88- Optimize Your Recovery in Sports with Lenny Parracino

Bryan: 00:00:15 What is up everyone? I'm Bryan Carroll and I'm here to help people who have an injury or illness that holds them back from enjoying the outdoors. And today we have one of my favorite guests back on the show and the last time he was on the show was back in may of 2017 which is still the most downloaded episode in the history of this show. So you may be wondering who it could possibly be. And of course it is a one and only Lenny Parracino. Now he's been doing some neat work with the Los Angeles Clippers and the Meyer Institute of sport and since he is working with high level athletes, of course we had to have them on to talk about sports recovery and different ways to keep your body healthy and injury free during the season. So before we dive into this episode, this episode is brought to you by our friends at athletic greens, which supplies over 75 important nutrients to help you function optimally. Athletic greens is designed for performance so it has immune boosting nutrients and adaptogens to reduce the overall stress on your body. So to get your own bag of athletic greens, go to Summit For Wellness.com/greens now let's get into my interview with Lenny Parracino.

Bryan: 00:01:28 Lenny Parracino is a former author, hands on instructor and clinician for the national Academy of sports medicine. Currently he serves as a faculty member of the Gray Institute of applied functional science is a soft tissue therapist for the Los Angeles Clippers and works at the Meyer Institute of sport. Lenny has recently authored the functional soft tissue transformation course and the great Institute certified applied functional science curriculum for manual movement practitioners of all levels. Thanks Lenny for once again coming onto the show.

Lenny: 00:02:00 My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Bryan: 00:02:03 Of course. And last time you were on, it was episode 12, and that was back in 2017 and you were actually the most downloaded episode for 2017 so I would love to hear kind of some of the projects you've been working on since last time you were on the show.

Lenny: 00:02:20 Okay. We have a lot of projects in the hopper right now. One of the ones we just completed [inaudible] is our functional soft tissue transformation course. We made it available online, which serves two major purposes. Number one, people can prepare before they come to a live course study before they come to the live course because it also has with the online 20 hour modular system, 250 page ebook. So anybody that wants to get deeper into the research or if there's a component that really there curiosity they can get deeper into it. We provide all the references. And then the other is for people around the world that just can't make it to a live course and they like to learn online. So that's available.

Lenny: 00:03:15 So we're still doing a live course. We've been doing that for about, I think it's been 10 years, but we're proud to announce that we finally completed that project and Dr. Gary Gray was nice enough to be a part of it. He was a big part of asking us a lot of questions and really tying in human movement science with a lot of the techniques and strategies that we covered in the course. So that was a big project. The online is always evolving. That's what's kind of nice. I'm sorry, the live, the line is always evolving. That's what's kinda nice about having both is in the online course

Lenny: 00:03:56 We have a lot of the principles that will never change and strategies. But with the live, as research continues, we're on top of it and we're constantly applying. In addition to all that, the LA Clippers had made some amazing infrastructure changes as well as with our team. That's pretty much public knowledge now. I'm very excited about R a year coming up. And with that said, I'm working with a great group of clinicians, practitioners and we have some things that we're working on from a systems perspective. You know, one of the big things with sports and sport recovery as load management and we've been working a lot on how do we quantify load management, how can we individualize load management? We know that in order for tissues to heal, in order for tissues to adapt, in order for us to be resilient, we have to load the system. But if you overloaded, it's not helpful. On the other end of the spectrum, if you don't load it enough, it's not helpful and it really is individualized. So we've been working really hard on that

Bryan: 00:05:08 And since we will be talking about a sports recovery, why is sports recovery so important? Because it's definitely something people are talking about now and you don't hear a whole lot about that as of a couple of years ago. So why is this a topic that we should be focusing on?

Lenny: 00:05:26 Well, I think it's become popularized, I guess my guess would be because of injury. You know, when you look at physical injury, it's when the load exceeds the tissues capacity. And when I was a kid, we played sports seasonally. So when sense it gave me rest, right? So I play my baseball, I play my basketball, I got a arrest from the repetitive nature of sport. Now we specialize very early and because of this in a way I think it's forced us to say, okay, it's one thing to stress the body, but it's another to adapt. In fact, when you see a lot of kids, and I do see kids in my private practice, a lot of what we have to educate the parents on is simply rest recovery, not have to work out harder. So I would answer the question by saying my educated guess would be we're specializing too soon and we're seeing more physical injury.

Bryan: 00:06:37 That was going to be my question. Since so many kids nowadays specialize so early, do you think that is increasing the likelihood of them developing injuries and more damaging type of injuries?

Lenny: 00:06:52 I think so. I mean, I think it's multifactorial. When I look at my son for example, is 14. He lives, eats, breathes basketball, loves it, trains every day. I go to all of his games, as many as I can go to and I look around and I watched the kids. They're drinking. Oh, artificial sweetened [inaudible] type beverages. They're eating potato chips, Fritos, right out of the vending machines. You know, rarely do we see kids eating, drinking very healthy, raw, real type ingredients. That plays a huge role. I think dr Cate Shanahan and her book, deep nutrition, she had a whole section on collagen and foods relative to collagen will. Collagen is important. It's the most abundant protein in the body. It is

Lenny: 00:07:52 The makeup, you know, the substance that makes up our soft tissue predominantly critically important. So I think it's multifactorial. It's not just a mechanical, repetitive stress. It's also what we're putting into our system. And I think today I'm just comparing it to when I was a kid, I mean my mom always put me to bed by eight, nine o'clock and now it seems like kids are staying up later when I ask parents, you know, how much sleep does your child get? It's amazing to me. Kids are going to bed, or maybe they're going to bed, but they're on their phones, they're on their computers and it's late, and then they get up early for school. We had a parent come in not long ago and she's like, wow. Our pediatrician actually prescribed sleep for my teenager. You know, I thought that was brilliant. So I think it's multifactorial.

Lenny: 00:08:49 I think it's food. I think it's sleep. I think we're specializing too early. And this a storm. Four repetitive stress injury. Yeah. I work with a lot of kids, especially high schoolers. And it seems like most of them go to bed around 10 o'clock when their parents tell them to go to go to bed, but they actually fall asleep around two 3:00 AM and then they have to be up at six, seven o'clock for school. And they're just spending all their time on their phones, computers, whatever it is. And there's growing off instead of sleeping. Yeah, it's huge. There's a lot to be said about sleep and I don't know your readers or your listeners have read the book, why we sleep by Matthew Walker. It was released I believe last year. Great read. Okay. Cause there's a lot of different thoughts on how much is necessary. No, for the average person they say seven to nine hours, but kids might need a lot more. Kids are in sport, they go through growth spurts. They might need a lot more than that.

