August 20, 2025 • 25 mins
Chad Gray is co-founder of JointStrong.com. Keeping it brief ... when you feel surgery is your only option or there is nothing to be done, Chad has some things for you to think about.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome friends. It is the third hour.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
It is.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
It always just feels like where did the time go?
And yet here we are already and it'd show five
four hundred and thirty five of The Morning Show with
Preston Scott. Great to be with you, Jose over there
in Studio one A. I'm here in Studio one B,
and I am joined by a friend. I have known
Chad Gray for a lot of years. I got referred
(00:29):
to Chad. I want to kind of lay this out
years ago when I was doing some training at Titus
Sports Academy Adam Farrow, one of the co founders of Titus.
I said I was having an issue and he said,
I want you to see this guy. And he said,
I want you to see Chad Gray. I said, tell
(00:51):
me more, and he proceeded to share about Chad and
his philosophy of treating injuries, all manner of injuries that
a lot of people immediately jump and go straight to
the surgical option. And so I went to see Chad
and that problem. What was that maybe fifteen eighteen years ago.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
About sixteen years ago, I think.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
And about sixteen well, thanks very much.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
It was.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
It was amemberable moment for you to.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Tell Yah and forget it.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
And I have not had that issue treated again since
because he taught me how to deal with the problem
myself once he diagnosed and was able to determine what
was going on in my body. I have since referred
maybe a dozen or so people with significant injuries to
(01:44):
Chad and his practice. His practitioners, and the reviews have
been the same people that have been facing ACL and
MCL surgeries that were treated improperly at the beginning, avoided surgery.
People with back issues, show older issues, elbow issues. You
even helped one of our guests on this program that's
(02:05):
a former ice agent in Arizona.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Correct and this.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
I guess what I think would be useful would be
to explain, Chad, where did this philosophy begin for you?
What was the motivating factor to address this type of
practice Differently?
Speaker 2 (02:22):
You just when you look at the data regarding the
incidents and prevalence of orthopedic or muscular skeletal conditions in
this country, when you look at that data on the
health plan side of things, when you look at that
data on the athletic side of things, you look at
the MLB, you look at the NFL, you look at
all the major sports leagues. We've seen a dramatic escalation
(02:47):
in the frequency or the incidents and prevalents of these
conditions across the last thirty to forty years. And all
of that escalation, all that increasing frequency, despite the fact
that we've had access to the best technologies, you know,
MRIs and ultra sounds and YouTube. YouTube, yeah, Google, just
(03:08):
google it.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
You can figure it out, right, gocket Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Uh, we We've We've thrown.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Everything but the kitchen sink at it, right, and we've
done nothing to slow down the frequency of this situation,
of this particular medical condition. And and it as I
took an interest in this and got curious about it
along with my partner Mark Miller.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
We we we we didn't.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
We didn't have our own philosophy. What we did was
we dove into the medical science. We dove into the data,
the peer review publications that are out there that spoke
to how frequently we were misdiagnosing things, how frequently we
were mismatching the treatment to the patient's actual condition, how
we weren't really determining root cause and source of the
(03:55):
episode or source of the symptom. And and we took
that information, that data front that was published in all
of these well respected journals, and we started de siling
it down, and we started plugging it into clinical practice
and application, and we started making that a standard practice
of ours. And we then took that and embedded it
(04:18):
and started monitoring the data within that ecosystem and reacting
to that data and information and constantly adjusting our clinical
protocols and trying to get better and better and better
and more and more precise at figuring out what the
root cause and source was and what the actual solution
was for the condition. And in those episodes that we
could manage with conservative care of self care, we moved
(04:41):
those people quickly into that model. And the cases that
looked like they were clearly structural and needed a surgical console,
we quickly moved them into surgery. But the whole model
came down to this. It came down to understanding how
to triage a case, how to make a really precise
and reliable decision about what was going on here. Is
it truly structural, is it chemical?
Speaker 3 (04:59):
Is it mecanic? Does it need movement? Does it need
a shot? Does it need a surgery?
Speaker 2 (05:03):
And making that really precise decision allowed us to stratify
or group people into the right bucket of care and
get really good at getting them better faster than the
traditional system was capable of.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Do it back with Chad Gray from jointstrong dot com.
