13. Strong, Mobile, and Pain Free: Rethinking Yoga and Movement with Cecily Milne

Cecily Milne, founder of Yoga Detour, spent a decade completely devoted to yoga, but ended up in so much pain she couldn't make her bed. She rebuilt herself from the ground up by diving deep into the study of functional movement. This conversation will change how you think about pain, posture, strength, and what it means to move well in midlife.

Don't miss Cecily's FREE 10-class bundle for our listeners! 30 days of access, curated specifically for women over 40. Use code BEYOND40

In this episode:

• What pain and tightness in the body often mean and what to do about them
• “Structural balance:” what happens when parts of your body go offline and others have to pick up the slack
• Why arbitrary movement “rules” we’re taught (like "don't let your knees go past your toes") can foster weakness in your body, not safety
• The case against high-intensity cardio for midlife women and what to do instead
• Why strength training is non-negotiable IF it's programmed with intention, not done at random
• The posture myth: why perfect posture isn't a position you hold — it's the strength you build so you don't have to think about it
• How somatic movement and nervous system regulation are the missing piece in most women's fitness routine.

Our Guest:

Cecily Milne — Yoga Detour founder followthedetour.com

Instagram: @yogadetour 

Links & Resources

Better Beyond 40 Formula — Mary's signature program for peri/menopausal women (35–65)

👉 Watch the FREE MasterClass

Join the FREE Community on Skool

Newsletter — weekly guidance from Dr. Mary

Instagram @drmarypines

Full show notes, citations, and transcript: drmarypines.com/podcast

Mentioned in this episode:

Functional Range Conditioning 

Soma Training 

ELDOA System 

This content is for educational purposes only and is not medical advice. Please work with a qualified provider before starting any new health protocol. This content does not establish a patient-provider relationship with Dr. Mary Pines.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome, welcome my friends. Today it is my great pleasure to welcome someone I hugely admire who I've been following for a number of years now and whom I've had the great pleasure and benefit of being taught by myself. Cecily Milne is a bit of a celebrity where I live. She's a pillar of community, but also a greater strength. And actually, I'm told that you can swing a kettlebell your own way, which is so awesome. Anyway, my friends and I might be just a little obsessed with her functional movement classes. We actually kind of joke about the cult of Cecily. So it's today my great honor to host her on the show, and soon you'll find out why. She really takes the science and practice of movement, mobility, strength to the next level. And she has a special focus on the particular needs of midlife women. So hooray! I'm sure this conversation will be practical, relevant, and fascinating for you, my dear listeners. And oh gosh, don't we just love when passionate people nerd out? Yes, we do. So stick with us, it'll be a good one. Plus, Cecily has a special exclusive gift for you, our listeners, today. Stay tuned. She's given us 30 days of free access to a special set of 10 awesome classes she curated just for us. Details on that to come. Welcome to the Better Beyond 40 Formula Podcast, where smart, driven women over 40 and those who support them ditch the confusion and cut through the midlife wellness nonsense. I'm Dr. Mary Pines, award-winning PhD biomedical scientist of 25 years with a decade in women's health and longevity consulting. I specialize in transforming the health and lives of midlife women from their late 30s through the early 60s by delivering clarity and practical real-life solutions with honesty, compassion, and a little humor. Now, before we dive in, just let me give you a quick snippet of who Cecily is so you can appreciate the breadth of her wisdom. Cecily Milne is a globally respected yoga and movement educator who's been teaching since 2009 and is best known as founder of Yoga Detour, a method that bridges traditional yoga with diverse movement modalities that our bodies truly need. She has extensive training beyond the yoga world as well. Much of her work is influenced by functional range conditioning and the Soma training and LDOS systems. So what I love about Cecily is that she offers a deeply informed science-forward approach to practice through her online classes. She's a virtual studio and in-person events around the world. So she really helps her students to build resilient, adaptable bodies while staying grounded in curiosity and sustainable movement. And in addition to her running her business, Cecily is also a mother, living and loving life in the coastal mountains of BC. She happens to be in Mine Town as well. Lucky me. So welcome to the show, Cecily.

SPEAKER_01 3:03

Thanks, Mary. Great to be here.

SPEAKER_00 3:04

I'd love to just kick things off with maybe a little bit about your own personal story of how you got here, how you came to develop your movement philosophy and your unique blend of approaches that you have put together over many years.

