"This concept that we’re going to somehow figure out where pain is generated in the brain and turn it off with a designer drug [is] nonsense because pain is an accumulative experience of a lot of different phenomena."

Sam Visnic

Sam Visnic believes staying on the cutting edge is the key to FASTER results. That's why he is passionate about learning new techniques, staying on top of current pain research, and integrating the best approaches to both clinical massage therapy and movement re-education.

Sam is the founder of Release Muscle Therapy, where he provides pain relief through clinical massage and movement. He is also the owner of the Visnic Center For Integrated Health, whose focus is “on assisting clients with achieving the highest levels of health and vitality through an integrated approach.”

Sam began his career as a personal trainer at 19 during the fitness boom of the 1980s. He quickly found his niche in corrective exercise and decided to become a massage therapist subspecializing in neuromuscular therapist.

He describes the trajectory of his career and his expertise in his field as ever-evolving as knowledge about the human body expands over time. He quips, “What happens is, the more you learn in this field, the more challenging your clients get.”

Sam explains how his approach progressed in the past two decades, from an initial perspective that was purely mechanistic in its view of the body to one that is entirely holistic—known as the Biopsychosocial model of pain assessment and treatment. His open-mindedness and relentless drive to learn as much as he can earned Sam the reputation of being the go-to guy for difficult cases among his peers.

Listen in as Sam shares why developing the ability to build rapport with clients can be a game-changer for anyone in his field, why hypnotherapy is “the next thing”, how your brain controls how you feel pain independent from what’s actually happening to your body, and how to rewire your mind to dismantle unproductive beliefs.

Follow Sam on Instagram @releasemuscletherapy

Follow Chase on Instagram @chase_chewning

Key Highlights

What is the biggest misconception we have when it comes to pain and how can we work through it?
How does Sam communicate to his clients that a certain pain may not be due to an obvious cause, but a result of a myriad of factors (i.e. nutrition, neuropathic, etc.)?
How much of perceived pain is purely psychological?
Sam enumerates his five-step formula for making changes in your life.

Powerful Quotes by Sam Visnic

I always make fun of this concept that we’re going to somehow figure out where pain is generated in the brain and turn it off with a designer drug. That’s nonsense because pain is an accumulative experience of a lot of different phenomena, and the brain takes all of that information and runs it through various filters.

Your brain, to some degree, can’t tell the difference between something you’ve vividly imagined that’s pulling at all your sensory resources, and something that’s actually happening in the real world.

Beliefs are those things you can’t get by. A belief is just a thought that has legs under it like a table. It’s sturdy. It’s simply a thought that has moved up another level.

When you run up against a belief, the belief will shield a certain reality from you and leave you less perceptive to different pieces of the experience.

Brains do three major things: they delete, they distort, and they generalize.

More about Sam

I've spent my life studying the fundamental aspects of human health with a focus on movement and clinical massage therapy.

In a world of specialists, surgical procedures, drugs and quick fix remedies, I'm committed to finding and developing strategies that help people stuck at the “gap”.

Over the last 18 years I've studied dozens of systems and methodologies for uncovering the root cause of aches and pains, along with postural and movement issues.

Pain science, the art and science of hands-on soft tissue massage techniques, and coaching movement is essential in my practice.

Integrating different methods but above all deciphering WHEN to use different techniques with different people and situations, along with integration of movements that people want to be able to do again is the key to long term success with my incredible track record with clients.

Understanding the various elements that contribute to conditions and the power of communication and education makes my Release Muscle Therapy program separate from other hands-on therapy approaches.

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Interview transcript:

Sam

Well, I have a very interesting history, I would say that classically, I was training, I was just a personal trainer, you know, when I was around at the fitness boom, where things started kind of moving into the corrective exercise stuff, you know, when asked and NASM was really starting to kind of take off into that realm. And I remember those old school books where they're telling you to suck in your stomach and all that kind of stuff and fix your posture. And, you know, when I started off in that realm I was a meathead, you know, skinny kid, wanted to lift weights and get jacked and want to be a pro bodybuilder, you know,

Chase

Sounds about all of us when you first find a barbell, right.

Sam

Absolutely. And so, you know, a love for that kind of stuff. And, you know, science, a bodybuilding kind of stuff. I remember reading old school stuff. And if your listeners remember Fred Hatfield and so forth, and those books hanging out in Barnes and Noble

Chase

Yeah, it was it a Schwarzenegger's Encyclopedia of bodybuilding. So many golden things back there.

Sam

Absolutely. And when I started with that, I mean, we can dive into that if it's interesting. But there was an interesting progression about how I learned and got to the way that I am right now. But I became a trainer when I was 19. So is I've literally done nothing else. And so it's been about 20 years now. And very early on, I linked up with, you know, was so interested in that kind of corrective exercise kind of model and learning from NASM because it was so new, I really found, you know, I had a niche, you know, and it was when I was working at 24 Hour Fitness, and I felt so comfortable kind of applying that stuff with people who had aches and pains, which are reality as anybody who's a trainer, right? Everybody's got something. And but nobody wanted to deal with that stuff because they were afraid to go practice. It was just like, hey, this person's got knee problems. I'm like, I'll take them. So give me a right away just kind of became this thing. And I linked up with, you know, I'd read the references on the back of the NASM books. And I linked up with a guy named Paul Chek and long story, you know, after that, we started to realize that casually, it just

Chase

You casually just linked it with Paul Chek, no big deal.

Sam

Yes, yeah, he was, I mean, I give him a lot of credit for where I started. And he was way ahead of his time back then. And, you know, you know, you said, you're not going to be as good as you can be with this work and helping people unless you get some kind of specialty to put your hands on people and do manual therapy. So that led me to massage school. So I did go to I became a massage therapist. And that's kind of my license is the kind of work that I do. But it's hard to say it's like, you know, fitness training, but also massage therapy. But I call myself a neuromuscular therapist, because that was the subspecialty within massage that I worked at. And that's kind of like I think is a good reflection of the kind of work that I do is neuromuscular techniques, anything that's affecting, you know, the nervous system and the muscular system and the output of that, which is going to be you know, what it used to be is like posture and muscle imbalances, but it means a whole lot more now. So that's what I'd say I'd say more of a Clinical Massage Therapist. And in this country, it makes difference to actually state that kind of a difference. Exactly, you know, in a spa massage therapists, nothing wrong with that, but it's just different. And you know, in Canada, you're an RMT, which are a little bit more of an integrated health professional, you know, it's different there. So if I were to say if I was in Canada, I’d probably be an RMT. You know, so, but that's kind of like my general sphere of the work that I do.

Chase

Sam we were talking before we hit record and you have a very, very unique approach and kind of lens through which you look at pain through which you look at the human body where it is. Where people think that it is, where people think they want it to go. From head to toe, head to toe, you're even kind of challenging some just common terms and descriptors that I'm familiar with. And I would even use in a very unique way. So like, please what is the misconception, the biggest misconception we have when it comes to pain and understanding where it is in our body, what it means and how to work through it?

Sam

Oh, that's a whopper.

Chase

It’s a big one; you'll be here for 30 minutes.

Sam

Hey, that's cool. That's cool. I like it. Um, but it's good to understand that that model of how things have progressed in this industry, and I talk about, and it's very interesting to see how it all has progressed and how my thinking has progressed around this. When I, when I started, it was all about, you know, looking at the body, obviously, through this mechanical lens, you're looking at posture, distortions, and posture, muscle imbalances, it all kind of started off with that. And so what we looked at is to say, hey, these muscles are short and tight, these muscles are long and weak and we can fix all of this stuff by just giving you stretches and exercises and foam rolling.

Chase

Just focus on those muscles.

Sam

Totally as if the person didn't exist, it was just a you're looking at, you know, like a pinball machine, it had parts in it that you could just fix and, you know, very early on, I was kind of moved off of that thinking because in the beginning, that's what it was about. And sometimes when you're learning the mechanics of the body, it is helpful to kind of think, think about things as a structural mechanical model. But and I dropped the name, Paul Chek. And I do give the guy a lot of credit. And he's not so much some people aren't even aware of him now. Because there's so many new models and things that people are talking about. He's out there doing his thing. But in the beginning, you know, I remember going to the, you know, looking at him as a reference. And here's this guy out here. And I bought, I think, remember scientific core conditioning these programs. And this was seven hours of video of this guy yapping on and on about functional anatomy and how all of these things are connected. And I was like, I have to take this, nobody knows this. This is insane. And so I took the courses and you know, through the course of Paul's program, he moves you more into even in the beginning when you like now he'll teach you all the spiritual stuff and the nutrition stuff that he talks about. But early on, he didn't talk about that. It was all about you know, you got to learn the mechanics first you learn something's working well, and when it's not working well, but then started kind of introducing this idea of nutrition. And you know, how, why is it you've got clients that come in and their lower abdominal muscles don't seem to be working or they're hanging? Did it ever dawn on you that the person has a gastrointestinal problem, and they're inflamed? How are you going to get that person to not have an excessive anterior pelvic tilt in these postural aberrations when their guts are inflamed, and they don't feel well, and they have neurotransmitter problems, and blah, blah, blah? And that really just got you to think like, whoa, you can't, you have to actually kind of move into some different fields here,

Chase

Maybe there's more than just meets the eye

Sam

Totally and then that kind of like, as I kind of made progress in these mechanical models, I had to jump track and learn a lot about nutrition and this was early on when nobody knew what an adrenal test was. And I remember I was learning through them through bio health diagnostics, Bill Timmons, here in San Diego, they got us through Paul's nutrition coaching program, we were able to do some of these kinds of labs. So I started running adrenal profiles, urine test on people and I was looking all these metabolic markers and you start to see a lot of people have some interesting stress based syndromes and issues going on here. And so we would work on that just from a lifestyle perspective. And it was just, you know, we didn't get into too much supplementation later on I did but very early on, it was like, are you sleeping? Are you drinking enough water?

