Episode 193: Move BETTER with REAL Myofascial Release

If you are not feeling as healthy as you want, you've got various issues. How many of them do you think are, I don't know, genetic, something you got from your parents or something about your environment or something? I mean, basically it's something out of your control. I mean, I'm sure you think there's quite a few of those, right?

Maybe not. We're going to take a look at that today on this episode of the movement movement podcast. The podcast where people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting feet first, you know, those things in your foundation. We break down the propaganda mythology and sometimes the straight out lies that you've been told about what it takes to walk and run and play and to yoga and crossfit and whatever it is you like to do and to do it, enjoy it, and efficiently and effectively.

And I say enjoyably, of course I did. It's a trick question because if you're not having fun, do something different until you are. It's a bottom line. You're not going to keep it up.

It's not enjoyable. And even if you were going to keep it up if it's not enjoyable, where's the fun of that? So I'm Stephen Sashanko, founder, co-CEO of zero shoes.com and we call the movement podcast because we're creating a movement about natural movement, letting your body do what is made to do. And the movement part involves all of you just spreading the word.

It's really easy. You can go to our website, www.jointhemovement.com. There's nothing you need to do to join. There's no secret handshake, no money involved, no whatever.

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All right. Let's get started. Hey, Steve, do me a favor. Tell people who you are and what you're doing here.

Yeah, my name is Steve Holmson and Stephen Sashanko asked me to be on the show to talk about some of the things I'm interested in which are helping people to move better and to essentially get rid of all the excuses of why we don't move better and pursuant to what Stephen was talking about, all these things that people say it's genetics or it's environment or what is it or I don't have any control over it or do I have control over it or do I just hang out with people who make excuses so I subscribe to that kind of thinking or do I think there is a better way to do things and I need to hang out with people who are more progressive minded. That's a good one. And in a similar vein, you know, when we met what impressed me about you is that your understanding of these things that we're already just talking about was so different than what I hear from most people and more accurately or more importantly, you were able to demonstrate real changes in people really, really quickly. And they were like legit, not just, you know, when you go somewhere and they put a magic holograph bracelet on your wrist and they go, Hey, look, you're stronger with this magic bracelet on your wrist.

Which by the way, whenever I'm like a street fair and there's one of those guys selling those things, I'll have them put the thing on my wrist and then when they're not looking at take it off and kind of put it on the ground and then they do the experiment on me and I go, Hey, didn't work. The thing was actually not on my arm when you're trying to show that my arm got stronger because I was wearing your magic bracelet. Then they get mad. But anyway, that's to be that.

I like messing with people who are trying to sell placebo. So that's the bottom line. Yeah, understandably, there's so much to break through. And that's what I'm all about.

I mean, honestly, I tell people all the time, look, unless you have something majorly wrong with you where you have porn ligaments or tendons or something broken, then I can help you. And what I will say to people is that we're conditioned to think that we have to do something invasive, but why can't we do noninvasive things? And I think the issue is people always say to me, well, are you a doctor? No.

Are you a PhD? No. Are you a physical therapist? No.

But I will teach you how to move better so you can resolve your issues because not everybody is trained in what I'm trained to do. And honestly, the reason that I learned about what I do is because I was an example of one of those people that had terrible movement patterns. I was an example of a guy that had a big ego that thought he knew how to do things and had to acknowledge that he sucked. I'll never forget reading that book.

It's called Mind, Body, Mastery, or Body, Mind, Mastery. It's like I Dan Millman who wrote The Way of the Peaceful Warrior. And that book became required reading for it. There's nothing more fun than I will never forget.

It was either. Hold on. It's, uh, so that one, um, so anyway, sorry for interrupting, but that was just too funny for me. So you read Millman's book, who by the way, I talked to a couple of times and we're both former gymnasts.

So we have a lot of fun with chat, but, um, so you read, you read that book and what have, I went back up, like what was going on prior to reading that book. And then when you read that book, what was the aha moment that led you down the next part of your life journey? Well, I'd been a senior instructor for years and I thought I was pretty athletic. And I, when I first met my wife, she was a former professional dancer and she taught gyrotonic and pilates and she also studied exercise science and school.

She was a national academy of sports medicine, personal trainer who I got certified through afterwards. She inspired me to do that. And she was taking me through a kettlebell workout and I had no idea how to create a hip hinge and I didn't know how to activate my glutes. In fact, I had what they referred to as glute amnesia and I had flat amnesia.

The combination of both of those is the reason most people have terrible posture because they're all part of your posture or chain. And if you can't fire the biggest muscles in your body, which are your glutes and your last biggest muscle in your upper body, there's no way you're going to eradicate all the issues and you're going to create literally its physics. You're going to create shearing and compressive forces on your joints. And I had no idea because I had taught skiing, but the sad thing about the ski industry is they'll tell you they teach mechanics.

They don't teach mechanics. They define mechanics as, well, this is a movement that you need to do. But so often the people who are on the professional skiing structures of America demo team, you know, and every four years they have their version of the Olympics showcasing their stuff. A lot of them don't necessarily have movement dysfunction.

In other words, they maybe don't externally rotate their feet or internally rotate. You know, their knees don't collapse in. They don't have two angles. They don't have as many of these postural things that are going on.

So people just think, well, like, I'm how to do it and they didn't learn it. So they must not know how to do it. But it's because they don't know how to correct the movement pattern. And the only way I found that you can correct the movement pattern is by literally doing myofascial release foam rolling, things like that.

I mean, you literally have to get the fashion and the muscles to slide on each other. And if they're getting stuck, then that's a problem. And that brings up somebody that everybody knows who's considered the goat. Well, Paul, because I want to do this because for some people who think they know what myofascial release is or what foam rolling is, this is one of the reasons that I adore you is that what you're doing is not what people think.

And so I want people to stick around if they're thinking, I know I got to go foam rolling. No, no, no, it's going to be very different than that and we'll dive into that in a bit. But just, you know, quick prelude, stick around. You will be surprised.

