Timestamp Speaker Transcript
00:00:01.62 Tony Fowler And we're rolling.
00:00:04.60 Taylor Kruse Welcome back to the Cruise Elite Podcast. What's up, Tony?
00:00:07.86 Tony Fowler Good morning, Taylor.
00:00:09.51 Taylor Kruse How's it going?
00:00:10.87 Tony Fowler I've got my Cruise Elite t-shirt on.
00:00:14.90 Taylor Kruse Limited edition.
00:00:16.15 Tony Fowler Limited edition. Ooh, I didn't know that.
00:00:17.88 Taylor Kruse Well, we yeah yeah we haven't ordered those in a while. We haven't ordered them in a while. We'll see. We'll see.
00:00:23.38 Tony Fowler Does the Neuro Dojo know that you have them?
00:00:23.58 Taylor Kruse One...
00:00:27.48 Taylor Kruse um Some people have seen me wearing them and they're like, hey, you know how about some swag? And we just haven't... you know There's just a long list of stuff that we got to do.
00:00:35.51 Tony Fowler Yeah, yeah.
00:00:35.78 Taylor Kruse And like that's just not near the top right now. But eventually, i think eventually we'll do something. I'd like to send students you know some swag.
00:00:42.70 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:00:45.35 Taylor Kruse And we've had some clever ideas. like People... People once in a while will be like, hey, do a t-shirt you know that says, you know I've heard ah your your eyes are your new core, you know or you know stuff like that.
00:00:52.87 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:00:58.49 Taylor Kruse And I'm like, oh, that's a clever idea. But yeah, the man, there's so much to do. Eventually, we'll get back on the swag wagon.
00:01:05.59 Tony Fowler Yeah, yeah no that would that would be fun though. I think yeah you know you finish your your courses and then you get a ah t-shirt or something that you can wear in the gym.
00:01:09.32 Taylor Kruse Definitely.
00:01:14.23 Taylor Kruse Yep.
00:01:15.73 Tony Fowler yeah
00:01:16.45 Taylor Kruse Yep.
00:01:17.04 Tony Fowler How's your ah training going?
00:01:19.06 Taylor Kruse um Pretty decent. I mean, it's like, so actually it's a good opportunity to report some good news too.
00:01:25.78 Tony Fowler Okay.
00:01:26.07 Taylor Kruse um
00:01:26.09 Tony Fowler Okay.
00:01:27.00 Taylor Kruse Training has like, my training right now is sort of, well, it's always based on feel, but I like really have to respect what my body is telling me right now.
00:01:40.24 Taylor Kruse Mainly, pretty much entirely because of all of this detox that we're doing.
00:01:42.91 Tony Fowler That's right.
00:01:46.94 Taylor Kruse i don't know if i I think probably a lot of our listeners have heard me at some point say that our family is essentially battling mold toxicity. So six plus years of you know intense mold toxicity.
00:02:02.87 Taylor Kruse And now we're in a different living environment, which is great. actually told most of the story on the year-end review that we did that was published more towards the middle to end part of January.
00:02:09.00 Tony Fowler that's right
00:02:13.47 Taylor Kruse So if anyone is interested to hear that story, you can you can reference that episode. But basically, we have now now that we're living in a new environment and we're making a lot of changes, we're working with a and dietician that's helping us with supplements that we need and building back our minerals and detoxing at the same time. It's a very extensive process and we've done a lot of testing.
00:02:40.50 Taylor Kruse Because of that, I've really had to respect how I feel in the moment because when you're going through a detox process, it's just, it's up and down. It is definitely up and down. And so on good days, I try to take advantage of that, you know, and in my training it is, you know, how I would like it to be right now. It's just kind of exploratory.
00:03:00.28 Taylor Kruse I'm doing, you know, a fair amount of of strength training. i've I've brought back in um quite a bit of like bodyweight exercise. just because I haven't really visited that category you know in a while, I felt myself kind of getting away from it.
00:03:14.49 Taylor Kruse So I've been working on like some specific mobility things, primarily extension. So like I realized that in this whole process that I've been going through, which also led to very extreme pain, you can hear that in the story that I tell in the year-end review. it's ah it was I would just basically say it's like ah it it was like a sciatic type thing.
00:03:35.76 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:03:36.63 Taylor Kruse In that whole process, I lost a lot of like whole body extension. I remember, i'm i'm like I used to be a wrestler, and you know I've done a fair amount of Jiu Jitsu. I haven't been training Jiu Jitsu as of recently because of all this.
00:03:52.09 Taylor Kruse But I used to be able to, like I'm the guy who could lay on the wrestling mat and spring up to back bend, whether it was on my head or my hands, and have like a nice curve through the body.
00:04:05.02 Taylor Kruse you know, hips, spine, because that's a very important movement in in like grappling sports is to be able to extend like that. And I was like losing it and I became very like extension intolerant and that really was bothering me. So I've been working on gaining that back and and it's been quite successful.
00:04:23.45 Tony Fowler So a quick mini review.
00:04:23.67 Taylor Kruse So yeah.
00:04:27.29 Tony Fowler is it Is the PMF, is that where, the PMRF, I'm sorry, is that where we can target some extensor muscles?
00:04:30.26 Taylor Kruse Oh, the PMRF. Yeah.
00:04:35.83 Taylor Kruse Yeah, nice. Yeah, you could. You could. live Like, if we were, i mean, the PMRF as a whole, you could target it and activate it to to help improve extensor tone. Sometimes we go a little bit deeper, and we even say, like, primarily going after the pons with different forms of of, you know, whatever tools we have, different forms of stimuli could absolutely help with extensor tone.
00:04:51.76 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:05:00.66 Taylor Kruse So there's a lot of tools that we can use to do that for sure. So yeah, that that's kind of been my my focus, like mobility-wise, is kind of restoring that.
00:05:04.85 Tony Fowler fun
00:05:10.28 Taylor Kruse And it's been quite good. And yeah, just beyond that, just kind of strength training, trying to get in, work with my clubs, steel clubs, and you know, the body weight stuff, just kind of working on some, uh, some isometric type strength things and been back on the gymnastics ring, gymnastics rings a little bit.
00:05:26.98 Tony Fowler yeah oh cool
00:05:30.08 Taylor Kruse And yeah, so it's, it's been, it's been pretty good. And then, you know, and then some days I just have to wave it off. You know, I just don't feel good. Um, you know, I guess I would call it like more of like a detox type day where it just kind of gets a little overwhelming. I can feel that,
00:05:45.75 Taylor Kruse I'm lethargic. My energy is not as good. My body is not really in a place for any kind of intense strength training. So I try to listen to that as much as I can. But but the good the good news is um I just got back a hair mineral test.
00:05:56.21 Tony Fowler Yeah.
00:06:03.08 Taylor Kruse So this is the the second hair mineral test after our first sort of phase, I guess, where we did like a build back your minerals phase and then like first kind of detox phase.
00:06:17.72 Taylor Kruse And according to the test, I haven't actually reviewed the entire thing yet. It's not but really me reviewing it. I'm reviewing the review that our dietician has presented us with.
00:06:26.94 Tony Fowler Sure.
00:06:29.40 Taylor Kruse And the good news is I just learned that my heavy metals have been cut in half, which is huge.
00:06:35.45 Tony Fowler Let's go.
00:06:36.25 Taylor Kruse Yeah. So that's huge, because when I first got my initial test back, one of the ones that was like out of control was uranium. It was like off the charts.
00:06:45.75 Tony Fowler That doesn't sound good. Yeah.
00:06:47.03 Taylor Kruse No, that can't be good. so that So we got this one back. And of course, it all looks like just red and green lines to me on a chart. I don't know what it all means, really.
00:06:59.06 Taylor Kruse But i still you know we still saw that that one was way up. It's like, oh, great. But we got the feedback from the dietician. And she was like, oh, just so you know, this is still higher than the other stuff. But this is cut in half, which is how off the charts yours was to begin.
00:07:15.29 Taylor Kruse So several of the heavy metals have been basically cut in half, which is great. So, so far so good. And I've had a lot of good positive changes. And it's kind of a weird thing when you're trying to detox from something like that. It's like the way I would describe it now is that my good days are better and my bad days are worse, but I now have more good days than bad days.
00:07:43.06 Taylor Kruse So it's like you're very, yeah, you're mobilizing the bad stuff.
00:07:43.16 Tony Fowler Interesting. So it's kind of hard on your body and in the process, huh? Yeah.
00:07:49.72 Taylor Kruse Whereas your body's really good at keeping it ah locked up in a, you know, deep, dark place far away from everything that's important. and And when your body starts having the resources in a lot of different ways to, you feel like it can now detox, that's actually like mobilizing the bad stuff.
00:08:13.59 Taylor Kruse So your body then has to go through the process to deal with it.
00:08:17.02 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:08:17.53 Taylor Kruse And that's the part that if it's too intense, it can not feel good. So you kind of, we sort of balance this line of what is appropriate for that response and like for example we had given our dietician a few uh some feedback and she was like i think we're going to stop i think we're going take a break from abc supplements but you know there were several of them because they typically encourage your body to detox more we're going to a break from that we're going to use these instead kind of dial back a little bit
00:08:52.50 Taylor Kruse still stay on that path, but maybe not you know promote as intense of a response. And you know so that's kind of where we're at now. And hopefully, just we keep moving the needle in the right direction.
00:09:06.46 Tony Fowler Yeah, I think about like a an immune response and how what that's doing, it's actually fighting off, you know, whatever germs it's trying to get rid of.
00:09:11.13 Taylor Kruse Yes.
00:09:15.64 Taylor Kruse Exactly.
00:09:16.09 Tony Fowler Right.
00:09:16.82 Taylor Kruse Yep.
00:09:16.89 Tony Fowler But it doesn't feel good. You know, it's like you got you get a fever, you get all stuffy, runny, you know, headache, whatever it is.
00:09:19.16 Taylor Kruse That's true.
00:09:23.28 Tony Fowler Right.
00:09:24.05 Taylor Kruse Yeah, well, that's the...
00:09:24.22 Tony Fowler um To purge these metals, like maybe your body's doing something similar. It's like we have to provoke a reaction.
00:09:29.11 Taylor Kruse Yeah.
00:09:30.52 Tony Fowler Right.
00:09:30.94 Taylor Kruse Yes. And that's kind of the weird counterintuitive part when you think about it is that when your body's responding to the bad guys, that leaves us with the symptoms that we complain about.
00:09:44.18 Taylor Kruse But that's actually good news that your body is doing something about it.
00:09:44.23 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:09:48.09 Taylor Kruse So it's it can be a little counterintuitive. you know like Jumping into this whole process in my mind, I was like, I i just want, you know like anyone, I just want consistently good results.
00:10:00.05 Taylor Kruse Like I want to keep feeling better and better and better, but I quickly learned that it's not going to be linear like that because as my body is actually responding, I'm going to feel that sometimes with negative symptoms, but it actually is better than my immunity being so low that I'm not having a response because that was sort of like what was happening to us in those six years of living in that toxic environment.
00:10:23.34 Tony Fowler Right, right? Yeah.
00:10:29.88 Taylor Kruse is our body basically was sensing, hey, i we're not going to mobilize this. Because if we do, it'll be too dangerous because the threat bucket is going to be filling over spilling over constantly, which is what was happening.