Chase

Fundamentals.

Sam

Fundamentals and these are things you got to do. And you know, things will get more complicated. And it's funny, what happens is, the more you learn in this field, the more you get challenging people. And so you know, you get stuck, and you're just like, people have these problems, you don't have to deal with them. And you had to kind of branch out and learn new things. And that led me into communication. And you know, early on, I was a Tony Robbins fan because he was you know, 1920 and I want to be successful. But, Tony, I talked about his neuro associative conditioning, which was, you know, tied into hypnosis and early neuro linguistic programming. So, you know, being me, you know, and obsessed with everything about this stuff, I went and took a ton of courses on neuro linguistic programming, and I spent years learning the communication models, and then I would tie that into the things that I was doing. So when somebody came in, and usually they were coming in through, they might be coming in for nutrition, or might be coming into mechanics, because I was a do everything practitioner, which means I was a master of none of them but you try to discern way did somebody need to go with this? And it was really hard to put all of that stuff together, as anybody who works in a kind of a unit of practitioners knows that it's better off that to see an individual for each individual kind of discipline.

Chase

That is why we have specialists, right.

Sam

Absolutely and so but I was I was getting good results. And my name was starting to grow as being somebody who was really good with difficult cases. So easy stuff. I never see these people but I call chiropractors in my area and be like, hey, do you have those patients that you don't know what to do with and you want to get rid of?

Chase

Send me your problem children.

Sam

That is what I did and so when you get cases like that you get good at those kinds of cases. So I get to lead athletes and stuff from time to time just because of my networks and I got to tinker with those. But my real passion was dealing with these people with these really complex problems. And they had actually been cleared through the medical system.

Chase

So like what, for example, if you could kind of highlight one, you know, you're talking about maybe someone presenting with something and actually, maybe considering a nutritional approach, like what would be an example of one?

Sam

you would get people that would come in, I think, you know, whatever I was writing about, you know, as I was doing, writing blogs and stuff, I became really well known for sacroiliac joint problems, for example, because not a lot of people were writing about it, the therapy field was kind of moving away from the SI joint as a pain generator. And you know, for good reason. But you know I still talk about those things. And you know, really, what you'd end up finding is people would come and say, have this chronic SI joint problem, it was really nonspecific low back pain, they'd run through, you know, the medical system that had x rays, MRIs, nobody knew was wrong with these people, but their pain was, you know, six on a 10, they have very specific, you know, movements and so forth, that would help. They went through physical therapy, they still have pain, and they'd end up on my office, and they've been just trying everything, you know, acupuncture, chiropractic isn't doing all this stuff. And then when you evaluate them, you know, there were certain things that early on, I was not aware of what was making them better. But my colleague reminded me even just a couple years ago, and he's been out of the business for a long time, and we're usually like, I remember you saying it 15 years ago, you were convinced that the reason why a lot of the people were getting better is because you were convincing them that there was nothing wrong with them. And it struck me now

Chase

That kind of psychosomatic approach.

Sam

Yeah. Which was really just, you know, as reflective of what we look at with pain, neuroscience education, now what's happening, which is, you know, people would say, I can't do anything in my low back would hurt, or my SI joint or whatever. And I'm like, can you breathe? Yes, this is my favorite line, can you breathe? Yes, I can give you an exercise. So I can help people. And I would just start with whatever they could do. And a lot of people at the time, it was bird dogs, it was lower abdominal exercises, things that I learned through the Czech Institute, and NASM, and so forth. But I would really show people micro progressions and graded exposure. And that's what I was doing. And I would start with whatever they would do and a lot of people would say, I've done planks, I'd done bird dogs, but they didn't have specific protocols on how to progress them. So they would get this kind of initial level exercise of a bird dog, but there sets, reps, loading tempo speeds, those things were not included. And what I would do is I would show people how to do those micro progressions and each way along the way, I would say, you know, some people would be nervous to do movements. Sure, and those listeners are familiar with this term is called kinesiophobia. So they would believe that they had a delicate spine or whatever, and they were gonna get injured if they weren't careful.

Chase

And that would enhance the belief of what I can or cannot do.

Sam

Yes and that would make them more sensitive, short, and their nervous system would express more pain when they would move as an alert system. So what I would teach them and say, you know, did your back brake when you're doing this bird dog exercise? I'm like, no, it feels okay. And I'm like, good take, remember that. So now when you do this exercise three times a day until you're absolutely convinced that your nervous system doesn't give a damn about doing this exercise and this is how I used to talk to people, but I didn't realize what I was doing. But at the time, I had that mentality where you are not fragile. And the answer is to build up a bunch of muscle. That's a meathead’s mentality, right? If you have ton of muscle, your spine is going to be stable, because I was still in

Chase

Need to stabilize the joints above and below as you need to strength train and hypertrophize.

Sam

That's right, dude, you're good to go and stop bitching, because you're going to be fine. And you know, so it was like that. And over the years, the approach was more refined. I just went through a lot of phases where I just developed my craft, and I got better at, you know, convincing people they refined by giving them exercises and so forth. And then, you know, again, I got into a phase where I leave this out, but I did lots of lab testing, and I was really into the functional medicine side of things. That was due to influence of Charles Poliquin, big guy in the in his bio signature phase and that went through a whole thing, where I was learning about hormones and everything else. I linked up with a well-known doctor back in the day. His name is Dr. Eric Serrano, became a very good friend of mine and I literally went to Ohio and I moved out there with him to literally go room to room with him with patients and learn how he treated people. And you know, he's taught me a whole lot about hormones. And, you know, Eric knows a lot about bodybuilding and dealing with that kind of stuff. Bodybuilders who have those kinds of challenges and, you know, that just kind of really and one of the things that I give a lot of credit to Eric for is Eric was just absolutely masterful at patient communication. He had such an insane rapport with his patients. And I was just convinced that watching him interact with people is that his level of comfort, and the confidence that he would have still on his patients, it was brilliant, brilliant doctor as it was but just watching him interact. I was like, this is the key. This is what I'm missing.

Chase

Communication.

Sam

Absolutely and building rapport and helping his patients not feel threatened. And it was such a game changer for me. And it's funny that a lot of the a lot of classical things that you would think would actually make you better as a practitioner made me better as a practitioner just watching somebody who's really good with building rapport and communication and a lot of things he would do with people, you know, you know, hugging a patient I was very uncomfortable with because I wouldn't hug people, you know, very much like I don't like people touching me

Chase

Don’t get too attached to the patient, you know.

Sam

That’s the irony of being a massage therapist I don’t want people touching me. So but you know, stuff like that really got me into, again, understanding all of the facets. And you know, when I got back to Southern California decided I want to stay in Ohio, restarted my practice again, but then kind of went into a different direction, which I really want to just kind of focus on the mechanical aspect of the work, I don't want to be running labs on people and having to work with doctors, and it was just kind of a pain to do that. And so I just kind of went full scale into just going back to my mechanical work. And what came along out of that was I think, a number I can't remember how many years ago that was, but pain neuroscience education started to become a thing. Internet started booming, you know, a lot more professionals online sharing information, which is just remarkably changed everywhere

Chase

More access to information.

Sam

Unbelievable and you know, I started reading things and I got a lot of from a confirmation bias perspective, things that I had been doing that research was like, this is it and I was like, Whoa, this is bonkers.

Chase

You're getting validation on your work, you're getting challenged approaches.

Sam

Yeah. And then of course, you read it. And then you're just kind of like, there's a lot of that stuff that you hadn't considered. It's kind of like I had cracked open the doorway, and I was starting to get going on it. But I really didn't get it until I read a lot of the books on that information. So I started reading a lot about pain neuroscience education, from Adrian Lau therapeutic neuroscience education, that book was awesome. Every clinician needs to read it. Mosley's audios and videos online and I just immersed myself in that there's a lot of stuff that I just didn't know. But as I got into it, I started noticing parallels between that stuff and a lot of things that I had been doing, which I feel like I was able to kind of advance or put it more into practice, again, with hypnosis and using language. And you know, one of the things and I'll mark my words on this and everybody listening is hypnotherapy will be the next thing, we are stuck in this this realm where we don't understand how to kind of reset things a lot of times in the nervous system. We're dealing with subconscious elements and that's what with things like hypnosis, excels in. I mean, we've seen the rise of motivational interviewing and so forth, which are language models to help shift beliefs and people.

