Dr. Kareem Samhouri Action Guide - Amazon Web Servicesfutureofhealth.s3.amazonaws.com/interviews/guide/Samhouri.pdf · Dr. Kareem Samhouri Lose Weight Quickly with Neuro Fitness Who

© The Future of Health Now 2012 1

Dr. Kareem Samhouri Lose Weight Quickly with Neuro Fitness

Who is Dr. Kareem Samhouri?

I am the President and owner of Global Fitness LLC. Dr. K and

graduate of the University of Miami’s Doctor of Physical Therapy

program, and have earned a Bachelor of Science from the

Pennsylvania State University in kinesiology.

I am a licensed physical therapist, certified as a Health and Fitness

Specialist from the internationally recognized American College of

Sports Medicine, and am a certified Strength and Conditioning

Specialist through the National Strength and Conditioning

Association. I have worked in some of the best hospitals, rehabilitation facilities, outpatient

physical therapy services, and elite performance gyms in the United States.

What is Neuro Fitness?

When we're born our body is in a really healthy position to know what to do with itself.

Over time, we pick positions that become our favorites. We sit in them all day at school,

or we work in them all day at work. Our body learns to tighten and hold ourselves in

these new positions.

That's like communicating with your body that you belong in this flexed or awkward,

rigid position.

Neuro Fitness strives to reinforce the message that your body is meant to be mobile.

The following is taken from The Future of Health Now interview conducted by Ann Wixon with Dr.

Kareem Samhouri, President and owner of Global Fitness LLC and graduate of the University of

Miami’s Doctor of Physical Therapy program.

We have compiled the best, most valuable and easily applicable content from this amazing interview so

you can begin to implement positive changes today, as you strive to live a happier and healthier life

now and in the future.


When we realign your body the way it was aligned when you were a baby, pain

disappears, your muscles rebalance, and fat sheds right off the body

It is the combination of the most advanced principles of physical therapy and personal

training, in a simple method to realign the body.

Carrying Stress in Our Shoulders

A lot of people, especially women, carry their stress in their shoulders.

There's an anatomical reason for this, of the breasts carrying them forward in the

shoulder, which forces you to want to elevate to try and get out of that position, just

because of increased weight there.

When your shoulder elevates, your big muscle up there, your trapezius, has a bundle of

fibers that grabs your first rib, and it pulls it up with it. That's the beginning of this

biomechanical misalignment.

You know that good hurt when somebody is massaging you in your shoulders, and you

get that one spot that hurts every single time?

Everybody thinks that's a muscle, and they keep trying to massage it out; it's your rib. It's

your first rib.

Shoulder tension shifted one rib up on one side, and now you're side-bent.

Overriding Stress Signals

Your body has overrides just like any other machine or technology. We can add that little

vibration, and the cue to say, "sit down and back right here, because this is where you belong."

With just a little bit of pressure in the right direction – or in this case, we do it many times

through exercise – it's trying to outsmart your body into going back where it belongs.

Shoulder Stress Release Technique

Sit up straight in your seat, or stand, shoulders down and back, not hunched up.

Take your right hand and reach across to the top of your left shoulder.

If you're just underneath your ear, on your shoulder, on your trapezius muscle, I want you

to move over one-third the distance, towards the outside of your shoulder. If you’re a

woman, it’s just little bit inside of where the bra strap is.

Press down. Feel for that good hurt spot. If you're not there, move your hands around a

little bit until two fingers are on the good hurt spot.

Once you get there, press in gently until the muscle doesn't compress anymore. I want

you to push back your right hip.

You're going to push diagonally down and in towards your right hip, gently.

Then, if you're going to go to make a fist – but you can't, because your hand's stuck on

your shoulder – you'll notice that as you go to make that motion, your hand will start to

vibrate just a little bit if you put some effort toward it.


When you feel that vibration, now what you're doing is neuro inhibition: you're

overriding your nervous system.

It's a short-circuit to tell that muscle to relax, and let that rib sit back down where it

belongs.