SPEAKER_01 3:18

Sure. I've always been attracted to different forms of movement. As a kid, I grew up doing ballet and gymnastics. And then it was in university where I discovered yoga, specifically Ashtanga yoga. And I was so pulled into it that it kind of became my entire personality for close to a decade. And it was the only type of movement that I did. And at the time I didn't think or know that there could be anything wrong with that, of being so kind of myopic and what my movement focus was. I just loved the practice. I loved the community that I had found within that practice. And my body seemed to be quite well designed for the practice. I had natural flexibility, which I now know is actually hypermobility. And I was also caught up in this kind of quest for approval through my teachers. And that was sort of born out of my ballet and gymnastics history. And then the same type of dynamics were present in the Ashtanga world, at least the studios that I was exposed to, where I really found a lot of gratification when I could do the pose and be given the next one by my teacher. It was sort of like being given a gold star. And so that validation through the practice was quite addictive for me. And there wasn't as much emphasis in my training on diversity, variability, and also progressive adaptation. It was sort of like just go and do it. And because my body could go and do it, that led to a lot of repetitive strain over time and eventually a lot of body pain. Once I was in that state of pain, it got to the point where I really had to make a choice. Either keep doing what I was doing and live with the kind of pain that was keeping me from doing like basic everyday tasks, like making my bed or bending over the sink to wash my face. All of it was hurting me, it was in rough shape. Or I realized I had to change something. And so I opted to make a big change and I didn't remove myself completely from the yoga world, but I started learning exclusively from outside of the yoga community because most of what I had learned up until that point all came from yoga teachers. So that's when I sought out strength coaches, and I and I kind of just spent close to five years drinking from a fire hose of movement education. And I did a bunch of different trainings, I met a bunch of different coaches, and I traveled a lot. And because I was taking in so much information, the beginning of that, it's like the first two years of that process was quite disorienting because I realized I had been taught things previously that weren't actually all that helpful. And that the sort of quote-unquote rules around alignment that weren't being taught in yoga didn't actually align with a lot of what's taught in the strength and mobility world. And so it was a difficult time for me because I just was sort of reconciling with all these different contradictions and trying to figure out what was what and how I could continue teaching without feeling like I was leading people astray. On the other side of that process is when I began to create this hybrid approach within yoga because I could see how many people within that community were following a path similar to mine where they were doing so much yoga or they were being kind of, they were forcing themselves, their teachers were forcing them into these extreme ranges of motion, these quote-unquote advanced postures, and their bodies didn't feel that good. So I wanted to be able to teach classes within a yoga environment that integrated what I had learned from all of these, you know, different coaches and trainings that could show people how to bring more like what I call structural balance into their bodies through targeted strength, targeted targeted mobility work, and let them just feel a lot more balanced in their bodies in general. So that was what eventually gave birth to Yoga Detour. And Yoga Detour is now both an online platform where people can take classes and yoga teachers can take trainings as well as a source of in-person community and connection when I travel to teach different immersions and host events even here in Squamish with people coming from all over the world to see what this is all about.

SPEAKER_00 8:11

That's awesome. I love that. I love your story. So I really wanted to get into that so everybody kind of understood your background because your classes are unlike anything out there. I mean, the word yoga is in there, but it's really amazing, and and you're focused on what you, as you say, mobility and structural balance. I would love to tap into that and what what you mean by structural balance in particular.

SPEAKER_01 8:38

Sure. I think of structural balance as overall functionality in the body. But we also have to consider that for some folks who, let's say, are professional athletes, they are by design not structurally balanced because their bodies might need to do a very specific set of movements in order to be successful in their sport. For example, a golfer is not changing which side they're going to swing from. They're always swinging the same direction. They're always applying the same amount of torque through their spine for a reason. And that's why you'll see professional golfers run into those types of injuries because there is not an intentional structural balance there because it would actually be detrimental to their success. I ran into the same thing when I worked, I used to coach a professional soccer team, and not coach, I was not the coach of the team, I was the mobility person in the team. And I remember the coach spoke to me when he noticed some of what I was offering the team in our classes, where he was saying, like, I actually don't want you to be working so much on, for example, like creating more length in the hamstrings, because these guys need that like short, explosive power in the posterior chain. And I don't want their hamstrings to get sore from being overstretched and all of that stuff. So I was like, oh, okay. I was way earlier on my journey when I was working with those athletes. So that was a good learning moment for me. But for the general population, for you and I, for people who are not out there trying to, you know, become Olympic athletes or professional athletes, structural balance is something that we would strive for as functional humans so that the different areas of our body are all showing up to the table and performing in the way that they're meant to and bearing the load that they're designed to. So we can think of the body as a group project where everyone has a task. And life being what it is, bodies being what they are, it's pretty common for certain players in that group project to be offline for whatever reason. And when certain areas go offline, other areas have to pick up the slack the same way as if we were doing a group project and I didn't want to do any of the work, you'd have to take on my share of the work to get it done.

SPEAKER_00 11:08

No thanks.

SPEAKER_01 11:09

And right. And when you do it, how does it make you feel as the one doing too much work? You start to get cranky, you feel a little bit resentful. So, in order to avoid that crankiness, we need to learn how to distribute the load in a way that is balanced, hence structural balance. When I came from the yoga world into the strength training world, I remember one of the weakest areas of my body was my hamstrings. I was the opposite of the soccer players. Because in yoga, we spend so much time forward bending, looking for that long line in the back of the leg, thinking that it's so important to be able to like straighten the knees and touch the toes. And many, many, many, many, many years of creating that stretching through that posterior chain actually made my posterior chain very weak. So I would go into the gym and I would lie down on one of those hamstring curl machines where you're on your belly and you kind of stick your feet into the hamstring curl part. And when I would do that with one leg, like a single-leg hamstring curl, I could barely curl five pounds. Oh my god, oh my gosh. There was nothing there. And my hamstrings would cramp because they were so overstimulated with that load that they had never experienced before.

