The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Gregory Stern, Chief Foot Officer and Owner of From the Ground Up Physiotherapy

Episode Date: October 12, 2023

Gregory Stern, Chief Foot Officer and Owner of From the Ground Up Physiotherapy Rebuild.groundupphysio.com Greg Stern is the owner of From the Ground Up Physiotherapy and creator of Rebuild Your Body From the Ground Up mobility program. After experiencing years of chronic pain himself and trying everything, he discovered unqiue methods that most other healthcare professionals don’t know. He helps people get to the root cause of their pain by taking on a holistic approach that teaches them how to get their entire body working together rather than simply focusing on the area of pain. His chief mission is to help guide people through their own path of self-discovery on their health journeys and guide people to not only be pain-free, but to thrive in their everyday lives.

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the authors of all the great books, and what else? The White House advisors, the astronauts, you name it. We just always have smart people on the show. They're going to grow your mind, make you smarter, make you more beautiful. And hence you'll just walk around and people just see the Chris Foss show glow that comes off of you. Today, we have another brilliant gentleman on the show. He's going to be sharing us his insights and everything that goes into what he has learned and what he's going to teach us today. We have Gregory Stern on the show.

He's the chief foot officer. Probably the first time we've had a chief foot officer. Is that a CFO? Owner of this company called From the Ground Up Physiotherapy. He's going to be talking to us about some of what goes into his education, learning, coaching, things that he does to help people understand better about their lives. Greg Stern is the owner of From the Ground Up Physiology or Physiotherapy. Did I say physiology? Physiotherapy. There you go. And he's the creator of Rebuild Your Body

from the Ground Up Mobility Program. After experiencing years of chronic pain and trying everything, he discovered unique methods that most healthcare professionals don't know. He helps people get to the root cause of their pain by taking a holistic approach that teaches them how to get their entire body of self-discovery on their health journeys and guide people not only to be pain-free, but to strive in their everyday lives. Welcome to the show, Greg. How are you? Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it. There you go. The owner of From the Ground Up Physiotherapy. That's quite a title to have there in your business title.

Yes. Well, just a little play on words. We got to go with chief financial officer, chief foot officer. And so my whole journey is all about the foot and my own story of pain. And hence, the ground up mentality is one of our foundation effects our bodies. And everyone intuitively understands that when it comes to a building the foundation of the building is the most important part but when it comes to our feet we don't give enough love to our feet and of course i help people with all sorts of issues but so many times it comes back to how do they load their body and how does their foundation load and that's kind of what I help people out with is this holistic approach to the body. There you go. It's pretty interesting. I know that there's a lot of like chakra points. I think

I've seen stuff on the feet and, you know, we walk around these poor things all day long and abuse them and we don't give them much love, I guess. So give us a 30,000 overview of what you do at your company and what you do for people. Yeah, absolutely. So I basically help people get to the root cause of their pain by teaching them how to move better. So when most people think of physical therapy or a chiro or any sort of modality that's aimed for treatment to get out of pain, we often have like the patient will lie on the table and hope that their therapist is there to fix them. And while that sounds beautiful in nature, and it feels good to be temporarily, you know, to get that massage to work on that area of pain. The problem is the moment you stand up from the table, you go back to the same movement

patterns that got you into trouble in the first place. Maybe for a couple of days, you feel great, but then two, three days later, or a week later, the pain comes back and you're back where you started. And you keep going through this merry-go-round wheel of temporary short-term solutions that never address the root cause. And the root cause usually is you're not moving well and you got to move better and you got to move differently. And teaching the whole body to work as a cohesive unit together so that that area of pain can now, instead of be working all the time on its own, it's supported by the rest of the structures in the body. So people come in here claiming that they've tried everything. And then within weeks, I'm getting people back to doing the things they love because we're looking at a more holistic picture

rather than just zoning in on the site of pain. There you go. Now, when you say people come in there, do you have a business shop that people... Yes, I have a space in Montreal in Canada. But but I also as you're alluding to with your introduction I I've launched an online mobility program that teaches the exact same exercise that I do with my 101 clients that I now teach online as well to get it you know my message across louder to more and more people throughout the whole world there you go that's very interesting it's something that more people throughout the whole world. There you go. That's very interesting.

It's something that more people need to think about because certainly pain comes from something that we're likely doing wrong or something that we're doing that's unhealthy. And it's kind of a signal to our brain going, hey, stupid, knock it off. You know? Yeah, it's a call for help. That's what pain is. And so sometimes we get very scared about pain. And the first thing we want to do is kill pain, right?

