The Movement Underground

The Movement Underground Discover whats holding you back…and build a body that wont. BE UNBREAKABLE.

Whether you are an athlete, or active adult tired of nagging pain and injuries, TMU offers the same care pro athletes get - For Every Body. WHAT WE DO

Eliminate Pain, Restore Movement & Optimize Performance
Professional Athletes and Performance Artists have a whole team of Performance, Recovery, and Rehab specialists in their corner to keep them healthy, and functioning at their optimal level… Who do you have in your corner? We have helped thousands of local athletes, fitness enthusiasts, and weekend warriors overcome pain, poor mobility, and get the most out of their body and life…

We can’t wait to stand behind you too.

12/23/2025

Let’s clear this up because it keeps getting butchered online.

Red light DOES NOT increase melatonin production.
That’s influencer bro science… not actual science.
(They do that a lot...)

What red light does, when it’s the right wavelength and not blindingly bright,
is not crash melatonin the way white or blue light does.
And that distinction matters more than people realize.

It does not produce it...it just preserves what you have...

Your circadian rhythm is incredibly sensitive to light exposure at night.
Flip on a bright bathroom light at 2am and you’ve basically told your brain it’s morning...

Melatonin drops.
Sleep pressure + momentum disappears.
Good luck falling back asleep.

Red light helps us avoid that problem.

It gives you just enough vision to navigate…
without slamming the brakes on melatonin release.
That’s why it’s such a smart ambient lighting option.

New parents.
People who get up to p*e at night.
Anyone trying to protect their sleep quality without living in the dark.

Motion-sensored red night lights are one of the simplest, highest ROI sleep upgrades you can make.

Not supplements.
Not gadgets strapped to your face.
Just smarter light exposure.

Sleep isn’t fragile because you’re broken.
It’s fragile because the environment matters more than most people think.

And yes… i brought receipts...

Gooley JJ, Chamberlain K, Smith KA, et al. (2011). Exposure to room light before bedtime suppresses melatonin onset and shortens melatonin duration in humans. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, 96(3), E463–E472.
PMID: 21610228

12/23/2025

Your neck might not be the problem…

One of the most common things I see with “mysterious” neck stiffness is this...
- Pain with rotation to one side
- A feeling of tightness that never really changes
- Endless stretching that gives you nothing back

And yet the neck keeps getting all the blame.

Here’s where I zoom out.

The cervical spine doesn’t live in isolation.
It sits on top of the thoracic spine…
And it’s functionally married to the shoulder blade.

Enter the levator scapula.

A strange little muscle with a foot in both worlds.
Originating off the upper cervical spine
Attaching down to the medial border of the scapula

Creating an "anatomical bridge," so to speak...

So when someone has neck pain with same-side rotation, stiffness that feels deep and familiar, and a shoulder blade that barely moves or upwardly rotates…

I stop asking “what’s wrong with your neck?”
and start asking “How's that scapula moving???”

If the thoracic spine is locked
If the scapula doesn’t upwardly rotate, posteriorly tilt, or slide
The neck is forced to beg, borrow, and steal...

And borrowing turns into overuse
Overuse turns into stiffness
Stiffness turns into pain

That’s the masquerade.

So yes…sometimes treating the neck helps.
But sometimes the real unlock comes from restoring thoracic motion, scapular control, and letting the neck stop doing everyone else’s job.

Assess more.
Assume less.
The body is usually telling the truth…
just not always where you’re looking.

Comment "stiff" and I'll send you my 40+ page e-book that covers the what, why, and how of MUSCLE STIFFNESS, and how to feel free in your body again!

12/22/2025

This is one of those sneaky drills that checks a lot of boxes without wasting time.

Sprinter stance band work is money for runners with foot and ankle issues…
not because it targets the foot directly,
but because it trains a movement pattern that generally is chronically underloaded.

Hip flexion.

Most traditional strength lifts barely touch it.
Squats, deadlifts, hinges… all great movements for runners,
but they drive their primary work through hip extension...

Meanwhile, running is a high velocity, ultra repetitive hip flexion task.
Every stride demands strength, control, and timing through that position.

When I was working at UF with the track program, hip flexion strength and control was a huge piece of the training for the sprinters and distance runners...but often lacking in most "run specific" training programs I see online.

This drill creates a multi win scenario.
You’re loading hip flexion.
You’re challenging single leg balance.
You’re asking the foot and ankle to stabilize while the pelvis and trunk stay organized.

