Hello, and welcome to the RBI Performance Podcast. I am Dr. Blair Bundy, and I'm joined by my co-host, Dr. Stephen Reinley. Stephen, what's up, buddy? How's it going, Blair? Doing good, man. Ready to get started with you. We've been talking about this podcast for about a year now, so it's going to be good to kind of get rolling. Absolutely. It's been long overdue. Well, this being our introductory podcast, I figured we should give the listeners a chance to kind of figure out who we are, what makes us tick, kind of what our background is. So I'm going to kick it up a little Q&A. How's that sound for you? Sounds awesome. Let's get to it. All right, buddy. So my first question for you, Stephen, is why did you become a healthcare provider?
How deep do you want to dive into the weeds on that? Let's get deep. All right, let's do it. So this all kind of started for me in high school. I was a junior going into my senior year. I was out in the outfield in a meaningless summer league baseball game, and I was doing a little long toss, getting warmed up to do some pitching, and I felt a little funny tweak in my right elbow. At the time, I didn't think much of it, but decided I would, you know, let's summer ball. You rub a little dirt on it, and we'd go from there and decided to get into the game and pitch. Well, I walked away from that game not feeling so hot. My elbow started hurting, and that kind of put me on the path going forward.
to where we are here tonight. To make a long story short, not drag it out too far. I got kind of bounced around the system a little bit. I went and saw my general practice doc shot some x-rays. Nothing was found. I went and saw a PT and chiropractor. Chiropractor popped my neck, told me everything would be okay. Nothing changed, of course. Physical therapist gave me a handful of exercises. Nothing really changed there either. Nobody was kind of addressing maybe what needed to be done. I was having some soft tissue problems, and just through studying and learning about the body, I've come to find out I most likely had a flexor or pronator strain, which is kind of a precursor potentially to a Tommy John, just depending on how it goes from there. So I took off about six months and wasn't really getting any better.
It was to the point where just resting my arm on my center console and my old Explorer was not comfortable. And I tried everything from gadgets, which I still have to strengthen that part of my arm, to TheraBands, to ice, heat, anti-inflammatories, rice buckets, all sorts of crazy gadgets. And nothing really helped me for the longest time. And then I had a friend on the team say, hey, why don't you go see this guy I called a voodoo doctor? And he was a massage therapist, did some great work, but essentially had a muscle injury and it needed some soft tissue release. So I went and saw this guy. He helped me out a ton. After one session, I was back throwing.
about 80% pain-free. And after a couple more sessions, I was feeling so much better. And that got me, that really got me interested in this world. I thought to myself, well, some simple soft tissue work just got ignored. Think of how many other kids, how many other players are not getting that type of advice. And if I could get out there and broadcast some of those ideas and save some kids from, you know, taking off six months of time from training, from playing in the fall, that's if you're going into your senior season, the time to get recruited, to go play Juco ball, to go play division one ball, division two. And then, you know, in the spring kind of, it's whoever's left over goes to the smaller schools.
That summer I had been clocked in the mid to upper 80s, anywhere from 85, 86, 87 consistently. So I had a real shot at playing some college baseball. I wasn't just some guy throwing 78, 81 miles an hour. So that kind of foiled those plans because although the soft tissue work was great, I didn't have anybody there to kind of put me back together from a rehabilitation standpoint. I had adapted just trying to throw around pain. This cockamamie, really strange throwing pattern where my ball was way up over my head because that's the only way I could throw without my elbow killing me and just never regained. I lost my command. I got...
Kind of all up in my head on throwing the ball. I used to get commented on all the time because I also played second base. I would throw sliders to the first baseman to throw guys out. Like just things just didn't feel right. And although my arm after getting some treatment with this soft tissue guy was better, I was still in a bad spot. So that's what kind of drove me to get into the healthcare world. I got into college. I got really interested in strength, conditioning, and fitness. Wanted to use that to my advantage because I was no longer pitching. But I was hitting a lot of doubles. And I was leading the team in doubles as a freshman in college. And I wanted to turn those doubles into home runs. So between my sophomore year at Mary Harden Baylor, where I played college baseball.
Through my senior year, I put on about 30 pounds. All natural. No extra help there. Just lots of eating and lifting and being committed to a plan and working hard. So those are the big highs and lows of kind of what provoked me to become interested in this world. Kind of some of the reasons why I want to broadcast my message out there to the world and just help some kids and some players avoid some of these unnecessary injuries. Or if you do get dinged up, let's make sure you're getting good information and that you can get back as quick as you can. So that sums up kind of where I'm coming from. Blair, give us a shout. How did you get started in all this?
