The Crackin' Backs Podcast

Move Like a Baby, Heal Like a Pro - Dr. Michael Rintala

• Dr. Terry Weyman and Dr. Spencer Baron

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Ever wonder why chronic pain persists or why some athletes effortlessly maintain peak performance? Join us for a powerful conversation with world-renowned chiropractor and DNS (Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization) expert, Dr. Michael Rintala. In this captivating and insightful episode, Dr. Rintala shares his personal journey from enduring a severe spinal injury as a collegiate tennis player to becoming one of the globe's top specialists in movement optimization and rehabilitation.

What You'll Discover:

  • DNS Explained: Learn how Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization taps into natural, infant-based movements to reset your body's innate stability patterns, relieving pain and enhancing performance.
  • Breath as Medicine: Understand how something as simple as breathing can dramatically improve core strength, stability, and overall health.
  • Mindful Movement: Hear how Dr. Rintala integrates mindfulness and meditation into rehabilitation, creating profound physical and mental resilience.
  • Behind-the-Scenes Stories: Gain insights from Dr. Rintala’s experiences working with professional surfers, PGA golfers, dancers, and everyday patients, including fascinating recovery success stories and surprising athletic insights.
  • Practical Tools: Get actionable DNS exercises, posture tips, and breathing techniques you can apply immediately, whether you're a healthcare provider, athlete, or someone simply aiming for better movement and less pain in daily life.

Who is Dr. Michael Rintala? Dr. Michael Rintala, DC, is one of only 18 international DNS instructors trained at the renowned Prague School of Rehabilitation under Prof. Pavel Kolář. He’s a trusted practitioner for professional athletes from the World Surf League and the PGA Tour, blending chiropractic care, ART, and DNS principles to achieve remarkable outcomes in performance and injury recovery.

Connect with Dr. Rintala:

Join us as we laugh, learn, and dive deep into how rediscovering the basics of human movement can radically improve your life. Whether you’re a seasoned clinician, athlete, or just someone seeking lasting health, this episode is filled with gems you won’t want to miss!

We are two sports chiropractors, seeking knowledge from some of the best resources in the world of health. From our perspective, health is more than just “Crackin Backs” but a deep dive into physical, mental, and nutritional well-being philosophies.

Join us as we talk to some of the greatest minds and discover some of the most incredible gems you can use to maintain a higher level of health. Crackin Backs Podcast

Dr. Spencer Baron:

What if the key to healing your back or boosting your golf swing is learning to move like a baby again? Today I'm sitting down with Dr Michael rentalo. He's one of the world's top dynamic neuromuscular stabilization instructors, or DNS. Mike is the secret weapon behind pro surfers and PGA golfers who need to stay in peak performance, but he's also just an incredibly down to earth guy with insights that can help you move and feel a lot better in everyday life. In this episode, we're going to talk about how a breathing exercise literally changed Mike's life, the crazy things that we've seen working with athletes you know, from ocean waves to the fairways and why, Mike always says, your body has the answer. It's going to be a fun, informal chat between two colleagues, packed with practical tips you can use right away. So grab a coffee, settle in, and let's dive into movement with this journey with Dr Michael rental, I promise you'll learn something new, just as you should every day. All right. Dr Mike rentala, welcome to the show. My man,

Dr. Michael Rintala:

welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Yeah,

Dr. Spencer Baron:

of course, man, we understand you're some hot stuff in the chiropractic sports medicine world, aside from living in California. Oh, sorry, I had to throw a Florida joke in there. All right, whatever.

Dr. Terry Weyman:

It's two against one. Mike, so,

Dr. Spencer Baron:

oh, wait, Dave, we need the engineer

Dr. Terry Weyman:

back on that. We're good.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Hey, all right. Well, hi, Dave. We became interested in you because of your world of rehabilitation, and especially after your own athletic injuries, you were a real hot shot in the tennis world, and you ended up breaking your back. And then decided to go, well, we call it spondylolisthesis. You went to chiropractic college, then you ended up in a in something called dynamic neuromuscular stabilization, aka DNS. Now that's what we want to talk about too, but we want to hear more about your history. But actually, first, why don't we? You give us a little bit of a understanding of DNS.