Lenny: 00:09:56 Yeah. I'm actually just listening to the, the audible version of that book. So funny that you bring that up. So when it comes to sports recovery, you talk a lot about load management and so there's a lot of different, we'll say, techniques that people use in order to recover in athletics. So can you talk a little bit about how to first to minimize the load or to allow the body to adapt to the load and reduce the overall stress to the body from the load? Before we get into utilizing all these different techniques? Okay, so if I understand your question, the answer is simple. You have to first find the individual's threshold, right? I can't make an adjustment to loading unless I first understand their threshold. So we developed a system and I think understanding what a system is becomes very important and it can help people sit through the confusion that exists so that we don't become hostage to techniques.

Lenny: 00:11:08 And we can use our own intelligence to figure out how to use techniques. There's a big difference. A system by definition is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieved something. And it consists of three things. It consists of elements and interconnections [inaudible] a function or purpose. We think about that. The key words are. And so you have elements have interconnections and you have a function or a purpose and puts it all together into a system which provides a feedback loop. All right? Cause you can have an element isolation. But if it's not taken into consideration other connections and tied to a function, it's just reductionistically and element. Do you know how much research does this? People tell me about the NormaTec or people tell me about their vibration and they just huge [inaudible] information about the product. And then they'll hypothesize how that's gonna help.

Lenny: 00:12:21 But until we understand individuality in the person's individual threshold and put it into a system that has a feedback loop, which it does, right? We stress ourselves, we adapt, and we have to measure that adaptation. We don't know if these products are going to work. So most of what we read about these products, in my opinion, is marketing science. For it to be practical science, it has to fit in with the individual. So what we do is in, in private practice, this is very simple because people are coming into us and we're individualized [inaudible] clinic. The Meyer Institute of sport you're coming in cause you're seeing us individually. And even in team sports now I can only speak for the NBA. You know, we have enough people on staff where we can individualize. Okay. The programming, which is fascinating. I'm not saying that that happens in all sports.

Lenny: 00:13:23 I can only tell you my experience. We actually have individualized plans for our basketball players. We're able to do that. And that way we can say, okay, this person can use what's called the Firefly. This person can use Marc pro, this person, it should be used in some NormaTec. This person should do hot, cold contrast. Maybe just cold contrast with this person and let the homeostatic mechanisms be the heat. We don't have to apply artificial key to that person. So it's a long way of saying we have to individualize in order for us to understand what techniques actually work. Otherwise, I just hear a bunch of marketing signs.

Bryan: 00:14:04 And what are some markers that you're looking for that indicates what would be the best for an individual? Like, what, how would you know that someone would do better with a hot cold contrast forces and NormaTec or even a vibration plate or something similar?

Lenny: 00:14:22 Movement efficiency. There's the quick answer. That really doesn't give the listeners much. I want you to think about, think about this. There's holding tension, there's active tension, there's resting tension, and there's passive. There's always tension in the body. [inaudible] 10 Segretti system, strength by definition, or we can define it as our ability to produce internal tension against an external load. So if you were to get up out of your chair, how efficient are you in doing that? So when someone's sore and they're kind of crying out for recovery, it's because they're not moving efficiently. They feel heavy. They don't feel as springy.

Lenny: 00:15:09 So think of it like a basketball, well inflated. You haven't played in awhile. So you're in your garage and you grab it and you want to test to see it's efficiency in the change of direction. So you slammed that basketball down onto the floor. How old is it? Spring, back up. If it doesn't spring up real well, you say, Oh, we better pump it up before we go play. That's a lot like the human body. When you lose your spring, you have this heaviness to you, it's time to make a change and put yourself into more of an it arrest adaptation or what you I have referred to as sports recovery. But this is for everybody. I mean we look at everyone as an athlete, we just have different levels of athleticism. That's why I'll always maintain a private practice and not just being professional sports.

Lenny: 00:16:00 I mean I love working with the Ferrari's, but I also like to work with all populations because selfishly I get to learn a lot. So I look at everybody as an athlete with different levels of athleticism. So if I'm working with someone 80 years of age and they're having struggles walking because they've lost the spring in their step [inaudible] me, that's an indicator that we have to look at the work rest ratios, what's going on in the system that is not allowing it to be efficient and movement. So it goes back to movement efficiency. Remember you can be effective at something you can get and then out of your car and get to the grocery store and back. The question is, are you efficient? You know, energy is this concept central ball science. And when the system is healthy, it's conserving energy. It's not wasting it. You know, and this is what's happening in sports science right now. We're starting to realize that muscles are not the main force generators in efficient movement. Of course they're there working that muscles can produce the force, but connective tissue organizes it. So very healthy, smooth, efficient movement is more of an elastic recoil with very little or minimal muscular involvement because muscle, well waste, a lot of energy

Lenny: 00:17:27 Know, and the research proves this now.

Bryan: 00:17:30 Okay, so when you're taking a look at kids, especially between middle and high school and that their bodies are constantly adapting and their bodies are changing all the time, are you having to adjust their protocols and their recovery methods all the time? Because, I mean today they could know exactly how their body is working and they can be efficient with their moment and tomorrow they could have grown a little bit and it's completely thrown off their entire system.

Lenny: 00:17:59 Yeah, that's a great question. I see this a lot and that's the problem with sports structured sports because you know, coach can't take that into consideration. I have X amount of kids in front of me and I would program that I have to run. When we see these kids individually big time, we see growth spurts hormone cascades that are affecting growth rates. That's one big question I always ask. Parents asked the child, have you grown a lot? Over the last six months, three months? So we're constantly adjusting it from a clinical perspective. It's easy for us though. I don't think it's as easy for the coach, but that's a big, big factor. And I think it's often overlooked. People come to me all the time with their children and we're constantly happening, you know, to educate them on stress adaptation rate.

Lenny: 00:19:01 Great example is my son. They want him to bulk up for basketball and I refused to let him wait train right now and know of course I have to go round and round the strength coaches, their biases, put weight on them and make them grow big. It makes no sense and I'm open minded. If someone wants to argue this point, they're going to have to prove it to me because I will prove my side. It makes no sense to me for a child to put artificial load into their body and they can't control their body weight. A lot of these kids are showing up. It's kind of like going camping. You love to camp

Bryan: 00:19:40 [Inaudible],

Lenny: 00:19:41 You got your tent [inaudible] you forgot your poles and you forgot your Guidewire's to keep your tent up. And that's what we see with these kids. It's like they have this connective tissue canvas but they don't have any integrity and it, like we said before, you know, there's a lot of factors to this. Well, putting artificial load into their body is not the answer. Loading them is, but not artificial load. So if I can't control my own body weight, why would I put a barbell on my back? So a lot of these kids are deemed weak. They need to get stronger and that's what puts them in these strength programs. But they're not first tested for their threshold. Need to know where the threshold is and then we can design programs that allowed them to be incrementally keyword incrementally adapt. And I think we'd see much less injury must less frustration.

Bryan: 00:20:38 Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. Cause I've seen it with a lot of kids where even over a summer they can grow a few inches to half a depending on the year. And it's amazing how they, you know, at one height or so coordinated and then they come back and they're just like, they have no idea how to control their body in space and they've lost everything and they're trying to figure it out again because they have all these new legs, you know?