You know, I got a pretty similar story to you, Stephen. I grew up playing a lot of sports, but baseball was always my biggest passion. Had a huge drive for it. Played a little outfield, played a little pitch. You know, I loved the feeling of being out there on the mound and going to a tote with guys. That was a blast for me. And so, you know, one rainy night in my junior year of high school, I kind of felt a pop in my elbow during inter-squad. You know, tried to kind of do some conservative care, some non-operative stuff. Did some rehab, you know, rested a little bit. No dice. Didn't really feel any better. So I went into my senior year, played some football, no issues. You know, just kind of figured I'd wing it, play my senior year, maybe throw a little outfield and see what happened. And, you know, same thing. Had another elbow pop. That time it was for real. Went and saw the doc and got my own, got my very own surgical scar. Got a little Tommy John surgery.
Tore the ulnar collateral ligament in my right elbow and went through quite an extensive process for rehabilitation. And went to the University of Mary Hart and Baylor where I met Steven. We got to hang out, got to spend some late nights talking performance, talking rehab, talking just, you know, talking baseball. We both loved baseball. We both loved the performance aspect of it. And I think that's kind of what has driven this relationship in the past couple of years. But, you know, when I was playing ball at UMHB, I kind of got very into the rehab stuff. I had some great therapists I work with. Really seemed passionate about what they were doing. They seemed like they were having a lot of fun at their job. And so I kind of went the pre-physical therapy route and I got lucky, man. It worked out.
Got into PT school. When I got done with that, I ended up getting to pursue some internships with some pretty high-level guys in the athletic realm, sports therapy realm, who do some rehab with overhead athletes. I worked out with Todd Ellenbecker out there in Scottsdale, Arizona. I worked with some guys down here in Houston. Did a sports medicine or sports physical therapy residency program afterwards. So I got to do like basically spending a year working with some very specialized training, learning how to work with some overhead athletes. Got to do some internships with some pro teams, work with some high-level guys all the way down to high school guys and kind of see what the difference looked like.
To be frank, man, it's been a blast ever since. I've been very fortunate in my career to not only get to learn from some very good therapists, but also now I have the opportunity to work with some high-level athletes of my own. So most of my day-to-day practice is spent treating kids who are overhead athletes, and also I see a good mix of knees and elbows as well. But lots of baseball kids are in my schedule right now, and it's fun because I'm hoping that for these kids I can hopefully save them from going the same route I did. Hopefully they can kind of work with me a bit, get a routine, and get out of there and avoid going under the knife.
Well, Steven, that kind of wraps up our story about a healthcare provider. We both played a little baseball growing up. So what would you say is your best baseball memory? That's a good question. Maybe...
I would say my biggest or best baseball memory probably comes from just actually being off the field. I finished up playing baseball in 2008 at Mary Harden Baylor, and I stayed on there that year to run the strength and conditioning program, which was a lot of fun, going from teammate to coach, if you will, in a matter of a couple of months. But that fall, that was the last year old Yankee Stadium existed. And I remember having this conversation with my dad. I called him up.
some night in august and i said dad um i don't know if i can live with myself if we don't at least try our best to get up there and catch a game it's just such a historic site let's let's look into it so i was a college kid broke as a joke um and my dad at the time just was not able to take off a bunch of time from work it was just not good timing in his life so we concocted this um super in hindsight super fun plan at the time it was it was fun exhilarating but exhausting we uh flew out on a tuesday morning at like 6 6 30 out of austin bergstrom and uh Got into New York. Neither one of us had been to New York before. We're flying into...
I think LaGuardia, which is just a nightmare. And so we fly in there and we're coming down in the skyline and I've never seen a city this big or developed. And it's, you know, everything I'm used to is Dallas or Houston where everything's spread out for miles and miles and miles. And it's just, it's just a cool setting. It's a cool site. And my dad and I are both juiced and we get off the plane and we go in for a little cafe lunch, a little New York style pizza, a little cheesecake, you know, doing a whole New York thing. And we decide, you know, we're going to walk to Times Square, check that out a little bit, just kind of make it a deal, jump on the subway and then take the subway down to Yankee Stadium. And, you know, you're walking into.
