I called relief progress for three years
For three years I called relief progress.
I was a lifter first. Then one bad rep on the bench, pain down my leg, a foot that started dragging when I walked. I was studying kinesiology at the time, learning how a body is supposed to move while mine kept getting worse. Stretches, mobility, the exercises. Every good week felt like proof it was working.
That was the story I told myself. From the outside it looked different. A guy who knew better, doing the same drills for three years, mad that other people were getting better, and never once asking whether any of it was moving him forward. I had the training to know the difference between relief and progress. I didn’t run the test on myself, because relief was all I had.
For a while I did the same thing to the people I worked with. Someone would tell me the drills were giving them relief, I’d take it as a win, and I’d send them back to training. Some of them came back the same way I kept coming back.
Relief and progress are not the same thing. Early on, relief tells you the approach isn’t making things worse. Six months in, relief on its own is the trap. It feels like it’s working, so you never change the plan.
Now when someone tells me the rehab gives them a little relief, I say cool, a shower gives me relief too, and I ask three questions.
Can you handle more load than you could six months ago?
Can you train harder than you could six months ago?
Are you doing more of the things you actually care about?
Three years ago I couldn’t answer yes to any of them. I was calling it progress anyway.
Hope you’re moving well and brewing better. ☕
Gabe
PS. Stuck doing the same old boring rehab drills and not making progress? Apply to work with me here.
He was afraid to sneeze
Eric told me he was afraid to sneeze.
If he felt one coming, he’d crouch down into some cradle position and hope.
That’s where his back was at when we met.
Two hip surgeries. Years of PT. Cortisone. Massage. A machine that stretched his spine out.
The back pain left after each surgery, then came back.
He’s a police officer, and he’d stopped trusting his own body on calls (he told me he felt like a liability).
We recorded a call about it this week.
youtube.com/watch?v=mmZZBfnPuiE&feature=youtu.be
He talks about the moment he decided to stop catering to the pain and start working with it, and what happened when we stopped treating the spot that hurt.
There’s a part about an eight foot fence I’ll let him tell.
“Everyone was just treating the spot that hurts.”
Where it hurts is rarely why it hurts. Eric is what that looks like a few months later.
If you’re in the crouch-and-hope stage right now, hit reply and tell me how long it’s been.
Hope you’re moving well and brewing better. ☕
Gabe
Your rehab worked (that's the problem)
For three years I had good weeks.
I was studying kinesiology at the time. Learning how a body is supposed to move, in a student apartment, with a back that was getting worse while I read about it.
It started with one bad rep on the bench.
Then pain down my leg.
Then my foot started dragging when I walked.
So every good week felt like the end of it.
A week where nothing hurt. Where I’d warm up and think, this might be it, and actually mean it.
Then I’d load the bar.
Not always the first session. Sometimes the third.
Same spot. Same leg. Same thought.
I was better. What happened?
I had a lot of those weeks. Too many to count.
What I didn’t have was one week where I trained the way I wanted to and nothing came back.
That week never showed up.
Somewhere in year two, I stopped expecting it to.
That’s the part I don’t talk about much.
I was mad watching other people get better.
I still showed up to the gym every week. I just stopped lifting like someone who believed they’d get it back.
I wasn’t getting better.
I was feeling better, over and over, and treating them like they were the same thing.
They aren’t.
Feeling better is the pain settling down.
Getting better is being able to handle the training you actually want to get back to.
I had years of the first one.
I was studying this stuff. I should’ve known the difference.
I still couldn’t see it in myself.
And for a while, I couldn’t see it in the people I worked with either.
I sent clients back to training because they told me they felt better.
Some of them came back the same way I kept coming back.
Nobody was measuring the second one.
Not the people I saw.
Not me.
That’s what I look for now.
Before anything else.
Not whether it hurts.
Whether it holds.
Hope you're moving well and brewing better ☕️
Gabe
Stop writing new programs until you read this.
Greg could tell you his deadlift from seven years ago.
It was the same as last year.
He did everything you'd expect.
New programs. Deloads. Different splits. More volume. Less volume.
Nothing changed.
Eventually he started wondering if that was just his ceiling.
That's usually the point where people start looking for a better program.
I get it.
It seems like the obvious answer.
But most long plateaus I see are movement problems.
If your body's working around something, there's only so much a program can do.
You can keep changing sets and reps, but if the movement underneath hasn't changed, neither will the lift.
When Greg came in, we found it pretty quickly.
He couldn't hinge past a certain point without his lower back taking over.
