178 Nic Bartolotta: The Truth Behind Stretching

Most people believe that stretching is supposed to be painful and that that sharp feeling when you relax into a stretch is what you're trying to accomplish. And that is honestly why most people don't stretch, is because it is painful. If you relax into a stretch when you resist with a muscle during a stretch, when you don't relax into a stretch, the muscle protects you from that pain. And then the pain is the guideline on how far into the stretch you should go. So as long as you maintain a contraction in a stretch, you're not going to feel the sharpness. The sharpness is actually the indicator that you're doing something wrong.

That's Nick Bartolotta, and this is episode 178 of Wellness Force Radio. What's up, my friend? It's your host, Josh Trent. And welcome back to another episode for your weekly access to global experts in all things wellness as we discover the physical and emotional intelligence we need to live life well. In this episode, we're standing tall with our best of the best conversations with Nick Bartolotta, number 113. This is our Standtall series with our partner Intelliskin, creators of Smart compression, human technology that pulls your shoulders back throughout the day. I cannot wait, by the way, for Dr. Tim Brown and Nick Bartolotto to do a podcast together. I'm just counting down the days till I can release that to Wellness Force Radio. I mean, talk about next level conversations for physical intelligence. And you're in for one of those today where Nick B. Teaches us about stretching, biotensegrity and human movement. And why this is so intriguing to me, and I know you're gonna love this too, is because what most people don't know is that our body actually has a second heart. It's on the back of our legs and it helps us with venous return, pushing blood back to our heart when we're walking, moving or doing anything at all that pumps our blood. And today on the podc, we're learning about a training technique for our body called dct, or Dynamic Contraction Technique from our friend, licensed physical therapist and founder of the National Resistance Stretching Association. We're diving into brand new topics like flexibility versus flexability, how to properly train our muscles using eccentric loading. Why Nick believes from working with thousands of clients and some of the top stars in the National Basketball association that we all have this second heart in our lower extremities. And what stretching does for this second heart, what it can do for our overall movement, quality and wellness. If you've ever had an injury or circulation issue that sidelines you on the wellness journey, or if you've been looking for a way to build up proper range of motion without compensating your joints, this is going to be a powerful episode for you. Be sure to listen until the end of the show where Nick discusses how to train flexibility using his invention, the Proflex and Roll Flex. And listen as he uncovers the most common mistakes that people make when training flexibility in new exercise programs. And also he answers the timeless question that so many pros for, some still are arguing back and forth about when exactly is the best time to stretch? Now Nick's answer is going to surprise you. So let's step in to this conversation with Nick Bartolotta. Nick Bartolotta is the founder of the National Resistance Stretching association and is a licensed physical therapist and holistic health practitioner specially trained as a flexibility and myofascial release expert. He's the co founder of Range of Motion products, maker of the Rollflex, and the creator of DCT Dynamic Contraction Technique, which we'll talk a lot about today on the show, which I'm really excited for. He actually got his start in alternative health after he got injured as an athlete when he was 19. He fell in love with the profession and successfully resolved his own knee injury in 2001. So over the past 17 years, he's dedicated his whole life to learning about the body, pushing the limits of human performance by applying these principles of DCT in his own training and for his clients and patients, including a ton of NBA stars for from LA Lakers, Houston Rockets, Dallas Mavericks, and more. Nick, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Josh. I'm excited to be here.

This is so fun. I got to see you in person, I got to work with you in person, and the connection between you and I runs deep. This message is so powerful about resistant stretching. I think it's something that I had a lack of clarity on and if I had a lack of clarity on it, I know that the audience and most people in wellness have probably a lack of clarity too. So what a powerful topic to discuss today. I want to go back to my time at the Wave House. It was like 10 plus years ago. You were building your business back then. You were studying dct, you had founded it, you were working with your mentors at that time. Looking back, what was it like to be at Mission beach and having conversations not exactly sure where you were going to go? Take us back to the beginning of your origin story, this really cool superhero story to the very beginning when you actually Founded dct.

It started, as you said, in, in college. I was a gymnast my whole life. Became a springboard diver in high school. I'm fairly tall for a gymnast, so I ended up being much more talented at diving and got a scholarship to UC Berkeley. And very quickly my freshman end of my freshman year was sidelined by what they call chondromalasia patella, which is just. I had basically worn the cartilage down to the bone. The pain was so sharp that when I would go to step at the end of the board, it would feel like someone was twisting a knife into my knee and my leg would buckle. So the real origins were the doctors being very frank with me and saying that if I couldn't handle the pain that I should pick a different sport. And that in 25 years I was told I would need a knee replacement. And I was 19 at the time, so it was really. It's not what a 19 year old wants to hear. And it didn't make sense to me. It didn't seem right just at my core. So I searched around in the alternative fields because the traditional routes hadn't worked for me and I was too young for them to do any kind of surgeries on. And I met a guy doing a form of resistance stretching called at the time meridian flexibility. And his name is Bob Cooley. And his, his book, actually I got to be part of the innovative process of him writing his first book on resistance stretching. And, and I mentored under him for about a year and a half, realized that there were some gaps in the science that I wanted answers to. I would ask very simple questions about what muscle tension is and why we're tight. And I couldn't get a direct answer from him or from my therapist at the time. And so I realized that when I started doing my research online that, you know, a lot of these things in physiology and exercise science, they're called theories. Like you have muscle sliding filament theory, and we take them as scientific fact. And yet the reality is that it's just the smartest person in the field's best idea of what's going on. And that was a pretty big revelation to me because most of us are brought up to believe that the doctors are speaking in facts, in absolutes, in what is true and what is absolutely a physical certainty. And what I came to learn, because through working with Bob initially we were able to fix my knee completely, first of all, within two months, like I went home for a summer.

