Functional Movement & Joint Mobility with Athlete
Ellice De Giovanni

Felicity Cohen: Hello, I’m Felicity Cohen. I’m so excited to introduce you to my Wellness Warriors podcast. For over 20 years, I’ve been a passionate advocate for helping thousands of Australians find solutions to treating obesity and health-related complications. Through surgical intervention and holistic managed care.

My podcast is dedicated to all the people past, present, and future who have helped shape my journey and continue to inspire me to work consistently to achieve a healthier Australia in both adults and future generations. I hope you enjoy it. My next Wellness Warriors guest is beautiful, Ellice De Giovanni.

Welcome. Thank you so much for coming on board and joining me here. Oh good. So Ellice and I actually met, by chance at a health retreat where she was teaching people all about joint mobility and it’s something that I’ve actually, I’d never seen anywhere else. I’d never seen this taught as a, as a solution for functional fitness, for injury prevention for body and health maintenance from so many different aspects.

I found it absolutely fascinating. And so today is my opportunity to learn all about you and to share a little bit more about what does that space look like and why is it important for us to exercise our joints? And what does joint mobility all about? But before I dive into all of that, let’s learn a little bit about you and your background.

And I think you started first of all in the world of professional sport and you’re you were a hurdler.

Ellice De Giovanni: Yeah, so I, I mean, I think it was grade eight. They pulled out the hurdles at school and they said, well, we’re doing hurdles today. And I was like, Oh, okay. And. I just was a natural and went over them super easy in the sports teacher said, have you ever done that before?

And I was like, no, and she’s like, you need to get a coach and you need to do that sport. So I found a coach and then the next year I made it to nationals. So it was just a very easy sport for me. And then from, I did it through all through school and then all the way out of school for another 12 years.

So, yeah.

Felicity Cohen: Where did your career take you with hurdling?

Ellice De Giovanni: I went to a world juniors. And then I kind of came to that cross paths. So with athletics, there’s not a lot of money in that sport, especially back, you know, when I did it. So I came to that crossroads of do I keep kind of dragging my tail along the ground through, you know, career wise that, and just have the passion for the sport or do I go down another road and teach lots of people about why I like to do the sport.

So I kind of steered courses and went that way.

Felicity Cohen: What are some of the key learnings that you took away from, from hurdles? What was it that you learned the most?

Ellice De Giovanni: It definitely gives you a different perspective and mindset. When you do incorporate sport from an early age, it teaches the brain a lot of discipline, I think.

And I was never one to sort of go to the parties or, you know, the, you know, all the things that young kids did because I was so disciplined and I had so much passion for what I wanted to achieve. So from an early age, it made me realize that my goals are more important than anything else. So that’s what I loved about it.

And it really did give you that discipline for life and life skills.

Felicity Cohen: Amazing. And I think that is something that most athletes learn in high-level sport is you’ve got to be so committed. You’ve got to be goal orientated and transferring that across to other aspects of life.

Ellice De Giovanni: Yeah. And it can be, it can go to any aspect of your life.

And that’s what I think one of the biggest reasons I did learn from sport.

Felicity Cohen: Amazing. And from there you then went on to decide that you wanted to become a paramedic?

Ellice De Giovanni: I did. I, well, I didn’t really know, it was kind of fate that kind of put me in that as well. It’s always just, you know, something led me to somewhere else.

So, I was like, what do I want to do? Do I want to be a physio? Do I want to do osteopath? And then I remember, signing up on my cuetec form at, for university and I, I was about to press physio first and I accidentally pressed paramedics and I was like, Oh, Oh, actually, I think I’d really like to do that and I kept it there and just like, we’ll see what happens.

And then I put physio second, and then I put osteopaths third and I got straight into the first round of paramedics in Brisbane. Yeah, offered. So we were the first group that ever went through and I’ll start.

Felicity Cohen: That’s amazing, what year was that?

Ellice De Giovanni: 2007, yeah, we started. And we were lucky because it was the first group of paramedics that ever went through.

We had amazing people on board, like Steven Rashford, who is the best trauma, physician and doctor, you know, in the world almost. So we had these kinds of people teach us. So that, because we were the first round and we were very lucky to do that.

