#35. Becky Dunphy. Learning to trust your body

In this conversation, Andrew sits down with physiotherapist and first-year PhD student Becky Dunphy to explore what changes when you stop treating movement like a neat mechanical problem.Becky traces her journey from a “black and white” early-career physio mindset (find the faulty part, prescribe the fix) toward a public health lens shaped by COVID-era NHS strain, inequality, and the reality that bodies don’t behave like textbooks. We go into how an “injury” makes sense on the surface, but when you widen the frame to stress, sleep, workload, and skipped meals, you start to see why the body might protect itself — and why a purely biomechanical explanation often fails people.From there the conversation moves into Cognitive Functional Therapy and the practical art of helping someone “make sense” of pain, reduce fear, and rebuild trust through experiential learning. Becky also challenges the idea that there is one correct way to move — pointing to everyday labour, the Paralympics, and sport itself as evidence that humans self-organise brilliantly. The deeper risk, she argues, is when credentialism and “optimal form” narratives become barriers that stop people moving at all.The episode closes with Becky’s current research focus: peri- and post-menopausal women with multiple long-term conditions (especially osteoarthritis), and why the gap in strength training may be biological, social, and structural — not a motivation problem. She ends with heuristics for exercising with pain: aim for tolerable discomfort, watch the after-effects, and keep it functional.