So all right, back to you for the win. So one of the things I used to talk to people about, you know, athletes or people who had issues and, you know, for the most part, women take direction better than men. Men were like, I got this. You can't tell me, I know how to move.

I know how to work out. But one of the reasons that I named my program that I did on Tony Horton's website, PowerNationFitness.com, I named it Movement IQ, is because most people have a relatively low Movement IQ. We have so much emphasis on the mental aptitude, but not in the physical aptitude. But if your body can't carry your brain, then you're not going to be able to accomplish nearly as much in your life.

And I realized I had a very low Movement IQ. And I would tell people all the time, like, if you want to last in, let's say, professional sports is what you need to do. And people will be like, no, no, no, they're doing like the combine exercises. And then lo and behold, the goat, a football, Tom Brady comes out with a book, TB12, and half of the training is what is called myofascial release.

And you're right. A lot of people, it's a difficult thing to talk about. Fashion. What is it?

Well, it's just all this connective tissue. It literally goes from your feet to your head. And what he talked about, and he explained it very simply, there is ability. And then there's durability.

And if you want durability, you need pliability. So what that means is people, you can get, you can get tight. And what I mean by that is you can get not lesions, adhesions, scar tissue, whatever, you know, from sitting on the couch or from the biggest waves in the world, it doesn't matter. We all have it.

And there's many people that can get along, but eventually they'll burn out. I mean, you know, they even did that with Kobe Bryant. When he used to shoot, his knees used to collapse in and go way forward and they fixed his movement pattern, so he'd get a longer career. And going back to what I was talking about with the body mind or mind, body mastery, I remember how it goes, that became required reading for a lot of people going into the NBA because the premise of that book was I can't help you if you're not coachable.

If you come in with this huge ego and this arrogance, like I got this and I know a lot of them have issues because I'll never forget working with the kids, speaking of basketball, you have a full scholarship to go play at college. But every time he jumped his knee hurt, I worked with him one time. That's it. I corrected his movement patterns by doing the myofascial work.

And the foam rolling, you're right, Stephen, you're absolutely right. Most people, they just go up and down the leg. The whole idea is you want to find the most intense spot you can. You want to hang out there for a minimum of 30 seconds to the GTO, which is a gold-gutendent organ releases.

And then you want to do some flexion extension movements, especially extension. And this is more lower body. You can do some of the movements on the upper body as well, where you do variations of your release in your pecs, you know, it's like a single arm, snow angel or release in your rhomboids. There's all sorts of stuff you can do.

But so often the problem where somebody has it, let's say they have an issue, the way our body works is things alternate. Our body is actually really smart. And the first thing, and this is why I love your shoes, is your feet have to be stable. If your feet are not stable, then you are essentially building everything on a faulty foundation.

And most sports are oriented towards complex movement patterns on a very weak foundation. So I realized how weak my foundation was when I had been wearing orthotics for 20 or 30 years, and I had a cushion shoe and all that and getting into your shoes forced me to make my feet stronger. So if your feet aren't stronger, nothing's going to work because your body literally alternates all the way up. You go from your feet are designed to be stable, your ankles mobile, your knees stable, your hips mobile, your low back stable, your thoracic, which is a mid to upper back mobile, your shoulders are mobility stability joint, but we need to learn to stabilize it and we want our cervical to be stable.

And the reason why this is so important to understand is if you have a low back issue, everybody's like, this is where all the pain is, there's probably something going on in your hips and there's something going on in your mid to upper back, your thoracic. If you have a knee issue, you probably have insufficient mobility in your ankles and in your hips. So what we're trying to do, and the reason where a lot of pain comes from is we're trying to get mobility out of a stability area. And that is unfortunately what happens with all the time.

And I did that for years. You know, teachers, keen, everybody's like, okay, you got to get forward. I'm camping out in front of my boot. All that's doing is loading my quads.

My glutes never even get a rest. So it would be like, you know, for anybody who knows, grouch your marks and he would do that low walk all the time. That's essentially the way a lot of people are seeing. They never, you know, extend.

They never use their glutes to, you know, use that motion. Like if you're doing a squat and you want to come up and you have to use your hips to come up. So when we walk, we flex and extend. If we don't even out that motion, then we have issues.

And for me and skiing, I was way too flexed all the time. I never knew how to extend. The other problem too is, and it all comes back to what you're doing with your shoes is the ski boots for too tight. And what I mean by that is they make, you know, they're all pretty much made in Monte Blume, Italy.

And of course they're Italian. So of course they want to look fancy and chic and it's almost like a modern version of foot binding. Not as bad as what the Chinese did and broke pretty much every bone, you know, in girls' sheets in China. So they would look attractive, but it's literally you're putting your foot in this thing and they thought, well, you got to control the forefoot and you don't have to control the forefoot.

You have to control the heel. So now they're actually making them wider. My feet never get cold and they're actually making them flatter than they did. I wouldn't say they have no ramp angle, maybe a little bit, but not nearly as much.

All these things contributed to years of people having knee injuries and tearing ACLs in skiing. And when I say this to people, they're like, no, no, no, no, I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, they were trying to get everybody forward. But the problem is you want to be flatter because if you're flatter, now you can dorsiflex and plantar flex. So dorsiflex is being able to flex your feet.

Yeah, pulling your toes towards your knees. Pull your toes. Yes. And then being able to point your feet.

And that's actually how I make most of my corrections skiing. But because I didn't have that ability to do that because I was so far forward in the boot and it was jacked up so high and a lot of bindingsings, the heel piece is thicker than toe piece and they're making them leveler now. But these all contributed to people having issues, but you want to be able to use your whole foot. And so this is how I learned about it because I've had four knee surgeries and it was all due to poor movement patterns.

And you know, even though I might ski with guys in the devil team and all these educators, I'm going to be wrong. The skiing has been awesome for me. I love skiing, but I'm constantly surprised and disappointed that it doesn't matter if it's skiing or any other sport. None of the coaches know the buying mechanics of movement.

