Kristina became a flexibility coach after her own work healing herself from injury and illness. While she had always been flexible, she did not start training contortion until she was 31, about 20 years behind the recommended age.
Throughout most of her 20s, she had struggled with serious health problems and dance and movement became an integral part of her healing. In contortion, she found a physical practice that was as mentally and emotionally challenging as it was physically demanding. She fell in love with the way that flexibility training opens both body and mind.
For five years she trained with renowned Mongolian contortionist Serchmaa Byamba at San Francisco Circus Center. Despite her advanced age, she was able to perform a contortion table act both as a duet with Serchmaa and as a soloist. She accompanied Serchmaa to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia to train and learn more about the history and traditions of this beautiful art form.
However the rigors of full-time training began to take their toll, and by 2010 Kristina was suffering from multiple injuries that made her unable to continue. Doctors told her that she would need surgery, and her contortion days were over. After so many years of battling physical limitations in her 20s, Kristina was unable to accept this diagnosis and began searching for other options.
She discovered that the intense stretching had weakened her muscles and connective tissue, resulting in instability and pain. She began to work with a physical therapist to strengthen overstretched muscles and regain her strength.
She earned her Pilates certification through Body Arts and Sciences and applied that knowledge to her own training. Within a year she was performing again, and actually able to achieve movements that had always been too difficult before.
This method formed the foundation for Fit & Bendy. Kristina found that the methods that helped her recovery also helped her flexibility students at Cirque School LA where she founded the contortion and flexibility programs. In 2013 Kristina released her first DVD, Get Bent, and went into private practice.
Since then she has taught thousands of students all over the world and has continued to expand her knowledge of the body, by studying methods including the targeted strengthening practice of Muscle Activation Technique, and the physical therapy techniques of Integrated Kinetic Neurology.
Kristina coaches a wide variety of humans from celebrity performers and elite athletes to those recovering from injury and trauma.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Kristina Canizares about a contorted approach to fitness.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How you don’t have to be an athletic person to enjoy movement.
– Why hypermobility syndrome can make it difficult for people to gain strength.
– How people who are hypermobile don’t have as much stretch reflex as other people.
– Why Pilates is a great way to move if you are someone who is hypermobile.
– How it’s more difficult to build strength around your joints when you’re older.
Connect with Kristina:
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Links Mentioned:
fitandbendy.com
Connect with Steven:
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@XeroShoes
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@xeroshoes
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facebook.com/xeroshoes
Steven Sashen:
Many people think that if you are going to be fit, you really need to start as like a fitness-minded something, but what happens if that’s not who you are? And how do you make that transition in a way that actually works? Well, we’re going to be chatting with someone today that has a very interesting story about going from not fit to, well, I’ll let her fill in where it goes and where it’s continuing to go on today’s episode of The MOVEMENT Movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body, starting typically feet first, but not always, but that’s where your foundation is, so that’s where we’d like to start.
And we break down the propaganda, the mythology, sometimes the flat-out lies you’ve been told about what it takes to run or walk or hike or play or do yoga or CrossFit or any number of things and to do that enjoyably, efficiently, effectively. Did I say enjoyably? Trick question. I know I did, because, look, if you’re not having fun, you’re not going to keep it up. Do something different till you are. That’s my theory, at least, and I’m Steven Sashen from XeroShoes.com. I was going to say cohost. I don’t know why. I’m the co-founder of Xero Shoes, but I’m the host of The MOVEMENT Movement podcast, and we call it that because we, and that involves everybody here, are creating a movement about natural movement, letting your body do what it’s made to do without getting in the way and having it function best when you do that.
And if you want to find out how to be part of that community, it’s really simple. Just go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. You don’t need to do anything to join. You don’t need to pay anything. There’s no secret handshake. We don’t get up at 6:00 AM and do the same dance, whatever it is. It’s just, that’s a place where you can find previous episodes, all the ways to engage with us, all the social media channels we’re on. I mean, look, you know what to do. Give us a thumbs up or a like or a review or hit the bell icon on YouTube. In short, if you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe. It’s really, really simple. So let’s have some fun. Kristina, do me a favor. First of all, welcome. Tell people who you are and what you do.
Kristina Cañizares:
Hi, everyone. My name’s Kristina Cañizares, and I am the founder and coach at Fit & Bendy in Los Angeles. And I am currently calling myself a movement coach, but it’s only because I haven’t really thought of a good way of describing what I do. I teach Pilates. I teach the sort of personal training, kind of strength training, and my background is primarily in flexibility, flexibility fitness. That’s what I’m most known for.
I used to be a circus contortionist, and I taught flexibility and contortion for a really long time. And I still teach some amount of that, but it has morphed more into just working with people on how to move in a way that feels good in their bodies, because I feel like movement is a really important part of what we are built to do and it’s a lot of how we come to know ourselves.
Steven Sashen:
And as I hinted at the opening, you did not start out as a fitness-minded human being.
Kristina Cañizares:
I really didn’t. As a kid, I was pretty frail and I was teensy-tinsy, and I had just no strength, not particularly coordinated. I remember having to do the Presidential tests, which I don’t know if people still could do those in school.
Steven Sashen:
I don’t know if they still do it, but the Presidential Physical Fitness Test was one of those interesting things. I was really good at everything, but there was a 600-yard run. Now, I’m a sprinter, so 600 yards, I could barely make that one. But my favorite part about the 600-yard run was, when we were doing this, we had someone in our class, I won’t mention her by name, but who was really, really not fit. She was also the girl who matured faster than everybody else, was the tallest person in the class, and ran super, super slow with her head just looking at the ground the whole time. So we finished the 600-yard run, and everyone was like, “What was your time? What was your time?” And then they would look at her and say, “How much money did you find?” because she always found money along the path.
Kristina Cañizares:
There are perks for everything. But yeah, no, I was that person who came in last at everything. And when they’re picking teams for sports, it would be like, “You take her.” “No, no, no, you take her.” So I never really thought of myself as being active, and I, as kids who were bad at things, do had some trauma around fitness and sports. And I did discover dance and martial arts in high school and got really into that and did some competitive kickboxing.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, wow. Wait, where did you grow up?
Kristina Cañizares:
I grew up in Boston, Massachusetts.
Steven Sashen:
You have seemingly inadvertently or intentionally dropped a lot of your Boston accent.
Kristina Cañizares:
Yeah. Thank you for noticing. I left Boston when I was 18, and I haven’t stayed there.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Even still.
Kristina Cañizares:
So I got out of there. But yeah, no, that’s where I grew up and-
Steven Sashen:
Wait. I got to pause there. To go from not really fit to… Dance is one thing, but kickboxing, I mean, that’s an extreme other side of the equation.
Kristina Cañizares:
Yeah, and that’s why I liked it, is that I was so tired of feeling frail and I wanted to feel strong and I wanted to feel confident in my body and not walk around hunched and scared all the time, and hitting things seemed like… I had some anger issues too. I was a little goth girl. There’s some rage in there, and I really liked the idea of learning to hit things. And I went in there and they were like, “Wow, you’re super flexible.” I could just lift my leg right over my head, like incredibly flexible, but I had zero strength.
