Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #12 Human Movement and Taking Control of your Health with Gary Ward

Episode Date: April 4, 2018

Dr Chatterjee talks to Gary Ward about his journey on discovering his passion for human movement, how he believes healthcare professionals and movement specialists can learn from his philosophy and why we should all be in control of our own health. Show notes available here: drchatterjee.com/garyward Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee/ Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, my name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, medical doctor, author of The Four Pillar Plan and BBC television presenter. I believe that all of us have the ability to feel better than we currently do, but getting healthy has become far too complicated. With this podcast, I aim to simplify it. I'm going to be having conversations with some of the most interesting and exciting people both within as well as outside the health space to hopefully inspire you as well as empower you with simple tips that you can put into practice immediately to transform the way that you feel. I believe that when we are healthier, we are happier because when we feel better, we live more. I'm really excited to welcome today's guest onto the podcast. It's somebody who actually is pretty hard to put in a box. He is safe to say the person who I give the most credit for actually getting rid of my 10 year history of back pain for good. Mr. Gary Ward.

Gary, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Ron. And it's an absolute pleasure to be here. Gary, look, we've got to know each other really well over the past few years. And in that time, we've actually done quite a bit of work together. I always try and share with the listener how I met some of my guests. And if I just sort of rewind back a few years, I can't actually remember when it was now but I 2012 I think maybe 2012 yeah I like many people have had a long history of back problems and you know like many people until I had a back problem I never thought about my back I just got on I did what I needed to do yeah and I was at university I was at medical school I think

I was in the final year there and I was helping a friend of mine Mary move into our new apartment and I was lifting boxes all afternoon didn't think about my technique didn't think about whether my back was straight or not I was just a you know a young strong guy moving boxes and then boom out of nowhere sharp pain in my right lower back and I fell to the ground I couldn't get up I screamed out in agony and that was the start of a 10-year journey pretty much of having to give up things that I loved having to spend a lot of time at different appointments spend a lot of money on a lot of private therapies to try and get me better but frankly I was still in back pain I was I was still in pain and I wasn't getting better and around that time I was really into

skiing so I was watching a lot of ski videos and I think I saw something online that you were doing something at a ski show I think ski show yeah yeah and you were there was something that you said that really made me resonate with you. I thought, wow, he's looking for the root cause of the problem, not just looking at backache being a back problem. And so I've always been very open-minded. I've always wanted to learn. And I found who you were on the internet,

and I signed up to go on one of your courses because you are you're an educator you educate first and foremost yeah people all around the world and i actually came and signed up for one of your courses and actually started to learn some of these uh you know these ideas that you you talk about in your education courses that you talk about in your book what the foot and by doing that you got rid of my back pain almost instantaneously. I think over that weekend, I was doing some practical work with the groups, and you said to me, Rongan, your right foot is stuck in pronation, and pronation is, for people listening who are not familiar with pronation,

often that can be a flat foot, but you said that's the problem and actually if we get your right foot working your right glute your my bum muscle will start working and that should have a positive impact and you gave me just two or three exercises and literally within about two or three minutes i could just suddenly feel that that tension in my back had gone. That's a very shortened and abbreviated version of what happens. But, you know, Gary, how, you know, how did you get to being an educator, an author and being, you know, in many ways, a specialist in the foot? How did that come about? That would be my backstory, I suppose. how did that come about um that would be my backstory i suppose um i was skiing i was an educator i was in teaching teaching french and german and i decided that wasn't for me and disappeared to the french alps for some solace and to find myself and expecting completely to

find the feet which i discovered were there at the end of the legs during ski boot fitting training. So I spent a good bunch of years from this point onwards fitting ski boots, working with feet. We used to build orthotics to help a foot sit comfortably inside a ski boot. And that invariably involved changing the structures of the feet. My foot education came in three days. One with a guy called Julian Mills, who can be found in Chamonix. A guy called Croc, who I think can be found also in the French Alps still, who was living in Saint-Foy.

And the Conformable Stroke CEDAS guys, who were the insole makers, and were down in Voiron in Grenoble. And these three days just helped me understand how the foot moves, very simply, like three days or, you know, three degree. But we did it in three days and I fell in love with it instantly. And I learned that I had this idea that a foot, of how a foot should move and how a foot should rest on the ground. And then I'd be presented with countless feet over the day of ski boot fitting every day, weeks, 20 weeks a year,

and would be able to see a foot and say, that foot shouldn't look like that. It should look like this. And which part of the foot is not where it should be and where should it be? And we would then build the orthotic to help influence the shape of the foot and help it sit inside a ski boot that was precisely fitted so that it wasn't too big wasn't too small goldilocks principle just just right for the person and what started to happen with people would have their ski boots fitted and because we were right there on the slopes in marybell they would go out and they would have a ski if there was a problem they'd come back immediately and if there were successes then they would come back at the end of the day and let us

know and what people were remarking on was how their skiing had improved with nothing more than the addition of a new ski boot and in my opinion a well-aligned foot but also that their pain would go away and it wasn't pain that was in the foot, but pain in their knee, pain in their back, some people pain in their shoulders that they experience when they're skiing. So on one level, we were enhancing people's performance by making subtle changes to the feet, and we were eliminating their pain by making subtle changes to the feet. So as you can imagine, somebody who was, you know a year or two before was was trying to teach kids to speak french in a classroom this was completely uh mind-blowing information um so i then chose to

