Lies You’ve Been Told About Pain with Butch Phelps

This week’s episode is about the Three Lies That You’ve Been Told About Pain with Butch Phelps…Butch, a former corporate executive who lost 105 pounds and after developing severe low back pain, transitioned to massage therapy and neuromuscular sports massage. He discovered the Active Isolated Stretching technique and worked with neurosurgeons to understand the brain's role in muscle pain. Butch developed the Stretch and Release technique, which involves brief, repeated stretches to train the brain to release muscle tension. He has helped many with conditions like fibromyalgia and plantar fasciitis, and has published a book and created 180 YouTube videos to share his methods. Butch emphasizes that pain often originates elsewhere than the site of pain and that emotional factors significantly impact muscle tension.  So let’s call in those lies Butch!!!

Transcript

Speaker Dar  

Today’s episode is about the Three Lies That You’ve Been Told About Pain with Butch Phelps…Butch a former corporate executive who lost 105 pounds and after developing severe low back pain, transitioned to massage therapy and neuromuscular sports massage. He discovered the Active Isolated Stretching technique and worked with neurosurgeons to understand the brain's role in muscle pain. Butch developed the Stretch and Release technique, which involves brief, repeated stretches to train the brain to release muscle tension. He has helped many with conditions like fibromyalgia and plantar fasciitis, and has published a book and created 180 YouTube videos to share his methods. Butch emphasizes that pain often originates elsewhere than the site of pain and that emotional factors significantly impact muscle tension.  So let’s call in those lies Butch!!!  All right, welcome in. I am so excited to have you with us, 

Butch, and before we dive into the three lives you've been told about pain, please tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got to this point? 

