 Welcome to Seymour's World at Think Tech Hawaii. What a show we're going to have today. Today I have some wonderful guests. And the reason I wanted to do this show, because if you have been following me and Seymour's World, you know that like every other pseudo-athlete who thinks he knows everything and can do anything that he wants, I have reached a certain age which is in the 70 plus range where I'm playing tennis and golf every day and exercising a lot and I get a lot of pains and a lot of aches. And everybody keeps asking me what is the best way to get over all this stuff because they see me coming, I had both my knees replaced, I've had hamstring tears, I've had back issues, etc. So I have two guests here today in which we are going to talk about joint pain and we're going to talk about the physical therapy, the elixir for joint pain, because I honestly believe that our guests are going to open your eyes as to how important it is to do certain things like stretching for instance, like doing certain exercises before you get hurt and after you get hurt. So without further ado, I want to introduce Reina Hawkins. Hi Reina. Hi Seymour. Thank you for joining me. Reina, this little 100 pound woman is able to give me pain and she has given me pain over all the years that I have been a patient of hers. Reina owns Oahu physical therapy, correct? Yeah, East Oahu physical therapy. East Oahu physical therapy, sorry. That's okay. And you have worked on me for about 10 years and the first time I met you was after my knee surgery, right? Yeah. And you got me playing golf in a matter of 30 days which is much faster than my orthopedic surgeon said I was going to play and I was playing tennis in 60 days. I want to talk about how you did that and how you're able to manipulate an old body like mine into being a guy who thinks he's 40 or 50 years old when he's on the tennis court. Okay? Okay. Next, we're also going to invite all the way from Florida. We're going to invite a very good friend of mine, Chris Katowski. Chris, are you live from Florida? Can we get you on the screen? Hi Chris, how are you? Very good to see more. How are you doing Reina? I'm good. How about you? Great to be here. Well, Chris, just to give you a slight introduction and I'll let them talk about themselves a little bit. Chris is a physical trainer for superior athletes. He's worked with football players, professional football players, MMA guys. He'll talk about all that once we get into it. But more important, Chris helped me in a certain situation in Florida when I had a major accident and I had a hamstring tear. So we're going to talk about what Chris did that was able to move me from a 8 to 10 week prognosis before I could play again to 2 to 3 weeks. And as we get into it, you will understand why Chris has now written books and is actually world famous giving lectures all over about his ideas of physical training and jointly. So first, Reina, we're going to start with you. Okay. Tell us a little bit about your practice. We've got four physical therapists and we're all licensed PT's so we don't use aids or assistance and two massage therapists. And all of us are pretty much trained in Pilates, myofascial decompression, which is the cupping, kinesiote, a number of manual therapy techniques. And I've had most of that. Yes, probably all of that. Probably all of that. Including, I remember when I was recovering from my double knee surgery, you had me in the hallway with bands around my feet running up and down the hallway and doing all that stuff sweating. You had that smile on your face. Love it. You loved it. I knew you were going to get out there sooner than you're supposed to. And I did thanks to you. So tell me a little bit about your theory. Your theory is that if a patient comes in to see you, do you do what the orthopedic surgeon says or do you have your own protocol? Well, of course we follow the general protocol of their surgery because they have pretty general guidelines. I get one month, you're supposed to be doing this two months. But of course I pushed you because I knew you could handle it, but within safe guidelines. So first you need to get full range of motion, right? So some people just have you stretch, but of course I do a lot of manual because if I don't do that, it's going to take a lot longer. So we do a lot of massage, fascial stretching, fascial release, stuff like that. Push a lot of the swelling out because a lot of times you don't have full range of motion because there's so much swelling in the joint. So that's your biggest factor. And once that's all gone, then strengthen you within your protocol. So can people come to East Oahu physical therapy by themselves or must they be referred? If they come by themselves, they have to pay cash. If they come with a referral, then their insurance covers pretty much 90% of it. And that's what you, is that how your business is built? Primarily we do get a bunch of cash patients though. Because I find every time I come to see you, even for when something hurts and I just need you to do something to alleviate the pain. There's a lot of people there. You have a tremendous amount of patients. We