Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #25 Unconventional Bodywork with Dr Beau Hightower

Episode Date: March 19, 2018

We sit down with Dr Beau Hightower, a leader in unconventional bodywork, to discuss a myriad of ways to keep the body running at peak performance. Check out Elite.osm.com Beau Hightower on Twitter YouTube and Instagram Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on Twitter and on Instagram Get 10% off at Onnit by going to Onnit.com/Podcast              Onnit Twitter         Onnit Instagram

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Give it a check out at Onnit.com. Thanks for tuning in to the Onnit Podcast. We got my man, Dr. Bo Hightower. Dr. Bo Hightower runs one of the biggest clinics out in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And, you know, one of the things we get into the show here, he works primarily with MMA athletes out of Jackson Wink and a number of other people. But this idea that, you know, AKA when I was training and fighting at American Kickboxing Academy, everybody went to different practitioners for body work, for health, for chiropractic, for massage.

And it was kind of a free for all. There was no standalone guy. I mean, I had my buddy, Dr. Brink, but it truly was every man for himself. And we didn't have this one global place to go to get healed up. That's not the case at Jackson Wink. And obviously they have, if you're not familiar with mixed martial arts, they have one of the greatest camps of all time. They have a wealth of championship fighters that go and train there. And it seems like everyone is going to see Dr. Bo Hightower when it comes to helping themselves heal, getting the tune-ups physically. He's got a wealth of information and a wealth of

knowledge. And he's also got probably more acronyms at the end of his name than anybody I've ever met before. Stay tuned for an excellent podcast with Dr. Bo Hightower. On a podcast with Dr. Bo Hightower. Oh no, no we're gonna have to get rid of that we've got their phone on gps signal lost that's okay off now i still don't even want to edit that out let's keep it natural keep it in what's going on man oh man it's great to have you in town i've been following you for a while now online and you are um unconventional to put it lightly but uh you know you're you're the go-to guy in albuquerque and you know it's funny it's something we were talking about

yesterday when i trained at american kickboxing academy everyone kind of did their own thing everyone had their own strength coach their own nutritionist and their own body workers and the good guys you know like i met i met a few good guys that did some art and different things and i would try to set up you know josh thompson and a few of the other fighters like hey you got to go see this guy and word would kind of spread but it still wasn't universal so being at a jackson wink in albuquerque is arguably the greatest place to train in the world for mixed martial arts producing a wealth of champions and just tons of people in the top 10 very high level fighters and to have them all go to you as the go-to guy for recovery and and rehab and just

fucking the tune-up right we all need the tune-up and if you're you're pushing yourself in the gym or working out hard you got to pay attention to some of these recovery tools, right? But mixed martial arts arguably is one of the most damaging things you can do to your body. So it's essential to have somebody like you in the game. And it says a lot that everyone chooses you in that area. Yeah, man, we've been really blessed. Like my team is amazing. We've got physical therapists, chiropractors, napropathic doctors. We've got some really, really good individualistic clinicians in there. One of the really cool things that we've been able to really work on

is implementing prehab and rehab programs for fighters and really serving as a gateway access to all forms of medicine. So any time a fighter gets hurt, basically they come to me, we take a look at it, we say, do you need x-rays? Do you need soft tissue work? Do you need dry needling?

Do you need manipulation? We're able to get those fighters the things that they need. That way they can get paid. Because what if they don't fight they don't get paid so like one of the big things for us is we just want to make sure that our fighters can feed their families yeah it's a big one uh i've had orbital blowouts in my left eye twice and that's the only fight you get for the whole year yep you know and it's like you better stretch stretch that dollar if you can or have a second job, which I did. Yeah. But let's talk about how you got into this.

You played college football. I did play college football. And you studied fucking everything under the sun. At this point, yeah, pretty much. So yeah, my bachelor's degrees, I've got three of them now. I've got a bachelor's in biology, a bachelor's in health and wellness, a bachelor's in anatomy. My master's degree is in exercise science. The PhD I'm currently pursuing is in health and health performance. And then I've also got doctorates in chiropractic medicine and

neuropathic medicine. So trying to get a lot of different lenses to be able to look at athletes through different lenses, because unfortunately, that's one of the problems with health care providers in general is we're so biased, we have this confirmation bias, you can pretty much look this up in any kind of provider, like if you go to an orthopedic surgeon, they're going to tell you there's a structural issue that needs to be corrected with orthopedic surgery because that's how they view the world. A chiropractor will tell you what your bones out of place. We need to see you, you know, however many times three days a week for the next 64 years, even PT. I mean, you might be seeing six to eight weeks and your core is weak and that's the only frame

of reference. They're looking at it. Massage therapists, you've got tight trigger points. And the thing is that all of these lenses are right sometimes. But unfortunately, if you're only looking at it through your lens, you're missing out on all the other people that might need alternative therapies. And so you're not really able to tell them this and this might not be for you. We need to get you somewhere else. That's something we take a lot of pride in at our gym and in our practice is that we give the patients the appropriate care. We don't ignore the minority populations that might need something different. And then we get the people to the person they need to get to, even if it's not us. Like, I think it's really crucial. Yeah. It's massive. You know, we talked about that with

Western medicine, kind of looking at things as they compartmentalize, you know, and they're very good in those compartments. There's no doubt, you know, best in the world for surgery and repair and things like that. But sometimes it's not always necessary. And especially if we have more tools in the toolbox for correcting things and imbalances and getting our ass back in the gym where we want to be, where we want to be healthy and we can actually perform. What are some of the cool tools? Obviously, we get to play with a wide variety of shit that you're coming out with. But what are some of the cool tools and prescriptions that you give to people in terms of health and home care? Sure. So, you know, it's, it's, it's interesting that a lot of people get so caught up in transient changes. So it's really important to move in our lives,

right? You have to exercise. It's important for your health, your brain, everything, your heart. But there's a consequence to that. Like if you overuse your muscles, if you create imbalances in your body, basically, like if your pecs are too tight relative to your rear delts and your rhomboids, that's going to create a postural fault. If you're doing a repetitive motion over and over again, like throwing punches or kicks or whatever, and you're not really strengthening the muscles on the opposite side, you're going to create postural faults that have an orthopedic consequence later on down the road. The same analogy applies to anything, right? Like if you eat food, which you have to have to survive, if you don't brush your teeth and floss, there's going to be a consequence to that.

It's important that you're getting interventions that can basically keep you neutral. You go too far this way, you go too far this way, you're not in good shape. If you don't work out, you're going to be sick, but if you work out too much, you're also going to be sick. More is not better. Better is better. I think it's important to realize that. Some of the cool things that we have in our office. We almost utilize our office as an athletic training room, which doesn't really exist in the MMA world. Like we have traction, we have cold laser, we have ultrasound, we have East and we have massage therapist, strength conditioning coordinators.

We do dry needling, we do electric dry needling. And we do our hammer therapy, which a lot of people have seen on social media, which is very unconventional, but highly effective as well. And the proof is in the numbers, right? Like we've only had three fighters at Jackson Wink and even some of our associated gyms like Finn and HB and some of the other folks around pull out of fights in the last three years. Two of those were broken hand and one was broken ribs. That's over 200 UFC fights. So, you know, again, if you're a fight fan, you should really be appreciating the body workers and all these other people at different gyms that are able to get your

fighters to the fight so you can watch them fight. Also, you know, from a fighter's perspective, you may not have health insurance. You may not have other revenue streams. There aren't sponsors in the same way that there were before because, you know, the Reebok thing has taken a lot of that away. So in that aspect, if you don't fight, how are you going to pay your bills? How are you going to save up money so you can invest in rental properties or a 401k or your own retirement strategies? And, you know, what people don't realize is that they don't fight, they don't get paid. Yeah, it's a it can't be understated. You know, there's so much importance.

