67. The Missing Piece in Fitness: Why Recovery Changes Everything

Your workouts might not be the problem. Your recovery might be.

After a long stretch of silence, I’m back with a real update on what’s changing at Transform Health Initiative and why. Even with years of lifting experience and a solid handle on nutrition, I hit a frustrating wall: I was getting stronger, rebuilding muscle post surgery, and still dealing with constant tension, nagging aches, and movement limits that wouldn’t budge. That sent me back to a lesson I should’ve never ignored recovery isn’t optional if you want performance, longevity, and a body that actually feels good.

I walk through my path from music to massage therapy to personal training, and how those chapters finally came full circle. The big shift: I went and got my massage therapy license so we can legally and professionally bridge the gap between training and recovery here in Oklahoma. We talk tissue health, mobility, assisted stretching, soft tissue work, and why combining bodywork with smart strength programming helps you correct the real issue instead of just “working around it” until you can’t.

If you’re a busy adult trying to lose fat, build strength, and stay active for your kids and grandkids, this is the missing piece most fitness plans never address. I also break down why most injuries don’t happen in the gym they happen in everyday life when you’re stressed, tight, and moving fast on autopilot.

Subscribe for the upcoming shift toward more recovery based content, share this with a friend who’s always beat up, and leave a review if it helps. What’s the one area of your body that never seems to loosen up?

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Transcript

Medical Disclaimer And Show Opening

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. We share general health and fitness information and professional experience, not individualized medical advice. This content does not replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making any changes to your health routine.

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Welcome to Live Transformed, the podcast from Transformed Health Initiative, where evidence-based truth meets real life transformation. Lead yourself, integrate health, value what matters, engage in the process. This is how you live transformed. And now here's your host, Adam Kelly.

Why I’ve Been Away

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What is going on, all of my Live Transformed people? It has been a cool minute since I've put an episode out. Once again, it's been um probably a month, if not a little bit longer. But we are back nonetheless. So I will explain why I've been away once again. Um, you know, life has been busy, busy to say the least. Some good, some bad, and it all balances out to be a beautiful existence that we get to have because not everybody gets to live, not everybody gets to continue on each day. Some people woke up today with the full intentions to live their life, and life decided otherwise. So if we are some of the blessed people that get to be here, we should be happy regardless of what we're facing. So that's my positive note for the day. Um, other than that, it's a beautiful day here in Moore, Oklahoma, um, right in the middle of storm season, which started early this year. So we are on day three of Tornado Hell Thunderstorm Threat. Fun, fun. So um, yeah, that's where we're at. Anywho, this episode is a little bit different. I'm basically filling you guys in on some updates that I've made to our company here at Transform Health Initiative and what that looks like and why these things are happening, because there always needs to be a purpose to anything that we do. So, how do I want to start this? Um, basically, let's let's go back in time a little bit, okay?

