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FC2O Episode 5 - Paul Chek (Part 1)
53 Plays5 years ago
Paul Chek has a reputation for working with medical failures; featuring in the autobiographies of many sports stars who he has coached through a rehabilitation process, or has trained to realise their potential in their sport. He has produced more than 100 videos and developed a 4-year training program for health & fitness professionals; written 11 books; and runs a highly popular podcast Living 4D with Paul Chek.
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Transcript
Introduction and Early Life
00:00:00
Speaker
You know, it's a very, very full on, you know, a full bone working farm like that requires a tremendous skill set. So it gave me a grounding in nature and responsibility and learning how biological systems work. So that really set the basis. And then my mother being a yogi and very, very, both my parents being very holistic, um, set the tone for the rest of my life, really.
00:00:27
Speaker
By the time I was 16, I had more skills than most professionals do. Yeah, yeah, right. And so how about your formal education? Just give us a brief rundown of what happened at school and where that led. Well, my dad liked to tell his friends that I always got A's for outstanding in the hall.
00:00:57
Speaker
water
00:01:17
Speaker
Welcome to FC2.0 with me, Matt Walden and my guest today, Paul Chek. I first saw Paul speak in 1997 and I recognised straight away that he was a unique thinker and a highly intelligent man, although as a recent graduate he seemed rather under qualified for my liking.
00:01:34
Speaker
I next went to see him speak in 2001 when he was in the UK and at this point I realised he was not only a leading thinker in human biomechanics rehabilitation and integrated performance conditioning but also was and is to this day the most holistic speaker I've ever seen present.
00:01:52
Speaker
He incorporates a deep understanding of human nutrition, lifestyle, physical, emotional, mental and spiritual factors into his teachings and practices. But it doesn't stop there. Aside from being a great teacher, Paul developed a reputation for working on medical failures, elite athletes that had been medically retired, ex-games athletes who had suffered career-ending neurological damage, and extreme medical cases, from those with diabetes to those with cancer and many other complex conditions.
00:02:20
Speaker
How does Paul achieve these seemingly impossible feats?
Paul Chek's Hobbies and Philosophies
00:02:23
Speaker
Well, he doesn't treat the disease that has the person, he coaches the person that has the disease. Paul features in the autobiographies of many sport stars who is coached through a rehabilitation process or is trained to realise their potential in their sports.
00:02:38
Speaker
He's produced more than 100 videos and developed a four-year training program for health and fitness professionals. He's written 11 books, including the best-selling How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy. And he now runs a highly popular podcast, Living 4D with Paul Chek, which I'm honored to have been featured on once and soon to be twice. So that's great. So now the tables are turned and I'm interviewing Paul.
00:03:03
Speaker
Paul is a trained neuromuscular therapist, a holistic health practitioner and a licensed medicine man. In his spare time, if you can imagine that he has any, he likes to paint, to lift weights, including some very heavy rocks and awkward to lift rocks to create rock art.
00:03:19
Speaker
and he likes to meditate in particular in his infrared sauna. So that's a snapshot of Paul. I could go on, of course, but enough of this introduction. Let's let Paul tell you about how the journey he took to finally reach this incredible level of accomplishment unfolded. Hope you enjoy the show. Here we go.
00:03:45
Speaker
So welcome to FC2.0, my new podcast with me, Matt Walden, and with my guest today, Paul Chek. So, Paul, welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Congratulations on your new podcast. I'm excited for you. I think that you'll have a lot of great stuff to share with a wide, wide variety of professionals and people. So it's exciting to share.
00:04:07
Speaker
Definitely, definitely. I'm looking forward to it. So obviously the theme for the podcast is attempting to find order from the chaos. And I know that you've experienced your fair share of chaos in your life, but also that you probably made or managed to find more order than most in a wide array of different fields. And one of the things that I talk about in the preview is that in any field of study,
00:04:34
Speaker
or any field of experience in life that we often start out in a relatively chaotic state we don't really know what's what and we gradually make sense of it as we expose ourselves to new stimuli and to new information and so on and you know as i say you have done that in many different fields but i thought what i'd like to start with is a bit of a kind of
00:04:56
Speaker
Well, in fact, I thought the whole theme would just run through your life so people understand how you've made sense of things in life and particularly in your career.
Farm Life and Skills Development
00:05:05
Speaker
But I know you started out living on a farm in quite a challenging environment. So do you want to just give us a brief rundown of your upbringing? Well, you know, it's a long story, which, you know, has been told a thousand times. So I'll kind of just keep it simple. My father,
00:05:26
Speaker
My original, my real birth father and my mother departed the company when I was very young, probably around three or earlier than that. He drowned when I was eight and my mother married another man who was a special effects man at Universal Studios, but also had a degree in agriculture and they wanted to move to Vancouver Island to start a sheep farm. And so in 72, we immigrated to Vancouver Island
00:05:57
Speaker
My parents got 142 acre sheep farm. And so we imported sheep. My father brought select sheep that were specifically known to breed well to produce black wool. And so we basically ran a woolen factory and we had, you know, usually around, I'm guessing around 100 to 120 sheep that were specific for the woolen industry.
00:06:26
Speaker
And we also had our own produce. We raised and sold produce. We sold firewood and we had horses, cows, chickens, pigs. You know, it was a full blown working farm and we pretty much lived off the farm. Rarely did my parents get too much from the store.
00:06:53
Speaker
We made our own bread, our own cheese, our own butter from the cows. We milked our own cows, our own ice cream. So I kind of got raised in an environment that was sort of by today's standards, very old fashioned, but it gave me a real solid understanding of the interactions between nature and life and the importance of, you know,
00:07:23
Speaker
following the seasons, interacting with the animals. And it gave me a real strong sense of responsibility and discipline because on a farm, if you screw shit up, it costs you a lot of money and animals can die and plants can die. So it gave me a grounding in nature, in responsibility and learning how biological systems work. So that really set the
00:07:51
Speaker
basis and then my mother being a yogi and very very both my parents being very holistic um set the tone for the rest of my life really yeah yeah and what was it like this sort of environment in terms of um you know something went wrong on the farm presumably you know you had to fix it you had to find solutions and i'm sure there were other people that could come in and help for very specialist things but i imagine and have heard from other people that have grown up in farming environments that they
00:08:19
Speaker
they really need to be kind of jack of all trades and need to be able to fix fences and fix motors and do all kinds of different things that the average person on the street might call in a builder or a mechanic or an electrician. What was your experience on that front? Did you have to get quite practical?
00:08:40
Speaker
Constantly, my father is a very, very skilled tradesman. He used to be an underwater welder and blaster and worked on stunts for Universal Studios on many major movies. And he had tremendous mechanical knowledge. He was also very good at making stained glass windows. In fact, he is quite famous on Venkarel. He built an entire restaurant without using any nails.
00:09:07
Speaker
He used the old style peg system. All the wood came from our farm and he cut it with a chainsaw. So he milled all the wood with the chainsaw. But yes, we had tractors, we had balers, we had furrows and rakes.
00:09:29
Speaker
A farm has a lot of equipment. By the time I was probably 16, I was very skilled at welding. I went to trade school when I was 18 to become a mechanic and got my training in that. I built my own race car engines, my own roll cages. I understood the basics of all the systems on a farm. We had electric fences.
00:09:58
Speaker
There's a lot of systems and you have to be pretty functional at everything from building fences to clearing land to even using dynamite to blast stumps to a lot plus a lot of work with veterinarians. I learned a lot just by being there with cows and they would eat barbed wire and weird stuff and get sick. We had castration and shearing sheep and
00:10:26
Speaker
It's a very, very full on, a full bone working farm like that requires a tremendous skill set. My mother's a spinner and a weaver and a sculptor and a crafts woman. It's a full blown deal. By the time I was 16, I had more skills than most professionals do.
00:10:49
Speaker
Yeah, right. And so how about your formal education? Just give us a brief rundown of what happened at school and where that led. Well, my dad liked to tell his friends that I always got A's for outstanding in the hall. Excellent. Very good. You know, I hated school. The only thing I liked was metalwork, auto mechanics, biology, and physical education. And I typically got
00:11:16
Speaker
A's and A's or B's, biology, I would get a B now and then. But I got A's in everything I enjoyed and I got D's and F's in everything that I didn't enjoy because I just had no interest in it. So I never did homework. I hated reading. I actually, I think you know the story. I never read a book cover to cover until I was 21, which was a nutrition, a holistic approach by Rudolph Valentine, which I finished on an army bus on the way home from a 10 mile race at the Pentagon.
00:11:46
Speaker
Oh, well. And you've been making up for it ever since, haven't you? Yeah. You read more books than the most these days. Yeah. So I left school. I only the first three months of the 10th grade and I left school just because my girlfriend got pregnant and I had to go out into the work world and make things happen. So.
Career Beginnings and Innovations
00:12:03
Speaker
So what age is that, Paul? I think I was 16. And, you know, it's turned out to be the greatest blessing of my life because I quickly learned as I emerged
00:12:16
Speaker
into the adult world that most people could not solve problems at all. On many, many different crews of different types of many different jobs I did, I ended up being the guy that was always solving the problems and it used to freak people out because they're like, how can this young guy figure all his shit out? And I used to look at them going, how come you can't figure it out? It's pretty common sense.
00:12:40
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Did you go straight from school into the army or was that with other jobs between- No, no, I had many, many jobs. I worked on exploration and water well rigs. I worked in logging camps. I worked as an auto mechanic, an auto mechanics assistant. Even when I was a kid, I worked in butcher shops, skinning moose and deer and all the animals during hunting season. And a friend of mine's father's butcher shop,
00:13:08
Speaker
I worked as a brick masons apprentice. I worked as a heavy duty mechanic apprentice. I did whatever I had to do to keep food on the table. I joined the army in 83 in Florida and Miami, which I'd gone there because I needed to get out of home because the unemployment rate was wickedly high and I had to feed my family.
00:13:33
Speaker
Being an American, I flew to Florida where a buddy of mine was at, and I got a job on a fishing boat. From there, I joined the military in Miami, Florida. Then that began my career, which led to, I signed up to be in the 82nd Airborne Division because I had a suspicion I may not like the army. I figured I could fight my way onto the army boxing team, which I knew was at the 82nd Airborne Division because I used to watch them on wide wilderness sports all the time.
00:14:04
Speaker
Okay, so I haven't made that connection before. Okay, that's interesting. Yeah. And within, I know that within your training, within the army, you trained as a weapon system repairer. Yeah, I was my MOS military occupational specialist at 68J1P
00:14:22
Speaker
which is I'm the guy that repairs all the weapon systems on Cobra helicopters and I serve as the co-pilot or the gunner. If in a battlefield the co-pilot gets killed, then I'm the only one that knows the intimate details of how to work the weaponry. So I actually would have to step in as the co-pilot's position to control the weapon systems.