And you see coaches all the time telling their kids to do this. They can't do any of the movements. They can't demonstrate what a good push up is. Everybody's like to a push up.

I mean, I used to teach at a place here called the Professional Fitness Institute. They would do a two year study and become a personal trainer and run shims and things like that. Most people, they're like, they would be doing push ups, the shoulders are killing them and they're low back is killing them. I'd fix them.

And they've learned all this theoretical stuff and they probably knew more about the origin sensations of every muscle, but who gives a shit? I was able to fix them and get out of pain when you work with somebody. They want to feel better. They don't want this theoretical idea and all this data that corroborates that.

That stuff is so immaterial. They want to feel better and be able to do stuff better. So going back to the guy I worked with about basketball, he literally, within an hour, I got him out of pain. You couldn't believe it because I did the mind fast on the phone rolling.

I showed him how to do that. I corrected the squat mechanics. I got the right muscles firing on the right sequence. It would be like the equivalent of giving the ultimate tune up to a vehicle, whereas running my crap and you wanted to run right.

And afterwards he jumped and I was like, well, see if you didn't make it, he jumped, he jumped, he jumped. I can't believe it. So here's what would have happened. He would have gone to college and he would have been told to suck it up.

And here's some pain meds and there wouldn't have been anybody to identify that. And who knows? He might have had a long career or he might have blown out, but when everybody says the best athletes are out there, that's bullshit. You get somebody who gives you some guidance and you get a good mentor, but most people don't.

And the sad thing is there's so many people in the industry that are challenged by people like me. They don't like me because they want us to keep doing the same stupid shit they've been doing forever. And I'll be honest with you, pisses me off because a lot of people associate their sport with pain, not pleasure. And it starts at a young age.

I worked with a girl who's a figure skater. She was 10. Her parents had a lot of money. You know, they hired like the best Russian coach and but she already had low back knee ankle pain.

I fixed all of that. Then she started sticking all her jumps, but she would have associated her sport with pain forever because everybody's like, this is how it's supposed to look. They don't understand the mechanics of you can still make it look good, but biomechanically correct so you don't blow somebody's body out so they're not in pain the rest of their life, which is completely as far as I'm concerned, unnecessary. You know, I think I think it's start the whole idea of associating any activity with pain for many people starts earlier, especially if they're in some sort of sport in like junior high school where the average coach, if he's mad at you, will say, go to a lap.

And so they're using running as punishment. And so that's, you know, just one. And then yeah, there is a whole lot of suck it up. And now it's in junior high school, I was an American gymnast.

And there's just a lot of times where frankly you get injured and you have two choices, you have to compete or you don't. But also I think about this a lot lately that and I'm done to get your opinion. I think that for many sports, we like to get kids into them way earlier than is appropriate because they don't have the control or awareness to actually have a good movement pattern from or even the ability to have the strength to have an effective good movement pattern from the start. I mean, I was just actually watching, it was not a young guy, I was an old guy, I was a 73 year old guy at CrossFit, Jim swinging on rings through a muscle up.

And this guy's going to rip his shoulders out because he didn't actually know how to swing and he was putting his shoulders under an amazing amount of stress. But ironically, his swing looked just like ours did when we were 11 years old and we had no strength, we had no ability to pull the rings back as part of the upswing or push them forward as part of that swing when you're coming up and going up in the back. We were swinging through our shoulders, which is why I've had my right rotator cuff repair and I've had both biceps taken out and screwed back into my arm because I just shredded them when I was a kid and it took forever till that showed up. Wow, what age were you when you shredded them?

Well over a six to 10 year period of time. It's just that it didn't show up until later for whatever reason. This one actually my right shoulder, I can't do this joke on a podcast. What the hell, I'm going to do it.

28 years ago, my right shoulder went out and for the umpteenth time and I go to the orthopedic surgeon and he says, well, yeah, your biceps and your shredded, your rotator cuff is shredded, you're going to need surgery. And I said, what's the recovery on that going to be like? And he goes, six to eight weeks in a sling and six months of physical therapy and minimum. And I said, yeah, I can't take off that kind of time because that's going to interfere with my professional masturbation career.

And, you know, and nationals are coming up and people are expecting a lot out of me. So I literally said that to the doctor. And then I just, you know, I put it off and I kept having shoulder issues, shoulder issues, until one day it was so bad or actually for about three months it was so bad. I went to another doctor and he goes, yeah, this is, well, I'll say it this way.

After he did the surgery, this is a guy who's as as sick as they get, he cannot carry on a conversation. I love him. That's what I want in a surgeon, someone who does it all day every day and is, you know, doesn't care about you cares about doing the job. He comes in after the surgery and he goes, we got to do a lot of work in there.

And I said, I'm not sure how I feel about you being so giddy. That's pretty funny. That means there's no pretense. He's totally transparent.

No, no, he was like excited. It was like more than just running the mill, which was very entertaining. So anyway, so I want to back up. I mean, you covered a whole lot in there.

I want to highlight a couple of points. So first, let's just describe it with a little more detail. I'm going to try and do it and then you feel in any missing pieces. The difference between just like rolling over, you know, your, the IT band in your, in your thigh, which for people that know, it's that part in your outer thigh where if you're on a foam roller, I don't care who you are, you know, it's going to hurt.

I don't know why they just didn't bring foam rollers down to Guantanamo and make all those guys just do IT band rolling because they would confess to anything. They would confess to the JFK murder. I mean, you name it because that's usually really painful. But what you're going to do.

So the first thing, and some people will get to this next part of like find the spot that's particularly unpleasant and hang out there. It's cool. And then, you know, that can often create a response. But the part that you did when we were together at I door is now just, you know, so you're lying on your side, let's say you're on your right side, you got the foam roller on your right leg using your left leg, take a little bit of weight off of your, off the rest of you.

And then when you find that spot, you're going to flex and extend your knee. You're basically going to bring your heel into your butt and away from your butt. And that's going to add just that stretch and releasing around that tight spot. And again, will most likely make you want to curse people's lineage.

