Barbell Shrugged - A “Strong First” Approach To Improving Performance And Combatting Autoimmune Disease with Dr. Emily Kiberd- Muscle Maven Radio Episode #15

Episode Date: May 16, 2019

This week Ashleigh talks with Dr. Emily Kiberd, a chiropractic physician and founder of the Urban Wellness Clinic in New York City, about what a strength-focused, holistic chiropractor actually does and does not do; what is hypermobility, why it can be problematic for stability and athletic performance, and how to address it; and how strength training can improve mobility and stability, and (surprisingly) address issues like autoimmune disease, a complex and varied health challenge that disproportionally effects women.   Dr. Kiberd is a chiropractic physician and founder of the Urban Wellness Clinic in New York City; the clinic’s mission is to optimize every patient’s health, so they live—sprint, lift, race, or stand—without pain. Dr. Kiberd earned her Doctor of Chiropractic degree from the University of Western States, in Portland, Oregon. She is a 200-hour-certified yoga instructor, and develops wellness programs for corporate clients, including Fortress Investment Group, Corbin Capital, Sundance Channel, and Fortune 500 companies. Dr. Kiberd also helps yoga instructors deepen their understanding of anatomy and biomechanics through in-depth workshops. Her expertise spans several therapeutic fields: biomechanics, yoga, and functional movement patterns.     Minute Breakdown:   3 - 18 Introduction to chiropractic physician Dr. Emily Kiberd and what she offers at her Manhattan-based Urban Wellness Clinic; why clamshells aren’t always the answer with PT and hip mobility; addressing the myth that chiropractors only deal with the spine; and when is chiropractic medicineis NOT the answer    18 – 25 What does it mean to have hypermobility, and why is it a problem? How do you address and manage hypermobility?     26 – Dr. Kiberd dives deep into the challenge of autoimmune issues and symptoms, gut health, and how her clinic can address these challenges. She discusses her own struggles with autoimmune disorder, and talks about her Thyroid Strong program to manage thyroid health through lifestyle factors and strength training.   40 – 43 How breath work and posture work can assist with mobility, strength, and movement      43 – 1:03 Why many women (and men) should do less cardio and more strength work; why perfecting strength basics is crucial; and how physical strength carries over into other areas of your life by building mental resiliency     1:03 – Dr Kiberd talks about working with pregnant women, and the importance of mobility and strength training in preparing for the physical exertion of birth. She talks about her own experience with home birth, why she changed her mind about her birth plan after touring a hospital, how she’s approaching her upcoming second home birth   1: 24 – A quick chat about Acupuncture: when it’s good, how and why it works    ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Show notes: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/mmr-kiberd ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @Hylete- Hylete.com - RC15 for 15%   ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

Hello, bros and girl bros. Welcome to the 15th episode of Muscle Maven Radio. I'm your host, Ashley Van Houten. I'm still here, guys. Thanks for sticking with me. This week, I am chatting with Dr. Emily Kyberg. She's a chiropractic physician. She founded the Urban Wellness Clinic in New York. And in my opinion, she is part of this badass woman Illuminati in New York, which also includes past guests of mine, Melissa Paris and Gabrielle Lyon, and actually a couple more guests that I have coming up, but you'll have to stay tuned to find out who they are. But basically, it's just like this group of women who are working super hard. They know a lot.

They're always learning. They're trying to be the best they can at what they do and trying to help as many people in the process become healthier and stronger and fitter. And it's my honor to know them and talk to them. And maybe one day they'll invite me to be a part of their secret club of badasses. So stay tuned. Um, but so, okay, going back to Dr. Kybert, her expertise spans several therapeutic fields. She's into biomechanics, yoga, functional movement. She earned her doctor of chiropractic degree from the university of Western states in Portland, Oregon. She is a 200 hour certified yoga instructor, and she has her own podcast called muscle

medicine, which based on the name alone, I'm super into, but she's done a few strength and conditioning based episodes that are fantastic that you probably want to check out. And today we're just talking about what a strength-based holistic chiropractor actually does and does not do and what she offers at her clinic. We talk about things like hypermobility and how that can actually be a hindrance, an issue, and how you can address it. But mostly we talk about her strong first approach to mobility, to health, to wellness, and the idea of using a strength-based practice and paradigm to address health issues. Surprisingly enough, health issues like autoimmune disease, which is something that she struggled with and is also something that disproportionately affects

women. And some of the movement and exercise practices that tend to be marketed towards women can actually be causing more problems than they are helping. So the spoiler alert here is that more women should be strength training. But what's especially interesting is the ways in which strength training can help women, especially, but everyone. So this is for everybody. But I hope you enjoy it. And as always, if you do, please shout us out on social media. Tag us at Shrug Collective, at the Muscle Maven, and at Urban Wellness Clinic.

And help us share this super high quality, free information with people who can benefit. All right, that's it. That's my spiel. Here is my interview with Dr. Emily Kybird. Dr. Kybird, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to sit down. We're like practical neighbors. I know. It's so crazy. Okay. I have so many questions for you. I'm still trying to like figure it out in my head how I want this to like how to organize it. We'll see where this goes. But first, if you could kind of just introduce yourself to our listeners, just kind of tell us who you are and tell us a little bit about your clinic while I kind of get my head around how I'm going to ask you questions. Yeah, totally. So I'm a chiropractor by training.

I've done thousands of hours of movement specialist courses and really focus on taking someone who's in chronic pain, you know, the busy New Yorker, in chronic pain and getting them out of pain and strong. And a lot of chiropractors don't do that. It's usually like a five minute adjustment in and out. And so we've kind of combined chiropractic, soft tissue work, some DNS rehab, which is, you know, taking how we moved as babies and applying that to the rehab setting and then building strength on that. Because a lot of people that come to us do dance cardio or they do spinning classes and they don't have the skills to pick up their kid or lift their suitcase to the overhead. And so we're trying to give them those skills so they're just better at life.

So we have a clinic, urban wellness clinic, in Midtown Manhattan, 57th and 6th. And it's myself, two other chiropractors, a massage therapist, a trainer. And we kind of go at training through a strong first background and then an acupuncturist. So really just an integrative approach. Okay. I want to talk a lot about the strength aspect to this because as you said, I think that's sort of a unique part of what you do, but it's cool. So the clinic essentially is like a little bit of like a full service

situation where you might have some pain and you want to go see a chiropractor. But at your clinic, there's a bunch of other aspects to it. It's not just like you go in and someone kind of messes with your back a bit. It's like a very like, checking out your entire body and your history and trying to figure out the root cause. And then you've got other resources like acupuncture and a trainer and you have a dietrist too, don't you? Yeah, I'm a dietrist. Emily Splickle is in the clinic too. She's an awesome, she's a whole evidence-based barefoot academy, which is really cool. She teaches other instructors. Yeah. I mean, for us going back to like root cause, we like to say we're practicing why medicine. So if someone comes into us and they have wear and tear degeneration in

their low back or disc herniations, you know, impinging nerves and causing nerve pain down the leg, we want to know why, right? We want to more than just, yes, we're going to clean up the postural. We're going to make ergonomic recommendations. We want to know, is their core stabilizing? Can they find intra-abdominal pressure when they need to find it? Or do they like suck their belly up and in when they're like trying to pick up something, you know, um, is, is everything firing? Is everything firing, you know, together and are their movement patterns clean? Like 99% of the time, just from life and sitting and bad habits or old injuries or even surgeries, it changes our movement patterns and it changes the way we remember our movement patterns. So that's part of the cleanup. Oftentimes,

a lot of rehab and chiropractic is very passive. And people just want to lay on the table and get worked on. And over the years working with people, those people have kind of weaned themselves out because our care is very active. People are are moving, um, some of the soft tissue techniques we use, like active release technique, like you're moving through that through emotion while we're pinning a muscle down and working on any scar tissue or tightness in it. So, um, a lot of our rehabs active. And I think people appreciate that because they've kind of seen, you know, multiple chiropractors or physical therapists. And they're like, you know, I was kind of given the same things like clamshells and monster walks and side leg lifts. And you're like, that's great.

