Teemu Arina and Tateki "Tech" Matsuda discuss various exercises and daily habits to counteract the compound effects of a sedentary lifestyle, such as bad posture and lack of movement.

Tateki Matsuda, originally from Tokyo, Japan, transitioned from a baseball player to a martial artist after discovering kickboxing in his youth. Despite lacking formal training, his dedication led him to excel in full-contact karate tournaments in Japan. Moving to the U.S. for education, he earned degrees in Sports Movement Science while simultaneously forging a career in MMA, culminating in his UFC debut in 2014.

Tateki attributes his success to the support of his team, sponsors, and fans, emphasizing the importance of growth and teamwork in his journey. Multicultural experiences in Thailand and Brazil enriched his perspective, and he remains committed to continuous challenge and personal development, both in and out of the cage.

Tateki is also a valued member of the Biohacker Center team and manages the upcoming Biohacker Summit in Tokyo, Japan, which will take place in October 2024. He is a popular speaker and hosts engaging functional movement workshops at the Biohacker Summit and Retreat experiences.

This conversation was recorded in December 2023.

Check https://biohackersummit.com for upcoming events & tickets!

Devices, supplements, guides, books & quality online courses for supporting your health & performance: https://biohackercenter.com

Key moments and takeaways:

00:00 Introduction by Teemu Arina

03:21 Tateki's background

05:14 From baseball to martial arts

07:09 Martial arts is as much a mental sport as a physical one

07:44 Injuries and rehabilitation

09:14 How Teemu healed his sports injuries

10:32 The importance of nutrition

12:34 Injury recovery: to rest or not to rest?

13:24 The dangerous life of a desk warrior

15:38 Devices for relieving stress

17:35 Repetition and consistency aid recovery

19:07 Sauna, massage guns, red light

19:52 The body chooses the path of least resistance

20:49 Sedentary PC worker life

22:43 Deadlifts vs. posterior tilt

24:53 Core activation for better posture

26:06 Why Tateki focuses on mobility

26:51 Wearables for tracking muscle activation

29:52 The importance of correct eye level and posture when working

32:17 Low-cost methods to optimize ergonomics on the go

33:39 Saddle chairs & male reproductive health

35:15 The Pomodoro Technique

35:45 Tateki's everyday "snackcercises"

37:11 Kettlebell swings vs. ab crunches

38:20 X3 bar & Dr. Jaquish

38:50 Becoming the Supple Leopard

39:44 A surprising spot for back pain massage

46:26 Tateki's exercises will be on HoloHabits

47:26 Back pain is common, but easily treatable

47:45 Nutrition and recovery aids

48:38 Learning about your body opens new possibilities

49:57 Psoas, balloons and Airofit

50:45 The cause of pain is upstream or downstream from the pain

52:12 Learn more about devices at biohackercenter.com

52:23 Upcoming events, Biohacker Summits Helsinki & Tokyo, Ibiza Retreat

52:51 Follow Tateki on Instagram: @tatekimatsuda

Music.

Talking here to Tateki Matsuda who is an MMA fighter by training and also he

is coaching people with high performance and biohacking.

He is part of our team at Biohacker Center Japan and one thing that I've learned

from him is all the different ways how you can take care of your body, especially corrective exercises.

I think today when we work a lot in front of our computers We need to be conscious

about the way how sitting is affecting our health.

Probably everyone has heard that sitting is not good for you.

It's like smoking for our generation.

But there is a lot of biomechanical misalignment that comes easily from repeated sitting.

And I remember reading this book from early 1900s of a doctor who described job-related diseases.

Diseases and people who polish shoes which we

don't do nowadays but there was actually a professional shoe polishers

would like crouch it and polish your

shoes they would have like anatomical changes hunched back this kind of text

neck we call it today with mobile phone use and all that when you're hunched

forward and you try to look up it has been known for a long time and It started

with people who do shoe polishing,

but now it's pretty much everyone who sits in front of computers and uses mobile phones.

Mobile phones are probably the worst because you are constantly in this forward

head posture and looking down.

And so your spine is not straight, and it adds tens of kilograms of extra weight on your discs.

And there's this Chinese saying that a man is as old as his spine.

Spine, and if you don't take care of your spine, you're going to have a lot of issues.

One of the statistics that I've been looking at is...

Job-related disabilities. And of course, people get things like sleep issues

and cardiovascular problems, heart, nervous system-related problems.

But one of the leading causes of disability is back pain.

And so lower back pain, upper back pain. So that's a huge problem.

And it requires that you are conscious how to correct those misalignments with corrective exercise.

So I I want to jump on a call with Tateki to share with you some of the things.

And I've also got a lot of help from corrective exercises.

And we are also going to touch some devices and technologies and tools of trade

that people can use to help themselves have a little bit more leverage to do

material therapy on themselves and also do corrective exercise more effectively,

including massage guns, massage balls,

exercise bands, you name it.

So I think he's definitely a specialist and what

I really like about him is he's not just showing the exercise

he's actually describing the anatomy of what's happening

there so welcome to the show man thank you for

having me cool give us like a little brief background as an MMA fighter so I

would imagine doing a lot of hard training for over the years you have to become

also a specialist of making sure your body is not getting in the way of your

performance yes I'm not like top top specialist.