You do that for 30 seconds, and the rib will sit back down. Some people, if it has been

there for a while, need to do it for up to three times in a row, but it'll still sit back quickly

– that's two minutes.

When you go to hit your exercise program, what happens is, now you're in alignment. When

your body gets stronger, it strengthens to the right position, the right posture, and you start

communicating with your system to say, "I'm ready to grow, or I'm ready to get in shape."

What is Kinesiology?

Kinesiology is just a fancy way of saying "the study of human movement". It's exercise

physiology, for some schools. Penn State used to name it exercise physiology, and they switched

it to kinesiology. That's what it is.

The Top Benefits of Neuro Fitness

Number one is restoring balance in the body to prevent new injury. This happens when

joints are out of position, not aligned, the muscles are out of balance. For example, you have a

much stronger chest than you have back, much stronger quads than you have hamstrings; then

your body wants to turn muscle groups off to avoid injury, which makes you de-conditioned over

time. Or, the opposite can be true, where the muscles continue to fire, and it causes injury.

Number Two benefit of Neuro Fitness is that you're going to restore balance, which is going

to enhance metabolism. When you restore balance, not just right to left side of your body, or

top to bottom; but also, within the extremities. Is your biceps as strong as your triceps; but then,

is your right biceps as strong as your left?

When you restore balance in your body, you automatically increase your metabolism, because

you're creating a healing state in your body. Whenever your body is healing, there's an increased

metabolic rate. When you leverage that for a fat loss effect, by just working the right muscles

groups in the right sequence, then your metabolism goes crazy.

You can actually create, over a four month period, a metabolic shift. That's the difference

between the person who gets away with eating stuff, and the person who doesn't. Because my

whole life, I was the person who didn't get away with it – until I shifted my metabolism.

The third benefit is relieving chronic pain. A lot of people learn to have an acceptable amount

of pain in their lives. People learn to accept that as some sort of acceptable level of pain, which is

honestly the worst decision you can make. Nine times out of 10 that sort of pain goes away once

you actually balance out your muscles and work Neuro Fitness.


How Restoring Balance Helps Enhance Metabolism

Can pills enhance metabolism? No.

Can caffeine stimulate a higher metabolism temporarily? Yes.

Can things like caffeinated substances that are also stimulants do the same thing? Yes.

Can metabolism type pills and diet pills that actually affect your insulin response to your

blood sugar assist with weight loss? Yes.

But that's not changing your metabolism. Many of those diet pills and substances are

actually very, very harmful to your body and create cardiac risk.

When it comes to actually shifting your metabolism: balance out your body.

You're recreating the balance you were born with, in a sense.

That's when your body is really operating at its highest state. That's why a baby heals so

quickly. I was born with a broken clavicle; it healed in 10 days. Why can that happen at

that age? That only happens because our bodies are in the ideal position, and because

they're in their most natural state.

The metabolic rate of a baby, relative to its size, is huge. The metabolic rate of a

sedentary adult is very low.

How to create a Metabolic Shift

Metabolism comes down to a couple factors.

One is your muscle-to-fat ratio. Body fat percentage turns out to be a better measurement

for metabolism than scale weight.

The more you increase your muscle to fat ratio, the higher your metabolism is going to

be.

That's because muscle requires more energy to exist than fat does.

Metabolism as something that's very tangible: it's our bodies' response to our lives.

If we increase the response to our life, then it makes a lot of sense that metabolism is

going to be higher.

If our body is used to being in a certain position, and we shock it into a new position, it's

going to increase metabolic demand.

Now, if we can increase metabolic demand for a two to three day period at a time, so

we're creating lactic acid: the soreness after a workout.

Illness, trauma, injury: all these things can increase metabolism for days at a time.

If we continuously do any of those things – especially through exercise – then we're

elevating metabolism for two to three days at a time, never letting it drop, and doing it

again. Over a course of about four months, your body creates a new equilibrium, or a new

homeostasis, at this new metabolic rate.