His hamstrings weren't doing the job anymore.
His body couldn't do what the program was asking.
Three and a half months later, he pulled a deadlift he'd never hit before.
Does that mean every plateau is a movement problem?
No.
Some really are programming.
But if you've been stuck long enough to start calling it your ceiling, it's worth finding out before you write another block.
I've got a few different ways to work with me now.
Have a look and see which one fits where you're at.
Hope you're moving well and brewing better ☕️
Gabe
September, October, November
Five years ago I was sitting in a kinesiology lecture on spinal loading with nerve pain going down my leg.
Learning how bodies work while mine kept breaking down.
I'd read everything. Tried the stretches, the mobility work, the exercises. Get a good week, lose it, start over with a new modification. Keep the load safe and hope this is the one.
More trying. Same pain.
Liz did the same thing for four months. You read her story Friday. Five people, five answers, and she was working harder at this than most people ever will.
A few months into working together she was off the couch and back in her own bed. No pain, no numbness.
Her effort didn't go up. Someone finally looked before fixing.
That's the whole job. I watch how you move. I go through your history. I see how your body handles load. Then I know what we're dealing with, and only then does anything get prescribed.
Most people spend years fixing things nobody has checked.
It's Labour Day. Half the people reading this are about to start fresh: new program, new stretches, new resolve.
You've done that before. It's how you got here.
This fall, don't start fresh. Start by finding out what's actually going on.
September, October, November. Those months pass either way. If you'd rather not be guessing when they do, Apply here.
Hope you're moving well and brewing better ☕️
Gabe
Her back felt better. Then the numbness started.
There’s nothing wrong with modifying a lift.
I do it with clients all the time.
But I want to be able to answer three questions:
Why are we changing it?
What are we trying to build?
What tells us you’re ready for more?
Liz is a good example.
When we first spoke, she’d been dealing with back pain for about four months.
It had progressed into numbness and tingling down her right leg.
She could barely bend forward.
And this was where her head was at:
“I don't know how to get rid of the pain right now... I'm afraid that any move that I make will make it worse.”
That last part matters.
Because Liz didn't want to stop training forever.
She'd spent four years building herself up in the gym.
When I asked what she actually wanted, she put it pretty simply:
“I need to be able to go to the gym and lift heavy.”
That was the destination.
A few weeks into Rebuild™, she said something that pretty much explains the cycle she'd been stuck in:
“All I thought was I need the pain to go away so I can go back to doing what I'm doing.”
Stop.
Feel better.
Go back.
End up in the same place.
The problem wasn't that Liz modified her training.
The modification needed somewhere to go.
So inside Rebuild™, we kept working toward the thing she actually wanted.
Not just less pain.
Getting back to training.
And eventually, this was the message I got:
“No pain, no numbness and been sleeping in my bed for a few weeks now”
That's the difference.
A modification is a tool.
It can help.
But it should be preparing you for something.
If you've been modifying the same lifts for months, ask yourself:
What is this actually building me toward?
If you don't have a good answer, book a call.
Tell me what you're dealing with and what you want to get back to.
I'll tell you if I think I can help.
Gabe
It’s “coming along”
There's a guy I see at the gym. Maybe six months ago I asked him about a shoulder injury.
“It's coming along.”
Cool.
Six months later, I still see him doing the same rehab work. Same modifications. Still coming along.
I don't say that to make fun of him. I did the exact same thing for years.
I spent five years dealing with chronic back pain while studying kinesiology. I read everything. Tried the stretches. Did the mobility work. Found exercises that helped.
I'd have a good week. Then I'd lose it.
So I'd look again.
Different answer. Different exercise. Something else to add to the pile.
And here's what makes this so confusing:
Some of those things actually helped.
I wasn't necessarily doing the wrong exercises.
I just had no idea where any of it was going.
That's the question I left you with yesterday.
So here's how I actually answer it.
Reveal what's actually driving the problem.
That's the Ground-Up Assessment™, so we're working from how your body actually moves under load instead of guessing from the spot that hurts.
Reset the movement you're missing.
That's Movement Restoration™. Building back the movement options you need before asking more from your training.
Rebuild™ your ability to handle the training you actually want to do.
That's Capacity Layering™. Progressively building back toward the demands of your training.
Rehab should move you toward load. Not away from it.
Every phase points at the next one.
And the last one points at your training.
That's the exit I never had.
And I'm not going to pretend I know your version of that from an email.
That's why Rebuild™ starts with a full assessment.
We figure out what's actually going on, start working on it, and see how you respond.