But when do you do that in life? Like a clamshell? Yeah, that's a good point uh yeah I mean you got to be willing to do the work right as much as maybe sometimes we do kind of want to just lie on the table and have you do the work that's not really you never really get anywhere with someone else doing the work for you yeah I think it also starts to change people's mindset um some people who they are their pain like they so identify with their chronic pain. When you can change their pain, like their sensation of pain in the moment by changing how they're moving, they're like, oh, my gosh, I am not my pain. So I think it starts to change people's mindset and people kind of go from a poor me to like a really empowered place. Yeah. I mean, people get so used to the way they feel that it's almost scary to think about

not feeling that way anymore. Yeah, totally. Yeah. So, and I think that there's a misconception too, that a chiropractor is basically just if you have back pain, like basically if you sit at a desk all day and your back hurts or your neck hurts because you're hunched over, that's what a chiropractor fixes. But you guys can address all kinds of imbalances, right? I mean, kind of talk about that a little bit more. Yeah. So in school, we learn adjusting of the extremities.

So like ankle, knees, elbows, everything. And then we also learn how to diagnose knee issues, labral tears, meniscus tears, ACL tears. Like we learn, we learn all that from a medical perspective and we learned the orthopedic tests and the signs and the symptoms. I think some chiropractors just like to focus on spine cause it's, it's almost easier. It's really, you know, this is an example. We had someone with an ankle sprain who a couple months later was getting headaches and it was tied to her not fully rehabbing her ankle properly. So her sloppy ankle was working its way up the kinetic chain all the way up to her neck and she was like locking down on one side of her occiput. So if

we just kept on adjusting and adjusting her neck, her neck would probably become too mobile. She'd probably get headaches, right? And the, really the root cause of like stabilizing the ankle, giving her ankle exercises, strength, learning how to load that foot um retraining her gait patterns like if that wasn't done and we only focused on where the pain point was in the neck um it would have been such a disservice to her so yeah we love to look head to toe we do we have we have this really long hallway i purposely built an office with like a hallway that goes end to end so that we can watch people walk and see their patterns and see are they loading one side too much. So yeah, I think, I think it's, you serve the patient and the client in such a more in-depth and you really serve them to the highest

when you're looking head to toe, not just focusing on the back. When is it, just to play devil's advocate here, when is it not a good idea to see a chiropractor? Like when, if you're having sort of pain, either muscular or whatever kind of issues and you're thinking, maybe I should see a chiropractor and they can kind of snap me back into place and I'll feel better. Like when, when would you kind of go through the intake with somebody and be like, you know what, I don't think that this is something actually that I'm going to be able to help you with. Yeah, totally. So I think one of the most important things is like knowing when it's not in your scope and when to refer out and also in the skills to be able to do that. So I just had a woman come to me recently and had really bad symptoms of bloating. She had like a visible goiter on her neck, which is a thyroid

condition. And just was like, basically woke up one day and was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, like joint pain, muscle aches everywhere to the point where she went on disability. And she was looking to me for soft tissue work adjustments to get rid of her joint and muscle pain. And I was like, this is not a biomechanical problem. You need to go see someone to clean up your thyroid, whatever else is going on. So we sent her to a functional medicine doctor down the street, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, who's also been on your show. And I was like, listen, go clean up everything internally, whatever it is, because I don't know what it is. I just have a sense. And then you can come back, like come back six months later. And then if you're still having every single joint

in your body ache, then we can start to work together. That would be one example. Another example I just saw was this guy. His symptoms didn't match up. He had numbness around his mouth, numbness in both his hands, on his abdomen. And just the orthopedic test didn't match typical nerve symptoms. So got an MRI, and he had myelomalacia, which is basically a disc that has herniated so much so that it's starting to soften the spinal cord and that's emergent neuro, that's surgery. Like that person should get surgery within the week. So knowing when to pick that stuff up is super important as a practitioner. And knowing like, I think potentially

a chiropractor might be like, you know what, we're going to, you know, cause chiropractors have a bad rap of being like, we're going to see you three times a week for the next nine months. You know, like if he had, if he had gone that treatment plan, that might be standard. There could be serious damage done. So those are two cases when there's something, maybe functional medicine going on, especially with bloating. If someone's bloated, it is super hard to get them to have good core stability and strength and build that intra-abdominal pressure because the bloating is competition for space so um we're always usually co-treating with someone that can help clean that up yeah okay first of all is there like a secret society of um badass women

doctors who are like the muscles because i keep meeting these people and then like gabrielle introduced me to you and then you're like it's it's there's a secret society and i want to be a part of it i guess i just have to go to medical school right well you talked with like melissa paris she's super badass um you know it's like a new york illuminati of like badass women who are like taking over the world and being super strong. I love it. Totally. I think there's like a common thread of this really strong mindset of coming up to a challenge and not seeing it as stressful, but rising up to it with courage. So yeah, I think it's like the women that have that really strong

mindset that it's, yeah, they just like gravitate towards each other. I think so. And I think there's also this like natural kind of curiosity and love of problem solving too, right? Because what I'm hearing already, just from the few examples you've given is like, no days, no two days are the same with you. Like you guys, you're always kind of coming up against these really interesting problems, because we're all all people and all of your clients, we're all sort of complicated, layered individuals with it's never sort of one answer, right? It's never like, Oh, well, you had one injury. And so that's causing x, y,Z, or you just sit weird. And so that's a problem. Like we always have a lot of issues.

So it's your job to sort of unpack and figure it out and try to address all the kind of different layers that are contributing to a problem, right? Totally. And when I think of like the women that you've had on like Gabrielle and Missy, you're all naturally curious. Like Gabrielle, you hang out with her, you try to talk to her, she is reading some research study. And she's like, don't bother me. Because yeah, when I interviewed her, she was like, literally sitting in a pile of like research papers. And like, yeah, yeah. And so this natural curiosity of like, if I don't know the answer, I'm going to go find it. And if the person's not getting better, I need to go find what's going to get them better. Same thing with

Missy. Missy's always studying pelvic floor. Like she's studying PT courses and she's a trainer. Right. And I think this natural curiosity of, um, wanting to be the best at what you do and wanting to, like, your clients and your patients are like family and wanting to bring the best self to help them get better is, like, it's really deeply ingrained in all the women that I know that are just wildly successful. Wildly curious and yeah, ambitious. I mean, I have the best job for that personally because I just get to talk to people like you every day and ask me questions. And I've always been very transparent about, I think that I try my best to ask questions

that obviously I feel like my listeners would want to ask themselves and want to know. But I also get to be super selfish and be like, hey, Emily, I got this. My hip, like you want to sort this out? Like I get to ask you kind of personal questions, too, which is great. I'll try not to totally take over and just ask you questions about my own issues. though, that you do talk about sometimes, and I wanted to get into this a little bit, because I think it will be very relevant to our sort of fit listeners, and also maybe women specifically. And that's the idea of hyper mobility, I think is probably generally a bigger issue with women. And I think that a lot of us tend to, we tend to think, okay, mobility is good. So let's, we wouldn't

worry about being hyper mobile. Like, if anything, it's like, well, check me out. Like I can do this and move my body like this and move my hips like this. But I guess there are, there are issues where with hypermobility and being a little bit too, um, flexible. So can you talk about that a bit? Yeah. So there's, uh, so there's, you know, a genetic predisposition for hypermobility. Like there's certain conditions like, like an earlier Danlos where the tissue is just more lax. So if you were to look at someone when they just stood, their knees would start to travel back behind their ankles. Almost like they kind of had like, like legs that looked like a horse, like they would have a big sway back. They might jut their chin forward. If that person was in a yoga class,

they might be the person that the teacher instructor is always coming around to correcting their elbows and putting a little bend in their elbows. If you take their thumb and you press it down towards like the soft part of the forearm, the thumb might actually touch the forearm. Like these are signs called a Baten score that are signs of hypermobility and there's a genetic predisposition, but then there's also the biomechanical, the dancers, the yogis, the ice skaters, the gymnasts, where they need that flexibility to perform their sports, right? So we often find that those people want a lot of soft tissue work. They're like, oh, I'm just so tight. I want a massage. I want to get adjusted. And you go to touch and feel their soft tissue,

their muscles, their tendons, and it doesn't feel tight. It doesn't feel like a trigger point where it's tight and contracted and it kind of feels like a little band, like a guitar string you're running over it doesn't feel that way and then when you go to adjust them you kind of build tension in the joint and it's like the tension never builds like the joint just keeps going going so um over the years when I would treat those people, this was like 12 years ago when I first started, they would come back and they'd be like, I'm so sore. Like, I feel like I was hit by a truck. And it was me putting too much mobility into an already hypermobile person. And, you know, if you go to great cook, FMS, SFMA, those techniques, they go, don't be an amateur. Don't bring, um, uh, a mobility solution to what really needs a stability solution, like a really stability

