(upbeat electronic music with acoustic guitar)
- Welcome, my friends, to the Bob and Brad Podcast,
produced by Bob and Brad,
the two most famous physical therapists on the internet.
I am Bob, and I am exactly one-half
of the Bob and Brad team,
and today, I'm gonna be joined by Dr. Robert Schleip.
We are fellow Germans,
and he knows everything there is to know about fascia.
And I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, what do I need to know about fascia?
You are gonna be amazed how this can affect your life.
If you're having problems with plantar fasciitis, back pain,
all sorts of things that you didn't think were related
to fascia, it could be the answer to your problems.
And also, if you wanna stay young, you gotta see this guy.
I mean, I won't tell you his age,
but we'll reveal that in the podcast,
and we'll reveal it on the video.
You're gonna be amazed.
He looks a lot younger than he is,
and there's a good reason for it.
So, welcome to the show Dr. Robert Schleip.
Okay, I wanna welcome to the show Dr. Robert Schleip.
I'm so glad you joined us today.
- Yes, I'm very much looking forward, Bob,
because I'm one of your heroes,
and you are one of my heroes.
- Vice versa. - I'm one of your fans,
all the way across the Atlantic here in Munich, Germany.
- Awesome, and as we mentioned before,
I also have a German background,
so we'll get along just great.
So let's talk about treating and training fascia.
What are your, you've got four training principles,
basically, that line up with the four functions, right?
- Mmhmm, yeah.
- So could you talk about the training principles?
- Oh, sure.
Yeah, so the first one would be the elastic recall capacity.
That is, of course, very, very important.
So you do these bouncing elastic recall capacities.
The second one would be that you do end-range stretches,
so it means stretches where you go towards the limit,
but not before, and there, you include a lot of variation.
So multi-directional and multi-joint stretches
rather than isolated stretches.
- Gotcha. - So that you have there.
And the third one we already mentioned,
is the nutritional function.
So you try to squeeze the fascial tissues,
lengthwise, but also perpendicular, as a sponging effect.
So foam rolling would be included in that.
And finally, fascia is a sensory organ.
So you do exercises where your attention is not outside
catching the ball and hitting a blow,
but where your attention is inside of the body
so that you train your mindful body perception
and you use fascial multi-directional movement
to feel your body on a delicate level from the inside.
So it would be the sensory perception training.
Then you have all of the four pieces
that most of the professional fascia trainers include
into their training recommendations.
- Now, this, again, is a little bit off-track here,
but you have in the book
to try to determine what type of fascia you have.
- Oh, yeah, yeah. - It's very helpful,
because anybody could do this.
I mean, anybody could do the testing
and determine if they were a viking or, what was it?
I know it's from Janda, the upper-cross and all that.
- Yeah, so that would be the crossover type.
- Crossover type, right.
- So you have the Bendy Wendy or hyper-flexible.
We call it the temple dancer, because if you have ever seen
Indian temple dance where the women are doing
with their hands incredible flower postures.
If I wanted to learn that,
somebody needed to break my fingers,
because they can bend each finger 90 degrees backwards.
But in medicine, those people in our society
would be called hypermobile,
but in India, for many women, it is natural,
and they have no problems, and they become dancing stars.
So some people have a constitutional
or genetic tendency to be hypermobile
or to be more mobile than others of the same age,
and that was more common and still is more common in women,
in Asia, but not so common in men living in Scandinavia.
There, you find more vikings
who are prone toward the viking disease
that is a stiffening of the fascia in the side of the hand.
When they are 60 years,
many of them sleep with flexed hands,
not because the muscles are short,
but because the fascia gets short.
That is called the vikings disease.
Many people in North America, but also in central Europe,
their ancestors have been living,
or some of their ancestors had been living in Scandinavia,
so we have the genes for it, many of us.
And these people tend to be more stable and more stiff.
They are not so talented
to be in the first row of a yoga class.
