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
They called him the crooked man
At his police department, they had a nickname for Eric.
The Crooked Man.
His lower back had him leaning sideways. Upper body tilted to the left, in uniform, all day.
Three years of that. Three cortisone injections, every one of them failed inside 24 hours. Rehab he described as rinse and repeat.
He was bracing his knees to sneeze. Bending down first, because otherwise his back would give out.
But the pain wasn’t the part that got to him.
“Right now I look at myself as a liability with the way my lower back is behaving.”
Not a liability to himself. To his partners. A cop whose back might go out mid-shift is a problem for the people standing next to him.
Three years of unresolved pain stops being about training. It becomes about who you can be at work.
We started three months ago.
Last week he sent me this.
An eight foot fence with a steep drop. Landed on concrete. Zero back pain. His confidence on the job back near where it was when he started the career.
Three years of rinse and repeat, then three months of training built around what his back actually needed.
Nothing about his case was exotic. It needed someone to ask why his back kept giving out instead of chasing the spot where it hurt.
Gabe
PS. If pain has changed the way you live and not just the way you train,
Book a free call and tell me what’s going on.
If I can’t help, I’ll tell you that too.
Chronic pain made me a worse person
There’s a version of this story I don’t usually tell.
When my back was at its worst, I wasn’t just in pain. I was mad.
Not at the pain. At other people.
Guys at the gym adding plates while I negotiated with warm-ups.
Friends signing up for meets. Everyone’s life kept moving.
Mine felt paused.
That’s the honest part. It sounds horrible to say I was mad that other people were getting better. But I was. And if you’ve been hurting long enough, I’d bet you’ve felt some version of it too.
Long pain does that. It doesn’t just change your training.
It starts to feel like it changes who you are.
You’re still you. You just stop feeling like it.
But the part I want you to have is this.
I’m on the other side of it now. And that version of me, the anger, the hopelessness, all of it, feels like someone else’s memory.
It wasn’t even that long ago.
From inside the stuck season, that state looks like the rest of your life. It wasn’t. Not for me, and I don’t believe it has to be for you.
If you’re in it right now, the mad-at-everyone season, book a call and tell me.
I remember it well enough to talk about it.
Gabe
Your rehab plan is a museum piece
You probably still have the sheet somewhere.
The one from the clinic. Three exercises, photocopied, a little skeleton doing clamshells in the corner.
You got it in week one. It never changed.
Your pain changed, though.
Some weeks it barely showed up. Some weeks it ran the whole session.
Sleep changed it. Stress changed it. A heavy deadlift day changed it.
The plan stayed frozen while the problem kept moving.
That mismatch is why so much rehab feels like it almost works.
A static plan can be right for the week it was written. Every week after that, it drifts a little further from what your body actually needs.
What holds up is a plan that answers back.
Crushing your lifts? It progresses. Rough sleep week? Volume comes down before your back complains. A flare-up? It bends without stopping.
That’s how I coach. Every week I look at how your body responded, and then the next week gets written.
Your pain adapts weekly. Your plan should too.
That’s the difference between managing a condition and actually getting back under the bar.
Gabe
PS. If your plan hasn’t changed since the day you got it, book a call. Bring the sheet.
You're negotiating with chairs
There’s a strange thing that happens when your back hurts.
Normal stuff stops being normal.
Chairs, for example.
You used to walk into a room and just sit down.
Now you walk in and scan every chair.
How long will this one let me sit before my back makes me get up and pace?
I remember a wedding, right in the middle of my back pain years.
I wasn’t excited about the wedding. I was doing math. How long would I be standing. How long sitting. Would I be able to dance later.
I wasn’t in the room. I was managing it.
That part wears on you more than the pain does.
You stop trusting your own body.
And that’s the piece most rehab walks right past.
Getting the pain down matters, of course. But that was never the whole job.
Pain-free and confident are two different things.
You can be cleared on paper and still brace every time you add weight to the bar, or lower yourself into a chair you don’t trust.
