Barbell Shrugged - 167- How to Erase Pain, Improve Mobility and Live Better in Your Body w/ Jill Miller

Episode Date: March 4, 2015

This week on Barbell Shrugged, we interview Jill Miller and she gives us a step-by-step guide to erase pain, improve mobility, and live better in your body. Hey, this is Rich Froning. You're listening to Barbell Shrugged. For the video version, go to barbellshrugged.com. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Bledsoe here with Doug Larson and Chris Moore. I see TP behind the camera. And we have our guest today, Jill Miller. You may know her as Yoga Tune Up from her Instagram and Twitters. She wrote this book here called The Role Model.

Yep. We first discovered you. I don't know about we, but I first discovered you when I was watching a creative live video you were doing with Kelly Starrett and, uh, he was doing all this stuff about mobility and then he brought you in and you start talking about diaphragm and breathing. And I never even thought about that really. I mean, I thought about like, I'm like, I'm like running, you like running you know when you're trying to catch your breath between sprints

you put your hands over your head and you're like oh you gotta try to breathe deep and you know you're told those things but you started

saying some things about diaphragm and breathing where I was like oh I never really thought about it like that before and you kind of

brought up a lot of points so I've been interested ever since I'm glad yeah additionally actually I put out something on Twitter today yeah and there's i had a hernia surgery uh-huh in october and uh i've had a lot of people hit me up after that like i didn't know that that was as common as it was because i constantly had people going oh i've got that

too i've got that too i got that too what do you do and i was like i don't know what you do i'm trying to figure it out but But when I had the surgery, you sent me some balls and I've been rubbing out my scars and that kind of stuff. I mean, it was after the surgery, like well after the surgery. The balls were not used for the surgery. They didn't put them in there. They lost the foam. They lost the needle. They're like, oh, and there's a yoga tuna ball stuck in his abdomen they didn't put them in there they lost the foam they lost the needle they're like oh and there's a yoga tuna ball stuck in his abdomen too

that's odd yeah so a lot of athletes and stuff they there's some things they can do to train their breathing yes

so they can recover in between workouts they can recover better when they're asleep maybe yes they can activate muscles all that

in their abdominal abdominal wall to you know make them better at lifting yes your your diaphragm is this central and in my opinion it's the central muscle of your core yeah i'm going to use that word it is the core core this is the core of core muscles it is the it is the the cork of the core it's so poor um yeah it's it's the inside of your lower six ribs your diaphragm it looks like a a mushroom cap inside of your body and it also attaches to your low back and it can actually be dysfunctional. Just like you can have a twitchy hamstring or you can have overworked this or that.

Your diaphragm is a muscle also and I think it's become like the unsexy abdominal muscle. Well, you can't see it on the beach, really. You can only feel it when you get the hiccups. Because you know what? My diaphragm is totally ripped, but you can't see it on the beach, really. You can only feel it when you get the hiccups. Because you know what? My diaphragm is totally ripped, but you can't see it. Well, you know what?

In fact, all the chicks see you walking, man, look at the diaphragm on that. He's such a sexy breather. And you know, actually breathing is really sexy.

Sure it is. Because if you can breathe really deeply, you can access a lot of actually transcendental states that I know you know about. I actually do think that breathing is sexy. And I think, I think it is sexy because most people that breathe really well tend to have very good posture. Yes. And then to, to move that

one, one step further forward, technique is just moving around with good posture. So people that have good technique and that also have good posture tend to have good breathing patterns and vice versa. It might be a chicken and the egg thing, I'm not sure. It's a total chicken and an egg thing. I call your respiratory muscles, your breathing muscles, the lining of your birthday suit. And that's pretty sexy, right? Your birthday suit.

Depends on who you are, but yeah. I guess it can be. So the diaphragm lines the inside of your lower six ribs and it attaches to your lower back and it's interconnected to all of these other abdominal muscles. And so, and actually some hip muscles and some lower back muscles. So if you have weird tension in your diaphragm because you don't breathe well, it's going to impact all of the muscles and bones above and below it. So a lot of times, if you have, um, you have pain in your hip inevitably because hip pain is going to do some, it's going to do something weird to your psoas and your psoas, by the way, is the chief

hip flexor. The diaphragm and the psoas actually intersect. And so if I have hip pain, it actually might cause my diaphragm to also have some weird tensions in it. That's going to also throw off my rib cage. It's going to impact my posture. So it's not just that my hip hurts and my posture is wonky. It's that those soft tissues, because they're interconnected,

they're seamed together, they're sewn together, are going to end up having a ripple effect uptown of that hip issue. But maybe my hip issue was caused because I'm a bad breather, because I'm a shallow breather, because I've got so much tension in my diaphragm. It's actually pulling things down below to get back to the hernia, to maybe pulling things down below, or maybe applying inappropriate pressures to, you know, the right side of my gut because of, for whatever reason,

I mean, the diaphragm actually, it's a pressure, it's a, it's a, a pressure inducer and your respiratory diaphragm moves up and down like this. and it has a very, very strong central tendon. The tendon is a flat tendon. It's not like a tendon like your bicep has a cord like. Yeah, so tendons in your body can be flat. They can be cord like. They can be thinner. They can be thicker,

but that central tendon has a lot of power, and as it goes down and up, it should ideally be pushing downward and the soft tissues below should balloon in response to that. There's a rhythm of movement. But if we stand kind of funky. Like, stand funky.

Yeah, I get it. I don't normally stand that way, Jill. That's okay. I promise. Actually, when I came in, I saw your feet placement. I'm like, oh my God, this guy, I don't normally stand that way. That's okay. Actually, when I came in, I saw your feet placement. I'm like, oh my God, this guy, you've got such good, you know, feet placement. But the thing is, how were they placed? It's a conscious effort.

One was placed behind his head. He was in a really Look at your feet placement, you sexy dog. He was doing a really interesting yoga pose when I walked in. No, but if I'm, if I, but if I stand off axis a lot, so right now I'm sort of thrusting my ribs off to the side, I'm twisting them out.