Pain killers. At every stop, every shop around the corner, you're thrown Advil, Tylenol, whatever, and it's immediate. But it's an adaptive evolutionary signal that's supposed to tell us something. Whatever you're doing right now, I don't like it. Help me out, please. And so it's important that we listen to pains in our body as opposed to just trying to kill them. There you go. So give us your history. How did you get down the road? What was your journey that made you discover this and develop it? Yeah. So 10 years ago, I was playing flag football in Montreal and I had just an innocent ankle sprain. And for a while after the season,

I would expect a couple of months it'd be okay, and I had been a rambunctious kid, always getting injured, tons of broken bones, stitches, tons and tons of crazy accidents throughout my life, but I would take all of those over chronic pain, and that's kind of what happened is that, you know, a broken bone, boom, it will, it sucks six, eight weeks, but then you're back to normal or so you think you know and but in my case this ankle sprain just dragged on and so i was getting physical therapy i was trying osteo i was trying orthotics i was trying orthopedic shoes and my my ankle pain and foot pain just lingered on and i couldn't stand barefoot for more than 10 seconds without

pain i couldn't do the things i loved anymore because it might, my whole body started to feel off, you know, my starting hip pain and back pain. And I was in a very desperate situation and I, I didn't know what to do. And eventually I ended up getting surgery. Um, and the surgery didn't go the way I hoped for, you know, you have this like image in your head of what surgery means. It's going to be like this aha moment where everything is just going to fix the moment after surgery. But as I mentioned, like, you know, this ground up approach, my foot was in a mess. And so I started developing chronic pain in my hip and my back. And now before I only had chronic pain in my foot, but now I had all these issues.

And it was only until I started to take a real deep dive into my body that I really started to make progress. So I was thinking about going into medicine when I was in university. And I ended up pivoting paths and going to physical therapy. And beyond the classroom, I was attending seminars and workshops and starting to learn from people outside the confines of institutional education because what I was finding what I was learning in school was the same types of thing I was receiving for my ankle pain just the hands-on very isolated approaches and I start to find the right mentors throughout the world and slowly but surely chipped away and made progress and now at a point where I have no more pain, I go on hikes barefoot

after not being on barefoot for 10 seconds. I go barefoot hiking. I do slacklining. So, you know, two trees and there's like a little rope between I can walk that. I do lots of fun, cool things in my body. And now I share, you know, the lessons and knowledge that I've accumulated along the way with my clients and my online clients and and you know through different education platforms online there you go uh you know it's interesting to me uh you know you you were talking about how the foot pain turned into back pain everything else and i imagine that happens because you're trying to you know you're maybe shifting your weight and standing differently and uh that that causes you know your back to get thrown out because you're just you know something you want your body's using different

strategies yeah now you mentioned one thing that's kind of interesting i found in your stuff is you uh you're a total foot nerd and you're a barefoot hiker. Yes. Tell us about that. That sounds, I mean, do you go someplace that doesn't have big rocks? Well, the thing is, right? So remember, I was coming from someone who literally needed orthotics to survive. And that's one of the biggest fallacies

that we have in the industry and that we're sold about foot pain. So imagine you came to me with neck pain, okay? I'm like, all right, I'm going to give you this brace and I want you to come back to see me in a year. You'd be like, well, what do you mean? Like, I need to get more mobility. I need to, you know, develop the strength.

I need to work on it rather than just bracing it. For whatever reason, the logic we apply to our feet is a brace. So our feet are like trampoline. They're supposed to go down and go up. Think about like the foot flattens and people hear the word flat feet. They think that's a bad thing, but our feet are supposed to flatten to accommodate the ground. They load, they spread out, they widen, absorb force, and then they become very rigid and stiff and propels forward. But unless we honor both functions, we kind of dishonor how the foot is supposed to work. And so all the hiking boots, orthotics, you know, think about Asics, New Balance, Nikes.

You think about all the good brands that are out there and what's happening is your rigid motion control, stability, all these fancy buzzword terms that you hear, you're basically preventing the foot from moving. And if you've ever been in a cast after a few weeks in a cast, what happens? The arm gets stiff in the case of a broken arm and weak as well. And so our feet start to become weak and stiff. And so barefoot hiking was this journey that I went on of allowing my feet to start to feel the ground, work on uneven ground, and start to get stronger and move better as a result of actually just just think wait a minute haven't we always been doing that or or our kids that we used to have or just protection but not imposing on our feet and that's what's come about is that all the conventional footwear that we think about that is good because of all its fancy technology it's basically yes it protects our foot against you know stabbing against glass on the floor here but it's also now imposing on the foot and so our feet start to change because they can no longer move well that makes sense and you know we we have been walking barefoot for thousands of millions and millennia of years and all that stuff uh so you know why change um but yeah in the feet uh

