Mark Bell's Power Project - Are You in Pain? You Haven't Tried These Tools - Jill Miller || MBPP Ep. 940

Episode Date: May 30, 2023

In Episode 940, Jill Miller, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about a different approach to pain relief utilizing breath and soft implements. Follow Jill on IG: https://www.instagram.com/thejillmiller/   New Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the new Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw   Special perks for our listeners below! ➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!   ➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!   ➢ https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off Mind Bullet!   ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save up to 25% off your Build a Box   ➢ Better Fed Beef: https://betterfedbeef.com/pages/powerproject   ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject Free shipping and free bedside tin!   ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!   ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM   ➢ https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject to save 15% off Vivo Barefoot shoes!   ➢ https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori!   ➢ https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep!   ➢ https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS at Marek Health! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off!   ➢ Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150   Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en   Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

When I started teaching yoga, I started to see a lot of problems specifically around people had to do poses that their bodies couldn't accommodate. Talked about my fast release on the show. We've had a lot of guests that have come on and most people are talking about hard implements. But when we were using that, it just did so much. And you don't expect that with a soft implement. Soft is supreme. I thought you'd say it's a new hard. Soft is supreme. I thought you were going to say it's a new heart. I was like, hey, that's good. And what you can see with hard tools is that the hard tools initiate,

in most bodies, a muscle bracing response. That's one of the gifts that a soft tool can do is that you can just get in there right away. You know, we talk about time under tension when you're under a bar. Well, I talk about time under intention. The emotions show up when you're under a bar. Well, I talk about time under intention. The emotions show up when you let go. Off my teeth. Okay, I'm sure it'll be right into the mic. Yeah,

people will just do ASMR. Oh, God, that sounds so vivid. It's so close. I feel like you're inside of my ear. Right? It's a little too much. And let's start it over. Yes. So you were bulimic for how many years? Well, this is a good place to start. So I have all this almond skins all over my teeth right now. And the reason I'm experiencing it is because I have a lot of gum recession. So right before we rolled, they were like, oh, is that from brushing too hard? And yeah, I definitely brush with vigor.

Sorry. Didn't seem easy. I mean, I really want to get those teeth clean. You know what I'm saying? Like, I love vigorous brushing. My girlfriend does the same. I'm like, calm down. She's like.

No, I know. The gums are girlfriend does the same. I'm like, calm down. She's like. No, I know. The gums are a very specialized muscle. Little circles. Yes. And did you guys know that you're supposed to actually, you don't necessarily, it's not about brushing the teeth. You're supposed to brush up against the root. Yeah, the gums, yeah. Yeah.

So I didn't know that. And this brings me to the answer to your question about, so the recession is probably part from vigorous brushing and then part from being bulimic as a teen. One of my best friends in the world is a pastry chef, top pastry chef. She's won three James Beard Awards and she happens to be married to a dentist. And we're very proud

because we took them on their first date. But I decided to swap dentists. I was like, I'm going to start going to see her husband, of course, because that's family. So the first time I sat in his chair, Ed looked at my teeth and read them like tea leaves. He's like a tooth intuitive. And he looks at my teeth and he goes, oh, you have acid reflux. And it's one of those moments where I just felt, boom, boom, boom. This gap of, you know, somebody saw me.

He saw right through into my teeth and knew the cause of the recession was from bile. And the kind thing to say is acid reflux, not, oh, do you have a mental health issue called bulimia or did you? And so I, and I just, I looked at him, I said, oh no, I was bulimic when I was a teen from age 16 to 20. And it was just shit. I had no idea that in my forties, I was going to have a consequence like that. But there's lots of consequences that follow your whole life with, you know, with when mental health is, is something that is very tenuous. What do you think was the start of that? Oh, the start of throwing up? Yeah. Well, I got the idea.

Let's say I got the idea by watching a TV show in the 70s. So I think you and I are Gen Xers, firmly in the Gen X. And there was a show called, I think it was 2020? Yeah. Yeah. With Barbara Walters? And Hugh Downs. Okay. And they did a show with- I think it's still yeah yeah with Barbara Walters and Hugh Downs okay and they did a show I think it's still on the air right maybe maybe I don't know I don't watch tv anymore um it was a great show it might have been 2020 or it might have been some other news digest show like that but they had a show that featured Jane Fonda and Jane Fonda on this show came out and talked about bulimia,

that she had been living with bulimia for many years. And she was talking about this condition that she had where she ate and then she would throw up. And I mean, they, they, it was a really good segment and it was talking about it as a mental health condition.

And, you know, was it, was it because you wanted to look thin? And yes, she wanted to look thin. And it was the fitness industry and the Jane Fonda workout. And it was around all of this time. But that was the first time I learned about it.

And somehow it went into my little tween brain. And my tween brain was probably like, oh, that'll be a good idea to use someday when I eat too much of something. I can just throw it up. So that idea came in. And then when I was 16, I ate a pan of brownies. I made a pan of brownies for my family and I made them at night. And I was worried that the sugar was going to keep me up. So I threw up the brownies and I didn't successfully throw them up. Um, but it's interesting. I was more worried about my sleep than about spiraling out of control for the next four years into an eating disorder. Um, because I, I'm going to protect my sleep at all costs. And we can talk about that on this podcast too. But that was, that was the first moment when I did that. And, and then it followed

me for the next four years. Did you, as a time, were you like overweight at all? Or were like, I was not overweight as a teen. I was overweight as a kid. So I was the chubby kid. I was the shortest kid. I was the youngest kid. So I was very smart. And back in those days, if you were too smart for a teacher, they would just kick you up into the next grade. And so I was the youngest kid in the class. I skipped first grade. And I think that probably on a social emotional level, I was trying to keep up with kids who were far ahead of me emotionally or psychologically. Um, but I was really chubby and I wasn't interested in, in my body and I wasn't interested in athletics or anything. And so I was like a hundred pounds and four foot nine in sixth grade with the, you know, the only girl with glasses got picked last,

the only girl with glasses, got picked last, got picked on, got teased. I was that girl. And that was, it ended because I started not eating. So my first taste of the mental health problem that was my eating disorders was anorexia. So I started to starve myself and I lost about 35 pounds. And that coupled with at the same time getting into my body, because my mom had brought home at the same time, ironically, the Jane Fonda workout and the Raquel Walsh yoga video. So we lived off the grid in a solar home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. So like there wasn't a lot to do, but walk the dogs, read. And if you wanted to watch a show, it was on beta. So she brought home these videos and I started doing them with her. And if you wanted to watch a show, it was on beta. So she brought home these videos and I started doing them with her and then she stopped doing them, but then I became obsessed. And that

took me through, you know, a decade of challenges, um, to figure out a path out of anorexia and bulimia. And a lot of the, you know, the book that I wrote, Body by Breath, a lot of the work that I did way back then, and that has followed me for these past 20 years, the ripple effect of the body-based therapy that I, I guess I MacGyvered for myself, has shown up in application for all sorts of other people and other conditions, not just an eating disorder. Physical exercise may have saved your life to some extent. Yes, because I could have become an alcoholic or a drug addict very easily. I have that addictive, obsessive, kind of compulsive, disciplined vibe.

And so I think about that all the time. Yeah, it could have gone in a very different direction. I became addicted to something that actually had the potential to be create tremendous healing. Did you communicate with your parents at all about, I mean, probably not, I'm assuming, but how'd you get past bulimia? Well, I hid the anorexia with big clothes. I kind of hid underneath big clothes. I can see pictures from that time and I'm wearing like, it was like the early eighties. So big baggy sweaters and big baggy, you know, Madonna, like just, yeah, they're back in. That's come back.

