Sports Performance and Chiropractic: An Interview with Dr. Tim Brown

All right, and as promised this week, we have a special guest, Dr. Tim Brown. This is going to be an awesome episode. If you are into sports or performance and. Or a chiropractor, this is an episode you're going to want to pay attention to. Thanks, Tim, for taking the time.

Hey, super honored to be here. Thanks for. Thanks for the interest.

You got it. So I read up on you a bit before this conversation, and it looks like you've really been, in my opinion, trailblazing in terms of sports performance for quite a while.

And.

And for any of the docs that aren't familiar, I was hoping you'd kind of break down your history. How did you become involved in the World Surf League, Hurley, Red Bull, all these companies. Give us a little bit of context.

Now I'm so old, it was pretty much by default. You know, it's everybody take one giant step backwards and I was the only guy standing there. So basically my background's as an often injured athlete, you know, really curious about the body. Never could find out enough from the guys that were taking care of me. Always thought that there was something more that I could do to help the body to help itself. Just innately had a very strong sense of that. Didn't have any experience with chiropractic. Was going to go to medical school, in fact, and try and do my thing from a natural approach that a medical doctor could take. But then was prompted by a buddy of mine that I went to high school with that I met out surfing in the water one day and said, you know, I told him what I was up to, getting ready to take the MCATs. This is, gosh, like 40 years ago. And he said, look, you know, I know you always been into exercise and nutrition and taking great care of yourself, and I'm into this chiropractic college right now. And it's like, I've got an article in my car. You got to read it, and I think this is the way you ought to go. And it was just one of those just moments in life where it was a clear delineation that I was head maybe down the wrong path and I should take a right turn. And what he did was he gave me an article on Dr. Leroy Perry, who was kind of a renegade sports Cairo back in the 80s and 70s. And he took care of guys like Carl Lewis and Dwight Stones and Wilt Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul and all these sports icons back in the day. And he was really the only sports chiropractor I really knew of that kind of Was making a name for himself. So I got into his story a little bit, and the guy would. You know, he'd been arrested a couple times for showing up to take care of athletes. The athletes wanted him there. The medical doctors didn't want him there. But he was just so strong in his purpose that he was like, you know, I'm gonna be here for the athletes no matter what. So they ended up arresting him for trespassing, and then the athletes followed him, got him out of jail, followed him to his hotel, and the line started to form outside of this guy's hotel. So it's just like, oh, my gosh, that's for me. And ended up doing my internship, some of my internship with him, and just had an extremely valuable lesson in the philosophy of chiropractic and sports chiropractic. It was this guy that really drove it home for me that, you know, we are what we eat, think, and do, and. And those are the most simple terms. Of course, back then, it was biochemistry, structure, and mind. And now it's more contemporary to just say, hey, you are what you eat than you do. And so I really embraced that philosophy and really tried to implement a lot of the things he was teaching into my own lifestyle. So I was still a competitive athlete when I was in chiropractic college. And then when I got out, I qualified to play pro beach volleyball on the tour, and I'd lose early. You know, it's double elimination. My nickname was Uno dos adios, and I'd break out my table. And fortunately, because I could speak the language, Jeff, I think that's what allowed me to get close enough to the athletes to say, hey, let's give this guy a shot. And indeed, was able to do some things for the athletes that they had done before with the soft tissue work that I was learning. And, you know, that was kind of the beginning of it. And so that's what started the trail.

I love it. And throughout your journey, I mean, I imagine you've seen a lot of change. And I just would love to have your thoughts on how is chiropractic's position in the sports performance world evolved over the past decade or two. How have you seen that evolve as time has gone on?

Yeah, it's gone from the pariah position to one that's. There's a Cairo just about on every staff now. And it was, of course, my dream to create an interdisciplinary staff. No matter where I went, whether it was the surfing tour, the pro beach volleyball tour, or anywhere else. It really doesn't matter what's behind your name, it's really the person and everybody's experience is so different in their education and in their life that if you're coming from an allopathic perspective, you still have something to add to the program, especially if there's heavy trauma. We need those guys and gals. But also on the other end, if we look at who's used at the events the most. I mean, certainly I have a biased eye to some. To some extreme, but it's the Cairo. You know, you're the only one that's trained to diagnose and treat right there on the spot. And so it really helped to encourage my confidence and competence as I went along, because I knew what we had to share, and I also knew what we didn't have to share. And so it allowed me to really open my eyes to things that, hey, I wasn't really educated in this area, but it's science, it's working with the body. I can learn to do these things. And I think everybody kind of had that attitude on our staffs, and we were able to really openly share the things that we are good at and the things that we weren't so good at so that we could improve our skills. Because our bottom line was, hey, we're here for the athletes. It's not an ego show here. You got to drop your ego at the. At the. The entrance to the tent or you're really not welcome. And so that's kind of the environment that we created both on the. The avp, the association of Volleyball Professionals Tour, as well as the pro surfing tour. And those. I'm really happy to say that those philosophies and those approaches still exist today, and hopefully they're growing as they are in all professional sports.

