Move Better, Hurt Less: The 5 Pillars of Chronic Pain Explained

Chronic pain isn’t random.

It’s not something that just “shows up” one day without reason—and it’s definitely not something you fix by chasing symptoms.

In this episode, I break down the 5 pillars of chronic pain—the exact framework I use with clients, athletes, and dancers to not only reduce pain, but actually understand where it’s coming from and how to fix it long-term.

These five pillars are:

1. Movement
Most people either don’t move enough—or they move poorly. Bad mechanics, compensation patterns, and lack of awareness slowly overload the system. Over time, that turns into pain.

2. Mobility (Soft Tissue Work)
Mobility, in this context, isn’t stretching—it’s what’s happening in your tissue.
From foam rolling to Gua Sha, IASTM, cupping, and manual therapy—this is about improving how your tissue slides and glides. When tissue becomes stiff, sticky, and restricted, movement becomes inefficient and painful.

3. Strength
You either don’t have enough strength, you have too much in the wrong places, or—most commonly—there’s an imbalance.
Your body doesn’t care how strong you are globally. It cares how balanced you are locally.

4. Flexibility
Same problem, different angle.
Too stiff, too loose, or completely imbalanced.
When one side is doing all the work and the other isn’t pulling its weight, your body turns into a constant tug-of-war.

Think Navy SEALs vs toddlers.
That’s not a fair fight—and your nervous system knows it.

5. Lifestyle
Lifestyle sits on top of everything.
Sleep, stress, recovery, and daily habits all feed directly into the other four pillars.

But there’s one piece I see all the time:
People trying to numb the problem instead of fixing it.

Medication has its place—but if all you’re doing is blocking pain signals without addressing the cause, you’re just delaying the inevitable.

It’s like taking your car to the mechanic because the check engine light is on…
…and instead of fixing the issue, they just unplug the light.

The problem didn’t go away.
You just can’t see it anymore.

And eventually, it catches up.

If you’re dealing with chronic pain—or you feel like you’ve tried everything and nothing sticks—this episode will give you a completely different way to look at your body, your movement, and your recovery.

This is where you stop chasing pain…
…and start fixing the system.

Ready to take this further?

Join The Unbreakable Dancer—my complete program designed to help you fix chronic pain, prevent injuries, and optimize your body for performance.

Inside, you’ll get a structured training program, mobility system, and flexibility plan so you can finally learn how to take care of your body the right way.

This isn’t about doing more.
It’s about working smarter.

And when you have the capacity—like champions do—you can do both.

Start moving better, feeling better, and performing at your highest level.

Link below.