work out my way how do i get to understand more about the rest of the body because this is just the foot and it's part of a whole big thing i was in the alps because i was a bit sick of education to be fair so i didn't really want to go down a degree way so i got the quickest way into the system i could and that was personal training and sports massage therapy so um i guess that's that would be what i am by qualification but kind of seems overly narrow for you yeah just call you just a personal trainer not there's anything wrong with personal trainers it's just not at all it doesn't seem to just resonate with me if i think about you about me yeah no i know um but i don't you know there's no point beating

around the bush i don't have that classical medical background so this eventually all came out of a pure fascination there was confusion in in the mechanics that were being taught for a personal trainer and there was feelings in the body that i got through massage therapy and there was my own body that needed to move and my own discomforts and over the years i learned to understand how my body wanted to move and how the mechanics of the body wanted to move and gradually started building a picture and fast forwarding to today we ended up with this concept that I call the flow motion model and the flow motion model is how every single joint moves in three dimensions not only

how every single joint moves in three dimensions but how they sequence to the joint below and the joint above as we walk through the human gait cycle. So we ended up with, everybody knows that when they're walking, you'll put your heel on the ground, then the foot will go flat, and then you'll come up onto your heel off the ground onto your toe. But what we're not necessarily aware of is that there are sequenced shapes that we would ideally make if we're going to follow this idea of a flow motion model now it's not everybody's cup of tea walking is walking but by spending time analyzing joint mechanics in walking recognizing that there are specific movements who want to happen in the foot specific movements who want to happen in the knee and a relationship between the two relationships

between the hip and the knee and the foot and then that works up into the pelvis and the spine. Suddenly you can map the whole body. And that's essentially what I've done. That's what people invite me to educate them in. And then talking about the personal trainer, we're able to use this to help personal trainers understand on a higher level what it is that they're doing and they're influencing in their training programs. And on the therapy side, we have therapists coming in.

And what we're able to do with them is to help them recognize that the thing they're treating, as you described as the root causes, there may be blockages in people's movements that mean a person has no option but to have pain in a certain part of their body. movements that mean a person has no option but to have pain in a certain part of their body treating that area of the body may not necessarily set them free until we put the movements back into the places that have been lost yeah so just to be clear you you were in education and then you went off to the alps just to escape that for a bit to sort of just have a bit of fun find yourself and you were just working in a ski boot shop as a as a job yeah but no other interest apart from okay it's a bit of bit of work but a spare cash when i'm out here absolutely and then by seeing lots of feet every

day by having that three-day what sounds like a master class really in feet and seeing how people are coming to you because they want to have a better ski holiday and they want a comfortable ski boot and one that helps them ski better yeah so you see a lot of feet you figure out with your training and with your intuition what a foot should look like you help that person have that perfect model of a foot with an insole with the with the correct boot and then you're getting feedback from your clients that hey yeah I'm skiing better but also that that pain I had in my back or my shoulder that's gone as well and so you're then putting this without probably without realizing it you're starting to put all these connections in your brain going hold on a minute their foot is in a better anatomical position but that is feeding through

the rest of their body what the hell's going on yeah absolutely there are relationships going on that are unseen unseen and unconsidered and not talked about and more courses i would do nobody would talk about these uh relationships and so they needed carving out and they needed examining. And I often say, because there's often a lot of positive feedback. People come on the courses because of the positive experiences they've had or because of somebody else's positive experiences. And I always marvel at the fact that people are having positive experiences with this work. And all it is that I feel like I have done is write down what the body does and dictate when it does it. So those two things alone, for me, should have been really stand out obvious. We should all be able to describe when the knee bends and when it extends

and when the pelvis rotates in a certain direction it should be obvious but unfortunately it isn't and so it's taking somebody to stand up and actually have this conversation to open people's eyes um and so that we can move forward as a therapy and training industry yeah i remember on that course that i came on um i think it was called anatomy and motion level one back then has the name changed now we just we have a six-day immersion program where we just check people were getting such good stuff from the from a two-day level one that they didn't bother coming back for level two three and four because they thought they had the keys to the kingdom just pronating feet and supernating feet and setting people's bodies free so we now have a six day where we check everybody in and everything in and leave no stone unturned in the process yeah it is incredible really because

you know i know i was the the first medical doctor to go on your courses and i know you you teach a lot of different professionals i know you know i'm sure you can fill fill me in but i know you've had personal trainers physiotherapotherapists, osteopaths, yoga instructors, Pilates instructors, doctors like me. You've got all kinds of different people who are coming because your tools can be applied by many different people. Yeah. For want of a better phrase, and I say that because it sounds almost arrogant, but our quest is almost to find the truth about human movement. How does this structure move truly and honestly and relating all the way up and down through the whole body?

So if you can understand that, if you can have a real appreciation about how the body moves, you should in theory be able to take any person's posture, any person's movement patterns, any person's discomforts and work the patterns back into the system to help unravel it it's really it's it's um it takes you away from the idea of looking at the problem yeah because you really got to look at the bigger picture yeah and what i think on some level i've always resonated with your approach or what I've resonated with about your approach is that the way I look at medical problems that come into my practice now is I try and take a step back and look at the whole 360 degree picture and go, well, what's the root cause of this?