My diaphragm is actually going to angle out this way. And so it's going to apply excessive and sort of inappropriate pressure constantly on the angle of pitch that it's, you know, treading. So, street corner standing is not good for the diaphragm. Street corner standing, supermodel standing. I guess rolled short position or slouching or anything that is not just a nice anatomical

position or functional position. Yeah, I mean, but you don't want to be like all uptight either, right? So, I mean, you're fluid. Your body's fluid and it's moving. But I'm going to suggest that, you know,

there might be, and for you, it's probably microscopic because I know you're like totally in tune with your passion, with your... Your chakras.

Your chakras. Your chakras. Yeah. But there's, hernias get caused, I mean, there's lots of reasons why you might get an hernia. But this's, hernias get caused, I mean, there's lots of reasons why you might get it in a hernia,

but this is one of the, one of the ideas is that. I went in and I had three, which makes me think that it might not have been like a single instance. It was just something, maybe I was genetically

predispositioned to hernias or something like that. Yeah. And then, you know, we're generally predisposed and then we sort of, maybe we're treading

in a way that is actually exaggerating it. And it was your right side? I had a right inguinal and then I went in for a consult. They found a left inguinal and then when they found one

down below as well. Oh, wow. You're all checked out. I was all checked out. You're a medical miracle. Okay. Am I anomaly? They went in, they put a little mesh all on the inside of me.

Yeah. So, I mean, I actually looked. I was like, is surgery necessary? And I looked everywhere and it sounded like surgery is the only way to go. And I've had people email me since because I posted the pictures of my insides on Instagram. I have to go back through your Instagram to see that. I've got before and after pictures. So, I've got the before of my insides on Instagram. I have to go back through your Instagram to see that. I've got before and after pictures. I've got the before of no netting.

Yeah. And then I have the polypropylene netting installed in there. So they went in right below the belly button and did all that. But they found three. And I don't know. It took me a while to recover. It seems like it's i don't know took me a while to recover it seems like it's all right now it takes a while to recover and what i would what i'd suggest to anybody who's had abdominal surgeries whether you have mesh put in there polypropylene or stitches

or whatever it is is that you want to make sure that you keep once i mean once you've healed you want to make sure that you keep the soft tissues that are involved with that healthy and hydrated and um talked to so talk to your groin more than you know some really weird conversations his groin usually talks to him a few years ago i had i had a woman in one of my abdominal courses, and I teach a lot of soft tissue work in the gut area. People come to me with all manner of dysfunctional breathing. We bring it up because this is a super common issue. Athletes, elderly, everybody from walk of life has issues with the core function and stability and everything.

Yeah. It's surprising. There's a lot of high-level athletes. Whether you're pre-surgery, whether you don't need surgery, or whether you've had surgery, it's a good idea to have some type of way of addressing the stiffness and or imbalances, or just basic mapping of the abdominal tissues that are related to your breathing function. Because like I was saying, if you have so much tension in your abdomen that you're unable to take diaphragmatic breaths or abdominal breaths or abdominal breaths or breaths where your abdomen and actually your pelvic floor should expand like an inner tube, like your

inner soft tissue inner tube. But a lot of times because of cultural conditioning or habit, we suck it in, we hold it in, we stiffen up in a disproportionate way to actually what's necessary for us to survive. Like when you're doing a deadlift, when you're doing like almost everything that you're doing in CrossFit, you need to create appropriate tension for the load that you're creating. Being able to both completely relax these tissues and also to contract them is the opposite end of the spectrum. You can't just keep contracting.

There's some skill that's required to do that. Absolutely. Absolutely. And then another thing, the skill to breathe right, but also there's gonna be a lot of people who have, like you said, a hip flexor issue.

And the classic thing is you hit, you feel a problem and go, well, I got to fix this hip thing. Never knowing that the breath is even a thing to worry about. You will, you'll rail away and do anything you can to try to improve the function of hips.

But meanwhile, the source is somewhere else. Like tight shoulders in a snatch. You don't, you keep working on your shoulders, not knowing your ankles are tight. Another example of that. Exactly. Well, this is, this is the principle of the seam system. Your body's interconnected. Everything is interconnected. And so, yeah, so I've got a tight hip, but yes, the, I have a relationship. My hip has a soft tissue relationship to my breathing muscles, the lining of my birthday suit, that inner abdominal canister. So I want to be able to address the soft tissues health by doing some type of maybe self massage or

really smart movement patterns. But sometimes I can't move well because there's so much stickiness and stiffness. So it needs to be addressed manually. So I need to either go and pay a lot of money to a clinician or I can dress it myself with some type of tool. Yeah. It's the first tool, like the easiest thing. We always like to return like the biggest bang for buck thing you can do to make yourself perform better. Is that breathing? A proper.

It costs you nothing. Yeah. The proper skill of breathing skill that's the biggest bang for your buck it's free yeah sleep and then breathe you're getting a lot of progress how do we breathe better i'm a i'm a lockdown uh diaphragmatically dysfunctional power out there guy whatever i need help uh functioning better core my breathing what do i start i mean you start by trying to get feedback of what your breathing pattern is. And so actually one of the easiest ways to do that is to lay face down on some type

of object, like a rolled up towel or a pillow. I have a tool that I use called the gorgeous ball and to actually try to breathe into that object. And that's actually going to tell, it's going to give you immediate feedback about the soft tissue stiffness that's in there. And I'll just, you're going to do this before you have burritos. You're not going to do that because if you do, then when there's a breed on your stomach,

obviously there'll be a whole other feedback loop. Interesting. I had a, when I, before I had my surgery, I didn't know what was going on. Dr. I happened to be in the same place at the same time as Dr. Romanoff.