It's just not the most pleasant thing. And then, you know, after a, have every seconds of agony, you get up and say, Oh my God, that feels way better. That's one application that I get that I describe that well. No, you did a brilliant job.

And it's better than me because that's exactly where I went through the first time. In fact, a friend of mine who was a chiropractor and a yoga teacher introduced me to foam rolling. And I was an absolute agony. So I know what that's like, you know, it's interesting for me, though, one of the most important things about the foam rolling is to not do it in a vacuum.

In other words, I always say to people, it won't mean anything to you. I mean, you'll feel a difference. I know when you got up, you felt a difference and you felt a lot, but I always tell people the reason why the National Academy of Sports Medicine does movement streams and then foam rolling then doesn't move it again is to fix the movement. So I always try doing a squat, you know, can, you know, and the overhead squat is particularly hard if you have your arms overhead and if you think about your arms being in the same line as your torso and then when you start squatting back to see if that's parallel, like almost like a parallel ground with your lower leg and you can have somebody look at that or when you squat, do your feet flare out, do your knees collapse in, do you have an anterior or posterior tilt in your low back, which is basically sucking, you know, arching or rounding.

I mean, these are all the things we're looking for because honestly, that tells everything about somebody's problems. Yeah. I mean, somebody might think like, well, I got this problem here, how come you're going there? And more often than not, yeah, where you have the issue is not the source of it.

And so then I have people do the wrong thing so they can feel the difference. And then I introduce the corrective exercise where it's like, okay, can you feel these muscles moving? And one of the big things I like to do with people that I feel is missed a lot of times when people get worked on and don't get me wrong, like I love massage therapy, I love everything, but I want people to know like, what am I supposed to be feeling when I'm working out? Like, what's the dominant mover and what's supposed to be assisting it?

Or, you know, there's things that happen where the wrong muscle is working and we have to get the right muscle working. So there's literally a reeducation neurologically what's supposed to happen. But once you do that, and the reason why this is so important and this, I mean, this is a basis for me for everything in terms of people's self esteem. It's so often growing up, you know, kids will be like, Oh, I suck at sports.

And that's bullshit. I have fixed so many kids movement patterns and all of a sudden they're really good because they're just fighting themselves behind mechanically. I mean, there's there's a guy in Santa Barbara who contributed to other workouts when I helped Tony Horton create P90X2 and he did the PAP, which is a post activation potentiation. This guy Marcus Elliott, PhD MD is a genius.

He's awesome. His facility in Santa Barbara and he had us out there and he and I talked a lot about that. He'll get kids that are in middle school, high school that are just mediocre and he'll make them great because he won't say like, Well, you can't do this or that. He'll be like, he identifies the faults, the movement pattern, dysfunction, whatever, and he corrects it.

A lot of people think like, Well, this is the way I'm born. I'm just, you know, I'm supposed to walk duck footed pigeon toot. No, you're not. And once you start fixing that and people and understanding just like you said punishment for kids is to go run.

But nobody ever says like, Well, if you're making a lot of noise running, you're probably not doing it very well. Right. Yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, because that goes back to if somebody is, you know, externally rotated duck footed or internally rotated pigeon toad, they can't roll through their feet, right?

Which means they can't, they don't have any ability to absorb anything. And one of the movement screens that I do that you might remember is when we release the calf of the Achilles, your gastroc and soleus. Yeah, unfortunately, Aaron Rodgers just stores Achilles with sucks. And the reason those are so critical is because if you have somebody hop up and down a one leg, a lot of times they'll just land hard on their heel because they don't have the ability to decelerate.

But when you release that gastroc, soleus, sometimes your anterior tip anterior to be allis is a muscle just to the outside of that shin bone that people hit on coffee tables all the time. So that's basically your shin split muscle. You can get rid of shin splits really easily. Yeah.

But if you get all these muscles firing properly, then you have the person try the leg, they just released and all of a sudden they're bouncing up and down and then that's the layman on their heel. Because they're not able to decelerate. Now you think that in terms of the coach making the person make a lap and the person's landing hard and all they're doing is wrecking themselves because he never fixed the mechanics of it. You know, and you know a lot more about running than I do.

But one thing I say to people all the time because they say, well, how should I run? And I say, well, the easiest way to learn is just work for me is go run barefoot on grass or on a padded track and see how you land. See how you can make the least amount of noise and the least amount of impact. I'm going to give you a clarification.

But first things first, I think we actually just landed on a real part of the problem that we hadn't identified. My dad used to have a line. He was a dentist. He said, you know what they call the guy who graduated last in my dental school class?

I said, well, he goes, doctor. And so and his other line was 80% of the people in any profession are not qualified to do that. And so with coaches, they don't have the eyes to see the way you were describing most of them. You know, they're just regurgitating something that they learned somewhere or heard somewhere.

And they're and they're not thinking through. I mean, I tell the story of a friend of mine who's a world champion 400 meter runner when he was coaching me at one point, he said, when you're in the air during this one drill, you've got to get your hips over your feet. I went, dude, it's too late. I can't do anything while I'm in the air.

The thing to say is I'm not taking off in a way that puts my hips over my feet. And now I can kind of figure out I can work with that. But you're giving me a cue about something after the fact. There's no way to change it.

Or my favorite again that I mentioned all the time is when parents, especially junior high and high school sprinters will yell at their kids, knees up. It's like, no, no, you don't lift your knees up. The fact that your knees go up when you're sprinting is a reactive thing, not an active thing. So the coaching, I think is a big part of the problem is in generating these bad movement patterns is they don't know any better and they don't have the eyes to see what the problem is, let alone correct it.

So there's anyway, there's that the correction that I'm going to toss in your direction for running, I agree, it's taking off your shoes, but the problem with grass is twofold or padded surface. If you have padding and the grass will be padding, your leg is going to be stiffer than if you don't. The more padding you have, the stiffer your leg gets and the less feedback you're getting in your foot and grass in particular, you don't know what the hell's in the grass or you don't know what the undulations are of the whatever the hell's underneath the grass. So I don't sprint on grass because invariably I will step on something where it's like a little too high or a little too low and my gate goes like a goog goog goog and so that's not good.

