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FC2O Episode 12 - Phill Beach
22 Plays5 years ago
Phill Beach an osteopath, acupuncturist and truly innovative thinker leads listeners through his deep evolutionary and embryological insights which led him to develop his fascinating and clinically applied concepts of Contractile Fields, Archetypal Rest Postures, Decoding the Meridial Map and the importance of brachiation among many other gems. Phill is a unique thinker, and this podcast with him is a rare gem allowing you to get a glimpse inside the mind of someone who takes biological wisdom to another level.
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Transcript
Integrating Embryology with Human Movement
00:00:00
Speaker
So if you come up with ideas, the ideas have got to be as far as possible congruent with embryology and congruent with evolutionary biology. Otherwise, it's just whistling in the wind. For example, when your legs, when your limb buds are forming, your limb buds form on a very enigmatic structure. It's only there in the embryo for a few days
00:00:25
Speaker
encircles a whole embryo. It's called the wolf ridge. Your arms and legs form on this ridge. As the lower limb forms, it goes through a profound internal twist so that the front of the leg, the quadriceps, is derived from your back body and your hamstrings are derived from your front body. So if you just try and run lines directly down the front of the body and then down the quads,
00:00:53
Speaker
without showing that there's been a profound twist there, it's just wrong. There's no other ways of doing it. So you've got to use embryology and you've got to use those insights and try and, in a way, work out how to model this stuff. Contractile fields, it's a beautiful model. I still think, I published this in 2010, Muscles and Meridians, a book
00:01:23
Speaker
I think it's still the best model there is out there. It's the only model of human movement that is whole organism in scope, meaning every field I describe has to go from your sensory platform down to your pelvic floor. In a sense, cranial nerve one, the nose, leads the whole game. And it has done invertebrates for the last 500 million years.
00:01:48
Speaker
And then your feet aren't the bottom of you, your pelvic floor is. So every field, like a magnet, has to go from the north to the south. So from the sensory platform down to the pelvic floor.
Phil Beach's Journey and Influences
00:02:30
Speaker
I'm excited to share with you my friend, colleague and mentor, the deeply insightful Phil Beach. Now Phil is an osteopath and acupuncturist based in Wellington, New Zealand. There's someone I could listen to all day. As you'll hear, Phil is highly creative, original and epitomizes what it is to be a truly free thinker. A huge influence on my career, Phil was the first person to guide me to see the value in developing models to help simplify the vast complexity of human function. We'll see its roots in Phil's own contractile fields model.
00:02:59
Speaker
Working with Phil allowed me to immediately recognise the value in Paul Chek's similar free thinking ability to develop clinically applied models allowing people to move towards realising their potential. Here we journey through Phil's early life and career to understand what influences directed his thinking, diving into his models of archetypal rest postures, decoding the meridial map, contractile fields and his clever use of analogy and metaphor to help us recognise simplicity on the other side of complexity.
00:03:26
Speaker
I'm sure you'll enjoy taking this journey with us and will emerge the other end with deeper insights and new ideas as to how the human being has evolved to function. Enjoy the show. Here we go.
00:03:54
Speaker
Welcome to another edition of FC2O with me, Matt Walden, and my guest today, Philip Beach. Welcome, Phil. Thank you, Matt. A pleasure to be with you. Excellent. Okay. Fantastic. So now I'm going to do a little introduction because, of course, actually in my preview to the podcast series, I mentioned
00:04:13
Speaker
you. And I mentioned your archetypal postures, which we're going to get to later. But you've been one of my biggest inspirations in my career. As a student, I was very enamored with the information you're presenting and the way you're presenting it.
00:04:31
Speaker
really just captured my imagination and you know a lot of that of course is because of the way you wrap it up in the embryology and the evolutionary biology and so on so I'm gonna ask you a bit about that as we go through but I think also because your take was so unique and so what I wanted to do is get a sense of
00:04:53
Speaker
your background leading into your career and see if that sheds any light or shines any light on how you ended up with the approach that you have. So Phil, tell us a little bit about your childhood and how you ended up in London at the Osteopathic College training there. Okay, Matt, this sounds like taking a case history. Yeah, exactly. Tell us about the aggravating and relieving factors.
00:05:23
Speaker
My father was a banker, and he set up banks in developing countries. So I was born in Sydney, but every three years we'd head off for another three-year stint somewhere else. So we lived in Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, and Nigeria. And so three years on, three years off. And I guess that shaped the way I view the world.
00:05:48
Speaker
And then I was interested as a teenager in biology. Just gradually, gradually, I realized that studying osteopathy would be a good thing for me. So I left Sydney and traveled to London in 1979 to study in the British College of Osteopathic Medicine. Yeah. And was that on your own or did any family members come with you? No, that was on my own. Yeah, yeah. Taking off.
00:06:17
Speaker
Great, I love the college in those days. It was all cranky, quirky, but a good education. Yeah, yeah. Excellent. Okay. And so then, so what age were you when you made that trip? I think I was about 19. So you studied pretty early on and then what year did you graduate then?
00:06:41
Speaker
in 83. Right yeah yeah okay okay and so then I know you've trained in acupuncture as well which obviously leads into some of the models and theories that you've developed but when did that occur in your career so had you been practicing for a little while before you studied acupuncture? I practiced for a couple of years and then I went back and started doing some teaching with Philip Tanswell and that went on for a few years and then
00:07:10
Speaker
I was about 87, I guess. I started studying acupuncture and graduated in 1990, 1991, somewhere in that time frame. So I wanted a different cultural perspective. I didn't know much about acupuncture. In fact, nobody in the early 90s knew much. There was only one or two schools in Europe that it was already new. I wanted a different cultural perspective, and I certainly got that.
00:07:40
Speaker
Yes, yes, absolutely. And so how did that influence your thinking from an osteopathic perspective? Well, in the beginning, and for quite some years, when you study acupuncture, particularly in those days, it was done entirely by rote.
00:07:57
Speaker
You were presented this 500 page book that described the meridians and all the extra meridians and the points on the meridians. The way this line links to that line. And there's no external validation for this at all.
Movement and Meridians: An Innovative Model
00:08:14
Speaker
Which is quite a strange thing to study really. It's like faith medicine in a way. It's like
00:08:22
Speaker
you know, having a large table with 600 colored smarties and every color does a different disease. Yes. Well, you know, how do you, how are you linking color to pathology? So anyway, you just, you studied because you want to pass your exams. And I, you have to trust that the Chinese 2000 years ago, we're mapping something. Yes. Yeah. And then gradually as I was developing my contractile field model,
00:08:53
Speaker
I had a couple of these aha moments when I started to see what I think the Chinese were trying to do with their map. And I would suggest that meridians are largely a map of manual therapy. That's why it's very useful for any manual therapist or particularly osteopathy.