Right. Um, and I do remember, um, when I was in college and I was really struggling cause I knew one of my girlfriends was going into the hospital. She was emaciated. I mean, I was in the dance department. We were a mess. Like all the girls I hung out with was like one after the other had just weird eating habits. And it's very common in the dance department at different, maybe hopefully not now, but certainly back then. And I know that it's a big problem now. now, but certainly back then. And I know that it's a big problem now in general, in teen bodies, especially female teen bodies. I mean, this is one of the leading causes of death of all mental illnesses. Eating disorders are the number one cause of death. If one is to perish from a mental health disorder, it's eating disorder. So they're deadly. and one of my best friends, she went into the hospital to get treatment. And some of my other friends were like, you need to get treatment too. And, and I was not in denial. I just didn't think that was, of course, when you're digging your heels into your addiction, you're like, that's not going to work for me. I'm going to take it into my own

hands. But I did tell my parents and I remember my mother not knowing how to deal. When I finally told her that I was bulimic, she couldn't face it. And then I told my dad. And my dad said, it's just a phase you're going through. So when I did cry for help, I didn't get the help I needed. But I was seeing a therapist through the college. You get a few sessions as part of being in the student medical, you know,

thing. Did your friends open up to you at that time too and say, Hey, I'm kind of dealing with the same thing. We just knew all of us knew who's, who had, you know, strange eating patterns or,

you know, we all just knew. But the, the talk therapy I did was not moving the needle and I couldn't stop throwing up. Like I just couldn't stop the behavior. And, um, and when you go into hospital, they make you stop the behavior. They have so many really great and necessary tactics to do that. and I don't think my parents thought it was urgent enough. Like when I confess to them, I didn't get the response of let's help you, which is really what I wanted.

That's why I told them I wanted the help. But what ended up helping me was I told a yoga teacher, I was also doing work study outside of school at a massage studio and at a yoga studio. Like I was looking for help by going into the healing arts while I was in school full time and working and doing all the stuff. But I was trying to figure out how to not suffer so much. And I told this teacher that I had, that I was bulimic and that I also couldn't feel my abs. Because I was like obsessed with, I I also couldn't feel my abs because I was like obsessed with with I mean everybody was obsessed with having you know abs right and jacked you're very

jacked now nowadays by the way uh well that's a very long process of understanding that I actually need muscle mass for health and the stretching is not the the solution for you know a lifetime of especially when you're hypermobile. So I told this teacher that I couldn't feel my abs and I knew I couldn't feel my abs because I didn't get abs sore the way my classmates did when we did Pilates. So there was a Pilates requirement as part of our dance thing. And I never got sore, but my roommate who was pre-med, she would always complain of being sore. And so I told this teacher, I can't feel my ab, or I don't get sore. I can't feel my abs and I'm bulimic. And I knew these things were connected.

And she suggested that I lay face down on a beanbag shaped hamburger bun. So this is like a prop used in the Iyengar yoga space and it's filled with sand. So it's very, very hard. And she said, just lay down on it and breathe into it. And so I laid face down on this rock and started to feel just unbelievable pain, like insane amounts of pain. And knowing what I know now as a person in the body space, like that's called visceral pain. Like that was the agony of your organs that had been hiding in the dark, obscured by all of my anxiety and by the eating disorder and by all the stresses I was running away from. But that pain also helped me to not only feel that discomfort, but it also tapped into grief and tapped into rage and tapped into all of the emotions that were festering in this little, you know, 19-year-old body that was crying out for help. And that's how I started to tap in to myself. And I literally, the next day, I woke up in the morning and I was like,

I need to have that thing again. And I roll up a hand towel and I wrap the hand towel to make it look like a honey bun. And I put it on my abdomen and I just moved it around different parts of my gut. And I breathed into all these different parts. And I would do this every morning like a ritual because I'm very disciplined and through going into my body I started to finally accept my body I started to have my feelings I started to speak the truth and experienced um moving beyond I mean I haven't thrown up in 20 unless it's well I had food poisoning I can count the number of times I've thrown up because that's what I believe like a bul in 20, unless it's, well, I had food poisoning. I can count the number of times I've thrown up because that's what a bulimic, like a bulimic,

well, like if I throw up again, I'm a bulimic, but I did eat some bad turkey chili at Whole Foods and that fucked me up. So- You gotta just let that shit out. And it came out all directions, every which way. That's the worst. Like when you think about the food that you ate too it makes you like sicker

you're like and then you think you're like i think it must have been that chili it's a reflex right it's like autonomic reflex the that gag response yeah and so that so you know healing through that and then just doing a lot of research and a lot of study and then trying to analyze for the past whatever multiple decades the human body in the way that I do, I've transmuted that practice into a much softer, broader tool. And it's called the Cordius Ball that I use for all sorts of purposes, not just for recovering bulimics, but for people who have low back pain and people who have scar tissue in their abdomen or people who have challenges with their breath, which brings us to Body by Breath. What would that class that you just took us through be called? Because Mark was mentioning that Jill Miller's coming to town, we're going to do some yoga. And I was like, okay. So I was imagining something totally different than what you took us through.

I'm actually going to grab the other balls that you had us use, but what would that be described as? It's called unfortunate misbranding by the global marketplace that doesn't necessarily have a hole for me to sit in yet. I have been creating a regenerative fitness program for the past 20 years. And that's interesting because now the term regeneration is one of the pie slices in the greater fitness complex. But yes, I sort of fit into the yoga box because that was my background. I started doing yoga age 11 on. And professionally.

Age 11? Yeah. Videos. Videos. Exactly. You can count Raquel Welsh's yoga video as the beginning of my yoga career. See if you can bring it up, Andrew. I'll see what I can find.

Oh my God. So it was Bikram's series. So if you're familiar with Bikram yoga. So she was a student of Bikram's series. So if you're familiar with Bikram Yoga, so she was a student of Bikram. It's called Raquel Wells' True Health and Beauty. And you can see there's a trailer on YouTube and she's wearing a camouflage bikini running on the beach. And there's a Humvee or a Jeep or something chasing her.

And she's like running on the beach. That's the trailer. But humvee or a jeep or something chasing her and she's like running on the beach that's the trailer but it's Bikram series he ended up suing her because she I mean she obviously infringed on his like series of IP but that was my that was my first introduction to to yoga but I grew up in Santa Fe it was like very hippie so So yoga was like, that was people, that was, that was fitness in Santa Fe yoga. Um, so how, how do I define myself as a practitioner? Um, I, you know, I would say I'm, I'm a leader in the regenerative fitness space. I'm a part of what I would call the movement movement. Um, but in terms of my credential, I'm a yoga therapist. And maybe it's that word yoga that trips people up and then they assume, oh, we're going to be doing these either flowy postures or warrior two, down dog, what have you. But I created a program called, there you go. This is one of them that popped up, so I'm not sure. No, she's in, I'm pretty sure she's in a bikini in it, but maybe it's a one piece. No,

you're right. It's the onesie. It's a zebra print, not camouflage. Oh, she's gorgeous. God, she's amazing. She just passed away. Oh. What, but what an entrepreneur and what an incredible actress.

And so they do this in this like tiled sauna. Wow. There you go. Imagine going home to that every day. Videos like stretching and stuff. Yeah.

I am dying to meet some of her backup people. That was one of my first things I did. I was a backup yoga person in a friend's yoga video that went very wide. And that was such a big deal to get cast as a backup yoga person. Is there, like, are some people that are in a kind of traditional yoga space, are they like angry with you?

Because maybe, I don't even know where you stand on this, but do you not necessarily believe in some of the yoga practices and you believe more in some of the stuff that you're learning and teaching now? Well, obviously I believe in what I'm teaching completely. My work, when I started teaching yoga, I started to see a lot of problems in yoga classrooms, specifically around that people had to do poses that their bodies couldn't accommodate. And hold them for minutes at a time a lot of times. Or go through dynamic ranges that just didn't seem

like they were a good fit for a lot of different structures. And that, you know, you had to kind of stick with the sequence. But I knew better. I had things that could help people. Because part of where I went after college or during college, I ended up going to work at this place on the East Coast called the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, which is a big retreat center. So people in the West Coast are familiar with Esalen, this like on the, on the, are you familiar with Esalen? Oh, nevermind. Okay. So maybe this, this, the listenership of this podcast may have no idea what I'm talking about. So, okay. I come to you from a completely alien life form. This is awesome.