So I always say a nice smooth hard surface. I read Davis from Harvard says, Saint Paul, which was Harvard says the same thing because you're going to get the most feedback, which is a quick, I mean, you were heading in the right direction with you want that feedback, but I would say that a smoother hard surface is going to be that better feedback. You want to make an accomplished barefoot runner get misty eyed, take them to somewhere where they just painted a freshly painted white line on the side of a road and because it's nice and smooth and it's cool and it's not really padded, but it kind of feels like it is. I mean, it's really pretty, pretty dreamy, but to your point, it's really, you know, the number one thing that's going to generate a new movement pattern is getting the feedback that something that you're doing is incorrect.

And the problem is that if you do it incorrect long enough, your brain habituates and thinks that that that's correct. When I see kids who walk like their parents with some coat totally dysfunctional movement pattern, I'm sort of stunned by it, but it was clearly like something that we developed millennia ago about how to fit in with our family and our tribe is we start imitating those movements that are often dysfunctional patterns or malfunctioning patterns. And we do it to fit in because it's one of my favorite things is almost anyone can do this where you see someone 100 yards away, they take two steps and if it's someone you know, you recognize them. You can't see their face.

You just saw them took two steps and or saw them take two steps and you recognize them from the movement clearly. The way we move is a very important thing evolutionarily that we don't really fully appreciate. But I want to but related to that from my little rant, I want to ask you this question and I'm going to put myself in a similar category to you in that I'm good at spotting movement patterns that are right or wrong and figuring out what the kind of essential thing is in I've taught everything from Zen Archery to running to Tai Chi to gymnastics to whatever else. But what I noticed is that I'm seeing things differently than what other people are seeing.

Why do you think you went from realizing you had these problems reading this book from Milman and suddenly applying your ability to see into coming up with these methods for changing movement patterns? Do you have any reference to what I'm even talking about? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you're right.

I mean, honestly, for somebody like me that had done things wrong for so long, I suppose I finally opened up my mind because I just feel like life's a series of mentors that are out there and some you listen to and some you don't. So I'm just glad I started listening during that time. And I'm still working on things to this day that I want to fix because it's easy for me to fix somebody else and myself often. But for me, I think from years of teaching skiing, I just got good at looking at things.

Just like you said, you can tell from two strides. I can tell who somebody is from two turns. And so then I had a better idea and I started teaching differently than anybody else because I started teaching firing sequences of muscles and what people are supposed to feel when people are like, wow, I'm a cheerleader. And I'm like, I know, I wish I'd known this before.

And oddly enough, there's a lot of sports of top people out of due and I don't do this sport. Right. Sometimes it's better. Yeah, sometimes it's better if you don't because if you do, you may have developed some ideas about the way it's supposed to be that if you're naive, you know, you're coming with a different set of eyes.

I mean, I'm not trying to pat myself on the back when I say this, but I have some friends who are long-term, you know, high-level footwear designers and I have some patents on some things that I came up with. And I said, how come I'm coming up with ideas that none of you guys did? And they said, because you didn't know anything about footwear. And so I walked in with a clean slate, but I walked in knowing what I was seeing when I was watching people move, running and walking in super slow motion or in various controlled situations where I could identify it.

This is in the lab with a guy named Dr. Bill Sands. He was his research, but he's showing all these videos. It's like it couldn't have been more obvious to me and to Bill as well, but other people just weren't seeing it.

I mean, in related note, you know, back to some of your glute amnesia and some of the things I'm trying to remember, some of you said to me, think of this. One thing that amazes me in terms of using the right muscles, that's where it came from. Mostly in America and other places well, definitely in the West and mostly in America. We don't even know how to walk because we're not using our glutes and hamstrings at all.

We're not using these things to extend from the hip. And the writer David said, he said, I've been quoting this quite a bit lately, lives in France. And he said, my French friends accused me of walking like an American. He said one day, what does that mean?

They go, you throw your legs in front of you, which is not the right way to walk. It's using the wrong muscles in the wrong place. And but around here, you know, we don't know how to walk by using your glutes in any way that's going to move you forward by using strong muscles instead of trying to pull you forward by putting your glutes and hamstrings in a weak position. Wow.

That's a fascinating idea. Actually, unfortunately, it makes a lot of sense just because on average Europeans do dramatically more walking than Americans do because walking is considered something enjoyable as opposed to here. We kind of frown upon it. You're walking like what the hell is wrong with you.

Yeah. I agree with that completely. I had to relearn how to walk. I mean, you know, when I had all these knee issues, my physical therapist was like, how come you're kicking your leg out?

I mean, it was literally like Money Python's ministry of silly walks. Right. And yeah, I had no idea I was doing that. But as humans, it just points out we're amazing compensators.

Yeah. But process, we definitely erode quite a bit. And the hip extension you're talking about is a critical one. That was one of the biggest things I was teaching a scheme, which I never did before, which nobody ever told me hip extension.

So your glutes actually fire, but you're right. I had to literally learn how to do all this stuff. And maybe because I learned how to relearn how to do all this stuff in my 40s. It meant more to me because I knew so many people that told me, you're not going to be able to do this.

You're not going to be able to do this. And I just have never really subscribed to the naysayers. And so I was like, well, I just got to figure out a way to fix it and also hang out with people that have ideas of how to fix it. And but yeah, the same thing happened to me when I was asked to help out with a guy who'd been in the NFL and he'd been in for like three seasons and then he was running a gym and I was one of the trainers there and he said, ask me if I could work on him and he had a hamstring issue.

I got rid of it in an hour and fixed all, you know, he had good movements. He was obviously an athlete, but I just made him feel better than he had. Well, put it this way. The first thing he said to me afterwards was why didn't I learn that in the NFL?