00:09:14
Speaker
Yeah, fantastic, fantastic. And I know in the early days, or I say I know, I believe you were talking more about the concept of muscle chains, but you changed that kind of terminology to contract our fields at a certain point. And does that describe better or does it interact better with the acupuncture observations that you made?
00:09:43
Speaker
No, I was moving towards the field theory before I sat down. It took me about six months to reverse engineer the map once I realized what they were trying to do. Right, right. And so I was thinking along the idea of fields, I realized that lines, if you could reduce something as complicated as the human body down to a few lines,
00:10:10
Speaker
Anatomy trains, that sort of thing. Every culture would have done it. A thousand years ago. Everything we know about fascia and human movement that's lines is inadequate. So I started to move towards this idea of fields. And one night I was sitting there trying to see how I could model, how I could understand limbs in my model.
00:10:40
Speaker
and I was looking at a picture of an embryonic limb bud and suddenly I saw it. The limb bud was at about 28 days and it was showing like a little paddle coming out of the side of the embryo. It had a pre-axial border, which is the top of the paddle, a post-axial border at the bottom of the paddle and lines in the middle, front and back. And that's when I started to see that
00:11:10
Speaker
embryologists were describing something that was very similar to what the Chinese were doing with their meridians. Right, so these are essentially axes down the limbs, right? Well, the ventral axis in the middle and the dorsal axis in the middle, yes, they're axes.
00:11:29
Speaker
At the top and the bottom, they're called borders. A border between ventral and dorsal, or you could say a border between yin and yang, the same type of idea. And to control the border, you need to place lines of control on either side of the border. I read a paper a few years before called Border Control in Cellular Walls.
00:11:58
Speaker
It's all about how complicated cell walls are. And you control in and out of a cell wall through a bilaminar membrane. So something's got to get through the first layer of the cell wall into this very complicated nether world in the middle. And then it's either accepted and brought in through the next layer or it's turned out. And it's analogous in a way to the steering wheel of your car.
00:12:28
Speaker
If you're driving, it's best to have a line on to place your hands at, say, two o'clock and four o'clock. Yeah. Oh, no, that's not right. Two o'clock and ten o'clock. Two o'clock and ten o'clock, yeah. That's good to say. It could be an interesting journey. So you've got a border in the middle there. And it's no good, if you want to control that border, it's no good putting your hand just on the top of the steering wheel. Because as you drive along, you'll veer to the left and to the right.
00:12:57
Speaker
You know, you weave. Yeah. Yeah. Rives people mad behind you. Yeah. So I started to see that at all levels of biology and politics and, you know, everywhere you see a border, the best way to control a border is to put these lines of control on the dorsal and the ventral side of the border. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Suddenly I started to see that the Chinese had been very, very perceptive in
00:13:27
Speaker
rooting out where these borders are on the human body and placing lines of control on them.
00:13:33
Speaker
And I remember you relating this at one point to this kind of exquisite observation of human control through the martial arts. Is that right? Is something along those lines that the way that, for example, in Aikido or other martial arts, there's certain points on the body which if you twist or grab or strike, it has a kind of predictable effect on the body. And am I right in thinking that you were saying that
00:14:02
Speaker
that sort of level of observation and practical application relates very closely to these lines you're describing. Absolutely. The Chinese, when they were doing this 2,000 years ago,
00:14:19
Speaker
Obsessed with borders because they were the Genghis Khan and his group was coming down and causing mayhem Yeah, the building there they great the early forms the prototypes of their Great Wall of China, right? Right. Yeah So they were very concerned about in you know inside and outsides And and they'd been through and they were towards the end of what's called the warring state period right? 400 years of almost continuous warfare
00:14:48
Speaker
as they went from 60 or 80 states down to one state. It was a time of generations of horrendous fighting.
00:15:03
Speaker
But Albert was a very creative period for their philosophy, obviously for their medicine, because there were a lot of trauma. And then a lot of martial arts, because that's how you win by being the best fighter. And so all of that played into, I think, into the development of this map.
00:15:29
Speaker
Yeah, I actually think I've come closer to I call it a translatory model. I've got a
00:15:38
Speaker
The Chinese did what they did 2,000 years ago. We largely learned that by rote now. And then the modern world where we like to see reasons or rationale for it. And so there needs to be a translatory model between those domains. And I suspect that contractile fields and this model of lines of control goes a long way to showing what the Chinese radio map is all about.
The Importance of Rest and Natural Postures
00:16:07
Speaker
Yeah, fantastic. So at what point did the archetypal rest postures sort of start to form in your mind as part of the system of balancing the body? Because this is another key model that you developed and taught me at college. And then obviously I taught alongside you for a while. And that archetypal postures concept, did that come to you around the same time or was it before or during this kind of period of developing your ideas around the meridial map?
00:16:36
Speaker
It was before that, and I've been conscious that a posture like the full squat is a very important human posture. I didn't really know why in the beginning. I just thought that if you're going to do a test someone by standing behind them and watching them forward bend or backward bend, you might as well get them to squat as well. So I knew the squat was important, possibly because I grew up in all these third world countries.
00:17:05
Speaker
And I'd spent a lot of time squatting with my friends in the backyard. I don't know. So that idea started earlier, but then it takes time for these ideas to morph into a coherent strategy or insight. So out of that and some years of gradually refining my ideas came
00:17:35
Speaker
what I now call archetypal postures. A bit tongue-in-cheek, the opposite of sitting on the floor is the getting up and down from the floor, I call those the erector sizes. Yes, and does that link into home erectus or is it just purely the fact that you are getting up to stand erect? It's both. I could have called them the floor to standing transition exercises,
00:18:00
Speaker
But, you know, that doesn't have much, much wow. And we, yeah, most research coming out now says that Homo erectus was in our family tree, you know, if not a direct ancestor. And this, something about standing up changed the whole game with us. Because the standing up came before
00:18:27
Speaker
the big brains, before the fire, before the language, and before the tools. Yes, yes. We were basically a pretty primitive chimpanzee-type animal. And because we started to become bipedal, full-time bipedal animals, a cascade of change was initiated.
00:18:54
Speaker
Fantastic. So the flip side of being on the floor is getting up from the floor. And that's where we are derived from Homo erectus. That's what we did. We stood up. Yeah. And so just to give people a mental image of what we're talking about here. So we've obviously mentioned the deep squats and then getting up. But you've got specific, first of all, other archetypal postures that you talk about.