unbreakabledancer.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Movement, mobility, strength, flexibility, and lifestyle. This is where your chronic pain is coming from. And I've got my timer set for 15 minutes because I'm not going to make this longer. But we need to understand where your chronic pain is coming from. Because everybody's body is built the same, but not everybody is built the same. So that means when it comes to chronic pain, we've got movement, mobility, flexibility, strength, and lifestyle. And now I've said them already in a different order because it doesn't matter what order. There's no rank to this. It's knowing which one fits for you. Now I find it easier to say movement and mobility together just because it's like MM, I guess. I don't know. But let's break down each one so you can understand why why you most likely have chronic pain and maybe that you're focusing on your strength, so to speak, which is why it's not getting better. And really at the end of the day, I mean Einstein said it the best. I will paraphrase him here. And you know, he what did he say here? Let me think for a second. I'm staring at a black box when I do this thing. So sometimes I lose my train of thought because I'm literally looking at black foam to bring down the um the echo here. But basically, Einstein said, if you know, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting and a different result. So what we need to do is make sure you are not doing that. So, with that being said, and with this black foam being in front of me, let's start breaking down those five pillars of chronic pain, as I call them. So the first one, movement. Well, you either don't do it enough or you do it wrong. So, or you do both. So now, a lot of times in the 2026th century we live in, or in the year that we live in, nobody is moving enough. There was a book written about 10 years ago, uh known as uh called Deskbound. And basically, speaking about the way we sit too much, sorry, I lost my train of thought there. And deskbound basically said that we shouldn't be sitting for more than two hours a day, and we really should use sitting as a as a as a resting period, not as a working period, not as a transportation mode of like a car or a train or a bus, but really just to rest. Now, I've always told my clients that we should not sit for more than three to four hours a day, and that sitting should be on the floor, not in a chair in in 2026. I mean, that's not possible. However, does a tiger belong in New York? Of course not. However, the zoo has one, and you know, for the most part, he's healthy, happy, and strong. Okay, I don't know about how happy he is, but it works. And the reason it works is because he's not in some apartment in New York in some skyscraper. He's in an he's in a home, if you want to call it that, or the zoo that matches his natural habitat. So for us, we are basically zoo animals now because we are sitting almost the entire day. And I said four hours, and when I told you about the deskbound book, the research actually says around two hours a day. So we're, yeah, it's it's not really gonna happen. And we can't change our lives to make it happen. So we kind of have to understand that we are the tiger in the woods, so to speak. You know, that's how I like to use this analogy. But that's okay because once we understand that we are kind of the tiger in New York, I think that's more accurate, then we just need to start building our day around movement patterns or knowing that our tissue is gonna be shortened, it's not gonna be moving like we want it to, and it's gonna start to become kind of like stuck together, if you will, adhesed together, because movement increases our blood flow, and blood flow increases the the suppleness of our tissue. So that means if we're sitting in a car, in a bus, in a train, we're working all day, and then we're going directly to dance class, most likely that five, 10-minute warm-up in the beginning might not really be enough. And we might need to do a little bit more. So even if you don't have the time to do a little bit more, then maybe we need to find during the day how we can do a little bit more. We can get a standing desk, we can move around, we can do some of the soft tissue mobility work that I teach uh in my Instagram channel, in my YouTube channel, and obviously in the Unbreakable Dancer, in my online program, where I go exactly over these things, how we can start implementing more movement into our day. And when we do more movement into our day, we do it correctly. Because at the end of the day, if we're doing burpee challenges and we're doing a thousand burpees a day or whatever it is, and we're doing them with wrong technique. Not only am I not really a big fan of those types of challenges, anyways, but if we're doing everything wrong, that is like driving your car with the parking brake up. That is gonna be no fun for the mechanic, you or your car. So we need to make sure that when we're moving, we know how to move. And interestingly enough, from your belly button down, a lunge, a squat, and basically a deadlift. So leaning over and picking something up is a hundred percent of your movement. So if you're walking, it's like a lunge. If you're sitting, it's like uh a squat. If you're uh I used to use a tennis serve as an example because I worked pro tennis, that's basically kind of like a hip hinge or a deadlift and a squat at the same time. So everything we do, especially in dance, is going to mimic those three movements. And many, many, many people do those movements wrong. When you squat, if your knees stay over your toes in like good alignment, that that's wrong. They need to kind of open up a little bit. And if you don't know what I mean, next time you see a kid kind of squat down, like a little kid, like three, four, two, I don't know, whenever they're old enough to start walking, look at what their knees do. Look at a Japanese person sitting when they're taking a break. Look at a Bedouin, how they sit, and you'll realize that, yeah, sometimes their knees come straight over their toes, but not usually. Usually they come out a little bit so the body can drop down. And because it's the natural motion of the hips, it's one of the laws of external rotation I talk about in my program, which I'll go into maybe at the end if I have some time, but I'm already at six minutes here, so maybe I'm not gonna make my 15-minute mark. So that is movement. Mobility I call soft tissue work. That means if you do a foam rolling exercise, or if you take a mobility ball, or if people seen my Instagram, the scraping videos and they turn super red. Well, if you're doing the mobility ball in the foam roller and it's causing you a lot of pain, or you're getting a scraping session or something like that from me or somebody else, and your skin is turning massively red, well, that means that that tissue is dysfunctional because of course you're gonna feel the scraping, you're gonna feel the foam roll, you're gonna feel the mobility ball. Yeah, sure, of course. We're not dead. If you didn't feel anything, I'd be even more worried. But it shouldn't massively hurt. And if it does hurt somewhere, try the other side. So, for