And I said, well, that's the first thing I teach people because there's an assumption that when people get to higher levels, like they're never taught these things, it's kind of like your body either blows up or you make it. Sorry, there's, I don't want to name names. There's a running coach that I know. Let's just leave it at that who has become very famous over the years because he had some really good athletes, but I've watched him work with his athletes and he basically, he looks at the way he coaches as a Darwinian experiment.

It's just going to see who survives what he's doing. And if they survive, then clearly they must be the best, but I've watched really, really good runners fall by the wayside because he's beat them up so badly. And if they weren't beat up so badly, they'd still have careers. I mean, it's the bottom line.

It couldn't have been more obvious. And I'm just blown away. Now I will also add in, people might actually figure out who I'm talking about when I say this. He's gotten some criticism for this lately and had some people basically say that he ruined their careers as a result of training with him.

And actually, now that I think you won't be able to look up that person based on that because there's a number of people who are getting that accusation lately suffice it to say it's endemic. But that idea that you're saying is like, whoever survives clearly is the best one, but they only survived because they were able to survive, not because they're optimal, not because they're performing better or functionally better necessarily. No, I agree with you completely. I think about, and I'm sure you do as well, so many sports that happens to people.

I was asked by this guy who was an NFL player. And you know what he said, why didn't I learn that in the NFL? For me, the biggest thing I like to do when I work with people is I don't want to, you know, so often people will come and they'll fix you, you feel better. You don't know why.

The why is always missing. Yeah. Well, how did you do? Oh, you know, it's almost like people would tell me like, well, you got a crappy business model because they don't need you anymore.

And I'm like, that's the point. No, anyone says that's a crap. It'll be great. Bullshit.

Yeah. No, anyone who says that's a crappy business model doesn't understand what happens when you help someone quickly. And then they tell everyone they know, oh, you got to go see this guy. I mean, that's a way better business model than having them on the hook for months or years at a time.

I mean, there's a chiropractic place down the street. They had this one particular machine. I just wanted to get one treatment with that one machine because I'd used it somewhere else and they were the only people that went around here. They said, well, you're going to need a whole bunch of other stuff.

You're going to have to come see us like three or four times a week for six months. And I said, oh, is that going to fix me? They go absolutely. I said, so you guarantee it?

They go, what do you mean? I said, well, you know, I mean, that's a lot of money and a lot of time. So are you guaranteeing that I'm going to be fine after six months? Well, you know, we can't guarantee it.

I go, well, then why are you saying something like, well, you know, where's the information that tells me this, their whole model is just to get you on board and invariably, I know that if I had spent the money and spent the time at like month, five and a half, they would have found some new shit that, you know, is going to be another six months. Yeah. And that's the unfortunate part about it, just because, you know, the general direction we're going in as an example, which is the antithesis of the direction we're going in in terms of, we have no idea how to prevent things. We just most of our medicine is towards catastrophic.

And a buddy of mine who's an acupuncture stuff and Jackson Hole, awesome guy. And he studied in China quite a bit. He, you know, he had his own acupuncture clinic and Kathmandu studied a bunch of, you know, he was in a shell income food, but really an acupuncture, but he said in traditional China, you know, before Malibu in the place and 49 and on, the only way an acupuncture would get paid is if he had no patience. I love it.

And for me, I'm on the same model. I guess there's a part of me that if you're ethical and conscientious, you're, you know, sometimes you've heard people say that where there are people out there who know how to fix people, but they're like, oh, just do a little bit. Don't do too much. I'm like, well, why am I going to hold back?

If I'm going to fix them as much as I can. I mean, I just, I just know, here's, here's your new company. You're a new completely unethical business model. So you fix people and then you tell them that for them to maintain that fixed, you need to do some sort of psychic surgery every night and it's going to take about an hour and they need to pay you for the psychic surgery as well.

So I think that'll do it. I know that's classic. So in any event, going back to where coaches, uh, layers, just a lot of people general where you said you could spot things, you were surprised they didn't see what happened to me as well. I was asked by this guy who was running a bunch of football camps for people who were trying to make it in the combine or maybe, you know, help and get drafted, whatever.

So he said, Hey, can you come out and put a few some workouts? So I put in some some workouts where I can identify movement patterns and I'll point out to all these coaches. You see that? You see that?

They're like, no. And I was like, I was like, Hey, I'll just make a little gambling myself. Let's see how well they do when the ball is involved and the guys that had the better movement, they got to the ball better. They caught the ball better or whatever, whatever they needed to do task wise.

They achieved it. And I said, do you see the correlation? And they none of them could see it. I did the same thing with basketball.

I was like, look at like, you know, some of these course, what mechanics? I mean, the person's more trying to figure out how to move there as opposed to just handle the ball. And then the people who had the good mechanics, they're already there so they could focus on the actual task, not the movement component about it. And it was another thing where I was like, they couldn't see it.

So I just felt like, I don't know, just kind of beating my head against the wall. I improved all of them, but they didn't understand how and remember I did the same thing with the tennis player, you know, she got like half the shots and she's really good what she gets a shot. So I worked on her literally for 20 minutes. I worked on a coach for 20 minutes.

He moved better, but he didn't understand what happened because he was clueless and she got every shot after that. And he just thought, Oh, it was just something simple. Like he didn't understand. Well, there's actually I'm taking a scientific approach.

I'm not just pulling something out of nowhere. There's actually reason rationale, but it's almost like he didn't want to learn that. You know, for me, I guess if I was an acquisition somebody showed me that I'd be like, no, I'd hear that. Can you work on my athletes?

Nope. Nope. No, you didn't want to challenge. No, that's it.

I mean, I see this on a regular basis. So there's these events that are put on from a couple of the top researchers about natural movement and footwear and a bunch of physical therapists go to get continuing education units and most of them walk out of there and they will not change anything they're doing. And I think it's for a couple of reasons. One is they think they made a rational decision to be wearing the dumb shoes they're wearing and they don't want to and you can't just give people data to talk them out of there what they think is a rational decision.

