Ever wondered what fuels the tenacity of high-performance athletes and the therapists who keep them at their peak? This episode brings you an inspiring conversation with a former athlete turned manual osteopath, whose journey from environmental science to sports therapy is nothing short of extraordinary. With firsthand experience in the NHL, AHL, and ECHL, our multifaceted guest peels back the layers of the transformative world of manual osteopathy, emphasizing a hands-on approach that eschews prolonged treatments for focused, targeted therapy sessions. Their storied career, owning gyms and educating budding therapists, provides a rich backdrop for insights into effective athlete care and the importance of understanding one's own body.
We also tackle the critical need for athlete education, turning players from passive recipients into informed partners in their health journey, while stressing the role of continuous learning for therapists themselves.
Strap on your heart rate monitors and fine-tune your understanding of athletic training. We navigate the intricate web of bodily mechanics, exploring how hip and spinal dysfunctions can skew performance and the nuanced techniques to correct them. Join us as we lace up our skates for a session on improving body awareness and coordination, underscoring the essential synergy of mental and physical agility in sports and beyond. Get ready to be empowered with knowledge that goes beyond the playing field, and into the core of optimal health and performance.
Want to see more of the AP? Subscribe to the AP YouTube channel.
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Check out James' stuff:
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Check out Dave's stuff:
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Produced by Rise Virtually
***
Other episodes you might enjoy:
World Strongest Man Mitchell Hooper, Taylor Learmont (Little "T" Fitness), Bruce Boudreau (Vancouver Canucks), Rhonda Rajsich (Most Decorated US Racquetball player), Zach Bitter (Ultra Marathon Runner), Zion Clark (Netflix docuseries), Jana Webb (Founder of JOGA), Ben Johns (#1 Pickleball Player in the World)
Perfect Sports Supplements
Get 20% off all Perfect Sports Supplements by using the code "AP20" at checkout!
Check out our Website | Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram | Tiktok | Spotify | Apple | Google | Youtube
Ever wondered what fuels the tenacity of high-performance athletes and the therapists who keep them at their peak? This episode brings you an inspiring conversation with a former athlete turned manual osteopath, whose journey from environmental science to sports therapy is nothing short of extraordinary. With firsthand experience in the NHL, AHL, and ECHL, our multifaceted guest peels back the layers of the transformative world of manual osteopathy, emphasizing a hands-on approach that eschews prolonged treatments for focused, targeted therapy sessions. Their storied career, owning gyms and educating budding therapists, provides a rich backdrop for insights into effective athlete care and the importance of understanding one's own body.
We also tackle the critical need for athlete education, turning players from passive recipients into informed partners in their health journey, while stressing the role of continuous learning for therapists themselves.
Strap on your heart rate monitors and fine-tune your understanding of athletic training. We navigate the intricate web of bodily mechanics, exploring how hip and spinal dysfunctions can skew performance and the nuanced techniques to correct them. Join us as we lace up our skates for a session on improving body awareness and coordination, underscoring the essential synergy of mental and physical agility in sports and beyond. Get ready to be empowered with knowledge that goes beyond the playing field, and into the core of optimal health and performance.
Want to see more of the AP? Subscribe to the AP YouTube channel.
---
Check out James' stuff:
Instagram
LinkedIn
---
Check out Dave's stuff:
Instagram
Twitter
LinkedIn
---
Produced by Rise Virtually
***
Other episodes you might enjoy:
World Strongest Man Mitchell Hooper, Taylor Learmont (Little "T" Fitness), Bruce Boudreau (Vancouver Canucks), Rhonda Rajsich (Most Decorated US Racquetball player), Zach Bitter (Ultra Marathon Runner), Zion Clark (Netflix docuseries), Jana Webb (Founder of JOGA), Ben Johns (#1 Pickleball Player in the World)
Perfect Sports Supplements
Get 20% off all Perfect Sports Supplements by using the code "AP20" at checkout!
Check out our Website | Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram | Tiktok | Spotify | Apple | Google | Youtube
You were to tell general population to track one metric, what would it be? You're the most decorated racquetball player in US history, world's strongest man, from childhood passion to professional athlete, eight-time Ironman champion. So what was it like making your debut in the NHL? What is your biggest piece of advice for the next generation of athletes, from underdogs to national champions? This is the Athletes Podcast, where high performance individuals share their triumphs, defeats and life lessons To educate, entertain and inspire the next generation of athletes. Here we go. We can first start off by introducing manual osteopaths. Is it officially doctored? There's different terms down in the states that you get on no.
Speaker 2:So the United States is an allopathic field, it's traditional. So osteopaths down there like if I went down to my masters there, I'd be considered an osteopathic doctor and I could prescribe prescription medicine. During World War II, when all the surgeons went off for the war, osteopaths were granted the ability to prescribe medicine and do everything else. So Canada is a mid-difference. I'm a manual osteopathic therapist yes, Manual because I am, but it's my hands. I'm touching tissue, I'm touching bodies You're manipulating. I don't use tools outside of this. Now, having said that, if it's like a calcium formation or a bone issue, I mean I've got a shockwave machine in there, I've got all the other toys, but when I'm treating as an osteo, it's just me in my hands that you can feel what's wrong with the body.
Speaker 1:I'm excited for this conversation. You obviously were introduced to me through Engle Meg, david Adjusen and Kevin Woodley, obviously as a manual osteopath. You've worked on NHL, ahl, echl, who athletes. We're in the athletes den here today recording. We're going to get over to work done. You're going to explain kind of the work. You do some five steps. I believe that you specifically refer athletes to on a daily basis, something that I should probably incorporate into my routine after traveling on the road for the past year and a half with Phoenix. I definitely need some work, so there's probably going to be some serious improvements in what I can do over the next 30, 45 minutes and hopefully the athletes listening are going to gain a ton of value from these next couple minutes in this conversation. Where do you want to start off? Do you want to maybe give a bit of background on your knowledge of how you got into the space? Sure, because you're in two decades in physically with your hands, but you're also still teaching. You're basically at the pinnacle of what I would say is elite sport performance.
Speaker 2:I've had a lot of fun is what I would say, and honestly I'm 46 years old and I feel like I've lived about five lifetimes. Now is what I would say. I mean, I started off originally going to school. I was at Duggy Daycare in New Hespinster no one knows what that one is and I was studying environmental science because I was going to go into biological engineering at UBC Venn. I was going to look at Habestat, restoration, habitat Management, and that was my second year and had to take some electives. And I found the sports science stuff in my car and I was an athlete my entire life, high performance swimming from age basically six until I was 18, professional rugby all over the place. So I took a course and I'm like, let me out. I was like, oh my God, like why would I not say anything else? And there's actually a Dr Allen Chin. He's now retired but he actually lit me up the best with his explanation of things and then just had a spark that was there and I completed my first year of the sports science at Douglas and then transferred to UBC Vancouver. I was there for the next decade Undergraduate graduate work yeah.
Speaker 2:So I've researched exercise physiology. I've looked at respiratory physiology. My undergraduate degree was Kinesis combined with a bit of health care therapy. I ended up being the head trainer for UBC Rugby, then UBC Football, and all that means is I've seen just about every which way the body can break and bend or twist or snap, and I've had the opportunity to well, the blessing and the opportunity of abundance to just get enough hands on. So I practiced in my field as a kinesiologist. My first company was actually a kinesiologistca still rents today. I've owned this is the fifth gym I've had in my lifetime.
Speaker 2:I've taught Kaplan University, quest UBC, van UBC or taught sessionally here in town. Yeah, I've taught at massage schools. I teach in the osteopathic program, many osteopathic college in Canada. Still, just, you have to give back and teaching is one of the best forms of mastering for your craft. I mean you.
Speaker 2:I've never been asked so many questions in such a different way that I have to think about the information for one for what they're actually trying to ask me and then two for what type of learner they are and how to deliver it. So from that scenario, as an osteopath, the teaching enhances my practice so greatly. And now, yeah, I've seen a bunch of bodies, I've seen a bunch of players. I've been fortunate enough to abundance that I've met people in the industry, that they've met me, and there seems to be a real need, a real lack of this, and there's no such thing as maintenance. I don't understand why we're on this path of two times a week for a year here. Please pay me your $10,000 or whatever it is. It doesn't make any sense. If you're a great therapist I've said it before it's three to five sessions and you're done, and it's not hard.
Speaker 1:I had a physiotherapist who I went and did my humanities co-op in high school with. So I spent three works learning from him it was my buddy's dad, actually, and he recommended to me he's like if you can do anything, it would be become an osteopath. And I was like intimidated at the time. I wasn't a biology body guy so I was like not interested. Now, looking back, mike, the knowledge that you have in this field is so applicable across every board so I'm just jealous in that aspect. So now I get to self-assessually, ask questions and hopefully improve.