example, many of my clients might have sciatica on the right side. So then when we do the soft tissue manual therapy work, foam roller work, scraping work, on the right side, where their sciatica is, it bothers them. On the left side, if they don't really have any issues, so they're asymptomatic, often they feel it, like I said, but it doesn't bother them so much. Your body is speaking a language, and that language is pain. You we just need to learn how to listen to it better in kind of like the Rosetta Stone to translate what that pain means. And when we know what that means, it is very, very, very easy to fix. So, movement, we either don't do enough of it or we do it wrong. Mobility, soft tissue work is either, you know, absolutely a 10 out of 10 in pain, or if we're doing something like scraping, your skin turns massively red. This is also not really normal. When my assistant does like scrapes me and practices with me, my skin turns sure pink because he's scraping me with a tool with wax, of course. But I don't get those cra I don't get crazy like my clients do, because if I did, I would post the videos because those are the ones that get all the views. But that doesn't happen. But I also am not struggling from these chronic issues. So we've got movement, we've got mobility out of the way, and we're at eight minutes and two seconds here. So movement, mobility, strength. This is an interesting one because everyone always feels that everything is weak. Oh, you know, my lower back is weak, that's why it hurts. My knee is weak, that's why it hurts. My ankle is weak, my core is weak, I have bad running technique, or I can't uh do lifts in in salsa, or what my whatever is always because of a weakness. That could be true, but if weakness was always the problem, then CrossFit athletes would have no pain at all because I mean all they do is train. So for me, and you know, I'll jump forward ahead a bit. Uh I will jump a little bit ahead here and say if it was all about stretching, then yogis would have no pain. So again, there's no one answer that fits all. There's these five pillars of chronic pain we have to talk about and find out which ones or which one match you. So now we're talking about strength. What I see often is more of an imbalance. So maybe one side is much stronger than the other. Think about your right hand. If you're right-handed, you're most likely much more, you have much more dexterity and strength and coordination on that side versus your opposite side. Well, that that could eventually end up being a problem, especially if you're dancing quite a bit and you're doing choreos where we need both sides of the body. And if you're social dancing, well, then you need both sides of the body for sure. And one of the worst things that we can do for the nervous system is have some type of imbalance. So I'll go back, I'll go into the imbalance thing also when it comes to the flexibility, because this is also where we see an issue. But with the imbalance of the imbalances of the body, it's almost like team Navy SEALs versus team toddlers and tug of war. Again, it's just no fun for anyone. And sometimes, of course, we do see some weaknesses in the muscle, and certain individual muscles or muscle groups or areas need to be strengthened. However, I recognize or I have noticed that when we're sitting, obviously for more than two hours a day, sometimes the muscles get more neurologically inhibited than anything else. So literally, like the definition of retarded. They're not doing what they need to do. So often, just by a proper warm-up or some of these corrective exercises we would technically give to strengthen these weak muscles uh, anyways, if we believe in the weak muscle theory, I often do similar exercises to activate the muscles. So the nervous system realizes, oh, you know what? I need to turn my quadricep muscle on or my individual quadricep muscle when I'm doing uh lunges or squats or I'm running or I'm doing a choreo routine. Okay, I've just been turning on the major muscles and sometimes forgetting to activate the smaller ones. Not you, obviously, but the nervous system. So in strength, A, we really need to look at the balance of the body. So from the right arm to the left arm, but also from the right side to the left side, and also from the legs to the arms. Obviously, your arms are not going to be as strong as your legs, but there should be some type of ratio and balance there. So we've got movement, we've got mobility, we've got strength. Now let's talk about flexibility. Flexibility is a really interesting one, especially in the dance community, because often dancers are quite flexible. We recognize as humans that we often tend to lean towards our strength. So if you go to a CrossFit studio or a contact sports team, often the people playing those sports, if you want to say that, are stronger and they build muscle quickly, but usually lack flexibility because often, just genetically, those two kind of seem to be on opposite aisles of each other. So if someone finds themselves being able to put on a lot of muscle and lift a lot of weight, they usually don't see themselves in dance class or yoga classes because that's like their kryptonite. And vice versa. If you go to a yoga studio or if you go to a dance class, sorry, I was just making sure my microphone was still on, then you're gonna see people that are usually ones that were quite mobile or hypermobile, often is what we call it, meaning they have they're like over-flexible, which is also not necessarily a bad thing, but they're going towards their strength, which is also not necessarily a bad thing. But then we go back to that balance conundrum. And if we're always focusing on our strength and not so much on our weaknesses, then we're gonna throw our general system out of balance. So I've spoke about strength being in balance and flexibility needing to be in balance and also just the entire general body. But let me not go too much on a tangent here because we are talking about flexibility, and within flexibility, the balance is also important. Imagine doing the splits. If you have your right leg in front and your left leg in back, your right leg's hamstring is gonna be great, and your left leg's hip flexor is gonna be fantastic. But what if you never train the other two, actually? So putting your left leg in front, right leg in the back, and then also doing the pancake split. So when you bring them out to the side for your groin, well, if you have ever done like a split challenge or know someone that has done one, you know that often after the people are usually destroyed because A, they either did way too much, way too fast, and changed the flexibility of their body before their nervous system could kind of catch up to it, or most people usually focus on their good side because they want to get that split, so to speak, and show it on Instagram or wherever they're doing their challenge. So they throw themselves completely out of balance. So flexibility is very important to have good flexibility. If you're hypermobile, I'll get to that in a second, but you also want to make sure you stay in balance. So in my program, The Unbreakable Body, when people come in, if I see