The other is in a way they take it as discovering that they were wrong and they don't want to admit to their clients and patients that they were wrong instead of saying, Hey, I learned something new because even if it's like I learned something new, they think that would breed some level of distrust because we'll wait a minute. I thought you knew everything because this is a problem from the patient side is that we expect the medical practitioners to know everything for every possible situation that we could be presenting the way, which is of course ridiculous. But that's what we do. And then there's one other thing where there's just a self image thing about making any kind of change.

But in the case of, you know, this coach, it's like if he had to learn something new, again, it would be admitting that he is not as good as that he had been trying to portray himself or as people thought he was. Now, my former gymnastics coach was still a friend of mine. He was the exact opposite. He was always experimenting and always open to learning something new and often to the great chagrin of the parents of his young gymnast where he would discover something and go, Oh, we got to go back to the basics.

We got to spend a month just doing round offs and handsprings because I just learned a little thing where half of these people are doing it wrong. And then the parents would lose their minds. You're taking my potential Olympian and making them just do round offs like they're five years old. It's like, yeah, that's what I'm making them do.

And then a month later, they're 20, 50% better because there was some little thing in a movement pattern that he now knew about and it made them better. And then the parents, they never said thank you. They never, you know, came back and went, well, sorry, my mistake. But this is a guy who, like you, his only concern is how do I do a better job at what I'm doing and is it working?

Is it for real? And that's why he's produced, you know, like more high level gymnastics than I think any other coach that I've ever heard of, not the ones who are already getting the ones who are already elite level, they don't count. You know, that's awesome. I mean, I think that you're right, that's endemic in our society too that, and honestly, it all comes back to self-esteem.

Like, I have no problem admitting I'm wrong, I screwed up, I did something, I was a dumb ass. I mean, so many people have problems saying about themselves. It's, I'm sure who I am as a person. And if you don't have good self-esteem and you can't laugh at yourself, then how can you take any direction?

And that's the thing for me, like if somebody says, hey, you know, oh, great, I'm glad you showed me as opposed to like, oh, you can't show me, I'm supposed to know this. I'm male, you know, alpha and you know, you can't talk, you know, like, and that's, you know, funny when you're talking about, you know, your, your friend, you know, the gymnastics coach, that's exactly that Dan Billman, when he worked with those gymnast, so it's high-level gymnast, and they'd be doing these complex routines and he'd take them back, you know, to what they consider the basics and they'd feel all insulted. What do you mean, I'm better than that? But it's like, they didn't, and you're right, it's like those parents who aren't appreciating saying, if you know, I mean, honestly, if they have a little more understanding, they'd realize they're saving your kid from injuring themselves.

Yeah. Well, I understand that. No, I just realized the problem with this, hey, let's go back to basics. Is this presented as let's go back to basics?

Let's go back instead of art, you've gone to the point where you now know enough to learn how to really do this. What you think is a simple move even better. If it was Frank, because I remember when my question was Jack, when he did it to me, was during one summer session, he said this whole summer we didn't know nothing but these two things that couldn't have been more basic. And I was already like, you know, the top tumbler in the state.

And so it's like, and I was just angry and confused. And I don't know if I was insulted, but it's like, I didn't feel like I was going to be moving forward. But it was like, this is part of the moving forward plan, I would have been all over it. I would have been completely on board.

You're right. I'm going to go back to basics. Even though you're tempted to say that, let's just, I would say like, let's shore up your foundation. Let's rebuild.

Let's make it stronger so we can build complex movements safely. Because you're right. It's all in the phrasing because people feel like, as you just said, and you experienced that yourself, I just wish I had had somebody like that. I grew up playing ice hockey.

And you know, we had a great coach. It was like under the NHL where we played hockey in Salt Lake City. And the guy who was the captain of the team was our coach. And you know, I remember he gave me the greatest compliment I ever got from any coach.

He just said, look, Olmsohn is not nearly as talented you guys, but he works harder than all of you. But I just wish you'd have the knowledge to teach me how I get better. I mean, if I was even firing my glutes or, you know, I had a Q&A anything, you know what I mean? All those things when you're growing and things aren't right and you're awkward or whatever's going on.

If I just had some idea of like, wow, and that's what I love working with people now is showing them like, you don't have to do something for six months to get stronger. Sometimes you can make somebody stronger in one hour because you just get the right muscle working. And I'm like, well, that much easier. They're like, well, one is that much easier and my joint doesn't hurt and I can move farther than I ever have.

And for me, like that's the most gratifying thing of all. And I've worked with some, you know, people that were a little resistant to beginning, like I used to train the SWAT team here in Vegas and I was training them for this big obstacle first competition. It's like this best in the West for all the SWAT teams in the West. And these guys, they're all pretty yoked.

You know, they were strong, but you know, they had like me issues, low back issues, shoulder issues, just the standard stuff. So I fixed all that because the first time I brought up the foam roller, they're like, what's that? And then they're like sweating profusely. And I think the only way they listen to me, and this is why I'm a huge advocate of being able to perform things, is they saw me go through the obstacles a lot easier and a lot faster than them.

That's when they're listening. But the other thing for me and why this is so important, it's not just about like being better or whatever, it's like, you know what, you're a SWAT guy. You lay your life on the line every day. When they went to that competition, they were the oldest team.

Not only did they dominate the competition, but the other team said, how did you make the obstacles look so much easier than the rest? And I'm thinking, well, that could be a life and death thing. But for me, and honestly, that's a big part of my philosophy of, you know, people think, you know, what, you vain, you're working out, you want to take care of yourself. It's like, no, here's the way I look at life.

Everybody has somebody out there that they love. And if there was a disaster and an emergency, can you do what it takes to save them? And if you can't, then you should get off your ass and do something about it. And that's the biggest problem these days.

I mean, even in fire departments, police departments, there are people that are super fit and they resent the people who are out of shape. And I remember when I had to get elbow surgery years ago, and one of the guys who was getting rehab for his shoulder was a fireman here in Vegas. And he told me he wouldn't trust half the guys he worked with to save them. And I was just like, that is pathetic.