00:10:42.78 Taylor Kruse Yeah, so it's it's ah it's a learning experience, for that's for sure.
00:10:46.46 Tony Fowler And I just want to highlight what you were saying about, you know, listening to your body and on and taking days off, you know. um One of the things that you've impressed upon me and the listeners throughout this podcast has been we're trying to teach people to listen to their bodies in many different ways.
00:11:05.72 Taylor Kruse Right.
00:11:07.49 Tony Fowler And so that's just a great, like, real practical example of that where it's like, hey, I'm working towards these goals. I'm trying to increase extension. i'm trying to you know, increase mobility.
00:11:20.50 Tony Fowler But I'm also aware of my threat bucket and how I'm feeling.
00:11:23.38 Taylor Kruse Right.
00:11:24.28 Tony Fowler And, you know, I don't want to take three steps backwards to take a step forward. Like, I'm going wait a day.
00:11:31.03 Taylor Kruse For sure.
00:11:31.83 Tony Fowler Yeah, very cool.
00:11:32.53 Taylor Kruse that's That's exactly right.
00:11:35.38 Tony Fowler Well.
00:11:35.70 Taylor Kruse Oh, yeah, what's on tap?
00:11:38.26 Tony Fowler Today, we are going to be having a conversation about manual therapies.
00:11:44.28 Taylor Kruse Right.
00:11:46.36 Tony Fowler And sir I think, per usual, I think it's useful to just start from scratch and just define what we mean when we say manual therapies. Because I think even you and I, maybe I need to ah have a mind meld with you on that.
00:12:01.24 Tony Fowler And then, you know, talk about how they work from a neural lens.
00:12:01.31 Taylor Kruse Mm-hmm.
00:12:06.62 Taylor Kruse Yeah, that's great.
00:12:06.99 Tony Fowler Yeah. yeah
00:12:09.21 Taylor Kruse So yeah well as far as manual techniques go, so I think we probably are highlighting more of like the soft tissue techniques.
00:12:20.62 Tony Fowler Hmm.
00:12:21.11 Taylor Kruse right Because there's other like manual techniques that are um not entirely based around the actual soft tissue part of it. There's a lot of like muscle testing and um you know different things like that. So think we're probably primarily talking about the manual technique. So we're talking about any technique that uses touch.
00:12:44.54 Taylor Kruse right And so it could be a touch from another person. right like That's, I think, what people probably think of, like a massage therapy. And there's lots of different kinds of manual techniques.
00:12:57.94 Taylor Kruse A lot of times, people just think of like general massage right that might be more therapeutic in nature.
00:13:02.73 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:13:04.97 Taylor Kruse But there's also very technical types of manual therapy. lots of different names for them too, different sort of release techniques where a certain kind of touch is being applied to the body. Maybe it's to relieve pain, improve movement, anything like that.
00:13:25.98 Taylor Kruse um We'll probably talk about some of this too, because I think some of this needs some demystifying, because there's a lot of techniques out there that are talking about doing things to the body that they're probably not.
00:13:36.54 Taylor Kruse So maybe we'll talk about that, because this this whole idea has come very far, especially in the last 15 years or so. We're starting to really understand what's happening with different types of manual techniques versus before. We've always known that touching other bodies helps improve how people feel and how they move.
00:13:57.28 Taylor Kruse We've always known that, but we but what's starting to happen now is we're getting clearer based on new emerging neuroscience. It's helping us get clear on what is actually happening with these different types of techniques. And I guess we could also group in just like any kind techniques.
00:14:19.00 Taylor Kruse You know, stimulus, a lot of us own different things, tools we can apply to the body, whether it's a foam roller, whether it's some sort of trigger pointing tool.
00:14:31.54 Taylor Kruse muscle floss, voodoo floss, there's lots of names for you know that type of tourniquet that you wrap around muscles. And all of these things are tactile type tools that, when applied to the body, have the potential of creating change.
00:14:46.52 Taylor Kruse whether I think their most popular way to use these things is to promote improvements in movement output, usually mobility, but then also to decrease pain as well.
00:14:59.77 Tony Fowler So just kind of as ah as a rough working definition, could we say something like applying
00:15:09.21 Tony Fowler touch or pressure to the body in order to promote some sort of beneficial change, right?
00:15:17.98 Taylor Kruse Yes.
00:15:17.97 Tony Fowler So massage, foam rolling, everything you just mentioned.
00:15:20.34 Taylor Kruse You got it.
00:15:21.86 Tony Fowler Yeah.
00:15:22.38 Taylor Kruse Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:15:23.57 Tony Fowler OK, cool.
00:15:25.94 Taylor Kruse So let's see. how about How about we start with a little neurology on touch and sensation?
00:15:34.30 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:15:35.04 Taylor Kruse Because I feel like we've we've talked about this in several other episodes. We've talked about some manual therapies. We've talked about some different sensory inputs. And today I was thinking I would explain it differently to start, to kind of lay the foundations. Because I've never explained it like this on a podcast before.
00:15:55.48 Taylor Kruse And I think this could be important for helping people understand how our sensory system actually helps us in the real world.
00:16:06.26 Taylor Kruse Because if you're if you're using any kind of tactile... stimulus whether it's a tool or hands from you know of yourself or from someone else, it's important to understand sort of the functional role of the sensory system because it can kind of get confusing.
00:16:27.58 Taylor Kruse It's kind of like, well, what like how how is this actually helping me in the real world you know when I apply this kind of sensation to the body? So let me yeah let me lay those foundations. I think where I want to begin with this is describing what is called or two sensory pathways is, is I guess, how we would describe it.
00:16:52.06 Taylor Kruse There is what is called a first touch sensory pathway. And then there is also something called a second touch sensory pathway.
00:17:03.90 Taylor Kruse okay And these pathways are the pathways that are delivering information about you know whatever we're coming in contact with to the brain.
00:17:15.29 Taylor Kruse okay So we've got a first touch and we've got a second touch pathway. And they have very unique roles. so And they're very much related to survival, which is really the the whole key that I want to get at here, is that our sensory system, today we're primarily talking about the skin and the underlying tissues of the body.
00:17:32.80 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:17:35.45 Taylor Kruse Well, the whole idea but behind having skin is to help us understand our external environment. And its role is to keep us safe right in a in a survival-based situation. So I think this will help kind of ah help people kind of understand how.
00:17:54.58 Taylor Kruse So we've got this first touch sensory pathway, very much related to survival. And its job is to give us facts and help us make a survival decision.
00:18:07.45 Taylor Kruse So what that means is that when we come in contact with something, whether we are touching something or something is touching us, this first touch pathway is going to help us take in information, factual, detailed information about that thing.
00:18:27.29 Taylor Kruse So this is like, um I won't go into like the names of these different nerve receptors because it would take up the whole episode. But it's easy to find you you know if our listeners want to you know do a search on on some of these nerve endings.
00:18:42.78 Taylor Kruse But the nerve endings that innervate the skin and in underlying tissues that help do this basically are nerve endings that respond to like light touch, pressure, vibration, temperature, even itch, and then nociceptive sensations, which are nociceptors are nerve fibers that take in information about potentially dangerous things. They're like threat receptors.
00:19:09.10 Tony Fowler Right.
00:19:09.59 Taylor Kruse Okay, so all that input that we're getting from these things is using this first touch pathway so that we can collect the details.
00:19:21.08 Taylor Kruse and And we need those facts and details to essentially help us survive. Okay, so we're gonna keep that. So so then moving on to like this second touch pathway,
00:19:33.72 Taylor Kruse This is more of what is described as like an affective pathway. So it affective mean meaning like emotional. So gives us emotional content about the experience that we're having.
00:19:48.06 Taylor Kruse So this is different in the sense that once we come in contact with something or something touches us, the question is then, okay, something's touching me. How do I feel about it?
00:20:00.28 Tony Fowler Yeah.
00:20:00.64 Taylor Kruse So it's like, how do I feel about this sensory information? So we've got two pathways. We've got one that's dedicated for to the details and the facts. And then we've got one that's dedicated to helping us answer that question, how do I feel about it?
00:20:16.70 Taylor Kruse okay Now, it's it's interesting because the pathways work differently. in terms of the type of stimulus that they give the brain, but also the speed that they send the information.
00:20:33.75 Taylor Kruse okay So then in like the literature, this is often described as um what what is low road processing versus high road processing?
00:20:45.98 Taylor Kruse So I'll give like some, ah hopefully I'll provide some more context here and explain it in in a way that's relatable. So for example, Let's say you are out for a hike in the woods and it's, know, I'm just thinking about my life, right? We're out we're out in ah on a hike and it's April where the sun is finally coming out and things are starting to warm up.
00:21:12.38 Taylor Kruse And when we're hiking on our trails around here and we have those areas of the trail that are exposed to direct sunlight, guess what is often waiting in those little areas where you want to step?
00:21:24.73 Taylor Kruse Snakes. right because they're yeah they're they're sunning themselves.
00:21:26.16 Tony Fowler Oh.
00:21:30.36 Taylor Kruse right and so And we know that. And it's just kind of like this habituated like thing. it's Now it's just basically unconscious. like you just Oftentimes what happens is you step in one of these little sun areas,
00:21:41.37 Taylor Kruse and you you startle because there's a snake there, right? And the snake startles too. So I'm thinking about that. So let's say you're out for a hike and you know it's that time of year.
00:21:53.05 Taylor Kruse So you already have like preconceived ideas that it's that snake time, okay? And you're walking through the woods and you know that there's a high probability that you could step on a snake and you step on a route.
00:22:07.86 Taylor Kruse just you Your foot rolls just right on a root and maybe on some leaves, and the leaves crackle, and you feel something under your foot. And because of your preconceived ideas of what you might need to expect, and now you actually feel something has come in contact with you.
00:22:29.02 Taylor Kruse And so you have a startle response, let's call it. where even though it was just a root and leaves crackling, you sort of jumped to the conclusion that it might be a snake.
00:22:43.29 Taylor Kruse And you had a survival-based type of response based on that. okay So that is that process right there, that is the low road sensory processing.
00:22:55.80 Taylor Kruse And that is the first touch pathway becoming active. where we're getting the detailed facts coming in through what we're feeling.
00:23:06.65 Taylor Kruse The interesting thing about this is that that information is being transmitted very fast. I was trying to look up some numbers for this, and it kind of depends on what you read, but I think ballpark, this happens approximately 13 to milliseconds.
00:23:27.13 Taylor Kruse So yeah so that's ah think about that as like a rapid subconscious threat assessment. So you're that's that's very fast, okay? And very subconscious. you're It's kind of like you're making a...
00:23:41.59 Taylor Kruse ah subconscious response. Okay, so keeping that in mind and then thinking about that second touch pathway, but what is also referred to as high road sensory processing, once the low road sensory processing has taken place in that 13 millisecond window, you then bring in other senses that
00:23:43.41 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:24:02.74 Taylor Kruse to evaluate the threat. So that would be like using your eyes. So you look down at the ground and you evaluate using other senses and you're essentially using other senses to try and confirm or deny what you think might be happening.
00:24:23.80 Taylor Kruse And all this, of course, is happening very quick. But the second touch pathway or the high road processing happens slower.
00:24:34.84 Taylor Kruse It happens after the low road processing. So um I find it all fascinating to kind of think about it that way because it really helps you understand that you know all of our ability to take in information from the external environment is very much based on survival.