They’d put a weight in my hand and be like, “All right. You got to start lifting weights.” And I couldn’t do a bicep curl of five pounds. It was too heavy. I was an absolute frail little flower. And I had also struggled with chronic pain from a very young age. I had a lot of back pain and hip pain. And at the time, I’d go to the doctors and they were like… I mean, basically, it was like, “Ah, too bad. There’s nothing wrong with you.” I’m using air quotes.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Kristina Cañizares:
And it wasn’t until many, many years later that I realized that I have hypermobility syndrome. I mean, many, many years, like well into adulthood, that I figured out that that was a thing, because nobody was talking about that at the time. I was a kid in the ’70s. And really, as soon as I heard that, everything clicked into place. The whole story made sense. But at the time, it was just like, “Wow, she’s just super frail, and everything we try to do with her, she just hurts herself.”
Steven Sashen:
So hypermobility syndrome, what’s the actual thing that’s happening in your body that gives you the hypermobility?
Kristina Cañizares:
Well, it’s actually a bunch of different things. One of the things is just the composition of the connective tissue and muscles themselves. So connective tissue is the sacs around your muscles. It’s your tendons. It’s your ligaments. It’s kind of the things that hold you together and give you a shape. And generally, for most people, it’s mostly collagen. So it has a little bit of stretch to it. There’s some elastin, some amount of stretch, but it’s pretty strong and it kind of holds your joints in place and gives you this nice sort of springy stiffness as you move through life.
If you are hypermobile, generally you have a much higher percentage of elastin in that tissue. So that tissue, instead of being strong and holding you together, kind of goes… It’s way too springy and stretchy. And then the other thing is, there’s a pretty strong neurological component to it as well. So in our bodies, if our muscles stretch too far, there’s this reflex, a stretch reflex, that says, “Ah, you’ve stretched too far,” and it kind of pulls you back in. Hypermobile people don’t have as much of that stretch reflex.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting.
Kristina Cañizares:
So our bodies are often capable of moving into positions where we don’t actually have the strength to hold ourselves there, and it goes flop, drape, smoosh. And so, you can get into all these crazy positions. And as a kid, it was fun. I could just wrap my spine around my skull and freak people out with how flexible I was and do all these crazy flexibility tricks, but I was also getting hurt all the time, and I couldn’t curl five pounds.
And there’s also a real proprioceptive problem when you’re hypermobile, where without that stiffness in the joints, a lot of this proprioceptive feedback that we’re supposed to get from our joints and muscles doesn’t really compute on the same level. So we don’t tend to feel things as well, which makes us wobblier, balance can be a lot harder, control, just knowing where your body is in space. We tend to prefer big, extreme movements because that’s what we can feel, but that’s also risky because we don’t always have the strength and ability to control it.
Steven Sashen:
Control that. Well, first of all, I appreciate that you actually know what proprioception means. It’s obvious that you would, but most people think it’s like, it’s about what you’re feeling. I mean, in the barefoot running world, it’s like, “Oh, what you’re feeling in the ground.” It’s like, “No, no, it’s where is your body in space.”
Kristina Cañizares:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
And in fact, it’s something I talk about with people who are learning to run at all, but especially if they’re learning to run in bare feet. There’s a group of people who they don’t have great proprioceptive skills and, of course, don’t know, because how would you know what you don’t know? And my favorite is someone who said, “Hey, the rubber on your shoes is faulty because I’m wearing it out on the heel.” And I said, “Oh. Well, you’re over-striding and heel striking, because that’s putting force on the ground and that’s what’s causing that.” “Yeah, but I don’t do that.” I went, “This is just physics, man. If you’ve abraded something, it’s because of excessive friction, which comes from horizontal force, and send me a video.”
And the guy sends me a video. And this happened a few times, sent me a video, and I spent 20 minutes showing frame-by-frames like, “Yeah, you’re over-striding. Foot’s landing way in front of your body. You’re heel striking, then you’re pulling back. That’s causing that friction. That’s causing that abrasion.” And literally, after 20 minutes, this same person would say, again, “Yeah, but I don’t do that.” “But dude, it’s a video of you by you.” And it’s like, “All right.”
So there are some people who just do need more feedback. I had a flashback when I was a 12-year-old gymnast. The compulsory floor routine, you had to put your arms parallel to the ground. And it took us weeks to learn what parallel to the ground was, because the way your eyes see it, you want to go here instead of here, and it’s fascinating how people get that. So anyway, now I’m curious, given the stretch reflex thing and the proprioceptive thing, and this is just because I’m a geek, is it because of something that’s missing, say, in or near the muscle spindle fibers or in the muscle tissue itself rather than in your brain not getting information?
Kristina Cañizares:
Yeah. Honestly, the information out there on hypermobility and how it works is still really nascent. It’s something that hasn’t been studied as well as it really should have been.
Steven Sashen:
Not a lot of people, I’m guessing.
Kristina Cañizares:
It’s more than you would think. So I should be clear that hypermobility is a spectrum.
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Kristina Cañizares:
So some people have just a small amount of it, and some people have a scary amount of hypermobility, which goes into the range of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which basically means that you have a level of hypermobility that will affect you beyond just movement issues. It can affect digestion, cognitive abilities, emotional stuff, your ability of your body to move blood and lymph through the system.
Steven Sashen:
Wow.
Kristina Cañizares:
And I have clients with Ehlers-Danlos, and it’s a whole… It can have a massive effect on people’s lives.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Kristina Cañizares:
It could be really, really damaging. Sorry, you were going to ask something?
Steven Sashen:
No, no. I mean, that’s fascinating. It never occurred to me that there could be a connection between hypermobility and little things, having your blood circulate or your lymph move, and that’s wild.
Kristina Cañizares:
You have to have some amount of stiffness in your body to have enough pressure to drive the blood back towards your heart from your feet. So a lot of people with Ehlers-Danlos have to constantly wear compressive socks or stockings because their lower limbs will swell up or they have to lay on their back with their feet up.
Steven Sashen:
So when did you actually take that and turn that into doing circusy things and being a contortionist?
Kristina Cañizares:
Well, when I was 23, I had a really, really severe medical incident that almost killed me. And at the time, I was in school for economics, because that’s kind of what was expected to me to get a real degree. And after that happened, I was kind of like, “You know what? Screw it.” I’ve always loved dancing. I know I’m late to the game. I’m going to be a dancer. And I did. I became a dancer and did that for a long time and really used that as a path to healing for my body, because I was pretty messed up, and really, throughout my 20s, had some very serious health issues and was diagnosed with chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, which are also neurological, autoimmune issues.
And dance and movement really became my way of resetting my relationship with my body and finding healing, and I loved it. And then when I was 30, I met someone who was a circus performer and was like, “Hey, you’re naturally really flexible. Have you ever thought of trying contortion?” And I was like, “Ha ha.” And she said, “Actually, there’s a woman…” I was living in the Bay at the time. “There’s a woman in San Francisco who teaches contortion.” I was like,-
Steven Sashen:
Teaches? Huh.