Lenny: 00:21:05 Yeah. And that it's like a person when they're injured and they're immobilized, it doesn't take much mobilization to really change the neural organization of the body. Of the motor control of the body and more of this is really starting to become understood because we're starting to study living tissue. I'm going to say that again. We're starting to study living tissue.

Lenny: 00:21:31 For all your listeners that have studied anatomy, I want you to think of this analogy. If my goal was to get my PhD in living trees, how well would I do studying telephone poles? But man, when people tell me about their hamstrings and their SOAs and our QL and all the popular main muscles, we're basing it off of topographic or geographic memorized anatomy, not leaving anatomy. And I've had the fortunate opportunity to study fresh tissue, cadaver dissections, 16 models to be exact. And man that was like learning. It was analogous to drinking water out of a fire hydrant. That's how much I learned. I mean it was absolutely crazy and that was still deceased models. Dr Gilberto has said, Hmm, what if we put an endoscope in the living and then we magnify that video footage, what's going on in the living? And interestingly, that looks very different than fresh tissue cadavers.

Lenny: 00:22:40 And that's not even moving. I mean, they'll move the limb around, but obviously the anesthesiologist is, they're putting the person out so the person's out when they have it, it's endoscope in their body, but my whole point is so much is emerging right now on tissue because we're starting to look at the living. We've been studying the dead and hypothesizing, stretching and strength protocols, and when you start to look at research, you realize it's not looking at the system. That's why I define that earlier. We're looking at specific elements like how often do we hear about creep in history? [inaudible] And stretching research? Well, they took the particular tissue out of the human body and they measured it. That's looking at an element reductionistically you forgot that there's interconnections with the human body. There's a function and a purpose. You know, a great example I give people is if you look at your house right now, a structural engineer would come in and could calculate when your roof was going to collapse.

Lenny: 00:23:42 In fact, in California here we have earthquakes, so structural engineers will come out and say, you know what? It's not safe for you to go back in your house. They're figuring this out mathematically, so as weight is on top of your, your roof, can I say it's a lot of snow? We don't have that problem. John and Southern sunny California like you, let's say it's where are you with and there's a lot of snow on top of your roof. It's like it's real heavy. It's going to start to weaken the structure. True trail. Interestingly, on a healthy human, when you load it, it gets stronger. It doesn't get weaker, it actually gets stronger. It's quite interesting on a healthy human, so the load behavior of living tissues, very different and dead tissue and so we're starting to learn more and more about this. For example, one of the things, because this is about sports recovery, everybody can do practically whatever walking you do or running.

Lenny: 00:24:39 You know, walking is, is beautiful natural movements like a window into the nervous system. Let's say you get heavy legs, we'll say, or you just feel like gravity is kind of beaten on you at two miles. I'm just making this up. You can be a runner and you can run 10 miles. You could go hiking for an hour straight and feel great. It doesn't matter. It's still the same thing. We're standing in the field of gravity and the ground, okay, and it's starting. Does it feel ah, laborious? Okay, we're starting to use our muscles more. We're not springing. Okay? All you have to do is take your current threshold, break it up into chunks. Literally stop, lie down, sit down, let your legs rest from being compressed. Within five minutes you get up and walk again. I guarantee you will feel different spring in your step.

Lenny: 00:25:29 Guaranteed. That deals with living tissue. It deals with the hydration. So a lot of the injuries we're starting to see right now are starting to focus more on the last, the loss of fiscal [inaudible]. It deals with the fluid matrix. So without getting too deep into the woods here, think of a human body, right? There's four main tissues to make up a human body. You have your epithelial tissue, muscular tissue, nervous, and you have your connective tissue. Most abundant is the connective. It's the supporting framework or the human body. Now there's three raw ingredients that make up the connective tissue cells, fibers, and a ground substance study. The ground substance, because that is what's highly changeable. It's reversible. There's a lot of people in social media that are talking about, well, you can't change connective tissue and you can't stretch connective tissue, and manual therapy is a bunch of wasted time.

Lenny: 00:26:33 They're partially correct and partially very wrong. They're taking elements out of the system. They're not including all of the different interconnections that exists like I've just mentioned, and they forget the function or purpose because loose connective tissue is highly reversible. I have plenty of studies that I show using ultrasound imaging after manual therapy after form. Rolling loose connective tissue is reversible. They are correct in saying you can't manipulate a tissue if they're talking about dense connective tissue, but remember, all of this works together, so the behavior of dense connective tissue changes if you manipulate the loose connective tissue, which has a fiscal elastic behavior. Okay. Another practical example would be if you're doing lunges right now or you're stepping up and downstairs and you feel spring-like like very energy efficient. Now sit your butt down for three hours. Okay, the shape of your butt while you're seated changes, it gets wider.

Lenny: 00:27:35 Let's be real. You looked at your butt, put your hands on your nice, cute butt and sat down. It got bigger. It's stretched for three hours. Now when you stand up, it doesn't remain flat. It goes right back to where it was before. So this is where the people and stretching saying, well, there's no sense of stretching and it really doesn't do much. They are correct with respect to the shape of the tissue. Okay? Or the length of the tissue, I should say the dimension of the tissue. Right? But here's what's interesting. If you go back to that lunge I just mentioned or walking up and down stairs, you've lost your spring, guaranteed. You measured, we have force plates at our clinic that would do this, right? We have fourth place that will measure their transformation from one position to the next before sitting for three hours. And then after sitting for three hours, I guarantee you it'd be a delayed response. It would be like that deflated basketball versus the well-insulated basketball that deals with the ground substance, how the fibers are behaving, not the morphology, not the singular element fibers. If we just looked at the fibers through a study, and that's where these studies are so flawed, is they eliminate all of the different relationships that truly exist in the living.

Bryan: 00:28:58 Yeah. So when you're talking about dense connective tissue, that would be like the muscle fibers. Correct. And then the last dense would be more of the tissues outside of the muscle fibers.

Lenny: 00:29:10 I'm not exactly. So like I said, when you look at tissues of the human body, you have muscles, you have nerves, epithelium and connective. You with me?

Bryan: 00:29:20 Yup.

Lenny: 00:29:21 I guess a simple analogy would be if you cut a great fruit in half, you have the meat in between the cellulose pockets. Those would be our muscle fibers. But the silos pockets are made up of connective tissue or the cellulose pockets. In our analogy here, [inaudible] is connective tissue. Now, connective tissue has subsystems. Right? And I just talked about the elements of connect tissue ourselves, fibers in a ground substance. And then from there there's different types of connective tissue and one type [inaudible] is loose connective tissue. So you were mentioning the dense the dense is extremely strong so you can't foam roll your dense connected tissue in change. It's fiber morphology. Like you can't go in and and say, okay, I just rolled my it band and now I'm going to go re MRI it and it's going to look different. No, you can change this behavior because you can because it's been shown over and over again to be reversible. The loose connective tissue which lies between the sheets of dense connective tissue. Hopefully that makes sense.

