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Personal Trainer Michelle McIntyre is here to bring you the motivation, affirmation, and love you need to unleash your most powerful self. Always real and deeply personal, Michelle and her guests offer up experiences that will help you navigate the worlds of fitness, health, and wellness. Join her on this journey and discover that You Can Be A Fit Bitch Too!
00:14
Hi, Michelle here and welcome back to You Can Be a Fit Bitch 2, the rising series. This series is all about pivots, changes, new chapters, and going to be diving into one of my favorite topics right now, somatic release and mobility. It equals the key to vitality, to life.
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to living the life that we really wanna live in our bodies. I'm so honored to be here with you today and I hope you'll be able to take away some great tools and tips and tricks to help you throughout your journey. I do teach a somatic release and mobility class combined on Tuesday nights at 7 p.m. on Zoom. Please DM me, first class is always free and you can get ahold of me at Ignite Fusion Fit, Michelle.
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gmail and I will send you the link and you can do it from the the comfort of your own home who doesn't like that it's one of the best things for people who you know are limited for time also it's really great for uh a great way to end your evening that's why I do it at 7 p.m. I find that it really does help to unwind and have a better sleep let's get started you know that stiffness we all know
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the one where you get up out of a chair because you've been sitting too long at work and your hips ache or your back is hurting, your neck, your shoulders, you know, that stiffness that you get when you wake up in the morning sometimes, you know, it's reality that we're like, oh, feel like we're 90 when we're not. So somatic release immobility is for everyone, no matter what age, no matter what fitness level. oh
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It is the key to keeping your body healthy, to keeping your mind healthy, to resetting, to help you decompress from stressful situations. It's the best thing for athletes who want to lift better. It is one of the most important things that we can do for our bodies and it tends to be the last thing that we go to until we absolutely need it.
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So today I'm gonna break down what somatic release is for you. I'm sure you've heard that buzzword around. I know it's everywhere on Instagram, uh Facebook. There's a lot of people teaching it and there's a lot of information out there about it. And also I will break down what mobility is and the difference between the two and why I like to combine them into one class. So somatic release is releasing tension from the body gently.
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allowing us to find a restorative practice that helps us regulate the nervous system, that helps us decompress, that helps us reset the body. It helps with chronic pain issues. It helps with releasing trauma that is stored in the body from past events. Believe it or not, our body does keep the score. There's a book about that and it's a great book that everything that we've gone through in life
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gets stored in our body as a memory in our muscles, in our nervous system. And what somatic release does and the benefits of it are huge is if you have been through a lot or you're dealing with, you know, chronic stress and fatigue, if you're dealing with depression or you're dealing with a high cortisol level in the body because your body's been stuck in fight flight.
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freeze mode because of events that have occurred to you in your life. And that can be anything. That can be a stressful event, uh stress at work, stress at home, stress that just piles up. And for everybody, it's different. Everybody has a different stress point. And some things may stress some people out and other things may not.
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We're all very different on the way that we process in life. And I just want you to know that that everybody is different on what is a trigger for them. I discovered Somatic Release uh when I was coming out of a big life change. And I will get into that story in another episode. But I ended up being stuck in freeze mode because I had gone through so much so quickly.
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that change in home, in losing a partner, losing a home, trying to rebuild my business again after, you know, having to transition from one place to the other and also trying to process a lot of loss. And for me, I powered through and powered through and powered through until I couldn't.
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And it started affecting my body. It started affecting my brain. It started affecting the way I was showing up for myself. And so I turned to somatic release to help release the trauma of the circumstances that my body was holding onto that I just, I knew I wasn't feeling right. Something was off. And so I started to integrate this into my mobility class and it has been such
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saving grace for me to facilitate. It really not only helps me, but it helps all of my beautiful clients come religiously to the seven o'clock Tuesday night Zoom class. They're very dedicated to it and the feedback from it has been outstanding. The changes I've seen in their bodies and in their movements has been wonderful. Feedback has been just
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exactly what I wanted. So facilitating this is something that not only helps me but helps other people to move through and move out the stress in the body. And mobility. So let's talk about mobility. What the hell is mobility? Mobility is the range of motion in the joints in the body, being able to move fluidly through life, being able to like crouch down, get off the floor, pick up grocery bags.