problem. So over the years, we will encourage women and we do it in the clinic. We'll do a little bit of soft tissue work. We usually don't adjust them. We do some rehab from DNS, sometimes PRI, Postural Restoration Institute. And then we go and we do strength training for half an hour. And at first they're like, oh, I feel so tight. And it's just them starting to feel integration of the muscle. So for example, usually we'll do like some posterior chain,

hip hinging stuff like deadlifts, even just like hip hinging to the wall, touching their butt to the wall and they feel tight, but it's really their muscles like integrating. And after about four weeks, they feel so much better. Those, like, I just had a woman, she had, um, hip pain on the outside of her hip for three years. This woman, if you just laid her on her back and lifted her leg towards the sky, straight knee, like a straight leg raise, you could almost like touch her leg, like up to her shoulder. And yeah, we started her dead lifting and doing push moves and some lunges and squats. And three years of the throbbing hip constantly, which sounds terrible after three weeks, she's

like, my hip doesn't throb anymore. I was I was like yeah because you were getting rolfing and structural integration and all this massage when you just needed stability and she was going to bodies and she was doing some PT but she was doing uh clamshells and she she needed to like pick up the heavy weight, own her movement, move the weight, put it down so that everything was kind of forced to like fire and stabilize from the foot all the way up. So it's so important. I think a lot of practitioners are like, oh, that, that spot's painful. I'm just going to massage it or I'm just going to adjust it. I'm going to put that Theragun on it and just smash it to death. And really, there's an underlying stability problem potentially somewhere else. So is it safe to say then that hypermobility is generally just sort of a lack of stability and therefore probably strength in a greater range of motion than most

people have. Yeah. I mean, there's definitely, and this is more of a clinical finding. This is not in any sort of research. A lot of like there's populations where from a clinical background, I see hypermobility more often. So in people with autoimmune conditions like Hashimoto's, where due to the low functioning thyroid, those women will have a predisposition to having low muscle mass. Their type 2a fast twitch muscle fibers actually turn into type 1 slow twitch, more postural muscle fibers. They have a slower, tender turnover. There's no research out there that says if you have an autoimmune condition, you have hypermobility. But just from a clinical finding, I see it all the time with people with

Hashimoto's or having a sluggish thyroid and, uh, and strength training to maintain that muscle mass because they already have a hard time maintaining the muscle mass is so important. The fine line that happens is not over-training and pushing them into adrenal insufficiency or flaring up their Hashimoto's. So the fine line to walk. All right. Just a quick interruption, guys, to tell you about my show sponsor. And I know you guys roll your eyes when sponsorship ads come up. But guess what?

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discount on some sexy ass high performance workout gear. And I wanted to ask again, I wanted to bring this back. It usually is women, right? Because are we we're more sort of just naturally inclined to be flexible for physiological, for biological reasons? Yeah. I mean, I think in general, men typically have more muscle mass, but we see it in men as well. Usually those men have some underlying condition that needs to get cleaned up from a functional

medicine doctor. So we've seen it in men and it will present as hip pain, hip impingement, a labral tear, pelvic floor pain. And their knees are so how they're standing in locked out. And they have like no muscle mass that the one place that knows to stabilize like a hip joint is, uh, just is working overtime. That would be what we've seen recently. Okay. All right. Um, another thing that you talk about and work on a lot is with women and helping them feel better and kind of build muscle and be strong is working through potential,

I guess, thyroid issues. And you have a program too, right? Yeah. So we have a program. It's online. It's a online video exercise. There's 10 videos and it's called Thyroid Strong. And it's encouraging women to use their workout program to beat their fatigue, feel strong and confident in their body. Weight loss is always an added benefit that probably every single woman Hashimoto's is looking for. And yeah, so it's online as well, if people can't get to us in New York City. I'd love to just like talk a little bit more about thyroid issues because it seems to me like, I guess there's sort of like a sliding scale, right? You don't have to have clinical thyroid or autoimmune issues for this to be a problem.

There could be varying ranges of intensity, you know, the issue that you're dealing with, right? Like how do people determine, first of all, that they're having issues with their thyroid? Yeah. I mean, I think some of the signs and symptoms or things that people feel would be feeling cold all the time. Like when I had hashimotos it would be summertime and i would be wearing a jacket and a scarf around my neck constantly um weight gain although that is a pretty common issue with women though right like and that's like even sort of like an ongoing joke it's like women are always cold or fear always cold right yeah but one in eight women will struggle with Hashimoto's. So it's pretty common.

Dry, itchy skin, super constipated, they feel depressed. Another big one that I also have felt is brain fog to the point where like you start a sentence and you can't remember what you were going to finish with. Extreme fatigue. And I'm talking you can't get out of bed and you just slept 14 hours. And you're like dragging. Muscle achiness, joint pain, hair loss. And really telltale sign is like the outer third of your eyebrows starts to disappear it's typically a thyroid condition and it's so stupid and crazy yeah so uh some women will like literally be like washing the hair and like clumps of hair will fall out so those are you know some of the common signs and symptoms and i think just making sure that you're seeing

the right practitioner that the right blood work is getting done um and that's obviously not my specialty that's like i'm just like go see the functional medicine doctors for that um you know this underlying thing so for example i had my first my first baby, who's not a baby so much anymore, he's three and a half, Elvis. And 18 months after, I was like, I couldn't finish my sentences. I had like 20 pounds I couldn't lose. Super fatigued. And everyone's like, yeah, you're a new mom. Yeah, it's hard losing weight as a new mom I'm like this is not new mom like there's definitely something going on every time I ate my tongue would hurt I had eczema I would go do a workout that would used to be like

the warm-up like 15 minutes of running or like a hip class and I would not be able to get out of bed for like two days I was so exhausted so uh some multiple doctors primary care endocrinologist gastro because I was also bloated every time I ate I saw a couple functional medicine doctors wasn't getting better and then one of my friends introduced me to Gabrielle she's like oh my god she's three blocks from you and she was like I'm so glad you came to me now because you are on your road to a permanent autoimmune condition and it was so much you know going back to the root cause I had two parasites um living in my tummy. So part of that was like a gut healing protocol, killing the parasites.

We have a house in Bali in Ubud. So during my maternity leave, we went to Ubud. Everyone that went, myself, my husband, my mother, same two parasites. Okay. I have so many questions already. I got to stop before I forget. First of all, I got to yell at you again. If you can kind of, you're, you're a little bit softer now after I told you about the issue. So just, no, that's worse.

I think how you were first was the best because it was, your voice was more clear, but you were a little bit softer. Mouth right up to the microphone, I guess. That's better. That's better. Okay. Okay. So let's walk this back. There's a lot going on here. First of all, Gabrielle and her parasites. When I went to see her, she was like, you probably have a parasite. I'm like, damn it.

Like everybody has a parasite. We all have parasites. Anybody who travels anywhere or does anything, if you're living your life, you're basically going to get a parasite, I think is the lesson that I learned. Yeah. That's kind of too bad. And they can get it in New York, you know? Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, it's very, I guess it's very easy, but I think people assume that that's something that you're gonna see immediately, like major crazy sort of side effects that are alarming that you'll know what it is right away. But a lot of this, a lot of the time,

it's stuff that you can kind of, it's like low level stuff that you can sort of live with forever and never really know what the cause is. And I think this is one of the tough things about autoimmune issues, because I've talked I've interviewed a lot of people over the years with different autoimmune issues. And it does tend to be almost exclusively women, which is another subject that's kind of interesting. But it's there's such complicated issues that have so much to do with your environment and your lifestyle and so many different elements go into it and they can happen sort of gradually. And then all of a sudden it hits you and you think it's like this acute thing when really it's something that's been

sort of building up over years. And it takes so long often, as you said, for people to kind of diagnose different things because there's just so many elements of what's happening to your body. But the Hashimoto's, so this is something I didn't know this. This is something that you can sort of have and then fix so that it's either dormant or it's gone completely. I mean, for myself, all my blood work was pointing to, have Hashimoto's like high antibodies. Um, all my numbers were off and it was affecting, you know, hormones and gut health.

And I went through Gabrielle's protocols, killed a parasite, which by the way, those suckers, when you Google them and you Google lays 20 to 40,000 eggs a day, you're like, Oh my goodness. I'm definitely Googling it when we're done talking for sure. Um, I had some heavy metal toxicity. Like I used to, um, do construction with my dad. My dad's a roofer.

