How To Treat Your Own Joint Pain (Without Visiting An Expensive Doctor or Therapist).

Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And I've been messing around with a new form of deep tissue work called the melt method. You're gonna learn all about it in today's podcast episode. In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

If you compress fascia too deep, too fast, the fascia is designed to support, protect, and stabilize everything. So the tissue will actually broaden. And where it broadens or where it contracts, if you will, are in the superficial layers. And that's where all the nerve endings are. So you keep pressing really hard and you're actually inj increasing something called nociception or pain reception. That was what I felt in bodies that were not in pain was this consistency of architecture or fluid motion. And in my clients that had pain, it literally was not that the fluid wasn't moving. It was just very diverted.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

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Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield, and I am going to admit it right now, live. I am a complete nerd when it comes to using a dizzying array of bodywork tools and massage and deep tissue manipulation and mobility methods and much more on my body literally every day. Like, I wake up every morning and while my coffee is on for 10 to 15 minutes, I will hit my body with everything from a rumble roller to voodoo flossing around my joints, to mobility bands, to vibrating massage devices and a lot more. It's kind of like a medieval torture experiment on my body every morning. And so I was pretty excited when I got a chance to read this brand new book about how to basically create almost like a map of your own connective tissue. And then using that map and that understanding, erase pain and increase mobility or performance in specific areas of your body using that system. So this book is called the Melt Method. That's M e l t the Melt Method. And in it, the author goes into this self treatment system that you can use to get rid of chronic pain and to erase a lot of the effects of aging on the joints. And a lot of these techniques are things that take like five or 10 minutes, and they can be done in your own home. You don't have to necessarily go and hire an expensive therapist or go visit the doctor for some kind of an injection. It basically teaches you how to use your body's own natural restorative properties. Now, before you run for the hills thinking this is going to be yet another episode on how to use a foam roller, then stick around, because it's not. I actually thought that that's what this book was going to be. And then I realized as I was reading it, it is an actual system that goes into a very detailed and a very scientific way to actually restore things like hydration and mobility and proper alignment of fibers to connective tissue in your body. So I think you're going to really dig this episode. If you fall into the category of anybody who ever has any kind of pain in your body, you need to keep listening. So my author is, of course, the author of that book, and her name is Sue Itzman. And Sue trains 3 thousands of people around the world on how to do this stuff. And she provides continuing education units for some of the biggest certification programs on the face of the planet, like ACE and NASM and ncb, TMB and all these other Alphabet letter soup, personal training and fitness certifications. But she's been on Dr. Oz, the Rachael Ray Show, Live with Regis and Kelly, Self magazine, Prevention magazine. And the reason is, I have discovered, because I've been using it on myself on my low back, my hands, my feet, my elbows, this stuff actually works. So we are going to talk with sue today about the melt method. Welcome to the show, Sue.

Thanks for having me, Ben.

Awesome. Well, I have to ask you right now, I think you've got a pretty amazing backstory in terms of what drove you to start digging into fascia and connective tissue and pain and movement. Can you talk about how you got interested in this stuff in the first place?

Well, my background is in fitness. I actually started as a fitness professional when I was 16, and I think I fell into the category of the no pain, no gain mentality. I think that that's kind of what I've learned over the years is the dirty little secret of fitness is everybody's injured and they all think that's normal. And unfortunately, about a decade into my own exercise regimen, and after having a master's in physiology and anatomy and taking extensive trainings in neuromuscular therapy, I found myself in chronic pain and nothing that I knew was fixing it. And I had to go far beyond the confines of General fitness and therapies to figure out what was causing this chronic ache that I had in my body. And in searching for an answer, I stumbled upon this emerging field of fascial research in the late 90s.

And.

And it completely veered me out of the fitness industry almost entirely. I got into more the healing arts and the light touch therapeutic techniques and modalities. And I found I had quite a knack of palpation beyond just muscle testing and understanding how the nervous system operated. And in working on my clients over decades, I had always been able to make good success with my clients. However, I always felt like I became sort of a crutch for them, that they constantly had to come back for the repeated tune up, either each week or sometimes twice a week. And it started, this whole process started in the late 90s. One of my clients said to me, you know, if you could just invent a way for me to do this to myself the way you do with your magic hands, I'd stay out of your office altogether. And at first, I think my first thought was, well, I would be unemployed and want to do anything.

Why put yourself out of business?

Yeah. I was like, yeah, I'm going to have to pay my rent somehow. But it did sound very intriguing. And I'm one of those curious people who thought, gee, I wonder if it is possible. I never really thought about it, but let me see if I could invent ways to do these light touch therapeutic interventions on myself. And over the course of a number of years of tweaking and playing with balls and rocks and rollers, I'm kind of like you. I'm a little obsessed with all of the tools and objects that were out there, trying to simulate more this light touch therapy that I was understanding what I was doing in my own body and trying to basically do that with objects and tools. And when I finally figured out how to do it and I knew I had done it to myself, I started sharing that with my clients. And I was finding not only did they feel like they were able and empowered to do things on their own, they were coming back so much better, so much faster. It was actually just the opposite effect in my private practice, where instead of seeing the same 30 people over the course of a year, a couple of times a week, I suddenly was seeing over 500 people a year, able to get them in and out of my office within three to five sessions, identify what their actual problem was, develop kind of how you said, these melt maps so that they could go home and sustain those changes. And actually build themselves out of the pain problems that they had. And today, 16, 17 years into this, and we've got like how you said, I mean, we've got worldwide distribution of a method, the book's been translated into eight languages, and we've got 1300 instructors worldwide who have been the healing hands far beyond my touch and have literally empowered hundreds of thousands of people to learn how to do this on their own at home. And it is just like a quick 10 minute a day treatment.