see one on one though. So we see one patient to one therapist the whole hour. But we are, there are four of us. So usually four of us and four patients. So we're going to go, we have a lot of pictures because we don't have a table here and you guys can't see her working on me. It's truly amazing if any of you have any joint pain to hear in Honolulu or you feel that something hurts or you're not sure. And if you don't want to go to your doctor, make an appointment with Reina because I can only tell you after 10 years of working with this young lady, I run faster and you know, I'm not exactly on my even weight scale. I should lose a few pounds, but I'm still able to move well and it's thanks to you Reina. So I'm very happy that you do that. You're welcome, but you work hard. So a lot of it is you guys, you know, we do half of it, the manual portion and then give you things that are within your guidelines and to keep you safe, but to get you stronger and then it's up to you guys to do, to actually do it at home too. I will never forget when you put me on the bike right after surgery. I think it was like a week after my knee surgery and it was a fully replacements for my legs. And you put me on the bike and you said pedal backwards, I think first and I said, why does she want me to pedal backwards? And then I pedaled forwards and I realized I couldn't do it. It's easier to pedal backwards. Much easier to pedal backwards and I was able to do whatever you asked in a short period of time and then it worked, which is terrific. So let's look at the first two if we can. There's two videos. Oh, that is me. I think there's two videos first. Let's see if we can bring those up. Chris, the other one is yours. We're coming to you in a second. So what is that first video? We saw that stretching motion. So that first video is a professional. She's a sponsored surfer. So she's a competitive surfer. She's only like 11 years old. She did a spinal fracture from water skiing and holding on with one hand and just all that compression coming down. So we rehabbed her so she could compete again. So we're just rehabbing her core and then adding some strengthening for her arms because she needs to be able to paddle. Let's look at the second one. What was that one right now? So that's Tara. She's one of our therapists and she's just doing a manual glide on your spine. So your spine moves in certain directions. So when you side bend, you know, your joint's supposed to come down and his is not. So she's just manually gliding it in a normal motion that it would, but it is not doing by itself. So Raina, if somebody has a stiff neck or they're, you know, they're always doing this, which I happen to do quite a bit. Should they come to see you? Can you help them? I mean, we should be. Yeah, it could be muscle, joints. It could be a number of things. And you're able to interpret it and put a treatment plan together for them to get rid of that? Yes. So we do an evaluation to kind of narrow it down to whether is it the joint that's not moving correctly? Is it a disc that's in the way? Is it muscle? Is it fascia? Things like that. And then we narrow it down and then create a plan for you with manual therapy and then exercise that you do with us and then at home. You know, everybody is watching and listening and they say, this girl is an expert. You're terrific. Absolutely terrific. Thank you so much. All right, let's go to the next one, which is actually a picture of my hamstring. And Chris, we're going to bring you in on this one. We're showing the back of my leg where I tore my hamstring, which was completely full of swelling and edema. Chris, how did you treat this? Well, one of the biggest ideologies that I've kind of uncovered while I've been helping people with muscular injuries is that human beings are machines, but we are a little bit more like a web as well. Okay, so I'm going to use a quick example like a car. Say your carburetor, your water pump breaks in your car. You can take it to the maintenance person and they can fix your water pump and then all of a sudden the rest of your car works. So the problem was the water pump. Okay. Now, when we look at you and your hamstring here, anybody would look at your hamstring and say the problem here is the hamstring. But because human beings are a biological system, they're a web of seemingly unrelated parts, but they are still related in some fashion. It is actually your glute that was creating the problem for the hamstring. So the hamstring was the symptom. The hamstring was not why you were breaking down, the glute was why you were breaking down. Now, hold on here for one second. In other words. Okay, hold on. We're going to move to a second slide, which I believe you are now working on my glute. And you can see the swelling is all the way up to my rear end and all the way down to my knee and you're rubbing my ass. Anybody looking at this is going to say, why are you doing that? Well, one of the main reasons is because our nerves that come out of our spine are going to travel underneath the gluteals and then on down the leg. So if we cut those nerves off, we choke them off at the gluteal at