And so we do construction every summer. So that was, you know, that was in there. Gut health, clean up food intolerances, like taking out the gluten, the dairy, the sugar, the alcohol, high histamine foods. Things you think are healthy, like blueberries, bananas, spinach, citrus foods, anything fermented, all gone. So for the past year and a half, my blood work's been like spot on, like as if I don't have any thyroid issues. So do you think it's the case though, that if, um, you know, you sort of, well, you're pregnant now, right? You're, you're pretty far along. Yeah. I am. I had to Google how far along I was in the day. Like I'm busy. I've got other things to worry about.

What size fruit my baby is right now. Congratulations, by the way. Elvis is an awesome name also. he's not gonna meet another Elvis that's that's pretty yeah that's pretty true um yeah so 29 weeks and blood work's been good through the pregnancy which is you know pregnancy is such a strain on the immune system in the body you know taxing on the thyroid on everything really. And my numbers have been really good. So yeah, it's good. There's, I guess, is it that you maybe have to be sort of hyper aware of these things because of your, your history with, you know, these challenges that you face, like if you kind of slip and you start to eat a lot of fermented foods and blueberries again and avocados and then you kind of have some gluten and then you're just chilling and whatever.

Like could these things kind of, is there this understanding that you're a little bit more sensitive to this now? Or is it one of those things where once you've kind of cleaned out the system and you've reached this baseline of health, like you're good to go? I think in theory, the idea is that i'll go back to eating those foods but i don't slip like i haven't when gabrielle's like you can't have high histamine foods two years ago and one of the like high histamine is like wine anything like i haven't had a drink in two years I haven't eaten gluten in two years like she was like this is what you need to do I was like great I'm gonna do it so yeah I think the idea is that the gut heals things heal I mean the blood work looks great. But my feeling is like there's certain genetic predispositions.

Like I'm not a good liver detoxifier that comes up in my 23andMe. Why push the liver if I don't have to, if I just don't drink, you know? Yeah, that makes sense. And I think it's worth bringing home, too, the idea that what's healthy for one person doesn't mean it's healthy for everybody, right? Like that's, we tend to get super dogmatic about our, our workouts and our food and like, this stuff is good and this stuff is bad. And that's not always the case with everyone. So for me, I'm thinking like avocados and blueberries are super foods and they're so full of nutrients and they're great and they're delicious and I'll eat them every day. That doesn't mean that they're good for you and vice versa.

So I think that that's something that's like I think more people need to sort of internalize. It's good to learn from other people and take the advice of smart, you know, medical professional professionals that you trust. But I mean, you also have to do your own due diligence and like pay attention to what your body's telling you and and all that yeah i mean i think you know the there's so much information out there it's so confusing but i'd like to have a personalized approach for you because i've had like bloating for years and um was vegetarian, raw foodie, did a juice cleanse for 30 days, you know, like tried so many different things and didn't work, but I wasn't going at it from like a medical, what does my blood work say? What does my ion test say?

What does my Dutch, you know, what does my Dutch test say? What does my heavy metal test say? Like, I wasn't looking at it through the lens of collecting data and then starting to change habits based on the data. Do we know why women are the ones who overwhelmingly deal with autoimmune issues? I don't know. I think that's like a question for like Ralph. Yeah. Yeah. Gabrielle. I'm not sure why personally. Um, it really does seem to be, I mean, again, I, I work with, um, I host another podcast with paleo magazine and I talked to a lot of people who deal with autoimmune issues because that's a big part of that community. People go to

eating sort of whole foods, paleo, keto, whole 30, all of that stuff because they're having these issues and they're trying to figure out ways to fix it with nutrition and lifestyle. And it's like, I don't know if I've met a man with an autoimmune issue. I mean, I'm sure they're out there, but it's almost exclusively women. Yeah, I've met a couple men who have had autoimmune issues. Um, but it's more from a genetic predisposition, like, like an earlier Dan Lowe's or, um, something like that. Yeah. So in your clinic, you, and this is going back to the thyroid strong program and and your work with hypermobility and stuff but you work with women who have autoimmune issues and hashimoto's and

um i guess there's a connection there with low muscle mass and i have this i think i took this from your website that low muscle mass and slow tendon turnover yeah Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah. I mean, there's, uh, the typical, let's say someone's strength trained three times a week for someone with an autoimmune condition or Hashimoto's that would probably keep them at like baseline. be gaining muscle mass so it's harder to create good integrity in the joints stability when you don't have like there's just less tissue stabilizing recovery takes longer. So, yeah. What does tendon turnover mean? That's a question for Kara, what's her name? Kara Luzakis.

She's a muscle physiologist, but it takes longer for like the tendons to heal, basically. She's been into like all the muscle physiology of that. I just know how to train it yeah okay can you talk a little bit about that without giving away the the sort of program but if people are if women are coming to you because for a whole host of issues but they want to feel better they want to feel stronger they want to have less pain and they think that it's connected

to a thyroid issue I mean besides just working on strength training or maybe that is the answer but what what are some of the things you do address for women who are having thyroid yeah so we teach them how to breathe we teach them how to breathe in grace like how to create intra-abdominal pressure good stability through their abdomen so that when they do go pick something up, um, they're not using their joints. They're actually using the brace of their core. Um, and then we teach them this concept called stacked. So you want your ribs stacked over your pelvis, right? So sometimes if we're sway back or our pelvis is kind of dumping forward into an anterior tilt, we're crunching down on our back and then the front of our core is getting overstretched, is not integrated. So we teach them that. We teach them how to find, like how to stand and walk without the hypermobility, the hyperextension in their knees. And we help them just clean up posturally, like ears stacked over your shoulders, over your

hips. And then we take them through a rehab sequence also considered a warm-up of how to move like we moved when we were babies right so you can't own a lunge a squat if you can't be on your back and bring your knees to 90 and breathe embrace down into your belly. Like on a neurodevelopmental level, like the brain on a primal level, it's hard to do higher functioning, more advanced moves if you can't do the basics. So we take them through a warmup of like starting on the floor, breathing, bringing their knees up to 90, rolling, getting them on hands and knees, getting them in a lunge position, a squat, and then up to stand just like we did when we were kids. So, um, we have a couple like rehab sequences for neck pain, back pain, shoulder pain, and hip pain. And, um, and then we have a beginner's workout.

And I think a lot of trainers that work with autoimmune population that don't even know probably do too many reps. Um, so a lot of our stuff, we're not doing more than five reps with that and every rep is the most perfect form and if the breath and the brace and the core doesn't happen then you don't you just reset and retake a breath right versus like cranking through 50 air squats or whatever um so and then we teach them how to start to load properly so it's really like a beginner's course like an intro course um because i think the common recommendation is go for a walk go to pilates uh go to yoga or get on the elliptical It's all low weight or too much cardio. And every single one of those women need to start to get strong, build their muscle mass, muscles like their metabolic engine. And I don't know, I always found it interesting that like people are not recommending more strength training.

I think it's just because they don't know how to progress someone with an autoimmune condition properly. Yeah. Well, this this reminds me of I was listening to one of your podcasts, muscle medicine, which I love. And you were talking with Chris Duffin, and you were talking about strength training, and much confusion and like conflicting information there is out there and how oftentimes it's kind of just best to like sort of go back to the basics. And in part because of that podcast, and there's another one I was listening to, I can't remember now. But it got me thinking about because I've been strength training for like 15 years and I've gone back and forth between powerlifting and CrossFit and like typical bodybuilding stuff and then training for specific sports like all over the place. Like I'm I'm a pretty like I'm an OG.

Like I was doing bicep curls when I was 15 years old. So I'm like, you don't have to sell this to me. Like I like I like strength training. But I mean, all of us, as much as we love to be in the gym, like you can have a little bit of like, either I don't know, mental exhaustion over the whole thing, or sort of boredom, or you get stuck in a rut. And it got me thinking about going back to basics, but really paying attention, like really thinking about that mind muscle connection and connecting what your your body is supposed to be doing. Because when you get relatively proficient at something, the next step is like,

well, how heavy can I go? And then how fast can I do it? And there's a little bit of that CrossFit mentality where it's like, oh, you learn how to do a snatch, now do 30 of them as fast as you can. You know, but going back to the idea of like, I've been doing like really, really slow controlled paused squats, like weighted pause squats, because I have a little bit of hypermobility, I think, with in my hips and stuff like I can kind of like, do a little bit too much, but without the stability and the strength that I need there, I think to get better at stuff. And I was doing these pause squats. And I'm like, the next day, I'm like, my core, my core is sore in a good way, like feeling like it has worked in a way that I have not felt from doing

squats in a really long time. And I'm like, how bad is that? Because I was probably, you know, I'm just kind of like, bouncing my way through these squats and not really paying attention to what my body's supposed to be feeling and how it's supposed to be contracting. And just putting a little bit more attention into it. It like did a whole different thing to my body. It was crazy. But and this is me saying I've been doing this for 15 years. And it took me this long to it, it like did a whole different thing to my body. It was crazy. But, and this is me saying, I've been doing this for 15 years and it took me this long to like pay attention and do some squat. Like it's pretty crazy. Yeah. I mean, I interviewed, um, Brett Jones, like the, uh, what is he? Director of education for strong first. And here's a man who's been

doing, you know, kettlebell work for like 20 plus years. And he says, every time I swing, I learn something new. I was like, excuse me, what? It's like every time I swing, every single swing, I learn something new. And every single swing, it's with working on form, syncing with the breath. And it's 20 reps of one.