That's the website. And because it's that time of year
where people are a little more active, they're going to
get more active and kids are back in school, kids
are back playing sports. Maybe you've got a collegiate athlete,
maybe you've got just someone that really loves to participate
in activities. Chad, You're you're covering though a scope and
(05:35):
range of ages that literally is as big as the population.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Yeah, we work with you know, as I say, oftentimes
the eight to the eighty year old or beyond that
even you know, So we see all demographics we see
We see athletes from every level as well. We see
you know, the middle school the high schoolers that are
in the local sports programs. We see collegiate athletes, we
(06:01):
see professional athletes, we see olympians on a regular basis.
We see these types of athletes coming through our practices
and through our facilities and embedding in our ecosystem and
trying to access the kind of information and data we've
talked about on our last visit and the information we'll
talk about today. So we're seeing every demographic you can
imagine with musculo skeletal conditions or orthopedic conditions.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
What's happening to the body, generally, we're painting with a
paint brush here, that's pretty big. What's happening to the
body and why?
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah, in the broadest context, what we you know, We've
here's how we figured this out. We've taken one point
five million plus patient encounters worth of data. We created
a very rigorous mechanism for gathering information and data from
the clinical side of the isle, and we said, all right,
let's run that information and data across all these clinical
(06:48):
encounters through the machine, and let's look at the patterns
that are showing up in the clinic. What are the
common manifestations or common presentations we see with orthopedic conditions
coming in. And there's a commonality of an intimate link
between pain and stiffness or loss of movement. There is
(07:09):
a consistency that's there. People don't show up into the
clinic hurting without having a loss of movement. It is
almost universal. So we know there's an intimate connection between
those two things. That stiffness, that loss of movement, that
loss of range emotion in the joint system, as we
have seen it in the clinical data, is a clear
(07:29):
byproduct of a failure to move in natural ways or
assume natural positions in the human body go to or
achieve what we call end range movement of the joint system.
When joints aren't moved through their full motion consistently and often,
they begin to stiffen and lose that motion and mobility,
and then they begin to ache and hurt.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Can you break down and take like one joint that
we have in our body and describe what end range
means in that joint?
Speaker 3 (07:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
So, the simple analogy I use oftentimes in the clinic
when I'm engaging with someone is take your finger and
bend it all the way back as far as it
will go, and you'll reach a point where you feel
strained to the point of almost pain. That is in range. Okay, Now,
how often does your finger ever go that far? Well,
(08:17):
it doesn't. Well, how often does your knee or your hip,
or your lower back, or your neck or your shoulder
move to those extremes of movement that are available to
that joint system. Well, it doesn't. We don't have We
have a lifestyle where we inherently live in what i'll
call mid range. We are working through a partial amount
of our movement, but never accessing or using the end
(08:37):
points of moving in that joint system. And let's face it,
in the last fifty to seventy five years, that's gotten
remarkably worse, because what are we all doing now that
we weren't doing then? We're all sitting in a chair
behind a screen, in front of a phone, in front
of a tablet, in front of a computer. And if
you tally up the total number of hours spent per
(08:58):
day with with no movement really happening except some of
that mid range stuff when you're moving between office, home, etc.
We're spending twenty two plus hours a day not moving
the joints at all, and we're rarely ever achieving in
range movement.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
I was just going to say, it stands to reason
then that most of those movements throughout the day aren't
even nearing the end range for any of those joint systems.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
Not even close. And that's how we begin to slowly
stiffen and lose motion. And that's where the confusion about
what's actually going on starts to creep into the medical system.
We aren't trained to look for these things in medicine.
Most physicians, most pts, most cairos don't study the joint
systems to that degree or to that extent and assess
(09:43):
an examine thoroughly.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Do they have.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Range movement available in that joint system, because if they don't,
that's generally the primary reason we see people hurting. It's
not any more complicated than that. Really, it isn't.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
Here for most the rest of the hour, Chad Gray
with Jointstrong dot Com. Chad. When you use words like
loss of motion, pain, immediately people in our audience, I
know my audience, a lot of them are thinking, well,
that's called arthritis, and what are you gonna do?
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Yeah, so super common diagnosis. Of course, everybody gets it
if you show up and you're over the age of
forty and you start having an ache or a pain
in some general joint system. What we now know about
arthritis is this, As I mentioned in the last segment,
there's consistently every time we examine people who come into
(10:41):
the clinics with pain and a joint system, there is
a loss of movement there. When you look at anybody
who has an arthritis diagnosis, there's always a loss of
movement in that joint associated with their pain. So the
stiffness and the pain and the loss.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
Of movement are endomly connected.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Again, the picture has been the primary way we've examined
and diagnosed the condition. We take an X ray, we
take an MRI, we take a CT scan sometimes and
we look at that joint and we go, oh, we
see there's some thinning of the carlage, and there's some
wear and tear in there's some narrowing of the space between.