After 7 days I'll have a much clearer picture of what you need and where we need to go next.
If you've been “coming along” for months but you're still building your training around the same problem, book a call.
I'll tell you if I think I can help.
Gabe
When do I stop doing this?
Someone asked me a question about their rehab recently:
“When do I stop doing that? Do I ever stop doing that?”
That’s a really good question.
Because there’s nothing inherently wrong with doing a rehab exercise.
And there’s nothing inherently wrong with modifying a lift when something keeps bothering you.
I do both with clients.
The problem is when nobody can tell you what happens next.
Why are you doing this?
What is it supposed to change?
When do you make it harder?
When do you stop?
And how does any of it get you back to squatting, deadlifting, running, or whatever you actually want to do?
That’s where a modification can turn into another thing you’re stuck doing.
If I change someone’s squat because their back keeps getting cooked, I don’t want that variation to become the lift they avoid back squats with forever.
There needs to be a reason for it.
Something we’re trying to restore.
Something we’re trying to build.
And a way to know when they’re ready for more.
Because the goal was never to become really good at rehab.
The goal is to get back to training.
Tomorrow I’ll show you how I think about that progression inside Rebuild™.
Hope you’re moving well and brewing better ☕️
Gabe
Your next training block
September starts tomorrow.
Most people serious about training are already thinking about the next block. New program, back into a routine, a number they want by December.
Before you pick the program, there is a more useful question.
How much of it are you already planning around pain?
You probably know the answer before you open the spreadsheet. The program says back squat, and you have already decided you will front squat instead, or use the safety bar, or keep the weight at something that never asks a real question.
Deadlifts are on Friday and the load depends on how the warm up feels. Pressing day comes around and you already know which angle you will skip.
You are still training. That part is fine. You have just gotten very good at working around it.
And you have already tried to fix it. PT. Chiro. Massage. Mobility work. A stretch someone showed you. A program someone swore by. Maybe several of those, maybe all of them.
After all of that, the thing you still do not have is a path from managing this back to training the way you actually want to train.
So the block starts, the workarounds come with it, and in December you are roughly where you are now with a few months gone.
I am not going to fix that in an email today.
But before you lock the program in, be honest with yourself about what it is built around.
Reply and tell me one thing. What is the lift you have had to change the most?
I read every reply.
Hope you are moving well and brewing better ☕️
Gabe
A water fountain called me out
I was out walking with my son Nico the other day. He’s one, so I do the walking and he supervises from the stroller.
There’s a water fountain near our place. We stopped in front of it and he just watched.
Water going up, water coming down. A kid completely locked in on it.
You know how life gets. The phone, the clients, the next thing. Half the time I’m somewhere else in my head and I know it.
Not this time.
For a minute I was just there, watching him watch the water.
And then a thought landed out of nowhere.
If my pain was still here, would I even be in this moment? Or would it be taking something from me, right there next to him?
Because I remember what those years were actually like. Pain doesn’t just take your deadlift. It runs in the background of everything.
You’re at dinner, but part of you is monitoring your back. You’re on the floor with your kid, but you’re already negotiating with what it’ll cost you to get up.
Pain doesn’t just steal the lift. It taxes every moment it touches.
I talk about getting back under the bar all the time, because that’s the goal the people I work with care about.
But standing at that fountain, I realized the bar was never the whole prize.
The prize is being all the way in your life again.
Hope you’re moving well and brewing better. ☕
Gabe
If your pain vanished tomorrow
If your pain vanished tomorrow, would you train the way you used to?
Sit with that one for a second, because if the answer is no, the pain was never the only problem.
You know the routine. You load the bar and it turns into a negotiation. Maybe pull a plate off. See how the warm-up feels. Leave a couple reps in the tank today.
None of it feels dramatic. It just quietly becomes how you train.
So I made a video about the part almost nobody covers. What happens after rehab gets your pain down and you still don't trust yourself under a heavy bar.
It’s the three phases I use to take lifters from cleared to actually training hard again.
You didn’t fail rehab. It ended too early.
Hope you’re moving well and brewing better. ☕
Gabe
I've only told you pieces of this
I was sitting in class when I felt something run down my leg.
By the time I got to the hallway, I’d lost motion in my foot.
Last month I deadlifted close to 500lbs.
Three years sit between those two sentences, and I’ve only ever told you pieces of it. The bathroom stall. The chairs. Being jealous of everyone still training.
I finally put the whole thing in one place. What happened, what rehab got right, what it got badly wrong, and what I ended up building because nobody had built it for me.