And this is after the physician said there's no way you could heal this. There's nothing you can do.

That is after MRI showed that the left side of my knee was ground down to the bone. And absolutely, the doctors were telling me that there was absolutely no recourse and no solution. And the physical therapists were confirming that. And so when I got the first stretch, the first time I worked with my original teacher, he did one stretch with me, and it's a resistance stretch. So it's. There's. There's something. We're going to get into this today, I'm sure.

Oh, yeah, we're going to go deep into resistance stretching. I'm going to talk about my experience with you in person, but keep going, because I want to ask you a question about how you came from a rhetoric background.

Yeah.

To not wanting to take the answers they were giving you. How did that relate to this process of you saying, I don't accept your answer of I can't heal.

So basically what happened was that summer we fixed my knee. So in my mind, I knew that what the doctors were saying was false. Right. I didn't understand yet what that meant exactly. But I was in college, and I was. Like you said, I was a rhetoric major. And what that means for the layperson is usually people who go into rhetoric at Berkeley become lawyers. My family's a bunch of lawyers. I was heading towards law myself. There are three different tracks of the rhetoric major. There was the law, there was philosophy, and then there was this other track called narrative in the Image. And what that was about was learning to use language to basically write a paper in which you propose a theory and you subvert somebody's understanding or ideology or their belief system. And after they finish reading your paper, they have no way of going back to their previous belief system. So that part of my rhetoric major is what led me to use the therapy techniques, because it was the exact same process. When I started working with clients, initially, they would come in with certain beliefs about what stretching was, what tension was, what a stretch was supposed to feel like. And I would go through this argument process or dialogue process, and by the end of the session, I would prove to them by showing them what it was supposed to feel like and what was possible in their bodies that they could never go back to thinking about stretching the same way again.

I think it's such a cool connection, too, because you give people a result, a feeling they've never felt before, which is what I experienced from DCT But. But people come in with a mindset. They come in with a paradigm and then you just knock that paradigm off the counter. So looking back, I mean, there is this clear connection between what you learned with rhetoric and how that's used. Now. What is a common misconception about stretching per se, Nick. That most people, they just have such a wrong idea of what stretching actually is. Can you break that down for us?

Yeah, absolutely. Most people believe that stretching is supposed to be painful and that that sharp feeling when you relax into a stretch is what you're trying to accomplish. And that is honest. Why most people don't stretch is because it is painful if you relax into a stretch. And what we've discovered and the theories that I am now proposing around resistance stretching and the theories that I've been taught by a lot of my teachers over the years are that when you resist with a muscle during a stretch, when you don't relax into a stretch, the muscle protects you from that pain. And then the pain is the guideline on how far into the stretch you should go. So as long as you maintain a contraction in a stretch, you're not going to feel the sharpness. The sharpness is actually the indicator that you're doing something wrong. That concept of using sort of feedback driven therapy or feedback driven stretching is a new concept. You know, most people, even physical therapists, aren't asking the patient what they're feeling and they're not telling them what it should feel like. You know, when we've had our discussions in the past, I talked to you about how a requisite for becoming a DCT practitioner is that you receive. Receive enough of the bodywork and that receiving the bodywork on a regular basis is absolutely mandatory because if I don't know what it's supposed to feel like, then I can't communicate that to my, to my client or my patient. Without that communication of that experience, there's no way for me to bridge you through and actually educate you on what it's supposed to be like.

You wrote an article or co wrote an article a few years back for the Daily Burn. It's called are you stretching all wrong? And we'll link that in the show notes today. And in there you talked about deep. I think this is a great time for us to unpack what that actually is. Stretching is much different than dynamic contraction because there's one piece that's tight, there's one piece that's loose. Just because a yoga teacher comes behind you and pushes you down in forward fold, doesn't mean you're actually getting the benefit. Correct. Tell us about DCT what is dct?

DCT as a genre is a resistance stretching technique, which means that we're going to use muscle contractions. You have three different types of contractions that people, most people understand relative to weightlifting. So when you lift a weight like a bicep curl on the way up, when the muscle shortening is concentric on the way back down, where you're, you're lowering the weight but not just letting it drop and the muscles contracting, but getting longer, that's called the eccentric contraction. And then where you hold it still, like if you hold a plank position or halfway down, a push up to really hold that position. So a contraction with no movement is an isometric contraction. So what DCT is, is a very, very structured application of all three types of muscle contractions and a communication of what it's supposed to feel like when you do those so that we can actually change the physiology of your body. Yeah. And I have a couple. What you were talking about with the forward bend and actually pushing someone further into a stretch without them being able to actually maintain a contraction, it's likely you're doing more harm than good. And the reason why is because if the person can't maintain a contraction, then you're putting pressure into the joints and you're putting pressure onto the connective tissue. And if we return back to my knee injury, originally the reason why the cartilage wore out on the outside of the left knee was because my bones were actually twisted and torqued out of position by chronic tension in my hamstring. So all we did to fix my knee problem was take tension out of the lateral hamstring and the bones rotated back into position. So I went from being duck footed to having my feet straight ahead and my posture changed without me having to think about it, which is a big, a, big deal. There's a lot of techniques out there that try and teach you to control your posture, but if you don't fundamentally change the tissues in your body, it's kind of a. You're fighting against your own anatomy, your own, your own architecture.