Speaker Butch 

Wow, perfect. Yes. So I was actually in corporate America up to about age 39 and took an early retirement, and I had, at right before that time, I had gained weight to about 315 pounds, and I lost about 105 pounds in 18 months. And I decided, since I'd been a three sport athlete in my past, I really want to get in shape with this big weight loss. And so I started working out like crazy. And to my surprise, I developed, by the time I was 3940 years old, severe low back pain, and it was so bad that I can remember crawling out of my car onto my hands and pulling myself up by the door handles because it hurt just to stand up straight. And that sort of led me into the journey that began to put me where I am today. I took about a year off, and I was looking for my next career. What was I going to do? And I wanted to do something that would give back. And I decided, after long research, to do massage therapy. And so I went back to school and went into neuromuscular and sports massage. When I started school, I was looking just to be a massage therapist. And like we had talked about before, prior to recording the show, it was almost like a divine intervention. I got into school, I can remember saying to my wife, somehow I know things that I'm not sure how I know them, but they're coming into my head really fast, and so as I kept going through the class, and I would have teachers, you know, who would on my breaks, would ask me to work on them, and everything just seemed to come really easy. And so I wound up meeting a guy. Actually, three of my teachers had said to me, there's a guy named Aaron Mattis that you need to talk to. And Aaron Mattis was the founder of active, isolated stretching, and he lives here in my hometown of Sarasota. So I I contacted him after I graduated, and he laughed, and he said, I've been waiting to hear from you for about six months. I've heard all about you, and I'm like, really? He said, Yeah, are you sure you come to study with me? So I came, and I spent about six months with him learning about active, isolated stretching, which is a very different stretch from what we see in gyms. And as I started to do that, I volunteered at a senior center here in Sarasota, which had about 54 retired physicians working there. And I became friends with the lead physician, who was a retired neurosurgeon, and she then got me in contact with a second neurosurgeon who was teaching a class on dementia, because she knew of my interest into the human brain, and between the two of them, I had learned a lot about the brain's connection to our muscles and how that affects our body and how the muscles affect our bones and so forth, things that I had never learned in school. And as I started to apply these things and put them together. It started to make more and more sense to me, and all of a sudden, I would get people who were dealing with things like fibromyalgia or plantar fasciitis or grinding their teeth, and within days, they would come back and report how much better they felt. And in some cases, the pain had completely left them. So I was blown away by that, and I've just, over the years, kept building with it. I've worked with PTS, and I've worked with chiropractors, and learn a lot from each of those. And I've just taken pieces of the puzzle and started putting those pieces together. And I realized that with the muscles of the human body, what we leave out too often, is the role that the brain plays with that. And so when we think about our muscles, our muscles are just as emotional as they are physical. And so when we just focus on the physical side, too many times, the emotional side can create just as much pain. And so as I started putting those things together and started to develop the stretch and release, Stretch and release technique. What I work with that is, instead of like typical stretching we see at the gym, which would be like static stretching, where you pull really hard and pull as long as you can, I realize that if we only hold that stretch for about five to six seconds at a time, and we repeat it 10 times, that actually what we're doing is, is we're training the brain to release the tension in the muscle. And we know we talked about, before we recorded, he was thinking of the muscles like a rubber band. You know, a rubber band is of a certain length, so it's never going to get any longer, no matter how much we pull on, it's always going to go back to the length that it was. Yeah, well, too many times with muscles, we hear people talk about lengthening muscles, and when you think about, well, muscles are attached on both ends, that's really an impossibility. What we're doing actually, is that the muscle tenses up from our thoughts and our feelings and what we do each and every day. And so what we really want to do with stretching is by relaxing the mind. We can relax the muscles and take that tension out of the muscle, and when it does, the muscle then relaxes, and we can start to stop that pain. Well, once I started figuring that out, I then started working with more and more people in my office, and I was just amazed every day at how many, how many people would come in and out, and they were just feeling better doing things that they haven't done in 10 or 15 years. And I was, like, blown away. And one of my friends suggested to me, you should make videos and put them on YouTube. And so I did. And then I started getting people saying, I watched your videos after doing it, like, two or three times the pain stopped and blah, you know. And I was like, that's insane. That can't really be true, but I'm getting these reviews over and over and over. So I've been making videos ever since. I've got, like, about 180 videos on the YouTube channel. And so that led me into writing a book, because everybody kept saying, You need to write a book. You need to write a book. And I wrote a book called Stretch and release, and it was actually published by one of my clients, and it was edited by two of my clients. And so the book, then, not only has my knowledge, but it also has the perspective of a client's perspective of when you read the book, which is what I wanted to begin with, and so that's how I got where I am today, and it's like I still live in amazement after 20 years of doing that. 

Speaker Dar  

That is amazing. You should feel amazed. I just want to tell our listeners the name of the YouTube series is on. It's called the muscle repair shop. And I started my conversation with Buch offline, telling him that I'm addicted. So go on over there to the muscle repair shop. And his book is, well, his book is entitled, Stretch and release technique to eliminate pain. So relax the mind, to relax the muscle. Tell us more about the three lies that we've been told about pain. 

Speaker Butch  

Yes. Okay, so Lie number one when you're especially when you're dealing with muscles, is that the site of pain is rarely the cause of pain. And what I mean by that, you know, we all know somebody who has low back pain. They get up in the morning, their back feels stiff. They walk around a little bit, and it goes away. 99% of the time when I get someone like that in my office. It's usually coming from one of two different places. Number one, it's coming from the front of their thighs, which are the quads. And the quads attach below the kneecap, run up the thigh and into the back of the pelvis. And when the quads get tight, it can get tight from lifting things. It can get tight from sitting a lot, running, walking, walking upstairs, any of the activities like that, what it does is, when it gets tight, it tilts the top of the pelvis forward, which increases the lower curve in the spine, which causes back stiffness. And then when you get up and you start walking around, you're forcing blood through those muscle tissues. Makes the muscles more pliable. Pain eases up. However, even though the pain is in the side of the low back, that's not the cause. It causes on either the front of your thighs or the inner thighs. And a good way to tell the difference is that if you sit down and your back pain stops, and you stand up, and it goes, I'm sorry if you sit down, it goes away and you stand up and it comes back. Chances are it's coming from your thighs, not your not your back. Over time, it can create a problem in your back if you leave it alone. The second line about muscles is that we we look at muscles and we think that it is, it is something that had to happen, or something that was just bad luck and and typically with muscle aches and pains, you know, they'll talk about, I pulled a muscle, or I strained a muscle, I'm getting cramps on my muscles and so forth. So when you look at the muscles themselves, since the muscles are so emotional, what happens there is that everything you think, feel and do will cause your muscles to tighten. So if you're afraid of something, if you are angry about something, if you are frustrated with something, at the time that you are feeling those thoughts or feeling having those feelings, the muscles then start to tighten, which puts. You get into a fight or flight, if you happen to make a quick move, somehow you can actually overcome, stretch momentarily those muscles and create some of that pain. The idea that we're going to put a brace on you, or we're going to bandage this up somehow, is crazy, because what happens is it winds up atrophying the muscles if you keep it on for too long a period of time. The truth of the matter is, once you let go of that emotion, and once you relax and let go of the tension in that muscle through the mind, then what you can do with it, with this type of stretching that I teach you can get that pain to go away. And then, then lastly, if you said, then you ruminate about the pain. In other words, once pain becomes chronic, now what happens to you is that your emotions, then, because you're anticipating that pain, will actually cause the pain to get worse. You know, if you get up 14 times. And 14 times you get up, your back hurts. It's a natural thing that when you go to get up on that 15th time, you're going to prepare yourself and tighten the muscles before you stand up. And so by learning how to do it again, relaxes the mind to relax the muscles. By doing that, what happens there is that now you start to show the mind that you can stand up without having that pain, and once your brain sees that, the pain stops. And those are the three biggest lies I've seen people go through with their muscles. Oh, I know. And there's a fourth one, actually, it's your age. That's the other one. It's your age. You know, when you know, when you get older, you're supposed to have these problems. And the issue with that is that for most older people that I work on, their biggest issue is lack of muscle mass. They don't have the strength, and they've lost their flexibility. Because for most of us, we tell each other, as we get to be 50-60, we need to slow down. And the reality is, we need to speed up, because at age 40, we started losing muscle mass at a rate of about 1% per year. So age is not really that big of a factor. It has more to do with lifestyle. 

Speaker Dar 

Thank you, Bucha. And no, it doesn't have to do with age, exactly, and you have a background in aging sciences, been working with that for what, two decades? 

Speaker Butch 

Yes I have.. I mean, yeah, so much, so much about aging. I mean, we blame a lot of things on aging, and it does appear to be true, because if you look around, most people who are 50 plus, have very similar things going on. But the reality is, when we look at our lifestyles, and we look at our nutrition, way we eat and so forth, you start to see those similarities and start to show up. And as they do, you really can contribute more to lifestyle and diet, and then you can do anything else, and also mindfulness. When you think about mindfulness, you know, everybody worries about getting older, but the fact of it is, is that we should be getting wiser. And it's like if, as we get older, we've learned a lot of things, and what we haven't learned is how to take care of this body beyond 50, 

Speaker Dar 

right and the subtitle of this podcast is Mindset, Soul set and Heart set living. So we'll just add your tagline, live better, pain free. 

Speaker Butch  

Yes, exactly right. Is mindset. Mindset plays a huge role, and it's, you know, I see so many people who they just assume that as they get older, these things are going to happen and and I've seen, I've worked on, many people who were late 80s, early 90s, who moved as well as most people in their 60s. And I mean, you know, based on what most people believe, these guys should be sitting in a recliner someplace, watching TV, drinking iced tea or something, you know, and yet they're out learning new things, working with new technology. One guys built a farm at 87 years old. So I mean, it's, it's, it's not inevitable, it's just the mindset, 

Speaker Dar 

Yes, we all should have a mentor, like him, or like my aunt. My aunt is turning 90, yeah, and we have plans to go skydiving on our 100th birthday.  