Imagine if you only got paid three times a year and you're getting your ass kicked literally on a fucking daily basis so to stay in the game i mean it's it's it's everything you can think of from the weighted standpoint of the physical the mental and the emotional demands it's it's the ultimate test right and and it truly is the ultimate test yeah and you had in all these other things like i'm not going to be able to pay rent i'm not going to be able to pay this and then why do you think people show up hurt you know everyone got on pacquiao's ass when he fought floyd mayweather because he fought with a torn rotator cuff people that had bet money on him wanted their money back right they wanted to fucking sue him but it's like at the end of the day that fight's already

been canceled once he's not going to step out he'll step in hurt just so he can get paid and hopefully he can pull something out sure um but yeah it can't it really can't be understated when you can help a fighter show up to the fight healthy it's just it's massive on all levels it's good for the fans it's good for the fighter it's good for the income and it's good for the sport right so you've got john jones you've got you know donald serroni who's an on it guy you've got a long list michelle watterson i mean there's a ton of people that train there and a lot of them fight fairly frequently you know before jones got all his stuff going on he was a fair one of the most active champions donald serroni is always telling the ufc you know get me back in there keep me busy

and um that's a true testament to what you guys are doing out of your practice yeah it's a combination to you you can't understate the the coaches and the strength conditioning coordinators like we've got a lot of really good ones in Albuquerque to Lauren Serrera, Jared Saavedra, the folks over there, Adrian Gonzalez. There's a lot of really good ones that also contribute as well. But one thing that fans don't realize is nobody's ever 100 percent going into a fight like this is the hardest sport there is. It's not one sport. It's a combination of judo and wrestling and striking. And particularly in the non-PED era, how do you train four or five times a day

and not get hurt? It's very difficult to do. You have to balance your nutrition. You have to balance your supplementation. You have to balance your recovery. How do they do that? You know, when I get a professional golfer or a professional baseball player,

like those patients are cakewalks to me because their repetitions are so predictable. They're not going to wrestling practice and gonna get their neck cranked on immediately afterward. And then after that, they're gonna go hit mitts. going to get their neck cranked on immediately afterward. And then after that, they're going to go hit mitts. Like these motions are all so different and so unique, combining the aspects of martial arts that we have to be able to tune in and predict our treatments based on all these diverse movements.

It's incredibly complex. On top of that, you add in the masculinization of the sport where basically, you know, you can't be a pussy, right? For lack of better terms, like your teammates will yell at you you the fans will get on you and mma fans are not the nicest group out there either you know so it's it's uh it can't be understated how much these fighters actually do end up fighting injured and part of our job is to make sure that they can fight with an injury that doesn't actually a put them at risk or b put them at risk of losing their fight and getting previously injured like you could have a you know a minor lead toward mcl

that may not actually put you out of it and mean it, you may actually be able to work with, um, one of the fighters fighting at UFC Austin in two weeks, Marcian Tiber, he was fighting Verdum, I believe is the headline on a card. And he tore his hamstring grade two, about four weeks out from a fight. He got, there was a lot of high kicks. So we had to figure out a way to basically get him back in there, but without the high kick, why is he even taking the fight? Yeah. So we did a bunch of dry needling, a bunch of other stuff. And we made the call about two weeks. We said, we're going to give it two weeks. If you're functional at that point, we're going to keep you on.

But if not, we're going to pull you off of there. So we were able to continue to test it out. We had a theory. We tested it. We saw if it was reproducible, which is the scientific method, which is what you're supposed to implant into your practice as a clinician. You're supposed to be aware of the literature and aware of the research, but you don't make all of your decisions based on only that. It takes clinical expertise and it takes impact from the

feedback from the patient. In this case, a professional athlete that knows their body pretty well. If you can combine those things, then you can find out where they are and if they're ready to actually get out there and compete and perform. Look at the guy who went five rounds, almost knocked him out against one of the top three heavyweights in the world. And now he's fighting the black beast coming up, which should be a hell of a fight. Yeah, that'll be a hell of a fight. So you did, you did mention something. Obviously we're talking about the scientific method and the implementation of that. How much pushback, you know, anytime you go against the grain and you're implementing new things, it's's it's odd to me as a doer a

self-experimenter as you know the in-office at on it i'm kind of the guinea pig here but you know it's it's not like i'm doing anything fucking new you know guys like ben greenfield tim ferris peter attia they're all self-experimenters and the world has plenty of them uh i've found through coaching and and things like that when I was coming up in football that if I just, like if somebody told me something to try and I just scoffed it off and said, fuck you, you don't know any better, I wouldn't even have the opportunity to learn. And if I at least gave it a good go and tried it first, then I could make my decision based on if it worked or not. And there's so many of these new techniques and things that are coming out where even just

talking about fucking foam rolling, where people are like are like hey that shit doesn't work and then you actually do it and you're like damn i feel a lot better my fascia is released my body moves better i feel like i'm getting more oxygenation and more better movement and i'm not locked down in the same places that i've been locked down chronically what has been kind of your biggest drawback in starting to implement some of these other techniques that really go against traditional norms? You've got powerlifters on one side, you've got MMA trolls on the other. You can't win, right? At least the CrossFitters like us, I guess, right? Well, that's because Kelly Starrett paved the way for them. So they're all about flossing the body. Yeah, that's funny.

So it's interesting when you think about this. So like the concept of evidence-based medicine didn't really exist until about 1997. And if you look at a Venn diagram of all three components of it, it's the best available evidence, clinical expertise, which is why we have clinicians and not robots, so they can make individual decisions about individual patients because none of us respond the same. We all have different genetics, different histories, different lifestyles. And so why would we all respond the exact same to the same things? We all need to find what works for us. You can't basically ostracize and put the minority out on their own just because they don't fit into a normal Gaussian distribution. Like the middle of the curve is the norm. And if that's all we pay attention to, you're losing out on 33% of people that are not getting the right care or the right treatment.

Like if we only made decisions based on the evidence that existed, we would have never had penicillin, which wasn't available until 1942, because there was nothing in the evidence about that beforehand. But look at how many lives, millions and millions of lives that have been saved because of the advent of that drug, even prednisone that wasn't commercially available until 1959. So literally medicine didn't even exist until the 40s. If you look at what medicine actually is, like you didn't have antivirals, antifungals, antibacteria. So what the hell were people doing then? Well, they were doing certain things. Some of it's instinctual, maybe in our DNA, bone setting, massage.

But like a medical doctor, what were they possibly doing back then? There was surgery, but imagine surgery without the advent of antibiotics. The death rate is astronomical. I mean, it's crazy. So as we move forward, what's unfortunately happening is a lot of clinicians are on this evidence-based kick, and they've completely forgotten about the clinical expertise and the patient feedback and the patient interaction as well. And so they only make decisions based on that. And first of all, clinicians aren't even scientists, right? They're not even experts.