SPEAKER_00 12:30

Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 12:31

And so that's a great example of structural imbalance and lack of integrity in an air key area of the body that was likely a huge contributor to why my lower back was so sore. So when I started to bring more structural balance in and I strengthened my hamstrings and I strengthened my glutes, and I strengthened my entire back chain, all of that lower back pain went away. Because it was no longer, you know, mixed up in this unbalanced group project where there were so many players offline.

SPEAKER_00 13:01

Absolutely. Wow, that's super interesting, and I'm sure really relatable for a lot of people. And I I mean, I personally relate because I grew up playing a ton of field hockey, so very one-sided, hunched over, and then I'm a snowboarder as well. So my whole right side, right dominant leg, I'm really noticing that now that I'm in my 40s and you know, in yoga or in women's strength training, it's it's quite a thing. So I'm super glad we're having this conversation because a lot of people are are um sort of ignoring that. And to your point about load bearing, I love how you really draw attention to what is engaged in online and what is offline. Are you using your glutes? Most of us aren't, I think. Or you would know better, but yeah, glutes, hammies, like core, all of that stuff, and having more mindfulness around around activation in those zones to sort of even things out. Because what do you do you in your opinion, is a lot of the body pain that people experience sort of by the time they get to midlife, is that related to imbalances if there's not a direct and overt injury?

SPEAKER_01 14:11

It can be, but a different way of thinking about it is that pain, which is so multifaceted, so let's just refer to it as sensations. And those sensations might be tightness, restriction, or it could be real acute pain. Okay, but there's a spectrum there. Often when that when those sensations show up in the body, they're there for a reason, meaning that they are a nervous system influenced manifestation of protection. So if we lack strength, if we lack connection, if we lack proprioceptive awareness of like where is my ankle, where is my rib cage sitting? If our brain has lost connection with soup certain areas of our bodies, which could be from an injury, or it could be just from like patterning over time. Like for me, I had lost connection to my hamstrings, I just had never done a hamstring curl. So when we lose those connections, the nervous system is going to respond to keep us safe by creating guarding patterns. Guarding, meaning, don't go there because you might get hurt. Don't go there because you don't have control of that range of motion. Don't go there because we don't have the strength to support that range of motion. So, because of that, I'm just going to make it feel really tight or really uncomfortable or maybe even painful, so that you just know to be cautious. My joke, my super nerdy joke that I always say in my trainings is it's called the nervous system, it's not called the confidence system. The confidence system would be a lot of it would be a much different thing. And the nervous system is is inherently going to default to being more cautious around doing new things because newness is perceived as a threat. Novelty can be perceived as a threat. And so as we get older or we get stuck into doing the same things all the time, our zone of familiarity shrinks, and our zones of unfamiliarity can expand. And that's why, you know, for like super simple things. I often work with older clients who realize that they don't put their arms over their head anymore for any reason than to maybe like grab a high dish off a shelf or wash their hair, their hands go up as high as their head, but no higher. And then they wonder why their shoulders feel so tight. So obviously, like the the more common way of talking about this is if you if you don't use it, you lose it. So there's validity to that. But I like to go a little bit deeper than that and acknowledge that pain is there for a reason, it's there to keep us safe, and it's a signal. Very rarely is that pain always an indicator of a problem, of there being an injury, of there being damage. Obviously, like if you just fell off your bike and it's gonna hurt, maybe because you actually had an injury. But in most cases where we have these niggles and areas of discomfort, and it just feels like not that great to reach your arm over your head. It doesn't mean you have a torn rotator cuff necessarily. It just means your body's sending you signals that this is not something you normally do, and we need to proceed with caution.

SPEAKER_00 17:56

Love that reframe. Thank you for framing pain in that way. That's so interesting. And the nervous system's surveillance capacity. Yeah, because a lot of people will nudge against that edge and say, Oh no, I think that's not good for me. And that speaks to the fact that having a movement specialist, a trainer, help is so important, especially in the early days.

SPEAKER_01 18:18

Yes, yeah. And I do see that a lot. A lot of fear, a lot of apprehension, a lot of people saying, Oh, I can't do that, or that's not gonna work for me. And I really try and switch that around from a sense of like almost movement pessimism to movement optimism, where it's like, well, what do you want to be able to do? And then when we figure that out, we can work backwards and say, okay, well, what are the building blocks needed to help you get there through progressive load and allowing you time to adapt and recover so that we're never doing too much too soon, but we're gradually pushing that edge of what right now feels possible and doable.