Dr. Michael Rintala:

So DNS dynamic neuromuscular stabilization. It's, it's based out of Prague School of rehabilitation. And the kind of developer or founder of these concepts and principles is Professor Pavel collage. He's a pediatric physiotherapist, but also treats general population, and he works with the Czech Olympic teams, National Soccer, hockey, tennis, so he sees general population pediatrics, as well as high level athletes in the Czech Republic, but also around the world, and with his his knowledge, his experience, he has come up with the concepts and principles of dynamic neuromuscular stabilization. And one of the key components or concepts is that it's based off of developmental kinesiology, or what we call onto Genesis, which is the study of motor development after birth, and the developmental Kinesiology. When you study it, when you understand it, you see the origins of movement and movement quality, quality, synergy, coordination and timing of our deep stabilizing system, which consists of diaphragm, pelvic floor, the entire abdominal wall, all the musculature running throughout the spine, and this is all controlled by the central nervous system and during development, during ontogenesis and developmental kinesiology, the first year of life, this is the time where these inborn, hardwired motor patterns are starting to express themselves, and it's a subcortical region of our central nervous system. And as the infant develops during this first year, you'll see certain developmental milestones. You know, you mentioned a little bit about my history. I don't know about the hot shot with the tennis, but I tried, right? But you know, my motivation for really going into more. I am now, was kind of selfish, right? I kind of fell apart like in college, and didn't make sense to me, right? I was training hard, and what I thought doing all the right things, but the wheels kind of came off, and from that point on, it was like, Okay, how do I fix me? And that kind of, like, up to that point I was, I always had a, you know, being an athlete, not just, you know, I focused on tennis, but when I was younger, played all the different sports. So my idea was, I was always on the track of going into athletic training, you know, being an ATC. I liked that. I spent enough time in the training rooms, you know? I liked that environment. I liked what they were doing. But once I fell apart, I kind of changed the track to like, Okay, how do I address what's happening to me? And that was kind of that the impetus to go to chiropractic school, because I saw with, with chiropractic, I can, I could integrate PT, ATC, and I'd have the manual skills that I wanted and all these things with my own experience and that with the spondylolisthesis, and, you know, the fracture, the stress fracture in the low back. Not any one thing was the was the answer, but I saw the combination of things move me towards where I wanted to be. And then it wasn't till chiropractic school, you know, probably like a year and a half in when we we had a rehabilitation course, and I got introduced to Prague School of rehabilitation. And at that time, we were learning about Professor yonder, Carl Levitt, which are neurologists and physiotherapists. And when I saw that, I'm like, okay, like, year and a half into school, I'm like, Oh, finally, something makes sense, right? Or at least it made sense to me, and so that that kind of put me on that journey of exploring what's now called DNS. And it wasn't until, you know, once I got introduced to those concepts and principles, learned as much as I can, I started implementing them as best I could on myself, combining chiropractic, combining soft tissue work, and then it's probably, you know, few years out of out of chiropractic school, saved up enough Money I went over to Prague School of rehabilitation and started learning from them. And at that time, you know, yonda and Levitt were, were still who was known from Prague School of rehabilitation. And on that first trip, around 2003 that's when I got introduced to Professor collage, and saw how he was thinking. He was talking about developmental kinesiology and infants and relation to movement quality. And that was another thing that talked to me, right? And, you know, it's just been continuous from there. I don't know if I'm going on too much, but that's kind of the progression.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

You're fine. I actually wanted to ask you that also be aware that we do have a lot of doctors that are that listen to the and view the show. But there's also lay people. And I wanted to mention that, you know, in a more practical perspective, you've often referred to this as basically relearning how to move like a baby. And the only thing that I can, you know, relate to is that, as we've heard so much about cross crawl, and if you miss that, you got people back on the floor, relearning how to cross crawl. What else would be a practical application to the patient? So your explanation is beautiful. People probably want to understand how it would pertain to them,

Dr. Michael Rintala:

right? So if you look at an infant, and you observe how they they learn to move. All that is their central nervous system maturing and expressing these motor patterns. But also they're exploring their environment, you know, they have motivation to reach for the toy, to to, you know, get up to a higher position, and as that central nervous system is is expressing itself, and they have an ideal environment to explore points of support and move to these objects or things where they want to move to. So. That integration helps them get to those higher, more unstable positions. And it's, it's not that we just want to move like the baby. You know, it's not just crawling. It's not just working the cross crawl patterns, but it's the nuance of how you're supporting while you're doing that, right hand support, knee support, foot support. But also the external cues are the motivations to enhance that. That movement a baby has different proportions. You know, body proportions in us, it has different mobility. But the point is that we still have the same, you know, the central nervous system is still has a potential to express those patterns. So if we we can use those developmental positions, you know, hands and knees, squatting, lunging, half kneeling to wake up, those those patterns. And as an adult, you know, again, we have different limb proportions, different mobility. And wherever you are with your mobility or your you know the suppleness of the musculature you can still tap into these inborn patterns to help improve your your quality or your coordination of how you stabilize, which will then help with your movement efficiency. You know that the thing that will affect that nice expression of ideal movement and stabilization when we're younger is we sit too much, you know? So postural habituation, we do repetitive movements. We get hurt. Usually we're looking at all three of those things affect that inborn motor program that wants to express itself. When that happens, we start to use kind of compensation patterns, and our bodies and our brains are designed to do that. You know, that's how we serve. It's like a survival thing, right? So if a dinosaur, I know this is the wrong context, but if I'm being chased by a dinosaur and my legs hurt, my brain is going to find some way to get out of there however I'm going to move. So if these other things affect that quality of how we're moving, then we're going to use what we call a high threshold or compensation pattern to create the movements that's okay temporarily, but if that becomes your go to pattern over and over, then we see wear and tear. You can take the spine, for example. We'll see wear and tear in the transitional areas throughout the spine, lumbar region, thoracic, lumbar, cervical, thoracic, all the places we'll see the disc degeneration, facet hypertrophy, all the areas where we get wear and tear throughout the back that then radiates to can Be elbow, shoulder and knee. So you want to address the areas where you have inflammation or degeneration or pain, but where DNS comes in, it's looking at, okay, what's the underlying story of how that occurred? Was it traumatic, like a sport injury or something else, or was it repetitive movements along with compensatory patterns that created the wear and tear, the pain and you want to address both to help our patients, you know, achieve their goals, whatever that may be.

Dr. Terry Weyman:

Hey, Mike, I gotta ask something. So like Spencer is in congratulations, Spencer, he's a new grandfather. So he has a he has a new little baby. And so when we're seeing these little babies, what inspired you to look at this little baby or to seek more care from this in Czech Republic? I mean, the only time we see adults acting like a baby is when they had a little too much to drink and they're laying on the ground, right, right. So, you know, so a lot of time they're flopped around and they came and roll over and and so then and so. And then you have these athletes to get hurt, or these older people, and they walk all hunched over. They walk. But what made you start looking at this concept of looking at pediatrics and equating it to adults

Dr. Michael Rintala:

with pediatrics, again, with, you know, a healthy development of the central nervous system. You'll see that that ideal kind of pure expression of coordination and. Timing of all the musculature as you're as you're moving. And this is what Professor collage, you know, working with pediatrics, with athletes and general population. That's what he started to put together and observe, so knowing or observing ideal movement, ideal position, let's say of the shoulder girdle, which then provides ideal position of your this is your humerus into the glenoid, observing that you can use that knowledge and observation to assess us as adults, or, you know, adolescents, or whoever it may be, and you can see the efficiency of their nervous system to, you know, create this ideal stability and efficient movement patterns.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Michael, let me ask you, oh, again, I want to make this as practical as possible, too, and that is if a patient comes into you with a a traumatic injury, or an injury induced by a traumatic experience, or somebody comes in with something that's gone on as a repetitive micro trauma, and they're compensating, because athletes are the best compensators of all you know. So when you approach that, we're in essence peeling back the skin of the onion to find the core of what caused the injury, correct to some degree, all right? And then you apply principles. Once you find like, what would be an example? Let's use you and your spondylolisthesis, which is a fracture. Was that l5 l4 was that where you experienced your spondylo Yeah, l 4l, 5l, 405. Common area. And what did you do? What specifically? How did they figure out, what the cause was from that, and how did they manage you? And you know, specifically, how did they manage

Unknown:

you? So initially, as far as you know, it happened in in college, initially going, you know, the orthopedist and the trainers, you know, eventually, with imaging, they saw the fracture, the stress fracture. And the big component there, initially, is right calm things down. And there's lots of different things they could do to help calm that down. But if you don't again, address the movement pattern that created in the first place, it's just going to keep coming back and become chronic. And that was my thing. I couldn't get back to playing on the team or doing much at all because of the pain. So initially, if I see somebody or with me, it's like, okay, how do we calm things down? And again, different modalities, manual methods, medication, all that you can utilize all that to try to calm down the inflammation. The big thing, as far as the approach with Prague school is there's certain assessments, like we take people through a whole sequence of different movements and watching the movement palpating, you know, touching people, feeling the tissue quality, palpating and feeling the mobility through the thoracic spine, through assessing the hip, etc, taking that looking at the soft tissues, so fascia muscles, Looking at the quality of movement, the joint structures. But then third, the big one, again, with DNS, is what? What's the movement strategy? What's the stabilization strategy that they're using? Is it the efficient strategy where there's nice coordination and timing and nice stabilization? Because when you have that, it actually facilitates an unloading in the transitional areas throughout the spine. So