00:19:20
Speaker
but also specific ways of getting up as well. So do you want to sort of give a little bit of an overview? Sure. There's, I call them archetypal because I think they're common to all mankind, women cultures all around the world, young baby, well, not babies, but from infants right through to old age,
00:19:49
Speaker
and going back in our evolutionary history as well. Every animal, when it's not moving, needs to rest. You can't have rest without movement. You can't have systolic without diastolic. Your blood pressure, for example, the rest is really important and all animals have particular forms of resting. And for humans,
00:20:16
Speaker
it's predictable. You either lie down on your front, your back or your side. And that's on the ground. So it's a fairly firm surface. Or you do full squats or all the other form of the more linear looking postures, which is a long sitting with your legs in front of you or sitting on your knees and toes.
00:20:45
Speaker
or sitting on your shin bones like the Japanese do, those more linear looking postures, or, and just as importantly, you can start turning your legs out or in. So now you're all the cross legged type postures. Yeah, yeah. There's quite a few variants on that. So I think the human physique to be in good form, and because we're bipedal, we're rather specialized,
00:21:15
Speaker
these postures help tune your physique. I think it's really important that we let kids grow up with less access to chairs, more access to the floor, and for longer. So that as they, you know, when teenagers are developing, as they're going through their growth spurts, as they're starting to put on muscle, all that type of thing, that system is fine-tuned by regular access to
00:21:45
Speaker
squatting and the more linear postures and the more turned out postures. Yeah, because in your home you don't have chairs. Have you got any chairs? I know in your living room you don't have a sofa or an armchair. No, no, they're bad. We have a bench that you can sit on if you need to. Some people aren't comfortable on the floor and if people are coming for dinner you've got to give them something.
00:22:15
Speaker
There's a hard bench that you can sit on. But just by getting rid of your chairs, I would urge people to, when it's socially acceptable, if you want to age well, if you want to load the biomechanical dice in your favor, so more likely to get to 80s and still be in reasonable form, get rid of your furniture whenever it's socially acceptable and return to the floor.
00:22:46
Speaker
Because you've got to stand on the floor. Yes. You're getting up from the floor is a profound movement sequence. Totally different to getting in and out of a chair.
00:23:00
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And that's why it takes so long for a child to get to the point that it can stand up. If you take the baby that's just been born, it takes close to a year for them to be able to stand up because it's a very complex movement pattern which requires all kinds of stabilization and coordination to do that, right? You've got the big heavy head right at the top of the wobbly system.
00:23:24
Speaker
Yes, yeah. On two little bases of support, it's really quite ludicrous. It is, it is. But tying in with this, I think I might have sent you the report. But I think it was maybe two years ago, roughly, that there was a report that came out which was looking at a key predictor of longevity. And it was the ability of an individual to get up from the floor without using their hands had a statistically, I think it had one of the strongest statistically significant
00:23:53
Speaker
kind of indications that you would live for longer. And if you had to use a hand to get up, then, you know, your chances of surviving dropped right down.
Critique of Conventional Exercises and Furniture
00:24:05
Speaker
So I thought that was just a fascinating kind of supportive piece of evidence for your erector sizes concept. Totally. Yeah, very strong predictor. Yeah, yeah.
00:24:18
Speaker
OK, fantastic. A Brazilian study published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology. Right, right. OK, so you got the study. Excellent, excellent. And so, you know, can you can you tell us anything more about these exercises? So, you know, some of them sort of more lunge like and some of them more squat like and I mean, how what are the different variations? I'm not that keen on lunges. Yeah, I think that's
00:24:49
Speaker
lunges in a way come out of a reductionist approach to understanding muscles and movement. A deep lunge is a way of targeting your quads. And if I saw a Stone Age man lunge across a small stream and then get back and then lunge across again and get back and lunge across the stream and get back, I would think he's
00:25:19
Speaker
gone crazy. You know, all these things. What's what's happened? Yeah. I can see putting a weight on your shoulders and walking up a hill and stepping over things. But moving on, you know, I see that as a more lifelike, valid exercise. I see people in bad mechanical condition and they go into a boot camp, they do too many lunges and
00:25:49
Speaker
Once you upset those knees, they can be upset for a long, long time. Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. So how have you seen these things applied in clinic? I know you've used them for many, many years now. And I know you've told me some stories of people that have just had really quite, well, I think what many people think, quite miraculous turnarounds in their biomechanical health from using archetypal rest postures and these erector sizes.
00:26:14
Speaker
Can you give one or two examples of that kind of thing that you've seen? Through the erector sizes and archetypal postures, I'm interested in your biomechanical tune. Yes. I think these postures, including now the ideas I've got about recreation and hanging, these postures are so deeply embedded in your system.
00:26:41
Speaker
They're directly analogous to 120 on 80 for your blood pressure or 20 vision. That sort of thing. So by taking people towards ease in these postures, you're tuning them towards these deeply embedded norms. When you're in better tune, you're less likely to hurt yourself. And if you do hurt yourself, you're more likely to get over it.
00:27:11
Speaker
Whereas in my opinion, if you're getting tight and maybe strong, but tight, and then you hurt yourself, the injuries go deeper. They take longer to repair. So I remember you telling me about a patient of yours that was a crossfitter and they could squat deep, but only when they're holding their kettlebell or their barbell or whatever. And that's not the kind of tuning you're talking about, right? No, that's an external help.
00:27:41
Speaker
There's a full squad. There's a nice book out called Lowly Origin, which is about the evolution of humans in East Africa. And this guy calls the book Lowly Origin. His name's Kingdom. I think it's Jonathan Kingdom. And he suggests that he calls the book Lowly Origin because he thinks the whole game started with an eight
00:28:10
Speaker
that started to come out of the trees for longer periods of time. And it started with an ape that could squat. A full squat freeing the hands up. That way you've got two hands with two hands that opens up the possibility of sign language. It opens up feeding faster, all that sort of thing, possibly. So it goes from squatting to standing to walking to running.
00:28:39
Speaker
That's the DCs. Yeah, yeah. That's the persuasive idea when you read the whole book. Yeah, makes sense. So in this idea of tuning, I think that you've got two main, if you're trying to tune a Steinway piano, you'd go to middle C, get middle C sounding good, and then you start to go up and down through the octaves. So I would say we're like a bimodal,
00:29:09
Speaker
I think we've got a key tuning point around middle C, which is the full squat, and another one around being at ease in cross-legged. A lot of people I meet prefer one over the other. People that can't squat like to sit cross-legged, or vice versa. Whereas in the ideal world, you've got access to both.