Felicity Cohen: So you had incredible mentors and that led you into a career becoming a paramedic.

How many years did you spend as a paramedic?

Ellice De Giovanni: I was a paramedic for just under 10 years. Yeah. And most of those were on the Gold Coast. Yeah. Loved it.

Felicity Cohen: What were some of the things that you use to manage life? You know, work-life balance as a paramedic, I think is incredibly challenging. You see some horrendous things and there’s a lot of mental health issues that we know.

Paramedics, unfortunately, just absorb and don’t treat themselves and their own self care can often sometimes be compromised just because of the intensity of them work life. How did you manage that?

Ellice De Giovanni: I mean, I am a type of personality that can separate things. So I know it sounds a bit morbid, but I could definitely separate the anatomy from the emotion.

So when I saw a trauma or something like that, to me, it was how look at the anatomy here. Look, what’s going on in the body. Look what’s going on in the brain. And I, I think that’s definitely needed in that job to separate that it’s a person with a family and blah, blah, blah, blah. So that helped me definitely..

I think the hardest thing for me was the health aspect of that job because of the shift work. It was, 12 hour days, five days a week. So I had to pull back on my training, which was hard for me. I had to kind of, I was still an athlete when I first started paramedics, but I have to kind of really stop that and go, now I’ve just got to do this career because it’s so many hours a day.

And the night, the shift work. Not great for me. I love my sleep and I love my that’s where I recover. So I found shift work incredibly hard from day one. I don’t know how I managed 10 years of it. I did, it eventually got me in the end though. And, after that 10 years, when I decided I had my son, I had a little boy and I just thought I’ve got to pull back on this job.

So I went back part-time and then eventually, yeah, stopped. Stop doing it. And that was probably my main reason was the shift work and the health aspect.

Felicity Cohen: I think that’s something that we see in our patient population every day, that shift workers are some of the most challenged in our population in terms of.

Self managing their health and why we often are looking after people at that point in time where they wake up one day and all of a sudden their health has been compromised, that yes, their sleep’s been compromised and they might have sleep apnea. All of a sudden they’ve got weight-related medical comorbidities and the work-life balance is totally out of whack and it is very hard and it’s not just for paramedics.

We see nurses, nurses for one of the most significant patient cohorts in our population. That might be a surprise to some people.

Ellice De Giovanni: Yeah. And there was just, no, what I’ve found coming from a health background, I’ve always been in that health background. There’s no education behind shift work. Even when I first started as a paramedic, when I was sort of 23, when we went through uni, there was actually no education behind the health aspects of how to deal with shift work, what you eat during a night when you’re awake, when you’re meant to be asleep, like those sorts of things.

I found incredibly important for myself, but, no education at all around it. So I, I, when I was a paramedic, I tried to bring in education, you know, with food and exercise and how to do it through shift work. But it was kind of hitting your head on a brick wall through that field.

Felicity Cohen: I feel like that is still so needed that there needs to be an education program around not just the paramedics, but anyone who’s coping with those shift working environments.

That there are ways to better manage so that you’re not reaching for high energy dense foods to cope better.

Ellice De Giovanni: Many a times in the hospitals you’d see bowls of lollies in the nurses stations. And I was like, wow, three in the morning. That’s what, they’re eating. I’m like, this is crazy.

Felicity Cohen: It is crazy.

Yeah, I totally agree. Well, something to think about and maybe, I still believe that that’s a future need that needs to be addressed.

Ellice De Giovanni: Yes, definitely.

Felicity Cohen: Interesting topic to raise. So from paramedics, you pull back to part-time paramedic. You had a son.

Ellice De Giovanni: I did.

Felicity Cohen: How old is he now?

Ellice De Giovanni: He’s eight now. Yeah, so he, I kind of, I put a lot of, I thank into him because he had eczema severely when he was a baby. So from six months old to about three years, he was head to toe in eczema. So I really, I thought I was healthy, but I really changed my views on medicine and on health and on alternative medicine due to his ailments.

So to try and, you know, cure him, I guess from his eczema, took me down a really different path of health and wellness. And I thank him for that because it led me to where I am today.

Felicity Cohen: So you had to look at diet and readdress, everything that you,

Ellice De Giovanni: Yeah, what I was getting in the main medical field or the mainstream just was not helping.