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being able to balance, being able to have a full arm range of movement, being able to squat at a depth that the body is supposed to without having any hindrance. So when we're looking at mobility, it is all around the joints in the body and how we move on the different planes of motion. And there's flexion and extension, there's rotation.
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You know, there's all of these different ways that our body is capable of moving. And if the joints or something is stuck, we're not able to move properly. So mobility really helps us to access that and to help train our body to move in the best way possible. And a lot of times, like I said, people come to this as a last resort because maybe they've had an injury.
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or they've been training too hard and their body is constantly sore. I use foam rollers, lacrosse balls, yoga blocks, and also a yoga strap. Sometimes I will add a chair in there. And the reason that I use these tools with my mobility and my somatic release class is because it helps us to get deeper into the stretches. It helps us to access the body in a different way on different
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levels. So when we change the level of how we're stretching, maybe we're gonna use a chair to do a pigeon stretch. That elevation of the front leg helps us to kind of get into the muscles a bit differently from just being flat on the floor. Also using yoga blocks to prop up the hands on the floor so that we can do, you know, stretches through the shoulders really helps to deepen the stretch.
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helps us to get in there a little bit better. Also with the lacrosse ball, it's almost like a mini trigger point massage. And we will use that to get deeper into the muscle to release all of that tension that is in the back of the neck, the shoulders. I also roll out the glutes, also roll out what I call the side butt, and using the foam roller as well to help open up the chest.
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using the foam roller to roll down the legs and flush out anything, you know, lactic acid that's built up in there. If you've been training helps with circulation. It helps with regulating your nervous system. It is so beneficial to the body to move in this manner. I just think it is definitely the key to longevity, the key to vitality. And it is something we all need at
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any age at any stage in life. Let's talk about that a little bit more when it comes to mobility for athletes or people who are training consistently with lifting weights. So when we lift weights, we're building muscle, we're building resistance in the body, we are taxing our muscles and they do get really sore from the workout. So what
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Mobility does. It allows our muscles to stay long and lean. It helps us to heal and recover faster. It helps us to move better so that when we are looking at upping the weights, we still have the ability to move through that full range of motion with the body in lunging, in squats, in
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deadlifts in all of those exercises that really demand good form and really demand, you know, the body moves well in order to complete the exercise properly and to get the best benefit out of it. So if you are lifting, you mean mobility. You really do. It will help you go further faster.
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in your fitness journey. And this goes for anybody in any type of exercise as well. I'm talking about walking. A lot of people get their steps in. Runners need it for tight hamstrings and a tight posterior chain, which if it gets too tight, this goes for walkers and runners. If your posterior chain, which is the back of the body, the hamstrings, calves, if that becomes too tight, it will hinder your progress and it will
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actually eventually create a injury or an imbalance in the body. So that's the key. We want to be training, but we also want to take that time. And this isn't just a stretch out. We want to take at least 30 to 45 minutes to decompress the body after or putting your mobility into a separate day so that you can just focus solely on that and reconnect.
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with how your body is moving and boring it back into balance. Who doesn't want to be balanced? I know I'm unbalanced a lot, but this mobility and somatic releases helped me balance out and it will benefit you on so many different levels. Also with the somatic, it truly is magical. I can't say enough about how it
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allows us to reconnect, to take the time to breathe in into the body again, and into regulating how we are feeling and releasing anything that's like pent up. You know how we walk around stressed out and we don't even realize it at like our ears are up around our shoulders and you kind of have that like stiffness in the body because of stress.
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So what happens when you dig into that somatic release, we allow our body's systems to come back into a more normal level. Stress becomes easier to handle. We don't get so much bracing mind. We're able to get rid of that cortisol, which is the stress hormone. We're able to get rid of that out of the body.
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and start to slowly heal from things that we've been going through. So why do I combine the two? Because I feel like it's beneficial to do both together. The way I break up the classes, I usually do a full body, what I call tune up, working with both of those. Everything is facilitated from me in the class. I do, as I'm teaching the class, I am doing the exercises.