How did you learn about connective tissue? Like, how did you learn about connective tissue and fashion and stuff like that? And the reason I ask that is because I, I too have been immersed in exercise science for many years and I did a master's degree in physiology and biomechanics and even spent time in the anatomy lab dissecting cadavers. But there weren't really any very intensive courses on how fascia work and works and how connective tissue works. So what was your method? How'd you learn about this stuff?

Well, that was just that in every hands on methodology that I had learned, from neuromuscular therapy to cranial sacral therapy, visceral manipulation, there was always one common thread that was in conversation, which was connective tissue. And using it sort of as a vehicle to alter other systems because the tissue is three dimensional and you can, and it's kind of connected and seamlessly attached to everything. You can actually manipulate organs through fascia. So I was learning things like that. And so there was always a curiosity about it. But I was like you. I had a master's in physiology and anatomy. I had already done dissections. And the thing about connective tissue is it's really kind of considered by the general consensus of doctors, kind of just a passive packing material. And in the dissections I had done in school, we had basically either we never saw it because the medical students got to the bodies before we did, or you just chuck it in the bucket to get to the good stuff and look at the nerves and the muscles and the bones so that those were supposedly the important things. And as I started to kind of come up with an understanding of what was it that causes pain to become chronic. And I had found this research, connective tissue, and gaining a better understanding about the fact that connective tissue is not only just the supportive infrastructure of muscles and bones, but is actually the environment that every nerve ending, blood vessel and cell lives in. And when I started seeing it as a system, I found Gil Headley, who did this layer by layer dissection course. And he defined connective tissue as a system. And I said to him, well, it's not a system. I mean, it doesn't have active things going on. And he looked at me and goes, why would you say that? I said, it's just a passive packing material. And he looked at me and goes, no, my friend, your entire world is about to change. Because I'm going to tell you something that nobody else has. That connective tissue is, in fact, an active system, and it's actually where most nutrients are transported. The cells are proliferating. They're reacting and responding to movement and compression and tension every day. It is, in fact, an active system. And that literally unraveled a decade and a half of education and schooling behind me, and I almost had to unlearn anatomy to go back and learn more about this. And I was very privileged to, I think, you know, meet Gil. And he basically gave me phone numbers of all of the researchers. So I was calling Robert Schleip and Tom Meyers and Tom Findley and all of these researchers from around the world. I was asking them, what do you know? Here's my hypothesis. This is what I'm thinking. Do you have any research to back this kind of information? And I got taken under the wing in the early 2000s, and I became a founding member of the fascial research Society and basically have taken the science from the fascial research scientists and the researchers from around the world and have assimilated that science and simplified it down so that the general public could actually grasp and understand the importance of this tissue to their overall wellness. And then, of course, I just started to apply the science into a methodology. And that's what the melt method is. It basically culminates all of that science into an applicable method. And I think what I've hopefully done in the book is simplify it cellular science and neurological sciences down to a level where anybody can understand it, whether you have science under your background or not. And I think that's what's great about it, is that you get an education as well as a method.

Okay, so you learned all this about fascia and how fascia is more than just like this sheath, right, that gets described. And I've kind of found the same thing. You know, I've talked to guys like Kelly Starrett on the podcast before, and we've talked about why you feel so freaking good after you do, say, like, foam roller work or mobility work, because the fascia is actually capable of helping you to produce Neurotransmitters, Right. Like serotonin and dopamine.

Well, it's not producing it. It doesn't produce it. But as you see.

But doesn't it cause the release of.

Well, there's, I would say.

Fill us in.

Yeah. So connective tissue is in fact, just a. It's basically collagen, elastin and reticular fibers that are all made. All of these elements are made from a cell called a fibroblast. And a fibroblast is basically producing all of the stuff outside of all of your other cells. The sliding surfaces from cell to cell to exist so that cells communicate and not only transport and share nutrients through each other, but also cell to cell communication is occurring through connective tissue. But the connective tissue itself isn't where you produce neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are produced in the gut and in the brain. But to transport those neurotransmitters and to utilize them, we are actually utilizing them through this transportation highway and called connective tissue. And so what connective tissue is really, if you think about it like a sponge. You want to think of these cells of connective tissue as being a protein cell with carbohydrate around it. And when you squish them and pull them, it's like working fluid into a sponge. And the more hydrated the tissue is, the more the tissue is able to morph and adapt and stabilize and protect all of the other structures. But it's not what is producing neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are a part parcel part of the brain and the cellular communication of the digestive system.