that they are hypermobile, I'm not gonna make them focus very much, very long or very hard or intense on the stretching program because stretching is not necessarily important, but range of motion is. So if they already have the range of motion, then I'm gonna have them focus more on the strength because if they're hypermobile, especially, that means they're putting their joints into extreme positions. And in those extreme positions, we need to protect the joints, need protection, and we do that by making the muscles stronger. So then they can go into those extreme positions and they have the stability and the support from their nervous system and their muscles to make sure they don't go A too far into that position and B, when they go into that position, cartilage, connective tissue, ligaments, all of the other tissues we have are not injured in the process. So again, often the crossfitters is always this is like my joke. I say the CrossFitters need more yoga, and the yogas need the yogis often need more, I wouldn't say crossfit, I would say strength and conditioning. And this is one of the major things I go into in the Unbreakable Dancer is I program all of it for everyone. So many times people are like, oh, it sounds great, but I don't really have the time for that program. That's the point of the program. Everybody, it it gives you your time back. If you're doing a stretching program, if you're doing a mobility program and you're going to the gym or doing something for strength at home, all of it is planned out for you. So now you just do what is in front of you, what has been created by someone that knows what dancers need, and you save yourself a the time of just kind of fiddling around doing things that are nice but maybe don't necessarily work, and you get exactly what you need. And then for people that aren't doing one of those facets, one of those pillars. So let's say maybe you're really into flexibility in yoga in stretching because your flexibility is good. Well, then you need the strength, but you might not know what you need to do. Well, that's taken care of for you because there's a strength program that you start right away. And then with the coaching calls every single week with me in the group where you can ask me questions every day in Telegram, you always have contact to me to send me the videos to show me what you're doing and really understand what you need to do, how to do it, so you can get it done correctly and quicker. So the point of my program is to help people realize that they can save themselves time and they can start working smarter and not harder. And as I always say, sometimes do a little bit of both. And I'm one minute over, I think, my time limit here. So let me go into lifestyle now. So we had movement, mobility, flexibility, movement, mobility, strength, flexibility, and now lifestyle. Lifestyle is kind of encompasses all of them, actually, because if you're moving and if you're uh well, actually, I mean, a lot of times I would say lifestyles if you're sitting all day, but that goes into the movement box. So I've kind of moved lifestyle into the section of sleep. Um, yeah, I would also say nutrition and drinking, sure. Like how much are you drinking alcohol? Because I mean, at the end of the day, that's completely toxic. Caffeine actually is much worse for us than we think it is, too. But for me, I do lifestyle of more uh medicine at the moment. You know, are we popping a bunch of ibuprofen or panidol or tylenol or acetomedaphen? And are we are we masking the pain that we have by just kind of unplugging the check engine light, so to speak? You know, if your check engine light and your car went on and the mechanic just unplugged it, you would probably not accept that as a uh maintenance on your car, right? Because then you're gonna drive down the road and the whole thing's gonna catch on fire because nothing was fixed. But yet this is not only what we're doing to the pain that we have in our shoulder or our knee or our ankle, but we're also destroying the gut microbiome at the same time. And the gut microbiome is like 80% of your immune system. So if your gut is destroyed and you are destroyed, how is your gut, your immune system supposed to fix anything when it can't even repair itself, so to speak? So movement, mobility, flex, so movement, mobility, strength, flexibility, and lifestyle, again, they can really be said in any order you want. I just think movement, mobility, strength, flexibility, lifestyle is the easiest to say because that's usually the order that I put them in. However, this is something I go over quite often, again, in my online program. And I would invite all of you to come. I'll give you a two-week link absolutely for free. So we can start, I can start teaching you about your body because at the end of the day, every human body is the same, but not everybody is the same. So for me, my issue right now is flexibility, which is why I'm in yoga two times a week, is because I have enough strength, my movement is fine, my lifestyle is good, but I my mobility is not bad, but I want to work more on my flexibility because I would say if the other things are in the 90 percentile, my flexibility is maybe in the 70 percentile. So it's not bad, but again, remember the balance I spoke about. This is what I want to bring in into my life as much as I can. So when I'm 80 plus years old, I'm able to continue to dance and go to yoga and and live like I'm 40. And so for everybody, we need you and everyone else to find out your five, your five pillars of chronic pain, so to speak, and the percentage of or ratio that you have to. Are you lacking a massive amount of strength? Are you kind of 22, 25% in all of those? 25% times five is obviously more than 100%, but you want to get my point here. So, where is your ratio? What is your ratio? And do you know what you need to work on? And in this case, what is your strength, so to speak, and what is your weakness? So once we know that, it makes it much easier to let's say diagnose the problem and fix the problem, and it's I'm always a huge proponent of let's work smarter and not harder. And then when we have time, maybe a little bit of both, that's usually not sustainable unless you're like Ronaldo or Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant. And most of us maybe not be. So we want to learn how we can get the most done with the least amount of time, so to speak, and get the best results. So, again, I'm gonna make this the end of it now because I think I'm at 19 minutes. I try to keep it under 15. Maybe I'll succeed next time. This is your little movement bite of information, so we can call it like a movement snack, if you will. And if you guys have any questions, reach out to me. You can see my program at the unbreakable dancer.com. American PT Stuttgart is my main Instagram page, and also the Unbreakable Dancer is my Instagram channel too. It's brand new, it's quite small, but please follow me. And uh, I look forward to seeing all of you hopefully soon somewhere on the dance floor. And let me know if you have any questions and definitely sign up for that free trial of my program. And I look forward to seeing you on the coaching call soon.