About Us
The Wellness Within Coaching Story
Enqing found his passion for helping people to achieve their best health when he joined the Navy in 2011. 7 years spent in the navy as a command fitness leader enabled him to help and guide sailors to get healthier and stronger.
After exiting the navy, he decided to fully pursue a career in health and wellness. He completed his bachelors in exercise science, became certified as both a personal trainer through the American Council on Exercise (ACE) and as a holistic lifestyle coach and integrative movement coach at the Chek Institute.
His dream is to help people to start living life with more energy and connection to their body and mind by finding the root cause of what is holding them back without relying on crash diets or medications.
Our Mission
At Wellness Within Studio, we believe everyone already has the wisdom of wellness within them and we are here to help you discover it. We understand the frustration and confusion when it comes to trying to lose weight, getting out of chronic pain or getting your energy back because of so much conflicting information out there. We work with you to find the root cause of what is holding you back and build a plan that will work for your individual needs. Our goal is to provide you with the tools and skills you need to sustain a healthy lifestyle forever so you can do more of what you love.
Our Coaching Principles
- Our purpose as a coach is to help you find the answer that is already within you.
- We are here to witness and acknowledge your effort and your courage
- We are here to give you the space to explore who you are and who you are becoming
- We are here to truly listen to you, where you will feel heard, acknowledged and supported
- We are here to help you notice the unconscious part of you that has not been explored, nurtured, and heard
- We are here to guide you toward understanding the wisdom of your body, mind, and heart
- We are constantly exploring the most effective ways to help you reach your full potential
- We are on the same journey of discovery, healing and exploring life with you. We’ve learned many lessons through our own trials and errors and hopefully, this will allow you to make less and be more of who you are
Our Training Principles
- We teach our clients to start with a strong solid foundation of proper breathing, core activation, and alignment. The stronger the foundation, the more you will be able to grow in your body, mind and spirit.
- Your body is unique, we do not fit you into a box or a system of ours. Instead, we see the uniqueness you possess and find a holistic solution that creates harmony within your body.
- Movement, Nutrition, hydration, sleep, and mindfulness are an essential part of wholistic healing and living. We practice to embody these practices as we share these principles with you to reach your health and wellness goals.
- Movement is a way to explore our body and mind. Our mind and body are one. When we move well it will help foster a more centered mind that allows us to think, process and focus on creating the life we desire to live.
- Our body is interconnected, we start with working with different part of the body with the intention of integrating the body as whole to help you feel strong and confident in your body’s ability to perform at it’s best.
To your health,
Enqing Li
Owner and Founder
6 Foundation Principles
The 6 foundation principles are the keys to living a happy, healthy, and vibrant life. They are thinking (mental well-being), breathing, hydration, nutrition, sleep and movement.
For Mental Well-being
- Our thoughts are very powerful in conditioning our mind, which directly affects our body. Our thoughts are like the governor of our bodies. For example, if you relax and think of what makes you happy, you will feel that happiness and joy. On the other hand, when you think of a time you were stressed out, your body will produce stress chemicals as though you were back in that situation. What you’re thinking affects your reality the most.
- Our attachment to our thoughts can make or break us. Most anxiety and depression stems from our attachments to our thoughts. Much of the stress we feel is because we think the future is going to be worse than the present. It is human nature to imagine the worst possible outcome. This tendency helped us survive thousands of years ago. But nowadays, this pattern of chronic stressful thinking can break us. Research shows that stress is the leading cause of cancer and disease. Our unresolved emotions can also show up as pain in different areas of our body.
- The best tool to use to become more aware of our thoughts is meditation. There are many methods out there for meditation, but the simplest one I have come across is to simply sit or lay down and start becoming aware of your breathing. We can also use movement, taichi, art, or sound as a way to meditate. Many people think meditation is difficult because you have to “stop” your thinking. Our brain is designed to think. Instead of stopping our thoughts. We focus on understanding the nature of our mind and use our mind’s power to cultivate what we want to experience. There are many apps out there that are great, such as Calm, Insight Timer, Oak Mediation, Brain.fm, and more!
Breathing
- Breathing is by far the most important function of the body when it comes to keeping us alive. Breathing also plays a big role in governing what state we are in. There is only 2 states within our nervous system. One is the flight and flight survival state, the other is the rest and digest relaxed/calm/peaceful/thriving state.
