Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
A podcast about practices to promote healthy lives featuring experts, businesses, and clients: we gather to share our stories about success, failure, exploration, and so much more. Our subscription episodes feature some personal and vulnerable, real-life stories that are sensitive to some of the general public.
Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
Connecting Psychology to Physics: The Holistic Therapy Revolution
Tom Swales transforms how we understand rehabilitation and human movement through his groundbreaking "Five Elements of Human Design" approach. Breaking away from compartmentalized treatment models, he reveals how psychology, neurology, biology, chemistry, and physics interconnect to create a comprehensive framework for healing and performance.
What makes Swales' methodology revolutionary is its ability to identify the true origins of pain and dysfunction. That nagging shoulder pain? It might actually be caused by limited hip rotation on your opposite side. The Achilles tendon that won't heal? Perhaps it's compensating for poor balance and core control issues. By following a systematic assessment process, practitioners can uncover these hidden connections and address root causes rather than chasing symptoms.
The stories Swales shares illustrate the universal application of these principles. When the World's Strongest Man came to him with chronic knee, groin and back pain, Swales didn't focus on strength training. Instead, he identified subtle issues with neck extension and visual tracking. After just one session targeting these areas, the athlete reported a pain-free personal record in his squat the very next day. Similarly, an 85-year-old woman with balance concerns made remarkable improvements through deadlift training - demonstrating how the same principles apply across the performance spectrum.
Perhaps most refreshing is Swales' emphasis on patient independence. "The worst thing we can do as health experts is create dependency," he explains. Rather than fostering reliance on ongoing treatments, his approach educates patients as "students of their own bodies," empowering them with self-awareness and practical tools to maintain their health independently.
Ready to rethink your approach to rehabilitation and performance? Explore Tom's Advanced Movement Therapist certification at amtcertified.ca or access his free resources on YouTube for practical applications of these transformative principles.
Intro for podcast
Here is the link for Sunday's 4 pm Pacific time Zoom meeting
Well, hello, welcome back to the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, Joe Grumbine, and today we have a very special guest. His name is Tom Swales and he's a highly respected physiotherapist and strength coach. This guy's got 20 years of experience with human movement, injury prevention, rehabilitation, and I can just go on and on, but what I'd rather do is jump into the conversation, tom. Welcome to the show. I'm so glad you're able to join us and just love to have you introduce yourself yeah, thanks, Joe.
Speaker 2:so, as you said, my name is Tom Swales. I am a physio strength coach up here in Canada for those of you listening in the states and I have a clinic business with my wife. We've grown that from just the two of us to now almost 30 staff and we're opening a second location in Barrie, Ontario. Along my own journey of trying to be the best I can for those that I help, doing the courses, doing the certifications, coming out of school with this big ambition to help as many people as possible. Now you run into your own problems and what I've created over the last, I guess, seven to eight years and distilling down what I feel are the most relevant things in the rehab and performance side of things.
Speaker 2:I came up with the Advanced Movement Therapist certification to help, you know, clinicians and coaches coming out of school to help organize and increase effectiveness super quick and then help those veterans who have done it all but they don't know which tools to use at the right time for the right person and for the right purpose. So you know it's it's a framework and a system to kind of build more knowledge on top of, because we're lifelong learners and we love what we do. But you know we can also get bogged down with the amount of information out. There is like, what do I use for which person? And you know, if we have a way to organize what we know, it also helps us build more on top of that so that we can continue to evolve in our thinking and our approaches.
Speaker 1:That's pretty powerful. It seems that you know, as I'm walking down my path to health and meeting all these different professionals and you know you meet most of the people that are the most skilled in their profession are the ones that have been through the problem and have solved the problems. But they don't often, they're not always good business people. They don't know how to do necessarily the part that they're not trying to do, which is help people, and I think that's huge. You know, you run into somebody who is maybe he's learned how to solve a problem, maybe he's got this whole little practice that's working great, but he gets stuck with, you know, a couple of clients or whatever. And what do you do with something like that?
Speaker 2:Right, it's the Thomas Edison and the Nikola Tesla. Right, Thomas Edison, he became famous and rich. Why? Because he had money and backing and marketing behind him to tell the world what he does Exactly to tell the world what he does. And Tesla became a you know, a well-known later, but you know, impoverished genius who didn't get the accreditation or credibility that he deserved.
