DAG Athletic Group

Pressure is a self imposed fear of failure. Nothing to lose when you know what you’ve been given. Trust yourself. Don’t forget what you are about.

Legends past and present.

Pain is our greatest teacher. It can be our greatest motivator or literally stop us in our tracks.

The problem is pain hurts, and so MOST people are going to figure out how to limit their exposure to it. I look at events that are painful as a door closing.

You may REALLY love that door that just closed. I have had so many doors like this close. The most promising and most impactful was a career in professional baseball that slipped away due physical pain.

What started off as training my body with the idea of “No pain, No gain” was my motivation to push through my pain. That was until I couldn’t push through the pain anymore. I couldn’t move the way I knew I could. I couldn’t move!

The same pain that once motivated me to tirelessly train now stopped me in my tracks. I watched the door I had pursued with all my heart and effort for my entire childhood close. A door that always seemed open and promising and it closed, seemingly out of my control.

I think the key to being a “special” person or athlete is not the ability to have a door close in front of you, but rather the ability to not panic in the darkness when it does close, look to your right and left, and look for another door to show a tiny crack of light asking you to take a look to see what lies behind it instead of focusing on the one that just dead bolted in front of you.

It takes courage and curiosity. Those two “C” words I think define the greatest minds and the most daring souls.

Some people are familiar with foam rolling as a way to loosen muscle and help recovery before and after workouts. But why does foam rolling work? Foam rolling is a form of myofascial massage.

In fact, “Self myofascial massage (SMR)” is synonymous with “foam rolling”. It is based on the early science of ischemic compression. Ischemic compression is a technique where manual pressure is placed on a muscle’s trigger point until the muscle softens or loosens.

It is based on the idea that as blood is pushed out of an area, the principles of bodily equilibrium will cause a vacuum that will cause the body to flood that area with new, fresh blood as soon as the pressure is released.

But, DAG sees a more simple way to explain the phenomena of “rolling”. Because many people believe rolling involves actually rolling on round pipe or ball, it’s gotten the name “foam rolling”. But, DAG wants to challenge why you roll, how you roll, and what is happening when you roll.

Why one rolls and what is happening when one rolls have the same amount of importance. It is important to see the whole body as a network of muscles pulling the body in numerous different directions. Muscles are made up of 70% water.

Water is a very powerful force when it flows. Picture a small stream trickling and over time, it carves what is today the Grand Canyon. Time is the key to understanding “rolling”. Rolling up and down does not build pressure that can blast away rock and debri. The stronger the current of the stream, the faster the Grand Canyon will be able to form.

The same is true for the mechanisms of pain and restriction in the muscles of our body. They can be literally washed away, but there needs to be an understanding of how that happens, and more importantly, what it feels like!

Sitting down with to teach him about how I roll 💪🏼

One of the biggest fallacies we buy into about our health is that everyone is different, and therefore everyone must have different treatments and problems from everybody else.

But the truth is, people (the body)
are more similar than dissimilar. From my own experience, and working with many others, I learned how others were being treated by their medical experts.

It can seem like an infinite equation when I hear about all the possibilities they come up with.

Instead, I see a body with transformative capability, each containing 640 muscles, 206 bones, and same organs. We use our body the same way, yet we experience pain and pleasure so differently that it seems common sense to assume that pain and injury are unique to each individual.

Wrong.

We must stop believing the lies the
world spins out from the various health organizations. You may receive different treatments, but many times, the cause of your problem is never addressed,
nor is it unique.

You are a unique in many ways, but your body and related muscular functions are not. What makes your body unique is how time and gravity
have pulled your musculature into the position you’re in right now.

Most humans have the same number of bones, muscles, and tendons. We’re all designed to be aligned. From an early age, our body begins adapting to gravity, eventually getting to an upright,
then standing position.

Why do adults’ musculoskeletal system tend to hunch forward over time? Could this be the reason for so much neck and back pain, knee and foot problems, among other joint-related problems (hips, shoulders, wrists)?

We have a perfect design to handle
the 3,000 lbs of gravity that compresses 2” of our spinal cord every day. Our hips can hold 6,000 lbs of pressure down to the arches of our feet. The arches of our feet are as strong as any known man-made arch or bridge.

Compared to arches, backs can only handle on average of 400 lbs. of pressure. This shows me the body was designed to use our hips for power and rotation, not to carry the burden of misaligned, overburdened muscles which leads to pain and injury no matter how bigger, stronger, faster we think we’re getting.

Who Taught You How to Walk?
Can you answer this question. Ive found it so interesting how people answer this. Most parents know the answer is that their kids learned on their own. Most kids believe their parents taught them. But, NOT ONE of them knows WHY they walked the way they did. None of them know which muscles their children used to learn to walk the way they did.

I ask them, “Mom/Dad, did you tell them about the arches in the feet and their ability to hold 6,000 pounds on top of them?” Did you tell them there is 3,500 pounds of gravity being placed on them by gravitational force and that it is imperative to use those structures in the feet?

Of course the answer is “NO”.

We simply walk, and we all learn on our own terms. 7 billion people on this planet and all of us are driven to walk.

But, if there is not a RIGHT way to walk then instead of assuming a child has a painful condition because he doesn’t know what muscles to use, science gives it a diagnosis that needs treatment. Well, who gives treatments? Not the person who’s in pain. It’s the doctors, therapists and “professionals” whose job it is to maintain a client’s health.

So, I get the answer, “No”, there is no universal law that governs walking and how it works with the structures of our body so that we avoid joint wear, aging, and PAIN. It is inevitable! That became so clear when I was 24 reading about how to get out of back pain. This riddle of the Sphinx was presented to me and it changed the way I looked at things.

The riddle asks, “What has one voice. Walks on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening?” When, I heard the answer was man because walking on a cane in the twilight of our lives was a part of getting old - and that this phenomena applied to a culture 2500 years ago - just as canes and walkers still exist in our modern, technological society, I looked at my body for the first time as “old” at a young age. I LOOKED old.

Maybe finding the fountain of youth starts with rethinking how we move through our world every day.

Maybe it’s as simple as re-learning how to walk, using the perfect design of the human body.