to my understanding they have a lot of chakra points don't they yeah yeah i know my masseuses are always into that and all that yeah i know my masseuses are into all that and i know that i know that when a masseuse gets a hold of your feet and does a really great job of hitting all those sore points your your eyes roll back in your head and your brain goes and uh but uh some sometimes it's painful sometimes it feels really good um and i know that uh i know that it's important and we walk around our feet like all day long i've got a foot massage thing here from one of the big foot massagers that we reviewed here at the house and i get in every day and man, there's sometimes I put my

feet in that thing and, and, and the muscles are just all pissed off at me and like you idiot. And it, it can hurt, but by the time it gets done, it just feels so healthy and so good. So you recommend that your clients go barefoot. Um, you, you actually insist on it then. Well, it's, it's, you know, you were talking about like using a foot massager but nature has a natural foot massager it's called uneven ground and one of the problems is because we're always walking on flat even ground asphalt you know concrete cement wooden floors everything is flat and even but the whole idea of being on more uneven surfaces allows your foot to you to get its natural movement. But yes, I'm definitely a proponent of either being barefoot or using what we'll call natural footwear.

So those are shoes that are much wider at the tips of the toes. So instead of, when most people think, again, Asics, we could all agree a high-heeled shoe, very obvious. It's a triangle, right? Your foot is not the shape of a triangle. So they don't coincide together. But even if we look at a typical runner that most people wear, it's still not as wide as it needs to be. And so what I would like someone to do is, you know, there's lots of different companies

that are out there. One, you know, I don't have any sponsors to any of them, but the whole idea being that a wide foot allows your toes to spread. Just like you wouldn't wear mittens all day long. You wouldn't wear something that, you know, tapers your toes and your fingers in. So that's why I want people to be barefoot is one that their feet aren't squished. But then we also talked already about this element of flexibility.

And so most of the shoes that are on the market are not flexible at all versus, I guess we are live. Is that correct? That is correct. So just to see if people are watching, like I could take a shoe and I should be able to completely bend it. You'll notice that this is a lot wider at the tips of the toes. It's also flat from heel to toe because when we're born, our heel and our toe are flat to the ground. But all of a sudden, even a classic, think about a dress shoe, think about an Asics. Any of these shoes, they're slightly higher at the heel than the toe. And what does that do with our body? It pushes our body forward. And now all of a sudden I need a crank at my back to

prevent myself from falling over. So there's all sorts of things that are just impeding us from just being more grounded, connected, and having natural movement. There you go. So for those of us in the audio, on the podcast, you're taking the shoe from front to back and crushing it into itself. And if it can't do that, then that's bad? Well, there's a caveat to all this in saying your podiatrist right now will disagree with what I'm saying wow and guess what my podiatrist when i was in years and years of pain told me you got to be the most maximalist shoe possible you need to be in orthotics but explain to me why i could hike barefoot now because the foot changes just like any other structure you want to get stronger biceps you go to the gym well if you want to get stronger feet you have to use them and our again

all this is about gradual exposure because think about if you want to get stronger feet, you have to use them. And again, all of this is about gradual exposure, because think about it. If you've been in something so stiff for so long, it takes time and you have to ease into it. And a lot of the time I'm giving people different exercise that kind of facilitate this transition to a more natural shoe. But ultimately, if you want to be the most natural human being possible and to thrive and be pain-free and have a resilient foundation that affects the rest of the body, you need to be in a shoe that lets your foot function like a foot. And most shoes that don't bend and twist, they're not letting your foot function like a foot. There you go. Now, one of the other things you talk about is why posture is a very dirty word and why learning to slouch will save your back. Tell me about that.

Yeah. So again, unconventional ways of approaching the body, but they're effective. So how many times have you been told in your life to sit up straight, stand up straight, you know, good posture, shoulders down and back, right? By my mom every day. By your mom, by your dad, by your teachers, your teachers by society by everyone everyone thinks good posture means to to be upright right yeah but what's happening and i'll we'll just do an example here i want you to take your hands together right now and squeeze them together as hard as you can okay go for like five ten seconds and tell me squeeze squeeze squeeze okay okay well how do your hands feel right now uh they're kind of relaxed huh tense or relaxed very tense okay

cool now relax now put your hands on your lower back okay and go ahead and sit up as as like your mom told you in that nice good posture what happens to your lower back right there does it feel tense or relaxed um i don't know well so like usually so just think about it this way in order the way that most people upright themselves really on the lower back if you're really going to pop your chest up and go in good posture squeeze your shoulder weights together you're going to feel that your lower back muscles squeeze right they're engaged they're not not engaged right now right i'm still waking up this morning so my back and body is still a little sore okay no worries but you know the point to make and that most people will feel is that