Okay. And I was like, he saw me kind of like having to take a break. I couldn't even stand for an hour. I had to like sit down and go, all right, I'll take questions sitting. Wow. Like I gave like an hour-long lecture, and then I had to sit down. And then he's like, oh, let me feel this. So he has me lay down, and he's feeling on my abs and he's want me push against his fingers and certain things weren't

firing. Yeah. But it was just as obvious to me as it was to him that I could, could push back on my left side, but not my right. Right. Yeah. And is that what you're talking about? Yeah. I mean, that's, that's, that's exactly, yes. Sort of. Yeah. So this would be that you would actually try to breathe into that object you try to breathe into a ball and a lot of people can't actually differentiate meaning tell the difference of where they're actually locating breathing in their body. Your breath happens as a concert between a lot of different muscles. The breath that helps you to actually rest and recover is an abdominal breath. It's a breath that allows the diaphragm to go through its full range of motion, which is that it contracts down, your guts expand, and on exhale, it actually flies back up. Then you also have these rib

muscles. They're called intercostals. Then you also have these rib muscles. They're called intercostals. If you ever had, you're from Tennessee, so I know you guys have some lip-smackety riblets that you like to eat. That's intercostal. That's what I call them, too. You guys got any of those rib-smackety-mig-mig-mig-mig-mig? Ribs.

Barbecued ribs. They are lip-smacking. You've got non-barbecued ribs right here and those non-barbecued ribs have this this living muscle that it that sort of wraps and different ways around the ribs that helps to pull the ribs apart and bring the ribs back together again and your diaphragm works in concert with those muscles so if i have over tightened rib riblet muscles or if i have over tightened abdominalened rib, riblet muscles, or if I have over-tightened abdominal muscles, it's going to impact my ability to take deep, to have deep breath rhythm altogether. And so when I get compromised breathing or when I'm not a good breather, you start to pay for it in other

muscles. And one of the other places you start to pay for it is in what I call the stress muscles of respiration, the clavicular muscles. Do you know anybody that's always breathing like this? When they get stressed and fatigued, especially things, their chest caves in, shoulders round forward, breath gets shallow and all that. This is a bad sign. It's a really bad sign. This is an asthma breathing pattern. It's a freaked out breathing pattern.

You actually need it. If you hear a gunshot, your shoulders will fly up and you're like, you're out of there. So this is like, you're totally on adrenaline. Kicking in. Yes. I mean, I had to fold over just to recover from, you know, demonstrating that. Um, because just even doing that makes an imprint on your nervous system. You want to know that? Now I need, I need to take an abdominal breath. Yes. But the thing is, is we don't always know how we're facilitating

our own breathing. And I think actually computer use, like when you're texting, you're actually, a lot of times you're mocking a stress breathing pattern. You see people

with their shoulders lifted and rounded forward. Curving into the screen. Yeah. Or, you know, a laptop or what have you. It's like we're modeling this stress breathing pattern all over the place. screen. Yeah. Or, you know, a laptop or what have you. It's, it's like we're, we're, we're

modeling this stress breathing pattern all over the place. And that modeling actually follows you into training. And so I think just training your breath, even though it doesn't sound terribly sexy, even though we all agree, it's very sexy, right? That is going to have a huge impact on your overall, the way your body hangs, the way your body fits itself. How does sitting play into this? Are you about to tell me that sitting is the new smoking, Jill?

I'll tell it to you different. Please do. Because I always feel bad because I'm a writer. I sit almost all the time. We all... You know, I'm a writer. I sit almost all the time. I'm a writer also, and I stood through 90%. You really are a writer. There's so much fucking information in this book. This thing is thick with information.

I was fucking blown away. Anyway, go ahead. It's information thick. It's also story thick. There's a lot of stories. 24 stories of people who've changed their lives without medicine. It's amazing. So here's my shtick on sitting.

Give me your shtick. My shtick is this. So when you're sitting, are you, and I'm pretending that I'm sitting right now. Can we all pretend that we're sitting? Thank you very much. You're sitting. Doug refuses to pretend.

I was like, I'm not sitting. I never sit. I don't even pretend to sit. When you are sitting, are you activating your buttock muscles or are you deactivating them? I usually sit like this. Butt squeeze. He's like,

gently tapping, pecking at solitary keys. Just rocking like all this. It's a sexy sit that I have going on. So you're, again, a medical miracle. So I'm just going to go to the other. So your muscles are totally deactivated while you're sitting. That's the point.

It feels great. Jill, it feels great. It takes almost no energy. So essentially they're in a pull. They're being stretched. right? When you're sitting, you're stretching. Yeah. Right. And in, in correct doses, stretching is great, but are you suggesting that sitting will give me a floppy ass and that doesn't translate to big snatches. So you're sitting on your stretchy butt for, you know, eight plus hours a day times 10,

20, 30, 40, 50 years, however old you are. And by the time you stand up, your butt is no longer on your butt. Your butt has fallen off to the sides. Why is your butt falling off? Right? Whoa. I got a crazy visual. I get visuals anytime anyone says anything, actually.

I freak out a lot. So hallucinate on this, Michael. Ready? Okay. Imagine your butt has fallen off your butt. Your gluteal muscles extend your hip, and they pull your thigh bone backwards. You're the primary engine for hip extension.

So if your butt muscles have sort of fallen off axis because they become overstretched. Now, how do they become overstretched? The fascias within your gluteal muscles with that prolonged loading, right? Sitting on them is loading those fascias constantly, consistently, day in and day out. They start to lose their elasticity. They start to lose their elasticity.

They start to lose their ability to recoil, to recoil and keep your butt on your butt. So sitting is going to make you weak. So sitting weakens those gluteal, the fascial tissues and the muscle fibers. And plus, you're just squishing all the fluid out of them as well. So your butt's falling off your butt. What was the question? Why is sitting the new smoking? What was the question?

Oh, so, so you lose a lot of, let me just keep saying your butt falls off your butt. So by the time you stand up, um, after these untrained buttock muscles have been sat upon for years and years and years, you really have lost a lot of their ability to produce force. So this is why I try to sit as infrequently as possible and why when someone says take a seat in a doctor's office, I'm so offended. I'm like, you medical system, you're trying to get me to sit? What are you trying to get me to do? You're killing me here.

I'm so offended when someone asks me to take a seat it's like can i go with you next time you go to the doctor i'm glad we were standing out here actually i wish we weren't i want to see that we all gently stand up okay well we're the assholes here no it's great i mean this i when i've watched your podcast before i'm like this is awesome they stand this is perfect well kelly told us one time it makes us smarter. So we went with that the whole time. You know, that's the other thing. One of the reasons why I became so interested

in the physics of the body was in my physics class. I had a horrible, horrible physics teacher in high school. It was so boring. First period. Do you want to call him out by name? I don't remember his name. I was so bored. It was so boring. First period. You want to call him out by name? I don't remember his name. It was so bored. I was so bored.