00:29:41
Speaker
So we're all genetically different. Hips vary quite a lot. But I think that in a more normal lifestyle where you're barefoot as you're forming, as you're learning to walk, run, jump, that sort of thing, you would tune your system towards the best that your genetics could give you. Yeah.
00:30:09
Speaker
Whereas now we're letting our genetics, you know, we're not inhibiting, we're not attenuating the, what you've been given from your ancestors. So this is like, the tuning concept is like a kind of homeostasis for the musculoskeletal system. Absolutely. I'm sitting here in front of this computer cross legged. But if I was,
00:30:37
Speaker
Outside in the New Zealand winter, cold, wet, muddy, I'd think I'd be trying to squat. Yeah, yeah, right. Or I'd be sitting Japanese style so that I'm only putting my shin bone into the cold, wet mud.
00:30:52
Speaker
Yeah, I remember Michael Tetley. So Michael Tetley was the guy that wrote the Instinctive Sleep Postures paper, which had some similarities with your concepts. But he talks about that posture as being used by, who was it? I think
00:31:09
Speaker
know something like Siberian Gypsies to sleep so they would kneel down and his explanation was that you know if you've just got the shin contacting the ground then you just literally are contacting the ground with bone and you're not letting your soft tissues get too cold. I thought that was quite an interesting insight.
00:31:26
Speaker
Tibetan porters sleep like that. Tibetan porters maybe. It's been a while since I read the paper. They don't carry their own gear. They make money by carrying yours. Yes. So they just have a coat and if the going gets tough, that's the way they'll sleep. They'll just go down into a child posture in yoga and then drape themselves with their coat.
00:31:50
Speaker
Wow, yeah. Tough living.
The Role of Brachiation in Evolution
00:31:53
Speaker
Yeah, it is, it is. Wow, okay, great. So that's a little bit on the archetypal postures, but you've also more recently started to model how the arms fit into this and brachiation. So do you want to give us a little teaser on that? Again, quite some years, probably the last 10 years, I've always had ropes up
00:32:19
Speaker
in the home. Home is on three floors and we've got ropes on every floor now. Because I reasoned that if I was putting an ape inside a room, I'd give it a rope at least, if nothing. But gradually I started to see the importance of this as for the upper limb, it's as important as the floor setting is for the lower limb.
00:32:49
Speaker
One of the key facts here was the separation about 30 million years ago, the divergence between the monkeys and the apes. The last common ancestors somewhere back in that timeframe. The monkeys stayed small and smaller brains, smaller social circles. They kept their tails and they came to run along the tops of branches. And the apes went another way. They got bigger.
00:33:20
Speaker
Quite a lot bigger. Smarter, larger social circles. They lost their tail and they tend to suspend. So they have this suspensory behavior. Yeah, yeah. Climbing and pulling themselves up with their arms, hanging on with their arms as they scurry along branches.
00:33:44
Speaker
that's safer than putting your whole body weight on a branch and walking out away from the trunk. If you're 40 kilos and that starts to give way, 50 kilos, it can be over quickly. If you're bending yourself, you can take one arm out further away from the trunk and test it.
00:34:09
Speaker
we've been elongating our bodies, the apes, for 30 million years. That's why we probably became bipedal, because of this long pre-adaptation to an elongated body form, using the tail, using those tail muscles to reinforce the pelvic floor. And so I started to see that
00:34:38
Speaker
swinging and hanging and I've developed a whole series of exercises around swinging and hanging and twisting and turning are profound for you in a sense that even predates the sitting postures because it's back to the origin of apes, not humans.
00:34:59
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It makes sense. I remember hearing Dan Lieberman speak, you know, the Harvard professor of evolutionary biology. And so he was addressing this conference and he said, you know, looking out on the audience here, I can tell this is a very unusual group of primates. And everyone's kind of waiting, you know, for the punchline. He said, because I bet if I were to ask any one of you,
00:35:22
Speaker
none of you have spent time in a tree in the last 24 hours. And that, for a primate, is very unusual. And, you know, he was just making the point that, you know, we've adapted to do something different, but obviously our primate ancestry was all about that, all about hanging from branches and being in trees, you know?
Embryology's Insights into Human Development
00:35:43
Speaker
Totally. Look, I'm sitting here in this room, but if a big cat came into this room,
00:35:49
Speaker
And this was serious, you know, my adrenaline would go absolutely berserk. And I would look for the highest thing I could to get onto. You can poke down at a big animal. Whereas if you're looking eye to eye at a big cat or a big dog, that's not a good look. No, definitely not. Great stuff.
00:36:14
Speaker
you know, switching back to the meridiol map. Now, you know, one of the things that I have always appreciated about the way you teach is that you go deep into the evolutionary biology like we've just sort of touched on there. But you also talk about the embryological anatomy. And I just wanted to, you know,
00:36:35
Speaker
ask a little bit of a generic question around that because you know one of the things I've come to realize having heard you speak and hearing others speak about I mean most most other people I've heard speak tend to be focused more towards the evolutionary anatomy which of course is highly valuable but you've really studied the embryology in a way that I've never heard anyone else explain it and you're really coming to it from that idea of the meridial map and movement and how the development of the
00:37:05
Speaker
the individual is going to inform us of the function of the way that the body has developed. What was it that kind of led you into that study? Because, you know, you've studied that in some depth, haven't you? I have. I'm, you know, not to degree level, I'm just a layperson interested, so I read the textbooks. Yeah, yeah. Biology is a fantastic way of putting yourself to sleep.
00:37:33
Speaker
It's so arcane and the language is so dense and the 3D morphing is really hard to get your head around. I would suggest if you haven't read some embryology, you just don't get it. So if you come up with ideas, the ideas have got to be as far as possible congruent with embryology and congruent with evolutionary biology.
00:38:02
Speaker
Otherwise, it's just whistling in the wind. For example, when your legs, when your limb buds are forming, your limb buds form on a very enigmatic structure. It's only there in the embryo for a few days. In circles, a whole embryo. It's called the wolf ridge, because the guy wolf first described it.
00:38:28
Speaker
and your arms and legs form on this ridge. As the lower limb forms, it goes through a profound internal twist so that the front of the leg, the quadriceps, is derived from your back body and your hamstrings are derived from your front body.
00:38:50
Speaker
And so if you just try and run lines directly down the front of the body and then down the quads, without showing that there's been a profound twist there, it's just wrong. There's no other ways of doing it. So you've got to use embryology and you've got to use those insights and try and in a way work out how to model this stuff.