Kristina Cañizares:
… “Yeah. That sounds wild. I got to go try that.” And I immediately fell absolutely in love with it. It was absolutely the hardest thing I had ever done. It was so intense. And I loved the woman who’s the coach there, named Serchmaa Byamba. She runs the Mongolian Circus Contortion Center. And we just became fast friends, and I trained with her for five years. I actually went to Mongolia with her and trained there with the circus.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, man.
Kristina Cañizares:
And at the time, for someone to start contortion at 30 was absolutely unheard of. Everyone was like, “What are you doing?” It’s more common now, but I was obsessed with it. I loved it so much, and I was like, “I know this doesn’t make any sense for my life. I don’t know what I’m going to do with this, but I need to do this. There’s something in here for me that I need to find.” So I never became Cirque du Soleil soloist or anything like that, but I got way better than I expected, and I did perform for a while. And really, it was a life-changing experience. It was so beautiful.
Steven Sashen:
One thing I know about contortion, and this is interesting, given what you’re saying about not being able to do a bicep curl with a five-pound weight, is people think it’s all about flexibility. They don’t realize how much of it is about strength.
Kristina Cañizares:
That’s clear, right?
Steven Sashen:
So how did that change for you?
Kristina Cañizares:
Well, it was the first time that I was learning how to build strength through my entire range of motion. So a lot of times, strength training, as it’s traditionally done in a gym with weights, you don’t use your full range of motion, right? And especially not for someone with a massive range of motion.
Steven Sashen:
That’s where I was going. Yeah.
Kristina Cañizares:
Yeah. So a lot of times, you see people doing movement generally… And we’re strongest in the middle of our range. Everyone is strongest in the middle of the range. So once you start to get to our end ranges where the muscle is longest or the muscle is shortest, you have to use a lighter weight. But I had never really trained that way. And with contortion, you have to. You have to be strong through your entire range and you have to train your end range. And so, so much of the constant pain and struggle that I’ve been dealing with my body, contortion really fixed it.
Steven Sashen:
Wow.
Kristina Cañizares:
So people think of it as being damaging, and I did get injured. I did get injured, and I’ll tell you about that story because that changed everything too. But when I was training properly with good coaches, I felt better than I had felt in my entire life. Less pain, more strength. I actually built muscle, like real muscle, and I could do a handstand and I could stand on one leg with one foot up over my head and control my body in ways that I’d never been able to before. So there was a deep healing in that for me. I had really healed so much of the relationship I had with my body.
Steven Sashen:
I love it. Only because this is, again, one of my fascinations, how was Mongolia?
Kristina Cañizares:
Well, that’s where I got injured.
Steven Sashen:
Perfect segue.
Kristina Cañizares:
I will say, overall, I loved Mongolia. I was there for a month, and I was there with my coach who’s from there, so I got to stay with her family and travel around the country and get to know people and attempt to speak Mongolian, which was really hard, and it was absolutely beautiful. But I did train with a coach there, whose name I won’t repeat, who injured me. And he was not used to working with adults, and he, I don’t think, was really happy to have me there, and he was training me as if I was 12, which was the next oldest person who was there, and he completely dislocated my hip, like complete tear of the hip, and dislocated a number of ribs and tore my shoulder.
Steven Sashen:
Holy moly.
Kristina Cañizares:
Right. Go ahead.
Steven Sashen:
This is actually a really interesting point, though, is finding a coach who has some experience with who you are. I’m thinking about that. I mean, when I got back into sprinting, I was connected with a coach here in Boulder, who was a very well-known running coach, but he wasn’t a sprinting coach, and it took me two years to figure that out. We had a big screaming, yelling match. I said, “You’re the only sprinting coach in history who suggests you get faster by running slower. So this is not working for me.”
Or when I was a gymnast and I went to college, I asked the coach there, I said, “Do me a favor. I’m going to do this particular move. Just stand there in case something goes wrong, like if I slip or something.” And it wasn’t as bad as you perhaps. Actually, now that I think of it, it could be worse. He decided to try to spot me on this move, and I landed in a way that may have broken my spine.
Kristina Cañizares:
Ooh.
Steven Sashen:
And I say “may have,” because I have a broken spine now, and when it was diagnosed, the doctor said, “What’d you do 30 years ago to break your spine?” I said, “Well, I was an all-American gymnast.” He goes, “Ah, that’s enough.” And later, I asked this coach, I said, “Why did you try to unsuccessfully spot me on this move?” And he said, “Well, because I knew there was only three people on the planet doing it, and I didn’t think you were one. I thought you were just trying to show off, and I was going to try and save you.” And it’s like, “Dude, you put me in bed for two weeks and I couldn’t move. I was on Valium and codeine for two weeks.”
And it was, again, just, it was the wrong guy for… It was a mismatch. And so, finding someone who understands your situation, who you are, and has worked with someone, I think that’s a really important thing. I don’t even know how you would necessarily find out other than asking things like, “How many other people like me have you worked with?” and see what their response is, and even more find those people and see what their experience was. Do you have any other thoughts from dealing with coaches that might be useful for humans?
Kristina Cañizares:
Yeah. I mean, I think, like you said, it’s really important to find a coach who has some experience working with people like you and/or someone who at least listens to you, takes what you’re saying very seriously, because I think the problem is, a lot of times, coaches have their hammer and they want to make you into a nail.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Kristina Cañizares:
And you might not be a nail. You might be a staple. You might be a screw. Who knows? And I think it’s really important as a coach or someone who works with coaches to be like, “Well, maybe the tools that I love and work really great for me and some of my other clients aren’t the tools that this person needs, and this person might need other tools, and maybe I have those tools too or maybe I don’t and I have to say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t think I have the right things for you. Let me refer you to someone. Let me find someone who’s going to be right for you.'” But that takes a lot of humility as a coach.
Steven Sashen:
Well, I was going to say, the fact that you even bring that up, it makes you special, because most people think that they do have a tool for every whatever who shows up, and it’s definitely not the case. I mean, I was really lucky. My gymnastics coach is one of these guys who, to this day, we’re still friends. I mean, 40-something years later. And he’s just one of these guys who was such a… He’s so good at figuring out who you are and adapting what he does to you, and he had people who came in really uncoordinated and he turned them into good specialist gymnasts, just like he figured out, “Oh, you could do rings. You could do high bar.” We had a team that never lost a meet in six years.
Kristina Cañizares:
Wow.
Steven Sashen:
And I met him… I’m going to do this one story because I think you might like it. We were hanging out just recently and he said, one of the things that he does if he has a kid who’s just in a bad mood and is going to be disruptive, he goes, “I make him my assistant coach for the day. So that way, he’s helping me and that’s all he can focus on. He’s not being disruptive, and it gives him yet another skill even.”
It’s like, the fact that he even thought that idea up is just one of those really special things. And you’re in a situation where, given what led you to becoming a coach, and we’ll get there, you had a number of things, obviously, that led there that makes it, I imagine, much more clear about who may be right or wrong for you and vice versa.