SPEAKER_00 18:58

Nice. And then do so supporting the nervous of the system. Yes, yeah, and I I love that you actually included for our listeners a lesson on nervous system regulation, like you full really fold that all in, and that's so important, and it's a lot of the times missing from a trainer's paradigm in the conventional sense. So that's awesome, thank you. And on that note, nervous system regulation, mobility, structural balance, these are a few things we've talked about. What would you say are maybe the most important considerations for a midlife woman who's maybe starting out, or B, we could maybe you could speak to both. Someone who's been doing a lot of exercise, you know, in the classic sense, three days a week. She goes to Orange Theory, she maybe jogs sometimes, she does yoga. What what does she need to think about versus the newbie?

SPEAKER_01 19:52

Well, I think the thing that would be consistent across both of those examples, and something that I don't see a lot of is people learning to move through what I'm gonna call a full or complete range of motion. Not that. If we think about group classes, typical group classes, they can be fast. There's often not a lot of eyes on or coach attention to every individual in the room. And it can also feel like you need to keep up with what people are using in terms of weights or what you should be using, you know, rather than what your body might actually be ready for. And that could be more than what people are using or less of people are using. But in the work I've done with women over the last few years, the thing that I that I see a lot of is again that that fear and that apprehension. Because we've been fed these what I'm gonna call arbitrary rules, such as don't let your knees go past 90 degrees, don't squat below parallel, keep your elbows at 90 degrees when doing a push-up. Like there are these these not these, yeah, they're arbitrary. My my question, whenever someone says, Oh, but I thought I shouldn't let my knee go past my toes, why is my response to that? Tell me why. Did someone ever explain it to you? What was the reasoning, or was it just a hard rule saying, don't do this or else? And when we're fed that message of don't do this or else, it continues to bolster this misconception that our bodies are fragile. And our bodies are actually not fragile, our bodies are incredibly adaptive and resilient and responsive, and the thing that they're gonna respond to is load, and that load is meant to be progressive, meaning we introduce a little bit. More over time, and we don't push things in a way where it's like maxing out every single time you do it. But I always say to people your knee has the capacity to move into terminal flexion, meaning like full knee bend, hamstrings and calves touching. Your knee has the capacity to do that. And it should have strength through that entire range of motion. So if you're always stopping at a 90-degree knee bend, there's a considerable amount of range that you're never moving into when you're working out. And that range can become what I would call a zone of liability, where it's like you're not putting the deposits in there that you need to to bring it up the way you are the other side of the range of motion from a straight leg to a 90-degree knee. And so that can freak people out at first. And they're like, but I thought, no, like I was taught this, I was taught that. And that's exactly where I have been. That zone where I was living for a number of years, coming out of yoga. Oh, but I thought this. Oh, but I thought we weren't supposed to do that. And really, it's like there's too many arbitrary rules floating around out there, not enough justification for those rules, too much language around fear and pain and injury that makes us all feel more fragile than we are. When really, if we can move through a full range of motion with integrity progressively, that is what's going to keep our bodies moving well throughout midlife and beyond. It's going to help us mitigate tightness. It's going to help keep us, you know, super functional. You want to get up and off the ground easily? Well, you better be able to bend your knees past 100 degrees.

SPEAKER_00 23:58

Love it. Absolutely. Yeah, that full range of motion. And I think that speaks also to the partly the instability problem, the balance problem. Where, you know, people are prone to falling as we get, you know, much older. But that starts in the in the 30s, the 40s, ideally the 20s, of like working in a 360 motion rather than in two or one plane. If if you're just doing like gym machines, you know, most stuff is in one or two planes. And I think that's the case with yoga too, right? Like it's a bit biplanar, and then actually working the muscles, the ligaments, the joints to strengthen it in all angles and all vectors is a part of that range of motion as well, right? Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. It's so interesting, actually, when sometimes people will come to visit, and I love that. And I can tell always when they are um, and absolutely no disrespect, of course. This is just how how life is for a lot of us in cities, and my former self is we're not used to balancing um full ranges of motion, climbing over rocks or stumps, and people are really wobbly on their feet. They're kind of almost falling over, going up and down uneven surfaces, and it really makes me think of what you describe as this functional full range of motion training in all directions and with consideration for mobility. So yeah, it's a it's a real thing, and I think it really contributes to the fall and break a hip problem, you know. I love your your um pan exercise or newbie to really experience women in this space being around, like get that full range, make sure you're moving in all vectors. Yeah, absolutely. Um so I would love to know, you know, I get asked all the I guess asked all the time, so I have to ask you what do you think is a healthy, balanced movement schedule for let's say the average bo woman in life? She wants to be strong, fit, set herself up for a healthy future. Maybe she's got a moderate level of fitness to start out with. She probably wants to lose a little body fat along the way. How do you advise advise women set themselves up? Would you be sort of do strength training two or three times a week? Are you a cardio fan? Do you like a little bit of HIT? What would you set a woman up with, say, to be healthy and balanced without over or underdoing it? If you could answer that for kind of an average person.

