The Mindset Forge
In Season Five, The Mindset Forge focuses on helping men between 40 - 60 years old maximized this chapter of life by building strength, discipline, purpose and a proactive mindset.
During Season's one through four, you will fantastic content focused mainly on successful athletes and performing artists who've learned how to show up for the big moments of sports, performance and life.
The Mindset Forge
Unveiling the Mysteries of Fascia: w/ Advanced Rolfer Tom Richards
Ever wondered how understanding your body can unlock your health potential? In an enlightening conversation with martial artist and former classmate Tom Richards, we explore the fascinating world of fascia, the connective tissue in our bodies. Tom shares his personal experience with Rolfing, manual therapy, his holistic approach to bodywork, and how this technique allowed him to overcome a hip injury. We delve into the role of fascia in maintaining our health, discussing myofascia and its contribution to the fascia continuum. Tom enlightens us about the strain patterns that can distort our fascia, likening it to a wetsuit that doesn’t quite fit.
The journey continues as we venture into the realm of proprioception and the profound role of breath in our wellbeing. Tom draws on centuries-old Eastern wisdom on breath and its validation through modern science. We assess the transformative potential of breath as a point of leverage in changing our state of being. From there, we examine how an overdeveloped neck can limit your breath and how understanding back breathing can help mitigate tension in the upper back. Our discussion also addresses how to appropriately confront shoulder impingement and maintain pelvic mobility.
We conclude our enlightening conversation by revisiting the concept of Rolfing, while also considering other holistic approaches to health and fitness. Tom elucidates how these techniques can address chronic injuries and advance overall health and wellbeing.
At the end of the episode, Barton discusses how with his coaching program, he emphasizes the value of integrating blood work, VO2 max testing, and DEXA scans for a comprehensive approach to anti-aging and strength enhancement. Barton can be reached for more info in the links below.
Email: Barton@bartonguybryan.com
Website: http://bartonguybryan.com
Use this link to get a 30 minute discovery call scheduled with Barton regarding the Team Bryan Wellness Concierge Fitness Program
https://calendly.com/bartbryan/conciergecoachingcall
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7 Essentials to Building Muscle after 40
3x Olympic Gold Medalist Brendan Hansen
MMA Strength and Conditioning Coach Phil Daru
You got one body. You got one life. How are you going to treat it? That's what we're going to talk about today as I interview Tom Richards, and he's spent his life working with top athletes, people in pain, people of all fitness levels, all ages, and he's going to really dive in with me on really the understanding how the fascia works, how to keep ourselves healthy, pain free and living our best life. It's Bart and Brian with the Mindset Forge Podcast. Welcome back. We're going to dive deep today. There's so much to talk about with Tom. He's actually my former classmate. We went to high school together 30 years ago when we graduated class in 93. We just bumped into each other a few weeks back, got to talking at the reunion, realized there was a lot of synergy in our thoughts, ideas, experience. So I wanted to bring him on and have this discussion. So, without further ado, my friend Tom Richards hey, tom, good to have you here. First of all, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:I'm doing great. Happy to be here. Yeah, I appreciate you, man, it's great Looking forward to this.
Speaker 1:So you know, a lot of us find these kind of aha moments in our life because of something we personally go through and how it impacts our life in a really kind of unique, positive way. I know a little bit about your story, being a martial artist and kind of having a hip injury and that's how you kind of found a rolfin and you got that type of therapy. Talk about that moment where you were injured, you were looking for a way to treat it and the importance of kind of that first connection with rolfin.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I had just completed my degree in kinesiology and I was on track to go to physical therapy school. That was the logical progression was to go to school for physical therapy. So I was on track to do that and right at the same time as I was up flying I actually injured my hip training and I was trying everything. I was just throwing everything that the kitchen sink at it and I had actually read an article in a martial art magazine about rolfin. I said, oh, let's go give this a shot, and met a really talented rolfer by the name of Art Riggs, who you know.
Speaker 2:I was just blown away by the process of it. It was, I mean, first of all, he was able to address the problem at the source right away. I got results that I hadn't seen through all the traditional routes you know massage, acupuncture, physical therapy. But I just I really enjoyed the process of it and it looked fun. You know I was like wow, this guy's able to do all this problem solving. It's very hands on, it's not dealing, and I was working as a PTA so I knew that like, oh, there's all this billing and terrible. You know you're really involved with this whole you know sort of medical industry and I saw, oh, he doesn't have to do that. Wow, that looks nice, I could do that. But it was really, I think, the problem solving aspect of it. It just it felt like magic. It felt like magic in the way that martial arts feels like magic, you know, and I think I wanted to recreate that experience that I had, you know.