Right. But what's happening is that as you are making your connective tissue, realigning fibers and increasing hydration to tissue, you're allowing those neurotransmitters to travel more efficiently through tissue.

Yes. And to be utilized, to be absorbed and transmitted. Absolutely. That is a part of the process. Absolutely. And what I think is important for people to. Is that this tissue is doing more than just being a supportive infrastructure of, you know, your bones and your muscles, but it is, in fact, a cellular communication highway. And it is responding and adapting to our movements, but only when it is hydrated. And the problem that science is starting to recognize is just daily living. Our daily activities are actually throwing the system sort of out of balance. It caus cellular dehydration. And whether you've got pain or not, it's important for people to also know that this is a natural cellular process. It happens to every single one of us every single day. And we've all experienced the effects of cell dehydration. Like when you sit for long periods of time and then you get up and your body feels like as stiff as a dried out sponge left overnight on your kitchen sink. That feeling of stiffness, whether you get that when you're sitting for long periods of time, or you do a repetitive movement for a long period of time in your feel stiff, that's part and parcel part of the dehydration effect that you're feeling. And the problem with that is that you get up and you move around and it goes away. And because it goes away, we actually don't realize that we need to do something about that tissue. And if you don't do anything about it, if you think of connective tissue like a fluid based river, you're literally laying sediment down in the river. The collagen, they're called microvacules. They're like bubbles or spaces in this tissue collapse. And when the collagen bindings don't morph and adapt efficiently, you still move around. You just don't do it looking really good. You kind of look a little funky. Your arms raise up and you shrug your shoulder to do it, or your back looks a little more flexed, you don't look as upright. And you know, nobody ever complains about getting taller. As we get older, we just lose space. And that is also an effect of cellular dehydration. The good news is that you can reverse that process if you treat the tissue as a system from day to day and don't allow it to accumulate with sedimentation or what I call stock stress.

Now, in the book, I came across that concept of dehydration, and I almost completely skipped that chapter because I thought you were gonna talk about what everybody talks about. Right. Like if you get joint pain, drink more water. Right. And my eyes roll over in the back of my head when I hear that because it's like, okay, I know I drank a bunch of water and my joint still hurt. Can you go into the concept of what that dehydration actually is and how you truly rehydrate a joint?

Sure, sure, sure. Well, first, Jamie, let's talk about the water concept. So water and what we eat is where, you know, the body is getting fluid from is from what we intake. You know, it just doesn't, not by osmosis. You got to actually intake fuel. But the thing that I think people do think is that, oh, I need to drink more Water, but it's not volume that is more necessary. It actually has more to do with the effects of drinking it consistently enough. And we don't drink water with consistency. Most people will drink a bunch of water in the morning and then they won't drink any water for hours. And that is what causes cellular dehydration. But when we talk about cell dehydration, I know it's kind of hard for people to wrap their brain around because again, you think, I got to drink more water. But if you think about connective tissue, again, like a sponge, just like a dried out sponge doesn't absorb water as well as a moist one. That's the problem with connective tissue, is if you never stimulate these cells, these fibroblasts are again reactive and responsive to tension and compression. So when you compress or pull on connective tissue for long periods of time, it literally is drawing the fluid out of the coll, causing stress on the collagen fibers. And water gets omitted from that tissue, and then the other cells transport it and move it out. But that's. You got to bring it back in again and again. If the tissue is always in a constant state of tension and compression, which is essentially occurring to 99% of humans, because we tend to do the exact same things every day. We're repetitive. We sit for the same amount of time, we do the exact same habits and postures and movements. And that causes too much tension or compression on the tissue. But what we understand, understand is the very thing that can dehydrate the tissue can actually rehydrate it, if you know how. So what we're also understanding is if you pull or compress small local areas of the tissue and create a frictional type of tension to the tissue, kind of like working fluid into a sponge. You know, you don't just slap water on a sponge, you kind of massage it. You sort of work the fluid. You kind of squeeze and pull it. And then what do you do? You compress it in one local area so that you're pulling all the old fluid out. So when you let it go, now the sponge, if you will, is moist. And so now you can attract new fluid into the sponge. And that is what melt does. We use soft balls and soft rollers to basically work and stimulate those cells. Because it's the cells that, as they become stimulated, they then create signaling through something called not only the fibroblast, but the nerve endings will react and respond, and that creates all sorts of stimulation. Just like how you said neurotransmission can fire. And cells, once you compress or pull on them, will then attract fluid back into the cells, and they sort of plump up again. And that's how you get the sliding surfaces back to the tissue.

Now, I like hard foam rollers. Like, I use this one called a rumble roller that has a bunch of ridges in it. And I use, like, when I'm at the gym, I look for the ones that are just, like, basically pvc. And I like the really hard balls, right? Like, I got to the point where a lacrosse ball was a little bit too soft for me, and so I started using these special, like, yoga tuna balls. And, you know, and. And, like, I already mentioned his name before, you know, Kelly Starratt. He wrote the book Becoming a Supple Leopard, and he, like, you know, mashes barbells into tissue and all sorts of stuff. And then you talk about softballs, and you talk about soft rollers. Why soft?