And in many ways you do that, well, you do it holistically anyway, but you very much do that with the body and the body's mechanics in that a back problem may not be a back problem or back pain may not be a back problem. Or I think in your first course that I think you said something like, you know, a knee problem is very rarely a knee problem. Your knee is in between your hip and your foot. And it could just be a reflection of problems there. Between a rock and a hard place, yeah.

Yeah, and so your knee's taking the strain and we're looking at the knee and trying to massage the knee and do what we need to do with the knee, but actually the problem could be somewhere else. And if I just talk about my own story, we're having a back issue and I went round the house as I saw a top spinal surgeon. I got an

mri scan i went to all the nhs physiotherapy appointments i went to lots of private therapies and you know i had got some relief but it always would be temporary and then it would come back so you know a back problem okay we're gonna it's a bit of tightness there in the back let's loosen that okay fine it was loose my pain had gone three or four days later boom so i'll come back again because i hadn't altered the movements and i hadn't altered the structure that led to that problem being there in the first place and that's really i think what i got from you is wait a minute nobody has ever looked at my right foot so nobody's ever ever apart from once i once went to see a podiatrist who put me in an orthotic and maybe if we've got time we'll explore orthotics a little bit later because

interestingly enough yes i did have a flat foot when i first came to see you and i used to wear orthotics for it but just in a few years of doing maybe five minutes tops a day and that was it's not every day right i don't have a flat foot anymore like you've helped me re-educate my foot so it is no longer foot so it's actually got a natural arch in it yeah which is completely so far away from what i was taught uh and what the conventional wisdom is and i think you know is there anything there you want to comment i think you nailed that on the head there um there are many schools of thought where there is an idea that structure cannot change um which is not i can't subscribe to that at all because because i often see it feel it and people experience it in our classes and courses um but

you said so much there my head was exploding with with ideas but right back to the beginning you there are so many ways of treating the back from from a back crack to a stretch to a tennis ball in the back or a foam roll uh many many techniques many many gadgets but if the back isn't the problem you can you can foam roll that thing all day long the way when you stand up and go for a walk on a foot that you just described the limitation of movement in that foot will limit the movement in the lower leg which will limit the movement in the knee and therefore the upper leg until all of a sudden you're at the pelvis where the movement limitations in the pelvis are visible and strong and now your back cannot move because the pelvis can't move because your foot

can't move and so it's very hopefully that's not too much of a leap for people to make so the flat foot i remember your foot obviously and you're not the only person we've ever had with this and weirdly there's only it's a huge foot yeah but um even little feet can have the same problem. And there actually aren't many ways that we can distort this posture of ours. That's the fascinating thing. So there may only be a few movements that we can do to revisit that actually help restore whatever that was. But your foot was flat for one. I'm doing that in inverted commas.

No one can see me do my fingers, so i thought i'd bring it up front but that uh shape of the foot when we moved your talus bone and managed to help it sit up which is what the orthotic would have been intending to do but being able to do it in a way where it allows your knee to move differently allow your hip to move differently allow that space in your back to open so it's no being compressed, but can actually have an opportunity to decompress for the first time. Suddenly means that the sensory awareness that you had, which was a signal set going to your brain that says, this hurts, or there's a problem. All of a sudden, you had no reason to send that signal anymore. So the brain doesn't experience any pain. I mean, that's kind of pain in a really quick nutshell. Pain is a signal of warning. And that warning says says something's going

wrong in my body um that we need to change that signal is not i've got back pain please rub it crack it foam roll it stretch it we we have to go from i've got pain in my back so there's something going on in my body yeah and i think when we move from that space we'll stop seeking people to rub it and crack it because it doesn't actually it doesn't help the einstein principle of course would be if it didn't work the first time you've got to look somewhere else because otherwise you drive yourself mad going again and again and again and again for the same for the same process so um like i said my brain was kind of exploding there but but i think i think what's it what's a key point i think for me to bring in there is that what you're doing with your education courses is allowing people

in many ways to expand their toolbox so for example if someone is used to manipulating a back or actually releasing something locally they can still do that absolutely but then there's a bit of further education there where they can say well look i'm going to do that absolutely but then there's a bit of further education there where they can say well look i'm going to do that we'll give you some temporary relief but now i'm going to help you re-educate your body how it wants well not even your body actually put your body in certain positions to re-educate your brain so your brain starts to remember that actually it's a lot easier and more efficient to move like this and certainly that's that's what's happened with me and and what i always

find and i've taught many patients your exercises i've taught many of my friends your exercises or i i have tried to within within sort of my capability yeah um strategy style strategy style exactly i i found that everyone sort of you do even 30 seconds of those exercises and you walk a bit differently afterwards. You're not even realizing it, but something has significantly shifted in your body. And I really resonate with what you taught me, which is basically your brain knows the most efficient way to move. So if you help put your body in the right position, your brain will start to remember and go, hey, it's much easier to move so if you help put your body in the right position your brain will start to remember and go hey actually it's much easier to move like this yeah and you know yes it's helped me i know you've helped countless people for people who who are listening i know some people listening may have