All right. Let me describe. So there are these- We don't even have women on the show. Here I come. We can start from that. Oh my God. Okay, fabulous. I am representing so many diverse communities right now. All right, so there is, there are these places all over the world

called retreat centers and they're basically campuses that are like campgrounds with nice buildings and rooms or yurts or whatever for adults to come and do continuing education or to take a vacation where they can just for a whole week learn yoga or learn holistic basketball playing or drawing on the right side of the brain or angel cards.

I mean, like the or meditate with Ram Dass, like the different the disparate or it used to be called the self-help community or self-realization community. Like it keeps changing. Now it's I think called wellness, but it used to be the self-help or new age. When I was into it, it was the new age community. And so I went and I worked for one of these places on the East Coast called Omega.

And I lived in a tent for an entire summer. By the way, this is how my bulimia healed in addition to the body-based work I did. living in a tent on the ground for an entire summer. So something about earthing and grounding actually was very effective for regulating my nervous system, getting out of the city, and being of service, like helping other people all summer with luggage or finding which building they should go to. So I did work study. I traded my presence as an employee in exchange for classes. And one of the classes I took every day was yoga from this master named Glenn Black, who turns out to be a lifelong mentor of mine in yoga and body work um what was the question where did we go to what was the question the question is yoga tune up the question is kind of just centered around uh whether i guess people are upset with you because maybe you you i guess you're pigeonholed

into the yoga space but then come to find out that maybe you don't love the practice of actual yoga. Come to find out I'm actually a disruptor of the yoga space. So I went all in in the yoga space. Glenn was an incredible mentor to me, and I studied with many different masters, learning different yoga formats. different masters, learning different yoga formats, you know, from Raquel, from my original teacher, my video teacher, to a lot of different formats. But ultimately, one of the things I learned from Glenn were biomechanics, anatomy, fascia science, and massage. And when I moved out to Los Angeles after I finished college and after I finished a couple years in Chicago, I started a theater company, dance theater company with a number of other graduates,

but I moved to L.A. because I wanted to be an actress and I wanted to do it out in L.A. But I did yoga as my sustenance, as my soul sustenance, because it took care of me. It was my greatest regulating thing. But I had learned all this stuff from Glenn, and I'd been studying massage also on the side. By the way, in college, I was doing work-study at a shiatsu school.

So I had all these other healing arts skills. And when I started finally teaching yoga, and that's a longer thing, but when I finally started teaching, I saw problems in the classroom. And I knew I had tools gained from my studies with massage and human anatomy that I could help people if I would do these little tune-ups. If we would just stop doing the up dog, down dog chaturanga and like, let's actually work on the shoulder. Let me teach you the joints of the shoulder. Let me teach you the bones of the shoulder, how the shoulders actually move. So if Nsema and I are to do some

of the movements that you mentioned, it's going to look very different. And so why not just take a moment to tune me up and then tune him up maybe with a different practice, right? That's right. That's right. And so those little tune-ups became these little detours that I would take in the middle of the classroom. Of course, I got called in by the management and they said, you can't do that here. And so I said, well, then I'll- Where's your bolster? So I said, well, I'll leave. And I went and I rented a martial arts studio. And quite frequently, I was paying my students to be there. It was very hard to make a living.

I was waitressing, but I was so dedicated to this. And I ended up amassing a following. And this was before I even had Facebook. And so word of mouth got around and then the Facebook existed. And then it's a much longer story. But I decided to term what I was doing yoga tune-up because I was more interested in tuning up people's bodies than doing actual yoga poses. I thought it was more interesting to disassemble or we could use the yoga pose as a construct. as a construct. And then if we disassemble it and then teach you about all the joint mechanics that belong to it, you know, grease you up, polish you up, maybe even do some massage on these different parts. And so I brought balls into the classroom to help people propriocept their body parts. And once they propriocepted them, then they could actually activate them better and locate

them better. And so it just became a thing. And so I think I was probably one of the first, if not the first person to bring your massage tools into the yoga classroom, but to make it into a format that was duplicatable. And then a longer story, I met my now husband and I met a number of other students who were like, I want you to teach me. And I created a teacher training program around it. And my husband and I ended up building a business around my methodologies and that's our company tune up fitness. And so we have yoga tune up. We have the role model method, which is exclusively the rolling because the rolling goes way beyond the yoga space. You know, we work with so many different communities and then now body by breath. There's a lot. I hope we have enough time to talk

about some of this stuff with you but there's you know when we were going through that class with you and you had us using these balls these courageous balls i'll roll this over to you so you can kind of describe it the gorgeous ball the gorgeous i keep calling it courageous but you had us using that and it's soft right we've talked about my fast release on the show we've had a lot of guests that have come on and most people are talking about hard implements we We're getting in there. Yeah. Digging in.

Right. But when we were using that, there were certain positions that you had us put it like on our lower back and breathe into that area. It gave feedback, allowing us to feel what it feels like to breathe in. But then it was also, it just did so much and you don't expect that with a soft implement. Soft is supreme. I thought you were going to say that with a soft implement. Soft is supreme. I thought you were going to say it's a new heart. I was like, hey, that's good.

Men take note. You're good. We're all good. Wow. Yeah. Say that again. I'll say it faster. Soft is supreme.

Yes. that again. I'll say it faster. Soft is supreme. And yeah, I wrote a chapter in a medical textbook called Fascia Function and Medical Applications. And it's a book that came out in December 2021, I think. And it covers different aspects of fascia for the medical community. And I was, they reached out to me to write the chapter on self myofascial release. So I, you know, I've been teaching with soft tools for years and I have, you know, wrote a book about soft tools and the benefits of my approach and this and that. And I had to go into a lot of research in order to write this. It's a narrative review to write the review. And, um, hardness is one of the variables that is the least looked at. But when you look at the few papers, and there's about five papers, five, maybe six now that have looked at

hardness, the results you see in the clients or in the cohorts are pretty astonishing. And so what the soft tool can do that a hard tool can't do is, and by the way, there are so many different sizes of tools. So size also matters. And that's another variable that we can talk about. But in general, I mean, people use hard foam rollers, foam rollers, you know, foam is actually very hard, right? The black foam, which is that ubiquitous, or even the white foam is actually quite hard in terms of the stress transfer that it does into your body. What is stress transfer? Well, it's like, think of ground reaction forces. Like you feel different in your body running on turf versus running on concrete versus running on sand versus running on grass. Well, tools are

textiles that transfer stress into your body as well. And so trying to look at, well, what are the kind of forces that are coming into the body from the tool? And what you can see with hard tools is that the hard tools initiate in most bodies a muscle bracing response because it hurts. And your body's trying to protect itself from the hurt. That's your autonomic nervous system. That's not you consciously because you consciously are like, I'm going to just breathe and I'm going to try to receive. But you're like, I feel owie on my quad when I stick a lacrosse ball on it. Yeah. Right?

