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Ari Dolegowski, a BioPerformance Therapist who offers transformative massage sessions with a tailored approach rooted in Physical Therapy and Eastern medicine, joins Discover Lafayette to share his philosophy on living a well-rounded and healthy life. He studied both Eastern and Western modalities of therapy in Thailand, Costa Rica, and New York City, to form an integrative approach to treatment and to better understand human nature.
Ari played pro soccer in Chile, Tel Aviv and the U. S. and maintains a consistently active lifestyle, biking whenever he can in lieu of starting up a car. He also maintains a Tai Chi practice which ensures full body power and optimal alignment. Tai Chi is a moving meditation in the form of a series of gentle exercises that create harmony between the mind and body. The ultimate purpose is to cultivate our inner life energy (qi) to flow smoothly and powerfully through the body, a spiritual experience as much as a physical one. Ari will be offering classes in Tai Chi this year.
Ari’s work focuses on optimizing the body’s natural abilities, through physical therapy and massage treatments to encourage clients to achieve peak physical and mental states. One thing many of us fail to do is stretch enough and he offers “Stretched Out,” a modality of massage with a lineage of Thai Massage, TaiChi, Yoga Therapy, and Western joint mobilization. “Imagine having a stretch, a trigger point release, and increased blood flow all at one time,” Ari says.
His practice also includes cranio-sacral massage, a gentle yet effective way to ease tension and promote relaxation, and can help relieve headaches, reduce stress and improve overall well-being.
Local athletes call on Ari for deep tissue massage sessions to treat musculoskeletal issues such as sprains and sports injuries; this form of massage helps break up scar tissue that forms following an injury and reduces tension in muscle and tissue.
Ari offers consistent messaging on lifestyle, health, and wellness. “It all starts with us, our choices, our movement, and our intention to live a good life. Bio means life and performance considers honest personal health choices that can revolutionize your own path to developing awareness of the body and in the mind in order to lead an overall healthier and happier lifestyle.”
Ari’s background working for an Eastern-Western physical therapy clinic gave him a way to look at the body in different ways than the Western lifestyle. “Environmental issues, not just lead in the water but anything outside that we bring in on ourselves, whether it’s family or the news or politics, is a culmination of everything that we do. Then one thing can trigger pain, whether it is an unfortunate bike accident, being yelled at, a TV show that upsets you or the news….all of a sudden you have sharp pain in your neck and you don’t know why. People look for one thing to blame, and just want to fix it. Is it acupuncture? Meditation? A cortisone shot or a chiropractor? It might need to be all, depending on how tightly wound up you are or your physical and emotional pain.”
At times, Ari works with people who may have unrealistic goals who have pushed themselves too far and incur an injury, taking on physical exercise that their body is not ready for. “The body just says ‘whoa.’ You know, if you’re just looking to be healthy, maybe you need to go out and walk really fast a few times a week, rather than taking on running when you have never exercised. Because that’s really hard on the body.”
“You should be able to do your job and then offset it with what you do when you’re not working. If you sit all day, you should be in good enough shape that you can sit, stand, maybe go for a walk, do a quick stretch and not worry about that too much. ‘Am I sitting ergonomically? Is my desk high enough?’ I think it’s what you do outside of your job or your career that helps with that. Perhaps you just have a simple 20 minute a day or every other day routine that allows you to sit comfortably and achieve the small goals with minor adjustments you can build off of. People complain about their sleep. Whether you’re going to pharmaceuticals or you’re going to Instagram to get weird, funny pillows to fix your neck while you sleep, it will benefit you more to have a routine that you do during the day, and then you can rest or fall asleep or stay asleep.”
“I recommend that people build an achievable 20 to 40 minute routine that you do two to three times a week consistently. You can even do a ten minute routine that just wakes you up or calms you down, or just mobilizes your body before a sport or before you’re just going to sit down or even before you sleep. The magic word for anything is consistency, which is the hardest.”
Ari is a big believer in the benefits of Tai Chi. “It is for everything. Pick your ailment and Tai Chi can help as long as you complement or supplement it with something else. Eating right, finding happiness somewhere, or an emotional compliment of having good friends, enjoying your work.
We asked Ari what Tai Chi is: “In stillness you can sense movement. Once you learn movement, you can sense stillness. Until you find a class and go consistently, you will not feel the benefit of stillness, which is an upright meditation. Tai chi is a martial arts form of qigong. And qigong is a repetitive movement designed to build Qi. Qi is energy and gong is work. Through those slow, repetitive movements, you actually build up energy with the least amount of tension. You’re mobilizing all the bones, muscle, fascia and nerves.”
“I ran for years on a treadmill and you will not see me on one of those anymore unless I’m trying to do some funny Instagram reel where I run backwards eating an ice cream cone. It’s the way: getting the sun in your eyes and the sun on your skin. The air in your lungs. I don’t think we were made to ride a stationary bike. Although if that’s all you can do, that’s fine too.”
Eastern techniques are longer” a traditional Thai massage is two hours. “A traditional Chinese treatment can start in the morning with acupuncture and manual work or herbs, and then you have lunch, come back for an the next part of the treatment, which usually ultimately ends in bone setting or chiropractic work. It can be a whole day. The time it takes to heal is given more time. So instead of just treating your headache really quickly, with traditional eastern medicine it might take two months to get to the root of it and devise a plan. Threemonths to make herbs for you to drink or apply, and four to adjust the treatments as you get better to weed out what’s causing your pain. Whereas in Western medicine, no one has three months to have a headache.”
“The root causes of so many illnesses are stress and driving ourselves too hard. Think about heart disease. If we were more relaxed, perhaps we wouldn’t have those high rates of heart attacks and cancer. It’s just a different lifestyle. The Eastern medicine takes longer because they get to the root cause, whereas Western medicine, we feel the need to get fixed right away. Sometimes you may need to get fixed right away. I like taking herbs, but at the same time, I might need a professional practitioner to tell me to take an MRI.”
“I think everybody everywhere needs the same treatment. It’s just other cultures are different. Americans are apprehensive of manual treatments, whereas in Thailand, it’s perfectly normal for people to get a two hour massage and then sit in an herbal spa, bath, steam room for another two hours. The economy might not be flying as ours is here, but they’re in a healthier culture. In Russia, men have no problem being in a room with tons of other men and slapping each other with a banya. It’s a special tree branch that has herbal superpowers. And you’ll go in a hot room and you’re all sitting in there and it’s super hot, and one guy slaps the other’s back with it. It seems like torture. In Russia,it is perfectly normal for a bunch of men or women. If you go to Korea, you walk in, you all pay at the same door, and the women go that way and the men go that way. No matter what your creed is or how you feel in your brain, they don’t care. You go that way, you go that way, and everybody’s naked. But the men are over on that side of the wall. The women are over on that side of the wall. Nobody cares.”
“The other things fall into place when you take care of business,” says Ari Dolegowski.
To find out more about Lafayette BioPerformance Therapist Ari Dolegowski, visit https://www.instagram.com/ari_d_therapy/ or email aridolegowski@gmail.com.