But they are made more for stability
and for living in an outer climate
where you want muscular friction in order to generate heat.
So we have a test to find out to what degree
are you a viking, or are you a hyper-flexible dancer body?
Then you have different recommendations.
- Based upon that, right.
- And then there is a third type
that is not so much genetic.
It is more your lifestyle,
and it's based on the Czechoslovakian
or the Czechnian teacher Vladimir Janda,
and that is called the crossover type,
and that is very interesting,
that you're stiff in some parts of your body
and hyper-flexible and weaker in other parts of the body.
So you can find out whether you're a viking
or whether you are hyper-flexible
or whether you are a crossover type.
- Very good, very good.
So, we're gonna talk about the back now again.
The back is obviously densely populated with pain receptors,
you said in the book.
So could you talk about, how does that present itself?
Is there a way that you think this person
is definitely having trouble with their fascia in the back,
or is it just one of the many things that may be happening?
- So when people have excruciating back pain,
they usually go to a doctor,
and they do some imaging usually, MRI or x-ray
to see if there's anything happening to the spine.
In 15 to 20%, the spine is or the disc as part of the spine
are the cause of the low back pain.
But in 80 to 85%, all the experts agree that this pathology
is happening only as it happens in people of the same age,
but it's not the cause of low back pain.
So it means in the majority of low back pain,
we have no agreement on what the cause is.
But in a few years, we will have ultrasound imaging,
so the same imaging that they're already doing,
to see whether your fascia is glued to each other
in the way that I have described it before.
Then you don't need to do surgery for the discs.
You don't need to do muscular training
or to do psychotherapy
when actually a fascia-oriented treatment
would be the best treatment of all.
But we don't have the ultrasound examination yet
in a reliable way.
I think we are two years, maybe three years away,
because we need thousands of different people
to know, what is the average thickness
for people of your age, et cetera.
What we already have is indications,
and fascia-generated back pain spreads more.
You cannot pinpoint it with the finger.
- Gotcha, gotcha.
- And that has been done in very, very nice,
high-quality research at the University of Heidelberg
where they injected a painful, irritating substance
either into the lumbar fascia or into the lumbar muscles,
and when you have muscular low back pain,
you can pinpoint it.
It is a small area.
But fascia back pain, you use your whole palm and say,
"Somewhere down there."
- Can that refer into the legs too?
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So if it spreads to a larger area, that is not proof,
but it's an indication that you more likely
have fascia-generated back pain.
And the second one is if it feels more emotional.
If you have muscular low back pain,
people say it's a hot pain or a cold pain
or it's a piercing pain, but if you give
the same irritating substance into the lumbar fascia,
they say it's a mean pain, it's an agonizing pain.
- Oh, weird.
- So they use emotional description.
And some people do that with everything, you know.
Whenever they have a disappointment,
they say, "Poor me," et cetera,
and then don't blame the fascia.
But if your patient is somebody
who copes well with other challenges,
but since they have this new kind of back pain,
they seem to become a different character,
where they complain and pity themselves, et cetera,
it may be a second indication together
with a bigger area of spreading and radiation
that maybe they have fascia-generated back pain,
because it fits to the overall picture
that we have from different experiments.
- So just as an overall advising to try to treat this,
one, they could try the stretches
and the back movements you show in the book,
and then probably some foam rolling?
- Yep, yep.
If the foam roll, you start with a roll
that doesn't feel comfortable first,
where you go, "Holy moly," like four-syllable exhalation.
(Robert laughs)
So not ouch, but also not nice, but you go,
"Holy moly, mama mia, oh my gosh."
(Bob laughs) - I like that.
- So we call it a beneficial pain
where you have a long exhale,
at least three syllables, better four syllables,
and that would be the best foam roll if you have back pain,
because already after a minute, you will realize,
oh, this is not as bad as it felt
in the first second you were foam rolling.
