#114 - Unlocking Flexibility: How Breath, Brain, and Emotions Shape Effective Stretching with Butch Phelps, LMT, Part 2

Welcome to The Factor Podcast, where we talk about the stuff they didn't teach you in school, how to grow your practice, refine your clinical skills, and get better results for your patients. We're here to help you navigate the real-world challenges of being a healthcare provider, from delivering top-notch patient care to running a business that doesn't run you into the ground. Whether you're fresh out of school or scaling your practice, we're diving into effective cutting-edge treatments to get patients better faster. We'll also talk about business strategies and tactics to help you work smarter and not harder, and the mindset shifts required to thrive as a top performer in your field so you can build a career you love without burning out. If you're ready to learn what works and what doesn't from leading experts, industry innovators, and respected clinicians across a wide range of specialties, you're in the right place, my friend. Let's dive in. Did you know that 99% of golfers that Butch Phelps works with Who had back pain actually traced the root cause back to tight calves and hamstrings, not their spine. It's insights like this that reveal why lasting change requires a very different approach to stretching. Welcome back to The Factor Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Riddle, and today we're continuing our powerful 2-part series with massage therapist, educator, and author Butch Phelps. If you missed part 1, I highly encourage you to go back and listen to episode 113. It lays the foundation for what we'll cover today, and I've linked it in the show notes for you. In today's episode, we build upon our discussion in part 1 and get into the tactical implementation of the concepts discussed. Today, Butch shares specific strategies you can use with your patients and clients, from targeted calf and hamstring releases to how you can teach your patients to combine self-massage with stretching to retrain the brain-muscle connection. Let's dive in.

And the fun thing, funny thing was, was that I actually had one of my clients say to me, you should teach this online. And I was like, well, I'm not sure how that would work because I'm thinking I always have to touch somebody. And so I started creating teaching videos on my YouTube channel, the Muscle Repair Shop. And as I started to do that, I started to see people giving me comments back and saying, oh my gosh, I've been grinding my teeth for months. And all of a sudden I did this for 2 or 3 times and it stopped. And I went back to sleep and, and I was fine, which was a real shocker. And I have to admit today, it's still a shocker today that a video could actually help somebody that much, which is pretty cool. And then last year I wrote a book, finished writing a book called Stretch and Release. And in that book, it talks about the elements of what I've been talking about today a little more in depth. It talks about why a lot of traditional treatments that we've all been trained to do either come up short or just don't work at all. And then finally, in the back part of the book, it gets into how to do these stretches for shoulders and neck, for how to do them for the back, how to do them for the calves to resolve that. I mean, things like plantar fasciitis, for instance. I mean, you literally can solve that in 2 to 5 days. I've done it hundreds of times. And everybody, when they first hear about it, they go, oh, that can't be true. I've been dealing with this for months, or I've had patients I've been dealing with for a long time. Really and truly, I've seen hundreds of people within 2 to 5 days have it gone, and they're fine. There's no orthotics, there's nothing in their shoes, and they're fine. And so that's the— that was the point of writing the book. I spent about 4 years putting that together, and luckily it just won an award. this past month, and which is pretty shocking for a first-time book, and I'm real proud of that. But that book is available on Amazon, and you guys are, are welcome to, to get it and read it. You certainly can reach me and we can talk about that even one-on-one if you like. But I'm telling you, what I found with this has been just amazing. The, the idea that, that we're working as a team with our patients and our clients really truly You start to actually create a situation where people are benefiting better, they're holding better, they're lasting better. I've done this work with chiropractors, I've done this work with orthopedists, I've done this work with physical therapists and massage therapists, and it's a great add-on to what they do. In fact, with the chiropractors, I've had a lot of fun working with them because what we found was that when people are doing this kind of work, getting their muscles manipulated where they keep their muscles loose, Then when the chiropractor's working on him, I mean, he looks like a champ because the, the, a lot, the adjustments actually stick and hold much better and it doesn't take all the time that it's been taking in the past. That's worked out really well. With my physical therapist friends, we work a lot together with people who've had joint replacements. And so when you're working on 'em after rehab, once the surgery's done, you're really getting 'em back to their ADLs. And so once they're back to that point and, and they sort of get released, I'm usually the guy that steps in and helps them get back to almost 90, 95% of their range of motion. And so that's where it can work out with that. Same thing with massage therapists. I work with several of those and it's like, as they are doing their massages, we, we contact each other back and forth. It allows me to, to express, express to them what I see. And then they talk to me about what they see. And then we work together as a team. And not only that, we've got the client there that is actually working on their own lives, which helps them, which makes everybody look really good, including the client themselves. So that's one of the— that's the thing that I found has worked the best with this. And it was something that came out originally, it came from just my own issues, my own back pain that I had 23, 24 years ago. I had lost actually 105 pounds in 1997 and was working out like crazy and wound up hurting my back. And I couldn't figure out what was causing it. And so I went, I decided to go to school, to massage school, and I decided to really start digging in. And, and once I got done with massage school and these mentors started falling in place and I started learning, what I realized was it wasn't a back issue at all. It was the front of my, it was my quads and it was my inner thighs.