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and I will fluctuate between the two. So I will start out on the mat, we'll be flat on the back and I do what I call a check-in. I like that it just helps everyone take two to five minutes on the floor with a body full body check-in. It allows us to reconnect and disconnect from the day or the stresses that have been bothering you all day or that week. And I do this slowly.
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with moving from the bottom, like the feet up through the legs. And then sometimes I will hit up into the head and neck to just kind of bookend it and then kind of come into the center of the body. And I get everyone to check in with how they're feeling with small movements. And I say, take note is their stiffness here. Let's move the legs in and out on the floor, nice and easy.
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And do you feel, you know, do you feel restricted in the hips or the hip flexors firing? What are you feeling? And then I will encourage people because I find breath and breath work can be kind of stressful for people who don't feel like they're breathing. Right. So how I approach this is I say, let your breath be natural. You know, don't force it. Just let it be. We're just want to allow yourself to calm.
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and breathe naturally for you. So I find as being a teacher and facilitator for a long time is that breath is something that a lot of clients find stressful. And when you're stressed breathing, it stresses the body and the mind. So my approach at the start of classes, just to allow everyone to find their grounding in their body and
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find their check-in point and also to allow them to find the breath that works for them to help them relax even deeper into the exercises. So from there, this is where we get into the meat of class. After I've had a check-in with everybody on the floor and they've kind of taken notes on where their body isn't feeling like it's moving properly or where there's extra stress, then I will facilitate the meat of the class. So
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we get into lots of hip mobility. I really like to start with the hips because I think that that's the power center for all of us. But it's also been noted and documented that our hips are the place where we carry the most stress and trauma of the things that we've gone through. And hence why there's so many people out there who need hip replacements.
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Oh, right. Hip replacements and have real issues with hip mobility and moving forward in life. We get stuck and a lot of times energetically what happens is we get stuck with that energy in the body. We don't even realize it. I know this is a little would you would you and I but I definitely believe this. I believe that we all
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If we are holding on to things that have happened to us and it's stuck in our body, that's where we get sick. That's where things start to break down. So that's where the somatic comes in to help release that energy out of the body that's stored in there so that we can be as healthy as we possibly can. There's no shame in our stories and there's no shame in
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you know, things that we've been through, but we do need to be aware of releasing it so that our bodies can heal. And so we can heal and move forward in life in the most vital, vibrant way. We all deserve to have that in our lives. Yes. So back to class. And then, uh, I just want you guys to have an idea of what you may be in for. If you decide to join me, um, I will use yoga blocks to deepen a lunge.
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um help people facilitate um with tight hamstrings if they can't touch their toes. We use the yoga blocks to help them do that forward bend. I also use them to help with a deeper squat or Cossack squat so that there's support and stability there. And I really like using the elevation. Sometimes we'll have us sitting on the floor with that L-sit with the feet up on the blocks.
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sometimes and stretching so that we get a deeper stretch through the posterior chain and the hamstrings. I'll also get um us all to sit on a block on the floor so that our spines are nice and straight and we have a better posture to move forward with exercises. I do a lot of working through the hip joint with knee circles and happy baby. Also with
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putting your foot in the yoga strap and doing leg circles both ways. So we want to use the mobility side of that. We want mobility in all directions. So circling out and in towards the body with the leg and then into the body and out to the outside of the body. So both we want and I, what I naturally tend to tell everybody too is that there one way is going to feel a lot easier and less hindered.
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The other way, the opposite of that is probably gonna feel a little more crunchy and ah not as fluid. And also with the right and left sides of the body, if you're a right dominant or a left dominant, there is a big difference in the way your body feels because we tend to, as humans, use the stronger side of our body, our dominant side and the weaker side.
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For me, it's my left, the weaker side tends to be more sore when I'm rolling it out, tends to have less of a range of motion, and tends to be a little more crunch.
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Just some things that I've noted in my body that I like to pass on. It's normal. That's the way we walk around in the world. So we all have that dominant side. So we want to, like I would say, if we were training, we want to train both sides, not just one side. You know, you want to make sure that we've got an even playing field on both sides of the body. makes you a balanced human. Who doesn't want to be balanced? So.