Yeah, definitely.

Definitely.

Got to have the right team. And when you do, it makes such a big difference, I think. And in all aspects of life, I guess we could say, in diving into the specific, if we dive into the weeds of really what you've been heavily involved in, I want you to talk a little bit about specific proprioceptive response technique. What is it? For anybody that hasn't heard what got you interested, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

Yeah, thanks. Well, first of all, I'm a terrible marketing guy, and I made up that name that I was trying to work my way into sport and sp over. Oh. Because I was just biased as a young chiropractor, so screwed that one up pretty good. But it's. The bottom line was I just I figured out a way working on athletes on site, and again, I'm getting all this great feedback and feed forward from all these different professionals. So I'd hate to say it's all because of me. I created the smoothie. The information was there from everyone. And what I did was found out that the skin was a really important part of a treatment paradigm that we are all missing. And working on athletes on site, you're not supposed to go deep on them, right? Because if you go deep on them, you actually dampen physiology, you actually will depress it. Well, I learned from a guy named Vladimir Yonda, who was an MD from Czechoslovakia, a neurologist that we, many of your listeners might be familiar with. He created the upper cross syndrome and lower cross syndrome kind of phenomena, so to speak, and found the consistencies that we all have and we're all imbalanced and there's nobody that's balanced. So he was the guy that first said, hey, if you're missing the skin, you're missing a tremendous opportunity to help somebody heal. And it just intrigued me because we weren't allowed to go deep on the athletes. So I started to play with this taping technique that would allow me to not tape circumferentially around the body like a mummy. Like, we all kind of grew up seeing that white zonas tape. But what I thought, well, what if we could put those structures that were damaged in alignment with the body as opposed to trying to just compress and shut down all the movement. I was really intrigued with healthy movement versus unhealthy movement. And so the taping allowed me to kind of, kind of visit the skin as a first barrier to the body to create a feed forward and feedback system that allowed the brain and the nervous system and the muscles to coordinate. Because we found that after an injury, it's almost like having a stroke in that area. You lose proprioception, you lose the ability to communicate with that area. So what better than to add a little something down there? It's almost like I. I look at it almost like a proprioceptive warning track. So you build the tape up so that it slows motion in a direction that's going to be pathological or exacerbate the injury. And what we're doing is building almost like a warning track like you have in baseball. Like a guy's running for a deep ball that's hitting the center field and he's running, his eyes are on the ball and he doesn't know where the fence is. But all Of a sudden the grass goes from grass to dirt. And now his feet feel the change and he can begin to decelerate. And that's really what the taping systems and the intelliskin clothing systems that I created are really about. It's an early warning system so that your subconscious can help your conscious remain aligned and function at a higher level.

That's awesome. And to me it sounds like the application of that doesn't necessarily just have to be high performance athletes. And it doesn't sound like it's in tune with one adjusting technique. Is this something that you've seen chiropractors of all makes and models, so to speak, be able to utilize in their practice?

Yeah, and it's wild. Not only chiropractors, but PTs, athletic trainers even. I teach medical doctors and orthopedists how to do this stuff because it's not, you know, it's not brain surgery. Fortunately for me, I'd be out of the picture. It's really something that's very simple. We all have the education, chiropractic to do this stuff. It's just harnessing kind of a new perspective on how to help somebody to help themselves. And it really became big after events like when someone is recovering, it's much so nice to take them into a posture that they now have enhanced their awareness of their body position in space with. So that as we know, when we're tired, we like to slump, we like to sit in chairs that are killing us, literally. So it gives us, offers us another way to carry our message through the day. Not just while the athlete or the patient is in your office or on the field, but actually when they go home. And that really became a huge marketing tool for me. It wasn't overt, but when people were wearing this tape out in the 90s and the early 2000s, people weren't used to seeing this colorful tape and all these different mechanisms used in tape before. So it became a great marketing tool for me because people are always asking, hey, where'd you get that? What's that for? And then the patients would say, oh, my doctor told me about this and he set me up with this and here's what it's doing. And it's a great way to educate the patients by involving them in their own treatment protocol. Asking the patient, what feels good? Is this too tight? Is this too loose? How can I make it feel perfect for you? Involves them in their own care. And it really, from a psychological perspective, really helps our patients get on board and help to participate in their own care. Because we all know by now that, you know, God bless the chiropractic adjustment, but unless they're cooperating with you, doing their exercises and paying attention to their ergonomics during the day and obviously eating well and thinking the right things, unless they're doing that, you've really got an uphill battle. Yeah.