Speaker 1:But one of the things that you get as an osteopath is seeing all these different bodies, seeing the range of abilities in these bodies. One of the things I've heard you said is that if you're born with that range, you should have it for your life, theoretically right. Phoenix and I watched Barry Sanders documentary this morning. I don't know if you've seen the way that guy's body moved. It's not like anyone else in the world and I want to maybe show some clips at some point. But I'm curious are there specific athletes that you work with that you see that have tremendous abilities and that you should maybe try and emulate? Is it gymnastics as kids growing up, is it swimming? What should young athletes be doing so that they can seek out that peak performance?
Speaker 2:It's an interesting conversation. So when I taught human growth and development, that course was about the different critical periods in development of a human being, from conception, so from rate from fertility to the age of all, the critical periods that occur for formation of the organism, up to adulthood, when the epiphyseal plates ossify. So for kids, anyone like so, for males below the age of 17, females below the age of 15, 16, and they should be doing as many movement patterns and as many sports as possible. I've said this before and other things like we're, we're how are we going about it? With single sport athletes and this focus on single sport, we're fundamentally damaging our children long term and we're doing that in such a way where, if we're not regularly using a motor pathway, which means we're not touching it on a regular basis, so by the age of 10, if we haven't been using it, our body decides that, well, I don't need to maintain that from a calorie perspective. So therefore, I'm going to lice that pathway and end it.
Speaker 2:So if I, if I have only ever played hockey and I've only ever skated, and I was a skater and I was a center, that's all I've ever practiced. Well, you know what about lateral movement, like tennis. What about lateral movement, like racquetball or squash? You know what about? You know, foot-eye coordination from field sports that involve your, you know, like soccer, we don't develop those pathways. So therefore I haven't developed a fully functioning organism.
Speaker 2:So if I'm going to be a single sport athlete, having all those fundamental lumen patterns and primitive lumen patterns already developed and ingrained, when I decide to specialize, I'm much more successful. And the top NHLers that are out there, you know, like David's, the Crosby's, all these guys, if you look at their resume or their resume of physical activity as a youth, it was so diverse and that's why they have the abilities to do what they do now. Because if I'm regularly using it at least I touch it, like once every three weeks my body will keep it. But if I don't allow the neurology to continually be tested, it's like I don't need this Right.
Speaker 1:Honestly, that, like that clip alone is all I frankly want to be able to share with the world. Like that is one of my main missions with the athlete's podcast not only to educate, entertain and inspire the next gen, but to make sure that they know that playing hockey from the age of five years old until 20 is not going to be the road to the NHL. You're probably going to just develop crazy movement patterns, have one over, develop side from pulling face off back and taking slab shots and then, after hockey is done, what the heck are you going to do? You're never going to be able to socialize, play, go for a round of golf with friends because you've never played the sport, and you're never going to be able to play pickleball, squash, tennis. I can't thank you enough for just at least saying that. Where else do you see people maybe athletes in particular falling short when it comes to movement?
Speaker 2:So that's a multi factorial question and also a double edged short in some way. So, first off, we're failing our athletes in the quality of the therapist we're providing. That's a blunt statement but it's true. You won't find me circling junior 18 because the affordance isn't there. Now I do some work, but junior eight kids in town and some works volunteer, some works not, but I only have so many hours of the day. I mean, I have three daughters. I've got life that I have to live, but for our athletes, the quality of therapists that we're getting, for the money we're willing to pay, right, and this goes right up to the show level. There's a therapist there that they're trying to do what they can, but there isn't the budget to maintain the athletes. You've got a payroll that's north of $60 million and you've got a trainer paying 70,000 US. That might not be the guy, isn't that crazy? It's actually not part of the pay and that's part of the problem. So last year I had to fly a couple of times and sadly these are show level guys. They team cannot know I'm there.
Speaker 2:So the uncle Jimmy's coming to town. You shouldn't meet my uncle Jimmy is what the sentence goes, and that's how I met the one guy that you know. He had had hip surgery and he was being trained back and the trainer from the steam sent him to some speed power guy down in California that did plyometrics in a circuit format where each round was like 480 to 500 reps, which completely violates any science that's out there, because an elite athlete can do 100 touches of plows or 120 max, which is a jump as a touch the end of his first circuit on the very last exercise. This is a guy's trying to rehab from a hip issue, about to go back to play blows as a kill he's done, just snaps it.
Speaker 2:You know nice, sweet Russian kid and he was 24 years old when I saw him and I mean he thought he was done, hips couldn't move, everything else. And it's actually a funny story because as an osteo I worked on him and it was just a lack of internal rotation because his hip socket was impacting because of the neurological muscle tension. When I fixed that in his Russian accent he was just like with his this that I'm like what do you mean? It's no hurt and like okay, well, that's good, is that?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like no, no, it no hurt. They look so over at the gentleman that brought me down there and he's like they're like what is this magic? Like all it was was. He was so torsioned at his hips and nobody looked at it. Yet this is a guy that you went on to actually sign a two year 1.125 million dollar deal. After that I worked with him a few more times and when the team was up playing the connex, I flew down because LA or Vegas or it was there and I saw a couple guys treating in the hotel, or Uncle Jimmy's come to watch.
Speaker 1:And you can make a blunt statement like the fact that the therapists that are working on these guys maybe aren't at adequate levels because you worked for the Cox for six years doing their work.
Speaker 2:Well, I did preseason evaluation on the Dr Ted Rhodes yet so that was through, began exercise, science, labs, and it's not so much a bloodsame, it's just more. Hockey is a world where you can grow up within an organization. So the gentleman that was the stick boy can slowly work his way up to being the equipment manager and a trainer, which is well. And some teams don't allow this. Some teams do just because it's that culture of old boys club. Yeah well, there's a bit of that for sure, and I mean I've always reeled against it. It's why you don't see me publicly around there, because if I've gone to bat from my players and I've had some challenges in relationships, even locally here with with the team that I housed a kid in my house for free for six months to rehab because the teams grew to much that much played with a broken clavicle and called him and posted in front of the teams that he had to play and he didn't.
Speaker 2:He had a broken clavicle. They thought it was fine, but it's healed the scar tissue and then they got boarded in the game probably four months later and the scar tissue severing the clavicle popped up. By the time I went for surgery he had to have cadaver bone grafts, cadaver tendon grafts, because the bone was starting to die. And then there's a drink, covid. So he kind of got dropped off the side of the cliff and it was his 20 year bone. Oh, so I got him, not, no, no, he ended up getting his 20 year, end up getting his cauli. So it all worked out. But it's like I housed him for six months. When he first came into here, into this place, he couldn't even push the bar, you know.
Speaker 1:So how good does that feel for you to be able to do to someone like, oh, that's awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I see this every day, though, from regular people to elite athletes. Whatever you see the change and it is rewarding in the sense that, yes, you have a craft that has benefit. And also, this isn't a job for me. This is truly a passion project. I love what I do. It's why I teach. I mean, every second Wednesday of the month in here, all my osteoscience students and a teacher here, and I close my gym down and I open up for free treatment to the public just so my students get practice, and that's not something that any other sort of silly instructor in the program does. That's just me, because I have the space and because I want to, one, educate the world about what could be happening and then, two, I want to offer the students the same affordances I had. I mean, the reason I sit in front of a lot of people is because I've literally screwed up that much, because I just had that much opportunity and I've done a few things right.
Speaker 1:And that's actually how my parents both got treatment. They came down to visit you in Vancouver. When you offered that, was it at the Pacific Inn or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was so. That would have been at the college. Yeah, so there's a Pacific Coastal College in Massage. They're everywhere there. Many Austrian program runs. So I was facilitating a program in Vancouver once a month. I now have one in Vernon once a month that I'm doing as well and then I travel as well. But yeah, so they came in and yeah, they had some issues. They both were enamored at what you've, but it was awesome with them because they came in so Blaine, another osteoamine out of Calgary, so undergraduate kinesiology, master's in biomechanics, then it became a massage therapist, then it became an osteopath, just checking off the boxes, literally. So him and me we go down rabbit holes Every time. We're facilitating together and teaching. We stay in the same hotel and we go for breakfast and the conversations we have. You're really talking about type one afferent fibers and how they affect visual spatial life.
Speaker 1:I love the conversations because I'm just going to go along with what he said and pretend like I knew what that meant.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm able to have conversations in the deep and in the weeds, which I love. The challenge with me is dialing back sometimes.
Speaker 1:How do you dial it back then? Because when you're talking with a 16-year-old athlete or let's say a 17-year-old athlete, goal Tender, for example who maybe is just like hey, my lower back is sore, my hips are tight, I'm not getting the movement I need, and you're like you've got all these issues, you could go super deep from an academic standpoint and explain to him, but you need to really say hey, you just need to do these kinds of movements.