00:14:45
Speaker
So I went through- Sorry, I was going to say, is that a little bit electronic? It's an intense amount of electronics. It's very, very intense. I had to spend just under a year in electronic school and to get into electronic school, I had to do eight weeks, eight hours a day of training in math because when you're in school, you have to do everything longhand. You can't use calculators because if you're in a battlefield and stuff gets blown up, you've got to be able to fix the helicopter without aid.
00:15:14
Speaker
It was some of the most intensive training I've ever done. I felt like my brain was melting every day, but I graduated with 97.3% grade average over 26 tests for the entire course. What a slacker. Where did those last couple of percent go? It was terrible. Yeah, it was a bitch. I tied for second with another guy and one of my best buddies beat us.
00:15:40
Speaker
I think there was three tenths of a point separating the first three guys and I was third place. I didn't like it all. Yeah, I bet. So that led you into the US army boxing team as well as part of that journey. Yes. And tell us about the sort of evolution of that little journey.
00:15:59
Speaker
Well, I became a fighter on the army boxing team, but I also represented the army in triathlon. I won the army triathlon. My wife won it too, which was the first time on a husband and wife had ever won a major event like that. But I was going to go full time into triathlon and the boxing team asked me to stay and become the trainer, which allowed me to work with a teen physician who was an osteopath.
00:16:23
Speaker
So I got to spend two years learning how to take care of acute sports injuries. And the boxing gym was also the headquarters for many of the army sports, such as track and field and powerlifting. So I was working with athletes from all sorts of different sports and the team doctor was also working with them. So I implemented sports massage therapy just by studying books and working with the team doctor. And I already had a lot of knowledge of weightlifting.
00:16:52
Speaker
from all my athletic development as a boxer, a motocross racer, and many other sports. I started lifting weights consistently when I was 12 and studied it very intensely. So by the time I got to the boxing team, I already knew more about diet and conditioning than they did. I also used to be an aerobics instructor part-time when I was young. So I had a good background in that approach, which was very helpful for boxing training.
00:17:20
Speaker
And I was in extremely good shape, so I didn't just tell the boxers what to do. I actually led them through all the workouts. And one of the reasons they made me the trainers, because the fighters and the coaches could not figure out for the life of them how I could train five to seven hours a day on the boxing team and still do my triathlon training and still fight hard all three rounds. And my diet approach was radically different. So they knew whatever the hell I had up my sleeve, they needed some of it.
00:17:48
Speaker
Yeah, I was going to ask, you know, what was it? Because obviously, you're in the 82nd Embold Division there with how many thousand people are in that? There's 16,000 paratroopers, at least when I was there, there's 80,000 soldiers on post, but there's 16,000
00:18:04
Speaker
paratroopers. There's gonna be a lot of guys there that know a bit about training, but they wanted you to head up the boxing team. So as you just alluded to, your approach was obviously significantly different, different enough that they knew you had something up your sleeve. And you mentioned nutrition. Do you think that was one of the key things? And what else was it about what you were offering that was different to what all these other guys were doing?
00:18:26
Speaker
Well, one, their approach to nutrition was ridiculous. I won't even bore you with the details, but they were doing stupid stuff like eating spoonfuls of honey between rounds and starving the hell out of themselves and living on McDonald's and drive through food and antiquated, silly, old fashioned ideas. And my conditioning approach was very different because they were all very afraid of weightlifting because there's a long history of boxers and golfers and people like that.
00:18:55
Speaker
losing their speed when they start weightlifting, but they couldn't deny that I had a lot of power and speed. I knocked pretty much everybody I fought out except one guy who was a fourth ranked welterweight in the world at the time. Um, and they all knew from sparring with me that I could hit hard. I broke three bones in sparring sessions of fighters and, and they coaches sort of had to step in because I was the only white guy on an all black and Puerto Rican boxing team. And they were trying to kill me.
00:19:23
Speaker
I wasn't going to just lay there and play dead, so I broke a couple of ribs and a nose or two in reciprocity for my broken ribs and noses. Finally, the coach stepped in and said, all right, you guys better quit hassling this guy because if you haven't noticed, he's beating the shit out of you too. Yeah, right. Where did the sports massage come in? Because I know you said you'd had some background in massage, but you
00:19:47
Speaker
When did you do the neuromuscular therapy training? Well, what happened was I was in so much physical exhaustion from training for two sports at once. My grandmother used to massage me when I was a kid. I had bad asthma and she could take the asthma away with massage, which always blew my mind.
00:20:05
Speaker
So I got to the point where I was so sore, I just literally begged my wife to just massage me any way she could. And I immediately noticed a significant difference in my recovery rate and how better I felt. So I bought a book at the time, the guy that wrote the book became one of my best buddies, Rich Fay, who was Nike's elite athlete massage therapist hired by Nike and worked for them.
00:20:33
Speaker
He wrote this amazing book called Sports Massage. And so I just started studying it. And I intuitively knew that I could help the boxers with massage. So I kind of just picked up my grandmother's vibration and combined the techniques of reading Rich Fay's book. And that actually took me a hell of a long ways. And just through studying all sorts of stuff and applying it right on the job, the results were so phenomenal it blew the team doctor's mind.
00:21:02
Speaker
After one year, they record every injury and how many fights are lost. I think the first year, the year before I came there, there was something like 43 missed fights due to injuries, and this is 30 fighters.
00:21:23
Speaker
And it went down to three after the first year I implemented my coaching strategies and massage therapy and the team doctor was just blown away. And so were the athletes. And so he just said, whatever the hell you're doing, just keep doing it. Fantastic. Fantastic. So did you do the NMT training with Paul St. John after you left the army? Yes, I started that in 86. I left the army in October 86 and drove directly to
00:21:49
Speaker
San Diego entered into sports massage therapy school and shortly thereafter started my neuromuscular therapy training and completed the entire series of five workshops and did my testing in 86 or actually no
00:22:06
Speaker
somewhere maybe a little later than that, but not too- Because this is serious training, isn't it? I mean, I had been trained in what was called neuromuscular technique at Osteopathic College. And it is a very good technique, but the degree to which Paul St. John teaches in terms of the detail and the kind of exploration of different parts of the body, he's fearless, isn't he? And he goes,
00:22:34
Speaker
to the nth degree to be able to help people. And I was really blown away when I saw that training because it was so much more in depth than anything I had studied as an osteopath. It's very intensive. The anatomy is extremely intensive. A lot of study, a lot of hands-on training. And when I finished my training, it included intra-pelvic work. So we were taught how to do pelvic floor work, both vaginally and rectally.
00:23:02
Speaker
But he eventually got shut down by jealous physical therapists and medical people that thought that was illegal and all that crap. But fortunately, I got all my training before that happened. And I had a lot of referrals from medical doctors because I was the only guy in the entire city of San Diego and probably still am that I know of. Actually, I heard of one more person doing it recently.
00:23:26
Speaker
But there was just droves of people with all sorts of chronic pelvic floor disorders that weren't healing because they needed internal work. And also he was very good at the jaw and the anterior neck and areas that rarely ever even get looked at or touched upon that are absolutely critical.
00:23:47
Speaker
And so that enhanced my approach very well. And then later I got my license as a holistic health practitioner, which in California gives you quite a lot of freedom to do anything that's natural.
00:24:00
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, right, right. Okay, good stuff. I remember in my osteopathic training, one of the lecturers saying to us that, you know, the body doesn't start that the rest to stop at the waist and start again at the upper thigh, you know, there is a pelvic floor and a pelvic pelvic organs and, you know, genital urinary system that is all still part of the body. And just because there's social taboos around it doesn't mean we shouldn't consider treating that area, you know, and but it does seem that that is the way that because of the, I guess, the medical legal
00:24:30
Speaker
trends that have emerged, people tend to refuse to go in that area, which is, which is crazy when there's, you know, it's still part of the body. But yeah, yeah, actually, the only physical therapists in the world that are taught intrapelvic work are the Danish physios. And just to give you an example of how
00:24:47
Speaker
Silly this whole approach by most therapists is and even some doctors I was once referred a lady I worked in the largest physical therapy clinic in San Diego for four years and I was the first massage therapist ever hired by a physical therapy clinic in the entire city of San Diego and physical therapists were looked down upon like prostitutes and idiots, you know hippies and
00:25:10
Speaker
But a long story made short, I was referred this lady who had been through 163 physical therapy sessions for chronic pelvic floor dysfunction. And with intra pelvic work, I completely helped her completely heal the problem in six visits. And when I asked the physical therapist why they had not done intra pelvic work, the most common answer I got for years was I would never stick my finger up somebody's ass.
00:25:40
Speaker
That's the level of immaturity and sort of silliness that is rampant throughout the entire rehab community to this very day. Yeah. Yeah. It's very childlike behavior, isn't it? It is. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But you did a series of cadaver dissections as well as part of your training. Yes. I did two complete cadaver dissections at the Oregon Health Sciences University. I did another one with Guy Voie.
00:26:09
Speaker
in Canada, and then I did a series of them. The Orthopedic Physical Therapy Clinic was also a surgical center. We had 13 surgeons there, their own operating theater, and they regularly did cadaver dissections to test new surgical techniques and just sharpen their anatomy. So they would actually buy from San Diego, University of California, San Diego Medical Center, they could buy basically
00:26:37
Speaker
either whole bodies or parts of bodies, which then they had to return after they dissected them for burial or cremation. But I did a number of dissections with the surgeons and I also attended many, many surgeries. Anytime any of my patients needed surgery, I would go to surgery with them with rare exception. So I've seen a lot of surgery up
00:26:57
Speaker
You know, blood all over me from splatters and saws and everything else. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. So we're still in the 1980s, aren't we? And towards the end of the 1980s, you introduce the Swiss ball to the gym environment. And there's something which can, let's say, bring out the chaos.
00:27:17
Speaker
and requires the body to find order, right? It does, yeah. It brings up the chaos when you introduce a concept like that as well. Yeah, so tell us about how you first came across the Swiss ball, because really, one of the things that you're best known for is being this guy that introduced the Swiss ball to the world, because you go to any gym,
00:27:38
Speaker
that's worth its salt, and you'll see Swiss balls there. And that wasn't the case until you were speaking internationally. And I know you met a lot of resistance around introducing the Swiss ball, but it took what must've been at least 10, 15 years for that to catch on after you first were introduced to it yourself. Yeah, actually not quite that long. What happened was is when I got hired at Sports and Orthopedic Physical Therapy Clinic, the first day I walked in the clinic,
00:28:05
Speaker
which is a big clinic. I mean, there's 22 physical therapists working there. I noticed over in one corner of the therapy bay, there was this great big red ball sitting there.
00:28:17
Speaker
And it was covered in dust. And I said to the owner of the clinic, what is that ball? I thought it was a fishing float, because where I come from on Vincu Rowan, you see these great big fishing floats that look like that to keep nets up. And she said, that's called a Swiss ball. I said, well, what do you do with it? She said, well, to be honest with you, nobody here really knows how to use it. Well, immediately I had a strong intuitive hit that I was supposed to investigate that.