your butt cheek. What's going to happen is we are going to have dysfunction at your hamstring. The nerve impulse that's going from your spine on down your leg is going to be somewhat muddled. It's not going to be a clear signal. So you told me that when this happened you were reaching for a ball that you didn't think you should go get. So what you were doing is you were asking a little bit extra of your body. Your body sent that signal. It got cut off at your glute and your hamstring didn't pick it up very well. What do we have? We have a little bit of an atom bomb go off in that hamstring and it's your body's way of telling you there's something wrong. So Chris, I think the audience should get the background on this. So here I was playing with my brother who's a physician and we're playing in a tennis tournament and this happens to me and Mark says, oh, your hamstring just popped and he said you're going to need eight to ten weeks. And then you started working on me and if we can move to the next slide, let's see, I think I have one more slide on that hamstring. No, we don't. Okay. But you started working on me. There it is. Yes. You started working on me and the swelling the next day was down by 50%. And then two and three and four days later, the swelling was almost had almost disappeared from my hamstring, went down my leg and basically was leaving my body and I was able to play tennis in three weeks. That was incredible. Absolutely incredible. Right. So we can think of, I mean, we can think of your glute is like the Hoover Dam, right? It's backing everything up. It's delaying your healing. It's delaying your recovery. When we loosen up that gluteal, when we open up your butt cheek and the tissue is allowed to slide and the blood is allowed to flow, it can reach down into the depths of the hamstring a lot easier and help clear out that hematoma that you're experiencing, all the purples and the blues and the yellows and the oranges, all those colors in that hamstring. Your body was able to clear it out. And remember, I told you, I said, I want you to be as active as possible. Human beings are like sharks. If we stop moving, we die. So if someone else were to look at your hamstring, they'd say, oh, Seymour, you know, lay in bed for the next four weeks. Now we know you're not going to do that. So I would rather tell you go and do what you can do pain-free and keep that blood flowing. Keep everything moving. Okay. And one of the other things that we need to know is that our lymph system is going to be responsible for clearing out a lot of that metabolic garbage from your hamstring exploding. So our lymph system works best when there's vibration, whether we walk, whether we run, we can jump up and down on a trampoline, anything like that. So if you lay in bed, you're going to delay the healing. You're going to make that hematoma kind of pool. And what do stagnant, what do stagnant lakes smell like? They smell like death, right? There's just not too much going on. So when we have that blood just pool, you're actually making your tissue much more unhealthy and it's going to prolong your injury. I got it. And, you know, something our audience gets it too. Now, Chris and Raina, we have to take a short break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about other specific cases. And, Chris, we haven't even gotten to your background yet, so we're going to talk about that as well. As you can see, this is an amazing show that we have today that talks about physical injury and how to fix it. And unfortunately, I'm the guinea pig in all this, but hopefully in the second half of the show we'll be able to see other cases besides myself. You are watching Seymour's World on Think Tech, Hawaii. We'll be back in a minute. Welcome back to Seymour's World on Think Tech, Hawaii. I have two guests with me. I have Raina Hawkins here in Honolulu from East Oahu Physical Therapy that I saved right this time. And I have Chris Kadowski all the way from Florida. So, Chris, tell us a little bit about yourself. People want to know, I've had two questions already. People want to know, what are you doing in Florida? Right now, I am running my own business in Florida called Influential Health Solutions. I am kind of like a rogue therapist, I guess you could say. I seek out the toughest cases, the toughest of the tough, the ones where people have gone to the physical therapist, because they've gone to the acupunctures, the chiropractors, they've done their cupping, and they are either on the brink of two things, having surgery or living with the pain that they have for the rest of their life. So, for me, I'm pretty much the end of the road when people come and see me. Now, you work with professional athletes, don't you? Yes, yeah, I do. I've picked up a generous portion of mixed martial artists as well down here. People like Robbie Lawler, Mike Chandler, and Logan Storley, they all were or are aspiring to be world champions in their division. I've been very, very fortunate with the people that I've been able to work with and work for, definitely. And I know you've worked with the professional football players as well. Yes. And I think