And then on the side, I was reading some magazine. And I remember reading the magazine. Public People, huh? It was so horrible. It was a horrible 17-mag. Cosmopolitan. Ten ways to keep a tight,

force-producing ass for your boyfriend. Look, I'm so much older than that. Like, back in the day, they weren't talking about that in Seventeen magazine. Like, I hope they're talking about that now. Maybe one day. But it said that one way to actually maintain good concentration

is to hold yourself in good posture. And I thought, because I would be like this. It was so boring. I couldn't sit upright. So I forced myself to sit upright in that class. And I think that was actually part of the genesis of my interest in alignment was just the ability to concentrate better.

And it translates into so many other spaces you know amy cuddy talks about how um excellent posture and sort of power positioning increases levels of testosterone in your body it actually gives you more physiological authority there starts this whole chemical cascade on this uh on testosterone just posture and and attitude how it affects uh and poor posture increases cortisol in your body. So it's like, fuck that. I don't want any more cortisol. I got enough stress. I'm going to stand up right. That'd be better.

Yeah. So there's my sitting story. So earlier you mentioned something that you call mapping the body. Like, let's dig into that a little bit. Well, you see, I don't want to get too sciencey on you. I'm really interested in self-knowledge.

And for me, one of the most interesting ways of getting to know myself is knowing how I operate, knowing my body, knowing my biology, knowing my physiology. And I got really interested in the science of proprioception. So proprioception is the ability to sense where you are in inner space without seeing it. I'm really interested in where I've gone blind inside myself. And I'm interested in helping you figure out where you're blind.

Sure, I've got plenty of blind spots. So at the most basic level, like if you close your eyes and you put your hand in front of your face, you still know your hands in front of your face because that's the concept of proprioception. But beyond that, you're talking about like within your breathing patterns, you should have some type of sense for how your breathing patterns are affecting you or something like that. Well, actually, your breathing pattern would be a category even more subtle than proprioception. It's called interoception. Okay.

So when you actually, when you, yeah. It's a new one for me. Yeah, new stuff. So when you actually, when you sense sort of your organ movement and your heart's movement, you know, the movement of blood, the movement of fluid flow, cerebral spinal fluid, some other cool things that you actually can get a sense of if you

get quiet enough which is why relaxation is so interesting and important because you can sense nuanced things about yourself that by the way will pay off in dividends in fine-tuning your performance of lifting um let's get a moment of silence getting really mellow talking about it I'm really relaxed I know I'm just trying to get

pep this up it's either that or the it's either you or the four roses or the bourbon you brought us the four roses by the way which is really good

you win guest of the year I mean we're about two three weeks into the year so far already you're winning

but you're the first to bring bourbon to the show. Absolutely. Ever? Not ever. Bourbon specifically. I think ever. You know,

I just knew. I knew it was the right fit. So, proprioception, your body sense, knowing where your limbs are, being,

and then more refined, being able to get a sense of sort of some of the fluid flows in your body. But you have these nerve endings, these proprioceptive nerve endings littered all throughout different soft tissue layers in your body through your, throughout your different fascias. And it's actually possible to improve your body sense. Your body sense, actually, the better you are at proprioceiving yourself, the better you are at actually sensing

where you are in space, basically it leads to better coordination, so you're less accident prone. But also, improving proprioception diminishes pain. It's a really, really cool relationship. There's an inverse relationship to pain and body sense. And I go over this a lot in the science chapter in my book.

There is the science chapter in my book. Even though we're talking a lot of science altogether, there's only one chapter in the book that's science. The rest of it's yoga stuff. Don't worry, man. I'm just kidding. That's so mean of you. But there are some pictures of me in a onesie doing some really outrageous yoga poses, but it's not a yoga book. You had the chops. I'm just joking, by the way.

I'm joking. Because I knew that would get you fired up. It's about balls, not yoga, sir. It's about balls. It is about balls. A lot of balls. You spend way too much time up north. Northeast.

With that accent. Balls. That's what he's referring to. I married a Jersey boy. Oh, did you? Yeah. I'm from the south, but I married a Jersey boy. Yeah.

A Jersey man. There you go. There you go. He's at home going, what the hell? He's got his balls. He's fine. What are we talking about? So we talked about a lot of kind of intangible topics

like proprioception and- Intangible? Close your eyes, put your finger on your nose after you've drunk my bourbon and you know that's proprioception. It's your anatomical sobriety test, sir. There you go. My anatomical sobriety test.

That is exactly what proprioception is. It's your anatomical sobriety test, sir. There you go. My anatomical sobriety test. That is exactly what proprioception is. It's your anatomical sobriety test. I think we should see how many shots he takes Doug to not find his nose tonight. Let's do that. The thing is, it's trainable. And one of the tools I use are the different size therapy balls

because what they do is they help to tease their way into tissues because they're so grippy and you have a humongous layer of of a specific i'm gonna name i'm gonna do science here of a specific nerve ending they're called ruffini endings and they're feni ruffini r-u-f-f-i-n-i it's like pasta not rotini but ruffini. R-U-F-F-I-N-I. It's like pasta. Not rotini, but ruffini. Ruffini. Not rotini. Not rotini.

Oh, shoot. I hear where you're going now. What's in this drink? That's what I was thinking. Okay. So, something about, okay. The ruffini nerve endings. The ruffini, yeah, the nerve endings.