My Career Turn From Music

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Let's go back um about 2010, I want to say. So I had recently moved back from California, I was out there doing music. Long story short, gave it up, came back to raise my child that I had, and um I didn't really have a lot of focus and purpose in life. I had planned for you know the prior five, eight years to do music, and thought I finally had my opportunity to do so with a record label. Um, things didn't go at the pace that I felt they needed to in order to be the provider that I wanted to be for my son. So I decided, you know what, this may never pan out the way I want it to, and I'm missing my son's life. So, needless to say, when he was six months old, I moved back from California. And like I said, I had no focus, no direction, no idea what I wanted to do with my life at this point, because I'm gonna be totally honest with you guys, I was pretty wild back in my teenage years, and I really never thought I was gonna live past 2021. Um, so you couple with that with the fact that I was no longer making music, and that didn't seem to be a direction that my life was going to go in. Um, at 19, 20 years old, I was completely just, you know, just existing. And that doesn't work out too well for me. I need to have direction, I need to have purpose, and I need to be working towards something. I've always been that way, and I will always be that way. So I've always been pretty fascinated with the human body. I was lifting and exercising pretty regularly for several years at that point. I lost over 100 pounds the first time at that point, and I was thinking, you know, what could I do for work that involves things that I'm interested in? And I don't really honestly remember why I chose massage therapy, but that was the avenue that I went to. So I went to college back then. You actually went to college for massage therapy. Uh, things have changed quite a bit in the last 15 years. But that's what I did, got my associate's degree and started practicing. And then a couple things happened. One, my body started breaking down a little bit because I was living hard, you know, I was partying, I was working, I was lifting and running and doing boxing on the side, and just so much demand on my body that one, my body, my hands, my thumbs, everything started kind of breaking down. And also, I started to realize there was a lot of limitations on us as practitioners that I didn't really care for because again, I come from a lifting background, I come from an exercise background and a strengthening background. So in massage therapy, if you're not a certified personal trainer or a physical therapist or something else outside of the scope of massage therapy, you're legally not allowed to prescribe exercise or tell people how they could strengthen things or how they can actually fix the problems that they're dealing with. So basically, I have people coming to me, they would feel better when they got off the table, they would be able to move better, less discomfort, less tension, and then they go on living their life and they get stuck in that same cycle of feeling a little bit better after treatment and then going right back to where they were or getting worse over time. And I started to lose focus there because it's like I don't really feel like I'm helping people. I'm just kind of wooing people, helping them relax and feel good, and I'm not actually helping fix anybody or helping fix the situation that they're dealing with. So at that point, I turned to personal training and I went back to college for my second associate's degree for applied science in personal training. So actually, it's applied science and healthcare, and the subcategory is personal training, however, they word that. Anywho, I did that, and basically I completely quit doing massage therapy and turned all of my focused intention into personal training and then met my wife, got married. Um, you know, life just kind of took on new responsibilities as a parent, a full-time parent, and my son also had um my wife had a child that she brought into the relationship. So life changed a lot in personal training. I had no business mentality, like I had no understanding about how to, you know, create business, how to find business, how to keep clients, you know, client retention. I had no understanding on anything outside of just, oh, I need to work a job and make money. So needless to say, I didn't operate my business well at all. And that led me to going into other fields of work to provide income for my family. I needed stable income, I needed full-time income. Um, so I got out of personal training completely, pretty much, you know, outside of training myself and helping some family members and friends and things like that. I got out of it, did other jobs, and um, you can check some previous episodes about what actually led me back into personal training and then health and transformation coaching. So pretty wild story there. I don't want to go into it again because either you've already heard it or you could go back and listen to some of the previous episodes. Um, but ended up getting back into personal training, led me to creating an opening Transform Health initiative. Now we have our own private training facility, and that is evolving into something much bigger and better and more impactful and helpful for the people that I'm blessed to work with. So that's what brings me to today's episode. Now that I filled you in on this little section of my crazy life story, and things have completely come back full circle, which is pretty wild when I sit and think about