Kristina Cañizares:
Absolutely. Yeah. And, I mean, I definitely have the experience of working with the wrong coaches and with the right coaches. Serchmaa, my contortion coach, was the right coach for me.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Kristina Cañizares:
And even though she actually had never coached someone my age before, she listened to me and we talked and we communicated clearly, and she knew when to push me, when not to, and I would never have been able to do what I did without that coaching. And then I’ve had other coaches who were not the right coach and who did not listen to me and did not trust what I was saying about my body. And not just coaches, but chiropractors, massage therapists, where I’m like, “Hey, please don’t push on my upper back. You’ll dislocate my ribs.” And sure enough, pop.
Steven Sashen:
I had one with a chiropractor who… He said, “Well, we’re just going to give you some traction and then I’ll put your spine back in place.” I said, “But there’s no muscles that are holding those vertebrae in place. They’re disconnected from the vertebrae. So what’s going to keep it in place?” And he just looked at me and he was like, “Well, but I mean, I think you still need the traction.” I went, “But why?”
And then he said, “Well, you also need this three-quarter orthotic.” And I said, “Well, I’m a sprinter, so I never actually touched the part of my foot that that orthotic would have any impact on. I mean, I’m on the ball of my foot, not everything further back.” He goes, “Yeah, but I mean, like when you’re walking to the track.” I went, “That’s a bit of a stretch.” So, I mean, to your point, basically, he’s trying to figure out how to fit my square peg in his round moneymaking hole, which sounds really wrong when I say it that way, but I’m sticking to it.
Kristina Cañizares:
Yeah. It’s the right words. Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
So five years of doing contortion. I mean, I’m desperately curious, it occurs to me, what were you doing to support your contortion habit?
Kristina Cañizares:
I was belly dancing in Middle Eastern restaurants.
Steven Sashen:
I love it.
Kristina Cañizares:
And I was doing-
Steven Sashen:
As one does.
Kristina Cañizares:
As one does.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Kristina Cañizares:
I was doing a lot of belly dancing, some ballroom dancing, performances, and stuff like that. I was teaching dance classes, and I was doing freelance writing jobs. I did a lot of grant writing for arts organizations and I did copywriting stuff. I was cobbling it together, and I was living as cheap as I possibly could. I was living in Oakland, California with a bunch of artists in a house, and we didn’t live fancy. I didn’t buy new clothes. I had a wonderful life, but I was definitely not wealthy.
Steven Sashen:
You’re giving me stand-up comedy flashbacks.
Kristina Cañizares:
There you go. Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
I remember in high school watching The Tonight Show and you’d see these two actors like, “Hey, remember when we were roommates?” How are all these people knowing each other? And it was the same thing in my 20s and early 30s when we were all, not struggling, struggling, but we certainly didn’t have a lot of money, all of us comics. Now I watch TV and I’m so grateful that my wife still stays with me after every night when I’m going, “Yeah, I lived with that guy. I worked with that guy.” I mean, it’s just, you’re in a community, and that’s the important part.
Kristina Cañizares:
Yeah, and that’s how it was with dance and then really with circus, and a lot of those people who I was in circus school with are still very close friends of mine. And then I started performing, and I did a lot of corporate shows. I worked for a couple of circuses. I had my own dance and circus company for a while, and-
Steven Sashen:
I love it.
Kristina Cañizares:
… moved to L.A. and started doing… I did a lot of stunt double stuff. I did a lot of music videos and did some touring. I was a burlesque performer and incorporated the contortion into burlesque acts and toured those.
Steven Sashen:
Love it. So, so, so from there, I mean, we are finding our way from you being a frail, hypermobile child to now really finding yourself in dance and contortion. Just out of curiosity, did you drop martial arts?
Kristina Cañizares:
I actually dropped martial arts in my early 20s, just because I became more interested in dance at that time. I just grew up.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, no. It’s a blast. I had a vicarious thing. During COVID, I watched a lot of Brazilian jujitsu videos.
Kristina Cañizares:
Oh. Yeah. Good stuff.
Steven Sashen:
When I have time, it’s still on my to-do list. I was doing Tai Chi and aikido, both of them. It was a really rare group of people. We were doing both of those. Tai Chi was originally developed as a fighting art. Aikido, same thing, but they basically modified it so you weren’t killing people because they needed to come back and practice with you the next day, but we were all treating these things really seriously, and it was an unusual group of people and super, super fun.
I miss it, but my thing, I got off the mat because I was too dangerous to myself, because the people that I hung out with, we weren’t going to fake it. We weren’t going to throw ourselves on the ground. If you didn’t make me fall on the ground, I’m not going to just jump onto the ground. And then I’d go to other dojos where I thought everyone was like that.
And so, some big black belt, and I’m just some little kid, I mean, I was 5’5″, 125 pounds, he couldn’t move me, and I’d be thinking like, “Isn’t this cool? Now you can learn something.” And he’s like, “Hey, I just learned that I’m going to try and break your arm because I have an ego to protect.” And I was too committed to poking at people and I realized, “I got to stop doing this.”
Kristina Cañizares:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
So we’ll see. So as we’re progressing to when you started becoming a coach and your understanding or your deepening understanding about movement, what’s our next chapter?
Kristina Cañizares:
Well, the injuries really were the next chapter, especially the hip injury. It really sidelined me. I continued to try to work through it, and I didn’t have health insurance. I didn’t know what was going on. I was like, “My hip hurts.”
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Kristina Cañizares:
And I finally got an MRI and the doctor was like… I was 35, 36. I was 36, and the doctor was like, “Well, your ligaments are all torn, and as a result of continuing to work on it, you now also have tendinitis in your hip, and your SI joint is out.” My hip was a mess and it was creating all sorts of problems radiating up and down the chain, and he’s like, “We’re going to have to do surgery. We’re going to have to go in there and replace those ligaments,” and “You’ve had a good run. You’re too old to be doing this anyway, and this is the end of your career.”
And I was like, “Ugh.” I was so depressed. I could not imagine stopping. I couldn’t imagine stopping. And I kind of stewed on it for a little while, then I was like, “You know what? I’m just going to see. I’m just going to see if I can fix this on my own.” And I started seeing a physical therapist. I started doing a lot of Pilates. Pilates is something I always recommend to hypermobile people, because it saved me. It taught me so much about my body. It really taught me how to strengthen through my full range in a way that was different than contortion because it enabled me to actually feel the entire range instead of only feeling the ends.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting.
Kristina Cañizares:
And just little by little, I was like, “Oh, man. I’m starting to feel better.” And a year later, I was back on stage, and actually was better than I was before because I had strengthened myself and I had fixed some of the things that were problematic in the first place through the rehab. And then, at that point, I was living in L.A. and a circus school had just opened up down here and they were asking if I wanted to coach some contortion and flexibility, and I was like, “What if I take some of these principles that I’ve learned through my own rehabilitation and start applying it to the way that I’m teaching people from the beginning?” So changing the way that you learn it in the first place. And from there, Fit & Bendy was born.
Steven Sashen:
Well, so give me an example then of what it’s like to turn things on its head and start there. So I’m trying to find something to hold onto for what that would look like, or if I was coming to see you for the first time, what we would do.