Speaker 1:Well, give my listeners an opportunity to know more about Rolfine. I've personally heard of it, never had it done to myself, never gone to a treatment, so other people may have other ways that they've heard about it or not heard about it. It's definitely not throwing up. Rolfine is different.
Speaker 2:Let's clear that up. Yeah yeah, so in order to understand a little bit about Rolfine, I think you got to understand what fascia is. So fascia is the connective tissue of our body that wraps around all of our muscles and it even suspends our organs. It's so all-encompassing, in fact, in our body that if you took away all your skin, all your nerves, all your vessels, everything, and you were just left with fascia, you would see that that's part You'd actually recognize who you are. It's everywhere. When we have a trauma, we have an accident or something, a spill that can cause a strain, a distortion in that fascist. So now we have a strain pattern. Rolfing is aiming to create structural alignment, regain structural alignment in this fascial matrix.
Speaker 1:A lot of people have probably heard of the word myofascia which is a fascial release. Myo, meaning muscle fascia, obviously connective tissue or tissue. Is fascia, the way you describe it, the same as myofascia, or are we talking about a little bit more holistically how the body works with fascia?
Speaker 2:I'm so glad you said that because, yes, you're right. So we actually have all kinds of fascia and it is a continuum. So it sort of defies traditional ideas of anatomy. So those are your listeners who have taken anatomy. It kind of throws all that stuff on its head. We understand that the fascia is a continuum but, yeah, the myofascia relates to the fascia that wraps around the muscle. It's not the same as the fascia that suspends organs, for instance.
Speaker 1:Could I use the word kind of webbing fascia as a bit of a webbing around the body? Does that spring true with the way you imagine what this fascia looks like?
Speaker 2:That's great how it operates. Yes, exactly Imagine that your body, the outer perimeter of your body, is a wetsuit. Imagine if that wetsuit didn't fit properly. Let's say the front of the wetsuit was too short and the back was too long and you walk around on that web suit and you're like I don't know what's wrong with this, but this just doesn't feel comfortable after an hour. That's what it's like. That's what our fascia does to us when it has these strain patterns that I'm referring to.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's talk about the practical concepts around fascia. Somebody walks in, they've got pain.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:They've got an area of the body where there is active pain. What are you kind of holistically looking at? How are you addressing it? How are you helping, lead that person through to become pain-free and more kind of movement-ready, in the sense of where the fascia is kind of come back to, closer to what it should be?
Speaker 2:The first thing I'm looking at actually is how is this body able to stand? I had a rulf called this the line Meaning the most economical line, finding that center point, and you can feel this yourself, I'm sure. If you hold the heavy weight over your head, you can feel when that line is off You're bowing in the back or you're a little bit off to the side. You have a very visceral sense of where that line is. So when we're standing throughout the day and we're off of this vertical midline, the body is in a little bit of distress. We're not able to stand and move efficiently, we're not able to breathe with maximum efficiency. So that's the first thing. Okay, if I see something that's really off, that pelvis is just completely out front of the rib cage or the head is jutting out forward. That takes a lot of energy from the system to to hold that position and I want to Unstrain that position. That's the first thing.
Speaker 1:Okay, it's a great time to be in the industry because I think we're learning so much so fast. But there's a lot of schools, right, there's a lot of schools of thought. There's a Western there's not just Western and Eastern school which I think Ralphine is a little bit more on the eastern side of this, like kind of philosophy around the body and how it works as a System versus you know. The western side is like oh, your pain is here, there's something wrong with your shoulder. Let's do these shoulder exercises, rotator cuff, and fix it right. In the moment the pain is gone and you've done six weeks of physical therapy or whatever. You're good. But there's a root to why that shoulder issue was happening, like, and you talk about kind of the line of the body or the head jetting forward, you know forward, kind of anterior posture with shoulders and everything is kind of long and weak in the back.