seen the bbc one documentaries i made called doctor in the house for those of you who have seen them and i think you can actually find them on youtube anyway but in the house for those of you who have seen them and i think you can actually find them on youtube anyway but in the very first series you may recall that there was a bodybuilder who had a 30-year history of chronic back pain and he had been to see three i think musculoskeletal consultants he'd been to see a whole load of physiotherapists and you know everyone had tried their best to help him within within the you know with the tools that they had yet they hadn't managed to help him uh he had been very proactive in trying to follow their advice and it ended up him sort of having a huge dependency on opiates painkillers and sleeping

pills over the internet it was it was really you. It was really not in a good way at all. And I remember when I was filming that documentary thinking, how am I going to get this chap out of pain? Because he's telling me that actually I'm not addicted to these painkillers. I'm addicted to not being in pain. And if I'm not in pain, I won't need them. I thought, okay, well well the only person who i know who's got any chance of actually get to the root cause of this in the few weeks i i've got with him is you gary and so i called you up and um

we had a chat about you know whether you could help and it was remarkable to watch you assess his movement and actually get to the root cause of it such that he became pain-free within days within days and that has continued two to three years on he's still out of pain he's off off all of his painkillers he's off his sleeping pills um can you share some of your insights from that yeah i'd love to um this was an incredible experience for me uh as well i mean many many of the clients are but for this to be aired in such a way uh just phenomenal the the main insight that i can give if we if people are listening with a view to helping themselves up front what what the thing that happened was we created an environment for healing and I think

all of your work is is about this and is where we really join forces and to create an environment for something to heal we trust the process that the body's in sole intention is survival so survival it will create a mechanism for healing and the thing that prevents healing is blockages in the system whether that's and i'll just talk about structural ones so my my when i'm looking at a human body i'm interested in finding what the blockages are or what the limitations are in that person's movement, in that person's physical structure that is preventing them from being able to have a normal life. And because the model, the flow motion model I mentioned is based on walking. Walking is this idea, I need to get from my right leg to my left leg and back to my right

leg. And higher than that, because we're talking about really unconscious work here. It's not conscious. This is not hold your shoulders back, stand tall, book on your head type concept. This is how do you recreate a space where your brain finds, without you having to think about it, you having to think about it, an upright, accessible posture. And so for Ray, the bodybuilder, he very clearly, he's got two legs and was choosing to stand on one. And he had been choosing to stand on one for a long, long time. He had potentially had reasons in his system why he wouldn't put his left leg on the ground. For instance, having foot uh on the on the left hand side um his pelvis was shifted all the way over to the right um and he'd had some falls and he'd had some concussions and i'm taking his history i'm just going back in time so what have you done to

yourself broken the wrist broken the foot broken uh had some concussions blah blah blah we put this huge list we built this list out and i'm getting a sense of his posture already is is is excuse me is in what i would describe as one of my phases so it looks like he's occupying dominantly a moment in time in the gait cycle which means he will not be able to occupy that physical structure oppositely on the left on his other leg which is just to be clear you're saying that he's there are different phases of gait or walking yes and he's stuck in a particular phase would represent a whole body posture yeah and they're all different because we're moving through it and so he's stuck in one his shape was just one of these phases on his right

leg and that means because he's so dominant on his right hand side, the chance of getting to his left hand side is nil. So his whole body was set up around being stuck over here. And I wanted to know why. I wanted to know why. I want to know what the limitations are in his system that have led to this. And because the history was kind of making sense in terms of the injuries he'd had and the shape he was holding, what wasn't making sense was every injury that this guy gave me was after the onset of his back pain. So if we're going to go with my thought process, the back pain must be there in a purely biomechanical context because the structure's already changed.

The structure's already in place. So I said, what happened to you history-wise, injury-wise, before the onset of the back pain? Right. And it was that moment on the TV. Was it any major surgeries? No, nothing major. Anything minor. And the minor just happened to be the broken jaw and that was was that just like a ding

in your head at that time i remember you also said something like the uh does that kind of match with the timeline i think it was a year before his back pain really begun this this had happened and so we just we just start then we don't say oh that's it move on we tested it so we test the jaw by seeing can he move it to the left i also through this model recognize that there's pattern um movements those are patterns between the way the jaw moves the way the pelvis moves etc etc and everything was over to the right so what if we could just get his jaw to the left what would happen and in long story short we we got the jaw left and you can see your face on the on the on the show um if you haven't seen this and you are listening to the podcast that is you you can see it on my um website findingcenter.co.uk

if you wanted to look i'd highly encourage people to go what findingcenter.co.uk and they can see this little clip yeah and you see the way he walked beforehand and the way he walks after. I think that'll be really useful for people to watch and I'll include that in the show notes at the end of the podcast because a lot of the things that we're talking about are quite hard to get your head around

just hearing about it and so some sort of visual representation I think would be fantastic. But the key here is I spent the time listening, spent the time analysing his history, recognising that the majority of the problems that he thinks have been the problem happened after the onset of pain. What happened before the onset of pain broke the jaw jaw treat the jaw and as you said the rest the rest is kind of history but gary there's a real beautiful simplicity there that often you can only get that simplicity when you go that deep into something and you you take a step back you know actually yeah it's quite obvious really if you look about if you look back at a history okay