Kristina Cañizares:
So I’ll give you an example. Let’s talk about hamstring flexibility. I always like to start with hamstring flexibility because it’s something everybody wants and we always talk about, and it’s a really easy example. So traditionally, the way that one would stretch a hamstring would be to do some sort of passive stretch. So there’s a lot of sitting on the floor, you got one knee bent, the other leg straight out in front of you, and you try to lean over that extended leg. And then someone may come along, kind of push on you, or you take a strap and you use it to pull yourself deeper.
Well, this is passive-static stretching. Right? This is like, I’m going in here and I’m going to hang out and I’m going to breathe and I’m going to hope that that muscle relaxes and I can start to get a little deeper over time, and maybe I cry just a little bit because it sucks so much. So what I would do instead is that I would have people lay on their backs and lift their leg up towards their face and do a whole bunch of different exercises, bending and straightening the knee, flexing, pointing the foot, moving the leg side to side, lifting and lowering it, moving it around.
And then at the very end, they use the strap to start to bring that leg in a little bit closer. But what I’m trying to do is start with the muscle that’s shortening, the hip flexors, and the ability of the hip flexors to shorten and bring that leg in. And so, I’m creating that strength in the shortened side that supports the limb through the range of motion that we’re building. And this is what’s so important for adult flexibility, is where if you’re teaching a small child, it’s okay to make massive changes in their passive range and then build the muscle around it, because they weigh like 30 pounds.
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Kristina Cañizares:
Right? And they don’t have a lot of injuries and a lot of history and a lot of trauma in their bodies already. You take an adult body and you vastly and quickly increase the range of motion through extreme passive-static stretching with someone standing on you or pushing on you. All of a sudden, you’ve created a range that the body doesn’t support. Most likely, you haven’t created it with good alignment because the body is going to shift to try to accommodate to get into that crazy range.
Steven Sashen:
Yup.
Kristina Cañizares:
And then you have this loose joint, and then you try to strengthen it. And the problem with that is, building strength in that way in an adult body, especially an older adult, it just doesn’t build as easily, and we have a lot more weight that we’re moving around and we have all sorts of crap that’s happened to us in our lives. So if you build the range actively, it’s going to be a slower process, but it’s going to be a much healthier process, and it’s a much more usable flexibility. It’s much healthier for the body. So that’s what the whole premise is built on.
Steven Sashen:
I love it. I mean, arguably, it’s contortion 101. The important thing is being able to move into that position with control and strength rather than just the fact that you can, which is totally, totally fascinating. So other than hamstring, give me another one, because I’m loving that one. I’m playing with another one in my head.
Kristina Cañizares:
What one are you playing with? I’m curious.
Steven Sashen:
Well, I’m going to go for one that’s problematic for a lot of people. I literally had no intention of this one until you asked me that. Thoracic mobility is something that people lose significantly as they get older.
Kristina Cañizares:
Especially with the computer hunch.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kristina Cañizares:
Yeah. So thoracic mobility, a lot of times, that’s taught where you take a foam roller and you backbend over the foam roller. Right? And again, this creates a passive range. And a lot of times, what you see when you see people do that, if they don’t really actually have the ability to go into that, is you’ll see some kind of like, the shoulders ride up and you see a lot of floppiness in the neck, the neck falls back, and maybe you get some change in thoracic mobility, maybe not. So what I’ll have people do a lot of instead is work on, in hands and knees, what it feels like to bring the sternum up and forward.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, interesting.
Kristina Cañizares:
And I’ll usually preface that with a lot of lower traps work, a lot of serratus anterior work, through planking, through side planks, through lifting the arms in a V shape up over the head, because those are the muscles that you really want to get that actually are able to create that thoracic extension. But even more than that, it’s like, why does the person not have that thoracic extension?
A lot of times, there’s breathing patterns that you’ve got to look at. Are they able to use their transverse abdominis and their oblique muscles to support their bodies? Because if not, that could be a big cause of that thoracic immobility where your breathing mechanics and your core support are not there. So there’s a lot going on that can create thoracic immobility.
Steven Sashen:
Well, I mean, yeah, there’s a lot of… What’s the word I was looking for? Muscle insertions that impact that. But I like the overarching theme, which, if I could, is, if you’re looking to find, create mobility somewhere, you want to think of the thing that needs to be stronger that will allow that rather than just doing some passive something that goes neither way. I mean, boy, when you talk about this, I think about gymnast stuff.
I mean, gymnasts, the most important motion is all just forward and, really, shoulders internally rotated. How old am I now? I’m 60 years old. I’ve spent 40 years of getting the gymnast out of my body. But the thing that was really fun, people were having me do all these dopey little exercises for… anything going on to get my shoulders back in place. And one day, it occurred to me, I’m just going to do chin-ups and pull-ups and really just focus on that part, on that initial thing that forces my shoulders to get back there rather than just using my arms, and huge difference, and it’s like, “How come no one ever thought to suggest that? Seems somewhat obvious.” Yeah.
Kristina Cañizares:
Doesn’t it, though?
Steven Sashen:
It does. Well, it only seems obvious if you’re someone who’s looking to investigate this. If you think about what we did when we were kids, and I’m older than you are, but when we were kids and you’re in gym class, a lot of the times, we’re just repeating what we did in gym class, or we’ll pick up some exercise, some activity, and we just think, “Well, sure, I can just go out and do it.” I mean, obvious example is running. People think, “Oh, you just go out and run.”
Kristina Cañizares:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
You had any response to that one?
Kristina Cañizares:
I did. Well, it’s funny, because a few nights ago, my neighbor, who’s a friend, called me and she was like, “Help. I need your help. Come over right now.” And I come over there and she was like, “I went to go play soccer with my pick-up league tonight and I was out there two minutes, and all of a sudden, I thought someone had shot me in the back of the calf and I can’t walk at all.” And she couldn’t move her leg. Her calf was in full spasm.
And so, I worked on it for a while and I was like, “So what’s your warm-up like for running?” And she was like, “Warm-up?” And she was like, “Well, I take a strap and I really just stretch up my calves really good and then I go run.” And I was like, “Ah.” She was like, “Well, I’ve been doing it that way since I was a kid.” And I was like, “Yeah, you’re 35 now. How’s it working for you, babe?” So I was like, “Okay. We’ve really…” She said, “This is what my whole team does, the whole soccer team. They stretch their calves and they go out and start running.”
Steven Sashen:
Holy moly.
Kristina Cañizares:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Running is one. I remember there was an early… One of the first seasons of Shark Tank. Someone came on with a device that was designed to help you learn to run better. And basically, it was like a belt that had some elastic bands attached from the belt down to your ankles with the idea being that it would help you learn to engage mostly your hamstrings properly, and I remember the sharks just saying, “But everyone knows how to run.” It was like, “No. No, no, no. Not quite so simple.”
Kristina Cañizares:
No. Yeah. Our bodies are these very complex, amazing creations with this incredible architecture and choreography that goes on within it, and I have so many clients who come in and are like, “How come I don’t stand right? How come I don’t breathe right? How come I don’t just do those things naturally?” I was like, “Well, we don’t use our bodies naturally.”
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Kristina Cañizares:
We sit. We are not nearly as active and mobile as we’re designed to be, and we also live way longer than we originally did. So now we have the issue of longevity that we’re working on, but the main thing is we’re just not active enough most of the time throughout our lives, and I feel like we don’t know how to feel our bodies.