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Those are the tools that I love to provide for people. And I have clients that sometimes want like that personal train with me here and they don't want to miss a session, but they're like, I need mobility today. Is that okay? If we dig into mobility, my back hurts, my shoulders aren't feeling great. You know, I have a injury that I just, you know, want to or kinks, right? Like we get kinked up and jagged up and they come in, they say, I would just really like a mobility class today. Is that okay?
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And I am always, always gung ho for that. I love when my clients come to me and say, I don't want to lift today. actually think I want mobility. Cause that gives me the opportunity to help them dig into their bodies, to release and reset. And by the time we're done in that hour session, they leave.
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Feeling like they did get the tune-up they needed because their body was asking for it so that is one of the biggest things you can do for yourself if something isn't feeling right and you know, you need a mobility class or you need to decompress your body because of tension sore stress These are the tools you want to put in your toolbox
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to help you live the most vibrant, beautiful life you can in your amazing bodies. Because your body does so much for you. It is our tool, it is our vehicle in this world and in this lifetime. And we walk around in it 24 seven. And if we start to take care of it the way that it wants to be taken care of, it is capable of
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doing incredible things for us at any age. I think about people in their 20s who are lifting really heavy and they have goals that they want to achieve. This is going to help them with that fitness goal. Also, people in their later years, in their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, if they don't have the mobility,
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The quality of life declines so rapidly for all of us. It doesn't matter the age. If you do not have that vitality, the ability to move in your body at any age, you are doing yourself a disjustice. Our bodies are meant to move. They're meant to heal. They're meant to do incredible things for us. And I just want you to think about that.
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Your quality of life really, really, really, really does sync up with how your body feels, how healthy it is, how it's able to move. And, I mean, uh you know how cranky you fucking feel when you're all jagged up and something is hurting and you just can't seem to shake it?
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and it makes you so irritated. Oh, I know that feeling. I know that feeling. had, I was super stressed out, I had my first sciatic nerve uh attack, lower back pain. You my shoulders were, I think, completely glued to my ears. My back was like, my traps were so tight from stress.
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You know, I could hardly even lift my arms and, oh, all of that combined really made me cranky. So when we're hurting and our body's hurting, we're walking around in that all day and it is irritating. Who wants to be like that? I'm not a very nice person when I'm like that. Oh my God. I was like, who wants to be around me? Not even my dog. So.
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These are some of the tools that you can do to help with that and help with longevity. You know, it helps with circulation. It helps with mindset. It helps us to slow down. Yes, it's okay not to just be throwing weights around and, you know, and beast-moding it. It helps us to slow down and reconnect with our bodies in such a healthy, gentle way that...
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We can then deal with the things that are on our plate a little better. We are a better human because of it. We come at things with a lighter light. So that being said, please message me if you would like to join in on my Somatic Release and Mobility class. I would be honored and thrilled to have you. Just know that I'm here to support you. I'm here to support your goals.
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I want you to live in your body and live in that body the best way possible. And this is one of the most incredible gifts you can give yourself. It's a chance to slow down. It's a chance to reconnect. It's a chance to de-stress. It helps with sleep. It helps with temperament. It helps with everything. And then we don't feel so
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Crookedy crackety and off
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You'll have to walk around like that my friends. There are things we can do that are gentle that will help you get back in tune with you. And if no one has told you yet today, I believe in you. I believe in your ability to change, to grow, to heal, to move forward, to do new things for your body that are going to be amazing.
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You got this. You got this. I believe in you. You can do it. If I can do it, you can do it. Let's rise together. And until next time, I'm Michelle, and I do truly believe in your ability to change, to heal, to pivot, to live the best life you possibly can.
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Thanks for listening. To connect with Michelle, you can email her at ignitefusionfitmichelle at gmail.com or visit her on Instagram at Diva Delight 911. Support the show by subscribing or sharing it with friends or anyone you think would benefit from hearing it. You Can Be a Fit Bitch 2 is produced by Haunted Mouse Productions. This has been a Haunted Mouse Production. Cut that out.