all these things that have happened these things happen after the back pain so what happened before the back pain i mean on a on just a very basic intuitive level that kind of makes sense doesn't it let's go back in time you know this age you did not have back pain then a year later you did okay what happened then and do you know what i mean for me this is why we take a history i mean other people might take history just for insurance purposes i don't know but there's a value there is a story in that person's life well that has led you to where you are today gary you look at the human body and when i am taking a history from my patients now particularly the last five or six years i draw a timeline for every single patient gold it really is gold it's such a deceptively simple tool but then you you know you let's say it's a 44 year old lady and then you just put at the end of the arrow 44 what are the problems now

and you just go back step by step what happened you know did you oh what happened just before this oh there was a bereavement right okay what happened oh you changed jobs okay what was how what was going on at university here and before you know it you map out things in their life and you see when symptoms started yeah where they peak and not only as a as a as the person as a therapist as a as the doctor trying to help them it also has value for the patient or the clients because they're seeing and they're suddenly putting the dots together and they're joining the dots and going oh i get it now yeah and and one of my frustrations with the way that we deliver medical care now and is time is very compressed and it's very hard to rush these things you know you can't do that in 10 minutes so it's very hard to yeah um yeah i just like to there's a just to sorry to butt in

hey butt away wouldn't be the first time when you take that history you can look back at all of the significant moments in people's life and what I teach is look for the earliest there's a guy called

A.T. Still who wrote From the Dry Bone to the Living Man. And he's the founder of osteopathy. But he calls these injuries or traumas, he'll call them an insult to the body. So if you think of everything that you've done as a potential insult to your body, that's something that your brain responds to and reacts to moves towards moves away from um and to everything your brain will do will be about keeping you safe so the way you organize your body around um these insults is ultimately going to be on show and there's another little addition there is um we read that you can tape your fingers together two fingers tape them together into one and it's not a huge window of time before your brain starts eliminating the idea that you have two fingers so if you've worn a cast and you held your arm in a position for six years um six months sorry

weeks weeks six weeks um that's a lot of time before your brain to forget about how it should move it's the arm and and the brain in in nlp terms has this wonderful way of deleting parts of our body we've had people self-assess and they reckon they've got a left leg that feels visually internally twice the size of their right legs like they've started rubbing it out kind of like back to the future images um and so all all of this stuff means that whatever we've done to our body has changed the way we perceive ourselves and so we all hold ourselves in a certain in a certain way ray's way on tv was to hold himself with all his weight in his right foot the back right heel pelvis to the right everything to the right Couldn't get anything left. It's a no-brainer then, is it, to go, well, let's get you left and see what happens. And watch the body come back online.

Yes. And so the brain starts to wake up. So you said about walking away and you feel different. Some people report feeling lighter. There's a change happened. If nothing changes, you didn't get into the right space. You don't do it again. You keep looking for the thing that needs the work.

But I was going to say on the history, you go back and you go back and you go back you pick the earliest insult what is the earliest insult because that would have offset you quite significantly and look for the most impactful and the most impactful might be certainly after the earliest but a big car crash or something could have cataclysmic shock through the system. And all of these things are treatable even now in today. We can go back and we can assess the structures and does that make sense to what happened in the incident or whatever. And you're assessing structures then that are not necessarily in the resting posture they should be. And they're not moving how they should be. So you can reintroduce movement to those areas so that the posture subtly changes

and the brain can be reminded of its ability to access it and make it used and usable. And what you'll find is that these areas, even an ankle sprain, when you were 13 years old, can be living in your system today, untreated. And so the words that I then will go back and I'll ask the patient,

are these untreated? Have they the words that I then will go back and I'll ask the patient, are these untreated? Have they been unconsidered? Or have you never like divulged this as a piece of information? So the fact that we aren't, they're not present on the timeline, or the fact that we know that they're there, but we aren't considered if we should treat them or not, or because we haven't taken into account that that actually might be corresponding to the current problem. So there's a huge moment just in the history take where we can really start to understand people's situation. Some of that reminds me of the most important question I think I ask any of my patients now, which is, when was the last time you felt truly well and sometimes it's remarkable how long back you need to go yeah you know and often that is that's the critical gold in the history is when you go back there and you figure out what was going on there

often you get your answer when did this first trigger start and then you see all the knock-on effects later but you know with all of us particularly you know the work i do but also what you do is trying to get to that what's that initial insult what's what's the thing that went wrong that everything in the body is now responded to yeah um of course it doesn't need to be mechanical structural it could be emotional emotional tags uh leading to nutrition changes uh then we have the kind of biomechanical psychosocial models um where it's all in i mean my my my goal is bringing keeping biomechanics relevant in the world and recognizing that changing structure does set the system free and creates an opportunity for that healing that i

talked about earlier when we first started the ray conversation but it's that's that's a wider point which is it's very hard now to keep things in their tidy little boxes right as you understand more about the human body about how everything is interconnected you know what i can't say well this is my realm and that's actually this is structured now that's your realm there's so much crossover isn't there and there has to be there has to be one system it's one system and that's i think that really sort of makes me reflect on something you said right at the start i said it's very hard to put you in a box and classify you and there's a lot of people out there who feel very passionately that only you know a qualified professional can give advice on something. And, you know, I would challenge that slightly by just saying, look, a qualified professional just simply means to me that there's an institution.

