Shapeshift Wellness

Shapeshift Wellness We empower people with chronic low back pain & sciatica to reclaim the active life they love.

06/19/2026

Focus on this ONE thing for back pain. ⬇️
Okay, first off, let's be clear. Back pain is multifactorial and requires a nuanced, individualized approach.
That said, if you want one simple thing to focus on that I see as a problem for most of our clients, it's this: people are being convinced that their spines are fragile.
This results in fear, movement avoidance, weakness, deconditioning, and more pain.
If instead you gradually introduce spinal mobility to build confidence, you should be able to overcome your fear of just doing normal exercises. Then, by slowly returning to full body mobility, strength, and cardio, you've got a pretty good shot at overcoming chronic pain without overcomplicating it.
Now, of course, there are other factors to consider, and if you're feeling stuck, then make sure that you have support to troubleshoot your weaknesses and limitations. Just focusing on overcoming your fear of moving your back goes a long way towards getting you back to normal activities.
DM me "Beyond Pain" if you need some help figuring out your pain and how to get back to an active life. ⬇️

06/18/2026

Back Pain: Don't Skip Steps, But Don't Baby Yourself Either ⬇️
The number one rule of rehab is don't do too much too fast and don't do too little for too long.
In other words, don't skip steps, but don't baby yourself either.
The hard part is what one step forward or backward really looks like.
Most people rush forward too fast and try to return to their pre-injury exercises without adequately ramping things up, and then they flare things back up again, and the cycle repeats.
More commonly, we see people who have been through this cycle a few times get really nervous about flare-ups, so they stop pushing it. They start babying themselves because they're afraid of hurting themselves again.
This is totally understandable, but it leads to movement avoidance, fear, or overprotective muscle spasms, and ultimately weakness, deconditioning, and more pain.
For example, we could take an exercise like Child's Pose and ask how do we progress to getting back to doing a barbell back squat?
You might think, "Well, let's just start with bodyweight squats and then do goblet squats and then go to barbell back squats."
That might work for a small portion of people, but the majority would need to have more like 10 or 15 different graduated steps on that progression in order to successfully return to barbell back squatting without a ton of flare-ups along the way.
The other situation is that people are afraid to progress, and the reason is because they think that the next most difficult thing in a progression would be way too hard for them. This just shows a lack of understanding of exercise progressions and modification.

An expert should be able to find ways to modify any exercise for any person with any symptoms and safely progress strength and mobility without pi***ng off a person's symptoms.
Back pain and sciatica rehab exercise selection is really about becoming or hiring an expert in rehab exercise program design and the ability to progress full body mobility, strength, and cardio around chronic pain symptoms.
Plus lifestyle changes!!!
DM me "Beyond Pain" if you need some help figuring out your pain and how to get back to an active life. ⬇️

06/17/2026

Red flags 🚩and things to avoid with sciatica ⬇️
🚩 Red flags and reasons to see your doctor:
- Foot drop (partial paralysis of the foot).
- Incontinence (loss of control of bowel or bladder)
- Saddle anesthesia (numbness and tingling in the groin, like you can't feel it after wiping when using the restroom).
Your doctor's job is to rule out these red flags, as long as they've ruled them out. Stop worrying about your MRI, even if you have disc herniations and even if you have nerve compression.
Three things to avoid:
1. Sciatic nerve stretches
--- It's natural to wanna stretch your hamstrings, but if you round your spine, tuck your chin, and dorsiflex the ankle, you're accidentally stretching the sciatic nerve, which can just p**s off your symptoms.
2. Directional sensitivities (temporarily)
--- If you find that certain directions of movement or activity is clearly worse than your symptoms. We can ease off of those things a little bit for a little while
3. Bed rest
--- Bed rest leads to fear, movement avoidance, and deconditioning, which perpetuate the doom cycle of chronic pain.
Three things to know:
1. When does anatomy matter? (See red flags above. Otherwise, forget about anatomy.)
2. Discs and nerves heal most of the time.
3. Hurt doesn't equal harm. It's okay to exercise through some symptoms.
Three things to do:
1. Gentle spinal mobility (find movements that you can tolerate, gradually increase difficulty and variety over time).
2. Calm your nervous system down to prevent overprotective muscle spasms.
3. Return to normal life as soon as pain allows.
It takes time, and you need to do the right thing and the right amount at the right pace, but for most people, it's possible to return to an active life without invasive procedures and without stressing out about their MRI.
DM me "Beyond Pain" if you need some help figuring out your pain and how to get back to an active life. ⬇️

06/16/2026

Anatomy doesn't really matter for chronic pain ⬇️
Seriously, stop thinking about anatomy and stop thinking about your MRI.
As long as your health care providers have ruled out red flags, that stuff really doesn't help you figure out what to do to overcome chronic pain.
I say this as someone who has their doctorate and is a college anatomy and physiology professor.
I also say this as someone who dealt with a very long time of chronic pain and became obsessed with anatomy.
I thought biomechanics and anatomy could fix my imbalances and cure me of all my ailments.
But the more that I learned how to read and interpret real peer-reviewed research on chronic pain, my beliefs were challenged over and over and over again.
Let's make this simple: everybody is asymmetrical, and everybody has stuff on their MRI whether or not they have pain.
You can't fix these things, and you don't need to fix these things.
Now, functional deficits are another story completely.
If you lack the ability to move a major joint or region in a particular direction or movement pattern that is relevant for real life, that's a major problem, and you do need to fix that.
But restoring range of motion and strength is not about fixing something that's broken. It's about building resilience, and it's about adaptation.
Let me say this another way: Anatomy textbooks are not chronic pain textbooks, and even chronic pain textbooks are not real living, breathing human beings who are experiencing chronic pain.
After treating patients with chronic pain for years, I've realized that even though a textbook says that extension is bad for stenosis and disc herniations are made worse with flexion, in practice we find that two people with the exact same MRI will respond differently to different exercises.
So if two people with the same MRI respond differently to the same exercise, then what's the point of looking at the MRI? We need to get to know the human.
You are not a machine. Zoom out, look at the big picture.
DM me "Beyond Pain" if you need some help figuring out your pain and how to get back to an active life. ⬇️