when when you're sitting up straight in this good posture and i'm going to put that in quotation marks for a second is that what we're doing is we're engaging our lower back muscles and just like you didn't want to engage if i ask you right now to squeeze your hands together for 10 seconds you'll say sure now i ask you to squeeze your hands together for the next 12 hours. He's going to say, screw off, you know, like I'm not doing that, but that's kind of what we do when we go into good posture, right? We're squeezing our lower back muscles and it's not what they want. Now think about, let's teleport ourselves to India for a second. I was there in 2014. Now I saw 80 year olds being able to do an ass to grass squat,

basically where they're able to sit with their heels on the floor and they could sit down, you know, that's the natural way we're supposed to do the washroom. It's also the natural resting posture of the human being, right? So if you think about for thousands of years, we would sit around a campfire and we'd be all like huddled around and we'd

be able to round and be relaxed. Now the thing is in that natural resting posture we're not in good posture so to say according to the way that most people think about good posture we're in relaxed posture so the problem is everyone who thinks about good posture all we're doing all the time is we're engaging these low back muscles 24 7 and doing the exact opposite of what's natural to the body, which is to relax it. So if we're in a deep squat, our low back is relaxed, when we should sit, we should be slouched and relaxed. We should allow our rib cage to come down so the low back muscles

are not engaged 24-7. There you go. You know, it's one of those things with the back of trying to sit right and be comfortable. But, you know, make sure that you don't end up. One of the things that I have in my family, we seem to all have, is we have this C-back where we slouch way too much. And we, you know, if you look at us from the side, we do this. What do you think about stuff like that? Well, yeah, it's a good question because everyone says no trust me i'm already slouching the thing is like there's nuance to this because most people's low back is still engaged but what happens is that they end up slouching from the

upper body but if we allow the low mid and upper body to relax that's kind of what we want when we're sitting like yeah there's a place for more upright posture and i'm not saying demonizing one position but the problem is we have demonized one position we think that slouching is bad and that good posture is good and so everyone walks around all day long i had a client the other day saying she's like 80 years old she says you know my trainer tells me to imagine my shoulder blades that there's a wall behind me all the time and so what does that do to the body? It just compresses the back side of the body all the time. If we're squeezing, right, everything gets compressed back there. And usually pain is a result of something being, you know, compressed too much, too much, like all the time.

There you go. So I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing that we, we sit in more relaxed postures. Um, but as long as we're able to tap into you know doing some other things but when it comes down to it it's about the devil's in the details learn how to slouch through the entire body by almost exhaling fully letting the ribs come down and that allows our lower back to relax more comfortably there you go uh so one of the things you talk about is what role does victim mentality play in recovery? I thought this was very interesting because, you know, there's some people that kind of go down a spiral of victimhood mentality. And sometimes, I mean, you can't play if you have cancer or something or, you know, whatever.

But I think with victimhood mentality, you kind of, you don't feel empowered. And when you don't feel empowered, you sometimes can, I don't know, make your condition worse. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I am definitely a big proponent of that. Because, you know, again, if we look at the traditional model of therapy, it's like, you know, I asked someone a question in my clinic, you know, if I've got a magic wand, like, what do you want to be able to do? And they're like, fix me, right? And so immediately, they're taking the onus and responsibility and putting on the therapist, but it has to be the other way. Like, I'm there to be their guide. I'm there to show them things. But ultimately, they need to take responsibility for

their health. And so oftentimes, you know, what kills me inside is when, you know, doctors will say, like, you you know how many times we've have we heard like the doctor said they'll never walk again and what happens they walk again so when we have this notion or this message that's so disempowering like you're never going to do that there's two types of people one of them goes like screw you you know i'm gonna do everything i can to make sure i can do it. And then the other, you know, the other side is like, your words are my reality. And so we like take on the words of the doctor. And so when we play a victim, we believe that we have no choice in the matter. There's nothing we

could do about it. But healing is possible in anyone. I've helped years and years of chronic pain be reversed through proper movement. And you find the right coach that teaches you, that empowers you and guides you along the way. 1% better is 1% better every day. But the cool thing is oftentimes I'm showing people the exact opposite of these mind programs, like keeping their back straight all the time. And all of a sudden I teach them how to slouch and use their legs for the first time. Their legs start quivering like crazy and like real nervous system changes are happening very quickly. And so pain can be changed like rather rapidly if done by the right, you know, approach. And that's this whole idea, like the approach can't be back pain equals, let me just stare at the back. I got to look

upstream and downstream so that everything could start to work together. All right. Very interesting. That's, you know, some people don't think of this stuff in that ways. So basically, you know,

there was this show I saw, let me pull it up here on the side. It was on Netflix and it was called the blue zones thing. Did you, did you hear about that? I don't know about the show itself, but I know about the blue zones. And one of the hear about that i don't know about the show itself but i know about the blue zones and one of the one of the people they found they were basically a show about this guy went and found the centurions that were living around the world in in kind of group

populations and he was wondering why they were so centralized and why are they were living these long extended healthy lives and he went studied them and one of the places the blues ones he found were these people that are constant they don't do exercise they don't go to the gym yeah but they're constantly moving their body and i think it was in japan and you know how the japanese will sit on the floor yes across their legs and you're like god that seems don't you have a couch hey and uh, but they'll do that. And he found that these people, and I think this has been found in other studies, people that move their bodies, their whole bodies, and move it in different ways,

and they're moving it throughout the day when they do stuff, you know, because they're in the fields doing the old style farming or working in their shop, or, you know, they're, they're, they're constantly moving as opposed to what we do, you know, where we sit in front of a computer all day long. Um, and they found that, uh, that was one of the factors to these centurions, uh, centurions, centurions, um, where they live a long life and, uh, you know, they're just, their bodies are constantly moving and they're constantly burning. They don't put on a weight either. Cause they're constantly burning calories,

doing everything they do to lead their lives. Yeah. Well, you know, if you hear 75 year old female or male found on the floor in North America, we think hip fracture, like we immediately associate like older person and floor at right. However,

in their culture, you sleep on the floor your whole life. I don't know about everyone, but yes, I've been to Japan and like, you know, the old school style is to sleep on the floor. So every single day you're practicing standing up from the floor. But for many people, they're like, I asked them, let's go to the floor. Oh, no, I don't go to the floor. It's like, what do you mean you don't go to the floor. Oh no, I don't go to the floor. It's like, what do you mean you don't go to the floor? And so it becomes this thing that it's like, like it's, you know, like imagine you're standing on a bridge and you're looking down that bridge. Whoa, that's scary. But for people to look at the floor and think that's scary, that's, that's like, that scares me because

it's just showing them like, it's so unfamiliar. And, and when we sit on the floor, like I'm a big proponent of sitting on the floor, because when we do sit on the floor, what happens is after a few minutes, we get a signal that we're uncomfortable and guess what? We change positions. But when you're sitting in a $500, nice chair, lazy boy, whatever, you're not going to move because it's super comfortable. And the problem is we sit our butts in two positions the whole entire day and the shifting and moving is what we need. And so exactly, these blue zones, it's that constant, no massive exercise, but the slow daily grind of gentle movement throughout the day and different shapes and positions. So that's the key is that we expose our body to these shapes and positions to keep our body healthy and young.

There you go. And it's been found that people that keep moving throughout their day in their life, I need to do something in my chair or something, come up with something for the computer work that I'm always engaged in. But I try to get up a lot. I find that I have to get up a lot and do stuff, especially with my older age and what's going on with that. It's really important. You talk about why freedom and movement and why they're important to work together. Tell us what that means. Sir, do you mind repeating what you said? Freedom and movement.

And what do they have to do with each other? Well, I guess, you know, movement gives you freedom and freedom gives you movement it's it's like this idea that instead of us you know what do people want ultimately at the end of the day like they want to close their eyes and think back to time in their childhood where like they didn't have to think about their movement there was no fear involved and so the goal of the things that i do with people is to give them that sense of freedom again in their bodies so i think that's that's really what i was getting after there um was this this idea that we should just all be able to exude a sense of um you know playfulness in our bodies

throughout our entire lives there you go and and movement is really important you know you talked about the japanese they sleep on those little cots I've seen, which are very similar to like a yoga mat, you know, and you see people when they're doing yoga, they're basically moving the body. And it's kind of interesting how that seems to have a meditative approach of healing and making the body feel better. And people are like, well, I'm doing yoga, but it's the movement probably that is the big factor in there right yeah well i mean like we we've always slept on the ground throughout the entire history of mankind or you know you'd stack up some stuff but it would still be a more firm surface and then you go to a hotel or whatever and it's like the most soft mattress in the world that you sink in and it feels good initially but it's not what our body wants because again even this idea of we talked about sitting and adjusting positions when we sleep our body should be moving as well a little bit again it's happening unconsciously while we sleep but if you're in something that's so sinky and you basically can't move because your body just like

it's stuck in that hole of the bed i i injured my back uh years ago and i started sleeping on the floor because if i didn't i would end up uh just like a pretzel all messed up and pain and so i started sleeping on the floor and uh i did that for years because it was just more comfortable the other thing it would do is it would put pressure on my muscles and cause them to break up, relax, and stuff, where with a soft bed, it's a little bit harder to pull that off. And so I found that it would, I kept doing it for years after my back healed up, where it would just keep me aligned.