The Missing Piece Is Recovery

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it. So, long story, longer stories short, I started to realize something, not just with my own clients, but with my own self and my own health journey, especially coming from multiple spine surgeries, all the other injuries I've dealt with, all the aches and pains and little injuries I've sustained throughout the years, rather from just reckless living to sports related to just happenstance related, which is typically what happens. It's just something that should have never happened that ends up happening to me. And um so as I've come back from my surgeries and I've been lifting again for several years now, about three years since my last surgery, building muscle back, built more muscle than I had before, um, getting stronger. But I started to notice that my pain wasn't getting any better, my discomfort wasn't getting any better, my movement limitations weren't really getting better. I was just working around them with your typical bodybuilding, you know, single plane of motion type exercises. And, you know, I've been a huge fan of bodybuilding for the last 10 years or so, uh, the sport as a fan and as a coach. And so uh that's influenced a lot of my training and philosophy when it comes to exercise. Um, it's all about getting as jacked as possible, as muscular as possible, all that good stuff. But I kept getting banged up, kept getting little injuries and stuff like that in my neck, just constant pain and just constantly feel like I'm wearing my body down. So I started to think, is there something that I'm missing here? Like I'm doing the things that I should be doing. You know, my diet's pretty fair. Um, you know, sleep is the best that I can really get it uh with pain and things like that. Sleep hasn't been great for a long time. But I do, for the most part, a pretty good job at trying to ensure I get the best quality that I can. Um, strength training regularly, things like that. And I'm just like, man, why do I feel like I'm constantly running myself into a wall? I have to take five steps back just to take another two to three steps forward and just repeating the cycle. And I started to realize, dude, you know better, but yet you're not doing better. That was a hard realization for me to come to, as I have had to many, many times in my journey, as I do every single day as I continue on my journey and self-sabotage enough myself. Uh, but I started to realize that you're focusing on progressing, but you're not focusing on recovery. You're focusing on building bigger and stronger muscles, but you're not focusing on, you know, improving the quality of your tissue that you have and making sure that you're moving in a way that promotes joint health, that doesn't tear up your joints, that doesn't lead to muscle imbalances and things like that, which I already have enough of. And I have enough nerve damage through my neck and my shoulder and all that, um, and just really not doing well for myself. So I started to think, well, why is this happening? Um, and the biggest difference was I stopped going to get massages as often. So I have a massage therapist that I've been working with for probably 10 years, if not more, probably 13 years. Um, and she's helped me through both surgeries, the recovery process, getting mobility back, getting range of motion back, um, you know, kind of calving some of the nerve issues, some of the extra tension, breaking up scar tissue, all those good things. And, you know, I took like three, four, or five months from going to her just due to life circumstances, busyness and all that, and I started regressing very quickly. Uh, it was about a month and a half in, and just the pain was getting worse and worse, and I kept having to dial back my workouts and change things up pretty much weekly just because my body just feeling completely trashed, and a lot of the nerve issues and the um neurological issues through my arm and my neck and my back and all that starting to get worse again. And so I started kind of digging into things, trying to figure out what's going on, and basically I started to also realize with that just how many of my clients are kind of in the same situation where maybe they've had some injuries in the past or just wear and tear, beat themselves up, lived life, all that stuff, you know, put themselves last while they put everything else and everybody else first, and they come and work with me, they start losing body fat, they start building muscle, they start improving their mobility, they start, you know, um getting faster and stronger and and all of that good stuff. Wonderful, wonderful things. But then they start also getting beat up. And as time goes on, because most of my clients are long-term clients, like I average, you know, honestly, my retention rates at least a year at this point. Um, and I'm blessed to be able to say that. But when you work with people that long, week in, week out, you know, getting after it, progressing, PRs, all that stuff, it begins to add up. And the body starts to feel the effects longer than it should. Maybe recovery's off, maybe joints feel beat up, you know, uh, maybe muscles stay tight and just you never seem to have relief, little aches and pains, little thing, you know, all those things that kind of accumulate into just being very annoying at best and lead to falling off at worst. And I would have people come in and they're like, man, I'm just, you know, my back hurts from work or my knee hurts from this or whatever. So I can't really do a lot. And so, you know, the session just isn't as effective, or they end up canceling or rescheduling because they're just too beat up or they're too worn out or broken down. And usually those people are the ones that fall off fairly quickly and end up being ex-clients. So I started taking to that account too. Like, am I really? It's kind of it kind of went back to how I felt when I was just doing massage therapy. It's like, well, I I think I'm helping people, but am I really helping people? Like, am I really making a difference? Or am I just perpetuating the problems they already have, you know, solving one problem to give them two more problems? That's just kind of the way my brain thinks about things. So if your body feels tight, worn down, or just off more often than it should, that's not something you just have to live with. A lot of people are doing the workouts, trying to eat better, staying active, but they're still dealing with constant tension, nagging aches, low energy, and their body's just not responding the way it should. That's the gap. At THI, we bridge the gap between training and recovery, combining strength training, nutrition, and targeted body work to improve how your body actually functions. So you don't just look better, but you actually feel better, move better, and perform better in your everyday life. If that's the piece you've been missing, we're here when you're ready. All right, back to the episode. As I started reflecting on where I've been, I a lot of the principles of massage therapy and body work and tissue manipulation, you know, and uh milofascial release and trigger point therapy and all these different techniques and and methods started coming back to my mind, and I started remembering how effective they were on helping me with my tension and my discomfort and my pain in general. Uh, and it was like, man, it would be so nice to be able to add in like some assisted stretching or some type of soft tissue manipulation for my clients on the days where they're super, super beat up and can't really lift heavy, or you know, um, they just really need it. You know, they've had a rough week. Uh, maybe they tweak something in the garden or at work or whatever it may be, uh, and they just really need some help.