Statistics can be very confusing. And so really statistics are for public health care administrators, policymakers to look at a population. The clinician is supposed to look at the evidence and then make individual decisions through trial and error and compiling data in their clinical practice over time. So if you're only doing the data that exists, you're doing a massive disservice to your patients. And one thing that people don't realize is like when you scoff at everything, literally you've lost the creativity, the individualistic portion of medicine, and you're just a bunch of zombies and robots walking around saying there's no evidence for anything. Particularly in manual therapies and physical interventions like foam rolling, there's so many modes you literally

can't do in RCT because how do you actually come up with a placebo? Like a sugar pill is easy to do. You compare that to something else and you blind the provider. But when you're talking about like a skill set, for example, like somebody that does ART or something like that, there's good people and there's bad people. And there's certainly levels to that. So if you're saying those two things are the same, I can promise you that they're not. Just like a shitty comedian is not the same as a really good comedian. A shitty chef is not the same as a really good chef. So we wouldn't say that like baking doesn't work because somebody, you know, messed up your quiche one time, right? Like that's, that's ludicrous. I went to this shitty restaurant and fucking no one knows how to cook on earth. I'll

never trust bakers again. Like, like there's extreme levels of proficiency and quality to any profession. And particularly when we're talking about physical modalities, like it's based on the individual experience. Everything works in a certain patient population. The question is what percentage is that? Say acupuncture or even manipulation. Here's an example I use a lot of times. Say you're checking manipulation for lower back pain.

We took 50 patients with lower back pain, but without the clinical expertise to decide who has maybe facet joint imbrication, which is like what manipulation would actually help with. Let, say it's 13 of those people have that. The other people I manipulate that have a disc issue or a muscle problem or an imbalance, why would they respond well to manipulation when that's not their problem? So the other 13 respond, maybe 90% of those do well, but now we would walk around saying only 25, 26% of people do well with manipulation. Well, the problem there is you didn't have a clinical expert

to basically provide which of those they think would respond well based on their presentation, which requires a history, an exam, and a diagnosis. So now we're basically gonna say all these things don't work, but we didn't find the right patient population for the specific therapy. Just like your story about how acupuncture

did so well for you. You know, people will say that acupuncture doesn't do anything. I can promise you it helps a lot of people. Is it going to be my frontline therapy always for anything? No, it's not. I'm going to use the Occam's razor. The simplest solution is the best one, but then work my way back from there. I can't ignore the results that are happening. If something isn't working, I have to check my ego and put that aside and decide that this isn't the right therapy for a patient and either A, give them another therapy and reassess it or B, send

them somewhere else because they need some other therapy but there's a solution to every single problem and unfortunately people's egos get caught in the way and they won't get them to other people because they're so stuck in their dogmatic ways yeah or they're stuck trying to hold on to their method they're the thing that they know whatever they're an expert in and if it doesn't work for you i'm sorry there's nothing else outside of this that can possibly work. Right. Right. And everyone wants to hold on to what they have and just say, like, this is this is it or bust. How naive is that?

Right. Like, yeah, like how caught up in your own self and your own life. You know, I think somebody on the podcast really said you're not that important, really. Like, we're all stardust, right? Like, everything is trans and even our lives. So, like, while you're here, instead of being so caught up in your own woo and your own fluff, like, why not try to help people learn so caught up in your own woo and your own fluff, like why not try to help people learn

and try to help people take care of their own bodies and judge yourself too and say, hey, how much do I actually learn today? Like one thing I do every morning, I have this little sticker up on my wall and it says you're either moving towards poverty or prosperity.

Choose one. Like it's so easy just to get in your rut and do the same thing every single day. Sometimes you need daily reminders to tell you to, you know, kick yourself on the ass. You know, like, like, do you know more now than you did five years ago? Have you forgotten more than you've actually learned in the last five years? Well, that means you're decreasing in life. Basically, you're moving towards death.

Are you fitter now than you were five years ago? And just because you went to school, you know, for whatever degree doesn't mean that you know everything there is to know. In fact, you just know the basics. You know where you should start from so you can be aware of what you don't know. Now it's time to get to work. Like when I graduated, I thought I knew why wouldn't I know everything else? I have a doctor now, right? Why would some other clinician be better than me when he has the same degree as me? I mean, what kind of egotistical nonsense is that? I was caught up in it just like anybody else. And life is humbling, right? Like life will break all of us. And unfortunately, my first year or two, I probably sent way more people to an orthopedic surgeon than I should have because I wasn't aware

that I could help certain conditions because one, I didn't try them. And two, I hadn't expanded my knowledge base enough to look at them through a different light. So there's a lot of patients I wish I could get back, but I can't. But I was under the assumption instead of referring to some other clinician in the field who has experience, who may have seen this case in the past, even if they're one in a thousand, if you have 20,000 cases, you've seen it. If I have 50 cases, I probably haven't seen that statistically. So instead I assume that I knew everything and, oh, well, I can't help you. You must need surgery. And, you know, like I said, I'm not immune to it. I'm still not immune to it to this day. It

takes constant work, but I feel like a lot of clinicians really fall into that, that faulty paradigm. And it's sad because who suffers? The patient. Yeah. And there, you know, you touched on a great point. This is something that I've been very frustrated with, uh, particularly with, you know, like, like some people that I grew up with family and shit like that, where you have this idea that when you get out of college, like you're done, I'll never read another book again, unless it's fiction, you know? And it's like, there's so, there is fucking infinite knowledge out there. We're in the fucking age of knowledge. We can access it instantaneously from our phone. There's, there's audible books. You can fucking listen while you drive your car or on that airplane

flight. Like it's, it's amazing. It's amazing time to receive that if you're looking to learn and you're looking to level up as opposed to just stay in place. And, you know, like you played football, like you're either moving forward or you're moving backward. No one's staying stagnant. Right. So just that concept of continued education, not for I mean, it can be for your job. It can be for something you're passionate about, but really just for the idea that I'm going to better myself through this knowledge and embody that and turn it into something usable. That's true wisdom.

And that's the usable part that's important, too. Like so many people get caught up in the self-help loop where they're not actually taking action. They're just getting a dopamine high from, you know, just listening to somebody who actually has their shit together and is moving forward. Like if there was a self-help book singularly that would help everything and fix everything, there wouldn't be need for more of it. There's some nuance needed. And there's some other, you know other languages that people need to hear because

words don't mean the same from one person to another. Somebody else might have a different life experience or spin that would relate to you better, that would get your ass up. But unfortunately, listening to three hours of pick a podcast every single day while you're sitting there not doing anything and constantly getting this buzz from people that are kicking ass isn't enough to actually change your life. You have to have action like you were talking about. Like those things can be used appropriately for fuel, but you actually have to do something. You can't stay in your mom's basement playing video games while listening to JRA on your headphones and think that you're actually moving somewhere in life. Like you actually have to get up and try things

and take action and put your ego and your life out there on the line, whether it's entrepreneurship, whether it's, you know, sports, whatever it is, like in order to make a positive impact. And you're like, you have to get up and take dramatic action. 100%. I've mentioned this a thousand times, but Bruce Lee's famous quote, it's not enough to know we must do right. Knowledge is not the fucking answer. We have to put that into action.