Perfect as a warm up when time is tight to prime powerful hip flexion.
Just as useful inside a rehab plan when running volume is limited but demand still exists.

Simple. Efficient. Specific.
If you're a runner, and not doing these...you're welcome...🫡
Wishing you more miles with smiles!

12/22/2025

Why are clinicians the worst patients?

We know what to do.
We know the research.
We know the drills, the progressions, the red flags.

And yet… we ignore our own stuff longer than anyone else.

It’s not laziness.
It’s not ignorance.
It’s patterning.

We’re wired to take care of other people.
To problem solve outward.
To downplay our own symptoms because “it’s not that bad” compared to what we see all day.

So we normalize discomfort.
We self treat halfway.
We keep moving the goalpost and telling ourselves we’ll deal with it later… after this client, this week, this busy stretch.

There’s also a weird pride layer to it.
If we’re the expert, asking for help can feel like a quiet admission that we should have handled it ourselves.

But here’s the truth most clinicians don’t want to admit.

The skills that make you great at helping others don’t automatically turn inward.
Objectivity disappears when it’s your own body.
Bias creeps in.
Emotion creeps in.
And suddenly you’re just another human trying to push through something that deserves attention.

If this made you nod a little too hard… good.
Awareness is the first step.
You deserve the same care, patience, and precision you give everyone else.

12/21/2025

RNT split squats are one of my favorite ways to blur the line between strength and stability training.

On paper, this is still a sagittal plane lift.
In practice, we’re adding a multiplanar problem the body has to solve in real time.

That’s what Reactive Neuromuscular Training really is.
You bias someone into the “crummy” position on purpose…
then teach them how to control it.

The band isn’t there to clean things up.
It’s there to create a demand to reorganize against.

Life and sport don’t happen in straight lines.

Frontal + Transverse (side and rotation) plane forces exist whether we want them to or not...

So instead of pretending knee valgus or lateral stress never shows up, I’d rather expose it in a controlled setting and build familiarity and resilience there.

For rehab, this is gold.
You get strength, control, and confidence layered together without needing to chase complexity.
Especially in scenarios where perhaps adding more weight isn't yet appropriate or we're building up to it.

And if you’re training, and not rehabbing… it’s an easy way to turn a classic lift into a serious glute and control challenge.
Try them, and feel the deepest glute burn after!

Simple tweak.
Bigger challenge.

Anyone still using RNT stuff or am i the only one? 🙋🏻♂️

12/20/2025

“Find the root cause” sounds great on a website.
Admittedly, I use it for marketing as well...

It makes pain feel clean, linear, solvable.
But the reality is...real humans don’t work that way.

There usually isn’t A root cause.
It's more like a web.

History. Stress. Sleep. Work. Past injuries. Fear. Beliefs. Capacity. Load tolerance. Movement options.

Pull on one strand of the web and ten others move with it.

As a clinician, I can educate people on a lot of those variables.
But I’m also realistic about what I can actually train.

I can’t fix your marriage.
I can’t make you sleep eight hours.
I can’t force you to eat better or manage stress differently.

What I can do is find opportunities.
Places where movement, strength, control, and exposure can change the equation to tilt in your favor.

I can help you exploit those windows… while giving you honest guidance on the other pieces that still matter.

This is why I don’t promise magic bullets.
I promise thoroughness.
I promise problem solving.
I promise I'll go the extra mile, and do the work to help you now, while we prepare future you to live life without compromise.
And I promise to leave no stone unturned within the things we can actually influence together.

Fixing pain isn't always finding a mythical root cause.
It’s stacking small, meaningful wins across the variables you can control…
and letting time and momentum do the rest.

12/20/2025

Regional interdependence is bu****it too now says the contrarians?

Some studies suggest outcomes aren’t significantly different whether you train locally or address other regions of the body.

That summary is largely fair… at the group level.

But here’s the part that gets lost when nuance dies on social media.

When you average large groups, individual wins disappear into the aggregate.
A massive success for one person gets canceled out by a miss for someone else.

That doesn’t prove something “doesn’t work”…
what it proves is that research has limits in complex human systems.

Pain, rehab, and performance live in a swamp of confounding variables.

History, beliefs, fear, sleep, stress, capacity, skill, tissue health, load tolerance.

Research is forced to isolate variables that can’t truly be isolated…
Result? Blurry, Broad brush strokes that favor groups over people.