It's not like just banging through them and getting through the workout. And I think that's what, you know, the really proficient experts do is they always talk about going back to the basics and just executing the basics really, really well. That's it. And when you look at it that way, instead of like, getting over the I don't know, ego of it all. And like, well, I should be just doing heavier or more and you just do it better instead. And you look at it that way, like every swing or every squat, I'm learning something new. That's, that's fantastic, because there's no reason to be bored or to think you should be doing something else when you're learning from every single rep. I mean, I think that's a cool way to look at it. But going back to the strength training with your your clients and your patients, like it's we kind of live in

a bit of a bubble, maybe, well, maybe because you have clients that aren't the same. But like, I live in a bubble where like, women are all all strength training and we love it. And we're trying to get jacked and we want to like lift heavy weights. And like, that's normal to me. And then every once in a while I step outside of that bubble and realize that, yeah, most people think that Pilates is like literally the only workout that there is. And I'm like, oh, okay, well, it actually is hard to get a lot. It isn't necessarily mainstream for women to want to lift heavy and be into strength training and that kind of thing. So do you have any challenges to overcome with your clients

in trying to encourage them to embrace strength training and get a little bit stronger? Yeah. I can't tell you how many women come to me and they're like, well, I've been doing Tracy Anderson for seven years or, you know, there's like so many variations of that now in New York and, um, or they only want to do Pilates and they are drawing up and in like to physically get them to breathe into their belly and to expand their

waist and create a brace is like near impossible. Oftentimes those women are coming in and they're slightly anxious, slightly nervous, breathing into their neck. They're getting neck pain, headaches, and overusing all those accessory muscles in the neck because they can't breathe down and wide. So, and then trying to, um, yeah, convince them like two hours a day of dance cardio in a whatever 98 degree heated room is not good for your adrenals, not good for, uh, muscle mass, it's a challenge, but I think people are coming to us hitting rock bottom a little bit. They are in so much pain, chronic pain that they just live with, that they're willing to make a change. And it's really baby steps and it's really planting the seed every time. And it's a little bit of tough love.

It's like, listen, we need you to be strong for life, for things in your life. Carrying your groceries, carrying your purse, you know, lifting your suitcase, like really basic things, getting yourself off the floor. And if you can't do those things, um, you're going to be in pain. So, you know, we're teaching them basic movement patterns, like a hinge, a squat, a lunge, a push, a pull, some sort of carry, and then some sort of anti-rotation move. Um, and building it slowly because there's like those habits of dance cardio are right in there like super way back booty pop like if someone goes down into the squat the first thing that moves is like their butt pops back and their back arches so yeah yeah it looks cute though cute especially when you're doing like spinal murder on your facet joints yeah yeah i wonder if you

can like try to like sneak it in you know you like get people to like dance around their living room for 10 minutes and be like oh wait here's a dumbbell pick that up like just kind of like you know like trick them into doing it without them realizing i mean i guess like there's an intimidation factor to it too because these these um like you know dance classes and pilates and i don't want to throw a lot of these things under the bus because again, different folks, but like they do a very good job of marketing for women. And they show pictures of these like sort of slim women. And it's like, this is a very welcoming space for women. And we haven't quite gotten there necessarily with

the strength training, um, sort of visuals, like even like, even, you know, environments where they encourage women to like CrossFit or, or different areas where women are in there, and they're working out, like, it's still like a very sort of, I don't know, aggressive sort of testosterone fueled kind of environment where some women are drawn to that for sure. But the majority of women, and especially if you're coming into it from a place of being unsure and not feeling fit or strong, like you're not going to feel welcomed into that kind of environment. So I think a lot of it is just making people comfortable or finding the space for them to feel like they are allowed to start from the bottom and try and it's okay if you don't go in with a six pack and be able to bench press your body weight. And, you know,

there's like a little bit of that sort of um marketing disconnect really yeah and i think there it really comes from i mean especially with a lot on like social media there's definitely women who are like showing how you can be strong and still have a six pack and look fit just by doing kettlebell work and not signing up for 10 Ks and half marathons every other month. Like Lacey Lazoff is one of them. She's in New York. Artemis has a whole course on don't be afraid to lift as a woman. I mean, we literally have kettlebells in our treatment rooms and someone will walk in and look at them and be like, oh, no, those are going to hurt me. And I'm like, well, not really. But like, let's let's reframe the perspective around them. It's not the tool. It's, I, I just, because in the spirit of transparency, I, uh, I don't like to,

um, I don't like to speak badly about anything that I haven't tried myself or experienced, you know, like I always joke about how I actually committed to reading the, um, the first Fifty Shades of Grey book just so I could shit all over it because I look, I'm a reader, like I'm into literature, I'm into literature I'm into fiction and I was like I knew that this book was gonna be real bad and I'm just like but I can't I can't talk shit about something that I don't know anything about right so I read that whole book just filling me with rage it was the worst book I've ever read I'm like I feel so bad there are so many women out there this is how they're getting their erotica like this is the

best that we can do is so sad anyway I'm going off on a whole tangent, but I want to experience it first. I did that with Pilates too. Like literally maybe three or four months ago, my girlfriend made me go to a Pilates class with her. It was like a class pass situation. And I had never really been into it before, but I'm like, yeah, it looks like it works for some people.

I don't know. It seems complicated. It's fine, whatever. And I did it and it could have been the class. It could have been the instructor, but I had such a visceral reaction to Pilates. I just, I hated it so much in a way that like, I've gone to, you know, dance classes and different sort of like group classes that aren't necessarily for me, but I'm like, I get it. I totally get why this works for people.

And Pilates, I'm like, you could do all of this stuff without this weird equipment. I hate it so much. Like just learn how to do a proper squat, do a plank, do a pushup. You don't need this weird contraption. It's so bizarre. It just seemed like such a weird, weird world to me. I just hated it so much. Anyway, I just had to give it all to my chest. So totally. I'm right there. Like every single thing that I've talked about, like I've done Tracy Anderson, I've done the dance cardio and, um, totally have struggled with injuries through those things. And it's interesting to watch habits as like someone who watches movement all day. So I'm also like a certified yoga instructor. I don't really teach that much anymore. I used to more so, but like when you go to a yoga class and everyone looks like they're kind of

actually the instructors like walking as if they're on like one of those airport escalators, like they're kind of floating off. Like it's because they have hypermobile hamstrings. They physically can't push off to like, you take a yogi and you make them go run. They are in so much pain for like three days. Same thing with, um, and this was actually my mentor, Gary Ward. He's a, he has a course called, um, anatomy emotion. And he looks at what does every single joint in the

body do through each, um, phase of gait in all three motions, like three planes of motion. And he was like, you know, you ever look at a Pilates instructor? And I have many friends that are Pilates instructors, so I'm not like throwing them under the bus because they do a lot of good work. But they also teach not like traditional classical Pilates. When you watch a Pilates person walk down the street they don't turn their torso they literally are like only moving their four corners like their hips and their shoulders they don't actually like shift rotate and load a leg when they step on that leg like it's kind of very like because they're taught you know because so much of it is like staying square, torso square, and then moving the extremities around that, you know, square torso.

So it's interesting to like know those kind of things and then start to watch. If you do go to classes, you're like, oh, yeah, everyone's like floating across the floor right now. It is interesting. It must be so funny for you to like go to like a cocktail party or somewhere and just watch how people move because you're seeing it in like such a Matrix style way that the rest of us are. Because we might notice like, oh, this person has weird posture or this person kind of like walks funny or whatever. But we don't we aren't going to pick up what that really means. Whereas you can be like, oh, I bet that chick does Pilates. Like, you know, right away just by how people move. Yeah, it's almost to like a default like i'm like oh man that guy's meniscus hair oh she probably has a disc herniation or like there's some shoulder instability on the

right side i mean gabrielle's the same she's like you know the dark circles under the eyes oh maybe that's food intolerance and heavy metal detox is going on, you're just nerds, basically. That's what we're really saying. But I mean, again, it goes back to like, everybody, you need to find what works for you. And, you know, fine if that's Pilates, but going back to the basics when it comes to food, when it comes to movement, all of those things.