But those changes on picture are not what cause pain.
(11:18):
It's the gradual shortening or stiffening and fibrosing. It's almost
a scarring down process that occurs to the ligaments that
support that joint. The ligaments allow the joint to move
through its full range of motion. Our quality of movement,
our ability to get to en range, my ability to
bend that fingerback like I talked about on the last
segment and get to that endpoint is directly dictated by
(11:39):
how much flexibility is in those ligament of structures and
ligaments when left still for too long or when not
moved to their endpoints will gradually scar in in fibros.
That really is the hallmark characteristic of arthritis.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Is that also why we see as people? And I've
talked about it on the show, You and I have
discussed it privately. Is that why you see as people?
A many of them, not all, They start to hunch
over more and then more and then more.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
That's another one of those joint systems that commonly goes
only in one direction. Let's talk about the spine for
a second here. It spends its life in what we
call flexion or forward bending. We bend forward three to
five thousand times a day. I think I mentioned that
last time I was here a few months back. And
we never go in the opposite direction. We never go
in the opposite extreme of movement. So as I, as
(12:29):
I age, and I spend more and more time bending forward,
but less and less time straightening or bending all the
way back as far as I can go, You're going
to see a gradual loss of mobility. And that's why
if you look across a population of seventy plus year olds,
you're going to see a large segment of that population
with that stooped forward bent slouched posture.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
So let's tie that together to what we were talking
about with the arthritis diagnosis. That's the standard diagnosis out there.
What are the connecting points to this?
Speaker 2 (12:59):
The the connecting points to this are relatively simple. Again,
if I can teach people how to use range movement
of the joint systems, we can stop the common manifestations
that we see with arthritic change in the joint systems.
The stiffening that occurs is preventable, the range of motion
(13:21):
loss is preventable, or it's restorable, we can we can
remodel and bring back that movement once it's been lost.
If we can teach people how to use aggressive range
movement protocols, we can keep people out of the system
completely if we teach them how to access and use
movement they aren't commonly using in their day, and by
doing that, we stop and avoid those those common aches
(13:44):
and pains that come and that send us kind of
into into healthcare.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
All forms of arthritis or just some it's.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
It's the osteoarthritic diagnosis typically that we're talking about here.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
You know, you're you're rheumatoid.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Arthritic processes are a completely different type of condition and
require a different type of treatment, but your osteoarthriti is
your most common one. Is most of the changes that occur,
they are completely preventable and avoidable if we just teach
people early and often in life how to access and
approach those in range movements in the key joint systems.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
We've got about a minute left here in this segment.
You've got a bunch of people that are probably between
our age give or take a few years, and I
think younger than me. What about those that have a
progression already in place?
Speaker 2 (14:32):
So that progression once again is created by the gradual
stiffening and shortening of those ligaments they started to scar
in and fibrose. The beautiful thing about the human body
is if I take tissue and I apply stress to it,
it changes. If I appla stress to bone, it gets
more dense, it gets stronger. If I applash stressed to
muscle it hypertrophies, it gets bigger. If I apply stress
(14:54):
to ligaments that are stiff and short, they will remodel
themselves and become normal again. But I have to apply
the stresses to.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
Them to make that process happen.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
That remodeling of ligament, that remodeling of tissue that's begun
to shorten is a normal physiological process that happens in
all humans. If you just ask the tissue to do it.