So how do I approach it clinically?

I don’t pretend I can guarantee outcomes either way.
Local only… or regional.
Both can work. Both can fail.

My job is to increase the area under the curve.
I do it the same way investors survive bad markets…
I hedge.

Regional interdependence isn’t bu****it…
It's systems thinking over parts thinking...
It’s pattern recognition.
It’s seeing opportunities in the folds, the in-betweens, the maybes.

Why wouldn’t I build local tissue capacity and load tolerance…
And while we’re at it, improve strength, control, and options in the surrounding regions with limitations that are non-painful?

The contrarians want to be right. Good for them...
I just want my clients to be better.
And to give them the "no stone left unturned" experience that is by and large unheard of in modern medicine.

And I’ll take this bet every time…
Most of my clients recover more often than not.
They feel seen and heard.
They know we actually give a damn.
Their experience is more complete… and so are their outcomes.

Human beings are complex.
I’m not interested in diluting that complexity just to win an argument online.

So stick to your papers, and argue methods online...
I'll be in the trenches with my athletes doing the work everyone else is looking for evidence to avoid...

12/19/2025

This is why I care so much about movement competencies like hip CARs.
Not that this exact drill/movement shows up in sports…
but more so because of what it does to the nervous system and brain of the athlete.

Schmidt’s Schema Theory gives us a useful lens here.
When the brain learns a movement, it doesn’t store one rigid pattern.

It stores rules… relationships… options.
Force, position, timing, effort, error.

All of that gets "cataloged" so to speak, so the system can solve future movement problems in new environments.

That’s what drills like this are doing.
They’re expanding the library.
Improving the quality of the information going in.
Giving the brain more clean data to pull from later.

When movement competency improves, skill acquisition improves with it.
Therefore the drill doesn't have to look like the sport…
In other words...

The athlete now has more usable options to express force, rotate, decelerate, and adapt under pressure.

This is the carryover aspect lots of trainers miss, when stuck in the "sport specific" marketing hype.

Another way to frame this...

This is not training a movement… It's upgrading the operating system.

And once that system is better, it can apply the pattern in unlimited ways across lifts, sprints, cuts, swings, throws, and everything in between.

Foundational work like this isn’t a detour from performance.
It’s how you build a body that can actually learn new skills faster and express them with less friction.

📚 Schmidt, R. A. (1975). A schema theory of discrete motor skill learning. Psychological Review, 82(4), 225–260.
https://doi.org/10.1037/h0076770

12/19/2025

This stuff still blows my mind 🤯… every single time.

Predictive capacity is one of those concepts that should be emphasized more in school and i think the missing link for so many people stuck in chronic stiffness and pain.

We've been so programmed to find tissue and joint solutions to pain problems, and ignore the fact that without the 🧠...
Your muscles are just f*n hamburger...

Your brain is a prediction machine.
That's its primal function.
Threat detection, resource management, safety & survival.

Your brain will choose safety over performance 100% of the time.
Period.

It’s constantly asking… can I control this? What's next? Do we have the resources for this? All intantaneously.

When the 'answer' is unclear, the system tightens the reins.
Less go...more whoa!
Stiffness shows up. Guarding shows up. Pain shows up.

What’s wild is how often nothing is actually limited mechanically.
The range is there.
The tissue can move.
But the brain doesn’t have enough clean information to feel safe letting it happen.

Everyone agrees graded exposure is a great tool for rehab.
What they fail to appreciate, is that it works because of the predictive coding entwined in our physiology.

This is why stretching alone fails so many people.
Hardware solution to often a software problem...

Once the brain feels confident again, motion opens up almost automatically.

When people finally reconnect to their body in this way,
it feels like a light bulb moment.
Once they get it...they GET IT!

It's always been one of my favorite moments with clients...
and more fun when you realize it's there all along...
it just needs a nudge sometimes to break through.

Cool read if interested in the science of predictive capacity...👇

📚 Clark, A. (2013). Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(3), 181–204.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X12000477

12/18/2025

Former athletes don’t get hurt because they’re weak.
They get hurt because their identity is stuck in a body they don't have anymore.

You still remember what it felt like to train hard.
You still know how to push.
Remember what it feels like to perform...effortlessly.

What we don’t always respect is what the years of mileage, stress, work, sleep debt, and life have quietly left us with...