It was a lot of focus on the external, like putting creams on and steroids on and whatnot, but I realized that it’s all internal, everything comes from that diet and that, you know what they’re consuming and he was allergic to eggs, dairy, nuts, red meat. So I had to completely change how I ate and how I cooked.

And it was just a blessing in disguise, because as I said, it’s just made me so much more healthier now from learning through ailments like that.

Felicity Cohen: So do you think that there were food intolerances that you might’ve had that you weren’t also aware of?

Ellice De Giovanni: Yeah, definitely. Cause I had asthma when I was a kid and asthma is an allergy that not many people realize. So I’m not sure. I probably thought maybe it was dairy when I was young. Cause I used to guzzle lots of dairy, but yeah, I’m not sure what it was when I was a kid, but it was always just, you know, you’ll be right. Just, you know, it’s fine. And they never went through that diet aspect.

Yeah.

Felicity Cohen: So interesting. And you know, dietetics nutrition and how far it’s come now is phenomenal. I’m very lucky here in our environment that we’ve got a group of brilliant dietitians who are here to educate and teach patients every single day, you know, how to, how to focus on nutrition in a totally different way.

And I think, you know, we’re so lucky to have integrative health practitioners out there as well. Who do look at that whole big East meets West kind of approach. It’s so valuable.

Ellice De Giovanni: Yeah, definitely.

Felicity Cohen: Interesting. You’ve also written a book. Tell me a little bit about it that you’ve written.

Ellice De Giovanni: I’ve got a couple.

Felicity Cohen: Fabulous. Wow tell us about those.

Ellice De Giovanni: The first book I wrote it was for, young adults. It was, it’s almost like a bit of an emotional manual and when they start feeling, you know, sad depressed, lost. It’s kind of a checklist of what they can do naturally to help themselves feel better through their mental state and their emotional state and their physical state.

So, yeah, that was the first book I wrote. Then that sort of, I had such an overwhelming response from that from the parents that they were like, can you kind of put, cause that was very written in a young, you know, word, young language. So, they said. You know, what’s how does this translate to adults?

So then I wrote a second book, which was under construction, the body rebuild, and it’s my top 10 tools to really switch on your central nervous system and to really help the body heal and help it get to the next step of wellness.

Felicity Cohen: So, what was the trigger for the first book? How did you get started with that?

Ellice De Giovanni: So, that first book came from being a paramedic and seeing many, many young kids struggle with mental health and emotional distress and not having enough time in the back of the car with them. I thought, how can I help as much as I can? So I thought I’ll write a book, but very much in their tongue and their language.

So it’s called “WTF: I can’t even deal.”

Felicity Cohen: I love that!

Ellice De Giovanni: All about young adults.

Felicity Cohen: Beautiful. And then the second book is targeted towards what kind of demographic?

Ellice De Giovanni: Yeah, so I mean anyone but more adults and how really these tools can help you just ignite your health and wellness

Felicity Cohen: Can you give me more insight into that? What does that look like?

Ellice De Giovanni: Yeah. So some of the tools are, mobility, joint mobility. I’ve got vibration training in there. So standing on vibration plates and I really go into explaining how these things can switch on your central nervous system, because this day and age, our central nervous systems, it’s not being tantalized as I call it enough, meaning it usually has a job to do.

And because we sit in such a comfortable state of being, it’s not really being tantalized and switched on enough. So we’re almost turning down the dial of our central nervous system and these tools bring it straight back up into having a job to do.

Felicity Cohen: Let’s talk about that a little bit more. What is dialing down that system to start with?

Where does that come from?

Ellice De Giovanni: It can come from a variety of things, being stagnant and not moving. Our temperature variations. I mean, one example is we kind of sit at 37 degrees and fester at 37 degrees. Like when it’s hot outside, we turn the air conditioner on when it’s cold, we put a jumper on and that 37 degrees temperature is.

Our body knows that it can fester disease in that temperature and it’s the perfect state to fester. So when we sit, when we change our variation from extreme temperatures, so extreme heat or extreme cold pathogens can’t survive. So that’s what the central nervous system does back in the hunter gatherer days,

we didn’t have a jumper to put on. So we went outside and our central nervous system had to do its job. We started shivering. Those kinds of things made our internal structure a lot more well than it does this day and age, where we’re just comfortable in how we live too comfortable.