Steven Sashen:
So when you’re working with someone both about just either getting them to have more or different movement or getting some awareness of what’s happening below their neck, what do you do with humans to help with that?
Kristina Cañizares:
I mean, the main thing I do at the beginning is I listen to people, because everyone has their own journey of how they got here. And me listening to them, I’m hoping that they also listen to themselves.
Steven Sashen:
So if somebody were coming in… Again, I’m pretending it’s me for the fun of it. Someone coming in to meet with you for the first time. Let’s do this for people who aren’t meeting with you, but of course, we’re going to invite people to do that. If someone is just imagining talking to themselves or, more accurately, imagining they’re talking to you, but they’ll be talking to themself, what story would you ask them to be telling, and what would you ask them to listen for?
Kristina Cañizares:
I want to know about their relationships with their bodies, because that is really where it starts. That’s the foundation. Right? I can have all sorts of ideas about exercises that I can give you, but if you can’t feel them, if you can’t feel your body, if you don’t have the ability to just be present with what’s going on, then the exercises aren’t going to really make a change, and I think this is the issue with a lot of physical therapies.
You go in the physical therapist’s office. You’re like, “My shoulder hurts.” And they’re like, “All right. Here are these exercises. You do them with the band. Here they are on a piece of paper. Go home and do the exercises.” And then it’s like, “Oh, my shoulder doesn’t really feel better.” It’s like, “Well, what else is going on? Are you breathing? How are you standing? And can you even feel your shoulder? Can you even feel the muscles that you’re trying to access?” Because without the ability to have that relationship, really, it’s a relationship that needs to be healed and cultivated, and the movement is the way that you heal and cultivate that relationship.
Steven Sashen:
I’ll give you one that I literally just realized the other day. You might get a kick out of this.
Kristina Cañizares:
Mm-hmm.
Steven Sashen:
And this is a fun one because I realized this, I think, psychologically first, and then I realized the movement component of it, and I’ll do the psychological part. I realized that I have a habit of-
Kristina Cañizares:
Sorry. Rocky. Hey.
Steven Sashen:
Let’s see Rocky. Hold on.
Kristina Cañizares:
Rocky, go get that.
Steven Sashen:
That was good. My dog would not do that.
Kristina Cañizares:
Great. I’m so sorry. Hold on one second.
Steven Sashen:
Sure, sure. Really quick, in case anybody wonders, you did not go through a time warp. Kristina just moved to a new location. All right. So here’s my weird little psychological thing. I realized that I have a habit of postponing enjoyment till later. So my favorite way that I think about this is, for most of my life, when I would eat a piece of chocolate cake, my all-time favorite food, I would eat most of the cake part first and save just a little bit of cake attached to the icing so I could have the icing last, and what I realized is that… And I do things like that a lot.
As a athlete, I was working on something that was going to take years until I was able to do what I wanted to do. As an entrepreneur, same idea. It takes years until I get to a point where things are working the way I want them to work. I’m trying to think of how to describe this. So for me, it occurred to me that part of my relationship with my body, and I’m giving this as an example to invite people to inquire themselves, is that I’m much more goal-oriented than process-oriented.
And finding something that’s just sort of enjoyable in the moment, finding something where I don’t have to struggle or strain or put out too much effort so that sometime later, I will have some benefit has been something that, again, I didn’t even realize I’ve been doing for most of my life until very recently, and it’s been fascinating to explore that. And it’s literally just beginning for me to take a look at that and see what kind of things that I would want to do that would allow that process to be potentially more compelling than the imagined end result.
Kristina Cañizares:
Well, yeah, and also to challenge the idea that struggle and strain is required for-
Steven Sashen:
Exactly.
Kristina Cañizares:
Yeah. Go ahead.
Steven Sashen:
Well, that’s an interesting one. I mean, this is the advantage of getting back into sprinting when I was 45. It took me a few years to realize that when I had that thought, “Okay, I’m going to do one more,” that was the time to stop.
Kristina Cañizares:
Yes. Oh, yeah. That’s a good one.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. That one took quite a while, but now, same thing. If I feel the tiniest little tweak, done for the day.
Kristina Cañizares:
Yup.
Steven Sashen:
And as a result, I mean, I haven’t had a real injury, jeez, in 13 years.
Kristina Cañizares:
Wow, that’s great. That’s great.
Steven Sashen:
And I’m not complaining.
Kristina Cañizares:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that a lot of the way that we are taught to think about, and I’m going to air quote here again, fitness, and I’m air quoting fitness because I think even the definitions of fitness really need to be reexamined a lot of the time, but the way that we are taught to think about it is, you put on your gym clothes and you go to the gym and you suffer for an hour in order to try to get your blood pressure down and maybe you’ll look hot naked or whatever, but there’s nothing in that process that is about your relationship with your body or how you feel.
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Kristina Cañizares:
There’s no feeling in it. There’s no communication in it. There’s no checking in with yourself in it. It’s just, I just got to go suffer through this crap in order to check exercise off my list, and then we wonder why so many people don’t want to do it.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. No, it’s just putting in the numbers. Well, my line is, we go inside to work out instead of doing something that’s actually enjoyable. It’s the opening line. If you’re not having fun, do something different till you are.
Kristina Cañizares:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
And now granted, there are some things where the stress or the effort of it is enjoyable. One of the reasons I like sprinting is I like the competition, and that’s a stressful thing, but there’s something about it. And in fact, for Masters Track & Field athletes, I joke that it’s one of the things that we all have in common. We’re really competitive. We’re old enough to realize how stupid that is. We’re old enough to realize that’s not going to change. And so, we just enjoy this stupid thing where we’re competing for nothing. There’s no prize money. There’s no nothing. At the beginning of a race, I’ve had this happen a lot, where someone looks at me and goes, “Hey, have a good race.” They’re really intense, and I go, “Look, just get to the end, be healthy, have a good time, and, oh yeah, by the way, I totally want to kick your ass.”
Kristina Cañizares:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
And so, let’s just do the whole story, because it’s fun that way.
Kristina Cañizares:
Yeah. No, it is. And I love pushing myself. I absolutely love it, but I also have come to understand that the push needs to happen in a way that is still in relationship.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Kristina Cañizares:
The push can’t be something that I use to hurt myself or because I believe that the push is the only way that I’m going to be, quote, “better.”
Steven Sashen:
Right. So, I mean, the thing about people who are listening/watching, how else can we talk about how people don’t necessarily feel what’s happening with their body and some suggestion for what they might want to experiment with to kind of try something new?
Kristina Cañizares:
Well, I always start, almost always, depending on the client, but my preferred place is to go, when I first start working movement things with people, are feet and breathing, because if those two things aren’t working, none of your other workouts are going to go great. And very frequently, there’s some really good stuff to get into there. And so, how do you breathe? Can you feel yourself breathe? Can you control your breath? Can you hold your breath at the top and the bottom? Can you actually get rib cage movement? Can you feel your diaphragm? Can you feel the way that your transverse abdominis and your obliques contribute to breathing? Can you relax your neck and shoulders while you breathe?