00:28:44
Speaker
So I went to the University of California San Diego library and basically paid a professional librarian to do a worldwide literature search. There was nothing written on it except one small little book about using it in aerobics by a lady in Colorado. And I found three books in Germany, one in Sweden and two in Germany, none of which were in English.
00:29:09
Speaker
And I bought the books and I read through them and just with my knowledge of anatomy, physiology, biomechanics, kinesiology, and exercise, I could immediately see how powerful this thing was. So I started just.
00:29:23
Speaker
I bought my own ball and I started just doing the exercises in all the pictures in the books. And as I'm doing it, I'm correlating what's going on with my knowledge of anatomy. And I could, I just sensed, wow, this is amazing. So I started basically, uh, not only using the exercises I could pick up from the books, but developing a lot of new exercises. And I would spend hours and hours in the gym just
00:29:49
Speaker
working through the anatomy, the physiology, common spinal pathologies, and developing exercises to specifically address key issues. And so I would use it with athletes. And finally, after about a year of this, one athlete said to me, Paul, why did I have to get injured to come here to learn how to use this ball for you? Because I'm feeling and performing better than I ever have in my life.
00:30:14
Speaker
This should be common knowledge. And it kind of hit me like a lightning bolt. And I said, yes, you know what? Maybe I'll develop some videos on it. So that launched my, you know, actually developing public workshops and shooting videos. So I produced the first, really the first videos in the world on how to use a Swiss ball and a gym, how to do orthopedic assessments on a Swiss ball. I produced the first videos in the world and programs in the world for integrating the Swiss ball with gym equipment.
00:30:45
Speaker
And the first professional sports team to hire me specifically for my approach to the core, which included a lot of Swiss ball work, was the Chicago Bulls. And it blew them away. And I had an open door policy with the Bulls. I think I consulted for them seven times during the Jordan era.
00:31:04
Speaker
And they had amazing results with the ball. And the LA Lakers picked it up from interacting with the Bulls and seeing what they were doing. And then from there, it just started to spread. And of course, I've consulted, as you know, for countless numbers of sports teams and Olympic committees, all of which I introduced the ball in. And then it just started going crazy after it, you know, once the professional athletes started getting wind of it, then it started spreading like wildfire.
00:31:30
Speaker
Right, right. So, but still, I mean, my experience with the Swiss ball was that I didn't really see it much until perhaps the late 90s and certainly it wasn't easy to find one. I mean, I used to drive to my gym with a Swiss ball in the car and other people would do the same in that sort of, I would say late 90s, early 2000s. In the UK at least, it was only, as you started to get maybe 2003, 2004, it was pretty much standard gym equipment.
00:31:59
Speaker
When I was saying 10, 15 years, I imagined to get it into the public psyche, it probably took that long. But that's quite an achievement. That's quite a shift in the gym landscape, as it were. But you also had other concepts that were gym-based and exercise-based. I know that the primal patterns is something that really caught my attention because I had been trained by a guy called Phil Beach, who I introduced you to at one point.
00:32:27
Speaker
He had his concept of archetypal rest postures. And when I saw your advert for Primal Patterns, I thought, oh, that sounds like a similar evolutionary kind of concept. And that was what drew me in to see you in the first place in 1997. So can you tell us a bit more about how you developed the Primal Pattern system and what it actually is?
Primal Patterns and Holistic Health
00:32:45
Speaker
Yeah, well, basically what I did was I, you know, I meditate on things a lot. I was trained in meditation as a kid by Self-Realization Fellowship monks and
00:32:57
Speaker
So I've always, whenever I wanted to solve a challenge, I would go into meditation. And one of the questions that kept coming up in my mind is having studied anatomy so much is why do we have the tonic phasic system we do? Why are certain muscles so much more fast twitch and some more slow twitch? Why do we have the pan Asian angles that we do? And why is there such a difference in the structure of muscles in different parts of the body?
00:33:25
Speaker
The only answer I could really come up with is that we had to adapt to the selective pressures of nature. What I did is, also growing up on Vancouver Island, being a logger, working in the woods a lot, spending a lot of time in the woods, hiking in the woods, hunting, I had a pretty deep understanding of what it's like to be in the wild.
00:33:48
Speaker
So I started asking the question, what would a human being have to do movement wise to survive in nature? And so what I did is I started just writing down, I would think what would I have to do if I was
00:34:05
Speaker
out in nature in a sort of a native environment. You know, I'd have to hunt, I'd have to fish, I'd have to gather wood, I'd have to build shelter. Occasionally you'd have to protect yourself against enemies. So I started writing down all the movement patterns that would be required for that. Then I took every single exercise I could think of and I would write it on these white boards and I had boards and boards of exercise names written down. And I then said, what's the common denominator that all these
00:34:34
Speaker
movements have. So to make a long story short, by the time I finished this synthesis, I found that all movement patterns had these seven common denominators, which are squatting, lunging, bending, pushing, pulling, twisting, and gait. And then when I looked into the neurological research on gait, I found it had three derivations in the motor learning arenas, which is walking, jogging, and sprinting.
00:35:04
Speaker
And so part of what had happened was when I was working at Sports and Orthopedic Physical Therapy, the doctors and therapists were freaking out because I was doing all this lunging and squatting and weightlifting with people that they'd been taught you should never do that with, but I was rehabbing people 10 times faster than they were and it was baffling them. So I got asked by the head physical therapist who was a really intelligent lady to please do a presentation for the doctors and the therapists on the rationale I use to choose exercises
00:35:34
Speaker
So I took that analysis that I had done and I presented to them and it blew their freaking minds is what happened. And then I began traveling all over the United States in 1988 teaching courses on soft tissue work mixed with rehabilitation and weightlifting and postural rehab.
00:35:54
Speaker
Unveiled it to them and they all found it very very fascinating because it's a very simple but profound way to analyze Movement, but really I said it boiled down to what do we have to do to survive and I can show you as you know well now which I did teach you in my clinical training with you is that if you have a person that cannot do any one of those movements adequately and
00:36:18
Speaker
to interface effectively with their environment, they will get injured. So as you know, one of my slogans is if you can't, you must. So if you can't squat, then I must teach you how to squat. If you can't lunge, bend, push. So really my approach to rehab was the opposite of the standard approach. Oh, if you hurt yourself squatting, then you should never squat. If you hurt yourself lunging, then you should stay away from the lunge.
00:36:44
Speaker
And so I'm like, well, that's ridiculous. I mean, how do you poop standing up? How do you get in a car without squatting or getting in and out of a chair? So along in the short of it was is that I just spent the time to analyze what did nature require of us and make out of us so we could interface with the environment. And then that was the product of it. And I'll tell you what,
00:37:11
Speaker
Not only did it serve me, but something that blew my mind, which you know about. When I went to the Czech Republic in around 2000 and did my advanced training with Vladimir Yanda and Carol Levitt, and learned Voigt's approach to infant development, and then started researching infant development experts in books all over the world, when I mapped out the stages that an infant went through from birth through to walking,
00:37:42
Speaker
They turned out to be exactly the same seven stages I'd identified as primal patterns. It literally was one of those eureka moments where I realized that spirit or intuition or God or soul was guiding me.
00:37:59
Speaker
Because Yeah, and it's a great it's a great example of finding order amongst the chaos again, it is, you know, there's so many exercises that you knew and that can, you know, be created or thought up by, you know, if you go into any kind of funky gym, then there'll be all of these kind of crazy trainers doing that, that what whatever looks the coolest, and whatever the latest exercises is such an array of exercises, that you've managed to boil it down to this, you know, sort of,
00:38:27
Speaker
gonna say synthesis, but that's not the word I'm looking for. Yeah, yeah, that's it. That's it. That's it. So you distilled it down to just these seven movement patterns. It's just, you know, fantastic. And, and then as you say, to also find that same
00:38:43
Speaker
format that the child actually goes through to become a functional bipedal human being. That's quite something. Now, obviously, we've talked quite a lot biomechanically, but also around this time, you were using a tool called the Health Appraisal Questionnaire. How did you find out about this Health Appraisal Questionnaire and what purpose did it serve for you and your client?
00:39:05
Speaker
Well, I spent about three years studying nutraceutical approaches and Jeffrey Bland's work largely, and it was very, very complicated. I'm sure you know of, do you know Jeffrey Bland's work? So lots of hormone pathways and complex vitamin language and biochemistry, and it was brain racking, and even
00:39:26
Speaker
You know, as you know, I've got a brain that works pretty good. I mean, if I can get through weaponry training to repair weapon systems on the most advanced helicopters in the world, I'm looking at all this. And so I'm studying it, and I'm studying it, and I'm studying it. Well, one of the first things I noticed is that research keeps coming out showing that yesterday's research was wrong. And I'm like, okay, well, we've managed to survive for millions of years without all this biochemical, you know, fancy-dancy shit. But in that time,
00:39:56
Speaker
I hooked up with a company named Medigenics who was a big promoter of Jeffrey Bland's work and they had a very comprehensive health appraisal questionnaire. So in 1989, I started running a health appraisal questionnaire on every single one of my clients and I was tracking their
00:40:15
Speaker
performance while supplying the nutraceuticals that were recommended by metagenics to help with all the common ailments that you can imagine, right? They have, you know, problem solution. Adrenal fatigue use these products. Liver detox use these products. Inflammation use these products. And I was monitoring every patient with these health appraisal questionnaires, which I found to be very, very good because a health appraisal questionnaire is based on the common symptoms that a person
00:40:44
Speaker
produces with various dysfunction. So if you take a thousand people with a liver disorder and look at what are the common symptoms they have, that's what you ask on a health appraisal questionnaire. So one, it was alerting me to a tremendous number of internal pathologies that were directly connected. And because I'd studied visceral anatomy and the autonomic nervous system,
00:41:09
Speaker
and looked at this not only in physiology texts very deeply, but also through cadaver disections. I was already aware of, and through my neuromuscular therapy training, we learned about all the
00:41:22
Speaker
somatos, somatos, somatos, visceral, visceral, visceral, visceral, somatos, reflexes. I'm watching these people and I'm going, Jesus, Murphy, this person's got chronic liver stress and they've been having rotator cuff problems for two years. They've had two surgeries that have never worked. I started addressing the organs connected
00:41:43
Speaker
through the sympathetic nervous system to the muscles and right away saw that I got improvements where other people weren't getting improvements with people. But the thing that was frustrating is I didn't see people's rate of recovery improving very much at all. So I used to work with Dr. Oliver, and I still do, who's a very astute clinician and very, very knowledgeable in many areas. And he turned me on to Bill Walcott's metabolic typing
00:42:12
Speaker
work, which I actually found to save time. There's a story, I found it before Dr. Oliver, but Dr. Oliver turned me on to Walcott's book and I started running metabolic type testing to see how my patients should be eating based on the metabolic typing approach.
00:42:30
Speaker
And then I started switching them all to organic food because having come from a farm and studying farming, I knew already that chemicals were very dangerous and I'd studied the effects of farming chemicals on the body and it was bad news. But within one month of switching people over to
00:42:49
Speaker
organic diet and eating right for their unique metabolic needs. I saw health appraisal questionnaire scores dropping like crazy. I saw trigger points clearing up magically. I saw injuries healing, surgical, post surgical wounds healing way faster.
00:43:07
Speaker
And it was 10 times more powerful than any of the nutraceutical horseshit. It was just not even comparable. And I actually, I stopped using all that stuff because it was, now I don't not use it at all. It's just that I only used it very carefully and very select. And I switched to only organic source material because if you're using nutraceutical based stuff that comes from commercial farms, you're just giving concentrated toxins to people.
00:43:36
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. So obviously you're screening all of these organs and then you sort of moving moving on we moving into the 1990s and you
00:43:49
Speaker
I think from a story you told me, you were a bit ahead of the curve when it came to transversus abdominis as well, because certainly from my perspective, it was kind of late 90s that I started to really begin to hear a lot more about the core and the transverse abdominis and there were studies coming out and the group from Queensland in Australia where we're talking about it had a bunch of studies come out. But you've been talking about it
00:44:15
Speaker
before that sort of buzz had kicked off. So what was it that drew your attention to the transverse abdominis and the concept of the inner unit before that all kicked off? Well, there was three main reasons for that. One, I had studied a lot of old medical books like Body Mechanics and Health and Disease published in I think 1934 by Joel E. Goldthwaite, MD and others. I'd also studied the work of Mabel Todd,
00:44:43
Speaker
I had done a hundred hours of Feldenkrais training with Frank Wildman, who was trained by Feldenkrais himself. Through the study of the anatomy and reading people like Joel E. Goldthwaite and some of the pioneers of posture, there was a lot of information about the transverse abdominis and its importance.
00:45:08
Speaker
studying the anatomy and then learning about the interrelationships between the diaphragm, the deep spinal stabilizers, the transverse abdominis and the pelvic floor. I was already primed, but then when therapeutic exercise, what's
00:45:27
Speaker
Oh yeah, therapy to exercise. Therapy to exercise for segmental spinal stabilization. Yeah, exactly. So when that book came out, it basically just tied together everything I was already doing clinically, but I'd also done a lot of work with a famous physical therapist and expert in EMG studies named Shirley Sarman. And having done a lot of EMG training and learning how to assess specific muscles using EMG,
00:45:54
Speaker
And then learning a lot of these specific clinical tests from Shirley Sarman, I was able to actually find out what happened if someone's pelvic floor wasn't working and then see what happens. And I get all these patients with blown discs or post-surgical problems. And because I developed assessment techniques for all these things, when I got a hold of Richard
00:46:17
Speaker
Hodges and Joel's work. It just made me realize once again, I was right on the right track And so I just picked up a few tidbits out of there
00:46:26
Speaker
incorporated that, and also the famous back surgeon, Vert Mooney, turned out his clinic was in the same building that my physical therapy clinic was in. After I left Sports and Orthopedic Physical Therapy, I started my own physical therapy clinic with a partner in exactly the building Vert Mooney's clinic was in. So I got to interact with him a lot. I got a lot of referrals from him.
00:46:49
Speaker
So I was able to get, and he was connected to Andre Vleeming. And I studied Diane Lee's work. I studied Philip Greenman's work. I studied a lot of the pioneering osteopathic. I studied the history of chiropractic, the history of osteopathic, the history of medicine. I studied many, many Steinler's textbook of kinesiology. So basically I was able to put the pieces together and through clinical observation,
00:47:18
Speaker
I came to understand that really we were fixated on abdominal conditioning when really we needed to address what I coined as the core because all these muscles are interacting with each other. What's your definition of the core? Well, the core is what's left if you pull the arms and legs off the body. It's very, very inclusive of the cranial nerve system, the jaw, the eyes, the inner ear, the hearing system, the upper cervical system.
00:47:47
Speaker
And the visceral system, because the visceral system is a regulator of those muscles. So, you know, I quickly learned working with, you know, hard to deal with medical cases, medical failures and surgical failures, that most of these people were failures because they had such isolated approaches and they weren't basically, nobody was paying attention to how one system was affecting the other. And Trevell's work was a real eye-opener for the integration of systems.
00:48:15
Speaker
Right. And I guess the fact you've been working with the health appraisal questionnaire already gave you a really neat insight into how that visceral system, especially, but also the emotions and other things that are screened on the health appraisal questionnaire. Yes. How they were interacting with what you're seeing before you in your patients. And I saw, for example, when I found people with malocclusion, that their core would not work properly. When I had people with ocular disorders all the way back,
00:48:42
Speaker
In my early years, I wrote posture and craniofacial pain when I was 27. Imagine how much research I had to do and knowledge I had to even write that chapter. I'd already been well into testing eyes and teeth. One of my buddies was a dentist and a chiropractor. I was a lecturer at the Los Angeles Chiropractic College.
00:49:08
Speaker
and I'd studied a mountain of information, and whenever I would test the cranial nerve system and found problems like malocclusion or ocular disorders, and as a neuromuscular therapist, I'm training the treatment of the muscles of the eye, so I could do a therapy session after I'd assessed a person's core, work on their eyes, for example, normalize their vision, and all of a sudden their core would work perfectly.
00:49:31
Speaker
I can clear inflammation out of people's guts and do parasite cleanses and boom, a totally dysfunctional core would be working fine. They might have post surgical like a common case I saw is after hysterectomies or C-sections that women's cores were completely dysfunctional.
00:49:50
Speaker
And one of the tests I learned early in my orthopedic training from various experts was whenever you have a surgical scar near areas where muscles aren't working, ice massage the scar until it goes numb and then retest. And I would ice massage these hysterectomy scars and C-section scars, and all of a sudden the core would turn back on. And so long story made short, I found very quickly that the conventional approach
00:50:20
Speaker
to what I call the core was extremely, extremely dysfunctional, isolated, and completely disrespectful. Yeah. So focused on the transverse subdominis. Well, they hardly even focused on that. Exactly. Most of them didn't even know what it was.
00:50:35
Speaker
Right, yeah. So then I guess another thing that I saw happen is that, of course, with this excitement and this focus on, in particular, the transverse abdominis and the multifidus seem to be the things that everyone was talking about. And the pelvic floor and the diaphragm were thrown in there a little bit as well. But the focus seemed to be very much on couch-based rehabilitation. It was literally getting someone on the treatment table
00:51:02
Speaker
getting their transversus switched on, and giving them that exercise and off they go. But there didn't seem to be a lot of the reintegration side and this whole notion that you again, this is a formula that you you created, which is the flexibility, stability, strength, power formula, right?
00:51:18
Speaker
And, you know, I think a lot of physical therapists, and certainly, you know, even when I wrote my own chapter on rehabilitation, one of the guys that reviewed it said, I can't believe that you're putting weights in there, they only injure people, you know, you need to take this section out, right?
00:51:37
Speaker
But the point is that that was kind of the attitude, you know, people thinking that, you know, we just need to switch this multifidus back on at this level, and then the back pain will go or they're back to full function. But that's only a small part of the story, right? Well, it's worse than a small part of the story. It's infantile. And what used to irritate the hell out of me
00:51:59
Speaker
is doctors and therapists of all types had to study the same damn anatomy I did. And I'd be talking to doctors and therapists and say, this guy's rotator cuff's full of trigger points and he's got timing dysfunction, scapulothoracic and glenohumeral timing dysfunction because his liver's in distress. And I would show them how I would determine that. I'd say, look at the allergic shiners on his eyes. He looks like he's been punched out. And they didn't have a clue even what that meant.
00:52:27
Speaker
Of course, I would then clean the liver out, manage the diet properly and all of a sudden the shoulder would heal like magic and they would think, what the hell happened? And most of them would just deny it. They wouldn't even believe it. But one of the things I want to point out is during this whole era, there was hardly a free weight to be found anywhere. Everybody's clinics was full of Cybex and
00:52:48
Speaker
not cybex but uh nautilus machines and medex machines and isokinetic devices so i started using cable machines and had my my boss buy a medical grade because i also studied uh norwegian medical exercise therapy with bioran spenson and i also a little grimsby's from san diego and he's a genius norwegian physical therapist runs a master's degree program so i was able to take some courses with him and ask him
00:53:14
Speaker
key questions. People were looking at me like I was the most dangerous weirdo in town, but they couldn't figure out how I kept rehabilitating all these patients. They couldn't figure out. I was swimming against this tide of free weights are dangerous. These machines are better.
00:53:31
Speaker
But I'm like showing them the research going, look, here's the research on the postural system and the stabilizer system. And it shows very clearly if you put someone on a machine or on the floor, the brain will not fire the core system because the whole body operates on the men's theory or men's system, minimal electrical neuromuscular stimulation, and the body won't spend energy. It doesn't need to spend.
00:53:55
Speaker
So I would show this therapist, you're training muscles in isolation and I would prove to them over and over again, okay, this person's increased their strength on a back extension or a trunk flexion 300%. But I tested them six weeks ago with a box lift and I would use just a standard like plastic box and put weight in it. And they have not improved their ability to lift a box at all.
00:54:21
Speaker
I was rehabilitating tons of injured workers from everybody, from fighter jet pilots, to UPS truck drivers, to firemen, to policemen, to nurses. I showed them clinically, this is bullshit. I actually showed Vert Mooney the same damn thing, which kind of embarrassed him because he had a whole clinic with over a million dollars worth of med-ex equipment. I said, this is all crap.
00:54:47
Speaker
Yeah, well, one of the things that strikes me is that when you look at the research, particularly on the multifidus, one of the things that's very clear about it is that when there's back pain, the multifidus becomes inhibited, first of all, and then that it starts to get fatty infiltration and it atrophies, right?
00:55:04
Speaker
So, you know, you can get someone to switch that muscle back on, but that's not creating a hypertrophy stimulus on it. You've got to actually get them to the point so you can create the flexibility and the stability, but you haven't got them to the strength or the power. And so, you know, you need to put a strength
00:55:21
Speaker
stimulus onto them to create hypertrophy. And then the hypertrophy is obviously going to rebuild the muscle, but then they also need to be able to withstand higher forces that may occur in sporting environments, activities of daily living in accidents, you know, car crashes, whiplashes, things like that.
00:55:37
Speaker
So to rehabilitate anyone, you really need to take them through that full formula. You can't just wait till they get out of pain. And I think, you know, even Julie Hides, who was one of that research group from Australia that did the book therapy to exercise for segmental spinal stabilization. She even showed in 1995 that
00:55:59
Speaker
the multifidus doesn't recover its function, even after the pain's gone. And yet, it still seems that most therapists are working with pain. And this whole field of pain neuroscience at the moment is all about pain. And can we get people out of pain? And it's like, well, pain isn't what you want to focus on. I mean, the pain is obviously a helpful guide, a helpful pointer as to what you need to work with. But you need to move people to function, right? It's not just about getting out of pain, because
00:56:25
Speaker
can get out of pain and still have a multifidus that isn't firing or that isn't hypertrophy or whatever. So, you know, it just strikes me that still that whole discussion is off the mark, you know. It is. And there's another factor that you haven't touched on that's really important. And that is whenever we're whenever we have pain in any region of the body, particularly along spine or joints, you know,
00:56:50
Speaker
Remember the law, it's what is it? The nerve that innervates the joint, innervates the muscles of the joint and the skin over the origins and insertions of such muscles. I'm brain farting on who's law. David's law, isn't it? David's law.
00:57:04
Speaker
And so the thing that a lot of people forget, especially professionally trained therapists and doctors, is that all stabilizer muscles have a significant population of fast-twitch muscle fibers because you cannot stabilize a lumbar. Imagine kicking a soccer ball or being a high jumper or sprinting across the street or swinging an axe or a shovel. And so because the type 2B
00:57:31
Speaker
Muscle fibers are the first to atrophy whenever there's pain and immobilization, which is common with injuries. You see atrophy like crazy, but the rehab approaches are all these kind of slow, isolated, low intensity exercises. So they think just because someone can activate their multifidus lying on a table that they're ready to go back and play professional sports or swing a sledgehammer or whatever.
00:57:55
Speaker
And I kept showing them all the time, look, you're sending this guy who's got less than first grade level of conditioning into an environment where he has to be effectively conditioned. Like a UPS truck driver has to lift packages that range from one pound to 132 pounds all day long, eight to 10 hours a day. Yeah. And I used to see professional football players post surgical with back, shoulders, knees.
00:58:22
Speaker
who hadn't done anything but stretch cords and pink dumbbells and isokinetic machines being rehabbed to go back to full intensity football, and they couldn't figure out why they had the same injury five times over. And I'm like, with Christ almighty, you don't need to be a fucking genius to figure this out.
00:58:40
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So one of the terms that you've used ever since I've known you, and I'm sure it was long before we even met, is the notion of isolation to integration. Yes. And I even heard one of your recent podcast guests telling you about this concept of isolation to integration as if it was relatively new. Yeah, I was giggling, yeah. That's happened a thousand times in my career, by the way. People
00:59:04
Speaker
Yeah, people telling me stuff that I'm actually the founder of, like, it's their knowledge. And I just giggle. Yes. Yes. I'm aware of that, actually. That's fantastic. No, it was good. It was good. You're very, you're very courteous and polite. But so the but you know, part of this integration is is, as we said, taking people into strength, taking people into power. And I think part of
00:59:27
Speaker
Well, one tool that I saw you develop is the tornado ball. Now, was that your own invention or do you see something like that and you just sort of took it under your wing? They have, in my searches of the Europe, I also did worldwide literature searches on the medicine ball and I found a ball in Europe that they used to, it had a hole in it like the tornado ball, but they would hang it from like a basketball hoop.
00:59:53
Speaker
Right. Or where you would hang a punching bag and they would swing it. And they were typically around 20 to 35 pounds, depending on which one you bought. And so when I first saw that, I thought, well, shit, if I just put a rope in that thing, I could swing it. And it would be much more functional for rehabilitating any athlete or any worker that had to move implements like tools, like a shovel, an axe or anything, like a fireman, for example.
01:00:23
Speaker
at high speed or a baseball player or a golfer. And so I ordered a few of those balls and I went out and I bought some one inch sailing rope. I went to a marine supply store and then I put this great big one inch rope through it.
01:00:41
Speaker
And the problem was is that the balls would wear out because the rope would wear right through them and then the air would leak out of them or they would just pop. So eventually I found a manufacturer and worked with them and got the material situation handled and produced a much more durable dynamic. And I produced a small one called the Tornado Ball for rotator cuffs and shoulders and things like that. Twistable, isn't it? Yeah, that's right. It's been a long time.
01:01:10
Speaker
But anyhow, so I basically took a kind of a dead concept that nobody was even thinking about, revived it, remodeled it, retooled it, and then implemented into my conditioning programs for myself, for athletes, for people.
01:01:28
Speaker
And it actually got popular pretty fast. Yeah, fantastic. So look, I know one of your phrases that you use is that if you're not assessing, you're guessing. And of course, the whole check system is very assessment focused.
Innovations in Posture and Rehabilitation
01:01:45
Speaker
And as part of that, there's a lot of objective measurements that are done clinically with various calipers and devices, the forehead calipers and so on. And so you invented a forehead caliper to measure posture, didn't you? And so can you tell me about how that came about? Yeah, what happened was is because I'd studied so much research on the head, neck and jaw, repetitive stress injuries,
01:02:13
Speaker
Whiplash injuries, you know, I studied all of Croft and Foreman's work. Took a lot of workshops with very skilled therapists in these areas. And what I found is there was all this talk about posture and head carriage and I found calculations about how much the load would increase on the neck extensors as the head moved forward sagidally. But the only way you could measure it was with x-ray. And I thought, well, that's ridiculous.
01:02:42
Speaker
So using my kind of natural farmer, inventor, mechanic mentality, I just said, well, I know how to measure these landmarks because basically, as you know, the zygomatic arch needs to be directly above the manubrium of the sternum. So I basically created a prototype caliper that used a carpenter's level so that the horizontal beam coming off the sternum was horizontal. And then the vertical beam with a sliding probe
01:03:12
Speaker
that touch the cheekbone so that basically the carpenters level made sure that you were calibrating the caliper to level or you'd get a faulty reading. And then I found I had to put a spring-loaded tip because it was too easy to push. You couldn't standardize how far you pushed the caliper into somebody's cheek because you could get someone with chunky fatty cheeks or someone with bony cheeks. And if they had chunky fatty cheeks, you could be a quarter of an inch off
01:03:41
Speaker
So long story made short, I worked to develop the prototype till I had it perfected. And then I took it to my buddy, Dr. Curl at Los Angeles Chiropractic College, who was a professor there. And they ran 2,600 measurement tests on it and actually wrote a study on it. And they showed scientifically that it was the most accurate method for measuring head carriage in the world other than x-ray itself.
01:04:11
Speaker
Because that's such a critical measurement, anyone that understands biomechanics, I could go on and on on that, but you know what I'm talking about. I was baffled that there was mountains of literature on the dangers of forward head posture and spinal curves, and it was the same with first rib angle. I found references largely in European literature.
01:04:32
Speaker
to the correlation between first rib angle and thoracic outlet syndrome and other related neck problems, but there was no way to measure it. And I could see the mechanics of it. It was obvious to me that that's a measurement we needed. So I went to the drawing board and built a caliper, a calibrated system for measuring that. And then I learned how to measure spinal curves from Bjorn Svensson. And I picked up his inclinometer system
01:05:01
Speaker
I studied goniometry with physical therapists and read the books and took courses and all that. All that basically led to the assessment methodology that we both teach through the Czech Institute. Without those calipers, you cannot accurately prescribe exercises. In fact, I'll tell you a funny story. When I first started selling the forward head calipers,
01:05:27
Speaker
to physical therapists and chiropractors, I started getting them sent back to me. And the most common thing that people said was this caliper doesn't work. And I would say, well, you know, it's a calibrated piece of equipment. Of course it works. So I call them up and say, what do you mean it doesn't work? They said, well, I, I tested my patient in the beginning. And then at the end of my, uh, treatment protocol,
01:05:53
Speaker
four weeks later or whatever, I tested them and they had worse head carriage. I said, guess what? That's not the caliper. It means that your protocol is wrong.
01:06:04
Speaker
It's like saying my Swiss ball doesn't work. I keep falling off it. Well, it's like someone it's like calling the bank and saying how much money have I got? And they tell you that you're, you're broke. And you say, well, that's impossible. Because I haven't spent that much money. Well, we haven't balanced your checkbook in a year, right? Yeah. So the funny thing is, is not one single therapist wanted the caliper back after I explained what it was teaching them. They would rather well, they would rather not know. And that
01:06:33
Speaker
blew my mind. Their egos were so threatened that they chose to not use a scientific approach but would rather give the wrong exercises
01:06:47
Speaker
And you and I both know that if you use the analysis system that I've developed, you will find a lot of that going on worldwide by people that have very fancy degrees and big names and really think they know what they're doing. And I ran into this with professional sports teams and therapists and doctors that had their head up their ass so many times. And that's why I carried all my calipers with me everywhere I go, because you can't argue with objective facts.
01:07:15
Speaker
That's it. That's it. Yeah, I totally agree. They've been a massive help to me clinically. And as you say, you can't design an effective exercise program without them. But you know, one of the topics we've talked about before is the idea that, you know, you can't change people's posture and yet
01:07:31
Speaker
the, it's like, well, you know, you may not be able to see someone's posture, but if you're using the right tools and the right exercises with the right acute exercise variables, and so on and so forth, and looking at the organs and looking at the higher reflexes, then these are all things that are going to impact on the potential to be able to adjust someone's posture. So you know, with that in mind, I want to interject one thing.
01:07:56
Speaker
Countless is the number of times that I would say to an orthopedic surgeon or a physical therapist or a chiropractor or an osteopath, how is it that you're determining what a person's spinal curvatures are? For example, who has a flat back or excessive lordosis or forward head posture, whatever. Oh, they said that 99% of the time the answer was I can tell by just looking at them. I said, is that right?
01:08:23
Speaker
So what I would do anytime I could, as that's okay, I'd grab a therapist and say, okay, take off your shirt, go down to your underwear, and I would get this smart alec therapist, say, okay, tell me what their curves are. Nobody, nobody ever was even close.
01:08:44
Speaker
The number of people, for example, that they thought someone had too much lordosis because it was an athlete with well-developed glutes and I measured them and they actually had like 10 degrees of lumbar curve. They weren't even in the ballpark, but they were so convinced that they could look at the topographical anatomy. And I actually read a book by a famous British physical therapist. I'm trying to remember his name anyhow.
01:09:14
Speaker
He looked at, very deeply grieve was his name. He looked at the whole concept of bony landmarks and assessing people by how they look and showed that it was completely wrong.
01:09:29
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. So I was just going to sort of move on to the notion of higher reflexes. And you've already touched on it a little bit, but the concept of the totem pole of survival reflexes or hierarchy of survival reflexes that you developed that was this was in the 90s still. You see, I'd been progressively developing that because I kept on having all these complex patients. But when I did my research,
01:09:59
Speaker
to write Posture and Craniofacial Pain, which was published, I think, in 93, but it took three years for the book to come out. So I finished writing that book in about 89. I wrote my chapter, which was the longest chapter in the whole book. And the book's titled A Chiropractic Approach to Head Pain by Williams and Wilkins, edited by Darryl D. Curl. But I read 330,
01:10:28
Speaker
334 research papers and 34 books cover to cover just to get the background information. But when I got into all the key issues that regulate posture, I found very important information from pretty much all the cranial nerves, which then led to me studying books on cranial nerve assessment and then applying these techniques to my patients. And so then what I would do is I would
01:10:56
Speaker
Take a person, say, who had chronic failed low back pain or something like that, and I would assess all these things, and lo and behold, I started finding, for example, there's things that I could work with right away, like the eyes, or I could do manual therapy on the jaw, for example, or I could do muscle energy techniques to correct the position of the upper cervical spine, which I'd studied with not only Philip Greenman's work, but Roccabato's work,
01:11:24
Speaker
And I could turn muscles on, I could change spinal curvatures, people that had pain for years would be out of pain as quick as I could make the corrections on them. And so I started realizing these higher order systems are actually controlling everything. And as I did deeper and deeper research into the literature, lo and behold, I found that and I studied how is the nervous system wired together.
01:11:47
Speaker
And you see, for example, if you study the respiratory system, it controls every muscle in the body. So if a person's got any kind of a respiratory dysfunction, the brain is wired to compensate and sacrifice any system that has to sacrifice to enhance respiration. So what I found over time is that all these systems that are represented in the totem pole are actually higher order and
01:12:14
Speaker
The number of people that have problems in those systems is, as you know, from testing them is significant. And so people would be baffled, like doctors would be completely baffled. Like, why did you send this guy to see a behavioral optometrist when I sent him to you for chronic SI joint pain?
01:12:32
Speaker
And I would sit there and explain that and even show them the anatomy. And they didn't even want to listen. Most of them would just walk away and say, don't do that again. I told you to work on the back. And I said, well, look, this guy, this person has been in therapy for three years and they're doing better in three visits with me than they have in three years. Isn't that any interest to you at all? And it got so bad, actually, sometimes the patients themselves would get frustrated. And so I started just finding doctors that actually had enough intelligence to appreciate what I was saying.
01:13:02
Speaker
And I would just suggest to the patient that they go to this other doctor, which they're allowed to do. And so I started having to send patients to other doctors to get prescriptions to allow me to do what I did because so many doctors kept telling me not to touch anything outside of the zip code of what they were referring to the patient for, which was really, you know, it's hard to really put into words how frustrating and how sad that was.
01:13:31
Speaker
And how many people I've seen ruined by the medical system and professional rehabilitation because they simply have... One of the things that drove me the nuttiest is when people get their degree,
01:13:44
Speaker
they actually stop studying and think they know everything. And I tell them, that's your license to begin to learn. And that's why I quote Mark Twain, who says, don't let your schooling get in the way of your education. Because I saw over and over again, the more degrees a person has, the less open they are to new ideas. And the more they actually think they know what they're doing, even when it's not working.
01:14:06
Speaker
Yeah, that's been my experience as well, you know, even in elite sports, when I've worked there that explaining some of these higher reflexive functions, people just look at you, you know, shake their heads and ignore the advice. And then when finally that that elite
01:14:24
Speaker
sports person goes perhaps to another club and ends up being seen by a medical team that understands how the TMJ could be, you know, driving a recurrent ankle sprain, for example, then suddenly, that's when they get over their their recurrent injuries, you know, and it but still is
01:14:42
Speaker
surprising and sad that these people that obviously are ambitious and obviously very intelligent at the top of their game in many ways just reject something because, as you said, it's not in the same zip code. It doesn't make instant sense to them how an ankle sprain could be related to a neck issue or jaw issue or whatever. And so they dismiss it without even really giving it a go or taking the time to study the neurophysiology.
01:15:07
Speaker
Okay, so we've talked about the totem pole briefly and we've talked about your health appraisal questionnaire and this holistic system, the holistic way of working you started to develop. When did this sort of concept of physiological load start to dawn on you that people who have excessive stress on their body, whether it be from visceral dysfunction or emotional challenges or biomechanical challenges, pain,
01:15:31
Speaker
All of these things accumulate in the body and create what you term physiological load. Well, I learned that in sports massage therapy school right off the bat because I had to study, I forgot the famous book, Kelman maybe. It's all about the emotions and how they affect the body. It's an old book. Oh yeah, emotional anatomy. Emotional anatomy.
01:15:55
Speaker
And that was part of my massage therapy training. And I saw over and over again, when someone was going through a divorce or any kind of a life crisis, for example, their neck muscles would lock up, their abdominal wall would lock up, their pelvic floor would lock up. So I was hip to the whole relationship. But then when I started running health appraisal questionnaires,
01:16:21
Speaker
And then don't forget later, I did three years of training in functional medicine with one of the pioneers of functional medicine, Bill Timmons in BioHealth Diagnostics. So I not only understood it from the health appraisal questionnaire, but I was running lab tests on people for all sorts of things for years.
01:16:39
Speaker
And what I could see right away, for example, is if someone lost their job or some kind of a crisis happened or, you know, a dog died. I mean, I've seen many people's bodies go into the dump just because one of their cats or dogs died. And so by monitoring all these things, and I can even show you postural changes right away when a divorce or any of these things happen.
01:17:04
Speaker
So pretty much from the beginning of my basic training as a massage therapist, I was tuned into paying attention to these things. And I also have a body, so I would know how my body reacted. And because I'd been meditating since I was a kid, and I've been a high level athlete my whole life, I'm very tuned into my body. And as I would learn things, I would pay attention to my body.
01:17:29
Speaker
For example, say, well, you know, if I just think of a time when I was really angry, what happens to my breathing? What happens to my abdominal wall? And I could literally feel the changes happening right inside of myself. And since I'm a human being like all other human beings and we have basically the same systems, I started looking at other people and sure enough, it was right there. So I found countless, countless cases of the readings that orthopedic problems weren't clearing up was emotionally driven
01:17:58
Speaker
issues and the body was just breaking down from all the stress of it all.
01:18:02
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. So, and, you know, presumably, as you say, health appraisal questionnaire and seeing the stress on the organs as well, you know, and making that correlation between organ health and glandular health and how that's affecting the body. That was all part of your development of this concept of physiological lobe, which is sometimes referred to in the medical literature as allostatic load. They seem to be fairly synonymous.
01:18:28
Speaker
There's another component to it though. I also studied a number of books on how to do a proper intake assessment, how to interview a person.
01:18:38
Speaker
Countless is the number of times I would say to someone who maybe had irritable bowel syndrome or chronic low back pain, what was going on in your life around the time this began? And they would look at me and think for a second and say, oh, you know what? That's right around the time I got a divorce. Or that's right when I lost my job. Or that's when my kid got ran over by a car. And so, I mean, it didn't take me but a couple of months of paying attention to intake assessments.
01:19:07
Speaker
to see, wow, there's a common denominator here. Whenever people have stressful events in their life, the week is changing, the length breaks. Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. I guess that leads into, as we move into the 2000s, one of the key areas of focus for you in those early 2000s, as far as I saw it, was you started to
Spirituality and Health
01:19:31
Speaker
delve very deeply into people's belief systems and started to really start, I guess, explore the whole notion of how people's perception of God, of spirituality, essentially their emotional, mental, spiritual systems were having such a profound impact on them.
01:19:50
Speaker
What was it that that sent you down that pathway of because he I remember having a conversation with you I think it was about 2003 and you said something along the lines of I'm gonna get to the bottom of this god shit First of all, I had my own firsthand experience of it because my mother was a Christian scientist before she right yogi and
01:20:18
Speaker
you know, sitting as a kid in Sunday school hearing that God loves you and in the next sentence, God will burn you in hell for doing something wrong. I'm like, I'm only eight and this doesn't make any sense. So then when I started asking questions to the Yogis who were really masters of world religion. And then what happened is I took that experience into my clinical work and having interviewed thousands of people with intake interviews and getting to know them and finding out, you know,
01:20:47
Speaker
trying to change someone's diet and finding out why they won't eat certain foods. Well, it almost always tracks back to a religious idea or anism. So here I have a professional athlete that's a vegetarian who's starving for protein, whose adrenals are in phase three exhaustion, who's pasty-faced. I've had athletes pass out doing a squat with an empty dowel rod, with a wooden dowel rod on their back because their adrenals were so shot. And then I'm trying to get them to eat
01:21:16
Speaker
And they won't do it because of religious reasons. And then I've got people that are, you know, I've had countless cases of people who are very unhappy in their marriages and it's clearly showing up as back pain, digestive trouble. And I'm like, well, if you're unhappy in your marriage and you don't want to be with this person, I mean, why do you stay married? Well, because I'm a Christian.
01:21:35
Speaker
And my vow is till death do you part. And I said, so you think God wants you to live a painful life with someone that you're not in love with and you're sitting there teaching your kids how to have a shitty marriage. Do you really think that's very godly? Well, to make a long story short,
01:21:49
Speaker
When I, you know, I found early all behaviors are backed by beliefs. The belief is the motivation of our behaviors. So in order to be an effective therapist, I learned right away, you got to identify what the belief is, or you can't get people to change the behavior that's producing the dysfunction that you're a therapist for. All you can do is palliative care, which is any moron can do that.
01:22:14
Speaker
I'm interested in helping people heal. So thousands of times I kept running into religious ideas that were the barrier that was stopping people from taking on new concepts from
01:22:27
Speaker
doing the things they needed to heal and early on I was referring clients out to psychologists because so many of the people with chronic pain had deep psychological problems that I couldn't help because I didn't have the skills which I realized if I'm going to really help people I better study psychology, I better study world religion
01:22:46
Speaker
And I better learn about how all this works. So that led to the study of psychoneuroimmunology and all the related sciences and depth psychology. And I studied, I did a major university course that overviews all the schools of psychology. But one of my favorite people that I used to refer patients to was a doctor named Mark Wiesner who got quite wealthy because he invented a feedback device that would let kids know when they were about to wet the bed. He was an excellent hypnotherapist.
01:23:15
Speaker
Man, this guy used to help me fix up the most screwed up people you've ever seen. And he would do hypnotherapy on them and get in there and lo and behold, everything that I had assumed or not assumed, but came to the conclusion.
01:23:30
Speaker
was the issue, like it's their lack of willing to leave this relationship or their fear that God's going to burn them in hell. He identified through hypnotherapy was exactly what was going on. So I got to be able to correlate my observations with a hypnotherapist. And when he worked on these people, some of them, I mean, I've seen complete cases of scoliosis clear up with hypnotherapy.
01:23:55
Speaker
or with visceral manipulation. I've seen stuff that people wouldn't even freaking believe because they don't assess it well enough to see it. We got to remember 85% of people worldwide claim religious affiliation. That's 85 out of every 100 people that ever walk into a clinic.
01:24:12
Speaker
Have a set of ideas deeply ingrained into their subconscious and unconscious minds that are regulating the choices they make at a conscious level. And therapists are completely not paying attention to that. And I got to the point where I'm like, God is a dirty ass trickster because all these belief systems are really so far from the truth.
01:24:32
Speaker
And I realized that most people are children, even in adult bodies, they don't ask questions, they believe stuff as though it's fact. So, you know, having spent time with yogis and meditating, understanding God became a very important part of my approach because of the number of times it all tracked back to some belief that was related to God, even an atheist, because atheists are still living in a Christian culture.
01:24:59
Speaker
acting out Christian ideas, celebrating Christian holidays, using a Christian banking system, road names are Christian, and they're so they're Christianized, but they don't even know it.
01:25:10
Speaker
Do you think that some of that is down to the fact that the way the unconscious is programmed is programmed when we're children? And so we still, you know, if we believe in this, you know, Father God in the sky or whatever, even if we've then consciously decided over the top of that, that we don't believe in it, we've rationalized that that can't make sense.
01:25:31
Speaker
that we're still acting out the behaviors because they've been unconsciously programmed into us. No question. All you got to do is listen to my podcast on multiple partner relationships with Aubrey Marcus and Kyle Kingsbury. And I can give you an example of my own experience in that. But there's no question. It takes a fair bit of focused work to reprogram the unconscious and you got to know how to go about doing it. And the person has to be willing to do it. And it's tricky business because as soon as you start working with a person at that level,
01:26:00
Speaker
They have to be mature enough to be able to stand alone as an individual because if you help a person identify that they're really not happy in their given religion, be it Christianity, Islam, Judaism, then all of a sudden they're in a major battle with their family, their friends. They go through a real crisis. So most people are not brave enough to be an adult yet. So we really have a Western culture that psychologically is about a 12 year old at best. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:26:30
Speaker
They can't think for themselves. They believe what's written on paper more than their own experiences. Yeah, for sure, for sure. We've talked about religion just a little bit. I know you can speak about religion for days on end, but one of the things that it links in with, as you just alluded to, was people's nutritional choices. Yes.
01:26:53
Speaker
I don't know which year it was, but it was in the early 2000s, you developed the image of the organic closed cycle or the wheel of life, which is essentially showing the soil and the health of the soil being paramount. And then of course, that produces healthy plants, and then healthy plants are eaten by healthy animals and those healthy animals.
01:27:12
Speaker
go on to feed healthy human beings with the healthy plants as well. And I think what some people don't pick up on that image is that, of course, then healthy human beings make healthy decisions about how to manage the soil again. And so
Soil Health and Nutrition Critique
01:27:27
Speaker
it carries on as the cycle continues.
01:27:31
Speaker
you've got a kind of opposing cycle, which is the cycle of death, which is showing, you know, unhealthy soil, unhealthy plants, unhealthy animals, making unhealthy human beings, and then making unhealthy choices about how to manage the soil. And, you know, it strikes me that, again, you know, you've got this whole sort of belief system behind all that, that someone's going to take care of them, the doctor's going to give them the drugs, someone's going to do the farming for them, someone else is going to look after the planet, while they just sort of carry on in their existence.
01:28:00
Speaker
But how did you come around to developing those images of the cycles? Was that something that struck you as you were going through your nutritional training? Well, once I started using metabolic typing and switching people to organic food, I'd figured the organic food out.
01:28:18
Speaker
issue through my own healing process and also my farming experience, but I joined a number of soil associations to do research and I studied a pretty comprehensive course on soil agronomy by a rare guy named Arden Anderson, who's a medical doctor. He's also got a PhD in soil science and I studied the work of Elaine Ingham.
01:28:43
Speaker
And like I told you, the first book I ever read was Nutrition, a Holistic Approach by Rudolf Bountain M.D., right? So right there at 21 years of age, I already had a very comprehensive book talking about these things. And so the more I studied soil science, the more I realized this is freaking believable because people actually think that
01:29:08
Speaker
the people that are farming and the medical industry and the government have their best interests at heart, but it's completely all about money and it's very, very short-sighted. It's like, you know, Lao Tzu says, if you sharpen a knife too much, it gets dull. And so what I saw is people got smarter and smarter yet dangerously dumber and dumber.
01:29:30
Speaker
Long story made short, I saw that the soil was the basis of all things. In fact, if you study the root meanings of the word Adam and Eve as presented in the Bible, Adam means Adamus, creature of the earth, of earthly slime. In Arabic, it means creature of red earth. And Eve translates to life force, which means yin and yang. It's exactly what the Taoists told us.
01:29:55
Speaker
Even the word human being is a human being. It comes from the soil. I saw radical changes in people at every level from emotionally to neurologically to physiologically to circulatory changes, blood pressure changes. One of the most profound books I ever read was Clinical Ecology by Lawrence Dickey, M.D.
01:30:20
Speaker
who published that in 72, and he showed almost every single disease and problem that they see in hospitals comes from food intolerance, food allergy, and toxic food. That book was so dangerous to the medical system, they tried to take his medical license away, and they tried to block it from being published. He got into a big battle over that, but that book is full of scientific research showing exactly that.
01:30:48
Speaker
When you've done as much research as I have, the problem is the truth is laying there, but everybody's walking on it and shitting on it and poisoning it, and they're running around spending tons of money. Remember, the average person in a critical care unit spends their life savings in the last five days of their life because the hospital takes advantage of the fact that the family's so scared, they'll run every damn test and probe and poke and cut them at great intensity to make as much money as possible.
01:31:17
Speaker
And so from clinical experience, seeing how powerful it was, many people, when you switch them to an organic diet, will go through a significant detox just because of eating organic food. So as someone who comes from a holistic background on a farm, had holistic parents, studied with yogis, and used these principles to train himself to high levels of athletic performance,
01:31:45
Speaker
I already had firsthand experiences of what happened to my body when I ate stuff that might have been written up in books, but it didn't work, like protein powders and whey protein and watching what my body would do and then detoxing myself and getting myself off of that stuff. So a lot of this exploration had happened in myself first. And then I said, well, if it works on me, let's see if it works on my patients.
01:32:10
Speaker
I'm telling you, there's two things that are really important if you want to be effective as a therapist. One, you got to understand the soil because you cannot understand nutrition if you don't understand the soil. That's another thing. The whole entire industry of nutrition, the whole degree program of nutrition is void of soil science, which is kind of like being a doctor that doesn't understand anatomy. Here I am a farmer with a ninth grade education.
01:32:38
Speaker
going, what in the world is wrong with you people? It's right here in your own research. Most of this research came out of their own journals, but people just don't even pay attention.
01:32:48
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, you mentioned it working on you first. And it's interesting, I was talking with Diane Lee the other day, and she was talking about how there's a trend back to the n equals one kind of approach in terms of experimental numbers, because everything has to be customized. And so these big meta analyses and systematic reviews, they flatten the results out. And it means that the person standing in front of you
01:33:12
Speaker
isn't representative of the flattened result in the study. And so she's saying that increasingly there's a push and a drive back to this N equals one approach of, you know, what works for that person. Well, here, I was just going to say, here's one of the biggest problems in medical research of all types. And I've, you know, you know, I've read a lot of research, right? I used to subscribe to 36 journals from around the world.
01:33:39
Speaker
and pay researchers to scan read them and highlight the key pieces that I was looking for. So I spent years getting up at like three, 30 and four o'clock in the morning and working 15 and 18 hours a day to keep up with all this stuff. And I have never seen a medical research study that was properly normalized. Like if you look at all these studies on posture or orthopedic injuries or whatever it is,
01:34:05
Speaker
They don't normalize people, so the subjects that they're using as references are as screwed up as the damn people they're measuring, yet they determine that that subject group that they're calling the normals are normal, and they're not.
01:34:19
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, exactly. This is a huge problem in all aspects of musculoskeletal rehabilitation. They don't know how to normalize people and therefore, it would be like being a scientist whose calibration systems are off, yet they're measuring it as though it's factually correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. Listen, looking back to the wheel of death, one of the things that
01:34:45
Speaker
I didn't mention, but is a reflection of the opposing forces compared to the wheel of life is that, of course, if you've got someone at the end of that wheel of death cycle where they're feeling terrible, they're eating bad meat, they're eating bad vegetables, unhealthy soil, etc.
01:35:04
Speaker
they're sick, they're unwell. And so what that does, of course, is it drives them into a high cortisol state. Totally. And what cortisol does is it's a fight flight drug, right? It brings you into yourself, you have to survive. Yeah. And so you don't care about other people, you don't care about the planet. And the research shows this, you know, persistent pain patients, they become more and more antisocial, they have less and less interest in other people's welfare and so on.
01:35:30
Speaker
And so then, you know, what you're going to choose, you're going to choose something that supports the planet, or that's just easy for you. And this is what seems to be driving, you know, the situation that we're in is that we have such a high rate of disease and disease in the population, that people are much more concerned about, you know, where they can get their next calorie and whether it tastes nice. And, you know, how cheap it is, as opposed to actually thinking about the bigger picture. But so, you know,
01:36:00
Speaker
With cortisol, one of the things I know you're a big fan of is coffee. Of course, coffee is a sympathetic, it does stimulate cortisol, but you came up with an interesting concept around coffee to try and minimize that impact way back in, what was it, 2000, 2001? Yeah, 2000, 2001.
01:36:21
Speaker
Yeah. So what happened was is over and over and over again, as you can imagine, I kept seeing that there was a lot of coffee being consumed. And I was also by then doing functional medicine testing and finding like eight out of 10 people were either in phase two or phase three adrenal exhaustion. I had all sorts of people with serious hypothyroidism. I had
01:36:45
Speaker
Patients showing up with their fingernails falling off. In fact, one time I had a medical doctor's wife come to me. She flew all the way from New York. I remember she had seen 10 medical doctors. They had diagnosed her as severely hypothyroid, but she was drinking 25 cups of coffee a day and not one doctor mentioned anything about it, even though she told them.
01:37:09
Speaker
What I found is that because people were highly addicted to caffeine, that trying to get them off of coffee was very, very hard to do. But one of the patterns that I identified right away is that the majority of people that I saw clinically were not eating breakfast. They were just drinking coffee and then rushing off to work. And this was even more of a problem for females. And I saw that whenever there was the more coffee consumption there was and the more frequent it was, the more
01:37:37
Speaker
chronic problems I saw with menstrual cycles, so amenorrhea, desminorrhea, infertility, because the female body is much more sensitive to caffeine and other stressors due to the fact that she's got to have the ability to carry enough resources for two bodies. So a woman's systems are much more tightly calibrated hormonally.
01:38:00
Speaker
So basically what happened was as I was like meditating on how am I going to deal with this problem? Because it's a very big problem and it's really stopping people from healing. And when the body gets excessively yang like that, it doesn't have any ability to heal. So you see like post-surgical graphs, like an Achilles tendon repair or a rotator cuff repair. These people just don't heal well at all. I even see spinal fusions not taking. And so.
01:38:29
Speaker
I was just meditating on how do I handle this and I just happened to be reading at the time a nutrition book that was giving a comprehensive explanation of chelation and how chelation works and so how you can create time-release vitamins. It just dawned on me like a flash of lightning. Well, shit, if I just put some fat in the coffee that will create a food source,
01:38:54
Speaker
And I can tie the coffee up, the caffeine up in a food source, which will make it so the body has to metabolize it. So I hired a professional librarian to do a worldwide literature search, and I couldn't find anything at all on this topic, except I found one paper, not a paper, it was just an article talking, it was like an article on historical approaches to eating that said that the Tibetans put yak butter in their tea.
01:39:24
Speaker
That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I've heard of that. And so I thought, well, that's exactly what I'm thinking.
01:39:31
Speaker
I started testing butter and I tested all sorts of nut oils to find out what worked best. And I found that the problem with all the nut oils is that they floated up to the top of the coffee. And so a person could drink the caffeine, but because it wouldn't micellize, it wouldn't mix in, they'd still get the caffeine rush. But the benefit was is they had some saturated fat in their body to give them some nutrition and some energy. So it helped a little bit. But whenever I could get people to put
01:39:59
Speaker
butter or full thickness cream, it would tie the caffeine up with protein because there is protein in butter and cream. Then I found that their blood sugar highs and lows or their blood sugar handling improved radically, headaches would disappear, back and neck problems would disappear, pain between shoulder blades would disappear because the pancreas reflexes to the rhomboid middle trapezius region.
01:40:25
Speaker
Yeah. And so what it allowed me to do is while I was working on techniques for helping them get off the coffee and use other methods, whether it be things like gaiasa or various other forms of tea that could give them... Yeah, green teas and stuff. Yeah, things like that. So I created a kind of a rainbow bridge of steps to use to get off of coffee, but I found I had radical improvements in their overall level of health vitality and hormonal regulation and that their adrenals healed a lot quicker.
01:40:58
Speaker
When was
Challenges and Self-Publishing Success
01:40:59
Speaker
that, Paul? Roughly when was that? Because I seem to remember it was about 2001, something like that. It's right around 2000, 2001. The first big time athletes I taught it to was Gabrielle Reese, which I started seeing her around, well, actually I started seeing her around 99. Okay.
01:41:18
Speaker
And then I was still testing it and then Laird came to me around 2000, 2001. And he's actually the guy that started spreading it all around because he absolutely loved it. And of course it makes coffee and espresso taste way better. But you know, remember this is in the era of saturated fats or the devil. So again, I got resistance everywhere I went and I'm like,
01:41:43
Speaker
Look, I can hammer the shit out of you in the gym. My life is a demonstration and if saturated fat was so bad, then how the hell did we last two million years in nature living off the damn stuff? I said, I don't care what you're reading. That's a bunch of silly crap. It doesn't have any respect for nature at all or the facts of reality, which is typical horse shit. You see this going on even to this very day.
01:42:09
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Well, there's a couple of phrases that I remember hearing you say right in the early days, probably around 2001 as well. And you use the phrase that if you can't pronounce it, you shouldn't eat it. Or you can't pronounce, you know, what's on the label in the ingredients, right? Should not be eating it. And, and then you also were talking about if it wasn't here 10,000 years ago, don't eat it. And, you know, back at that time, those were quite radical comments.
01:42:36
Speaker
I also would tell people the longer it lasts on the shelf, the worst it is for you. I also got a huge backlash when I showed people, if you're eating pasteurized anything, it's dead. The enzyme activity is gone, which one of the most common things you see when you start doing clinical tests on people, the number of people that did Heidelberg capsule tests and found to be hypochlorhydric was unbelievable. The most common thing doctors gave them was antacids. I'm like, what the hell is going on?
01:43:07
Speaker
Part of my point in bringing that up is that because I was also lecturing around that time and doing presentations to local fitness clubs and things like that, so I was reiterating these sentiments to people. You could see the light switching on, but as far as I could tell, I was the only person saying that. Other Czech professionals, obviously.
01:43:33
Speaker
Then I remember about 2006, something like that. I saw exactly that written in one of the newspapers here in the UK, I think it was the Guardian newspaper or one of the big broadsheets. And it said, you know, some people say that if you can't pronounce what's on the label, you shouldn't eat it. And I thought, well, that's Paul said that.
01:43:50
Speaker
But it's amazing how, you know, again, you can be saying something for a while and it's it's novel and new and then gradually creeps into the sort of, I guess, the general psyche and people start to, you know, you see it coming out in media and then you hear other people talking about it and then suddenly people are trying to reteach you that same wisdom you taught 20 years ago, whatever.
01:44:15
Speaker
Well, there's actually more to that story. I was interviewed by the Guardian, the London Times, the New York Times. I've had many, many experiences. I've written articles for magazines many times, and what happened would be is they would interview me, take everything I said, and then publish it without referencing me.
01:44:36
Speaker
Oh my gosh. Wow. I had numerous magazines that I don't know if I should mention the names, but some very famous magazines that are still popular today. Yeah. And I would write articles and they would say, okay, the published date, and then it wouldn't come out.
01:44:52
Speaker
But I would look through the magazine and somebody else, one of their staff writers, would write an article on the same topic and take all the key points that were my novel discoveries and explorations and explanations and put it in their article without referencing me.
01:45:08
Speaker
And this happened to me over and over and over again, and it was very, very disrespectful, irritating. In fact, when I wrote my chapter for Williams and Wilkins, when the book came out, they put the editor's name on my chapter.
01:45:24
Speaker
And I'm like, what in the hell are you doing? And so I contacted Williams and Wilkins and I talked to the editor and they said, well, you don't have a university degree and it would be a discredit to the book. And I said, well, if the chapter is good enough to publish and the editor himself said it's the longest and most comprehensive and best chapter in the entire book on his opinion, then isn't that academic standard enough?
01:45:51
Speaker
I was getting ripped off like crazy. I'm letting you know that you probably read that in the newspaper because they interviewed me several times on these concepts. In fact, when I started traveling around to ... I hired one of the best literary agents there is who did all the one-minute manager books, and she took me to the 10 major publishers. I had to fly to New York.
01:46:15
Speaker
And almost every one of them said the same thing. If what you say in this book is true, it means all of our authors are wrong. If we publish this book, we'll have a coup on our hands. And I said, they are wrong. I can prove it to you. I can put more research on your desk than you'll ever be able to read. And I have a question for you. Are you publishing books to tell people the truth? Or are you publishing books to tow a party line?
01:46:38
Speaker
And they wouldn't answer the question. So ultimately, as you know, I had to publish how to eat, move and be healthy myself. I was going to lead into that because I was going to say that's that's one of the ways to to avoid plagiarism in a way is that you know, you get you get your message out in your own book. And yeah, I wanted to
01:46:57
Speaker
obviously mentioned how to even be healthy because it's been such a fantastic book, I think, for many people. But also, again, ties back into what we're talking about, about the health appraisal questionnaire and about the stress levels that you found your clients under and why you developed the essentially the bulletproof coffee before bulletproof was a known thing. Well, bulletproof also sells non organic coffee and they encourage the use of
01:47:25
Speaker
MCT oil and medium chain oils. Personally, I think, oh, that's just a pile of crap. We have as much problem with fats and all the breaking up of fats. All of this, if you just eat your natural diet and practice the techniques I teach in primal pattern eating,
01:47:45
Speaker
through the Czech Institute online course or in my HLC training, none of that becomes an issue. If you're
Paul Chek's Unique Health Approaches
01:47:51
Speaker
dealing with a cancer patient, there are times when you need either short chain, medium chain fats or things like that. And Emmanuel Ravicci's work goes very deep into that. So there is a clinical application, but what happens is people take...
01:48:05
Speaker
to take a little tiny piece of information that might apply to a cancer patient. They think it applies to everybody, and then they write books about it because they've got a master's degree or a PhD. They're believed as though it's God. And I watch all this silliness go on, and countless, as you know, is the number of elite athletes that have come to me doing all this shit that are all screwed up. Their metabolism's messed up. They're full of inflammation, yet they're eating $1,500 a month where they're the best pills, and they've seen the best doctors, and they're getting worse and worse and worse.
01:48:34
Speaker
The reality of it is, health is not complicated. What's complicated is the fact that all the smart people have made it impossible to be healthy.
01:48:42
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, exactly. But I think how to even be healthy was, am I right in saying it's the first book out there that really gives assessment tools in all of these holistic sort of approach to eating, moving and being healthy. You know, I don't think there's anything out there. There's probably a number of books in each field that have pieces of it. But this was really the first book that at least I'm aware of that actually covered
01:49:09
Speaker
the whole body and the whole being because it also offers, to some degree, a spiritual side to it as well. Certainly, the emotional mental spiritual is inherent within what you are assessing and providing tools for. It's also the first book in the world to show people how to work in.
01:49:27
Speaker
the importance of inner work and cultivating life force energy through Tai Chi and Qigong principles. And to this day, I think it's the only book I've ever seen that if a thousand people use the book, they can get a thousand different outcomes because it's designed specifically to address exactly what's going on in the individual's body. So there is no shotgun approach.
01:49:49
Speaker
There's an old saying, we're as different on the inside as we are on the outside. So when I'm teaching classes, I say to people, look around the room. Is there anyone in here that looks just like you? Well, the answer is no. Well, good. That means if you use the same approach for everybody in this room, you're going to be wrong that many times. And I'm teaching you how to do your job well, not to be a cookie cutter, because it doesn't take any brains to do that at all. And if you paid $60,000 for an education that teaches you that, you got very ripped off.
01:50:33
Speaker
If you'd like to learn more about Paul Chex and the Chex Institute's offerings, you can head over to chexinstitute.com. That's chex, C-H-E-K, institute.com or to paulchexblog.com. If you're interested in making change in your life, then Paul's personal professional spiritual success mastery program is available at ppssuccess.com.
01:50:43
Speaker
Yeah, for sure, for sure.
01:50:55
Speaker
Paul and the Czech Institute are thrilled to offer you access to a very special Movement as Medicine video series as a special bonus to FC2O listeners. In this video series, Paul teaches you how to use movement to recover much more quickly from injury and illness, to direct nutrition and energy to specific locations in your body, locations in need, and to meditate and reduce stress, balance your hormone levels, and much more.
01:51:19
Speaker
All you have to do is head over to the following link which is https colon slash slash checkinstitute.com forward slash m for mother a for aardvark m for mother forward slash. Thanks for joining us again and stay tuned for when we really turn up the juice in part two next week.