And, you know, one of the things that i really loved about tools of the titans with tim ferris and one of the reasons why he keeps a very similar line of questioning to all of his guests so he can try to extrapolate what are the take-homes from each of these very fucking inspirational and positive and awesome people whether it's through i think he breaks it down into healthy wealthy and wise right right so in that book you have these three sections and there's crossover between all the sections and a lot of these people who are you know experts in one field are are they contain all of it you know they're not just fucking wealthy they're they're fucking healthy and they've got a lot of wisdom as well but something like 80 of the people in that book had a meditation practice i think um 70 to 80 used uh some type of uh temperature device that goes over their

bed i don't want to they're not a sponsor and i can't remember the name right now but it's not important it's something where you just fucking lay on this cold mat runs water through it and it helps you get a little deeper sleep right so sleep is a focus is the point like if you just took that one thing from it from that that, from that sleep product they use, they're focused on fucking bettering their sleep, right? Sleep hygiene is a big deal. What are some of the practices that you have personally on a daily basis that help you fucking move the needle? Yeah. So some, some biggies for me, obviously trying to get exercise, you know, I run multiple practices, you know, I'm working on a lot of things and basically I run the

show plus I'm teaching my provider. So it's, you know, unfortunately I neglect myself practices. I'm working on a lot of things. And basically, I run the show. Plus, I'm teaching my provider. So unfortunately, I neglect myself more than I should. But getting into my self-myofascial release techniques, spending time by myself in solitude with sensation deprivation, not necessarily entertaining. But for me, it's just in a quiet room. I don't necessarily have the time when places are open or necessarily the money to have one of those myself. But when you don't have those things, it's okay to just go into a room and get away from electronics and turn the lights off and just sit there and be one and just try to figure out what your vibrational frequency, now I'm saying wooey, is, right? Just to be in touch with yourself and figure out what your thoughts are without being interrupted by your GPS navigator or your Facebook notification or

your emails that basically stop you from actually moving forward because you're constantly interrupted. That's where we lose productivity. You know, the other thing for me is like, I always try to find 30 to 45 minutes to reread the stuff that I previously knew. It's not just enough to get new information. Like if you don't continue to fire those memory pathways, you will lose them at some point. And think about like, like I was trying to help somebody with a calculus differential equation the other day, and I can't do it. I haven't used it in clinical practice. So because of that, I don't have the capability. Now, did I ever need to learn it?

That's a completely different conversation, right? Compared to figuring out taxes and finances and mortgages, completely different conversation. But relearning those things, whether it's statistics or anatomy, that's part of why I teach doctoral students selfishly so that I can keep my saw sharp, right? Like so that I can keep my anatomical knowledge sharp and to learn from the mistakes of the past. When we look at scientific information, we talked about, you know, in the 40s and 50s, like these novel techniques came out that saved millions of lives. But literally 100 years ago, we didn't have any of these kind of ideologies. But if you tried to come up with something new at

the time, you'd be laughed out of the room. You're a quack. Unfortunately, people are so caught up in myopic in their time frame that they're not capable of looking towards the future. And they feel like everything we know now is all there will ever be to know. And history has shown us over and over again that's not true. You can look at the CDC releases from 1952 that say that smoking doesn't cause cancer. There's no evidence that smoking causes cancer. If that doesn't give you a paradigm of where science can be, science is always moving forward. It's really simplistic to think

and really myopic to think you know everything there is to know. We talk about this sometimes when people predict the end of the world. Every generation that's ever lived has thought the world would end during their lifetime. Why wouldn't it? It's the only lifetime they've ever had, basically.

So we have these doom and gloom feelings. And whether it's meteors or global warming or whatever else, the odds of the world actually ending during our lifetime, statistically or infinitively small, like the odds of any of those things actually happening during our brief 75 to 85 years are so small that we get so caught up

in the scary things and the negative things instead of slowing down and appreciating the positive things. And same thing with clinical medicine. Like we get so caught up in trying to disprove everybody's stuff instead of slowing down and appreciating the process of healing people and contributing to people's health and wealth and knowledge that we're so busy out there trying to debunk everybody else. And we're so worried about everybody else. Like we get out of our own paradigm and we don't think about how to make ourselves better and our patients better. And to me, that's a really sad thing yeah it does it does suck is it and it

just goes back to the like scarcity right try it try it for yourself you know just try it for yourself give it a give it a real fucking go and see if it pans out and that's with anything right psychedelic supplements meditation like something will work for you that may not work for somebody else but you won't know until you try and you have to, and you have to give it. And so I'm a skeptic, right? Like, like anybody with a science background, like I said, I've got a master's in exercise science. You should be skeptical about everything, but you should be open-minded as well. And I've, I've had my life changed multiple times by being open-minded and trying things. I remember being 16 years old and not believing people could be drunk. I said, no,

they're faking it. Like, what is that, right? Like, I've never experienced it by myself. But let me tell you about what you do and how you're faking it, right? I remember thinking the same things about mushrooms or other things like that. But until you've experienced it and you lived it, you don't have frame of reference. It's like trying to describe to somebody what heartbreak feels like. Until you've actually lived it, you can't feel it. The same thing can be said about pick something, nutrition, supplementation, yoga, body work.

Unless you've actually lived it and you've actually given it an honest try, you don't have frame of reference. You're judging people based on your own limited view of the world. And that's not a place to be. That's a place of scarcity and not of abundance. 100% brother. So what are some of the things that you give because you mentioned something that was really fucking fascinating to me when we were working with the hammer yesterday which is is definitely one of the odd tools um it it worked incredibly well and you know my next question was how how many times does this treatment need to be done for somebody to really be fixed and they can go on with their life or maybe have some home practice and home guidance that they can have some take-home work to do and be out of

your office and you said three three or four times that's fucking incredible right and that goes against like 90 of chiropractors 90 of you name it who will basically say like oh you got subluxation in your c1 and we're gonna have you for the next six years doing stuff uh look at this here x-ray and and it proved it you know and it's like this idea that i can get some healing and then i can have some homework and i don't need to see you again right for a while and and maybe until the next and obviously mixed martial artists are different we talked about that they're going to continue to get dinged up but for general population which is the masses which is who we're talking to right now that's a fucking pretty that's a pretty awesome thing to be able to say that this is not only what we're

doing and what we're seeing but this is our goal it's our goal to be able to push people out the door healthy and to not keep them signed up to us for years to come. Right. And so that's interesting, too. Like when people ask me how many visits it'll take, you know, until I've actually evaluated you and seen you, the answer depends. I'm not sure. Can you help me with this, this and this? Like as a scientist, for you to say yes or no without actually assessing them and trying things, even on their first visit, if they go, can you fix this? I said, I don't know, but we're going to try. Based on my previous experience with a very similar injury, we have a very high success rate.

So we're very outcome driven, right? Like we try to take surveys on every single person, even the ones that don't come back so we can see where we're at as far as statistically. Yeah, we average around 3.8 to 4.3 visits per session. So what we want to do is we want to have a results oriented practice. We want to teach people how to take care of themselves in the long term, similar to how a dentist teaches you to brush and floss. We want to teach you that for your musculoskeletal system so you can take care of

your muscle health and your hygiene so that you have the proper length tension relationships in your muscles so that way they don't yank on your joints. They don't cause bone spurs. They don't cause arthritis. They don't cause all these limiting things that can basically ruin your life. So from that abundance perspective, we figure if we get enough people fixing out the door, not only are they going to be happy about it, but they're going to refer so many people back in that we're going to be swamped. And we are. We've got 7,000 patients in about four years in Albuquerque. The turnover is tremendous because we get them in and out the door, which flies in the face of most business models from traditional physical therapy and chiropractic clinics because they're stuck in a

scarcity mindset of we're trying to hold on to our patients. That person's my patient. We don't want to look at people that way. Nobody belongs to anybody. So if somebody wants to go somewhere else, the only time we'll hesitate to do that is if we really think something might make it worse or we don't want to necessarily co-manage patients because at that point we're trying to find truth, right? So we don't know if something's making it worse or better if we have multiple cooks in the kitchen. So we may just may just say hey go try that for a while and see what if it works better than this come back to us if you feel like it's not right like like have a little bit of abundance in that situation um and and we have to constantly be testing and retesting too like all of my clinicians