Speaker 1:So true, so true. So how, how? How does this work? You know, you've, you've got this, this course, this, this certification and all this, and how does somebody even approach it? How does it even happen?
Speaker 2:So you know it's all online. I was teaching it from the beginning, again, pre-covid. You know I was running around weekends teaching level one, level two certifications, and then of course, that got halted in its tracks and my wife wasn't really too keen on that side of the business because we were still running our clinic and she's like you're going to be gone every weekend, Like that's not the point of this, You're going to be working more and uh. And then when, when we kind of again forced everyone uses the word pivot uh, we turned it into an on-demand pre-recorded, hired a professional recording company record five days straight, banged out all the information, rewrote the textbooks, you know, went from a hundred pages to 550 pages. Um, yeah and um. You know, now it's now, it's this product that anybody can do, um, online. And then we're offering live coaching sessions come up in the September where people can get more clarification and and we'll do case studies and whatnot. So you know it's going to be a community, the.
Speaker 2:The big goal of it is by 2030, I want to help 75 million people, right, as an extension of. You know, at first I'm like you know what I want to get. I want to, I want to certify so many therapists, so many coaches and clinicians, and I'm like you know what the bigger picture because where the passion lies is teaching, not just clinicians and coaches I love teaching the general public too is well. If we can help 75 million people, well, that's just a bigger, broader perspective and goal to do. Because now we can find the like-minded individuals who want to level up their skill set, level up their knowledge, think outside the box of their traditional paradigm and that they can continue to build their knowledge instead of just get stuck in what they know is what they know, type of thing. Because it's easy to do that, we get comfortable. But comfort comes with consequences and it usually leads to stagnation and burnout.
Speaker 2:Doing this for 20 years now, I see some of my colleagues are just like, oh, you know, like I'm running a business, I'm done, blah, blah, blah. I'm going to ride this out for another 10 years and I'm going to sell. I'm like, yeah, or you could re-spark that love for what you do by continuing to evolve. You know, not just as a business owner but as a clinician. And then you know, maybe you continue to mentor and teach those in your clinic, okay, great.
Speaker 2:Well, it's hard to teach those. You know it takes a lot of time to get people up to speed in your clinic. Well, here's a training system. It's kind of a hands-off and I'll do it for you. And now, all of a sudden, hey, you know what? I'm going to open a second clinic. All right, sweet. Hey, you know what? I'm going to open a second clinic. All right, sweet, why? Because we took care of one of the systems of leveling up and getting your clinicians good really quickly either new, grad or veteran, and everyone's speaking the same language. Right, we all know that when running a business, the only way you can kind of step away from the business is if you have really good systems in place. And early on when we were and a team you have really good systems in place and you know early on when we were in a team you got to have people.
Speaker 2:You got to have a team, oh for sure, Like the culture and the people. But you know, you got to find the right ones on your bus, that that are along for the ride and see the end goal. I mean, that is so critical. We've learned that over the last 13 years and we have an amazing team, which is why we're able to, you know, open up a second location. Everyone's excited to do it and help out, but everyone's rowing in the same direction. Everyone has this mindset of you know, of this cohesive culture, and everyone coming in wants to teach the newbies coming in. They're excited because that's what was given to them. We had this culture where it's an open-door policy. Everybody teaches everybody. You know, we have masterminds once a quarter. We do mentorship every week and we're just constantly refining skills. Oh, you learned something new this weekend on a course. Guess what you're doing? Mastermind, You're now the expert and you get to teach everybody and everybody yeah, it's so fun.
Speaker 1:Student becomes the teacher, and then you learn something, but you know where?
Speaker 2:I learned, when I realized when, anytime I learn something, I take the mindset is I'm going to be teaching this tomorrow. So now I really have to drive in understanding so that I can communicate this new skill set, this new information, in a practical, applicable way, so that now those that I work with can also take that new information and adapt it to their skill set, rather than them having to go out for the weekend, right? So everyone takes that mentality of they know if they're taking a course one weekend, they're coming back and they're going to be the teacher next, the next mastermind. So they love it, they love.