SPEAKER_01 26:54

Sure. Yeah, I'm gonna answer that in two different ways. The first is that I think strength training is non-negotiable. I think the research is pretty clear on that. And yet I wanna put an asterisk on that, saying that strength training is gonna be that much more productive when it is programmed and not random. When it is, and I don't mean programmed as in you're working with a certain like a super rigid 12-week have to do it exactly this way every single time. I mean with a certain level of intentionality that you're working towards specific goals rather than just doing whatever comes to mind every time you go to the gym. In terms of cardio, I might be a little bit against the grain here, but I would say that if someone is getting a good amount of walking in every week, that that's a great place to start. And maybe that's can be it. Because one of the things, and I'm sure you can speak to this too, Mary, based on who you work with, but there's a lot of women, a lot of us, who are fighting the battle with cortisol at this point in our lives. And that's why overdoing the cardio, the hit, the intense exercise, in my mind, is just continuing to feed that cortisol and elevate it in ways that are not necessarily necessarily serving us the way we want them to be. So I would say that regular and consistent walking, and then maybe that turns into walking faster, and then maybe that turns into running, but running in a way that you're still able to stay calm, and that requires training. So you're able to breathe calmly, you're able to run and feel like you went for a walk, a brisk walk. But you're not running in a way where it's making you feel like you're being chased by a tiger. Nice. And I think a lot of people get off the couch and go for a run, and it never feels good. Their bodies weren't ready for it, their cardiovascular systems weren't ready for it, and it ends up being this like a very taxing experience for the nervous system. That's not all we need right now. So I think there's a very big difference between like, oh, so-and-so said I should be running or doing cardio, and then you go and just, you know, abuse yourself on a bike or on a rower or an air dine, and you feel like you want to vomit afterwards. I don't think any of us need to be doing that right now. That time is past. You know, so I think that there's a way to be smart about cardio. But the other way I want to answer that question, so I think this is what really helped me in this season of life as someone who still has a young child, because I think that there were, you know, there's such a spectrum of us who are entering our 40s and 50s, who, you know, I have friends whose kids are going into high school. My son is four. We have very different lives and we have very different opportunities when it comes to working out and paying attention to ourselves as individuals rather than just as moms. And so I when I heard the the reminder that training does not have to be linear, that is what really helped me stay sane. Because I think we get these ideas in our heads, especially when we're fed all this information through like the quote-unquote menopause gurus of like you have to do the strength training this many times a day, and you have to walk this many steps, and you also have to take your this supplement and take that hormone, and it just adds up to being this like incredibly burdensome list. And how unfortunate that that is how we are treating women now, that it's just like we've been shouldering so much for so long, and now here is your to-do list. And if you don't follow all the things on this list, something bad's gonna happen. You're gonna break a hip or you're gonna gain too much weight, or who knows, whatever those dastardly, you know, those consequences might be that we all maybe want to avoid or that we're afraid of, they're kind of just like dangling over our heads as this perpetual threat, unless we carry out the list. And I don't want to live like that, and I don't want to see other women live like that. And so I think when we embrace the reality that progress isn't linear. And there will be some weeks where you don't get to the gym. And there'll be some weeks when you do, but you feel really tired and you're picking up way lighter weights, so you're doing way fewer sets, you're not getting any PRs, maybe for weeks or months at a time. We kind of have to move away from this really aggressive need for constantly overdoing it or striving for perfection and give ourselves some grace that we know what we need to do. We know we need to strength train. We know we need to get outside and enjoy some fresh air. We know we need to move our bodies and do some mobility work and get on a yoga mat here and there. We know all of that. But we also need to protect our peace and give ourselves grace and understand that we're trying our best. And sometimes our best will look different than at other times.

SPEAKER_00 32:24

A man's system. Love that. Such a full-body exhale for women when they hear this advice, and it's so wise. Um part of that nervous system regulation piece. And that's actually the one of the first things I do with my women who are still cycling, but all the women is like, let's listen, let's cycle think if you're still perimenopausal and listen to the very different myriad hormones that are active in the different parts of our of our menstrual cycle, because that's super important and critical to be kinder to ourselves. And then for our menopausal women, you know, there's lots of things going on in in life, and a lot of a lot of retirees that I work with are just as busy as they ever were, and yet they're trying to do all these things, and the grandchildren and the workups, and as you say so much, and and they're yet they're like, I'm retired, I should be, I should, should, should, and just so nice to hear you confirm just nervous system regulation, have a listen. What's supportive right now? That's huge. So I love I love that you have that purview because it's certainly it's tricky in the coaching training world with all the masculine influence of the men are the same all month. Like, why are we doing this to ourselves? This is physiologically sound or sensical, so yeah, thanks for speaking to that. It's totally okay to go light some day, some weeks, some months, and not see that that progress. Progress is kindness to yourself, that's huge progress. So I love that. Thank you. I just wanted to go back a step. You mentioned with strength training, a lot of women I work with, talk to every day, are a little bit confused about how to set themselves up for this. And you said do it intentionally and have have a program, maybe you know, two different days. How do you recommend a woman goes about deciding what she should do? Is there a particular type of therapist that you like, or does like how does that work? What's the best approach? Sorry to interrupt. Here's a quick moment of honesty, my friends. I don't run ads, so if you're getting value here, please do hit the follow, subscribe button, share the show with your friends. This not only helps you never miss an episode, but you could change the life of someone you care about too. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 34:54