i tell this too when you do an intervention you have to retest it so for example i'm trying to get you to razor i'm over your head i need to every time i do something i need to retest it like say for example i adjusted your humerus which you to razor. I'm over your head. I need to, every time I do something, I need to retest it. Like say for example, I adjusted your humerus, which we did yesterday, right? Or your first rib. But then I did something else that reset it. We actually did this with Aubrey. We were setting his ribs and we got them flatter, which he was like, wow, I didn't even think that my ribs could possibly move. I thought that was just who I was. So we made a big difference there. But then I did some other things trying to fix something else and it brought that back. Right? So I don't even know if something works or doesn't work because I might do one

thing that's positive and something else that's negative. They have a net neutral. So at that point, I assume that nothing I did worked. So now I don't have my own proper worldview or frame of perspective of what works or doesn't. And then I won't know to apply that to the next patient. So you've got to document those things, too. You need files in your office so you can see which patients respond well to which interventions and therapy. That way you actually have data, like real world data that you can actually relate to because you tried something. You can't possibly just use data from somebody else who has a different skill set, who might be extrapolating different data, who might be using, you know, altered p-values, who might not necessarily be controlling the variables for

the same type of intervention as you are. The patient population might be different as well. Like our patient, we're cash-based only. We don't take insurance. So part of the reason why we do really well as well is we have a population of patients that's invested in their health. They're going to spend $70 to get better. We're not really dealing with Medicaid patients. We're not really dealing with people that are on auto insurance or things like that that may not be as financially and emotionally invested in getting better. So I think that also has an effect on our outcomes and our rates too. Like if we had a bunch of people that, you know, were 450 pounds that weren't paying for things out of their own pocket, like it is important sometimes to reach in your own pocket and pay for it. If you're not paying for something, you have no investment in it. You have no skin in the game. So you're either won't

do your homework or your exercises because what do you have to lose? Or you won't fully commit to the program. So because our patients do that, I think that it really skews our numbers downward somewhat as well. And we also get a healthier patient population based on them seeing MMA fighters or powerlifters or NFL players or, you know, whoever comes to see us for our expertise. So are some of our numbers skewed a little bit? They probably are. But, you know, sometimes I think it's important to recognize like the benefits you have going for you as well. And that's one that we certainly have is a fairly healthy, invested patient population that wants to get better and is willing to do work to get better. Yeah, that's an excellent point you brought up. Jordan B. Peterson, I'm reading his

new book, 12 Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos. And he brings up the point from a psychologist standpoint that if you don't want to get better, if you're not there, you don't want to be there, then you will never get better. Right. And that's just on the mental side, but it's clearly on the physical as well. And he talks about, you know, getting people sent from a judge, from a, from a court program, they have to go see a psychologist and then they have to get therapy and it's court ordered and he had worked with like 20 different patients and he couldn't help a damn one of them you know because you really do need to want to improve yourself and if it's something like well my knee's fucked up and you know my friend told me to go here but i guess i'll go you know i think

especially if they already have the idea in their head they need surgery like this is something where you know i should just get surgery but let me go here and just see whatever this quack can do. And it's like, yeah, you know, it's, it's, it's, if you drag in your heels through the doors, don't expect to get much out of that. Right. And we still might fix some of them, but it's definitely a, a higher hurdle that we have to cross. And like, it's interesting. We talked like you were just talking about a psychologist, like people that think that the mind and the body are some sort of separate entities are ludicrous. They're crazy. Like, if you don't think that like when you're in traffic and somebody cuts you off and you can feel your blood pressure go up and your muscles tighten up, those are direct physiological consequences of an emotion, something that's only happening here. It's not actually happening in the body, but you could literally have a heart attack from your blood pressure shooting up. Like those are real consequences, real manifestations. The same way that like Buddhist monks can lower their heart rate down

and people that meditate have more control over their sympathetic nervous system. Like those things have real world benefits. So even just having somebody that you believe in as a clinician that's in your corner that you think wants the best for you can actually improve your healthcare and your outcomes. Like you have to buy into it,

but sometimes, and I will say this, sometimes you actually have to see some change to actually be able to do that. I can also buy into just getting But sometimes, and I will say this, sometimes you actually have to see some change to actually be able to do that. Like, yeah, I can also buy into, you know, just getting popped all the time or, you know, doing some band work all the time. And even though I believe it will work, it still may not work. Like there's a balance always between the two. But usually one of those things on their own, if one is completely limiting you, it doesn't matter how strong the other one is. You're not going to be able to go over the top. So you need to combine both of those for the best possible outcome. Like if your shoulders physically rotated up and in,

but you believe that you're going to get unimpinged by raising your arm up over and over again, and there's a physical impediment, statistically, you're probably not going to do it no matter how hard you think about it. Like I can't walk through the wall, no matter how hard I think about it. Believe, fucking believe. There's some limitations too, right? But also, you know, if you don't believe that you're going to do well in also you know if you don't believe that you're going to do well in a podcast you don't believe that you know you're going to get a job or something like that and you have the physical capability to look at look at all the great athletes you probably played with in college there were those guys that had the it factor

like fast strong crazy you know athletes but they didn't want to hit or they wouldn't go get the ball when it went up in the air you have to have both to be able to succeed like in high school you had some guys that had the it factor, the mental part of it, but they were just limited skill-wise. They were short, they were slow, but they would go get the ball, man. They were players. And then you get the guys that get signed to college that are, you know, what are they called, combine warriors.

Like 4'3", 40, 35, you know, reps, but they're soft as Charmin. And they won't hit, or they won't go get the ball, or, you know, when clutch time time comes they don't want the ball like the people that do the best in anything combine both the mental and the physical and they work on both of those then you have a tom brady which maybe the timing's a little bit off right now right or a jordan but you have people that they're physically capable of it and they also have the mentality of a winner of somebody who wants to improve their life that wants to challenge themselves. And when you combine the physical and the psychological,

now all of a sudden we have the best possible outcome. And that translates to clinical practice as well. That translates to fighters also. Damn good stuff. So what are some of the take homes that you give people in terms of, you know, prescriptive exercise, rehab stuff.

And obviously this is going to vary fucking wild, widely and wildly, but you know, prescriptive exercise, rehab stuff. And obviously, this is going to vary fucking widely and wildly. But, you know, like from foam rolling to some of Kelly Surrett's stuff with the traction on the bands, things like that. I mean, what are your, how does it vary? I mean, obviously, between, pick a fucking body part. It's going to vary quite a bit. So, generally speaking, one of the most simplistic ways we can look at the body is a series of cables and bands basically, right? So a lot of them have an antagonist-agonist relationship from muscle groups. So for example, your elbow, your biceps brachii, your brachialis, those are your flexors, your brachioradialis and your extensors is your triceps, your anconius.

When you have an imbalance there, if you've overused your biceps and your bicep is stronger than your tricep, what that's going to change is the tension on the bone. So basically it's going to pull you this way. So if my bicep is too tight, I can't get tricep activation and I can't get to a neutral position, which is where we want to be roughly. Some places anatomically we're not capable, like the ankle is someplace.

Like when you think about like the thickness of the gastroc, the calf muscle versus the shin muscles, nobody's going to have an equal balance. Like the cross section diameter of those muscles is different. So that's gonna end up pointing us into a plantar flex position. So just working on the muscle balance

isn't enough to create that. You have to do some joint mobility too, which Kelly's done a great job of and other people have as well. And people are like, well, why is that one imbalanced? Well, our eyeballs are right here. So if we were running towards food or away from a threat, we generally don't have the need to run backwards

since our eyes are in the front of our head. So that would explain evolutionarily why our calves are much bigger than our shins. So we have to acknowledge that that's a realism of the world, so we have to work on that more. So we have to work on loosening the calves more, strengthening the shins more, but as a consequence, also loosening up the ankle joint itself. Most of us have faulty posture, and most people on here have probably heard about the difference between the pec majors and the abs pulling us forward and the weakness in the posterior muscles to hold us up right. Like these are basic tenants of physical therapy. Kelly calls that douchebag shoulders.