Well, first of all, you know, I mean, I get different strokes for different folks. If you like the hard pressure, whatever. But the things I have trouble with is, first of all, if you're in pain, why would you cause pain to get out of pain? Why would you hurt yourself, Inflict such deep pressure that you're actually scrunching your face and your muscles are tensing up. You think you're getting so deep or making resolve, and actually, you can cause more problems because connective tissue is a supportive infrastructure. If you compress fascia to deep too fast, the fascia is designed to support, protect, and stabilize everything, so the tissue will actually broaden. And where it broadens or where it contracts, if you will, are in the superficial layers. And that's where all the nerve endings are. So you keep pressing really hard, and you're actually increasing something called nociception or pain reception. You're irritating the sensory nerve endings local to the skin, and that's then sending signals to your brain saying, hey, danger, danger. Something's wrong. And that's not really that great of an option. And I see on, you know, and Kelly Starrett's one of them, I get it. You know, go ahead and put a lacrosse ball in your stomach and put a weight on it and jam, you know, pressure into your body. But if you don't know where nerves and blood vessels are, if you aren't really savvy, you could hurt yourself. You could actually cause injury. And I've had, you know, plenty of athletes who do those kind of mashing. My fascia kind of mentality actually cause more problems down the road. And so the cool thing about melt is that it's actually not after muscles. We're not trying to restore blood flow to muscle. We're not trying to over sensitize your nervous system to send it into submission so that I don't know what you're trying to accomplish by pressing so hard. But the unique thing about melt is that we're going after the fluid system of the whole matrix. So it takes a much softer, gentler approach. And its sole intention is to move the fluid through the entire matrix. And the compelling thing about melt is that if you are a fan of heavy pressure treatment, whether it be using balls, racks, rollers, PVC piping, or you go to see a Rolfer or somebody who does heavy compression force treatments, Graston techniques, or any of those sort of things, melt, if you melted before you did any of those things, if you just used the soft roller and you actually did the methodology of gliding, shearing, rinsing, of pulling tension in local regions and actually created the fill effect in 10 minutes, and then you walked away from doing those types of techniques and then got on your hard roller. And by the way, I think the rumble roller rollers should not even be used on a horse, is my personal opinion. But you know, you want to rumble, roll yourself to oblivion, whatever you want to do. But if you melted before you did it, you'd find three things. You'd find that it would, it would. Using those hard rollers would in fact hurt you less. You would almost intuitively slow down. You would work with a little more savvy, and quite honestly, most clients will get the aha later on. The gee, I don't really think I need to be pushing on my tissue quite that hard. I bet I could slow down. And I wonder if I use the melt methodology using the hard roller, could I then get even more benefit? And we find that people do that very often who like the heavier compression or they feel like they got to spot treat their thighs or wherever they have the issues, they'll go after it that way. Just remember this one thing though. If you have pain in an area of your body, the last thing you should do is go right to the area of pain. Think of the pain areas as victims. If somebody was crying out for your help, you would not walk up to them and punch them in the face to make them stop crying out for help. You would go find the criminal. And that's what we try to do as a philosophy, is this concept of indirect before direct approach using melt. So if you had neck pain. The last thing you're going to be doing is going anywhere near your neck. You're going to work on your hands and to draw fluid back to the neck region to support the neck and the space that's being compressed. Instead of mashing your fascia in areas that hurt, we go after where stuck stress is living in your body. And again, melt is a methodology. The one thing that's missing on a lot of foam rolling concepts is actually giving people a baseline and education of identifying what's the problem. Where is stuck stress living in your body? Not where do you have pain, but where are the problems causing you pain? And then treat yourself and then reassess in that instance and have you decreased the pain or the tension that you felt that was bothering you? And if the answer is yes, you just learned how to treat your body more like a manual therapist and not chase your pain or beat your body up to make it feel better. Don't cause pain to get out of pain. It's just. It doesn't even make any sense when I say it out loud. And I would just recommend that to anybody.

Now, since I read your book, what I started doing was like, some of this softer stuff and some of this almost like, like milking and using some of the maps that you have in the book to work on the actual, like, the joints, right? Like the elbow joint and the knee joint and the pelvis joint. I've still been. Don't get mad. I've still been, like, mashing more of, like, the muscle, right? Like the deep muscle belly and, you know, along the quadriceps and along the hamstrings. I. I just feel as though, you know, and I don't know, maybe it's just because I'm a big guy or something, but. But I feel as though. So that digs into those muscle areas better than, like, a soft roller or a foam roller. But I mean, would that. Would. Would the melt method be something that you use just on, like, the joint area, or do you. Usually you use it on, like, the muscle belly as well?

