What is my method? Questions and Answers

（日本語訳はこちら）

For the last few weeks I have been writing about my method, but until now, I haven’t been able to finish it, as I realize now it will take a long time before I can describe what I have been practicing and coaching in an accurate manner. It is rather difficult to put into words something that happened organically, through experience, without borrowing from others’ theories or believes.

So today I decided to explain my method using the most common questions I get asked. I hope you find it easy and clear to understand. Don’t forget to write your comments or questions on the section below this article. So here it goes!

Does your method have a name?
No, and I don’t plan to give it one any time soon. I prefer to leave it open until I truly round up intellectually what I am doing in practice. For now I will refer to it as “my method”. You can recommend it like, hey, I know this crazy mexican guy that coaches this weird method that makes me feel fantastic. That should do.

What is it?
It is a practice that allows self-healing to take place. Through various techniques and movements, and through my constant tactile and oral cueing and feedback, your body will find itself in a number of positions where the re-shaping of tendons, ligaments and fascia can happen without risk of injury.

Lines of tension in the body get adjusted to healthier, more efficient state that allows freer movement.

How do you do that?
Through my method, body awareness (BA) is developed to become the most important tool for self-correction of movement at different levels of complexity and depth, so your body and all its parts and systems can align themselves correctly in relationship to our bone structure. Specific movements and body awareness allows the release of unnecessary tension in fingers, wrists, forearms, shoulders, scapulae, sternum, spine, glutes, knees, ankles, toes, etc, to allow the full recruitment of the core muscles, which results on the gaining of mobility from the limbs in relationship to the torso and every other part of the body.

Who can benefit from this practice?
Everyone, except the arrogant and the impatient. I have yet to see a person that doesn’t need to rebalance their body, get rid of a compensation or need to work on body preparedness: the ability of the body to adapt/react to any given activity, practice or situation where physical effort/interaction, is required.

I have coached people from their early 20’s well into their 60’s, looking to get rid of pain, gain mobility or avoid surgeries, as well as amateur athletes and former professional athletes. Healthy and unhealthy people, fit and sedentary people, men and women and even some kids. As long as you are willing to learn and improve your body and your mind, you will benefit from this practice.

What are some of the main benefits of your method?

Improved body posture in record times
Improved breathing and strengthening of the respiratory system
Release of tension on neck, head and jaws
Release of tension on the sternum
Independence of limbs from the torso (real mobility)
Regained mobility in places affected by old injuries
Regained mobility and strength of your spine
Improved hip position and stability
Re-activation of your posterior chain (all the muscles on the back of your body)
Knee pain relief
Unlocking and re-activation of ankles and toes
Scapular stabilization
Strengthening of the core muscles
Overall mobility improvement
Ability of self-healing of injuries and pain
I am not very fit, can I still practice your method?
Yes, the movements and positions are scalable to every possible degree. As long as you are willing to endure a healthy level of discomfort, far from danger or true pain, you can definitely do it.

How fast can I see results?
Depending on how trusting and open minded you are and the level of body awareness you can develop, pain relief can be seen after a single session, but it won’t be long lasting. For long lasting effects you must be patient and give your body a chance to adapt to the new way of using it.

Why do I need to be trusting and open minded?
My method is very different to others and you will have to trust that I know what I am doing. You will be set on certain basic positions and asked to do certain slow movements while developing body awareness. At first it may seem pointless, boring and difficult, but after a few sessions the reasons behind the practice will become clear to you.

Once you start seeing the obvious effects, you will never look back, it usually take anywhere from 3 to 5 sessions for this to happen. When this happens you will no longer need to trust me personally, you will trust the method.

How often do I have to practice it?
I recommend having 3 sessions with me per week for the first 3 months. Once you have developed enough understanding of how to move, what you are moving for, and the body awareness you need to spot and resolve tension, you can reduce to 2 sessions a week. If you want to truly benefit from this practice, you should practice every at least 4 days a week on your own.

How long does your sessions last?
Between 60 and 90 minutes, depends completely on your condition that day.

Will I get stronger with your method?
Yes, absolutely, but it will be so gently that at first you won’t even notice. The strength will help you to adapt to the movements I will demand from you. At first you may find difficult to handle certain positions, even they look overly simple, after a few sessions you will notice the same positions not being challenging any more. That is how true strength is developed, without sacrificing health or soft tissue integrity. At all moments I will make sure you develop strength by priming the core as the source of stability and power.

What do you mean by soft tissue integrity?
Most people don’t realize the importance of the tendons and ligaments (soft tissue). Muscles can contract (force) only as much as the tendons and ligaments that join the muscles to the bones together can hold.

Muscles develop much faster than soft tissue, strengthening a muscles take only a few days, while soft tissue takes usually months/years. Exercising in ways that allow the strengthening of tendons, ligaments, and muscle at a safe ration is paramount to health tissue and to avoid pain and injury.

Can you explain what is the function of the tendons and ligaments? It is still unclear to me…

Imagine a slingshot: without the body of the slingshot, the rubber can’t stretch and throw a stone far away. The body of the slingshot (without rubber band) is the bone structure. The two sides in contact between the slingshot and the rubber band ends are your tendons and ligaments. The middle of the rubber is the muscle.

If the slingshot body is strong AND the middle of the rubber is strong too, but the parts where the rubber band is attached and/or the ends of the rubber band aren’t, your slingshot will not be able to resist the pulling of the rubber, so your stone will not fly far. If you are overly excited or overly stupid and pull further that what the slingshot can resist your will break it. Most injuries happen here, and these kind of injuries last very long and are difficult to take care of.

My method strengthens both the ligaments/tendons and the muscles attached to them at a ration that doesn’t put unnecessary stress on your soft tissue, preventing injuries and preparing it for future muscle development.

What is the tension you talk about?
There are lines of tension running through your body all the time. The very fact that you are standing or sitting now without collapsing down like a jello on the floor has a lot to do to the muscle tone and overall tension that your body has all around.

When a body is healthy and has no compensations, tension is where it should be mainly to the places where the fascia is very thick and resistant, that way the rest of your body stays nimb and mobile.

When your body has compensations tension moves to places that aren’t suppose to hold it. Small muscles and joints take the burden of tension and stability with the consequent loss of mobility.

My method re-establishes tension in the right places though constant work and body awareness. It isn’t easy and it isn’t quick. Be ready to work hard for months, if not years.

What is fascia?
Welcome to where things get interesting! Until very recently, and amazingly still unknown to most doctors, the fascia is becoming the big star of the body.

If you want to truly understand the magnificence of the fascia please watch this video, a true marvel, don’t be discouraged by the technical language, it is worth. Here I will give you a quick, simple explanation of it.

Have you ever eaten fried chicken? Remember when you took a bite and a part of the crust came off exposing a bright membrane between the skin and the actual meat? That is the fascia.

For years it was thought to be the “container” of the muscle, kind of skin of a sausage. It has been discovered though, that the fascia in fact connects EVERYTHING in the body, not only covers, but goes deep into the muscles, connects ligaments, tendons, muscles, all your organs, your nervous, endocrine and circulatory systems and more.

The speed at what fascia reacts and facilitates all other systems is unmatched, even by the nervous systems.

This jelly kind of organ is supposed to be symmetrical, flexible, coherent, but due to our habits, injuries and adaptations it assumes positions that aren’t correct. For example, if you have a chronic injury, your fascia will adapt to protect the area by reducing mobility. If you are a tennis player, your fascia will favor the side you hold the racquet with and so on.

Picture yourself in bed with a pijamas. Do you remember when in the middle of the night your pajamas were all in the wrong place and you felt uncomfortable and restricted? That is how the fascia gets when you don’t take care of it.

My method reshapes the fascia in your body so you regain mobility. We do this in two ways, movements done through body awareness and nutrition. The fascia is extremely sensitive to inflammation and dehydration. I will definitely share the knowledge to get your fascia healthy, hydrated and balanced/mobile.

So your method includes nutrition advice?
I consider any method that doesn’t include nutrition to be incomplete or invalid. You truly are what you eat. If you eat in a way conducive to health, you will experience health.

Eating a diet that is non-inflammatory wins half the battle. Hydrating your body, moving to heal wins the other half. Achieving a body weight that fits your bone structure and height, will only have beneficial effects.

What kind of nutritional regime you advice?
It depends on the person, their daily activity and at what stage of health recovery they are at. Just to give you a clue, it primes protein and healthy fats, and it encourages to stop consumption of sugars and simple carbs.

You talk about movement to heal, how can movement heal injuries when most doctors advice immobilization?
Movement that is natural to human beings, heals. Movement with intention, that comes from body awareness, heals.

What is primal movement?
Look at babies and how they develop movement and strength – lying on the back and turning their head around is primal movement -. Lifting the head while lying is primal movement, learning roll to lie on the tommy and look up, crawling forward and backward, holding and pulling, squatting and standing, climbing things, pushing away from discomfort, all these things are primal movement, and if done with absolute body awareness and intention, it is healing.

Everyone can do that, so how can it be healing?
You would be surprised about how many people can’t even crawl like a baby. They don’t have the coordination, or strength to keep themselves in position. Their wrists and knees start hurting because of the pressure of their own bodyweight on the floor. Ask yourself, how can a baby crawl and you can’t? You were born in a beautiful, balanced body that you managed to screw up with time, NOT because of time.