I'm so cold. You can like see, though, my skin is getting whiter by the moment. So, deep in your fatty layer, so you have skin, your body is many, many, think of the body as many layers. You have your skin, underneath your skin,

you have a superficial fascia, which most people just call your body fat, right? And at the very base of this fatty layer is a membranous layer, a thin membranous layer. A thin membranous layer. Sometimes it's two layers. Sometimes it's three layers where there's a tremendous amount of slide. In fact, if you pinch your forearm

or your stomach right now and you try to move it to the right or the left. I can't pinch anything on my stomach. How about your forearm? Not even there. Oh yeah, a little bit there. So you have a tremendous amount

of soft tissue mobility right there. And this is this membranous zone. This is this transition layer between the fat and what's called your deep fascia or your fascia profunda. That's the sort of duct tape fascia. But in this membranous layer, this transition zone between the fatty layer and the deep fascia are an abundance of these Ruffini endings. And when you take a ball and pin it to your skin and twist or swizzle the fatty layer, and then you move that fatty layer, it excites these Ruffini endings. And the Ruffini endings then tell your brain more about that location. And they also tell your brain to relax. So mapping yourself with the therapy balls that I use

both helps you to improve your mapping, but at the same time, it turns on your off switch. It helps to downregulate you. Improves like proprioception and relaxation. Yep. So you get to choose. So maybe a better athlete. Yes.

Yes. I mean, I mean, that's what we're getting to. I mean, but like, I mean, those are like two very huge things

that you can achieve with just balls. I find that fascinating. It's fascinating. So by mapping yourself, you're saying that you should just do a lot of soft tissue work with these balls, with all the methods you outline in your book, or you're trying to find the specific places

you need to do soft tissue work and you show people how to find those places or? Yes, so both. So you may actually have pain and dysfunction in certain areas and you may need to do some regular work to help unstiffen, bring hydration, bring mobility to alleviate adhesions or scar tissue or dysfunction in those tissues. And you can use the

balls to do that. But there's also places on your body where it just feels good to roll. Like it doesn't have to hurt to work because getting those soft tissues, hi, your eyes just sparked up. You're like, I don't want it to hurt to work. I actually like pain a little bit. You do. Then there's that. Only in the bedroom. um, getting your body, getting familiar with the textures and the different places in your body will also help you to improve your mapping, your overall mapping. So inevitably this translates

into performance because you know your way around the inside of your body, just like you know the way your way around your, the map of your city. I mean, most people can find their way through the streets and alleys of their city much better than they can find their way around their own body. That's the one part I like good about your book, or like well, but you have a section in there about how to locate key landmarks on your own body,

which I don't think is a thing commonly. People get on these balls commonly or rollers and they just roll around looking for tight spots and mash it out, but with no understanding of what that may be the purpose is other than just rolling around. Yeah. I mean, I think that I don't ever want to scare anybody. Like you can just stick a ball in different areas of your body and you can get some really great work done. But I think eventually when you start to feel like, wait a minute, I don't have pain anymore. How did that happen? You might be interested in actually looking at how things are interconnected, looking, learning a little bit more about the bony structures and the soft tissue structures and how they interrelate. I really hope to entice people to get to know their bodies better

in that manner. So there's a couple of things. I mean, if anyone's ever coached anyone before and you're trying to get them to fire a certain muscle, I mean, you're saying that maybe a beginner who doesn't know exactly, you say, Hey, you need to like maybe try and make your, put your back in a more neutral position or something like that.

And they're like, you mean like this? Right. You're like, Oh, and it's like, if you just have them do some, uh,

some ball work that might actually help, you know, build that proprioception where they can actually tune in. So it might not be like, we just need to do more squatting. Exactly. We might need to pull the balls out. Then this is, this is actually how I came to do this work is I, I used to, I had a teacher since I was 19. His name is Glenn Black.

He's my, my yoga mentor. And, uh, he would hate that. I even use the word yoga now. Cause he just teaches human movement as do I would just happen to have come from the yoga space and meditation space, soft tissue space. And, um, he, he's sort of a recluse. He's doesn't really like people to talk about him. And he'll call me at 3am and say, why aren't you meditating? He's like, really? doesn't really like people to talk about him. We're talking about you, buddy. He'll call me at 3 a.m. and say, why aren't you meditating? He's like, really?

It's because I'm meditating. Exactly. Why did I answer the phone? Unconsciously. Unconsciously. It's a very old, like I've known him for more than 20 years. And we would be practicing and doing yoga and he would be disgusted

with how we were performing poses with how we were doing movement and he would throw us on the ground and start doing manual therapy on us so that we could feel the body parts that he wanted us to activate in any given pose and then he would make us do the same body work on each other so that we could translate the felt experience of him touching us to be able to apply it to somebody else so that it wasn't just a fluke of, of him working on us, but that we were working on each other. Um, and then by the way, that awakened all those proprioceptors, all those proprioceptors, you're able to sense where you were in space and your asana or your, your yoga pose was better.

So when I started to teach my work, um, initially I was just teaching yoga or I was teaching dance as well. And the same thing, I would see my students doing movements and I thought, Oh my God, this is a train wreck. This is horrible. I don't want you to see me move now. You're just going to get like a stick out and start hitting me. No, just a ball. I'll throw balls at you. Exactly. Well, actually I'll have you throw balls at yourself. I'm really good at helping, helping to cue you into, to cluing into your own body because that's actually where the change happens is not that I'm doing something to you. It's that you do something to you. And so I use human language. I don't use like special cue sets. I try to talk to the context of who you are and you're a CrossFit person. So I would use your language as best I could to help you. Handstand pushups and all. Reach into your,

you know, your armpit with a ball or with a hand or whatever to help you to locate those tissues so that you could eliminate unconscious tension in them maybe address any dysfunction in this trigger point or what have you nowhere to go to treat it the the to roll out the issue to roll out the issue to touch the issue doesn't have to hurt to work, whatever, breathe, maybe it's going to help you breathe better and then voila, you're going to move better. I see it all the time. That's what happened in my classrooms

and that's what's still happening all over the globe. And I've got one more question. Go ahead. I've got one more question and we need to take a break. You said that an increase in proprioception is a decrease in pain earlier.

Yes. But I don't feel like we covered that. Yes. Can you explain that? Yes. So all of your, so we covered that. Yes. Can you explain that? Yes. So all of your, so your nerves, they,

you have lots of nerves that fit into sort of a big nerve cord. What was I doing there? That's a plane trombone. All right. That's not what I was thinking. Exactly. Well,

I'm just deflecting so there's a story in my book of truly an athlete his name is Eric who has a he has a genetic disease genetic peripheral neuropathy now peripheral neuropathy

is a nerve disease that affects the limbs and what happens in this disease called Shark and Murray Tooth disease is all of the nerves in your limbs become unmyelinated. They lose their protective sheath. It's a bad thing. It's a very bad thing.