We. Well, that's just it, Ben, you know, is that we're not really looking at muscles at all. And the thing is, we never compress spaces. So spaces are the joints in your body. So you'd never compress, roll the roller on your neck or right on your low back or right behind your knee or at the elbow itself, because those are the areas where the connective tissue is the most stiff. And what you want to do is draw fluid toward the joints, so that the joints regain their sliding structures. So, again, you have to think of connective tissue more globally on a cellular level. If you go down to the microscopic level of even the molecular level of connective tissue, it is truly like a spider's web that is three dimensional, and it infuses every system, cell structure in your body, and there's no separation in it from skin to bone. In cadavers, we can create these layers so that you can actually see how the brilliance of the human form is that it can actually deposit more collagen closer to the skin, more reticular fibers near the gut. So the structure of it looks different from layer to layer, but the molecular components are the same, no matter if you're talking about cartilage, tendons, ligaments, or the myofascia, which is the fascia that's around all of your muscles. So I think the thing people kind of need to hear here, from me at least, is that we have this idea that we need to dig and push on our muscles to induce a change. But the reality of it is that connective tissue is this infused fluid collagen matrix, and it doesn't take heavy forced pressure to really allow the fluid state to adapt. And when the fascia is more fluid, it does create better sliding surfaces. So that, again, if you then used a hard roller after you melted, you would find that you wouldn't actually need to press so hard. Your own body weight would be enough, and you would feel what you're looking for, and it wouldn't actually hurt you. It would more feel like, wow, I actually get where I am. And instead of landing on the lumpy areas, you'd be more apt to kind of think of those lumps as, like, sediment. And then you'd work around those areas to slip fluid around and under those. Those tissues that have gotten restricted to make the change.

Okay, yeah, that makes. So you start with the soft stuff. That's interesting, because what I have noticed, sue, is I have an infrared sauna, and sometimes I'm coming over. Yeah, seriously, I'll foam roll after I do some yoga and stuff inside my infrared sauna. And I have found I gotta apply a lot less pressure when I do. That makes sense. So you're achieving something kind of similar in terms of, like, tissue hygiene, hydration, and the movement of fluid with the soft stuff. And you're saying, like, if you're going to use, like a hard foam roller, you should try doing something like that first.

That's right. Because then what you'd be doing is really aiding the ultimate goal of self myofascial release. The true concept of it is to restore blood flow to muscle. That's really the key component and concept of using a hard foam roller. So again, you know, if you go too deep, too fast, you'll actually just irritate. You know, like people get bruised and things like that. You're going too fast. But again, if you melted, you applied that softer compression. And again, you use an infrared sauna, if you melted 10 minutes before you went in, melted your feet, did a little lower body compression, and then brought your harder tools into the infrared sauna, you would find that it would not hurt you and you would get a lot more out of it because the heat of the infrared sauna is actually going to move blood flow. Your heart rate's going to increase, so you're going to get more blood flow to the muscles by default. So now when you go and you apply a heavier ball or, you know, like, I love Jill Miller and her concepts with the yoga tune up balls because she kind of is the same philosophy. She's working more deeply, but she really has a specific intention of all of her techniques. So then if you use those types of tools, you would just get so much more out of it. So melt doesn't replace foam rolling or using balls or anything else. It really is something so unique because it's actually addressing the whole whole matrix on its own, not the muscle.

Gotcha. So in terms of the melt method itself, I think we've been throwing around this term for a while and not actually mention what melt stands for. And by the way, if you're listening in, I know we're mentioning a lot of little resources here. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com melt that's BenGreenfieldFitness.comm E L T. I'll link to Sue's book and her website and anything else that we discussed during this episode. But in the meantime, speaking of melt, what exactly does melt stand for? Why do you call it melt?

Well, it's really just about, you know, I mean, if you think about melting something that's stiff, it's just about restoring a stiff state back to a fluid state. But when I first developed the method back in, you know, the early 2000s, I thought I needed an acronym. And so when I came up with melt, it started out as an acronym for myofascial Energetic Length Technique. But it sort of outgrew its acronym over the past decade because what I added to the techniques were Neurological techniques to try to quiet the stress reflex and the nervous system, which is sort of easier said than done on a. It's a kind of a complex process, but also another easy self methodology. I figured out ways to do what I did with my hands, with my clients, to educate them how to do it to themselves. And those techniques worked as well, so. So it sort of outgrew the acronym. I took the periods away, and now Melt is just about restoring a stiff state back to its fluid, mobile, functioning system. That's what Melt is really about.

Gotcha. Now, when I look at the book you've got, for example, let's say, like in the case of a hand, there's like five different spots on the hand that you point out, and you have a specific direction that you go from number one to number two to number three to number four to number five on the hand with point pressing. And then you do a gliding movement, and then a shearing movement, then what you call a rinsing movement. How exactly does that work? How do these maps work? And how'd you come up with them? I know this is kind of a loaded question, and what are these steps?