That's the key ingredient here. You have to teach people
how to access in range movement and engage those structures
that have shortened and stiffened and reshape them and.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Remodel them, and you have to encourage them to tolerate
that process for a season.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
You can't be afraid of the pain, Yeah, and you
don't suffer miserably afterwards. It's just while you're doing the action,
it's going to hurt a little bit, but that pain
is going to bait quickly. And what you're going to
notice is, over the course of a few days, a
few weeks of doing that, all of a sudden, magically
things start to move better and hurt less.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Thirty six minutes past. Two more segments here with Chad Gray. Chad,
I want to segue into the sports world, and this
is a world that you have had quite a bit
of direct impact in some pretty high level arenas.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Yeah, Like I said earlier, we work with with athletes
just about every level, consistently with our local high school athletes,
of course in middle school athletes.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
But we have a platform now on the other side
of town.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
Where we consistently engage with professional athletes and olympians as well,
trying to to take those individuals once again and teaching
the basic concepts of joint health and joint care. How
do you how do you take care of the joint
systems so that they'll serve you well in your sport
and in your career. How do we prevent you from
(16:31):
having the common injuries that occur in athletics, Because, as
I mentioned earlier, despite the fact that we've got access
to all this technology and all these wonderful resources, when
you reach that level of athleticism, when you're when you're
in that professional and olympic sphere, you've got access to
every resource you need. Every great surgeon, every great massage therapist,
(16:52):
physical therapists, chiropractor, every every resource you need on the
planet is there at your fingertips because you've got the
money to access it. But despite the fact that they've
had all that access, we've seen a continued spike or
escalation and the injury rates in those professional leagues year
over year that is not slowing down.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
Or changing at all.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
And so we've started a different approach of all right,
let's try to work on preventative models. Let's take what
we've learned in the clinic and embed that and build
that into the training and performance models for athletes so
that we're optimizing their capabilities to excel in their support.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
You're seeing now kids with injuries, ailments, concerns that are
not common twenty five, thirty years ago.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Yeah, thirty years ago. When we first started in clinical
practice here, it was an outlier event to see a
sixteen or a seventeen year old come in with severe
low back pain or neck pain. And now all of
a sudden, it's twenty or thirty or more percent of
our day is spent screening and examining these kids with stiff,
(18:04):
painful backs, weakness in the limbs as a result of
the spinal problem. And it's clearly a byproduct of how
much time these kids are now spending and seated positions
and postures in school, in front of gaming systems, in
front of cell phones all day long on social media.
(18:25):
You know, the consistent pattern of movement, of poor posture,
of positioning themselves in a sedentary way, and then intermingle
that with the action on the field and in training
and in practices has created an epidemic of back pain,
for instance, in this country and that demographic in that group,
(18:45):
and all of it's preventable and avoidable. If you teach
these athletes how to apply the right protocols to prevent
those common injuries, it creates a better athlete. It creates
a more injury resistant athlete. It creates an athlete that
can access power and force more efficiently when you protect
the joint systems first.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
Chad Gray with me. Jointstrong dot com is the website
where you can learn more and follow up on some
of the things. And we're we talked about in the
break this is shotgun time. We'll go. We'll go with
slugs the next time we visit and get a little
more specific on some items. What would you say to parents,
because it is the time of year, the kids are
back in school, kids are back playing sports, whether it's
(19:24):
recreational sports or competitive sports, some more serious than others,
but sports or sports, they put stresses on joints in
the body. What would you say to moms and dads out.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
There, Yeah, we have to rethink how we are training
and skilling up and preparing our kids to enter athletics.
You know, the high schools and middle schools just don't
have access access to a lot of resources, So you
need to kind of take control and oversee and kind
(19:53):
of manage some of what's happening to your kids. As
I mentioned earlier in the segment, mobile has to be
the first thing we look at. We have to look
at range emotion, in range movement of all the key
joint systems to make sure that's the foundation of how
we start training our kids. If I can get them
to move well first, if I can access all of
(20:16):
the range emotion at all the key joint systems they're
going to be using in their sport first, then lay
strength on top of that.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
Second.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
I've got a really great foundation to prevent common injuries
from happening, to keep them in sport longer, to keep
them performing at their highest possible level longer, and to
let them eventually escalate to that next level if that's
where they want to go.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
When you say strength, are you talking literally appropriate age,
appropriate weight training.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
Yes, I'm talking about not dropping them right into the
Olympic lifting room on day one and trying to teach
them how to do a clean and jerk or a
squat or deadlifts and things like that. No, get them
to move well first, put them out on the floor. Second,
and teach them how to manage their own body weight first.
You know, how can I handle body weight type exercises?
(21:04):
How can I do plyometric type exercises? How can I
do those functional things that really equate to much better
strength and power than you access or get in the
Olympic room.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Are are young men and we know they're made different,
but are they skeletonally speaking different?
Speaker 2 (21:21):
Do you do?
Speaker 1 (21:22):
You have to approach end range of motion differently for
a young man versus a young woman.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
No exact same okay, exact same type of approach happens there.