And your body knows that and you sense that and you're like, fuck, this is going to hurt. It's going to hurt. Right. And so you're just rolling against your own tension. You're rolling against your own unconscious tension. And that's not very therapeutic. It's just arm wrestling somebody with a ball. But what the softer tools can do, and there are a number of other parameters in terms of what I teach to help people acclimate themselves and their pain pressure threshold, meaning, you know, their ability to tolerate pressure into their body. But with a softer tool, because it's not as threatening to the tissue,

you don't get a danger response from the nervous system. So you don't ignite like a sympathetic, you know, breaks on muscle bracing response. And so that's one of the gifts that a soft tool can do is that you can just get in there right away. And then time is another factor. Like we spent a lot of, you know, we talk about time under tension when you're under a bar. Well, I talk about time under intention, right? And so we have a really skillful way of applying the ball, but also there's a mindset going on, right? I had you guys repeating this thing to yourself, my breath is home. So there's also some cognitive effects that I was introducing to your body so that you had this ability to increase your tolerance for the implement into your structure. There's also, I'm going a little bit off here because I'm talking

about a number of other features, but in terms of the soft tool, like the soft tools that I use, we have a fleet of balls called the role model balls and they all um are soft pliable rubber the gorgeous ball that we use to decompress the low back is inflated and it's very very broad and then there's um smaller balls the smallest ones are called yoga tuna balls they're then there's the plus balls a little bit bigger and there's the alpha ball which is a little bit smaller than a soft ball yeah so they're all different sizes but they're all a grippy pliable rubber. So they conform, they have squish to them. And so when you're rolling

them up against joint junctions, the bones of your joints will sink into the ball and you're not going to have an annoying pinching, bruising, or alarm go off, right? So it's not going to leave you with bruises or skin irritation from the hardness of the tool, right? So if you're rolling lacrosse balls up and down your spine, you're like rickety-rackety, rickety-rackety, you know, peep, pep, pep, pep, pep. But there's no yield to the soft tissues. So I like the soft tools because your bony prominences can tuck in, they conform to your form, and then you have more of a molding quality of the tissue and your nervous system.

And that's where you're going to have a therapeutic response. And you can compound that with your position. You can compound that with the way you're breathing and, of course, mindset. And then you get this cocktail of physiological relaxation plus therapy yeah which is what a massage therapist is trying to do to you on a table we'll never stop talking to you guys about how important your sleep quality is and how it can help speed up your health and fitness your fat loss your life goals that's why we've been partnered with and sleeping on eight sleep mattresses for so long now and right now is

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And our sleep has been transformed because of it. We and myself used to wake up in a puddle of our own sweat. And now the 8 Sleep mattress every single night is blissful. Head to 8sleep.com slash power project for exclusive Memorial Day savings on the Pod Pro cover or the Pod Pro mattress through June 6. Stay cool this summer with 8sleep. Shipping the U.S., Canada, and all those good places. Link in the description down below. I end up doing a lot of myofascial release stuff just within the last maybe like year or so.

I've been implementing more and more of it. Of course, I've heard all your stuff and heard Sturette's stuff forever. And I just was not smart enough to catch on and just start to implement it more often. I did do some of it when I was powerlifting, but it was like, let me just kind of tune up my body for this particular movement and then like not touch it again and not really address it. But I have noticed that, you know, when I do go into the gym and I do, let's say, go face down on like a medicine ball, that's hard. I'll set my timer on my phone or something like that for two or three minutes. And it takes me probably a good 40 seconds or so

just to like melt into it because of how hard it is. So I have not even really thought of trying to use something softer until you were bringing that up today. So that's a practice that I could utilize and I can breathe better into it. Because the stuff that you had us do today, especially, I mean, we weren't even working on the shoulders. But our shoulder mobility changed a lot and the mobility through the thoracic spine changed a ton just by utilizing some breathing and breathing into those products that you brought in today that are teaching us and allowing you to kind of like melt and meld into these positions. Yeah. And you get this amazing biofeedback about the behavior of your breath. And also, you start to feel where this subtle tension is being held in your body. I mean, we're so unaware of our resting state. You know what I mean? Like our resting state is not very restful. You know, when you're completely relaxed, we don't realize like, oh, my shoulders are still holding on, right? Because we went through that check-in multiple times. You thought, oh, this is great. I'm lying on my back. It feels so good. But then

we did this decompression of the low back. And then we did this decompression of the thorax. And then we did this decompression of this zone three, right? The face, neck, and head. And, you know, the elegance of the movement or the lack of restriction in the shoulder movement. And so there's a payoff in joint mechanics. And then now's the time to train. I mean, it's either the time to go to sleep because you're so relaxed or now's a good time to train. If I'm doing, and I would qualify, do a much shorter session if you're going to go train. Or time to pee. Everyone had to take a pee break. Real quick yeah real quick question man Andrew

because like you had a drastic change right what can you just kind of describe kind of what happened to you yeah I'll do my best so um in we kind of did like we ran diagnostics on like how far our mobility and our shoulders can go from like waist to above our head, lying down, lying down without grunting, without, you know, lifting up the spine and without really forcing it. And I was shocked. I could barely go like, kind of like pointing my hand straight up in the air. And I was like, Whoa, like I instantly started feeling my spine moving all over the place. By the time we did what, like maybe four or five rounds of different things, it just like flopped down on the floor. And I was like, whoa, like this is really eye opening.

And my left shoulder has been bugging me pretty bad. And like that feels really good right now. And what I was explaining to Jill is I think my body is so tense and so like trying to hang on and protect itself all the time. That just getting into that parasympathetic state allowed my body to kind of just like, hey, let's chill out. We're safe right now. Now, I don't know if that's for everybody, but I know for myself, I think that's kind of more along the lines of what was going on for me personally, but it could be so many other things like, you know, just like I said, let my body let go, a lot of my shoulder mobility to just kind of be all willy nilly. Yeah.

And, and what, what I try to do with this new book with body by breath is teach people to be able to easily replicate, replicate a physiological relaxation. And I have this thing called the five P's and they're so easy to achieve and it's really easy to accomplish. And these five P's make a difference every time that you perform them.

It is the inner medicine chest. It's the compound pharmacy. Do you want me to go over the five P's? Because I didn't illuminate them for you when we did the class. So the five P's are, the first P is perspective. And perspective has to do with mindset. And so the mindset is giving yourself a top-down permission to go into the relaxation response. And so our top-down, our mindset for our class, our perspective was my breath is home.

top-down, our mindset for our class, our perspective was my breath is home. Now, if I'm focusing on, because I was trying to teach you guys about those three zones of respiration, but if I'm exclusively focusing on relaxation, it could be I allow myself to relax completely. It could be something like that. Or if I'm processing something heavy emotional, it might be all of me is welcome here. So you can have any top-down suggestion that is going to help to be a good host to the body-based experience that you're about to have because the other four P's are all going to illuminate. My body thinks and feels. It's going to illuminate all these feelings from the body. The second P to make sure you have in place is place. So for your body to achieve deep relaxation, it needs to be in a place that brings you peace. So we're not talking about like, if I'm in the airport and I was this morning,

actually, I was running late to the airport and I was like carrying my suitcase, not carrying, I was rolling my suitcase and I'm trying not to have a panic attack because that's where, by the way, that's where the panic attacks happen for me is the airport. And so I'm doing a number of different breath practices and counting my footsteps to try to keep me from spinning out.

And I didn't end up having a panic attack. Yay. And I got here on time. But place, ideally, if you're really looking for physiological relaxation, it needs to be a place that brings you peace where you feel safe. So safety is a big part of it. The second P, and that's that place where you're just like, and you guys laid, you're in your gym, like you guys feel safe there. So you're like, this is my home. I love it. The third P is position. Position is one of those factors that alters our blood pressure

and alters our postural tone, our postural resting tone. So when we recline, so ideally for relaxation, we're in a recline or we're in a gentle slope. And that gentle slope is where the pelvis is higher than the heart, higher than the head. And what that does is it induces a vagal dominant state. It creates the baroreceptor reflex. And the baroreceptor reflex is a reflex that happens because the brain is afraid that too much blood is coming at it. So if you go upside down, the amount of blood in your brain is highly regulated. And so once your pelvis is higher than your heart and gravity starts to make more blood flow towards your head, the carotid arteries in the side of the neck are going to sense that bulge of blood coming at it. And there's a very quick relay reflex arc from the sensors in the carotid sensing this pressure via the vagus nerve. And it goes to the brainstem.

