If you’ve traveled the boardwalk in the past year, you may have seen Sean Pastuch, a doctor of chiropractic, holding a microphone, standing beside an A-frame sign with handwritten messages on each panel. On one side: “What hurts? I know stuff.” On the other: “Ask me about fitness. I know stuff.”
The Merrick native and Sanford H. Calhoun High School graduate waits to answer fitness- and pain-related questions from passersby, recording the content to share with his nearly 40,000 social media followers. Pastuch began working as a personal trainer in 2005, practiced as a chiropractor from 2009 to 2018 and founded Active Life on East Park Avenue in 2023. A second location is scheduled to open in Port Washington later this year.
Pastuch, who has lived in Long Beach for more than 15 years, recently wrote “Live More. Hurt Less.: The practical guide to overcoming pain and living an active life,” which became an Amazon bestseller within its first week on the site. In the book, he challenges the mindset that chronic pain should dictate how people live. “Why would you ever shrink your life,” Pastuch said, “compromise on how you live, so that you can keep the pain at bay? The thesis of the book is, the more that you live, the less you’re going to hurt.”
Rather than solely offering exercise advice and physical assessments, the book also explores the psychological and social factors that influence recovery and performance. Pastuch said people often reinforce one another’s limitations by accepting casual statements such as “I used to be able to” as inescapable. “Their friends giggle because they think the same way,” he explained. “So how do you get out of that if everybody around you agrees, celebrates you for it and shares that commonality?”
Pastuch discussed his firsthand injury experience, when years of persistent neck pain eventually left him unable to put his 5-year-old daughter on his shoulders during a walk home from a neighborhood block party. “I didn’t sleep that night,” Pastuch recalled. “Not because of the pain, but because I never wanted to be the dad who couldn’t do anything.” He worked with a coach to regain his quality of life, an experience that meshed with the book’s philosophy — helping people regain the confidence and capacity to perform activities that give their life fullness.
The unique tactics aren’t solely focused in the gym. Pastuch recognizes that legitimate injuries require medical insight and the book facilitates the conversation. He says readers will learn how to be a “teammate” with the doctor, and more efficiently self-advocate, instead of being a passive patient to whom the physician dictates treatment. “A lot of people, unfortunately, settle for lives that they would prefer were different because they don’t know a better way,” Pastuch said. “The fear of the conflict of changing their life is greater than the perception of what it could be on the other side.”
“Live More. Hurt Less.” is scheduled for release Sept. 8 and is currently available for presale on Amazon.