Mm-hmm.

And my calves. And once I learned how to stretch those correctly, pain went away and it's been gone for 22+ years now. And I wake up every morning at 65 with no pain. So I've been sort of my own guinea pig in doing this. And I always try everything that I do before I put it on, do it with somebody else, because I wanna know how it feels. And that was one of the, the drives behind this. And once I saw how good I felt, I thought, well, to be sure, Other people want to feel the same way, and so that's one of the reasons why I did that and and started creating that as well to keep that going. But when you have questions, we'd be happy to answer any questions that you have, and because that's where we really learn, and I've just found over the years when I've done presentations that I like to to to really interact with people and get the questions themselves. So. Jessica, if you want to— we want to get the questions started, that'd be awesome.

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Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. We've had a number of questions that have come in, not only through our chat feature, we have people that are texting in questions as well as on our social media channels as well. So I really, first of all, want to say how fascinating it is that you are looking at your patient care from a very holistic standpoint, that you're considering not only the physical body that's in front of you and the physical ailments that they may have, but you also have really tapped into that biopsychosocial aspect that more and more physical medicine providers are starting to look at, where you understand that what's happening in the body isn't just a product of their physiology, but also sometimes their mental and emotional well-being, their environment, their stress level, etc. So from your perspective, one of our listeners was asking What are some of the biggest shortcomings of the conventional static stretching, the traditional modalities that maybe were utilized that you learned in school back when you first started out that really kind of inspired you to say, this isn't working as well as it could be for my patients? What are those shortcomings from some of the static stretching modalities? I know you mentioned that— Sometimes when a patient is tense or when they have a lot of other things going on to keep them from relaxing, your care's just not as effective.

Exactly. It's a great question. One of the things that I learned, I was a 3-sport athlete when I was younger, and I can remember the static stretching that I was taught at the time, and it never seemed to really make me that much more flexible. I mean, it might for the moment, but it never seemed really to stick. And as I started to delve into stretching itself, what I started to see was that I was feeling, as I was feeling the muscles, for me, it was like the muscle was just stopping. And I would hear people talk about things like muscle memory and we're fighting against the muscles and we're lengthening the muscles. And the muscles always fascinated me once I got into school. And I kept thinking, you can't be lengthening the muscles. They're attached on both ends. That doesn't make any sense. And then number 2, the muscles don't have any capacity to stop me. What is stopping me? And as I started to work with the 2 neurosurgeons, and they started talking to me, we got into dementia things and so forth. And they started talking to me about how the body changes with the thoughts and the feelings and the state of mind. It dawned on me that, that fact, that fight or flight. So what happens is when someone's trying to do static stretching, and they're holding for long periods of time, and that stretch reflex kicks in, That stretch reflex kicks in because the brain then is fearful that this could hurt or I could tear something. And I've listened to so many people that I've worked on, that would be their remarks. Are you sure I'm not gonna tear anything? I don't wanna hurt myself. And I realized at, at that moment that that was the brain doing that, not the muscle itself. And then once I was able to get them to breathe, And I would assure them and talk to them. And of course, they would start to trust me that I'm not going to just shove their leg and hold it as hard as I could. I started seeing their bodies do things that were just amazing. I've had people in their 80s and 90s, but I had a guy who was 89 years old, and his daughter was with him, and I'm stretching his hamstrings. And she couldn't believe that in the course of the time I was working with him here, his hamstrings had moved as much as almost a foot. from where he started on that day, and he was even shocked. He'd never seen that before. So that was the big thing that I saw was a missing piece in static stretching. Now, I've seen some studies where they talk about that the static stretching for athletes before an event actually can affect their performance in the event because, as they're holding for long periods of time, they're actually fatiguing the muscle while they're doing that, and that was the major flaws that I saw with that.

Absolutely. And let me see if I can change our view here so I can be back on camera. I know sometimes it's hard to just speak to a screen. There we go. One of the other questions, and, and I, I'd love to learn a little bit more about this breathwork that you have your patients go through while you have them on the table while you're doing the bodywork as well. Do you use a specific type of breathwork, breathwork like box breathing? Any type of, like, we've talked in past trainings about things like the physiological sigh, things that can really affect vagal nerve and kind of calm down the nervous system.