Speaker 2:So education is the best tool you can ever have in your life. So I speak to an athlete like they're a student of mine and I explain and I teach them. Teach them on the way, like I had Wanda get brood and gate back in the day. He just graduated from out east but he first time he was in here and I've got a cell icing lactate analyzer where I actually draw blood lice, the red blood cell, and tells me your exact lactic acid at that speed or wattage. So I was testing it and I was explaining to him. He hears it and looks at me and goes Jimmy, I got no blank idea what you're talking about. And I looked at him and I said don't worry, son, you will. And by the end of summer he was walking into the room as I was running the data and he's like what's the blood lactate at? And I'm like, oh, it's 3.68. Oh, he's not his lactate threshold. I'm like, no, he's not, it occurs at four. He's asking me the questions that I looked at and I'm like, no, you know something.
Speaker 2:But the fact that I do that and I'm going to say this in a very specific way when you educate an athlete properly and you give them the power of knowledge. They know the difference between horseshit and whipping cream. Yeah, you might have to believe that one out. Sorry, I have to be blunt on it. So when I deal with an athlete I'm direct, but I also have models, like I've got little pelvic girls and I can explain everything. I can explain what torsions are, how it looks, and I got skeletons that I can bring out and I have a female pelvic floor so I can actually explain the anatomy and what I'm doing. And then when I talk to them about the neurology, so even Maddie, one of the goaltenders we're sort of aligned with, he understands it now too.
Speaker 2:And I mean, when they asked me a question, well, when I was growing up as a kid, my aunt was at UUB's RSFU store in the library and if you asked her a question she'd give you the full explanation. Remember, once when I was six, I asked her where the sky was blue. She actually explained how, like particles reflect off a certain light wave in the sky and that's why it glows blue and yada, yada. So that's how I was raised. So when people ask me questions I'm like, well, you asked.
Speaker 1:So here we go Again, what you asked for.
Speaker 2:But then there's enough analogies along the way where you can kind of relate it and dumb it down. But I don't ever want to dumb it down. I want individuals to understand so that way, when they're speaking with somebody and they hear these words, okay, I recognize that one, they can hear it in the same way, or structure the same thing. Okay, yeah, that's a good path versus, like you know, not having any knowledge is going to what people say and that currently happens at the show level everywhere.
Speaker 1:I equate it to like education, where you're regurgitating your answers on a test, compared to actually being able to act out what you need to do to solve the problem. And there's two very different. It's the how and the why.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a lot of people just have the why. They can talk to you about the anatomy and talk to you about the injury. They can talk to you know the incidents of this occurrence in the human population, but then how do you deal with it? And that's a lot of stuff that's lacking at a university level. University is now. I mean, I was at UBC for 10 years. I understand You're getting a lot of theory, but there's not a lot of hands on practical, and that's what's missing. Is that how? So we're getting some really intelligent human beings come out that we just need to do a bit more work on showing them what I call the way.
Speaker 1:So how do you balance, Like we talked about before we started recording? Yeah, they tell me not caring about science as much now, whereas there's results that we're seeing Players are skating faster now than they were a decade or two ago. So you're like, okay, tangible results on one hand, but they're not caring about the science.
Speaker 2:Is that Well, some teams are, some teams are. Some teams are, I mean, like Vegas, is man, oh man, the way they go through? Two seasons ago they had a PhD in exercise physiology as one of their head people, and so there are teams out there that do and there's other teams that don't. I mean, some teams still run a beep test on the ice, which you know. Why would you make a goal tendon do a beep test? A goal tender is not an anterior, posterior athlete, they're a lateral athlete. Why are they even skating in lines? Yeah, right, so there's that level of science that we're lacking. But the other side I mean, you know VO2 MaxCard, blood lactate analyzes, like all this other stuff that we used to use back in the day some teams still do.
Speaker 2:Some people, some teams do a modified wind gate. I know the penguins do a specific protocol where it's like five on 15 off, then like 20 on five off, and then they mix it because we're looking at peak power, okay, and sustainable peak powers over time from repeated shifts. You know, with the NUX, back when we were there, we did a 45 second wind gate with 9% of your body weight, which is that's not a pleasant experience, yeah, so afterwards you had to sit still in the chair and couldn't move while we drew your blood and analyze the blood lactate. Because, one, we wanted to see how much you could generate, but two, how quickly did you clear it? Because if I understood your clearance rate then I can make predictions on rest between shifts. So now you're equipping a coach with science. You're equipping a coach saying, okay, well, sadeen's need approximately 30 seconds, we're choosing you to do a minute. You can cycle your lines Interesting.
Speaker 1:Right, so how do you say? I'm the coach of the local semi-amor Ravens in White Rock, so Surrey, and I don't have the ability to analyze my player's blood lactate levels and how they're going to perform if they get double-sinted, simple things you could do.
Speaker 2:I mean, honestly, a 12 lap around is still one of the best pre-tortures of the O2 Max. Okay, fast, you can run 12 laps on the track. Strong correlation to your O2 Max. So that's one way to do it. The level of level of level is easy. Your thresholds themselves, so your fat metabolism called beta-oxidation. It turns off at two milimoles of blood lactate, which is approximately the time where you can no longer say 15 words comfortably, right. So if you can exercise and have a conversation where you can say 15 words without struggling Zone two You're in.
Speaker 2:Beta-oxidation. Yes, on the five zone model, zone two now Okay, you can use a five zone. Seven, zone 11 zone. However, you want to slice the onion depending on the level of depth. If you're going to go to hemoglobin disassociation, curves and all the other stuff for hockey, a five zone model is perfectly fine. So that's zone two beta-oxidation, which every athlete needs because it's the only thing that spares glycogen. You get 400 molecules of ATP plus for one triglyceride, whereas you only get 32 to 34 for glucose, or glycogen or glucose respectively. With oxygen, without oxygen, you only get 34. So fat is your first. For goalie, good, oxidation is to be high. The next one's your lactate threshold, which is zone four, okay, and that you can train real hard, because if your legs are burning and you want to throw up, you know your blood lactate threshold Now, if they're still burning. But you can do it for three minutes. For the knee, no, you just blow it Super easy.
Speaker 1:I've heard of athlete supplementing with eight. All right, is that it?
Speaker 2:What I'll say to that one is so the lab that I was at at UBC so Big Ken Exercise Science Labs way back in the day there were seven studies that was done out of there research and creatine we found the largest effect was the training stimulus, not the supplement. So if I do 30 reps of five seconds sprints where I separate 30 seconds rest between, take a 10 minute break, repeat that three times, then my creatine stores are naturally harrowing taking any supplement.
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Speaker 1:Whether you're getting diesel protein, whether you're getting altered state pre-workout or hydro splash to stay hydrated, perfect sports, the athletes podcast, is now powered by perfect sports. We've been using it for years. Now it's your turn, if you're not already. Hope you're having a great one. Let's enjoy the episode. We just had a little 20 minute hiatus there where you basically shared some really crazy stories that I want to get you to bring up again, to be able to go from someone who's viewed as competition to then eliminating that so that you're continuing to just up level, the industry, the space, high performance. How do you spend five plus 10 plus hours working with your hands? I can't even give Phoenix a five minute foot massage with my thumbs not hurting.
Speaker 2:It's like anything you develop tolerance through training. When I first started out, my hands would get sore, but now I've got these massive bear paws. Now my thinner eminence on this hand is actually double the size of my other one.
Speaker 2:She knows which hand I treat with a little more. You develop a tolerance over time. But it's also I take care of myself as well. Then it says I do the little things at home or off hours between clients. If I'm a little sore here, I can truck with myself, I can do treatment on myself. I try and make sure that I'm revving properly as well.
Speaker 1:You're feeling your body, obviously right now. You talked about your carnivore diet 44 days.
Speaker 2:Has it been difficult. No, yes and no, because I quit everything. I stopped everything, I went to just water, even with your caffeine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm on the caffeine now. I'm back on a little bit. You gotta have one addiction in life, right. But I did stop everything at first for 30. That was a bit of a headache but it was interesting because I wanted to explore my own physiology, like I said in a bit of downtime. There I don't speak to something unless I've personally tried it, because otherwise it's ignorance For me. I wanted to understand what my athletes and these players were talking about. So I went strict at first, and I'm still strict right now, because my partner decided to join me along the path. So I thought I'd support for another 30 days which I'm definitely looking forward to a raspberry.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I bet.
Speaker 2:I'm drooling just to the thought of a raspberry actually, because I'm like, hmm, that would be real good right now.
Speaker 1:I've heard it resets all of your receptors, though, and everything afterwards.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of very interesting research and my brain is one where I don't read other people. I'm gonna put this one. I'm gonna go straight to literature. So I'll go to Google, Scholar or PubMed or SportDiscuss and I'll just start pulling studies. And there's some really cool studies. I've walked into Even studies on looking at how the brain functions on a glucose molecule or glycogen molecule. It's a ketone molecule and there's some research where they're looking at MRI imaging and how the brain lights up and what they're finding is, with a simple sugar like glucose, it's kind of like a little spark and it turns off. Now when a ketone hits it, it's like a patch lights up where it's like and there's this patch of the brain that lights up bigger. So there's some interesting literature there. You mess around with fasting.