Your metabolism is designed to make your body efficient; what we're shooting for is

greater efficiency.


Restoring Balance

What happens when you restore balance is, you take joints out of bad positions and put them in

good positions. When a joint is in a bad position, there are sub-sensory pain signals going on

inside your joint all the time, sending feedback to your brain and saying: “I'm out of position. I'm

out of position. Help.”

Rotator cuff tendonitis doesn't happen overnight; it happens after a long time of your shoulder

being out of position. The whole time that's happening, you're getting pain signals to your brain.

When that signal gets to your brain, your brain sends a signal back and says: “Turn off the

muscles in the area, because I don't want you to pull something and get hurt worse, because

above all else, it's creating more injury.”

When we balance the body, we get a better signal. We get more muscle involved. When you get

more muscle involved, you're affecting your muscle to fat ratio, and around and around we go.

How Neuro Fitness is Different from Other Exercise Programs

The Triple-M system: Muscle balancing, Motor unit recruitment, and Multi-planar

movement.

Muscle balancing, as described above, involves ensuring equal strength left to right, top to

bottom, within the extremity.

Motor unit recruitment happens because of complex or compound movements. Complex

exercise – a squat plus a press, as opposed to just a knee extension or a leg extension – involves

more muscle groups, and requires greater demand upon your body, which increases the

metabolic demand.

Multi-planar means that we don't exercise just forward/backwards, just side to side, or just with

rotation; but, we integrate all three planes of movement, so that we're moving diagonal directions

and rotational directions with our upper body, or side to side with our lower. That enhances

coordinative effect, and it targets – here's the main principle – we're doing top-down, not bottom-

up.

Retrain Your Brain for a Better Body

Most gym programs exercise your muscles first; we're going to exercise your brain first.

We're going to start at the signal, and we're going to get the signal stronger to the muscle.

If you just try to retrain your muscles, what happens if the signal doesn't get there?

You might be training one-third of your muscle at best.

We saw this with elite athletes and Olympic athletes: they were getting 30 - 40%

efficiency from their muscles, as compared to three weeks later.

That's an absurd difference for them for that time period.


They're getting a 300% gain in a couple of weeks, in terms of muscle contraction and

performance, because their signal was disrupted from old injuries and bad positioning;

that's all it was.

Understanding Chronic Pain

One reason the body may experience chronic pain is to stop new injury from happening.

It's holding you in position, because sometimes it doesn't want you to bump into things or

that sort of thing, because that's going to cause the same injury – just an increase in pain

signal. It's acting as prevention, in that sense.

Above all else, what we really want to be considering is that that pain signal is telling you

there's something wrong in your body.

Your body is trying to communicate to tell you something is going wrong.

Your whole body runs on electricity, blood flow, and oxygen. If you get the inner

workings of the body down really simple.

Without oxygen, nothing heals or improves, and nothing gets nourished.

Blood flow carries that oxygen.

Then, we're speaking the language of electricity to our bodies. Anything that kinks the

hose, or stops that electrical signal from getting to where it needs to go, is causing

problems in your body that are compounding over time.

The reason the chronic pain goes away is because when you can actually can stimulate all the

muscles in your body, and deliver blood flow where it belongs, then that nourishing of the areas

that had the restrictions and pain signals goes away.

Good Pelvic Alignment

The first reason is that most people are out of balance to begin with in their pelvic

alignment.

When you lean forwards, or when you bend forwards, your pelvis tips backwards.

We live in a very forward-based world. We are front of body everything. We reach and

grab in front of our bodies.

The first step of this is to get you leaning backwards, to counter balance everything else

you're doing in your day.

When your pelvis is tipped backwards, how does your belly look? Does it look like

ripped abs, or does it look like there's a little bit of a belly fold?

When you lean forward, there should be some sort of skin fold.

You have to be like sub-10% body fat not to have that.

When you're standing up straight, your pelvis is backwards, or it's posteriorly rotated. It's

the same thing for your spine as leaning forward. So it's no wonder your abs aren't

popping out.


This first occurred to me when I was training a law student at University of Miami, She told me

she was doing 1,000 crunches a day, or something crazy like that. She was eating right, and all of

her exercises were right, but I went through her entire exercise program. The only thing that was

missing was the multifidus, which is a lower back muscle that works for rotation and extension. I

trained it like crazy for a couple of weeks, and boom – her abs popped right out.

Then I started to say, there's something to this muscle balancing thing. The pelvis was out of

alignment. It turned out that she didn't have a body fat issue; she had a positional issue that was

compressing her abs and creating that skin fold effect like bending over, but when she was

standing up.

How to Get Visible Abs

Step one: Train your back.

When you train your back, you're going to lean backwards, correct your pelvic alignment,

and then that's skin is going to elongate.

You might already have abs underneath.

I recommend: bridges and back extensions on a ball.

Step two: Unstable surfaces: stability exercises, as opposed to abdominal exercises.

The reason is, when you have to have a balance reaction, that's the way your abs work in

real life.

When we move away from functional exercise, we move away from the carryover effect,

and then you only get a result for the exercise you do in the gym.

Crunches, and all the variations of crunches, work a muscle called your rectus abdominis.

That's your six pack muscle; it's the one that looks good. But it has no functional

carryover to real life, because it's not part of your true core.

It's your oblique – external and internal – it's your transversus abdominis; it's your

multifidus; it's your psoas; and some people would say, your quadratus lumborum, which

is your side bender.

Those are your true core muscles. They work automatically as a balance reaction to any

movement that creates that.

10 Minutes a Day – Really!

In 10 minutes a day, you can get in lots of exercise.

The secret is to go from upper body, to lower body, to whole body, and repeat.

Start with upper body, then, no rest, switch to lower body – no rest again – switch to

whole body.

An example would be doing a bicep curl and press: just bending your elbows, then

pressing up overhead, and repeating for 50 seconds, 5 - 0.

Then during your 10 seconds of transition to equal the minute, you're going to switch

over to a pivot squat; which would be like a regular squat, but instead, you're trying to


rotate back behind you with one leg, and then stand back up. Now we're working

rotationally.

Then the third exercise would be something that is known to be a burpee, which would be

squatting all the way down to the ground, kicking your legs out behind you like a donkey

kick, doing a pushup, and then jumping back up to a squat position and standing.

You want to do each one of these exercises for 50 seconds at a time, using that 10 second

transition period to move to the next.

Then repeat that kind of sequence. You can switch exercises but, upper, lower, whole.

Upper, lower, whole.

Do that three times – that's nine minutes.

The do, a plank; which is your unstable surface and will work your abs specifically at the

end.

You always want the carryover to be on the abs. Work your whole body for stability, and

then work your abs specifically at the end of the exercise program, and watch your results

appear in just 10 minutes. That's 10 exercises in 50 second increments, with 10 second

transitions.

Three Types of Body Challenges

One of the things that I learned is that what works for one person doesn't necessarily work for

everybody.

First category is the skinny-fat person. The second category is the fat-fat person. The

third is the “nutri moron.”

The first category, skinny-fat, is going to be somebody that is, by everybody's judgment,

in great shape.

This is your typical 19-year-old female who you see on the treadmill at every main gym

across the United States, doing 45 minutes of walking or running at the same speed every

single time.

But her body never changes.

She might have 35% body fat, so she has very little muscle, but her overall weight is

pretty low. That's the hardest category to lose weight.

Secondly, you've got your fat-fat person. They've got plenty of muscle mass, huge calves

from walking around with extra weight.

Third, the “nutri moron” is the person who thinks that they're eating well because they're

following the food guide pyramid, and stuff like that. It's not working as well across most

of the population as we'd love it to.

It's a little behind the times. We'd rather see you eat a lot more protein in your diet, phase

it in really early in your day.

Eat five or six meals a day to keep your metabolism high, and keep you full and away

from reaching for snacks. Make sure your hydration is adequate.

You just want to feed your body a bit of every macronutrient in every meal, because

that's how the energy cycle works: some carbs, some protein, some fat. When you do it


like that, then your body can sustain its energy over time instead of crashing after every

meal. That makes a big difference on activity.

Advice for the Skinny-Fat Person

You have to increase muscle mass.

That person is not going to do this super highly metabolic stuff, where I said 50 seconds

as fast as you can go. Instead, in that 50 second time period, they're going to see if they

can get 6 quality repetitions that really take them to that point of failure or fatigue, where

they can't get one more without breaking form.

They’re going to go nice and slow, and they’re going to build muscle. When they build

muscle, they’re going to enhance their muscle-to-fat ratio, raise their metabolism, drop

body fat, and get the result.

Advice for the Fat-Fat Person

That's the highly metabolic person. That's most of the people that want to lose fat, would

be the person who has normal muscle mass, but is 20, 30, 40 pounds overweight.

That's your example of that 10 minutes a day thing that I'm talking about. You want to

stimulate a new level of intensity, and you want to alternate really hard stuff with nothing

at all.

When you do that, you shock your body. It learns to find a new equilibrium, which is a

skinnier or healthier equilibrium for your body.

The Difference between Weight Loss and Fat Loss

Weight loss is overall body weight.

That includes your fat free mass and your fat mass of your body.

Fat free mass includes muscles, bones, ligaments and organs.

If you have a very high body fat percentage – this is the correlation of BMI, body mass

index, which is your weight in kilograms over your height in meters squared: that's your

BMI.

That still is a good predictor of heart disease. American Heart Association continues to

recommend it as the number one predictor of heart disease, so it's important to look at.

But body fat percentage, on the other hand, is a better predictor of metabolic rate.

Weight is good for BMI, for reducing risk of cardiac disease. But body fat percentage is

what you need to focus on, instead of scale weight, for ultimately affecting metabolism

and the appearance of your body.

That's going to come down 50% to diet; that's how you move scale weight. The

nutritional habits you have, scale weight moves from that.

Then, exercise, which is what changes your body fat percentage much more rapidly. It's

the combination that affects the scale weight.


Getting Rid of Stubborn Belly Fat

The first and most important tip I can offer you is: work on systemic fat loss, not local fat

loss.

Spot reduction only works with hormonal regulation.

We have fat storage patterns based off of elevated or lower level hormones in our bodies.

For example, people know cortisol stores body fat.

A lot of people don't know about insulin and love handles, but that would be another

example.

The only way that you could actually lower abdominal belly fat specifically would be by

reducing cortisol; not by working on your lower abs.

I want you to lose fat all over your body. Challenge as many joints as possible. Use the Triple-M

system to follow your exercise principles. Upper body, lower body, whole body, all directions of

movement. Balance your muscles where you see imbalances. If you spend your whole day

forward at a computer, start working the muscles in the back of your shoulders. Correct for that

stuff, and you're going to see miraculous results.

Bridges to Prevent Falls for Age 60+

In the older adult population above the age of 60, 65 it's really important to be doing

bridges, because extension equals fall prevention.

I'm going to say that again: extension equals fall prevention.

Right now, hip fractures are the number one cause of mortality and morbidity in older

adults that are otherwise healthy.

Within one to two years of a hip fracture, people are dying very quickly. That's really

scary.

How to do the Bridge

Lie on the floor, bend your knees and have your feet flat, squeeze your cheeks together,

and then lift your bottom up off the floor.

Hold for five seconds, and come back down.

Do that five minutes a day, if you're age 60+, so that you can prevent falls. Because

extension is really the thing.

The back side of the body, over many years, just tends to stick out back behind us. We need to

push it out forward in front of us, so that we re-center our center of mass, and we don't fall.

That's how we prevent hip fractures.