Speaker 1:It Raises the level of expectation and puts it on yourself. Raises the level of expectation and puts it on yourself. Raises the bar. Passion is what brings, I think, most people to their place of business if they're self-employed, and all of these are certainly that, and everybody wants to hear about the why, and I understand you've got some pretty interesting stories that bring you here. Why don't you tell us a little bit about how you came to this place?
Speaker 2:Okay, well, I mean, it's every. Every journey starts with that personal struggle, right? Coming out of school, you're eager, you're like oh, I got to level up. I know I know what I learned in school, but I know everything. It's not the end, all be all. And I know what I learned is the foundation. It's foundation knowledge. It's also not super like what you, what you learn in a textbook doesn't always apply to real life, for sure.
Speaker 2:So, immediately I started learning courses, getting confidence, getting my handling, acupuncture, manual therapy, and then, you know, learning kettlebells, learning gymnastics, integrating those natural movement patterns, integrating those natural movement patterns, you know, I just absorbed whatever I could. But then, like I said early on, I started to get confused and you know, I would go do a course and guess what? Everybody got that month Flavor of the month. Everyone gets this new technique that I learned, right, and you know, from a practice perspective, you get really good at that one particular thing. But then you lose perspective on how maybe this isn't the right tool for the right person at the right time. So then you start realizing, wow, like this worked on these people, but it didn't work on these ones. Why? So then, okay, well, maybe I'll go back and do the other skill that I learned on this person. Oh, okay, well, that kind of worked for 10% of them, but the other 90% didn't work. So of them, but the other 90% didn't work. So then you get confused and now you're like I have all the I don't, I don't know what I'm doing anymore. So you start to lose confidence again, right? So you come out of school with no confidence. You learn a couple of things. You get some confidence and some wins and then you start losing confidence because now you don't know what to do on anybody and then you're like nothing works for anybody. But it was.
Speaker 2:I tried to find the through line between all of these concepts, all of these tools and techniques. I'm like, what are the commonalities, what are the fundamental first principles that go through high performance, through movement patterns, through rehabilitation, through manual therapy, all the stuff? And I was able to distill it down into what originally was four, but it became five, five fundamental principles or elements of human design, and it comes from kind of the entire interaction of seeing a client. So, for example, so these five elements are psychology, neurology, biology, chemistry and physics. I distilled it down into older things, but you don't have to be experts at those, you just have to have a baseline understanding of those things, because those the rules and the laws of those five disciplines. They don't change, right, and they apply across every human being.
Speaker 2:So, psychology, we're going to sit down and we're going to have conversation. I need to take a history, the first word, the first interaction, the language that I use, the language that I don't use, you're going to. I have to make you feel safe. Right, I'm going to use, I'm going to ask questions, I'm going to create the connection, I'm going to build trust and, with the trust, create safety. Well, what happens when you feel safe in my presence? Ah, nervous system starts to calm down. So, pain levels, sympathetic state, all of a sudden they start shifting into this person. Oh, I can trust this human being. Great, now we're tapping into the neurological system. What do we got to do to look at?
Speaker 2:Next, let's look at how you move as a system. Right, because the body's a system, it's not individual parts. Individual parts can hurt, but the cause is typically a systems-based problem. Right, can you touch your toes? Can you backbend? Can you stand on one leg? What is your neck doing? What are your shoulders doing? Hey, that side's moving different than that side. Why Then you start breaking up the pieces.
Speaker 2:So you look at deeper into the nervous system. What's your nerve tension, like Central, peripheral? What's the electrical system saying? Do muscle testing, look at the joints what parts are moving, which parts are not, and then you can start to kind of whittle down as to you know what this right shoulder issue. That shoulder moves, great. But you know what doesn't move? That neck doesn't rotate to the left, or your rib cage doesn't rotate, or you don't extend well, or you can't single leg balance on the opposite side. Okay, well, let's go look at those parts and then we'll come back to the shoulder.