Once again, look at the ability to move the joint
system through its full range of motion. Make sure that's
available first. And if you teach them how to consistently
utilize those in range movement protocols on top of their strength,
conditioning and development processes, then you have a well rounded,
(21:49):
injury resistant athlete that is capable of performing at their
highest level. We don't have that happening anywhere in athletics
right now. In the world that I know of, we
don't have this kind of hyper rests of stance and
move no pun intended towards getting athletes to the end
of their range emotion consistently before we put them on
(22:09):
the strength and conditioning floor intermediately or during the strength
and conditioning protocols. I need to interrupt those processes within
range movement and at the end of their strength and
conditioning process, I need to introduce them to those in
range movement protocols. We have to consistently be pushing the
joints to their endpoints so that we are getting to
the point where we're stopping these common injuries from happening.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
You have actual experience with you mentioned Olympic athletes, but
professional sports franchises. You're demonstrating this, You're proving this as
this is what works and keeps athletes playing sports and
doing so in a healthy manner.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
We're going in and training trainers, training teams, training coaches,
training staffs to understand how to implement these protocols. We've
created and designed a platform across town in our facility
over their Town Center Fitness in Southwood to introduce these
concepts to athletes and our programming out there. We're trying
to teach and educate all the people that are accessing
(23:11):
you know, these kids, these athletes at every platform, at
every level, how to apply these protocols so we can
stop this common pattern of injury from happening in sports
and athletics and keep our kids engaged so they can
reach the goals and the and the heights they want
to reach in their sport.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Kid comes home, they said they've they've got a sprained
ankle or a sprained wrist, or they tweak something in
their back. What's the first thing mom and dad ought
to do?
Speaker 3 (23:37):
If there's trauma involved.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
We do always recommend at least inn X ray so
we can just see and make sure there's nothing fractured
or broken. But after that you need to have the
triage and you need to start moving it. We've got
to start once again gaining movement back once a sprain
strainer injury happens. First step is always gain movement back,
then see what's left over second after that.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
So immobilization is not normally the proper thing.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
To do, not the thing to do anymore, and the
rest ice and elevation theory has been tossed out. The
window and is no longer viable now it doesn't.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
Have any science to support it.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
So now we ice temporarily only in the first eighteen
to twenty four hours, and after that we start movement.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
Nice.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
I love it when you come in here. Thanks for
making time, Thanks for having me, Chad Gray. It is
jointstrong dot com. And hopefully I would put it this way.
This is about just putting a comma on your injuries,
your stiffness, your pain. Don't put a period and say
well I gotta do this. Learn about your options and
(24:43):
learn about how to perhaps figure out how you can
almost become your own doctor and treat yourself by just
learning what to do. I think you're going to find
some help there. Jointstrong dot com
Welcome friends. It is the third hour.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
It is.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
It always just feels like where did the time go?
And yet here we are already and it'd show five
four hundred and thirty five of The Morning Show with
Preston Scott. Great to be with you, Jose over there
in Studio one A. I'm here in Studio one B,
and I am joined by a friend. I have known
Chad Gray for a lot of years. I got referred
(00:29):
to Chad. I want to kind of lay this out
years ago when I was doing some training at Titus
Sports Academy Adam Farrow, one of the co founders of Titus.
I said I was having an issue and he said,
I want you to see this guy. And he said,
I want you to see Chad Gray. I said, tell
(00:51):
me more, and he proceeded to share about Chad and
his philosophy of treating injuries, all manner of injuries that
a lot of people immediately jump and go straight to
the surgical option. And so I went to see Chad
and that problem. What was that maybe fifteen eighteen years ago.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
About sixteen years ago, I think.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
And about sixteen well, thanks very much.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
It was.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
It was amemberable moment for you to.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Tell Yah and forget it.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
And I have not had that issue treated again since
because he taught me how to deal with the problem
myself once he diagnosed and was able to determine what
was going on in my body. I have since referred
maybe a dozen or so people with significant injuries to
(01:44):
Chad and his practice. His practitioners, and the reviews have
been the same people that have been facing ACL and
MCL surgeries that were treated improperly at the beginning, avoided surgery.
People with back issues, show older issues, elbow issues. You
even helped one of our guests on this program that's
(02:05):
a former ice agent in Arizona.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Correct and this.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
I guess what I think would be useful would be
to explain, Chad, where did this philosophy begin for you?
What was the motivating factor to address this type of
practice Differently?