Felicity Cohen: So that comfort zone is actually, manifesting disease?

Ellice De Giovanni: Can be damaging.

Yeah. Too much comfort zone can, because if you have a look, we’ve got, TV’s we sit down at all day and we watch the TV, or, you know, yeah. We’ve got our air con, we’ve got our heater, we’ve got our bed and even a bed we’d never used to have a bed back in those hunter gatherer days where you lay on a hard surface, which actually reset all of your joints and muscles and ligaments and tendons.

Now laying in a soft bed changes your body, not in a great way, but I mean, I’m never going to give up my bed.

yeah, we are getting more, more and more and more comfortable. And you’ll notice that that’s just increasing day by day. You know, you can get an app and food comes to your door. Like it’s just getting easier and easier.

Felicity Cohen: Absolutely. And just on that in terms of being in that comfort zone and I’m part of the.

You know, the whole evolution of where we’re at today, things that have led towards our ever increasing obesity rate, that you, you don’t have to move to do anything. You can order anything online. You can drive through anything you want, whether it’s to the, you know, your groceries or coffee or dry cleaning or whatever it looks like we’re not encouraged to move, we’re going to move less and less.

So on the, on the flip side, you teaching about how to trigger the suite to change that whole pathway. How do you do that? And what does that look like?

Ellice De Giovanni: So, I mean, it all comes from here. It all comes from our brains. So everything that we want to do is sitting up there somewhere. Every answer that we need is sitting up there somewhere.

So I’m very big on urology as well and changing or mapping our brain and figuring out that a little bit differently. So yeah, definitely one of the, I guess the key things I, or one of my key tools is mobility because it’s teaching people that they can move their joint structures in full range of motion to get the best out of their brain mapping wise and input wise.

An example of that is your cerebellum in the back. That’s where your pain response comes from. That’s where your threat response can come from. So if we’re not moving a lot, our threat response can increase daily, meaning that we can start getting more pain in our body. We can start getting more headaches.

Our brain might give out, give out a threat response of nausea or dizziness. So we want to start moving a little bit more because it actually trumps the pain input into the brain and the pain receptor. Yeah. It’s fascinating the brain.

It is so fascinating.

Felicity Cohen: Wow. Yeah, very cool. Some of the other tools in that book can.

Give us a couple more.

Ellice De Giovanni: Yeah. So I’ve definitely got, food in there. Just, my sort of take on food. I’ve got my take on exercise. My take on, as I said, hot cold therapy. There is, vibration training. There’s just almost my top 10 tools that I’ve personally gone and done and done the work with that have helped me through wellness and fitness and exercise and mindset and movement.

Felicity Cohen: The hot cold therapy. That’s kind of fascinating too. I recently had the chance to learn, Wim Hof breathing technique followed by the ice bath. I found that fascinating. And hopefully that’s going to be the subject for another podcast, so interesting to see how that’s used for trauma. Why hot, cold, What are you getting out of that?

Ellice De Giovanni: So that’s what I was saying before that it helps your central nervous system switch on. Yeah. It helps your central nervous system do a job. It helps it switch on a lot faster. And in that hot cold, it kills those pathogens because we don’t, we live in such a, you know, stagnant temperature. So that’s why the hot cold is great.

Yeah, the it’s hard to jump into cold water, really cold. So for here, it’s, building resilience, but the main thing, and that’s why I do it. It’s because it is hard to jump into cold water. Your brain has to really switch on and it switches on in survival mode because jumping into cold water, initially, what happens is your cortisol levels drive up, your adrenaline drives up

So that stress response drives up when you jump into cold water, but then when you can learn to breathe and become, in a state of stress that can jump on over to many other areas in your life.

Felicity Cohen: So interesting. I know that there’s so many benefits from, you know, using the cold pools or ice bath for athletes, you know, for muscle recovery.

Did you use, were you exposed to that when you were younger?

Ellice De Giovanni: Yeah, hated it back then. Cause I didn’t didn’t know how good it was for my body, but, now that I really understand the benefits of it, I try and push myself through it a little bit more just because I know it’s doing amazing things for not only my body, but my mind.