00:24:59.64 Taylor Kruse And so taking it a little bit further, um just so people can hear a little bit more about these about first touch and in second touch pathways. So the the first touch pathways are made up primarily of what is called A-beta nerve fibers. So these are mechanoreceptors, and they have the very fast transmission speeds.
00:25:24.50 Taylor Kruse okay So that's the first stuff. And they're low threshold, which means that they don't need a lot of stimulus to fire. And that kind of makes sense too. right Because from a survival perspective, would you want to be able to pick up on all intensities of sensation or just the very intense ones? You'd want to be able to pick up on the the ones that are less.
00:25:49.11 Taylor Kruse right um
00:25:49.09 Tony Fowler Yeah. You can feel a fly land on your back, you know?
00:25:51.42 Taylor Kruse Exactly. Exactly. So low threshold, meaning they they they don't need a lot of stimulus to fire. And you know the skin itself, it's ah it's very much sympathetic. like It's primarily sympathetic. So anytime you touch the skin, you're communicating to the sympathetic nervous system.
00:26:11.83 Taylor Kruse and And basically, you're you're either increasing threat doing that or you're you're decreasing it. Now, the second touch... ah The second touch pathway is primarily made up of C fibers. So this is ah this is a different type of nerve ending, and it is the slower transmission speeds.
00:26:31.03 Taylor Kruse And C fibers are really unique. They are like unmyelinated nerve endings that um can sense pleasant sensations, but even like temperature and nociceptive sensations.
00:26:46.20 Taylor Kruse And they're a very... interesting group of of receptors to target like with training tools. this is This is kind of cool. So what um and I should say this, so that the conduction velocity for those guys is 50 times slower than the sensory nerves for the first touch system.
00:27:09.30 Taylor Kruse So in in that, yeah, when you understand that, it makes sense thinking about the stepping on ah a root and thinking it's a snake, right?
00:27:09.91 Tony Fowler So
00:27:15.92 Taylor Kruse It's like you want that fast response. You want the details to come in really fast. And then after that, the um the next kind of order of processing is bringing in other senses to confirm or deny it.
00:27:27.80 Tony Fowler so I was actually thinking of a different example. If you touch like a hot stove.
00:27:32.92 Taylor Kruse Yes.
00:27:33.56 Tony Fowler you feel the solidness of the metal before you feel the the burn. Like there's like a split second where you're still touching it and you haven't removed your finger.
00:27:41.02 Taylor Kruse Exactly.
00:27:45.78 Tony Fowler And then, ah, then it happens, you know?
00:27:47.86 Taylor Kruse Definitely. Definitely. and in in ah In that scenario, you notice how like it's funny. like Pain comes after. When something actually causes pain, it comes after. And that gets into this totally different concept called like the gate control theory of pain.
00:28:04.34 Taylor Kruse But basically, you're designed so that you can make the appropriate survival response to the initial details and facts coming in as being threatening, you wouldn't want pain to be the first response necessarily, because pain inhibits a lot of stuff.
00:28:23.22 Taylor Kruse It inhibits movement.
00:28:23.64 Tony Fowler Interesting. Yeah.
00:28:25.18 Taylor Kruse right So it actually makes sense that your motor system is still very active before nociception can get to where it needs to go and in actually end up being constructed into a pain experience if, in fact, the brain finds it dangerous enough.
00:28:46.23 Taylor Kruse right So it's it's it's interesting to know how the system is kind of built like that in the speed the transmission of speed or the transmission speeds of the information. You can really understand how, from a sort survival perspective, it makes a lot of sense.
00:29:02.74 Tony Fowler Yeah, and for the for the math nerds, I kind of think of like orders of order of operations.
00:29:08.63 Taylor Kruse Yeah.
00:29:08.60 Tony Fowler It's like, OK, first we're gonna the brain is going to get this information. Then it's going to get this information. Then it's going to get this information. And like that's due to that transmission speed difference, right?
00:29:20.34 Taylor Kruse Totally, yeah. And and what we lack, this is interesting too. So what we lack in speed, what we lack in transmission speed, we make up for in volume. So the C fibers actually make up 75% of the entire sensory system when we're talking about the skin and underlying tissues, which is very interesting, but also another reason why C fibers become a very important tool for us with all manual therapies.
00:29:29.17 Tony Fowler Hmm.
00:29:47.35 Taylor Kruse Because knowing how to activate them makes a lot of sense because your body already has a lot of, call it nerve real estate, dedicated to being able to sense those types of stimuli that come in through through those C-fibers.
00:29:55.11 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:30:01.36 Taylor Kruse And we talk a ton about C-fibers in the NeuroDojo when we get into sensory testing and also things you can do, different techniques you can use on the body, primarily the trunk and thorax area, because the C fibers are most abundant in the connective tissues of the middle of the body, essentially.
00:30:25.69 Taylor Kruse So just knowing already, like as a manual therapist or somebody that has a manual technique, Knowing that C fibers make up most of the sensory system, but then also knowing where the most C fibers are located, you already can do better work if you're looking at what you're doing as affecting the brain.
00:30:41.57 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:30:48.95 Taylor Kruse right So it's it's just really useful to know this stuff. Now, um this is really the question that comes from all of this, that comes out from all of this.
00:31:00.41 Taylor Kruse Because it's like, OK, I get how the get out the sensory system helps me stay alive. right But here's the question that comes into my mind. So if we have deficits of some kind in the sensory system related to the factual information part,
00:31:18.14 Taylor Kruse can you see how that could be an enormous survival threat for the brain?
00:31:24.10 Tony Fowler Right.
00:31:25.18 Taylor Kruse So let's think about the person. I mean, there's so many examples here, but let's let's think about like a diabetic who has extremely poor circulation to their feet.
00:31:38.33 Taylor Kruse And typically what you see in that scenario is that their sensory processing gets really skewed, and they can no longer sense things accurately in their feet.
00:31:49.74 Taylor Kruse There's a lot of examples we can use, but that's little bit more extreme than saying, like, you know, I had a i sprained my ankle, and I can't feel the ground as well as I used to. We could use that example too, but this is a little bit more intense.
00:32:02.55 Taylor Kruse So for the person that no longer has the ability to interact with the ground in the same way, because remember, a lot of this sensory information coming in, this is all, there's there's more to feeling things, like the environment, there's more to it than just what you're conscious of.
00:32:24.46 Taylor Kruse There's an entire subconscious part of that, okay? Meaning you're you're unaware of a lot of the processing that's happening. And so if you have a an issue like that in your feet, the way that you're moving through the world is going to change,
00:32:40.95 Taylor Kruse and not being able to get the facts and the details in any situation, your brain does not like that. and it ramps up threat. It increases threat levels to try to keep you safe because one of its sensory systems is not providing clear, accurate information.
00:33:01.98 Taylor Kruse And you can use any example you want. It could be any body area. And we know that sensory information can be just disturbed for so many ways. There's so many reasons, right? It could be an old injury that has disturbed your your ability to feel something. It could be a surgery.
00:33:27.03 Taylor Kruse You know, if you if you get sliced, that's damage to the receptor bed. And maybe now after a surgery, you don't feel things appropriately the way you once did.
00:33:38.33 Taylor Kruse You know, you can be hypo or hypersensitive. Right? You could have joint injuries that you know eventually, over time, maybe with chronic pain and moving differently, you develop a sensory problem.
00:33:52.54 Taylor Kruse These types of sensory issues create a blurry spot on your brain's map for the body area. And that's when threat increases. so Thinking about it like this makes you go, oh, got to make sure that my clients are able to take in this this sensory information through that first touch pathway.
00:34:14.39 Taylor Kruse And we want the interpretation of it to be as accurate as possible. Because it's the accuracy, a lack of accuracy, leads to a lack of predictive capacity for the nervous system.
00:34:29.59 Taylor Kruse Because your your brain and your nervous system is is trying to predict what's coming next, no matter what, using all of your senses to do that. Because prediction really is the best survival strategy.
00:34:43.95 Taylor Kruse So problems with accuracy create problems with predictive capacity. Problems with predictive capacity create uncertainty for the brain and nervous system.
00:34:58.04 Taylor Kruse Uncertainty, you could argue, is the root cause of all of these movement problems that we might face that cause pain or you know mobility issues.
00:35:10.52 Taylor Kruse It could be looked at as uncertainty with movement based on sensory issues coming in, based on that information not being clear.
00:35:20.41 Tony Fowler So use the example of like a diabetic with poor circulation, poor circulation. um So a manual therapy in that case is someone gets a foot massage and that increases blood flow to that area that increases inner innervation right along those pathways.
00:35:38.65 Taylor Kruse who
00:35:39.57 Tony Fowler Your brain is starting to wake up to the sensations down there and then good things happen, right?
00:35:48.15 Taylor Kruse Yes.
00:35:48.92 Tony Fowler is that Is that kind of how we would apply a manual therapy in that and that scenario?
00:35:54.58 Taylor Kruse Yes, and it's here's the thing. So it goes much deeper than this when you start to look at, the different sensory receptors. So to be a ninja with neurology, at some point, you have to really spend the time to understand the different types of receptors that we have at the level of the tissue.
00:36:20.50 Taylor Kruse And you have to understand how to test them. So for example, in our NeuroDojo course, we get into sensory testing. And we teach people what these different receptors are.
00:36:33.78 Taylor Kruse We teach them about the type of information that is transmitted through these receptors and how we can actually test them to get an idea for whether or not a specific sensory deficit is present.
00:36:48.79 Taylor Kruse And we get into testing specific sensations that actually correspond to different sensory pathways.
00:37:01.11 Taylor Kruse So for example, we have a sensory pathway called the dorsal column that is primarily dedicated to sensing things like vibration, some light touch types of sensation, and also something called two-point discrimination, which is like understanding if I were to test this, I would touch people touch somebody's skin with either two points or one point, and they would have to tell me, their eyes are closed, they would have to tell me, oh, that's two.
00:37:33.30 Taylor Kruse Oh, that feels like one. And the way that you, you got it.
00:37:35.32 Tony Fowler And the closer they are together, the harder it is to determine. Yeah.
00:37:38.39 Taylor Kruse Exactly. And so you're kind of working through like a radius. And eventually, it's a kind of a normal response that when you touch somebody with two points, eventually they're going to say, that felt like one, because the two points are so close together.
00:37:51.48 Taylor Kruse But you're you're getting a sense for like how accurate are they with that. And so we have a sensory pathway called the dorsal column that is dedicated to helping us understand that type of information.
00:38:02.68 Taylor Kruse And we have another one. There's some slightly different like variations of these, different names. But basically, we call it the spinothalamic pathway. And this one is ah more dedicated to what we would call what would be like more of a ah nondiscriminative type processing where like let's say I put my hand, let's say your eyes are closed and I put my hand on your shoulder, you can feel that there's weight on your shoulder.
00:38:35.66 Taylor Kruse You're aware of that, but you might not be able to collect the details about what is my thumb versus what is my pinky. You just feel, kind of like broad strokes, right? You just feel the large area which is my hand touching your shoulder.
00:38:52.09 Taylor Kruse But you're not like, oh, I can feel your middle finger. I can i can tell where your thumb is. You're not sure. that's kind of that non-descriptive or discrimination type sensation. And then also what falls in that category is things like crude touch.