So that would be a very good treatment for people
who have low back pain that fits into these two categories:
it's a big area, and it feels a little bit more emotional
than normal muscle pain that they have.
And the third one I mentioned is
if you stretch the lumbar fascia by going forward
and the pain gets more, that would be a third indication.
- We used to recommend not foam rolling the low back
because it would jam the facets together.
Is there another way to do that,
or is there a better way to do it?
- Yeah, you don't put the foam roller on the back
and then your body weight on it.
You put the foam roller or foam roller ball behind the wall
and you, and then the wall.
- Oh, on the wall, gotcha.
- You are using body pressure.
You have it behind you. - Excellent.
- And you imagine you are a bear,
and this is your favorite massage tree,
and you want the tree to stay there, not to break away.
Then you play with different rotations
and look for this good pain, for the four-syllable pain,
where you go, "Holy moly, this feels very, very good."
- Gotcha, I love that, I love that.
Do you think a massage gun would work
if somebody was helping you out?
- Yeah, I didn't think they are very good,
because particularly of the gun mentality.
It's not only the American mentality,
shoot away your problem.
That will be the final solution
of all the world's problems, shoot the pain away.
But they are amazingly efficient.
- Oh, fantastic!
- So we used to have massage sticks.
They are still there.
- Yeah, I know what you're talking about, yes.
- But since somebody put them into this pistol arrangement,
now they have made a steep development,
because we have now different frequencies,
different amplitudes, and you have different end pieces,
and you can find places in your lumbar back.
If you were a bear and you had a vibrating tree,
you would go there more often
if it has the right frequency.
- Right, very good.
- So I do recommend them.
- Last question here.
I wanna be respectful of your time.
We had Dr. Mike Cucuzzella on our show,
big fan of yours, by the way,
and he's a big advocate of zero-drop shoes
or shoes with very little heel, because they feel like,
he once again developed the fascia on the feet.
Are you of the same like mind?
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Of course, if I could steal everybody's shoes
and teach them to barefoot walk in the future
on the beach, that would be the best.
But even that can be too much.
So barefoot walking is what nature had designed us.
But it is similar, if you are not used to it,
it is as if you have been living as a chicken on the ground,
and you get the chicken on a big rock and you throw it
into the air and say, "You are made to fly."
The chicken will crash down
and will injure themselves and will say,
"Even if I was designed for it, I don't like it."
(Robert laughs)
And that would be the same if you put people's shoes away
and say, "You are made to be a barefoot runner!"
(Robert laughs)
- Sure, you gotta transition.
- So you need to slowly make the pathway back.
Ultimately, barefoot running is the best.
I highly recommend it.
But you should start with the chicken
so you have a little thing,
and that's what you can do with these barefoot-inspired feet
or shoes where you have a thin sole,
and also, you prevent the high heel in the back,
so that you are more horizontal or maybe even further up.
As you're walking in the sand,
sometimes your heel is further down,
because then you get more natural stretch
into the Achilles tendon, and as we have mentioned before,
if you get more stretch in the Achilles tendon,
your headache may disappear
because of the myofascial line going all the way up.
- [Bob] All the way up.
- So I highly recommend it.
- Dr. Schleip, I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed this.
This was just fantastic.
Again, the book, this book, by the way,
he's written many of 'em, actually,
is Fascial Fitness: Practical Exercises to Stay Flexible,
Active, and Pain-Free in Just 20 Minutes a Week.
Very, very helpful, I think.
People are gonna find answers to the problems that
they've been having, and they thought it was something else.
So, thank you for your time,
and say hi to the people from Germany.
- I do, and happy stair dancing.
That is one of the exercises in the book.
So when people are now going down the stairs,
hopefully with minimal shoes,
then they should have a happy down, happy bounce.
- Yeah, I saw that.
- And they can contribute it to my inspiration if they want.
- Very good.
Thank you for taking the time.
- Thank you very much, Bob.
(upbeat electronic music with acoustic guitar)