Speaker 2:And then, once you start looking at oh you know what, that left hip, you can't rotate into that hip. Oh yeah, I've had low back pain for the last 10 years. That's kind of important. Okay, now that low back pain, you've learned to compensate with that. But now you've transferred all those forces and energy into a shoulder across the body because of the gait reflex. Right, this shoulder works with the opposite hip, just simply from walking. So now we can start saying, okay, well, you know what? We have a bit of a physics problem because energy moves to the area of least resistance. Well, this, this and this aren't moving. So guess what you're moving more into? Ah, the most mobile joint in your body, which is the shoulder. That could be why you have this overuse problem. Or the Achilles tendon. You have an Achilles tendon ice. You don't take twice as many steps on the right than the left, do you? No, I don't think so, but could be well, you don't balance well on the left leg, you are not driving with the right hip very effectively and you have some core control problems. Well, you might be pushing off that calf and Achilles a little bit harder with every step, and your nervous system knows this. It will always use the stronger part, it will ignore what's weak. So once we start finding oh, you know what we have these imbalances, now we can start to redistribute forces into the body effectively. And now we've taken all that force away from the injured area because we're distributing it more effectively. So that's your physics. Great, now we've taken care of the physics problem.
Speaker 2:Let's look at well, what's biology? Cells, tissues, adaptations Okay, how did we evolve? Okay, we developed through tubes. We're in the embryological. We were organized and designed in the same way, right, in the same order. The nervous system prioritizes structures in the middle. All of our movement comes from the top down. We develop movement from the center out, like babies on the ground rolling around.
Speaker 2:And then we look at chemistry. Well, what's chemistry? It's breathing. If I'm over-oxygenated or under-oxygenated, am I acidic? Am I alkaline? The breathing also affects the nervous system. If I'm coming into like this, what state am I in? Sympathetic, can't heal in that state. Ah, we need to go after your breathing. And when we affect your breathing, we now improve the chemistry. What also affects chemistry is the food we eat, because it's all molecular, everything's molecules right, your molecules, I'm molecules.
Speaker 2:So when we find all of these, you know, when we look at things through these five elements of design, it gets a little bit easier to explain what we do, why we do it and how we do it better. So people will say well, you know, I got needling, okay, great, what did the needle do? Well, it created this myotactic reflex and it relaxed the muscle and spinal record and top down, okay, cool. But what we essentially did is we changed the inputs. Your nervous system said, oh, I like that. And it took the brakes off, it reorganized Ah, we have a window of opportunity to change things neurologically. But if we don't which is movement, if we don't take advantage of that new window of change, guess what the nervous system does Goes back to the old patterns, which is why two, three days later you're like ah, that's stuck again, right, because you defaulted back to your old motor patterns. You didn't learn anything new, right? And then the last part, again physics.
Speaker 2:So we talked about physics from a physical perspective. But then we move into the quantum mechanics or quantum physics, which is vibration, frequency and energy. Well, if everything's molecular and you look at molecules and atoms at their fundamental level, it's 99.9999% empty space. Exactly, right, okay. So then what are we? We're over 99% of empty space. Well, how can? We can see each other in this physical, three-dimensional way, because everything is. When you look further down at quarks, it's wavelengths. Everything is when you look further down at quarks, it's wavelengths. So wavelengths that are running at specific frequencies are now being perceived and organized by us in the three-dimensional world as physical matter. It's a specific frequency. That's what we're doing, right, okay, well, what affects? What affects wavelengths, thoughts and emotions? Okay, so now it comes back up to psychology.
Speaker 2:And what will also determine whether somebody responds positively or negatively to a modality? Manipulation, needling, soft tissue work is their belief. If they believe that's going to help, well, it's going to get the nervous system and everything to organize in a positive way. We get a positive output. If they had a negative experience in the past, well, you do that same technique. They're probably gonna have a negative response, right? So this is where it all loops back up together. And once we understand these five elements, then what we do from a manual therapy perspective, from a rehabilitation through modalities, through movement, now we can better understand how that individual is going to respond to the therapy that we're providing individual is going to respond to the therapy that we're providing.
Speaker 1:That's powerful. I you know, through the last couple of years of doing this podcast, we've been talking about health and you know there's two ways to look at something. Well, many ways to look at it. But there's a singular or linear approach that says I'm going to do this thing and it's going to cause this thing, yeah. Then there's a holistic approach, which is what we're talking about here. Then it's all affecting this and we're going to look at the whole picture and we're going to give value to all the parts in the picture. And it's been my experience that when you're able to step back a little bit and use this holistic approach, we find unexpected developments, unexpected breakthroughs. Tell me about some of the remarkable changes that you've discovered.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, there's all kinds of fun cases and I always like using kind of two extremes. So I've had the opportunity and the privilege to work recently with the world's strongest man. He lives in my town. He reached out to me, right, am I going to make him stronger? No, he's already the world's strongest man, right, and he's crushing and he's on like he's such a good human being and he has no problem with me. Uh, talking about that, he's online and he does lots of stuff.