- When we are in a survival state, the body shifts to use more of our neck, shoulder and chest to draw in more oxygen. When this is done for a prolong period of time. This will tense up the neck, shoulder, chest, as well as the entire body. When we are in survival, we need to be tense to react to external treats. Our breathing rate can be up to 20 breath or more per minute when we are chronically stressed. Stress is the main factor that shifts our state into a tensed survival state.
- Breathing also massages our digestive system. If our digestion is fucked, then we’re shit out of luck. Imagine you can massage your organs 25,000 times a day (that’s about how much breath we take in a day). It’ll be very difficult to have serious digestive issues. Why is digestion important? When our gut is inflamed, it creates tension and pain. Also, it how to turn food we into into the nutrient we need to have energy, balanced hormones, like do things in general.
- What can you do about stress? Not much. It’s difficult to control our environment, our coworkers, or our partners behavior. But we can control our breathing. It takes some effort in the beginning, but when you are able to breathing into your belly more often than to your chest, your body will start to alleviate tension, which leads to less and less pain.
- The basic proper breathing is 2/3 of the breath into the belly and 1/3 into the chest. The normal breathing rate to keep the body in a clam state is ideally 6-10 breath per minute. (We teach and demonstrate how to breath in our alignment class.)
Nutrition and Hydration
- Nutrition is all about nourishing our body with the right food for our body. What we eat becomes what we use to repair our joints, ligament, bones, and muscles. In other words, what we eat becomes us. You can’t expect to build a strong bone with a donut. Anything that has over 6 ingredients is probably not good for you (aka creates inflammation). Same goes with anything that is processed. Patronized dairy, flour, gluten, white sodium are other common food that creates inflammation for most.
- When we are in a stressed/survival state, we tend to focus our energy outside instead of within our body. This disconnection is one of the main reason the body gives a a strong signal (Pain) because our mind cannot hear the more subtle signals. When we are connection to our body. The body will respond to any food we eat within 10-15 mins after you eat it. When you start to track what you eat to how you feel over a period of time. You will be able to map out what creates inflammation/pain verses what give you good energy and vitality.
- For our private clients, we share a system around how to identify what the right food is for you. We also have a system that can test what food/supplement is good for you or not.
- Our body is 60-75% water. All of the chemical reactions in our bodies rely on water to keep working smoothly. Dehydration can lead to many issues, such as joint pain, low energy, constipation, and more.
Sleep
- When we don’t get enough sleep. Our body does not heal properly from daily stress and inflammation. As time goes on and the inflammation builds up, one of the ways it shows up in the body is pain. Sleep is mother nature’s best medicine, and it’s free! Research has shown that most people need at least seven to nine hours of sleep to function at their best. Sleeping eight hours may not help if the quality of your sleep is poor. This includes waking up multiple times or having a hard time falling asleep. Good quality sleep is indicated by feeling refreshed and not tired throughout the day, and by not relying on caffeine or other stimulants to push through the day.
Movement
- For movement, we start with the foundation of the ABC (alignment, breathing, and core).
- The core is the key at supporting our entire body. But most people only trains what we call the outer core. The outer core is insufficient at stabilizing as its job is to produce more power. The inner core (aka. Transverse abdominal) is design to keep your spine and hip stable (so it doesn’t get compressed). Our core is also much more than just the core muscles. There’s a stabilizer system in our body call the inner unit. Within the inner unit, there are 4 primary muscle groups. One of which is the core. The breathing muscle, diaphragm and another part (this means, our ability to breath into our belly is essential at creating a better overall core strength.) Pelvic floor muscles are another part of the inner unit that creates stability within our hips and leg, which our spine sits on. Last but not least, the spine stabilizer (yes, we have baby spinal muscles that support our spine), these are usually weak because we never train them. It’s possible to train all the inner unit muscles. Movement is one thing I cannot show you through these text. We welcome you to try out one of our alignment classes where we go into some of the inner unit muscles. For a deeper dive, we do that in our private training sessions.
- Posture alignment training requires awareness of our body within. When we are stressed, our attention goes outward (back to the importance of breathing). Once you have awareness (btw, the wall is a great posture trainer, and it’s free), the video on YouTube can help. But we’ve found most people do not have good posture awareness.
- Poor posture means misalignment and compression.
- Poor posture also affects our mood. These are called power postures.
- Poor posture takes away our energy, because a poor posture is a system that is inefficient at doing things.