working with me as your worst patient of all, you have obviously done wonders for me over the years. So, I appreciate that. We're going to come back to you in a minute, okay? Okay. Now, Raina. Absolutely. I want to know more about different types of treatments that you do at the East Oahu physical therapy. So, is it just joint pain or do you do other things as well? No, we do everything like nerve pain, joint pain, post-operative, elderly who have balance issues, things like that. Oh, really? Now, we've got a slide we want to bring up. Let's see this one. And you can tell us a little bit about it. Oh, that's Chris working on my hamstring, Chris. Look, that was the third day that you came up. And you could see how the swelling is down. Just amazing. But we're going to move to the next slide. What's this one? What am I doing here? So, you're doing a side plank. So, you're engaging your core, your glutes. And am I doing a good job? Yeah, pretty good. Pretty straight. Well, I'm glad to hear that I was doing a good job. What was this for? The idea that this was my back issue, I think. So, you were coming for your back and then we were treating you together. He was talking with us on the phone. I was mostly focusing on some fascial stuff from your IT band all the way down and then also your facet joint at T12 area. And we had an issue. As you people are looking at this, I had a back problem and I went to my orthopedist, Dr. Bob Atkinson. And he did an MRI and he did an X-ray. And he said, Seymour, you're getting old. And he said, there's nothing you could do about this. And I said, what do you mean? He said, you're going to have to suffer through all the pain. And I said, I beg your pardon. You know, this is really hard with my tennis, my golf and everything else I do. And he said, well, you know, what was it, L2 or I can't remember whatever the number of the disc was a problem. So I went to you first. And then I went to Chris Kodowski. And I had the two of you together. I said, two is better than one. And you were so agreeable to allow Chris to come in on a FaceTime or a Skype with us. And you guys, in a matter of two weeks, I was pain-free, totally pain-free. We're normal physicians look at it and say, uh-oh, you're in trouble. So you guys did great. And that was part of the treatment was that plank, right? Right, part of your whole exercise. Right. And then, uh, you gave me other stuff too. And don't you, uh, I mean, I found that you said to me, I have to do exercise at home. Right. And Chris said the same thing. Chris, you said I have to do a lot of exercise at home to make sure... Absolutely. Absolutely. It doesn't matter if I'm working on a 13-year-old ballet, um, teenager, or if I'm working with a professional athlete or you, I give everybody homework. It's absolutely imperative that somebody does something away from what I do because as soon as you get off my table, as soon as you walk out of my office, your body is already starting to undo what I undid. So you came in injured. I undid that. And then your body says, wait a minute, I don't like this. I want to be the other way. And as soon as you start walking out to your car, your brain starts to remodel what I did. So when you go home and you start to beat that back down with your softball, with your lacrosse ball, you keep that joint open. You teach the tissue, you teach your brain, this is how I want to be. And when you get to a certain point of health, your brain and your body says, oh, I remember this. And you stay there permanently. So if you're not doing that extra work, then it makes my job a lot harder and you're going to recover a lot slower. It's amazing, both of you are actually preaching the same thing, which is wonderful. And I really appreciate that you're able to convince the audience that it is important not to just go for physical therapy and that's it. And then next week you come back, that's not the case. If you really want to help yourself, you have to do it. Of course, joints need lubrication, right? So like you said, if you don't use it, you lose it. You don't move it. And that's exactly what Chris is saying. Let's look at one of those other shots that we have. I think, Raina, this is one of yours coming up. What are you doing here? So that's a single limb bridge. So you did that for your home exercise. Right. And that was for my back injury. Also your core. So you're trying to keep your hips level, not let your hip drop on the left side. You're using the right leg to keep your butt up. So you're using your glutes, your hamstrings, your core. That was one of the hardest ones for me. Yeah. Really, really good. Chris and I totally agree with that exercise. And he also wanted you to have that to strengthen your glutes. And it helped. It really helped. What's the next one? Chris, this is yours. This is somebody lying down on your table. But I don't know. You can't see the video. So let's move to another one. And maybe we can describe it a little better. Oh, that's me. That's me water skiing. Yeah, that's me. I was a little bit younger then. At the same time, I was not a competitive water skier, but a pretty good water skier. So that's pretty