Bryan: 00:30:34 Okay. How much of what the soft tissue can do is determined by brain function or nerve function? Because if you're awake and you're trying to do certain movements or you're trying to move the body in certain ways, you might get restriction. However, if the person was under anesthesia, you'd be able to move them a lot differently. So how much is a brain controlling the movement capabilities? Of a person.

Lenny: 00:31:04 Good. Yeah, that's a great question. And what's the brain's main function to protect? It's to move. Think about protection is key. This is exactly, I call it client speak. This is how we explain it to our client. An example of this would be say you're moving smoothly and efficient and across the floor and then all of a sudden you hit a slippery surface. What do you typically see? A holding tension, like I mentioned before, there's this holding tension, act, attention, resting tension and passive. When we're moving very efficiently, were performing more passive, wait, activate, they're all working together. Oh. Even though I'm separating it in conversation, technically the holding act of resting and passing at work, working together. But if you spending more time passively, you're very efficient, right? Cause you're using gravity in the ground, your massive momentum to be energy efficient. So you activate just enough to get the system to move through passive [inaudible].

Lenny: 00:32:09 That makes sense. Now all of a sudden I had a slippery surface. What happens? Zoom. The nervous system is going to hold. Now you're going to look a little bit more robotic. Like you're gonna use more active tension with the holding tension. So to answer your question, it's huge. It is what I would call half the battle in my practice is trying to get people just let go. Now, why does the system do that again, to protect, Hmm. To protect in the beginning we need to protect, right? Acutely, we need to protect. But what happens is people hold onto this, they hold onto it, especially in our society today. When I was a kid and we got injured, the coach said, throw some dirt on it. Walk it off. Oh, some dirt on it. Walk it off. Now it's Holy cow. Mobilize it. Take something for packing on ice.

Lenny: 00:33:04 Put a boot on it. Don't move it. We're not sure what to do. And everything's on lockdown and it's not. But the body desire, the brain is not going to lie to you. And that's, you know, I think the art of being a clinician is to be able to get people to move without them knowing. You know, think about that. Get them to move without them knowing. So here's an example for our listeners. If you stand up right now, I want everybody to stand up, take your right hand, raise it up as high as possible, and what did you do with your right hand and turn it to your right as far as possible. Just do it a nice smooth, fluid manner. I will promise you your left foot prone H and your right super nights and I'll come on back. So again, it's your right hand as high as possible overhead.

Lenny: 00:34:00 Then rotate it to the right, your left foot pronates and your right supinate. Now I'm not there with you, but it happened. The rate at which it happened, the amount of range you went through is going to be individual. But I guarantee if you had to force plates underneath your feet, you would notice that your weight shifted. This is your brain's response to say, Hey, shift the center of mass. I don't want to fall over. In doing so, it changes the dimensions of joints. So your left foot pronouns and your eyes super knits. Now let's say you had a left ankle sprain, left ankle sprain. That would be more of a SuperNet Tori twisting phenomenon. I took your brain and said, look at your right hand, put it overhead. We're not even thinking about your ankle right now. Stare at that right hand and turn it to your right and I'm staring down at the left foot as I want to see if that tibia can internally rotate the forefoot.

Lenny: 00:34:59 Abducts a little bit you proning because if I can get that area to move that you just injured, I've created a healing cascade for recovery. Now notice I didn't say left hand overhead turn to the left because that would go into the extreme position of what it just went into when you had an ankle sprain. Now, could I progress to that if I see success? Yes, of course. So this is an example of how important the brain is and how the brain can actually hinder your healing. Yes, the clinician understands how to tweak, position the body. We can get a lot of authenticity out of the person. In other words, real loading capacities. Once I understand the loading capacity, I can set up a plan. So that's just an example.

Bryan: 00:35:51 So let's talk about developing a plan a little bit. So once you do figure out their loading capacity and their movement efficiency, then how do you start determining what type of recovery protocol they should have? And can you talk about some of those different tools that you mentioned earlier, like the NormaTec and vibration plates and what those can be used for?

Lenny: 00:36:16 Yeah, that's kind of a loaded question. Because it really is individual. I mean, I don't really have a protocol. Let's see. I'm teaching a course here.

Lenny: 00:36:32 I'm trying to think. I did a case study just to show people how to utilize the system that we teach. So our system it really simple. We have to first come up with the client's key objective. Like why are they coming in to see us? You know, I don't want to sound conceited or you know, like we're better than anyone else. But we have a very interesting clinic. This is outside of the MBA. We have a cash based practice that every one of their clinicians is really busy. It's not insurance-based, it's cash based. And people aren't going to keep paying cash unless you're getting results. So it's very results oriented. And so I urge practitioners to read the book, measure what matters. And if you're a movement practitioner, why would you read a book like that? This is a book that Google was built on, bill Gates foundation was built on and it deals with what's called, okay, ours, objective key results.

Lenny: 00:37:31 So you come up with the objective and then you come up with ways to measure if that objective is being met. Okay? So I utilize that system in our system because it keeps us true. It keeps us interacting with the client, which is what I call the platinum rule. You ever heard the golden rule? Do the others the way you want done to you? You ever hear that it's really selfish? Think about it. Do to others. The way you want done to you is very selfish. The platinum rule is do to others with they want done to them. So our system deals with the platinum rule. It's like why are they coming in to see us? What's the main objective? Now, what are we going to do technique wise, strategy wise to measure if we're meeting that. So I had this lady come to me, she's a sharp lady, very, very active, high-level soccer player as a kid, went to college, became a doctor of dermatology or Maine.

Lenny: 00:38:33 The reason why she came to me is she would to run again. But she's starting to give up because three years ago she had a partial because [inaudible] confirm via MRI, partial hamstring tear, the bicep tremors [inaudible] by its origin. And this is three years ago. That's the key part of the story. And every time she runs now or walks fast briskly, it starts to agitate her. So she's given up. But every once in a while it's still agitates without doing fast walking or running. But she would love to get back into, right. So to your question, like how did I build a program for her? Well, the first thing I did in our system, we have three categories. We have global loading, local loading and manual loading. So we don't call it any fancy name like a R T or FRC and all these different names that are out there.

Lenny: 00:39:28 That's great that people want their proprietary names and all that. It's fine. But at the end of the day it's loading. Let's call a spade a spade. It's loading. That's why in our classes and like take this information and make it your own. Put Bryan on top of it. I don't care because we're not going to have initials by your name saying fftt. We just had to put a placeholder name in it and that's how we get to see you as you've got to call it something. So we have global loading, MEB local loading that manual. So globally I decided to walk her because that's what she did when she came in so she walked. She doesn't feel anything when she walks so I decided to tweak the walk walk with a longer stride. Ooh. She gets a little bit of a hint on the upper posterior aspect of her hamstring on the right side.