I would feel more refreshed. It would, it was almost kind of like a, a big massage where it would push on all my muscles, break them down, get them to relax. And, uh, just that hardness of the thing. And I would keep like a soft mat like the Japanese do. And that really helped me. It really worked well. Um, let me ask you this. Do you, do you work with people that uh have i know that uh people i know in my family have uh pre-diabetic sort of symptoms they've talked about it was a myopathy neuropathy and it's a system where your feet have issues is there a way to heal from that or a way to improve that from yeah so i have a little quick story there. I was dealing

with a rabbi's wife. So you can imagine a rabbi's wife being more conservative in nature in the way that she dressed. And so she was always wearing socks in the house and always having her feet covered. And she was experiencing three years of foot numbness. She went to doctors, neurologists, podiatrists, and they're all like doing all the tests and everything was coming back normal. And, you know, there was a local little thing about my clinic opening up and about me being the foot nerd. And so she came and made an appointment with me and I had her, you know, explain to her the concepts I was talking about before. Our feet have 20,000 nerve endings on the bottom of each foot the same for our hands okay now our hands are responsible for touching you know fine motor skills typing whatever it is attuning to the environment right they connect to what we manipulate and our feet

are the same exact thing the thing is when we we cover them with with thick cushiony footwear so think about the hokas then you know the the adidas boost and the air max and all the things that we say it feels like i'm walking on a cloud unfortunately walking on a cloud is not what your body wants it wants to be connected to the ground instead of floating so i just you know i have this little spiky mat actually here so i'll just it sounds like the same sort of principle of the mattress you know if it's too soft you might see this idea there's little spikes it's called an acupressure mat. Okay.

And I had her stand on this acupressure mat. And the first time she, she jumped like crazy because it was so intense for her. But after she, you know, she came back on it and she used it a couple of days and she ended up buying one herself. And I,

I had her wear toe spreaders. So, you know, the idea of like getting her toes to spread out more against the nerves could also have space. Two weeks later, after three years years all her numbness was gone really wow weeks so all the doctors that i poked and prodded simplicity is the answer you know we talked to get you know go barefoot it's very obvious like nature produced amazing bodies that have the capacity to heal and it's the use it or lose it principle.

So, I mean, people with diabetes, like oftentimes, like there's a insulin resistance side to that. And so for sure, working on reducing refined carbohydrates and sugars to, you know, properly attune your insulin resistance is a huge important factor in that. But also just getting your feet to feel again. I might be sensitive, but we need to desensitize our feet. So like if you had a blindfold on for the last three years and I took your blindfold off the first time, like your, it would take you like an hour to open up your eyes because you'd be so

sensitive. Right. Well, it's the same thing with our feet is that so many people, the only time they're ever barefoot is when they're on a beach. And then when they do go on the beach and they walk on a little stone, you know, they're walking very gingerly. But the key thing, if you go to other places in the world, rural villages,

kids are playing out barefoot, running on rocks and roots. And so that is the thriving state of the being is to be connected. And so I would encourage anyone that has any sensitivity in their feet to go out and just like buy an acupressure mat, you know, and just slowly desensitize the foot. Go on your backyard or go to a park and start walking around on the grass instead of thinking that like, you know,

I need to be in shoes all the time. Yeah, that makes sense. I really like this, the acupressure mat. Is there one that you recommend? I'm looking at several on Amazon. No, honestly, on Amazon, they're all pretty similar. Are they? They're all from China.

They're all just like pokey mats that you could just... And then it looks like they have some that are for your back and your neck. Yeah, you could actually lie on them on your back. Really? You can get some cool relief from that as well. These things are interesting. Yeah, it's pretty cool cool and then you need one for your foot so well you know the ones that for your back is you basically just stand on it oh you just

stand on it and do that yeah that's this this is really interesting i never heard about this you know i i do i i've you know my masseuses back in the day you know they would always tell me about you know uh hey you need to make sure that you uh you know there's acupressure and you would feel it you know when they go in there yeah they hit those points you're like wow but i've learned over the years that uh those pressure points are them are need to get need to get pushed through but years ago points also the skin as well that's really yeah well the skin is what like is where all these nerve endings are located so yeah it feels good to get the deep massage but ultimately we want to like desensitize the skin and you know the the layers beneath that where all those those nerve endings lie it's kind of

funny i'm looking at some of these and they look like torture pieces from the medieval times i'm looking at the little dudes and i guess this explains you know When I was young you'd see the Those guys over in Japan Or China that would sleep on the nail beds Yeah And you're like that looks painful And I imagine some of What is it acupuncture probably does a little bit of the same thing