We remember the Glory Days, so the instinct is to do what you did then...
So you train like the old version of you…
With the capacity of the current version of you.
And the gap between those two, unfortunately, is where injuries live.

Most former athletes don’t need motivation.
They need re-calibration.

They need to rebuild tissue tolerance, joint options, and work capacity that eroded when sport stopped being the priority and life took over.

This is why “just stay active” fails so many people, and imho, bad advice for many.
Intensity without preparation doesn’t keep you fit…
it exposes the weak links you never rebuilt after you hung up the cleats.

Staying fit as a former athlete means respecting the rebuild phase.
Re-earning positions.
Re-loading tissues progressively.
And letting go of the ego that says you should still be able to train like you’re 22.

Train the body you have… not the one you remember.
That’s how you stay fit in the game of life!

12/18/2025

End range isometrics get a lot of hate right now.
In 2025, the contrarians are always looking for their next technique or approach to bash...
I already can see the comment section...

“Just train full range.”
“GPP is all you need because research says...”
“Specific mobility is a waste of time.”

That advice sounds nice...and trust me, I wish solving complex problems was that simple...but it ain't.

To them I ask...

What happens when your sport demands a position you don’t currently have access to?

What happens in rehab when loading a joint dynamically is painful or flat out not appropriate yet?

Do we just wait around until range magically returns?

That kind of thinking is exactly how rehab became lazy and cookie cutter.

If general training solved every problem, people wouldn’t keep failing.
But they do… mainly due to a lack specificity to the problem,
or it's so conservative they never create a meaningful adaptation.

Now, I don't think everyone needs hyper specific programming.
Sometimes simple is better, especially working with a novice mover, or someone shaking the rust off after a long time of being sedentary.
For them, GPP is great.

But for athletes? Active adults who train and move regularly but are still struggling with pain, injury or limited performance...

End range isometrics help create a window.
A way to load tissue in what otherwise may be a vulnerable position.
You know, the positions athletes usually get hurt in...the ones they aren't prepared for...

They also represent a way to build strength and control at the edges of motion when movement itself isn’t an option yet.

TLDR: Mobility work matters when it matters...

The usual rebuttal is “you’ll never need that much range” or “it’s normal not to have active control there.”

Sure and … it’s normal for people to live paycheck to paycheck
Would you recommend that even though its "normal?"
Normal doesn’t equal optimal.
And I’m not interested in chasing normal for myself or my athletes.

Research should inform thinking… not replace it.
Problem solving still matters.
Context still matters.
The real question is simple… is the adaptation worth it for you?

The answer?....
it depends.

12/18/2025

Every profession has its stereotypes… PT, AT, LMT, Chiro...
and in sports medicine, the khakis and polos joke has been around longer than most of us have been alive.

When I was in college, our clinical hours didn't count if we weren't wearing f Khakis, a polo, and a nametag. It was absurd... as if that in any way affected my ability to learn...

It was considered "professional"

Ironic, because I haven't donned the stiff, uncomfortable, non functional camel tan pants ever since, and I think i'm quite professional? LMAO

So when we catch ourselves accidentally leaning right into the cliché,
just roll with it.
Laugh a little.
Make fun of ourselves.
Keep it light.

Because honestly, this job is too rewarding and too intense at times to walk around pretending to be stone serious every second of the day.

The people we work with deserve expertise, yeah…
but they also deserve some freakin' humanity.
A sense of humor.
A reminder that we’re all just trying to make it through life in one piece.

Stereotypes are funny because there’s usually a sliver of truth in them.
No need to run from it.

Embrace it… have fun with it… and stop taking yourself so seriously.

None of us get out of this alive, so you might as well laugh a little while you’re here.

Address

3553B Merrick Road
Seaford, NY
11783

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 5pm
Tuesday 9am - 8pm
Wednesday 9am - 5pm
Thursday 9am - 8pm
Friday 9am - 5pm
Saturday 8am - 12pm

Telephone

+16315267692

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when The Movement Underground posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Practice

Send a message to The Movement Underground:

Shortcuts

Share

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on LinkedIn
Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share via Email
Share on WhatsApp Share on Instagram Share on Telegram

Category

Our Story

The Movement Underground is a concierge performance therapy service designed to identify and eliminate the underlying causes of injury through the systematic evaluation of posture, movement, and stress. Personalized care, private sessions, and attention to detail allow for unparalleled results in minimal downtime. This is Recovery Lab.