It’s the version of this story I wish someone had handed me in year one.
Hope you’re moving well and brewing better. ☕
Gabe
I almost didn't notice
Something happened last week that I almost didn’t notice.
I finished a heavy lower day. Loaded the bar, pulled, racked it, drove home.
It was only in the car that it hit me.
I hadn’t thought about my back once. Not during warm-ups, not between sets, not walking out.
There were years where that sentence would have sounded like fiction.
When you’re in pain, you forget what it feels like to train hard. When you’re training hard again, you almost forget what it felt like to be in pain.
I lived the first half for years. Training hard turned into a memory I couldn’t quite reach. What I had instead was managing. Bracing, modifying, doing math about chairs and warm-up weights.
Now I’m living the second half, and it’s strange in its own way. The guy who scanned every room before sitting down is getting blurry.
The part I sit with is that I don’t want him gone completely.
I don’t want to fully forget.
Remembering is the reason I do this work the way I do it. It’s why I answer every reply on these emails. The day I forget what the stuck side felt like is the day I get worse at helping people out of it.
Which half are you living? The one where training hard has become the memory, or the one where the pain is starting to blur?
Hit reply and tell me. I read all of these.
Hope you’re moving well and brewing better. ☕
Gabe
Your low back isn't tight
You stretch your low back. It feels great for like……20 min?
Then it’s tight again.
You’ve run that loop enough times to know more stretching isn’t the answer.
Here’s what I mean. Pick up a grocery bag and hold it out in front of you.
Thirty seconds, fine. Two minutes, your forearm starts burning. Ten minutes, it’s rock hard.
So would you stretch your forearm? Or would you put the bag down?
The muscle isn’t tight because it needs to be stretched. It’s tight because it’s overworked.
Your low back is holding a bag.
When your pelvis sits tipped forward, your hip loses some of its ability to rotate. You need that rotation every time you take a step, squat, or pull something off the floor.
When the hip can’t give it to you, your low back takes over the hip’s job.
Every rep. Every step. All day.
It never gets to put the bag down.
So you can stretch it all you want. It goes right back to work.
Two drills fix this, and the order matters.
First, give the hip its rotation back with a sidelying stepover. Foam roller on the crest of your pelvis, top knee reaching just past the bottom knee on the exhale, eight reps a side.
Then teach the pelvis and the low back to move separately again, with a swiss ball deadbug. Two sets of eight each side.
Both drills, in order, right here.
The second one only works once the hip has room, so don’t flip them.
Hope you’re moving well and brewing better. ☕
Gabe
I'm no longer the crooked man
Two weeks ago I told you about a client whose police department called him The Crooked Man.
Three years of low back pain. Leaning sideways in uniform. Three cortisone injections that all failed inside a day.
He messaged me this morning.
“I’m no longer the crooked man, which is feeling really good to say.”
Same guy, a few months apart. The lean is gone.
He also hit 205 on the floor press. Three reps on his last set. He said it made him a little emotional, in a good way.
“It feels good to feel like a man again.”
That’s the line I’d underline.
He didn’t come to me to press 205. He came because his back had taken his confidence at work, his training, and a big piece of how he saw himself. The number is just the receipt.
Before we started, here’s what he’d already been through: surgeries, shots, physical therapy that went nowhere, and doctors handing him pills and wishing him luck.
None of that was ever aimed at why his back kept giving out. All of it was aimed at the pain.
That’s the difference, and it’s the reason he’s standing straight in that second photo.
Hope you’re moving well and brewing better. ☕
Gabe
PS. If you’ve collected the same list, the shots, the therapy, the good luck, and nothing has held, book a call and tell me what you’ve tried.
She had a marathon and a surgery date
Marie-Claude had a stress fracture, a surgery date, and a marathon on the calendar.
The plan for after surgery was rest and hope. Nobody would give her a straight answer about running again, and the answers she did get sounded like months.
She’s a runner. CrossFit through the week, races on the weekends. So the thing keeping her up at night wasn’t really the bone.
“This might be it.”
I hear that sentence a lot, and it’s usually less about the injury than the fear underneath it. That this is the version of you from here on out.
We started the week after her surgery.
Nothing dramatic. Basic strength work matched to what her body could handle at that stage of healing. Then running mechanics with no impact. Then short, controlled runs.
Every stage was earned, and every stage gave her a bit of proof that the leg was still hers.
Six weeks post-op, she was cleared to run.
Her surgeon handled the bone. That part was never my job. Mine was everything around it, keeping her strong while it healed and rebuilding her trust in that leg one step at a time.