Yeah. So it's nothing specific. I typically, what I say with them is like, if you're, if you're doing, say, a calf stretch and you're pulling your toes back towards you, I'll have them to do, as they start to pull the toe back, they inhale, and then they exhale as they're pulling the toe back towards them. And that little bit of an exhale as they come out like that seems to cause the brain to relax. The funny thing is, is that I get a lot of people who are high achievers, athletes as well as business people. I try not to give them too anything to think about because they overthink it. And when they start overthinking it, you can feel their muscles lock right up.

Absolutely. Yeah, I can, I can attest to that as someone myself that tends to be in that high achiever category for sure. Like, The time that you can have to take for yourself and have this self-care is so important, and being able to calm down your nervous system in some ways for that is important. I know we've had several practitioners, and many of you that might be listening in, you've had— all had patients that have had some type of sympathetic nervous system reaction to your care, anything involving touch, anything that involves them possibly moving beyond a range of motion that is comfortable for them. Sometimes they'll break out in a sweat. Sometimes they'll tense up in some ways. Tell me a little bit about the conversation that you have with new patients when they come in for the first time and you kind of address the fact that you might be a little bit non-traditional from what they may have experienced in the past. And how do you kind of bridge that gap and have that conversation with them?

Well, number one, I realize that when they walk in the door for the first time, I usually give my new patients a 30-minute free consultation. And the reason for that is that I am very different. And it's, and I always start out with saying, this is nothing like you've ever seen before. This is gonna be very different. And then I listen to them and I really spend the time getting to know them as they're talking about their pain. Now, what I'm looking for is I'm looking for their reaction. One lady came in and her pain was excruciating, just excruciating kind of pain. And come to find out, if you put it on a scale of 1 to 10, It was more about a 5 once she got to that point. But in her mind and her feeling was that it was excruciating. And when she would do that, her face would tense, or you could see her whole body tensing. So that set the stage for me of understanding where she was coming from. Or I may have a guy who comes in and it's like, well, you know, I'm not a very flexible person. There's no way my arm's gonna go that far. And in some cases, you would start to move there and they would literally pull back just to, so I couldn't show them it would go that far. You just have to play with them a little bit to see where they're coming from. But the most important piece of that is building the trust with them. I would spend a lot of time with them talking about what they're feeling, why they're feeling it, because so much of the time we're trained to treat that symptom versus that cause. It's like what they want to know is, why does this keep coming back? Sometimes it's not anything that the practitioner did wrong, But like I said earlier, you go in and you adjust them or you stretch them or you massage them and they feel great when they leave, but then they go back home and they do all the bad habits they did at home, not realizing that what they're doing is really negating the work of the practitioner. And so what I wanna do is be able to continue that through their lives. So when they come back, A, I don't have to work so hard, but B, they'll see much bigger gains.

Absolutely. And speaking of big gains, one of our listeners was asking about your different approach or maybe your conversation that might be a little bit different when you're treating a young athlete, maybe even an athlete that has a little bit of fear avoidance tendencies because they're recovering from an injury or they've had an injury in the past versus your aging population, your retirees or your weekend warriors. How are those conversations different or is it different? Do you approach them in different ways?

Oh, very, it's very different, very different. So you get a young athlete who's had an injury, for instance. I just had one not too long ago, a 16-year-old pitcher who had A labrum tear. And he wound up having to have a surgery with it. Well, when he comes back from the surgery, he's gone through his rehab with physical therapy, and he comes back from the surgery, obviously, he's a little apprehensive about moving his arm. And so it becomes real important that as I'm working with him to really make very slow, deliberate movements with him, give his brain time to see that I'm okay. And it usually takes about 1 session, maybe 2 sessions. But once we get to that point that his brain can click on and say, okay, This is not going to hurt anything. All of a sudden, his body just releases and lets go. When I'm dealing with someone who is, let's say, in their 70s or 80s, their big— you have to understand, their big fears are things like falling, bones breaking. A lot of times their muscle mass is not very, very much. So I have to be very careful not to pull too hard. They may be on medications that can cause bruises on their skin. So I have to be very careful not to press too hard on their skin. And then address the fears that they have as an aging person to get them to where they— again, it's about trust, about trust. When I'm dealing with— I've even dealt with kids as young as 7, 8 years old. And again, it deals with trust, but you sort of kind of play with it. And what I learned with kids is when their muscles are tight, they think it tickles versus hurt, where somebody 80 is gonna say it's gonna hurt. So I have to get them to start breathing. And all of a sudden I'll tease them about, once we get these muscles soft, this ticklishness will go away. Really? For real? And I go, watch this, let me show you. And you breathe this way and we'll start to do that. And after a while it's like, hey, that didn't tickle at all. And I go, exactly. And then they get excited about that. So yeah.

