This episode is brought to you by Bubs Naturals
and one of the most profound new supplements
I've added to my own diet is collagen.
And Bubs provides the only collagen
that is not only NSF certified,
but also Whole30 certified.
Now when we think of collagen,
you might think of beauty products,
but when ingested, collagen not only positively affects
skin, nails, and hair, but also joint and gut health.
Something that I witnessed personally within myself.
Now I'm also a huge fan of altruistic business
and Bubz was founded out of tragedy.
Glenn Bub Doherty was one of the two Navy SEALs
killed in Benghazi.
And his friends, Sean and TJ founded this company
to not only create great nutritional products,
but also take 10% of the proceeds
and donate them to charity.
So they are offering you the audience
of the Behind the Shield podcast,
20% off your first purchase
if you use the code SHIELD at bubznaturals.com.
And if you wanna hear more about the inception of Bubz
and Glenn's powerful story,
listen to episode 558 of Behind the Shield podcast
with Sean Lake.
Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast.
As always, my name's James Gearing
and this week it is my absolute honor
to welcome on the show functional health coach,
author, and chiropractor for the World Surf League,
Jason Gilbert.
Now in this conversation we discuss a host of topics
from Jason's early life,
his own personal back pain journey,
his path into chiropractic,
functional medicine,
heavy metal poisoning,
proactive versus reactive medicine,
foundation training,
surfing, and so much more.
Now before we get to this incredibly important conversation,
as I say every week, please just take a moment,
go to whichever app you listen to this on,
subscribe to the show,
leave feedback, and leave a rating.
Every single five star rating
truly does elevate this podcast,
therefore making it easier for others to find.
And this is a free library of almost 900 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share
these incredible men and women stories
so I can get them to every single person
on planet earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said,
I introduce to you Jason Gilbert.
Enjoy.
["Rainbow Road Remix"]
Well Jason, I wanna start by saying firstly thank you
to Jesse Salas who connected us
one of my firefighter brothers
and foundation training family members.
And secondly to welcome you
onto the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Mate, thank you very much.
It's a pleasure to chat with you
and also thanks to Jesse as well.
What a legend.
Jesse and all I get on really well
because we've got so much in common around health
and helping people and that passion for wellbeing.
So I'm grateful as well for the invite.
Beautiful.
So where on planet earth are we finding you this afternoon?
This afternoon I'm on the North shore of Hawaii,
Halieva.
I'm here, I'm usually based in a place called Lennox Head
nearby in Bay on the East coast of Australia.
And this is just a great place to be this time of year.
I've worked with the world surfing league for 20 years.
A lot of the athletes are here pre-contest.
The first contest is the end of this month at Pipe.
So some of them need help.
Some of them been injured while they're training here
and others just are aware of how important maintenance is.
So we just do some continual maintenance work.
I was about three years ago now,
I think maybe a little bit less than that.
I interviewed Bethany Hamilton,
who was my son's hero at the time.
He'd read her book and was just blown away.
And she said hello to him on the,
what was Zoom back then.
Is that an athlete that you work with?
Cause I mean, she, my goodness,
overcoming both psychological fear and physical trauma,
she's absolutely incredible.
She's an incredible human being, isn't she?
And yeah, the last time I saw Bethany was a long time ago.
I'd worked with her.
I'm pretty sure, I'm not sure if it was before
her incident with a shark, but definitely after.
And that was when she was still on tour.
And then I remember going for a surf with her
in really decent sized Bells Beach
and just being blown away with us jumping off the rocks.
At that time, she had like a handle
in the front of her board that had helped her duck dive.
And I believe after she wasn't using that.
So yeah, I've seen her both as an athlete
that I was training, but also surf with her
and just being amazed, absolutely amazed
what we're capable of if we believe
that we can overcome obstacles.
100%.
Well, speaking of overcoming obstacles,
I would love to start at the very beginning
of your lifeline.
So tell me where you were born
and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic,
what your parents did, how many siblings?
Sure.
I was born in Sydney, Australia.
I have one brother, so younger brother.
I was first off the, first come off the rank.
And look, I would say probably the most significant thing
with my early life was the fact that mom smoked
when she was pregnant.
And I was born as natty.
And I mentioned this because there's things in life
where certain decisions or pieces of advice
can help us and influence follow one path or another path.
So I was very lucky that in mom taking me
to certain doctors, one recommended
that she put me in the pool
and get my lungs stronger naturally, even though I was a baby.
Just you put any little baby in a pool
and it's gonna instinctively wanna stay afloat.
So that will induce like an exercise,
I guess in lung strengthening.
So that's what I guess directed me towards swimming.
Okay, became a competitive swimmer,
plus eventually surfing in the sea and all things aquatic.
However, if it was another doctor
that recommended Ventolin and medication,
my life I see would have been very different.
And made I use that as an example,
there's so many things in life that we could go,
oh, poor me, that happened to me,
I'm this and that happened.
But you can also look back and go,
without that happening, I wouldn't have learned this
and I wouldn't be where I am today.
So it goes that far back, my passion around health
and taking advantage of any disease, any symptom,
any adversity and turning it to our advantage.
Even though as a child,
I wasn't making conscious decisions around that,
a lot of it was luck as well.
So that was one really important part.
The other one was us owning a health food store
when I was younger and I'd work there
and I'd be influenced by incredible elderly people
still rocking it in this 80s and 90s.
And I was just always fascinated by what they were doing.
And back then, they weren't getting any complex combo
of supplements, most of them were coming in for the basics,
Brewers yeast, Swedish bitters, aloe vera,
things like that, whole foods.
So back then also, I noticed I had this interest
around staying functional and being inspired by those people.
I guess in that mix as well was just a life of rugby,
rugby league and lots of activity after school.
So sport was important, different to today
where that's a challenge for a lot of kids,
sedentary lifestyle, build up cities, technology
and all the rest.
So I'm very grateful for that.
And also, I guess having that as a given in life,
something that you don't have to think about,
you exercise, that is what part of a healthy lifestyle
entails.
It's something that I talk about a lot
and it really is to counter the judgy side
of the fitness industry.
Like, oh my goodness, why don't they just go to the gym
and eat salad and be like me with abs?
And it's so kind of ignorant to have that conversation
and not take into account the environment.
If you grew up, for example, I did,
you grew up on an English farm
where you literally have an orchard
and you have vegetables in the garden
and you eat your own meat,
your perception of food and health and time outside
and getting dirty and all the things that we know now
are very healthy is very different than
a kid that grew up in inner city New York somewhere
that all they had were bodegas
and concrete jungles to play in.
So this normalizing, what I would argue was
pretty much most of the world 100 years ago,
the Western world at least,
is such a huge part of the conversation,
especially as we've just come out of this pandemic
where supposedly health was supposed to be important
for those couple of years.
I totally agree.
And I guess when I look back, I'm 54 now,
so I look back and I see it,
let's say I'm more ignorant or less informed me,
less empathetic, not getting that
because hey, hang on, this is normal for me.
This is my normal.
We know that and not understanding.
Well, it's not like that.
I lived in Sao Paulo on and off for 20 years.
Brazil is 20 million people in that city.
And at the start of my career there would frustrate me
so much to see that exercise wasn't even
on a lot of people's radar.
It was polluted.
They live in buildings.
You know, like they often don't have open spaces to play in.
And it's only with time that I'm thinking,
hang on, I have to modify my advice here.
I have to have more empathy in regards
to what people's foundation is.
If they're born in a city,
then my advice to them is not only different,
but also where I start to educate is different as well.
Cause my norm is not the same as their norm.
You know, so you're so right on that front.
But I do think it's really important as part
of that education is to compare how we live now
as opposed to how we would have lived 100 or 200 years ago.
And most people get that.
Cause most of these cities that have built up
and they've built up in the last, let's say 50 years,
before that people would have been able to relate
to the fact that their grandparents weren't overweight.
The grandparents were more active.
Where there's buildings now,
there was open spaces and a clean river before, you know,
things like that, that, you know,
living in developing countries is very easy to relate to
cause they're developing fast a lot of the time.
And as you said, mate, the whole thing about the pandemic,
wow, that was at the start, you know,
I naively thought, oh, hang on, you know, like,
well before we knew what was happening,
but look, immune system, health, we've got this, you know?
Okay, we don't know the severity of what's coming, I admit.
However, let's just be the most prepared we can be for it.
That's gonna make a lot more sense
and just going in there unprepared.
And then sadly seeing at least in Australia
that essential services were liquor shops,
you know, grog shops as they'd say,
and more essential places such as gyms were closed down.
And eventually people could go back and work out in a mask.
But there was always that question mark there around,
hey, hang on, what do people understand is healthy?
And how's this gonna affect not only their physical health
but their mental health?
And therefore what we're seeing now,
their ability to grasp these concepts we're talking about
due to the last three to four years
and what they've been through mentally.
Yeah, yeah.
To me through my lens at least, 2023 was the glaring year
of the ripple effect of the year two years before.
And I saw a lot of people struggling, continue to struggle.
But, you know, and I've underlined this a lot.
I had so many people just like yourself during the pandemic.
I put an extra episode out each week
and it was nutritionists and chiropractors and doctors
and strength conditioning coaches and you name it
to empower the people that were at home, you know,
that have been told to stay in their flat in London
or wherever it was and give them some autonomy back.
But when there's this conversation
and all this scaremongering about the health
and the disregarding of underlying comorbidities,
what's disgusting is as we came out, nothing was done.
And I highlighted this, you know,
no local farmers were given incentives to grow organic food.
You know, PE programs weren't put back in schools.
You know, real food wasn't cooked in lunches
and removing the soda machines.
It was nothing, absolutely nothing.
So not only did all those people die,
we did nothing to honor their memory.
We did nothing to change it
so that the next virus that zooms through our planet
doesn't claim as many lives again.
Made 100%.
I couldn't put that any better
than what you just put that.
So what's that word?
I think it's in Mandarin, the same word as crisis
also means opportunity.
And that was our opportunity.
And it was, some people, a lot of people did benefit
and they turned that into a positive.
However, it is sad to see that that crisis
did not result in opportunity for a lot of others.
And as you said, you know,
whether it be for another crisis that's coming
or a pandemic or just life in general,
the lessons that we can learn during crisis
are so important.
And what it highlighted is that,
and I guess when I do my retreats and when I wands,
I always start with the fact that
we live in an allopathic society
where we are encouraged to wait till we lose our health.
So when most people think about their health
when they actually lose it,
when a disease or pathological process is occurring
and causing obvious symptoms,
so that's when we are programmed to believe that,
okay, we need to look at our health then.
And we live in a world that, I don't know,
I put a percentage on it, is it 95%, 92, 98,
it's a huge percentage of the health profession
is actually focused on disease.
So this is really, really important
that people understand this,
that our allopathic professionals
are incredibly responsible and dedicated
and really well-intentioned,
that's the most important thing.
However, their allopathy is not focused on function.
Okay, it's a bit like a house catching fire.
Of course, we're gonna call the fire brigade,
that's allopathy.
We need the fire brigade to come
and help us put that house out.
However, because that allopathy is englobed
in a health profession title,
we believe that our health will be looked after as well
when that fire is put out.
What we don't understand is that it depends on us
to look for a carpenter, a plumber, an electrician,
all the rest to help rebuild the house.
So it's not the fire brigade's fault,
okay, they're not coming along saying anything different
other than, hey, we'll put the fire out for you.
But we believe that in that system,
that will include and help us be guided towards health.
So what I might do actually,
while I'm talking about this point is,
we'll say, well, what are most people,
what most people have is their definition of health
is based on how they feel and somehow they look, okay,
if they look healthy, if they look fit
and how they feel.
I ask people, oh, what's health to you?
It's when I'm feeling good.