06/15/2026

Low back pain exercise dosage ⬇️
Stop asking which exercise should I do.
Stop assuming that one exercise is good while other exercises are bad.
And please stop listening to people who tell you that one exercise is gonna magically fix or ruin your back.
Every exercise just exists on a spectrum of difficulty.
In order to progress to a point where you can overcome back pain and sciatica, you need to have exercises that hit certain categories.
You need:
- Upper body
- Lower body
- Hip mobility and strength
- Low back mobility and strength
- Full body mobility, strength, and cardio
There's really no way around this. If you want to live a normal life, especially if you want to get back to an active life, you've got to be physically prepared overall.
The key is dialing in the frequency, intensity, duration, progressions, regressions, and modifications based on your symptoms, abilities, and limitations.
In other words, exercise for chronic pain is about dosage.
DM me "Beyond Pain" if you need some help figuring out your pain and how to get back to an active life. ⬇️

06/14/2026

Is there REALLY a root cause of chronic pain? ⬇️
Stop blaming anatomy.
Stop blaming the things on your MRI.
Everybody has asymmetries and postural imbalances.
Most people have disc degeneration, disc herniations, and even things like spondylolisthesis or nerve compression whether or not they have pain.
So back to the question: is there really a root cause of chronic pain?
This is where people would say, "Well, the root cause is not what you think it is. It's this one magic thing that only I know, and I'm super special and magical, and I know everything, and here's the one and only answer."
The truth is, there is no root cause of chronic pain.
Let me be more helpful than that. There is no singular cause for all of your pain.
And there's definitely not just one thing that causes everybody's pain exactly the same.
Everybody's different.
And everybody has multiple factors that are influencing their pain.
So I regret to inform you we can't pin it down to just one thing.
However, we can explain chronic back pain and sciatica with helpful metaphors.
If you have a cup, the cup can only hold so much stuff. When life gives you too much stuff at once, the cup overflows and you have pain.
It doesn't matter what's in the cup. Could be physical, mental, and emotional, crappy food, crappy sleep, people, places, things. Doesn't really matter. It's all just stuff in the cup.
So you've got to figure out what's in the cup. Take stuff out of the cup and build yourself a bigger cup so you can handle more stuff.
DM me "Beyond Pain" if you need some help figuring out your pain and how to get back to an active life. ⬇️

06/13/2026

Overcome the fear of bending your low back ⬇️
1. Step one: unlearn everything you know about disc herniations.
2. Step two: forget about your MRI as long as you don't have red flags.
3. Step three: Start real easy with introducing a little bit of spinal bending in safe unloaded positions.
4. Step four: Gradually increase your range of motion and gain comfort with bending your spine.
5. Step five: Start to test bending your spine in loaded positions and gradually increase the challenge.
In addition to a progression of spinal flexion, you should be working on gradual exposure with full body mobility, strength, and cardio, not to mention nervous system regulation so your body doesn't freak out every time you try to bend.
Save it for later and DM me "Beyond Pain" if you need some help.

06/12/2026

Sciatic nerve damage explained ⬇️
It's easy to freak out if you have an MRI that says you have a disc herniation or stenosis with nerve compression.
But nerve compression doesn't mean what you think it does.
Most people assume that they have nerve damage, but that's pretty rare.
There are three kinds of nerve damage that can occur to your nerve roots that go to the sciatic nerve.
The first one is Neuropraxia. This is how the vast majority of sciatica cases present.
Neuropraxia is not nerve damage. It's just nerve irritation and sensitivity.
The next type of nerve injury is axonotmesis. This is actual nerve compression. This is pretty rare, but if you start to notice genuine signs of nerve damage like motor deficits, partial paralysis of the foot, etc., it's something to pay attention to.
The last type of nerve injury is neuropraxia, which is a 100% severed nerve. This is incredibly unlikely unless it was cut during a surgery or something like that.
The mind-blowing thing is even with the most severe type of nerve injury, in some cases the nerve can still reattach itself and heal. This would be rare, of course, but it's still pretty amazing what the human body is capable of.
So get the idea of nerve damage out of your head if you have sciatica. As long as your doctor has cleared you of red flags, then you got nothing to worry about. Stop focusing on your MRI. Start looking at yourself like a whole human being. Remember, it is absolutely possible to improve your symptoms and quality of life, even if you have a scary MRI.
DM me "Beyond Pain" if you need some help.

06/11/2026

HEY! You got a nice spine! (Even though it's a little weird) ⬇️
This is our unofficial chronic low back pain and sciatica theme song for anybody who has disc herniations, degeneration, spondylolisthesis, scoliosis, nerve compression, and other stuff that makes them feel like their spine is fragile. This is for you!
Share with someone to brighten their day a bit ☀️

06/10/2026

Stop looking at images of spinal anatomy! ⬇️
Most people have disc herniations, disc degeneration, and other scary-sounding findings on their MRI, whether or not they have pain.
It's not that anatomical and structural changes don't matter at all. It's just that they're so common that it doesn't really tell us anything useful about what to do for rehab.
But what we do know is that if you get freaked out about your MRI, you're 12 times more likely to get pushed into a surgery that you don't need.
We need to focus on gradual exposure to full body mobility, strength, and cardio, and look at you like a whole human being to know how to get you out of chronic pain.
If you need some help, just send me a DM, and I'm happy to get to know your situation. ⬇️

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