Chase

Just needing to tap into altered states of consciousness in various ways.

Sam

And we're doing it anyway. It's just the problem is that people don't have a structure for doing it on with volition doing it on purpose. So but there's tons and mountains of research on hypnotherapy and I always tell people, you don't believe it works. Imagine what happens when somebody has an allergy to anesthesia and a dentist has to pull your tooth out. When they use hypnotherapy for dentistry, and they can yank a tooth out and you don't feel it. It works. So I know you say they had like, come on, we know it works. There's a lot of research. And the problem is just the comfort with it and dealing with the stigma that's associated with it, which is a problem. But you know that stuff when I looked at it in the languaging, because pain neuroscience education is really about taking something that people just really don't understand at all, which is pain. And we don't have an instruction manual for it

Chase

Really, we're still studying it.

Sam

That's right, we don't understand it but take that to an individual who's just dealing with day to day pain, and educating them on this and being like, Hey, you know, let me teach you what pain really is, and how it relates to what you're experiencing and reframing that and putting those things into context, which changes things for the individual. And the my work is really kind of coalesced around that whole can of worms, there's the interaction between the structural elements, the biological elements, sociological and psychological elements, which is known as the bio psychosocial model, which is looking at an individual as a whole, and all of the environmental interactions, and so forth, that kind of like, maintain and sustain that, that status, or that state of consciousness that they are experiencing, or, you know, whether that's pain or anything else. And so it's complicated, and it is a web factors, but traditionally, you walk in, and people are gonna go, well, I'm going to do a structural evaluation on you, and we're going to start kind of layer without overwhelming people. So it's a, it's very, very cool. There are a lot of facets to it. And that's just kind of like the essence of the kind of work that I do

Chase

It is pretty wild. When you think about I think everyone would agree when we think of homeostasis, it is head to toe, majority speaking here, every system in our body working individually and working together in a very efficient manner but when we have something that is a problem, when we have pain when we have an injury when we have all of these things that we believe to be true, or we're being told or we look up or our doctor tells us or trainer tells us, it quickly goes from the holistic systemic view to individual. So how then do you tell how do you help translate to somebody, hey, you may think you have pain here but what actually is going on is a whole myriad of systems running in the background that are probably out of alignment and this is just kind of like the manifestation?

Sam

Yeah, that's, that's a really tricky thing because we cannot, you know, I think the real genius is to be able to go global and go specific, and be able to slide between these kinds of realities. And with language we call specificity versus generalization is your ability to move within that realm and tie all of the pieces together. So within individual coming in and says my knee hurts, and my knee hurts under these conditions under these circumstances. And, you know, if, if it makes sense, you're gonna say, well, I want you to do these exercises, these stretches, these are the things that are predictable, meaning I can turn that issue on, like a light switch on and off, right, so if I can do that, I'm going to hone in on that. But then you're going to find that more chronic pain situations, and this is how we would describe it, let's say, for example, central sensitization, or, you know, one of these kind of, let's just stick with that central sensitization, which is basically that the system itself is having aberrant responses and having over responses to non-painful stimuli. So let's say Fibromyalgia or something like that, there is no consistency to it, right? So how are you it is not a light switch phenomenon. So in that situation, you cannot deal with these people on a localized way, you have to teach them global approaches to understanding their situation. So the, you know, proper classification of the kind of pain that the person is experiencing is really, really tricky. And that gives you an idea of what to do like, again, it's like I've seen, I don't see many people with fibromyalgia because again, as a massage therapist, you do get a lot of people who are looking for pain relief, and we come in and one day, I would do massage work with somebody that they would feel amazing, I would do the exact same massage the next time in person and a lot of pain with fibromyalgia and that's because their system, for whatever reason,

Chase

There’s no rhyme or reason.

Sam

There is but we just don't know what it is true, you know, so that day, maybe they were being affected by some other type of stressor, or trigger, and now that sensory input was way too much. So in that situation, you know, that person does not have an understanding of how central sensitization works, and all of the different factors that can kind of cue them in as to whether or not that kind of stimulation is appropriate that day, then they're going to be largely far more stressed and anxious, because any given sensory stimuli may result in them having a horrible day and being in a lot of pain. So, you know, they have to have more education and they have to have more, you know, guided like, you have to let us know how you feel this day and then we can help kind of guide what might be best for you that day. But again, on the other end of things, that the more kind of run of the mill, my back hurts when I bend forward, or when I deadlift, we want to be able to replicate the scenario as much as possible. And you know, to some degree, that's not always going to be the case because the context in which the behavior is occurring, which generates the threat is not the same in your office. You know, we all see those people of practitioners who, you know, got the client that comes in, and who plays 18 holes of golf on the weekend, and their back kind of hurts a little bit. But then you come in to give them a bird dog exercise, and then they call you the next day. And we're like, what the hell did you do you my back is killing me? And you're like, how can you be swinging a golf club and walk in you have minor pain, but yet this non-threatening stimuli has a significant reaction. So you know, those are, those are situations that you're dealing with. And I say, I always tell my clients, I'm like, I'm very conservative. In the beginning, I give you small doses of things. Because I'm going to go after antagonizing your direct pattern, we don't know what your nervous system is going to do with that, you know, and so educate you so that you don't feel extra threatened by the process.

Chase

You want to know exactly when, where, why and how you poke the bear it wakes up.

Sam

Yeah and under what circumstance and so that the closer you can get it into that into those cues, and those triggers, because the nervous system may have very, very defined parameters on when it feels threatened and when it doesn't. And so, you know, a lot of people, you can replicate things and correct them in the office and doing exercises. I say more often than not, that is the case but there's definitely circumstances where it's not the case and that's where you have to dive into the lifestyle factors. Because, you know, a lot of people said, we don't know why people hurt. We don't really know what the mechanisms are. And that's okay. We're not going to figure that out but as a result of that, not knowing we need to be kind of encapsulating the problem with more different therapeutic modalities, meaning dealing with their stress levels if we can, make sure they sleep, the researchers and all supporting certain things in neuroscience education, like number one, we educate people. I mean, the more they know about their pain, the less threatened they are by it. We know that the research shows that but then we have to sleep. You know, they do these wonky studies where of course, they take some college kids, and it's alright, we're gonna poke you with needles, and then we're gonna see how much pain you experience and you're gonna give us a rating, then you're not going to sleep for three days, and then we're gonna poke you again and let's see how much pain you have. And of course, when behold, they have more pain sensitivity when they don't sleep. So we know that and that makes things easier. Your client comes in, and you run a pain questionnaire on them, and they don't sleep and they have chronic pain, and nobody's been able to help them. But yet every single practitioner they see has another biomechanical reason why the person hurts interesting. And I'm like, well, first of all, your eight on a 10 scale, in terms of pain might really be a two, if you got some sleep, why aren't? Why aren't you sleeping? And so that's the direction we want to go with that. And you want to get quick wins with people by kind of targeting those areas. But again, like every case is different. You look at that paperwork, and you start talking with people. Do they fear their situation? The pain? Do they fear movement, that kinesiophobia, they're phobic of movement, or they're not sleeping, and they're just really stressed out and a lot of different areas of life. And it does not mean that they don't have a mechanical trigger, because they do usually when they come in, but there are all these exacerbating factors that are making that situation far worse than it really is.

Chase

Sure. Yeah. We tend to do that, don't we?

Sam

Yes, yeah. So you're, you know, you're kind of circling around this, trying to understand the scope of what it is that the person is experiencing. And I always tell them, I said, Look, I feel like if I could jump into your body and live in you for a day; it's probably a lot easier to figure this out but we have to deal with this little issue, which is that I'm living in my body, you're in yours and we have this crude source of communication, which is we're using language to try to communicate that experience back and forth. So a lot of times, it's like, I'm literally having to teach the client and get on a common language.

Chase

How to translate and how to talk to you in a way that you can actually properly interpret and is like hitting home for them.

Sam

That's right. And if I'm a bad communicator, and I can't teach people how to communicate to me, and we're literally passing by each other in terms of the language, there's a much higher chance of failure, because we're not talking about the same thing and we're not creating the same representations in our minds of each other's experience. So that is, I feel like when a lot of the pain, neuroscience education pieces really about and, you know, so that's kind of a, that's a, that's an interesting terrain to dive into.

Chase

Yeah, you bring up a really interesting point as well of the more people can know about pain. I personally have been through experiences. And when I was in clinic, I would see patients as well, who you have some kind of thought or affinity towards something that happened to you pain, limited range of motion, whatever it may be. And then you learn about it. And then you learn about what's going on in my muscles, what's going on, like, what's a pain receptor, you, the more you learn about the situation, and you develop an understanding for it, and with it, it kind of alleviates the pain a little bit sometimes or it can exacerbate it, you know, you understand more what's going on your body like holy hell and what my body is doing what? Like then it can either go one of two ways I think. So to that my question is, is like, to what level is pain real? To what level? You know, when you help someone understand what's going on in their body? Does it get alleviated? Does it get worse? And so then was there actually that level of pain even to begin with? Like, what is the knowing concept of pain?