So instead of being able to fire muscles or to be able to actually sense where you are in space, all these nerves become our pain signals. All you're getting is pain. So a lot of these people with Charcot-Marie-Tooth, they have to be on a lot of pain medication to be able to survive. Over the course of working with Eric, I've worked with him for eight years now,

but when I first started working with him, he wore ski boots, basically, to help him walk because he had no motor control of his ankles. He couldn't feel the bottoms of his feet. He couldn ski boots basically to help, to help him walk because he had no motor control of his ankles. He couldn't feel the bottoms of his feet. He couldn't button his shirt. He couldn't pick up a penny. And his doctor said, you'll never be able to sense the bottom of your feet. And he sent to me for actually stress reduction. That's why he first came to me and I handed him a pair of therapy balls. Anyway, long story short, very long story. He was on the highest dose of fentanyl that's legal. Now fentanyl is a hundred times more potent than, than heroin. It's the, the, the.

Sounds like a party. It's horrible. A hundred times better than regular heroin. You have to have a lot of. She's like, it's the opposite of a party. It's fucking terrible. That was a joke. Over the course of working with him

for the, over the first about five years, he was, got off of fentanyl completely because of that, the overtime conversion change between awakening his proprioception ultimately tamped down his pain perception. So he was having pain, even though there wasn't necessarily pain in the soft tissue. Right. There wasn't damage. It was just pain. Exactly. So this was like, this is the story that exemplifies that relationship. And now, by the way, he wears minimus shoes.

He's out of the leg braces that he laces himself with his wonderful opposable thumbs. And, you know, he can button his shirt. He's lost 60 pounds. He's off of so many medications. The list of medications was insane. And that was never his goal. And his goal was never like, I want to get off of medication. He just was sent to me for stress reduction and there's been all these other

other changes but but his story really exemplifies that this shift between somebody who now actually has a tremendous amount of body sense whereas he had no body sense before he constantly fell and is in a lot less pain and on much, much lower doses of medications that have horrible side effects and ramifications for the rest of your life. I mean, balls don't have bad side effects. We can all agree on that. We're going to cut that out of this episode somehow. Let's take a break real quick. When we come back, we're going to talk about the fascinating world of fascia. This is Tim Ferriss, and you are listening to Barbell Shrugged. For the video version, go to barbellshrugged.com.

Barbell Shrugged is brought to you by you. To learn more about how you can support the show, go to barbellshrugged.com and sign up for the newsletter. And we're back with Jill Miller. Jill got cold. She got cold. I'm so cold. So we're warming up.

My teeth are chattering. All right, so we're going to talk about fascia. Yeah. Which a lot of people just kind of, it's just left out of the conversation. Fascia is just not brought up as much as it probably should be. It doesn't get enough respect. I'll say that.

Let's give it some respect. I think it'd be really helpful just for your listeners to understand, you know, fascia is the soft tissue scaffolding of your body. It's what your muscle cells rely on to sort of help create themselves. Everything in your body is interconnected with this soft tissue seam system. And you can actually prove it to yourself like right away that everything is interconnected by doing something simple like doing a little, try to do a forward bend, touch your toes. This is like the classic thing. You do a little forward bend, try to touch your toes. You're going to feel restriction in your hamstrings.

You're going to feel restriction probably behind your knees. Oh, isn't that fascinating? And then roll one foot on top of any ball. It doesn't have to be my ball. It can be any ball or any object. Do it for like two or three minutes and then fold forward again. And you will be astonished that you have less tension in the back of that leg and that you have, you seem to like, you can bend forward deeper on that side. And if you're in the back of that leg and that you have you seem to like you can bend forward deeper on that side and so if you're in the military you have to do that that silly sit and reach test every six months just roll like your damn feet before you go in totally you'll have an astonishing change it's like the most retarded fitness test ever but anyway but one of the but

one of the thank you very much. Just validating your point. This is why I presented at the Fashion Research Congress. Everything you just said is important. No problem. You know what I'm saying? It's a bad test for military fitness. Because you can trick it. Because you can game it or whatever.

All right. So, but one of the reasons why it's a wonderful illustration is because it shows you the interconnectedness of all things. You weren't trying to stretch your hamstrings. You weren't doing hamstring stretching or hamstring lengthening exercises. You massage the foot, but it sent mechanical signals literally upstream

through that side of the body. And by the way, it was also talking to your brain and helping to sort of unkink some of the muscle bracing going on upstream of it. And that helped you to have a more perceived length in that moment. One of the things I think that's really helpful for listeners to understand is there are different layers of fascia in your body. You have, I talked already about that fatty layer, the superficial fascia. Then there's the deep fascia,

which doesn't have fat in it. It's very, very strong and sturdy. And it looks like, this is the typical analogy is like sausage casing type of thing. And then you have transitional fascias. You have fascias that connect other layers to one another. And so these are actually called loose fascias. You have fascias that connect other layers to one another. And so these are actually called loose fascias. And these transition zones are what allow a lot of the slide and glide, a lot of the inter muscular movement to occur. And then you have this other term that

you probably hear a lot called myofascia. Sure. You've heard of myofascia? Yeah, of course. Myofascial release and all that. Yeah, exactly. So what is myofascia? Myofascia. Sure. You've heard of myofascia? Yeah, of course. Myofascial release and all that. Yeah, exactly. So what is myofascia? Myofascia, this thing is in my mouth. Myofascia is actually the combination of your muscle and the fascias that are interwoven within the muscle itself. And your fascias wrap around individual muscle cells. It also wraps around bundles of

muscle cells. It's called a fascicle. You might be familiar with fascicles and then bundles of muscle fascicles end up being a muscle, but you have fascias wrapping and wrapping and wrapping and wrapping. So let's do something together to help illustrate that because I think this is going to help everybody. Come over here. I need warm, big men next to me. So you're going to, this is going to be fascia for you and I'm going to take mine's all crinkly, but I'll do the crinkly fascia and this is for you. And then this is the toughest ones. You're actually going to be deep fascia. I'm deep. Okay. So you're going to come in last. The three of us, we're going to create, um, a, a rectus femoris. So we're going to come in last. The three of us, we're going to create a rectus femoris. So we're going to create a quadricep, one of the four quadricep muscles,

the one that's right on top. So each of your fingers are muscle cells. Okay? Sorry, iTunes listeners. Oh, so we're holding five. All of us are holding five fingers up. Well, me. You got to go to the video, folks.

