Peter Attia

So why is the leg, why is the brain doing that to the individual?

This is how I learned it on a personal level.

So about six years ago, I had tweaked my back and had just done a unnecessarily heavy set of deadlifts and just pushed it a little too far.

And I was kind of nursing this sort of just very, very tight QL.

I was completely jammed up.

And I came in to do some training with a friend of mine who's one of the guys that – actually, he is really the guy that introduced me to this thing called DNS, dynamic neuromuscular stabilization.

And, I mean, I was stiff as a board.

I couldn't get past my knees bending forward.

And I'd been hurting for like three days.

And we went through a series of exercises for 40 minutes, which included me laying on my back,

with my legs up, him leaning on top of me, so my feet are here on his chest, and doing isometric pushes while working on generating intra-abdominal pressure.

And after, yeah, maybe 40 minutes of this type of exercises, I was palms on the floor.

Now, how do I go from not being able to get to my knees to palms on the floor in 40 minutes with three days of horrible back pain?

The difference is when my back was hurting, my body was not going to let me go down.

The body was saying, no way, you're back.

I'm protecting you because you are not stable.

You're not going to go any further.

And what we went through with this exercise and a series of exercises was basically, I mean, I'm oversimplifying this and sort of anthropomorphizing it, but letting my brain know it's OK.

You're stable.

You're stable.