Recovery is the day you walk into a room, or into the gym, and just do the thing. No scanning. No negotiating.
That’s when rehab is actually finished. Not when the pain leaves. When the trust comes back.
Gabe
Hurt on a weight you warm up with
A back tweak on a warm-up set is one of the most confusing things in lifting.
The weight was light. Your form was fine. You’ve done that exact set hundreds of times.
So why that rep?
Short answer: it wasn’t that rep.
For weeks before it, things were adding up.
More volume than usual. Less sleep than usual. Training through a busy stretch because that’s what you do.
Form slips a little when that happens. Depth gets shallower. The hips start doing something different on heavy days.
None of it hurts yet, so none of it gets noticed.
Pain shows up at the end of that process, not the start of it.
That's why the rep that "did it" is almost never worth studying.
The month before it is.
It's also why rest keeps failing you. Rest treats the last rep.
The month is still there when you come back.
First thing I do with every lifter is walk back through that month. Training, sleep, stress, the small form changes nobody clocked.
Find what was stacking up, and the pain finally makes sense. Fix it, and it stops coming back.
Gabe
Your knees don't cave from weak glutes
You’ve seen it in the mirror mid-squat.
The bar sinks, and one knee sneaks in toward the other.
Someone told you the fix years ago. Weak glutes. So it’s been clamshells, band walks, and glute activation before every session.
Months of that, and the knee still dives.
The part nobody explained: when you squat, your knee doesn’t just bend.
It rotates.
Your shin has to turn a little as you sink toward the bottom.
When it can’t, your body still finds the depth you asked for.
Caving in is the workaround.
So before the tenth round of glute work, try giving the rotation back.
The half kneeling shin rotation, watch it here.
A few slow reps per side, before you squat.
Give the joint its options back, then watch what your knee does on the next squat.
Gabe
She hurt her back, then said sorry
Liliane wasn’t doing anything heavy.
She was racking a pair of 15 pound dumbbells when she
felt an electric stab in her back.
Her first message to me wasn’t about the pain.
She apologized.
Like a flare-up meant she failed her program. Failed me. Undid all of it.
So I asked her one question.
“Huh??? Why are you sorry?”
Because she wasn’t just hurting.
“It feels very familiar and I’m trying not to catastrophize. Part of my misery is just being so afraid I’ve messed up.”
That fear is the part of pain almost nobody treats.
We didn’t panic. We adjusted her plan that day.
A few movements matched to what her body could tolerate. Sleep set up on her calmer side. A long walk the next day if it felt fine.
Checked in the next morning. No more zaps.
Less than 48 hours after the flare-up, I asked how much better she felt.
The pain settled in two days. The fear wouldn’t have.
Not without someone helping her make sense of it.
Bodies calm down when you give them a reason to feel safe. The voice saying you broke everything needs a plan too.
You don’t need to be sorry. You need a plan for the bad days, because they come either way.
Gabe
PS. If your flare-ups come with that same fear, book a call and walk me through your last one. If I can’t help, I’ll tell you that too.
A police officer texted me this
You’re on the physio’s table when the sentence lands.
“Let’s shut things down for six weeks and see how it feels.”
You nod along. Then you sit in the car doing the math on everything six weeks is going to take.
Strength. Conditioning. Bar feel.
The version of you that walks into the gym without thinking about it.
So maybe you did the six weeks. Pain settled, then the first heavy week brought it right back.
That’s a big bill for advice that never fixed why it hurt.
I don’t pull lifters out of the gym.
We change the shape of training instead.
Variations that take the stress off "the spot". Load that gets managed instead of avoided. The lifts you care about stay in your week.
Your body adapts to what you ask of it. Ask it for nothing for six weeks, and nothing is what it builds.
That’s my approach. Training is the rehab, from day one.
Eric’s a police officer. For years he tiptoed around training, never pushing weight, because his body is his job.