And Getting those muscles relaxed Years ago I used to go to the chiropractor all the time. My back was constantly out. I was under so much stress running three companies and I was almost living at the chiropractor and I would, I finally, I, I would get in the car and I would start driving back to my office and my back would just start seizing up again and one day i just got pissed and i drove back to him and i go i don't understand you you just worked on me and i get

you know five minutes down the road and my back's locked up again it needs to be adjusted what is going on with me like am i you know am i know, am I dying or whatever? And he goes, no, he goes, I probably shouldn't talk to you about this because you probably won't ever come back to see me again. He goes, but what you have is you, you have muscle issues. You don't have spinal issues like bone. He goes, you have muscle issues. And he goes, what, what your back is doing is, is your muscles are throwing your back out and they're pissed off. And he goes, he goes, the reason you have pain is because what happens with the muscle is the blood is going through the muscle and the muscle gets oversees. And so it's blocking the blood from going through there. Uh, and, and that's where your pain is coming from. And he goes, so here's what I want you to do. Cause you

have these pressure points that these muscles that are really being a problem for us. He goes, I want you to get a tennis ball and I want you to stand up against the wall and wherever you're feeling the pain or that tightness of muscle, lean up against the wall and roll. You basically, you get really good at this after a while. It's hard to do at first, but you roll that ball around and then he goes anytime you find a pressure point he goes it's going to hurt like hell it's really going to hurt like someone's stabbing sometimes it feels like someone's stabbing you uh but just put the ball on there and put the pressure on the muscle and he goes what happens is you you press on the muscle and when you compress it you're going to get the blood flow to start going through there and then it's going to pop and release and you know what i never went back to a chiropractor ever again uh it actually

worked i want to comment on that stir if you don't if you don't mind please do um well you know the thing again like as i was mentioning at the very beginning of our talk was like you know how does my approach differ from most other people and like whether you're physio, you're chiro, whatever it might be, adjustments, hands-on therapy, whatever active release technique that you went and got a course in and you have it next to your name, those are all one tool in the toolbox. And your ball on your back is one tool in the toolbox. But the key thing of why people that see me don't have to keep going back for adjustments is because we're getting to the root cause of the pain.

And so why does your body go back into that, you know, seize mode because it doesn't feel safe. And so you're just like cracking and, you know, he's imposing his will on your body. And then your body's like, well, I don't want that. Like I, there's a reason I'm stiffening up. And unless you, you yourself guide your own nervous system through, you know, safe, gentle movements to get you back to a place where you're comfortable moving again, that's only the time when it's going to finally learn to let up and hold and relax. And so that's the thing is that people go on this fricking treadmill or, you know, a conveyor belt of the same treatments over and over again.

And they're like, oh, if I could just get that one crack, everything will be fixed. And that's how people think. And it becomes literally a crack cocaine the way that people go to these, to chiros. Like all the time I hear it and the chiro takes an x-ray before and after like their treatments. But the reality is if you take a look after their spine a year later, there's no such thing as a perfect spine alignment. It's more, how does your nervous system manage gravity?

We're all against gravity. So we need to learn how to do things in standing. And so what I teach people is the exercises that I do with people. And I was mentioning the idea of shaking. I mimic the demands of real life. I teach people how to squat in very interesting ways, to hinge, to bend, to rotate, to side bend, to expose their body to three dimensions so their body is familiar with these things. Because as we mentioned, our lives are so, you know, in front of the computer, one-dimensional.

You go to the gym, it squats, endless bench breaths. Everything is forwards and backwards. But ultimately, I need to go, I have to reach across the side. Ah, I hurt my back. It's because we're not exposing our body to these shapes the way that we talked about with, you know, the blue zones. These guys are just doing natural movement throughout the day, bakes in 3D movement. than just like hoping that like me doing some sort of like clamshell on the table or some you know baby exercise that doesn't actually uh you know mimic what what life is like against gravity that's the key thing there you go that makes complete sense man and uh you know you you you

do very rigid stuff you know you don't sit here for you know sit in your computer desk for a while and you go look over there and you're like oh man man, I pulled my neck out. I shouldn't look over there. I should just stay rigid. Avoid movements, right? Yeah, you avoid movement. And so it's a vicious cycle because like the less we move and now when we get hurt again, we move even less and even less. But the key thing is to introduce movement back, obviously in a safe way. There you go. And it makes sense because the reason it hurts is because you haven't moved that way in a while. And your muscle's like, hey, what's going on?

And you need to keep that open. So tell us how clients can onboard with you, utilize your service, get to know you better, and work with you. Yeah, absolutely. So if anyone's listening in Montreal, you can come see me in person. But the key thing that I would encourage people to do is check out my program called Rebuild Your Body from the Ground Up, which is the exact same system of exercises that I use my clients on a daily basis. It's easy to perform, whether, you know, a gym goer or someone who's just looking to get off the couch and feel good in their everyday life, you know. It's all about using your whole body together. You know, you could be a beginner or advanced and it's it's

in the comfort of your own home the goal for me is to make it as easy as people for people to follow so it's like 15 minute daily commitment but the results are incredible that you'll you'll have and you'll you'll be able to you know feel like a kid again and move the way you want to move um and you know be able to do the activities that you love so if you you know i guess like going my instagram is ground up physio facebook ground up is everywhere you can find me it's ground up so that's the word ground up and physio is p-h-y-s-i-o and my you know the links in the bio and all that jazz um and people could check it out um and if they have any questions if they want to work one-on-one with me i also also do virtual consultations. So I've got clients all over the world as well that do one-on-one.