Felicity Cohen: Amazing.

So I’d love to talk in detail about your joint mobility techniques and why it’s so important to learn this. And, and for me, one of the things that I talk to patients about is functional fitness. And the reason I do that is that if you’re going to be functionally well, you need to be functionally fit to live in your own home until you’re 95, basically.

What I would tell people is, you know, if you can’t, you know, bend down and pick something up off the kitchen floor and in very crude terms, if you can’t, you know, feed yourself and do all those essential activities in life so that you can live at home, you know, your pathway might eventually be nursing home.

And for me, that’s the last thing that I want to see any patient end up is in a nursing home. So managing their functional fitness first is really important. And I think that’s a strong message that comes through for you when you’re teaching joint mobility, but it’s a technique I’ve never seen anywhere else.

I think it’s pretty unique to you. Is this your unique design?

Ellice De Giovanni: This is my design. Yep.

Felicity Cohen: It is phenomenal. Can you please talk us through first of all, how did you get there and what’s it all about.

Ellice De Giovanni: Yeah. So I was lucky enough to be introduced in to the joint mobility as an athlete. So my coach would sort of give us a little bit of input into joint structures and not only about joint structures, but how much input they bring into your brain and switch on your left and right brain hemisphere. So it’s better for performance and speed and agility and movement. So I taught, we were taught a little bit about it back then. I guess coming into and seeing a lot of patients, through the fitness world, I always was interested in ailments and diseases and injuries because of being a paramedic.

So I geared towards, not able bodies and that was great because it made me, design this mobility program so that every human body can do it, whether they are six or ninety six and the concept behind it is that so our joint structures have what’s called synovial fluid that sits in between two bones that come together.

And as we age, especially after puberty, that starts to decrease. So that synovial fluid carries nutrients, that repairs, cartilage, ligament, and bone. And I always say, it’s almost like if you’ve got two blown up balloons and you put the two, two balloons together and you do that, they’re going to make that horrible screeching sound.

But if you put a bit of Vaseline in between the two balloons and you do that, it’s going to smooth and move a lot better without that screeching sound. So that’s exactly what, different movement does to your joint structures. And as human beings, we work very single plane motion. We sit, we stand, we walk, we sit, we stand, we walk, you know, we run, we, you know, bicycle, it’s all very up and down kind of movements through the joint structures.

We don’t get a lot of varied movement anymore. And we certainly don’t put our joint structures through their full range of motion all of the time. So I designed my program to really get into every single joint structure, move them in their full capacity, their full range of motion under any load intention.

So that the brain doesn’t, I guess say that there’s a response, say that there’s a threat in those areas and then we can move better for longer. Yeah. And yeah, that’s how I designed it. And then looking at obviously older bodies and going, how can I do it for you? And then how can I do it for you?

And how can I do it for you if you’re in a wheelchair? And yeah.

Felicity Cohen: That’s actually phenomenal, really amazing. And I’m surprised that it’s not something that’s been more broadly and widely taken up because I just see the value in it as being exceptional. When I first did one of your classes, you talked about, you know, how you start with the feet.

And that people don’t stretch their feet. So why is that so important and why don’t we know how?

Ellice De Giovanni: I’m massive on feet. I am such an advocate for your feet because they are the star of your body. They are the foundation of your body. They also, the first thing that touches the ground. So therefore the first thing that talks to your brain and what do we do with our feet all day long, we put shoes on them.

So we’re cutting off our communication directly to our brain. And it’s proven that by wearing shoes on your feet actually stops the integration between your left and right brain hemisphere. So just by taking your shoes off and whether it’s just walking around the office or going outside and placing them on the ground.

Switches that back on your left or right brain hemisphere. And if your left and right brain hemisphere is not functioning or integrating coherently together, we can be more fatigued. We can reach for the coffee. We can feel foggy in our brain. We can feel tired and irritable yet. As soon as you actually bring some attention and movement into your feet, that all switches off and increases your energy straight away.