I mean, I'm not saying that I'm trying to be like 100% quote unquote natural in everything I do, because we live in a modern world. And I don't even know what that means. But the idea of learning how to just move your own body through space, and lift things in a way that is replicated every day in your life just seems to make so much more sense to me than lie on this weird piece of equipment and like hold a thing and like move your body like it just it just boggles my mind it just I'm like I don't just pick up a weight like that's so much more fun and actually directly translates to what

you're doing in life right I mean I guess I mean I think you know if you take the population that is like in chronic pain or has like a disc herniation and every time they bend over, it's like a zinger, electrical pain down their leg. I can understand why they don't want to bend over to pick up anything. But on the flip side of that, I think they, you know, the old traditional medical model and recommendation was to lay in bed for six weeks. And everything atrophies, all the, you lose your muscle mass. You're not teaching your body how to move better. And so, you know, the newer day and age recommendation is to like move your body, not to the point

where you're like causing, you know, sciatica symptoms all the time, but move your body so that you're kind of like, you're going to feel some discomfort and then you like back off and you, you build your tolerance and resistance and you're just retraining your, your motor control, your muscle memory. So yeah. Okay. So I mean, you, you guys at your clinic, you have a really sort of whole body approach and you have a lot of different resources and people that can help at the clinic. But if you have somebody, for example, that you're working with in a chiropractic capacity, and like, do you offer sort of training programs or food recommendations, nutrition recommendations, or do you offer resources like, Hey, go check this person out. Maybe they can help you with that. Like, how does, how does that work? Cause you can only do so much in the clinic and then

what the, you know, the healing is going to happen in the other 23 hours of the day that they're out doing their own. Yeah. So we try to build it into their dates. Some of it is every patient that comes in sends us a photo of them at their desk. Because we could do the work, but if your desk is set up terribly, the other hours of the day, it doesn't really matter. It kind of voids out what we do. So we do like a virtual ergonomic assessment for all our clients. If we need to refer out, we totally do it. We want like what's best for the patient. So if it's functional medicine or a pelvic floor physical therapist, we have resources for that. Or if someone wants to strength train, but they live

all the way downtown and they're like, Oh, getting uptown is just too much. Like we'll find a trainer for them to work with downtown. Like, so having good resources of people who are like-minded is super important. Um, and typically people aren't coming to us for chiropractic. It's, it's very rare that someone's like, Oh, I just want to get adjusted. Um, so we're always building in the soft tissue, the rehab, the strength, uh, in, in the sessions, even if someone comes in, like, I just want to get adjusted because I want to open someone's eyes to like, what is possible and really what they feel, um, how they might feel different and feel better than just getting the traditional chiropractic adjustment. I think there's a

really important component of strength, which is getting someone to feel physically strong has such a powerful mental impact. It's like, if I teach someone to train and get strong on their own, will they not stay in that bad relationship? Will they speak up for themselves at work? Will they ask for that raise that they never thought of? Will they not feel like in danger if they're like walking down in New York city street at night? Like so much of the strength is like building that mental resiliency and that mental capacity that, you know, is like one of our kind of like underlying goals. It's like you'd sneak it in, but you know, that's not what the person's asking for, but you can see these tremendous

changes just through the strength training. Yeah, that's huge. That's so true. Like when you gain confidence in one area, it has so many positive repercussions in every other part of your life. And then that starts kind of a cycle because when you feel better in other areas of your life, then you kind of push it and the other ones and it just kind of steamrolls from there. Every single woman, so we treat a lot of also like prenatal and postpartum women, is getting them strong for pushing out a baby, whether it's a medicated birth or a home birth. Even if they're scheduled C-section, recovery is going to be so much faster if they are strong.

So for example, like every pregnant woman that comes to us, we're trying to get them to start to strength train. Obviously not if they come to us in their full term, but even just like if they're doing TRX squats, because I've literally had women come to me postpartum saying that they pushed for four hours, like was in that pushing phase of labor for four hours in a squat position. And it's so hardcore. I was like, I pushed for 45 minutes and I was like, I'm done. Um, so having the endurance to just go through that and give that endurance to a woman through strength, is there a higher probability that maybe they don't need a C-section? Maybe. And that's like such a life-changing, powerful tool that you can give someone.

What percentage of your clients are women versus men? Probably like 65 to 70% are women. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, cool. And you so we've got to talk a little bit about this um the the home birth and the birth thing thing because you're getting ready here for something you had you delivered Elvis home birth right and now you're getting ready for a second home birth so okay I don't keep you on on here day, but I kind of need to hear every single detail. Tell us, just tell us a little bit about the story. I was like all lined up, birthing center in a hospital, Mount Sinai West was with an OB and I started to tour the hospitals, which are supposed to do a labor and delivery tour.

And I remember touring the hospitals and I was like, yo, it smells like hamburgers and French fries up here. And every single door, every single laboring woman's room is open. So there's like a tour of like 25 to 30 of us pregnant women waddling down the hallway with our husbands. And you can literally look in and be like, oh, she's pushing in a spot oh she's like there was no privacy and I was like this is not how it's going to go down for me this is not how it's going to happen I'm like you get to do the tour I would never have gone way too introverted for this so um 30 weeks which is super late I started looking for other practices. Most practices don't let you transfer after like 16, 20 weeks. So I was like, okay. So then I started looking at birthing centers. I was like,

I'm just going to do a home birth midwife. So I interviewed two of the, um, there's a couple midwives that do home births that have been doing it for like 35 years in New York. And they're like, you know, it's really late, but yeah, we'll do it. And, uh, so one of them, the one that I went with was Marcy Tardio. Um, and she's been doing home births exclusively for, you know, 35 years. Um, and you know, my baby was breached. I had to get like an external four attempts an externally version like turning him from the outside um no sorry just to interrupt you don't know if the baby's breached until sort of you're going into labor because can't like they can they can move in the

meantime like if he's if he's facing the wrong way like a couple weeks out you're like oh well we'll just wait no no no so usually like 34 35 weeks they're like if he's not in position like head down you get an ultrasound if he's still breached then usually at like 30 36 37 weeks they'll try to turn them from the outside um and i was like i do not want a hospital birth so much. I'm going to get four attempts at this turning. Usually like if people do once and it doesn't work, they're like, all right, schedule C-section. And I've just seen the effects of C-sections, like the scar tissue, the numbness, like women 20 years later, they're numb right around their scar. They, they can't feel anything. The, the, how hard it is to get your core strength back. Like I see that with clients every day for the last 12 years, I was like, I'm going to try and do everything I can to not get a C-section.

And if I do need it, I feel so blessed to be in a country that has them, that offers them. So yeah, flipped him, um, water broke like eight days later. And then for 24 hours, nothing like nothing happened. I was like walking around getting some coffee, trying to get labor going, had some acupuncture. And then like four hours later, labor started. I was in labor for like 11 hours pushed for 45 minutes he was out I just know and at home with a midwife and a doula okay so you had a doula midwife your husband was there and did you have any kind of pain no it's not an option there's there is no there's no option. There's no epidural. There's no pain meds. It's like my heart, my heart blood pressure is going up.

So scary. Okay. So was this, and was this a conversation like with your, when you decided sort of late in the pregnancy that you wanted to go this route was your husband supportive was your family like are you crazy like what was the kind of conversation there before we toured the hospitals he was like no way no way you have babies in the hospital and then you bring them home that's how it's done Then he went on the tour with me and he was like, babe, you do whatever you want and I will support you. Cause it smells like french fries. There's no privacy. And I mean, here's the thing. Water breaks 24 hours. Nothing happens in a traditional hospital setting. They're going to start giving you pedosin in it and you know inducing you probably you know 12

hours in and with that comes typically epidural because getting induced is really painful it's like unnatural contractions and then epidural will slow down labor and then you know you're on a clock i just knew i didn't want to be on someone's clock I had it with the midwife I had the emergency plan we have like a long like if we like if my blood pressure was spiking you had a different kind of like you know emergency plan and so I just didn't want to be on someone's clock and the irony of it was Elvis came out, he was perfect, fine. And I could not deliver my placenta for two hours. So if you can't deliver your placenta, you basically will bleed out. And so at the end of my birth, I had to get emergency transferred because like my body

would not deliver my placenta. So I transferred um and at the hospital they gave me like uh some like basically took out my motor control from like my lungs down my ribs down and like my placenta fell out for whatever reason and um and even knowing all of that I would still choose a home birth, which I'm doing again. I mean, seriously, Mother Nature, like we give birth, it's not, it's not difficult enough, then you got to deal with the placenta after and there's like issues with that now. Like, it seems unfair. It's like, why can't that part just be easy? Why can't any part of it just be easy? Okay.