00:39:19
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Contractile fields, it's a beautiful model. I still think, I published this in 2010, Muscles and Meridians, a book. I think it's still the best model there is out there. It's the only model of human movement that is whole organism in scope, meaning every field I describe has to go from your sensory platform down to your pelvic floor. Yeah.
00:39:49
Speaker
In a sense, cranial nerve one, the nose, leads the whole game. And it has done invertebrates for the last 500 million years. And then your feet aren't the bottom of you, your pelvic floor is. So every field, like a magnet, has to go from the north to the south. So from the sensory platform down to the pelvic floor. One of the big advantages of my model is that
00:40:18
Speaker
I put the limbs in a bit later in the modeling process. Most people go wrong because they try and immediately just look at an adult human and start trying to place lines that go from the torso into the limbs. Yes, yes. I would suggest you can be a very good vertebrate like a snake and you don't have limbs. You've got the same neuroarchitecture, you've got the same
00:40:48
Speaker
Torsal muscles in large part, you know, you don't have the limbs or or you can be afflicted by thalidomide something like that terrible drug that That disrupted limb development in children. So yeah, yeah a Great person there, you know without limbs Yeah, yeah
00:41:10
Speaker
But they still move, and this is where Serge Brzezinski's work was so good. And he was... Exactly. People move with the same movement patterns that we move in. So that's why contractile fields for a number of reasons are... I think they're a step change in theory of trying to understand, trying to probe deeper into how and why we move the way we do.
00:41:39
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And just for people that aren't familiar with Serge Krakowiecki's work, a large, well, first of all, it was called the Spinal Engine, wasn't it? And, you know, his whole
00:41:52
Speaker
approach was informed by, again, studying the evolution and looking at the evolution of the spine and showing that the spine is the generator of motion in fish, of course, because they don't have limbs. Of course, they have pectoral and pelvic fins, but they don't have limbs in the same way that we do.
00:42:10
Speaker
So the motion is generated by the spine and that's continued into lizards and of course the limbs that emerge there amplify the movement of the spine and it really of course then pointing out that our limbs do the same thing they amplify the movements of our spine but you know my experience and you know I think most people's experience of if you study the way someone moves and you try and get a gait analysis book then it's all about
00:42:38
Speaker
feet and it's all about, maybe you might get a bit about the legs, you get relatively little about the trunk, and even if there is stuff about the trunk, it's generally glossed over with very little detail, but it's almost like they've got everything upside down. I'd agree. And I guess if you don't understand these archetypal postures, your gait patterns are profoundly affected by them.
00:43:05
Speaker
If you're stiff in these archetypal postures, it goes right through into your gait patterns. Don't change gait patterns without changing your biomechanical homeostasis or balance, tune. It doesn't work. It's like having someone to stand up straight. They do it for about two seconds and then they go back to their habitual posture. Yes, yes.
00:43:36
Speaker
So it really took the game ahead. He did. He did. Yeah. Amazing. Amazing man. Now you mentioned the Wolfie and Ridge. Now that has a similar or other a synonym, which is the apical ectodermal ridge, if I'm not mistaken, is that correct? Yup, ectodermal ridge, ectodermal ring.
00:43:54
Speaker
Yeah and you know one of the things I find fascinating about this and this is I think largely through your insights is that of course what it does is it forms the the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, all the special sensory tissue around the face and then the nipple line and the genital tip so that the penis or the clitoris
00:44:19
Speaker
And then obviously the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet. And so this is all special sensory tissue. And, you know, what struck me about that is that the model of the reptilian reflexes, which I think you've probably probably heard of the idea that you've got your sort of first reptilian reflex being safety and security and your second reptilian reflex being nutrition. So finding food and the third being sex.
00:44:50
Speaker
And really, that apical exodermal ridge is all about all of those three things. So the idea of the reptilin reflexes is that
00:44:58
Speaker
you will, from a behavioral perspective, you will go through each of those in sequence. If you're not safe, you're not interested in food or in sex. And if you're not safe and fed, then you're not interested in sex. Food is your priority. But so the apical exodermal ridge is all about being able to sense danger, to smell danger, see it, hear it, and then provide you with a means to get away from the danger, which is, of course, again, using those senses, but also using your,
00:45:27
Speaker
palms of your hands if you're a quadruped and the soles of your feet to get away from the danger and make yourself safe. And then of course the second reptilian reflex which is to find food is again you need special senses to do that you need to be able to see that the apples are ripe so it's worth climbing the tree to get them and then when you pick up the apple and you smell it
00:45:50
Speaker
smells good then you know that you're ready to bite it and then when you bite it and it tastes sour you think oh that's not good maybe that's not an apple maybe that's toxic but if it tastes sweet then then you bring it into you incorporate it and and so then at that point if you're then fed then the next thing is you need to
00:46:07
Speaker
find a mate so you need to see the mate you just smell the mate you need to perhaps talk to the mate whatever it is in this day and age and then you need to move towards the prospective mates and then of course finally that that genital tip and the nipple line and everything comes into play and all of those special senses that were formed by that apical exodermal ridge are all sort of let's say they you realize their potential
00:46:32
Speaker
Yep, that's one take on it. Yeah, one take. Go on, have you got other insights on it? I just think it's been a... Vertebrates go back more than 500 million years. Once the audio plan of a vertebrate was established that long ago, it's been remarkably stable ever since. And the Wolfian Ridge seems to be an information superhighway.
00:47:02
Speaker
In fish, it's called the fin line or the fin hold. So I think quite analogous goes right back to fish. And so it's a way of linking together in early embryology, these fairly separate modules of development into a cohesive unity in a whole organism. So you've got eyes, ears, nose,
00:47:32
Speaker
hands feed genitals, all networking in real time to form a viable embryo.
Barefoot Movement and Biomechanics
00:47:43
Speaker
In a sense it goes right back to the beginning of our heritage as a fish. Yeah, as a vertebrate, yeah, yeah. But so this,
00:47:58
Speaker
Wolfiam Ridge also links in with Barefoot running. And I think, well, I know you were the first person to even suggest to me as a student and as the whole class that the foot has evolved to be Barefoot, which, of course, in this day and age, having been through this kind of period where there's been minimalist shoes available and the discussions become more of a public discussion,
00:48:22
Speaker
That seems like quite a logical thing. But back in the 90s, that was quite radical. But you were even more radical than that. You actually went barefoot running, right? And I know you and I went for a couple of runs up in Hampstead. So you had a trail that you knew was relatively safe to go barefoot running. And so tell me a bit more about that. Was it just purely an intuition and sort of rationalizing out the sort of evolutionary path that we had taken?
00:48:52
Speaker
It was partly that. Between contractile fields and archetypal postures, I had quite a rich model. And the model acts a bit like a treasure map. In science, they say that's what models are. They're theory-driven treasure maps. And the model was showing me how important feet were to a bipedal species like us.
00:49:18
Speaker
I was also seeing a lot of very dysfunctional feet, feet that have, you know, right from early, early days of walking, they've had shoes and socks on. And then in Britain, where it's cold and wet so much of the year, people rarely take their shoes off and go outside. So, and the only way to really improve or the fastest way to, to improve feet was to
00:49:44
Speaker
take your shoes and socks off and start going on some rough terrain. Start to use your plantar fascia in the way that it's really been designed to be used. A bit of rubbing wasn't going to do it. Yeah, yeah. And so that led to barefoot walking, running. My exercise of choice here in Wellington is to barefoot run on some of the
00:50:13
Speaker
paths up into the hills and then go to a children's playground and play around on there for half an hour and then come home. Yeah, yeah, excellent.
00:50:23
Speaker
Fantastic. And I remember you, I think you and I had a conversation one time with Skype to just have a bit of a catch up and you were saying to me, isn't it amazing that when you look at the sole of the foot, then it's innovated by the L4, L5 and S1 nerve root, which is exactly where the information needs to be transferred so you can stabilize that kind of junctional area.
00:50:47
Speaker
where the spine is at its most vulnerable. And I've kind of spoken a fair bit about this and looked into it because of my involvement with Vibram 5 Fingers between 2007 and 2017. And of course, one of the things when you look into back pain is that 98% of low back pain occurs at L4, L5 and S1. So there's very segments that the nerves from the feet feed back into.
00:51:15
Speaker
It was you that pointed that out to me, so I want to credit you. But it was just an amazing insight. And it's so obvious when you see it that the soles of our feet are designed to provide that information. So it's just an amazing design. I call it a data stream, an enormous data stream in real time, into those most vulnerable segments. Telling those vulnerable segments how to sit on each other.
00:51:45
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So when you run barefoot, you run more carefully, you run more lightly. There's a lot more variability, and biology loves variability. And that led me onto the importance of dorsiflexion. Right. I've had a t-shirt made that says, in praise of dorsiflexion. Excellent.
00:52:15
Speaker
And another one for the love of dorsiflexion. Dorsiflexion is when you bring your foot back up towards your shin. I started to see how important that angle was. Our species has hit a delicate balance there between climbing and walking and running. So we mostly walk and run, but if we need to, we can scamper up a tree. And dorsiflexion is that angle.
00:52:45
Speaker
That's why barefoot restores your God-given dorsiflexion. Normal training shoe, you've got a positive lift at the back there. You're really mucking with a key biomechanical angle in my opinion.
Sensory Integration in Movement Models
00:53:05
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. I agree. And we saw that a lot when people transitioned from their, you know, traditional running shoes into a more minimal issue. A lot of people experienced discomfort in their Achilles tendon for that very reason that they're stretching it further to get further into dorsiflexion. Of course, there is the whole thing that if you're
00:53:26
Speaker
If you're running around barefoot or in a shoe that has no cushioning, then you're much more likely to forefoot strike and so you load the Achilles tendon more as well. But I think one of the key benefits, as you say, is increasing that range of motion through the Achilles tendon to allow more dorsiflexion.
00:53:48
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So I know you mentioned briefly the sensory organs earlier and how they are embedded within these contractile fields. Can you just elaborate a touch on that just so that people understand what you mean by that and how they would relate to these muscular contractile fields that you've described? Well, it's a bit of a long story. I was developing the model of contractile fields.
00:54:17
Speaker
This is all, in those days, it was very tentative stuff, reaching out into the unknown, trying to put together this model. And at the same time, I was starting to see what the Chinese were mapping. And one of the things that came out with meridians, I started to see how they were running meridians from particular parts of the body to particular sense organs.
00:54:47
Speaker
And so in a sense, the Chinese said, well, why don't you think about putting a sense organ as embedded in a particular field of movement? And I realized that this was a valid thing to do because for 500 million years, the mural architecture of vertebrates has always placed the same cranial nerves in a fish are the cranial nerves we use.
00:55:16
Speaker
Yes. Well, we've got two extra. We've got a tongue that moves, and what else? We've got a sternocleidoid. See, fish don't have a neck, per se. Yes. Yes, right. That came later. But the other 10 are the same. So it means that as bodies have morphed and morphed and morphed over 500 million years from a fish-type ancestor to an upright bipedal ape.
00:55:45
Speaker
the basic neuro-architecture has stayed the same. I do think that the very early forms of sense organs set up the Christian cross. They set up a front, a back, a left, a right, a top, a bottom.
00:56:08
Speaker
And the sense organs are like beacons that help this basic patterning that sets up very early in embryology. So in your ventral dorsal field, your body's ability to move forwards and backwards, I place your nose. In your body's ability to bend left and right, like a fish, I place your ear organs. In your body's ability to talk, to twist, I place your eyes.
00:56:36
Speaker
and your body's ability to squeeze, I'll place your mouth and your anus, and so on and so on. It's in the limbs, the limb fields that I described, the sense organs are the hands and the feet. Right, yes, yes. It's just, in a sense it's thinking out loud, in a sense it's trying to come up with, if we're going to understand movement, we have to break down what I call tissue fascism.
00:57:07
Speaker
Yes, yeah. For example, I'm very interested in fascia and I go to the conferences and so on, but I don't want to be a tissue fascist and say that fascia is the thing. Yes. It's another tissue. Nice play on words. I don't want to be a tissue fascist or all that sort of thing.
00:57:31
Speaker
Yeah. So Phil, can you just explain a bit more about why fields is a good term for these contractile elements that we colloquially know as muscles? The word field is not tissue specific.
00:57:49
Speaker
Yeah, that's why I liked it. It's, I wasn't, it's not, it's not neuromuscular. It's not neuro myofascial, you know, make the word. That's not the way to think about this stuff. It's a whole, I think we need to keep coming back to a whole organism perspective. Fields, fields get bigger, they get smaller fields die. They can eventually go. Um,
00:58:19
Speaker
the fields interact with each other. And that is in a sense, one of their most powerful attributes. So the field- I guess they have boundaries and borders as well, don't they? Boundaries, borders. So my model is all about boundaries and borders. I state very clearly in my book and now that the breaking up of the body into these fields, which once I talk you through them,
00:58:49
Speaker
Most people go, well, why didn't I think of that? It sort of becomes obvious. But doing this is primarily for our intellectual pleasure. Because in the real world, the fields are totally interactive. And that's the most important thing by far. So we can look at fields, but if I stand up from the floor here, I'm using all of my fields.