They've got a set of exams and a set of structures and some competencies that you have to tick off to be certified by them okay that's the same for medicine that's the same for a dietician the same for a personal trainer or a physiotherapist how you then apply that in real life with real patients that qualification doesn't give me any information about that it just means you have um you know met that criteria and you know there are there are there are some fantastic doctors i know there are some doctors who possibly don't have the best manner with patients and you know don't have the best ability to get good results with them and you know that everyone's a qualified doctor you know i've met some fantastic physiotherapists who are really good at looking around the picture

and trying to get to the root cause of a problem, fixing the symptom, but then also giving some remedial work to try and help change things. But I've also met some who possibly weren't as skilled at that. And that's where I have a problem with sort of saying that, you know, this profession is good or bad or this is good or bad it's like well how does someone interpret that that knowledge with their patients and the fact that you don't have that sort of stereotypical training I think in many ways is fantastic because in many ways it allows you or makes it easier to think outside the box

and not be weighed down by necessarily what you were taught to be the truth. As you said, you are a truth seeker. You're looking to find that truth. Yeah. And we continue to do that. Many people have thanked me, weirdly, in hindsight, for not going down the traditional route because of the perspectives it's able to give them. But, I mean, I like the right or wrong and the good or bad words that you just used. And for us to be able to

ditch those completely would be such a wonderful thing there's there's no we have um i talk about foot pronation a lot um which is not such a weird thing these days in my industry but 10 years ago that was a weird thing to talk about that was the thing we wanted to eliminate as in it had this kind of evil or bad tag to it but but it's a part of our movement and so i love the human body so much is is even the bad stuff that we've given labels to is a necessary requirement in our natural movement so we recognize that it's only bad if we spend too much time in it or can't experience its opposite yeah and so being able to promote opposite movement and what i mean by that in the layman's terms is if my spine um can side bend to the left it should

be able to side bend equally to the right if it can't then it's going to lead to some kind of extra stretch in one area versus another and that becomes a feeling and then a problem and blah blah blah blah but the the body for me epitomizes this idea of of everything and all we don't we can't segment it you can't work on one bit without affecting all of it and that that's kind of the irony uh there but i feel like i just wandered a little bit off off your off your question but do you remember what your question was no well look i i mean what sorry gary go on yeah we were talking about the uh the the qualifications and stuff weren't we well you are ironically you are teaching a lot of people with the standard qualifications you know you're teaching yeah doctors physiotherapists osteopaths

um you know pilates instructors you're teaching a lot of them and they're coming because they want to learn your philosophy and then they want to apply it around their traditional training yeah that's i mean you said earlier use the word toolbox we actually say that the model is the toolbox it's not actually a tool no exactly you can bring your pilates tool and you can bring your chiropractic tool the toolbox in which in which it goes so if you it's a way of thinking you're thinking about core stability or pelvic floor work, or whether I need to high velocity thrust on a spine, but to contextualize it in the picture of the whole body is really where we want people to go. So like you said,

we can do treat locally the back to give some symptom relief, but do also recognize that there is a whole chain of movement here that will allow your brain to move and support that symptom relief um so again it's whole big big picture big picture it's always a massive conversation yeah it is well well just just to sort of bring it back to a bit of reality for people listening is that you know you are very skilled at looking for this root cause and looking for you know what's going on in a person's body that we then now need to help them change and influence and for me i remember when we got together about, you know, you helped me with a chapter of my book, The Four-Pillar Plan. And one thing that we were trying to talk about beforehand was, OK, what can people do?

What can we empower people to do that's going to help them so they don't need to come and knock on your door and get that sort of expertise and that look? Right. It's about what can people do themselves and you know you very kindly work with me on that chapter to actually see well these are sort of four high impact exercises that actually if done correctly and if done you know just a few movements a day can have a very profound impact that certainly helped me for those of you who are not entirely sure what we're talking about, there's a section in the book

called Wake Up Your Sleepy Glutes. And there are four exercises in there that we have also, Gary and I, recorded YouTube videos on as well, which you can check out as well, which will help you go through those exercises. I've got to tell you guys, these are the ones that absolutely changed my health, got rid of my back pain to the point where i'm now back skiing playing squash doing

you know lifting sofas moving beds around the house things i wouldn't have done for about 10 years because i was scared but i have no fear anymore that actually my back's going to go because i can just feel that i've got to the root cause of these exercises regularly still don't you yeah i go through phases like everyone, right? Initially, when you're in pain, you do them all the time. And then you think, oh, yeah, I don't need to do them anymore. And then you kind of fall back a bit and then something happens. You start to feel it a little bit and that reminds you.

Sounds like life. Exactly. And it reminds you, hey, you know, I've got to go back to that. But, you know, for me at the moment, my routine is I do a few minutes of these every day and i've my little routine as i in the morning i'm in my kitchen i'm sort of i weigh up my coffee and it brews for four minutes and while it's brewing i've got to step there in the kitchen and actually go through those exercises for maybe three or four minutes and it just sets me up for the rest of my day but gary you've got some exercises that people can can go on your website and see.