And then the vagus says slow down heart slow down breath and all of a sudden you get free relaxation response just by being and i'm not you can get this all the way upside down but why stress your body just lift your butt up on top of a book on top of a gorgeous ball on top of a block or top of a couple of weights and you get that for free so we're compounding all these relaxation things so so you've got perspective, place, position. The fourth P is pace of breath. And so the breath pacing is a way to inoculate yourself away from sympathetic and into parasympathetic. And so ideally we're slowing down our exhales, longer exhalations versus the time of inhalation are typically the thing that's going

to induce the relaxation response and bring us to a vagal dominant state. There are paradoxical breath patterns where we can do things with inhales to also do that. But for the most part, it's longer exhalations get us into the relaxation response. And then the fifth P is palpation. And that's where the pressure of the balls on strategic parts of the body helps to bring about that unwind, that unbelievable unwind. And so if you get at least three of these P's in place, you know, if you have all five P's, like you've got it, like you are going to go, but get as many P's can and, um, and you'll get that physiological relaxation. Seemed like an amazing teaching tool, you know, trying to teach people about like lifting

and, uh, you know, trying to do a deadlift or something you'll say, or a bench press or even a squat, you'll say, you know, engage your lats, you know, you want to have your lats involved in like all three movements really. Um, and when you're trying to explain it, people are like lats, like, I don't know. And it's like so vague. And then you're vague with your explanation because you're like, I don't really even know how to describe how to flex your lats.

But with, you know, the way that we were doing this, where we were laying down on our back, we had the ball basically, you know, kind of under the armpit-ish area. And you can feel yourself kind of breathing into those areas. So I thought it was really a awesome teaching tool, you know, to be able to teach people like that's when we're training some of these

exercises, when you're doing a lap pull down or you're doing a deadlift, this is the area that we want you to activate. And if you know how to breathe into it, the odds are you're going to be able to learn how to contract it probably a lot quicker. But in this, in this situation, what you're doing is you're providing the lat with its optimal length

tension relationship. So typically, especially if you are, not that you're over-trained, but you're like, I've trained my lat so much that they typically are a little bit stiff, excessively stiff, right? They're tonic. And they don't, you know, it's like, I can't get a good side bend. It's hard for me to get my arm overhead. I'm not really able to get that wingspan. But because of the time under intention, because of the time and the locus of where the balls were, we are interacting with the fluid environment of the fascial tissues, as well as the fibrous environment of the fascial tissues. And then the muscle fibers are like,

oh yeah, I actually live longer, but my connective tissues are so coiled and tight that I didn't have a chance to have my length show up. And then guess what? You're going to have a better lift when you're optimized on axis from sacrum to humerus. You know, if my tissues are shortened, I can't shorten, I can't contract things that can't lengthen, right? So I have to be able to fully

lengthen in order to fully contract. And then the idea of like fully lengthening just under like a one-arm lat pulldown is much different because you're still way under tension, right? Yeah. So I think there's direct transfer, but also for the high performance body, you have to refill the tank. You can't just burn out and burn to a crisp. So one of the reasons, and there's a whole chapter in the book called The Role of Recovery for my athletes, for the coaches that I work with, so that the resilience is not just I can perform, perform. The resilience is this balance of parasympathetic-sympathetic. miles but can you not that you have to meditate for 26.2 miles but it's like what is your tolerance capacity for a parasympathetic dominant state and what's your capacity to do nothing like a lot of times people that exercise a lot their capacity to do nothing and just totally chill and not have toe spacers on and not be working on some weakness with their fingers or whatever like it's it's okay to have the toe spacers on and not be working on some weakness with their fingers or whatever.

Like it's, it's okay to have the toe spacers on when you're training. All right, all right. I'll cut you some slack. That's a good stack. You can work on your grip at the same time. I think that's a good stack actually. You know what I'm saying though? I do.

Like your mind is still halfway not there. It's almost like you're, you know, it's almost like you're picking up your phone while your spouse is talking to you. Like you're just, you're not all the way there. Oh my gosh. But I will say there is this phenomenon that you're describing and I talk about it in the book called, you're going to be blown away. Relaxation induced anxiety. I'll say it again.

Relaxation induced anxiety. So what relaxation induced anxiety is is a phenomenon it's not in the manual of of mental health disorders but this is a phenomenon that happens and i came across this about 20 years ago 25 years ago in a textbook and i was like huh and it was talking about this this phenomenon where people are laying in shavasana. So shavasana is corpse pose. It's the final pose in a yoga class. And they're in corpse pose and they're uncomfortable laying still. And they can't help but look around or have fidgets or have involuntary fidgets or pain or what have you. Relaxation-induced anxiety is a phenomenon that happens in bodies that feel threat in stillness. Now, that is not an uncommon experience.

Think of how many people are meditation averse. Up to 53% of people in this one paper that I saw have relaxation-induced anxiety because when you are still, that's when the discomfort sets in. And it's not like just, well, a meditation, I can just push through that. And eventually, probably you will if you can actually conform to the meditation. But there are genuine, unconscious neurological processes that spring up in so many bodies that prevent us from experiencing total stillness. And that is not a judgment on you as a bad or good person. It's just what is. I remember I was giving a massage to my husband when I first started dating him. So I'd read about this phenomenon and then I was giving a massage to

my husband when I first started dating him. And, you know, as you do, like now I'm just like, go roll on your balls. But then I was like, very very good i was massaging him and and all of a sudden sorry i mean we've been together for a long time so all the no i mean i i will work on him occasionally but we definitely do not qualify the amount of massage that he got in the beginning of dating okay um we have two kids. Shall I go on? Um, and, uh, like a third of the way through, I don't know where I was, you know, maybe he massaging his back. He was like, he started going like this. He was like flicking his hands and like, he was like, Oh God, I guess I can't, I can't

stop it. And what was happening was he was having rushes down his median nerve. All of a sudden, he was going into this deep relaxation, and then his nervous system hijacked him. And he just had these unstoppable, irritating nerve rushes. Now, people might get this in their sciatic nerve, or they might start to have restless leg syndrome, or their jaw starts to grind. We even know that during sleep, sleep is not very restful for many bodies. So relaxation induced anxiety is the disability, the inability for a body to be comfortable in stillness. And so I'm fascinated by this. I've

had, had it at times and I'm a fidgeter, like a total fidgeter, but like put me in Shavasana or tell me to meditate. I'm like, I cannot wait. Like, let's do it. So I, I somehow have been able to work with this, but in general, I mean, you can hear how fast I'm talking. I'm a, I'm a very sympathetically toned, tuned person, which is why I think I've gone so deep into the parasympathetic work to, to, to help me match my, my high excitation. But for people with relaxation-induced anxiety and the inability to find peace in stillness, they need to have their relaxation response too for their health. And so this book has so many solutions for them. And that's why, you know, breathe doesn't mean that you're just breathing in a statue-like position. Like we couple breathing with rolling, with movement.

And then one of the tools in the book is non-sleep deep breaths. That's yoga nidra. That might come or it might not come. And it's okay if that chapter, you leave that for eight years, you know, eight years from now. Like the other chapters really help you with that physiological relaxation for anybody, whether a body is stillness averse or whether they like stillness. Power Project family, your normal shoes are making you weak. This is why I partner with Vivo Barefoot Shoes because they have a wide toe box, they're flat and they're flexible. So with every single step you're taking, if you're taking a 10 minute

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but it is not boring like a typical textbook. Loaded with information. Loaded with a lot of good applicable information that whether you're an athlete who's just trying to be able to recover better and learn some of these things, you will be able to use it if you're a practitioner or you're a trainer, it's super fucking helpful,

but it's, it's, it's so solid. How many things you can just easily apply? Like there's, there's breath work for you to be able to prepare you to sleep. You know what I mean? And when you understand that you're going to be able to fall asleep faster.

