As business owners intensely pursuing excellence in business we sometimes forget to take care of our body. As we get older chronic pain creeps in, and we just learn to deal with it.

However, your chronic neck and back pain doesn’t have to be your new normal.

Meet Butch Phelps, CEO of The Muscle Repair Shop and author of The Stretch and Release Technique.

Butch has dedicated his career in massage therapy towards relieving people of their chronic pain and restoring their overall health.

Chronic pain does not have to be your new normal!

Through his well-renowned Strech and Release Technique, you’ll learn how to relax your muscles, achieve peace of mind, and uncover the impactful connection between your mental and physical health.

Join us to learn of Butch’s health journey and steps on how you too can eliminate chronic pain and age with strength and vigor.

Redeem Your Business Today by the Following:

How can we honor God in our business?

                    When making a profit, make sure you’re making a difference in people’s lives at the same time. Try not to get too caught up in the profit side of things as you may unintentionally do more harm than good.

One challenge from today:

If you have tension in your brain and are constantly thinking about the next thing, your muscles will be tense as well.

Do the following to release the tension and relax your back:

• Take a tennis ball, put it in a sock, and lean against the wall.
• Don’t roll on it. Instead, check point by point for any sore spots on your back and hips.
• If you find one, stay there and breathe out. Allow the muscle to relax and you’ll feel the tightness begin to go away.

More About Butch Phelps

Book: Stretch n' Release: The Missing Piece to a More Pain-Free Life

Website: The Muscle Repair Shop

YouTube: The Muscle Repair Shop

LinkedIn: Butch Phelps

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David:

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

Butch:

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

David:

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

Butch:

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

David:

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

Butch:

[1:17] Yeah.

David:

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

Butch:

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

Butch:

Butch:

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

Butch:

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

Butch:

David:

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

Butch:

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

David:

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

Butch:

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

Butch:

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

Butch:

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

Butch:

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

David:

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

Butch:

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

David:

[9:50] I get it.

Butch:

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

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