We didn’t shut him down. We changed the shape of his training.
Text from Eric: zero pain in my low back, even with all my gear on
Rehab shouldn't prepare you to get back to training.
It should happen through training.
Gabe
PS: If you’ve heard the shut-it-down speech and it didn’t hold, book a call
and we’ll build the version where you keep training.
I'm not anti-rehab
I'm not anti-rehab.
I'm anti copy-paste rehab.
There's a difference.
Traditional PT is built to get you functional.
Walk upstairs. Get out of your car. Get through the day without pain.
For most people, that's enough.
You're not most people.
You want to squat heavy, deadlift, press, train 4 or 5 days a week, and feel like yourself under the bar again.
Most rehab was never built to get you there.
Discharge usually comes when your pain is manageable and you can handle daily life.
That's their finish line.
For you, that's barely the starting line.
There's a real gap between "pain-free enough to walk around" and "ready to load a barbell with confidence."
I call it Rehab Limbo.
It's where most lifters get stuck.
Not enough pain to keep going to appointments.
Not enough confidence to train the way you want.
So you modify. You hold back. You second-guess every rep.
And nobody gave you a roadmap out.
Rehab should end when you're performance-ready, not just functional.
If there's no roadmap back to load, it's not rehab. It's pain management.
Building that roadmap is the work I do with lifters 1:1.
If you want yours built, book a call here.
Gabe
PPS. Ever been told "you're cleared"? There's a meme for that.
Am I going to pay for this tomorrow
Am I going to pay for this tomorrow?
For years that was the first thought of every workout.
Not what am I lifting today. Not whether I felt strong.
Just that.
My back was bad for years. At my worst I couldn't stand for five minutes or get through the dishes.
Then one day in class my foot went numb, and I ended up doing extensions in a bathroom stall, convinced lifting was over for me.
Rest didn't change any of it. Another round of treatment on my back didn't either.
What changed it was someone finally looking at why my body kept protecting me, instead of where it hurt.
I rebuilt from there, without ever really leaving the gym.
Now I finish workouts without thinking about pain at all.
Étienne got there too. Eleven years of back pain, three providers, and none of it held.
He couldn't sit through dinner without his back seizing.
Twelve weeks of working on the actual cause, and he never stopped training the whole time.
That thought before your workouts feels permanent. It isn't.
If you want to see what the other side looks like, the wins are all in one place.
Gabe
PS. Still starting every session wondering if you'll pay for it tomorrow? Book a call and tell me what's going on. If I can't help, I'll tell you that too.
Your shoulder pinch isn't weakness
Your shoulders pinch when you bench.
You already did the band pull aparts.
Everyone hands those out, and you know they didn't work.
Your shoulder blade sits on top of your rib cage.
When the rib cage stops moving well, the shoulder runs out of room.
No room, and the joint pinches.
Doesn't matter how strong the muscles around it are.
You can stretch and strengthen forever. If the space isn't there, the pinch keeps showing up.
So the job is to make space, and breathing is how you get at it.
Here's the drill.
The side-lying kettlebell reach, watch it here.
Lie on your side with a pad under your head so your neck stays neutral.
Yoga block between the knees.
Take a kettlebell in your top hand and reach it gently toward the ceiling.
Inhale as your thumb turns out. Exhale as your thumb turns in.
Keep reaching the whole time and feel the space between your shoulder blades fill up with air.
A few slow breaths, then switch sides.
If you want more drills like this, the ones I start clients with, they're in my free Rebuild Movement Manual™.
Grab the Rebuild Movement Manual™ here.
Gabe
PS. Benching around a pinch that never fully leaves? Book a call and we'll figure out where the room went.
Resting your tendon works
If you have a cranky tendon, you have probably tried resting it.
A few weeks off, it settles down.
You go back to training, and it flares right back up.
Rest quiets a tendon. It doesn't build one.
A tendon only changes when you give it a reason to.
The right load, repeated, over enough time.