It's so useful. So it was just great job on that book. Oh, thank you. And SEMA. I really appreciate that. I think one of the things you're talking about, like with people being restless is a lot of people are just in pain. You know, you're just going to like, you might not even really realize how many

times you fidget in the middle of the night, but it would make sense if you're, you know, if your lower back hurts or your hip hurts or this hurts or that hurts, your body is really intelligent. Your body is like, I don't like laying in this position. Let's go to the other side. Then you go to the other side and the shoulder hurts on that side. I think a lot of people are in a lot more pain than maybe they even realize. Why do you think sometimes these things don't register as pain? register as pain. You know, for example, if we go to use one of the smaller balls that you have,

you know, and we put it on our shoulder or like you had us do our neck. Why do we get a sense of like pain there, but we had no idea that we had an issue there at all until you put pressure there? Yeah, I always like to say, you know, the balls don't hurt. They just show you where the hurt is. So until we actually start to play with the textures of our own tension, we don't realize what little tiny nerves are all trapped up in there or all jumbled up in there or all agglomerated in there in terms of, you know, thickened fascia or lack of good contractility in the muscles or inflammatory fluids that are just trapped from lack of movement and lack of movement because you're protecting it. So, you know, pain signals travel very slowly, whereas movement travels very fast.

And so I just want to address a couple of things that you said. So one of the reasons that the fidgets also distract us from the pain is because the movement, the brain is like, oh, movement, movement, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel. And so it's picking up on the movement because those are faster moving signals, whereas pain is a lot slower. You think about, you stick your hand on the hot frying pan. This is the classic, right? You stick your hand on the hot frying pan, and then two seconds later, you're like,

ow, you pull your hand off, you shake, shake. The pain disappears while you're shaking. The minute you stop shaking, oh, it hurts again. And then you're like, then you start walking and pacing. You're like, oh my God, water. You're like any other stimulus to change the pain response. So our brain is equipped to process pain more slowly than others. But once we do get still, pain starts to really surface. Or once we are probed with a little tiny rubber ball, it's not like a hammer, it's not an ice pick, but the precision of sort of locating these

different areas of stuckness or stagnation or lack of movement, we're going to feel the irritants that are in that area. And that's why that shows up. And everybody has these spots. I mean, you know, it's like we sleep weird or we, you know, had an accident when we were seven and then now we're now we're 42. And oh, my God, my knee clicks all the time. What's that from? Well, because your leg got slammed in the door by your brother and you forgot about it and now if you're you know you had you've walked weird the rest of your life and now here you are you know so i mean it's like we have we have this legacy uh that we're walking around with and the you know massage has a habit of revealing that stuff so does movement right movement patterns you can you know look at people

under the bar or just look at gate or there's so many different ways to see this. But I love pressure because I feel like it's such a truth teller. Like you just, it's so direct, but you can also change it very quickly through different applications or through adjusting your pain pressure threshold. And then you can actually reprogram your brain, basically, that sounds so tacky, reprogram your brain just through retraining and neuroplastic changes so that your brain no longer is holding on to phantom pain that actually isn't there anymore. So a lot of times the brain just remembers a habit. And so it's keeping tension in an area because, you know, you threw your neck out eight years ago, but there's nothing there, an area because you know you threw your neck out eight years ago but there's nothing there there there's no there there um i remember i did um my embryonic is one of my students and she we did a

when the book came out we did an instagram live and she gets infrequent very crippling back pain but has had all the scans they're all clean um but her psoas locks up why we don't know but it locks up and so we addressed the load we did everything that you guys did today by the way we did We're all clean. But her psoas locks up. Why? We don't know, but it locks up. And so we address the load. We did everything that you guys did today, by the way. We did the lateral raphe, the lumbar decompression move. We do some other stuff deep in the gut that we didn't do and some other psoas trickery and some hamstring trickery. And that can really be helpful. But it's like these patterns show up.

Sometimes they're not biological. They're neurological. The brain is saying, this is my stress pattern. And when I get triggered by life stresses, this is how I protect this being. And so we just have to keep learning to work with that, whether it's our restlessness or whether it's like legit pain that, that puts us, you know, into a, into a non-movement state. You know, what if somebody is doing some of these things, using some of these implements and they find that they just can't stop holding their breath? The reason why I'm asking this is because like, you know, in jujitsu, one of the first things that you have to kind of teach someone is stop holding your breath

when you're trying to do something. A lot of new people have a tendency of when they're trying to produce force, they hold their breath. Now, I see sometimes when people are rolling, when they get places or even maybe once they start, they're like, and they start holding their breath, which is why, you know, when the video comes out, you'll see you were taking us through breathing the whole time. Probably so we wouldn't have the habit of holding our breath in certain areas. Your breath is very labile. It's very dynamic and it is constantly responding to external and internal signals. When you hold your breath because of pain or because of discomfort, it's just a protective armoring response, right? It's bracing for a punch. And so obviously this is not very threatening, but in the right position, it can really hurt, right?

In the wrong position, you know what I'm saying? In the right position, it can if if i have pain there or if i have non-movement if my diaphragm and my intercostals don't um move well at a certain rotation angle i'm gonna all of a sudden feel like somebody punched me in my liver right or my kidney and and it might take my breath away because i don't have because i'm under threat anything that threatens breath by the way your body is threat. Anything that threatens breath, by the way, your body is very smart. Anything that threatens breath, it's like no go there. And it will, it, it will do anything it can to convince you to get out and to not be there. So, um, I think it's, I think,

I think I'm totally rambling right now. Like, I don't, did I just conclude myself? I can. Well, when you had us, uh, you had us on our back and, and us on our back and we had the balls on the sides of our lower back, and then you had us kind of like windshield wiper our legs back and forth. Yes. As you're breathing through that, it was way easier to get a lot more movement, a lot more range of motion as you're breathing through it. But if you do hold your breath and you kind of like usually what happens, you know, when you first go to lay on something and you've never done that before and you go on the so right

or or even or even one of these balls, sometimes that's the first response is to kind of like tighten everything up. But you really want to see people try their best over time to really try to relax and melt into it. Yes. So in the book, I detail three zones of respiration. So we have these three zones that are echoes of the diaphragm's dominance as your prime mover of breathing. And so when we're in calm breathing, the diaphragm can go down and up. The diaphragm lives in the rib cage, lives in the lower six ribs. It's like an octopus. It's like hiding in a cave in there. The diaphragm lives in the rib cage, lives in the lower six ribs. It's like an octopus.

It's like hiding in a cave in there. And when it decides to come out, it contracts down, and there's a distension of the gut, low back, pelvic floor, all that stuff. If I'm in a more sympathetic, activated state, I'm going to be sharing some of that breathing with the ribs, the thorax. The ribs are going to flare out and flare up. But if I go into a high stress state, I'm going to recruit head, neck, and shoulders as a rapid, in case of emergency, zone so that I can actually get that last quick of fuel because this is coupled with the HPA axis and then I can get the hell out of there. And so I just want to help to familiarize people with,

well, when are they going into zone three? And you see when you're in a defensive state, the zone three is what comes up. And what I mean by defensive is the ball hurt, and so I'm primed for defense. And so I think it's just really interesting for bodies to just keep reviewing where are those parts of their body where they don't even realize they're on guard. Yeah. viewing where are those parts of their body where they don't even realize they're on guard yeah and um but you can't know that until you actually tactilely go there which is why um i was really psyched to give you guys a class ahead of time because the book is full of so much information but this is not meant to live on pages it's meant to live in in bodies and i

i it's hard i can explain this stuff all day but now you guys have a living a deep knowing of oh oh no did the thing what what the audience doesn't know is i'm propped up on nine feet of risers here in order to be at the same level as Encima and Mark. And I just fell. I don't know why I fell. Andrew hit the doorbell. Trying to get up. Fed to the sharks, yeah. Oh, my God.

So, now I've got sweat all over because I have a fear response of falling. But we're good. So, anyway, as I was saying, relax, just chill out. So let me ask you this. With your implements, even though like when I was expecting to use them, I wasn't expecting them to be so useful because they're hard, but they're soft, right? Do you think there's a place for very hard implements? but they're soft, right? Do you think there is a place for very hard implements?

Like do you think there's a place for kettlebell, the soul right, any of these types of, you think there's a place for that if you can relax into them? I think there are some bodies that can tolerate that. I don't think most bodies can. There are now a number of case reports of people harming pancreases or tearing nerves or tearing colons from using these tools you

can find them in just in the google now a quick question because like for example with some of the i'm not going to name implement names but with some of these implements i am able to really relax into it but could that be like now i'm thinking that might not be the best thing to be able to relax into something like that. Are there particular areas? Yeah. I would say the viscera. I mean, I'd say the viscera. Yeah.