Speaker 2:So he first came to me. He's like yeah, like I'm lifting well, but I always have this chronic knee right, groin right, low back issue. I said, okay, cool, go through some basic movements. His neck didn't really extend. Look at his visual system. His left eye wasn't tracking in very effectively. He was kind of bugging out, but he couldn't stand on his left leg. So every time he squatted, he shifted to the right side. Well, because the nervous system knows that's the safer side. So guess what? He's overloading the right side every time he squats 800 plus pounds. Light him up.
Speaker 2:As soon as we took care of some visual stuff, as soon as we put his neck into a better position, all of a sudden the glutes started turning back on and his squat got easier and we did some rolling patterns to the left. We did literally three things on the first appointment. The next day he texts me. He's like hey, I just PR my squat for four repetitions, no pain, amazing. So did I do anything from a performance perspective? Not really. I mean, we just balanced him out and his nervous system took the brakes off, because we kind of calibrated and reorganized his nervous system so that he was able to squat more symmetrically and he was unloading that painful side Right so we could look at those things. Well, those are rehab exercises, not high performance. Well, what was the outcome? It led to high performance.
Speaker 2:And then you look at the other end. We have a little 85 year old lady who's got balance issues, who who is scared to fall, she's not strong, she wants to, you know, improve longevity and health. Guess what we get her doing? Deadlifts. We got her doing up to, like you know, a 40 kilo kettlebell deadlift for five repetitions. We put it on the agility ladder and guess what got better balance, foot speed, control, strength. So we took this, these rehab tools for this certain individual, and we improved performance. And then we took a performance tool to this individual and we improved her longevity. So it it's the same spectrum. Right, they're just two individuals on different ends of the spectrum, both have individual problems, but it's applying the right tools to the right person at the right time for the right thing.
Speaker 2:So once we have this understanding that we can't be super siloed into wow, I only do rehabilitation Like, yeah, but the human being needs to get off your table and they need to lift and do things in the real world again, or else they end up back on your table and if we don't find what those individuals need from fundamentals, well then we're going to miss the big picture and we can't help them. So this is where we need to think outside the box. Look at what every person in front of us needs, go through the same system and it's like it's an algorithm we figure out. You're like, oh, we hit this kind of fork in the road. We actually need to go over here with you. But for this person we need to go over here. But the only way to do that is to organize everything that we do and have a specific system that we go through so we don't miss important pieces of information, so we build our knowledge on fundamental principles.
Speaker 2:So it's almost like a bullshit meter, right.
Speaker 2:It's like we say all these things and we're like, ah, you know, like the science says this, I'm like, well, try it, and if it made a change, who cares?
Speaker 2:Right, maybe it works for 5% of the population.
Speaker 2:But at least you checked everything and make sure you're not making assumptions and be like ah, well, I think the shoulder, you know it's a tight pack Well, it could be nerve, it could be a neck issue, it could be anything else. Why is that nerve? If we always ask why, then it's going to be better. You're going to find better solutions to the pain questions that people are coming in with. But it just helps streamline what an individual needs by being very, very specific, very disciplined in our approach on the front end, say, of an assessment, so we can get creative on the back end with our treatment. What clinicians will often do is we get very creative with our assessment on the front end and then everybody gets the same exercises on the back end right, everyone gets protocols right. But that's cookie cutter when you have a set system on the front and you're checking all the boxes and you're going through the algorithm and you're finding what, what the true problems are, not just the pain. Now you get to be creative on the back end with your treatment.
Speaker 1:So a lot of times when people come to a therapist, they have a specific injury or illness that they're dealing with. Right, they have a problem they're trying to solve. But a true therapist or a professional practitioner, ambition, I would think, would be to help the person for the rest of their life. Yeah, and you know, this is where I think. A lot of times you know you go to the doctor, you get your fix and then you're done, yep, but what do you? I mean, it seems like this system has all the capabilities and the tools to really take both the practitioner and the patient into a journey to health. So why don't you tell us a little bit about what's the part that makes it go from okay, you're done to now you get to start and keep going?