Relicensing And Expanding THI

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And when I started looking into like assisted stretching courses and stuff like that, I started realizing that in Oklahoma, at least, it's not like this in every state, but in Oklahoma, there's a very umbrella description of what's considered massage therapy. And basically anything that has to do with contact, physical contact, and manipulating tissue, including stretching, helping people stretch, assisted stretching, is all under the umbrella of massage therapy, which means as a practitioner, you are at risk by performing that type of stuff without being a licensed massage therapist. And I was like, well, that's a bummer. So then I started looking into what I need to do to get licensed. That's a whole story there. I'm gonna save that for another day because of course, with my life, things don't typically work out the easiest way, it's usually the hardest way possible. Um so, anywho, looking into it, I was like, you know what? I think this is a good idea. If I can make this happen, if I can get my massage therapy license, and if nothing else just for stretching, but maybe even for some recovery, massage mobility work, then I really think this would be a huge boost for my client's health, my client's longevity, my client retention rate, and for business in general. And so that led me to taking the state exam, studying for a few weeks, taking the state exam, past that somehow, because I'm telling you, that thing was hard, and I felt like I knew none of the answers. Just I studied like a psycho and felt like all the studying I did, none of it showed up on the test. So, anywho, I passed it, um, got my state license done, got my multiple city license and permits done in order to practice here at our facility. And so now that's what's led me to where THI Transform Health Initiative has evolved. And now we're encompassing the entire ecosystem of the body into our practice. So we're not just focusing on nutrition and fat loss, and just on strength training or cardio training or just on lifestyle, uh, you know, healthy lifestyle habits, sleep, stress management, things like that, hydration. And we're not just focusing on stretching, we're also focusing on re-lengthening tissues to where they need to be so that the joint can function properly, that you know, tissues are able to be loaded properly so that it takes the extra strain off the joint that isn't supposed to be there, or the extra strain off of the tendons and ligaments that they're not equipped to have because the muscles aren't doing their job. And I've seen these patterns get worse with clientele over time when we're not addressing these things. It's like, hey, just ignore it, just ignore it. We'll just work around it, work around it until you get to a point where you can't anymore. And it becomes really important to start addressing things. And especially with my clientele, my um my average clientele, which is 35 to 55-year-old busy adults who have lived life, they've tried all the different things, they don't know why their body doesn't feel good. They're either active or they're not active, they want to get active, they want to do more, they want to feel better, move better, and they're starting to think about their longevity, kids, grandkids, great-grandkids, and how the rest of the years that they have on this earth are going to be lived out. And, you know, the way the body feels plays a huge role into that. Our recovery rate plays a huge role into that. And for our age group, we've put ourselves on the back burner for so long. We have a lot of things that a lot of us are trying to work through that aren't being worked through by just hitting the gym and trying to get good sleep and eating better. That takes care of a lot of it, but there's still things that need to be addressed, and a lot of people that have to go beyond that. So at first, like I said, I was just gonna do assisted stretching, that type of work, but now I'm evolving it into massage therapy as well. So um we have a therapy room, treatment room here now at the facility, which I'm almost done completing. I'm about two to three weeks out from releasing this service to the public. Uh, I'm gonna start with my