I mean, I'd be cautious, especially of, you know, stuff within the gut sac. Okay. Because that's where most of these injuries have happened that are in the literature. Okay. So I'd say caution, you know. But, you know, I also, it's like, oh, it's fun to lay over a basketball every now and then, you know, like, but I just like, you know, I'm also hyper mobile. So I'm like, I don't want to create a hernia anywhere. Like that doesn't sound fun.

And I want to give myself an inguinal hernia. A wine bottle works pretty good. Cause it's very, I mean, that's a very thin, it's, you know, anatomically that region, especially around the inguinal ligament is very thin. And so people are rolling on their abdomen. You know, the fascial tissue, the thoraco, excuse me, the abdominal aponeurosis, the rectus sheath is at its thinnest there. And so I would just be a little bit cautious. Got it.

Yeah. What about the movements that we choose in fitness? Got it. Yeah. What about the movements that we choose in fitness? Are we, could we spend less time doing some of these things in the first place if we're not deadlifting and squatting? And maybe some of these movements aren't great for us. I don't know about that.

I think it's great to deadlift and squat. It's been very helpful for me in rehabbing my hip. Like lifting heavy was protective of me leading up to, I had a total hip replacement five years ago. So I'm not quite sure what your question is. Cause I mean, I'm talking to like power strength, bodybuilder people. I just think you want to marry it with soft tissue work. You know, I mean, I can't get enough strength. I can't maintain strength just because of my connected tissue is so loose. I'm on the hypermobile mobility spectrum. And so I need some of what you guys got and you need some of what I got. You know what I'm saying?

So like, we're just going to, we're just going to keep sharing. We're going to cross talk. And why, you know, this, like I said, I came to this not because I wanted to get looser. I came to this because I was having a mental health problem. Mental health is a body wide thing. It doesn't just live in your head. And that's one of the messages that I really want to get across in the book. So people are like, well, you're so mobile. Why do you keep rolling? It's like, well, I'm not rolling to get looser. I'm rolling to stay sane. Yeah. My thought process is like, uh, we do get like addicted, you know, we get addicted to fitness, get addicted to running or, or lifting a particular exercise, a bench press or something. And, you know, maybe, uh, a recipe to help somebody get out of pain would be like, yo bro,

uh, you ever think of just like not bench pressing for a little while? Oh, absolutely. I mean, I see what you're saying now. Or maybe change your mechanics. Like there's something's going on where your elbow and your shoulder are killing you all the time. Yeah, I think you can discover a lot about some of the underlying drive,

some of the underlying emotional drive to keep pushing, to keep staying sympathetic by regressing considerably and dipping into parasympathetic work like this. When I work with very elite athletes or trainers like yourself and do a three-day, or we also have a seven-day. We have a three-day body-by-breath immersion and there's a seven-day yoga tune-up training and there's a two-day role model training. But when they're like, okay, I'm not going to do my other workouts. I'm just going to do this work.

model training, but when they're like, okay, I'm not going to do my other workouts. I'm just going to do this work. And their experience of the decompression, especially that builds day after day and their ability to, to feel restored in stillness. Cause it does happen. I've seen it happen again and again. And when I, what I mean by that is the, you know, at the end of sessions, we usually do a stillness meditation, in corpse pose where you know i'm guiding them and that we're it's very it feels really good to be held i don't mean physically held but to be held by a voice that is guiding you through your physiology it gives you something to do in those times that these athletes when they go back into their real life, outperform all their numbers. I mean, I've had people break records again and again after they've done this work, like a big dose of it.

That's why I'm like, you've run 26, two miles in the marathon. Well, what about building parasympathetic endurance? What about building a tolerance for parasympathetic state? It's doable, but it is a skill and it needs repetition and it needs discipline around it. But then ultimately it's a balance. Do a little bit of this, do a little bit of that, do a little bit of that and the other thing. Yeah. What are your thoughts on like these things being like therapeutic, like where you mentioned that when you first laid down on that hamburger patty, that it seemed to release a lot

of like emotion and things like that. What have you seen? And like, you know, sometimes you see it on online or you see like, you know, human garage and some other people that are, have some of these similar practices sometimes. And you're like, man, I don't know about that. Like the person's crying. Like, is this real? Like, what's your experience with that? This work reveals your range of motion and your range of emotion. The emotions show up when you let go. And if we're held together all the time, we don't necessarily know what we're really feeling on the inside because we're broadcasting or we're performing or we're working or we're pushing or we're doing for our family. When you start to slow down and reflect, it can be a boatload of emotion. And

those emotions also are sensate. They're part of your body and you'll experience them as emotional feelings and physical feelings. A lot of times people are walking around with a part of your body, and you'll experience them as emotional feelings and physical feelings. A lot of times people are walking around with a lot of physical feelings all the time, that pain in the neck or that nausea or a feeling of urge or urgency to pee, whatever. So there's signals that your body is telling you all the time. And sometimes those are because of unfelt or unexpressed emotion. Now, I'm not a psychotherapist. I teach this work to psychotherapists and to mental health pros. In fact, this coming weekend, I'm at a body psychotherapy conference in San Francisco

this weekend because this work is very helpful in a therapeutic, a safe therapeutic relationship with a mental health pro or clinical social worker who aren't a licensed to touch, but they can guide somebody through self-touch to tap in, especially if people are so stuck in their head about their story and their head has literally walked away from the sensations of their body, the experience of their body. And so this is a way to bring those two together into the same place. I mean, I was very motivated by Mental Health Pros in writing the second book

because so much of the feedback I saw and what we were getting is people weren't just like, oh my God, it healed my knee. It healed my lower back. People were saying, I brought these with me when I was in the trauma unit watching my son be resuscitated. You know, like every day I was rolling on the balls while he was, you know what I mean?

Like this is what we, what I hear and the stories I hear all the time. People are using this for emotional regulation as well as, oh, it really helped with my scar tissue. Beef. Power Project family, it is grilling season. Now, I really don't know much about grilling since I use an air fryer at home. My boy Andrew does, though. So since it's grilling season, it's time to get your hands on some P. Monti's beef. We love those glizzies.

We love that beef. Andrew, tell them more about it. Yeah, guys. So like you mentioned, they do have those glizzies. Hey, yo! For those that don't know, that's just a hot dog, but it's an all-beef hot dog, and it's amazing. My favorite thing to smoke is their prime rib, though. And, you know, it's it's grilling season.

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So I guess maybe best bang for your buck technique or what have you for, I guess, trying to remain in that parasympathetic state. And I guess also keeping your resting heart rate down a little bit. I ask this because I think this is an issue that I have, like just kind of how I was explaining earlier, how like my body's so tense all the time. When I go to bed at night, it takes me seconds to pass out and fall asleep. I wake up feeling pretty good. And then by 10 o'clock, it's like, is it bedtime yet? Like my energy does not stay throughout the day. I'm trying to keep my caffeine intake to minimum

because I know that's like just gonna kind of just compound on itself and make the problem even bigger something that with uh we spoke to Andy Triana about is you know if we're kind of constantly in that revved up state our energy is going to kind of get sucked out of our bodies really quickly and I just know for myself looking at my resting heart rate it's usually like in the 60s and 70s like it's always really really high And I just know for myself, looking at my resting heart rate, it's usually like in the sixties and seventies, like it's always really, really high. And I just know I'm kind of always in. Sixties and seventies is pretty good. Is that good? Okay. Sorry. My bad. Okay. That's pretty good. But I still feel like, man, if I can just kind of relax more. When you said,

when you said that, do you mean your sleeping heart rate or do you mean like when you're just sitting here right now? I'm just hanging out. Okay. I'm sorry. I thought that was high. My bad, but that's pretty good. Okay. Well, that's great. On the human scale, that's doing pretty good. Okay. Yeah. But I, but it sounds like, you know, I mean, I don't know what your muscle tone is like all day. I mean, some people just burn, they just burn tighter. But I would say if you look at the stuff that we did today, by the way, there's, there's a hundred exercises in body by breath and there's like videos and like, there's ways to, to, to reinforce what you learned today. Um, that the, that first exercise, the, what I call it, it's a very unfortunate name, but it's called the lumbar release via no lump. It's like, what's it called? Lumbar decompression via the lateral wrath.