So, yeah, definitely big on the feet. And it just makes sense because if you, the way you’re toes move, I’m going to bring my foot up, so your toes are constantly moving up and down. If you’re doing 10,000 of those every day, the opposite to that is stretching them out. It’s almost like doing 10,000 squats every day, but never stretching out after you did 10,000 squats, so it’s just

phenomenal not to stretch your toes out or not to mobilize every little bit in your foot. You can, because you’ve got more bones and more muscles in your feet than anywhere else in the body. So attention and focus has to come from there first in order for your building to start aligning better.

Felicity Cohen: So alignment is so important as, as well as we age.

What about for people who suffer from inflammatory type diseases like arthritis and all the variants of arthritis. Can this kind of, activity or teaching people how to kind of stretch their joints? Can that help them with their things like arthritis?

Ellice De Giovanni: Yeah, I can’t sort of always say I can’t reverse what you’ve done, but we can stop further deterioration.

So, with the joint structure and that synovial fluid, the body’s so smart in the fact that it can work out what you need and what you don’t need. And I say a lot of the time, if you’ve got swelling in your knee due to arthritis or due to inflammation and you start moving it. There are such things in the body called nora receptors, which are pain receptors, which are kind of little spindly things.

So you’ve got, nora receptors, which your pain receptors, that kind of spindly things that looked like this kind of really thin and spindly. And you’ve got mechano receptors, which are big, strong, heavy movement receptors. And your movement receptors, trump your pain receptors. So if we move a joint, what can happen is if you’ve got swelling in there that is excess synovial fluid, trying to do its job to help you.

But if we move the joint structure, it can pull out that excess synovial fluid to the degree that you need it. So movement is so important because the, it, it takes over the pain or the inflammation receptors that head back up to your brain. So it almost stops that information and a great way to explain it is if I accidentally hit my thumb with a hammer, what’s usually the first thing we do other than scream the first thing?

Felicity Cohen: Other than the scream?

Well, I, all I’m thinking about is just how much that’s going to hurt. I would be screaming for sure.

Ellice De Giovanni: Grab it and you’ll squeeze it and you’ll add movement through pressure. Okay. Or you’ll go like this. Ah, and you’ll start moving your thumb through movement. So the movement pattern overtakes the pain receptors.

So the pain doesn’t get back up into your brain. So that’s exactly why we want to move all those joint structures to suppress pain inflammation responses, to getting into the brain.

Felicity Cohen: Amazing. Tell me about some of the, the stories of clients who you’ve worked with and what changes physical changes.

First of all, that you’ve seen them achieve through regular practice of joint mobility?

Ellice De Giovanni: Yeah. And that’s probably one of my favorite things is because with really working through your joint structures, because that’s where it all starts. So a lot of the time people focus on the external. So the fitness, the running, the bike riding to getting fit on the outside.

But what runs the outside is our inside and it’s our joint structures. It’s our mechanical movement patterns. So when we can get back into those mechanical movement patterns, you actually get such a faster response on that outside. And I’ve seen people, you know, getting, not being able to get down and up off the floor to just giving them some little movement patterns, through

their joint structures every single day, and then them sitting cross legged on the floor, quite happily getting up, getting down, getting up, getting down. So it’s just, it makes a massive difference when you can work through your joint structures first, before concentrating on the physical aspect.

Felicity Cohen: That’s an incredible kind of rehab story, really, you know, to see someone who’s gone from not being capable or able to all of a sudden being able to change that pattern of behavior.

It’s actually life-changing.

Ellice De Giovanni: Yeah. And I think the other thing that I, I see with my clients is a confidence that comes with it. Because if you can’t move your joint structures, you’re not going to be confident in moving at all. And then that confidence brings, you know, almost depression, because if we can’t move our body, then things can’t move internally.

So, once I start giving people movement through that joint structures, they get confident. They’re like, I can do this. I can actually move quite well. And then they’re more confident to add on a little bit of resistance or weight training or add on a bit of this or a bit of that. So I love seeing that progress.

Felicity Cohen: And is that where you would start with someone you’d start with the joint mobility and then see take them through that whole progressive journey.

Ellice De Giovanni: Yeah, definitely. I start with the joint structures for sure. Yeah.

Felicity Cohen: That, that’s just incredible. I think it’s life-changing and I really believe that for so many of our patient population, this is invaluable information.