Dr. Terry Weyman:

Mike, what were your red flags

Unknown:

as far as

Dr. Terry Weyman:

like you're moving? What do they see on you that was causing the stress to your L,

Dr. Michael Rintala:

405, so a huge propensity to over utilize my the extensors in my low back and hip flexors, and for me, lack of mobility in my my thoracic spine, my mid back and my rib cage and. End, you know, looking back, if I look at pictures or videos, I have, you know, what we call a kyphosis, or where, you know, I tended to be hunched over. And you see this a lot with just, you know, people are sitting a lot, and so, looking back, you know, with that pattern leading up to the fracture in my back, you know, I had a lot of tendinoses, you know, impingement type syndromes. I had a lot of ankle sprains, various injuries, all of this affecting my quality of movement, and eventually, you know, leading up to that overload through the back and the stress fracture. So that was the big component, the lack of mobility in certain areas, and then the overuse of certain musculature and the under use of other musculature, like the synergy wasn't there, the timing wasn't there. So something paid the price, and for me, that was my my low back.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

You know, that's something to be said about I mean, we're all three seasoned chiropractors. We've been doing it for a long time, studying biomechanics and movement. I thought it was very fascinating that a lot of injuries that do come in, and you started to you highlighted for a moment that the thoracic spine, probably one of the most neglected areas, is so rigid on most people that most physicians, and I mean this in general medical, ex, not exclusively medical, but also coming with a neck or a low back, and that's all they treat. And I'm seeing more now that I've been become aware over the years, the thoracic spine is so damn tight and there, there's lack of movement with rotational right? Terry, you see you see that today?

Dr. Terry Weyman:

Hey, Mike, on that. I've been focusing lately, probably the last five years. I all I do. I even look at necks and backs anymore. I look at ankles, hips and thoracic spine, yeah, and everybody pounds on necks and low backs. I go, Well, those have to be stable, yet the thoracic spine, the hip and the ankle, I'll be mobile. Why are we looking at the things? Why are we trying to pound on things that are supposed to be stable and making them unstable? We should be focusing on the stuff that's this, that's locked up, that's supposed to

Dr. Spencer Baron:

be mobile, because that's what they taught us. That's what they taught us in chiropractic college, right? 30 and 40 years.

Dr. Terry Weyman:

Bang, bang, you know, and so. So when you so the chicken, the egg, since we just brought, I brought ankle, hip and thoracic spine, when you see yours, you were locked up in the mid back, your rib cage, your hips, where you start? You start at the hips, you start. You'll throw all of it at once. What's your kind of, your thought process and protocol,

Unknown:

right? So, one thing after I assess and I see the pattern right and assess the soft tissues and joint structure. One with that assessment, if, let's say the thoracic cage mobility is compromised, or hip or ankle, I want to address, initially, I want to address the soft tissue or fascia, and then also joint function, right? Because there may be this underlying central nervous system pattern, compensation pattern, and I can, you know, give them exercises and give them different cues to try to facilitate better activity. But if they're running into joint restriction or soft tissue restriction, it's just going to push them back into the compensation. So usually, all for me, I start with, you know, soft tissue and I've used various techniques. Then I'll go to joint function, and again, various techniques. And then, once we get better mobility, better pliability of the soft tissues, then I'll start to facilitate, or help them facilitate, more efficient deep stabilization activity. And

Dr. Terry Weyman:

hey, Mike, I'm gonna interrupt you for one second, because this is direction I want to go. You had, we've heard so many different topics about breathing, and I know that's where you're going with diaphragmatic breathing. And we've heard, you know, put your thumbs in rib cage and push out diaphragmatic breathing, chest breathing. You know, there's so many different concepts of how to breathe correctly. So I'm really interested to see why you why you believe in diaphragmatic breathing, when there's so many other experts that talk about breath holes and different stuff and and different ways of breathing? Yeah, there's a bunch. So I thank you for going this direction, and I want to just preface. It with why diaphragmatic breathing is more important than