And my program has options as well to have a more tailored approach for people. So people could check that out if they want to. If they're sick and tired of the endless solutions that only provide them that temper relief, that's where I come in. And, and it's, it's the same thing that I needed to use when I was dealing with pain for my entire, like for six years, I dealt with chronic pain for six years. I was, I felt broken and balanced. So I, I know what it feels like. And I, you know, I fortunate enough that this journey is certainly a blessing and a curse because it was not fun. I was depressed for a long time, but now I started my own clinic.

I love what I do every day, and I help people get back to doing the things they love and light people up in really exciting ways. It's extremely rewarding. And, yeah, so if anyone has any questions, I'm happy to answer anything that comes my way. Well, you've educated me, man. I'm going to quit using all my arcing shoes and all this stuff. I'm probably going to start walking around the house barefoot again. I could send you some.

You know, I encourage people. So there's very minimalist shoes. If you think about the Vibram five-finger shoes. So everyone's probably seen those before. You know, they're like the shoes that literally have five toes in them. You ever seen those before? Yeah, I've seen those where they have an individual slot for each toe. and those are people say what do you think about them i say they're great and i'm like if you want to pick up any any any chicks with those you're not likely to pick up

any ladies or boys whatever but the cool thing is that there's a lot of new companies that do exist one of them being the name ultra a l t r a so instead of and what i like about the shoe for most people to start with is it's cushioned flat wide and flexible but because most people are used to the cushioning it's it's somewhat easier versus something along these lines this is a company called vivo barefoot and these are extremely thin as you can see there's no soul and so they're like for me the thick souls are too much but it's because i've made the transition and i'm so used to be barefoot all the time again i couldn't stand barefoot for more than a few seconds so i like someone says oh it won't work for me it's like no it will you just have to you know our feet change in response to load

yes i've always changed in response to load but And our bodies change in response to load, but good load, right? So, you know, all these different foot companies exist. And so you don't have to only wear those five-fingered-toed shoes if you want to, like, be more connected to the ground. There's lots of new companies that exist that are more cool. Yes, they will look slightly different, but being different is good because, you know, it's, you know, oh, those don't look normal. Well, guess what? Normal right now is, is unhealthy. Normal is overweight. Normal is in pain. And so we don't want to be normal. Be the weirdo who's not in pain. Be the weirdo who's different and who follows the natural principles of the way that we're supposed to move. Be the weirdo people. Uh, what about sandals like little jesus type sandals yeah so i i don't

have yeah i do have mine but they're all at the other side of my clinic but one of the problems that when people wear flip-flops is that they clench their toes when they walk so you definitely don't want to be clenching because basically if i'm walking unconsciously if i'm gonna uh like walk normally the flip-flop will fall off my foot and so you have to clench your toes for it to not fall off and hence the flop because it comes back up it's like and so I definitely a bigger proponent of sandals but again more minimalist sandals so like I wear these these sandals that are super flexible they're very thin company called zero x e r o those are the sandals I like there's earth runners there's tons

and tons of these minimalist brands of any like even winter boots so much for all like you know winter is approaching and it's getting a little colder outside i have boots that literally feel like they're lighter than most people's shoes they completely flex so there's no excuse anymore it's amazing how all these companies now exist that like provide you know shoes for any type of purpose so if you're a trail runner or whatever you know activity you like there are shoes for anything and so a good shoe is a shoe that lets your foot move not walks movement there you go what about the sandals that have the the you know the my sandals have the band over the foot i don't like the this thing shoved up between my toes, the sandals. And so when I walk, I don't know if I clench because I, you know, my arch.

You do not if you have a heel hook. Like, again, you would want your heel to be like wrapped by a strap of some sort. Oh, okay. No, just like a classic sandal, but I like these more minimalist sandals. I'll wear my six inch stililettos then with the heel hug. Thank you very much, Greg, for coming on the show. Give us your dot-coms one more time for people as we go out. So I would just suggest people going either like groundupphysio.com or Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, groundupphysio. There you go.

Thank you very much for coming on. Uh, we really appreciate Greg. It's been very insightful and you've, you've changed my mind and now I'm going to use my feet. I'm going to start using them. Love it. There you go.

One foot at a time, right? One foot at a time. I'll just put one foot forward, but I'm definitely going to change so many patterns. Uh, thanks for coming to my audience as well. Uh,

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