Yeah. You walk around all slunched over. Douchebag shoulders. It's funny, though. You know, you think of a typical meathead, you know, but at the same time, you know, when you look into certain populations, people at a fucking desk hunched over their keyboard all day long. That's probably the largest population. But even among athletes, you know, mixed martial artists for eight years, not only to throw punches and work on that anterior chain, but my fucking stance was shoulders forward, hands high, elbows in. Yeah, you got to protect all that.

I mean, I'm rolling my shoulders right now. And it's like I'm forcing these forward. Same thing in jujitsu i'm go back i'm sitting on my ass it's the same position right it's the exact same position so there are things there where no matter what you do you're you know you're fighting an uphill battle trying to reverse that you know and you've got to do more work on the other end than you're putting it in this end like we do that with golfers right like you're a gol, you're a professional golfer. We've saved many professional golfers careers from back pain, you know?

So you're sitting there, you have a closed chain, your feet are stuck to the ground, you twist your body this way, you're literally rotating your spine to the left every single time relative to your pelvis and your femurs. So over time, you're going to have multiple imbalances. One, you're physically moving the bones that direction and locking them there.

You're also creating an imbalance between the rotators to the left versus the right. So not only do we need to work on loosening up the muscles that are too tight and strengthening ones that are too loose, but even the motions themselves, we need to do the opposite way. So we encourage our golfers to stop and take practice swings left-handed to try to create some semblance of balance. So we're always trying to find that center. We're fairly symmetrical for a reason. That's our best biological position, having two eyes, two hands, two ears, two shoulders, and also being perpendicular to gravity. Your core is designed to resist gravity. When you start to tip forward, now we

have something called Wolf's Law and Davis's Law, your body's going to lay down more tissue on the other ends to try to stabilize yourself. That's what's happened when you see these people with Dowinger, some old people that are stuck forward. They've been there for too long. Literally, their body has now put bone and connective tissue down on the other side that limits extension just to try to protect them and hold them to fall forward all the way hunchback kind of look like you ever seen like a mound on the fucking top of the fucking the bottom of the base of the neck there between the traps yeah yeah so a lot of that is a consequence of not knowing these other concepts earlier in their lives and working on them and stretching out

their anterior components and working on strengthening their back muscles. Like we've devolved, if you ever see the evolutionary chart, to this position. Yeah, to the fucking computer position. Right. And we're wired for flexion. People don't even think about this. Like when somebody has a hemorrhagic stroke in their left hemisphere, for example, what you're going to see is that right arm curl up and they're going to toe up on the other side. So they lose the ability to cortically fire their extensor muscles on this side. They can't get their triceps and their wrist extensors to fire. We're wired for flexion. When we lose that capability, when you're asleep, right, your

neocortex turns off. Where do we go? We go to fetal position. As a baby's brain develops, it lifts its head up so it can fight gravity, stand up, use its hands, be able to articulate with their mouth. But until they can develop that neocortex, they crawl and they can't pick their head up. And the first thing they learn biologically is to bring their hand to their mouth so they can feed themselves. So like this is a feed forward and feedback mechanism. Like we need to really be working extensors a lot, not only for the health of the body, but also for the brain and vice versa. None of these systems operate interdependently. They have to actually work together and synergistically. So there are neuroplastic changes you can actually have that are good for your brain by balancing your body.

So if you do everything with your right hand, you may be developing patterns in your brain that are actually doing you a disservice. One of the big things I've seen from people is most people hold their phone here with their right hand. So their eyes are actually weak going to the left. They're very comfortable here. So they have a hard time looking down into the left or up into the left. Like everybody that's listening, try that right now.

It's going to feel kind of tiring or uncomfortable. So as a consequence of that, what you may see is a neck problem as a result. So if I wanna look at you straight, but my eyes are comfortable being down and to the right, now I turn my head to this position so that my eyes are comfortable. Now I create a orthopedic issue in my neck.

So you have to work on your balance as well, symmetry in all things. You know, there has to be a balance between your emotions, your physical being, your wellbeing, your work-life relationship, your relationship between your family time and your work time. You also have to have a balance synergistically from your body as well. You need to do things with your left hand. You need to try novel activities.

Like if you're going to be the best possible you can be, what you don't ever want to be locked into is a simplistic movement or a simplistic way of thinking and facilitate that neurocognitive loop over and over and over again. Because what you'll lose is the ability to do anything else. You'll lose the ability to assess something through somebody else's perspective. And that's the one thing that really makes us human is empathy, right? Like it's the only thing that separates us from animals. A dog will hump anything around it.

A dog will eat any food that you allow in front of it, generally speaking. But we have the ability to look into the forward and realize that those things might be deleterious to our lives. You know, humping everything that walks by may cost you so much in your personal life. It may give you diseases. It may give you children that you have outside of wedlock. Your wife will leave you, you know, eating everything that's in front of you, not having any self-control there. That will give you diabetes and obesity and all these other problems. So when we lose our ability to function cognitively, we lose our ability to do the things that make us human, which is to look

at things and have some self-control and have some empathy and put yourself in someone else's position and to think things through what the long-term consequences are for you, your family, and your loved ones. Man, that's fucking beautiful. This fucking podcast is fire, Ryan. So something you talked about there that was incredibly true and very well said was this tie-in of how we are able we have the capability to think things through right and so many people right now want the fix with a pill and they want this this thing that's going to be the next and i don't get me wrong i fucking love alpha brain we sell it i take it every day it's an amazing nootropic i'm all about nootropics but if you have cognitive dysfunction that that may not it may not be the thing that brings you back up to baseline if you're constantly putting shit food in your body, right?

Right. And how much does the microbiome affect neurotransmitters? I've said it many, many times on here. 80% to 90% of our neurotransmitters are made in the gut. There's a direct impact of what you put in your body that has on your emotional status, your cognitive function, how you feel at fucking 3 p.m. in the afternoon, all that's a factor into it. And in addition to that, movement, body, being outdoors, getting fucking sunshine, hydration, all this shit plays a role in how we think, feel, move, and operate. And if we're not being mindful of that and what we do for ourselves each day, it's not just,

like Aubrey says, you know, and Rogan says, you don't just eat for mouth pleasure. Like there's fucking plenty of hyper palatable foods as Rob Wolf calls it, that will taste better than fucking anything nature came up with. And they're engineered by scientists to do so. Literally.

But what that does for you is far worse than it adds a couple pounds to your body. Like everyone thinks like well you know my weight's down i'm gonna have a cheat meal or you know i did good job dropping 10 pounds so let's have pizza tonight or whatever the fucking case may be and i still eat pizza i'm choosy with my pizza for damn sure balance right yeah there's a balance with anything but at least 80 20 you know like at least understand like i'm gonna do the vast majority of the work for myself to be better in all directions and if i do that it's not only going to impact how i look which is a nice

side effect but how i feel think operate the small stuff i won't sweat as much all that shit i'm not going to find that in a book i'm going to find that by doing by doing the things that are good for myself yep and even if the science doesn't necessarily support what you're saying, as long as you're feeling better and by your metrics, everything is getting healthy in your life. You can check your blood pressure. You can see how things are going with your relationships and your family. By any means,

the only actual thing that matters is you and how your results feel and how your life is functioning based on the parameters that you set for yourself. Like you have to find a, like whatever your goals are, which is why goal writing is important, right? And it doesn't have to be that you have the best podcast in the world. It doesn't have to be that you're a CEO of a company.