Yeah. And I want to go back to what you said, where stretching should never be painful. It's not something where we need to feel a knife digging into our legs. Although we see sometimes in the yoga community, like breathing through the pain is okay. What do you think about that? Is that a misnomer?

Yeah. I strongly believe that when you breathe through the pain and you learn to disassociate from the pain, that creates a psychological, almost a personality trait where you become Depersonalized, you learn to live outside of your body. And it's not just from yoga. Like people who have a desk job all day and sit at the computer sitting for 10 hours, eight hours at a time. It's painful. And we'll force ourselves and learn to disassociate from the pain in order to do our jobs, to make a living. But that process of disassociating makes it harder to come back in and actually learn how to stretch appropriately. So it's interesting when I have somebody who is either a workaholic or a type A person that works 16 hour days, or I have someone who's done yoga for 20 plus years and it's a traditional passive type of yoga, not like a power yoga or Ashtanga practice. It might take them 50 or 60 repetitions before they can actually feel the muscle start to burn or fatigue or activate. And the principle in DCT is we never do an active stretch on a muscle without pre activating it first. So if you can't consciously feel the muscle fatiguing, we're never going to stretch you because that means you're not actually able to use the muscle that you're trying to stretch.

And I think what you're touching on is there's so many people that are just doing their jobs, they're disassociating, like you mentioned, from the physical body and they're just kind of living outside of it. I went through something like that recently. I did this seal fit 20x where there was things that were going off my body I had, I didn't want anything to do with. And that was just for a 14 hour period. But imagine over the course of five years or 10 years, people that are disassociating from their body that much, what can that lead to? Can that lead to chronic forward flexion? Can that lead to having a hump on our back? Can that lead to having knee pain? I mean, the disassociation like you're talking about, it's getting connected to what I want to talk to you about, what you called the second heart. There are two hearts in our bodies. What can that do for us if we disassociate for too long?

It's absolutely what causes both traumatic injury and chronic injuries. That's the process is we do either too much sedentary activity or we become overactive with our concentric training and we never balance it out. And we never learn how to actually remove the tension from the muscles or the tension from the connective tissue which we can get into, and that leads to traumatic injuries. So when I work with professional athletes, the reason why DCT and the myofascial release techniques that I use are so effective is because these guys have been. And women have been pulling so much concentric strength and tension into their body. But so few techniques emphasize an eccentric load to release tension that they get a huge, huge shift in how they feel in their bodies even after one treatment. Yeah. And so when we work together, I told you that after the session, you should feel profoundly different in your body. If you didn't, then there was either I didn't do my job correctly or there's something else that your body needed. And that's when I refer out to other modalities.

Yeah, I actually want to talk to you about that because I did a DCT session. We did some Shihatsu, which is where your feet are actually kind of rolling the tissue, getting it ready for the dct. When I left, I was driving away in the car. I felt high. I actually felt like. Not like I had taken a major drug or anything, but I definitely felt like I was floating on something that I don't normally float on. And I'm curious what that was. Whether you believe in smoke and mirrors or whether you believe in hardcore science, there is something to be said about emotions that get stuck in muscle tissue. What do you feel about that? Was I experiencing some of that?

Yeah. The best explanation I've seen illustrated is from a movie that came out a long time ago called what the Bleep Do We Know? Have you ever heard of it?

It's a great one. There's only one part that I don't agree with, but the rest of it I love.

Yeah. So the part of it that I agreed with a lot because when I first started the stretching, I was like the fast food poster child. I had the belief system that drinking water. There was no difference between drinking water and soda. So why would I drink water over if I could have a soda pop? I literally was that unconscious about the body. And so when I started doing the stretching, I got the same kind of high you were talking about. And what ended up happening was in that movie, they show these little animations of neural peptides that are released from your brain, chemicals that are released from your brain when you have different experiences. So, you know, anger sends chemicals down into your tissues. Happiness, joy, all these things have a chemical release. And you can get addicted to those chemicals the same way you can a narcotic or a drug. And so what I took away from it was that the experience of that euphoric kind of high that you felt is literally your brain dumping neuropeptides into the tissues that you hadn't felt before. And it's always the first session is always my favorite with people because it is like a revelation. Like you come out of the experience. And most people have never done anything remotely similar to that type of training. It's just not in the educational system yet. Like, I had a lot of difficulty in graduate school for my physical therapy license with my professors because my theories were not in the textbooks yet. And in 10 years, 15 years, I can guarantee you that they're going to be taken as self evident, as obvious common knowledge. Like that eccentric loading is and must be done to keep balance between this idea of tensegrity or balance between strength and flexibility that we talked about in our session.