Speaker 2:It's educating the patient. So every client that comes into our facility, we treat them like a student, their student of their own body. We're not going home with them, right? The 30 minutes that we spend with somebody, you know, there's just over, I think, 10,000 minutes in a week.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And we always tell people like, look, here's the problem, here's what you need to work on. You need to work on these things so that next week, when you come back, we can continue to move forward. Right, if you don't do the things that I'm asking you to do, because it's your body, we can't continue to progress forward. There's no real end game, right? I mean, we want to discharge people. We want them getting back to what they love doing independently. They shouldn't need us. The worst thing that we can do as health experts is create dependency. You know, oh, I need to get my crack, I need to get my needles to feel good, or I can show you how to release this on your own, so that when you start to feel these muscles tightening up or this imbalance starting to happen again, you know how to correct it before it becomes a problem. So a lot of it is creating self-awareness and educating the people coming to us for help that they have the power and the ability to make sure this doesn't come back. And it's when they let it keep sliding or they continue to do the old habits that are contributing to the problem but not counteracting it. Well, it comes back. Now they need their fix again. And then what do we become? We become drug dealers, exactly Right Like.
Speaker 2:I mean, I didn't get into this field to create these long-term repeat clients. I mean it's great that you know they come to us for help, but at the end of the day we want to give them solutions for their issues and that they can become independent again. It's not this. I need this person. I need this thing For me, for us at our clinic, we are very happy when clients get back 100% plus more than what they've expected, and they're off and running. And if they do something silly again and they come in with something new, great, come back, we'll help you out again if you can't figure it out. But at least we can create that self-awareness in our clients and our athletes so that they can continue to perform in life and sport or whatever it is, for the long run, as long as they want to do it, not. Oh, I got to keep getting this sorted out. The pain came back.
Speaker 1:Well, if the pain keeps coming back right.
Speaker 2:Well, if, if, if, you keep coming back for the thing, that feels good. I haven't done my job as a clinician to find the true problem. We're just treating symptoms and to me that's not fun. All right, I want you to get back. I always ask clients if they come back and like new injury or old injury. And they're like new, I was like, okay, good, that means we fixed the first one Right. I'm like I did something silly. I was playing my sport. I twist my great, okay, great New problem.
Speaker 1:Right, exactly.
Speaker 2:I don't want to see you coming back for the same thing, which means that maybe we didn't do our job good enough or we didn't find the main problem in the first place.
Speaker 1:Well, it seems that you have created a valuable product in a very important space, and this is the part where I give you a chance to let everybody know how to find you, how to access what you have to offer and give your elevator pitch here.
Speaker 2:Okay. Coaches who want to streamline their practice, simplify their tools, organize what they do, you know, find the why in their clients, to actually get to the root cause of pain and problems or movement dysfunctions or improve performance. The AMT certification Advanced Movement Therapist certification is at amtcertifiedca. There's a blog there. There's a free eight neural hacks on how to move better and reduce pain in 60 seconds or less. That's a fun one. That's a presentation I do at conferences and it's fun because it's interactive. You get people moving. Also, they can touch their toes and their balance gets better within 60 seconds, like doing eye exercises, breathing exercises, tapping all the stuff, uh. So that's free for anybody going on there, whether you're a clinician or coach or just you're curious about your body.
Speaker 2:My YouTube channel is Tommy Swales lots of longer format. You know tennis, elbow stuff, hip impingement if you're a biker, if you're a runner or you're a lifter, so there's kind of troubleshooting self-assessments and troubleshoot exercises on that. My Instagram is swalestom, facebook is Tom Swales and as well as LinkedIn. So I put lots of free content up there for anybody who just wants to kind of troubleshoot it on their own. But for my clinicians and coaches out there who kind of struggle with, or they're not happy with, the results that they're getting, or they feel like they can do more. The A&T certification is the right tool for them.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, tom, I very much appreciate you joining us today. Your information is riveting and, I think, impactful, and I hope that the professionals that are listening are going to find it important, and I just want to thank you for being here. Thanks for having me, joe. All right, this has been the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, joe Grumbine, and we will see you next time.