Speaker 1:Oh, I am.
Speaker 2:I'm doing 16 and 8th min Now I'm gonna do. I've done 36s, I've done 72s. On this path so far I've been trying to stick to 16 to 20, just because I wasn't sure. But now that I'm at the tail end I'm gonna explore a bit more with that because there is when you look at the research, you just take your pancreatic beta cells and they're the insulin production.
Speaker 2:It takes 16 hours for the human body to drop into gluconeogenesis. That means where your blood sugar dropped 20% and your liver now has to spit out all of its stored glycogen to keep you going. It's 16 hours to get to that stage. But when you get to that stage the beta cells of the pancreas get a chance to turn off and breathe, whereas our current society and we would currently eat and the sugars that were feeding ourselves, the beta cells were overworked. And that's when we start to get into impaired glucose tolerance, which is the early stages of metabolic or type 2 diabetes. Then we get into impaired glucose function, which now you have type 2 diabetes and you're insulin dependent. It's because we're never giving it the break. So that's been interesting to explore.
Speaker 2:I will say day seven yeah, I want some sugar, a little crack addict, like, just give me some sugar now. Then, once that was passed, I was settled in pretty good and now it's like everything, like there's no alcohol, there's no nothing. It's just simple. And I'll tell you the quality of my sleeps, the rapid eye movements I'm getting. Now I'm getting seven to nine cycles a night, which is tracking? No, I'm tracking.
Speaker 1:I track everything. I just didn't know.
Speaker 2:I didn't see any wearables on Not right now, no, so when I'm treating I don't wear anything that's an electromagnetic around anyone.
Speaker 2:I keep all stuff away phones and everything but it's you know I do so. I have a blood pressure cuff beside my bed. When I wake up in the morning, before I can stand up the cuffs on, I have a pulse oximeter that I put on as well right away chestnut pulse ox my resting heart rate, before I even stand up or have any nutrients or move, just because I want a true resting base level. I my ketone strips. I monitor my ketones four or five times a day and I keep tracking. I was in grad school for six years. What do you expect me to do?
Speaker 1:I don't know, I genuinely I don't know my yeah, now, Phoenix is genuinely concerned about what I'm going to be pulling after this.
Speaker 2:Well, the thing is is like if I'm going to talk about change, I have to be empirical about that change, right. I have to actually have data points and base points and to say, and I mean, I can empirically state that how I've gone along, I can tell you the exact levels of ketones per day because I literally track everything. Yeah, you know, and I mean I've tracked my body weight, I can tell you when I've stabilized, when I've dropped. It's like shoots and valleys around the body weight. I'll drop a bit, then I'll stay normalized. Yeah, and I'll say I might drop a bit more and stay normalized. Right, so it's not. I mean there's been some change in mass? I never say. But overall I've always taken care of myself. Obviously I don't want to jam that we're sitting in. So you know. The other part of my brain is if you can beat me, I have no business training you.
Speaker 1:So a lot of my boys out there will understand this one.
Speaker 2:I will do anything you can do better. The second you're going to better me, then I'll find you a different coach.
Speaker 1:Damn, I love that. I I want to track everything now. I'm so jealous. I can tell you, when I did the 16, eight intermittent fasting, time, restricted eating, whatever you want to call it I felt great. I was also trying to lose a bit of weight at that point Not as easier from putting on mass, I find in a time restricted eating, but that's another thing. The way my mom described you is someone who can put the puzzle pieces together and I think from the 30 minutes here that we've chatted, at least I can confidently agree with that, because it seems like between your strength and conditioning background, your current knowledge, what you're doing now with the work, is there anything that you don't like doing or exploring or don't feel comfortable doing when someone comes into the gym?
Speaker 2:No, conversations are conversations and they're they're always opportunities. I, if people ask me a myriad of questions, now if it's out of my scope or practice, I'm very clear Like that's not really my scope. Like, yeah, I took courses in dietetics in my undergrad but I'm not a dietitian or nutritionist. So if you're going to ask me, I'll speak to some generalities but specificities. I don't get into grams of this per kilogram body weight, because that's actually violating my scope. Right, I understand my wheelhouse and where I sit. You know I'm not an on ice goal-tending coach. I'm not. There's wonderful people that are way smarter and way more talented than I am that can do that, but I'll tell you I'm an off ice guy for them. Especially when it comes to alignments, homeostasis, visual spatial gaze stability, vestibular function, there's some magic you can do there. So, putting the puzzle pieces together, yeah, I've got 16 years of post-secondary education. I spent $136,000. You know, it just means that one I know nothing About all this education I've gotten.
Speaker 2:I know nothing because it all depends upon the study, the population that was in that study and whether or not you actually meet those population demographics. And there's lots of studies out there. So you want to take about heart rate. Talk about Karonin formula. So 220 minus your age. Well, karonin's entire theory was based on the average population. So if you're an elite athlete falls apart. Now if you're a masters level athlete, because the formula instantly assumes you lose a heart's meat for every year that you age. Well, we did tests when I was in grad school. We ran masters level runners and the average maximum heart rate in these average age of 59 years of age, so 220 minus 60, for use of math should be 160 to be their max.
Speaker 2:Well, the average max heart rate was 198. So masters runners didn't fit the study population of Karonin. Well, every bit of equipment you step on that has that 65 to 85. That's Karonin. So if you're a fit individual it doesn't apply.
Speaker 2:So I know that much to be dangerous and I know that I know my own limitations, that I really don't know anything. But when somebody comes in with an issue, I have what's called a little C curiosity. To quote Amanda Lang. I never have a preconceived bias. I don't want to know your history before I see you. I don't because if you tell me something my brain's going to be going oh, let's copy that, I can dig into that a little bit. I don't want to know, I want to see you in a blank slate. You come in, you tell me a story. I'm like all right, let's have a look and I'll see things. And I'm like well, it appears to be this. I'm going to look at you in a sec. What appears to be that? It appears to be that. I'll say it in a very specific way because I'm not giving myself confirmation of bias and I think that's where a lot of society sits right now in sports and non sports is confirmation of bias.
Speaker 2:I mean you know it's, it's so-and-so does this and so-and-so sad success. Therefore, this must be true. That's case study level evidence. All right, I did a surgery on somebody. I put out half the brain, I cut it out and they functioned okay, all right. Well, it's not as good applied to everyone, really no.
Speaker 1:I think that's the scary part right now for society and for general pop, when they're listening to a conversation like this, when they hear someone who's got 16 years of knowledge, education that they've paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for, when they say they know nothing. And then you've got someone who's scrolling Instagram like I want to get in shape it's January 1st and New Year's, new me and they're like see one Instagram that says I should be eating bananas because they're good nutritional value and then I shouldn't be eating bananas because they're high sugar. You're like holy crap, and that I've used bananas. But then it could be cold exposure, it could be contrast.
Speaker 2:There's a whole bunch of things you can walk down rabbit holes on and the sentence that we've always said in my field is those that know the least profess to know the most, and those that know the most profess to know the least, because we know that we don't know. Like any textbook you read in my field, 60% of it's true. Reason why I mean with that one is if you take VO2 max so the maximum ability of you to take oxygen out of the environment into your tissues well, 60% of the studies say it's the heart that's limiting, it's the pump that limits it. There's some really good literature AB notes out of the South Africa that shows no, no, it's the muscle. Because he's taken dogs and it's a bit of a gruesome study had them run on a treadmill when they were muscles were exposed and he's over profused it with blood. He's given it as much blood as it can possibly take in. More didn't change the VO2 max. So is it the pump Right?
Speaker 2:And then we can look at lactate threshold theory. Well, you can, super max, you can. I've had athletes do it Hood or did it. So he was on a treadmill running above his lactate threshold and he had the mental fortitude to embrace the suck, just enough that he got to the nine minute mark, and at the nine minute mark, above his lactate threshold, you literally saw his entire frame go and he relaxed and he ran another 13 minutes above his lactate threshold. Now, the reason this comes down to this is some of the new literature around lactate.
Speaker 2:When I say new I mean it's within the last decade, because that's new for us. There's these one way lactic acid pumps that we know the heart has, because you know the heart can use lactic acid for energy during exercise. But we found them on the muscle mitochondrial walls now too. Now it takes a certain level of blood pH, of blood acidity, to actually turn them on, which means you have to embrace the suck. But once you do it enough, by the end of that summer that was three summers ago with Hooder by the end of the summer it was at seven minutes it was turning on.
Speaker 1:So you decreased the amount of time it took.
Speaker 2:So the more often you use, a pathway in the body, the more the body develops the pathway, right, that's that law. Specificity Well, if we're not specific to our modalities, like we're mixing up strength versus hypertrophy versus endurance, okay, well, we're training different things. The same with the enzymes for the systems.