So are you having for the second home birth, are you having the same midwife? I'm having the same midwife. I'm having a different doula. In New York, there's doulas who are really good with hospital births and like being the patient's voice. At home, it's a different need. You need the doula to recognize what you need as a woman before you even know you need it. So I remember in my first birth, I was like asking my doula for water or like, kind of like,

no, there comes a point where like you physically can't talk. Um, so I was like signaling water and looking back, I was like a good home birth doula would know that I needed that like a half hour, a couple of minutes. So I got a different doula. She's been a doula for 35 years before like doula was like a thing. And so, yeah,

so I have these like two older women that are super wise that have been working together, Marcy. And then this woman, the doula is Loretta. And, you know, it's interesting. It's in the middle of birth. had been working together, Marcy, and then this woman, the doula's Loretta. And, um, you know, it's interesting because in the middle of birth in a hospital, when a woman cannot take

the pain anymore, they give you an epidural at home. That's not an option. So, um, they give you herbs and I basically, um, that's what happened the first birth. They gave me some herbs stuff. You can get a whole whole foods like valerian fruit like the next week he's like I think you should chill me out if I have a stressful day at work um so valerian yeah skull cap things like that and I you know I was like in a shot glass knocked back And I was like sleeping through contractions. Like I'd have a contraction, then I'd like knock out. So, you know, it's, there's not pain meds, but they have some other little tricks up their sleeve. So what are some things going into the second one that you learned from the first time around that maybe you you can bring with you or things that you might do differently or just like mindset or or just knowing because you've been through it once

now like is there anything that you're kind of doing differently or feeling differently about you know amnesia is a very amazing thing the human race would not be here without amnesia of like forgetting what it was like the first time around um Um, but yeah, you know, meditating, working out, um, working on my squats, whether they're TRX squats or just like goblet squats. And, you know, I think, um, when you take birthing classes, they talk about like moaning and, you know, just vocalizing, but on the flip flip side vocalizing can actually like wear out your energy really quick if you're like vocalizing and you're only like three you know three centimeters dilated so um i think you know one of the big recommendations is like

trying to sleep as much as you can but trying to rest as much as you can, but trying to rest as much as you can in labor, which I know sounds really crazy, but it's really true. Like conserving your energy and resting. And maybe it's just like resting and then having a contraction and then resting versus like vocalizing and like moving your hips around. Like there will be a time for that. But you know, I think I did that like a little too early and I was like wearing down quickly my energy and my midwife is like, we got to knock you out and just like,

chill you out. So take these herbs. Have some valerian root. Yeah. I'm definitely like going to Whole Foods immediately and buying all of it. Cause I, I'm not giving birth anytime soon, but I definitely want to chill out. And I like that idea. Did you ever, you didn't do a water birth or anything like that? It was just like, just set up somewhere comfy at home? Yeah, you know, it was really cute.

My husband had, we have a shower upstairs and a a tub downstairs like just a really massive bathtub and he had like rose petals and like these candles all lit up to do a water birth and um we had just gotten like a brand new couch and a brand new rug from like abc home and my midwife goes if you go downstairs and do a water birth, you're going to have to recover downstairs. And I literally was like, I can't get blood on the new couch. Yeah, because ABC is not cheap. And it was fine. Like I pushed for 45 minutes on my hands and knees in my bed.

But it's just funny to look back like look at how that was what was going through my mind in terms of like i'm gonna push out a baby it's so epic do you not do you like i always think too about i mean obviously your your the birth was successful and everything was okay um but that it it like do you not have like flashbacks like you're in bed and you're like i gave birth in here holy shit like is that not i guess it's a little amnesia thing right like totally amnesia like it doesn't i don't even think twice um yeah yeah that's just so badass it's so epic i want to i would love to have another chat with you um later on post home birth number two and we can talk about it yeah that's very exciting you know if it's gonna be a boy or girl

that's exciting okay does she have an awesome name too you don't have to tell us like my husband every day he's like we have to name her and i'm like we just need to push her up like there's so much especially because you know there's there's no intervention there's not like a medical doctor ready to like give you a c-section if something goes wrong like there's so much especially because you know there's there's no intervention there's not like a medical doctor ready to like give you a c-section if something goes wrong like there's so much like let's just get through the birth and then we can figure everything else out like the name like for elvis we didn't name him for four days because when you do a home birth you have a week to send in a birth certificate whereas like at the hospital you can't leave the hospital until you name the kid so yeah i mean for four days we were like taking names out of a hat

and trying them out and seeing his reaction you're like how does this one work yeah so i'm just like yeah all this stuff so so going back to the first one though, when you had the issue with delivering the placenta, you had to sort of be emergency transported to the hospital, right. Which was, I'm sure a plan that had already been kind of figured out ahead of time in case. Right. Um, so does that mean like you had to get into a ambulance with the newborn baby and go to the hospital? I really wanted the baby to stay home with my husband. Cause it was not, you know, if you bring them to the hospital, then they have to get admitted as a patient. Then it's like, then he gets like,

you know, these drops in his eyes and like just stuff that like you have an option not to do at home. And, uh, and so we had to like call the hospital, talk to the doctor on call get the approval to like have the baby stay home and then it was like clean up you know the the aftermath the mess of the home birth and then emt cake um the emts came and it was like five dudes and like my like naked post-birth body just trying to wrap it up and uh yeah and it was like getting in an ambulance and going to the hospital and like you know getting admitted but you know I got admitted at like 10 I was home by six that night. Yeah, it was definitely, it was definitely an experience. And I remember looking at my husband and he was like, I don't know what to do.

Should I stay with baby? Should I go with you? And I was like, and almost like this fear and frantic. And I, and I had this moment of like, I was like, Oh my God, you can't make a decision. And he, you know, the emotion of having a new baby. And I was like, you're going to stay here. I'm going to go to the hospital. It's going to be fine. Just take care of the baby. So.

Yeah. I mean, he's probably got his own whole side of the story where it's like, you know, you, you give birth and it's like this epic thing and holy shit we have a baby now and then like an hour later you're gone and he's like at home with this newborn he's like oh god what do i really called three guys to come over to sit around and help him and it's like babies come out and they sleep goodness they just like you know they just have like you know the the adventure of coming out and then they knock out and typically mom knocks out too but it was him and his like three best guy friends like sitting

around just like holding staring at a newborn baby that is so intense and so are there not like the first week after because i I guess this whole kind of schedule will be different for a home birth, but the baby has to get like checked out by somebody? Like are there, there's like initial sort of like tests or things that they have to do? How does that work? So the home birth midwife will do that. So they'll weigh them.

They, she comes back like two days later, make sure breastfeeding is going okay. Usually it's not, it's usually kind of tricky to get a good latch and um yeah there's certain tests there's like a pin prick to the foot you just draw a little blood and then you send that out and um and then you know they go to the pediatrician like a couple weeks like there's there's not a lot of like you know i think what we see on tv of like baby comes out they go to this like station they're cleaned off and suctioned and you know all socks is measured like that doesn't um it doesn't really happen like baby comes out and they like lay on your chest and like breastfeed basically yeah and sleep and coke and then two years yeah it is true though we think of it as such a like highly medicalized process

so many things you have to do you got to check the baby and do this and do that and it's like if if everything goes well which you hope it does there really isn't a whole lot of intervention that needs to happen generally. Okay. I got to take a deep breath. This is like, I haven't had a kid, but I've been talking to a lot of people about it. I mean, I'm at the age where everybody is having babies and like Gabrielle's got hers coming on the way. And we had a great podcast chat about that. And it's just, it's, I don't know how anyone, I mean, it's fine if you don't want to have a kid, I'm still sort of on the fence, but I just don't know how as a woman, you can't sort of be like a little bit fascinated with the process because this is your body. Your body is doing such crazy, like gnarly things. It's amazing. Like it's just, I, I, yeah, whenever I have a chance to ask people all of the, all of the tiny details about giving birth, I need to because I just find it so – it's one of the most incredible things that human beings can do. day in pregnancy is different like every single day you're like oh my god my calves hurt oh i'm