Have we become mediocre? We're based on a meritocracy. So really, my philosophy is like, all right, I have the tools to one, get you off of pain meds unless you have something severe, you know, I have the tools to get you to move better never. I have the tools to really incredibly raise your self-esteem to make you realize how capable you are.

And, you know, I, for me, one of the things that inspires me the most was that whole JFK initiative that challenged in 1962 when you had the last year of high school in California. I think there was a bunch of hundreds of other high schools. And these high schools were insanely fit, you know, they're climbing the pegboards, climbing ropes, you know, doing human flags, doing like the hardest, you know, Bruce Lee type pushups, you know, doing these crazy parallel bars that look, they went up at an angle of diamond. I mean, it was amazing, but it's just like, why aren't we like that?

Yeah. And for me, this is just, I know this is my own little philosophy here, but it's like, people don't mess with countries where people are friggin fit. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. That's the truth.

But we're an easy target because people can't even get out of their own way. You know, I mean, if you think about it, look at the Romans, they're kicking ass, taking names, but they got sacked twice by the Oscar Goss and the Visigoths and like 410 or 455. And they conveniently made Christianity their religion at 457 and then Rome fell in 476. So it's interesting all these, I just looked, I'm a big behaviorless, but I just look at all these things that are happening like, Oh, life's so easy.

And I'm supposed to be that way. And one thing I saw the other day, which I loved, and I've been sharing this with my son. And it talked about there are two kinds of pain. There's the pain of discipline and there's a pain of regret.

And so often people are always like, Oh, I wish I'd done that. Wish I'd done that. Yeah. Because you didn't have the pain of discipline.

And maybe it doesn't have to be pain or whatever, but it's literally it's that. Are you disciplined to do it? And so for me, the biggest thing I want to impart is like, you know, like with the SWAT guys, it was a classic example. They were like, this was awesome.

Thank you for helping us. And I love helping them. They were great guys. And they said, Hey, can you train all the other SWAT guys?

Can you train all the Metro? I was like, I'd love to. So they go to some administrator and some administrator jerk off says, well, is he part of SWAT? Yeah.

So so often the people that are going to help you, you know, if you want to improve your society, you don't look within your society, you go to societies around the world and you see who's kicking ass and taking names. I mean, look what the Japanese did. They were close for 250 years. Admiral Perry sales in there in 1853, they had a choice.

They could get subjugated like China and basically become an opinionated state, right? Because England said we got to create, we have this trade imbalance. We need to sell them opium, but we can't sell it in England because it's a dangerous drug or they could send emissaries around the world what they did and catch up and find all the ways to improve their economy, their governments and everything. And that put them on like, you know, if you think about it, it was 35 year, well, actually 40 year waiting streak until obviously we have the bottom, but you know, it's all I'm saying is like, I don't know what frustrates me is there isn't that thing of like, well, how do we improve things?

Yeah, we think things are okay. And I'm like, I just feel like I know I'm an idealist about this, but why does it have to be an idealist? Why can't it be a reality? Why can't we get everybody into the best shape of their lives?

It'll take care of all the depression, all anxieties, PTSD's, all that stuff and we'll be competitive in the world because we'll be able to do a lot of our own work. I know I went off in a little tangent there, but those are some of my thoughts. No, I totally appreciate it. And ironically, it's the perfect segue to wrap it up because after all of that, I mean, where I started this conversation is that you're seeing things from a different perspective.

I don't know if I started that way, but it came up. You're seeing things from a different perspective that's working on bodies, but you're seeing things from a different perspective and oftentimes broader perspective. And it's something that is, I'm sure I was reading a thing. I went to Duke undergrad and I just got the Duke magazine and there's a whole bunch of stuff going on in the brain research world over there.

But partly what they've done is they brought in people who know nothing about brains. And it's just by having people who are coming in from the outside, you're just getting a different perspective and something's going to trigger something in someone's mind that wouldn't have happened if it was just a bunch of people who all knew the same thing. And that's a really valuable situation to be in that doesn't happen often enough. And you're just one of those people who brings in all these things into a way that turns into the work that you're doing that's helping people.

And that's the simplest thing. In fact, you don't even need to say all the rest of it, but it's part of what you're doing and part of who you are. And that's why you've been able to be helpful. So on that note, if people want to get in touch with you or find out more about what you've been doing or how they can experience what we've been talking about, how can they do that?

Well, people are welcome to email me directly because I always like to communicate with people that way. And my email is just simple. It's just my initials, S BH Fitness at gmail.com. So it's my name is Stephen Bigelow-Homeson.

I just use my initials. I use fitness and it's a Gmail. S BH is a Gmail, perfect. And that's the easiest way.

And fortunately, one of my good friends is Tony Wharton and he created a platform, his version of Beachbody, which has allowed trainers like me to get my information up there. And I'm really happy that my program movement IQ has gotten so many people out of pain, helped a lot of runners, IT band issues, helped somebody avoid foot surgery, numerous other things and helped people allow them to do plyometrics without their knee-serting. So for me, I just love having platforms so I can get my information out just to help people. That's really my prime directive.

And so if people reach out to you, then you can point them to Tony's thing if that seems like your perfect thing to do or wherever else. So I'll let them reach out to you and take it from there. I have mixed feelings. I'm hoping you get overwhelmed.

I hope you don't get overwhelmed. So suffice it to say, I know you're one of the handful of people who I know can be helpful for many, many people. So I hope they do take advantage of you giving out your email address and don't turn it into some crazy span thing. So anyway, Steve, as always, a total total pleasure.

And thank you so much. And for everybody else, thank you for being part of this conversation. A quick reminder again, when you get a chance go over to our website at jointhemovementmovement.com, and find out all the pre-find the previous episodes, find places you can interact with us on social media. And if you have any requests or questions or comments or complaints or people you think should be on the show, including people who might think I have a case of cranial rectal reorientation syndrome, which will be a pleasure, but no one's ever taken me up on that offer, you can drop me an email as well.

I'm at move, M-O-V-E at jointhemovementmovement.com. And until next time, just go out, have fun, and live life-feet first.