Speaker 1:So it's like you know if you have a CrossFit athlete, for instance, compared to an ultramarathon endurance runner, totally different specificity. But those pathways are forged based on what they've been doing.
Speaker 2:Totally, that's exactly it. So a marathoner has to run 80% of their marathon in the fat metabolism and beta-oxidation. They can't come out. The 80% of the recipes are always the bonk. And you see, the guys that bonk because at the finish line they're crawling and they can't stand up because he went too quick, he came out of beta-oxidation too early, whereas a CrossFit, I mean, they're primarily nano-robic. There's a bit of type 2x, is what I would say to it. That crossover fiber has a bit of a glycolytic side to it. You know, and again, very specific things, very good on concentrics, but eccentric is not so much because the weights are dropped. So and then, if I'm talking about that conversation, well, concentric develop the muscle belly itself, eccentric develop the tendons. So if I don't have an eccentric contraction, that slow controlled release or negatus is what you say back in the day, that's old people.
Speaker 2:The tendons don't hypertrophy the same way the muscles do. Therefore I get tendonitis, tendonosis, tendinopathy, which is what we see in a lot of sports, is because we're doing Olympic lifting but we're missing that other side of the coin.
Speaker 1:So interesting. You think, if anything, if you look at it from an unbiased perspective, you're just doing the part that builds the muscle. But people who have lifted for years know that that negative piece is actually what builds more of the muscle, right?
Speaker 2:Well, yes, so if I'm doing hypertrophy, I do want to engage in a more eccentric based or negative based training, because you're ripping apart the muscle and enacting heads. So if I'm slowly opening my bicep under tension, well, those mice and enacting heads are trying to shorten, but the muscles lengthen, so I'm tearing them apart. So, yes, I do more muscle damage, which then creates a greater adaptation, but that can only be done for a short period of time and it can't be done in season, which is my other being that I see right now, and I mean there's teams in town here that are doing 10 reps, sets of squats and RDLs and Bulgarian split squats with massive weight two to three times a week and the players can't walk. I have a goal tender that literally has to seem one to two times a week just to keep his hips moving, and this is a team that's supposed to be developing them for university scholarships.
Speaker 1:So that's why I didn't do well when I was trying to become a bodybuilder as a hockey player, golfer in high school.
Speaker 2:Well, first off hockey player and golf I mean the same, at least your goal.
Speaker 1:Justin Schultz can do it.
Speaker 2:Schultz Schultz. He got his first hole in one this summer.
Speaker 1:That guy, I've heard he's a stick.
Speaker 2:He's limber. You know is what I'll say, but no, he's not.
Speaker 1:No, a stick is like a really good golfer. Oh, 100%.
Speaker 2:If he could golf all the time, his wife would let him golf all the time. But anyway, guys, first hole in one this summer, he was in here the day after he got it. He was super stoked. But yeah, golfing and thinking about it, you shoot us one way and then you golf the same way. So you're training the same damn motor program. So, dear Lord, players, play tennis. Pick up something else.
Speaker 1:Goalies. That's why goalies are the best, though it's because we don't have one particular side we lean towards. No, the wall.
Speaker 2:Some goalies do. There are buys that are the way. Yeah, no goalies are. They're spider monkey in the net and they have to be a spider monkey in that. So how do you train a goalie? You got to train like a spider monkey. So a lot of the work I do with goalies, especially like you take in this name, I can say so.
Speaker 2:Tompkins from Tampa Bay. He came in here to train like a dinosaur. He was 3 1⁄4, except from camp Back pain couldn't walk. He's working with Laum Ast. Laum just said you got to go see Jimmy or James. Sorry, players call me Jimmy.
Speaker 2:Some players that are trying to create a new nickname, now called Frenchie oh, that's AFram Scrooge, or they want to call me Frenchie this summer. I'm like if you're going to call me Frenchie, you're going to get the French. But so with Tompkins he was in so much back pain I'd show him the way I'd fix him that he'd get screwed up and like what the hell is going on? Like you have something coming back, torsion. I'm like what are you doing? So it was one day I said, okay, I'm going to fix it and I want you to hang around here and you want me to just do some of the stuff you'd normally do.
Speaker 2:Well, first thing he does. I turn around and he's got one foot elevated on a 20 inch box doing elevated splits, quats with 65 pound dumbbells in each end. I'm like what the hell are you doing? You were literally doing 10 reps sets. I'm like you're three weeks from camp. What are you doing right now? So we walk through and we walk through all the so, the neurology, the proprioception. We walk through the feet. I explain the pressure pads, I explain the mechanical receptors, I explain the balance centers of the body. And then we did all that neurology and all the reprogramming from rockerboard to ballwork, to bocework, and there's a specific way you train a goal tent. There's a little bit of magic in what you do, and AFRAM is a great, wonderful coach. I respect him as well and he's really good at the craft too, and him and I align in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1:And I do have to refer everyone to engolmagcom, to your five ways, five damn things Five damn things.
Speaker 2:There's five damn things. There's a few of them out, there's a few more coming, so in goal. The next two I'm going to do with them is five damn things parents how to assess your children. And then five damn things, parents, how to fix your children. Simple muscle energy techniques that can take care of sacral torsions, cervical torsions, that are safe for parents to do and they can stop paying people money.
Speaker 1:We were Corey Gilday coach. Corey Gilday. He's a tactical coach overseas right now. He was talking. He trained Shaq for six months back in the early 2000s. One of the things I was doing some research learned about him was pre-competition lifting for muscle activation. Is that the same as muscle, like muscle energy that you were referring to there?
Speaker 2:No, muscle energy work is neurology. So we're actually playing with muscle spindles and Golgi tendon organs, where we're trying to actually get them to turn off, to release it, because in the osteopathic world we view the body as a geodesic dome, so we're always. The word is tensegrity. So there's two forms of tension in the body discontinuous, which is your bones, and continuous, which is your muscles, fascia, connective tissue. It's the continuous tension that's causing the issues. The bones don't do a damn thing. They're just bones. Like I said before, they're pulls in a dome tent, assemble them, put them on the ground. They're not going to do anything until you put them inside the fabric, which is your muscles and fascia. So for us, we're using muscle energy techniques to turn the body off. The one thing I'm really good at is turning people off. You know that's kind of the magic in life.
Speaker 1:That's your tagline right on the website.
Speaker 2:Well that, and I'm saving one pedestrian at a time. When I fix people's necks, I'm saving one pedestrian at a time.
Speaker 1:There we go, that's true. That's a good point. People don't realize how much you got to turn to shoulder check. You know.
Speaker 2:Well, it's taking up a goalie. So if we're going to go back to that conversation, or a D-man? I saw a D-man yesterday, actually heard one of my other podcasts draw from Sycamore's disease Diagnosis and concussion not a concussion which is severely torsioned, but he couldn't even turn his head to the right. So how does he check backdoor? How does he look who's there? He can't even see who's coming. Goal tent or same thing. If I can't look left to check behind that because I have a block, my vertebrae is rotated right. I now have to leak my right shoulder open to cheat that position. But now I've leaked. So now my right side is hanging open and then for me to get back there I have to correct that counter movement and then initiate a program. So now I'm missing pucks. So all this stuff plays in from a geodesic dome side. So you're always trying to make sure that the neurology is relaxed and the body is in homeostasis. Things are where they're supposed to be.
Speaker 1:And I guess one more point before we get in and get some work done would be for people who are wondering there's registered massage therapists, there's osteopaths. You can go specific work for CST that we were talking about, cranial work. You can get every type of option out there. Now To your point. There are varying levels of people who are able to actually practice and do this work. What should people be sourcing out? Is it specific to the injury or should they be sourcing out an osteopath first to identify where they have maybe some opportunities for improvement?
Speaker 2:What I would say is this you want to identify somebody that has a focus on a root cause, regardless of the discipline. There are wonderful practitioners out there, and I'm friends with many of them, and they do a wonderful job, but what they aren't is they're not dirty, rotten symptom chasers. It's the dirty, rotten symptom chasers you got to watch out for. So if I come in and say I have right shoulder pain, do you just look at my right shoulder? You shouldn't, well, but there's a lot of people that do. Now, like I've said before, if it's the right shoulder, my liver refers into my right shoulder. It's like my heart refers to my left shoulder. There's a visceral link there. If the fascia is tugging over here, if I pull on my shirt over here, it's pulling on my right shoulder over here. Well, the tisimus dorsi on my right actually shares origin through the thoracolumbar fascia to my left glute. So what if my ass is just on the left-hand side? It's causing my shoulder.
Speaker 2:But some people look at the shoulder. I'm going to IMS this. Oh, I'm just going to massage. That's a symptom chaser. Pause and find somebody that truly has that little C curiosity, that desire To look beyond what you're saying and just be okay. Well, that's interesting, thanks for sharing. And then somebody actually assesses you. They walk through everything, but they start with the foundations. They start with unity one your pelvic girdle and your sacrum. Your spine stacks on the sacrum, your legs hanging off of your lilliac crests. Might want to be a pivotal point to go to first.
Speaker 1:Everyone's heads are in their asses.
Speaker 2:I've said that before. Yes, there is a direct link and men are going to love this one. There's a direct link between the spinal cord and your sacrum, because your brain and your spinal cord are surrounded by one continuous sheath of dura mater, which is really hard to connect to tissue. That goes down to about T12L1, where it splits into kata aquana Latin for horse hair and that inserts into S1S2. So your head is in your ass, literally.
Speaker 1:Hey, let's get some work done, let's see what we can do, and then we'll maybe reconvene after and share what we've found how broken my body really is.
Speaker 2:We'll have a look at you and we can do that with some film and stuff that you guys can bring in after. And yeah, I'll just show you how I walk through it in some ways.
Speaker 1:Beautiful Former goalie. Haven't played in a while so hopefully I don't get torn apart too bad here in the YouTube comments. Yeah, have fun.
Speaker 2:So what's going to happen here? So you're going to sound nice and normal, nice and average and I want you to walk towards the red bag on the ground there and then walk back. You're going to do it twice, okay. So just start walking. So right away, we're watching hips, we're trying to see the movement, we're trying to see what's happening with his hands, what's happening with his feet as he walks. Is there fluid control or is one side kind of sticking? And right now I'm noticing one hip is kind of staying up and not going down. Go back and do it one more time. So there is a hip that's elevating up but it's not coming back down. You can see a shoulder that's higher. You can see the hand on the left side is more internally rotated than the hand on the right, which brings me into either some pec minor tension or some fascial issues that are there.
Speaker 2:Okay, so the next thing we do is you're going to turn around and face that way. I'm going to come into picture and here we actually landmark. So I'm going to drop down in front of camera and first thing I do is we come in and I'm going to look here at his iliac crest. So if I place my hands on his hip bones, which are right there, you can see that left side. The left side is sitting high. Okay, now, it appears to be high as what we would say. So if you can turn and face the mirror that way, so if I landmark the bony bit on the back is your PSIS and I landmark bony bit on the front, which is your ASIS, so you can find that quad tendon. That's there, and then come right up, there's ASIS. When I line up my fingers, you can just relax your arm down like that. Good, so when I line my fingers up, my middle fingers should be in line and you can see for him, my middle fingers are like this so females line up like this, males line up like that.
Speaker 2:He's currently here. So his hips are more rotated than the female's hips would be Okay, which means this is definitely forward. Now, if you turn back and face the window, an anterior, yeah, you have an anterior, an anterior that's rotated and nominate. So now if I landmark here and I hold the PSIS, slowly, lean forward from the waist, no forward, good, that's good, stop. So his hips up shifting, come back up. So as he leans forward, the iliac crest is lifting independently, which is not supposed to do. So that's a bit painful.
Speaker 2:Then we look at his paraspinals because they're directly above his TVPs. His entire thoracic spine is rotated to the left. So when we come down here into lumbar, lumbar is rotated right, which means his sacrum, technically speaking, is actually twisted, with a deep sulcus on the right. So left side would appear to be closer to me, which that happens in neutral as a sacral compensation. So sacrum sitting here, spine sitting here, sacrum is twisted this way. Lumbar spine is decided to go for a walkabout over there.
Speaker 2:Now, if he looks down and leans forward just a little bit and he goes into flexion, that's good there. He goes into flexion, all of those rotations disappear, which means there isn't truly a spinal rotation. There's a compensation for the sacrum. Come back up Now. Look up to the roof and lean back. We check in neutral, flexion and extension, same thing. I don't see a major rotation throughout the spine. They've all kind of cleaned up. Okay, there's a little something in his lumbar spine here Coming up tall again. But when he comes back into neutral and relaxes, now I can clearly see yes, this finger's closer to me, his spine's rotated here.
Speaker 2:Now, let's me know, it's a sacral compensation down here, okay, and then as a goalie, if this is twisted, well, we know this is twisted. So if I landmark on his ears, you can see my fingers. His head is sitting off like this Because his mirroring is sacrum. So how the heck does this guy even track a puck, right? And that's how we kind of look at it. You're not tracking properly, right? So now fixing this is actually super easy, okay.
Speaker 2:So what I do is we'll slide table in, I'll come on this side so I can get you to lie down on your back head over here, okay. So first thing we always do with any human frame is I want to know how your fascia's working, and I mean right now. He lies down on the table instantly. If I look at his shoulders, they're well off the chest, so he's done a lot of chest work. I mean, you're trying to get into the bar, basically, right now is what I'm seeing. So this guy's elevated off the table, more so than this one, okay, and that's the side that was also high. So when the other crest rotates forward, it pushes his rib cage up. So I'm seeing this stuff over here, right?
Speaker 1:Is there anything to do with my golf From a young age? A hockey bag on this side.
Speaker 2:It can be some postural, but I mean you definitely have some trap tension Both and then maybe a bit more trap tension on the sub, but nothing crazy, but it's definitely pec minor right inside there. So some fascia work you can do there. But the one thing we do look at is we try and look at fascial drag. So you have fascial slings in your body right. So if I grab legs and just I relax the slings, first thing I check is internal rotation and you can see internal rotation is slightly better on one side than the other. Okay, so this side here, this is not internally rotating. So your ability to get down into butterfly on this leg is gonna be significantly more limited. So now I start just a simple drag just to relieve it. Then when I let go, what I wanna see is when I pull on one leg, I should see a clean link to your chin where it travels all the way up, and right there I'm not seeing as clean as I want. The head is moving, which is positive, but the leg's not really moving separate from the hips. This is even worse. This one's just not doing whatsoever. There's no, there's really no movement. So there's, you have a block right here for sure, and your fascia and that's it shouldn't be laughing but so that's the hip, right. So this side here I should see that foot move and I do see that draw all the way down. So this sling, this fascia line, this Thompson-Meyer chain's relatively clear. So then I come to the other side and then I pull this side and there's really nothing. It's toes don't even move on that opposite leg, there's nothing down there. So, like this hip's just not connected anymore. As the body's decided, this is no longer mine, right. So when we look at this, there's a series of stuff we would do. There's a general osteopathic treatment. There's circumduction, leg drops, everything else we would do. One of the things relevant is to show how easy it is to fix some things. Okay, so we're talking about five down things for the hips Mm-hmm. Right, there's some muscle energy technique that I do just to correct that, and we know that this side's currently anteriorly rotated Mm-hmm. So I'm gonna focus on this side.
Speaker 2:Now, what we'll look at first. He's a goaltender, so you should have good internal rotation, right? This is my PGA tour leg. I was Is it Okay? Perfect, good. So here's neutral.
Speaker 2:When I go to internally rotate, the foot should come open to 45 degrees. Sure, not quite. Keep going, keep pulling, no, that's where I felt the first resistance. So that's feather barrier Like this is like literally, I can feel the body. Stop me right here. So zero, maybe 10. Okay, now I can try and force it. I can't even get to 44. And I'm forcing that right now. Right, that's not comfortable. But the crazy thing is, when you look at this, it's because of the head of the femur is being sucked up into the acetabulum or the socket, from the muscle tension. So I can do a couple simple things. So this is not my leg. Relax your leg. Good, now, there's already a click there. Yay, he's popping Right. So you do some circumvuction. One, because you're trying to get synovial fluid out. But two, it's also a diagnostic. I'm trying to see where is it grabbing, where is his brain saying, hey, I don't like this, and that's right there.
Speaker 2:When I come into internal rotation I try and cycle through. It's like go, go, go, go, go, go, go. I can feel the central nervous system going. No, thank you. So we start there. Then we do a passive SI, just passive leg drop, nice and relaxed, you're just tractioning the SI joint. Good, here. Then I get into a bit of in, flare out, flare, push up. So now he's pushing his pelvic girdle up into my hand. I'm driving it back down, then relax. Then I bring in what's called Rudy's pulsing just to try and loosen a bit. Push up. So we're basically taking the pelvic girdle and trying to splay the bone out and then let it come back and relax Good, do it one more time and then relax Good. Next I'll warm up the pubic symphysis joint. I have a special phrase for when this one happens. Gently push in, please. Oh, a little bit there.
Speaker 1:Was that a low-gain contour? Did you see what he just was dealing with? That, yeah.
Speaker 2:So this is your pubic symphysis joint. When your hips anteriorly rotated, your pubic symphysis joint, the one side anteriorly rotates or anteriorly displaces. So you do what's called a shotgun technique, right, to put it back into place. Good, I want you to push a little hard. Push hard, nice and hard. Good, relax a bit Good, good, one more Good, and then you can call it popping your mangyana. Okay, push out, Good.
Speaker 2:So now use the glutes, go on, push and resist me, don't let me close. Good, push again. I'm using the glutes to pull apart the back of your pelvic girdle. Good, nice and relaxed. Good, a bit more force than we normally do. But that's good. Everyone wants to try and beat me for some reason.
Speaker 2:Okay, so muscle energy technique we're gonna do about 10%. Okay, so I'm gonna come to feather barrier. And feather barrier is that first point where you feel resistance from the central nervous system. You don't perceive a stretch Like right, there's your feather barrier, I can feel it. You're not feeling a stretch at all. Right, but that's where your brain is turning on saying, hey, I don't like it anymore.
Speaker 2:So from here, push the foot back into my hand. Right, gentle, 10%. I'm a big man, I can lean if you want Good. So all we're trying to do is so. This is internal rotation. It's already loosened a little bit, just from the circumduction and the GOT and a couple things that you can see.
Speaker 2:Now I'm getting a bit better movement, all right. So push, hold. So 10% effort, six to 10 seconds, three to five times in each position. It's the beginning of the five damn things. So you're releasing the glutes, knees bent. You can do this by putting your hands around your knee, pushing up into it and resisting it. You can use a towel around your foot as well if you can't quite get to your knee, which some people maybe can't get there. So again, you see, each time I'm pausing, so I'm counting to that six to 10 seconds. When I release, you notice I cycle the joint Because I'm trying to get the muscle spindles to move Right, get that fluid out, because when I come back in there's a new feather barrier. If I don't articulate the muscle fibers and the muscle spindles, I won't feel the next feather barrier Right. So from there let me go to pure hamstrings. All right, that's great. Okay, bend your knee and push down. I worked him yesterday.
Speaker 1:Bend it and push down yeah okay, 10%, come on.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, sorry, come on push. Sorry, we had a reposition. Okay, so you hold it again. Six to 10, three to five, so you relax. Now again I cycle the joint, then I come back up. Look a little further Magic push.
Speaker 2:All we're doing by doing muscle energy. If we do it properly, at the feather barrier we turn the muscle spindles off so it allows the range of motion to come back. Right Now I'm gonna do three simple magic push, and that's just neurology. So you're always born with this flexibility. Your body just forgets that it's there because you sit all the time Right, which you're no longer, you know, playing goal turn anymore. You're driving a truck around and sitting in chairs. Okay, now we go straight leg raise. So this is glutes and hamstrings. Push straight down, good, and we just resist it.
Speaker 2:Six to 10. Always watch your body position. You'll notice I'm always repositioning stuff. So my mass is on the far side because that's where I can just hang out. How do I survive? Yeah, eight to 10 hours a day.
Speaker 2:Positional awareness push. So now three stretches like that and then you would attack the fourth one which we go back to internal rotation. So nice and relaxed. And now what's happened? It's opened up. But what did I do? All I've done is I've turned off two muscles so far. And what it does is it lets that head of the femur drop out of the socket. So now I can internally rotate.
Speaker 2:So does butterfly hurt a goal tender? What is a lack of internal rotation? Hurt a goal tender, and this is what I've been trying to say. So now I can actually work on internal rotation. So bring this to feather barrier. Push in here One, two, three. So I'm just he's pushing into my forearm. Nice and relaxed release. So come back out, come back up again. Push One, two, three, four, come back out. Good, push again. So now I'm working on internal rotation. Now you want to mind the MCL. You don't want to torque on it too much. This is 10% effort. You're in charge of how much you hurt yourself is what I'll always say. Right, but you can see that internal rotation now way cleaner.
Speaker 1:So is that as a goal? Tender, then, to avoid the splits quads with 60s in your hands. Should you be focused on ensuring that you're just making sure your mobility is at a level, because, at a certain point, getting stronger doesn't help you?
Speaker 2:in your job. It doesn't help you at all. And the more mass you put on, the lower your strength and mass ratio goes. If you're not working on it, if your strength and mass ratio drops, you have less power, you're less explosive, so you're slower. So goal tenors yeah, I mean you want to be positional average, which is gangly and lean. If you want to be bigger, well, buy a larger shirt underneath and put on bigger pants. Right, but keep your spryness is what I would say.
Speaker 2:So from here, the next magic of five down things is you can do this with a textbook, a yoga block, a ball. What you do is you take a yoga block or ball and you're going to place it underneath the bum cheek. I'm going to use my hand, so my thumb tucks in, because this is medical and not biblical here so we rotate over and you take a yoga block, a book or a ball and put it right underneath the bum cheek there, and then you come back again to feather barrier. So now that I'm here, he's going to push into me. So push up, straight up, straight up. Yeah, there, I'm going to pull up on the butt. So I'm pulling up as I go and I'm holding this for six to 10.
Speaker 2:Release, good and come back up. Push again. You notice how it just let go even more, because we're actually you're rotating your own bone. I'm just blocking it by holding the eschel tuberosity with a bit of tension, and you're pushing into my frame and release, good, we come back down. Oh, even more Push. You notice he's cycled the joint. Okay, good, so now you work with that. Come back again. There you go, play again Technique. While you look at it, you were stuck here and now we're here and that's what five damn things is. Every goal tender should be doing this when they go to bed, when they wake up, when they get to the rink, because this is when you lean to yourself. When you don't have, when you're stuck here, you're forcing it into the butterfly you can't get to. So stand up and walk around. Now we just did one side Walk around.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:So you see that left side, the butt cheek goes up and down.
Speaker 1:now it's not going, it's not going.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my right side feels tight now. Well, I know, normally I treat bilaterally because that's exactly what the brain does. Yeah, so your brain's no longer paying attention to those nociceptors and stretch receptors that we're screaming on your left side. So now it's picking up the right side because your brain pays attention to what's screaming the loudest. So if I pinch your forearm and I hold it and then I stick a needle in your calf, you're going to feel the calf, but you're going to forget the form, the same. That's happening right now. So one thing we have to do next is so that's five damn things. That's how you can keep your hips your hips actually level and keep the range there. Then there's the sacral side that we're going to do. So you're going to lie down your stomach and kind of come back in frame. So let me tell you Good, yeah. So now for this one. Is there any way we can come in to watch? Good, okay, because what you're going to do is, when we're ready, this one, I'm going to get you to put your forehead onto your hands like so Sure, okay, okay, so Right, because I'm going to be looking right here in this area, because what I want to show is. This is something for me that any parent can do. This is not rocket science, okay, so, even with your phone, if you want to come in and look, so it's going to have. So we're going to look at a sacrum. So we've done. We've set the one hip that was lesioned. I haven't treated the other one. Normally I'd go bilateral. For the sake of brevity and time, we're just going to list.
Speaker 2:But the next thing is look at the sacrum. So he's lying on the table. His sacrum is sitting right here like this. What I'm curious about is which way has it rotated and which way has it side bent? Okay, so you have them lying face down, head in neutral. So you have a nice neutral spine. You open up the SI joints by roughly opening the legs to the size of the table Right. And now, as SIs are open, how you find them? On the back of the body? There's these little bony bits here called your PSI, so you can feel them. They're little bony circles From here the sends.
Speaker 2:We say we go in a nickel, up a nickel and we push down and right away I can see my right thumb is deeper, it's into the deep sulcus. So this appears to be rotated right. What we do is, if you can pop up onto your forearms there, david, good. So he pops up, Okay, good, still there. Drop back down, good. So there. And then I come back down to sacrum and I go on either side. So he appears to be right on right. So pop up into your forearms again, okay. So that gets worse. It doesn't change. Come back down. So I check the deep sulcus. This appeared to be deep. But then I go to the inferior lateral angle so sacrum is rotated like it looks like it's like this, but it comes up into sphinx. So this one doesn't correct, which means this side's actually protruding, it's actually sticking up. So you have a sacral torsion where you're sticking higher on your left side but then dropping on the right, which gives you an oblique issue. So to fix this one, super easy.
Speaker 2:I come to that PSI. I said it's there, going to land. I'm going to come right on the sacrum here. Okay, I'm going to put some pressure, big breath in and release Good. So I'm just pushing down Big breath and as you relax, as I take a bit more pressure, big breath, release Good, big breath and release. It's called respiratory kinesthesis. We use the breath through the adjustments for us. So now I come back in again. Thumbs have leveled off and we come here, and you can't cheat this, because I'm on the bone. My thumbs are now even, whereas before my thumbs were this way. As I drive into the bone, those are now level and square. Okay, just time to walk around now and see how that feels.
Speaker 1:Better. Yeah, yeah, and it feels. Now this one actually feels like you did the work on it too.