Stairs for Middle Age

For the 35, 40-year-old age group, stairs are super functional; they work a lot of joints.

They help keep your knees healthy, your hips healthy, your ankles healthy and they’re

going to increase metabolic demand on a regular basis throughout your day.

For the stairs at home – of course, I want you to be safe and make sure you have a sturdy

railing, do the following:

One run up and down the stairs counts as one rep.

Do 10 reps, as follows:

o Rep one is one stair at a time.

o Rep two is two stairs at a time; now you're taking the double step.

o Rep three – make sure you're holding onto a railing, but not using it for more than

just balance support – is three steps at a time.

o Because that's going to force different muscles to work, similar to hiking and

climbing.

o You're stretching your low back and your glutes.

You just alternate that for your whole 3 sets of 10.

For a lot of people, three steps is going to feel like a lot for a while. But remember, we

want to get to that point, because that works different muscles than two steps.

Two Extreme Neuro Fitness Success Stories

I had the really good fortune of taking somebody from Olympic Alternate to Gold Medalist

through Neuro Fitness.

Her training principles being outstanding to begin with.

But she was missing her neurological potential from her muscles.

We rebalanced her. We worked on strengthening the muscles in the new position.

Then after that, we just taught her body where she was in space by having her have to

look left, look right while she was in various positions, and moving quickly the way that

would need to be done in track, and for hurdles.

We started doing that with variable head positions, distractions, and stuff like that, just so

she could learn this new position of her body. It was instantly a huge difference for her.

I had a gentleman lose over 250 pounds with these principles, when I was working in the

inpatient rehabilitation hospital.

He lost that weight in one month, actually, which was really neat to see.

He did have dietary modifications, because he was in inpatient, but he was well over 500

pounds when he started. It was faster weight loss than we wanted. We had to watch his

heart signs and stuff to make sure he was healthy.

But his body responded so well to it.

Those are two extreme examples, but a very common example of a success story would be a

baby boomer with joint pain that wants to lose weight. They finally come to me, I help them lose

weight, and I do it through Neuro Fitness. They might have had 5 or 6 out of 10 pain in 3 or 4


joints in their body. They lose the weight, and at the same time, the pain is disappearing, so

they're really feeling great.

Final Thoughts

Here's what I think really needs a solution in the world of health and fitness, and that is:

inspiration to exercise.

I think that's where, for a lot of people, the disconnect is happening. Because there's a lot of

exercise programs out there that can all get you some result, or all the result; depending on how

fast it happens is another story. How do we get people to do that?

I've got a theory, which has two parts:

Part One is a positive reward system, not a negative punishment consequence

system. People punish themselves for not following their diets; that's backwards.

Instead, when you chose to eat right, write it down and let yourself know how it felt.

Every night, I want you to read that piece of paper, because it's going to get longer, and

longer and longer.

Start seeing your victories.

I got this technique from Pat Croce: carrying a victory journal in your back pocket.

All the little victories in life is what your read when you go to bed, because it puts you in

the positive mindset to create change.

Part Two is to find inspiration.

Find something that is truly meaningful, something or someone in your life, and promise

that thing or that person.

For example, if I wanted to make sure that I was healthy so I can play sports with my

kids; then I would go right up to my kid once I made a decision in my head, I'd look him

eye to eye and I would say, "I promise you that I'm going to be 10 pounds lighter in the

next 3 months, and I'm going to be beating you down the field."

I would look him eye to eye. You don't break promises like that.

Find the ability to promise something that's important in your life, and attach fitness or exercise

to it. Then, reward the victories. That's my advice.

Resources

Anat Baniel interview

Tim Ferriss interview

This Action Guide has been brought to you by The Future of Health Now © 2012

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Dr. Kareem Samhouri Action Guide - Amazon Web Servicesfutureofhealth.s3.amazonaws.com/interviews/guide/Samhouri.pdf · Dr. Kareem Samhouri Lose Weight Quickly with Neuro Fitness Who