Because I think we are personally talked to many of the patients who, and I’ve spoken to thousands of them over the years who have arthritis, Plantar Fasciitis. You know, I see so much of that and the debilitating side effects that go with it, because if you wake up in the morning and you do have Plantar Fasciitis, getting out of bed is hard.

Life’s hard. And that pain that they’re dealing with is debilitating to the point where life is not great. So then I think you’re absolutely a hundred percent right. That the depression and all the other things that go hand in hand with that it’s, they work together. So if we can fix the physical and work on that, then you know, the mental health, outcome is, is also going to be so positive and progression through a much healthier body.

Ellice De Giovanni: Definitely. We’ve got to start teaching people that this is their real estate. This is their home. And to have a bit of an ownership over this, to understand their plumbing, to understand their electrical, to understand their structure and their foundation, and not have to always reach out for help, but to really gain tools so that they can be confident in fixing little pieces in their own house.

Felicity Cohen: That is the most beautiful analogy I’ve heard. I absolutely love that. That your body is your real estate. That’s just gold. I love that expression. How do we get more people to learn about the value of joint mobility? How do people connect and learn? Well, obviously this is something that’s unique to you.

How do people learn this? What do they do?

Ellice De Giovanni: So they can either connect with me. My program is very different to what’s out there through joint mobility. Unfortunately, if you do Google joint mobility, you’re going to get, movement for the very abled strong body. So it is geared towards athletes, Muay Thai fighters.

CrossFitters who already have that foundation of movement. So, I’ve really pulled it back so that every human body can do it. But just understanding that how a joint works and just to start moving it, like it doesn’t have to be a hard thing. You can just rotate all of your joints and start. You know, circling your joints and circling your knees and circling your hips and just getting that movement is more important than being stagnant.

Because as I said, that movement trumps receptors that bring pain and threat into the brain. Yeah.

Felicity Cohen: I actually love it. And I really would love to see this as a, as an option that we can teach our patient population. So I’m hoping one day we can get you in to teach a group of patients. There’s nothing like seeing it and experiencing it.

I know that people can also learn from you online, which is amazing. So I would love to be able to share that with anyone who’s listening to the Wellness Warriors podcast, because I, hundred percent see the value in this for everybody, it’s just phenomenal. So congratulations on the design of this incredible teaching method.

It’s just phenomenal. It’s hard to actually express, I think in words, and to get that message across, you’ve done a great job of trying to, of explaining it today. So I’m grateful for that. It’s just phenomenal. I like to end my, Wellness Warriors podcast with just learning from you. You know, what is your, what does wellness mean to you?

Ellice De Giovanni: It’s just an appreciation of this. Like, this is such a gift. What we, you know, what we live in every day. As I said, it is our real estate we, and the way I teach people is if we, our brains and our thought processes, where the employee of this, the employee, how well would you treat it? So if you were the boss of this, would you talk to it badly?

Would you work it 24/7, 365 days a year without giving your employee a break? You know, how, what type of boss do you want to be to help with this out? And then I always say to people, if this was someone you loved and it should be because you live with this 24/7. So if this was someone you really cared about and really loved whether it’s your child, whether it’s your father, brother, mother, someone you really cared about and loved, would you treat it differently?

Okay. If this was your child, would you speak to it the way you do, if this was your child, would you feed it the way you do? If this was your child, would you move it more or less? Would you give it more sleep or not? So it really gives a different perspective on health. We’ve got to start understanding that this is the only thing that’s going to keep it, keep us alive because it’s the only thing that is going to keep us alive is our body.

So that’s where wellness for me comes from a true appreciation of the makeup that this is.

Felicity Cohen: Oh, I absolutely loved that. You know, definitely respecting your body, treating it well, your own self-talk, you know, that self dialogue and how you’re actually, interacting with yourself, your body. I love that analogy.

It’s absolutely beautiful. Thank you so much for joining me on the Wellness Warriors podcast. Please thank Ellice De Giovanni. Thank you.

Ellice De Giovanni: Thank you so much.

Felicity Cohen: for joining the wellness warriors podcast. It’s been a pleasure to have you online with us. If you enjoy the series, please leave your review, subscribe and follow it.

And we look forward to sharing many more stories with you in the future.