Let's talk about that. The tensegrity. Everything kind of goes into one another like a honeycomb or a spider web. This concept of biology, biotensegrity, it was actually tensegrity was conceived by Buckminster Fuller. He's the one that coined the term. Tell us about that. I mean, why does everything kind of rope into one another? And does literally our foot possibly contribute to our shoulder pain? Do they all work together?

Yeah, absolutely. And you saw me glancing around. I have a. I have a model which isn't in my office at the moment, but a tensegrity model. There's a kid's toy that attaches sticks with. With rubber bands, basically. And the way there's like seven or eight sticks that are. And this is Buckminster Fuller's concept, is that you can, you can have rigid structures attached by ropes or cables. And those structures won't be pulled into one another if the tension on the, on the ropes is balanced correctly. So those sticks, like our body, it's called a closed system of tension. The sticks will be held away from one another, but all the ropes are pulling in. So it's very counterintuitive. But when you see one of these simple kids toys, and I'm tempted to like run out and find this structure to show you. But when you pull in and twist one side of the toy, the whole system gets pulled and torqued. Because it's, like I said, a closed system of tension.

Yeah.

So when you go and see a myofascial specialist, like someone who does Rolfing or structural integration, or even just someone who does deep tissue massage, they can absolutely work the bottom of your foot. And it'll help relieve tension headaches. Because there's a guy, Tom Myers, in my mind has created the most comprehensive book or understanding of fascial lines. And he calls them anatomy trains. And his book has these images of the fascial lines and you can see how the bottom of the foot is completely attached to the back of the head.

And looking at fascia, I mean it's literally spider webs stacked upon spider webs that connect every single tissue in our body, every other tissue. Like there's no separation, Correct?

That's correct. And the unique, I guess the most unique thing about DCT versus other forms of resistance stretching is that I've taken the time to differentiate between two different systems of tension in the body. So we have stretches like yoga stretches that affect the fascia or the connective tissue by the way that they position the body into these postures that pull on the whole what I like to call the wetsuit, right, the full body sheet of fascia. And then we have stretches that specifically go after the local muscle tension inside the muscles. And so, yes and no, it is all connected. And then there's also the individual muscles that are going to be affecting the joints. And when we teach you how to understand the difference between being tight fascially or being tight in your muscles, you can start to understand how to actually self treat and how to mitigate tension as it's forming in your body.

I want to go back too, because there's a different piece. There is the fascial tension, there's the muscle tension, they're very different. But when we look at the body as this completely comprehensive system. You wrote an article that I loved, it was called stretching your second heart and there's a quote here. With this understanding of how tension in the body can affect blood circulation, you can turn your attention towards what it takes to mitigate problems and injuries. Key injuries that happen by the way, from maybe having too much fascial and, or muscle tension, but they're separate. I'm curious if you can tell us about this connection between, between the lower calf, the soleus, the gastrocnemius, and why this is what some people believe to be our second heart. How does that relate to dct?

This is a principle that we, we learned in PT school. The calf or the lower leg is so vascularized, which means it's so full of capillary beds and veins that when we walk, you know, they call it cardiovascular training because when you exercise your muscles, they contract and that, that pumps and squeezes on the veins and pushes blood back to the heart. So when you walk or jog or run the soleus, which is one of the deepest muscles in your lower leg, in the calf, every time you take a step, it's pumping blood out of the legs and back to your heart. So when older people or the geriatric population, when you sit for too many hours in the day, your legs will swell up and you'll get edema, as they call it, because you're not moving the blood out of the lower leg. So one of the most simple ways to get rid of edema is you simply have the person pump their ankles every once in a while, and that helps circulate the blood, and that helps pump the second heart. But the second heart, the soleus, essentially, if it's so restricted with fascial tension or muscle tension, it's not going to be able to pump. It's like a sponge. If you squeeze a sponge, it'll stay dry and water won't penetrate, right? So if you have so much tension that. That. That muscle is staying tight and squeezed blood can't circulate through it. So when we do resistance stretching, we address the fascia on top of it, and then we actually get the muscle to resist against itself from the inside out, and it rips apart adhesions, and then it lets that sponge fill up with blood. And then when you go out and run now, all of a sudden, you can actually circulate the blood again.

I think this is a key piece to focus on, too. This is the real. In my opinion and in my own personal differentiation of DCT with just stretching, DCT goes in, it releases the adhesions, it releases all the things that are tensioned improperly. And then only then once you've loosened up what you need to loosen, does it stretch the correct musculature. Is that what we're understanding through dct?

Yeah. And it's. I do want to say it's. It's resistant stretching as a whole. So there's. The reason why I formed the National Resistance Stretching association is because a lot of the students and people that I was learning with from Bob way back, you know, in. In 2000, 2001, we all kind of branched out and everybody took this concept of using resistance while you stretch. And they created systems that are all incredibly viable and valuable. And so I wanted to create an umbrella organization where everybody in this genre could come together and could host courses and where you could learn about the different techniques that are out there. Because I don't have DCT practitioners in every state, you know, but there are kihara practitioners or M11 practitioners or we're all over the country. It's just we might not all be doing dct, but we're working with these concepts of resistance stretching. So I want to be a little bit careful not to make people feel like if they're listening to your show in the middle of the country and we don't have a DCT practitioner out there, you know, check in with the resistancetrenching.com hub and find out who is near you because the concepts are very similar. Yeah, it's just in dct, I've done a lot of the legwork and jumped through a lot of the hoops to learn the science and create information that helps people bridge or understand what's going on really, really clearly.