Well, these are pretty simple though, right? So the compression techniques called gliding, shearing, and rinsing are specific. Like if you went to go see a body worker, especially even a heavy pressure person, they don't just look at you and go, hmm, I think I'm gonna put my elbow right here. And they start digging into you. We do palpation. And what a gliding technique is, is a light touch, small, local back and forth movement either with the balls or the roller. And if the ball or the roller is moving, that's called a glide. And that's a way to prepare connective tissue for something called a shear force. And that is a heavier connect compression, very focal, kind of a scratching movement. If you're doing a direct treatment, you know, it'd be like just kind of keeping your thumb on one area of your hand and wiggling it. That's an indirect shear. Or in manual therapy terms, if you were to compress, you know, like, let's say your thigh, and then bend and straighten your knee. Your own knee action would create the pulling and the compression to the tissue. You were, you know, pressing with the roller. That's a shear force. And shearing stimulates those fibroblasts, these cells of connective tissue, and creates the reaction and the responsiveness of those cells, like working fluid into a sponge. And then the secret is, once you do a shear force, you compress and you wait so that when you let it go, rinsing is a one directional fluid motion. So if you think of connective tissue or your body like a closed cell environment, think about it like a. If you put your hand in a bathtub and you started to run your hand in one direction around the perimeter of the tub with the water, when you took your hand out of the water, sure enough, the water, like a vortex, continues to move in that pathway. Well, interestingly enough, fascia works very much the same way. Where after you stimulate tissue in a local region, like you do with gliding and shearing, then what you want to do is push the fluid throughout the entire connective tissue matrix. So if you move the fluid in one direction through what we call meridians or fascial planes, you can actually create that sweeping vortex. And over the course of a minute or two, the fluid flow throughout the entire connective tissue matrix has been affected from wherever you treat your body. That's really the cool thing about learning how to melt, is that you can melt local regions to create global changes.

How did you learn the specific spots to target as you do, like the pressure and the rinsing? Is this by looking at cadavers or is this like self experimentation or how do you know to go from one side of the hand to the other side of the hand in this specific sequence?

Yeah, actually, I mean, a lot of it was just from. I'm a hands on body worker, so I was basically taking hands on therapeutic techniques that I had learned from John Upledger's work with cranial sacral or Jean Pierre Barrall's with visceral manipulation and, and all of the things I've learned from structural integration to Rolfing techniques to d' Ambrosio's positional point release therapies. I've literally been trained in dozens of different modalities and I was trying to figure out ways to simulate those in my own body. And the way that I came up with it was truly trial and error. And I hurt myself, I have to be honest, a lot. Like in the early 2000s when I was really experimenting on what would work. And, and I have this knack of hands on palpation. And I always, ever since I was a kid, I've got this weird knack of feeling this funny fluid flow vibration under the skin that I always tried to explain to people. And my dad used to say, don't tell people you're weird. It's strange you talk about things like that. Don't say things like that. And so I've discovered that the fluid flow that I feel is the continuum of the fascial system. And so the direction that I felt was truly empirical, was that was what I felt in bodies that were not in pain was this consistency of architecture or fluid motion. And in my clients that had pain, it literally was not that the fluid wasn't moving, it was just very diverted. It kind of meandered a lot. And so that was my first plan of attack with my clients was I wonder what would happen if I reinstated the fluid flow of this supportive infrastructure and then I went after their liver or their hip joint or wherever the problems were. If I did it global and then I went local, did it make the change? And that was really what I found in working with my hands on clients, that that was how I made the changes. And then that's what I applied to the methodology of Melt. So Melt truly is a culmination of dozens of different hands on therapies that I've sort of put together as a hand hands off methodology. I call it hands off bodywork so that people can become their own bodyworker. And for those of us who have money and time and great therapists that we go to, what Melt offers is that supplement to getting a great hands on treatment. And then you melt so that you can prolong those benefits. So when you go back to your therapist, they can actually move you further. But that's really what it is. It was partly experiment, but a lot of it was from what I learned as a therapist using hands on techniques.

And that's something I do now. I didn't used to do this, but now on Fridays I try to get a massage. So I actually had like, I bought like a bulk massage therapy sessions from a massage therapist and she, she comes over on Friday nights and works on me. But then I don't just like sit around and wait for the next Friday until my body's all messed up again. You know, I've been doing well, I've been doing foam rolling and mobility work and now I've started to do some of your melt stuff on specific joints when they hurt. And it makes a big difference. It's also kind of cool because you learn by looking at these little maps you have in the book, you learn about how to kind of move fluid around your body. It's actually, you can almost feel your joints get rehydrated. It's really cool. Now you also, and this is something that, okay, I'm going to admit to you right now, maybe it's because I have add or maybe it's because I just. I don't like to feel like I'm being lazy. But you've got a lot of parts in the book where you're like. Like lying on your back doing, like, you know, assessment and breathing and stuff like that. Why is there so much breathing and lying on your back before you jump into the good stuff?