That's amazing. And I love how you kind of address the tiniest patients a little bit different because obviously their understanding and even their grasp of having the language to describe what they're feeling is a bit different.

Exactly. Exactly.

One of the things that you discussed that there's been a lot of work done in the mental health space is that you mentioned that sometimes emotions, past experiences get kind of stored in the body. And obviously, this was covered in some groundbreaking work in The Body Keeps the Score and things of that nature, where people who have past trauma, and whether that's from an injury or from something that was traumatic event that had nothing to do with their physical body, can cause some of those emotional muscular connections. Do you have any examples or maybe case studies you could discuss about great success you've had with patients that maybe had some of the pain that was coming from that past trauma where the body had really kind of locked that into their muscle tone and then you were able to help them through that?

Absolutely. In fact, I can start with my wife. My wife, she and I've been together for 25 years. And before I met her, she was dating some other guy and they went horseback riding and she was thrown off the horse onto her back. So she was having some back issues. What was happening was that as I started to work on her body, we were, we had to start to learn how to do this and, and working with her body, I realized that the hip flexors on the front, her quads on the front were in a more tightened state. Some of that was for fear that if I stand up, my back is gonna hurt because for her, typically when she stood up, her back would hurt. And as I started to talk with her and getting her to let go, and again, I talk with my patients, and I'm educating them a lot when I'm on there on the table with me. Because it does 2 things. Number one, it gets their mind distracted just a little bit about what's going on. But it also gives them a clearer picture of what I'm seeing underneath the skin as we're moving their body around. And I was able to get her back to a point where she hasn't had back pain now in 22 years, 23 years. I get people will come in, they've lost a loved one, they've lost a child, a spouse, a parent, and you'll see them almost curl up in a fetal position in some cases. And after a while, their, the front of their body will start to lock up, which will lead to things like neck and shoulder pain and low back pain and sometimes even knee pain. And then you start to unwind that from the front side, and it's not unusual for them to start crying on you. And men and women. I mean, I've had them both. And it's like, I would say to the men especially, don't be embarrassed, let this go. Because this holding on to this is causing your muscles to hold on tight, which is creating the pain. And I've been very fortunate they trusted me to do that. And they've just been blown away by how better, how much better they felt. So I've seen that several times. But I mean, somebody who's 70 years old, they could have fell off a bike when they were 5. And all of a sudden they had a pain. And so the brain then says, look, let's readjust these muscles so that it has the least amount of pain. And it never readjusts back. Or somebody has a joint replacement, a knee, a hip. Well, we don't necessarily go to the doctor that morning and say, look, my knee's hurting, can you replace it today? And they just boom, they replace it. So it takes weeks to months for a lot of times for that to happen. The brain then starts to set a pattern. So I mentioned about muscle memory in the talk. We're setting down neural pathways instead of the muscle having a memory, and we set those neural pathways down to block as much pain as we can. What we wanna do is once they come back and they have the surgery and they get the rehab done, now you wanna come back and unlock that, unwind that, so they can go back to walking correctly and not damage the other knee.

Absolutely, and we've taught in several of our classes about those compensation strategies and the way that your body will compensate, especially when there's lack of mobility Or dysfunction or pain, it will find a way to continue to move through the world, but it just might be in a dysfunctional pattern for sure.

That's exactly right. Exactly.

If you could, then someone was asking here, if you could address kind of the mental health community.

Yeah.

Do you wish more mental health providers would work in tandem with massage therapists, bodywork professionals on—