Sam

There's a lot of ways you could probably tackle that idea and so we know that there is no pain receptors actually in the body we use that term, just to make sense of things. But there really is just receptors, and all of our tissue tissues can send information through the medium of nerves to the into the brain and, you know, these receptors sense different things. We can sense blood flow, we can send compression, we can send temperature, we can send stretch, all these different types of receptors that we have. So these receptors send neutral information up the spinal cord to the brain, it's up to the brain to make a decision determination through many quadrants in the brain. So I always make fun of this concept that we're going to somehow figure out where pain is generated in the brain and to turn it off with the drug designer drug. That's nonsense because pain is an accumulated experience of a lot of different phenomenon. But the brain is going to take all of that information and run it through various filters in the brain that always remember these. But let's say for example, you have the part of the brain that is going to interpret the information. What is the information that's being sent; it is a stretch is this compression is this what is this? And it's also going to kick it over to another part of the brain that is going to make another evaluation which is going to run it through your memory filter. We've all had that experience where we go Oh shit, I felt this one in here before and this means my back's gonna go out. So and this is happening in

Chase

Your brain made an imprint on that moment of that sensation of that interpretation.

Sam

And it remembers it and so it'll run it through a memory filter. And then you have another element that kind of accumulates all of this data. And then you have the anterior cortex, remember which one it is. But you have a conscious evaluation of that data too. So when we say psychosomatic, and when we say things like, you know, I'm really trying to eliminate with my clients, the idea that pain is in your head, what do you mean by that it's in your head because your brain is in your head. But there's information that's going on in the background here, and you have a conscious evaluation of what's going on in the background, you are not generating that. That is happening. So you have sensor sensors going on, like you can think about slowing your blood pressure and your heart rate down but as soon as you check out again, it goes back to doing what it is doing. So, you know, when we are evaluating that, we, as human beings have this ability to layer our consciousness on top of itself is self-reflexive consciousness. This is what I feel about that. Well, how do I feel about the way that I feel about that? So we create these what we call Meta states, these states that layer on top of so many layers

Chase

How many layers of awareness, do I have consciously and subconsciously, about this sensation?

Sam

Infinite, you can have as many as you want but what we're trying to do is to look at this and to say, let's say for somebody has the experience of the sensory inputs that are going into the brain, the brain making that decision as to whether or not this is a threat.

Chase

Its sole job; survival.

Sam

So if it's a threat, you're going to get pain and pain is an alarm system. All pains job is to do from what we know is to tell us that there is a potential threat or danger and an action needs to be taken. The problem with this is that we don't know what that action is. And we oftentimes are just kind of instinctually react to things, if you put your hand on a hot stove, the instinctual response is to pull it away but if you have chronic pain in your body, what are we supposed to do with that? We don't know. So the system is trying to tell us to take some kind of action. But then if we have this conscious element on top of that, and a lot of times when we have acute pain, you roll an ankle or you put your hand on a hot stove, there's what happens our brain is like can rectify why that happened. So we're not going to go on and on, we might punish ourselves and say, I'm stupid to put my hand on this, though, why did I do that. And that can occur. But in chronic pain, and chronic is that long term, past the expected time of healing, that the pain will continue. And the brain has a hard time kind of a lot of times squaring that is to figure out why this is still occurring and what it means. So if we pull in this meta state reflexively to say, you know, I'm sick of my pain, I'm angry about my pain, I fear my pain, we bring this state to bear upon the initial state; what we're essentially doing is sending more threatening information to the system. So let's compare this to panic attacks. So in a parallel is like if somebody actually has a panic attack, and it becomes a terrifying event for them, because they don't know what happens all the time it does, then they will start to become afraid of situations that may generate a panic attack. So now for their system is more on edge and there's the irony of that situation, which is, are the main paradoxes like actually, being more afraid of having a panic attack makes a panic attack more likely.

Chase

What actually is causing the panic attack, like the trigger the event itself? Or like just the fact that you know, you've had this experience before? And you can kind of sense when it might happen again. I’ve been there.

Sam

Yeah, absolutely and the nervous system will and the brain will start setting up more potential triggers that are associated, that were never associated to the first one. So what will happen, it's called neuro tags and this is where things get interesting is that through a multi-sensory experience in our brain, because we coat information with lots of different pieces and chunks of information that will start oftentimes, like in this is a manifestation of like, for example, the way a client will come in and say, I initially bent over and my back hurt, then I can't deadlift. But over time, now can I not only deadlift, but I can't sit on a bike.

Chase

Anything that mirrors that movement that I thought I can't do before.

Sam

And then it expands to things that had nothing to do with that movement. Now, when I sit, now when I do this, there's more things I don't understand why more things now make me hurt, because the brain is actually starting to create further associations. And this is called a neuro tag. And that neuro tag can be more expansive. Now sometimes even with some type of mirror neuro tags I believe that if somebody can watch somebody else do the movement, they will hurt. So what happens is the brain is again, taking that sensory experience and tying it to that that pain experience that they're having so that things start to become associated in building connections.

Chase

Mirror neurons blew me away the first time I kind of discovered that or read about them. It's just like, wait a minute, you mean to tell me that my brain is not telling the difference between what my body is going through and what I'm watching somebody else go through of like a pain of pleasure of anything, it interprets things in a very, very similar way. And then it’s only really up to our conscious state to decide, oh, no, that is me or it's not me. We have to kind of get in front of that system.

Sam

Yeah, and it's, this is a lot of ways where again, you'll find elements of that as a reason why hypnosis works or something else like mental rehearsal, because your brain to some degree can't tell the difference between something you vividly imagine that's pulling in all your sensory resources and something that's actually happening in the real world. So you know, when we're, we have that idea again, of that, that reflexive state of fear of pain and etc., we have a little bit more of a like a dragon state, we have a problem here that turns on itself. And this is where you get something like pain education becomes it really shines. Because if you have that, then pain education itself, first of all, brings awareness to that that is occurring. Some people will auto correct. So when you tell them that they didn't know that they were doing that and a lot of them that will, their brain will just start making the changes in their little chain. You know, ever had a realization where you're like, Whoa, I didn't realize I was doing that and you just kind of changed. And there was a process for that. But some people do not have that process.

Chase

Inserting awareness can be a powerful tool for change.

Sam

And sometimes it does nothing. So yeah, I know that when I do this, this happens. But it doesn't stop the behavior from actually triggering and doing. So that's again, another distinction you have to make when the person is coming in saying sometimes education itself remedies the problem. And people's I've had cases where somebody fairly significant amount of pain. And then you know, anybody out there who teaches this will say the same thing. And then they'll say, after the first session, that kind of goes, I don't know if this is weird. But I feel like just after we talked about this, I'm already feeling like I have less pain, like, that is a flag there being like, this is a significant thing to this person. And then you'll have other people that just seem to be sitting there and digesting the information, but it's not changing anything.

Chase

That kind of leads into a lot of things I'm sure, you know, you were talking about hypnotherapy and a lot of other modalities. It's like, we choose to believe that it is true, and therefore it works, or we don't, and it's not kind of thing, you have to kind of have to be open to believing these kinds of things. Would you agree, you have to you have to be open to understanding that there is a lot going on in your body consciously and subconsciously and there are a lot of other ways to go about treating it? And if you from the beginning thinks something is real or not, then your brain is gonna be like it is or it isn't. And if you think something's gonna work, or it isn't, then odds are will or won't?

Sam

Yes, and you're working with people's styles, and there's you know, what we might call, you know, Meta states and, and values and beliefs. And I remember Richard Bandler, from NLP would say, there's a murmur beliefs of those things you can't get by. And a belief is almost like a shield, that when you're trying to move against it, a belief is just a thought that's been facilitated that has legs under it like a table. So it's not, it's sturdy. So, belief is nothing is functionally or neurologically not really much more different than a thought, or a value, a value is just a belief that has moved up to another level internally. So when you run up against a belief, a belief will shield a certain reality for an individual and leaves them less perceptive to different pieces of the experience. So you know, brains do three major things they delete, distort and generalize. So with beliefs, you're going to have a piece of distortion, generalization and deletion. So what you have to do is understand what's the framework by which that belief exists and you have to work around it. And, you know, one of the fastest ways of doing that is reframing, you know, when somebody says, my pain is always going to be this way; can you consider a situation where your pain might not behave that way? And then the person has to consider that and you have an opportunity to fill that in and to say, do you do you know anybody who this scenario has not played out this way? And that person is going to have to stop and consider that and very simply, you can break through beliefs

Chase

Attach themselves to a possible other reality,

Sam

Right. The first thing you have to do is to loosen the frame. And if you if a person has a frame, and you can't, you're not going to be able to move through it, you've got to loosen it, you know, and you have to show them counter examples, anything counter examples are probably one of the most powerful things. My back pain is because of my disc bulge. Well, let me show you this study that shows that, you know, 100 people were taken off the street, and they ran an MRI on them. These people did have pain or did not and 60% of them had at least a spinal abnormality. And when they ran, you know, literally looked at how many people and they compare it to so most of the people had the spinal abnormalities had no pain. What do you think about that?