the baseball cathedral I mean there's only a handful of parks in Major League Baseball that are just special and that's definitely one of them and my dad and I are walking in there my dad is he was born in the 40s and we're him and I are both diehard Cub fans he's never even seen the Cubs win a pennant so you know it's it's special because the game means something to my dad something to me something to father and son I think that's why so many fathers and sons gravitate and you know latch on to baseball because it's something you can share together so we sat up in the nosebleeders for some crazy outrageous amount of money for a ticket and watched uh you know Derek Jeter play Alex Rodriguez at the time they were still doing Alex Rodriguez, even though he was a Yankee, um, and talked with the locals and you could just taste and smell baseball in the air. Um, people in front of you, they were, they were talking about the game. Um, and they were just Joe Smokes, you know, they, it's not like going to a minute made or up there in ballpark in Arlington. Those are great venues, but it, the place just reeked and dripped.
of baseball in history, and it was so cool. After that, we went back to, we caught the latest bus out of New York City down to LaGuardia and slept on the floor and flew out the next morning at 6 a.m. I got back and made it to work the next day. So we were in New York for all of 19, 20 hours, I think, after I counted it up, and it was such a fantastic time. And for baseball, I don't see how it gets any better than that, from seeing Yankee Stadium before it gets torn down, catching a game, spending time with your pops. That would have to be my greatest baseball memory. Kicking it over to Blair.
Let's go ahead and find out what your baseball, your favorite memory is. You're making me feel jealous, man. I never got to go to the stadium. So I'm kind of sitting here like, dang, I missed on that. I don't know if I have any one particular memory, man, that just sticks out to me. I think the biggest thing that I miss or the biggest thing that I remember and have the most vivid memories from is just all the time spent with your teammates, whether it be riding the bus, you know, screwing around at the hotels on road trips, you know, playing in the, you know, kind of hanging on the dugout, you know, playing flips before a game or just, you know, working in the off season. But I think just all the times spent with the teammates and just kind of, just kind of growing as team. And you just kind of, you know, you have a lot of good quality male bonding time.
It's just fun, man. I miss that feeling of just a shared experience like that. I think that would be the thing that I have the most vivid memories from. And I'd say I still kind of miss the most. That, to me, is kind of what sticks out the most, honestly. All right, man. So the last thing I kind of want to ask you is, you know, in your day-to-day practice, how are you still involved with baseball players?
In a whole bunch of different ways. I kind of have a unique setting. So I'm classically trained as a chiropractor. So that kind of gives me direct access to all sorts of things. In my day-to-day practice, I see a mix from baseball players because I do some work with a local high school and a baseball academy here in Austin, Texas. And also, you know, I go out and from time to time speak at booster club events or what have you. And, you know, I get the here and there baseball player that just randomly makes it to our office. But I also do some coaching. I also do a little injury prevention work. I also am kind of involved from a strength conditioning standpoint.
You, Blair, might be more involved with post-Hommy John. That's really not my world. I wasn't trained as a physical therapist and don't pretend to be one. But I do spend time with baseball players from an injury prevention standpoint. I spend a lot of time using the functional movement screen or the selective functional movement assessment or the movement screening tool from the Titleist Performance Institute. And all of these are just...
evaluation tools, if you will, to check for muscular imbalance or if a tissue or joint or movement pattern is ready for loading or if it's ready for going fast or training. There's some evidence that shows that these things have a little bit of correlation to preventing injury, although the evidence is still in its infancy and highly disputed. But like anything that's new and coming on the scene and has some promise, people are talking about it. And from my experience, I think it matters. I go out to a local high school here in the Austin, Texas area and work with those kids.
do their movement evaluations. It's pared down. It's mostly getting ready to see if we're fit for squatting, deadlifting, pushing and pulling weight, building a more robust and injury-prevented frame. Outside of that, we check some shoulder range of motion with our baseball kids. We also work with the kids down at this baseball academy here in Austin, Texas, and I supply their initial movement assessment based on what they're doing at their baseball academy from their training program standpoint.
And do some speaking down there to try to get parents and kids educated on the value of taking care of your body, just like you would take care of your teeth or take care of your cardiovascular health. And there's specific parameters that fall inside the baseball athlete that we want to check from shoulder range of motion to the rotator cuff strength to proper core and hip control and those types of things. And we'll definitely dive into that in later pods. But from a practice standpoint, those are the big things outside of just my day-to-day treatment with soft tissue manipulation. dry needling or Graston, ART, corrective exercise, those types of things. From a more direct in the trenches baseball standpoint, I spend time for the last six years coaching the American Legion up at a local high school as well. We get about eight, nine crazy weeks where we play two or three nights a week, smashing some double headers. I kiss my wife goodbye in the morning at six, don't get home till 11 or 12 o'clock at night, just going mad dash. And by the time it's done, I'm done, but I'm excited. I got to impact 13 to 17 kids a couple of nights a week, talk to them about being young men, talk to them about baseball, get them ready for the challenges that lie before them.
