight. Ideal weight is not just healthy and attractive, it’s very likely where you’ll find your performance on F5 at its best.

Besides the fact that excess fat physically overloads the spine, it’s also been discovered that it increases systemic inflammation, wreaking havoc on the entire body. “Healthy at any size” is a lie, akin to “cigarettes aren’t harmful.” Inflammatory cytokines are thought to chemically accelerate degenerative disc disease and resultant spine pain.

Contrary to what pop psychologists will tell you, daily weighing has been consistently shown in the research to be both mentally healthy and an effective aid for weight loss and maintenance. Research shows dieters who weigh themselves eat on average 347 less calories that day. Those who weigh themselves daily usually lose weight, while those who weigh weekly, stay the same, and once a month usually gain. And about judging your fitness by how your clothes fit? That’s what fat people say.

The scale is an anchor protecting against eating disorders the other way as well. If you are significantly (>10%) under ideal weight, you’re perhaps at risk for the low side of an eating disorder, and probably going to need to gain some muscle to continue to set new records on F5.

Doing so is big part of SpineFITyoga. You are learning good neutral-spine postures with P5, incorporating such postures with challenging fitness building exercises with F5. However, it’s the ability to tell when you are in a good or bad postures in work, recreation, and often even rest, and to make preferable postures a habit that determines whether you get better, and stay better with regard to spine pain, and other injuries.