Speaker 1:Yes where do you look? First, because I, like chiropractic will talk about like kind of, yeah, the head neck down. There's a lot of people will talk about like from the feet up, yeah, like if your feet are off, oh, the whole system's off right. Oh yeah, pelvis is also another starting point From your mindset. You're the way you look at the body and and how the body should position and move. Where is your starting point? You know, for functionality of the body and where it might be dysfunctional.
Speaker 2:Man, this is the golden question. I think a great place to start is the breath, the things that we do. You know, oftentimes and I get this with athletes a lot is, you know, they'll say I think it's the way that I'm lifting, I think I'm just overusing my biceps, or I think I know I'm lifting wrong, or I know I'm bending forward wrong. But a great place to begin is how are you breathing? The quality of the breath, and if you're not breathing optimally, you're really struggling and you're you know, you're you're it really indicates Inefficiency right right at the outset we begin with breath function and then we start with the feet and looking at front to back balance and bilateral balance in the feet.
Speaker 2:But you know, if someone comes in and they say listen, my SI joints are screaming at me right now, you know it's it's time to, it's time to boogie on that. You got it. You know you better start you. You have got to Improve their, their, their pain outcome right away. And it's I have to put on a different hat, you know, am I, am I working with? You know, the quarterback of the Aggies, or something you know? We have to keep his he's, he's got to keep his shoulder To stay in the game. But if I have someone coming in and they say and they come in and their heads, their head is tilted like this, but they're going, hey, my foot hurts, I kind of go, hmm, what's up with that neck? You know, so it's. It's. The short answer here is it's a little bit of what they come in with, but a little bit of what's structurally screaming at you. Yes, we discussed, you know pre-call.
Speaker 1:It's about some of your kind of thoughts on Longevity and just, you know, you've got one body, you've got one life. You know, take care of it. What is the advice to give to men on, like, just staying healthy? Staying is, you know, active and and trying to live your best life?
Speaker 2:If there's one hot tip I could give anybody you know, just one big freebie it's take every joint In your body into every plant of motion, every day and every day. If you could do that, my god you know, because over time, trauma and injuries we dissociate From, from those segments of our body, whether we had emotional trauma to that area or we had physical trauma to that area. That's what I see over and over again is literally not just, not just you know facial adhesions that we've been talking about, but like, literally, we have neuro motor, like disassociation from areas. Yeah, keep moving.
Speaker 1:Joints in various multiple planes of motion. Yeah, some way every day.
Speaker 2:Yeah, do that, you know, obviously. Obviously keep our, keep our strength up, I mean, as we age.
Speaker 1:God proper reception, challenge your proper reception, for God's sakes, you know that people don't want to do that for the non-training like fitness professional.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um, challenging position of your body. Um, you know, balance and doing odd things. Doing odd things with your body, you know, and sort of a dumb down sense, do awkward things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, proprioception is a better way to say like functional training. But I think this idea of like, hey, if I'm going to be curl pressing, what if I was standing on one foot? Yes, yes, what if? I was standing on my left foot and only curl pressing with my right hand.
Speaker 2:Oh yes.
Speaker 1:Or creating a unilateral imbalance.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:Brain, my muscles and my body have to stabilize and figure out, versus just like sticking a barbell on your back.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Planting your feet and squatting, which is a great exercise right.
Speaker 1:Or a leg press, which is even worse because there's zero stability you have to create for yourself. Uh, so if, if leg press or leg extension or some sort of machine for legs is zero stability, a barbell squat would be like a little bit more stability, because you're obviously balancing a bar on your back, uh. But then you go into a lunge. That's even more stability, yes. And then you go a little bit farther and you say, okay, well, I'm going to, maybe I'm going to put one leg up and I'm going to do a Bulgarian split squat. Right when you're more, the balance is even more challenging.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And then you can start messing around with equipment or having, you know, a band around your knees so you're working internal stabilization of the knee while you're you know. So this is the way that things get more complicated and challenge the word which we're talking about proprioception.
Speaker 2:Yeah, uh yeah, it's just the vegetables people don't want to want to take, I think.
Speaker 1:But well, I think it takes it. You have to be in the right place in your life to understand like that I have a certain amount of time at the gym, right, if I, if I have unlimited time hours of in the week to go to the gym, then you can kind of do strength. You know the traditional, you know strength training stuff that you probably learned in high school or college and you can do some of these other things too. It's kind of like what my friend of mine is called like movement vitamins.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like okay yeah movement vitamins Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So the movement vitamin idea is basically like yeah, let's do some concepts that require proprioception to our balance, uh, that are a little bit more like brain, body complicated, that require more, more like kind of that yeah on multiple parts of our, our body and brain to to process the movement.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So you got to have some movement vitamins in there. Uh, you know, it's kind of what I'm hearing from you, right, and you had a whole part of your career where you really were focused on, like athletic enhancement, working with athletes, getting them your healthier, recovered, optimal for performance. Talk about that time in your life Like what did you what? What were you learning from that? That informs the way you work with, kind of the general population around pain.
Speaker 2:You know, for some reason I attracted more athletes and I would get these communities of, like, a lot of kite surfers and, um uh, brazilian jujitsu people, a lot of yoga people, and so, you know, you just kind of that was what was coming through the door, you know, and it's a healthier sort of demographic. To now I was on the Oakland Berkeley border, okay, and now I'm in Sacramento and sorry, sacramento, I love you but like you're just not not as healthy, you know, it's just just not as healthy, and so so that's what's coming through the door, a lot of that and a lot. It was just a lot of a lot of stress and a lot of trauma.
Speaker 1:Is that? Is that a post pandemic phenomenon, or is that just?
Speaker 2:life is stressful and I have to say, yes, I mean that's, that's my, my best guess. Yeah, it feels like something's different. Yeah, yeah, um, I don't know, I don't. I don't try to try to guess people's. I'm not going to speculate too hard, but it's, it's too. You know, there's more. I don't believe in coincidences.
Speaker 1:Sure, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Going back to one of the topics you brought up early on and I asked you kind of, what was the first thing you look at?
Speaker 1:you talked about breathing and I think this is a hard one for people to wrap their head around. I think it's very hard for people to understand just how impactful breathing or inability to breathe well can be on the body and how we hold tension and how we process, whether it's from your perspective as an athlete you know, a martial artist or as a you know practitioner of rulfing and such like, what are you trying to get people to understand about breath and how vital it is?
Speaker 2:Hmm, oh, big question. All right, first off, you know, I would just say that we can use breath as, like, an incredible leverage point for changing our state of being. The East has known this forever, you know. It's why it's as old as the hills, you know. And now it's being validated by people like Huberman. You know, now they're talking about actually being able to change your state of mind through breath. I think at the outset, for me is I want to, you know, a, I want to look at a body and see that the breath is moving in a three-dimensional way. So oftentimes I can see a really, really overdeveloped neck, a neck that's just really, really developed, and I might notice that the direction of breath actually goes up. So they will go, you know, and instead of the breath moving down, and not just down into the diaphragm, but that actually the ribcage can widen and come back in. So I kind of visualize the lungs as moving like two spheres that really move in all three dimensions. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I think for so long. I mean, this idea of like, okay, diaphragmatic breathing was important that we've heard that. I mean, definitely, if you're a singer, you know I was an actor singer, so we talked about diaphragmatic breathing. Yeah, it used to be just like push the stomach out and that would drop the diaphragm down.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But what, you know, what was really a game changer for me was understanding kind of the way that the back breathes. Yeah, I mean, I didn't realize that I had this especially upper back tension. I could not expand my upper back when I breathed, like it just it was stuck and so I had a lot of just kind of like tension around the upper back which just didn't allow me to radiate breath out the backside.
Speaker 1:And since it was really only having a little bit in the obliques, you know, with the expansion of the ribs out and but mostly just kind of happening here and it would process up into my neck, especially when I was working out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, shoulder, shoulder to raise up and the, you know, the muscles of the neck would get involved in the scalings and all that kind of stuff. And so I, you know, have been and currently working on, like when I work out, I consider how am I breathing? Can I wake up my back? Can I wake up the muscles of the breathing? Can I make sure that I'm as optimal as possible before I start doing movements where I'm not going to be thinking about my breath, I'm going to be thinking about lifting the weight, yeah, yeah, that's you know.
Speaker 2:I mean in a kind of general sense here, I think oftentimes my clients it's that it's like they're thinking about the what rather than the how and they want to apply exercise principles to actually a therapeutic problem and those don't always match up, you know. So if I have a shoulder impingement, it's not good to do more pull ups. You want to. You want to get that shoulder impingement straightened out so you actually get something out of the workout, so you can get back to the workout Right, somebody comes in.