Speaker 2 (02:22):
You just when you look at the data regarding the
incidents and prevalence of orthopedic or muscular skeletal conditions in
this country, when you look at that data on the
health plan side of things, when you look at that
data on the athletic side of things, you look at
the MLB, you look at the NFL, you look at
all the major sports leagues. We've seen a dramatic escalation
(02:47):
in the frequency or the incidents and prevalents of these
conditions across the last thirty to forty years. And all
of that escalation, all that increasing frequency, despite the fact
that we've had access to the best technologies, you know,
MRIs and ultra sounds and YouTube. YouTube, yeah, Google, just
(03:08):
google it.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
You can figure it out, right, gocket Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Uh, we We've We've thrown.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Everything but the kitchen sink at it, right, and we've
done nothing to slow down the frequency of this situation,
of this particular medical condition. And and it as I
took an interest in this and got curious about it
along with my partner Mark Miller.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
We we we we didn't.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
We didn't have our own philosophy. What we did was
we dove into the medical science. We dove into the data,
the peer review publications that are out there that spoke
to how frequently we were misdiagnosing things, how frequently we
were mismatching the treatment to the patient's actual condition, how
we weren't really determining root cause and source of the
(03:55):
episode or source of the symptom. And and we took
that information, that data front that was published in all
of these well respected journals, and we started de siling
it down, and we started plugging it into clinical practice
and application, and we started making that a standard practice
of ours. And we then took that and embedded it
(04:18):
and started monitoring the data within that ecosystem and reacting
to that data and information and constantly adjusting our clinical
protocols and trying to get better and better and better
and more and more precise at figuring out what the
root cause and source was and what the actual solution
was for the condition. And in those episodes that we
could manage with conservative care of self care, we moved
(04:41):
those people quickly into that model. And the cases that
looked like they were clearly structural and needed a surgical console,
we quickly moved them into surgery. But the whole model
came down to this. It came down to understanding how
to triage a case, how to make a really precise
and reliable decision about what was going on here. Is
it truly structural, is it chemical?
Speaker 3 (04:59):
Is it mecanic? Does it need movement? Does it need
a shot? Does it need a surgery?
Speaker 2 (05:03):
And making that really precise decision allowed us to stratify
or group people into the right bucket of care and
get really good at getting them better faster than the
traditional system was capable of.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Do it back with Chad Gray from jointstrong dot com.
That's the website. And because it's that time of year
where people are a little more active, they're going to
get more active and kids are back in school, kids
are back playing sports. Maybe you've got a collegiate athlete,
maybe you've got just someone that really loves to participate
in activities. Chad, You're you're covering though a scope and
(05:35):
range of ages that literally is as big as the population.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Yeah, we work with you know, as I say, oftentimes
the eight to the eighty year old or beyond that
even you know, So we see all demographics we see
We see athletes from every level as well. We see
you know, the middle school the high schoolers that are
in the local sports programs. We see collegiate athletes, we
(06:01):
see professional athletes, we see olympians on a regular basis.
We see these types of athletes coming through our practices
and through our facilities and embedding in our ecosystem and
trying to access the kind of information and data we've
talked about on our last visit and the information we'll
talk about today. So we're seeing every demographic you can
imagine with musculo skeletal conditions or orthopedic conditions.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
What's happening to the body, generally, we're painting with a
paint brush here, that's pretty big. What's happening to the
body and why?
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah, in the broadest context, what we you know, We've
here's how we figured this out. We've taken one point
five million plus patient encounters worth of data. We created
a very rigorous mechanism for gathering information and data from
the clinical side of the isle, and we said, all right,
let's run that information and data across all these clinical
(06:48):
encounters through the machine, and let's look at the patterns
that are showing up in the clinic. What are the
common manifestations or common presentations we see with orthopedic conditions
coming in. And there's a commonality of an intimate link
between pain and stiffness or loss of movement. There is
(07:09):
a consistency that's there. People don't show up into the
clinic hurting without having a loss of movement. It is
almost universal. So we know there's an intimate connection between
those two things. That stiffness, that loss of movement, that
loss of range emotion in the joint system, as we
have seen it in the clinical data, is a clear
(07:29):
byproduct of a failure to move in natural ways or
assume natural positions in the human body go to or
achieve what we call end range movement of the joint system.
When joints aren't moved through their full motion consistently and often,
they begin to stiffen and lose that motion and mobility,
and then they begin to ache and hurt.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Can you break down and take like one joint that
we have in our body and describe what end range
means in that joint?