Well, the first thing is when you lie on your back, what you're talking about is the rest assess. And the thing that I'm trying to educate people on, and this was actually what I learned from being a body worker. When I first started developing these techniques, I knew that they worked because I could feel the differences. And with my clients who really had severe pain, like I'm talking about clients with fibromyalgia, Ms. chronic fatigue, Parkinson's, you know, joint injuries, people who had surgeries and things like that, they actually, I have to be honest, people who are in pain are scared. They actually are afraid to do things for themselves because they think that they're going to make it worse. And so I would give my clients this homework, and then I would call them or email a couple of days into it before they came back for their session. I'd say, how's it going? Just to check in. And a lot of them would be like, you know, I haven't done it, I'm afraid. Or I couldn't remember. And so that was where I came up with this idea of, well, lie on the floor and let me see if you can feel the imbalances that I feel in my hands. Let me see if I can describe it to you. And what I found over decades of working on people is that there are four common imbalances that many people possess that are left unaddressed from day to day. And those are the four that end up compressing the neck and low back unnecessarily and actually destabilize the neurological core reflexes that keep your abdomen and spine stable. And so I would bring people through this dialogue to educate them on what it feels like when you've got stuck stress and when it's causing either imbalances in the shoulder girdle, because stuck stress loves to live in the shoulder girdle, the diaphragm, and the pelvis. So I would describe to them the common things they might feel as opposed to what would be ideal once they could identify them. And they said, I feel those imbalances. I said, okay, so now let's come up on the roller and let's see if we can hydrate and eliminate these problems. And then we would go back into that rest, assess and reassess. And sure enough, I would say, so you know, when you started, you felt these imbalances, what do you feel now? And they say they're gone. And I say, then you did it, right? You did it. And of course the next question is, is how long will it last? And I said, well, just like brushing your teeth, you brush your teeth today so that people can stand your stinky breath, but you also are brushing your teeth today for the long haul of not getting tooth decay later. I think that self care should be a daily process that people do that's just as important as eating a healthy meal every day or drinking water or brushing your teeth. That was the messaging I was giving to my clients. And then the other part of your question was why are we breathing so much? Thing about the diaphragm is that the diaphragma, amazing muscle that is told by the brain 28,000 times a day to contract and release. And for a lot of us, when connective tissue in the mid torso is stiff and it happens from the posture of sitting, more than anything, it compresses the mid region of our back and we compress the front aspects of our torso and that causes imbalances in the diaphragm. And if the diaphragm loses its three dimensional expansion 28,000 times a day, that's going to accumulate. And it's actually one of the primary culprits of low back pain is a stiff diaphragm, a diaphragm that doesn't express motion. So with doing something like the rebalance sequence, which is just the simple process of lying on the roller, doing a little rocking, identifying movement of the pelvis and then stimulating the diaphragm in your core takes 10 minutes. It actually quiets the stress reflex in the nervous system. It boosts your body's own natural rest and repair state. It stimulates the diaphragm, it improves blood flow, it improves heart rate variability and it basically improves the stress relaxation time of connective tissue, making it more reactive and more responsive to movement when you do get up and move around. So in 10 minutes, yeah, you're, you know, it seems like that's what I would say. The movements of mel seem so benign. They're so like, I don't even think feel like we did anything, but I'm feeling all these changes. I say that's the brilliance of connective tissue in the nervous system is they're the most abundant and most complex systems in the entire body. And if you know how to address them, access them and help them function more efficiently, I got to tell you, that's even more important than exercising every day. It's just as important as getting up in the morning and getting out and just doing general movement. This is such vital components of our body that are completely unaddressed from diet and exercise. And I said it at the beginning of our conversation, is that even people who eat right and exercise, even the big fitness pros, suffer with chronic pain. So there's clearly something missing in the just eat right and exercise idea of living an active, healthy, pain free life. There are two other systems in the body that are not directly addressed through diet and exercise, and that's your nervous system and your connective tissue. You add those components to a healthy lifestyle, I'm telling you, you're going to live better, you're going to feel better and you're going to want to be more active because when you feel good, you're more active. And that's just a fact of the matter.

Yeah, that makes sense. And maybe it's because I do a lot of like yoga and meditation and deep breathing to where when I, you know, again, don't get mad at me, but I've skipped some of those sections of the Rest and Assassin, just jump straight into the Melt method. And maybe it is because I have higher body awareness or something like that, or maybe I just need to try out the rest of the session.

Yeah, I would encourage you to just do it because that's just it. One person who became a Melt instructor had cancer. He had all of this radiation stiffness in his tissue. He couldn't turn his head and he started melting. He got all range of motion back and became a Melt instructor. And about eight months into it, he called me, he goes, you know, I think after you do melt for a while it's stops working. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, well, you know, I don't really feel the changes. And I said, well, what happens from the assessment to the reassessment? And he said, oh, I already know what's going to happen, so I don't bother. And I said, you know, you're actually interfering with the ultimate goal of what Melt is, is not just to rehydrate connective tissue, but to rehydrate connective tissue to improve the environment that your nervous system functions in. So if you don't do the assessment, you're actually missing the opportunity to heighten neurological stability and efficiency by giving your nervous system a baseline, treat it, and then return it to a new baseline so that it starts to organize neurological pathways in the direction you want it to go. And that I got to tell you, you're like a lot of people. You're actually missing one of the most important pieces. I always say, stop interfering with your body's natural processes of restoration. It's not about your thinking self that you need to change. You want to actually allow your body to experience a beginning, a middle, and an end position. So that when you lie down in that last reassessment and you are consciously sensing those changes, your nervous system is getting the opportunity to reset and to say, oh, is this my baseline? Is this the easy zone? Is this where the teeter totter of stress to repair is balanced? And once you start doing that more and more often, sure enough, the nervous system does seem to function in a state of balance longer. So for me, I find that I can melt three times a week for 10 minutes a day, and I can maintain my changes. But if I feel stiff or I exercise or I run, I do more for myself. I give back more than I just take out. We need to give, not just take from our bodies. Our bodies need some attention back. So give it some chance.