Dr. Michael Rintala:

some of these other other techniques, right? So, yeah, you have various techniques. You got Wim, Hof, you got Yoga, Pranayama, you know, various ways to activate the diaphragm. What? What DNS is talking about, what I'm talking about is, again, going back to development once the central nervous system starts expressing these patterns, you see the activity of the diaphragm change up to three months the central nervous system is immature. And if you look at the infant, everything the breathing is that the chest position is in an inspiratory position. There's no ability to create this stabilization through the trunk and the pelvis. So if the infant moves, the whole body is moving. It breathes. You see this, the chest moving up towards the neck and shoulders. Once the central nervous system kicks in or expresses these, these more ideal patterns. You see a change in respiration. The diaphragm starts to be able to contract drop. You see the spreading of the thoracic cage, like the whole thoracic cage, instead of accessory. You know the accessory breathing muscles and muscles in your neck and your shoulder, lifting the chest to try to create the breath. So what we're talking about is functional, the function of the diaphragm, which has to coordinate between breathing and stabilizing.

Dr. Terry Weyman:

Because we see, as docs, we'll see these guys come in and girls and their traps are huge, or shoulders are huge, and, and they take the shirt off or whatever, and they have no lower lat and, and they come in presenting with headaches and mid back pain, yet everything, like their bodybuilders, because their necks and their and their and their traps are gnarly and all that. And they like, and you try to adjust your mid back, and you can't, and you're like and every chiropractor, every physical therapist, just pounds their neck, works their neck. So what you're saying is, when you see somebody present themselves with large traps, large scalenes, large neck muscles, probably one of the biggest things is their diaphragm is not really working right. They're neck breathing, and we should probably focus on breathing techniques and and right? Is that?

Dr. Michael Rintala:

Yeah, I'm getting, yeah, yeah, yeah. So those patients, right? You can do tissue work, you can try to mobilize, but if that's the pattern, you'll see upper ribs are fixed, right? Thoracic spine, you're not getting the expansion of thoracic spine. So there's an adaptation of the fascia and the musculature, and then that affects the mobility through the thoracic spine. If you can't move through the thoracic spine, you're going to overload see, you know, cervical, thoracic area, or lumbar, sacral. So you know you'll see that that patient and one you can usually just tell right, like you look at the resting tone of the musculature, and you're just sitting there, and everything's hypertonic, and then you palpate it, and you're like, oof. And then especially, you palpate the scalenes, and it lights up, you know, some referral patterns, and that's all part of the assessment of like, these guys are working way too much. So, you know, you can try to adjust and everything, and if you do, that's great, and tissue are great. They may get some temporary relief, but if they're going right back to that pattern, it's harder to again move them to where they want to get to. You know, the function of the diaphragm, which really is a mirror of the function of the central nervous system, is kind of the huge component. Here you have Wim, Hof, yoga, breathing, again, all these different methods, and those can be utilized for different things, right? Calming things down, hyping things up, getting ready for performance. But what we're trying to focus in that also all those different breathing methods create a nice awareness of the diaphragm. But what we like to see is, as far as with DNS is okay, that's great, but I want to see nice function. And I want to see integration and synergy of not only the neck and shoulder musculature, but the trunk and pelvis. And when you see that again, you'll usually, if you take, like, if you look at the top athletes one, yeah, they're great at compensating. They have really good what we call cortical function, right? And that's one of the reasons they are how good they are. When you look at the the athletes that kind of rise to the top, and you watch them move, you see this, this fluidity. Right? It's almost like this effortlessness. And when I see that, I'm like, okay, they have good you know that what we look for with the expression of the central nervous system, they have good cortical functions so they can input their environment and output the activities. And also, with those athletes, you'll see longevity of career, right? They may get injured, but they recover quickly, and their overall career tends to be longer. There's plenty of athletes that still do well, but may rely more on strength and speed, but then you'll see those athletes more frequent injuries and harder times of recovering, and then maybe shorter span as far as career. So that's just kind of like a, you know, something that you can think about with the history, or just an observation you can make looking again at the what we call dynamic neuromuscular stabilization,

Dr. Spencer Baron:

yeah, I was going to ask you about remapping the brain. And you, you got somebody that comes in, they they injured their ACL they've been limping and putting pressure on what those are obvious things. And then you do some proprioceptive training or balance training, for the lay person that wants to know what that means, but what about I mean, you're going deep into areas that they're changing their biomechanics. It could be thoracic, but then they come in with it. They had a shoulder injury, and then their big toe hurts. Or, you know, I mean, you're unraveling a lot of stuff. How in the world are you remapping the brain after they've been doing that for years, right?

Dr. Michael Rintala:

So it's a process, and a lot of the timeline of that process depends on their overall body awareness, right? So you can have, let's say you I'm working with an athlete, usually they're going to have good spatial awareness, good, you know, body awareness. And so as I'm working with them and helping them facilitate this pattern. It's usually going to be a quicker progression. You have some people with poor body awareness. I know that, okay, it's going to be a little bit more work on my part, manually positioning to help wake up their their central nervous system. With athletes, when you're integrating these things, I'm not talking, you know, depending on the athlete. I don't talk about their specific technique. As a good pitcher, a golfer, you know, leave that to the coaches. I'm just focusing on that quality of stabilization and that quality of movement throughout the, you know, throughout the joint structures. And as you do that, you know, for example, let's say my runners, my swimmers, my bikers, for example, you know, I'm not talking I'm not talking about their training. I'll leave that to the coach, and again, to the Yeah, the trainer. But if I improve the efficiency, what tends to happen? Their times get better without them feeling like they're putting out more

Dr. Spencer Baron:

effort. I got a quick question, what if some if a patient, like many of them, come in and they're there is no chance to improve a certain range of motion because so much scar tissue or injury is and their movement pattern is screwed to begin with. And you're using a model of what good movement, especially in a baby, would look like without any restrictions. What do you do in a situation like that?

Dr. Michael Rintala:

So, you know, there's everyone's going to have different potential for improvement, and especially in our older population, right? We have degenerative changes. We have thoracic cage. Thoracic Spine could be fused, to some extent, post surgical fusions, even with the structural issues. If you you're if you can still tap into more, more efficient expression of that, coordination of respiration and stabilization with the diaphragm, you're going to help them improve as much as they can, right? You're going to improve the overall situation. So some patients, yeah, you know, everybody wants to move how they were when they were 18, right? They want to, and that's why we see a lot of people their 40s and 50s, are trying to do what they did when they were you. 18. You know, part of it is like, okay, explaining the situation, explaining what you're seeing, and then talking about what the goals are. You know, usually one pain free, so they can get back to activity. But if I can help them as much as possible, creating the ideal stability and the coordination of respiration and stabilization function the diaphragm, then they can manage things better. So you can have an 80 year old, maybe you just improve their breathing function. That's huge for them, right? Maybe it stops some headaches, or you get a little bit better stability. And this, they're loading less through their lower extremity. So there's, you know, there's limits again, you know, where it's not a miracle thing, it's giving them things in those in that those cases, to manage what they're what they're dealing

Dr. Spencer Baron:

with. Jerry, I got a quick, I got it. My question will be quick, but the your answer may be lengthy. So I just need to understand when, you know, we, we've got this thing called functional movements, FMS, you know, and there's a series of movements that you have, that a patient does, and there's a standard scale that they are great about. And then there's, there's, you know yonder his work, and you know kapanji and all that, and biomechanics. And let's see how you sit up when a patient comes in, whether they're they got a knee problem, or were they there and they're or they're 80 years old, or they're 17 years is there a is there a set criteria of tests that you do, or do you modify those, like, like, if a person comes up with a shoulder injury, we do a shoulder exam or a

Dr. Michael Rintala:

knee exam, yeah, yeah. So the DNS assessments, there's like, 12 different movements that we look at, also breathing and postural function of the diaphragm and that I'll do that. And not all doesn't have to be all 12. Usually, within you can take, depending on the complaint, you can do like three, two or three assessments, and you'll see what's happening. As far as the movement, Mike,

Dr. Spencer Baron:

let me ask you, you've got, most people have crappy posture, and they ask us all the time, especially, you know, the whole iPhone thing and the, you know, sitting on the computer. Let me also let the audience know that you're only one of your eight, one of 18 Certified International instructors is in the dynamic neuromuscular stabilization from that school in Prague, which is very honorable. So with that said, and all your super intelligence in that area give us an one activity or some activity that could be really practically applied to everyday stuff for a person that has shit posture. And they ask us all the time, is that fair? Is that a fair question? Sure,

Dr. Michael Rintala:

probably the number one go to yeah would be on breathing and paying attention to your breathing pattern. And I don't know if you want, I could demo something.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Do it, yeah, we love that

Dr. Michael Rintala:

so. And I don't know if people are like listening, or they can go to YouTube and watch, yeah, so, so if they're watching, and I'll do my best to describe Sure, but Right? So if you're, if you're, you could be seated, you could be standing, you can be laying down. But if you, if you take your hands,

Dr. Spencer Baron:

if you want, you could back up and yeah, so that'd be fine too.

Dr. Michael Rintala:

Yeah, okay, so if I'm, if I'm seated, you're

Dr. Spencer Baron:

sitting on a therapy ball. Look at that. All right, all right.

Dr. Michael Rintala:

All right. I'm stabilizing up, writing so, so if you just take your hands and you put them, you have your hip bones, right, the ilium, so it's, it's the are on your side, just above your hip bones, your ilium, yeah, below the ribs.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

I feel like a runway model, okay, yeah,

Dr. Michael Rintala:

your fingers will be in the kind of the lateral aspect of your abdominal wall. Your thumbs will be in the kind of the back area of the abdominal wall. The abdominal wall wraps all the way around. So if I have my my fingers in the front, my thumbs in the back, and then I squeeze my my hands together. Now just in this position, if you can take like a two to three second breath in through your nose, and then two to three seconds out. And. Now, ideally, if that diaphragm is functioning nicely, it's going to drop and spread, and the lower ribs will spread, and you'll feel with your hands. You'll feel your your thumbs and fingers spreading apart, and your hands spreading apart. Oftentimes, if that pattern, if that ideal pattern isn't there, instead of the feeling in the hands, you'll feel you'll feel the chest and shoulder rise up towards the head. Okay, nice. Just a simple thing, just feeling one what you're doing. And if your pattern is bringing your breath up into your neck and shoulders. What I want you to do is as you breathe in, have the intention of breathing down towards the chair or down towards the pelvic floor, and you want to feel like try to actively feel the expansion of the thumb and the fingers as you take the breath in. And so that's like a combination of assessment, but then also practice. And then the second thing that you can do is now, if you give yourself a hug, and you put your fingers in the lower rib spaces, so you give yourself a hug, lower rib spaces, and then let the shoulders relaxed. Now you're going to do the same thing this time. You want the again. You want the the intention of the breath moving down towards the chair, and also, as we breathe in, we should feel our fingers spreading apart. We should feel those rib spaces spreading apart. So the thing to take note of, is that happening, or does that start to happen and then you feel the neck and shoulder musculature taking over. If we're just sitting here, we should be all diaphragm, right? So one, you can see where you're at with your breathing strategy, but you can also catch yourself if you're coming up into the neck and shoulders too much, and if you do maybe three to five breath with that intention of getting that nice active and I spreading of the lower rib cage, the nice spreading of the abdominal wall, then you can start practicing that you if you can feel it, you can reproduce it, and that it's a psychomotor skill. It's like learning how to tie a shoe. At first, you got to really concentrate. You may get it, you may make a mistake and use the compensation, but if you're consistent, you practice that'll start to get easier. And as that gets easier, you're reinforcing the pattern, and eventually that can integrate more subcortically. It can wake up those patterns. And then when you're not thinking about these things, instead of everything coming up to the neck and shoulders, now you're facilitating this pattern. It's just like, you know, if you learn how to golf or surf or, you know, pick your sport. At first, you're kind of flailing around, you know, you're using too much of everything. But as you get it, you're not thinking about that stuff. You're just you're just

Dr. Spencer Baron:

performing. Are you as the practitioner now a patient comes in, are you doing that test on them? If they Okay? Cool, because that's what I was imagining, that they might not on that first visit, that might be a cool exam part. So

Dr. Michael Rintala:

thanks. Yeah, the biggest Yeah. And the biggest thing is, once they realize what they're doing, the usual response is, like, why has nobody told me this, right? And especially, like, I'll see I see a lot of people, and I get a lot of pain medicine docs sending me their chronic pain patients, right? And you know what I just described, probably like the number one finding is this discoordination, and that the thing is too if you, if you normalize the respiration, the stabilization starts to almost kick in automatically. So that's like, probably the number one go to is the breath. And people have the right idea, you know, okay, yogic breathing, Wim, Hof, again, different methods and again, different methods for different purposes. But what I'd like to see is those functional, you know, with the functional activity of the diaphragm, in my opinion, you know, with DNS, it's, it's not, don't do that. Do this. It's Integra. Operate this to help enhance what you're the good work you're already doing. Because you you know, a lot of these things you're helping people. How do we enhance that? Right? How do we enhance the effectiveness of everything else that we're doing, whether it's manual techniques, whether it's training, you know, whatever the integration and this is, and that's the big thing for me. When once I saw it and I got an understanding of this, it was like, All right, I saw the potential of being able to, again, enhance all the other methods I was I was utilizing. So yeah,

Dr. Spencer Baron:

dr, Mike, we're entering our favorite part of our program as we wrap up, it's the rapid fire questions. I think it's going to be real challenge for you. You, but when these are simple, easy to answer questions, well, maybe not, but there's five of them, and if you're ready, let's live the rapid fire. You ready to put in my glasses now you might want to kick them off. I want to put in hearing aids. So no, yeah, all right. Question number one, if DNS could fix one celebrity's posture, who would you choose and why?