00:39:07.90 Taylor Kruse Or sorry, that is typically called crude touch. And then um we have different nociceptive type um things there, so and as far and also warm and cool sensations. But nociceptive meaning, like we've got to an assessment that we often use called the pinprick test, which is you take a pin, there's a dull side and there's a sharp side.
00:39:33.53 Taylor Kruse And then as you're testing the skin, You're kind of moving through a radius that you've decided to to test, and you say to your client, I'm going to either touch you with what is sharp, which is the sharp end of the pin, or I'm going to touch you with the dull side. Your job is to tell me sharp or dull.
00:39:50.14 Taylor Kruse And so you start doing this, and your client's saying, sharp, sharp, dull, sharp, dull, dull. and And you're getting a sense for how are they interpreting the difference between what is sharp versus what is dull.
00:40:05.56 Taylor Kruse So that's one way we would test that pathway.
00:40:07.96 Tony Fowler So at the high level, what you're saying is we want to test these different pathways at these different you know with these different types of touch and determine how strong is that signal?
00:40:24.69 Tony Fowler How accurate is that signal getting to the brain?
00:40:26.55 Taylor Kruse Yes, yep.
00:40:27.83 Tony Fowler and And so... You might have a battery of tests based on different types of touch, temperature, all these things to that that target different pathways, right?
00:40:38.82 Taylor Kruse Right.
00:40:38.77 Tony Fowler Because you're thinking about it from like a brain nervous system perspective. And then once you have figured out, okay, there might be a deficit here, then you would apply the appropriate stimulus or therapy.
00:40:49.75 Taylor Kruse Right.
00:40:55.64 Taylor Kruse Yes, we would call that applying the missing sensation.
00:40:58.70 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:40:59.19 Taylor Kruse Now, that's why you can't just rub someone's feet and assume you did the right thing.
00:41:03.01 Tony Fowler Okay.
00:41:03.35 Taylor Kruse Right? Going back to, so yeah yeah, going back to like you know the the the person with you know the diabetic with the foot issues and the circulation issues.
00:41:03.64 Tony Fowler Okay. Yep. Yep.
00:41:12.06 Taylor Kruse you know Sure, we might we might get a result. like I mean, people hit a home run with manual therapies all the time, and they did no testing, and they don't know what they did. That just shows you...
00:41:24.66 Taylor Kruse that manual therapies are very powerful. that they're i want to make sure that people understand that I am pro manual techniques, but when you hear me talk about it,
00:41:35.90 Taylor Kruse um you're going to hear me trying to demystify some of the BS in it because we've we've come a long way now. And when you go into some of the dark corners of the industry where people have dedicated entire careers on a one very specific modality that applies one very specific type of um of manual therapy, there's so much missing from that.
00:42:03.32 Taylor Kruse when you start looking at the neurology and the different types of receptors and the different pathways and where does this information go, what does it cross on its way, and where does it actually get processed? So there's just a ton to demystify at this point.
00:42:17.14 Taylor Kruse So it's important that our listeners know I am pro manual technique, because remember what I said, the skin and its underlying tissues, it's the largest sensory organ that we have.
00:42:30.58 Taylor Kruse So it would be completely idiotic to not have any tools to work with it. But we just had to know how how can we make our how can make our tools more effective, right? How can we make things more targeted, more efficient?
00:42:44.02 Taylor Kruse And by learning how to test the skin like this and collect information on receptors, it then tells you exactly what you have to do. And you no longer have to do these kind of broad strokes, literally, hoping that you do the right thing.
00:43:00.66 Taylor Kruse Because the the problem is, with a lot of different manual techniques, they, they are not really as repeatable as one might think, especially if it's more of like a generalized thing. Like,
00:43:17.30 Taylor Kruse you know, that there's so many there's so much that goes into this. there's There's depth of tissue. There's direction that the tissue is being tractioned. You know, is it being decompressed? is it Is it penetrating? What is the speed of the manual um technique?
00:43:34.97 Taylor Kruse There's so many things that go into this that all communicate with the nervous system, and these things do get different results. right so So in testing the receptors and the you know in testing the person's accuracy of identifying certain sensations and you know whether or not they can discriminate against one versus the other, this eventually leads you to possibly finding a deficit where, let's say, i am testing vibration on somebody's old scar from a from an ACL surgery.
00:44:16.18 Taylor Kruse And they've already told me in history, like, oh yeah, my knee doesn't feel the same. I seem to not have the same awareness. And it's weird because when I'm wearing a certain kind of baggy clothing on my legs, it's almost like I feel numbness and then my scar feels hypersensitive.
00:44:35.80 Taylor Kruse right Sometimes you'll hear that type of thing from people in a history when they're talking about injuries and surgeries and stuff. So you already know you probably have to test that area because there's something going on there with their receptors. So so that's what you would do.
00:44:52.28 Taylor Kruse And you test both, all these different sensations that I described, and that will help you understand like Where is the deficit? Is it in the dorsal column? Is it in the the spinal thalamic tract? Because that is quite useful information too.
00:45:08.34 Taylor Kruse And then let's say you find that they are lacking the ability to to accurately sense a certain hertz in vibration.
00:45:19.32 Taylor Kruse Because we if we want to get super thorough, we actually test different frequencies.
00:45:23.55 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:45:24.28 Taylor Kruse Well, you just found what we would call like the missing sensation. And then your job is to try to figure out how to deliver that sensation to the person's brain. And sometimes it's really easy.
00:45:34.81 Taylor Kruse Sometimes it's like, oh, well, let's take this vibration device that vibrates at 100 hertz and let's touch it to this area of the skin and then retest it and see, did it do anything for you? Is your movement better? Is your pain less?
00:45:50.14 Taylor Kruse and And sometimes it's that simple. 100 hertz on the right area, how's that? Oh, that's the weirdest thing. My pain's gone, and my knee's moving better. And its it can literally work like that. And other times we gotta to do more focused work. I mean, at the bare minimum, typically I'm combining vibration, in this case, with movement,
00:46:09.74 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:46:10.35 Taylor Kruse Because I'm trying to teach people how to move better. Because that in itself is going to reduce threat, right? And it's going to improve that predictive capacity that we discussed.
00:46:21.59 Taylor Kruse So a lot of times we're trying to combine both sensory and motor things as far as the stimulus goes. So that's how detailed the work can get, is to actually find you know one of these senses that we discussed, or several, and then figure out how to apply it to exactly the right place in the body, maybe with movement.
00:46:43.35 Taylor Kruse And that can be done through a variety of different tools. In fact, this is another benefit of understanding your receptor types, is that I might not have to do an hour and 20 minutes of manual work with my hands if I know all the person needed was 20 seconds of 100 hertz vibration on their knee.
00:47:07.62 Tony Fowler Right.
00:47:08.06 Taylor Kruse This is enormous to understand because a lot of times in our industry with all these different manual techniques, a lot of them require a lot of work and effort. And people will tell you, like lot of our students and stuff who do manual techniques, I mean, it's very hard on their body too, right?
00:47:30.59 Taylor Kruse Because somewhere along the line, we got the idea that the harder we work on someone else's body, the more we're doing for them. Because most manual therapies over time have been kind of birthed on this idea of using a seek and destroy mentality, where we're hearing things like, let's do deep tissue something and break up adhesions and scar tissue.
00:48:00.25 Taylor Kruse right There's a lot of techniques out there based around that idea. And then some of the techniques are not using deep pressure. And they're more what we would call dermal layer techniques, where it's very light touch on the skin.
00:48:13.54 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:48:14.96 Taylor Kruse Perhaps thinking more about like some of the lymphatic techniques that are out there, where um working with the lymphatic system often does not take deep pressure.
00:48:26.33 Taylor Kruse And then, of course, we have techniques. This is really funny to think about. Not funny like I'm making fun of it, but interesting. We have, I don't even know if we can call them manual technique. It's more energetic.
00:48:39.52 Taylor Kruse There's no touch. right? There's literally no touch. Still, the person is using their hands, but there is no touch, okay? So ah this is why you can't deny that touching another person's body, or in this case, even more of like an energetic type approach, they all affect the nervous system,
00:49:05.78 Taylor Kruse the question is, how do we make it more accurate um and combine these things with the techniques that we're already using so that we can get more done in ah in a shorter amount of time and get the results we're looking for? So yeah, there's there's a lot that that goes into this.
00:49:26.37 Tony Fowler I guess we we don't need to spend a lot of time on this, but I ah kind of feel like I have to ask, how would not touching the body affect the nervous system?
00:49:35.38 Taylor Kruse Well, it's very, i let's just say there's a lot here for me to learn um because it's not, this is not my expertise, but um the nervous system responds to energetic fields, right? if you If people want to start looking into like more like quantum mechanics and stuff and the energetic fields that the nervous system or even the heart produces,
00:50:02.94 Taylor Kruse you know Remember, humans can only see a very small amount of the light spectrum. So we typically tend to only believe in things that we could see.
00:50:10.32 Tony Fowler Sure.
00:50:11.10 Taylor Kruse Right? Is Wi-Fi real?
00:50:12.89 Tony Fowler Same with sound, by the way.
00:50:14.06 Taylor Kruse yeah Right, right.
00:50:14.81 Tony Fowler Yeah.
00:50:16.47 Taylor Kruse It's kind of like, well, you believe in Wi-Fi, right? Because you're seeing the outcome of that. Sometimes it's hard for people to believe in more energetic techniques because they really they can't see how it would work.
00:50:31.10 Taylor Kruse so um, electromagnetic receptors, you know, that were kind of getting into that whole thing. And it's certainly not like something I consider myself an expert on, but I really enjoy learning stuff like that, hearing people's, you know, yeah.
00:50:47.06 Tony Fowler But from the nervous system perspective, do you, like that you said, electromagnetic receptors, those have their own pathways? That's a thing that that you can affect?
00:50:57.56 Taylor Kruse Yes. Um, and it's, it's still like, um, This is very still, this I feel this is very much in debate.
00:51:06.65 Tony Fowler Okay.
00:51:07.19 Taylor Kruse Yeah, I've actually heard there's different, it used to be that people were like, yeah, humans don't have those.
00:51:13.04 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:51:13.72 Taylor Kruse And now I'm hearing more, wait a minute, I think we might have overlooked this, right? um So anyways, for whatever that's worth, yeah.
00:51:22.39 Tony Fowler Yeah. Sure, sure. No, I was just, i just had to, had to ask.
00:51:24.25 Taylor Kruse Yep, yep.
00:51:27.74 Taylor Kruse Yeah, yeah, it's it's fascinating. It's fascinating. I mean, I'll tell you this, man, it's it's wild. I mean, it gets into a rabbit hole, that's for sure. But i have I have had extremely challenging clients in the past and you know difficulty finding an entry point, ways to work with them.
00:51:52.44 Taylor Kruse I got to the point once where I muscle tested myself to figure out if what I was doing might be the right thing for them. Okay? Now, I'm not saying there's a lot that goes into that.
00:52:04.09 Taylor Kruse I'm not saying it's perfectly accurate, but I will tell you, i have found some success with that. Okay?
00:52:10.65 Tony Fowler Interesting.
00:52:11.17 Taylor Kruse my nervous Your nervous system responds to every other person's nervous system.
00:52:11.17 Tony Fowler Yeah.
00:52:16.98 Taylor Kruse Okay? You know, easy way to understand that, have you ever had a visceral reaction from another human being without even really knowing them?
00:52:23.49 Tony Fowler Sure. Yeah.
00:52:25.62 Taylor Kruse You know, you you walk up, you're you're near them, your your fields collide, so to speak, and your nervous system's not jiving with the energy that it's taking in, if you know what I mean.
00:52:38.20 Taylor Kruse it's It's fascinating, right? I'm not saying I know a lot about it right now, but it's something I want to continue to learn about. Yep.
00:52:47.96 Tony Fowler So one thing I really wanted to do with this episode is kind of make it as... to is is to make it accessible from like a a layperson standpoint. And what what I mean by that is I would love to just kind of quickly go through some common manual therapies.
00:53:13.02 Tony Fowler You know, you mentioned deep tissue massage or you mentioned and just zero in on okay, this is what is happening in the nervous system.
00:53:23.40 Tony Fowler This is why it might work.
00:53:23.83 Taylor Kruse Yeah.
00:53:25.30 Tony Fowler This is why it might not. And ah you i think you've already done most of the heavy lifting by explaining those pathways and and that that system, but just to get it as as ah relatable as possible for the listener.
00:53:32.57 Taylor Kruse Yeah.
00:53:41.94 Taylor Kruse Yeah, so the way this becomes super relatable, and and honestly, the the really simple idea here is is the same idea that I would be teaching professionals.
00:53:52.89 Taylor Kruse It really, in the end, it all comes down to threat. okay is the Is the sensation or the type of sensation that's being created, how is it being interpreted by the brain?
00:54:07.86 Taylor Kruse Because we don't know how people are going to respond. Because everybody responds differently to a stimulus, which is why good manual work can be better manual work if you actually test what a person needs.
00:54:23.80 Taylor Kruse And some people are already doing that. they do There's a lot of techniques out there that have some form of assessment, which is great. So I'm not saying that they're all missing that. What I am saying, though, is that the the approach that we're teaching people to use more targeted forms of sensory testing gives you very, very applicable information.
00:54:46.78 Taylor Kruse And it helps you um target these sensory deficits in very creative ways that can create long-term changes for people. um So let's kind of think about like, well, we'll start with like do deep tissue stuff.
00:55:03.49 Tony Fowler Sure.
00:55:03.86 Taylor Kruse Right? Probably the most popular kind of manual therapy, I guess. um And one of them, anyway.
00:55:15.45 Taylor Kruse Deep tissue techniques are generally based around this idea of releasing a muscle or breaking up an adhesion, scar tissue, changing fascia, knots.
00:55:25.62 Tony Fowler I hear the word knots a lot. Yeah.
00:55:30.90 Taylor Kruse Yes.
00:55:34.30 Taylor Kruse Deep tissue work can be incredibly productive. okay What I want people to understand is that it's probably not doing what we want it to or think it's doing.
00:55:48.79 Taylor Kruse People have to sort of, you want to get really good at applying different forms of manual techniques. You have you have to really move away from being seduced by the fascial system, not in a sense that you don't want to know about it and understand it, but fascia in more of a general context, where we're going to do a deep tissue technique, we're going to change your fascia instantly, we're going to break up old scar tissue, we're probably not able to produce enough force to do any of that, if you think about how our body's connective tissues are.
00:56:32.18 Taylor Kruse So that's the first thing to kind of, that's important to do that kind of for people on their own to kind of demystify that for themselves over time. I was involved in that kind of way of thinking for quite a while early on in my career, getting involved in like a a certain fascial stretch technique where the whole idea was change the fascia.
00:56:56.92 Taylor Kruse Well, how are we going to do that? Well, we're going to do that with intensity. And sessions were an hour to two hours to two and a half hours of doing this active stretch therapy on people's bodies because you get in the mindset of, well, kind of like deep tissue, but this was more of like active stretching, having a person contract and then...
00:57:21.53 Taylor Kruse you would move them through a range of motion manually while they were actively contracting. And the whole thought process was if we do that, which is essentially eccentrically loading the body, this is also a form of manual a manual technique while we're changing the connective tissues.
00:57:31.91 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:57:39.13 Taylor Kruse And realistically, whether you're doing kind of an active type of stretch like that, or you're applying pressure to the body with one's hands, you're probably not altering connective tissues the way that you think you are.
00:57:54.30 Taylor Kruse What you are changing instantaneously is nervous system input. and And that has an outcome. right That absolutely has an outcome.
00:58:05.66 Taylor Kruse so People, I think, need to move away from the seek and destroy mentality. And when you understand the actual receptor piece, then you figure out, oh, I don't need to do two hours of this intense thing on somebody's body in order to try to create this change. I can actually do it in 30 seconds because I know the exact receptor type that needs to be activated.
00:58:34.17 Taylor Kruse And I know how I can include these sensations in their movement training, which is kind of cool. There's ways to like create active exercise where you're getting a very specific type of receptor stimulus that is needed.
00:58:52.34 Taylor Kruse So with deep tissue stuff, um there's a lot of intrinsic motivation involved in that. where someone who doesn't have this education will think that it's doing more than a technique that is more dermal level, like superficial.
00:58:59.30 Tony Fowler Great.
00:59:10.06 Taylor Kruse They'll think it's doing more because they feel it more and actually sometimes it hurts. So people are associating it with greater change because there's more intrinsic motivation that comes from pressing on someone really hard versus pressing on someone really lightly, if that makes sense.
00:59:27.22 Taylor Kruse You know, that's if you've ever foam rolled and you don't know anything about foam rolling, except that I should probably do this because it's supposed to be healthy healthy for my muscles. Everyone typically gets in the habit of foam rolling hard.
00:59:39.73 Taylor Kruse And they're like, oh, it hurts so good. Well, the hurt and the pressure is targeting one of those ah pathways we talked about.
00:59:51.77 Taylor Kruse Right, more, these are all, basically all the tools we apply to our body, whether it's hands or like actual tools. Most of them offer like combinations of sensory input.
01:00:02.87 Taylor Kruse So sometimes it's hard to like really zoom in on one sensation or one pathway.
01:00:05.51 Tony Fowler Right. it's it's It's dermal, but it's also deep tissue, but it's also, so yeah.
01:00:11.27 Taylor Kruse Yep, exactly. which Which also is a drawback in my mind.
01:00:17.42 Tony Fowler Hmm.
01:00:17.78 Taylor Kruse This is a drawback to a lot of the therapies because, as I said, if you figure if you can figure out exactly what the brain needs, then the problem is some of our tools do a combination of too many things, and then we can't actually replicate it.
01:00:33.91 Taylor Kruse And then the client can't necessarily replicate it on their own, which is funny because one of the only reasons I get results with people is because I'm able to teach them things they can do on their own.
01:00:45.55 Taylor Kruse That's literally it. It's more about like empowering them with something that they do need that they can repeat with enough frequency and intensity on their own to create a long-term change.
01:00:56.73 Taylor Kruse But when you go to your manual therapist and they do 30 minutes of hands-on work around your scapula, and yes, you do stand up and feel better and move better, how are you going to do that on your own?
01:01:10.90 Taylor Kruse And then it becomes this thing where it's like, well, I hope by seeing them once a week, that's enough. Sometimes it is. Much of the time, it's not. right So anyways, um deep tissue, very specific stimulus, um causing more discomfort at times, which sort of then is more like spinal thalamic in nature, as we talked about the pathways.
01:01:37.62 Tony Fowler Interesting, yep.
01:01:38.20 Taylor Kruse And hey, some people some people need that.
01:01:38.41 Tony Fowler Yeah.
01:01:40.70 Taylor Kruse I mean, i have I have met people who are like, I saw this therapist and they dug their elbow into my hamstring. And I'll tell you what, for two weeks I was walking better.
01:01:50.80 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:01:50.90 Taylor Kruse and And that is entirely possible, entirely possible. And they might be in need of a lot of spinothalamic training. But I've also met people who are like, I did that deep tissue stuff. I wanted to cry on the table.
01:02:02.90 Taylor Kruse And i think it made me worse. right and And that's just because of neurology. right Perhaps it was the the wrong dose of the wrong sensation.
01:02:14.14 Tony Fowler So when it works, that spinal thalamic um stimulation, is is there like ah is there more nociception there?
01:02:20.24 Taylor Kruse Yeah.
01:02:24.58 Tony Fowler Is there, like, what what what else?
01:02:24.95 Taylor Kruse Yes.
01:02:26.54 Tony Fowler what's it What is it? It's activating the sympathetic part of the brain more? Like, what when that pathway gets to the brain, what's happening where it works?
01:02:31.58 Taylor Kruse Well, all, yeah. So yeah, so so spinal thalamic, yeah, you're going to get a lot of nociceptive activity there.
01:02:35.48 Tony Fowler Yeah.
01:02:40.89 Taylor Kruse So if I press on your body hard enough, what starts out as feeling like pressure eventually could feel like discomfort. As soon as we cross that line of discomfort, we're starting to get more nociceptive in nature.
01:02:51.70 Taylor Kruse um you know that's That's going to be a you know specific receptor, specific pathway. So yeah, we're kind of on that spinal thalamic track now.
01:03:02.17 Tony Fowler Could it be like a resilience building kind of thing where it's like maybe maybe causing threat to go up a little bit was a good thing?
01:03:02.30 Taylor Kruse and
01:03:06.14 Taylor Kruse Yes.
01:03:11.80 Taylor Kruse Yes. So that's a really fascinating, um different topic. ah yeah Pretty cool.
01:03:20.25 Tony Fowler Sorry.
01:03:20.84 Taylor Kruse No, no, I like it.
01:03:20.80 Tony Fowler Okay. Hmm.
01:03:21.72 Taylor Kruse I like it. it's So that that would be what we call more thalamic conditioning.
01:03:26.23 Tony Fowler okay
01:03:26.30 Taylor Kruse so So when you're purposely doing something that's causing a certain amount of discomfort, Well, anything we practice, we get better at, whether that's good or bad.
01:03:37.34 Taylor Kruse So if you constantly apply nociceptive type sensation, well, could you actually get better at building a tolerance to it? And the answer is yes. And I think we all understand this as we as we're exposed to different, let's say, athletics, as we just develop A lot of our thalamic conditioning is based on our upbringing.
01:04:07.92 Taylor Kruse It's based on what we've been exposed to and the hardship that comes with those things. And there's value to that, right? There's value to that. So I think about it as in terms of like my introduction to jujitsu, you know?
01:04:24.76 Taylor Kruse And and i when I watch like white belts get started, I'm like, oh man, it's going to be rough. right There's so much pressure. right There's pressure, there's torsion, there's pain, and there's um problems with breathing because of all that.
01:04:42.49 Taylor Kruse you that's a perfect recipe for high threat, high tension in the body. And based on you know your previous experiences, your upbringing, your thalamic conditioning, I say thalamic, the thalamus is a brain area that works as a switchboard operator.
01:05:00.66 Taylor Kruse So I think this is kind of what you're going to with Tony, with with your asking about pathways.
01:05:03.78 Tony Fowler Yeah.
01:05:06.33 Taylor Kruse So the the all this sensory information eventually eventually routes through the thalamus um you know very like subcortical level structure in the in the in the brain.
01:05:18.30 Taylor Kruse and it And it acts as like a switchboard operator. So as that information arrives at the thalamus, the thalamus is making some decisions trying to help interpret how threatening is this?
01:05:30.94 Taylor Kruse right And then it will help to decide how much of that stimulus should be allowed to move on to higher order areas of the cortex for further processing.
01:05:46.33 Taylor Kruse And at this level, this subcortical level, some of the nociceptive input will be squashed or turned down because the the brain is not finding it extremely threatening.
01:06:01.02 Taylor Kruse So it won't it won't necessarily have it pass, it won't pass it onto the cortex, because as soon as it's passed onto the cortex, there is a stronger likelihood that once that information arrives there, it's compared to other you know bits of information, there's a stronger likelihood that there could be a more, i guess, intense ah output.
01:06:24.82 Taylor Kruse Right?
01:06:24.86 Tony Fowler Yeah.
01:06:25.26 Taylor Kruse Your brain decides, oh, OK, I'm getting this information. I've compared it to other bits of information. I'm now making the decision to create the pain experience. And as soon as it reaches that point, well, now it's a pain experience that becomes very um conscious.
01:06:47.13 Taylor Kruse Right? And it tells us, stop. Stop what I'm doing. versus the other type of nociception that might get turned down or squashed when it reaches those subcortical levels, um that you know we're able to build our tolerance to not allowing that to change what we're doing.
01:07:09.56 Taylor Kruse right you know so again, the athlete the athlete or this This type of tolerance happens in so many different things. We could say, sure, jujitsu, but we could say like tolerance getting into an ice bath, right?
01:07:25.12 Taylor Kruse Tolerance getting into a sauna. Tolerance with stretching. So if you stretch and it's intense, okay By repeated exposure to stretching, one of the benefits is that you become better at dealing with the actual sensation of the stretching.
01:07:47.42 Taylor Kruse So what was what started out as very intense maybe is no longer as intense, right?
01:07:47.73 Tony Fowler Right.
01:07:52.63 Taylor Kruse Because you built your tolerance.
01:07:54.27 Tony Fowler The thalamus is saying, hey, maybe this isn't so threatening after all, so I'm not going to send this on to the cortex to say, yeah.
01:07:56.92 Taylor Kruse It's like, you're cool, dude. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you're cool.
01:08:02.19 Tony Fowler Sure.
01:08:03.05 Taylor Kruse You're cool, dude. We've been here before. You're cool. We've been here before. i mean this is like, I think athletes really can understand this because we've all been in that athletic situation or when we're exerting ourselves to a very high level where you're almost having like a conversation with yourself.
01:08:11.15 Tony Fowler Sure.
01:08:20.14 Taylor Kruse It's like, How how threatening is this? Like, should I stop or can I keep going? Right. And that's that's what that thalamic conditioning is all about.
01:08:26.07 Tony Fowler no
01:08:28.42 Taylor Kruse Think about like martial artists hitting, you know, boards or whatever, breaking boards or gosh, have you ever seen um like kickboxers, the type of just impact that they can deal with?
01:08:41.24 Tony Fowler yeah their shins they're just yeah it's insane
01:08:44.60 Taylor Kruse I mean, building, yeah, we're talking about building we're talking about building tolerance like that. It's interesting. So yeah, so those so the thalamus is a big a big part of you know sensory input for for all the different types of sensations that we've discussed.
01:09:03.13 Tony Fowler Yeah, you know, a lot of times we talk about clarifying the map with with stimulus like that. Like, I'm going to massage this part of my calf, and that's going to help with the scar tissue here.
01:09:08.89 Taylor Kruse Yeah.
01:09:13.41 Tony Fowler and and
01:09:13.87 Taylor Kruse Right.
01:09:15.35 Tony Fowler But, you know, on top of that, there's this layer of this, you know, kind of thalamic input that that it's probably happening as well, right?
01:09:25.68 Tony Fowler And so this is where dosage seems like it can really matter.
01:09:26.03 Taylor Kruse Mm-hmm.
01:09:30.90 Taylor Kruse Yes, dosage does really matter. And I'll tell you what, most of the time the dosage is not what we would expect. This is, again, something people have to move towards, I think, as we start to learn more about the nervous system.
01:09:37.66 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:09:43.54 Taylor Kruse But typically when we apply any manual therapy therapy to the body, we're working with the nervous system, not really other things. um So a lot of times we can get the result we're looking for in 30 seconds instead of 30 minutes.
01:09:58.89 Taylor Kruse That's what's so unique about understanding this and, and the, um, the pathways and stuff. And, um, and then, yeah. And then finding that actual missing sensation and being able to construct other drills that, that it's involved in. I mean, there's, there's so many things, um, that go into like how you would apply touch to the body. If I, I'll, I'll name some things that we, we teach in our courses that,
01:10:26.93 Taylor Kruse change everything. So basically, we have what's called a 4D analysis of touch neurology. And these are the different things that actually matter and can produce completely different results. So you have the depth of touch.
01:10:41.37 Taylor Kruse So literally, i could I could touch the skin. So I could have like more of a dermal level effect, which is like light touch. And our listeners can try this on themselves. If you want to take your hand, and if you just turn your your forearm over so that your palm is up, and you take your other hand, and you place, let's say, three fingertips on the meaty part of your forearm, where like your forearm flexors are,
01:11:07.64 Taylor Kruse you can just place your fingertips there and only let the weight of your hand kind of deflect into the tissue, and you'll see the skin move. Okay, and it's it's very light touch.
01:11:18.78 Taylor Kruse And you can feel that if you really want to, you can slide the skin across your forearm, and you're you're you're moving skin. You're not moving necessarily the stuff underneath it, although it will be affected, but visually you can see that the skin can slide in all different directions. So that's a very dermal level type of touch, and some manual therapies only use that.
01:11:44.12 Taylor Kruse I have tremendous success with that with that kind of touch, and there's a lot of reasons why that are receptor-based.
01:11:48.05 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:11:51.52 Taylor Kruse So we've got more dermal layer, and then If we press in a little bit more, um and it's not much more, but we can start to create a light pressure, and and you know we're still kind of in that superficial level of tissue, but we're now starting to feel some different things.
01:12:08.81 Taylor Kruse It's not so much the skin, but we're we're getting into some of the underlying connective tissues that are still quite superficial, but if you move your fingers, in different directions, you can actually get this idea of how now you're dragging tissues that live underneath the skin. You're not just dragging the skin.
01:12:30.00 Taylor Kruse That's a different level of tissue with different receptors. And then let's press in much deeper. OK, you press in, let's call it like you're attempting to get to like almost a half inch of pressure.
01:12:44.34 Taylor Kruse OK, and that's quite deep.
01:12:44.49 Tony Fowler Okay.
01:12:46.57 Taylor Kruse That's going to require force. Like your fingertips are going to be white and pink pressing into pressing into the body here. And you can start to try to drag around what might be the underlying stuff. And you won't probably be able to drag it very far.
01:13:04.31 Taylor Kruse But you can get the idea that you're moving some of the deeper stuff. And of course, there's different things we could do that. We could grab grab hold of those deeper connective tissues by sort of gathering up the you know the muscle or whatever by almost doing like a pinching method.
01:13:21.11 Taylor Kruse So those are different levels of tissue. And then the last one here is you could actually come back to the skin level And rather than pressing on it, you could do a gathering technique where you just gather up the skin, so we're very dermal, and you pinch it.
01:13:35.80 Taylor Kruse And so you've got it now between your index finger and your thumb, and you can pull it away from your body. This is more of a decompression-type stimulus. um And and we could we could potentially do that to some degree with some of the underlying tissues. Again, that the body part would matter here, because some body parts allow us to do different things based on like the amount of tone felt in the tissues.
01:13:59.00 Taylor Kruse But you get the idea. We can gather up the tissue. We can pull it away from the body, do different things with it, drag it. These are these are all different forms of touch at different layers of tissue that can all produce different results Now, we actually test each layer.
01:14:18.07 Taylor Kruse okay This is this is how how detailed this work can get, this the style of manual work that we like using applied neurology. the The dermal level stuff, if you were to drag the tissue in all eight directions of the compass, as we say, this is called directional testing, we can drag the skin in in any direction.
01:14:40.22 Taylor Kruse And then we can see what the result of that is. So I might hold it there and then have somebody move and see, OK, has movement changed in some way? And then I'll go and explore the different directions the other directions of the compass and see, better, same, or worse.
01:14:55.51 Taylor Kruse And I can do that with each of the layers that we went through.
01:14:58.33 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:14:58.68 Taylor Kruse where I might find that somebody needs dermal level sensation work, or I might find they need the deep like layer, right? And each person is different for different reasons, which is quite fascinating because again, a lot of the techniques out there are sort of everything, right? And then the details get lost.
01:15:19.77 Taylor Kruse The details get lost. And you can actually have layers of tissue that are perceived as threatening when you work with them. So you might work with someone's superficial layers, sort of superficial connective tissues, and the person's nervous system might not like that.
01:15:38.26 Taylor Kruse And you might be getting threat responses. And then let's say you go deeper to the deep fascia, and now you're getting high payoff results, less pain, more movement. It is literally that specialized.
01:15:51.64 Taylor Kruse Okay, and it goes beyond it goes even further than that. I'm not gonna go super into it, but the but I do wanna tell people that you can test depth, you can test direction, which I just described,
01:16:04.79 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:16:06.78 Taylor Kruse And then you can also test speed of manual mobilization and get completely different results because we have receptors that are designed to be sensitized based on a certain type of frequency of movement.
01:16:23.03 Taylor Kruse So that means you now have to touch touch um test a sustained stretch. So let's say holding the skin, tractioning the skin in a certain direction, and leaving it that way for 30 seconds to a minute or more.
01:16:40.95 Taylor Kruse That might be a sensation somebody needs or doesn't need. And we can test the different directions. You can also test like pulses. So kind of a slow pulse would be a pulse every one to three seconds.
01:16:56.79 Taylor Kruse And then you could do like a a medium pulse, which would be like one pulse of the tissue every second.
01:17:03.70 Tony Fowler So you're just applying some pressure. Mm-hmm.
01:17:05.61 Taylor Kruse Applying pressure. Let's say you've dragged you the skin on the back of your forearm. Let's say you've dragged the skin towards your hand.
01:17:11.70 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:17:12.15 Taylor Kruse okay You could pulse into that. One every second, pulse, pulse, pulse, pulse. And that is activating a specific set of receptors.
01:17:24.60 Taylor Kruse And you could also, so you could test the slow, you could test the medium, and then we could also test fast, which would be more like three pulses per second. Pulse, pulse, pulse, pulse, right? You get the idea, like a faster mobilization.
01:17:39.96 Taylor Kruse Totally different results. And this is what I will have our students sort of experience at first, just so they can see how detailed the work can get, how precise it can get for the individual.
01:17:55.71 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:17:55.92 Taylor Kruse It's really quite quite cool. And then the last thing is body position. So the position the body is in during the mobilization actually matters.
01:18:07.83 Taylor Kruse And our listeners can actually try this because you might feel a difference. If you take your fingertips and you put them on your forehead and you just go, you're just at the dermal layer. So again, very light pressure and you can move the skin on your forehead around.
01:18:23.19 Taylor Kruse Think about all the directions of the compass and you're gonna test each one, north,
01:18:25.49 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:18:27.64 Taylor Kruse South, east, west, and then you've got your angles. And what you might notice is that when you pull the skin in one of those directions or several, you might run into some restriction because the skin should be able to move very freely.
01:18:42.23 Taylor Kruse And so I actually have a scar on my forehead from when I was like eight. And I can feel that when I move a certain direction, let's see what it is.
01:18:53.57 Taylor Kruse Well, I've got a couple barriers, but down, so down to my right, my skin is not as mobile. Okay, so that would be what we would call like a barrier.
01:19:02.29 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:19:04.92 Taylor Kruse and And typically, When we move into that barrier, i think, generally speaking, moving into the barrier is what generally gives people a good result.
01:19:15.89 Taylor Kruse So I might hold that, retest it in that direction, see if it's useful. On occasion, people get negative responses from that. So we typically go away from the barrier.
01:19:27.03 Taylor Kruse Again, this is all based on how the brain is perceiving the input. But the point I wanted to get it is this. So you've felt what the tissue feels like on the forehead in the neutral position, whether you're sitting or standing.
01:19:41.43 Taylor Kruse Now, rotate your head to either your right or left. Do the same barrier checking just from rotating your head
01:19:52.82 Taylor Kruse And you might notice that the tissue feels different in certain directions or even in all the directions. You might feel more tension in a certain area, less tension.
01:20:06.01 Taylor Kruse And that was only from rotating your cervical spine. And so the connective tissues are all affected by movement. which means body position can sometimes be a big driver to not only the person's pain, but also the actual intervention.
01:20:26.71 Taylor Kruse So this gal gets into another massive dilemma in the industry that we have talked about on previous episodes that I call the table dilemma.
01:20:33.05 Tony Fowler Right.
01:20:35.83 Taylor Kruse Because as soon as you're laying on a table and your relationship to gravity has changed and you're now in a perfectly relaxed and neutral position, Sure, we might be able to get a result there.
01:20:48.09 Taylor Kruse But then the question is, can we keep the result? Because when the person stands up and their other sensory systems now become integrated into what was just done, tone changes.
01:21:01.34 Taylor Kruse right And when tone changes, that means that potentially all the work you just did on the table could be erased. or it's just temporary, right? This is a big dilemma.
01:21:09.79 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:21:11.37 Taylor Kruse Now, the other thing to consider there is just position alone. So if somebody is saying, it's the weirdest thing, my neck only hurts when my right hip is in flexion and I'm standing up.
01:21:28.44 Taylor Kruse And then you go, OK, cool. I'm going to do some of my manual stuff. Hop on the table. Let's get some pillows under your head. Hey, bend your knees a little bit. Are you feeling relaxed? And now we're working on the body position that is completely nonspecific to their problem.
01:21:40.24 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:21:43.77 Taylor Kruse so ah So the next level of like manual work is actually understanding the table dilemma. and And this is not to say that table work is bad, because you can still get something quite useful. And sometimes it is the place that you have to start.
01:21:59.70 Taylor Kruse But to progress the work, we want to think about integrating other sensory systems into it, like the vision and vestibular system. so so And also changing body positions. So possibly doing manual work in positions that are either specific to how the person is going to use their body or even specific to the position they're feeling pain in.
01:22:25.14 Taylor Kruse And that that mean that could mean doing manual therapies standing up, which I've had tremendous success with. like leaning people up against a wall for stability, little bit of stability, and then literally doing some manual work while they're standing up. So now their relationship to gravity is more similar to how it's going to be when they're moving through the world.
01:22:48.34 Taylor Kruse That can be a game changer.
01:22:50.38 Tony Fowler Yeah, this is where something like a kinesio tape can be really helpful, right? Because you can have that tractioning happen while they're doing a squat, while they're actually doing the movement that might be causing them pain.
01:22:56.06 Taylor Kruse Totally.
01:23:01.24 Taylor Kruse Totally.
01:23:05.30 Taylor Kruse That's the other big dilemma is once you find a manual intervention that has helped, okay how do we replicate it so that the person can get enough time and intensity with that stimulus to actually make long-term change? So yeah, there's things we can do there. Kinesio tape is a wonderful tool for that.
01:23:29.55 Taylor Kruse The kinesio tape is another one of those things that like I feel like the general population sort of chuckles at because the athlete you know you might see an athlete with a bunch of kinesio tape on their shoulder, and it looks more like they're trying to make a design that looks like a tattoo.
01:23:45.21 Taylor Kruse you know And people don't understand that the tape on the skin is actually having quite an ah enormous effect on the nervous system. And the way that we use it is usually it only takes a little bit of tape.
01:23:57.34 Taylor Kruse by doing the barrier checking that has sort of brought people through when you're feeling the skin and checking the different directions of the compass. You might find a direction that really helps, and then you could tape the skin in that direction.
01:24:11.06 Taylor Kruse Now you send your client back into the real world, and they get 24, 48 plus hours of stimulus of what was high payoff that reduced threat before they have to change the tape.
01:24:26.90 Taylor Kruse And so now it's as if they're going through life with your hands on them doing exactly the thing that assessed well. And that is game-changing. Game-changing. This winter, I was working with an Alpine ski racer. And this is actually right before her season. She was having back pain, which was quite... It's it's a nervous time to have back pain before the season.
01:24:49.99 Taylor Kruse you're about to go into a very ah very strenuous situation. part of the year with a lot of impact. And we did some barrier checking on her abdomen.
01:25:00.56 Taylor Kruse I think it was like the left lower quadrant of her abdomen. We did some barrier checking there. We found a very specific direction of pull that the body wanted at the dermal level.
01:25:17.46 Taylor Kruse And she put a piece of kinesio tape. I think we did two pieces of kinesio tape pulling the tissue in that direction. And within 24 hours, she was sending me a text message that said, great session. My pain is gone.
01:25:32.04 Tony Fowler Yeah.
01:25:32.38 Taylor Kruse And that was it. And she actually continued to wear the tape. She would apply the tape before training. And she did that for several weeks as kind of like, hey, let's just kind of keep using this good stimulus right now and make sure we can drive this home. And she did. She drove it home and that was one piece of tape.
01:25:49.97 Taylor Kruse And it took us like you know It took us like 25 minutes of testing different areas of the trunk or of the abdomen, kind of going through things very methodically.
01:26:00.47 Taylor Kruse But then once we found what we needed, single piece of tape, and we're done. no No two hours of manual therapy that she couldn't reproduce on her own.
01:26:10.14 Tony Fowler So question about location. You know, I think I've been trained to be... suspicious of only applying a stimulus at the place that I want to fix. Right.
01:26:25.56 Taylor Kruse Right, right.
01:26:25.69 Tony Fowler So it's like my knee hurts. So I should do something to my knee. um And, and one of the things that we talk about a lot of the podcast is my knee hurts and there's something happening in the brain that's creating this pain that,
01:26:40.34 Taylor Kruse Yes.
01:26:41.05 Tony Fowler So what stimulus should I apply to the brain to help relieve this knee pain? And that might be at the opposite body elbow or in the back somewhere along the spine or in your ear or, you know what I mean?
01:26:57.02 Taylor Kruse Yeah.
01:26:57.79 Tony Fowler Like there could be somewhere totally, you know, seemingly unrelated.
01:26:57.94 Taylor Kruse Yes.
01:27:01.43 Tony Fowler Of course, everything's related in the body.
01:27:03.13 Taylor Kruse Right.
01:27:03.63 Tony Fowler But with manual therapy, I think the temptation is still very strong, right?
01:27:11.20 Taylor Kruse Very.
01:27:11.34 Tony Fowler It's like my my calf is tight, so let me apply a stimulus to my calf, you know, massage, deep tissue, whatever. um Do you find that with manual therapies that locality...
01:27:24.98 Tony Fowler tends to be a useful starting point or or more effective? Or is it actually still the opposite? My calf is tight. Maybe I should massage the back of my neck to send a stronger stimulus to the brain, for example.
01:27:38.81 Taylor Kruse Yeah, that's a great point. And those are all the questions that are supposed to go through one's mind when they're trying to figure out how to help someone problem solve an issue, right?
01:27:47.51 Tony Fowler Hmm.
01:27:47.66 Taylor Kruse This is this is where it comes down to understanding what we teach in our more advanced course. It's it's called the eight levels model. And so the eight levels model takes you through the most important levels or higher order structures that are involved with processing or taking in input.
01:28:08.47 Taylor Kruse And then so the question is, and I'll give you kind of a quick, our listeners kind of a quick layout of this. When a sensory input is applied somewhere in the body, we have we have some activation happening at the receptor level.
01:28:21.75 Taylor Kruse So a very specific maybe grouping of nerve fibers is activated. That information then starts to travel. We have peripheral nerves that help that information reach the spinal cord.
01:28:32.89 Taylor Kruse We have the spinal cord that then sends that information upwards towards the brain. The information reaches the brain. it It's impacting the cerebellum. It's impacting the brain stem.
01:28:46.99 Taylor Kruse It's impacting now the thalamus. We talked about the switchboard operator.
01:28:51.10 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:28:51.16 Taylor Kruse And then eventually, it's reaching the cortex
01:28:51.24 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:28:56.15 Taylor Kruse often most of that activation is going to be contralateral to where it was felt. So now the we're thinking about the processing happening in the contralateral aspect of the cortex.
01:29:08.31 Taylor Kruse Usually we're talking about that as the parietal lobe. but It's not the only area, but parietal lobe is is one that we'd be we'd be talking about. So you by understanding the eight levels, you can go, okay, these tight calves,
01:29:26.81 Taylor Kruse Are they tight calves? Or is there a problem somewhere in the eight levels that might be creating this protective output? and And this is, you know, so I'm not saying I would know the answer.
01:29:39.03 Taylor Kruse I would have to test things.
01:29:39.21 Tony Fowler Right. Right.
01:29:40.89 Taylor Kruse So there could be, someone could have a tight calf because they had an old injury that caused a sensory disturbance in that area of the skin.
01:29:54.17 Taylor Kruse that then caused motor deficits in that area. right So now we're now if we run that through our eight levels filter, we might be thinking, huh, I wonder, they did talk about that old that old knee injury or foot injury or something.
01:30:13.89 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:30:14.04 Taylor Kruse Maybe I need to do some local receptor testing there.
01:30:14.03 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:30:19.00 Taylor Kruse But perhaps they have a tibial nerve problem. so now we're So now we've thought about receptors. We've thought about the peripheral nerve, which would be the next level.
01:30:29.56 Taylor Kruse So now I have to test their tibial nerve. And I know where to test that because I know where, what part of the skin it innervates, bottom of the foot, back of the heel, some of the gastroc. I'm now running through my different sensations.
01:30:42.98 Taylor Kruse I'm running through light touch, vibration, two-point discrimination, warm, cool, sharp, dull. I've got all the dedicated sensations for the two pathways. right?
01:30:53.30 Taylor Kruse And so now I've thought about receptors. I've thought about the peripheral nerve, okay? And now I'm thinking about two spinal tracks, okay?
01:31:01.90 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:31:02.34 Taylor Kruse And and and let's say i I clear all those bases. I'm like, you know what? I'm not really finding a problem here. Well, what's next up? Oh, let's look at the spinal cord. Hey, client, let's have a conversation about your spine.
01:31:14.74 Taylor Kruse Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you. I've had two herniated discs at the sacral level. Oh, so now I'm starting to see the bigger picture.
01:31:26.09 Taylor Kruse Disc issue, primarily ah maybe affecting the tibial nerve. And there's a sensory consequence to that and a motor consequence to that. So even though maybe the problem didn't look like there was an issue with the calf, the issue could be coming from higher up in the eight levels.
01:31:46.44 Tony Fowler Right.
01:31:47.93 Taylor Kruse So now I'm thinking about, well, how do I deal with that? Maybe I have to start looking at actual spinal mobility or mobilizing certain segments of the spine and combining that with sensation work and motor work.
01:32:01.75 Taylor Kruse And it keeps going up because let's say we didn't find the problem in the spinal cord.
01:32:03.81 Tony Fowler Right.
01:32:07.51 Taylor Kruse um Let's maybe it's in the brainstem, right?
01:32:07.49 Tony Fowler Maybe it's in the brainstem, you know? Yeah.
01:32:10.73 Taylor Kruse and And this is then where it becomes really useful to know where your tracks go. So let's say somebody had a two-point discrimination problem on that calf.
01:32:23.93 Taylor Kruse You found that through testing. Well, then you you look eventually as you're working your way up in the eight levels and you go, okay, so two-point discrimination. I'm going to think primarily about the dorsal column.
01:32:36.28 Taylor Kruse Oh yeah, that's right. The dorsal column decusates in the medulla. That's the brainstem decusates means cross. So it crosses the midline.
01:32:45.56 Tony Fowler thank you.
01:32:46.28 Taylor Kruse Yeah, that's fancy. Yeah. Uh, it's a cool word too. Um, it means crosses in the midline midline. So then you go, oh well, if that crosses in the medulla, let me have a conversation with my client. Hey client. Um, and you start asking them about medulla stuff like, uh,
01:33:04.77 Taylor Kruse Do you have any breathing issues? oh Yeah, I have asthma. I've had asthma my whole life. Hmm. Do you have any issues with ah your your neck or your throat or your mouth? Like, well, does a speech problem count?
01:33:20.44 Taylor Kruse Because I was in speech therapy for long time when I was a kid, and...
01:33:20.49 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:33:25.10 Taylor Kruse I have this weird thing they call a tongue tie. They wanted me to get surgery. I never got it, right? Oh, interesting. And then you're starting to now gather up evidence about medullary type issues.
01:33:37.14 Taylor Kruse And so all of a sudden you're able to go, wait a minute. So could I now think about this sensory problem of a tight calf okay should Should I think about that as really just a tight calf, or could I potentially now see the effects of something else, kind of the downstream consequences of the nervous system?
01:34:00.89 Taylor Kruse So maybe now we're yeah we're doing medullary work. We're doing... things to strengthen the muscles of the throat, things to strengthen the tongue, literally tongue exercises, gargling liquids.
01:34:15.18 Taylor Kruse And we're doing that and all of a sudden seeing it, yeah, nice, nice, yeah, we're doing that.
01:34:16.98 Tony Fowler strong vagal stimulus.
01:34:21.12 Taylor Kruse all of a sudden we're retesting the calf. And we're going, son of a gun. Motor's better. Sensory's better. Wow, okay. um Very cool. and And so the point is you can keep you can keep looking at the eight levels and keep comparing it to history and findings. And you might even find yourself in the contralateral cortex rather than the brainstem and working on the person's parietal lobe to better process the information.
01:34:49.46 Taylor Kruse And yeah, we've got tools for that too. Smooth pursuits. Now we're doing a vision exercise to help parietal lobe activation, which might help a sensory problem that had developed over time on the opposite side of the body.
01:35:05.98 Taylor Kruse So it's just the cool thing about neurology. It takes the woo-woo out of everything. allows you to really look at how things communicate with one another and at least create theories about, you know, how one thing might impact another. And um because it's organized, right, the nervous system is organized enough for us, we can we can trace these things back and and find a and find possible causes and start training them.
01:35:34.19 Tony Fowler That's incredible, the eight levels.
01:35:35.96 Taylor Kruse It is.
01:35:36.19 Tony Fowler That's great.
01:35:36.95 Taylor Kruse Yeah, it's um it's something that so I think originally, it's not mine.
01:35:37.14 Tony Fowler um
01:35:41.24 Taylor Kruse ah i need to make sure people don't think that. it It comes from, I believe there was originally like a Seven Levels, which came from a ah Dr. Carrick. And then um there is a ah second interpretation to that.
01:35:57.27 Taylor Kruse um that I learned through Dr. Cobb that then we he made it more of an eight levels rather than a seven level. So this is kind of all coming from something original called the seven levels, which is it's just it's a it's a model to help us think, which is is really cool.
01:36:19.44 Tony Fowler Yeah, no, that's amazing. um So for for the manual therapist, let's say we have a masseuse or a sports massage professional listening to this podcast.
01:36:32.61 Taylor Kruse Mm
01:36:33.82 Tony Fowler They probably have a really great understanding of the manual techniques that they have applied.
01:36:44.34 Taylor Kruse right
01:36:44.86 Tony Fowler And, and, What Neuro can add to that is a way to be more efficient in targeting what what we need to do.
01:36:54.30 Taylor Kruse yes
01:36:57.94 Tony Fowler If there's a manual intervention that would be helpful, Neuro can help you figure out which one and how much, etc.
01:37:06.74 Taylor Kruse Absolutely. Yeah, and it can probably increase the speed of your results, and it can probably decrease the amount of time you need to use with your own hands, which I think all manual therapists would and would be happy about.
01:37:20.47 Taylor Kruse Yeah, but it does not take away your tool.
01:37:23.12 Tony Fowler Right.
01:37:23.38 Taylor Kruse that's That's what's so great.
01:37:23.38 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:37:25.10 Taylor Kruse It's one of the first things I tell our students as they're getting into neuro. i was like, hey, good news. I'm going to tell you that everything you already know is awesome, and you're going to be able to use it and view it differently and look at things through a different lens and still use the tools that you are most comfortable with and that you like the most, but you're also going to be learning some new ones.
01:37:45.91 Taylor Kruse is
01:37:47.35 Tony Fowler Yeah, and it might make it might make someone who's used to doing deep tissue more curious about soft touch or some of these other manual interventions that you know maybe isn't isn't the specialty, right?
01:37:54.30 Taylor Kruse Yes.
01:37:56.87 Taylor Kruse That's a good point.
01:38:01.72 Tony Fowler but
01:38:02.36 Taylor Kruse Yeah.
01:38:02.46 Tony Fowler But when you view it less as a one-size-fits-all, right, then then knowing all of these different techniques could really broaden someone's practice.
01:38:02.72 Taylor Kruse Exactly.
01:38:06.71 Taylor Kruse exactly
01:38:11.12 Tony Fowler Yeah.
01:38:11.32 Taylor Kruse Yeah, that's the whole thing. I think about my my sort of evolution coming coming through these different parts of my career where you know this when FASH, I got popular and and getting into that type of technique. for you know We're doing a resistance stretching kind of thing. And i think back to like what a paradigm shift it was.
01:38:39.03 Taylor Kruse um and in And it's difficult, right? It's difficult. It made me scared. um It made me scared to experience that what i the result that I thought I might be getting after an hour of working with somebody, um first of all, might not be what I thought it was, which is what I learned once i started testing people's responses to things.
01:39:06.63 Taylor Kruse Then also learned that possibly 30 seconds of manipulating tissue, dermal layer tissue in a certain direction, and then slapping a piece of tape on it that was you know two inches wide and four inches long, literally, i was able to achieve a much bigger result in um than I was after an hour of working on somebody's body and and putting physical labor into that, by the way.
01:39:34.95 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:39:35.35 Taylor Kruse Like my body hurt from doing that. So it was quite a paradigm shift. And then I was able to take what i learned. And this is the value of it for the movement people, the movement coaches, is that you can create assisted exercise.
01:39:52.86 Taylor Kruse which means you're constructing a movement drill to do the same thing, whether it is putting a piece of kinesio tape on the skin or you're holding the tissue in a certain direction or you've designed a mobility drill to traction the tissue in the same direction that you've tested is as what their nervous system wants.
01:40:05.66 Tony Fowler You know, just, right.
01:40:15.26 Taylor Kruse that is really the next level to to understanding this because as I said before, that's the empowering piece where now you're saying, okay, we've we've figured out what your brain and nervous system is asking for.
01:40:28.66 Taylor Kruse from a so in a sensory context. But now we're giving you the ability to replicate it over and over and over again with frequency and intensity so that your brain can learn to keep the results.
01:40:44.76 Taylor Kruse And that's that is the key. So there's a lot of ways we can do that rather than just you know have somebody hop up off the table and go home. Because then it's like, see you next time. Hope the result lasts.
01:40:56.22 Taylor Kruse Whereas I would much rather be able to educate my client and say, hey, yeah you know when you when you feel that tension coming back, let's get you practicing your drills.
01:41:07.30 Taylor Kruse Let's see if we can get some daily practice out of you. And those little frequent, like higher frequency kind of small doses go a really long way. in in dealing with whatever issue we're working on. i guess I guess that's kind of important to point out too, is that maybe I should have done this at the beginning, but working on the sensory system can be used for tons of different goals, right? It doesn't have to just be about pain.
01:41:41.05 Taylor Kruse It doesn't have to just be about tightness.
01:41:41.04 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:41:42.73 Taylor Kruse Those are the things we typically go after the most. But, man, you can use the right sensory stimulus to literally affect any kind of output, which is, again, one of the values of understanding pathways.
01:41:59.56 Taylor Kruse Because when you know the pathways, you can pick and choose your targets. So one example of that is if I'm trying to improve stabilization on one side of the body because somebody is very unstable.
01:42:14.84 Taylor Kruse I might actually apply sensory work on the left side of their body to create more reflexive stabilization on the right. So when you look at the pathways, you can start to make sense of that.
01:42:27.16 Taylor Kruse um Yeah, it's cool. When you start to look at it through sensory work, through the neurologic lens, if you will, you start to see that it is far more than just a tool for poking at people's pain.
01:42:44.26 Taylor Kruse There's a lot you can do with it.
01:42:47.42 Tony Fowler Very nice. Any last thoughts on manual therapies?
01:42:53.43 Taylor Kruse Well, just that if people are excited about that, well, when you're ready, you can jump into our courses. Yeah, I mean, we can, that's where that's where we teach a lot of the organization of that process and all the all the neurology that goes with it and the and the testing, especially in the NeuroDojo.
01:43:12.28 Taylor Kruse That's where we really get into the sensory testing.
01:43:15.48 Tony Fowler Very cool.
01:43:18.30 Taylor Kruse All right, there it is. I hope you guys enjoyed that episode. Man, I think we covered a lot of ground. So maybe this is one that I feel like we could always come back to. There's a lot it.
01:43:28.60 Tony Fowler Sure.
01:43:29.57 Taylor Kruse a cool topic. and it's ah it's it's a cool topic Just a reminder, if you guys are enjoying the podcast, if you could hit us with a review, five star, of course, we would really appreciate it. It really helps.
01:43:44.60 Taylor Kruse It really helps drive the podcast and get it to more people like yourself. So if you could do that, we'd appreciate it. And yeah, that's it for today.
01:43:55.76 Taylor Kruse Thank you so much for listening and we'll be back soon.