Is that right? Yeah, yeah. If we build up to that, because I think this is the crux of the conversation here, is we're actually, you said to me, what's the one thing that everybody complains of? And just ticking through, most people complain of having sleepy glutes and need to switch their glutes on, activate them, et cetera, et cetera. And that

led us down the whole conversation, which led to the videos. But what's bigger behind this is creating an opportunity for people to help themselves. And I think ultimately people would love to be able to help themselves. And that's what I call taking ownership of your body. If you've got problems in your body, most people are guilty of, and yes, of course, there's help available and they might need some help to help them see, but to go into that space of what they do is they go to somebody wanting to be fixed. It's such a big word in our industry that really gets the hair up on my back. Like, can you fix me? Who do I go to to be fixed. It's such a big word in our industry that really gets the hair up on my back. Like, can you fix me? Who do I go to to be fixed? And if we're going to be in a space where we try and create an environment for healing in a person, they have to have that person recognize that

they ultimately are the ones who fix themselves. The therapist will help them, guide them. Guide them, yeah. Yeah, we're guides. We are not the fixers. I mean, it's such a pressure. Think about the pressure on all the therapists who have all these people queuing at their door Guide them, yeah. Our role, my role, I see as an educator is to also educate people how to understand it better. And that's like a long term goal for me, not just the therapists, but for people to be able to wake up in the morning, have a sore back and go, I don't need to go and get someone to fix me. I need to actually go through a process and understand what's changed in my body. I didn't have back pain yesterday, but I do have it today. What's changed? And body. I didn't have back pain yesterday, but I do have it today. What's changed? And thank you for bringing in.

So on my website, there is a following on from the section in your book, Wake Up Your Glutes, where I decided to call this the Wake Your Body Up series. And on there is an educational exploration of your own body. And it starts with the history we talked about earlier. So can you, I'll guide you to have a look back at this timeline in your history. Take the history, we'll look at the earliest thing, we'll look at the most impactful thing and we'll just become aware of what we have done to ourselves. We'll look at the most impactful thing and we'll just become aware of what we have done to ourselves.

I don't like to say it too much out loud, but I'm going to do it to your large audience. But it's that kind of you got yourself into this mess, like at least take some steps to get yourself out of it. So take a look at your history. What are all the things that have happened to you. They may not have been all your fault, but there is things that has happened in your own personal timeline that we can probably start to equate to how you stand and the discomforts you have today. So in educational context, we go through history. We actually teach you and show you how you can basically assess your posture. We'll move you into a space where you go through a series of joint motion assessments, and you might find that we're now able to recognize some patterns in your own body that relate back to your history and we show you some movements to begin the unwinding process so you have the four

glute exercises on on youtube and on your blog and then there's more uh when you get into this space but rather than it being about your glutes um and you'll notice that even the glutes are for different whole body postures um we're actually really looking at moving your whole body and seeing if you yourself can find the pieces of the puzzle that are left unconsidered untreated um that when you actually get into that space with any therapist doesn't have to be uh somebody that I've taught. You should be able to take that to them and say, look, I sprained my ankle when I was 13 years old, and I recognize if I do this, it helps my back pain, but I can't quite get out of it. Then

can you help me work with my ankle? And you start to change the pathway. You're no longer going out and asking to have your back foam rolled or released or cracked, but you're actually interested in what it is that the whole body needs to do to lend that itself as an outcome. It's like a partnership, isn't it? Absolutely, yeah. And that's absolutely going to lead to better long-term results.

Certainly, you know, I'm just thinking back to my own history there. Certainly, I'm just thinking back to my own history there. It's amazing now if I consider, I would quite passionately say I don't have back issues anymore. It doesn't mean if something happens or I do certain things in the week and certain behaviors that I may not start to feel some tightness in my body maybe my neck maybe my back but what i think the work i've done with you and that educational process that i put myself on that a lot that i did myself is that i think i now know my body better i now understand when there's an early warning sign that actually yeah you're just starting to get tight maybe you need to just alter some of the things that you're doing do some corrective movements um be aware that next time you've got that run of events that

you make different choices you know I think that's the key thing for me and then it's really self it's really self-empowering because you're then less reliant on your therapist your osteopath your your physio your whatever it's the same as me as a doctor you know i want to i want to empower my patients so they no longer need me yeah so i help set them on the right path but then they don't actually need to come and see me they understand one of the biggest complaints from physiotherapists and osteopaths who come on our courses is that when people continually come back with the same problem that they know they can make sense of but it just keeps coming back that that really starts to grind them down so you know that

their intention is definitely to help you but you keep coming back and they're missing the steps. That's always been like one really big complaint of students coming on the courses because they're now into this idea of maybe I'm just not treating the right thing. I'm doing the right thing for the back, but the back is still at the mercy of something else. And can we go looking for that? And then often people think, oh, he can't fix, he or she can't fix my back problem. I'm going to see someone else. And then you've got this huge cycle of, you know.