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Oh absolutely. The technique itself can be done. Everything I do by hand or one of my practitioners does by hand can be learned to do on your own. You know, we're in the process of creating really, really phenomenal apps or you know, applications that you can download your phone and you know, the goal being that you you can buy one of our tools or products that learns and gives you leverage because a big part of the challenge with resistance stretching is that it requires leverage to create enough force to get an eccentric stretch. Right. So a lot of the tools you'll see on our website have to do with increasing self leverage or providing leverage to apply these techniques to people. I mean, all the way down to we have isokinetic machines, you know, these very expensive machines now that we can use to do resistance stretching with.

Yeah, the Proflex tool. I want to talk about this because this is a DCT specific tool. Lots of NBA players. We'll link this in the show notes where there's people that are doing it before the game on Instagram. And it's a long plank board that you have actually patented along with six or seven other things that are DCT specific. However, there's a lot of pro athletes that are using this board. Is that addressing the second heart?

Yeah, that's why I wrote the article about the second heart, was because the Proflex is designed specifically for the lower leg and the gastrocnemius soleus and then also the anterior Tibetan rib, which is on the front of the shin. And there's a principle in DCT where we always work the balancing muscle group or the agonist or antagonist muscle group relationship. The reason has to do with the joint mechanics and keeping the joint as healthy as possible so that you not only make the muscle tissue healthier, but you make the joints work better. So that's why when you stand up after a five minute protocol, your legs feel lighter and looser and you feel that high, because we've made it so that blood circulates through tissue that hasn't had oxygen or nutrients in a long time. But then you also can do a functional movement like a squat. And all of a sudden you can squat deeper because your ankle can bend further. A lot of people don't understand this. They think, oh, I can't do a deep squat because my hips or my knees are a problem. Well, we look at every part of the kinetic chain and if you look at the feet, if your ankle stops being able to bend, like if your toes can't pull up towards your shin very far when you go to squat, your heels are going to come off the ground or you're going to feel like you're going to fall back on your butt. So a lot of times I can work with an athlete who has never taken tension out of their lower leg properly. And just by working with the Proflex and doing the DCT protocols, we can change their game like immediately. And so I've had the opportunity to actually go and be on the court during pre game, shoot around and actually they send the guys over. We do a two minute protocol in whatever areas are restricted and they go out and they play.

And I think this is the paradigm that has been needed to be shifted for so long with people that just stretch. There's all these theories and information and the ocean of confusion out there about stretching when cold, when should we stretch? When we work out, and just so much confusion around it. However, the biggest result that's most important in my opinion is how you move and how you feel when you move. So these pro athletes are trusting you. They're trusting this proflex. We'll definitely link that in the show notes. But there is a big play on words that I love. You put in your literature and it's flexibility versus flex ability. Can you describe that? Why did you change that?

It's the best way to explain something that can be really confusing. It is truly a play on words. So if you actually look in the dictionary, I'm playing around with language a little bit, but it really works. And so flexibility, people think of someone who can do the splits or can lengthen their muscles a lot. That's typically what we think of as flexibility. But if we were to break apart the word and have it be flex ability. Right. Flex means to flex or shorten a muscle.

Yeah.

And the ability to flex a muscle actually is far more important than the ability to lengthen a muscle. And I can explain it to you in a way that you'd understand. It is if I have an unflexible bicep. Right. It means it can't get long. But that's not when injuries happen. Typically it's when the muscle has to get short. So if my biceps on flexibility flexible, and I wedge my fist in between my elbow joint and then I try and force my arm to bend around that fist, it's gonna blow out the opposite side of the joint. So I like telling the story about Kobe Bryant when he tore his Achilles. The standard thought process on that is that his calf was weak or he was fatigued, or he had a tendonitis or tendinosis in his Achilles tendon and it just gave out. But if you look at the mechanism of injury, when he stepped backwards and the front of his ankle tried to flex up towards his shin, he was unflexible. He was unflex able on the front of the shin and that forced all the pressure to the back of the heel and popped the Achilles off. So I have found with most of my athletes, we can avoid traumatic injuries by looking at which joints need to flex, need to shorten versus which muscles need to lengthen. And we get far more results when we do that.

So then what actually causes the knot? Because what I'm hearing from you is flex ability. But along with that, isn't there a tertiary point of someone having a knot? I mean, what creates knots?

Yeah, again, my theory. And if you were to ask that question to any doctor or therapist, you'll get a circular answer, which is really funny to me. So I would ask, hey, why am I so tight? And they'd say, you've got muscle tension in your muscles. And I'd say, okay, yeah, so what exactly is muscle tension? And they say, oh, it's knots, it's knots in the muscle. And I'd say, okay, well, what's a knot? And they'd say, yeah, well, it's muscle tension. And I was like, that is not explaining to me what it is. And in order to understand how to fix something, you need to understand what it is first, in my opinion. Right.

Yeah.

So my theory again on what a knot is, is inside each muscle you have these fibers that are made up of chain links on a row. And I don't know, I try and keep it really simple, but these chain links are called sarcomeres. And when you contract a muscle, all these chain links, there's sometimes 50,000 of them in a series inside a muscle fiber that have to slide together little link by little link, and that's how you contract and shorten a muscle. Right. So what I believe is going on is there's a dysfunction or something that causes that link to bind or fuse. So you don't get the sliding action of that one microscopic fiber. Now, they're very tiny. They're, they're small chain links. So you don't notice a problem for 5 years, 10 years, 15 years. It really doesn't become a chronic tension issue until you're about to get a traumatic injury. So by the time when you blow the disc out in your back, when you, when you herniate or rupture a disc, that doesn't happen to 10 year olds, 12 year olds, 15 year olds. Right. It doesn't even happen to usually 20 year olds. Unless in certain cases there's severe situations where it does happen.

Yeah.

But when you've put 10, 20, 30 years of sitting into your life where you've played an explosive sport that's pulled tension into the front of your hips, your hip flexors, you blow your back out when you do something as simple as bending down to pick up a Kleenex or your shoe.

This is so funny. I remember working at a gym, one of my clients was like, I hurt my back reaching for a shampoo bottle in the shower.

That's right.

And I was like, no, that's not when you heard it. It was probably something you did quite before. And you're saying the same thing.

That's exactly when you heard it. And I call it a hammer, like in some of my videos. Like here it's my fist blocking the elbow joint. And you can see if I force it, it's going to blow the elbow out. In one of my analogies I talk about a door. And if you put a hammer in a door hinge and then you, you open the door or close the hinge around the hammer, it rips the hinge out of the door. Yeah, this is a mechanical fact. You can try this on your door at home if you want to ruin your door. So when your client or friend reached to grab that shampoo bottle, that hammer was wedged in the front of the hips and the joint on the opposite side that's going to blow out is the lower back. So we teach principles of what I like to call mitigating tension, tension mitigation practices. And, and these are lifestyle habits like as simple as getting up every 30 minutes and doing a hip flexor stretch. If you've been at your desk for that long. You know, if you're going to work an eight hour day, some people will tell you you should get up every 20 minutes. But I believe with DCT and resistance stretching techniques that if you get up and don't just walk around, but you do a 1 minute or 2 minute DCT stretch for your hip flexors, you can sit for 45 minutes to an hour to an hour and a half without causing damage to your body. But you need to be associated enough, you can't be disassociated from your body. You have to be able to understand when you're starting to build that tension. I've gotten to a point with having done this work for so long and so many years that I can feel when I need to crack my knuckles or pop my shoulders or do self chiropractic type of movements. I can feel when I need to go and stretch. And I'm fortunate enough to have a gym in my house like a little, a little gym with a cable pulling machine and a lot of these DCT tools and other modalities. That I found and I'll go for five or 10 minutes and just take the tension out of my body before it becomes a problem.

There's things people can do. I mean, we don't have to have gyms in our homes. If you're at work, if you have this eight, ten hour day where you're at the desk, there's all kinds of things you can do. And I think what it circles back to, Nick, is it's being associated with your body again. It's how do I get it home in my own body that I'm living in and how do I stop ignoring the pain that I might be having? There's tools we can use too. I actually got to use out this Rollflex, which we'll show here on the YouTube video. It is phenomenal. Especially after my 20x event, I was doing some forearm work. What a great way to take away pain. What exactly is this doing though? Because this is your creation. This is something that you've brought to the market. What is this all about?

I'm co inventor with a friend of mine, Terry Cross. And what Terry came up with initially was this concept of creating compressive or a leverage based technique that imitated what you would do with a massage therapist.

So like a Shihatsu.

Yeah. And the difference. So the Roll flex, we call it the foam roller reimagined. Because what it is is we're using leverage instead of gravity. So a traditional foam roller, you have to get on the ground and you got to try and find a way to position your body if you're strong enough to lay on the ground to do that. And you're limited by gravity and your own body weight. With most of the tools out, they're these stick tools that you have to use your own muscle strength. Right.

The tiger tails, the rollers.

Right, all. All those things. And so what Terry and I did was we created a tool that allows you to hit about 95% of the muscles on your body and does it with leverage instead of gravity. So you can literally apply force from both sides of the arm, you know, as though. And there's this green roller on there and the middle roller is bigger and it's supposed to imitate like my thumb. It creates this trigger point pressure. But the real value in the product is in the name. It's called the Roll flex. And so when we use the product and the videos that are for free online for that product, they teach you to find a trigger point and then flex the muscle under that pressure. And what you're doing essentially is you're breaking up adhesions or scar tissue or connective tissue, the fascia from the inside of the muscle out. And there are very expensive physical therapy techniques that you can spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars going and receiving. And there's a lot of value in having a trained specialist perform those with you. But what we've tried to do is explain to people that going once a week or three times a week to physical therapy is good. Learning how to do certain things on your own every day, a couple times a day, is how you're gonna really change your body.