You mean age is not the reason we lose our abilities?
Absolutely, time is the canvas where we paint our reality. If you sit for hours every day, if you eat crap food at every opportunity you have, if you go heavily into sports without doing prehabilitation, or if you injure yourself and you don’t do rehabilitation, AND if you stop being mindful and stop inhabiting your body through body awareness you will loose abilities, and you will have pain, injuries and physical limitations. Blame yourself and your actions, don’t blame time.

What is prehab?
It is the series of practices you undertake to prepare your joints/soft tissue/ligaments and tendons, neuromuscular, circulatory and respiratory system to a given sport or activity to prevent injuries.

Rehab is what you have to do when you need to restore balance and function AFTER an injury has occurred. My method is the best way I have found to bring people to a baseline that allows them to play their sports without painful injuries.

Why is the best according to you?
Because it is so gentle, so subtle, and so risk-free. My method becomes a practice that generates and facilitates movement from the inside out. The moves are matched to your exact physical level today.

Most other practices require to get into positions that are too difficult for people to perform with the hope that eventually people will master them. This only creates more compensations, more pain and injury.

Using my method, we move within our limitations until the positions and movements are achieved naturally, without any forcing.

You talked about baseline. What is that baseline you are talking about?
Think what a toddler can do. When you can do the same effortlessly, you are back on your baseline. When you get there you can engage on any other sport or physical activity safely.

For me baseline means people being able to do:

3 pull ups
3 pushups
dead hangs for at least 30 seconds
baby crawls and animal walks
vertical and long jumps
climb
l-sit on the floor for at least 10 seconds
sit on the floor without pain or difficulties
sit on the lotus position
sit on their knees
sit on toes
squat to the floor
lift objects over head with locked arms
touch one’s toes in standing position with locked knees
All these with absolute perfect technique. Then you can safely take any sport without risk of injuries, others than the inherents to your sport. But even if you play contact sports your injuries will be of a lesser kind and degree.

So anyone training with you can achieve these feats?
Yes, and they are feats, they are simple movements that every single person should be able to do until the day they die. But again, it will take time and an enormous amount of patience.

How did you develop this method?
After more than 2 decades of pain and injuries, and 8 years of rehabilitation I realized no method out there was going to help me healing to the depth I wanted to be healed, so I started experimenting with movement.

Prior to that I had tried lots of different things and had developed incredible body awareness. Once I put the intention into healing myself, from the inside out, my body took care of the rest. I was a silent witness of my body repairing itself in a way that I couldn’t do it consciously.

Is it a spiritual practice?
I get asked this question a lot, and my answer is an absolute No, and an absolute Yes.

No, it is not spiritual at all, since you don’t have to align any kind of spiritual beliefs into the practice and you aren’t trying to reach Nirvana.

Yes it CAN be a spiritual practice as Origami or Bonsai keeping. This practice will reduce the mental noise to allow the body to heal. When you reduce mental noise you erase doubt, fear, and anxiousness, preparing the space for healing to happen naturally.

Any last thoughts?
The practice of my method seems to offer a lot but it makes no promises. It is all due to commitment. It needs no discipline since I don’t believe in forcing yourself to do things.

If you are tired of injuries, pain, lack of mobility, the low-level-suffering we have come to accept in modern society, then you will find all the will to go through this practice happily. You will even look forward to it every single day.

This method isn’t for everyone, but everyone is fit for this method. You must be ready for it. Most people are ready for true commitment when they have suffered enough. For those of you who are sick and tired of pain and discomfort there is a way out, and I am here to help you get started.

Do you mean you people can practice on their own without you?
From day one, I explain everything thoroughly, I don’t believe in keeping the knowledge to myself. I want my students to understand the basics so one day they don’t need me anymore. How long that takes depend on too many factors, but I always encourage self-exploration and learning. My students become my friends rather than my followers, and their suffering become their wings to freedom.

How can they get your coaching?
Just call me or message me. We can arrange.

Can you help those that can only be in your city for a short period of time?
Yes, if they are willing to practice daily under my supervision for up to 3 hours a day. I have had great success with people over periods as short as 10 days. In some cases I can travel to meet people who may want to get started on this practice.

Is training with you expensive?
I try to make sure the price is affordable to everyone that truly needs to practice my method. The more often I can coach them the better and the more economical it gets, as I want to make sure my students become independent to make space for new students.

In any case I can only ask you, how much are you willing to pay for a life that is pain free and deeply satisfying? I charge a fraction of that.