Speaker 1:they've got a shoulder impingement, they've got pain. They want you to help them work, kind of help them sort it out. How does it work? Are you working kind of soft tissue, like moving the fascia? How does that work? That's a great question.
Speaker 2:Going back to fascia, you know it's a it's. These are the, this is the casing around muscle. So imagine a rubber band. Okay, if you tie a rubber band in a knot and now you stretch it, well, the rubber band is going to stretch more in the segments that are not tied in the knot. But that segment that's tied in a knot doesn't stretch, right? So Rolfing's trying to actually undo that knot, right? We're not just sitting there stretching things, we're trying to unadhere stuck fascial segments. And when you actually feel that that we've, you know, maybe differentiated to stuck pieces, they really feel the difference.
Speaker 2:This is really different from stretching something Okay, this is un, yeah or just massaging it, and to do that requires a really special kind of contact. You know, it's kind of like if you have a sticker on a jar and you want to peel that sticker off, but you, you don't want to break the sticker, you just want to carefully peel it off. Well, you know you can't, you don't want to, you don't want to just apply a bunch of lotion and rub it on there, and you also don't want to take a foam roller and roll that out. Right, you got to carefully peel that sticker off, and that's. That's kind of how a roughing works. It's it's. It requires knowing the anatomy well and in a very specific kind of touch.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good analogy.
Speaker 1:I had a chiropractor who talked about like putting a rubber band around your finger and it's like you can massage, you can ice it, but until you take the rubber band off, you haven't really solved the problem. Yes, yes. So often like we. You know there's, you know we have a soreness. Okay, I'm going to foam roll it. I'm going to stick a TheraGun on it. I'm going to ice it. I'm going to do an ice bath. Yeah, we throw all these therapeutic things on it. Yeah, but are we actually addressing the root cause?
Speaker 2:Most of the time yes. Yeah, it's always hard to give a broad brush stroke answer because, again, everybody has such different needs. But I would say, for men, as they get older, the you know, the most common things I see is losing pelvic function, losing pelvic mobility. Don't lose your pelvic mobility. For a lot of reasons Okay, you don't want to have. For one thing, low back pain is almost always pelvic dysfunction related to some degree. We don't want to lose sexual dysfunction. I mean, I just believe that pelvic mobility is partly the fountain of use. You know, it's just pretty universally. Westerners just lose it by all the sitting we do.
Speaker 1:Well, I think too we. You know you hurt your back. You're down for the count for three to six weeks. We'll take medication for the pain. We might do a little bit of PT, but as soon as the pain goes away we're back. We're back to doing the old, but we're going to avoid things that we think are going to lead us back to an injury. So we might not squat as deep or we might avoid low back movements like back extensions or things that we feel are unsafe to our kind of fragile low back.
Speaker 2:But what?
Speaker 1:that in turn kind of leads to is adaptation of these restricted movement patterns that basically creates tighter and tighter hips and back, and then it's almost like you're creating the problem you didn't want to have to begin with.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's compensation for you right there. So that's a secondary compensation. And then maybe I don't want to move at the hips, so now I'm putting it all on my spine to move Instead of that segment that's not moving. So then you have tertiary compensation after a couple more years. So, yeah, you're right, just keep it moving. But you got to find it. You know if you're injured, you got to slowly, slowly find movement in a safe way before you're really going back at it.
Speaker 1:Great episode with Tom Richards. He's in Sacramento, california. Check him out, tom Richardsco not calm, but Tom Richardsco it's also in the show notes. You can see more information about him. Rolfing in general, things like that.
Speaker 1:If you're stuck with that chronic injury, something that doesn't seem to be getting better, with like the traditional approaches like physical therapy and things like that, you might take a look at something like ralphine. I think the concepts around looking at the body holistically is something that's coming out into our kind of the paradigm of training and fitness a little bit more now than 10 years ago at least. Last but not least, if you're looking for some coaching, that's what I'm doing these days doing a lot of online coaching, accountability, meal plans, fitness, the whole bit. We're even looking into blood work, vo2 max, things like that, looking at DEXA scans. I could help you find labs around your area to do that type of thing so you can really be holistic in our approach to your anti-aging, getting stronger and doing those things. If you're interested in finding out more information, go ahead and jump into the show notes, shoot me an email and we'll set up a discovery call. Alright, thanks for listening to the Mindset Forge podcast.
