Welcome to the FAKTR 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.

What if the real barrier to flexibility isn't your muscles, but your brain? Research shows that the longer you hold a traditional static stretch, the more your nervous system resists locking the body down instead of letting it release. Welcome back to the FAKTR Podcast. I'm your host Jessica Riddle and today we're diving into a fascinating conversation that challenges one of the most common practices in healthcare and fitness stretching. Our guest, Butch Phelps, lmt, is the creator of the Stretch and Release technique and author of the award winning book Stretch and Release. With over two decades of experience in muscle science, Butch has worked with everyone from aging populations to elite athletes. And what he's discovered will forever change how you view flexibility, pain and performance. In this first installment of our two part series, you'll learn why conventional stretching often falls short, how the brain plays a bigger role in muscle tension than most realize, and why rethinking your approach could unlock breakthroughs for your patients or clients. So grab something to take notes with and get comfortable.

Let's dive in.

Welcome to everybody who came on on this podcast today. Very happy to be here. What we're going to talk about today is is a different way of thinking about the muscles from what we've thought about in the past. Many things that I had learned over the last 20 years were not things I was necessarily taught in school and so you'll have plenty of courses, I'm sure at the end, but we will touch base on all those and help you better understand that as well. So I am a licensed massage therapist. I focus in neuromuscular massage and also into sports massage. And once I finished school and got from that I went into what's called aging sciences. How do we age from age 30 to death from the emotional side as well as from the physical side of that.

I was very fortunate that once I finished school, I started to meet some people who became mentors of mine. I had two neurosurgeons, kinesiologists, and actually a physical therapist and a chiropractor who became good friends as well as mentors. And as I started to really understand the muscles from a emotional standpoint, I started to see that it was something drastically missing from that. One of the things that I found, and of course I experiment a lot on my own body because at the time I was dealing with low back pain myself. And I started to look at how the emotional side and what I'm talking about that is that when you think about the muscles, everything we think, feel and do actually causes the muscles to contract and put us into the fight or flight or can take us out of the fight or flight. And so that sort of led me down the path that as I got into working with physicians and with other therapists dealing with chronic aches and pains from people, that became a major piece in what I did to help people resolve those issues. So one of the first places that I actually began working was a senior center. And I figured that as I started putting these pieces together, what better place to find than to be working with people who are older, who are dealing with chronic pain on a regular basis? And I was lucky enough that they had 54 retired physicians there.