Oh gosh. Yes. Yes. That's one of my favorite practitioners out there. I've got several patients who are in the mental health field, and we always have great times talking about the connection between what they do and, and what we're doing here. And it's like, from a massage therapy standpoint, when you get someone who's dealing with anxiety, if you can start teaching them— I know a lot of times in school they'll teach you not to talk to people and so forth, but you really should be coaching them. In that breathing technique so that as you start to touch them, instead of digging in, allow them to let go. And when you— what happens is, as a therapist, you don't work nearly as hard. So you see a lot of deep tissue massage therapists, they'll blow their thumbs out. And so most of my teachers when I was in school were deep tissue massage therapists. And the thing that I saw when I was learning how to do it is that the harder I would press in, the more the person with their mind would lock it down. And so it's like I'm jamming my thumb into a brick wall. And so what I found in working with people who are dealing with anxiety, or they may be dealing with depression, what I found was that is if I could get them to breathe. And once they breathe, I don't know that they relax the mind, but they relax the body. And we've had some great results working together in tandem with that. Yeah. And it's like, you think about massage therapy, we're talking about relaxation, we're talking about how to get people to slow the mind down. I mean, we've got so many people in our world today that they're so stimulated by so many things that they got 1,400 thoughts going on at the same time. This is a person with tight muscles every time. And it's like learning how to take some moments and relax. It's like, even with my stretch and release patients, I say to them, you do it for about 15-20 minutes in the morning, 15-20 minutes in the evening, because in the morning— even at night when you're sleeping and you're dreaming, you're tightening your muscles during the dream. Whether your brain works the same way, whether it's perceived or it's reality. In the evening, you've gone through a whole day of stresses, and you do that before you go to sleep at night to improve your sleep patterns at night. And all it's really doing is it's relaxing the mind.

Absolutely. And if you were speaking directly to someone that might be in a massage therapy program, then either they're still in school as a student or a current practitioner that's looking to develop relationships with mental health professionals or develop relationships with referral sources, people that may be able to send them patients who are dealing with some of these issues, What would you recommend? Like, how, how should they even begin to start that conversation?

So, so number one, I would dig into understanding, get a good understanding of how the mind-muscle connection really works. In other words, if you, if you really understand what's happening with the brain and the fight or flight, that when someone has a fear, perceived or reality is irrelevant, they have a fear. Those muscles are gonna be tight. They're gonna change the way they walk. An older person, for instance, they have a fear of falling. They'll shorten their gait. A person dealing with depression, picture that in your mind. They have a shorter gait. Their shoulders are rounded. Their head's leaning forward. You're messing with their digestive system. You're messing with their heart system because the muscles are pulling the bones in some weird positionings where it can lead to even pinched nerves and impinged nerves. And so the thing is, is that understanding how that mind works with the muscles, and realize that what they're dealing with on a mental side, then can be affected by the muscles, and then understand how you can take and work and soften those muscles, and get their bodies to go back to relax and let go. Now, when you talk to the mental health practitioner, they have a connection there, because now you're connecting the brain to the muscle. You see, so much of us, but all those of us in the physical world, we tend to not be taught a lot about the brain. And so many people in the brain world tend to not be taught a lot about the physical world. The two go together. I mean, my head is my brain and my body is my physical world. And so we wanna bring those two together.

Absolutely. And I think that was, that's very true. There's such a division between the two and it's, we're just kind of now scratching the surface about the capabilities of the brain, but then also how much the brain can have Such an incredible effect on so many different aspects of physical health as well. I'd love for you to be able to leave some information for our listeners, those that are watching live, and then those that are tuning in to the recorded replay about how they can connect with you. Where can they find out more about Stretch and Release and then possibly learn from you?

Exactly. So first thing is my book on Amazon. It's called Stretch and Release. It goes into talking about what we talked about, the brain, how, why, about traditional treatments, and then Some of the things in Stretch and Release, and there's a QR code in the book that actually can take you to the videos to help you see what I'm talking about in the book. I have a YouTube channel. There's over 200 videos on there called The Muscle Repair Shop. And then of course you can go to my website, musclerepairshop.com. You're welcome to leave any emails or calls. Be happy to talk to anybody. And that's the best way to get me.

Amazing. And where are you located here in the US or Canada where people could, if they had patients they wanted to refer your way or co-manage some care with you, where would they find you?

I'm in Sarasota, Florida. Been here since 1983, or actually been in Sarasota since 1990, but I've been in Florida since '83. And this is where I am.

Wonderful. Sunny, sunny Florida for sure. Well, thank you so much, Butch. We really appreciate you coming on today. Thank you again, Butch. We appreciate your time today.

Thank you, Jessica.

That concludes our 2-part series with Butch Phelps, and what an incredible deep dive it's been. From uncovering why the brain, and not just the body, controls our ability to stretch, to learning practical techniques that can resolve issues like back pain or plantar fasciitis in just days, Butch's insights challenge the old playbook and offer a new way forward. If you'd like to explore his work further, you can grab a copy of his award-winning book, Stretch and Release, on Amazon. Or visit the link to his YouTube channel, The Muscle Repair Shop, in our show notes, where he has a full library of video trainings and tutorials. And as always, thank you for being part of our Factor community. In an effort to bring even more value to our listeners, you can now access the Factor podcast on Substack. Check out the link in our show notes to learn more and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode or other amazing free content and resources.

We'll see you next time.

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