Speaker Butch  

There you go. There you go, exactly, right, exactly. We're only limited by our thoughts, 

Speaker Dar 

correct. So could you talk us through our audience, through maybe a sample activity of something they could do is they're probably sitting there listening to this 

Speaker Butch  

exactly. I've got one that's really easy to do. I. Most people will have neck pain or neck issues, and you know, they'll feel their neck get stiff by the end of the day. And so when you look at the neck, and you look at the muscles of the neck, your head weighs about 10 to 12 pounds. Well, every inch your head leans forward, the pressure on the back of your neck and down between your shoulder blades increases by 10 pounds per inch. But a simple thing you can do is when you're sitting in a chair, and usually with a back on the chair, set there with your with your torso nice and straight, take the palms of your hand and put underneath your chin, and just take a moment and feel just the weight of your head resting on the palms of your hand, and as you sit there, breathe out, close your eyes and then gently, with just your arms, do not use your neck muscles, but with just your arms, lift your head up towards the ceiling. Now, I don't care how high your head goes, because everybody's going to be different, but as you lift your head up, when you initially first start to feel the tension in the front of your neck. Stop, breathe out, hold that for about five seconds, release that and then repeat that 10 times. Now, the reason for the five seconds is that it prevents what they call a stretch reflex and the muscles on the front of your neck, but the 10 times repeating it, it actually is teaching your brain that this movement is safe. So for so many people, when they lift their head, they get a pain on the backside of their neck. And so to help you better understand that, is that we look down most of the time. Most of what we do is down in front of us, so our heads are looking downward, so the muscles on the front of our neck actually get tight, and when we try to lift our head up to be level, it strains the muscles on the backside, because if they let go, the natural place for the head to go is to look downward. What we want to do is get the muscles on the front of the neck to relax and release. And as it does that, and you bring your head back up. Now, all of a sudden, it no longer takes the effort, nor the strength to hold your head up on top of your shoulders like it should be. And then that takes a lot of that strain out of the back of your neck. You are beautiful. 

Speaker Dar  

It was silent on my end because I was still getting them done. 

Speaker Butch 

That's okay. Well, I mean, so many times when we look at our head, you know, you'll see people just when I woke up, I slept the wrong way. I have a torticollis, or I have a catch in my neck as I turn my head left, or I turn my head right, well, you have four major muscles that actually turn your head, two are on the back side, and two are on the front side. And so if I turn my head to the right, I've got to contract the muscles on the right rear of my neck to make that turn, but the left front has to be able to release. If that muscle cannot release on the left front, when I turn my head to the right, the right rear of my neck is going to hurt. And again, we talked about the lies of pain. Everybody would go to that back side of the pain to get it to stop, when, in reality, they should be going to the left front side of the neck to help get that pain to stop. I've seen that happen a lot, even with whiplash. 

Speaker Dar 

Wow. Listeners, if you're like me, you're already feeling some relief. 

Speaker Butch 

That's quick. That's terrific. 

Speaker Dar 

I already told Butch; I'm ordering up his book as soon as we get offline. “Stretch and Release Technique to Eliminate Pain” and it's really convenient there on Amazon to order so Butch… protecting client confidentiality. Can you tell us some just fun or miraculous results that you've seen? Y 