Speaker 3 (07:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
So, the simple analogy I use oftentimes in the clinic
when I'm engaging with someone is take your finger and
bend it all the way back as far as it
will go, and you'll reach a point where you feel
strained to the point of almost pain. That is in range. Okay, Now,
how often does your finger ever go that far? Well,
(08:17):
it doesn't. Well, how often does your knee or your hip,
or your lower back, or your neck or your shoulder
move to those extremes of movement that are available to
that joint system. Well, it doesn't. We don't have We
have a lifestyle where we inherently live in what i'll
call mid range. We are working through a partial amount
of our movement, but never accessing or using the end
(08:37):
points of moving in that joint system. And let's face it,
in the last fifty to seventy five years, that's gotten
remarkably worse, because what are we all doing now that
we weren't doing then? We're all sitting in a chair
behind a screen, in front of a phone, in front
of a tablet, in front of a computer. And if
you tally up the total number of hours spent per
(08:58):
day with with no movement really happening except some of
that mid range stuff when you're moving between office, home, etc.
We're spending twenty two plus hours a day not moving
the joints at all, and we're rarely ever achieving in
range movement.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
I was just going to say, it stands to reason
then that most of those movements throughout the day aren't
even nearing the end range for any of those joint systems.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
Not even close. And that's how we begin to slowly
stiffen and lose motion. And that's where the confusion about
what's actually going on starts to creep into the medical system.
We aren't trained to look for these things in medicine.
Most physicians, most pts, most cairos don't study the joint
systems to that degree or to that extent and assess
(09:43):
an examine thoroughly.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Do they have.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Range movement available in that joint system, because if they don't,
that's generally the primary reason we see people hurting. It's
not any more complicated than that. Really, it isn't.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
Here for most the rest of the hour, Chad Gray
with Jointstrong dot Com. Chad. When you use words like
loss of motion, pain, immediately people in our audience, I
know my audience, a lot of them are thinking, well,
that's called arthritis, and what are you gonna do?
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Yeah, so super common diagnosis. Of course, everybody gets it
if you show up and you're over the age of
forty and you start having an ache or a pain
in some general joint system. What we now know about
arthritis is this, As I mentioned in the last segment,
there's consistently every time we examine people who come into
(10:41):
the clinics with pain and a joint system, there is
a loss of movement there. When you look at anybody
who has an arthritis diagnosis, there's always a loss of
movement in that joint associated with their pain. So the
stiffness and the pain and the loss.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
Of movement are endomly connected.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Again, the picture has been the primary way we've examined
and diagnosed the condition. We take an X ray, we
take an MRI, we take a CT scan sometimes and
we look at that joint and we go, oh, we
see there's some thinning of the carlage, and there's some
wear and tear in there's some narrowing of the space between.
But those changes on picture are not what cause pain.
(11:18):
It's the gradual shortening or stiffening and fibrosing. It's almost
a scarring down process that occurs to the ligaments that
support that joint. The ligaments allow the joint to move
through its full range of motion. Our quality of movement,
our ability to get to en range, my ability to
bend that fingerback like I talked about on the last
segment and get to that endpoint is directly dictated by
(11:39):
how much flexibility is in those ligament of structures and
ligaments when left still for too long or when not
moved to their endpoints will gradually scar in in fibros.
That really is the hallmark characteristic of arthritis.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Is that also why we see as people? And I've
talked about it on the show, You and I have
discussed it privately. Is that why you see as people?
A many of them, not all, They start to hunch
over more and then more and then more.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
That's another one of those joint systems that commonly goes
only in one direction. Let's talk about the spine for
a second here. It spends its life in what we
call flexion or forward bending. We bend forward three to
five thousand times a day. I think I mentioned that
last time I was here a few months back. And
we never go in the opposite direction. We never go
in the opposite extreme of movement. So as I, as
(12:29):
I age, and I spend more and more time bending forward,
but less and less time straightening or bending all the
way back as far as I can go, You're going
to see a gradual loss of mobility. And that's why
if you look across a population of seventy plus year olds,
you're going to see a large segment of that population
with that stooped forward bent slouched posture.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
So let's tie that together to what we were talking
about with the arthritis diagnosis. That's the standard diagnosis out there.
What are the connecting points to this?
Speaker 2 (12:59):
The the connecting points to this are relatively simple. Again,
if I can teach people how to use range movement
of the joint systems, we can stop the common manifestations
that we see with arthritic change in the joint systems.