Well, I think that having a qualified strength coach in your corner is great. I know that we're many of us are not in a position to, let's say, hire a personal trainer or work one-on-one with the strength coach regularly, but if you can have someone assess you who knows what they're doing. So it could be, it could be a qualified strength coach, it could be a kinesiologist, it could even be a physiotherapist. You know, there's different people out there. I think in the States, if your listeners are in the States, a doctor of physical therapy, you know, there's um a lot of different options out there, but you basically want someone qualified who's able to assess where you're at because assessment is one of those pieces that is missing for so many folks. They just walk into the gym and they pick up the weights and they follow along with what everyone is doing. And there's not a lot of conversation that takes place beforehand around maybe not even injuries, but what are your goals? What do you want your body to be able to do and why? And so I love when I see a gym creating an opportunity for every new member to be onboarded through some form of one-to-one experience. Maybe it's one session, maybe it's four sessions, but some kind of opportunity there for there to be a coach and trainee dynamic created where the coach understands this person's needs, and the person can then get a better idea of who the coach is and what their approach is or where they're coming from. So I think both of that's really important. And then with the assessment, this is being able to understand what is how does this person's body move? What is this person's body's, how are they defaulting? What are their compensations? Where are their areas of potential liability? Where there might be, you know, do they have a knee thing or a hip thing or a pelvis thing, or are they coming back from postpartum? You know, what's what's going on there that we might need to program accordingly? Because you can't have just an a big broad brushstroke painted of a program where it's like you're gonna all do the same thing. And that in many environments is group fitness. So that's why it can be so difficult to make progress. That's why we can run into these walls where we have to we have to say things like, oh, I don't think I can do this, I don't think this is for me. Because, well, to an extent, yeah, those movements that are in that general program might not actually be what you need right now. It doesn't mean something else isn't waiting for you, you know? So I think that finding someone who can do those assessments, understand the body, and then provide some type of roadmap. And different coaches will have different priorities when it comes to that. Some coaches will say, okay, let's work on mobility for the next 12 weeks before we start picking up weights. Other coaches might say, okay, let's focus on your lower body and getting you squatting and hinging, or let's focus on the shoulder and figure out how we can get you hanging and pushing and pulling without any pain. All of that's going to be a reflection of what your individual goals are. And that's what I mean by intentionality. There needs to be a reason behind the things that you're doing beyond just, oh, I was told this was good for me. It's like, no, why are you doing that exact movement? How is it serving you? How is the way in which you're doing it serving your bigger goals?

SPEAKER_00 38:39

I love that you spoke to that assessment piece. That was definitely what I was getting at there. So that's perfect because there's so many workouts out there on YouTube. I had someone ask me yesterday, oh, I have Stacey Sims' newest workout, and you know, I was doing it, but I feel like I just injured myself, and I'm like, oh wow, yeah, you're that that wasn't made for you because X, Y, and Z. And so yeah, I love that, Cecily. And I can speak to my own fitness overhaul, actually, that happened when I went to see an athletic therapist. Shout out Paul Dwyer in Squamish, he's amazing. But yeah, he really, you know, if if you can do that kind of a thing where you know what he did with me, he looked at my gate, he did a lot of sort of different assessments of where my strengths and weaknesses were, and then created a sort of special workout for me. That appointment was game-changing. I think it was 120 bucks, it was covered by my benefits. Like, please, if you're especially if you're starting out or or even if you've been a longtime athlete with probably some imbalances in your body that aren't serving you, that is such an amazing way to sort of really up your game and get you set up for longevity.

SPEAKER_01 39:50

Yeah, and I mean when I when I first started working with a really high-caliber strength coach, I'd already been lifting and like doing barbell work for a couple years. And when I went to him, his assessment was watching me use those weights where he'd be like, Okay, get under the barbell squat, okay, let's see a bench press. Okay, let's see a deadlift. And then he basically said, I've seen enough. We're not doing any of those lifts for the next three months because we have a lot of work to do. And he took them all away from me and gave me all this remedial work to do for those three months. And I felt like such a geriatric at that time. I was like, I was only, I think, 26 or 27 years old, and he was treating me like I had this body that was broken. And that was kind of how I felt, to be honest, after coming out of yoga and then doing a bit of a patchwork job with strength training for a couple of years of just trying to figure it out on my on my own. And then when he finally gave me the tools I needed to fill the gaps, to create that structural balance, I went back under that barbell after three months and it was a completely different experience. Awesome. Yeah. So it's like assessment can look like a lot of different things. And it's not to say assessment should make you feel broken, like it made me feel that was on me. It should make you feel more aware of where your areas for potential are and how to get there.

SPEAKER_00 41:14

What actually specifically did you notice? I would love our listeners to understand what you mean by completely different before and after.