current clientele, give them a nice little discount, all that good stuff, you know, take care of my people, and then open it up to everybody else from there. Um, so we're gonna have things like recovery sessions where we're working on mobility work, stretching, assisted stretching, uh, passive and active stretching, those type of things. Uh, and then we're gonna have massage therapy recovery sessions to where we're actually digging into tissue, you know, releasing, uh breaking up adhesions, working on scar tissue if that's an issue, working on joint mobility, working on range of motion, getting in down into some of the tendons and things like that, kind of working insertion origin points, really getting down to the root of the situation. And what makes this so amazing, and why I'm so excited about it, is the fact that I have much less limitations than I did when I only did massage therapy, because now that I'm a certified personal trainer as well, and I actually own a private facility, I can not only tell people. People, what they need to strengthen so they actually fix the situation, not just mask it by relaxing. And the pain gate theory, if you don't know what that is, you should look it up. It's why massage therapy seems to alleviate pain. Uh, it actually doesn't alleviate pain. Let me let me just air that out because I'm gonna be real with you guys. A lot of people promote pain relief with massage therapy. Massage therapy does not cure anything, it does not get rid of pain, it can help with some of the symptoms of some of the situations that you know may be causing the tension that's leading to the issues that you're dealing with, but it's not actually going to fix pain. But it can help to relax tissue that's overtight, it can help with the correction process. If we're strengthening the underactive weak muscles and we're relaxing and relengthening to their proper length, the um overactive and tight muscles, now we're addressing the situation from both angles, okay? So we have a much higher chance of being effective. And that is the goal at the end of the day. It's not to have another service, it's not to have another way to make money. It is how can I be the biggest help to the people that hire me and trust me to do my job? How can I deliver the best possible experience so they live the best possible life that they can with the highest quality of life that they can have and enjoy it along the way? And if we're always beat up, we're always exhausted, we're always fatigued, we're always underrecovered and overworked, that's never gonna happen. We're not gonna suddenly just get so good that we're not affected by these things anymore. If anything, we're either gonna perpetuate them or we're basically pushing it off till later. So why not correct the situation, go to the root of the situation rather than just ignoring it and slapping band-aids on it? And so that's where we're at, guys. That's why I've been busy and have not put out much content as far as podcast episodes go. I'm still very active on social media, my Facebook, Instagram page, TikTok, eh, still trying a little bit. Um, so always putting out content on those different channels. But the podcast has suffered just due to time and really mental bandwidth and capacity, because like I said, y'all, that uh state exam was not easy. Um, I spent about three and a half weeks. And mind you, I've been in coaching and personal training for quite some time. So a lot of the base knowledge, like anatomy, um, muscle contraction, different things like that, I already know. Um, and I was trained in everything else. You have to have like 500 education hours in massage therapy to get your state license. I have 915 with my college degree. So well, well trained. A lot of things were kind of review, and with all that, studying literally three to four hours, six days a week. Um, I felt like that was one of the hardest tests I've ever taken. So uh that took up a lot of my what you could call free time, and then just kind of getting things in order since then, getting the business plan updated, the structure of the system, how this is gonna work, you know, and and everything that it's required when you're a professional to act like a professional and do things as a professional.

How The Body Compensates

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So my goal is to get back to either weekly or bi-weekly episodes, give you guys some helpful content, some helpful suggestions, and you're gonna notice a little bit of a shift, not a change, but a bit of a shift in some of the content. We're gonna be adding in more recovery-based content and um, you know, things that align with massage therapy and recovery, not just strength training and nutrition and lifestyle habits. Because again, we're this is one big beautiful picture of life, and the body is so intricate, everything is so connected, one thing affects the other thing, which affects another thing, which affects uh affects something that you would never even expect it would affect somewhere else in the body. It's just amazing the way that these machines, if you will, operate and what they're capable of, and how they're always trying to find homeostasis, how they're always trying to get to a place where you can continue to move, even if that means developing poor movement patterns and poor joint loading in order to accomplish a movement. The body doesn't really care what the long-term effects are going to be, it cares more about can I perform this right now? Can I walk right now? Well, if I have to compensate through my knees because my hips aren't, you know, my hips are too tight or my glute medius and minimus are too weak, so they're not able to stabilize my hips, so my TFL has to take a lot of that load, or that has to be transmitted to some other part of my body, the body's gonna figure out how to do it. It's gonna figure out how to accomplish the movement that needs to be done to the best that it can until it can't anymore. And it's not going to consider what is the long-term effect here, what is this perpetuating, what new problems is this going to create? It's only trying to solve the issue right in front of it, which is what is this person demanding I need to do and how can I get it done? You know, a lot of my clients, they work, you know, they're they're business owners, they're managers, they run branches, they run, you know, whole organizations, they spend a lot of time driving, they spend a lot of time doing desk work, they spend a lot of time doing physical works, repetitive motions, things like that. And, you know, just we're getting stronger, we're getting more fit, leaner, and fixing a lot of things, addressing a lot of things, but their bodies are still just bent out of shape, if you will. Um, and they can't figure out why their low back is always fatigued and achy, why they can't seem to get their squat pattern correct, why they can't seem to do a proper deadlift or a proper hip hinge without having back pain or knee pain, uh, and just so many of these other things, why their neck is always hurting, why they're always having tension headaches and migraines, why uh their shoulders always clicking whenever they're doing abduction or whenever they're doing uh shoulder extension or some other type of movement. And now we have another way that we can help you feel your best. So I am excited. Uh, like I said, we're two or three weeks out from releasing this to the public. I'm hoping to be ready to go full mode by the beginning of May. Now, mind you, I am the only practitioner. So uh my schedule is very limited. So if you're hearing this and it's before May, uh just know that I'm already starting to actually book people in advance. I've been putting out some stuff on social media, kind of giving hints, giving awareness to what I'm adding and what I'm doing. I've already got people reaching out, like, hey, as soon as you're ready, let me know, let me get on the books. So I've only got honestly maybe two or three hours a day at the max that I can fit in uh recovery sessions and massage appointments. So if you're somebody that you're like, yes, this is what I've been waiting on, this is what I need, um, then you should probably reach out pretty quickly and make sure that you can get some of those first slots that open. But outside of that, follow me on social media, Coach Adam Kelly, if you want to know more or see more as I continue to make my audience aware of how we're growing here at THI. So that's all I got for you on this episode, guys. Just giving you a little update, talking about tissue health, talking about, you know, just bringing awareness to the fact that it's not normal for us to be in pain and limited in movement and feeling tight and achy all the time. Like, yes, there is a trade-off with strength training, especially if you have goals and you're really trying to push, you know, your ability, you're really trying to put on a good amount of muscle, strength, all those things. There's going to be a trade-off, but that trade-off is actually pretty substantially low when it comes to risk of injury and things like that with training. It's it's very, very low. Matter of fact, people don't usually get hurt in the gym. Okay. People don't usually throw their back out while they're lifting. Usually. It's usually when they're bending over to pick up a piece of trash and they're not aware of how they're moving, or something is so tight that it's limiting proper movement, or they are picking up their kid, you know, off the ground because they fell and scraped their knee and they tweaked something, or, you know, it's like those day-to-day things that people don't usually take into account how they're moving through it. And that's usually where bad things happen because in the gym, typically you're very aware of what's happening. Like your proprioception is very high in that moment. You're paying attention to where your body you should be, okay? You're paying attention to where your body's at, how your body's moving, uh, where you're at in space, you know, paying attention to your form. So your risk of injury is very low unless a freak accident happens or something. But in your day-to-day life, so many of us are so busy and moving so quick and have so many things going on, and so much tension and stress in our lives, physically and mentally, that the last thing we're thinking about is how I'm gonna bend over and pick up this piece of trash, or how I'm going to pick up this heavy object and move it because I just need to get it done in a hurry. Or what this repetitive movement of lifting this thing or moving this thing, what effect this is gonna have on my body and my recovery rate. And so that's usually where we have problems happen and where we have injuries happen. So if we can address the underlying issues while also improving on our weaknesses, just imagine how good we're gonna feel and how much better we're gonna move, and just how much better our our body's gonna operate. And maybe more importantly, with where we're at in life, how we're gonna continue to be able to move in a year from now, and five years from now, and ten years from now, what type of quality of life are we gonna have then? That is the question that many of us are asking, and that's exactly what I'm trying to help with. So appreciate you guys for listening to my little TED talk here and little rant and little venting moment, as like I said, life has been wild. Um, and by the way, I just want to say, because I'm very personal and open, uh, if you are the praying type, then my family could use some prayer for some things that we're going through personally. Um, you know, it's just part of the cycle of life. But nonetheless, my family could definitely use some prayer and some thoughts and all that. Um, so in the meantime, between time, and until next time, make sure you do something good for yourself, something good for your health, something good for those you care about, and whatever you do, make sure you live transformed and went on purpose. Talk at you next time.