00:59:15
Speaker
Go for a walk or a run or a lift or anything. The fields are totally and utterly enmeshed deeply in each other.
00:59:29
Speaker
Yeah. And so, I mean, I'm not sure if that leads into, you know, the sort of fourth area that we had discussed that we would cover, which is the idea of analogy and metaphor. I mean, I guess you could call them fields from a metaphorical perspective and an analogous perspective, but I guess that, I don't know, are they literally fields?
00:59:56
Speaker
what I don't quite get that. Well yes sorry so what I'm trying to convey is that
01:00:04
Speaker
You know, you've called these contractile fields the term, you've used the term fields, but that's really an analogy or a metaphor, I guess, as opposed to a literal interpretation of what they are. Like you said, they all interact. And, you know, one of the things that I know you've been particularly giving thought to over the last few years is this idea of analogy and metaphor and how that can be utilized in teaching and in clinical practice.
01:00:37
Speaker
So I was wondering if you could expand on that. It comes in part out of my many years teaching osteopathic technique. If you're teaching technique, you teach a thing. This is how you do something to the wrist. These are techniques for the knee. These are techniques for doing something to a named muscle. As these ideas
01:01:04
Speaker
came into my life as they started to affect my manual therapy, very quickly in the real world, I go into freestyle when I treat people. And it's in a way difficult to teach. That's what I think. And I started to see the importance of language,
01:01:30
Speaker
and the importance of analogy and metaphor in the whole way the human brain is put together. So I started to teach manual therapy based on analogy and metaphor rather than based on applied anatomy.
The Power of Metaphor in Therapy
01:01:47
Speaker
And so that way, if I teach one of these analogies or metaphors,
01:01:54
Speaker
You can go back to your practice on Monday and you can use your existing techniques, but you think about them differently because you're using a different metaphor. There's so many manual techniques out there, so many styles, and who knows what's better in brackets than another. It's a very hard game to say, my work is better than your work, or that sort of thing.
01:02:24
Speaker
It's such a complicated thing. But for example, if I use one metaphor, it's a little bit rough. I call it the kebab technique. Nice, yes. If someone comes in with an acute left shoulder, I'll put them lying on their right side, right shoulder in the beginning. That lets me, I bring the problem up to the surface where I can touch it, move it, palpate it.
01:02:55
Speaker
And then I'll do whatever I want to do there. And this, you can treat this any way you want using your current practice. You then put the person on the left side and then you palpate the shoulder while it's down. You get totally different information. And then the person's on their left and then the person, sorry, then the person is on their back, then the person is on their front.
01:03:21
Speaker
and you can add some twist into there. Each posture brings up a different part of that condition. And that's through the sort of stresses that places through the contractile fields. Yes, through the whole network. Organism. Yeah, it's just the whole organism. It doesn't matter if you're doing cranial work or muscle energy technique or any form of, I don't care, whatever you do. Just by
01:03:51
Speaker
putting people quite consciously in the round, left, right, put on some twists, then you're going to get better results rather than just do whatever you're going to do on the shoulder and say, right, that's it. Yes, yes.
01:04:12
Speaker
And was this way of explaining things, do you think that was influenced at all by your traditional Chinese medicine training? Because one of the things I've noticed, certainly about the sort of elements and the way the Chinese talk about the elements is that, of course, you know, they're not talking about literal fire in the body or earth in the body, they're using metaphor to explain a much more complex topic and subject area that's far more vast than the metaphors that they're placing onto it.
01:04:43
Speaker
Do you think your idea of utilizing analogy and metaphor might have been stimulated by any of that, or is it just completely different origin that it came from? I don't really know, Matt. I've gradually started to see the importance of using analogies and metaphors and how analogies don't prove anything, but they aid what they call high-level perception.
01:05:12
Speaker
Right. Right. So they help you think about something. It helps bridge from something you know about to something you don't know about. Yes. Yes. So kind of making some order from the chaos, essentially. One of the ones I like is in the 2008 stock market crash. This was unexpected. And the world's economics people didn't know what to do.
01:05:41
Speaker
They modeled it, something crashed that big. And New Science magazine came out and said, the world economy, treat it like a polluted swamp. And so suddenly, we've got fair ideas about how to treat a polluted swamp. You've got great drainage, you've got to plant special things. There's ways of doing
Promoting Natural Movement in Modern Life
01:06:07
Speaker
it. And you could start to look at the economy and
01:06:11
Speaker
and apply those patterns. That way of thinking proved to be very powerful in helping mitigate us getting over that crisis. Fascinating stuff. One remaining question that I had for you, if you feel like we've reached the end of our discussion for today, because I think we're an hour in now,
01:06:40
Speaker
So what I wanted to ask you is, you know, where do you feel the world of musculoskeletal medicine could do with some redirection? And I think obviously we've just discussed that over the last hour, but would there be any advice that you would offer, you know, perhaps to an aspiring researcher or to someone, you know, who's running a college or whatever, you know, where do you think things have gone off track and how can we redirect them based on your understanding of the human body?
01:07:10
Speaker
First of all, it's much better to prevent rather than try and treat afterwards. So let kids, you know, don't put them into shoes too early. Let them sit on the floor to do their homework, all that sort of thing. And let go on as long as you possibly can. I call it placing a value on floor life.
01:07:36
Speaker
I would like to see offices around the world with big ropes slung right across the office space. So when you're not at your computer you can just get both of your arms up. And is the idea there that you literally swing from the ropes or you hang from the ropes or you just put your arms up above your head? I think you get 80% of the goodness just by getting your arms above your head.
01:07:57
Speaker
Well, do you know what, Phil? You know, one really interesting thing about that is that the Football Association here in the UK, because, of course, these footballers are such high commodities now, high value commodities, they invested. I don't know the amount, but it was it was at least hundreds of thousands of pounds into research to understand better how the footballers could recover quicker because, of course, the game is very sort of high level. It's using the anaerobic energy systems.
01:08:26
Speaker
so that the players can fatigue, they're at a greater risk of injury, the game's not as entertaining when they're fatigued, etc. So, you know, the big question was, how do we recover quicker? And what they established, you know, across all of this sort of expenditure was that the very best thing the players could do is put their hands above their heads, you know, literally walk around with their hands on their heads to recover. And so it's kind of interesting that it ties in with your breakiation theories.
01:08:55
Speaker
You've got no idea how profound getting your arms up, particularly then doing a bit of hanging is for your low back. If I hang by my arms and even with my feet on the floor, but I just bend my knees, I'm putting a 40 or 50 kg pull through my low back. If I tried to pull you on the table at 40 or 50 kg, so I'd just pull you off the table. Yes, yes, exactly.
01:09:24
Speaker
you're able to, by getting your arms above your head and bending your knees and so on, you're able to really help your system in quite a profound way. So I think that we've got a, you know, we've got a design, a new table that's being produced here in New Zealand called the LIVA, L-I-M-B-E-R Table. It's a fantastic table. It's,
01:09:53
Speaker
it goes from the floor to sitting to standing. That's something that we need to get into offices around the world. We need to get a floor life that transitions seamlessly into a conventional sitting life and then seamlessly into a standing life because of what your physique wants. And so this table goes from
01:10:21
Speaker
the floor to full height, standing height, in less than two seconds. Oh, wow. So you can, yeah, it's a really nice piece of design.
01:10:33
Speaker
Amazing. Well, I think you're aware that I recently wrote a paper with Mark Sisson, the Primal Blueprint guy, and I obviously brought in your archetypal posture's concept to that paper, and part of the reason that we discussed that is partly because he's into his Primal work and
01:10:55
Speaker
you know, discussion of that whole primal lifestyle. But I had found a paper within the Journal of Body Work that I was writing for, which was talking about how stretching and in particular passive stretching helps to regulate blood sugar control. And it was just fascinating because it led down a kind of rabbit hole of multiple research papers that all show the same thing. And it seems like a kind of passive stretch
01:11:22
Speaker
is more effective than an active stretch at optimizing blood sugar control. And of course, the archetypal rest postures are arguably passive because you're just sat there still and gravity is doing the stretching. Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it? That these mechanisms are built into us and we're negating them by sitting in a chair all day long.
01:11:49
Speaker
What I like about this part of my work is that it's really cost-free. Again, they're ideas that come from the model. To spend more time on the floor costs you nothing, basically. In fact, you don't have to buy the sofa. Yes. You can sell the sofa and put the money in the bank. Yeah, you don't have to pay for the osteopathic treatment.
01:12:13
Speaker
You know, I watch here in modern cities, you get in offices, you get the ergonomics consultant coming in for some hundreds of dollars per hour. And they get your computer and they take it two degrees this way and your chair goes up another centimeter. I rubbish. Yeah, I agree. You know, what your system really wants is, in a sense, an unergonomic, uncomfortable office life. Yeah. Where you've got to get up and down.
01:12:42
Speaker
Yes. It's those micro movements that keep you going.
01:12:46
Speaker
Yeah it smacks to me of a just complete misunderstanding of how the nervous system works because quite clearly you don't have to study the nervous system in too much depth and you start to understand that the nervous system is designed to move us and that the moment we start to get creep on our tissues our nervous system is being bombarded with messages asking you to move. So you know why just try and create one posture that creates the best optimal angles when really we just should be moving postures the whole time?
01:13:15
Speaker
totally ropes up across office spaces. It's, it's a really cheap, but powerful intervention into helping people get through their their working day. Yeah.
01:13:31
Speaker
Now I know in your own home you have, let's say, modified your kitchen floor. Would you recommend that to other people as well? Is that something that people can be doing to help minimize risk of injury and optimize function? We converted our kitchen floor into a rough stone mat. The stones were so sharp I had to draw red nail polish on them because they could draw blood if you were too clumsy.
01:14:00
Speaker
We had that for about four years. We've got rid of it now because we've got access to the great New Zealand outdoors. Fantastic, yeah. But that was an attempt to show that in big cities like London or Paris, where it's cold and wet a lot of the year, it's not cool to socially to walk around barefoot. We have to bring that outside life inside.
01:14:26
Speaker
And so that was an attempt to do that. My wife, after three months, said, Phil, look at this. And her shoulders had come down. That was the first thing she really noticed. The shoulders had come down. And if you're not comfortable on your feet, you hold yourself up with your trapezius and your upper girdle. That's the way it works. The more I do this business, the less difference I see between arms and legs.
Phil Beach's Publications and Workshops
01:14:56
Speaker
fully networked into each other. Yes. So Phil, that's been fantastic. Lots of amazing insights, as usual. Now, if people want to find out more about these kinds of insights, I know you've got your book out, muscles and meridians, the manipulation of shape. Where can people get hold of that? It's becoming hard to get. You can go directly to Elsevier copies on Amazon. You just have to
01:15:25
Speaker
to look around for it. It's a difficult read, but all the ideas are in there. Yeah, yeah, fantastic. And do you have, I know you've got a website, what do you have on the site? Philipbeach.com, I don't have very much. It's a brief outline about the fields and my two, three, four, five day courses that I run. And I try to keep it up to date with where I'm teaching.
01:15:56
Speaker
Excellent. Excellent. And I know you also wrote three papers for the Journal of Body Work and Movement Therapies, which I know a lot of people will be able to access. I think if you're an osteopath, then certainly you can download those as part of your general osteopathic council membership or whoever your governing body is. So those should be accessible, I imagine, still.
01:16:20
Speaker
But yeah, that's fantastic, Phil. Thanks so much for that. And I will look forward to seeing you in March because we're putting on a workshop, right? I look forward to seeing you then and that would be the place to meet us both and spend more time doing this properly. Fantastic. Fantastic. All right. Thank you so much for your time, Phil. Thank you, Matt. Speak soon. Bye. Take care. Bye bye.
01:16:45
Speaker
So there's just a glimpse of Phil's incredible insights into human function and I'm sure that's got your mind racing off in multiple directions. Of course that's just the tip of the iceberg as I'm sure you'll appreciate it's quite a challenge to convey a lifetime of exploration into an hour of podcast.
01:17:01
Speaker
If you love that and know others who would enjoy Phil's insights, please feel free to pass it on and share the love. Phil and I are putting on a two-day workshop in Wellington, New Zealand on March 5th and 6th, where we'll dive much deeper into the practical applications of this way of viewing the human body, looking at the interactions of the neurodevelopmental process infants go through, which of course mimics the evolutionary process, to prepare them for life as a fully functional bipedal human being.
01:17:26
Speaker
Immediately following this, I'll be holding a two-day seminar in Auckland and then in Sydney, applying a similar modelling to the field of persistent pain. So if you're near enough to join us and would like to explore this further, you can secure your place or get more details from mattwalden.com. Hope to see you there. Thanks for listening to the show.