Drop the mic. We're done with the interview. That was it. No, I'm just joking. That was such a powerful sentence. That's what this whole mission is all about. It's trying to give people tools so they can live life well. And this is a tool. What you're talking about is a tool. I want to talk to you about the last section of our show. This is where we get to know you a lot more. You've been really gracious, man. You've told us so much about you. It's been so educational. There's probably going to be about 50 links in our show notes today, but this is the last round of the show. So it's seven fast questions for seven of Nick's answers. Are you ready?

I'm ready.

Okay, the first question around mistakes. When people go into a new workout program, when they're diving into a new exercise piece, what's the typical thing they make a mistake on?

I'd say not doing a dynamic warmup. People tend to think they're indestructible and they tend to do workouts where they either passively stretch for a couple minutes, but your best results are going to be doing a dynamic warm up, doing something that has either big ranges of motion or movements that are controlled that open up the joints and prepare your body for work. Obviously, the tools, then the techniques that I teach in dct, we have warm up routines, we have techniques that we show people. But you're far better off doing bear crawls on the ground for two minutes before you go out and run or do something than grabbing your heel and pulling it up to your butt for a stretch of your quad.

I love that it's incredibly true because you're actually getting your temperature to rise, you're getting all your joints to mobilize and you're putting your body under load. But it's not external load. You're just learning how to move your own body. So thank you for singing that. When's the best time to stretch then? There's so many different informational pieces about stretching. Is it for maximum benefit before we exercise? There's been reports in the past years that cold stretching can actually damage us. When we work out from a therapist perspective, when should we be stretching?

So the answer to your question has to do with what kind of stretching you're doing. Passive stretching, you should never do. So I want to be really careful here. I don't want to give the impression that yoga is bad at all. We've talked about yoga and used some examples of yoga.

I love yoga.

I do too. And the point is though, is that there are certain practices of yoga that use resistance. They don't talk about it explicitly the way that I do in dct, but if you're doing postures that require isometric contractions of the muscle, it's safe to do that. Passive stretching is absolutely something that should never be done before or after stretching. After the show. You should never relax a muscle completely into a stretch. You should always hold at least a little bit of tension on the muscle because what that's going to do is it's going to tell you whether or not you're beyond your range of motion. Because if you can't contract a muscle, you shouldn't be in that position. And if you contract the muscle and then go further and further into position, it'll start to get painful. And that's when you stop.

I think you just blew like half the audience's mind because no one really thinks about that. The partial contraction when stretching.

Yeah, it's just once you receive a DCT session, you walk away and you'll never stretch the same again. You'll never relax into a stretch because it won't feel good anymore. Yeah, your brain, your brain, brain will understand that that pain is actually not what it should feel like because you've had an experience of it feeling good. But to answer your question, a warm up stretch is more about dynamic motion and engaging the muscles and the joints. Think about it this way. You're going to go out and exercise and pull tension into your body. Right. So when should you take tension out of the body after you've pulled it in? So you're going to want to emphasize your resistance. Stretching practice after you exercise.

Awesome. Now you're busy, you have a full schedule. You're an educator, you're a husband, you're an entrepreneur. How do you balance responsibilities but while also enjoying the process of life? Do you have a north star that guides you as you move about your life to not get overwhelmed.

For me, my North Star has always been the stretching, right? Anytime I've gotten out of balance has been when I've gone a week or two weeks without doing a good practice or stepping away from my discipline. And, and I use the word discipline because stretching and this type of resistance stretching, you're going to find, is a lot like a martial art where you start off as a white belt and you don't really know what's going on and it's awkward and it's uncomfortable and you don't know what you're doing. And then you get better at it. And then, you know, after four years, three to four years, you're, you're pretty darn good. And then seven years in, you're a master. I mean, you, you're a black belt. You've done the work. You can get by for weeks at a time without having to go back and train, right? But even the black belt, the person that's put the time and the work in, when they go past that certain point, they have to come back and then they have to do that work and that foundational training. So I've always made it a point in my life to have a trade relationship with a therapist or a stretching partner. Right now I've got a good friend of mine from college who can't afford my services, and so I've taught him how to stretch, how to reciprocate and do DCT assisted stretches with me. When we hang out and we do some stretching and we do some of the shiatsu work, you know, it's a, it's a very rewarding relationship. So that's kind of always been my balancing, my balancing North Star in terms of my, my psyche.

If you had the power, if you were granted the power to change our healthcare system, our broken sick care system, or some of the policies that affect us in a negative way, what would you do? What might you institute from a policy standpoint if you had that power?

Well, first off, I would give physical therapists direct access in California to patients. A lot of times the process of injury gets worse when you have to wait three weeks to get your doctor to prescribe you treatment. And then in the state of California, a physical therapist is technically not allowed to work on any part of the body that's not written explicitly on the prescription, which intuitively, if you understand a doctor's role, is not to be an expert in body mechanics and understand the mechanism of injury. So if I know That I need to work your foot or ankle to fix your shoulder. I can't technically legally do that in the state of California as a physical therapist unless the doctor explicitly writes it. So that's why I have and maintain a holistic health license as a massage therapist and I do my therapy sessions as a holistic health practitioner. So my PT license has been incredibly important for me to jump through the hoops and have the credibility with the doctors and in the medical profession and do business with the medical profession. But something that needs to be fixed is physical therapists and, or body workers in general, Massage therapists or even personal trainers that work in manual resistance training should be given. They should be the first line of defense. You know, if you go and we up the education standards for those disciplines, they should be able to be trained in how to identify if you have, you know, if you're not getting results, then we refer you out to a doctor that checks you for cancer. Right. Like, it's not that complicated.