I think my past days in

engaging in MMA scene pretty much

beat up my body every day and then the injury history and then the experience

from the rehab and the conversation with the physical therapist and then the

orthopedics and then all the smart professionals make me learn more and now here I am.

And also my background is kind of a practitioner strong first And I learned

corrective exercise from the functional movement screen, functional movement systems.

Originally, I was not a fighter. I came to the U.S. as an international student.

And yeah. So you're originally from Tokyo and you live in Boston right now with your family.

You are into exercise physiology, and you have several degrees.

Did you get into those because of your fighter career? What got you interested

in nutrition exercise? exercise.

I used to play baseball for my entire life until high school,

and I wanted to study sports science.

But back in Japan, back in days, I didn't have much choice for the university.

They don't really offer the sports science department, so I decided to go to

US, and I studied sports science during the undergrad, and then I got a master's

degree in applied nutrition.

Basically, I'm the same as you, health and wellness, like I'm a nerd about healthier lifestyle.

And at the same time, I build my professional MMA career and I have to take care of my body.

And of course, I have to cut the weight and I have to make my own nutrition

program during the fight camp.

And yeah, so it's almost like I've been choosing what I want to do. And now here I am.

So what got you from baseball to MMA? What made you fight? Yeah.

It's a crazy story. I needed to submit a grade note in English.

So I asked my high school teacher, I need a grade note in English.

So could you make one for me? And then he said, oh, I had another guy from the

next class and he also needs the grade note in English.

And I was like, oh, really? He sounds like he's going to US.

And then I visit his classroom and he was doing martial arts in a high school

classroom. And then like, why is that?

Looks cool. And then we study English and get ready for the study abroad,

learn English together. And we train together.

And I participated in an amateur fighting competition.

And then I actually won that competition. And that kind of triggered me.

And then, wow, this is such an addicting sport. So you got some positive reinforcement.

What kind of martial arts did you train in Japan? Did you also do Japanese martial

arts or just kickboxing and all that? It's like a weird karate gi,

but like the rule is kickboxing.

It's back in the days, the K-1 was huge.

K-1 is almost like, you know, Japanese kickboxing. Rule is a little bit different

from the Muay Thai and other stuff. But yeah, K-1 was huge.

And then everyone was dreaming about to be on the ring.

And yeah, and I participated in amateur tournaments and I won the fight.

Cool. Cool. Also, you got into MMA and you did pretty well also.

You've been practicing in the octagon and it's been your temple in a way.

Yeah, looking for the place to die as a samurai, but it's an honor to compete

in such a world-class promotion such as UFC, Berator, and the tankers in Japan.

I guess it's a lot about mind training also, not just physical training to do that kind of thing.

It reminds me of Navy SEAL training where even the fittest guys can do some

of the exercise if they don't learn to control their mind and breathing and

nervous system and all that so.

You have to be very conscious how you conduct yourself. It's not just that brute force will work.

Is that the case also for you? Yes. I'm telling you, this sport is...

I was at 90% mental sports and 10% physical.

Right. The most important thing is that you get punched in the face and then

you turn your back. That's obviously, it's not for you.

I see. You mentioned you had a lot of different injuries.

What kind of injuries you went through and how did you rehabilitate yourself

from those? I had a broken thumb almost like a decade ago.

That was like a local promotion title fight. And that happened the last round, fifth round.

I continued fighting and... Broken thumb.

Yeah, broken thumbs. And I went to Brazil to train BJJ.

And that was the second week. 100 kilo of my training partner just like smashed

on me. I popped my ribcage and then I took an anti-inflammatory and keep continuing, keep training.

And now my ribcage shape is different.

And another one is, oh, I popped the ribcage.

And yeah, my hip joint, when I get taken down, I popped.

And also my biceps, when I throw the right hand and my sparring partner,

he's a really good boxing background.

Both of our arms crossed and then I almost ripped my biceps.

And then like now like my range of motion got like

i got better but i used to be like this and i couldn't

even touch my shoulder with my right finger but

i can now come back and yeah so i'm like

once again i'm not a specialist like i

learned from my past and then now i try to modify to provide a good easy to

understand better version for the ordinary people so you're like a train wreck

and you had to figure out what to do to yourself to bounce back from those kind of situations.

I've been fortunate enough not to injure myself too much, like a few dislocated

shoulder things and also some microfractures.

I've been snowboarding all my life, so actually most of my injuries have come from snowboarding.

But one thing that I remember snowboarding,

I missed the the landing so I had just like too

much speed going to the jump and I missed the

landing and I couldn't walk my other

knee was like completely swollen and out of the game and I was into biohacking

at that time so I had a friend who said that hey it's a joint so let's get all

the building blocks for the body to rebuild the tissue so let's get bone broth

and so one thing that he got was like.

From a fish market, you went and bought all the leftover fish bones and fish heads and all that.

So you can get that stuff for free, basically, or for one euro or whatever.

You get like a huge bag of it. Yeah, yeah.

So we made like this incredible fish soup and with all the spices like anti-inflammatory

spice, turmeric and all that.

Then I used Pulse Electromagnetic Field Therapy on the joint and I used red light.

And literally one week later I was

on a bicycle and a few weeks later I

was walking again from a state of thinking that

this probably normally would take like months to recover

so I realized how important nutrition is in

recovery have you done something similar do you also consciously use

nutrients yeah like being a ketosis also

to me it worked very well of course like

I tapered down from hard training so that

like my body doesn't require glycogen-based energy

and the bone broths and all other biohacking

is really good and cold therapy that's really

good for the pain management and nowadays

we do the peptide injection too as far as i know the bpc-157 is still legal

under the world anti-doping association that like one of the secret in a biohacking

community but yeah in europe they added it in a pharmaceutical at least in Finland. Oh, really?

Yeah, it's peptides are natural in the body and in a way it would be quite hard

to outlaw something when BPC-157 has been added at least in Finland to this list.

And it's a novel food, so they can also block its sale as an intracellular. So it's more like.

In some countries where you get it, it's not for human use, all that.

But in any case, it seems to be quite promising for helping joints to heal as well.

But I definitely noticed that nutritional interventions help a lot with these things.

I remember one guy who had rheumatoid arthritis and his practice was to go to

the ice bath to the border of hypothermia.

He learned where his limit is, like how far he can go. But the further he went

into hypothermia, the longer the rheumatoid arthritis was gone after that session. It's dangerous.

You need someone to pay attention to you, right? Yeah, it sounds dangerous, yeah.

But he had pretty severe rheumatism, so that's what he is like.

Self-medication, as I was just like getting into an ice bath.

My understanding is that if you get an injury, a lot of people, they rest.

Rest but one key is also to get

moving and do some exercises and help

the blood flow and all that yes yes areas right

so that if you are like staying too much in mobile

like it might actually oh that makes everything worse

yes long story short brain almost forgets

how to move the body part and then unconsciously human

body compensate the movement let's say

you injured some part of be a joint or the

muscle and your body try to protect that

area and then all the other muscle compensate to

achieve the movement you want and then

that kind of makes the bad habit

and even though you think you're moving naturally

it's not actually natural at all i've had

back pain for quite a long time because i

work in front of computers since i was like 13 all

the time i do use a standing desk but I do

sit also and it requires quite a lot of attention

to my physiology to correct things like

bad posture and one of the things that I discovered 10

years ago was a posture tracker I think it's called Lumolift and I had this

like vibrating device that would vibrate when my posture was bad later on I

replaced that with upright go but I would use that when I'm speaking or in meetings

where my attention is not on my body.

But on conversation where I easily forget I'm supposed to be.

And it helped a lot because you have like this, it's almost like your mother,

but it's technology that always reminds you split second later that,

hey, they will correct your posture and it vibrates, irritates you.

Only when you correct that.

You get that relief from the vibration. Wait, so the device notify you or like remind you?

Yeah, you put it on your upper back or neck and it tracks with an accelerometer

your body posture and it will vibrate and it doesn't stop vibrating until you correct your posture.

So that was one of the most effective nervous system training to get a better posture.

But then unfortunately, I was doing quite a lot of exercise science many years

ago and I was doing pull-ups and the bar dropped on my upper back.

But what you mentioned about the body compensating and protecting an area,

I experienced that with my upper back.

So I had very stiff upper back muscles that were protecting the area of the damage.

All my postural things that I had been doing, being in a good posture actually caused pain now.

So I had to wait for the injury to heal to start fixing it again.

But since then I've had quite quite stiff upper back.

And only now, some years later, because of several times at Optimized Day workshops

and the Biohacker's Retreat,

listening to your corrective exercise that you always do for our customers,

I decided to try to figure it out to unlock some of the stiffness.

And I used two two different devices. I used an exercise ball and I used a massage gun.

And what I did was to focus on the stiff muscles in the neck area and also some trigger points.

And I would use the exercise ball for different things than the massage gun.

The massage gun I would use mainly on trigger points where I need to go deep.

And the exercise ball I would use to stretch some of those muscles.

So I learned some of the exercises from you to do it like manually with fingers,

but I discovered the ball that vibrates was more effective.

So there's this Japanese company called DoctorAir.

So I used the massage ball and then I used the massage gun.

I've been going 10 years to a Chinese massage master who is from the Shaolin

mountain, from a village next to it.

And he's grown up with all these Shaolin monks and all that.

But like he's an expert on the meridians and all that. And from him,

I learned about the trigger points because a lot of work that they do focus on the trigger points.

So basically like my shoulder pain, I worked on my hands, shoulder,

under the shoulder, in front of the shoulder, on the collarbone area and breast,

as well as the root of the neck and the two large muscles.

More on the front side and more on the side and backside of the neck where the

large muscles connect to the skull. Well, and I also figured out that these

trigger points also are key where your jawbone is connected to.

I learned that by having some pain in the ear and I thought I have some water

in my ear, but it turned out like I had just a stiff jawbone.

Oh, yeah. And once I massaged it open. That could cause to the mouth breathing too.

Yeah. I'm not a mouth breather. I'm a nose breather. So I'm happy to have that.

That's another topic, but it's very important to fix mouth breathing.

If you have one, for very different reasons.

But basically, I got myself into this little journey where I just decided I'm

now going to fix this 10-year,

issue where I have some neck pain when I turn my head to a certain way.

And doing every hour, so every hour when I was having a small break from whatever

work I was doing, I would massage all those trigger points and I would stretch the muscles.

And I would do that for a week. And then I remember like a pinched nerve suddenly

extending, felt like a shock of electricity.

And every day my mobility on neck area improved. I felt like I'm coming out

of a prison that I had been.

Suddenly, I had been a prisoner of my own body, and suddenly, I had all this mobility.

There's so many YouTube videos I've been watching about stretches and ways to

fix forward neck posture and all that stuff.

To me, I've tried all of it. It doesn't work for me.

I had to do a bit more serious manual therapy, and now I can use those exercises

to maintain maintain that I don't get back into whatever locked up situation I was in.

So I feel like a lot of those exercise, yoga exercise, very gentle stretches,

all of that is, it's great once if you want to prevent as a preventive measure,

maybe to increase mobility and all that with fascia.

But if you have a chronic condition, which is quite bad, you need some serious readjustment.

So I've noticed I don't need to crack my neck anymore or anything like that.

I used to do that that quite a lot. I just don't feel any issues anymore,

thanks to using technology for it.

And I would always use these massage guns and balls also after sauna.

So once the blood flow is increased, muscles are relaxed. That's a great idea.

Yeah, relax and the blood circulation is optimal. Yeah, I would do like a magnesium

bath, for example, and that was awesome.

And also red light therapy, I figured out is a good combination.

In my experience, having had one hour massages for or as long as I remember,

I can now get the same results like in 10 minutes.

If I do sauna or ice bath, red light therapy, and then I massage myself very

effectively, knowing exactly where I go into it.

It took me like a long time to

learn how my body operates and what the problem actually is to fix that.

Yeah, because body always wants to go the easier way.

And yeah, and if you want to separate the session, like not like a 60 minutes

session, but like five minutes every hour or something and separate throughout

the day, it's also a good strategy.

Yeah, one thing that I'm working on still is anterior tilt. So that's basically

like a misaligned pelvis that comes from sitting too much.

So can you describe a little bit like the detrimental effects of sitting and postural problems?

So basically, my goal now is to realign my pelvis so that it would be less likely

that I get a hunched or forward head posture.

So first, it's not your fault. Your brain works perfect. Your brain tries to compensate.

You have a stiff shoulder. So

that means your shoulder is rounded like a hanchengouba. I mean, everyone.

If you sit longer and do the PC work, that's like a human nature.

You know, our posture tend to lean forward and then pinch the front side.

That's why trapezius, your shoulder muscle, try to contract and work hard to,

hey, don't go that way. I have to pull it back.

That's why we have stiff shoulder. and as a result

of that posture now try to do

the overhead movement or try to look straight your brain send a signal hey lean

back a little bit now you extend your lower back that cause the pain and also

do the anterior tilt so even though temple you said I have a nose breather.

If your ribcage is open and then extend your rollback, your thoracic area has

a hard time to lower your ribcage to work the diaphragm contracted.

So that means if you have a hard time to contract the diaphragm,

you have a hard time to exhale longer.

If you can keep the correct posture and hack the breathing, which is like a

very good way and build a strategy to do the 20,000 breathing with right posture.

The levitation goes down and across and the diaphragms is like...

I've definitely noticed easier breathing.

I used to have quite a lot of like breathing problems, like shallow breath.

After working on this for a long time, like it's become easier.

Can you describe a little bit like anatomically what's going on there?

So one way like how I'm trying to fix now anterior tilt,

which is very common, It's actually like people who do selfies on social media,

especially women, they like to take like belfies where they take a picture of

their ass, but they're doing their hyper extending their lower back and there

is like massive anterior tilt and that's associated with beauty,

but it's actually not healthy.

So can you describe like why something like deadlifting is so key to fix that?

Because generally speaking, we sit long.

So sitting on the chair, the pelvis is posterior tilted. tilted.

But the problem is we keep this posture longer period.

And when we stand up and your body try to compensate, that's why anterior tilt happens.

And your glute muscle doesn't work well.

So when you drop your hip lower during the squat deadlift, your glutes cannot stretch well.

That's why body try to compensate by extending your lower back.

This is why glute activation movement all

the fitness influencer use the band and show

this is good for you and then that experience so

some women now it's more trendy to do

like deadlifts but some women don't want to have large muscles and they have

overextended joints and they have issues like this like lower back pain and

all that they're like making themselves the opposite favor by exercising those

large muscles that they're so afraid to become large and manly yeah that's a

you know what But first of all,

it is very hard for the female to put the muscle like that. They have to, yeah.

Exactly. It doesn't happen so easily, right? Yeah, it doesn't happen so easily.

They have to have a calorie surplus and then they have to send a signal like

activate the mTOR and then take the certain amount of protein and send a proper signal to the leg.

But yeah, the way they do the deadlift and the squat, their posture is very

important. if they use the belt to deal with the heavier weight.

Yeah, that could cause the, what is that called? Legzilla or whatever.

Because without a belt, you have to stabilize your core with your core muscle.

But you depend on the belt and without closing the rib cage,

you can actually have a stabilization and deal with heavier weight.

That means the signal goes purely to the leg.

That could cause the hypertrophy.

Can you describe a little bit more why core activation is so key for good posture?

I remember like this his name he

wrote a book called supple leopard but he said that you

should have always as if you have 30 core activation when you walk like constantly

especially when you sit down or sit up you have like your core activated a lot

of people don't have that like they because they don't exercise their core so

why would core exercise be key for this anterior tilt and most of our issues.

Once you understand how you tighten your core, you feel your diaphragm contraction.

And now if you feel the diaphragm contraction, now you feel your pelvic floor

muscle is actually loosened up.

That makes us go deeper on the squat and go bend the modulic joints and in specific

movement without hurting other body part or compensation.

Stabilization is very important because many people misunderstand flexibility

is very good, flexible body is good,

but especially very flexible female yogi, they almost do the hyperextension

on their elbow and too much pressure on the joint.

What I focus is mobility. Mobility. Mobility is the range of motion without compensation.

And then to work on your mobility, stabilization is very important.

Why? Because if you don't stabilize your certain body part, mobility doesn't work.

If you have to, let's say, let's do the, you do the overhead workout,

like a shoulder press or whatever.

If you don't have a mobility, as I said, they hyperextend their lower back and

then they lift the shoulder.

So the kettlebell practitioner always stabilize where it's called drop the lever gauge.

And without the compensation, we keep our arm right behind the ear.

But if you don't have that mobility, they compensate to achieve the movement.

There's actually some wearable technology that helps you to see this in real time.

There's two companies. One of them is called Apparel and the other one is called Myontec.

It's a Finnish company, actually. And it basically reads the electric signals from the muscles.

You have like this shirt, and you have an app where you can see in real time

your muscle activation.

And when you do certain exercises, it can give you the statistics of how you're

using different muscles.

It can tell you if you're overcompensating with certain muscles.

Viontech started that specifically with cycling and running.

So often people run or cycle, they don't reactivate all the muscles,

and that causes all kinds of problems down the road if you don't.

So then at the gym you would exercise on the muscles that are weaker to make

them stronger so that you can fix some of the overcompensating issues.

Other technology that I found interesting is a German company called Sculpt.

Sculpt is a device for measuring muscle quality and fat percentage per muscle.

So it's a device that you place on every muscle

and it reads all of the muscles in a targeted

way and it gives you an understanding of muscle

quality and fat percentage per muscle and for me

for example I noticed when I did this that my upper

back would have very lean muscle

but then my breasts or like my core wouldn't be up to that level oh so that's

an imbalance so then I would fix and also actually because I love push-ups I

had done too much of push-ups so that also showed up in the results So not enough pulling motion.

So you can learn from these technologies about the imbalances in an accurate way.

Of course, like an expert can just look at you when you do exercise and tell

you what you're doing wrong.

But I noticed like that you can actually measure these things and then figure

out on your own what to focus on, what would be the key bottleneck for your biomechanic issues.

Yeah. I also like it's called a figure eight. They're funded from MIT.

That's similar product like i put all

the device and do some like a basic movement push-up

and lunge and squat and in real time like i

can see which body part is contracting and i

see the difference between left side and right side that's pretty good especially

for the rehab session from the accident or something or injured athletes and

that's actually really good to prevent the wrong way to recover because usually

your brain tries to protect that area.

Indeed. Now, if we move into the upper back and shoulders, neck pain and all that,

so walk us through a few exercises and why those are key, what's happening when

we use our mobile devices or keyboards and so on, specifically referring to

the certain trigger points in front front of the chest,

under the collarbone and up over and also on the neck side.

So can you walk us through a little bit like what's happening there?

Think the the biggest uh cause is your

eye level what let's think

let's imagine we go to the cafe to do the work with the pc we usually look down

right and already your the posture is like drop your head down this way and

now your cervical area has to carry your heavy head already and And when you look down,

and also like you're pinching your front neck area.

And then that kind of caused a chronic contract here, you know.

Now, your head, I do the extreme example, like your head goes forward.

Now, your shoulder try to, hey, don't drop your head. Like it's now your shoulder gets tighter.

And then now also, if you don't have a healthier 90 degrees elbow posture,

usually either your shoulder is i don't

know when you put the arm on the desk it's

not like optimum level or like you extend your

arm and then you're clicking the mouse with your right

hand and now unless you don't have

a ergonomic mouse there's some rotation when you keep your hand and you can

feel it like by just grabbing your hand from right below elbow joint forearm

area And you just turn down and you can feel like some muscles contracting when

you turn your hand down as if you have a mouse.

So you can feel like there is a muscle that activates and that is the muscle

that I often try to massage.

And it makes a lot of sense to have an ergonomic mouse where your hand is like

more like grip position or neutral.

But there is not many good rodents out there to use for this purpose.

Most of them are, in my experience, not so good.

So I still use like a traditional one. So your right-handed forearm is like

a chronically pronated all the time. Yeah, it's rotated all the time.

And you use like keyboard, you're using a mouse.

But I'm aware that there's a muscle that is constantly contracted.

So I'm trying to massage it open.

And one thing that I really think is important is that you have a good chair,

a good desk at the right height.

And your screen is at the right level. Because if you're just looking down on

your laptop, it's also like your hands are closer to each other.

Some people have keyboards that are like split in the middle.

So you have them a little bit wider.

So you can have a wider shoulder posture instead of being very close.

I always carried the PC lifter with me. Like a mobile travel version.

Yeah, travel version. My laptop is always higher.

I've been working so much in public places and on boats and airports.

I very rarely see people using those. They are always on the laptops or phones.

And I always have an external keyboard, external mouse, and a way to elevate

my laptop screen to be more eye level.

And I don't know how anyone can work on a laptop.

Yeah, these are like cheapest investments.

Yeah, pennies on dollars. Yeah, pennies on dollars, you know, on Amazon.

Yeah. Yeah, like it's super cheap. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. A really nice, portable, wireless keyboard is also a really good idea to carry with you.