SPEAKER_01 41:21

It's sort of hard to describe, but if we think of a back squat, for example, where you have a barbell on your upper back. When I used to use that barbell, I think I was really sticking my butt out and allowing my chest way to tip forward. And so if you think of a back squat with a barbell as an opportunity to follow a certain line of gravity where the barbell is just going straight up and down in a vertical line, often if you tip your chest forward and you lean your hips back, that barbell is not going to follow that same line of efficiency up and down, like a plumb line. So when he kind of reprogrammed my body and taught my back how to be stronger, taught my knees how to initiate that movement of driving the knees forward rather than the hips back, it changed the whole orientation around that bar and the relationship to gravity. So I was able to pull myself into the bottom of that squat and drive out of it with so much more efficiency and strength that then I was able to just perform at a higher level. I was able to do more reps, I was able to create more time under tension by just slowing it down rather than like dropping in and popping out of it the way we see a lot of people do. And I was able to use more weight over time because my body was managing that weight so effectively rather than through these compensatory patterns that were just, you know, so limited.

SPEAKER_00 42:53

Love that. Yeah, beautiful. And that sort of speaks to the again, the the issue with the group classes, you know, things like CrossFit, where people are under time and throwing weights around and getting injured. And yeah, and similarly in yoga without proper supervision. I mean, unless you try a few bananas that people are in yoga and teachers are no longer really allowed to come in and and adjust. So it's a bit of a bit of a gong show. So whatever your sport is, whether it's yoga or weightlifting or running, it's super helpful to have a coach there to actually give you those personalized tweaks for your body because everybody moves differently to Cecily's point. Awesome, beautiful. We have a few minutes left, and I'd love to just get to a couple more questions. I did want to talk to you on this call about posture and having good posture. So you had some question marks around this when we were talking before. I'd love you to elaborate on what posture, good posture means, because I think you have maybe a different take on this than most people.

SPEAKER_01 43:55

Yeah, I think I rather than thinking about there being a perfect posture. I like to think about there being a lot of options in terms of what your body's capable of when it looks to find stability and when it looks to find comfort. So if we look at meditation, for example, and the ability to sit comfortably, maybe you're in a chair, maybe you're on the floor. Chances are if you try and sit with this, you know, ramrod straight spine, shoulders pulled down and back, your time in meditation is going to be quite restricted because your body's going to get tired. We are not designed to be in these like super rigid bodies, these super straight spines, this super open chest, all of these things that at some point became like known for being quote unquote good posture. It's funny, I joke that the biggest game changer for me in the meditation practice was learning how to deadlift. Because deadlift deadlifting just brought so much more strength into my back and into my like back body that I was no longer this like limp noodle trying to hold itself up straight. I just had this basic level of integrity in my body that I could sit there comfortably for way longer without because I was just sitting. I was just sitting with the strength that that weightlifting had brought into my body without having to like force it, you know. When I work with people who spend a lot of time at a desk or a lot of time in the car, they're always asking me, like, so how can I work with my posture? How can I improve my posture? I don't want to have tech snack, you know, all these things. I always just say, like, well, whatever you're doing a lot of, just make sure you're spending a lot of time doing something else. So if you're always sitting or riding a bike or walking and you're always moving in a very linear plane, get out of it. Move side to side, rotate, do movements that bring you out of those patterns so that you're not just conditioning your body to be stuck in this one range of motion. Because really, that's again kind of circling back to what we talked about earlier. We want our bodies to be available to us in whatever we want to be able to do comfortably with a feeling of capacity. And so if your body is stuck in this like desk position all the time, like that's where your body just lives and feels most comfortable, think of all the ranges of motion that you are not exposing your joints, tissues, nervous system to. And those become less and less available to us as we get older and as we bank more time, not doing them. So rather than working about worrying about how you can sit at your desk with better posture, do what you need to do at your desk. Just get it done and then get up and go to something else and expand that that you know movement diet so that your body knows that you want it to be able to do other things than just sit in a desk.

SPEAKER_00 47:29

Yeah, variety of the spicy life in so many ways. A great analogy is eating the same ten foods in a week. You're gonna get a nutrient deficiencies if you move in the same set of ways. Whether that's your go-to weightlifting that you do three times a week is the same stuff over and over, you're just conditioning the same patterns and gonna lose others create instabilities and stuff like that. As you say, I love that frame on posture and strength, and you know, makes me think about how being stronger in all ways really ripples into all every aspect of our lives, whether we're sitting in meditation, standing in line at the bank, you know, even even driving a car, like yeah, some having more muscle on your body helps to keep everything in alignment all the time and and just less effort and pain. So yeah, thanks for that. Okay. Last parting words for our midlife female audience, if you had one piece of advice or one thing you'd love for them to take away, or maybe something you haven't spoken to yet. Is there some some last bit you would like to leave us with today?