You're not very passionate about this topic, are you?

No.

Okay, I got one more question for you.

Yes.

And that is that some people like to wrap their heads around what this actually involves. So let's say. Let's say somebody's listening in. Maybe they're like sitting in their car driving right now, or maybe they're riding their bicycle or running or something like that, and they have a little bit of low back pain. Their low back's been bugging them for a while. What would a typical melt method look like for something like a low back issue?

Sure. Well, we actually did our. We just did a research paper with New Jersey institute of Technology, and we brought people through a four week low back pain process. And the very first thing we started every single person with was the foot treatment. And so we used these soft balls on the bottom of the foot to stimulate those sensory nerve endings that live in the foot, these mechanoreceptors and proprioceptors to help the brain figure out where the pelvis or our center of gravity is in relationship to the floor. And they did that for an entire week. And then we added to that something called the rebalance sequence, which is using the soft roller along the length of the spine and just basically doing these very subtle movements of the pelvis and the diaphragmatic breathing and learning how to find the reflexive mechanism, the contraction in the deep abdomen outside of the voluntary muscles of rectus or your oblique muscles, how to. To actually neurologically reacquire that contraction that is occurring every time we breathe. And then in the second week, we added something called the lower body compression sequence, which is a basic gentle compression technique to the back of the legs, the inner thigh and the calf, and then rinsing it to the low back. And then in the final week, we added something called the lower body length and low back release sequence, where you put the roller under your pelvis and you create lengthening techniques. A gentle tugging or pulling to the fascia in the front of the hip and the back of the leg, and then mobilizing the soft tissue in the pelvis to draw the fluids back to the low back. And in four weeks, we reduced thoracolumbar thickness. That's the low back thickness. So again, what happens to connective tissue when it becomes dehydrated is it loses its elastic properties. It does move and adapt and return to its original shape efficiently. It becomes too stiff. And in low back pain, people, not only is the fascia too stiff, it becomes thick. And because of the thickness, it deters muscle contraction on one side of the spine. And that is what causes the compression, the misalignments, and the damage to the discs in the low back. So in just four weeks, we reduced the thickness by 33%. That is more than they did with acupuncture, hands on therapy, or any other modality. It was actually a tremendous change that we found in such a short period of time. I think that the researchers were aghast over the idea of like, wait, so you didn't even touch the low back? I said, never put pressure on the low back. They were like, I've never heard of anything like this. And I said, it's the fluid flow. If you can restimulate fascial flow, you can improve the elastic recoil, which decreases stiffness. So we decrease stiffness, we improve stress relaxation time, we improve flexibility. People improve their forward bend by inches, and it decreased their pain by over 50% in four weeks. So, you know, somebody's got low back pain. This is an easy thing to do. And again, you know, it's taking people 10 minutes a day, three times a week. And in the low back pain people, if you were in pain, they did it more often, but still only for about 10 to 20 minutes. A day. But they did it about five days a week instead of three and made those types of changes pretty tremendous.

Yeah. And what I like about it is it's kind of like a little bit every day. Right. It's not like you're doing a two hour session a couple times a week, but it's like little bites. And for me, again, I do this while I put the coffee on. It's like my ritual. Now we have one of these Wilfa Precision coffee makers, and I've got it down to a T to where if I go downstairs and I put the coffee on and it makes the coffee and it'll still be nice and piping hot by the time I finish it, putting my routine, and then I just go drink my coffee and waste a bunch of time on Facebook and then go start my day.

That's what I do also. I mean, I do my feet when I brush my teeth, because I brush my teeth for about two to three minutes. And so I melt my feet for two to three minutes every morning.

Yeah, I like it. I even have one of these little balls on my desk right now that I'll roll my hand around while we're talking. It's cool. I'm glad I read your book, sue, and I'm glad I discovered you. And for anybody else who wants to check this out, I do recommend adding it into your routine if you happen to be someone who say moves. So you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com melt that's BenGreenfieldFitness.comm E L T. I will link to Sue's book. I'll link to some of the other resources that we discussed during this episode. And finally, if you have comments or questions or little thoughts about ideas that we generated during this episode, feel free to jump into the comment section. There's always a very good, engaging discussion going on there, and I try and get in there and help whenever I can. So. That being said, sue, thanks so much for coming on the show today and sharing this stuff with us. And thanks for writing this book.

Absolutely. My pleasure. I hope to actually meet you in person.

I'm sure that'll happen someday. I'm sure our paths will cross because I think we're both quintessential fitness nerds.

No doubt.

All right, well, folks, again, visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com Melt for the shownotes. And until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with sue, the author of the book the Melt Method, signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast Fast. Go to BenGreenfield Fitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sam.