Unknown:

Man, I thought these are gonna be easy. Oh, hell no.

Dr. Michael Rintala:

All right, I'm so I know there. Okay, let's say, Who's that? The at the actor who plays Thor, oh yeah. So I know he's had brains low back, right? Hemsworth, yeah, nice day. So obviously, super strong guy, right? Oh yeah. And, but I know just from reading he's had struggles with low back. And I think actually, he may in Australia, he may work with a DNS practitioner, but so something like, something like that, yeah, where you see this, you know, athlete or celebrity in great shape, but they have pain. So I would add that component to whatever his training is as he gets ready for those roles, which I I love, I love Marvel. I love, yeah, I love Thor, right? So, yeah. So,

Dr. Spencer Baron:

very good, very good. Question number two, now, I hope you're ready for this one. This is gonna be a tough one. You're on a holiday, you have one day and only one time, only one time that, or one time, or time for one activity. I should say the golf course is the perfect condition. Nobody is out there, but it's also next to one of the best surf breaks in the world, and it's going off perfect shape, size, with no one in the water, which I'm going sir, you just made Dr, Terry's day. Okay, very good, very good. That was easy, wasn't it? All right,

Unknown:

I'm not good at either of them.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

There you go. Question number three, you work with elite athletes, we know, but what's the one sport or physical activity you personally suck at, but wish you didn't?

Dr. Michael Rintala:

Let's go back to surfing, right? I mean, I love being in the in the walk in the ocean. But I came to that sport later in life, right? It's one of those things. You take golf, tennis, swimming, you learn those early. You have those patterns. I would love to be better at

Dr. Spencer Baron:

surf. Terry, I think you're better than somebody in

Dr. Terry Weyman:

surfing. There you go. No, no, I'm not. Yo, I tell people, people go, I go, I like surfing. I'm not a surfer. And people that understand surfing understand that statement. So like, this weekend, I'm going down, I'm gonna see you Mike at the seminar, and on Saturday they're all these guys are going surfing at 730 I'm not bringing my board because I'm not, I'm not a surfer. I like surfing, but I'm not a surfer, and I'm gonna go in the water with these guys. I go, I'm not gonna compete for waves. And now I like to, I like to go out when I'm when a few guys in the water, I go out during the week, but, yeah, I like, I'm not a surfer. I like surf.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Okay, back to rapid fire questions. Okay, if you number number four, if you could ever only listen to one song for the rest of your life, what song would that

Dr. Michael Rintala:

be? It's going to be a tool song. And I gotta put like lateralis or. Parabola, I'm a tool. I love the tool. Love it, love it.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

So last question, and Dr, Mike mentala, you have been pretty serious throughout this whole program. What makes you laugh?

Unknown:

I mean, I love comedians, you know, name a good comedian,

Dr. Spencer Baron:

and you name a good comedian.

Dr. Michael Rintala:

I mean, any of everybody from like Bill Burr, Will Ferrell, Conan O'Brien, you know, yeah. Oh yeah. Those guys hilarious,

Dr. Spencer Baron:

yeah? Sebastian Maniscalco,

Dr. Michael Rintala:

yes, right, right. He's the Italian. Oh yeah, yeah, he makes

Dr. Terry Weyman:

everything. Have you listened to Brad Williams? No, he's the dwarf.

Unknown:

Oh, God, I haven't listened

Dr. Spencer Baron:

hilarious. Yep, yeah. Dr Mike mental, thank you so much for imparting such fantastic knowledge. I really, really appreciate the practical approach that you applied to us that we can actually start today. So thank you for all that, that breathing and breath work concept,

Dr. Michael Rintala:

awesome. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you guys for having me on and let me talk about this, and Terry, I'll see you this weekend.

Dr. Terry Weyman:

You will Bye, brother. Take care, man.

Unknown:

Thanks. Thank you.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Thank you for listening to today's episode of The cracking backs podcast. We hope you enjoyed it. Make sure you follow us on Instagram, at Kraken backs podcast. Catch new episodes every Monday. See you next time you.