And if I look back, that's probably what I was doing right at the start of my journey with back pain. I was going, I was trying all kinds of different modalities and, oh, this is not working, I'm going to try something else. You know, thinking, who's going to be the one to fix me as it were um so so that's that's that's super interesting gary look i'm sure there's a lot of people listening who might want to learn about your trainings and your teachings and guys if any of you are healthcare professionals if you're an osteopath if you're a yoga instructor, a physiotherapist,

even a medical doctor like I did, you know, I've applied some of Gary's teachings in 10-minute NHS consultations and helped get my patients out of pain. So if you're interested, Gary, where can they check out your courses? Everything is around our website, www.findingcentre.co.uk. our website www.findingcenter.co.uk it's in a bit of a transition at the moment uh but if there's anything that you are uh lacking you can also find and ask questions on our web facebook page which is um anatomy in motion forward slash anatomy in motion i'll link to all these in the show notes so um but, websites. We invite anybody who is interested in courses to first divulge in the book What the Foot that I wrote four years ago.

And What the Foot is what I would call the separator. And also the Marmite. People seem to love it or hate it. If you've enjoyed this podcast you'll enjoy the book if you didn't enjoy the podcast you probably won't enjoy the book um but that's what keeps keeps it real so we end up teaching the people who are really fascinated and interested in the realm of movement that's what i absolutely love about your movement and what you're what you're trying to do you've you're such deep thinker. You've got such a clear idea in terms of where you're going.

You know, you're not trying to appeal to everyone. You're just trying to seek out the truth and put it out there. And my understanding is that if people aren't interested, that's cool. Fine, do your own thing. But if you are, you've got some great content and great educational courses for them. Yeah, look, all we're going to do is teach you how every single joint moves in all three dimensions and the relationships up and down and around the whole body and it takes us six days and it'll take you

a couple of years to learn it yeah well guys if any of you interested i i'd highly recommend you check it out gary have you got well we went pretty deep in this conversation today um i try and sort of give the listeners some useful take-homes that they can think about immediately once this podcast finishes so yeah i hope they have had an interesting conversation that's kind of stretched them a little bit but also i want to sort of bring it back down to reality and say hey maybe have a little bit you know have a little think about these concepts is there anything you want to leave the listener with? I think if we just summarised what we've talked about there, and also it's a little bit of a pitch into that Wake Your Body Up series, really.

Of the people that I do get to work with, have generally not had their history assessed. What is that for you? What is the stuff that you have gone and done to yourself? And sometimes we can go all the way back to birth with people to help with what might seem fairly innocuous problems. What are your movement limitations? We know that you have movement limitations. We have some of the, had some of the best movement people in the world on our courses and they still have movement limitations. That doesn't mean that they can't do their movements, but it does mean that they

pull on their system in a less than efficient way. And they, so they always benefit from working out what those limitations are. And can we help you to understand the bigger picture of that in your own body? In the same way as I see you on the TV series, clearing out people's cupboards, we want to clear out the joint restrictions in people's bodies so that they can have freedom to move, freedom to access all areas and create a healing environment inside.

When all of your joints move freely, all of the blood is free to flow, all of the oxygen is free to get around your body, all of the nerves are free to slide, all of the lymph is free to move. It's a real positive way of creating healing in your body. So the best way that you can do that pen and paper sit down go after it but if you would like to be guided then um and because i do find it very difficult to work with the amount of people who would like me to work with them since being on your tv show and in your book um we created this wake your body up series which is available on the findingcenter.co.uk website for a price of £9.99, which is much less than a

therapy session. And hopefully, in terms of, you know, putting value in understanding your own system, that's, it's kind of throwaway money. That's what I intended it to be for you. So they're my tips. Gary, Gary, thank you so much that i mean i just i just want to finish the podcast by expressing my really gratitude my heartfelt gratitude to you for the work that you're doing what you did for me personally as you say you didn't fix me you showed me how i could fix myself fix me you showed me how I could fix myself and the change that that has led to me in my own personal life you know I can't put a value on if I'm honest you know the the way I can move now the way I can I feel I'm actually you know I've always been very sporty but I feel actually I'm

moving better as a sportsman than I ever have done before because I think a lot of these limitations were going on since I was maybe 12 or 13. Yeah, it's amazing how even as we get older, even for myself, the more we unravel, the more robust the system feels even as we get older. Yeah, it is remarkable. And I want to thank you on a personal level. I want to thank you in terms of your single-mindedness

in trying to seek that truth and actually just kind of try and figure out what the body is meant to do as efficiently as it can I would highly recommend people who are interested to check out all the links in the show notes that I'm putting on there

with the videos that me and Gary have done together Gary's move your wake up your body wake your body up course we're going to build that we're going to build that so there'll be more to come and if you're interested

and you've got the got the desire then check out the book What The Foot which not only has a fantastic name it's got some fantastic content in it as well Gary you're very busy

I really appreciate your time today you're more than welcome it's been a pleasure and I hope we get you back on the podcast soon thanks you're welcome that's the end of this week's Appreciate your time today. You're more than welcome. It's been a pleasure. And I hope we get you back on the podcast soon. Thanks. You're welcome, Willie. That's the end of this week's Feel Better Live More podcast.

Thank you so much for listening. And I really hope you found the conversation useful, but also enjoyable. If you're not already, I'd highly recommend that you subscribe to this podcast so that you can be notified when the latest episode of my podcast comes out. I'd also be incredibly grateful if you consider going onto iTunes and giving this a five-star rating so that I can get this information out and reach more people. It really does make a difference. And if you have any suggestions for people you'd like to see me

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