Chase

I would see this all the time in my clinic to where you know, people would, you know, they would get an X ray or MRI back and they would see something or the doctor would you know, interpret the reading and they're like, Oh, yeah, you know, now my shoulder does you know, that makes sense. Now, my shoulder does hurt, where they never had shoulder pain before but then they see it and the brain interprets it as this is bad, this is an injury, this is whatever or even the opposite you're in, you're in immense pain somewhere, and then you get the results back. I'm sure how many people have done that. And the doctors like, I don't know, where your therapist is, like, I don't know, like your X ray looks fine. Your MRI is fine. You know, there's nothing there. What can I tell you?

Sam

I see it all the time and it's probably the majority of the work that I see in the problem is, of course, in the and this is a big issue. You know, it is a tangent. But, you know, certain portions of the orthopedic societies are trying to stop clinicians or doctors from running MRIs and actually, so soon into the process, I believe it but this is a big problem with liability to be the standard care somebody comes in, they're not doing movement evaluations on people there's expectation set from the people walking in the door but the problem is, once you get that visual diagnostic, now, boom, you know, you have a solidified belief, and we don't question it.

Chase

So many people want to go looking for something in hopes to find something in hopes of that being the answer, like doctors give me an MRI like see look told you see that micro tear in my labrum that's why I can't you know, have range of motion like no.

Sam

No you have pain, because I want you to remember this because it's an important one, you have pain because your nervous system gives a damn about that not because there are many people and you know, this is another thing that I tell people is that look how many people have a disc bulge they overcome the pain, and then rerun the MRI to see what happened to the disc bulge. Nobody. So the reason why we don't do that is because the most obvious which is the experience of pain is the only thing that matters, not the disc, the presence of the disc bulge. In either of these cases, I can tell you many times, this is where people's brains were getting twisted like for example, somebody has an extrusion and but yet they have pain. The doctor says that's never going to go away. You're not going to fix that it's not going to just reabsorb on its own, we're probably gonna have to do surgery on that, but then moves into what we're going to treat this by giving you an epidural. Okay, so what is the epidurals because what happens after the epidural is I well, then we'll see and then if it in a couple months, and if it doesn't work, then we'll do the surgery. Okay, wait a minute. So you're getting conflicting information here. So does the extrusion matter if there's no pain? So the tree falls in the forest, nobody even knows does it matter. So that's kind of like where that's confusing for the person is, because their mind is going to be clung on in the presence of the extrusion, when really, the doctor should have communicated, you know, this extrusion could be this issue could be stable structurally and we just need to get this nerve to calm down, we're gonna get the epidural and if that pain goes away, then you're okay, because he did not indicate whatsoever that the extrusion was so important that they're going to remove it, because it's, you know what I'm saying? So this is confusing, but this is the stuff that happens all the time. And again, it's like always, clients are like, Wow, my doctor doesn’t know this, your doctor knows this they go to pain conferences every year. The problem is communication. And that always ends up being the issue. I've talked to many smart clinicians, people, they know this, and I'm like, why don't you tell people this, you know, if you walked into the door, and again, spent a little bit more time on the understanding of like, Hey, your MRI is not 100% conclusive that this is causing your pain and I want you to know, this, you know, and some do, some don't. But all of this ends up kind of going into that idea of what people end up coming in with and this complexity, and that's what you're trying to kind of extract from people and see what the beliefs are. And the beliefs are the things that are kind of framing the experience. And that experience becomes part of their neuro tag, which continues to keep their state in this or their system in this state of suspended threat. And you've got to break that you've got to see it as an entire piece or chunk and where you need to start throwing wrenches in the wheels to start softening those frames or those barriers around that reality without necessarily taking a hammer straight to them on day one, you know, because again, their brain is not going to be able to interpret all of that information and to understand that because behavioral changes doesn't occur overnight like that, when you have we're dealing with a complex problem. People have been dealing with pain for years, and there's many components to their pain, which is now kind of influenced their entire, you know, psychosocial circle, people respond to them differently now that they have pain, their social interactions might be different, they might reduce that they might be dealing with anxiety and depression as a result of that. And when you come in there barreling through with all this pain education, you don't really know what's going to happen as a result of that. So it's always better to be conservative to work your way slowly into it, and kind of see how that person's nervous system is going to respond or be receptive to this.

Chase

Amazing. My squirrel brain went off for a second thinking about an analogy on the way you were describing belief system being this kind of like she'll this force field recently watched this Marvel show Wandavision, big MCU fan guy and I just finished it. I won't do any spoiler alerts for people but when you get into the show, you realize they're you know, Wanda this character, I mean, she's a superhero. So she's got powers and stuff. But it's a great analogy to this belief system that we have, you know, there's this consciousness, this world that she projected, and it literally formed, they call it the hex it was this barrier or like a force field kind of thing. And inside and outside of it, there were just various approaches to what's going on inside what's going on outside. And it all stemmed from a belief system. And it just, I'm probably doing a horrible job explaining this analogy, but just for some reason, when you talked about it like that, it's just yeah, it's like, how we perceive our world not only is how we live in it, but it is that projection on everyone around us. And then in the show, instead of like, you know, attacking, it didn't work, you know, he actually had to go to the source, they had to go to her and change her belief around how she was viewing the world. And only then did that kind of shield change and absolve,

Sam

And change technology works very much like that. And I think that no matter what system you're looking at, I mean, I was learning the, the formula for change is very simple. Number one, identify the problem state. Number two, because you can't change necessarily external circumstances, we're dealing with a person, you have to identify the problem state, you have to disassociate the person from the problem state, then you have to associate them to the resources that they need. And then once they're associated into the resources, you reassociate them into the problem state with those resources, so that the nervous system has an integration of those things. And then the last piece is to future pace them, to project them out into the future, seeing them responding differently to the same stimuli in the future, end of story that's therapy. Well, so when you do that, and I'm doing the same thing, I think with my work is associated the problem disassociate them, associated them resources, pain, neuroscience, new exercises that don't cause them threat, etc. and associate them back into those conditions and circumstances in which would generate that experience to begin with, lending deadlifting, whatever. And then with those resources, so the person has an integration experience, which is going to be a confusion state with skepticism, that the outcome is going to be the same, or different. And then future, pace them, let them continue considering in the future that they're going to be able to do that experience over and over again, with that with a different outcome. That's it. It sounds so simple, when you put it that way. But every step of the way, there's going to be interventions that may be necessary to do that thing. Some people cannot disassociate. Some people don't know what resources they need. Some people don't know how to not be anxious about the future. And that's those are those states that people get into anxiety is looking off into the future, thinking about what you don't want to have happen and feeling that as if that was happening now. That's dangerous.

Chase

Yeah, I've been there so many times. And speaking of resources and stuff, you know, I brought up for anybody watching the video here. A couple things, you know, when we look at treating pain, pain, management, mobility, all the standard protocols that we are led to believe, or we just naturally want to gravitate towards because we read about it, or we had an experience that actually gave us some kind of relief when you get into a couple of these. But one quick point I'll make is that I think for people like in the gym, especially this is a huge barrier if you're working through an injury or you had an injury before. And I've thought about this many times before. Me, for example, I've reached some plateaus, I'll say some limiting points in, in PRs in the gym, amount of weight or amount of reps, particularly in like a squat and the deadlift because I get to a point to where it's Yeah, it's that stress load is that load, you got to push through, like I've done so many times before. But it's at such a high level that I immediately instead of thinking about what my body can do, I think about what it used to not be able to do and recovering from a string of serious injuries from my hips. And so then I always wonder like, well, am I at a point a I recovered enough now, years later, when my body actually physically if under the right load and progressive overload can handle that? Or is my brain just say, hey, no, no, no, no, like, this is a weak spot this is an injured spot, you know, like, what is it? I have always wondered, am I physically capable? Or is my brain just a limiting factor?

Sam

Yeah, that's a good question. And but those things also highlight the importance of being around a influential community of individuals like I had the luxury or great experience of when I was in Ohio, being able to meet Louie Simmons and experience a Westside situation, which is interesting and to train at elite FTS for a while. Dave Tate and a colleague of mine, JL Holdsworth, who is a record power lifter and you know, watching this environment where the environment is it very much about

Chase

What is possible.

Sam

That is right and there is something definitely too and we've been talking about some of these really influential about changing beliefs as we are our visual system is far more trustworthy to us on a lot of things then actually hearing about things and so forth. So being in an environment where you're watching people, I mean, I think I watched one day, Matt Wenning in there and he was benching, I think a two board or three board press with 900. I mean, I watched that it was and my colleague JL was like, I haven't bench-pressed in six months, I'm going to bench today and he was on about a 10 or 15 degree decline. And I was on the video, it's funny, I have to find it. But he's like, I'm feeling it today, I'll bench a little bit. And it was like 495, for five human beings exist to do this. But at some point, you realize, you know, there has to be there's limitations, and saying I'm capable of doing this and seeing people do that. Sometimes there's genetic freaks, and you're gonna create stories in your mind, while you're just not that kind of a genetic freak and you're not able to do that. But seeing more like-minded people or people that you associate to kind of in your, in your sphere of like people that are like you, and you see them accomplishing that, that changes things. And that's the whole Roger Bannister thing, you know, the four minute mile, you know, yeah.

