Healing Joint Pain Naturally on a Russian Pravilo with Arseniy Grebnov

Full Transcript

Hello, its bill, the knee pain guru, and welcome to the pain education podcast sponsored by the comella Foundation. Today, we got a friend of mine, his name is our Arseniy, and he’s gonna share with us a lot about his experience in different Russian healing approaches. I’m going to let our Arseniy introduce himself, because he’s gonna be able to share with you the extent of his knowledge and experience a welcome Arseniy.

Thank you, thank you. So what I have been doing since I’ve been 12 years old is martial arts of different forms, spiritual practices and health practices, I’ve tried to dive into everything, I’m very open-minded and I try to experience with the Western, with the eastern medicine and fitness approaches and just try to integrate everything, how to say like, everything into one and make sense of it all and find what’s… Because we don’t have that much time right so of the health of the fitness, of this spirituality and stuff like this, so that’s a combination of that, is, is what I do right now is Pravilo… I do breath work, we do a lot of massage, we just saw with the cold therapy with the martial arts, a lot of people come with psychological things, a lot of people come with health, with physical elements, and of course, we do a comp of some martial arts classes but actually, the core of my training has been focused on health practices and.

Arseniy, would you go into a little bit, talk about the pravilo, introduction to it. Your experience with it. I will make sure somewhere over here, when the video is created that we’re gonna have maybe a picture of it or a short video clip so people could get a reference to what we’re talking about.

Yes, so pravilo, you know, if you think of the three components, for example, you need strength, you need stretching and you need a Play Station, it… So how do I combine all those things in a short amount of time, that’s very plainly speaking from a physical perspective, right, but I feel is an ancient Russian concept of stretching, compressing, strengthening. The second, the physical body… There’s many different levels to it. Like everything else, like anything, there’s the basics, there’s the intermediate, there’s the advance, and it all depends on what the person wants to focus on, you can take a just as a physical practice, you can take it beyond and have some psychological revelations and spiritual things as well.

Can you share a little bit about the history of it? The.

History is back in the day, there needed to be a method that a person can get ready in a very short amount of time for peak physical performance, and when something like that happens, for example, what we’re talking about, how to heal yourself and back in the day, if you think of how life in Russia was right, for example, intrusion village, it wasn’t like they didn’t have big armies and stuff like this, people didn’t have time to train, people needed to work… In the file, things like that. It was a completely different lifestyle. So for example, at the same time, you needed to be able to defend your small little bit, there had to be some kind of a protective unit, or for example, when invasions happen and stuff like this, they used to hang warriors on the overnight before the battle. You knew the battle. Tomorrow, you would for a couple of days and then you would hang overnight all night. We do, it’s a trip, you go through different stages, you forget the physical pain, like this is this, but obviously, we’re not using it like that right now.

Is again, it’s again for a different purpose like… And let me interrupt you just for saying, ’cause this is gonna be on audio as well, so for those that aren’t seeing the picture on the video that think of yourself being suspended by all four limbs hanging on a machine that is about 80 x 10, 10 x 10… About six foot off the ground. Yes, and you’re suspended by your wrists and your ankles, I.

yes, with weight. Right, so look, there’s different angles, and there’s no angle that, for example, is the secret angle, the best angle the body should be stretched and strengthened in every single angle in every direction. It can be done with weights, it can be done with a winch, it can be done with ropes, it can be done from the ceiling, it’s just a concept of decompression engaging the body and strengthening the body, connective tissue with the breath, of course, with the relaxation principles of course.

How do you approach when someone is in pain, they have joint pain, how do you approach using the pravilo in that equation? Honestly.

It’s all individual. There’s no… How to say… Standard way that you would approach every single person because… But anything you first ask the person’s life habits, right. Honestly, the first new has cash, do you… Do you sleep good? Now, you would think that those things. But it’s… You can be doing the whole best exercises in the world if you don’t need… Right. If you don’t sleep good, if you’re stressing out, if you don’t know how to breathe, it doesn’t matter, everything, it’s like a pravilo with Pravilo helps you do is re-align the energies, it has some packages in a body, you don’t have to do anything. I have to say, and it’s not like anything super natural, it’s just like we as humans, we have different blockages, different muscular tension, and a physical tension that helps you stretch and release all of that, and when you search and release all of that, you start buying by… It’s buying by… You start moving differently, you start breathing differently, you start… You start being more calm, you feel energy instead of fatigue, those things, and those things truly change your life if somebody’s overweight and they’re complaining about joint issues, but if you let…

Not gonna help with that. I don’t stretch people like that, I make you… Make you, I kill you over here with simple stuff, you need to lose a 150 pounds, or somebody… If somebody has played and screws due to surgery and stuff like this, it also has to be approached very differently, it would be more like a rehab approach, I would strap the ankle, it and put low maybe 10, 25 pounds and make them in rehab style. Move the leg each way of the elbows, not necessarily that you hang the person as much as they can and they stretched out and suffers. It’s very individual. It’s very nice. Or I have athletes that are joggers that are getting ready for a competition while that session is gonna be totally different… Right. Sure, they’re getting yelled at and screamed at, and push push. So it all depends what the person is looking for, but in terms of the pain, I would say range of motion and engage in the body, just like in rehab type settings, moving the joints in various directions with breath, making many wraps. Lightweight, be able to engage the joint to move it around, that promotes blood flow, that promotes you…

How do you view pain… There’s a lot of different ways to view pain, there’s a lot of ways to describe pain, some people would say pain is good, some people who would say pain is bad, some people would say pain is both, what is your perception of it? And I know we’ve trained in a similar martial arts, so there’s a transcendence of that pain through breathing and how we can get more in touch with our body for someone who’s been in pain for a period of time, either it be acute or chronic… How are you helping them to understand what this pain is…

You know, people take pain personally, and I view that as the number one problem, not the pain is not the problem. It’s how you interpret it. That’s really good, that’s really good. To find the person that doesn’t have any psychological or physical pain is impossible, is an innate part of life, right. And whether it’s some injury, whether it’s like I said, whether something happened to somebody, we all go through things, we all have injuries, it’s impossible to find somebody… That doesn’t have any pain, right? It’s how you deal with it, how much attachment you give to… You know how much you dwell upon it, right. Some people, some people buckle down in front of that pain, and some people rise because of the same situation, in the same pain, even with final surgeries, even with anything with every… So it’s actually more I think like somebody’s interpretation and psychological state and view.

On life, and how do you help someone get unstuck from that psychological view on life, like how could you are somebody that… I work with people in pain as well, and they tend to have that helpless, hopeless… There isn’t anything I can do, I’m stuck. It’s always gonna be this way. This is just what happens because I’m getting older, how do you… What is your approach to move someone from that place of being stuck to give them to a light at the end of the tunnel that hope…

It’s very hard. It’s very hard. It’s a very hard thing. And truthfully, if the person doesn’t want it, there’s nothing that you can do, you can be the best teacher, the best car in the world, if the person has not want it, it’s impossible. At the same time, you don’t have to be the greatest. And if the person has the desire, has the motivation, they need just a little nudge to become better, they just… They do watch your YouTube video and that’s gonna help them. They don’t need it. So how to awaken a person because especially recently, this year a lot of people are dealing with psychological things, a lot of problems in various things, and how to wait people it… How to help people to motivate people. That is a very hard thing. What I tend to do is to make them brief, they have to just… They’re very sedated. And people very, very sedated or the athletes are… If it’s an athlete, it’s on the opposite scale, they’re very hyper is like that… It’s a hyper person, you try to relax to try to calm them down, but if it’s a person that’s a depressed person, I try, you have to wait them up somehow, you have to make them do exercises, you have to make them portion overcome and through simple stuff, like that.

And conversation by conversation, it doesn’t reach as deep as giving a person a neck and an ability to kinda do something by themselves, they have no… You’re there for them and that you love them, but you have to push them. On hate relationship, right? Because you have to push because you’re trying to help somebody out of their comfort zone… Right, so it’s not gonna be comfortable. It’s not going to be convenient, so a person has to understand that they have… They’re gonna experience pain if they wanna overcome something and be better… Pain is a growth process. It’s a like notes. It’s not like a negative, right. If you don’t want pain, just go do drugs whole life and I just lay there and is around wrap and… Never do anything. You never meet anybody. Right, right. Even if you meet somebody, even if you love somebody, there’s gonna be pain associated with that relationship with… In your relationship, because a lot inevitable it, even in a psychological standpoint… And that goes through Buddhist philosophy in Buddhism. They say, the very first principle is, life is suffering. That’s the very first thing to understand that life is suffering a mainly because we’re gonna die and if we’re not gonna die, we’re gonna see other people close to us die…

It’s inevitable, right? And that’s gonna cost… So even that, even if you’re the best person in the world, but everyone experiences loss everyone experiences psychological and physical trauma to wake people up and to help them rediscover that fire, they need tension, they need strength and they need realization, like I said, right. So I put them through psychological and physical tension and make them do exercises that are physically and psychologically challenging… Can’t do that, I can’t do it. You have to do it. Then you give them an opportunity to start strengthening themselves and feeling like, Wow, I have some strength, I overcame something, and then appear a relaxation, it can be in either exercises, it can be in Pravilo. But like I said, it’s a part of this whole thing. It’s not like this magic thing, it’s like a much like Son, you have to shine up the detox, you have to go outside and get cold water and say… Those things are essential. Right. So it’s a part of a complex.

And how do you make that distinction between good pain and bad pain…

Back pain is acute. If something hurts physically, for example, if something hurts in an acute way, like sharp Lake, pins and needles, or if something is super swollen, those are situations where you shoot an exercise, you should get the swelling down, you should rest recovery, right. The other kind of a pain is nagging pain, for example, I have… Both of my knees are a online… They heard a lot all the time, right. But at the same time, if you don’t stress them properly, if you don’t engage them properly, that is gonna deteriorate.

So you can just not do anything and take, protein, whatever. Take Advil or Tylenol it, or whatever. Or you can every day, like brushing your teeth, it become every day, you give your own 10 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes in the evening and do some exercises for yourself to keep… To relax yourself. A good thing, like I said, the good thing is, should motivate you truthfully, good pain should motivate you and back pain as a pain where you take it and you depressed about it. And you had mentioned properly working the joint, I see a lot of people more towards the athlete side of things where they constantly push, they’re constantly pushing through the pain… No pain, no gain, Pain is weakness, leaving the body. They have that mentality of that drive, that push, but it almost seems like it’s self-abusive, there isn’t a health component to it, how do you make the distinction between the exercise that you’re doing that’s actually the pain that you’re working with, for instance, with your needs, the torn ligaments in your needs, how do you know that what you’re doing is actually helping your needs as opposed to that real type A personality of just driving forward and pushing through it…

Well.

That’s easy. Next to day, Do you feel better or do you feel worse through whatever you did, when I think it’s something you would think you would… You would think I get simple, but it’s…

Yeah, and this is where I think the psychological component comes in because there’s a blind spot for people with pain that think that that is the only way the pushing through the pain to drive, and even if it hurts the next day, that means it’s… I did a good thing. And I realized that I’m getting from you that you realize that that’s not necessarily the way to go, however, how do you get through to someone that it’s like, Are you paying attention here, are you connecting the dots on this… This did this, and this isn’t a good thing the next day.

So it has to be a whole education in everything… True health, physically, right? You shouldn’t… You should not feel burdened by your body, you shouldn’t feel like you’re moving this heavy thing, or you have things… Your body should be floating and light, and the problem is… 99.9% of the population has never experienced that. It’s not normal, right? What… Everyone has experienced this tension, but nobody has experienced true relaxation and likeness consciously, you can take drugs probably what you call out of my experience, but consciously in their daily life, they experience this fatigue and this drag with their body, it’s not like a beautiful flowing mechanism that works and functions properly. And you barely feel it. You should feel the… It’s called the light body, and she got a stuff like this on… And then again, we’re psychosomatic, so if you feel drag, if you feel pain, physical pain, of course, it’s constantly gonna give you pressure and tension on your site, it’s gonna be very hard to not think of it many backwards all the time. It doesn’t matter how much breath work I do, it doesn’t matter like my back hurt, you know, it’s gonna be very hard to relax or more mating, but at the same time, it’s much easier and more scientific in yoga.

They did… You start with asset, as you start with posture, you start with posture, you have to put the physical body into… Then you start with breathwork, breathing is there in the posters by the person whose bodies like brittle and frail, I always say weak person can never be free, you have to be strong, but to your question, with athletes, no support, gives you health… No athletic support. It’s the opposite. So that’s for was seeking out… At that stage, you seeking performance in mean… Whatever you’re doing is wrong. Yeah, if you want help. Step Lame sports, right?

No. Right, yeah. Well, most of them, the mentality is, what do I need to do to get back in the game?

What’s for… Like I said, it’s a performance and driven in that specific thing at us, even the amount of damage that isn’t sustained on what they notice, which is joints, muscles, things that happen, but what that does to the heart, what that does to cardiovascular… What that does to a nervous system that kind of constant constant goes on. It’s destructive. It’s like.

Destructive. Were you in Judo? Did I remember that correctly? And so I’ve done judo jujitsu. I’ve done all kinds of martial arts… Yeah, that one I had a hard time letting go of… My ego had a hard time letting go of Judo, once I really did, I was much healthier, not getting hit continually with the floor makes a big difference in terms of how the body can feel, and although I had… There was a high, there was a euphoria when I throw somebody or whatever that situation was, after that constant pain that the body was in just from falling all the time, it… Suddenly feeling good, I became more of a priority. Feeling that movement that you’ve been talking about, and just for everybody that’s listening, I started getting involved in the Pravilo about a year and a half ago. I reached out to our side, we got some videos, friends of mine got videos, and we put together one here in Ashville, North Carolina, and it’s been absolutely amazing. I’ve been using it, probably not as holistically as our Arseniy is sharing, but it’s been amazing, I immediately went to seeing how I can fully suspend myself from it and stretch out every nook and cranny of my shoulders and hip sockets, which has been great, and it’s allowed me, to jar some things loose, that I was able to work on myself in other aspects of way, shapes or forms in my body, so I could personally attest to how well the machine works or the concept of it works.

And there were old injuries that I experienced shoulder dislocation from when I was very young, and other injuries in my back that it’s like… I didn’t even know I had them until you get on the machine and you’re being stretched in a way that… There’s no place to hide. Yes, don’t play a place for that injury to hide, and it is very revealing, and it’s revealing not only physically, it’s also mentally and emotionally as well, ’cause you come off the machine and you feel like a 10 feet tall Eyal, however, with all of that stuff, stretched out the physical body, stretched out, the way we ourselves, there’s a lot of mental and emotional constructs we have, that was the follow-on from the machine over several days that I was like, Huh, I’m kind of pissed off today, and it came out of nowhere, or feeling depressed or whatever it was, it was just interesting. The process of going through that, how that felt with the machine.

When you start meditating, usually, you start meditating and then you come to your teacher and you say, How come I’m more upset and more stressed out, you’re not… You just are at aware, even with Pravilo, you just start becoming aware of your body differently, aware of your inner working directly. If you start truly stretching, truly working, doing the sauna, doing everything that I… Have people quit cigarettes? Have people quit empty? The presents have been on for 12 years, there’s been very, very amazing stuff with it.

Or… One of the pieces that in working with my own clients is that here, this level of pain when we first start working, and then the pain increases for a period of time, and they’re like, way what you were just saying about the meditation, that it’s not that the pain has increased in their body, they’re just more aware of the level of pain that they have it, so… I completely agree with what you’re saying, how people… It can be very challenging at first, when we first begin to that journey down the path to knowing ourselves more, what is our physical body really capable of, what is our mind capable of, how emotionally can we handle that and balance between the two. Yeah.

Yeah, it’s just… One of the most important things is just every person needs to understand by there when professional coming for a session, they have to have a good reason to be there because people drive in one hour and a half to be here. One way is, you have to have a good reason to be here, you have to be very invested and be very serious, now… You can’t take it lightly, otyherwise, it’s a waste of time. And like anything else, you know you have to take something serious or other for it to truly close to truly work and let the work at it. You can’t just go to somebody and say, Here, Mr, do things to me, or a massage guy, or sit in this guy, or anybody. You have to put in the work, you have to show up. You have to suffer. You have to split. And I think that’s honestly the most number one showing that a person has to show up and do it.

And when I hear you say showing up, it’s more than just walking through the door is.

No, although the door and you’re tracked out psychologically, you’re just there, it’s like some teenager stuff, that they can be… They get slapped with reality real quick, you can’t… The training is designed as such, you wake up real fast and it would give an up person, but at the same time, I rather person who isn’t psychologically all the way there, at least they showed up, get it. At least they showed up because another person they never show up, but even if they’re not logically, that person still got their bomb over there and is still ready for work, even if they’re not perfectly in a psychological state to perform… That’s your job, as an instructor to help them with that.

Yeah, yeah, it’s so interesting, and I think it goes down that the person needs to wanna do it, they gotta take the steps to wanna improve their life, they want to believe that there is a way out of pain and you’re gonna help them, you’re gonna move them in that direction, to the best of your ability, drawing on your knowledge and your years of experience… Right, right.

You have to give people even little bits of hope because a person has never felt free of pain, if you’ve been in pain for so long, you don’t even understand what life is, if it’s even possible, you’re late. That’s not possible, right? So even you have to give people with each session just a little glimpse of hope, something is a little bit… A little bit. It doesn’t have to be anything, grand, but they have to feel… And that’s what I’m saying. That’s the difference between health practice is support and you support, you leave and you get banged up more, but when you do help critics, you should feel better if they’re essentially like, Hey, you should feel better, you might be a door for sure. You should feel sore. And that’s what you said, the difference, between the good thing and the bad thing, sore muscles like pain is good, that means you did some good squats…

I find encouragement is really important, the more that I’ve incorporated encouragement that they can do it, they can accomplish these things, they can work in this direction. I think that’s very helpful. Another thing I tell my clients is, sometimes you need me to be a cheerleader. Sometimes you need me to be a drill sergeant, and it’s a fine line to understand… To get a sense for who I’m working with. What needs to happen? What has been your experience?

Exactly, exactly, exactly. Like you said, it’s a fine line, Arseniy.

Gotta revisit that. Somebody’s here.

Is… Yes, sure.

Sorry about that. All the problems to fire. Okay, what question did I ask you? And.

That was a long time ago. I don’t know.

I hear you. Okay, well, let’s… Now.

The approach to different people is like you said, it’s very… Like I said, it’s very individual, it’s very individual and based on people moving on, we wanna push people comfortably, we want people to come back to keep working, and like you said, that encouragement, and if you like solicit… So what I’ve been trying to create or Here is the community sense of positivity kinds of people, and everybody’s nice, it’s very supportive, and that is huge for people, not everybody has a good support team, and sometimes it’s good to get away from family and just… You guys have the guide time, and it’s good for girls to have their gril class, you know what I mean? All those things is, they’re healthy and they’re necessary, and then not many people have…

Right. Yeah, that community, that community. I think it’s important, but I think of a community in a way that isn’t… What my experience has been in the community has been more of a beat down, that there isn’t this… Building the people up, and I think that’s one of what I’ve really appreciated and got out of system was that concept that everybody has this egg inside, that analogy that they use, there’s an egg inside and you just wanna crack it, so something more beautiful grows out of that the person grows stronger, that you don’t wanna break the person and crush the eggs, so to speak, where they don’t have any desire to come back, that they’re getting stronger, even a little bit psychologically, physically, emotionally, whatever that is. Each time. Yeah.

And that’s the art part. That instructor has to learn how to do that people come to us for that. Right. Which is truly… It’s one of the hardest things in the world that I think it’s easier to do something else. This is one of the hardest things to be, one of the greatest release said, one of the most un-gratifying thing in the world is to be an instructor, you’ve put so much time, so much so, so much energy interpersonal, sometimes you see the flower blossoms, sometimes you don’t it in construction, for example, I know I put a day of work and I can physically see the results make sense, and sometimes you’re putting so much time into somebody, then they move in the or something else, so you don’t necessarily… You didn’t truly. You know, it takes years it… With anything, it takes time. And that’s another thing, even with pravilo right from the very first stretch, you’re gonna feel tension, you’re gonna feel good, you’re gonna feel bad, but even the first time, even after a month, it’s not gonna be the same as that, it’s gonna be after three and a half years, 10 years, for example, with consistent training is gonna be, you’re gonna have a totally different feeling and understanding of the exercise, or even if they had push-up.

So it’s consistency. And the people have to understand. It’s a life-long commitment. I say, I say through people, it’s like, it’s like brushing your teeth. You brush your teeth every day. Right, you eat every day, you should do something good for your physical body every single day, every day, and the saying is If you don’t sweat the day you haven’t lived it at, you have to stress your body, you have to make the body live.

Yeah, no, that’s really good. Arseniy, do you work with… Do you do coaching? Or do you work with clients online?

Line, I do, but I do it as much as I should be. I have… People have been asking me, especially through this pandemic, to do it more, and I probably should get into it more because people are all over the place, and you can’t obviously reach out everybody physically.

Sure, and if somebody watching this or listening to this wanting to reach out to you, what is the best way they can contact you.

we have pravilo usa dot com or fight in HEAL Dot com.

Okay, we’ll put all of that in the show notes.

You, I’ll take care of it. And as you see, this stuff is the hard stuff for…

that’s what, so great about this community. You and a lot of the other people that I have, healers. These people really know how to help people. Technology is their area of expertise. And it’s important to understand began everything. It’s important to understand, you don’t want them good at technology… Yes. But let’s see, Are we gonna be able to get a video ad yet must have something on your YouTube channel we can grab and put as a bonus down below here, a breathing or movement rolling something that maybe… You can check out… I have a YouTube channel, and there’s a couple of different videos with you and you can see how other people stretch and… Sure, yeah, cool, that would be great. Our city, is there anything in our conversation today that is kinda sticking out in your mind that I didn’t cover, you’d like to tie up… Before we wrap up the call. Well.

No, I think we covered the pain and the specifications of how… We didn’t really talk about anything specific that it was just like a generic, I guess, conversation… Right, sure. So yeah, if there’s anything that you wanted me to expand on or focus on we can do another session or.

Maybe if we had specific areas of the body, if there were some questions that came in, people wanted to specifically look at the shoulder or the US or the lower back or something like that, we could dig in in a future podcast where we can pick your brain, ask all sorts of questions on specific instances with those, but I think what I really appreciate about our interview today was around your philosophy that it really makes… When people are suffering and pain, it’s almost like all up in their face, and you’re broadening that perspective to see it’s so much larger, like who we are as people is so much larger and we put that pain in perspective. I think that’s super valuable. Even help me as how you were talking about all the different elements and aspects that you’re bringing to the table in helping someone, it almost seemed like, Oh yeah. Pain isn’t really that significant.

Well, it’s just part of life. It’s best part of life. And then you can’t take it personally, you can’t take it personally, and you have to just try to do your best, there’s not that much more than you can do, or you can’t give up. Right.

Well, you could. It’s just fun.

You could, but that’s not the people that we’re talking to on… I get it.

I get it. Well, Arseniy, I wanna thank you so much for being here. I wanna thank you for working through all of the technical challenges to be here, which was awesome, and I’m looking forward to see what we get as far as questions, and then having you on a future podcast. I think that would be great.

Definitely, thank you so much for having me.

Okay, thank you Arseniy, Thank you Arseniy for being here. This is Bill parravano, the knee pain guru. For the pain education podcast on behalf of the comella Foundation, thank you so much for being here. And we will see you on the next one.