Lenny: 00:40:10 Interesting. Okay let's go back to a normal stride but lets go. Normal stride length wise, distance wise, right to left foot faster. She doesn't feel it faster in that shorter stride. She just feels it longer Stripe. Is that okay? That was enough information from a global perspective. Now locally, let's do an excursion. Let's take the pelvic bone, move it over the femur bone in all dimensions. And I always use side that's non agitated first as a litmus test to the side of this agitated. So it's you versus you and not a normative piece out of a book. Right? Or what would people call Norman of data? I don't care about that. I care about the person, the platinum rule. So we go ahead and we go through her left side excursions, proximal and distal. So pelvis and femur. Multi-Angle [inaudible] feels good. She actually has really good tension.

Lenny: 00:41:06 Integrity. She's strong. And I was like, wow, that's pretty impressive. Not surprising cause she was high-level soccer player. And she's still very, very active as a professional. And now we do the right side and sure enough, there were certain planes that she was very successful in. And then there was a couple, she was not. So then we went to manual loading. I did some stuff standing with manual load, but then I went to the table. So I took her out of the field of gravity with respect to standing and compression. Obviously we're always in gravity, but would change the position relative to it. And I searched for tension, integrity, a comparative analysis, and sure enough there was inhibition of her hamstrings on the right side. And then I did a passive palpatory verification and it was density and soreness. So her sensation was, wow, it's very sore.

Lenny: 00:42:00 I compared it to the other side. So see how I'm taking you through a process where I gathered information. So then I continued with this passive compression and friction to the tissue to see if I couldn't desensitize it. Then we did some tension integrity testing. So I had her contractor lightly, not strong abrupt contractions, but lightly to facilitate that region, we'll call it the hamstrings geographically. Then we brought her back up, how to do the excursions. Then we finished with what we started with walking the whole goal. So you see how I did everything in the beginning. At the end, the whole goal was everything as a test and everything is a treatment. Okay? So then she said, wow, I feel like it's lighter now and I don't feel that agitation now. I said, good, what this tells me, did you have a physical plasticity problem?

Lenny: 00:42:54 Because the only thing a human hand can change and what you can change that quickly in one session is that physical elasticity, we can't change the, so cellular metabolism to any significant level. We can't change the mechanics of the fibers that quickly. Only the way they behave within their solution called an extra cellular matrix or what we'll call a Brown substance. So now what we have to do is we have to continue this. So here's what I'd like you to do. I know you love spin class, but I'd rather have you not to spin class for two weeks because of the compression and the friction. Instead, let's get out and walk because you do love to run. It is outdoors and it's great for the mind. She goes, yeah, I'm cool with that. No problem. I said, now what I'm going to have you do is wear a compression band around the hamstring, the upper hamstring area.

Lenny: 00:43:48 So your readers or your listeners might be familiar with BFR training, blood flow restriction training is very, very popular. There's a lot of good hardcore science. Well, one of the recent studies came out and are starting to see more and more of this in the literature is you don't have to use full occlusion to get the same metabolic benefits. You can use less intense compression to get similar metabolic benefits. In fact, they did studies with 70 year olds pudding compression around the upper thigh going for walks and they showed metabolic changes, which is fascinating because we didn't have to run the risk of full occlusion and DBTs and things like that. So we did that with her and it works great for adductor type strains and hamstring strains and even quad strain. So I put that only on the right side and I had her walk, showed her different tweaks to the walk, like faster speed, longer stride.

Lenny: 00:44:50 I said, that is going to be your rehab. In addition to offloading, using I mean eliminating the bike because I felt like the compression on the area where she's sitting on the seat and the repetitive nature of it is not going to help the fiscal lasted city. And then I gave her excursions to do. In addition with the walking, I want her to take intermittent breaks, do the excursion, take a rest for like three minutes to rehydrate the system. I'm talking about the tissue system and I give the analogy of a big wet sponge. Like a car sponge is full of water, you're pushing on it and you're pushing on it. That water's seeping out. If you keep pushing on and pushing on it, the sponge is going to dry out. It's all I could to do is take a break from your walk, let the water rehydrate back in there.

Lenny: 00:45:40 And that's analogies that a lot of the experts use that I've been, I'm lucky enough to here. So it works really well. It's a good visual and that's what we're trying to do is rehydrate, refresh the fluid system and she's been doing great. And the key is what are we getting closer to for sure. Her goal. Yeah, she really wants and that's what I said to her and what do you really want? And say we had a magic wand in here and we could take all this stuff away. What would you do? She's like, I want to run. So that's what I'm going to focus on. And it just so happened after I assessed her and then reassessed her, I'm like, you know what, I can give her wow, I can give her walking. That's a lot closer to run in and being inside in a spin class, which she admittedly didn't really like.

Lenny: 00:46:30 She just likes the intensity, the exercise, but you much rather be outside. So that's an example of a program. Now every single person that comes to me is going to get a different program. I was lucky enough to be able to give her something outdoors and very global for some people I have to give them local. If you'd like another case study. I had one come in yesterday, this lady weekend worrier 47 years old, sprinted the first play, first base playing kickball pop. She didn't really hear the pop but she, she thinks she popped something. Boom, she goes down, she goes lending before I get an MRI and just love for you to assess me and I'm always careful about that because it's always good to make sure you go to a medical professional first. I don't claim to be, but she has trust in me and what I do is I just educate.

Lenny: 00:47:22 That's my goal and I stress tested her and it was really interesting. She was her knee inflection contracture. She was doing it. Back to your great question, how much does the brain play a role? Huge. The brain plays a huge role. When I was done with her, given her confidence that she could load improving to her, she proved to herself, I should say that she could load. She left my office loading and then I said, here you got three days. If you increasingly are loading more and more, it's always your decision whether you want to get a scan or not. But if you're getting better each and every day and you're doing the hard work, it shows you that your system is less and less protected. If your excruciating pain, then you should have a checked out or if you find the pain doesn't go up but you're just not getting anywhere functionally in three days, it doesn't hurt us to get a scan. Interestingly, the rehabilitation, it would probably be the exact same with a scan or not, but it's just good for I think the client to understand what's going on and then we can have a discussion with that type of objective imaging. But that, that's just an example.

Bryan: 00:48:43 Yeah. Some people just need that, the confidence from someone to tell them that there is something wrong or not wrong. So definitely makes sense. Let's continue on with more recovery stuff here. And recently on your Instagram account, I saw that your son was in, I think it was a basketball tournament and he had multiple games going on and the photo is him sitting on the couch with these big leg boots on. And you were talking about some of the recovery stuff that you are doing there. So can you talk about [inaudible] for sports where you have a tournament on the weekend and you have multiple games in one weekend and you don't have like a week rest? Like we see sometimes at the professional level, what can people do to be able to mitigate some of the excess load from those type of tournaments and events that they're in?

Lenny: 00:49:44 Yeah, well, my son doesn't know how lucky is, right? Because I have the opportunity to have NormaTec in my house and they're not that cheap. I mean, it's worth it for professionals. People that exercise a lot. I still think it's worth it. Then going and getting, you know, cheap massages. You can save your money for about 12 or $1,300. You can get these basically their compression pumps. So for those, for the people there are not familiar with this, just look up NormaTec go online. Every protein has them. A lot of people have them now just for recovery, if you're really into exercise. And what's nice about it is you can be watching completely relaxing, offloaded, and it does all the work for you. And basically what it's doing is it, it's putting a high amount of pressure into your tissue and then releasing.

Lenny: 00:50:37 So it acts as a pump. That's all it is. And it really helps manipulate the ground substance, right? It helps the diffuse metabolites that bit built up and create soreness in the body can create inefficiencies and muscle contraction. And it was really interesting because this was the first time, I know you saw it on Instagram. That was the first time he did it. I did it selfishly as a study to see, I have a 14 year old, a teenager who has very healthy tissue by the way, he's never been injured outside of a bump and a bruise. He never broken anything. He's never had a sprain. So that's really neat. And he's just like, dad, my legs are heavy. We played a lot there, heavy in that. He said the word, I didn't put that word in his vocabulary and I'm like, Oh, that's interesting.

Lenny: 00:51:23 What do you mean by that? Like, you're not real fast right now. He's like, no, I don't feel like I'm quick enough. I said, let's, let's do this. I want you to sleep a lot tonight. And we put them in the NormaTec and yeah, use this like, ma'am, my legs felt great right afterwards too. I had them take them off after 20 minutes and I go, how do they feel now? Go up and down the stairs real fast. And he's like, yeah, they feel way better. And kids will always tell you the truth. Pretty cute. So that's neat. But if you don't have NormaTec, what can you do? I could have put them in a cold plunge. Right? And put them in a bathtub. Throw some ice in there. And what this does, it creates a vaso constriction. So just think it constricts everything, right?

Lenny: 00:52:07 Cold constricts. What does the body want to do when you get out? Dilate, open up and then up. So where do you think the benefit is in the ice? No, it's in the contrasting. It's the exchange. We know that now with icing, you don't see professional organizations, prolonged icing guys anymore. They do ice baths. They do contracting. But you don't leave ice on an area for too long. Yes, it decreases nerve conduction velocity, but it doesn't kill tissues. No. Matter of fact, it creates tissue congestion. And we do that right now. I don't know if you want me to talk about this, but we've seen this and I've seen it at the highest level ankle sprains. Now once red flags are cleared and we just have access to radiographic studies immediately. Alright guys, go get their x-rays. They have to get MRI, whatever. Once all the red flags are cleared.

Lenny: 00:52:58 What we do with guys is we'll put their foot in an ice bucket. We got this from Dr. Gary Gray. We'll put them in an ice bucket standing with outside support. So maybe they're holding onto the wall, say it's the right ankle, right foot goes into the ice bucket. And we have them offloaded to the degree that they have to, I remember the ice is going to decrease nerve conduction velocity. So a lot of times that numbing effect allows a little bit more load. Then I my hands in the ice bucket and I guide movement to see what they're capable of doing. [inaudible] Interestingly, right. And then after two minutes, we're both frozen frostbit. We jokingly, we take it out, we elevate them and we have them do ankle circles to whatever their capacity is. And a lot of times we'll also use a device like a NormaTec, but it's got a cooling, so it's called game ready.

Lenny: 00:53:51 So it's a lot like that, but it has a cooling apparatus to it. So it compression, relaxation, compression, relaxation. And then inside the boot itself, well having to do a little isometrics. If they can do isotonics, so like ankle circles, we'll do that. If not, they'll do isometrics in pain-free ranges and we'd go back and forth with that every hour. Now the next day we reassessed the load capacity, you know? So if you standing up right now and you had two scales underneath your feet, are you 60 40 are you 70 30? I hold onto their hands and then I have them shit. Can I go 50 50 yes. So it's the right side. Now 50 50 is okay. I'll shift them over to the right a little bit farther and farther and farther to see where they're at. And they now go right side 60 40 to left.

Lenny: 00:54:41 Can they go 70 30? What can they do now? Can we draw a circle with our pelvis to change the angulation of tissue, stretch to the foot and ankle? Where are we at in each day? I mean we're constantly reassessing and we're with athletes 24, seven, especially when we're on the road are with them every day. So I was, I'm able to see this was the most amazing part about me getting into professional sports is everyday we get to rehab them every day. We get to see and reassess what works and what doesn't. And that's what we've seen work really, really well with people. It's constant contrasting, which is really constant movement within threshold. That's the key to healing. This whole idea of a mobilizing things and taking things to mask it is really scary to me. And I think we end up a lot of secondary problems because of it. Because I see people healing really, really quick. Now of course someone can draw the argument while they're pro athletes, they're freaks. Yeah, that is true. But we also get to see them perform at the highest level. And they're not afraid to tell you it's not working either because this is their livelihood. But I've also seen it at all other levels, ah, within different populations. Yup.

Bryan: 00:56:00 And so let's say there's a soccer tournament going on and you're stuck at the field and you have three games in one day, what are some recovery options that someone can do while they're there at the venue and they can't get to a hot cold contrast or anything?

Lenny: 00:56:19 Now put your feet up. I lift the feet up, elevate it. Just two little ankle circles. When you're not playing, I mean, obviously on your, on the bench with a team you don't on a disobeyed the coach. But in between games I definitely have the athlete put their legs up, make sure they're well-hydrated obviously for the other metabolic benefits. Yeah, that's really the key. If you can take a nap in between games, take a nap. Yeah. Those are probably some of the best recovery. I mean, hyper ice makes a great vibration tool. They make other tools as well. I think if I had to choose one tool that they offer to help mobilize the ground substance, I would choose the hyper volt doesn't require power. Okay. Or electricity rather. So it's you know, handheld very easy. My son has one of those.

Lenny: 00:57:13 He puts in his gym bag and he'll do his legs. He'll do his cab area. I love it for the Achilles tendon. There's a lot of good research coming out with respect to the lack of blood flow, create change and Achilles tendon. And one of the big surgeons out in New York, I was just with a player last week and we were talking about Kevin Durant's big injury and he came out and said, he's the main surgeon for the Achilles tendon. He said, you know, we're looking at the morphology and it looks great, and then all of a sudden there's a rupture. And so I'm sure it's multifactorial with nutrition and all that, but a lot of people are starting to suspect it's a lack of blood flow to the area. And now the S the fibers become overstressed with the particular load. And ah, remember the ground substance is what provides a frictionless surface to the fibers.

Lenny: 00:58:06 A lot of people don't realize one of the functions of connected tissue and in particular the ground substance, is to help absorb force. So I oftentimes simplify it by thinking, well, and I'm in water. Like say you and I were together right now live and you are to punch me. I'm like, Whoa, that's an impact. Right? But if you and I are now are standing in water up to our neck, now you punch me, it's not going to be much of an impact because of the fluid concentration. It's going to help to absorb some of that force. I mean it's a silly analogy, but it works. And now I have optimal fluid concentration [inaudible] that the Achilles area, it helps to absorb and transfer force. That's one of its functions. Now if there's too much water, it's too boggy, like a swollen area, not going to be efficient. And if there's too little, if there's too little, it's not efficient either. It's always the Goldilocks, not too much, not too little. So what I would do is put the feet up, little ankle circles to create pumping, but you're elevated. Take a nap, a use a hyper bolt, the vibration. Those are all great tools and they're affordable now. So it's great.

Bryan: 00:59:22 Yeah. There super affordable compared to a lot of the other devices that are kind of similar. They're like half the price and they're amazing.

Lenny: 00:59:29 Yeah. Not only that too, they've done a good job with the amplitude and there's a lot of devices out there that are just retooled. Jigsaws and what they have is an amplitude that's much greater. So it becomes more compressive only is it louder and annoying, but it's more compressive on the tissue. You don't want somebody pounding on your tissue. You want a nice smooth vibratory percussion into the tissue. So it's not, I'm not going to say it's damaging. That would be far, far reaching. But you don't want to pounding on the tissue. Yeah.

Bryan: 01:00:01 If you get too much pounding then do you get more protection from the body?

Lenny: 01:00:05 Yeah, very well put. Yeah. Everybody is different, right? It's going to require greater resiliency on behalf of the individual. So if somebody is very resilient, they don't care, get a jigsaw and put a tennis ball on the end, you know, pound away. I see this in the CrossFit community. They get away with a lot of things because their tissues are so resilient because of the type of loads are used to, but you can't apply that to everybody. Especially kids. You get a 1415 year old male female soccer player, they might not be able to handle that kind of of amplitude or compression to the body. I remember force boils down or load boils down to compression intention. They're complimenting. So when you have something that's too compressive, you got to go with a little bit more attention. So even the volt I use speed one, I hardly ever use speed two or three or even companies will promote bow has got it higher speed and I'm like who cares? The faster I run in water, the more resistance there is.

Lenny: 01:01:09 I want slow, I want to cut through the water. Right? I don't want to run fast in the wall cause I don't want the water resisting back at me. One of the reasons why that happens in the body is it creates stability. So if you watch a sprinter, what happens? Their body stiffens, what do you think stiffening in the body. It's not just the muscles, the way the muscles are behaving and the ground substance. But that's an inherent stability factor, you see. So when I'm applying an outside force into the body, I don't want it to be fast. I want it to be slow, I want it to be rhythmic so I can penetrate deeper and get to to the tissue without creating, like you properly said, a defensive protective mechanism.

Bryan: 01:01:52 So that's a good question. Cause if you look up, you know, YouTube videos of people using these different type of massagers, usually people run them up and down their legs real quick and all over their body. So would it be more beneficial to have it on a lower speed and then go slow over the area that you want to change?

Lenny: 01:02:10 For sure. So the research [inaudible] is now out there, right? How much time does it take to change what's called a densification? What a densification is [inaudible] fibrosis, which is a pathology. So this is what's called disfunction, not pathology. There is a difference. Okay. When there's a densification. So a thickening in the ground substance, it takes anywhere from two to four minutes to change that solidity [inaudible] more fluidity. So two to four minutes. And so for manual therapists, that's a big thing. Like in our manual therapy, we do not use lotions. One of the reasons why we don't use lotions is because you tend to compress too much and tend to go too fast. We need to hook the tissue in, shear it to create an interlay or glide, which is manipulating the ground substance and creating greater space between the dense fibers tissues. Yeah. So two to four minutes is kind of the world, but everybody's different. Younger kids I would suspect take less time. But we never want a person holding away from our input, whether it be manual or you know, by the use of a machine.

Bryan: 01:03:21 Awesome. Lenny, well, do you have any final things you want to touch on before we wrap this up?

Lenny: 01:03:27 No. The only thing I would say is think about all of us going to a dentist. We, we see a doctor, the doctor does a very thorough evaluation nowadays. Even look at the tongue under the tongue for cancer and the guns. They do x-rays, they look at the morphology, the structure, and then they'll send that information to a hygienist. The hygienist does a phenomenal job and I think most people would agree they do a job that we can't do at home, but then a good hygienist, we'll go through your x-rays like the doctor did.

Lenny: 01:04:06 They'll do their evaluation. Then they're going to hand you a little baggy, hopefully. At least my dentist does. And they give you all these little cleaning tools, not just the toothbrush and not just the toothpaste, which I typically throw away cause it's not natural, but they give you a little sticks and they tell you the little things in between your teeth and they say not if you take good care of yourself when you come back to me, I don't have to give you Novacane shoot you up and dig deep into your gums and do deep cleaning. I'll just have to go through your teeth. I won't have to do a deep cleaning. Never once. Never once did I go to a dentist and the dentist say, don't worry about your teeth, don't take care of your teeth. When it hurts bad enough, come see me and I'll replace it.

Lenny: 01:04:51 How many people are told when you can't handle your hip pain anymore? Come back and I'll replace it when you can't handle your knee pain anymore, come back and replace it. Now interestingly, if you look at the human body embryologically, all of our tissues are made up by the same raw materials, sales fibers, and a ground substance. Then they differentiate into different proportions of the same raw material and we call it a tooth. We call it a gum, we call it things in the mouth. And we even have a profession called dentistry. So my big soapbox is soft tissue hygiene is critical to the longevity of our movement system. Soft tissue hygiene is a set of practices that we all can apply each and every day to ensure that we have healthy tissue and we know where our low capacities are. Know when to go harder, know when to go slower, know when to use less load in the gym. We need to be educated individually. We can't just rely on professionals. Professionals need to get this message out. Well that's the last thing I wanted to say cause we have to take care of our bodies are all over joints, all of our tissues, you know, not just our mouth.

Bryan: 01:06:09 Yep. This is definitely a very, a reactive type therapy where people come in once stuff has gone wrong and it's not very preventative. So I love that you keep bringing that up cause you brought that up last time too that if you take these measures in, put preventative measures in beforehand, it might not run into as many issues. So that's good.

Lenny: 01:06:31 No, we teach that. We teach that. We do obviously get people that come to us injured, but we get a lot of people that come in for maintenance. We promote soft tissue hygiene and we educate people on what they can do on their own so they don't have to rely on us. They don't have to rely on manual loading or manual therapy or our expertise. They're actually educated. And that's what's fun about it because we can pass the information on to other people and make the clients knowledgeable about their own bodies.

Bryan: 01:07:03 Awesome. Lenny. Well, my final question for you is do you have a morning routine and if so, what is it?

Lenny: 01:07:11 The perfect morning when I'm in season in the NBA it's a little bit different because it's a nocturnal league. We leave a city at 10 30, at night 11. We get into a city at two in the morning, so it does tweak things. But when everything [inaudible] is going real well, yeah, I love to get up in the morning. I'm an early person, so I always get up at like 5:00 AM I love to read. And you know, I always drink water, you know, we don't have a reservoir of water, so the most important time to drink water is first thing in the morning. So I'll drink mountain Valley spring water, which is naturally mineralized. You know, people don't realize that real water is already full of minerals. And so good healthy water in the morning read. And then I like to do, we actually have a hot sauna in our house and I love it.

Lenny: 01:08:06 One of the best investments and in there continue to read or just relax, think, and then I tend to mobilize my body. So the key is to keep my joint complex is healthy. My tissue, when I say complex, I mean in all the tissues surrounding the joint. So if I move my hip, I'm moving obviously all the tissues around there and I make sure that everything moves. I mean, joints are really spaces functionally speaking. They're designed for movement and I make sure everything moves. It doesn't take long at all. And I do that, you know, just so happens in a sauna, a lot of people ask me why I do the sauna. And I'm like, well, it's interesting. Someone led me to this research. If you really look at know things coming into our body, things have to get out of our body.

Lenny: 01:08:55 That's a great way of looking at movement, right? Things that come in are not supposed to stay in. Well, how do we get things out of the body? Through urine, we dedicate and we sweat. But when you compare what comes out of the body during sweat compare to urine, it's like a four fold increase. When we sweat, and I know it's late in the, in the game here, I don't want to get into it, but a lot of people don't realize the health implications of ground substance when it's stagnant. And how do we diffuse these metabolites out of the system? No, not only these devices that we talked about in human movement, like walking and, you know, putting pressure on the body and releasing it, but also through sweat. And think about that in the adult life. How often do you sweat? Yeah. And it's a huge exit. So one of the things to answer your question is I try to sweat. And luckily when we travel, we, I almost always have a sauna. So I can do that even when I travel. And then I'm hydrating and then it's off to a [inaudible] a long day. But during the day I typically I'll work out and I take my intermittent breaks and then I make sure I go to bed early.

Bryan: 01:10:15 Awesome. If only we could have the perfect morning and day every day. Unfortunately it doesn't happen that often. I'm sure. Okay.

Lenny: 01:10:23 No, I tried to make it happen. Yeah. Yeah. It's not every day. I mean there's always the tweak in the schedule, but it has to be more days than not. Otherwise, you know, to me, I'm just a hypocrite, so I do my best.

Bryan: 01:10:38 Okay. Well, Lenny, thank you so much once again for coming on and sharing such valuable information. People can find out more about [email protected] Also, you do a lot of posting over on your Instagram account, which is soft underscore tissue underscore therapy. And you also have your functional soft tissue transformation course that you had talked about earlier. So if people want to learn more about how to work with soft tissue, that's a great resource for them as well. Thank you so much Lenny.

Lenny: 01:11:11 I appreciate it. Thank you.

Bryan: 01:11:13 I really enjoyed chatting with Lenny. He continues to teach me to think outside of the box and to recognize the human body is a complex system and each individual needs their own process to boost their performance. If you want to hear more from Linney, you can listen to episode 12 or just look them up online because there are a ton of videos out there that he has done.

Bryan: 01:11:35 Are you ready to take your health to the next level? If so, we can help you. Our health programs are designed to help you make lasting changes to your health. By looking for the root causes to your issues, we hope you to create actionable habit changing steps that will make your changes stick for the rest of your life. So if you are ready to make a change, then go to Summit For Wellness.com/ready next episode we will be wrapping up our sports performance series by speaking with Barry Moore Rosellini who focuses on sports psychology. Let's learn a little bit about Barrymore. I am here with Barry Moore. Rosellini Hey Barrymore. What is one unique thing about you that most people don't know?

Barrymore: 01:12:18 So if if I were not a psychologist, I think I would on a plant store. I don't really tell a lot of people that I just love watching plants grow, I'm taking care of them. Just something I've realized kind of as I've grown, grown up and where I am now that that w that's what I would want to do. So totally different in a way. But also similar I guess in, in wanting to help things grow. Also I'm in the middle of a screenplay trying to write it for years. Not done yet, but I hope it happens soon. So not that many people know about that either.

Bryan: 01:12:52 Do you have a favorite type of plant that you like to grow?

Barrymore: 01:12:55 I mean, I love plants that produce, right. Some sort of you know, I guess pay off besides just looking at it to be honest to like, so like herbs and Rosemary's like one of my favorites. Basles one of my favorites. Those type of plants. Yeah.

Bryan: 01:13:10 And what will we be learning about in our interview together?

Barrymore: 01:13:13 So we'll, we'll talk a lot about sports psychology what that is and [inaudible] plays out with, with athletes, both young and old. A. And also I think, you know, when we talk about sports psychology, we hear a lot about improving performance, which is a big part of it. But when we talk, we'll also be talking about some more unique aspects that maybe we don't always think of when we think of sports psychology, like injury, athletic identity and things like that.

Bryan: 01:13:43 Okay. And what are your favorite foods or nutrients that you think everyone should get more of in their diet?

Barrymore: 01:13:48 So my, my favorite food of all time, it's pasta. And I really do, I think everyone should create any eat foods that they love as at least as part of their diet even if they're not quote right, unhealthy or healthy. Sorry. And I spent years, a couple of years at this eating disorder clinic called Opal. And so I think you've gotta be careful about too many restrictions or being too rigid about the foods you eat. However, I would say, you know, incorporating fruits, veggies, meet every once in awhile creates a, creates a good balance. My favorite veggie is probably carrots. I feel like I eat carrots all the time. Just personally. And then what are your top three health tips for anyone who wants to improve their overall wellness? The one practice, practice mindfulness and spending each time day a to slow down. Mindfulness is a nonjudgmental, present, focused attention.

Barrymore: 01:14:44 Breathing is the best way to kind of practice mindfulness in my perspective cause it's with you every second, every day. Number two, get outside exercise. Do activities that are fun to you. I think being outside is, is a really good thing. Being in nature. There's a lot of research actually that the effects possible effects of being in nature. Ah, so I see, yeah, get outside, do activities that are enjoyable. Do you exercise outside? And then lastly, spend time with people. Be around people. Yes, it's good to have our own time and space, but I think we are social beings and being around people and engaging and connecting is, is really, really important to our overall wellness.

Bryan: 01:15:28 I love trying to understand the way people think and how the mind works in different situations, which is really why I enjoy listening to that finding mastering podcast with Michael Gervais. So next week we will be working through different scenarios that athletes and people in general can find themselves in. So until next time, keep climbing to the peak of your health.