Doug, Michael, and I. Just go to barbellshark.com. Click the video. You know, that's real by now. If you're a listener, you know, the drill, uh, are holding up five fingers. So these are individual muscle cells and each one of your muscle cells is actually shrouded in fascia in it's in a fine filament of connective tissue. And at this level, it's actually called endomysium. In the book, I illustrate this with an orange. It's really clear in the book. Then muscle cells are further wrapped by additional fascia. So we're going to wrap the thing around all five of our fingers.

And so those wrapped muscle cells are now wrapped. Come on, Michael, get your fingers wrapped. I got to put them together? Yeah. This is really confusing. It's really difficult. This is like lady... My mother calls me Michael. Lady weaving. Have I keep calling you Michael? It's okay.

It's just interesting. It's the cult. Can I call you Douglas? No one calls me Douglas. I will not call you my mom. Wait, not you, Chris. You don't wrap. You're special. Okay. I'll wait for my deepness. You're going to wait for your deepness to show up. All right. So this is now a fascicle. Each one of us has fascicles. Yeah. Covered in its own fascia. So there's muscle cells in here covered in fascia. So let's bring our fascicles together. Okay. And then when fascicles come together, they're wrapped in more fascia. And so we can

may pull the fascia. These are, you know, elastibands. So now we basically have what's known as a muscle. This reminds me of an exercise workshop we did at Burning Man. These are Mardi Gras colors. I just want you to know I'm originally from New Orleans, so this is my Mardi Gras moment. And then we have deep fascia. This is my time to shine. This is your time. So this is the toughest fascia. So then this surrounds.

So I'm assuming you want me to wrap this all around to create a secure bundle. So this would be the sort of sausage-y moment. Oh, yeah. The sausage-y moment. Sausage and balls. I'm learning about fascia, and I'm also getting terribly hungry now.

A lot of sausage talk okay so why is that I say we're we're very nice we're building a rectus femoris

right so we're building a quad muscle so let's put this and becoming better friends I might add thank you let's put this down on my quad thank you

you're gonna break me now aren't you a martial artist you can wean your way out of this so all of the fascias that are wrapping around the muscle cells

and the fascicles and the fascia that's wrapping those fascicles together plus the deep fascia all of those soft tissues the muscle protein ends

right your rectus femoris ends but the soft tissues that were a part of that, they don't end. They actually tether their way to the kneecap and transition to attach onto, you know, just below they become the patellar tendon. Does that make sense? And then that patellar tendon. So if I pull all this stuff out and I actually can't, cause you guys are holding on really tight. So all those swirl together, all of those fascias become the tendon, right? They, and then the next protein structure

surrounded by additional fascias is the anterior tib there. And we've got stuff going down on the other side and so on and so on. So this is the principle of the interconnected body. So your, your fascias are helping to connect one structure to the next, to the next, to the next. That was like the best explanation of fascia I've ever seen. Had I gotten that in school, I might have... Passed. I mean, I passed. That's a joke.

You're very intelligent. When I think of you, I think academic. So this is why when you place the ball in your abdomen your shoulder stuff might resolve because of the way things are strung together why if you put the ball in your abdomen your inner thigh this weird twitch in your inner thigh might be resolved because of this interconnectivity connectivity. He's dying, man. He can't stop laughing. He's got like tears coming down his face.

Oh, boy. Something must have really happened that was funny that we all missed. You at home probably are loving it. That's the definition

of comedic genius. You fucking totally wrecked the cameraman with something you didn't even realize you were doing. You're so talented. It's always funny when you're't even realize you were doing. You're so talented. It's always funny when you're talking

with big boys and balls. That's the thing. That's your edit point. Yeah. Do you have anything else to say about fashion? It's all interconnected, Mike. It's all interconnected mike it's all interconnected

does he have like universal fascia stuff going on so it's all interconnected you provide soft tissue tools for people to to help them do what with their fascia like like how how are how is ball or you know people's people always talk about foam rolling which we can talk about that in a second and why this is different than that yes um how does a ball help you augment or fix your fascia whatever that means so fix your fascia so this is going to help to influence motion stretch uh rehydration body body sense in those, in not only your fascia, because you're not just poking fascia, you're getting everything. When a ball's rolling, it's rolling onto your myofascia, right? The muscle, the muscle that's stiff or the muscle that's not working well with

its neighbors. Or say you've got a scar, you've got scar tissue that you need resolution in. The scar is not just on the surface, it's going all the way down to the deep. And if you've got these unresolved tensioners in any area, because of the interconnectivity, it's going to actually throw off kilter everything that's interconnected to it. So that's why it's a seam system. You pull on one thread in your sweater or your sock, everything else sort of vaults toward it. So you want to try to resolve and create as much body harmony as possible altogether. So areas where you're feeling constant tension,

like for example, a lot of people have a ton of tension in their upper traps, right? And you're like, uh-huh. Yeah, I used to. And then I started, I put some balls on my shoulders. It's gone. It worked out.

But one of the reasons, there's many reasons why we'd have a lot of tension in our upper traps. You know, that forward head position, the constant forward load. Everything is in front of us. Our shoulders are constantly being asked to grasp in front of us. And because of that constant grasping, these tissues get longer. These tissues get constantly shorter. You're doing too many push-ups in your life. You know, some of us might have done a few too many.