Speaker Butch 

I can be sure, one of my clients is in the mid to about mid 60s or so, maybe late 60s, and they've dealt with fibromyalgia for many, many years, and they had, they love playing sports. They love to go skiing. And they literally got to a point from the pain they stopped doing that, or pretty close to stop doing that. And so I started working with them, and they wanted to know if I knew anything about fibromyalgia. And I said, well, yeah, actually, I've actually helped a few people with that. So I started working with them, and within probably six, eight months, they started going back to playing their sport that they enjoyed playing. And within a year, they started going back to skiing. And so every year, they snow, ski several times a year, and they play their sports three. Four times a week without a lot of pain. And I mean it every once in a while to come and go, but they know that if they continue to do the stretching, they can quiet it back down and keep living their life the way they're supposed to. And so even even their relatives are surprised by what changed with those little things like things like plantar fasciitis. And for people who have plantar fasciitis is not necessarily a little thing, because it really messes with the way you walk. And plantar fasciitis, for people who don't know, is when you stand up and you start to walk and you get a severe pain in your heel. And a lot of times, people will put a heel cup in your shoe, or in some extreme cases, they've done injections, and I've even seen some have surgery for it, really and truly. Plantar fasciitis starts from and caused by the upper quad, not quad muscles, but calf muscles on the back of your calves, you have four muscles there, and those, those four muscles actually control the foot, vertically, laterally and rotationally, but when they get tight and you try to bend your ankle to walk you, you're hyper extending those muscles because they're tight, and they actually cause the pain in the heel. And so I had several people, probably, I say several, probably close to 100 people I've worked on with plantar Fauci with plantar fasciitis. In most cases, within two to five days, that pain goes away with the calf stretch that I teach them how to do. Most people, when they think they do a calf stretch by dropping their heel off of a step, or they lean against a wall, or they stand on a slam board, what you're really stretching is your Achilles tendon. You're not stretching the four calf muscles, and until you've stretched the four calf muscles. And I've got videos on my YouTube channel of the muscle repair shop that's specific about that, and you can learn how to do the calf stretches at home. And like I said, you can knock those out in two to five days. So I've had probably 100 people with plantar fasciitis I've helped. 

Speaker Dar  

Wow. Thank you so much for being with us today and you're just gonna have to come back anytime and talk more about how these techniques to eliminate pain, because I indeed think you have one of the missing pieces for a more pain free life. Is there anything else you would like to tell our listeners? 

Speaker Butch  

sure, exactly. I mean, the big thing you brought up earlier about the book, and you know, the book has just been awarded an award in the genre of health and fitness from the Florida Authors and Publishers Association. But the book, like I said, was published by a client. It was edited by clients, and it's it's really a manual, and the book goes into some detail about why you hurt, why different parts of your body react the way they do, why most traditional treatments that you you go to a doctor or PT and they have you do either fail or come up short or don't last very long. And then finally, in the second half of the book, I go into explaining what stretch and release. Why does it work so well? And then I pick out in each chapter specific spots of your body, like the back, the hips, the thighs, the knees, the feet. And give you some breakdown on, you know, how to stretch those correctly, and what kind of aches and pains will happen. I mean something, for instance, you know, if your calves are tight, you literally could affect your neck and shoulders just by the way you walk. And in the book, there are QR codes in the book that you can use with your phone that'll take you to the videos that you can find that will help correspond to what I'm saying in that book as well. So the book really turns out to be like a manual, and I kept it at $15 so it's affordable for pretty much everybody. And because the thing is, as you start to read the book, you start to better understand what I'm talking about. I'm going to start doing some webinars this summer as well, so that people can get on the webinars, and, you know, get to me personally and ask questions as well, to try to help people better understand how to take care of their bodies. That's the key thing. And on the YouTube channel, the muscle repair shop, I have about 180 videos that are free there, and they pinpoint specific problems of the human body. And it talks about, again, why you hurt, why the treatments don't work so well. And then give you two or three stretches to show you how to get back out of that and solve that in your body. So those are the key things that anybody right now can take off and do and solve that problem quickly. 

Speaker Dar   

Thank you, Buch. Thank you for being so generous with this work, so generous and so giving. I just want to thank you. Thank you for, you know, telling people where they can go and how they can get this relief. It's so important to get rid of that pain. It affects so many people in their lives. So for a good work, just a good work, thank you all right. Thanks so much. Thank you. Bye. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai