If you’re reading this book, you’re probably someone who loves to move, like me—and who wants to keep moving for life.

Or you’re someone who wishes you were moving more, who feels that the hours you spend immobilized over your phone or your laptop are harming your health, but who hasn’t yet found a complete, full-body workout that you can fit into your day that leaves you feeling ener­gized and pain-free.

I’m about to tell you about a stretching and fitness revolution that will keep you moving, energized, and pain-free for life. It began with a simple insight: many exercise programs, includ­ing the ones I used to teach at my own studio, ac­tually leave you with less mobility and restricted joints, which lead to premature aging and injury. Throwing out the idea of “no pain, no gain,” I spent years studying how we’re actually de­signed to move and creating a full-body program that stretches and strengthens all the muscles in a balanced way, enhances the range of motion of every joint, and unglues stuck connective tissue. The result is Essentrics, a groundbreaking prac­tice of gentle movement, respecting the muscle chains and joint mobility of the body, that scien­tists from Harvard, Adelphi, and McGill Univer­sities have validated as a way to keep us strong, flexible, and fit for life, as well as providing im­mense benefits for brain and digestive health.

From my own experience I know high-impact activities like running, team sports, and tennis are fun, social, take us out into the fresh air, and exercise our bodies. As exhilarating as these ac­tivities are, they’re also hard on us. Work, too, whether we’re sitting at a desk or constantly on our feet, creates wear and tear on our joints and muscles. We need to protect our bodies from permanent damage so we can live fulfilling, pain-free lives at any age.

We tend to reward men or women who dis­play the strength and ability to keep going de­spite pain. Athletes, professional and amateur, push through pain and injury to finish mara­thons or triathlons, or to participate in sports like football, where the concussion and prescrip­tion drug use statistics are infamous. We’ve seen talented athletes sidelined by severe pain and injuries and high-intensity training partici­pants who have suffered muscle damage so se­vere that the proteins and electrolytes released into their bloodstream as a result put them into kidney failure. But we don’t seem to learn the lesson that this kind of exercise prematurely ages the body; we just keep pushing ourselves to the breaking point. I danced with the National Ballet of Canada and know from personal expe­rience that professional dancers ignore extreme pain and injuries up to the point at which their bodies can go no further.

Most fitness programs are designed to push young bodies to the limit; they are not designed to keep people injury-or pain-free. Quite the contrary: Pain is the gold standard for judging whether a workout is relevant. Over the years I’ve seen many people drop gym memberships because their bodies can’t handle the stress and pain. I’ve seen people stop exercising altogether because of injuries that led to chronic pain and surgeries. Unfortunately, many people equate exercising to pain and a sense of personal fail­ure, and they don’t want to try again.

With Essentrics, I’ve discovered a way to be fit without ending up in pain. Suffering from chronic pain and healing slowly are not inevita­ble, even as we live well into our eighties and even nineties and beyond; we want those years to be as much fun and full of activity as the first part of our lives. But if we’re in pain when we’re young, it’s unlikely that we’ll be pain-free as we age. I’m here to show you how you can and should be pain-free and fully active for all the years of your life.

Injuries are another thing that age us. The human body is designed to last well into our nineties without overuse injuries or joint dam­age. Some fitness experts say the body gets stronger when it heals after injury. My long expe­rience and the thousands of people I’ve worked with have shown me that this is not true: Injuries that occur in childhood and young adulthood often haunt people’s bodies throughout their entire lives. Injuries from repetitive strains or acute trauma often lead to increased risk of re­current injuries or chronic pain if the source of the trauma is continuously reproduced.

This is the problem: Life, many workout regimens, and many sports involve repetitive, high-impact movements that unbalance the 206 bones, 650 muscles, 360 joints, and connec­tive tissue (fascia) of the human body. When you unbalance the body, you will injure it.

In 2010 I was presenting a flexibility work­shop at canfitpro, a major fitness convention in Toronto, Canada. I asked the two hundred participating coaches and fitness instructors to raise their hands if they were in pain. Ninety-six percent of the hands went up. If that many instructors were in pain, think of how their cli­ents felt! Unfortunately, to this day in the fitness industry, some level of pain and injury are con­sidered normal, acceptable, and even celebrated as evidence that you’ve worked hard. The pain, you’re often told, is good pain, strengthening pain. For the record, there is no such thing as good pain. Pain is a neurological message telling us that something is wrong. Despite what some experts say, pushing through pain will not ulti­mately make you stronger. Yes, for a time, your muscles will get stronger—until they start to break down.

Muscles make up one-third of the musculo­skeletal system, which comprises three interde­pendent yet independent systems: the muscular system, the skeletal system, and connective tis­sue. Ignore one of these systems at your peril; this is when injury and pain occur. But when you work these systems as a trinity, pain and injury are rare. When your primary focus is strength­ening muscles, you often stress the connective tissue that supports and protects those muscles, causing conditions like tendonitis and inflamed ligaments. This is why the repetitive actions found in many workouts systematically destroy the cartilage, a connective tissue, in the joints. Many people believe that much of the pain and immobility we endure are natural results of growing older, but there’s nothing natural about them. They’re actually the consequences of un­balancing our bodies.

In the 1990s, many of the students at my fitness center who were turning forty began to complain to me that the high-impact aerobics routines we taught at the time were causing them injuries and pain. They asked me to create a workout that didn’t hurt, but they still wanted results. They wanted the good posture, elon­gated look, and stamina of a ballet dancer. As a former dancer, I thought I knew how to create both strength and length in muscles, but that assumption soon proved wrong, and I found my­self doing an abrupt turn away from dance and fitness into the world of neurology, biology, sci­ence, and anatomy.

The program I created—now called Essentrics—was based on the ways our bodies are actually designed to move, which involves having full range of motion in all 360 joints, equal strength in all 650 muscles, and well- hydrated, malleable connective tissue. The best part of my discovery was that this objective could be achieved by doing a daily twenty-to thirty-minute workout that used gentle, active movements to stretch and strengthen the whole body, including joints, ligaments, and fascia. This discovery was so contrary to everything I had previously learned that it took me years of receiving testimonials from students and clients (tens of thousands of them by now) and the re­sults of scientific studies to believe that the ben­efits of Essentrics were real.

I studied anatomy, neurology, and physiology to reinforce my intuitive understanding of how the various parts of our body interact with one another. I looked at how the body was created to move and quickly realized that so many of our habits, workouts, types of physical labor, and sports distort our musculoskeletal system, and that this was the problem. We often do exactly the opposite of what the body needs to be phys­ically fit.

When I began teaching classes based on these principles, my own horrendous chronic back pain disappeared. A recent X-ray showed that, at seventy-two, my lower spine had definite signs of arthritis, but I still have no pain—the re­ward for practicing what I preach for the past twenty-five years.

What is Essentrics?

Essentrics is an injury-free, pain-free, age-supporting way to exercise. It’s exercise in a healing mode.

Time and again, I’ve witnessed the way the human body performs as a self-healing machine. With the correct method of exercising, it can self-repair.

Each workout (ranging from twenty to sixty minutes) is designed to engage all 650 muscles and 360 joints in the human body, with an em­phasis on stretching and moving the full-body fascia. To achieve this, we use gentle, rotational, massage-like movements that slowly return every joint to its original full natural range of motion. Unlike many other programs, Essen­trics’ primary goal is to stretch all the muscles equally, so there are no tight muscles to tug on other muscles, creating imbalances and injury.

It’s extremely important to never use ex­ternal weights while doing Essentrics. You can strengthen yourself and stay fit simply by lifting the bones and muscles of your own body. Range-of-motion sequences in the Essentrics program use the principle of eccentric training, which is lengthening while strengthening. The joints of the human body are not designed to handle exces­sive weight and can be overstretched and dam­aged if you add external weights to Essentrics movements.

These sequences and workouts meet the de­mands of a wide spectrum of users, from people who are already in shape to people who are com­pletely out of shape, from athletes to people of all ages who just want to be able to bend enough to slip on their shoes and remain independent.

Essentrics works by rebalancing the muscles to enhance functional mobility. I know this not only because it has transformed my own body but also from the thousands of testimonials I mentioned. Essentrics increases strength and flexibility without injury or pain using, among other techniques, eccentric training, which lengthens and strengthens. In addition to rebal­ancing every muscle and joint in the body, Es­sentrics improves posture by placing a special focus on the alignment and placement of the body. It can slow or even reverse symptoms of biological aging,9 from relieving arthritis and a multitude of aches and chronic pains to boost­ing energy. Clients in their twenties and thirties who work out the Essentrics way talk about how much better they feel in their bodies and how much more fun they have participating in their favorite sports. People in their sixties, seven­ties, and eighties report that they feel decades younger.10 Just twenty minutes of Essentrics every day can give you a strong, vibrant body free of pain and injury.

You may find it hard to believe that fitness can be easy and much less time-consuming than most fitness experts recommend. I had trouble believing that also. But it’s true: with Essentrics, your body can be both pain-free and powerful.