share some of my knowledge. And that's why I go out there and do that. That's for me is not to sit there and watch a kid throw and analyze and break down every little bit of it because there's a time and place for that. But we're out there to be, we're out there to be guys and we're out there for me to act as a role model and kind of be a positive influence in these kids' lives. So I get a couple of different angles from injury prevention to rehab to strength and conditioning with a baseball program here in the fall where I get to consult and shed some light on which exercises are good at this time and how to periodize that and throw in when we should do power, when we should do strength, et cetera. So I just have a very varied experience, very unique.
perspective on some of those things. And I think it kind of makes me a Swiss army knife to some degree without getting over-specialized. And if I need an over-specialization, I call Blair Bundy. that's what i'm here for man i'm here to here to solve problems that's right um so yeah man i think that that's a pretty diverse uh kind of diverse skill set you have there as well you know i definitely i'm a classically trained physical therapist i'm a dpt i'm a board certified specialist in sports physical therapy i work at the houston methodist for center for sports medicine orthopedics and so i have a pretty good practice a pretty good balance of patients who are you know got the general back pain neck pain acls things like that but i would say that the majority of my caseload right now is actually overhead throwing athletes and I'm pretty fortunate to work in a position where the physicians I work along with trust me to handle their post-operative cases. And so I do have quite a few of your Tommy John kids on my schedule, your rotator cuff, your internal impingement, all sorts of different kinds of various orthopedic injuries that you see with throwers. I get to kind of help. And anywhere from the non-op kid who maybe has a little bit of a growth plate thing going on, a little league elbow, get to do some education, teach an arm care program, all the way to UCL repairs who were with me for the long haul. We were there from the day where we just kind of do some range of motion stuff for their elbow all the way to where we complete their throwing program.
It's fun, man. I really do enjoy working with baseball kids. I'm pretty lucky when the clinic I work at has about a 200-foot throwing lane. I get to go outside a little bit, play catch. Kids come in, throw some flat grounds, throw some mound work, put the gear on, get to catch the kids. It's fun, man. Not many guys get to say they play catch at work, and I get to say that. I'm very blessed with the position I've been put in. It's fun, man. I really do enjoy talking to kids about their mechanics, talking to kids about their mindset when they pick up a ball to throw again.
It's good having a scar on my elbow because I can talk to kids and be like, hey, man, I know what you're going through. I know this part of rehab sucks. It gets better, I promise. And it's good to kind of be able to talk a kid through the throwing program and what to expect, all sorts of things like that. It's given me a huge...
ability to kind of impact a kid and hope that they can avoid the same type of road I went down. And if that's just by teaching them some arm care exercises, teaching them a way to kind of warm up and cool down, giving them a routine to kind of get involved in, whatever it is. I had some great PTs in my life who really impacted me from a performance standpoint. And I'm just trying to do this as best I can to provide the same level of care as they did for me. Well, Stephen, that kind of sums up my private practice. So the last thing I kind of want to ask you is, you know, what do you hope to accomplish with this podcast? Short and simple, I would say
I really want to just get good information out there. That's always kind of been my driving purpose. You and I spend a lot of time, whether text or drinking a bourbon or something and just BSing while our wives talk about whatever's at Pottery Barn or whatever the case is going on. You and I just, we always are kind of tinkering with things. I send you my latest genre of a baseball assessment and you tear it apart and tell me good things and bad things about it. And then you send me something and I talk to you and give you some insight and good things and bad things about this. And so the last year we've just kind of been, you know, bouncing ideas off each other and kind of came to fruition about.
five or six months ago, Hey, we should, uh, we should just put it on the internet. We should talk to a microphone and just get this stuff out here. It doesn't need to just go to waste and get evaporated. And if I'm only working with that one patient and then you're only working with that one patient that we're bouncing ideas off of, it only affects one person. And, uh, it's kind of a slow trickle down effect then. And we're not really making a great impact. So my purpose, my, my, my, uh, what do I hope to accomplish? So to speak is let's get some good information out there. Um, I've got just like you piles and piles of research articles on my desk and books that I've read and courses I've attended.
experience in the trenches and um if that can get out there and serve a purpose to help a coach to help a kid to help a parent or another practitioner that maybe is just diving into this world or maybe someone's getting spot that's getting inspired to make a change um i think that would ultimately be the greatest benefit is helping someone that could use this information but the barrier was just not sharing it and to me that's that's not acceptable because knowing what i know now i would have changed a handful of things for sure in my own playing career and how i would have gone about it what coaches i may or may not have i would always listen to a coach and respect them but may or may not have kind of had some of those things going one ear and out the other um because we all don't we just we all don't know it all and if we all work together and share ideas this thing continues to evolve and keeps getting better so just imparting good information that's where i'm at how about you blair what do you hope to accomplish with our podcast how come when you send stuff to me i'm the guy who tears it down i can't just be like a positive guy in your life and what's up it's that beard oh come on oh man so i guess my my hopes and dreams for this podcast uh i just you know we like like steven mentioned about we talk about this stuff and i think we both have a passion for it you know we've described this before as a passion project for both of us and
If we can reach one kid, one mom, one dad, one coach, one PT, one Cairo, anybody, one person who can make a difference in a kid's life and prevent that kid from having an injury, maybe get that kid on a better track for performance, help that kid do a better job, you know, taking care of his body, taking care of his mind, anything. If we can have a positive impact on a kid's life, I want to do it. I know that I had some great guys I worked with growing up who did some things right for me, and I had some guys I worked with who probably didn't have my best interest at heart. And if we can do the one thing and just kind of help educate and show what that looks like, I think that's really the big goal. You know, I'm big on...
challenging the status quo. I definitely want to look at some things that are out there as kind of, oh, you know, we've always done it this way. It's always worked for us. I really don't think that's an acceptable thing to believe or say anymore. I think that you always need to be searching for how can we make this better? How can we improve this? And if you look at the current climate and the state of baseball with injuries, with the gurus out there, I think there's some room for improvement and people need to be held accountable. And this is not going to be a witch hunt podcast, but it's going to be a podcast where we have some honest discussions and occasionally we might challenge some sacred cows, maybe some challenge some beliefs out there that might make some people uncomfortable. But I would have hoped that people would have done this for me growing up and I hope to do the same for you guys out there.
All right, Stephen. Blair. Blair, what is a sacred cow? A sacred cow. I think it's a...
Well, without getting too religious about it, I want to say there's a religion that does hold cows sacred. And it's a turn of phrase, perhaps? Not sure. Yeah. I like that. It's just, you know, kind of like talking about, you know, you have to ice your arm after you throw. You have to throw a long toss in the offseason. You have to do this. You have to do that. There's a lot of things out there that we do it because we've always done it. And I don't know if that's always the best way to go about this stuff. And I just want to have some honest discussions about it. Are you telling me all those polls I ran in high school were useless? I don't know, man. I had some good times on those polls. Oh, that'll be another episode. I've already got a big gold green on my face. Oh, yeah.
I think that's the big thing that both of us want to do, though, is these discussions we've been having in private through text or phone calls, like Steven mentioned, we just want to get it out there. And we invite you, the listener, to engage us and discuss with us. We've got some social media accounts out there. We've got an email address. Anything that you guys have for us to get in touch with us, you can get in touch. And Steven, do you have that stuff for the listener? I do. So the social media stuff is going to be at RBI Performance. That's our Twitter handle. You can always email us. And we would love questions, ideas, anything towards what you want to hear on our podcast.
It's about the people out there that need this information. We're definitely doing this because we enjoy it, but we're just going to go off our menu of stuff that we've decided that was a good talking point. But if we got listeners out there that really are harping on a specific thing, let's do it. We can definitely bump that up the list. So please use these social media contacts. And then the email address is the RBI performance podcast at gmail.com. And then we also have the RBI performance podcast on Instagram. So you shouldn't have any trouble finding that stuff. We will eventually have a full blown website. We're just kind of getting the ground going on this deal. So look for that stuff. We're going to definitely have a Facebook page coming at some.
point in the near future. Kids love Facebook, Steven. They love it. We probably need a Snapchat if we're going to get down to what's, you know, the nitty gritty at this age. But I don't know what one step at a time. I don't either. And they do crazy things with your face. I'm still trying to figure out how that would affect a podcast. But apparently the kids love it. That's right. So I think most of the people will be listening to this are going to be parents and coaches. And so I think I think Facebook and I want to call it the Facebook because that's how it was when we started. But I think Facebook is going to be the way to go. And Twitter, of course. But in all seriousness, please, please contact us. Help us get this thing going. People that are out there listening, retweet us, like us.
put us a, a reasonable rating on iTunes, you know, five stars, we would definitely send you positive vibes, but whatever the case may be, um, help us get the word out. And, uh, if we suck, we'll get better. That's great, man. We definitely will get better. No, no doubt about that. All right, buddy. Good talking to you, man. We've got some good things planned for the season. I'm looking, I'm really looking forward to it. The signing off for now. I'm Blair Bundy. This is Steven Riley. And we will talk to you guys soon.