Chase

Nobody did it before him. And then he did it. And what like the same year like three, four other people did it right. Something crazy. Yeah.

Sam

Right. So he didn't suffer from the same generalizations, deletions and distortions as the people he was with. And you know when he moved through that, it takes crazy people to break the mold. So I think those things are really, really important. And that's also kind of comes into in the therapy world, why group exercise is important, but also, and you know, the old system of medical exercise therapy that came from Norway, I believe, but was all about, they wanted to have people in similar conditions in the same room doing their therapy programs, because you're always gonna have those people, it's going to influence the group. And so that's kind of like that, you know, we're talking about mirror neurons, which is, you know, we have pacing and leading, and that's a natural thing that occurs is that either your, your leader and other people, other people are pacing. But those can transfer roles as well, in your social environment sometimes you're the leader, sometimes you're the Pacer, but you're always going to kind of take on the characteristics. And hypnosis teaches this, like, for example, the first way to induce a trance with somebody is you have to go first. So the hypnotist should be in a trance, to lead the patient into a trance. So if I'm speaking fast, my heart rates elevated and I don't feel relaxed, it's going to be very hard for the person you are trying influence to get to that state as well. So the therapists, same thing, you know, when you don't know what happened, understand pain and you know, I don't show subconscious signs that I'm convenient with what I'm trying to teach you, you're going to have mixed communication with the individual who's receiving that information as well.

Chase

Like do as I say, not as I do kind of thing you have to you always have a problem with that.

Sam

I think it is hard to convince somebody to change a belief that you don't believe. Because it may or may not depending on the sensory acuity of the person you're telling it to, may be able to tell there's something in congruent about the what you're trying to come across with. So congruence does make a big difference as well and so all of that stuff is all part kind of part of this, this entire process.

Chase

Amazing, amazing. Well, before we kind of, you know, wrap up, you know, this is blowing my mind, I'm definitely I could go longer, but we'll have to get a part two. But you know, I brought up a manual therapy gun, a foam roller or lacrosse ball. Those are my go twos when I'm just you know, recovering from a workout or I'm just sore for you know, for posture from work from daily living, or just mobility, whatever the intention is behind it these are my go twos. Am I right in using these, you know, kind of learning more about, you know, what's going on with pain? How am I understanding it? Or what is my brain telling me? Like? Are these things actually doing anything for me?

Chase

Yeah, I mean, I look at everything. And I'm like, it's just a, I think, a form of sensory input. And so we're really looking for is you have this consistent state, right, of whatever's going on information that's going from tissues to the nervous system, your brain, and then it's outputting by having a behavior type muscle, whatever,

Chase

Let’s start with this guy so handheld therapy gun, like, the receptors, like what's going on there? Like what, what's actually happening?

Sam

Well, you know, we call it a novel stimuli. And in particular, it's like that stimuli is going to come in, you know, from the outside, the tissue is responding in a certain way, you know, sensory input. And then, you know, if I put my hand on there, it's a novel stimuli. And it's, it's something different than what's currently going on. And my nervous system is going to take that information, and it's going to process it, and it's going to determine is as threatening as non-threatening? What's going on here?

Chase

How would you describe it? So this input I would describe this would be rapid, consistent intensity and pressure.

Sam

Yeah. And it does induce a stretch. So if I pull a muscle under tension, and then I percuss it and the percussion is pushing down into it, let's say that has a 16 millimeter stroke to it.

Chase

It is fast; how fast can you count?

Sam

Around 2700 rpm. It's rapidly pushing into a muscle stretching it, right. So my challenge is that when I use it, these tools is I think, for the way that most people use them, where they're just going to put it on the muscle and let it sit there. And it's not very valuable. It's just like massage therapy, there's a difference between just lying there and being passive and just kind of checking out versus engaging with therapy. So if I put that on there, right, let's say that I have pain in my

Chase

I just want to localize I'm going to target it.

Sam

And then so okay, I could put this on there. But when I straighten my arm, I feel pain. And then I go like this, if I put the percussion unit on there, and you can vary the speeds in the application, and I start moving my arm, the outcome we were initially looking for is a state of confusion. So I might go this way and we've got input coming in, that if it's close to the area, where the receptors are that we're, you know, sending information that was threatening, it's going to create confusion. So if I put that on there, and you go, I can move my arm farther without pain when this precursor is on there. What is that doing? Your brain is like, changing the input. So the input is now taking that information that novel stimuli and changing what it's doing in the tissues. So when we start to move to this kind of more neurological basis of what it is that we're doing, you know, we start to move away from it. We talked about kind of before these mechanical eyes models. So we're talking about like this, these, you know, and I think in the therapeutic field, and people can be quite vicious on social media, the more evidence based kind of crowd which is right, and the saying that is not releasing fascia that is not doing any of these things. It doesn't negate the use of the tool, the tool is a good tool,

Chase

And it doesn't negate the therapy, the person interprets they're getting.

Sam

That's right, if they get therapy, if they feel better, you know, and they say, like, I use all sorts of tools, but the explanation of what I'm doing, I'm not creating nonsense, pseudoscience and reaction, the reasoning why I'm using these things. What I'm saying is I'm putting a novel source of stimuli into this tissue. And does that make the sensation that you feel different? Yes, it does. In a way that's less threatening? Yes. So I'm going to leave this on here.

Chase

And I think that's a key concept in a way that's less threatening. That's what the brain has to recognize and latch on to. And that's something that I would recommend everyone, you know, to kind of introduce as a state of awareness. Anytime you're trying a familiar modality or something new, you know, is this a non-threatening input? I think that can be crucial.

Sam

Well, let's look at you know, in the field where everything is about hyper aggressive, soft tissue techniques, I won't name names, but we know those ones that are making people squirm off the table. And, you know, the reasoning why they're doing this is because the interpretation or the idea of what is changing in the tissue, and we all know that that's not what's happening. Research doesn't support that. And one of those in particular is releasing fascia. We know that, you know, fascia is hyper dense material, and there isn't mountains of research on fascia that's really done, you know, you can find on PubMed, a lot of it is just basically shows

Chase

Relatively recently, only known. I mean, what in the last 50 years, 100 years, like I, I may be totally wrong here. But like our actual understanding head to toe clinical understanding of their being fascia, what it is, and how it operates it's in anatomy and physiology is a relatively new concept, right?

Sam

Well, a lot of it is being studied that actually has some value. The funniest thing is that you talk to who deals with fascia all the time, and you should really ask about this is talk to a surgeon and they're like, yeah, that's a crap you cut through that's in my way.

Chase

Yeah, it's that coating of the sausage, I got to slice through it in order to get to work.

Sam

Did you put that fascia back together when you were done? No, I don't do anything with it, you know, but now there's new research that shows that fascia has some interaction or activity that occurs. But again, it's generally non-relatable to the therapeutic industry, because it's not has hardly anything to do with what we're doing. Because fascia has, let's say, you know, I think the cranial fascia are somewhere in say, 5000 pounds per square inch of density. So you're not changing that with that percussive and certainly, if it even was possible, it would be insanely painful. And it will take a lot of applications to stretch that kind of tissue. Like if you've got the idea, I think, you know, started would be like, the amount of force that a lion's mouth and teeth. It would take a lion could barely, like tear through some fascia in your body by I mean, that's a hell of a lot of application and pain to get through that or to change it or to form it.

Chase

Maybe there's a new business model for the next handheld therapy gun and the lions bite. Don’t try this at home kids.

Sam

Yeah. So when we listen to this, and we're just like, wow, that's what's happening. And then you're like, Okay, let's ditch what I have. The problem is if we ditch the narrative of why these things work, and we talk about it more like this is non-threatening activity, and it's novel stimuli now, we get a little bit more into, you know, the reasoning why these things might work and move people away from some of these again, stories and overly biomechanical models. These changes are neurophysiological, they happen rapidly there, I could do quick things. You know, if I foam roll, you squat and your knee hurts and you've foam roll on your quadricep which is painful, you know, but it still does work. It causes blood flow to go to the area and it changes or alters the stimuli that the nervous system is experiencing. And then you squat again. And then you have less knee pain. Hey, that works. But let's be careful the narrative, right? Because the narrative is, is yes. So all of these tools will do these things but they're, you don't need any of this. I mean, that's the reality of the situation is you can use anything. You know, there's new, more evidence based kind of approaches to manual therapy. One of them from Diane Jacobson she's a PT and herr system is called neuro modulation, which is kind of a new take on myofascial release and myofascial release itself is has some hokey stuff to it, and what it might do, versus the idea that all of the nerves that are coming from deep are innervating, the dermal layers, that of the skin, and when you stretch the skin, you are actually pulling the nerves through these little grommet holes from which they originate. And nerves love multiple things. They love blood, they love oxygen, and they love movement. So when you slide those nerves around, you're creating an altered sensory experience. And the nerves will alter the behavior. In a lot of ways like for example,

Chase

Making all the conditions just right for what it likes.

Sam

That's right. So when you do something, and you know all of these techniques, and I can generalize this insane osteopathic techniques and muscle energy techniques, contract, relax, skin stretching, a lot of people are just kind of blown away sometimes at the work that I do is non-threatening, there's no pain associated to it and large increases in range of motion and non-threatening movement just by stretching their skin with breathing. And they don't really understand it when you're totally trying to go back to these pain science principles and say, your nervous system is perceiving like how does it know when you move? And how does your back know to hurt in this situation? Well, some receptors in the tissue are sending signals to the brain to tell it when to stop. And if I can manipulate the perception that those receptors are feeling or make those receptors fire later, by holding a skin stretch for two minutes until your nervous system starts to check out. And then I let go with a skin stretch and you repeat the movement and now you can go 10 to 15% further. What just happened there? What happened there is I manipulated the reporting stations in those sense receptors, and when that person now moves 10, to 15 degrees more, call their attention to it, and then the brain will start to go, I don't understand what happened here. And I just saw belief just get floored.

Chase

Or I mean, you hit on a key point to what happens when we hold a belief that we have a limited range of motion and injury, pain or whatever, and you ask someone to go through that range of motion or to move in a way that they think will aggravate that the clench, they tense up, they hold their breath, yes, the power of breath. And this I promise you won't get another tangent, but like I'm currently wrapping up James Nestor’s Breath, the book, what breathing can do for us or against us is blowing my mind is just, I mean, just that concept alone, like I bet if you are working with someone, and you go, Okay, go through this range of motion and they clench up imagine just like actually no brief, like just walk through some breathing exercises, and then see what you can do like that, that I think is one of the very first signals that we tend to send to our brain, like, Hey, no, this is danger, danger Will Robinson or no, actually, I can do this. Or it's not as bad as I thought before.

Sam

It happens on a subtle level and you know, we have these synesthesia patterns, which will occur like for example, breath, extension and flexion eye movement and those things trigger reflexes and initiate that process. So in the old osteopathic books, when you're using muscle energy techniques, let's say that somebody has limited range of motion, turning their head to the left, I will take their head to the left to the barrier, I'll back off about 5% to the non-threat, because I'm not stimulating the receptors, I'll have the person I'll put my hand right here and I'll say I want you to look to the right, turn your head to the right with a 5% effort. Take a deep breath, hold your breath, relax, let everything go, turn your head, your eyes to the left and then go further. And the range goes further. This is all muscle energy techniques. So you're facilitating this. Now remember, these micro breast holds are also a piece of it that are far below consciousness. So in trigger point therapy, and one of the things I learned early on when I learned from St. John neuromuscular therapy is first of all the language was wrong. So when you push on an area that had a trigger point, and they said, this is referring, I feel that pain going down my leg or whatever. Here's what I want you to do. Let me know when that releases. I had a problem with that statement. Because that statement is let me know when that releases as if that's something outside of you but it is not.

Chase

The whole communication concept again,

Sam

So I changed the language and I say, let me know when you release that. And all of a sudden, I started getting better results. Because people go, it's not releasing. Well, why don't you release that.

Chase

You are putting the power back into the person.

Sam

You have to. So then where they go, well, how do I do that? Now we're on a better therapeutic course and say, here's what I want you to do when I push on that do you feel that sensitivity? Yes, your sympathetic nervous system goes up a little bit. If I had a heart rate monitor on you or whatever, I'd probably be able to notice the subtlety? Now when I feel that do you feel like this little micro tensing? And that's the importance by the way of like, when I push on a trigger point, is it a one to 10, we need to be a five, because then you can actually relax if it's an eight and a half. And so if I push on there, like, that's a five, would you take a deep breath, remind yourself of the pain science stuff that we talked about at the beginning of the session, no threat, no threat, and I'm in a therapy office, and Sam is pushing on my back and it feels amazing. Now let go. Does the pain drop? It feels like are you lightening your pressure? That's what people know. I'm just keeping the same pressure and what happened is your nervous system goes, this is no threat, and it's gonna down regulate the receptors, it's going to send descending information down to say, this is less important. That is the therapeutic effect. And people are what Why do you call your release, that's the release. And they go, that's it, you understand how powerful that is? The difference is, is that when I stimulate tissue and your brain is firing up that neuro tag, and you have the ability to not lay there and passive therapy and hope that it releases, but rather you're part of the release, by engaging with your sympathetic nervous system and releasing your own threat response associated to that stimuli. That's the magic people. That is it. So when you take that range of motion, and you move, and you go, I feel threatened right here, I want you to bet I'm feeling threat back off 5% How do I feel okay, that's less threatening, breathe. And I want you to breathe until you're convinced that you're fine. And that you move a little bit further into it. If you can't, now boom, we got a therapeutic modality, I'm going to stretch, I'm going to put that on you, we are going to use contract, relax, breathing synesthesia with eye movement until your nervous system can get into a state of reduced the threat and we're going to attempt that range of motion again.

Chase

It's the human body, especially the brain, as of late neuroscience in the brain has been a huge interest of mine in the last like year, like six months to a year. But it just never ceases to amaze me.

Sam

Diving into the weeds with that stuff and saying, oh, that doesn't work. That's junk. What are you talking about? It's input. I could use nothing. I can use my hands. I could have the person go into a light state of hypnosis. And I can have them rehearse the movement 20 times with no threat. And then I can have them repeated, it'll probably work. So remember that we're talking about the nervous system can't tell the difference between reality and what's vividly imagined. So if I can vividly imagine that Andre Agassi was famous for saying when he won Wimbledon, he didn't look too excited. You're like, what happened? Well, I already won women's Wimbledon hundreds of times. It was rehearsal. He rehearsed the response. So many times and we've seen those things where people do and wonky applied kinesiology lectures where somebody turns and then you know, they think about something a positive emotion, whatever, and then they can turn further, what just happened there people? There's stuff that goes on there and when you're doing that with the interpretation of misleading people, because you're coming up with nonsense reasons why that worked. I have a problem with that because there was a legit reason why that works. And even when I do this, and people go, well, that's just placebo. And I'm like, okay, you know placebo is a good thing but also at the same time no, it's not, it's altering sensory input into the brain and your brain is taking new information and integrating with it, you know, and again, but we have to people have a hard time realizing that a lot of their boundaries are actually because of their beliefs. And truly, when you're doing neuroscience work, neurons are traversing new paths relative to old ones, I'm sorry, that structural therapy, things are changing and because the neurons are actually doing different things so you're structurally changing the brain. So like, let's stop relating this to the realm of pseudoscience, placebo, blah, blah, blah, and be like, we're actually changing things. And that's what I love about and I forget the neuroscientists that you came in, and you ask any neuroscientist about this stuff, the neurosciences will tell you, yeah, the brain is changing. Yeah, that's called plasticity. So let's, let's get rid of this pain is in your head nonsense, these associations to language in situations that people have that have negative connotations, and make it seem like what they're doing is not real. It is real. But let's ditch the garbage bogus narrative. And the reality is that there are plenty of studies that show that even when people are told that this treatment is a placebo, it still works. So you don't even tell I tell people, I'm like, look, this is what we're doing. It doesn't change it actually, in my opinion, makes it better. It makes it work better because people actually understand what you're doing. And they go, I don't understand how this works, but I'm experiencing the benefits so cool let’s just keep doing it.

Chase

I had a phenomenal conversation with a neuroscientist. She was on the show recently. Louisa Nicola. We talked all about like, these insane, tangible ways to increase neuroplasticity. She was a gem like just blows my mind.

Sam

Yeah. And you have somebody like her and me which was mesh and it's just really what you're talking about is just kind of like and this is the funny part is that all of this is like new science and you are like this stuffs been around for a long time, but nobody bothered to kind of look into some of that stuff and to really grab onto the parts of it that are working, and then figure out faster clinical applications for these things to actually put them in real time. And that's where we're talking, you and I are talking when I feel a wave is on the edge of what's available. And nobody knows, because we're now starting to play and playing and figuring out what works. But my next stop is, if I can find the time to do it, is again with more with hypnotherapy because I really think that that has the application that has been least emphasized in getting in and actually working with some of these subconscious beliefs and so forth in a more direct way, rather than an indirect way. Like right now we're using movement for that, we're using lots of different things that are indirect ways of doing it rather than kind of like working with it at the source. And there are lots of the Curable app, which is another one was just fantastic. Curable is that's they're leading the way with that stuff with pain metaphors, and teaching coping mechanisms, I think the pain psychology Institute is in West LA somewhere. So they're doing that stuff. And again, there's going to be integration here at some point where all of these disciplines are just going to kind of come together. And it's gonna revolutionize everything.

