 Welcome to Ancestral Health Today, evolutionary insights into modern health. Jill Miller is a pioneer in fortune-relevant links between the worlds of fitness, yoga, athletics, massage, and pain management. Having studied movement and the human body for more than 30 years. She's the author of the best-selling books, Body by Breath, and the role model, and creator of the fitness format, Yuga Tuna and the role model. Miller is also a contributing author to the medical texts Pasha, Function, and Medical Applications. Known as the teacher's teacher, Jill has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Shape, Men's Journal, Good Housekeeping, Women's Health, Yoga Journal, Self, and on the Today Show, Good Morning America, and Feature on the Oprah Winfrey Network. She has strained thousands of movement educators, clinicians, and manual therapists to incorporate her paradigm-shifting self-care fitness programming into athletic and medical facility programs internationally. Well, thank you for having me, Isabel. Yes, I'm an author. My first book was called The Role Model, and that book covered the contemporary application of fascia, fascial science for a self-application for via self-massage. And the more recent book is Body by Breath, the Science and Practice of Physical and Emotional Resilience. But I'm a lot more than an author. I'm really an embodied person, and I try to explore practices that I suppose make me more human and bring me into feeling. That path was a very long path. I was a very disembodied kid. I was a very overweight kid. I grew up in a solar community in Santa Fe, New Mexico, off the grid. My parents were in the solar industry, the booming solar industry out there in the 70s. But I was a very bookish kid, and I read, I had big, thick glasses, and I was quite overweight. And I was really, I would say living in my head. And in my early tween years, I came across two videos, beta videos, because we didn't have cable. We lived, like I said, off the grid. So if you wanted to see television, you would get a beta video, or I guess then it became VHS. So my mom brought home the Jane Fonda workout and the Raquel Welsh yoga video when I was in my sixth or seventh grade year, and I decided to work out together. And she fell off after about two weeks. But those videos just lit me up. And I started down a path of dream, disordered eating, and abusive exercise. And that really was the generation of me trying to live in my body, even though it was in a very complicated way. So that is a little bit of my origin story. The methods that I teach are really an amalgamation of many best practices, both creative practices and evidence backed practices to help me live better in my body and to share those practices with other people. Wonderful. So let's give a little bit of background of what that works entails. Let's start with Fasha. A lot of people don't know this word. Can you give us a definition and let us know how it impacts health and how it fits into the work that you do? Sure. Fasha is, I like to say simply, is your seam system. Fasha is the fibrous and fluid connecting tissue that strings together and suspends every cell in your body, almost every cell in your body from foot to face, cell to skin and everything in between. If you've ever butchered meat or taken apart bits of meat, you see this white filmy elastic tissue that separates different larger meat cuts or runs like rivers within certain meat cuts. Well, those white fibers are part of the fascial network. So the fascial tissues have become very famous as a, is a tensional fabric of the body and that tensional fabric I think has been really well explained by folks like my colleague Tom Myers of Anatomy Trains. You have these almost meridian like channels of elastic duct tape tissue that are helping us to connect our movements throughout our body and render us functionally connected. But the fascial tissues are not just a tensional network, the fascial tissues are also a neural bed. You have hundreds of millions of sensory nerve endings, ending in your fascial tissues, and your fascia is also a storehouse for fluids. So it's very, very complicated. It's not, it's not like just, oh, what is fascia? It's like saying, what's your liver where we can really identify the liver or the heart, which is a really specialized, you know, muscle, but the fascial tissues, they do many different services for your body. And we, we, we have to look at a unique system within the body. And so it's, it's very complicated. I've heard it called the largest organ lately because of how present it is everywhere. But how does the fascia relate to movement? What are the implications in health? And how can folks start to learn about those implications and how to take care of it? Oh, well, I think a simple way to think about fascia in terms of movement. I mean, literally, you could ask me any question. You might even say, oh, what about fascia and the immune system, right? What about fascia and feeling? So we, it's usually a something and so fascia and movement is a really fun one to explore because I teach movement. In terms of movement, your, your fascial tissues allow tissues to glide in and amongst each other. So maybe the easiest thing for me to do is to describe to you an analogy, which is a very, it's not that far fetch, but when you think about the organization of an orange, we've got the whole orange is covered by this beautiful skin of the orange. And you can peel that skin off, but you have to work to peel that skin off, right? We have this white fibrous layer underneath that. And then we have these segments that are bound together. You have the spherical orange, but you can leave it apart and you have a half of an orange and you can leave that half of an orange. You can find individual segments. But then if you break apart the individual segments either side the segment, you have all of these little juice packets surrounded by their own fiber that's almost cellosane looking packet of cellulose. So let's look at a muscle in the same way. If I go all the way down to a single muscle cell, a single muscle cell is like the equivalent of that little juice order thing in the heart of a segment. And that muscle cell is surrounded by fascia, afascia. And at that level it's called the endometrium. So I'm going to throw out a few Latin terms for everybody. The endometrium is the is the fascial wrapping around a single muscle cell, but muscles are made up of many, many cells. In fact, they're made up of bundles of cells. So if I bundle some of those cells together, I get what's known as a a fascicle. Or I would get one orange segment, let's say. And that fascicle has its own wrapping, just like the orange segment has its cellulose wrapping. So I have one segment and all the fibers are in there. And wrapping around many, many muscle cells. That's called the paramesian. Now, perimesium, the perimesial fascia, that segment, that fascicle, that comes together. Many, many fascicles come together to make a known muscle, just like many orange segments come together to make an orange. And when all those fascicles, when all those segments come together, it's wrapped by even more connective tissue, even more fascia. And at that level, it's called the epimesium. So we have all of these different fashas, both surrounding the muscle, within chunks of the muscle, and then within and surrounding individual muscle cells. And these fashas, the endometrium, the perimesium, and the epimesium, these all have a little bit of movement in between them. Like within a muscle, you'll get contractions. The whole muscle doesn't always contract at once. It's individual fascicles that are being ignited by the nervous system to lift my water can up. I don't need all of the fascicles creating maximum contraction. Maybe I do if I'm lifting a 60-pound kettlebell, but I don't when I'm lifting just a cup of water. And so your nervous system dedicates just the right amount. But if I don't have a good amount of movement in and amongst the different fashes of my muscle, I'm going to create, I'm going to get stiffness there. So our fascial tissues, all of this long-winded stuff to say, the fascial tissues permit the sliding in and amongst individual muscle cells and the groups of muscle cells, the fascicles, and then big muscles to be able to glide past each other. Think about your quadriceps. We have four different quadriceps. We actually have five different ones, but that's a other interview. But our muscles must be able to move around and amongst each other. You're not just everything moving like a glom all the time. And it's our fascial tissues that are allowing this glide. That is if they're healthy, if they're not healthy, if they're stiff, if they're stuck, if there is some type of pathological state going on with them, we can discuss what those things might be. Or maybe I have scar tissue. It's going to inhibit the ability for my muscles to fully contract. It's going to inhibit my muscle's ability to fully lengthen and for tissues to glide amongst each other during the course of movement. So that's one of the things that I find fascinating about fascia and movement. Do our myfascial tissues overgrown or is the liquid environment gloomy and not allowing for the muscles full expression of what they can do? Oh, super interesting. So in terms of ancestral health and modern lifestyles, how does the lifestyle of our ancestors and our modern lifestyle influence the health of the fascia? What can you tell us about that? Well, I've only been in cadaver labs with modern bodies. I have never been in a path lab of somebody that was exhumed from the ice age. That would be super cool to be able to look into the anatomy of bodies that had been caught in ice. So I couldn't really speak to that. I can only speak to it as a modern mover and knowing the limitations that are known in modern life, which is our chairbound culture, deskbound culture, our tech bound culture, and the non need for foraging and hunting because of supermarkets. And so we have to get our full range of mobility via exercise or maybe we do create opportunities in our life where we do climb trees and where we do forage or do ground based work. So you're connected to shoes respond to the load that's placed on them just like your bones do. And so your body is constantly adapting to whatever you do most or to whatever you don't do most. How your body is is how your body does. And how you do your body most is how your body does. So we can also create inflammation and challenges in our connected tissue by overdoing certain movements, repetitive movements. So, you know, if you were the person that was always responsible for skinning or or mending with needle and thread or whatever other rudimentary or would not rudimentary, whatever other tools you were using that was doing fine tool work versus larger movements, I'm sure there I imagined they had their own RSI repetitive stress challenges that our ancestors had some of those just like that. So volume is important but also not being repetitive with that volume is also critical for the health of the fascia. Absolutely. Yeah. So how did you come to get into this work? Tell me a little bit more about the story you told us about, you know, going into your body and exercising more and becoming more in touch with with your own body. But how did you go from there to the type of work that you're doing now? Yeah, so I the videos that my mom brought home, I mentioned where the Jane Fonda workout and the Raquel Welsh yoga video and they're like completely different types of workout. So one was yoga and the other one was I guess aerobics, calisthenics, whatever Jane whatever Jane was calling it back then. And the yoga was the one that really stuck with me. Like I really liked that. I liked that slow stretching feeling. And the the work of the movement based work in the yoga. I started to check out books in the library on yoga. I remember I was 14 years old when my aunt got me the yoga journal magazine for a birthday present. So I became a subscriber to that magazine. Side note, I was the anatomy columnist for yoga journal for a good year prior to the pandemic. So that was a really wonderful full full circle moment for me. But I just started really digging into yoga practices, yoga philosophy and dove into as much as I can gobble up. And it was part of this development of like I described this orthorexia and I did use the yoga both as a way to I think hope with a very difficult childhood, very difficult family situation. It was it both meditated me and it medicated me. But I also started to develop eating disorder eating around that time. So I started to restrict calories and then that ended up turning into I was never treated. And I ended up going into a different cycle of binging and purging. And so I became bulimic. And this is where the story really turns my life story really turns. I went to a very excellent college in Chicago went to Northwestern University. I was a top student. And during college, I started studying massage my freshman year. I started studying shiatsu massage. And I was also in the dance department. And we had to take pilates as part of the dance department. And I could never feel my abs in in pilates and was never like sore. I just I could never feel my abs. And I knew that that was there was something wrong about not being able to feel your abs. Because my roommate who was pre med and I would sneak her into the Pilates classes, she was always soaring her abs. So I think she was doing it right and I was not doing it right, I was using my limbs. And so I confessed to a local yoga teacher because by the way, I was also doing work study at a yoga studio while I was full time in college. And the teacher said to me, excuse me, I said to the teacher, I can't feel my abs. And I think it's because I'm bulimic. So I consented her I was reaching out for help I was looking for help. And the teacher didn't really have anything to say. I think she did this brilliantly. But she said, Oh, well, try this. And she handed me this object, which looked like a hamburger bun, it was a sandbag that was shaped like a hamburger bun. And she said, lay belly down on this and just breathe. And I did what she said. And I started to feel not just my abs, but I started to feel everything in the center of my body that I had been running from avoiding, creating pain in through this cycle, this binging and purging cycle, I started to feel visceral pain that was so large. I just remember it taking over my entire body. And I remember finally being able to grieve, to connect the physical pain to the emotional pain that I was suffering from. And that was a wrong tool. It was really hard. It was really painful. So when I went back to my dorm room, I started to do this practice with a rolled up hand towel. And the rolled up hand towel, but roll it up and shape it into like a cinnamon bun shape thing. And every day I'd wake up first thing and go to the bathroom. And then I would lay down and I'd move this towel all around my belly. And I was basically doing this self abdominal massage, this visceral work, and this emotional connecting. And I was just making it up as I went along. But talk therapy wasn't helping me. But something about this just turned the corner for me. And I was able to stop throwing up, which is a remarkable shift in the recovery of a bulimic or any addict to be able to be abstinent from those behaviors. And then finally confront the demons that were surrounding me and they were inside of me. So on the sideline, I was studying massage and I ended up spending a summer at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, which is a beautiful holistic retreat center in upstate New York. And I was 18 at the time. And I lived in a tent for the summer. And I did work exchange, you know, I worked 30 hours a week in exchange for food and a tent site. But I got to study massage all summer with all sorts of different people. And back then it was called the New Age Industries. All these big New Age people would come in and lead these huge seminars. And I was, you know, living in a tent, eating the food and healing. And it was there that summer that I met my longtime yoga and body work mentors. His name is Glenn Black. And when Glenn would teach classes to the staff, he talked about fascia. And that was where I first heard the term. How much longer do you want me to make this story? Go all the way, because it's fascinating. Okay. So Glenn did a form of body work called body tuning. Body tuning is a orthopedic manual massage, excuse me, orthopedic medical massage. And he learned from his mentor, Schmuel Totz, who still works to this day in New York City, unbelievable human and practitioner. And so I started studying this yoga and body work with Glenn. This was in 1991. Yeah. Wow. My goodness. Long time ago. And I just got more and more curious about the anatomy. I felt like the anatomy was giving me answers that yoga philosophy and yoga mysticism wasn't necessarily clarifying for me. And so that anatomy curiosity ended up, you know, with me basically continuing along all the trains that I was going on, which is studying yoga and movement, but then looking for other resources in anatomy, and then ended up discovering the work of Gil Headley, who runs cadaver labs for movement professionals and clinical professionals who may not have had access to cadavers in their medical training. And then just I'm leaping through the story now, then super fast forward to a friending researchers in the fascia research community, friending folks like Tom Myers, the creative anatomy trains. And then also simultaneously, while I'm in this sort of quiet yoga and massage space, the performance training space started to identify my work as something that was very valuable, especially in the CrossFit space and then in professional sports. And so it's now been this incredible build of programming that satisfies two very, very different sides of the resilience spectrum in terms of everything from the mental health space and the yoga space all the way to, you know, Olympians and, you know, athlete celebrities and whatnot, using all the methods that I've been accommodated. That's amazing. So can you tell us a little bit more about the two-note fitness that you're so well known for and the two-note falls and how you've used this in this space to help people with their own embodiment and to help with the issues that they may be coming to you for? Yeah. So two-note fitness is my company and that was co-founded with my husband Robert in 2008. I met Robert, I think in 2006, we met and he saw that my work had the potential to really help people. And I was doing it, you know, I was just doing my own little version of teaching and I would usually get on a plane and go teach my work here or there. But he saw me using balls that I bought like in a toy store and he said, you should brand these yourself and let me help you source them. And we ended up discovering, well, we've certainly learned a lot about manufacturing over the last 20 years or 16 years, however long it's been. But I ended up creating a fleet of therapy balls. So there are multiple balls that are made of soft, pliable, grippy rubber in different sizes. And these different balls have unique names. The smallest ball is called a yoga tune up ball. I actually have one here. I don't have all my balls in my office. The second size is called the therapy ball plus. So the yoga tune up ball is larger than a golf ball smaller than a tennis ball. The therapy ball plus is slightly bigger than a tennis ball. And then there's that a ball called the alpha ball that is slightly smaller than a softball. Those are all solid rubber balls that have the glitch and that are compressible. And so they're very tissue friendly. They don't bruise, annoy or you know, freak out your body the way like a sports ball can hardness really matters. And then the fourth ball I have is the gorgeous ball. So the gorgeous ball is an air filled squish ball that became the better generation than the rolled up hand towel. So after doing all this deep got exploratory work. I discovered that doing this on a soft inflated ball disperse pressure much better. Also you could modulate the the diameter of your ball by inflating or deflating it. And we could really have this incredible relationship this bio feedback relationship between the ball and all sorts of areas all sorts of areas all over your torso, rib cage, the back, the pelvic floor, the neck. It's it's really an unbelievable tool. So this fleet of balls is one of the I guess one of the the highlights of the work that we do at tune up fitness. It's utilized in a lot of the programming that I've created. And you know, and subsequently, you know, I went with my own pain pressure tolerance that is in lay person's terms, you know, I use tools that were comfortable to my body. Harder tools did not seem to induce a therapeutic response in my body. But I did write a chapter for a medical textbook called fashion functions medical applications. I have a coffee is out right here for a colleague David Lasondac and Dr. Angelie Ake on self myofascial release tools. And the soft tools actually have a little bit of an edge in terms of inducing a therapeutic response in bodies harder tools tend to initiate what's known as the muscle embracing response. And so your body kind of armors itself, it defends itself against the tool. So I think it's important for people to find tools that they that they can really nestle in with and that they don't end up having kind of a battle of will against their body and the tool. Yeah, I don't go anywhere without my balls that I have gifted them to so many people because they do just incredible, amazing work. I was just in Spain and just another group of people to use them and show them how helpful I am so so honored. This is so wonderful to hear. Thank you for sharing that with me. Yeah, they're incredible tools. And I want you to speak to two different types of people in in regards to the tools and the programs that that you teach. So the reason why I became familiar with your work through Katie Bowman and got the balls was because I have connective tissue disorder, a lot of pain, a lot of, you know, nuts throughout my body. And like I said, they are incredible tools that I don't go anywhere without. So I want you to just speak of how people with these conditions can benefit from your work and how fascia relates to those conditions. And then I would like you to speak to the other end of the spectrum, the athletes and people who are just doing a lot to their body without taking care of this aspect. So that's so necessary. Yes. So I, are you open to disclosing the connective tissue challenge that you live with? Yeah. Yeah. So I have hypermobile ETS. Oh, there you go. Okay. Yes. So are you familiar with Libby Hinsley? No. Oh, you must have her on your podcast. So she wrote a book called Yoga for Bendy Bodies. She is a DPT, a doctor of physical therapy. I believe she's in South Carolina. And she wrote this book and asked me to write the forward to the book. I didn't, I didn't know her. I didn't know about her, but she had been using the therapy balls, the yoga tuna balls to manage her pain and the contracture that she would get in certain tissues of her body and found that the yoga tuna balls were her ideal tool when she couldn't use her own hands. It's hard to get that depth of self massage in certain body parts. It's helpful to have a little augmentation like a, like a friendly spear to help you with that. So I think you would really benefit by having her on your podcast. Her book is incredible. She has hypermobile EDS. I love talking to people about this topic. So in EDS, Ellers-Danlos syndrome, there are many different manifestations of this hypermobility, the hypermobility. So fascia runs throughout your body, as I mentioned. It's not just this, the muscle analogy that I shared. Your fascia comprises every organ of your body. The only organ it's not comprising is your brain. But there are connective tissue sheaths that surround many aspects of your nervous system. So when we have extra loose collagen, this can create challenges with our eyesight because of the orbits of our eyes becoming elongated. We can have challenges with our respiration because of loose collagen, both in the trachea, the bronchioles, and within the lungs themselves. Lungs are dense collagen sponge network. We can have challenges in digestion because the smooth muscle is embedded in this collagen network of the intestines. And so there can be some dyskinesis there. So the collagen is pervasive. So when people think, oh, the hypermobility, they're just thinking about the joints. The hypermobility is everywhere. But in terms of the musculoskeletal approach, which is a lot of what I can talk to regarding the role model approach and the body by breath approach, people with the hypermobility, they will have some joints that are extremely hypermobile. But then there'll be other joints or other areas of their body that are extremely tense because those tissues are trying to hold on to the instability that's happening higher than or lower than. And so one of the things that I'll, one of the things I share with my hypermobile clients is you don't really want to drive the therapy balls towards your joints, especially if your joints are hypermobile, but you want to stick more in the center of the muscle, the muscle belly, and do exercises like contract relax. What is that? So contract relax is a way of attenuating to the discomfort of the pressure that a tool or even a stretch can do in a tissue. So for example, if you were trying to address some muscle imbalances in the quads, you would lay face down on the ground and you could place the yogatuna ball or whichever a number of balls in the center of the quad, you take a breath in, hold your breath and then contract the quadricep, almost contracting it so hard you can't even feel that there's a ball underneath and then you exhale and you let go. And when you let go, there will be a neurological relaxation and it will permit more soft tissue to elongate there. And that includes the muscle and the connected tissue involved with the muscle. So we would do this oscillation of contract relax, contract relax. And then once the feeling of discomfort has mellowed, then you can start to tool around. You can move the ball north south up and down the thigh or gently across the thigh and just trying to address the muscle tissue and the fascial tissues that are within the muscle and the fascial tissues that are surrounding it. So like, for example, with Isabel with having the hypermobile EDS, where is your, where is like, you're like every day I wake up and this is super tight on me. So my neck area and also the upper back, the arms can also feel very tight. That's what's constant. Yeah. So there's some really gentle ways to address that congestion in the upper traps, the levator scapula. So these are muscles on the back of the neck that connect the back of the neck to the scapula. The trapezius is huge. It goes all the way down to almost your lumbar spine. It's like this giant stingray, but you can prop, you can lay on your back and prop your pelvis up on, on like a cordous ball where you can prop a block underneath the pelvis. And then you can let the two therapy balls, the obitunate balls or the plus balls rest on either side of the shoulder and laying in that gentle slope, you can take very deep breaths and you can move your arms slowly overhead, like making a snow angel. And that's a way of basically tricking the muscle back into a lengthened position, releasing, releasing the grip that it has on your neck. And a lot of times we have that head instability, the neck pain, because in EDS you can have this cervical instability, the ligaments are very loose throughout the cervical spine. And so are the atlas and axis. When your body is so smart, it's like, I am going to keep my brain on top of my body. So the muscles are going to be like, I got this, when the ligaments really in the first place should have it, they don't. So the muscles take over next, next line of defense. And then the fascial tissues, they start to also adapt to that. And so they can become less mobile. So, you know, I really, I really feel for you, I have certain areas in my body that are genuinely hypermobile. I've never gone in for a workup on EDS, but I have, I'd love to tell you my whole medical history, but I won't bore you with that. But I have a lot of insights into what you and others in your community can do for, for self care. But also the other part of the self care for the EDS folks is the comorbidities that go along with the EDS include anxiety or prevalence towards anxiety. And so that's why one of the reasons why I wrote body by breath, this body by breath is full of novel strategies to help a parasympathetic cascade so that you can induce a relaxation response in very beneficial physiological ways. Yeah, amazing. Yeah. And it is super beneficial. And I think that a lot more people in this space need to learn about your work because they're, you know, the tools are really helpful and can really ameliorate the pain and help people have that relief on a regular basis. That just happened to go to therapy. And the point is that you can do this yourself. You can do this autonomously. And so you're like, oh, I got this crook in my neck again. But when you learn to do the contract relax type of activities and then do a little bit of therapy on the tissue, then the next step is to then do exercises that make those tissues more robust. And so those with EDS, you know, that's a chronic thing is that you is doing load based work, building up your ability to tolerate load so that you can try to continue to adapt to just a more healthy lung tension relationship, irrespective of the softer collagen. Yeah. And you spoke about breathing into the fall. So what's the relationship with breath and fascia? And where does breath come in and how is it helpful? Well, the main muscle of breathing is called the respiratory diaphragm. And the respiratory diaphragm lives inside of your rib cage. It's, it's a odd parachute shape muscle. And it lines the lower six ribs on the inside of the rib cage. And then it has these two little tails that reach down to the lumbar spine. So it's this interesting parachute shape with, with like, you know, the little cords hanging down. And being a skeletal muscle, it's covered with fascia. I mean, you don't have any muscle that's not covered with, maybe your tongue, like tongue is, we don't really think of the fascial tongue, but there is fascia inside of it. But I mean, you're, so the respiratory diaphragms is devoid of sensory nerves. Like you can't really feel your diaphragms placement, right? The way I could say to you, hey, can you feel your biceps right now? And you can literally take your mind to your upper arm and you can be like, yeah, I can feel, I can feel how long it is right now, but you can't feel the diaphragm. Really, the only time you feel it is when you've got the hiccups when it's in a, this, that hypercontractal state. So in order to help our breath, though, what we want to try to do is improve the diaphragms relationship to all the tissues it's connected to. And it's connected to all of them via fascia. And so we use the corgis ball or even a couple of corgis balls to roll upon and against all of the tissues that interface with the diaphragm. And in so doing, we end up getting this amazing mobility of the thoracic spine, the ribs, the low back, the pelvic floor, the neck, the shoulders. There is this incredible range of respiration that's not just a nose to lungs experience, but it's really a body wide experience. And it's body wide for many reasons, but one of those main reasons is the fascial interfaces of the tissues of respiration circulating around this diaphragm. So using tools that can improve the stretch between tissues or can improve the slide between tissues, that might even be a better way of saying it, can really help us to have a more complete respiratory cycle and be able to have the options to control our breath. Breathing is happening automatically all the time. It's part of your autonomic nervous system regulation. But when you start to use conscious breathing practices, you can set the stage for emotional tone in your body. So it's really a profound interrelationship. Interesting. So let's switch to the other end of the spectrum, which is another part of our audience. In the paleo world, the ancestral world, we have a lot of athletes, a lot of people who are looking to emulate the way of our ancestors. And with that comes a lot of movement, but we're also constrained by the modern lifestyles that we need to have with work with, you know, live in an enclosed basis. So a lot of people are going from being sedentary all day long, and then doing S4NUS exercises. And we see a lot of injuries. We see a lot of tightness and, you know, issues that come with that. So how does this work in focusing on fascia and connective tissue? How can that help this population have a better time and improve their overall musculoskeletal health by following your programs? Yeah, well, with these therapy balls and with the approaches that I teach, you get to be your own clinician. You also get to be the expert of your own body. So, you know, repetitive aches and pains, things that just won't go away, that rolling won't make go away, you definitely would benefit from consulting with somebody who can see you, or maybe image you, or maybe create a program. But for a lot of the, for a lot of things, you're going to be doing your homework anyway. You're going to need to do repatterning exercises. Self-massage is a huge part of that, because what the self-massage does for the athlete, and we can look at this in terms of injury prevention or injury recovery, we can look at it, look, dice this up as what should I do before a workout or performance and what should I do after a workout or performance. So, let me address the performance aspect. What's known from the literature on self-mio fascia release or some of the self-massage type of work that I teach is that it enhances one's proprioception. That is, it improves your brain's ability to locate the tissues that you are rolling. So, if you wake up and you're very stiff in your quads or your ankle range of motion is very limited, rolling those will not only improve the range of motion, but it will also improve your body's ability to monitor what's going on in those tissues, and that you'll be able to sense them better, they'll be able to sense themselves better in the context of the athletic output. One of the other really cool pieces of evidence is that the rolling before performance has also been shown to increase the muscle torque, the ability for the muscle to contract, and this is very helpful also for the EDS people. So, not only does rolling help to improve my range of motion, improve my sense of the tissue, but it actually creates a stronger muscle. So, I can have more power in my serve or my race or my lift or whatever it is that you're into doing. And in terms of the recovery, the rolling is very helpful to address tissues that you might have really cooked in that workout or that performance. So, tissues that might have been overworked, this is just a great way to flush fluids out, to reset stretch, but it also hastens all sorts of parasympathetic features. So, it helps us to calm down and come down, and that sets the stage for better sleep that night. And so, I mean, sleep is the ultimate recovery drug, right? And so, if I can get better sleep, then I can also optimize better performance tomorrow. So, it's just you've got, you've got wins on the recovery side and you've got rolling wins on the other side of performance. And then there's the pain management. If you end up getting injured and you're out and it alters your movement mechanics because you're out, well, that hurts too. You know, it's like you hurt your left knee in your road race. So, you're going to be spending 90% of your walking on your right knee now and the right hip. And that means your left shoulder and the left side of your neck are going to also take a toll, just from the weird compensation that we do when we work around an injury. And so, you've got tools now that can help you with the compensation pain that you'll get. My mother's about to have shoulder surgery. Well, so she's going to be frozen in that shoulder, but I'm going to tell you what's going to hurt like heck, her neck and her chest. But she can roll her neck and her chest after surgery. Yeah, wonderful. So, how about the average person? We've talked about the two extremes. That's mental. How can the average person sort of, you know, maintain mobility and stability and avoid pain and use this method to just, you know, to maintain their body and that decline. Yeah, a little bit of rolling goes a long way. As I mentioned, what excites me most about, this is a research of Dr. Robin Kapobianco, who showed that rolling, not only like rolling the yoga tuna balls along the calf improved ankle range of motion significantly, both in young population, but in older groups, she tested out middle-aged folks. It's very hard to find research on elderly or even middle-aged folks. It's always young college age, healthy kids. And so, the range of motion improvement on the older group was more robust than on the younger. Why? Because they probably lost more range of motion to begin with. And so, as we age, we lose this range of motion and slip and falls can be mortal for us. Being able to restore range that our joints are capable of, but maybe our proprioception isn't so good or our body is guarding. So, we have these tools that can be used to help you ambulate, also to help you breathe better if you have a difficult time getting spewed them out. I know a lot of people came to us during the pandemic with lingering COVID problems. Long COVID is a huge challenge worldwide, but they're like, I don't want to be, I don't want to be taking mucinex for the rest of my life. What else can I do? So, you can roll a cordous ball across the sternum along the ribs. That manipulates the ribs. It also squeezes the lungs. It helps to push the fluids that's stuck in the end fields of the lungs and allow you to be able to expectorate. But there's this other side effect, which is, oh, my gosh, my back pain went away because I was rolling for my lungs. Oh, up my posture feels more spontaneously aligned from the rolling. So, all of these other amazing side effects. Yeah, that's amazing and so, so informative. But this is just a teaser for all the wonderful work that you do. And I'd like to tell you folks where they can find you and where they can learn more about your work. Oh, yes. My website's tunupfitness.com. And we have about 500 teachers worldwide that teach my methods. So, you can do a search in your area. So, if you can find a teacher, I also teach online. I have an online classroom with hundreds of classes on topics from the thumb. I have a class just on the thumb to, of course, many classes covering breath movement and even all the videos or rather all the exercises that are embodied by breath. There's over 100 exercises in here. We recently just did a video series. So, those are available on the website as well. And then I'm on Instagram at the Jill Miller. Yeah, and your Instagram is fantastic for learning, learning. Yes, absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Jill, for being here with us and for sharing your work. And I highly recommend that people check you out. And I can assure you that it'll be of great help in whatever end of the spectrum you find yourself or if you want to just continue to have mobility and be pain-free. Thank you, Isabel. Appreciate it. Thanks for joining us on this episode of Ancestral Health Today. We hope you enjoyed our discussion on how evolutionary insights can inform modern health practices. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast to catch future episodes.