Horrible name. It's basically, and we've renamed it a million times on different podcasts, but it's like the lumbar hammock, right? So you're making that hammock. That felt really, really good, by the way. It's so amazing for adjusting resting tone, but that coupled with the slow breathing and then the other component was the move in there where we did the pelvic tuck, untuck. So that very slow oscillation of the pelvis and allowing all of your spinal bones to undulate, right?

That for two to five minutes, I think that will really, it's going to make you drowsy a little bit, but it'll diminish just that resting tone altogether. And you might see if you use that as an intervention a few times a day, you're going to be exhausted at first. You have to keep going with your day. But I have a feeling that might be a global, very good global rebalancing neurologically for you for just what your muscles are doing to you all day with their grip on you and so it's like a little neuro myofascial breath expedition that you can

introduce a few times a day i love that like for me i figured that one out during the pandemic because i was so stressed with both you know i had a three-year-old and a six-year-old and the home computer with the school and I was running a business and doing classes. And I had like hit, I hit, you know, I literally went down on my knees crying to my husband. I was like, we've got to stop the train. Like it was just too much. And I figured that one out based on some anatomy that I'd been studying with my friend, Tom Myers. So who have done, Tom Myers, the creator of Anatomy Trains. Tom and I have a program called Rolling Along the Anatomy Trains.

But I was really intrigued by this one little region of the thoracolumbar aponeurosis. Anyway, when I started experimenting. Sounds like he would say it. The way you spoke right there sounded exactly like him. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. So, but anyway, I started experimenting and literally

it was like one of those Eureka moments. I was like, oh my God, I have just found for me the way to go back to one. That was my reset. And it used to be the gut rolling, as you know, because I mean, that's one of the things that attracted Kelly to my work he was like oh my god smash your guts you know like that's one of the ways that we became fast friends is I I demonstrated that for him on mobility while like 12 years ago and um but I've since discovered a better and better best practices around that and now this is my favorite best practice but you need two gorgeous balls for it. Yeah. And we'll have the video posted.

Just don't get aroused as you watch us doing it. Oh, it's very sexy. Yes. Especially, I have to say, and Seema, very well articulated through his spine and pelvis. He's bending. Thank you.

Got anything else, Andrew? No, that's it for me, yeah. I mean, I did want to talk about the restless leg syndrome. When's your flight? But I can ask you. Let's make sure we have that. It's 2.30. Yeah, so we got to get her going pretty soon.

Maybe another five, ten minutes? Comfortable with that? Maybe three minutes. Okay. You don't want me to have a panic attack? Three to five minutes. I got you. I stated my line in the sand.

We'll get you. You don't want to see me have a flight panic attack. Yeah. Yeah. No, I did want to ask about the restless leg syndrome. My wife will kind of at time, like it's been a while, but she will get that and she'll just like be fidgety and moving a lot. And for a person that's typically not that, like she does breathe a little bit into her

shoulders every now and again, but for the most part, she's calm and she's pretty chill. And then all of a sudden it's like, what's wrong? And she's just like, I can't stop moving my legs. And so I don't know where that came from. Yeah. So those nerves are coming out of the lumbosacral plexus. So doing the same release, but then I would also roll the butt. So we did it. There's a move in the book called put your butt on your butt. No, excuse me. In the book, it's more, it's not as, as cute as that. I just call it the ball plow. Um, glute plow. Excuse me. It all sounds terrible. So, um, I would manipulate the, the, the, so because that's coming through the sciatic nerve. So you want to manipulate the glutes and just that would be some glute rolling.

How's that? So the low back decompression that we did, some glute rolling, that could be helpful. But also I would do pelvic floor work. We didn't do pelvic floor work today, but in body by breath and role model, I have some pelvic floor work. It's as simple as sitting on a yoga tune-up ball,

breathing and doing contract relax. And that's all very, very helpful for the lower body. But I mean, I'd want to know if that works for her or not. But I mean, this is like months. It's not like, oh, it's just going to go away. Got it. How long have you been deadlifting and things like that? You mentioned deadlifting helping your back and your hip. Well, I've been lifting weights for a long time, but a serious SMC practice probably for the last 12 years. And then I introduced HIIT in the last two, three, no, in the last four years, four and a half years. Anyway, I got my hip replacement about five years ago. And then about seven months after the hip replacement, my PT said, you need to push yourself. She said, you need to go do some HIIT. And then I found online,

it was Doc Jen Fit. Her name is, she got married to Doc Jen from Brony now, but it's Doc Jen Fit. And I started, she's a physical therapist and she had this great HIIT program. And so I started to just do her videos and I was like wiped out by them. But long story short, they were the best transition for me into plyometric work because I really needed to jump. I didn't do any jump training

when I was dealing with the degenerating HIIT. I avoided it. And we actually have a new program that we're releasing called Roll Into HIIT. And we actually have a new program that we're releasing called Roll Into Hit. So we did a fusion of the self myofascial release, coupled with a hit, and it's aimed at people who are hit averse or afraid of hit. People like myself who might've had a surgery and we're like, I'm never going to do something like that, but know that it's important for their health. And so the hit has been been very helpful in the right doses along with strength

training and along with all the other stuff that I do. How much you bench? I have no idea. I need you to help me. I was hoping for more hours up here so I could have you guide me through that. What about deadlift? What's the most you deadlift? Body weight. So 115. That's awesome. Prior to having my hip replacement, my top PR was 135. There you go. It's amazing. For a yoga overstretched person, that's amazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I weigh 112, so. Yeah. Come on. Awesome. Where can people get all your amazing stuff you got here? All the amazing stuff. TuneUpFitness.com is my website. I have an online classroom so people can join classes. I was telling one of your fellows, I have lots of really narrow topics and also broad topics. But for example, I have an entire class just on the thumb called Can You Handle a Thumb Class? But there's also lots of classes. Thank you. There's also lots of classes that deconstruct the diaphragm, the zones of respiration, take you through yoga nidra.

There's also lots of classes that deconstruct the diaphragm, the zones of respiration, take you through yoga nidra. Or you're like, I need some help with my hips. I have classes that cover the pelvis, the hips, the foot. There's a new class called So You Think You Can't Jump. And a class all on the big toe. I know you're a foot guy. Big toe class. Yes.

But so you can find me. 2023 is going to be about the thumb though, I think. We need it. class yes but so you can find 2023 is going to be about the thumb though i think we need it i mean the thumb arthritis from from holding phones is it is on the rise folks and then i'm on instagram at the jill miller my company is at tune-up fitness on instagram or tune-up fitness on instagram and then we're of course we're on facebook you know jill miller and tune-up fitness all that stuff but we have about 500 teachers that train that that are licensed to teach my work worldwide. So you can find people that teach role model or yoga to an upper body by breath all over the world through the website. Take us out of here, Andrew. Alrighty. Thank you everybody for checking out today's episode. Please drop those comments down

below. Let us know what you guys think about today's podcast. And then also if the video is, has been published where Jill took us through a class, basically that'll be down in the description below as well as the podcast show links along with everything that we talked about today. been published where jill took us through a class basically that'll be down in the description below as well as the podcast show links along with everything that we talked about today so make sure you guys go check that out follow the podcast at mb power project all over the place my instagram is at i am andrew z and sema where you at discords down below q and a's are there at sema in yang on instagram and youtube and sema yin yang on tiktok and twitter mark i'm at mark smelly bell strength never weakness weakness never strength catch you guys later bye