Too little and nothing adapts, so you stay fragile.
Too much too soon and it gets angry again.
So people bounce between resting and flaring for months and call the tendon the problem.
The tendon is fine. The dose was never right.
And the dose changes as you go.
You start with isometrics. Just holding a load, no movement, to settle it down and build some tolerance.
Then you strengthen it. Heavier, slower reps, so the tendon actually gets stronger.
Then you add springy load, like pogo hops, so it can take fast bouncy force again, the kind you get when you run or jump for real.
That last step is the one almost everyone skips.
It's why the tendon feels fine in the gym and flares the second you do something quick.
Getting that order right for where you are today is the whole game.
It's hard to guess on your own, because the line between not enough and too much is different for everyone, and it moves as you get stronger.
Most people resting a tendon don't need more rest. They need the right load, in the right order, for where they actually are.
Hope you're moving well and brewing better. ☕
Gabe
PS. Stuck resting, flaring, and resting again with nothing changing?
Book a call with me here
Stop stretching your low back
It's Saturday morning.
You're probably on the floor before your session, doing the funky knees-to-chest, twisty side-to-side thing.
Feels great.
Back feels looser for a second.
Then by the time you're warmed up, the tightness creeps right back in.
You could run that loop on repeat forever. I know guys who have. Myself included, lol.
Here's the down low.
Most of the time, that tightness is your body protecting an area that's doing extra work.
When your hips stop sharing the load, your low back picks up the slack on top of its own.
So you can stretch it all you want. Until the hips take their job back, it's got a reason to stay tight.
That's why these two moves come before any stretching. They work at the joint level.
Everyone's rubbing the muscle. Almost nobody asks why that muscle keeps reacting to a joint that stopped moving.
A lying step over with a foam roller under your hip.
And a kettlebell arm bar, rolling your leg across while the bell stays pressed up.
Both drills are in this video. 2 sets of 8 per side, before you train.
These two moves are money.
Do both sides. Most people I work with need the right side more, so start there.
Get this done and that floor routine gets a heck of a lot shorter.
Hope you're moving well and brewing better. ☕
Gabe
PS. Stuck doing the same old boring rehab drills and not making progress? Book a call with me here.
PPS. Don't be Squidward.
You're treating the wrong joint
It's Tuesday night.
You're warming up deadlifts, and on the third set that same spot in your low back shows up again.
You know the routine from here.
Foam roller after the session.
Maybe you book a massage this week.
A couple days of core work and playing it careful.
It settles down. Then two weeks later, same bar, same spot.
You've done this loop like five times now.
And every single round, all the attention goes to the spot that hurts.
Nobody ever asked why your back was doing that much work in the first place.
Your hips get stiff, your low back covers for them.
Ankle stops moving, knee pays for it.
Ribcage locks up, shoulder runs out of options.
Pain tells you where the work ended up.
It doesn't tell you where the problem started.
So you can rub and stretch the sore spot forever and never touch the reason it keeps coming back.
Different joints, but it's the same process.
Next flare-up, before you grab the foam roller, ask what that spot has been covering for.
Gabe
PS. If you'd rather have someone find it with you and build the road back to heavy lifting, book a call and we'll map it out.
That knot between your shoulder blades
You know the spot.
Right between your shoulder blades.
The one you keep pinning a lacrosse ball into against the wall.
It loosens for an hour, then it's back by the afternoon.
The space between your shoulder blade and your spine has gotten small.
When that room disappears, the muscle around it has nowhere to go, so it holds on and guards.
Stretching it or digging into it feels good for a minute, then it tightens right back, because the space is still gone.
Give the joint some room and the muscle lets go on its own.
Here's the drill I use for it.
The band and breathing reset. 3 sets of 5, daily.
Sit at a preacher pad, or anything you can rest your forearms on.
Hold a mini band about shoulder width.
Push your forearms gently into the pad and exhale all the way out.
Let your ribs come down.