So the soft tissues in front are adapting to become shorter because your body adapts to your, your body is an adaptation machine. It likes to adapt to stress, whether positive or negative. So you've got a lot of, of un, un,

unsurmountable stress that's pulling you forward in life. The tissues behind you are getting longer, right? When, when these tissues get overstretched, they're going to start actually getting weaker. And that weakness can start to signal pain. It can start to corrupt your movement patterns. And to tie it back into breathing, it's also making a mockery of a healthy breathing pattern. So we get locked down in these tension patterns. You start to use the therapy balls on the front of the chest to help optimize or reposition the

soft tissues to where they're ideally function. And you need a tool to do that. Just stretching is not necessarily going to do that. I need to actually trick the tissues into letting their length show back up so the joint can go back into its correct position so that I can pull correctly. And so then I can repeat my training. I can improve the new position or the new optimal position of the soft tissues with proper training so that over time, I can actually establish a new normal in my body. So a lot of, a lot of what this work does is it interrupts those old habits and that old normal so that your body, you're no longer blind to where your body has gone to sleep inside of itself. So a lot of people talk about mobility they talk about or they rather they think about

making muscles longer which isn't always the thing that's limiting your mobility right you could be very stiff and the muscle the muscle length could technically be there but the resistance to stretch is so great you feel immobile and then you also have sliding surface issues that we talked about earlier so in this case are you are you mostly referring to helping with that resistance to stretch helping reduce stiffness you're not actually talking we talked about earlier. So in this case, are you, are you mostly referring to, um, helping with that resistance to stretch, helping reduce stiffness? You're not actually talking about making things longer in most cases. Well, if the, the fascists have adapted to the habit of, in this case, right? If the fascists have adapted to the habit of being extra short here, because, because of, uh, because of how you hold yourself or from doing, you know,

overemphasizing bench press and you're doing it incorrectly. If you're doing it correctly, it's going to be awesome. But so much of our, we tread on our body. How you do your body most is how your body does.

And so the conditions of our environment are really creating a lot of problems for us structurally. Computers, texting. Right now I'm nursing. And so I've been getting neck stuff because I want to look at my kid all the time. I mean, it's just like,

that's totally organic and lovely and wonderful, but it's like just even passively having your head forward like this, if the front of your neck is not getting a stimulus to lengthen, it's just going to adapt to being in that shortened position. So I use the therapy balls often to go into these anterior scalenes

so that I can help reset the soft tissues where they are most normalized. And so the bones are going to be, the bones that are relating to those structures are also going to help to be in a better position as well. Is that too technical? No, I think it's great. No, I think we did a really good job this whole episode of, of making it easy to understand having some technical pieces is a good thing. Someone's going to send us a message and say,

otherwise, if it's all, if it's all too technical, that's a bad thing. Cause it's like way over the head of a lot of people and they don't, they don't get a lot of value out of it. But I think having some technical pieces is a good thing. So the other thing is the balls are stress reducers. And who can't use a little soothing as a regular part of your life? I think we all can. They are a wonderful way to turn off the overflow in your

brain. They're a great way to help reduce the, what we call in Yiddish, the spilkas, just the madness. And so they're a way to really help you to turn in and to tune in to yourself, right? To tune into your body parts, yes, but also just to help shut down some of the overload that's going on just because of how we live. So even the clangity clangity and the loud loud of the gym, I mean, we don't even realize, but that also overloads our nervous system and it keeps us in this sort of sympathetic arousal state. So I'd like to also invite your, your listeners to recognize that this is a way to not have to end up taking an Ambien at the end of the day or have to use scotch to cool yourself down. But there's other things that you can do or bourbon. It's very good. Bourbon is very good. You know, in medicinal doses. So

also this is another way of, of dosing yourself without side effects. And in the, in the book, there's a lot of stories of people who've actually gotten off of drugs and gotten off of medication, but using the therapy balls to deal with structural issues, disease states, and also unbelievable emotional trauma and using this to emotionally regulate themselves. And that might be something that's of great benefit if stress is overtaking your life and you can't really seem to concentrate well. This is a way to reclaim some of the softer states

that help you to have a better baseline. So, and I guarantee you, if you're able to enter states of relaxation, your performance output is going to be much more crystal clear altogether. So in addition to your book, do you have videos where you demonstrate a lot of the stuff that you talk about in the book? Yes. And there's a ton of free content online. If you go to therollmodel.com, if you go to yogatuneup.com, we have a YouTube channel. I've done a bunch of mobility wads with my friend Kelly Starrett, who also wrote the foreword to the book. He's a huge inspiration for me. And actually, I tell his story of being an asthma athlete and how he used some of my work, especially with the diaphragm, to help rehabilitate a final vestige of a chronic issue that he had in his wrist.

Awesome. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for informing us. It's been great. Thank you for welcoming me. I feel warm all of a sudden. There you go. Maybe it's the bourbon.

The bourbon's kicking in it's finally kicking in so you said yogatuneup.com therollmodel.com if we want to be able to contact you any other way

what's your social following my social following is I'm all over Facebook I have an author page Jill Miller there's also Yogatuneup

there's also Tuneup Fitness my greater company is called Tuneup Fitness and so we're actually launching that website soon. And that'll have a lot of new free content. TuneUpFitness.com. And

on social media, Instagram is Yoga Tune Up and Twitter is Yoga Tune Up. LinkedIn, whatever. Don't link me in, please. I don't understand it. I don't know what to do with that. I actually have friends on there, but I still have no idea what to do on LinkedIn. I don't want to be your with that I have some friends on there but I still have no idea what to do on LinkedIn what are we doing

I don't want to be your colleague don't link me I haven't signed into LinkedIn in like four years I create programs for a lot of you get a lot of notifications probably okay

yeah those notifications they just scare me I ignore them but I create programming for a lot of different gym chains like Equinox 24 hour fitness

you can find my programs a lot of our teachers, we have a lot of CrossFit coaches who've trained in yoga tune-ups. So there's about 320, 330 yoga tune-up teachers worldwide. And they teach the role model method and they teach all the down regulation work, the mobility work, the soft tissue work. It's awesome. Sweet. Do you have a physical practice where people can come work with you? Yeah. I teach out of my home in Studio City for one-on-ones. But I teach mostly on the road, teacher trainings, courses. I teach one public class a week.

Yeah. Cool. Everyone's going to come to Studio City. Sounds great. Awesome. It's a great little place there. All right. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you. Thanks for having me, guys. Thanks for coming out. Sure.