Some simplistic goals could be the best husband I could possibly be, the best father I could possibly be, whatever that is. Those goals are incredibly admirable, but are you actually taking those steps to do that? And those require, like you said, a balance of movement and health and oxygen and water. And without those things, your body will deteriorate. You will not

be capable of being the best possible father or husband you can without taking those other steps. There's only so much there that you can put towards something. If you spend all your energy at work and you're eating crap, you've got nothing left in the tank by the time you get home to hit the ground running with your two year old. Yeah, that's an important part of life life why are we why are we fucking working if it's not to make our children's lives better and to make our personal lives better as well it's it's it's it's bananas to me ben greenfield taught me that he he really laid the foundation for me because when i i i think the world of him is a biohacker and when i when i went up to spokane at his house and really got to talk to him i knew he was homeschooled graduated at 15 from high school graduated from college at 20 highly intelligent guy I thought his kids would be like

captain fantastic you know like know everything and read all these books and just be at home and and he's like look man there was a lot of things that I didn't get uh in being homeschooled you know I didn't do well with others didn't play well with others didn't take direction if somebody was trying to teach me something I thought fuck you I can do it better and then i don't think he used those words but um for his kids you know he said i want them to have the things that i didn't have and that means being in school that means learning to play well with others that means doing team sports and not just single sports and then when they get home from school all my fucking work is done i better make damn sure that every meal is sent, my workouts are done,

so I can be full court press as their father and I can teach them all the cool shit that I want them to know that they're not learning in a structured classroom. I can teach them how to bow hunt, how to forage for food, how to find fucking wild plants that are edible. And that's awesome, right?

Because that's the same deal, you know? Yeah, and I think our society is losing out on some of that stuff. Big time, big time and so many people it's it's a weird thing you know this is my first nine to five working on it in my entire fucking life right and i come home at five and for the first month you know i was focused on working hard and working out and i wasn't working in i had i'd lost my meditation practice i was also jacked to the gills on coffee like close to a gallon of coffee i'd start with a half a pot in the morning i'd have two more optimized coffees at work right when i fucking got here you know i'm at i'm at uh half a gallon before noon you

know what i'm saying yeah and you know obviously there's physiological problems problems with that but you know one of the biggest changes that I've had is just starting the day. And I got this from Aubrey's book on the day. Starting the day with 16 to 24 ounces of sea salt water. And then I have my fucking coffee. But front-loading that hydration pays dividends throughout. And I've found that if I'm tired in the afternoon, I can look back and say did i drink enough

fucking water it's that simple it's not it's 3 p.m i need more coffee like i shouldn't need fucking coffee at 3 p.m right yeah right maybe i just need more water maybe i'm just fucking dehydrated and that's been a a very easy take-home solution and that's easy to do when you're working all day right yeah busy yeah you don't think about that. You don't pay attention. But I got a fucking 64 ounce clean canteen that's full of fucking structured water. I got all the sea salt in it. It's ready to go. And I know once I've had that between all the other drinks that I have throughout the day, I'm good.

I'm still getting, you know, 120 plus ounces of fluids in my body. Right. That's cool, man. That's really cool. And you said something about like schoolwork. It really brought up an interesting point to me. So like I teach doctoral students now, right? So it's really important. Like I've, you know, knock on wood, I don't get any terrible reviews this time, but I've always had five star reviews. And I think one of the issues that we're

running into nowadays is like you're running through different generations and professors and teachers are used to having cultural authority and not being questioned. Well, in the day of Google and smartphones, you're a human. You're going to make mistakes when you're teaching. And unfortunately, because they're so used to having power and control, like this goes back to the homeschooler things, like they basically will beat down anybody who asks them questions. So that was me as a kid. Like I would read all the time. I would go read the encyclopedia. There was no Google. There was no. So if I wanted to learn something, I would have to go look it up. But the other students didn't know that stuff. So my teacher would say something wrong and not having the social IQ to notice that this isn't going to really make my life better.

It's going to make it worse. I had to correct them. I had to step in and say something. Most people don't appreciate that. And I would get in trouble and suspended. And so it's interesting to me now that I teach like one of the big things I try to tell everybody is like everything should be questioned. Everything that I say should make sense to you and should fit your worldview. Like don't believe something just because I say it or because anybody else says. Think about it. Think through using your logic centers. And if there's some research or whatever else, like if this actually makes sense to you, it may not. If it doesn't, you may need to look more into it or decide that there's somebody else's worldview that works better for you or question me because I am wrong sometimes. There's

no doubt about that. And I think when you can set your ego aside like that, then you get a lot more respect out of your students or whatever else. It's okay to say, I don't know sometimes because nobody knows everything. It's really important to be able to do that. Some of the other professors that I've worked with, they lose the trust of their class because they'll say something wrong and somebody will check them on it and Google it and call them out. And now everybody knows that they're fallacious. You cannot get by on that cultural authority anymore. You have to be capable of having input from your peers, colleagues, students, whatever that is, and being able to say, hey, listen, sometimes I'm wrong. It's okay to question

everything. You should, but you should also use, you know, based on your logic and worldview, the things that make sense. Like you can't just walk around. And this is tricky too, because sometimes what happens is we don't have the nuance or scientific background to really interpret things. So things sound good. Like when you talk about the earth being flat, that that might sound right. But that's because you don't understand the basic principles of physics 101. Like you don't know how light refracts. You can't understand that it bends around, you know, basically the curvature of the earth, just like your glasses work, just like your eyes work to bend light. Things are all based on perspective. Nothing really is what you think it is. So when you look at the world, you actually see it in 2D. It's like a painting.

Our brain interprets that information to give us the perception of 3D. The way we do that is things that are smaller away, and our brains means that it's further away. And we can correlate that by throwing something at it. I can determine that distance. Some people actually don't have that ability. So by a shadow, we assume that the sun is overhead. So nothing really is ever as you perceive it is. And if you've ever done psychedelics, that's a great way to view the world in a completely different perspective

and get yourself outside of your own box and realize that your view is A, not that important. Two, you're not that important. And C, the world could be completely different than you think it is. One way I like to show this with people is you can do blind spot testing. You draw a circle and an X. You hold the X, you close one eye right here, what you're going to see is the circle disappear

in your periphery right here. It fills in the information. Your brain fills it in with the surrounding information because you don't have rods and cones there to perceive light. So basically what happens, your brain tricks you into thinking there's color there that isn't actually there, at least from your perception. So in that aspect, reality is completely and utterly subjective, which means that you're actually capable of creating your own reality and creating your own perception of the world.