SPEAKER_01 48:43

I think it would just be to remember that our bodies thrive when we are in a relationship of of being their ally and having a sense of desire around wanting to understand our bodies and not be in a battle with them. Why is this happening? Why does this always hurt? Or just feeling disappointed in our bodies, but instead trying to create a relationship where we're curious and we are optimistic and we are grateful, and we're acknowledging that we're on the same team. Because I think I see a lot of women who get into this spiral of shame or disappointment, fear, disconnection. And that disconnection only amplifies over time when we have lost that feeling of relationship with ourselves. And like when I work with women and they start to move their bodies sometimes for the first time in years, because they've just been so caught up in other areas of their lives, it can be quite an emotional experience for them because the level of disconnection has run so deep that when they do start to actually feel themselves, you know, feel their pelvis moving, feel their hips opening, feel their shoulders, you know, dropping away from their ears, taking those big exhales, moving their spines, a lot of it can feel like you're just, you know, cracking yourself out of that egg for the first time. So it can be quite profound. And I I want people to be able to have those experiences where they are creating space for that relationship to be either rediscovered or maintained. So that we're not just shutting ourselves down in favor of, you know, whatever else the world's demanding of us, but that we are doing our best to stay in relationship with ourselves and with our bodies, even if it's through just five minutes a day of something that reminds you you have a body.

SPEAKER_00 51:22

Thank you. Powerful. Love that. You have you have a body and it needs your love. We're so hard on ourselves in general. Not a single woman that I work with who's like, I love my body and I'm happy in it. Like, oh.

SPEAKER_01 51:38

Well, and we're not gonna feel that way all the time. I don't feel that way all the time, you know. Like we're only human, but I think that, you know, there's definitely those times where it is through movement when I have made time to get on my mat or sit quietly or lie down and throw my legs up the wall, that I actually can then turn off all the noise and finally be with myself. And sometimes it's it's being with myself and realizing, oh man, I am really tired, or oh man, I am really sad, or oh, I'm just like just just to feel those feelings. Sometimes we're gonna have those feelings that are not comfortable to be with, so we're not gonna have those feelings of like, oh, I just I love everything and I'm so grateful all the time. I do love those moments of feeling connected and feeling aware of where I am and movement and stillness are great conduits of bringing us back into that connection.

SPEAKER_00 52:40

Absolutely. Thank you. And so now in our last minute here, for all the women who are like, oh my god, I need some Cecily in my life. This has been so awesome. We can you tell us about where where can people find you?

SPEAKER_01 52:58

Well, most of what I do is online. So I have the Detour Virtual Studio, which is where the collection of classes I've curated for your listeners lives. And it's a massive library, and I didn't want anyone to feel overlooked overwhelmed with the number of classes that are on there. So that's why I put together a curated collection of just 10 classes that were intentionally chosen because of what they offer. And so listeners who opt in for that will see that the classes really vary from nervous system regulation, core strengths, upper body work, lower body work, full body practices, and they're also different lengths depending on how much time you have. And you have all of those classes for an entire month. And then if you feel that it's a really great fit and you want to see more of that, then the virtual studio is available as a subscription, whether it's a monthly, quarterly, or annual membership. And then for anyone who is in the space of like training and working with other people, I offer online courses and all of the information is on my website, which is followthedour.com, or you can find me on Instagram at yoga detour.

SPEAKER_00 54:08

Beautiful. Thank you. And I'm gonna speak a little bit more to the classes that uh Cecily has offered us once we jump off. And everything about where you can find her will be in the show notes. So check out the website or listen to anywhere you find your podcasts. And I want to just thank you so much, Cecily, for joining us today. Thanks for having me, Mary. Okay, so circling back, Cecily has kindly offered us 30 days of free access to a collection of 10 incredible online classes that she's curated for us. Uh, women over 40. And they take all the boxes of what it means to move well in this chapter of our lives. Little snippets that can really support us. So it includes nervous system regulation, because we gotta calm shit down before we can build it back up again. Her words, not mine. Deep core strength and awareness of intra-abdominal pressure to help stabilize the trunk and spine. We've got pelvic floor mobility, ensuring this crucial muscle group can release and engage, depending on what you're asking of it. Joint mobility, particularly targeting the shoulders and hips, big problem areas for women, so that you can continue to do the things you love, from walking and weight training to playing with your kids or your grandkids. And then we have also, of course, strength building through a full range of motion. She spoke to you today, to ensure that your muscles get stronger, but they also stay mobile. So you can enjoy 30 days of free access to all 10 classes as a Better Beyond 40 podcast listener with the code Beyond40. That's B-E-Y-O-N-D 40. Thank you so much, Cecily. All right, my friend, that is it for us. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks to my wonderful producer, Kale Gosen. If this episode helped you feel seen or supported, and say you want to go deeper, you're ready for clarity, support, and a roadmap to truly feeling better beyond 40, visit my website, drmarypines.com, and explore my Better Beyond 40 program. And be sure to join my newsletter for free weekly guidance. You can also join my free community group on school, that's SKO L.com. It's also called the Better Beyond 40 formula. And in it, I offer lots of tips and tricks to help you keep informed of the latest. You can also follow me on Instagram at Dr. MaryPines for a day-to-day inspo. You are not alone on this journey, my friend. We are in it together, and you deserve to feel like your incredible self now and for many years to come.