Speaker 2:Well, because the sacrum was stuck, your sacrum was protruding on the left-hand side. So when it protrudes that way, you're jammed up, like that's how you have what's called non-physiological. Your body can't compensate for that alignment, so everything feels jammed. Now the next bit of magic is that neck of yours. So a stick has two ends. I've only dealt with one of them. I got to deal with another. So if you want to lie down with your head at the end up here, so on your back, okay, okay. Now, this is such an easy one. Anyone can do this one. It's a muscle energy technique. We saw his ears were crooked. Okay, so we come down and as a parent or as a teammate you did, all you do is your hand placement. So if I go two fingers in front, two fingers behind, your occipital-atlantal joint sits right behind the nose. So for him, if I palpate behind his skull, I try and move it. Yeah, okay, this side I can move. This side's like no, thank you. Left side stuck Right, so I can feel the vertebrae doesn't want to move. So his vertebrae is rotated. So all I do is I come here, I open the OA joint, open the facet, and I'm just going to hold here. Now this is a neck, so he's only going to push with five to 10% effort. But push into my thumb here, push and resist no talk about five percent means and release. Good, so we come back out, open again, push again. Gentle, there you go. Two, three, four, five, six. Good, come back out, open, open again. So I'm doing this in a neutral neck. I'm going to go into extension next as well. Good, so I come back those three times and I come up into extension. Open the OA, open facet, same thing, turn.
Speaker 2:Now I'm not snapping the neck, I'm not twisting the neck, I'm not thrusting a neck, I'm holding a specific articulating technique and then I'm making him use his muscles to pull the vertebrae back itself. And it's kind of the magic of osteopathies. We don't fight the body, we let the body do everything itself. Good, I'm going to come back up. I'll do once more. Push back here and relax. Good, so I'm going to come back out.
Speaker 2:Now, I can't cheat that. I come back into that exact same spot. How's it feel now? Better? Yeah, it's moving. It actually moves like it should.
Speaker 2:So then you start and now I feel stuck on the right there. So right next vertebrae down, so C3, c4 stuck. So here You've done it there. Yeah, so I'm going to hold them in a specific articulating block again, yeah, just gently turn and then release. So I'm pushing on the transverse process of the vertebrae with about 10-20 grams of pressure. Turn here and he's turning with 5% and all I do is I block it If I'm applying force at the top of the stick and I'm pressing in the middle of the stick, the falcrums are my fingers on the TVP because of that and release. So you're directing all the energy into that area.
Speaker 2:And once again, simple adjustment, just the muscle energy technique. You just got to understand your anatomy and your handout of the pop eight and you're fine. And release, okay, so now we come back out. Same thing. I come back in. Oh, look at that bit of butter, that's nice. Hey, the other side feels tight, almost. Hey, I'm just a little there. Push here. Now imagine a goal that you couldn't turn. Your neck, your vertebrae is rotated left, so for you to see the to the right side, you literally have to open your left shoulder and expose that left top corner.
Speaker 1:Does that come down to sleeping as well? Should be sleeping on their back posture.
Speaker 2:Posture matters. Whatever position you're in, just put yourself into position. It's nice and relaxed, looking straight up. Put yourself into a position where the body's in neutrality. So, if you're on your side, put a pillow between your knees, keep your pelvic go to level, because if you don't have a pillow between your knees, your pelvic girdle is tilting away from you because the top leg is drawing it away from your body, which then creates a bit of a shortening on one side, lengthening on the other, if your pillow is not an appropriate height. Well, I mean, I have a pillow that I travel with, hotels, airplanes, everywhere. I never change because my neck stays in a certain alignment?
Speaker 1:Do you track, while you travel, all your metrics as well?
Speaker 2:I do Nice. Everything comes with me, just data points.
Speaker 1:If you were to tell general population to track one metric, what would it be? Resting heart rate Okay.
Speaker 2:Every day before you had a bed resting heart rate. That's the one indicator of overreaching, overtraining stress. You know my resting heart rate sits at 42, which is people tell me is low. It's not. I mean, there's Olympic athletes that are down in the 30s. Free divers can actually lower their heart rates down to two beats a minute.
Speaker 1:I think I was low 40s when I was with my womb. There you go.
Speaker 2:Can you feel that neck now? Yeah, so I haven't cheated that, I haven't snapped it, I haven't thrust, but you can feel how loose that is. Okay. So now I'm going to support your head. Roll the one side, without lifting your head off the table. Use your body. Roll in the fetal position like in yoga. Did you yoga? Not anymore. So roll your shoulders, roll everything over. Now look at the table and sit up. Okay, sit up, sit up. There you go. Who's a good boy? Yeah, all right. So stand up tall and turn your neck. Just see how that feels. Yeah, way better. Now stand up and walk. Now you might be dizzy, so be careful. So when you walk.
Speaker 2:Now we've set the hips, we've set the base of the spine and then we've set the top of the turret of the spine as well. So now on the ice, you're in homeostasis. Your ability to track up and see a puck is better. Now what I always do with athletes afterwards is I do what's called re-synapticizing them. So I do a bunch of balance and stability drills, goggle drills, tracking drills, especially with goals. That's one footed, one footed stuff, but then so I have some of my buddies goggles over there, so I do the gays, stability, work with tracking and bouncing with goggles without goggles, working on such track, optics and lomast A lot of stuff there, because it really helps to cement the adjustment. If you re-synapticize the brain to the new alignment, it stays Right and that's called sticky treatment. Yeah.
Speaker 1:There you go. That's what you need. How'd that feel? Thank you very much. That was amazing. Where should people be sourcing out your stuff, wenlinca?
Speaker 2:Easiest place to go, you'll find me there for sure. Now I am only one man so, like I said, there's no such thing as maintenance. I only see people three to five times. A lot of the time it's been three. It's kind of the magic, so I always have space. If you want to see me directly, if it's online, you can see me online. If there's not a spot, if it's a major issue, reach out by email. I'll try and squeeze people in how I can Amazing. But if I can't reach you, I'll find somebody that will.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and more athletes should be sourcing out five damn ways finding out the way the Wenlin way.
Speaker 2:Well, there's a book coming. It's called the Way. It's actually what it's called, and it's a manual osteopathic approach to health, wellness and sport. Okay, so I'm being goaltender-specific, and then I broadened it and what this is is sort of my manifesto. So when I retire which we all do at some point you know there's a path there that people can still tag on to, and there's students that I'm mentoring that can kind of fill the gap.
Speaker 1:So one of the things that we like to bring up on every episode is the fact that not everyone might be the high-performance athlete, but we're all human beings. We all need to be able to move. I move better today. You folks saw that. Thank you so much, James. I really appreciate it. That's amazing. I want to be referred to Jimmy. You're a Frenchman, you choose there you go, there you go.
Speaker 2:Thanks, man, appreciate it. That was awesome, thank you. I'm going to keep my gaze on the spot on the ground. So here I'm, here, now I'm going to go inside of the center, inside the center, inside the center, outside the center, inside the center, outside. Now I'm wearing high heels so I don't have to hurt feet, but you can see it, it's crisp. Okay, I'm going to do that.
Speaker 1:That's your skate edge. Same foot, same foot.
Speaker 2:Good, so now you're seeing the behavior, nice and relaxed, gazing on the spot. Don't move it. Inside edge, inside, inside edge. Touch the ground there. Now come to center, outside edge, center. I'm going to show you how to trick this. Okay, so I'm going to pop over here with two snacks. Okay, give me a few more reps. Give me a few more reps. Ah, better, good, okay, so I'm going to do that. Now bounce the ball and catch it. Look at the ball. Look at the blue ball. Bounce it higher. Move your head. Bounce it a little higher. Good, you're still standing on the ground trying to use your first roll. Yeah, track it. Don't do that goal. Track it. Look at the ball. Good, okay, two more. Okay, got a good one for him. Good, give me the ball back. Now do your inside out side edges again, right away, inside out side edges Same foot, okay, so what did I just do?
Speaker 2:I took away your frontal lobe, I took away your brain.
Speaker 1:And you rationalized it.
Speaker 2:But you didn't even have to pass the focus on it. This became modern on it. Now you have your frontal lobe back.
Speaker 1:You shoved the needle in the cap.
Speaker 2:Literally. And now look at your calm down your eyes. That's making it even better. Look at me, don't look at those eyes. Put those on Now. Once you're down to the bottom, it will blow your eyes. Okay, look at me, I want to break that ball. Okay, now you can't cheat. Now bounce the ball and catch it. You got to look at the guy down the ball. Now Look at the ball, track it, catch it. No, you can only get your foot. You got to feel your foot.
Speaker 1:So you want me to track like this Suck?
Speaker 2:the balls. Catch it. You try to cheat. Don't cheat. Look at the ball. This is the problem with both hands. They don't turn their head anymore. They're fucking cheating with their eyes. Again, track it. No, you want to try it. You're staring at the ground. Let go of the ball, trust yourself. Good, there, see how I'm not going to ask you anymore. Again, drop back down again. Good, drive up sideways. Ah, you know these are a trick or a swing, simple drill. So what should play your video In-catching your body? All right, nice to hold it. Yeah, good, try and drive back up straight A little better. That's kind of cool. Good, now you're going to have a balance. You're going to need to do some adeptive while using that posterior fascial swing from the right shoulder to the left side. Good, and then you're going to have a balance swing from the right shoulder to the left side.