So asking yourself all these questions, and maybe start by asking yourself the question like, “Do I feel like I have a pretty good sense of how I breathe?” And think about how you breathe, and then actually start to do some investigating in how you breathe, and see if there’s a mismatch there. And then you can do some of the same things with feet. So I actually have people start laying on their backs with their knees at 90 degrees and their feet against a wall, and I do calf raises like that, so almost no weight.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting.
Kristina Cañizares:
Because as soon as you start adding weight to that calf raise, it’s hard to really see, like are you actually in control of it? You take the weight away, and you look. You can see what the mechanics are. You can see if you’re supinating really early in the calf raise, if there’s a tremor as it goes up and down, if the toes are gripping, if the ankles or knees are rotating in weird ways. And you start to get a lot of honesty that way about what’s actually going on with the feet and knees-
Steven Sashen:
That’s interesting.
Kristina Cañizares:
… and the toes and the ankles.
Steven Sashen:
Something else just occurred to me, especially when you put fitness in air quotes, and the reason that people engage in fitness. I mean, you are living in the mecca of we’re doing it to look a particular way, and not even feel a particular way, just to look a particular way.
Kristina Cañizares:
Just look.
Steven Sashen:
Say again?
Kristina Cañizares:
Yeah. Just look.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Just looks. In fact, it’s funny. There’s a trainer that I know in L.A. I was having dinner with him and all of his sub-trainers, if you will, and I said, “Yeah. The only thing I care about, I mean, of a sprinter, I just want my posterior chain to be stronger and more active. I mean, I want to be able to sprint better.” And as a half joke, they all looked at each other and said, “Did anyone understand a word he just said? We’re here to make people look good from the waist up.” It was totally, totally fascinating. I mean, boy, what’s it like doing what you do in that environment?
Kristina Cañizares:
I mean, I just don’t do that. And if people come to me and-
Steven Sashen:
Well, no, but that’s so interesting because, I mean, I imagine some people are like, “But aren’t I going to get washboard abs?” And other people are like, “Oh, thank God. This is not about washboard abs.” But it’s such a diametrically opposite way of approaching this compared to most people in your world. I’m just fascinated by that.
Kristina Cañizares:
And that leaves a giant gaping hole for me to fill, because most trainers who think of themselves as like… I mean, I’m looking at Hollywood out my window. So in that general direction, within a mile, I’m sure I could hit dozens of personal trainers who will advertise washboard abs and long, thin legs and striated shoulders. So there’s no shortage of that here. There’s tons of it.
But the people who tend to come to me are people who are like, “I’ve tried other stuff and it’s not working for me, and my body doesn’t feel right and I can’t do what I want to do in my life.” And that’s who I want to work with. And I’m like, “Will you lose weight?” Yeah. You can lose weight. If you feel better and you can move more, then maybe you’ll lose weight. I don’t know. Everybody’s different and everybody’s relationship with food is different. That’s really not my business.
Steven Sashen:
I mean, even though we’ve been talking about this for the better part of an hour, as soon as you said that, for whatever reason, it hit me very differently of, what would it be like, and this is kind of an invitation for people, to approach fitness from the perspective of, “Simply, I want to feel good in my body”? Not, “I want to look good.” Not, “I want to feel good.” Not, “I think if I look good, then I’ll feel good.”
But it’s like turning, strengthening, and stretching upside down, turning that upside down too, of starting with, how do you find a pleasant relationship with this thing that you’ve been carrying around or it’s carrying you around first? And boy, I mean, I’m just really moved by that.
Kristina Cañizares:
I mean, this is my whole thing, is fitness should not start with how you look.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Kristina Cañizares:
Maybe you get to that at some point down the road, maybe, if that’s something that’s really important to you. But you can’t start with that because then you end up starting with exercises that are not necessarily right for your body, and you don’t have the neurological relationship with your body to support the exercises that you’re doing. So you can’t feel them. You don’t experience them. You’re not moving healthily through them. You’re often doing it on a shaky foundation without a deep understanding of what it is that you’re doing, and there’s no joy in it. There’s no celebration in it.
And I will say that the vast majority of us out there are never ever going to get to that six-pack ab. I’m not built for that. The only time in my life I was doing that, I was working out all the time and eating unhealthily. My body is not built like that. And most people out there are never going to be fitness models. And so, to say that the model of fitness is to look like a fitness model is, it’s damaging and it’s crap and it’s deeply exclusionary of so many people who have perfectly wonderful bodies, which is everybody, and that body is still born to move. And movement is our birthright. It’s our healing. It’s our relationship with ourselves. It’s a key to self-knowledge. Not the only one, but it is a good one. And so, to say that fitness is about an aesthetic is to exclude all of those people.
Steven Sashen:
Well, I’m just marveling that… How do I want to say it? I can’t imagine you would have come to this were it not for the situation that you grew up with, were it not for all the hypermobility and all the issues that you had, because this was… I’m trying to think of how to describe this. You’re putting people on a path that you came to. Talk about taking things upside down. It’s like you had to find this, and now you’re able to take people without having to walk them through all of the challenging parts. You can sort of start at the end, which ironically… God, I wish I could find the right way to say this. Do you know where I’m going with this weird thought that is putting itself together as I’m trying to talk?
Kristina Cañizares:
I think so. I think so, but go ahead.
Steven Sashen:
I mean, let me see if I can do it a little bit better. Had you not had the peculiar relationship with your body that you had as a child, you wouldn’t have needed to. You wouldn’t have had the opportunity or the almost necessity for having a new kind of relationship with your body than what most people would otherwise have. And where that led you is to this really delightful thing that you don’t need to put someone through all of that challenge that you went through because that’s how you got here, but you can start near the finish line. That’s a horrible metaphor. I don’t want to use finish line.
You can start further down. You’ve got a rock path. You don’t need to walk on every one of the rocks. You can start way closer to wherever… Rock paths never end, but you don’t need to start at the very beginning. You can start somewhere else. And I’m not articulating it well because I’m frankly just so moved by the idea of start with building this relationship and then see where that goes, almost without an agenda per se.
Kristina Cañizares:
I mean, it’s almost without an agenda. I think some amount of agenda is good because I think agendas or dreams of what we can do can be good motivators. I have a client who’s in her 60s and has had a lot of issues with her body and was not mobile at all for a really long time, and her goal was to go to Mexico and climb the pyramids. That’s what she wanted. And when we first started, we were just working on being able to stand up from a chair and walk across the room. That was the level that we were at. And a few months ago, she went to Mexico and climbed the pyramids.
Steven Sashen:
I love it. But that’s a very different kind of goal than the average fitness goal. That’s an experiential goal. That’s a life goal.
Kristina Cañizares:
Yeah, but I think that those goals are actually way better drivers.
Steven Sashen:
No, that’s exactly my point.
Kristina Cañizares:
And I think that what you were saying earlier about the path, I don’t know who said it or where, but there’s a common idea that the things that are our greatest challenges are also our greatest gifts.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Kristina Cañizares:
And I think that when we can lean into the… My body has been my greatest challenge throughout my life. I’ve had incredible challenges with my body, and I’ve always leaned into that. And in that, I’ve mined out what I could, and that those tools are now the tools that I use to work with other people and to continue to work myself because, let’s face it, I’m not done. I’m just working on it.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. No, we never are. But what I love about what you said is, unlike, let’s say, your average therapist, therapist, where they’re still trying to work it out and, really, most of them really should try to work it out more before they talk to humans, what you’ve worked out and your continued process working that out is something that’s accessible to people as a process with what you’re doing. You’re not messed up. You just had a whole other way of having to get there that led you to these understandings that you can share with people that are universal, that do apply across the board, and that’s a special thing.
Kristina Cañizares:
Thanks. I love what I do. I love it so much. Every day, I get up super excited to do what I do. I love to work on myself and I try to spend a couple hours a day in the gym, and I love to work with other people and create resources and continue to think about this and continue to learn from other people as well. I’m always trying to learn new stuff.
Steven Sashen:
Well, why don’t we use that as a segue for, if people want to get in touch with you and find out more about what you’re doing and how they might be able to explore this with you, how would they do that?
Kristina Cañizares:
My website is fitandbendy.com. I’m also fitandbendy on Instagram, though I will confess that social media is not my greatest gift. I don’t post a lot.
Steven Sashen:
Trust me, I would not apologize for that. I was driving home a little while ago imagining turning off all my social media accounts, changing my email address, and only doing things like buying things online when I need them and having once-a-week check-ins with my friends, and it was the most blissful 20 minutes I’ve had in a long time. In fact, I had to stay in a hospital a couple weeks ago. I did something that I don’t think I’ve done in well over 30 years. I was not online for two days.
Kristina Cañizares:
Oh, that sounds amazing. You should do that more often.
Steven Sashen:
It was great.
Kristina Cañizares:
Yeah. I tried to take a vacation from online at least once a year. It’s not enough, but it’s better than nothing.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Actually, you know what? I take it back. I lied. I realized that maybe 20 years ago, I did a 10-day meditation course where I had no contact with anyone for 10 days. But certainly, in the last 20, 25, it’s been quite a while.
Kristina Cañizares:
It’s like when you run a business. When you run a business, there’s four hours a day. Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Someday. Well, anyway, so fitandbendy.com and fitandbendy on social media. I hope people do take advantage of getting in touch with you, and please let me know when and if they do. I want to hear what kind of experiences people have, both yours and theirs, because it’s always really fun.
Kristina Cañizares:
Absolutely. I’m really excited about Xero Shoes because I’ve never been a runner before in my life. And I have arthritis in my right foot from dancing and circus and all sorts of things, and I had surgery for it in November, and I’ve decided, as part of my rehab, that I’m going to become a runner because-
Steven Sashen:
Love it.
Kristina Cañizares:
… trying to run at 48 makes perfect sense to me.
Steven Sashen:
Absolutely. Hey, look, I got back into sprinting at 45, so-
Kristina Cañizares:
There you go.
Steven Sashen:
… I think we’re in good company. Good luck with it. Actually, wait. Sorry, memory jog. Correct me if I’m wrong, you had some interaction with Chris McDougall and Eric Orton?
Kristina Cañizares:
I did. Yes.
Steven Sashen:
Wow. Say more.
Kristina Cañizares:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
All right. We’ll pause on the exiting, and now say more about that.
Kristina Cañizares:
Okay.
Steven Sashen:
And just wait. For people who don’t know, Chris McDougall wrote the book Born to Run, and Eric Orton was his running coach, and now the two of them teamed up to write Born to Run 2, which is the ultimate training guide for anyone learning to run. So wait, say more.
Kristina Cañizares:
Yeah. I had a wonderful conversation with them last week about learning to run and being a beginner runner and running in hypermobility and what it means to build your running practice from the ground up, as someone who doesn’t have any experience with that and has injuries and all sorts of other things, like what does that look like? And it was such a wonderful conversation, and I love the fact that Chris and I actually have some similar trajectories here where he was told by a lot of people like, “Oh, you’re not built to run.” And then he became a runner. And so, I’m really excited about continuing to be in conversation with them and work with them as I’m gradually… I’m now three months out of surgery and just ran half an hour this morning, so…
Steven Sashen:
I love it. Congrats. Yeah.
Kristina Cañizares:
Well, I’m pretty thrilled about it.
Steven Sashen:
We will definitely stay in touch about that process because, I mean, the key, Chris and I have talked about this a lot, which is, I like to say, you can spot a barefoot runner or a minimalist runner or, more accurately, anyone who’s running with proper form from about 50 yards away because they have this weird look on their face called smiling.
Kristina Cañizares:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
It’s like, if it doesn’t feel good, something’s definitely out of whack. It’s the instruction I give if you want to learn barefoot running, but it’s true if you’re in Xero Shoes too. It’s like, find a smooth, hard surface. Take a really short run. If you’re not having fun, do something different till you are.
Kristina Cañizares:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
And that’s it. I’m using fun as a guide. Again, I’m a sprinter, so I had run a mile before but didn’t like one step of it because it’s just not what I do. And my first barefoot run was so fascinating, playing with my gait in different ways and playing with how my feet contacted the ground and just feeling all these different things, that at the end of this run, someone had a GPS watch. I said, “How far was that?” She goes, “It was about 5K.” I was like, “I’m sorry, what?” And I kind of kept going because I was having such a good time. And so, I’m very excited to hear what your path will be in that road.
Kristina Cañizares:
Yeah. I mean, it was great. I had one conversation with Chris and Eric, and Eric was like, “Hey, have you played with cadence yet?” I was like, “I haven’t really played with cadence.” And he talked to me about the 180 bpm and I made myself a little playlist and I went into the gym and immediately doubled the amount of time I could spend running.
Steven Sashen:
Brilliant.
Kristina Cañizares:
And it felt great. The half hour went by like… like nothing, and I felt so good. I was like, “Ah.”
Steven Sashen:
Brilliant. Brilliant. Well, all right, so that’ll be chapter two. In fact, maybe we’ll touch base in a few months and we’ll see where that’s gone for you.
Kristina Cañizares:
Thank you. Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Have a little epilogue. That’ll be a blast. But until then, again, everyone, go to fitandbendy.com. See what Katrina is up to. Kristina, sorry. I have a Katrina… It’s a long story. Anyway, see what Kristina is up to, and see how you can get involved and see how you can discover what it’s like to start, oddly, backwards by building this relationship with your body and then seeing where your body takes you, which would be just dreamy.
And for everyone, thank you all for being here. A reminder, www.jointhemovementmovement.com. Find previous episodes. Find ways to interact with us on social media. Find the place where you can give us a thumbs up or a like, or hit the bell icon on YouTube, et cetera. And if you want to reach out and ask me something or have someone you think should be on the show or tell me that you think I have cranial rectal reorientation syndrome, or whatever it is, I’m open. Drop me an email. You can email me at move, M-O-V-E, @jointhemovementmovement.com. And until then, go out, have fun, and live life feet first.
Kristina Cañizares:
Yay. Thank you so much for having me. This has been a blast.
Steven Sashen:
Pleasure.