And I think I love two things that you brought up there that I think are very, very important for all practicing docs. Number one is the patient centric approach. It has to be collaborative, the patient's involved and the tape enables them to become involved with their care because it's not just when they're in your Office for the five to 30 minutes, whatever it may be, but it enables them to take an active role outside of that and reminds them of what they're doing. The second component is of course the marketing. It's a little billboard that they're able to wear around, which is never a bad thing.

As now there's plenty of tape companies now that if you buy enough tape, they'll put your darn business card on that tape. You know, I've played with that idea for a long time. I haven't, I haven't jumped the fence yet, but. Or the shark getting there. Right.

So tell us a little bit. I know you have an upcoming course out in your neck of the woods in Costa Mesa coming up in early November. I'd love for you to talk a little bit about it. I saw you teach last year at, at Rock Stock and it was, it was awesome. I really appreciated the you brought. It was fun, it was exciting, it gave great info, is practical. So I'm putting all the words in your mouth, but I'll have you talk a little bit about the upcoming course you have in early November out in Costa Mesa.

Yeah, One of the things about my courses that I'm pretty proud of is I take a different approach. I use a Finnish system of education. The Finns are the number one educated country in the world. And they don't lecture, they do a lot of hands on. And so it's very, very practical. So everybody learns at their own pace in their own way, but in a very practical way. So everybody has lots of pearls that they get to take home. So what we're going to do is we're going to go over the sprt, it's specific proprioceptive response technique. And all I'm trying to do is create a feed forward and feedback system that's constant in the body so that there could be a lot of self correction. And we use this technique to not only treat or take people into better posture and spinal alignment, but we can also use the same technique to treat every kind of sports injury. We've got over 350 applications for this technique, you know, from a inversion sprain in the ankle to disc injury in the low back and everything else in between. So we treat a lot of problems just by stimulating the body to go into the right direction. The body is based on a mathematical formula called the Fibonacci sequence, also known as the golden ratio. And so I've never been a math guy, trust me, but this, this formula that our body is built on and how movement is based upon is something that everybody should really kind of embrace and really study and know about. It's just nature's way of organizing energy. That's the Fibonacci sequence. And everything in nature has this sequence to it. It's how our DNA is built, it's how flowers unfold. It's really quite fascinating. So I utilize that technique in a lot of my teaching and in a lot of my work. Because we have three planes of movement doesn't mean that we're built to be linear. I believe those three planes of movement are really to allow the spiral motion to happen whenever we move. If we look at how the joints are designed, I mean, they look fairly linear with some of the muscles and the bones, the way they're lined up. But if you look at the construct of the fascia and the muscles around there, every joint is surrounded by spiral shaped structures. So that's how we move. And we've got to encourage that movement. And so those are some of the other things that we do is we teach quality of movement in these classes. Better ways to examine through function and how a person moves is a really great window to what's happening on the inside. So, you know, from soft tissue to taping, to evaluation, to exercises, to rehabilitation, it all fits into a very nice little pocket. And I think there'll be lots of pearls that'll be dropped at this event. So be really stoked. And you don't have to be a sports chiropractor to be there. You just have to be in love with your profession, in love with what you're doing, and, and have a great passion for learning.

I love it and I appreciate it. There's nobody, perhaps nobody, that's been doing it at a higher level or longer than you in the sports performance world. I appreciate you taking the time. I can say I'm going to try to make it out there for the event. And I think everybody listening, you know, check it out. I'm going to link the event directly in the show notes. So as you listen or watch this, be sure to click through. And if you can make it out, Dr. Tim Brown, he's going to put on a great event early November and out at the Hurley campus, if I'm not mistaken, in Costa Rica.

Yeah, that'll be pretty special. Hurley's given us their campus. They have a town hall meeting there. We had the surf movement masterclass there last year. It was tremendous success and just a fun place to be. And yeah, I hope you can make it on out there. And also intelliskin is gonna be there and anybody that comes to the event will get a great deal on intelliskin posture wear. And also wanted to thank web Exercises who are hosting the event as well and partnering with me on this. What a great website. A place everybody could go to get their all the exercises that they need so that again, their patients can help participate in their own care. And we think that's just the only way success can happen. We don't operate on an island, you know, this is a kind of a holistic thing. Even though we learned things in maybe a reductionist way, I think that this is a great way to pull all things together and start to connect these subsystems together and also make new friends.

Well said. Thanks for taking the time, Tim. Appreciate it.

All the best. Thank you so much. And congratulations on your success too. Thank you.