And this is what I usually do, and at least I'm not making my situation worse.

But I see so many people working on, and sometimes preferring to work in front

of a cafeteria table on their laptops.

I don't know how they can live without pain, but that's what would happen to

me if I had that kind of working condition all the time.

Now said standing desk is of

course great yeah so i think standing desk is

good but the best scenario would be you keep the

constant movements throughout the day like right now i'm half sitting half standing

and then i can you have a Salli chair right, saddle chair, yeah that's like a chair

that mimics horse riding saddle chair yeah kind of mimics that but it also has

a little crack or or opening in the middle,

so it also helps align your pelvis better, but also reduces

Temperature on the groin area.

So for men, semen quality, all of this. Your balls are outside of your body

for a reason, because it needs to be in a lower temperature.

And if you sit on your balls all day long, you're not a chicken trying to tend on eggs, right?

But that's what most people do throughout their day. And then they have prostate

problems and they're surprised why.

If you want to reduce the pressure on the prostate, change the temperature of

your groin area, all of that, get like a saddle chair.

Personally, I don't use a saddle chair all day long. It feels a bit uncomfortable

for me to do the whole day, but I like to do it like I would stand during the morning. I have lunch.

Rarely I have, but when I do, I feel like sitting. So that's when I would use

a saddle chair and I would sit there until I get tired of it and then I would use a regular chair.

That's how I pretty much go. So another thing that I do throughout the day is...

Some people get sore though, like the first two weeks, they get like,

I've got the muscle soreness.

That's how much they don't use the core muscles. Yeah, there's some nice chairs

that really help you to activate the core muscles, like where the stem of the

chair is constantly moving, so with a spring, so you need to maintain your core.

You can use also like a large exercise ball to sit on, but I don't think that's very comfortable.

But another thing is that if you do this like

pomodoro technique where you are yeah i was gonna say same

thing wow yeah yeah go ahead yeah pomodoro is

great it's 20 minutes focused work and then a short break and that's when you

can do the bread work you're gonna pull ups push ups exercise band stuff so

can you like describe some of the easiest exercises desk warriors can use as

a quick couple of minutes break,

maybe with exercise band, maybe with body weight, like what would you do?

Oh, I jump on the PowerPlate, which is the vibration.

Whole body vibration, yeah. And then I do the four second sprint.

I usually kettlebell swing.

Sprint while standing no there's a study shows

that uh uh so actually fat

oxidation rate really goes up

compared to the sitting uh group do you

run in place no like any like a four second

sprint works like throughout the day and that's

like a total i don't know the it's less

than six minutes or something just like a four seconds like

every yeah half an hour can be any any

exercise exercise so you can push up pull up like squats

jack or there's this seven minute workout thing

that came quite popular there's some

apps on the app store that's the minimum dose of

high intensity interval training one can do yeah now you're

also a kettlebell coach what is the best kettlebell swing

for desk warriors first i

would say many people are not conditioned to

do the proper swing first i have them.

Do the very it's called a t-leg swing

so they don't fully you swing their

between their legs right exactly so you

activate your butt muscles and your core and you try

not to overextend and you need you try to keep

like your back i guess straight exactly because

if you are able to swing the 24 kilo kettlebell

every time you have a 200 kilogram

g to your core muscle that's way better

than you just do the millions of crunch you

know so it's better than crunching is the kettlebell swing

yes just tight your core with a strong swing.

Yeah right yeah how about the exercise pad what

would be like the key exercise you would do i would

say like a big three you know the deadlift and

squat and then but i don't do the bench press um

did you know the power lifter they never do the bench press

they always do the shoulder press it also also has

the highest risk of injury so it's

like people are like how much do you bench press but it's

not actually the best exercise to do yeah i

prefer do the push-up with the weight i put the sandbag on my back and then

tighten my core and then do the weighted push-up that's my go-to and then lots

of pull-up because fighters posture

they always we always tuck the chin chronically internally rotated,

I need to open up my back and thoracic mobility too.

Yeah, I use X3 bar. That's a really cool device.

Yeah, that one's really thick. You can do the heavy weight everywhere.

Yeah, the inventor of X3 bar is John Jaquish.

He invented that as a variable resistance training tool.

So if you have any kind of joint issues, it lowers the pressure on the joints

and you actually can more safely do heavier loads. Yeah, because of the band, yeah.

By the way, the book now I remember, The Becoming Supple Leopard,

The Ultimate Guide to Resolving Pain, Preventing Injury, and Optimize Athletic Performance.

That is written by Dr. Kelly Starrett. So that's one key book.

And then a lot of the studies and very methodological approach to exercise pads from John Jaquish.

Those have been like, to me, the most useful for a desk warrior.

Warrior so the idea is that what kind of exercise you can do throughout the

day that you don't need to go to the gym for and you can do them so that you

can potentially even build muscle and correct all those muscle imbalances so

i found like exercise band is great bodyweight training.

Kettlebells dumbbells even and then there's so much of

that in the Supple Leopard how to do deadlift

correctly he has very good videos also on that

but i realized that we went a bit far let's go

back to the neck area so there is like a

surprising place many people they have back pain so

they want to have a shoulder massage so why would you massage

something like in front of the chest area basically let's

say like you hold something and then usually your chest

muscle and the biceps are tightened up right so basically the hunching over

station is like your front muscle your chest muscles pinching so well that's

why like when i provide a corrective exercise session I have my participants

use a fingertip between the first and the second ribcage.

And that's usually like a pinched area.

And basically slide down on the collarbone until you find a place which is between

the first and the second ribcage, right? So that's what area you're going to go for.

When you push, like you feel like a little pinch. Super painful.

Yeah. If you understand, let's say like a massage is like a temporary relief, which is good.

What you have to do is after that, you have to re-educate your brain.

So you have such a good massage session or you have a basic knowledge and then

you have a biohacking tool such as Dr.

Airgun or whatever. And then you release your muscle.

And after that, instead of like you directly apply to the stiff shoulder,

but like you do the chest area to, you know, with a percussion device or whatever,

massage ball, and you feel really good.

Good. After that, like you have to re-educate your scapula, retract your...

Do the nervous system exercises.

Yeah. So DoctorAir is a Japanese company that makes massage guns. It fits your hand.

What I've noticed is that the energy in terms of vibration really goes to the

point, not in your hand, which is different for a lot of guns out there.

And you customize the head.

You can change the head. I often don't even use any of the customizations on it.

There's a few different heads that you can use. and

what I really like about this is like how light it

is durable and easy to carry in luggage

so when I travel I always have this thing it's a lifesaver

after airplanes and all that to do like the basic massages same

here so here in the front yeah and also like in the kind of in the root of the

trapezius which is like super painful actually the fatigue from the the monitor

all the pc work goes to the back of your head yeah and I also sometimes do massage

where the jawbone is connected that it feels really nice.

I agree with you. You can do like a massage your face with this.

Yeah, it's super cool. And then like looking up to the left,

for example, then I would massage the right side of the neck down and looking

up to the right, I would massage the left side.

And always when I would massage the trapezius, I would look to the opposite direction. Mm-hmm.

And in that way, I've noticed, like, my range of motion increases greatly, and it feels amazing.

And also, like, sometimes you feel like brain fog, a little bit headache,

and all that just goes away, because there's lack of blood flow into the brain.

And the vibration and also the release of the improved circulation blood flow

into the brain it's a massive shift in consciousness also so it's really important

to keep and you can actually like get some pretty serious conditions by having

like constantly stiff shoulders like in terms of,

oh yeah i don't really get headaches but the only migraines i get is tension

headaches related like like tension. Yeah.

So some supplements help like glycine, taurine, magnesium.

What else would you add into relaxing the nervous system?

Nervous system? I don't take that every day, but like a gaba is also good.

And also I love the reishi extract.

Reishi? Yeah. Under my tongue. I started taking like a lot of these things in the morning.

Often people take like stimulants in the morning, but I would take coffee.

And I noticed I feel less tension if I also simultaneously simultaneously take

a supplement stack of glycine and magnesium and taurine and more of these like

relaxing things. It really balances out like,

coffee stimulation because with coffee you can very easily get

you know dense muscles and your sympathetic nervous system is overactive

so it really calms the nervous system down you

get this like focus oh yeah without exaggerated stimulation

a lot of people add tannin but i think lysine is super

important also tannin with the coffee is biohacking 101 yeah so we are the first

distributor of dr air in europe so you can get from bikerscenter.com the dr

air massage gun it's absolutely incredible device to have to relieve any kind of pain, neck pain.

You just have to know how to use it properly. You can just massage a little

bit here and there, but to know the trigger point starting from the hand to

the shoulder, under the shoulder, front of the chest.

And I think the collaboration is very important. After, let's say,

you release your neck muscle, you release your front muscle.

Now you have to remind your brain to always relax happens after the quick contraction.

That's why when we play football in Europe, soccer, all the athletes move with

a baristic movement because they contract the muscle quickly and relax.

That's loosen up the tight muscle at the beginning.

That's why when I provide a corrective exercise and after the release point,

I just let the participants tap the chin to send a signal to the rectus muscle to waken up.

So that's why everyone is like a straight neck.

So once you look up and you you start looking on

that's when you are tapping your chin yeah that's it

and that i feel it activates like neck yeah

you feel the neck right so same thing let's say like

you have a long time of the pc work and then

let's say you have a stiff forearm and you apply the doctor air massage and

you feel good after that i would go for extensor which is cheap like less than

like a 10 euro on amazon so you have a rubber band right now around your fingers

and you're like yeah it's It's kind of like opening up your...

Opening up, like extensor.

Closing the fist, opening up, closing the fist, and you have a little bit of

resistance there. Yeah.

And everyone says, I have a chronic verbal pain. Let me check.

And then I touch, oh, this muscle is tight. You know what?

I have them, they can do the 20, 30, and then they get sore.

I can't move my finger. And then take it out. And okay, stretch out a little

bit. And then do some corrective exercise.

Stretch out. And now how you feel? Are you a magician? My pain goes away.

No. No, that's how much you put the chronic stress on a certain body part.

So once you understand your posture and lifestyle and you apply like a technology

as a biohacker and then as some small re-education session, that's like a huge

leverage for our daily life.

For sure. Yeah. Tateki has produced, together with my team, some corrective

exercises for the HoloHabits platform that will be available later this year.

This Tateki's exercises, so it's www.holohabits.com.

You can download an app. There will be free corrective exercises.

There's also my coffee routines. There's always hydration, bread work from Lee Evan. in.

There's a lot of cool stuff. I recommend people to download the app right now.

And there's also a biological test kit that you can do on biomarkers to figure

out your health span bottlenecks and it will provide you the exercise and challenges,

also nutrition that would be beneficial for correcting any deficiencies.

But I would say taking care of your biomechanics, your mobility is key because

if you don't, you will be like me, basically a prisoner in your own body until

you released that they realize like there's like this whole world out there. Everybody. Yeah.

It's incredible how many people have issues with back pain and are suffering

and it's absolutely treatable.

You can have disc problems, yes, which is a bit harder. But even with those,

maintaining good posture is key not to make things worse, but to slow down any kind of degradation.

Nutrition is is key. Anti-inflammatory things are key.

Red light therapy for me has been one of the biggest lifesavers for back pain.

If I have any kind of neck or back pain, I would use FlexBeam or just like we

have these spotlights in the Biohacker Center store, or I might use a panel.

And it's a huge thing, like 20, 30 minutes under red light, no pain,

but then using the massage guns and all that. That's my morning routine. Yeah.

On the vibrations platform and the red light of my entire body.

You don't want to have the pain because once the pain signal is there,

it's gonna like your nervous system is going to compensate.

So I've noticed like with red light, I get the pain away, but then I can like

actually stretch and I can retrain my brain to think about things differently,

like without the pain being present.

And in that way, it might go away forever.

So there's a lot of cool stuff that one can do once you're

aware how your body is operating and it's a

mechanical operating system any things you want

to add in terms of exercises or technologies that we haven't mentioned yet yeah

what we've been talking about it's not quick solution and a tool is we have

a tools but it's almost like a shortcut we don't want to depend on the shortcut

too much but like Like we should take advantage of the shortcut.

And after that, for the long term, we should apply this approach.

We should apply this lifestyle.

I think that guides us to our well-being.

That's it. Totally agree with that. And becoming aware, like understanding like...

Exactly. Becoming aware, yeah.

Like how the body is operating, like...

You have this body and where many of us are unaware how it works.

And by figuring out how it works up to the level of the biomechanics,

it can really reduce pain.

So just to give you an example, this anterior tilt, which is a compensation

for... Oh, you mean the psoas?

Psoas, yeah. So psoas, massaging that, understanding that gets stiff,

massaging that open. That's almost impossible to massage.

It's really deep state. That's why we have to exhale with a certain position and pose.

Right. Yeah. If the listeners are really interested, I would recommend go Amazon

or like any online store and get a balloon.

Balloon. Makes you exhale longer and stronger.

There's this Airofit device that we do sell in the Biohacker Center.

That also measures your lung capacity. That was my breakfast.

That was my breakfast too. Yeah, so the balloon is like a cheap alternative,

but with Airofit, you can actually train every day your lung.

And so that's releasing psoas, like very interesting stuff.

Now, also when you have this anterior tilt, often people get their feet are

not straight forward, but they start to open up a little bit.

So you have, what is it called, like when your feet are like not in straight

line, but externally rotated.

Externally rotated. So that causes knee pain. pain. So then you have like knee

pain and knee issues and it's not in the knees the problem. It's actually... Yeah.

The knees are always a victim from the toe or hip.

Yeah. Indeed. So it's very important to understand the cascade because often

the problem is upstream or downstream, not where the pain actually is located.

So like with my neck, I had to release like my hand and shoulder,

my skull and upper neck and all that to get rid of like a shoulder pain. Like.

Trouble tooth pain. So it's very cool. Yeah, we have to figure out both approach.

Of course, you have to take care of the symptom. And at the same time,

you try to figure out what the root cause.

But nowadays, the meridian, I had opportunity to talk with the doctor at the

Harvard Eastern Medicine, Dr.

Peter Wang, and he shared his

paper. Nowadays, we can visualize the the meridian root on the human body.

And then the doctor said acupuncture put the needle on a certain pressure point.

That's, they say they're guessing the property from the proprioceptor.

So any fingertip pressure or percussion stimulants or even massage.

That sends a signal to the brain.

So I'm not expert, but at least we can apply as a biohacker to release and recover the chronic pain.

Yeah i'm with you for the long journey yeah

if people want to learn more first the different

devices and tools so DoctorAir is

available now at parkercenter.com you can get your own massage then we do have

a Biohacker Summit coming in Helsinki in July and we have Optimized Day Workshop

and also we have the Sanctuary space where we provide different sessions so

if you want to like learn more about practically directly from Tateki you can

come over to the Biohacker Summit.

That's the fastest way to learn from the whole team like how to fix your body.

And yeah, we also are planning now to do an event in Tokyo in October next year as well.

Not just the July 10-year anniversary in Helsinki, but Tokyo as well.

If people want to follow you on social media, check out your website. Where should they go?

TatekiTechMatsuda.com That's my website. And on Instagram?

TatekiMatsuda. Yeah. Cool. So So Tateki is definitely one of those guys who

is not just showing exercise, but he can really describe what's going on, why.

And for me personally, it has been super effective to apply that knowledge into

fixing my 10 years of chronic pain. I'm fully gone.

Very happy about that. So thank you very much for showing me these things.

And yeah, I had to do the work repeatedly and consistently to fix the issues.

Yeah. Thank you so much, Tateki. Thank you. Kiitos, arigato,

kiitos, arigato, be well my friend and see you soon.

Music.