cool. Next. Oh, now Chris, this is you with an MMA guy, I think. Yeah, that's me with Robbie Lawler. With Robbie Lawler. And you worked on him, obviously. Yes. What was his issue? Can you tell us? He had several. He had come to me a couple of times with glute issues, pain rating down in his hamstring. And then he had come to me with a couple of issues of pain radiating down into his arm. We found that in his neck. And then he came to me with a clicking in his left shoulder. And we ended up finding and clearing out a lot of junk in his shoulder blade. Wow. Wow. And the next one. And that was me in Las Vegas with him right after he won the World Championship. Now, Chris, I just got a question. Somebody asked me, where do they reach you? How do they get a hold of you? They can reach me at Chris at influentialhealthsolutions.com. That's my email address. And then I don't know if you have show notes or anything like that. I can give people a link to my Facebook page, to my phone number. If you're in the South Florida area, I'd be more than happy to come and help you out if you have problems. And it's Chris at influentialhealthsolutions.com. Yes. All right. Terrific. Terrific. Now, do we have any more slides left, Bob? Oh, here you are with another guy. This is in the gym. Okay. I don't know, Chris, if you can't see it or not, there's a fly behind you. No, is he bending over? He's bending over trying to touch his toes? No, no, no. It's a guy standing up next to you. I'm the only guy. Oh, sorry. That's okay. That's my friend. That's my friend who is actually here. That's my friend who is actually a Navy SEAL. So I trained that gentleman to be a Navy SEAL actually from the big island of Hawaii. No kidding. And that's me and him on the amphibious base in San Diego. Are you still training Navy SEALs? Yes. Wow. Cool. Next one. This is somebody on their back, but it's too hard for me to describe it. We'll go to one more. We don't have much time, unfortunately. This is somebody bending over, Chris. I think he's trying to touch his toes. All right. If you guys look at that picture, you're going to notice that there's a huge discrepancy from the left to the right hand side of his back. And this is what I try to help people understand is true health comes from true alignment. This gentleman here, he was 25 years old, had unbelievable back pain. And as soon as I had him bend over, touch his toes and took a picture, you can see how much more built up the left side of his back is than his right. Now what ended up happening was he damaged his left knee, his meniscus a couple years back and he never got it rehabilitated. He just let it heal. Went back to playing basketball, football, lifting weights and everything like that. And what his body did was it automatically rerouted the torque in the force production and his right leg took over. Wow. So he never ever sent a signal to his brain saying that his left knee is no longer injured. So his body continued to operate as if the injury existed, even though he felt like it had healed. So one day, like I was saying earlier, your glute was the problem. The hamstring was the symptom, it blew. This gentleman, his left knee was the problem. And now it was going up the chain and creating problems with his back. The kid was 25 years old and I mean he couldn't even pick up a wet pair of socks off the floor. Wow. Amazing. So that's one of my biggest preachings to any of my clients. True alignment equals true health. What we ended up doing is aligning that gentleman and he's fine. Obviously, Chris and Raina, you guys are professionals in what you do and I really appreciate that you're able to help people, not just when they come in from surgeries, but able to help them through their daily lives because you can change a person's life. If somebody has bent over and they can't walk normally, you can change that. You can help them do that. And I think for both of you, I really want the audience to realize that this is not just after an injury. It's something that you want to do to learn how to, as you get older, as in me, you want to understand how to take care of yourself. And I think people should realize that it's important to come and see a professional such as yourself to figure out how to make sure that your body is in line. Do you agree with Chris when it comes to alignment? Oh, definitely. I look at alignment first before anything else. Yeah, because like you said, you have to find the cause of the problem rather than the symptoms. Well, thank you, Raina. Thank you, Chris. You guys are terrific. You're really, really very helpful. And I know the audience is going to really start thinking about, should I stand straight or what should I do? Am I in alignment or not? You can see Chris Kudowski in Florida. You can see Raina here in Honolulu. You guys were great. I just want to tell everybody that our next show is going to be on Christmas. And it's going to be a show with entertainers from our Make Him Smile program, a patient in the hospital who's going to talk about how they're spending their Christmas. So I hope you join us on the next D-Morse World. Thank you for watching Aloha from Honolulu.