And you can choose to make your life amazing and awesome and get all the things that you really want if you choose to accept that that's a possibility. And, you know, I'm not some, you know, secret guy or some metaphysical guy, but I do believe in the power of feed forward and feedback. So if I convince myself that I'm going to do something really well, I'm going to put that energy back out. And we have these little neurons in our brain called mirror neurons. It's why you yawn when I yawn, why I smile when you smile. Like our instinctively, our body gives us that feedback and that helps us to survive. So if I think that I'm going to do something really well, even if I'm not convinced yet,

and I act that out, other people will give me that feedback back and recalibrate that to where I actually do believe it. So now my body physically believes it. So you can literally brainwash yourself into thinking you're a great public speaker, a great clinician. And then as a result of that, you're going to give people the energy they need or the treatment they need or whatever else, just starting from the fact that you decided that you wanted to be really good at something and nothing was going to stop you from doing that. There are

literally neurobiological ways that that's plausible and possible. And we see it play out all the time in the real world. And when you talk about all these epic speakers and epic writers and all these people, if you really pay attention, that's one thing they all have in common. They all have a lot of certainty in themselves. And I bet if you ask them that that took cultivation, they actually had to create their worldview. They actually had to convince themselves at the beginning that they were really awesome and that they could really do something really well. Eventually what happens is everybody else tells you you're awesome. So then, of course, you believe that as your base work foundation. Now, at that point, what you have to say is, am I really that awesome or are other people

just hyping me up, right? So that's when you actually have to be realistic with yourself. Yes, man. Yeah, man. Everybody's gassing me up. Like some of my people sometimes I'm like, hey, put me in my place when I'm messing with you. Like I know I write your paychecks, but really I need that feedback sometimes from you.

Like this is a team effort. Like I might get out of line, but I don't have a boss that put me in my place. So please, somebody let me know if they think I'm doing something that is not productive for the business, not productive for my business relationships or not productive for our patients. Please, I need that. I don't have the ego that I'm going to be mad about it or whatever else because I want to be better. Yeah, you brought up an excellent point. And it really is, you know, fake it till you make it in a nutshell. Sometimes, you know, but it's not from the biological sense you're really not faking it right through belief and through the way that

our body interacts with with our thought you know but thoughts become things right and it's 100 true it's not oh i think i can dunk a basketball and then i could fucking dunk a basketball there's some work that needs to be done in between right and maybe some maybe there's some people that'll never fucking dunk a basketball due to their height that's fine but even if you look at just science behind smiling right you brought that up if i smile i can start to shift the way i feel inside same the way i feel inside when i see your smile yeah the same goes for if i'm frowning or if i'm making the pain face as kelly surrett talks about if you're getting body work done or you're rolling on a foam roller and you're doing this ah your body's not gonna fucking loosen up it's not gonna relax into the movement and open up to that and you're not gonna have the desired outcome that you want from it

right you know and jordan fucking getting back to my man jordan b peterson b he talked about um in his first rule it's a lot about lobsters and serotonin, but the first rule is stand tall with your shoulders back. And that posture has a direct effect on our serotonin response. We know from breath work that if I'm feeling like shit and I'm a little fucking hyped up and anxious and feeling overwhelmed, that fight or flight mechanisms kicked in sympathetic systems turned on and i can reverse that through my breath i can reverse engineer it just by slowing my breathing down and if i do that that'll kick on the parasympathetic that'll slow everything down heart rate's gonna come down breathing's gonna come down and i've just fucking altered it through my own fucking will right right we have control over physical response so much more than we think.

And you know, you don't always have to be the alpha in the room. Sometimes it's better for your life to be the beta or even the gamma. If you have four alphas in a room, you may see so much headbutting. So it may actually be in your survival best interest to not be puffing your chest out. So you have to find your spot sometimes. So you have to pick and choose. Sometimes, generally speaking, all the roles will be filled. So unless you're the type of person that doesn't have the EQ to fill the role, like sometimes when you're on some dominant person, like it's actually better

for you to fall back for a little while. Like if this is a mistake I used to make in business all the time, I would come in and try to tell everybody how much I knew and how smart I was. But I was the new guy. Like people don't like that. And the young guy. And the young guy. Yeah. It's not necessarily the best thing. What do you know? I'm going to put people off by trying to show that I know how to do something and it's actually not good for me. So like it's not always just standing upright and being the tall guy and the loud guy. Like that has totally backfired for me in my life on multiple occasions. So it takes some calibration.

Unfortunately, the only way to do that is through learning, right? Like you have to actually try things and experiment and find out which situations you do well with. That's what we call wisdom instead of knowledge and that takes time yeah experience is the best teacher by far yep but i still feel like you could stand tall with your shoulders back and just keep your mouth shut yes listen you know yeah yeah i was i was fucking ryan and i were dying in the fucking hallway here like you have the best last name of all time like it's fucking such a great last name police academy police academy yeah it's the fucking best yep people like that's not is that your stage name no no bo high tire ladies

next up on the main stage oh yeah yeah so what have you got coming up i know um obviously we're talking about some things behind closed doors about the potential of on it and partnering with you and things like that we don't need to dive in too much to that but what have you got coming up you guys got any big fights coming up yeah we got tons we'll be here in austin in two weeks again so we've got four fighters on the car we have cowboy we've got uh marcine we've got uh joe b we've got uh gt who's fighting sage northcutt so it's like the theQ match. They're both good looking. The ladies, go check out their profiles. This is kind of like Ivan Drago versus Rocky kind

of look they got going. So that should be pleasing for the ladies, I think. So we'll be here for that. I'm going to be at the Arnold Classic as well. Obviously, I'm always teaching. I teach four semesters a year at sunm.edu.com um it's a napropathic school so we basically i'm teaching these ways of assessing patients and thinking to doctoral students who specialize in connective tissue development so like it's really cool in this in this program because we get to look at the mistakes that chiropractic and physical therapy has made both culturally and treatment wise because those are maybe polarizing brands at this point and basically learn from those mistakes and implement the better things and basically

teach our students how to think, how to problem solve, how to address their own inadequacies. And it's really like a baby of mine, like aside from my actual business, which, you know, we're fixing people all day long. Like one of my main goals to teach young clinicians how to think properly, how to approach something in a logical fashion and be able to work themselves through an algorithm in their head to give the patient the best possible response, the best possible outcome, and to treat that patient like it was their mom or their grandma. That's what we're missing from healthcare now. We have these algorithms, this policy-based healthcare that doesn't do anything for the individual. We're missing out on the humanistic component of medicine. That's a huge thing for me. Otherwise, man, we're just a day to day trying to help people heal people and get them to

get the word out there that, you know, you can feel better and you will feel better if you buy into it. Hell yeah, brother. Where can people find you online? You can find me on Twitter, DR Bo Hightower on Instagram. Probably a lot of guys follow me on there for their weird, crazy, wacky videos I post. That's DR period Bo Hightower. If you're trying to get a hold of us, elite-osm.com post. That's dr.boe-hightower. If you're trying

to get a hold of us, elite-osm.com is our website. All of our scheduling is done through there. So you can book an appointment there. Pricing is way cheaper than anything else you'll find out there. So particularly if you're from another city in Albuquerque, we can't raise our prices higher than we are. We could, right? The market would take it. but it's my commitment to the people that I'll never make this therapy so expensive that regular people can't afford it. We'll always figure something out. Even if somebody can't afford the $70 treatment, whatever we have to do, if you're going to come clean the windows or vacuum, there's something somebody can do that we can exchange. The last thing we ever want to do is let a price preclude people from getting better. That's something we're committed to.

So, you know, you make my rehab mowing the lawn. Hey, whatever it's got to be, right? And this is, so turn around backwards and you're going to let it pull you. So this will stretch your anterior component. Also, my grass looks amazing. Mowing the fucking lawn backwards.

I love it, man. Yeah, you can find our exercise videos on YouTube. It's just Elite-OSM. Awesome, brother. It's been absolutely excellent having you on. We'll definitely want to run you back in the near future. Pleasure being here, man. Thank you, brother. Thanks. Thanks for listening to the On It podcast with my man, Dr. Bo Hightower. Be sure to check the show notes to see where you can find them online and leave us a five-star rating. That way more people can find out about this show and it is greatly appreciated. Thanks

for tuning in.