So, okay, well, a lot of people woke up this morning
feeling great and they're dead this afternoon
of a heart attack.
Were they healthy?
Did that just happen during the day?
Or maybe they weren't healthy and they didn't feel that.
So straight away, people are having an idea.
And my own mom actually, mom, she's a lucky thing,
she's six years on surviving lung cancer
from smoking 60 years.
Wow.
Late stage lung cancer.
And mom was feeling great even the day
that she first coughed up blood
and we found out she had cancer.
So we cannot have that definition of health, okay?
It will lead to disease.
However, if we do know the true definition of health,
which is 100% cell function,
and there's a word for that homeostasis,
then that gives us our best way of going,
well, hang on, if it's 100% function,
what's that in globe, what's that entail?
It entails us getting 100% of what we need,
what the genetic requirements of our cells are
and giving it to them,
and a minimum or zero of what it can't have,
which we'll call toxins.
So if we have the ability to put into a column
what our nutrients are and increase them
if they need to be increased,
which is the case for most of us,
and recognize what toxins are,
and not the typical ones that a lot of people think
might be chemicals in our food or cleaning products,
which are really important, obviously,
but a toxin is a sedentary lifestyle,
it's negative thoughts, it's lack of sunlight and more,
then we have the best chance at steering our health
in the direction of true health.
So back to the pandemic and all of the result and effects,
I think that, what do we see,
how do we see people lose function?
We saw mental health, obviously, talked about that,
due to a series of things.
If we limit people's movement,
they're gonna suffer mentally.
No animal, if we take a happy, healthy dog
or animal from the wild and we put it,
so we're gonna say a dog on a farm,
and we put the dog in a small backyard, a city,
or a wild animal in a cage, that's not a happier animal,
it's not a healthier animal for that reason.
So movement, I believe, is one of the most important nutrients
for our body and our brain.
If we look at, for example, the toxins that they took in,
like during that time, the sedentary lifestyle,
the posture, all the rest,
they're the things we need to look at
that did occur during the pandemic,
and that would need to be looked at now and reversed,
hopefully, in preparation for a next one,
or just a healthier life.
So while we're on the subject,
I'm gonna get your perspective on this,
and obviously then we'll carry on
walking through your early life and beyond,
but the people listening, a lot of them are shift workers.
They might be law enforcement, my profession,
we work 24 hours at a time in a US fire service.
Talk to me through your functional medicine lens
about the impact of sleep
and the impact of sleep deprivation
on physical and mental health.
Yeah, that is so important.
I mean, if we even started back to that health profession,
we look at the poor doctors when they come out as interns,
from day one, they're compromising
one of the most important nutrients,
which is sleep, by doing extended shifts.
So yeah, there's not a shadow of doubt that sleep,
and I mentioned movement being the most important nutrient.
Sleep is definitely more important.
And what's the why we sleep?
I've got a mental block.
Matthew Walker, I recommend that everybody read that book,
or if not, if they don't wanna read a book,
at least listen to one of his podcasts.
He's incredible, and by understanding
the intricacies of sleep and the effects of poor sleep,
we have one of the best ways of affecting our health.
So with the shift workers, yeah, I empathize, I really do.
And I feel like, well, if that is a necessity,
what do we do?
We've got to look at strategies to compensate for that.
How do we regulate our circadian rhythm
if we're working at night?
We've gotta be sleeping at day.
What do we need to make up for?
What hormones are being affected?
How do we compensate for that?
Especially cortisol, if cortisol goes through the roof,
because we wake up with cortisol typically high
in the morning, and that will be thrown out.
So we need to look at our individual case,
how often we work shift work.
If it's, for example, airline staff,
and they're not only dealing with change
in their sleeping hours, but also time differences
when they get to their destinations,
how they deal with that.
How do you deal with shift work,
let's say in the fire brigade,
if you have a night where you're not active,
you're waiting for a potential emergency,
what should you eat?
What sort of foods are inflammatory, what aren't?
Should you eat at all?
So there's a whole series of factors
that need to be looked at individual by individual,
and applied to minimize the effect, the aging effects.
I say firstly, your immune system, longevity, aging,
all of these things, they do suffer
with shift work is for sure.
Okay, what sort of exercise?
That's another one really important, yeah?
What about red light?
If you're sleeping during the daytime,
are you getting at least some red light
via various options with technology these days
to complement for that?
And now you have a few of your own tricks that you do
and that you've learned
from the people you've interviewed as well.
Yeah, I've got so many,
and the most basal ones that Matt Walker talks about
and some of the other experts in the sleep world,
the blue blocking glasses at night,
the temperature low, I have mine at 66
in the house at night, trying to minimize devices,
et cetera, et cetera.
I mean, it's not hard and fast,
but you're constantly deliberately trying
to create an environment to sleep well.
And I'm not on shift anymore.
I transitioned out five years ago now,
partly because I realized that this job was killing us.
And when I was at that crossroads,
which I had no intention of being at the time,
it was the last place that I worked,
made it easier to leave, let's put it that way.
It was also kind of walking the walk on regaining my health
and just to circle back to your burning building analogy,
we have a separate area called fire prevention.
Those are the ones that will inspect the fire escapes
and the extinguishers and the outlets and all the things.
And through putting all the incredible tools
that the fire prevention world
has come up with into schools,
we haven't had a fire that's killed more than,
I think, a person in a school since the 1950s,
because they've understood the proactive nature
of fire prevention.
That same theory needs to be applied to us.
So giving our responders enough rest and recovery
between shifts so they can get as close to baseline,
having fitness standards so they can not only perform
at a high level, but have a healthy retirement,
to me, that's the fire prevention perspective
on our own health.
Most definitely.
I think people need to look at the life they want
after they retire, and not enough people do that.
They either don't think about or allow their professions
to influence their health to a point
where they won't recover it after.
And what I was gonna ask you,
in regards to that fire prevention,
did that include all aspects of the building, for example,
checking out the integrity of, let's say,
anything that's made from wood, the electrical component,
every single thing was covered?
Yeah, because what it would be covered under
would be the inspections that now are woven
with fire inspections.
So there'd have to be firewalls,
like certain thickness of certain materials
to stop it traveling through the attic.
Wiring would have to be up to code.
So between the building and the fire departments,
they're working hand in hand to make sure
that you're not creating an environment to start a fire,
you're not creating an environment for fire to spread,
and then obviously you give the occupants the ability
to be alerted and get out before it's too dangerous.
So if we looked at, for example, our allopathic profession
or even our option of health professionals,
and we looked at the fact that, okay,
if that was provided by, let's say, a GP,
and to a certain degree, we could say it is,
because you can also go to your doctor
and get health, like, blood tests.
So this is important to understand
that most people doing a blood test
will have a specific question answered.
Okay, for example, is my insulin high?
How are my markers, my cardiovascular markers?
When those tests from allopathy come back negative,
we can falsely assume that we're healthy,
but in reality, we're just not sick.
Okay, so what I'd imagine that we'd have to add
with the fire prevention here is that we do that, okay,
we definitely do that.
We do our blood tests and all of our other tests
in regards to disease, but we also need to empower ourselves
with information around what professionals I need
to complement that.
For example, here's a really good example,
I was speaking about this this morning, with gut health,
a lot of people go, they know they've got something wrong
with their gut, and they'll go and get investigated,
but typically, the fecal samples that are done
to test for parasites and other bacteria
may come back negative.
And so therefore, they will assume,
I'm fine, I don't have a gut problem.
However, they need to go and have them tested further.
There's other things that we can do
to actually go deep on gut health,
which is so important, we know that these days.
So we just, I guess we need to understand the limitations
that the people of those professions offering that
and complement it with the tests that we need to do
with health professionals around that.
May, do you see what I mean?
Do you agree with that?
Yeah, no, I completely, it's funny,
because I look at the user analogy and keep building on it.
The allopathic tests are the smoke alarms
and the CO2 monitors.
They're the ones that tell you something is actually wrong.
The rest of it is like we said,
the construction of emergency doors,
the wiring that's up to date,
the walls aren't gonna burn,
those are the things that are preventative element,
the structure of the building.
So yeah, so it's spot on.
And I think the other thing to kind of tag on
to what you've been talking about as far as the principles,
this is what we see as paramedics, EMTs especially,
is you will have someone who looks like shit
and they hand you a bag of meds,
but when they go to the doctor's office,
even though they're 150 pounds overweight,
their blood pressure will be 118 over 72.
Oh, you're within normal limits.
Your cholesterol is here because you're on your statins.
So all you're doing is you're masking,
you're tricking the machines that we use
to test those metrics.
You're not actually fixing the root problem,
which is you are carrying a huge amount
of excess adipose tissue and your heart and lungs
are completely deconditioned.
And so everyone listening, day in, day out,
runs on 50 year old cardiac victims that never come back
and their heartbroken husband or wife
hands you this fucking grocery bag full of meds
that looked great when they were in the doctor's office,
but they still died.
Man, nothing frustrates me more.
Seriously, and I've seen that obviously
countless times in my career.
You know, and if I could relate it back to the start
of my career with spinal care,
and I would have people come in with obvious signs
of a hernia and it might've been like,
let's say a disc protrusion occurring
and they might've been on meds for ages,
they've come to a chiropractor.
This is the thing also that within the health profession,
you might get a chiropractor, a physio,
you might get a naturopath who actually functions
allopathically, okay, but using natural interventions.
So just because they are those and more professions
doesn't mean that they're looking at health as a whole.
And that was me when I first graduated.
So people would come in and I'd use this tool
that I learned at university and like, oh my God, okay,
well, there's the adjustment.
Good luck.
They'd come back after a couple of times
and say the pain's gone.
You know what I mean?
So that in reality, no, they were never functioning
like they should have.
And I had luckily the opportunity to learn five
or 10 years down the track that that dysfunction
that they had stayed asymptomatic five or 10 years.
And they've come back and gone, you're amazing.
Well, remember I saw you five or 10 years ago.
You took my pain away.
And I was young, so my ego loved that.
In reality, when we did the MRI at that stage,
like, oh my God, they've got a hernia now.
They only had a disc protrusion before
and now their disc is blown out.
So that can be via the medication.
It can be via so many other markers
that once again, if we're asymptomatic
and clearly looking at someone's life,
like these clients, they might've been sedentary.
They might've been sleeping in really poor mattresses,
might've been doing an exercise, but incorrectly,
they might've been a marathon runner
running with one leg shorter than the other.
Like there's all these causes, physical causes
plus diet and emotional stuff.
They might've been apparently okay.
And I learned firsthand,
not even using a natural intervention like an adjustment
could be the worst thing you can do
to someone helping them remove their pain
and having them believe that they're fine.
Because it happens all the time.
We can talk about dozens of degenerative cases
where the same thing happens and they end up worse
or they actually lose their life
because those signs were suppressed earlier on
and they were following a model
based around the presence or absence of symptoms.
Well, I wanna get to looking at spinal health
and then my story, which includes foundation training,
which hands down saved my career.
But before we do, let's go back to Sydney.
I actually lived in Manly for a few months
when I was traveling the world.
I thought, yeah, it was in there.
It was the only one in Manly for years.
Quite possibly you went there.
Probably, probably.
So talk to me about, you said you were asthmatic as a baby.
You're doing the swimming, which I think is incredible.
I wish they'd talked about respiratory strength
during COVID as well.
That would have been game-changing for some people.
But what about the pain that you were enduring
as a small child?
Walk me through that.
Yeah, I made the pain basically accompany
any physical activity that I did.
So whether it be, I used to run.
I liked long distance running.
So I'd run, I'd play rugby and rugby league actually
every day after school and surfed.
And it was always just a part of physical activity.
So I accepted it as normal.
It would be like a young child running
and being out of breath after it and accepting that,
oh, that just happens while you do that.
And then it recovers after that.
So kids have this amazing ability to,
I guess for their symptoms to subside fast,
they're naturally strong in most fronts.
And I assumed that that was that.
So it got to a certain age around, I guess 18,
where it stopped me in my tracks.
And I remember it was basically surfing.
You know what also?
It also coincided with me starting to go out
and have a few beers and thinking that was a normal,
that's in the food pyramid in Australia, alcohol.
So, you know.
They slayers, isn't it?
Yeah.
And I'd have a big day after surfing
and be out standing and a couple of beers.
And then because alcohol is a muscle relaxant.
So obviously any of the protection,
the reflex muscle guarding that my spine was getting
was removed combined with the fact that I was dancing
or standing for a long time at a party
and then waking up the next day,
absolutely stopped in my tracks.
So that was when I was surfing one day
and I was surfing with Tom Carroll,
who's a three time world champ back in the day,
mentioned back pain and he recommended chiropractic.
So this is the beautiful thing in life that I learned early,
you never ignore coincidences
because they're not coincidences.
And around the same time in that week,
I was working at the health food store
and already studying science.
And this guy's come in on a Saturday morning and said,
oh, what are you doing?
I said, I'm doing a bachelor of science degree.
He said, what are you doing that for?
I said, I'm going to work with a pharmaceutical company
one day, what are you going to do with it?
I said, I don't know.
I just didn't know, I didn't get what I want to do.
I wanted to study vet science
and I think physio didn't get in.
And I just thought I'll do this.
He said, no, you should study chiropractic.
I just went to the chiropractor hobbling this morning
and I'm fine now walking normally pain free.
And I was fascinated, I was like, what?
And straight away I imagined that the chiropractor
used some elaborate machine or something else.
And I said, what did he do?
He said, just use his hands.
He said, I was there for 10 minutes, paid 50 bucks.
And it was just with his hands, I was fascinated.
And because my dad, he had, I guess his job,
it was his business and it involved long days
and social catch-ups after work.
So I wouldn't see much of dad until let's say
after 6.30 at night.
I was always in my mind to find a profession
that would allow me time with future family.
And my first experience with chiropractic was exactly that
because I tried to book in as like,
oh no, that day I'm sailing.
Oh, that afternoon I'm not working.
When do these guys work?
But then I saw what they did is they just blocked
their days in a way that allowed them to also look
after their health, which appealed to me
to be able to structure my life and my work life
around something that was gonna favor my wellbeing.
So that's what led me to chiropractic.
And now there's stages to that mate
because I went into this profession,
well, starting a profession that I understood
very little about and scraped through orthopedics
back in the day and a few other subjects
but really excelled in the manual part,
the chiropractic adjustment part.
And you come out of chiropractic not really knowing
the power of what you're gonna be delivering.
And this is important not only to chiropractors
but also people from any health profession,
the body has the power to heal itself.
We know that.
It can only be impeded from doing so if there's blockages.
So all chiropractic does is remove blockages
so that the body can heal itself.
And a lot of us come out, we have zero idea
of how the nervous system works
and the fact that the nervous system is encased
within the spine and the spine can be affected
by physical things like posture falls,
which can end up affecting the nervous system.
So it was only with time and going to Peru
where I'd take my table up to the Andes and treat,
the busiest day was 220 people in a day.
I worked 18 hours nonstop, but I do regular campaigns
with the poor people in the Amazon,
a place called Akitos and Wanko in the Andes.
That's when I realized, my God,
that was the power of the human body.
Obviously the power of chiropractic to help
but the power of the body to heal itself
because I had very little experience.
I did technically what I knew I had to do,
but it was really then coming back and telling me,
oh my God, that pain down my leg has improved
or the headache that I had improved
or I haven't had a period for six months or six years.
I had my period last night.
I've been constipated for months.
I went, had a bowel motion.
I know that in that answer, mate,
I know that there's a lot involved there.
So if I got off track, I'm sorry about that.
But there's a, yeah, that's, I look back
and I think it's just a beautiful evolution
from having back pain to finding what I was meant to do
and learning firsthand about health from my clients.
Cause you know, we can't expect to know all of this
off the straight when we graduate.
But if we ask the right questions,
which is really important,
if you're not asking, when did this start?
Why did this happen?
Why do you think?
What did it coincide with as opposed to,
oh, what do I do to get rid of the pain?
The question's everything.
So I'd really encourage everyone,
even with their own health, to ask the right questions
and to have any hope of getting the solution
to get on top of the problem they're suffering from.
Absolutely.
I think it's so arrogant to think that a pill or a surgery,
and I'm talking more on the chronic disease world
and talking about you got your femur snapped into,
you know, is a better choice
than the body's natural ability to heal, to regenerate.
You know, and I think that we see that in ancient wisdom
and in ancient medicine, you know, from chiropractic
to acupuncture and the herbal medicines
that clearly lasted millennia because it worked.
And then, you know, come into modern medicine,
don't get me wrong, there's some drugs I use
as a paramedic that are phenomenal,
but more often than not, they're actually based on,
you know, substances that exist in the natural world.
And the same with surgery.
I mean, there's some incredible surgeries
that are absolutely lifesaving.
There's some, you know, things that are happening
to people that have been paralyzed,
or, you know, all the things
that absolutely modern medicine is helping.
But when it comes to the chronic disease management,
there's a complete, almost like heresy element
to how dare you suggest that food
could reverse heart disease or diabetes
when it can, so how dare you suggest that it can't?
Totally, totally.
And that's the danger where you get most of the world,
like people talking about what they think's the same thing,
but with just with a different angle.
You know what I mean?
And I'm with you too, like after having the most severe pain
I've ever felt for two months and fighting it
because my specialty in Brazil and Peru,
but more Brazil, was helping people avoid surgery.
And then like, how can it be that my case is surgical?
So I fought it, fought it, fought it for two months,
suffered the most pain I've ever felt.
Thank God for modern medicine.
Thank God for a procedure called microdyssectomy
that went in there laparoscopically,
cleaned up the disc material,
didn't hamper or affect my biomechanical function.
I've come back stronger than ever.
So when we need those tools and they're there,
we need to realize what they're doing,
and we need to go back independently of the problem
if we do use medication or surgery,
we need to go back and look at the underlying function.
As you said before, someone may suffer a cardiovascular problem.
Great, if you needed that,
if it got to an emergency state of crisis
and you use medication, fine.
But please don't accept that you're boosting your health
by continuing on with that,
whether it be a statin, something controlling,
cholesterol, blood pressure, whatever.
Go to your diet, go to your stress levels,
mate, that's another thing these days, that word stress.
People associate that with losing their shit in the traffic
and giving someone the bird.
That's not what we're talking about.
We're talking about any situation
where the body has to adapt to a situation
that puts in in a state where hormonally,
particularly cortisol, will alter
to be able to deal with that situation.
So if we understand that response, then we go
and we understand that elevated cortisol is pro-inflammatory.
And if we do have an underlying low back problem
or a headache or whatever, if we're inflaming it via stress,
we're inflaming it via diet, okay, or anything else,
well, of course, inflammation builds on inflammation.
So that's where you need to know, okay,
there's the fire brigade, there's the allopathic option,
medical option, and there's what I need to do
to actually truly boost my health.
And as I said, we said at the start,
benefit from any crisis so that you're stronger than ever, okay?
Many people accept that aging is just gonna slow them down
and make things more difficult.
That's not the case at all.
No, well, that's when you again go back
to the more indigenous groups around the planet.
You know, I shared a Haitian man a few months ago
on Instagram and he was doing an interview
and he was talking about, he could have quit,
he was in his 80s and looked like he'd be
on the front cover of Muscle and Fitness.
It was ridiculous.
And he was saying, yeah, but I don't wanna stop working
because then I'll become a burden to my children.
And this guy, I mean, just was in phenomenal shape.
Now, you know, what do we think about when we think of 80s
in, you know, especially UK, America,
you're thinking like, wow, you made it 80, you know,
you're probably gonna be a hundred pounds heavier,
you're maybe dragging around a nasal cannula the whole time,
you're in an electric wheelchair,
but you know, the lifespan and the health span
of a human being, if we look at other cultures,
you know, again, removing disease and some of the things
that killed the more ancient tribes,
we have the ability to have a hundred years of health,
like a beautiful hundred years lifespan,
if we don't, you know, just give up.
And the number of people that are younger than me, I'm 49,
that, you know, I'm totally accepting that they're on,
you know, diabetes, meds, as you said, statins,
beta blockers, whatever it is.
Well, I am 40, yeah, you're 40.
That's not even halfway through, you know,
if you were gonna live to be a hundred.
So we've got to change our entire mindset
and again, focus on pre a hundred years ago
and outside the industrial areas
and see the potential of not just a lifespan,
but as I said, a health span, a healthy, you know,
nurturing life right until the very end.
Made a hundred percent, couldn't agree more.
Our life should be like a light globe.
Light globes don't lose their shine bit by bit
as they go today, they're shining away
and then one day to the next, boom, gone.
So that should be us, as you said, around a hundred.
Now, I write, it's not ironic, what's the word on this?
Sadly, these days, there's people in their thirties
and forties that are losing their shine already.
Even earlier, that's dying to me.
They won't officially die till, I don't know,
put it, is it 60, is it 70?
Okay, but they are dying.
If you're in a process that's degenerative
and leading you that way, okay, that's a process.
As opposed to you shining and you being functional
to a point where you go to bed one night,
you just don't wake up.
So on a positive note, if there is one angle here,
I see a lot of people that abuse their health.
And look, when I say that, we're talking about,
they're not informed, so it's not their fault, obviously,
but they're not instructed earlier on
and they're still getting to their seventies.
Yeah, that's usually 60, 70.
These people have smoked, drunk,
my mum would be an example.
She's 79, 80 this year, but if you do that
and still make it to 70 or 80,
what about if you do everything right?
You're easily late 80s, 90s, 100,
unless you suffer what we've always suffered,
accidents and other things, you know?
But other than that, I think a lot of people,
if they're in that process of being overweight
or having some process going on,
that it's very hard to imagine
that things can be turned around.
And we need to have the belief that the body heals itself.
If you give it the conditions
and you let it do what it's going to do,
then you'll benefit from that.
We don't do this to have a number, to make a certain number.
We do it to be functional.
We do it to do all the things we love doing today
and continue without getting to a point in time and go,
well, I can't do that anymore.
I love surfing.
I'd hate to think that I'm limited when I'm 80
and I can't surf, do you know what I mean?
Or relate with others or whatever it is,
lose that passion for life.
And it's beautiful when you run into people
in their 80s and 90s rocking it still,
and you can sit down and have a chat with them.
It's not rocket science.
What they come out with are just simple,
I guess, rules that we forget
because there is a lot more information now.
There's amazing supplements for mitochondria
and all this and red light and technology,
but it's the basics.
You've got to have the basics in place first.
The rest of them are just nice bonuses
that augment other processes.
But yeah, I remember my gardener in Peru,
what inspiration, he was 88.
He's 88, I actually felt bad employing someone.
Initially, I feel bad.
Should I feel bad employing an 88 year old to do my garden?
He's the happiest person.
He'd run 14 kilometers three times a week.
And when we sat down to have a chat about it,
he was still in love, loved his wife, adored her.
So that's important.
Had a lot of fulfillment from his family.
He moved either through his work gardening or running.
He said, look, I never smoked.
So he went to the obvious toxins,
but we have to admit if you're in a South American country,
there's toxins in the air,
there's pollution from buses and trucks going past.
So there wasn't a paranoia around it,
but he knew that smoking was a toxin and alcohol.
And he just cited really basic things around his diet.
Peru, the fishing industry is big.
So fish are a part of the diet there and fresh foods.
He's 88, easily looking at 100.
Yeah, and again, that's so basic.
And it was everything that people really kept away from.
The natural food without chemicals, without hormones,
without antibiotics, time in daylight, community, movement,
I mean, all the things, touching nature,
whether it's in the ocean or getting your hands in soil,
those are the basic tenets of health and good sleep.
And if I'm sure if you're working out in a garden
for eight hours and throwing in a run three times a week,
you're probably gonna sleep like a baby as well.
Exactly, and adding to that,
there's just one thing I meant to say
when I said running is that anyone listening who's starting,
it's really important to understand
you don't have to run 14K a week, you can walk.
Do you know what I mean? Just move.
Like I'm sure the same benefit would have been obtained
if he was walking and actually there's a lot of studies,
especially in the blue zones of the world
that indicate that that low intensity,
longer duration exercise is better.
And I can relate to that.
My relationship with exercise at this time in my life,
I'm 54, is much different to what it was 10 years ago,
where I'd equate benefit with absolutely slogging myself.
And now I'm aware for myself and my clients who train hard
and I'm aware of the dangers of leaving cortisol
elevated for prolonged periods of time.
So as encouraging to people getting into it and starting,
just start moving, just do what you can.
If you're in pain, walk to it, is it five minutes,
10 minutes, just increase it and be patient with your body.
Just as we said, remove the blockages, give it time,
let your body do what it's gonna do and it'll heal itself.
Well, speaking of healing yourself,
firstly, you talked about your journey into chiropractic.
What about you as a patient?
You had all that pain up until you were late teens.
Did you have relief yourself
when you were under a chiropractor?
Yeah, sure.
So chiropractic from that point on
was always a really important part of my life.
And I was lucky overseas
because not long after graduating, I went to Peru
and I was just excited by the fact of being a pioneer
in places like Peru and Brazil.
So I was a founding member of the Peruvian Association
and Brazil helped start the first university course there
and actually helped get chiropractic
and spinal care out there on television.
I hosted a program on Fox or Three Ears, all the rest.
But at the start of that time,
I was basing my need for care on pain for sure.
Did not understand the full, firstly,
the importance of having a nervous system
that didn't have interference.
But it took a while for me to understand that diet
and sleep and emotional side is also important.
I thought you could train off a bad diet.
It was only really around the mercury toxicity time
that, and I'll talk about that,
that I realized no, diet's everything.
So it did pass a transformation there for sure.
And part of that would be that led me to spinal surgery,
interestingly, is that we don't always feel pain.
We mentioned that before.
There's a lot of people that wake up feeling great
and they pass away of a heart attack that day.
So my case also, I'm one of those people who,
my body, when it's telling me,
it's often way down into the red.
It's way progressed.
And that was the case.
I turned 40, actually, I was kite surfing
and I surfed a right hander for a week
in one direction the way it went.
And with my spine being twisted by not changing my feet,
the position on the board.
So basically adding on to everything else that had happened,
working the same side of the table all those years
and lifting the heavy table up
when I go and do the campaigns, probably diet as well,
was just the straw that broke the camel's back.
So you can see there that my relationship
with chiropractic changed also that time
from being more pain-based
to truly understanding what your body needs.
And then all those other factors that I mentioned,
diet, the emotional side and all the rest,
ended up having surgery.
As I said, that was humbling.
But to go into surgery and not feel a couple of your toes
and wake up and the first thing you're thinking of,
oh my God, I can feel my toes.
It's like, hallelujah.
And have that occur as a result, like, sorry,
have that occur and then get the strongest spine I've ever had
actually learn the right way to strengthen it, weights,
all the exercises involved and modify the way I was training,
beautiful thing.
You know, that's all already in my early 40s
that I've got the strongest back I've ever had
and still have a spine that very rarely I feel spinal pain.
And if I do, it's something I can pinpoint.
It's all about the question, isn't it?
Oh, hang on, I woke up with pain.
Oh, okay, well, that's right.
I'm traveling and I slept in a soft mattress.
Oh, you know what?
Why is my back sore today?
Ah, because I was in the garden yesterday
pulling out weeds.
Even though you can train a lot,
the garden will ruin you every day of the week
if you're not used to it.
Absolutely.
You know what I mean?
So just things like that,
learning to ask the right questions and then,
and you know, most of the time, mate,
when I'm in back pain now,
my go-to is going for a very long walk
and getting back to my stabilization exercises,
going to a chiropractor, I do that regularly.
I also include a physio, if I know some good physios around
or deep soft tissue massage.
So it's a whole thing with time of us building up
our little team of health professionals
that we rely on to keep us functioning well,
the same way that we would have a car that we care for
getting regular maintenance from a mechanic.
There's no different at all, you know,
if we want that car to function and last a long time.
When I was, how old would I have been?
It was about 10 years ago now, so 39-ish.
I pulled my back at my last fire department
and it wasn't anything heroic.
It wasn't a fire.
It was a gentleman, not a very big gentleman
having an anxiety attack, swore he was dying,
wanted to go to hospital.
And just the way the ambulance, the rescue was parked,
the stretcher, it was kind of on an angle,
so the stretcher wouldn't go in.
So I kind of arched my back to lift him up,
felt this pop in my back, drove to the hospital first,
got him out and off.
And then once we came out, I told my partner like,
something's wrong.
And again, I've been through a lot up to that point,
done stunts and kickboxing and all kinds of things.
So I know when I'm hurt rather than when I'm,
just tweak something.
And very well, I'll give you,
actually I'll give you the longer story
because of what we talked about earlier.
So the initial workman's comp thing
that I have to go to is a local clinic.
I see this one PA who,
and I understand that he's completely right,
gave me, I don't even know if he did an x-ray then,
but anyway, he said, look, you're gonna need a few days
for it to go down.
So here's the note for a few days off at first,
then come back in and then we'll talk about what's next.
So I'm like, okay, that perfectly understandable.
So I go back a few days later, but it's a different guy.
This PA is about 350 pounds,
winded by the time he even makes it to the exam room
and proceeds to tell me,
cause I was already pursuing,
okay, what about physical therapy?
I wanna get back on it as soon as I can.
And then an MRI, like it's still killing me.
Let's find out what it is right from the beginning
and then we can have a treatment plan.
And he basically said, no, I'm not giving you any of those.
Here's a prescription for pain medication.
Here's a prescription for muscle relaxers.
I'm ordering you to take them.
And firstly, this is a PA in a separate clinic.
So his orders don't mean anything.
So I was like, all right, fine.
So I walked out, rescheduled with the first doctor,
got my physical therapy prescription, got my MRI.
And it turned out that I had torn three ligaments in my back.
One of my vertebrae actually rotated laterally.
When I looked at my leg, not supposed to do that.
So, you know, fucked myself up pretty badly
and there was bulges and all kinds of things.
And so initially went through the physical therapy
that was covered by my work,
but then I paid out a pocket for a chiropractor.
I think it went like four times a week,
like really just kind of all in trying to get it
figured out.
And while I was there, he was playing a video
of a dude standing doing this weird pose,
which ended up being foundation training.
But my whole thing was, you know,
cause they, the one guy, of course,
it would have been pain meds
and then ultimately it would have been surgery.
That's what all the other people I know
were kind of sent into.
But my thing was this, you know,
what was it that caused it?
I was exercising well, I was doing CrossFit,
but I was also doing yoga.
You know, I was doing things properly
and I had a background in movement.
So it wasn't like I went from zero to a hundred.
So what is it about my body that causes injury?
Cause if I just get sliced and diced,
I haven't fixed the problem.
So then I dive into foundation training
and literally my recovery goes from, you know,
on an angle of 10% increase to like a 45,
sorry, 10 degree increase to like a 45 degree increase
in recovery is absolutely phenomenal.
Cause I understand now, ah, you know,
I've got this anterior pelvic tilt,
I've got a short hamstring.
This is now why I tore myself.
And ended up going not only back to work,
but about three months later,
we had a fundraiser for, I do every year for firefighters
and it was 225 pound deadlifts
in this kind of pseudo CrossFit style thing.
And they felt amazing.
You know what I mean?
So it wasn't like I just stopped the pain.
I'd figured out why I got hurt
and I'd made it stronger and more mobile.
So that was a huge aha moment for me
that I think kind of circles around
to what you were talking about is just cause you're
out of pain doesn't mean that you're healed,
doesn't mean that you're thriving.
So talk to me about, you know,
you were talking about treating pain alone before.
What shifted in your chiropractic philosophy?
And then talk to me about how you discovered
foundation training specifically.
Yeah, sure.
Mate, I was just going to add to one thing.
I didn't want to forget this point.
And it's relevant to what you're talking about
with insurance before that.
What is?
A lot of people base their ability to care for themselves
or what they should do around
what their insurance will cover.
And it's really important to understand that, okay,
it's exactly the same as insurance for your car.
When I say exactly, usually,
meaning that insurance will protect you
if the car is stolen or if you have an accident,
but it will not pay for your regular maintenance
with the mechanic.
Okay, so for anyone who has insurance,
please don't let that dictate
whether you are going to go and pay out of your own money.
Okay, when I say pay, it's actually invest
because the insurance company pays
for the result of lack of function,
disease, crisis, all the rest.
We need to invest in chiro, in foundation.
And when I say investment, it could be time or money, okay?
But it's an investment.
So it's an encouragement to those people
to please break out of that paradigm of letting insurance
dictate whether it's health-related or not
because it's usually not.
It's crisis, just like a car.
All right, mate, so with me,
my metamorphosis, I'd say, was,
the really important one was diet, okay?
Diet was important because, as I said,
I thought that I could train off a bad diet.
And what I saw with time is around the time
I was operated, I had a chiropractor who worked for me
who was about 100 kilos.
And he'd do, over the years, lots of soft tissue with me
and I'd be really sensitive, you know,
intolerant to a lot of pressure.
And so around that time, I understood about diet.
I changed my diet pretty radically.
And not only that, but everything.
I stopped drinking alcohol.
I started to alcoholize a lot more
with, let's say, apple cider vinegar
or sodium bicarbonate.
Within about a month or six weeks,
I couldn't feel the pressure he was putting on my spine.
And I'd say, mate, put more pressure.
He goes, I am.
I said, he would literally put his elbow
into my paravirtual muscles, my low back,
and lift his whole body off the ground,
and it was tolerable.
Whereas before, a tenth of that wasn't.
So, and that's something that I'd observed over the years,
but foolishly didn't join the dots on it earlier,
where I was living in Sao Paulo, big city,
lots of stress, compromised diet.
People work 12 or 14 hour days,
and sometimes they go and study.
What's their outlet?
Fun, restaurants, drinking, all of that.
So, and I'd come across many patients
who I'd palpate their spines.
I'd be like, what's going on here?
It felt like a brick, like this wooden table here.
And I'd say, hey, what's your diet like?
I always ask people to give themselves a score
for their diet, zero to 10, their hydration zero to 10,
their sleep zero to 10.
And often, hydration would be zero.
I mean, what do you mean?
I don't like water.
What do you mean you don't like water?
You need water, you're not drinking water.
No, no, I just drink Coca-Cola.
Well, sorry about mentioning that, but a fizzy drink.
So, can you see what I mean?
Like, it was time that helped me join the dots
on just how important diet was,
which coincided with the time of surgery, yeah?
And after that, look, my thing now,
and I would say that I'm differentiated
from a lot of other professionals,
even those who work with whole wellbeing and health,
is the fact that you need to look at chemical,
emotional, and physical.
So, if we go back to physical,
let's go to you putting that patient into the ambulance,
more than likely, not always,
but more than likely,
there was a degree of dysfunction beforehand.
And the incident is the straw that breaks the camel's back.
Absolutely.
Yeah, it's the last thing.
And that's what a lot of people go,
oh, hang on, the pain only started last week.
And you're like, well, yeah, look at your X-rays.
You've got osteo, I'm thinking in Portuguese,
we're speaking about Brazil, osteoarthritic spurs
that are 10 or 20 years evolving,
and you've never felt pain till now.
Oh no, but it was last week.
You're like, it's actually not.
You can't remember it.
We've got to remember,
gravity is a cause of dysfunction, it'll never cease.
Posture, mattresses, all the falls we have when we're younger,
we have more than 2,000 falls
in the first five years of life
when we're learning how to walk.
All of this and more can compromise
the biomechanical function of our spine,
the same way that all the potholes and bumps in a road
will compromise the alignment of a wheel.
We'll go over a big hole.
We won't feel that straight away.
So we can drive thousands of kilometers,
often before we'll even notice the car vibrate
or notice that that particular tire
where the wheel's misaligned
is wearing out faster than the others.
So once we understand that and we combine that with,
as I said before, anything that's inflammatory,
your stress, your cortisol, poor sleep, okay,
any emotional stuff, all of our old traumas,
if they're affecting us to the point
where they're elevating cortisol,
and I'll explain that,
I think it's really important to explain,
that's when we've got the best effort,
or the best, sorry, the best tools and strategy
to correct our pain dash spinal problems.
So as soon as we get past that pain, mate,
and we go, oh, we're going deeper.
So foundation, fantastic.
Mate, I've only been doing foundation for a year
with Jesse and actually with John again
and back home in Australia.
And I love it, you know, because here's a lesson,
we're always learning about our body.
And last week, Jesse and I probably did it three times
in different places, but in one of the groups,
he explained the importance of the adductors,
okay, the inside muscles of our legs,
and the fact that a lot of us
have those adductors shortened.
And I think this has come from Eric, you know,
Eric Goodman, founder of Foundation.
But I've thought that's exactly the way I'm working.
I'm working with my feet splayed
like a lot of professionals are.
And what's that doing to the adductors?
It's shortening them and they attach on the pubis bone.
So in foundation, when we can internally rotate those feet,
I love that and focus on the breath.
That's another thing that's really helped me.
And I see the importance around the stabilization
of the spine, love it.
As Jess said as well, he says it's like low hanging fruit.
It's easy, you can incorporate your prep,
foundation prep before your exercise.
I love that as well, because that's the hardest thing
when you're working with people who are busy lifestyles,
having them do something that's not an hour of their time
before they get to do Jiu Jitsu,
the thing they love or serve.
You know what I mean?
Like most of the time is important,
so someone actually ends up ignoring what they should do.
So that they can prioritize what they love doing.
Mate, so that was long winded my answer to you,
but did that answer what you wanted to know there
as far as what surgery did and leading me to foundation
and yoga, yoga is another one that's really helped me.
Steering away from running, mate, I stopped running.
One of my biggest health regrets,
I'll tell you is marathon running.
If I could turn back time, I would not have run.
I would have sprinted and I would have acted
with data my type two fast twitch muscle fibers,
and I would have done it for a short amount of time
and a very intense experience every time
to benefit physiologically much more than what I gained
from long distance running.
What else will change?
Yeah, diet as I said, really important,
but I've always luckily been really attentive
to postural influences.
For example, the way people sit,
the mattress they sleep on,
and most of it because of myself.
So I wrote a book called The Secret of the Healthy Spy.
That book came from five years of me documenting
every problem that was coming in.
And to tell you the truth, 80% of the physical causes
were already complete in three months,
but just over five years when the odd one had come in,
that we all do the same things incorrectly.
So if we understand those, the younger or the early in life,
the better, great.
And with time, as I said, the chemical issues,
such as sugar, dehydration, chemicals,
okay, toxins, the effect on our body and inflammation
and the importance of food,
staying away from vegetable oils.
This information's pretty accessible these days
to most people.
And their choices that if we know,
we have the information, very easy to make.
So talk to me about sitting.
When I look back, what was I missing prior to
when I got hurt?
And I agree 100%, I definitely pre-injured
doing ironically deadlifts in CrossFit before,
but was that what hurt me?
No, it was the straw before the straw
that broke the camel's back.
But what was I doing as a firefighter?
I mean, of course, as we've alluded to before, not sleeping.
I mean, just, I think this is another part
of the sea deprivation element
that doesn't get spoken about as much,
but I had Dr. Stuart McGill on the show
speaking of back health.
And he was like, oh no, it's not if you get hurt,
it's when you're gonna get hurt.
If you're not sleeping, you're not healing,
you're not repairing, you are going to get hurt.
It is a foregone conclusion.
So you have that, but also you have,
you think of the fire service as a very athletic career.
And at times it absolutely is,
but most of the time we're in the seat of a fire engine,
the seat of an ambulance,
we're in the back treating a patient,
we're in the hospital writing reports,
we're watching online training in the office.
Now we're finally getting a rest,
now we're in a lazy boy watching some TV between calls,
sit, sit, sit, sit, sit.
And then now at the moment,
I mean, this is my second interview today,
so this is like four hours in this chair.
My wife-
I'm moving around.
Yeah, yeah, I'm a little fidgety right now.
But then my wife's 300 miles away
in medical school, optometry school.
So that's a 300 mile, four, four and a half hour drive
one way, four and a half the other.
So we, even though I'm active and I do jujitsu
and I do the training at my CrossFit gym now,
and I walk my dog for miles every day,
it's permeated by lots of inactivity.
So, you talk about the book,
I'd love to hear the main elements that you recognize,
but is one of them sitting and talk to me
about the impact of that, not only on the lower body,
the hips, but also the neck,
especially with these devices
that a lot of the kids have these days.
All right, let's go.
Firstly, the spine's a machine, okay?
It's happy when it's moving.
When we're in a seat, that's not the case.
So we're not meant to sit.
That said, I'm not saying don't sit,
I'm just saying we have to recognize that seats are,
they're also a pretty new invention, you know?
Most indigenous tribes won't have a seat.
They'll be squatting and doing other stuff.
But anyway, so we recognize that it needs to move.
So if we wanna improve our situation
and we do have to sit, we have to move more.
Now, NASA did a study within the last five years,
I can't remember exactly what year,
that challenged, it didn't actually discard,
but it challenged that idea
that we needed to walk five minutes an hour,
which is beneficial, but they were just saying,
hey, every five minutes, stand up, sit down.
You can do that five, six times, okay?
Or I tell people when you have a phone call,
if you do, why not stand up and walk on the spot?
So sitting, that's already bad.
Secondly, combine the fact that a lot of people,
if they're sitting in a chair that's not adequate,
right now, I'm sitting on a bench.
So this isn't my place and I wouldn't sit here
for long periods of time.
And I'll explain what happens on a bench in a minute,
but that isn't ideal.
And even if they do have an ergonomic chair,
which they should have,
if they're sitting with their glutes forward,
their buttock forward,
then they're losing that curve in the lower back.
So we need to be sitting way back, okay, supported.
Now, how does it affect,
because you just mentioned other areas of the spine.
Well, if we're sitting incorrectly and the glutes go forward,
we lose that curve in the lower back,
and I'll explain the importance of curves,
we go up to the mid back and that's rounded, okay,
to compensate for that,
that throws our shoulders forward and our head forward.
So by sitting correctly,
we start with a base that allows the rest of our spine
to be supported.
The easiest way to understand this, mate,
is if we understand the center of gravity
and how that should fall through our body,
it should fall through our ear, shoulder, hip,
if we were standing knee and ankle.
So when we're sitting, if our hip, our knee,
and our shoulder are all aligned,
we know that a minimum of force from gravity
will be going through our spine.
However, if we're sitting correctly,
once again, with those glutes forward,
we curve, our head weighs five kilos.
For every one centimeter that the head, the ear, sorry,
goes forward of the shoulder,
overloads our lower neck by five kilos.
So you can imagine people like dentists, hairdressers,
anyone who's forced in their profession
to work with a forward head posture,
that anterior head carriage,
huge amount of load on their lower neck,
and that'll speed up arthritis.
Let's go to curves.
I refer to curves a few times there.
Let's compare two animals
to understand the importance of curves.
Okay, so having curve means we have mobility.
So if we're sitting incorrectly and we're losing that curve,
it's similar to being a giraffe.
Have you ever seen a giraffe pick something up
off the ground?
It has to separate its legs, doesn't it?
It can't bend its neck, it's a straight neck.
Okay, so it's got no mobility because it's straight.
Compare that to a flamingo.
A flamingo can turn 360 degrees
because it's got two curves in its neck.
So curves permit movement, okay?
Now, I'll ask anyone listening right now,
if they're sitting, just to sit,
throw those shoulders forward,
like to the worst posture possible,
and try and turn from left to right, right?
It's limited.
Now, sit up straight with the ear above the shoulder,
now turn left to right.
I personally have about 30 or 40%
more range of motion in rotation.
Why is rotation or mobility important?
Because we're sitting for a long period of time.
We're sitting for up to eight hours or more per day.
We're in traffic often to get to work, public transport.
We're sitting to eat and we often sit at home
watching television, let's say, or doing other stuff.
That's a large percentage of our life.
So you can imagine how that compounds over time
and has really negative effects
if we're not respecting that bare minimum
of maintaining posture.
And to improve upon that, just get up and move around often.
So there you go, mate.
That was a long-winded answer once again,
but it's important to go into the theory on sitting
because it really is, I guess it's one of the most
common causes of not only low back pain
but neck pain as well these days.
And the pressure, the load that goes on our spine
when we're sitting is seven to 10 times more
than when we are lying on the ground.
That's a lot, isn't it?
So you combine, let's say, a childhood fall
or some other trauma way back in the day
that was asymptomatic forever.
So you're not aware of it.
And then you're sitting a lot.
You can imagine how that load
is just compromising that segment even more.
Absolutely.
The bench you were gonna talk about.
I wrote a book about three years ago, and it's funny,
I'm writing my second one now and I'm not doing this
because of what I observed during my first.
I've got these Indian oak beautiful kitchen table.
It's like a long family one.
There's wooden chairs and then a fricking heavy ass bench.
And this table, you bang into it with your foot.
It is not moving.
It may as well just kick a tree.
You know what I mean?
So it's so effing hard.
And I wrote the book and wasn't really thinking about it.
But after it was done and everything,
when I would go to deadlift in the gym,
I would literally have pain down my hamstrings.
And I realized that it must have been my posture.
And I think I would tuck my feet underneath
and wrap the legs as well.
So now I've actually elevated my feet on my couch
with my laptop on my lap,
which seems to be a lot more forgiving
for these kind of two hour writing sessions.
So talk to me about the bench
because I'm curious to hear the muscular skeletal reason
why I effed myself up.
Yeah, you might have noticed me adjusting my position
quite a bit here.
So on a bench, if you are vigilant
and you sit and you're aware
of maintaining yourself upright, great.
However, gravity will almost always win,
especially if we're distracted and we just relax.
So what started as a position
that was maintaining that curve, okay?
The lumbar curve would be a curve,
let's say that is concave backwards,
like to the back of our body.
With time, as we curve down by gravity, we lose that.
So that's what benches do.
They don't have that back support
that other chairs would have to prevent that.
And I'd suggest to anyone who firstly,
don't work on a bench.
Do what you can to change that.
Buy yourself a chair, invest in a chair.
If you're working for a company
that won't buy a good office chair,
just buy yourself a good lumbar support.
Make sure that you support that curve
so that you don't lose it during the day.
It's very similar to our neck curve, mate.
What happens these days,
we talk a lot about the texter's neck, right?
We talk about that forward head position,
that anterior carriage.
So that curve, the neck curve,
is what suffers most when the head goes forward, yeah?
And so we get a rectified,
rectification of the cervical curve.
So we look at strategies to maintain that.
And I'll often work with, let's say,
a towel under the neck at the end of the day.
I'll obviously work with education
around maintaining that straight posture.
Work around the level, the height of the computer,
being at eye level instead of low,
so you don't have to look down.
So you really have to look at all these little things
and more to make sure that you're not doing something
that's compromising that, because it's a very long time.
It'd be like having, let's say,
something that's gonna cause a tooth decay over time,
a lot faster than another food that won't.
You're speeding up degeneration.
And unfortunately, with bone-edged degeneration,
a lot of other organs can be replaced.
We can't replace the spine.
If you get stenosis in the spinal canal,
or stenosis is narrowing, by the way, sorry.
If you get narrowing around the canal from degeneration
or the foramina on the side that hold,
in case of nerve roots, that can be a world of pain.
People get to an age where surgery's difficult.
You don't wanna bank on that
because the spine cannot be seen
the same way that the teeth can.
It's very easy to forget spinal health.
Okay, it's very easy just to let years go by
and not think about it until that day.
Now, you might be able to relate to this, mate.
That day that you had your crisis, it's a lottery.
At that moment, a lot of people find out,
oh, thank God it wasn't a serious problem.
It's resolved fast.
But for other people, they find out
that they have a serious problem that's irreversible.
What a shame.
And then it's not like the tire of a car
that can be replaced.
It's worn out.
Right now, we have surgery to replace discs.
We do have that.
However, even if someone has surgery
and they replace the tire, let's say,
how often are they coming along
and looking at the alignment of the wheel and going,
hang on, I've gotta look at the underlying problem
and fix that.
So what's the cause of the underlying problem?
Sitting, texting incorrectly, laptop use,
sleeping face down in a bed.
That's funny, I did a post recently on sleeping face down.
Quite a few physios were like,
why do you gotta sleep any way you can?
And comes to be like, no, it just doesn't make sense
that you spend six to eight hours of your day,
let's say 30% of your time,
with your head turned to one side only.
Most people who sleep face down prefer one side
because there's chronic shortening of the muscles
over time, so they find it difficult to turn the other way.
But there's only three or four.
There's many other causes.
But sitting's gotta be out there
with one of the most important things people can rectify
to get long lasting benefit.
I won't only say results,
the measurable results,
but actual benefit to their health.
I had a guy on years ago who's a British guy
who was kind of the sleep guru for a lot of sports teams,
especially in the UK.
And it was his stance was more about the actual bedding.
So he would create bed rolls for each of these athletes
that fit them specifically,
the kind of, you know, the firmness, the length, et cetera.
And they would put it on the hotel floor.
So they wouldn't use the hotel bed,
they would sleep in the floor, on the floor.
But it was interesting,
because I remember even now it really stuck with me.
He was talking about what they assume
is probably the natural way to sleep,
you know, if you go back humans a long, long time ago.
And he said, just think about defense.
He said, if you're face down,
that's the most submissive position you can be in.
If you're face up, you know, you're still vulnerable,
but at least you can look.
And then you have your dominant and your non-dominant side.
So there's one side where if you were attacked,
you are most likely to be able to push off, et cetera, et cetera.
And that always stuck with me, because I knew,
I know, you know, if I do have a drink or two,
I'll find myself rolling over on my stomach,
and that's the worst sleep,
and you end up with a crick in your neck.
But if, you know, when I first go to bed,
and hopefully it stays if I'm, you know, having a good sleep,
it'll always be my left side facing up and I'm left-legged.
So that's what I would kick with.
So I don't know if you've had any exposure to that,
but I've never heard anyone say it since.
But whether he's right, wrong, it doesn't matter.
To me, it makes sense.
I mean, I don't know if they can prove it or not,
but it really does make sense and kind of add some answers to
how should I actually lie when I sleep.
Yeah, yeah.
Firstly, I've never heard it.
I'm totally aligned with what he said,
and the reasons for it make sense.
Even what your dominant side on, your side would be,
it might be facing the door or the entrance, you know, like,
and the other way, you're not as prepared.
So all I'd say, traditionally lying on your back, great.
Compare, for example, Indian and Chinese culture.
They still, I remember going studying acupuncture in Sri Lanka
and the Indian teacher was in the Marriott in a beautiful bed,
or potentially, but he chose to sleep on the floor.
And a lot of people do.
And we'll talk about why, but the other one is the Chinese,
so they favour that as well.
Now, what I like about that, let's imagine two situations
where someone's sleeping on their belly.
I don't have the model of the spine here,
but if you had the model of the spine,
you can imagine that the spine could sag into the mattress, OK?
Obviously, depending on how soft or hard that mattress is.
As that sags, if you look at the anatomy of the spine,
in extension, it goes to a certain point
and it doesn't go past that.
It's blocked by a bony approximation.
Can you imagine having a few drinks lying face down?
And so you're not getting the pain signals
after you have alcohol, and you're sleeping on your belly,
that can totally inflame those joints, OK?
And it does.
And I remember back in the day when I'd do the same thing,
I can relate to it.
So yeah, we can imagine if we slept on our back,
then that beautifully opens that up.
It can stretch those ligaments and stretch
muscles, intrinsic muscles that are
being shortened during the day.
So it's a really good time to recover in all aspects
from what we did during the day.
On the side, pretty easy rule there,
our spine should be aligned, OK?
So that means if you had two pillows
and your head was elevated, then your neck
might be also inclined upwards, then it's not
aligned with the rest of the spine.
So just make sure that you look at the density of the mattress
and how far the body sinks, your hips particularly,
and your shoulders, and what size pillow you
need to maintain that alignment.
And for me, look, I've just worked
with hundreds and hundreds of people over the years
that they've come in, we're trying
to look for the cause of their problem.
It's a neck problem.
I've palpated it.
They can't recognize what's happened.
And I'm like, why are the muscles shorter on the right
than the left?
Once again, all about the question, right?
And then go on, join the dots and said, OK, how do you sleep?
I'll face down.
Right, can't sleep any other way.
So firstly, we have to turn our head.
And most people sleep face down all the time.
We'll have one side they prefer.
Very few can have both sides equal there.
And the other one is that, as I mentioned,
when you're sleeping face down, there's
more of an accentuation of the lumbar curve.
The only exception I'd say here, mate,
and let's say we've got someone who suffers chronic insomnia
or they're in pain.
Like yesterday, I was working with someone
who, before they had spinal surgery, the only way they
could sleep was face down but supported.
We'll just do the best to sleep face down
but support those areas so you don't
have an accentuation of the curve or an alteration.
So you're causing a minimum of additional load.
Does that all make sense?
No, it does.
It does.
Especially while you're talking, this
is just personally for me now.
I'm sure there's people out here that can relate to.
But it doesn't seem to matter what
I do, whether I have a period of abstinence from alcohol,
try and work on my stress.
I've clenched in my sleep for a long time.
I don't want to stick something in my mouth
because, again, root cause, that's
just sticking a wedge in my mouth.
That's not fixing why.
I had my jaw dislocated when I was younger
doing martial arts, so that didn't help.
And then obviously you add 14 years of being a firefighter
and sleep disruption and all the things, which also didn't help.
Is there anything that you've applied
to people that doesn't involve a mouth guard that you found
help in that particular kind of system?
Yeah.
Yeah, great question.
I can relate to this too because I used to do the same thing.
So because we're already on the sleep position,
let's imagine that we all, I'm not saying we do,
but just let's imagine we all move our mouth during the night.
We might, we're dreaming and that might manifest a little bit
in movements of the mouth, whether it be from stress
or whatever else.
If we're lying on our back, compare the difference
in movement of the jaw to a position
where we're lying on our belly and there's
one side of our jaw in direct contact
with the surface of the bed or the pillow.
So you can imagine that the grind or so
the movement of the jaw and the mouth
will have more load on it because we've
got the weight of our head on it.
So that's straight off the bat is another reason
why we should sleep on our back or our side and not our belly.
Now, grinding, when you say, are we talking grinding teeth
too, mate?
Yeah, well, clenching to the point
where I'll even have sore traps the next morning just
from the, you know.
So obviously, there's a stress response going on.
Yeah, so typically, if I had clients
that suffer from that, I'm going deeper as well
and looking at their stress at the day.
Anything that might spike their cortisol and have them
typically wake up 2 or 3 in the morning,
that's often common when our levels are higher.
That happens to me, for example, if I work physically
but I train hard in the morning.
It's just I can jack my cortisol levels that way.
It could be if we've got stuff on our mind.
So then we've got to get into other things like,
how are we going to work on the mind?
You know, I work with something called Brain Tap.
I love it.
It's technology that helps harmonize brainwaves.
But you also get a lot of success from meditation,
from breath work.
What's been helping is when I've had ice baths
towards the end of the day now and not the start,
real relaxation there.
You know another one that I should remember first
off the bat is look at your neck.
Yeah, if I get people with jaw problems and even sleep,
if I look at C1, occiput C1, C1, C2, the higher cervical
segments, very common that you've got something going on
there as well.
And it's not rare that after, especially the first adjustment
I give someone for their neck when I found a bad problem,
they'll come back and go, oh my god, I slept so much better.
I was out like a light or I was late for work or whatever.
So don't forget about the relationship
that the neck has with those muscles that
go over the skull to the jaw, okay.
So much so that when I get jaw problems,
very rarely will I work straight away with the jaw.
I'll see, and this is only if I find neck problems obviously
and usually I do, we'll work with that first.
Most of the time they'll clear up.
Brilliant.
I'm actually seeing, I've got a chiropractor I use in
near where my wife lives at the moment down there.
So I will ask him to specifically focus on that
when I see him on Saturday.
Mate, I'll throw one more tip in.
This is gonna help heaps.
There's these muscles inside your mouth called
the pterygoids, yeah.
So you can actually, there's a really good stretch
you do yourself.
You can go and get a chiropractor or other therapists
to do it, but you'll feel it if you open your mouth up
or look at someone else's mouth and you'll see
like a line of muscle to the side, left and right.
You get there and as you open, you work that
and it will hurt a bit.
So I'll often do it in traffic and I'll do it
when I feel like I've got this jaw congestion
that will help a lot.
Cause when these muscles are tight, let's imagine
a lot of people when they train and they clench their jaw,
they tighten, they shorten.
So that's a lot of load on that joint.
It decompresses the joint and you'll probably notice
that'll help as well.
Okay, beautiful, thank you.
They're the pterygoid muscles.
Brilliant, yeah, it's funny.
Ironically, when I wear my mouth guard
when I'm doing jujitsu, I feel that my jaw is quite relaxed,
which is the opposite when I used to do kickboxing
because you can't relax it too much when you get punched.
But I almost feel like that actually helps a little bit too.
So I'll work on those exercises tonight, so thank you.
No worries.
So one more area that I wanna go to surfing,
but before we do, you mentioned teeth and decay.
Talk to me about your dental journey and mercury.
Oh yeah, okay, so dental journey.
As a kid, every time I went to the dentist
till about the age of 14, I got fillings.
And it really paid me off because I looked after my teeth.
I did everything I thought you had to do.
And I was quite conscientious as a kid.
I took authority seriously, so I do what I was told.
Whereas my brother didn't and he never got fillings.
I was a bit paid to that.
But anyway, had these fillings put in,
never thought too much about it.
But over the years working in the health food store,
I would hear from people that had their fillings taken out
or relate to health problems that came from fillings.
And I would read up in some of the health magazines
about the danger of mercury in fillings.
And I actually observed the transition with time
to fillings that didn't have mercury in them.
There's always confusion around that
because our dental association in Australia was like,
no, that's garbage, there's no risk
and continued on with it.
While the European dental association
stopped using mercury fillings decades ago.
Anyway, I living overseas, for some reason,
it was in my mind that I want these fillings out.
I think I'd read also that if you grind,
okay, we just mentioned that,
that can actually heat the mercury up to a point
where it gives off vapors.
Or if you drink hot liquids like coffee or tea,
it can also cause a degree of vaporization as well.
So mercury is not stable in any state,
liquid, solid or gas.
But obviously it's safer if it's already in your mouth
in a solid form.
Now, there are easy, sorry,
there are great and safe ways to remove the mercury fillings
and you need to go to a special holistic dentist to do that.
I just went to my dentist and I said, please remove them.
And I had very little time.
He had no oxygen for myself or himself.
He had no dam, as they say, a dental dam.
And I didn't think anything of it.
Had them taken out, had them replaced, happy days.
Within, let's say, I can't remember exactly, okay?
Cause I wasn't that aware that there was a relationship.
But let's say within a year,
I started to get chronic gastrointestinal problems.
Like I'd literally go, I had diarrhea
at least six times before I leave
to go to work in the morning.
I felt tired.
I knew something was wrong, okay?
I'd actually take vitamins
and I'd see them pass through whole.
So I knew I was aware also that my absorption was suffering.
And with time, I also noticed I had candida.
So I had that white fume over my tongue.
I'm just trying to remember exactly the sequence here,
but if we take it back, I remember this started,
my awareness around mercury actually came back
to doing a spermogram, okay?
And finding out that my sperm count was low, okay?
And then from there thinking, hang on, I'm a healthy person.
Why would it be low?
So then it sent me towards doing an MRI of the pineal gland
cause sometimes you get calcification over that,
I saw the pituitary.
And working out and figuring out that the FSH hormone
and the luteinizing hormone were all out.
And then trying to figure out, hang on, I'm a young guy.
I've got no obvious symptoms, but my testosterone is low.
And it actually led me towards mercury
that you can actually have high mercury
that affects the pituitary without calcification.
And so I'm just trying to remember the sequence once again,
but anyway, it did take me towards mercury.
I got, oh, that's right, that's right, this is beautiful.
Back to the health food store, I was desperate.
Like we are sometimes, we know something's wrong,
desperate to find the answer.
Back in Australia, I give myself one month.
So I chased up every health function or health doctor
or health option I had, fecal samples, blood tests,
everything else, all fine, I had nothing.
And I was basically taught on that psychological.
It's gotta be psychological, you got nothing going on.
And I remember actually sending fecal samples to the states
cause we, to get other types of exams done
that weren't offered in Australia, they wouldn't make it.
They'd blow up the sample.
They'd say, oh, we lost your sample
because there's that much gas in there.
It just blew the top off it.
So that was interesting.
But-
On the no-fly list.
Yeah, exactly.
Last week of this particular trip,
I've gone to the health food store, mom said,
Jason, you've gotta try this.
One of my client's son has something exactly the same
as you only found that he had my high mercury.
And I went straight back to the doctor
that had been looking after me, who was an allopath,
he was a GP and a naturopath.
And I asked him to do it.
Just in time, before I was going away,
the results came in, it was off the charts.
Zero to six is tolerable, I was 600.
Bloody hell.
The only other person he'd seen that was high was 225
and that was a guy who painted the Harvard Bridge
in Sydney for 20 years.
Unbelievable.
So there's huge relief one side
that I finally found out the cause and that I wasn't crazy.
But then there was this huge question mark
around how I'd go about dealing with it.
And that alone was a journey.
That was, looking back, I was blessed
because I was treating one of my patients in Brazil
was the pioneer of functional medicine,
or the molecular medicine in Brazil.
His name's Dr. Leih Ibero.
And he invited me to go and study with him
and a group of doctors that he was teaching his methods to.
So over five years I studied functional medicine.
Over there I studied and actually had my blood analyzed
and live blood analysis and all this amazing stuff
that you wouldn't find legally in a lot of other countries.
Ozone therapy, I did my live blood
and it was just out of control.
When I saw what was in my blood,
that there was just a prevalence of Candida
and there was parasites going crazy,
I was like, I'm gonna do anything I have to do
to get rid of that.
And so I dedicated to that.
And it's a long story because you try one thing
and initially I tried chelation.
And in Western medicine,
we've got something called DMPS and EDTA.
DMPS is for mercury, more indicated.
And it helped, but the levels go up again.
I do a surf trip to the Maldives and I eat tuna
and they'd be off the charts again.
So it's like, I need to go deeper on this.
And it was only when I discovered the imports
of coffee enemas, believe it or not,
that I successfully lowered my mercury
and it's still low.
And with that, a lot of people when they're in dark times
in their lives and they discover Christianity,
for example, or other religions,
or if we say born again Christian, understandably,
well, that was me, that was me with health and gut health.
To have a normal stool after 10 years,
actually I'd say all my whole life,
I thought a loose stool was normal,
but the 10 years were out of control.
To have a normal stool consistently
was one of the most amazing things ever.
And someone, if they've ever been through that,
they won't relate to how incredible that is.
But that's really when I started to work on my gut health
and develop some protocols,
which I use with my clients today that I know work.
And that involved looking at the gut wall,
it involved dealing with the mercury, okay,
getting rid of that and liver, obviously,
killing the bad bacteria naturally, not with antibiotics
and boosting the good bacteria via a good probiotic.
So that and a few more things, that's the basis of it.
After that, never look back.
But I got, and this is interesting as well,
I think a lot of people will be able to relate to this
that I knew there was something going on
and I knew that there was spiritual dash emotional health
and growth that was waiting for me to occur,
but I knew that my physical health was impeding that.
And so when I got that back,
it was just amazing to feel and notice
that that finally I was growing again,
finally I was happier, I was focused,
I was more empathetic, everything that goes with that.
When you said about the coffee enemas,
it reminds me, and it's been years since I dived into this,
but the Gershian method, which was again, heralded as heresy,
but yet makes so much sense.
And I was actually having a conversation
with someone the other day about chemotherapy
and how that, as someone who was a medical professional,
even though it was at the paramedic level,
and an exercise physiology grad,
so somewhat of a grasp of modern medicine
and holistic medicine, to age and orange the entire body,
and then fingers crossed that it starts up again,
just never made sense to me.
But their philosophy of the juice cleanse is,
the juiciness of still getting your nutrients,
and the coffee enema actually makes
a lot more sense to me than just poisoning the entire body
and rolling the dice to see
if that person's gonna survive or not.
Mate, that's a great point.
I remember at the start I was talking about
nutrients in, toxins out, a function.
Yeah.
Gershian therapy was a major influence in that.
And I resisted it, okay,
maybe other men who have never done this before,
I resisted it because it's like,
oh, something you've got to put in your anus.
You know, I've got to stick that up my bum, you know, like,
and I regret it because I missed five or six years.
I'd studied the gershian therapy,
I was familiar with the principles, it made sense to me.
I'd looked at actually going to Mexico
and going deeper on it,
but it was only really when I saw that the DMPS
and other things failed that I tried it.
I was like, why didn't I do this earlier?
Because independently of looking at a major disease process,
or the fact that we've got to clean our liver out,
look at what most people do.
If they're next level health
and they're thinking about nutrition
and maybe supplementation, great.
But in this modern world,
unless we're looking at detox
and removing what shouldn't be there,
something's missing.
It's getting nutrients in and it's pulling toxins out.
And the gershian therapy, you probably remember,
when someone's late stage cancer,
they're doing four animals a day,
and they're doing their cold pressed veggie juices
13 times on the hour during the day.
Nutrients in, toxins out.
And the person I was talking to, she is a pathologist.
So, again, was curious when we were talking
about the cancer thing and what she sees
as far as some of the tumors,
but she was saying they don't really do autopsies
on end stage cancer patients.
And usually the family are like,
no, we don't need to cut them open after that.
But what does it look like inside the human body
from the chemo alone versus the tumor?
And so for me, you've got two people that are going to die.
One, they try the holistic method and they pass,
but they have somewhat of a quality of life
until the very end.
The other one, they're brutalized right from the beginning
and they still pass.
Now, again, it's not black and white
and it seems like immunotherapy
and some of these other things are starting to come in now.
Radiation therapy seems to be targeted to a point
where it's not as invasive anymore.
So they're changing it, but the knee jerk response
to when someone get cancer is there's no real discussion
on nutrition, exercise, sleep, time in nature, community,
all the things that would boost the immune system
and maybe shift towards homeostasis
where there is a regression of a tumor,
but it's all about, just as you said,
the radiation and the chemo,
and then now they're in a hospital getting hospital food.
So to me, I hands on my heart,
if I did have that diagnosis and I obviously pray I never do,
I know I would go the holistic route
just simply because the other way doesn't make sense to me.
If it's a tumor, you can cut it out and we're done,
just like your disectomy, beautiful, let's do it.
But if you're gonna fill my body
or my child's body full of chemicals,
I don't know, I mean, all that suffering
on the off chance that people survive.
And I really feel like chemo kills more people
than cancer does, I really do.
It's interesting you say all that, mate,
because in that short little phrase or series of phrases,
I had multiple flashbacks to mom
because mom's six years on now,
but she was six years ago, I went back to Australia
after living in South America 20 years,
had no plans really to go and move back there,
but felt that I wanted to change, gave mom the flu,
she coughed up blood, we found out she had late stage cancer,
lung cancer from smoking.
So she, I remember, like firstly she was cared for
by amazing oncologists and really caring people
who were similar to the fire brigade,
who focus on putting out the fire.
No one will ever get healthier focusing on a disease.
That's fact.
The best you can have or hope for
is that you will suppress the symptoms from the disease,
but you'll not be healthy on the other side of it.
So anyway, we're dealing with people like that.
And I remember when mom got the diagnosis,
it was the doctor said, look, you know, you're,
how old are you?
Oh, you're 76, no, sorry, 75, 74.
All right, your stage 3B, it's crossed your body
and it's gone to a tissue on the other side of your lungs
lymphatic system.
I think it's all about quality of life now.
So you knew in her mind that she said,
look, chemo is gonna rattle that.
So it's all about quality of life.
And I was like going Eureka.
Because only because I knew mom would not be one
of the patients who'd resist it like others.
So we were forced to very, very fast take her back
to those doctors in South America
that I'd learned functional medicine with.
And we were forced to firstly boost her health
with all the modalities that we could have
plus focus on the tumor, but in a natural way
because chemo was out anyway.
Do you know what I mean?
Like that's the thing I would hate to be the parent
of a child with cancer and have to make that decision.
I'd hate to do it.
It must be one of the hardest decisions
that you ever have to make.
And even yourself, you know, but I see this a lot
with people, women who have breast cancer,
you know, that takes about 10 years, they say
for a tumor to grow to one centimeter.
So there's often this urgency around removing
the whole breast and doing chemo and radio
when that's done, because you've got cancer,
but you're like, well, hang on, it's been there.
It's a process, you know, you do have time to make decisions.
And I feel sometimes when people are pressured
to make a decision that's faster than what they'd want,
then, you know, it can lead them down the wrong way.
So in mum's case, at least beautiful.
You know, what did we do over there?
We did fecal transplant.
We do IV in the morning with vitamin C, magnesium,
also glutathione, alpha lipaic acid and more.
Then we take her to a hyperbaric chamber
to augment the infusion of those into her body.
We did the whole process of the gut,
okay, versus colonics, ozone therapy.
Mate, you'd have to see it, like,
you have to see the eye as a doctor who looked after mum,
stick a syringe straight into her lung
and inject with ozone and wonder why
she didn't get a pneumothorax.
But there's all this stuff.
This is really important to say, okay,
what in that one month, we had a 10% reduction
in the tumor size was five centimeters.
So didn't cure mum of cancer,
but we did see the power of the body,
given all of the conditions to be able to work with it.
And mum's course was that for six months, it was stable.
We were in South America two months, got her home.
The doctors saw that it reduced a little bit in size,
didn't wanna know, actually a couple of times
ridiculed mum for talking about things like vitamin C
and whatever, like laugh, literally.
But not uncharitable, you know what I mean?
I say that's like, oh, poor thing, she's kidding herself.
But six months, I stayed by mum's side,
looking at everything, especially fasting in the morning,
especially any foods that were gonna increase glucose,
knowing that cancer loves sugar, okay.
Oxygenation, the ozone, we continue with all the rest.
When I moved out, I stayed in Sydney,
and I moved just to let mum be independent,
she started drinking wine again,
and not really looking after diet,
doubled in size within a couple of months.
So you mentioned immunotherapy,
back to the miracle of modern medicine.
If it wasn't for immunotherapy,
mum wouldn't be alive today, incredible.
But what's immunotherapy do?
They focus on the immune system.
And I've got the photo of the MRI on my phone,
it's incredible.
In three months, it went from eight centimeters
to literally three millimeters, incredible.
And we think, well, hang on,
if that's boosting the immune system,
what can we do ourselves during our life
to boost it naturally?
And that's literally just giving our health what it needs
and helping it avoid what it doesn't.
100%, well, that rounds beautifully
from the beginning of the conversation,
so I'm glad we ended up talking about this.
One more area before I do the closing questions,
you now work with the world surfer, surfery, excuse me.
I saw you interviewed Kelly Slater a while ago,
someone I still wanna get on the show.
I mean, his longevity is just mind blowing.
So I'd love to get him on one day.
But talk to me about how you went from this journey
working in South America.
Obviously you were a surfer,
you find yourself now in the functional medicine world.
How did you now enter the professional world of surfing?
Sure, yeah, that passion for surfing from day one
and chiropractic, we had a surfing event in Sydney.
And when I heard that one of the chiropractors
was volunteering there,
I think back in the day volunteering, maybe he's paid,
but we volunteered to help him.
And so that was 30 years ago.
That's where the first contact with chiropractic,
when I say chiropractic,
even though I graduated chiropractor,
to work with sports people,
you can't just do chiropractic, okay?
But you need in your arsenal,
some physio techniques and osteopathy,
I do electro acupuncture.
There's all sorts of stuff also you develop with time,
PNF, stretching, all this sort of stuff.
So when I was living in South America,
I made contact with them, the two of them,
when they were in Rio.
And I started to work with them in Rio
and then coincide with the time that professional surfing
start to organize its medical department.
And that was more than 20 years ago now.
So I've worked for the last 20 years
between one and three events a year,
typically two or three, more recently just one.
So it was COVID and all the rest.
And it's just been beautiful to be able to travel with them,
those guys and girls.
And when a contest finishes early
and it's in a beautiful location with good waves,
most of the surfers leave and you stay
and get good waves at the end of it.
You learn a lot about sports injuries,
but you also learn a lot about working with athletes
well before they're symptomatic and increase their function.
That's a beautiful thing actually,
a lot who don't have that knowledge
or have never thought about it.
When they see that you can increase, for example,
the range of motion of their shoulder
in five minutes before a heat from,
can you imagine paddling all those years
how it caused a dominance here of the internal rotator.
So if we open that up and they can see that,
oh my God, I've never got my arms close to my ears,
then let's say 15 degrees and the hips
and relating that to bottom turns and all the rest,
then wow, that's when you really see the power
of what you do with athletes.
Brilliant.
Well, I would love to just throw some quick closing questions
at you before I let you go.
The first one, you mentioned your book,
The Secret to a Healthy Spine.
So before we get to other recommendations,
where do people find that?
They'll find it anyway.
I think it's on Amazon, Booktopia, their local bookstore.
Just put my name on their search
and the title of that book and they'll find that,
no problem.
Brilliant.
So that being said, is there a book or other books
written by other people that you'd love to recommend?
It can be related to our discussion today
or completely unrelated.
Yeah, we talked about Dr. Walker's book, Why We Sleep.
Okay, for sure.
I'm gonna recommend Dr. McColler's book.
EMFed.
Okay, really, really important to understand
the effect of EMFs at the moment,
especially with the 5G being rolled out
and what we can do to protect ourselves from that.
There's so many books, isn't there,
that stand out over there.
Look, Dave Asprey's got a few books.
The reason I like to recommend his book is like Superhuman
and there's another early one that I forget the name.
Even Fast This Way, he's got a great fasting book.
So anyone, because fasting these days,
there's a lot of different info around.
If people are interested in intermittent fasting
or longer ones, that's a really nice book to read
and have an idea of what suits you.
And the Superhuman one just goes over, you know,
like next level biohacks for brain,
no tropics, sleep and all the rest.
So that's a goodie as well.
I love Ben Greenfield's podcast as well and Dave's,
but Ben Greenfield's always interviewing
really interesting people.
Mate, that's what comes to mind right now.
Oh, here we go.
This is one that Jesse recommended,
Concise Laws of Human Nature.
Okay, brilliant, I haven't heard of that one.
Wow, this is great.
Robert Green, it's incredible.
So it's a little bit away from health
and what we're talking about,
but totally related to mental health
and understanding how humans operate.
Beautiful.
What about documentaries and films?
Any of those that you love?
Documentaries and films, yeah.
There was, forget the names on Netflix,
there's one on fasting.
I've just got to remember the name of that.
Look, there's that film on Netflix at the moment,
the documentary series about the blue zones of the world.
I forget what that's called.
Yeah, I think it's called Blue Zones actually.
Yeah, Blue Zones, yeah.
And that actually comes,
like there's a book called Ikigai,
a Japanese word that also talks about that.
Really interesting Ikigai.
So they talk about the blue zones.
Another one would be, oh, I love this documentary.
It was Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead.
Yeah, it was at Aussie too, wasn't it?
Yeah, wow.
Anyone wanting to start their health journey?
I think sometimes it's easy to be inspired
by people who've been where they are,
or worse, and listen to their journey.
And that's really inspiring that one.
Absolutely, yeah.
I think it was his, wasn't there the trucker
that had the great success the first time?
He ended up putting a lot of the weight back on Saturday.
I don't know how he's doing now.
I actually was following on social media,
but I think he was struggling again.
But yeah, I mean, the power of juicing,
I mean, juicing, fasting and juicing.
Juicing, if nothing else, just as a cleanse,
just as a pause to give your gut some time to recover.
Again, it makes perfect sense to me.
Yeah, and look, go online and read up about,
or watch if you want anything about the Gersten therapy.
The beautiful thing is now you've got access to that.
Dr. McCollough's stuff,
I put him at the forefront of everything.
He's influenced me for 15 years,
and what he teaches is solid.
He talks about the importance of vegetable oils
and linoleic acid.
A lot of us are unaware of just how
dangerous vegetable oils are.
I didn't know this until recently,
and listening to a podcast of his,
that seven year half-life
to remove vegetable oils from your body.
That's crazy.
So comparatively worse than a cigarette.
Yeah, I had him on a while ago now, Dr. McCollough,
and then I also had Jason Vale on a few years ago,
who's the juice master, as they say.
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, awesome.
Brilliant.
Well, speaking of great people,
is there a person that you recommend to come on this podcast
as a guest to speak to the first responders,
military, and associated professions of the world?
Well, Kelly, you mentioned before,
straight away I thought I got to speak with Kelly
in the next couple of days,
and Kelly, I had to have a chat with you.
So I just think anyone like Kelly,
who's at the top of their game,
at the stage of life they are,
you'll always learn from them.
He's awesome to speak to with about health.
Anyone else that I know?
Is this someone that I personally know?
Doesn't have to be, no.
Mate, last year I worked with Matthew McConaughey here
in Hawaii, and we spoke about health,
but I think someone like Matthew would be really good
because he also englobes other aspects
of being successful around health.
He gets, I'm sure, a lot of his health benefits
from the joy his family gives him
and the importance he places on that.
So people who go outside of the biohacking stuff
these days are really important as well.
How important is love?
How important is being a dad?
All that sort of stuff, and I think Matthew,
he's just a happy guy smashing it, living his life well.
Yeah, I know he was doing podcasts for a bit last year
when he released Greenlights, but I missed that window.
Yeah, okay, voila, yeah, true.
All right, well then the last question before I make sure
everyone knows where to find you and the website,
what do you do to decompress?
Decompress traditionally has been a challenge,
I will admit.
Okay, so recently, let's say the last six years,
I give myself the first two hours of the day.
So I wake up, I have my detox routine,
I'm learning French and Italian online, which is great.
It's easy, churn that out.
And I'm actually learning, not learning,
I'm writing my next book.
It sounds like what decompress?
It actually is, when you're forced to be
on the bathroom floor for half an hour in the morning,
you can actually, you're inspired.
So I'm dictating my next book most of it,
and it's on longevity as well.
So that combined with my red light panel,
I use a PMEF every day for half an hour.
So multitask that, and then I'll either jump
into a surf or training.
So obviously all the supplements and detox stuff
around that, that are fast in the morning,
that's important, boom.
After that, I jump into the day,
and decompressing at night time's probably more
of a challenge for me because I work from home.
I've got my studio, go back to the house, what I do.
Because you've got to be very careful
that you disassociate totally from work,
and work has, I've allowed it to be too dominant
or predominant over the years.
So that's the biggie, having strategies around that.
So I don't think, I think, you can go,
I love the cinema.
So going, leaving the house is really important.
Let's say that that wasn't the case,
I've relied on things like Brain Tap,
the Shatkey mat, the acupuncture mat,
I lie on that and I'll listen to, oh, baths.
How can I forget magnesium baths?
That's also red light, okay, blue light locker glasses,
red lights in my home, in the rooms that I'm in.
So I'm not being influenced by junky light
that contains blue light, and just magnesium baths
with whatever else you want to put in there.
That's my decompression.
And when you work with people, physically and mentally,
I think you have the responsibility of being your best.
So definitely not alcohol, definitely,
no short, what's the word, duration benefits,
stuff that is long lasting and conducive to good sleep.
So you get a good sleep, happy days, away you go.
Some sleep herbs around it, great.
Love it, fantastic.
All right, well then you mentioned
where people can find the book.
You have a different kind of spectrum of services
and courses that you offer.
So where can people find all those?
Yeah, so they hosted on my site, jasongilbert.com.au,
and the launch, actually, my Strong Back course
is launched, if it's not this week, it's next week.
And on that platform, there's a Strong Back for Surfers
course, quite soon also.
I see the importance of helping people get through,
like recover after surgery, because there's very little
that I learned, that I was given actually when I had surgery.
So I'm launching a course on what to do if you've had surgery
or how to avoid it as well.
But the most important is what to do after it.
So from now on in, that's what I'm dedicated to,
just continual courses to more specific ones around detox
and all that sort of stuff.
That's on that platform, jasongilbert.com.au.
Oh, Jason.
Yeah, I was gonna say that people can find out
about the retreats.
That's actually something I like to say also,
that I often receive clients from long distances,
and I've only got an hour sometimes with them,
you need so much more.
So I'm introducing something that I'm not aware of,
maybe it exists somewhere in the world
that I'm not aware of it, but retreats every month
dedicated to spinal or articular problems.
So people come, I accommodate them at my place,
they stay three days, we look at everything.
They get a diagnosis, a plan of attack around it,
I work on them, soreness, infrared, whole body vibration,
and inflammatory stuff, lots of tuition, all the rest.
So that's something interesting as well coming up.
Fantastic.
Well, I wanna say thank you so much.
It's been an amazing conversation.
We've gone all over the place from teeth and mercury
through the cancer and chemo and everything in between.
But I wanna thank you so, so much for being so generous
with your time today and coming on
the Behind the Shield podcast.
James, my absolute pleasure.
It's my passion, health in any form.
And thank you very much for the invite.
I was really excited to sit down for two hours
and chat with you about all this sort of stuff.
So my pleasure, totally.
novassy tiger