Chase

Amazing and I mean, again, I could just keep going. This is an incredible conversation, I greatly appreciate you coming on the show and blowing my mind, giving some great new science, some old science and applications for my audience here to just like, tune into their bodies, challenge a belief system a little bit and just push through and to move forward in life. And that's what the whole premise is here at Ever Forward. And so I'll ask you the final question, then. How can this information help us move forward? How do you use this and do what you do? How do you live a life Ever Forward?

Sam

I would say to the first of all, that this information, I would hope to all the viewers inspires hope and most people feel that they're at the end of the line here, there's they've tried everything. And so for you haven't, you know, there's plenty of options and it's just more than often than not is a lack of creativity and you know, exploration, and never being satisfied. I mean, I think that's a really the key is that we tend to kind of run into a certain end point where we think we know everything there is to know about something and then that's all there is. But just realizing you're deleting, distorting and generalizing information. And the more you realize that the more you're like, oh, there's a lot more that exists out there that I know. And just becoming aware of those things, and starting to first of all, be skeptical, should always be skeptical of the things that you believe. And that's a hard space to hold. It's duality, which is I can believe something, but also and fervently believe it to the point where I can put it into reality and use it but also simultaneously be highly skeptical of it. Meaning I'm willing to change my beliefs, when new information comes along and it's better information, I will update my model. And that's how we work. And we need to work that way physically, and we need to work that way mentally, as we can obviously see as a reflection of what's happening in our society, that people are being awarded new opportunities to get new information, and they refuse because they want to cling to their models. But we have to upgrade, we have to constantly upgrade and seek out new opportunities because that's how we expand our horizons, we develop and we create new things. We're certainly not going to get people on Mars if we don't. But that's the mentality and I think it's the mentality that goes after that about the voracious learning and being open to learning new things and upgrading your model. If you can start with that, then I think a lot of filter down magic happens in a lot of areas of your life.

Chase

Beautiful, beautiful answer, we got to upgrade our model. Absolutely. Well, I'm gonna of course have all the information down in the show notes and video notes for people to find more about your work and possibly even work with you but if they want to click on the link right here right now, where are they going? Where are you hanging out the most online? Where can they learn more?

Sam

Well, I'm a in the office practitioner so I'm usually seeing people all day every day I'm literally that that type of practitioner but go to releasemuscletherapy.com and somewhere on there, you'll find my book, which is just kind of like a nice synopsis of all of the research that I've gathered in different areas, I call it a work in progress. But it's really something that like if people want to work with me or they're just interested in dealing with their own pain issues I am like read this book, I've kind of gone through all the pain science literature and kind of put it together I'm not the I guess the most highly best writer but I am putting things together, here's the resources, these are the links, that is where I got this information from and start learning about this and be skeptical of your pain if you have pain and what might be the primary generators and what you should be looking at and so the website has a lot of materials on there, I got some good articles, things I like to talk about, you know, which we'll talk about caffeine and pain and sleep and pain, all these different things and some of the holes, glaring holes that everybody is missing in these things. But check those things out.

EFR 463: Pain Science and Bridging the Gap Between Muscle Therapies with Sam Visnic

Follow Sam on Instagram @releasemuscletherapy

Follow Chase on Instagram @chase_chewning

Key Highlights

What is the biggest misconception we have when it comes to pain and how can we work through it?
How does Sam communicate to his clients that a certain pain may not be due to an obvious cause, but a result of a myriad of factors (i.e. nutrition, neuropathic, etc.)?
How much of perceived pain is purely psychological?
Sam enumerates his five-step formula for making changes in your life.

Powerful Quotes by Sam Visnic

Beliefs are those things you can’t get by. A belief is just a thought that has legs under it like a table. It’s sturdy. It’s simply a thought that has moved up another level.

When you run up against a belief, the belief will shield a certain reality from you and leave you less perceptive to different pieces of the experience.

Brains do three major things: they delete, they distort, and they generalize.

More about Sam

I've spent my life studying the fundamental aspects of human health with a focus on movement and clinical massage therapy.

In a world of specialists, surgical procedures, drugs and quick fix remedies, I'm committed to finding and developing strategies that help people stuck at the “gap”.

Over the last 18 years I've studied dozens of systems and methodologies for uncovering the root cause of aches and pains, along with postural and movement issues.

Pain science, the art and science of hands-on soft tissue massage techniques, and coaching movement is essential in my practice.

Understanding the various elements that contribute to conditions and the power of communication and education makes my Release Muscle Therapy program separate from other hands-on therapy approaches.

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Interview transcript:

Sam

Chase

Sounds about all of us when you first find a barbell, right.

Sam

Chase

Yeah, it was it a Schwarzenegger's Encyclopedia of bodybuilding. So many golden things back there.

Sam

Chase

You casually just linked it with Paul Chek, no big deal.

Sam

Chase

Sam

Oh, that's a whopper.

Chase

It’s a big one; you'll be here for 30 minutes.

Sam

Chase

Just focus on those muscles.

Sam

Chase

Maybe there's more than just meets the eye

Sam

Chase

Fundamentals.

Sam

Chase

That is why we have specialists, right.

Sam

Chase

Send me your problem children.

Sam

Chase

Sam

Chase

That kind of psychosomatic approach.

Sam

Chase

And that would enhance the belief of what I can or cannot do.

Sam

Chase

Need to stabilize the joints above and below as you need to strength train and hypertrophize.

Sam

Chase

Communication.

Sam

Chase

Don’t get too attached to the patient, you know.

Sam

Chase

More access to information.

Sam

Chase

You're getting validation on your work, you're getting challenged approaches.

Sam

Chase

Just needing to tap into altered states of consciousness in various ways.

Sam

Chase

Really, we're still studying it.

Sam

Chase

Sam

Chase

There’s no rhyme or reason.

Sam

Chase

You want to know exactly when, where, why and how you poke the bear it wakes up.

Sam

Chase

Sure. Yeah. We tend to do that, don't we?

Sam

Chase

How to translate and how to talk to you in a way that you can actually properly interpret and is like hitting home for them.

Sam

Chase

Sam

Chase

Your brain made an imprint on that moment of that sensation of that interpretation.

Sam

Chase

How many layers of awareness, do I have consciously and subconsciously, about this sensation?

Sam

Chase

Its sole job; survival.

Sam

Chase

Sam

Chase

Anything that mirrors that movement that I thought I can't do before.

Sam

Chase

Sam

Chase

Inserting awareness can be a powerful tool for change.

Sam

Chase

Sam

Chase

Attach themselves to a possible other reality,

Sam

Chase

Sam

Chase

Sam

Chase

Sam

Chase

Sam

Chase

What is possible.

Sam

Chase

Nobody did it before him. And then he did it. And what like the same year like three, four other people did it right. Something crazy. Yeah.

Sam

Chase

Like do as I say, not as I do kind of thing you have to you always have a problem with that.

Sam

Chase

Let’s start with this guy so handheld therapy gun, like, the receptors, like what's going on there? Like what, what's actually happening?

Sam

Chase

How would you describe it? So this input I would describe this would be rapid, consistent intensity and pressure.

Sam

Yeah. And it does induce a stretch. So if I pull a muscle under tension, and then I percuss it and the percussion is pushing down into it, let's say that has a 16 millimeter stroke to it.

Chase

It is fast; how fast can you count?

Sam

Chase

I just want to localize I'm going to target it.

Sam

Chase

And it doesn't negate the therapy, the person interprets they're getting.

Sam

Chase

Sam

Chase

Sam

Chase

Yeah, it's that coating of the sausage, I got to slice through it in order to get to work.

Sam

Chase

Maybe there's a new business model for the next handheld therapy gun and the lions bite. Don’t try this at home kids.

Sam

Chase

Making all the conditions just right for what it likes.

Sam

Chase

Sam

Chase

The whole communication concept again,

Sam

So I changed the language and I say, let me know when you release that. And all of a sudden, I started getting better results. Because people go, it's not releasing. Well, why don't you release that.

Chase

You are putting the power back into the person.

Sam

Chase

Sam

Chase

Sam

Chase

Sam

Chase

Sam

Navigation

Sam Visnic

Follow Sam on Instagram @releasemuscletherapy

Follow Chase on Instagram @chase_chewning

Key Highlights

Powerful Quotes by Sam Visnic

More about Sam

Ever Forward Radio is brought to you by Legion Athletics

Scientifically-Backed Doses and Ingredients

100% Formula Transparency

100% Money-Back Guarantee and Free Shipping

Click here to save 20% off your first purchase with code EVERFORWARD!

Interview transcript:

EFR 463: Pain Science and Bridging the Gap Between Muscle Therapies with Sam Visnic

Follow Sam on Instagram @releasemuscletherapy

Follow Chase on Instagram @chase_chewning

Key Highlights

Powerful Quotes by Sam Visnic

More about Sam

Ever Forward Radio is brought to you by Legion Athletics

Scientifically-Backed Doses and Ingredients

100% Formula Transparency

100% Money-Back Guarantee and Free Shipping

Click here to save 20% off your first purchase with code EVERFORWARD!

Interview transcript: