David:

[0:00] Well, today I'm super excited to have with me Butch Phillips, who is also the CEO of the Muscle Repair Shop. He's author of The Stretch and Release Technique, and over the last 20 years has been helping people improve their health, especially preventing injuries and taking care of injuries at the root cause. So welcome to Redeeming Business Today podcast, Butch. Glad to have you.

Butch:

[0:24] Thank you. Glad you're having me here.

David:

[0:26] Yeah. So one of the things I like to ask my guests when they first come on is, what is one way you believe we can honor God in our business that others may not know about?

Butch:

[0:37] Well, you know, when we look at our business, and of course, we're all there to make a profit. But the thing is, is we're going to be able to make a difference. And I think that if you can make a profit and make a difference at the same time, that's really the way to do that. I think too many times people get too caught up into the profit side of it and may unintentionally do harm instead of do good. And I think that we're given talents to improve people's lives and we should be able to do that.

David:

[1:07] Very good. I like it. I like it. So the muscle repair shop, that's a really unique title for a business.

Butch:

[1:17] Yeah.

David:

[1:18] I like it. Can you take a few minutes and tell my audience about your journey and what's happened with you and why you're here today doing what you're doing?

Butch:

[1:27] Absolutely. Some people go and they seek out a career. My career found me. And it was interesting because when I was in my 20s and 30s, I worked in corporate America and had no idea that I had anything to do with healthcare at all. And in my late 30s, I was getting to the point of retiring early from a corporate job. And I had gained up to about 315 pounds.

Butch:

[1:54] And in 1998, I lost 105 pounds and was looking good, feeling good, working out like crazy. But I noticed that at 39, 40 years old, I was stiff as a board. I felt like a 90-year-old guy. So as I was looking for a new career, I said to my wife, I think I'm going to try massage therapy. I've looked at several things. It seems to be things that I want to get into. And when I walked in the door, it was like probably the best way to describe it, divine intervention. When I walked in the door, I knew things about muscles that I couldn't explain to you how I knew them. All I know is I knew them and the right people fell in place at the right time. As I'm working on my two-year degree in neuromuscular and sports massage, I started to meet other people, people who were kinesiologists, and then I got into meeting neurosurgeons. I even volunteered at a senior friendship center, which had 54 retired physicians of all different types. And I started finding myself able to have conversations with these highly educated people. And it's like, that's amazing.

Butch:

[3:02] So at my 40s, going through massage school, back pain was a major driver. I wanted to figure out how to stop my back pain. And as I started digging into the muscles and learning about them and seeing that my brain plays as big a role as using my muscles themselves, I was able to develop a technique that actually helped me stop having that back pain. So in the beginning, I thought, well, maybe this is sort of a flute.

Butch:

[3:28] Let's test it with some older people at the Friendship Center and see if it works for them. And I did. And one day I was sitting at lunch and a couple of physicians came in and sat down with me. And he said, so tell me something. What are you doing in that room back there? And I said, what do you mean? Because I'm thinking I must be screwing up, you know, because they're coming out better than they went in, you know. And so as I developed this technique, I learned ways of teaching people. I mean, even people in their 80s and 90s, how to improve their mobility, how to reduce their chronic pain and get a feeling where they're at least 10 years younger than than what their age represents.

Butch:

[4:07] I currently wrote a book, which I have here. It's on Amazon, guys. But it really goes into detail talking about the mindset shift in stretching, which we can get into a little bit later. But it goes into detail about how this is a mindset shift about stretching and self-massage that we just haven't been taught. And once I learned that, along with learning how to eat better, my wife is a registered dietitian, but before I knew her, when I weighed so much, I had learned from a physician how to eat better and lose weight. Not only did I lose 105 pounds at 98 in 1998 and kept it off till 2020. I lost an additional 30 pounds doing the same thing again. So I help a lot of my clients on both sides of the aisle there.

David:

[4:58] Very good. Yeah, that's good. And that's living it. It seems like those lessons are ingrained a lot better because it's not just the book learning, but it's like, oh, I tried that. That didn't work. I tried this. This didn't work. And yeah, that's very good.

Butch:

[5:14] Very good. What was funny was, you know, going back through my whole life at 18, I was in a head-on collision and broke my pelvis in seven places and my left arm. And in today's world, I would have had all kinds of metal in my body. But the doctor I had back then was the Dr. Hundley. And he said to me, you know, I just think if our creator wanted us to have metal in our body, you'd be born that way. He said, you're a strong young man, you'd be fine. And then when I gained the weight, running into a physician who was a general practitioner, she wasn't a nutritionist, but she'd studied nutrition, she literally gave me the inspiration and the tools to learn not only how to lose the weight, but how to maintain my weight for years. So I've been very fortunate. You know, I had five mentors and two of them were neurosurgeons. I had a kinesiologist, a physical therapist, and also a chiropractor who each brought me pieces to the puzzle. And I'm just glad that I was awake enough just to open my mind and just let it come in. And it's paid dividends for me and over a thousand other people. Yeah.

David:

[6:22] That's great. Yeah. I know your stretch and release technique book. Explain what is that, or what is the stretch and release technique?

Butch:

[6:31] Yes. So the stretch and release technique, obviously it is about stretching, but it's not a traditional stretching that we would do in a gym. It's more about, typically traditionally when you do stretching, what happens is that you pull as far as you can and hold as long as you can with the mindset that I'm going to make this muscle let go. And what people don't understand is that the way we're built, the way we're created is that when you pull hard enough that you create pain in your body, your brain is like, uh-oh, something's wrong here. Contract, contract, contract. And it's really contracting muscles. And so what happens, people who are trying to stretch in the gym are literally strength training and not even understanding it. And then there's a part of the stretch and release, the release side of it, comes into two phases. Number one, it's self-massage. And I teach people how to do that. Understanding that when we dig in, dig in, dig in, you know, a lot of people love deep tissue massage therapists and it's taught in every massage school in the world.

Butch:

[7:34] But the truth of the matter is if you're laying there and somebody's driving their elbow into your back, you don't really understand what they're doing. Your brain then goes on high alert and says, oh my gosh, somebody's beating us up here, contract all these muscles. And so it will feel good for two or three hours. But the reason for that is that you fatigue the muscles out and the muscles just finally had to give up because it couldn't hold anymore. The second part of the release is actually the role the brain plays, as I mentioned with the stretching and I mentioned with the massage.

Butch:

[8:05] When your brain is relaxed, your muscles will be relaxed. Think about when you're angry with someone, how tight your body gets, you're ready to fight. Or if you get scared, you're ready to run. Whereas if you're having a cup of coffee with a friend, your body's totally relaxed. And so the state of mind has an effect on the tension in your muscles just as much as you lift in 100 pounds.

Butch:

[8:30] And so by combining those three ideas together and giving people easy things they can do throughout the day, because one of the questions I get from everyone is, well, but how long is it going to take me every day to do this? I teach people how to do things like stretching the front of their neck, setting at a stoplight while they're waiting for the light to turn green or work if their elbow hurts or hands hurt, learning how to massage while they're sitting and talking to their friends. In fact, I was giving a talk in front of about 75 people and I was telling people how about what I was doing. And this man stood up and he said, here's a problem I have. I don't have a lot of time. And I was working on my arm at the time. And I said to him, neither do I. That's why I'm doing it while I'm talking to you. This is what I'm saying. You can do it while you're talking to your friends. But the thing is, is that once you learn the easy techniques, and I've got 150 videos on YouTube to help people if they want to see that as well, which are free. And the thing is, is once you learn how the brain controls your muscles, then all of a sudden you have better control of your chronic pain and typically everyday pain.

David:

[9:44] So how does that help your pain? I mean, you're saying mind over matter or what?

Butch:

[9:48] I mean, I don't know.

David:

[9:50] I get it.

Butch:

[9:50] That's what it appears like on the surface. But what happens there is that what causes pain is the tension in the muscles, whether that is the state of mind or something that you're doing. That tension moves the bones. If you're talking about vertebrae, you're talking about the pelvis, the positioning of the head. As those bones start to move, the muscles will then apply pressure through the bones to discs, to nerves. It can set off inflammation. And so by taking that tension back out and allowing your posture to sort of realign on its own, you're actually going to learn a new normal. So many times, and I'm like a muscle nerd, so I love to watch people walk just sitting around out of park someplace. And what you see is that young or old, people walk leading with their nose like they're walking into a headwind. And so when you look at your head, your head weighs about 10 to 12 pounds. Every inch your head leans forward in front of your chest, it increases the pressure on the back of your neck and between your shoulder blades by 10 pounds per inch. So if you're sitting at a computer and your head moved two inches forward, you're up to 40 pounds of pressure between your shoulder blades just to hold up your brain and your head. And so by taking that tension out, you take that pressure off the nerves and the pressure off the disc and the joints.

David:

[11:14] Very interesting i've heard that and i don't know if it's true or not because i haven't really observed it that people who lead walk with their head um think basically think about problems with their brain with reason where people who are more feeling orientated will walk with more with their chest out front because they're leaving more with their heart i don't know if that's true or not but it's just something i've heard it

Butch:

[11:38] Could be true i mean i mean from from my point of view of it a lot of times when you watch people walk leading with their head, if you look down at their feet, their ankles won't bend properly. In fact, in some cases, they don't bend at all. The foot certainly doesn't bend. And a lot of that's because of the thickness of the soles of the shoes. But that forces them to lead with their head for a momentum. But many times people lead with their head, they're busy going somewhere in a hurry, and they're walking really fast. So that could be true.

David:

[12:10] Yeah. So as an example, I spent a lot of time at my desk at work in that. So what could I do to like if I have a little bit of back pain? What do I need to do differently to to take care of that?

Butch:

[12:25] So there's four things that causes back pain. Number one, sitting at the desk, your torso is 90 degrees to your legs. So the muscles on the front of your thighs, the quads, the muscles on the inner thighs, when you start to stand up, you'll notice that you feel stiff as you stand up. But once you get moving around, it sort of eases up a little bit. The reason for the easing up is that you're forcing warm blood into that muscle tissue, and that causes the muscle tissue to release slightly. What's happening is as you're sitting there, the muscles get tight. The tension in the muscles get tight. And so when you start to stand up, the pelvis is tilted slightly forward, which is pinching nerves in the low back. On the top part of your body, on the outside chest muscles, as we lean forward, you know, we're sitting in our computers, we're on the keyboard, we're leaning forward. The outside chest muscles here start to tighten as well. And I have stretches that I can teach people how to do that will open that up. It's just standing in a doorway, you can fix that. Stretches on the front of the neck. Because again, like I said earlier, as we get closer to the screen, it seems like the longer we're there, the closer we get. Okay. And so we want to change that as well. So the pain you feel in the back, while you do have pain in your back, the cause is on the front side.

Butch:

[13:45] And so there's four areas of the human body that But if everybody did on a daily basis for just a few minutes a day, you'd probably knock out 50% of the chronic pain that most people feel. And that's the calf stretch. So their ankles can bend. They can keep their head up on their shoulders.

Butch:

[14:01] The front of their thighs, which allows the pelvis to be underneath them. So again, their head is up on top of their shoulders. The outside chest muscles. So the head is back up on top of his shoulders and the front of the neck. Really and truly the best way to think about your body is from the shoulders down. Its job is to balance your head So you don't lose your balance and fall down, So just sitting in front of your desk, that's what we do every day.

David:

[14:27] Yep. Yeah. Wow. Very interesting. So, okay. So you go into businesses and you do like little seminars or you help people with their chronic pains in?

Butch:

[14:39] Yes. Okay. In fact, I was just talking to on another podcast for long distance truckers and discussing how truck drivers could use this work, using their truck, using walls. But anytime I go into a business, I'm always curious, number one, I wanna see what do they do? What movements do they make consistently? And even if it's repetitive motions, once you understand what muscles are being used in those repetitive motions, you can literally unlock those. It doesn't mean you have to change jobs, but understanding that each day, if you go home and you unlock that tension to get it out of here, then when you're doing those repetitive motion like that, it won't be a problem. Things like carpal tunnel, elbow tendinitis, for instance, most of that could be solved much easier without surgeries. If you know where to look and you take care of that on a daily basis, you can literally solve that without a lot of surgeries. I mean, if you watch a lot of people with carpal tunnel, they help surgeries. They're still wearing the braces on their wrists. And it's like, the thing is, is that the people themselves have to be a part of the treatment because it's their brain that has to release that. Nobody can do that for them. All we can do, somebody like me, is to be a guide to say, okay, David, this is what's causing your pain. This is how you fix it. But you ultimately have to do that.

David:

[16:07] Sure. So some of the carpal tunnel, what you would have some stretches or things for them to do on a different basis to help unlock their tension?

Butch:

[16:16] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what's interesting about things like carpal tunnel and elbow tendinitis is from the elbows to the tips of your fingers, you have about 26 muscles that control the hand, not only this way, but also rotationally and then gripping the hand and releasing it. And so what you want to be able to do is to unlock the muscles up here into the forearm and then down below here as well, because you've got five muscles that come out to your fingertips, allow you to grip your hand, and five muscles out here allow you to open your hand. And so by unlocking those muscles, you can stop that pressure on the median nerve in the wrist here. I've done it hundreds of times. And elbow tendinitis, I mean, I still have that for some people in as little as 30 minutes. I mean, I've got two or three physicians who send people to me on a regular basis with elbow tendinitis who they've tried with injections and so forth to solve. But, you know, keep in mind that all of us who go to health care school, whether it's massage therapy or a surgeon, what we're trained to do is to stop the pain, not find the cause. That's why that's why they go with the medications. They're trying to just stop the pain.

David:

[17:26] And is all that stuff detailed in your book?

Butch:

[17:29] Oh, yeah, absolutely it is. So the book is laid out to where there's chapters of, you know, the introduction of what am I talking about? What is the mindset? Then it gets into the nutrition side of it. It talks about why typical treatments that we all, you know, go through in the health care world work only temporarily. And then on the back end of the book, the last four or five chapters, take it by different body parts. You really start talking about the different ailments that happens in those body parts and how you can fix them. And then along with the book, it gives you links to videos. There's QR code inside where you can get to the videos that the videos can bring the words to life on the videos. It's really meant to be a manual. Yeah.

David:

[18:15] Yeah. I need to get one of those for my wife and myself, too. Yeah, we're getting older. We have issues, you know, with pains and joints and muscles and everything else. But this sounds like a great way to take care of things at the root cause. And it's not just good for business. It's good for at home, too, because everybody's body is getting older.

Butch:

[18:38] Yeah. Well, it is. And, you know, and again, you know, I do talk to a lot of business owners and I get in and talk to their employees. but also the things that we do at home. I mean, even if you lift something correctly where you're using your legs and you'll see people with the elastic back braces on the backside, They'll still have back pain and everybody thinks they have a back problem. And what they don't realize when I get them is I'll start working on the front of their legs and they can't believe their back pain stopped because they said, well, you never touched my back. And I said, because you don't have a back problem.

David:

[19:15] Interesting. Yes. Very good. Well, I thank you for your wisdom and a little bit of time you've been able to say that. Talk to us about that. I'm serious. I would like to get that book and read up on it. I'm more of an eclectic reader. I like to read all kinds of different things for health and business and Bible and everything else. So how can my audience learn more about you?

Butch:

[19:37] Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. How can you learn more? All right. Number one is obviously the book is an easy way to learn. That's on Amazon. But you can go to my YouTube channel, which is at the Muscle Repair Shop. And I've got about 150 videos there that each week I dive in with new videos talking about specific things. If you go to my website, the Muscle Repair Shop, you can sign up for my newsletter there. And on that newsletter, it comes out every Tuesday. And again, I will get to specific ailments, but I always share two to three videos in that to help bring the words to life. And then finally, you can just call me in my office or email me or text me. And I've even done Zoom calls with people from around the world. And i mean the first time i did it a young man from the netherlands called me or he emailed me and he said i read one of your articles you know can we do this and i'm like i'm not sure if this works or not we'll try it and it did work and i've helped several other people with through zoom as well so they

Butch:

[20:36] can get up with me any of those ways very.

David:

[20:39] Good that's neat that's neat so out of all this stuff what is one thing my listeners can do today take action on today to help them on this health journey of theirs.

Butch:

[20:48] So the biggest thing I would say to people right off the bat is understand that the tension in your brain, if you're the kind of person who is worried about making appointments and you're worried about getting things done. I know for single moms, for moms, especially dads, they have children. I got to get them to school and all those things. When the mind is busy like that, the muscles will be busy, too. So a simple thing is take a tennis ball, put it in a sock, lean against the wall. Now, don't roll on it, but if you check point by point against the wall on your back and on your hips, check and see if you have any sore spots. And if you find a sore spot, stay there, breathe out, allow the muscle to relax, and you'll watch the tightness go away in your back, and it'll take it from there.

David:

[21:37] Interesting. Very good. Well, that's probably in your book, too, and I'll have to take care of it. So, looks very good. Okay.

Butch:

[21:44] If you have any questions, let me know.

David:

[21:47] Yeah, thank you very much for spending your time with us today. And for all of you, remember that time has limits and you can't do everything, so choose wisely what you do.