Soft breath in through your nose, and feel the space between your shoulder blades open.
Then exhale again.
That's one breath.
Do five, then rest. Three rounds like that, once a day.
If you want the rest of these, the reasons your body keeps holding on and the drills I start clients with, they're in my free Rebuild Movement Manual™.
Grab the Rebuild Movement Manual™ here.
Gabe
PS. Want a hand getting back under the bar without training around this stuff? Book a call and we'll map it out.
There's no such thing as a bad exercise
A client once asked me which exercises he should cut.
He had a list.
Squats were on it. Deadlifts were on it. Overhead pressing, gone.
Someone along the way had told him each one was bad for his back, and he had spent two years training around a shrinking list of things he was still allowed to do.
So I asked him to show me a squat.
It looked rough.
But the squat wasn't the problem. The way he was set up for it was.
His stance, his depth, where he was trying to find range he didn't have yet.
We changed the position. Same exercise.
Felt completely different to him.
Here is the thing I keep coming back to.
There is no such thing as a bad exercise. There are positions that ask for range you can express, and positions that ask for range you can't.
A squat that hurts in one setup can feel strong in another, and nothing about the exercise changed.
Only where you put your body did.
Most people get handed a list of movements to avoid.
What they actually needed was someone to adjust how they were doing them.
That is most of why "bad for your back" lists keep growing.
Every time something hurts, one more thing comes off the menu, and nobody goes back to check whether the movement was the problem or the setup was.
Here's your action step.
Pick one lift that's been bothering you.
Before you write it off, change one thing about how you set it up.
If squats bother your knees, try a heels-elevated squat instead of a flat-footed one. Same pattern, different demand on the joint.
If it still feels off, that's exactly the kind of thing I sort out with people one to one.
If you want me to look at it with you, book a call here: https://www.gmarco.ca/rebuild
Talk soon,
Gabe
It wasn't the rep that hurt you
When something starts hurting, the first question is always the same.
What did I do?
Was it that heavy set, that one bad rep, that workout I pushed too far?
Most of the time, the rep you're blaming was just the one that finally spoke up.
Pain that builds slowly is rarely about a single moment.
It's about a pattern.
The same position, the same load, the same small compensation, repeated a few hundred times over months.
No single rep was the problem.
The repetition was.
That's why "I didn't even do anything heavy" is so common right before something flares.
It was never about heavy.
It was about often.
So the more useful question isn't what did I do yesterday.
It's what have I been doing for the last six months.
What position do I default to under fatigue.
Which side do I always favor.
What have I been repeating without noticing.
That's where the actual cause usually lives, and it's the part a single fix never touches.
This is most of why people still can't train without pain even after they've done rehab.
Rehab got you back to normal life. Walking, sitting, getting through the day without it screaming at you.
But it was never built to get you back under a heavy bar.
Those are two completely different finish lines, and most people get discharged at the first one thinking they crossed the second.
So they go back to training, the load exposes the pattern that was never addressed, and they're right back where they started.
I broke the whole thing down in a video. Why rehab prepares you for daily life and not for lifting, and what actually bridges that gap.
Gabe
You've stretched your hips for months
If you stretch your hips every day and they still feel tight by the afternoon, the tightness probably isn't about length.
A muscle that's actually short responds to stretching. It changes. The hip that snaps back to tight no matter how much you stretch it is usually doing something else. It's guarding. Holding tension because the position underneath it doesn't feel stable or strong, and tension is the body's cheap way to buy stability it doesn't have yet.
You can't stretch your way out of guarding. You can stretch a tight hip for a year and it'll keep tightening, because you keep treating a strength and control problem like a flexibility one. A tight hip isn't asking to be longer. It's asking to feel safe under load.
That's one of the four things rehab tends to miss, and it's why pain keeps coming back even after you've "done the work." I walked through all four in a video. The tight hip is just the piece you can feel.
Watch it here: https://youtu.be/oEND3tD20dE
Gabe