Yeah, I liked how you said the first line of defense too, because there's clues that are always appearing, but we have to open our eyes to be able to see them, but the clues are always going to be there. Now, when you get stressed out, I'm sure you have times in your life where everything's not just roses and perfect. Do you have mantras or do you have a self narrative that pulls you away from negative thoughts?

I've learned this from my dad. Every morning my dad wakes up and he looks at himself in the mirror and he says, vince, you handsome devil, you, don't you ever die? It's like his daily mantra. And I've seen him go through a bout of cancer and go through full remission. And every day he does that. And so every day I just affirm that everything's okay and I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. And I just remind myself that if I can go out and I can change one person's perspective, you know, every day I can have a conversation and I can invest enough into that conversation to let that person know they're being heard and that I care enough about them to give them some information, you know, that they don't necessarily have to pay for, then I feel like I'm affirming what I do.

Man, such a great answer. I did not expect that. And we'll definitely give your dad credit for that. Mirror work. That is awesome. Mirror work, man. I'm curious for you. In this stage of your life, you've created this Incredible DCT program and all these things you're working on in the past 17 years. What is wellness to you now, you know, in your life, in this moment, and what you're looking ahead to creating. What is wellness to you?

It's a combination of Western and Eastern practices. It's the blending of the far esoteric with the Western traditional modalities. There's too many people that are polarized, and where resistance stretching kind of comes in is, you know, I've played on the far end of each spectrum. You know, I went far Western training with my PT license. I went far Eastern alternative with my training originally with Bob Cooley. And, you know, I met in the middle and I think bridging the gap so that we can realize that there's never going to be a shortage of work for doctors and surgeons that need to do appropriate surgeries. I want to tell you that I am absolutely not anti surgery. Like. Like when someone comes in and they have an architectural problem in their joint that I cannot stretch the tissues around that and fix, I refer them immediately to go get an MRI or an X ray. And if it's going to take six weeks to get that, I suggest that they just cough up the 400 bucks and pay cash for it instead of trying to get their Insurance to pay $2,000 or $4,000. Get the information as quickly as possible and find out if there is an architectural problem. Because if there is, you need surgery. There's so many people that think that it's one or the other, and it's not. And bridging and communicating and bringing the two sides together is where the magic's gonna happen in the next era.

And I think what you're talking about is this blending of naturopathic medicine with traditional medicine. And there is a point for surgery, like, we have to have this because emergencies happen, bad things happen. It's how probably a lot of people could have been healed if they would allow themselves to just take a medication when they were sick. But there are some people out there with a mindset or they're so holistic and they're so pure that they don't even want to go there. I think that anytime we're leaning too far into one camp and not just being aware enough to look at both, we get in trouble, man. So thank you so much for being on the show today, sharing your gifts with us. Is there a specific place people can go to learn more about doing DCT at home, learning more about contraction stretching and understanding how this relates to their condition? If they're having pain at work or at home.

Absolutely. DCT for health. The number four is my homepage and there's a key note speech called optimizing flex ability where I think I distill down a lot of these concepts. And then resistancestretching.com the site is being built as we speak, so you're going to be seeing changes in online courses. And all of our NRSA endorsed educators will be getting their bios up there within the next couple months. And then obviously the products can all be seen from those homepages. But the Rollflex which you showed is irollflex.com and that product alone is the first of three major components to what I believe healthcare is about. And that's myofascial release. So that's the massage, the tissue work, resistance stretching, and then activation. So you cannot get well unless you're gonna go out and do the activity that you want to be good at. And I draw that from some lectures that I do with Gary Veti, who's become a great friend and was the head trainer for the Lakers for 33 years. And his three pronged approach that myofascial release, resistance, stretching and activation are why he stayed in the NBA. He is one of the longest tenured NBA athletic trainers. And his philosophy he calls the locker room is not a locker room. He calls it his wellness clinic. And that is, that's a really important thing to recognize is that he had a holistic understanding of the human body to have his success.

Yeah. And they don't play games in the NBA. Well, they play them on the court, but they don't play them in the locker room. Like, if you don't get results as a coach or an athletic trainer, you're out. So the fact that he's made it that long, there's obviously some science and some validity to what's been occurring with resistance stretching. So such an enjoyable conversation with you. I'm looking forward to learning what you're up to for the rest of the year and 2018. I also want to thank you, my men's coach, Johnny Blackburn, who has impacted my life so much. We've talked about his work and David Dita's work that he introduced me to. We're all connected here in this wellness industry, in this wellness world world. And I want to thank you for the healing you gave to him. You actually allowed him to walk through some of your services and some of your help. So double thank you for sharing your gifts on the Wellness Force radio show and helping someone who's impacted my life. So Nick, thanks so much for coming on man.

You're welcome.

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