having like a headache like hormonal headache and then the next day like i feel great i can like take on the world and then the next day you're like my hands are swollen like it's like every day i remind gabrielle of this uh i was like every day is something different and it's the ultimate form of letting go of like kind of giving it up to the universe and just being like okay i'm gonna accept what is you know given to me and um you know yeah there's so much there too you know with like around birth and then the pregnancy i'm just like staying really steady and um i i you could say having faith i'm not like a very religious person i'm spiritual but just yeah kind of giving it up to the universe and

like this all it's like the ultimate ultimate letting go yeah i mean i think it's a lesson that um we can all learn men and women the idea of being able to sort of adapt and let go when things are outside of your control. Because a lot of us are type A people. A lot of us like to be in control of our situation. And it's good to know that we have the ability to control a lot of the things that goes on in our life. But I think that it's very naive and silly to think that we can try to control everything and that to stress about things we cannot control is helping anything. So it's, you know, and it's easy to say it, it's another thing to do it. But I think that it is a really, really valuable lesson

for people to learn that when things do happen that you have no control over, it's how you react to that situation rather than try to like grasp onto it and fix things that are, you know, there's nothing you can do about it. It's your mental sort of state and your reaction to it that makes a difference. All right. So I know you have work to do. I don't want to keep you much longer. We'll have to do a part two, but I do have one sort of last topic that I want to chat about. And you did mention it during this epic pregnancy chat and that is acupuncture and you said that you were getting acupuncture maybe to try and stimulate labor yeah so I got acupuncture for two reasons when he was breached there are

certain acupuncture points that will encourage the turning of a breached baby. Those points are like on the outside of the pinky toes. And you actually, you use moxa and you just burn moxa to like the outside of the pinky toes. And it's supposed to encourage a baby turning. So that was one of the reasons. And then the second one was there's this woman in New York named Sarah, her whole practice for acupuncture is doing home visits to get labor going. That's like all she does. And, um, she came over, I like sat on this, uh, a ball and kind of just like put my arms on my bed and she put needles right on my sacrum and in my low back and their acupuncture points to, you know, get labor kicked in. It was the most painful acupuncture I've ever had in my life.

I was sweating the backs of, I just remember sweating from like every single, like my elbow creases, the backs of my knees. And you know, when they like put an acupuncture needle in, it was so painful and they turn it a little bit and you get like a little, like almost like a little feasting. So she was like spinning the needles, spinning. And I was like, I think, I think we've done enough twisting of the needles. And she's like, no, we got to get labor going. I was like, I think I'm going to need a little break. And so she like went and took a break. Five minutes later, she's like back to spin the needles.

I was like, we're doing more spinning. I know, but it was like, okay, if labor doesn't get going and my water's broke, like, you know, it was kind of like, it's this or something else. So what's that? Yeah. Four hours later, it was like go time. Or something else. So what's that? Did you think it worked? Yeah. Four hours later it was like go time. What? That's crazy.

I didn't know. First of all, I didn't know that any acupuncture hurt. I thought that it was all supposed to be pretty much painless. Because it's like tiny needles. You have them when they do like a little turn of the needle. And it kind of gives like a little zing. Or like a little kind of bee sting. Yeah. of gives like a little, like, like little zing or like a little kind of bee sting. It was like that, except there was like 20 needles in my low back.

And I was like, Oh my God. Just like a precursor. I mean, if it was that or a C-section, yeah. Give me the needles any day. So yeah. Yeah. Do you think that there's any and you have um people who do acupuncture at your clinic that's another service that you guys offer right do you think that there's an element of acupuncture where it works if you believe it'll work or is this like it is purely like it's scientifically proven like Like you kind of do this for that reason. It's going to stimulate X, Y, Z.

Like, is there an element of like, you sort of have to, have to believe in it and have to want it to work? I mean, we've seen a lot. I mean, this would be a better question for like Ralph, because he's an acupuncturist and functional medicine trained. But I think with acupuncturecture there's a reason it's been done for thousands of years and these points are like certain points that stimulate certain channels and meridians um i've literally gone into the acupuncturist with like gallbladder pain

and walked out and didn't have gallbladder pain like i would have all that pain for like four days straight go to them and it would be gone and uh i don't know if it's a much as like a belief um obviously there's like a user like the person placing the needles and how they place them and what points they stimulate and what meridians are you know they're stimulating will affect the treatment. But I'm a big believer in it. Like I used to get a lot of insomnia during the summertime. It was the only thing that calmed that down. So I really love it. We recommend it a lot for really contracted scars,

whether they're surgical or a C-section, if you thread the needles on both sides of the scar, you'll literally see like changes. Like if you took a biopsy of the tissue, you would see like fibroblastic change of the tissue, like a healing, like a healing response of the tissue, breaking down the scar tissue. So that's like we refer out a lot for breaking up really bound up contracted scars, like knee surgeries and C-section scars, really any surgical scar. But we find a lot of like good success in that realm. Okay. Yeah, I guess it's like, it's one thing that I haven't done yet. And I don't really know what my holdup is. I don't really have an issue with needles, but I just have never kind of opened up to the idea, although I'm sure that I could benefit from it. And you just

mentioning insomnia, that's probably one of my bigger issues is getting to sleep and kind of calming down at the end of the day. So it would be worth probably looking into it for that reason. I mean, people have been doing it for a long time. A lot of people have been doing it, so they can't all, all be wrong. So maybe I should, maybe I should open my mind a little bit. I mean, I think it's like, they're going to do a deep dive. They're going to be like, how's your sleep? How's your digestion? They're going to look a deep dive they're going to be like how's your sleep how's your digestion they're going to look at your tongue they're going to feel your pulse like they're going to get into potential you know things that you may not even know you're struggling with um and right i i there's like a certain kind of acupuncture where they put like electro stim on the needle that is really intense i'm kind of born to just like the traditional

kind of acupuncture with just like needles. But yeah, I love it. I think it's great. Great complementary to the movement, the chiropractic, the soft tissue work, the strength training, all that stuff. Cool. Well, just like Fifty Shades of Grey and Pilates, I can't knock it. So I gotta add it to the list. I'm curious, just like you, I gotta try it before I say anything. Okay. All right, Emily, thank you so much for taking the time. This has been amazing. I feel like I could keep asking you questions forever, but I will let you get back to your day um but thank you so much and i yeah i really would love to um have a chat with you again when you're sort of all recovered and back at it after baby number two and congratulations and good luck with all that thank you so much thanks

so much for having me it was such a fun chat and tell tell our listeners where if they want to learn more about you and follow you guys online. Because I know you offer a lot of resources on your website and stuff. Yeah. So it's urbanwellnessclinic.com. We are Urban Wellness Clinic on everything. Facebook, Instagram. You have lots of health tips on our Instagram.

We're probably most active on that. For Thyroid Strong, it's urbanwellnessclinic.com slash thyroid underscore strong. I can give you the link to drop in the show notes. But yeah, that's those are the main places. All right. Sounds good. All right. Thanks, Emily. Happy Friday. I'm going to come see you soon. Okay, that's it. Thanks, as always, for listening. If you have any constructive feedback for me about the podcast or any guests you want me to have, hit me up on Instagram at the muscle maven, or you can email me directly. If you head to my website, it's just my name,

Ashley van Houten.com. And that's in the show notes because I know it's spelled weird. Anyway, you can go there and you can sign up for my weekly newsletter. You can learn more about what I'm up to, and you can send me an email all about whatever weird topic you want me to discuss next. Okay. So shout out once more to my show sponsor, Highleet, uh, super into the gear that they sent me. And if you want to check it out and try some of their high performance workout stuff, you can go to highlight.com and use the code maven15 for a discount. And make sure you join me next week for a chat with a dear friend of mine and arguably the world's most interesting woman. Her name is Vanessa Lambert, and she's a coach. She's a co-founder of Be The Wellness, which offers high-end, super incredible, actually, healthy adventure retreats.

But this woman has also been, she's lived a dozen lives already. She's been a competitive athlete in a number of sports, including CrossFit. She was a competitive surfer for a while. She ended up teaching surfing in Hawaii. She was a firefighter. This chick's 5'3", by the way. Anyway, that's just the tip of the iceberg. She has an amazing story. She's got a lot of valuable lessons. So join me next week for that. And until then, have a great week, everybody.