Because that was the real fight. A body that needed six weeks, and a head that needed evidence it wasn’t over.
She’s building back toward CrossFit and the marathon now. The win I care about is that she stopped bracing for the worst.
Somewhere in the middle of it she sent me this.
Six weeks out from surgery, having fun in rehab. That’s not a sentence most people get to say.
If you’ve ever sat with that “this might be it” feeling, hit reply and tell me about it. I read all of these.
Hope you’re moving well and brewing better. ☕
The leg press has been cheating for you
Quick experiment for your next gym day.
Squat deep on a hack squat or a leg press. Easy.
Now try the same depth with a barbell on your back. Gone.
Most lifters read that as tight hips or short hamstrings, and off they go stretching between sets for the next year.
But flexibility isn’t what changed between those two squats.
Your center of mass did.
A machine holds your body behind your feet, so your center of mass sits back and your hips are free to drop.
A barbell on your back pulls your torso forward. Your body cuts the depth to keep you from tipping over.
Same joints. Same muscles. Different position.
So if you want more depth without giving up the barbell, change where the load sits.
The Zercher squat, watch it here.
Bar in the crooks of your elbows, held tight against you.
The weight sits in front of you, so your center of mass moves back, your torso stays upright, and your hips get room to drop.
No stretching program. No six months of mobility work. A setup that lets depth happen.
Try it light on your next lower day and see where your hips go.
Hope you’re moving well and brewing better. ☕
Gabe
Strong enough to hurt yourself
Pull up your training log from a year ago.
The numbers are embarrassing now. Squat’s up. Bench moved. You train more days than you used to.
That’s the part everyone celebrates.
Nobody tracks whether the parts underneath kept pace.
Muscle adapts fast. Tendon, connective tissue, joints, all of that runs on a slower clock. Weeks behind. Sometimes months.
So you can get strong enough for a weight your body isn’t built for yet.
That gap is where most lifting pain lives.
Weakness usually isn’t the issue. Form might not be either. The capacity underneath just didn’t keep up with what you started asking of it.
It explains the thing that makes no sense. The strongest year of your life, ending with a joint that complains on warm-up sets.
Pain shows up when what you can handle stops matching what you’re doing.
Rest lowers the demand for a few weeks. It doesn’t build the capacity. So the day you go back to training the way you actually want to, the gap is right where you left it.
The work is closing the gap. Building the stuff underneath until it can hold the strength you already have.
That’s the part most people skip, and it’s the one that decides whether you’re still lifting heavy in ten years.
Hope you’re moving well and brewing better. ☕
Gabe
PS. If your strongest year ended with your body arguing back, book a call and we’ll find the gap.
The 78th appointment
Somewhere in your city there’s a lifter who’s been seeing the same practitioner every two weeks for three years.
Same table. Same adjustment, or massage, or scrape. Relief for a few days, and then back on the schedule for the 78th time.
Nobody involved calls it what it is.
A subscription.
I was that lifter for a while. Years of appointments where the relief was real, and so was the rebooking.
The belief I run my whole practice on now:
The goal of rehab isn’t to make you need me. It’s to make sure you don’t.
By the end of working together, you should be able to adjust your own training, read your own warning signs, and progress without me in your corner every week.
You should graduate.
That’s a terrible business model, apparently. Retention is where the money is.
But dependency dressed up as care is how a two-week tweak becomes a three-year subscription.
So if your practitioner has never once talked about what discharge looks like, ask them this week what the plan is for you not needing them anymore. Watch what happens.
Hope you’re moving well and brewing better. ☕
Gabe
Good posture lasts 90 seconds
You catch your reflection in a shop window and do that same thing.
Shoulders back. Chest up. Stand taller.
It lasts about 90 seconds.
I know you’ve probably stretched the pecs, done the band pull aparts, and tried to sit up straight.
It helps for a bit, but then your shoulders slide right back into that same familiar position.
I’m here to tell you they’re not staying forward because the muscles are tight.
They’re staying forward because your body has adapted to that shape.
The rib cage underneath is stuck forward, and your pecs just tighten around the position your body already lives in.
So we have to actually change the shape and position of the rib cage underneath.
I got a drill for that right here.
The all fours ribcage reset, watch it here.
All fours, hands under your shoulders.
Push the floor away gently. Don’t round your upper back.
Exhale everything. Feel the ribs come down.
Then inhale, and feel the upper back fill up and open.
A few slow breaths there, then go check your reflection again.
Hope you're moving well and brewing better. ☕
Gabe