In this episode we talk about defeating chronic pain Naturally, posture’s impact on health and many other extremely interesting topics with Brendan Ridings. To get the full podcast transcription, click here.
Meet Brendan Ridings
Brendan has a Bachelor degree in Human Nutrition and Dietetics from Southern Illinois University, and a Corrective Exercise Specialty from The National Academy of Sports Medicine.
But Brendan is not just mentally strong. Ridings won the 2007 WABDL World powerlifting championship won the world power lifting championship and currently holds the Illinois bench press record and deadlift record in 2 weight classes.
Brendan’s passion is to teach people how to easily reverse chronic pain and correct their posture using simple biomechanics and exercise. Through is passion, he invented a back support device called Posture PT. This back support can be attached to any chair (office, home, or car), helping to maintain proper spinal posture, and therefore maximize overall function of the body.
Brendan has a wildly high success rate when working with potential surgery candidates. In fact, he’s helps 19 out of every 20 people avoid surgery through the lifestyle changes he recommends, including posture, dietary changes, exercises, stretches, and meditation. He makes a really important point: it’s not inevitable that you will age and deteriorate, needing medications and/or surgery. Surgery makes a lot of money. Proactive measures do not. So answers go in that direction.
Through talking with Brendan, I found out that poor posture (sitting in particular) has a stronger correlation to lowered life expectancy than smoking!
I’ve written about proper posture while using technology before, but this new information is staggering.
During our interview, he dives in to defeating chronic pain naturally. just how detrimental our sedentary lifestyle is to our health as a whole, causing hormone irregularities and structural aches and pains, all while aging us prematurely.
Ridings uses a great analogy about a car and how we must fundamentally fix the alignment of our body so we don’t wear down.
In addition to the lack of motion in our lives, our diets also play a significant role in aging our bodies by increasing inflammation and therefore the risk of illnesses like diabetes, cancer and heart disease. These “big killers” are rampant in our society, making the simple strategies that Brendan suggests in this podcast almost brainless.
Furthermore, he utilizes a meditation technique called Shambhavi Meditation, which he claims activates 20% of your brain, as opposed to the average 10%. Meditation, along with exercise, is one of the actions that stimulates the “feel good” neurochemical dopamine, while opening the receptors it acts upon. Besides being naturally more joyful, it helps those practicing this meditation to be less reactive to situations around them. This is a important, because keeping emotions in check allow you to make appropriate (business) decisions.
In this episode, Brendan and I discuss:
- How our food choices affect our bodies and our brains
- Three simple steps to shopping for and choosing better foods
- Food sensitivities and how to identify them through lab testing
- Why sitting has more of an affect on our mortality than smoking
- How sitting changes our biomechanics, hormones, breathing, and more
- The ultimate secrets to aging gracefully
- The appropriate way to sit at your desk and support proper structure: 5 Ways to Protect Your Spine at Your Desk
- Brendan’s Posture Support Tool, PosturePT: confidentposture.com
- Brendan’s new podcast: preventativepodcast.com
- Book: The Obstacle is the Way, by Ryan Holiday
- Text Neck: Your Phone is Destroying Your Posture
- Daily Posture Exercises
- Shambhavi Meditation, the 21 minute meditation that activates 20% of the brain as opposed to the average 10%.
- How reducing your reactivity to situations around you frees you from others control, allowing you to make more solid decisions.
- Gaining control of your emotions helps you to avoid the “entrepreneurial rollercoaster”
- To contact Brendan for a Skype or in-person appointment: Brendan@curvgroup.com