The stiffening that occurs is preventable, the range of motion
(13:21):
loss is preventable, or it's restorable, we can we can
remodel and bring back that movement once it's been lost.
If we can teach people how to use aggressive range
movement protocols, we can keep people out of the system
completely if we teach them how to access and use
movement they aren't commonly using in their day, and by
doing that, we stop and avoid those those common aches
(13:44):
and pains that come and that send us kind of
into into healthcare.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
All forms of arthritis or just some it's.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
It's the osteoarthritic diagnosis typically that we're talking about here.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
You know, you're you're rheumatoid.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Arthritic processes are a completely different type of condition and
require a different type of treatment, but your osteoarthriti is
your most common one. Is most of the changes that occur,
they are completely preventable and avoidable if we just teach
people early and often in life how to access and
approach those in range movements in the key joint systems.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
We've got about a minute left here in this segment.
You've got a bunch of people that are probably between
our age give or take a few years, and I
think younger than me. What about those that have a
progression already in place?
Speaker 2 (14:32):
So that progression once again is created by the gradual
stiffening and shortening of those ligaments they started to scar
in and fibrose. The beautiful thing about the human body
is if I take tissue and I apply stress to it,
it changes. If I appla stress to bone, it gets
more dense, it gets stronger. If I applash stressed to
muscle it hypertrophies, it gets bigger. If I apply stress
(14:54):
to ligaments that are stiff and short, they will remodel
themselves and become normal again. But I have to apply
the stresses to.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
Them to make that process happen.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
That remodeling of ligament, that remodeling of tissue that's begun
to shorten is a normal physiological process that happens in
all humans. If you just ask the tissue to do it.
That's the key ingredient here. You have to teach people
how to access in range movement and engage those structures
that have shortened and stiffened and reshape them and.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Remodel them, and you have to encourage them to tolerate
that process for a season.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
You can't be afraid of the pain, Yeah, and you
don't suffer miserably afterwards. It's just while you're doing the action,
it's going to hurt a little bit, but that pain
is going to bait quickly. And what you're going to
notice is, over the course of a few days, a
few weeks of doing that, all of a sudden, magically
things start to move better and hurt less.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Thirty six minutes past. Two more segments here with Chad Gray. Chad,
I want to segue into the sports world, and this
is a world that you have had quite a bit
of direct impact in some pretty high level arenas.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Yeah, Like I said earlier, we work with with athletes
just about every level, consistently with our local high school athletes,
of course in middle school athletes.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
But we have a platform now on the other side
of town.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
Where we consistently engage with professional athletes and olympians as well,
trying to to take those individuals once again and teaching
the basic concepts of joint health and joint care. How
do you how do you take care of the joint
systems so that they'll serve you well in your sport
and in your career. How do we prevent you from
(16:31):
having the common injuries that occur in athletics, Because, as
I mentioned earlier, despite the fact that we've got access
to all this technology and all these wonderful resources, when
you reach that level of athleticism, when you're when you're
in that professional and olympic sphere, you've got access to
every resource you need. Every great surgeon, every great massage therapist,
(16:52):
physical therapists, chiropractor, every every resource you need on the
planet is there at your fingertips because you've got the
money to access it. But despite the fact that they've
had all that access, we've seen a continued spike or
escalation and the injury rates in those professional leagues year
over year that is not slowing down.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
Or changing at all.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
And so we've started a different approach of all right,
let's try to work on preventative models. Let's take what
we've learned in the clinic and embed that and build
that into the training and performance models for athletes so
that we're optimizing their capabilities to excel in their support.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
You're seeing now kids with injuries, ailments, concerns that are
not common twenty five, thirty years ago.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Yeah, thirty years ago. When we first started in clinical
practice here, it was an outlier event to see a
sixteen or a seventeen year old come in with severe
low back pain or neck pain. And now all of
a sudden, it's twenty or thirty or more percent of
our day is spent screening and examining these kids with stiff,
(18:04):
painful backs, weakness in the limbs as a result of
the spinal problem. And it's clearly a byproduct of how
much time these kids are now spending and seated positions
and postures in school, in front of gaming systems, in
front of cell phones all day long on social media.
(18:25):
You know, the consistent pattern of movement, of poor posture,
of positioning themselves in a sedentary way, and then intermingle
that with the action on the field and in training
and in practices has created an epidemic of back pain,
for instance, in this country and that demographic in that group,
(18:45):
and all of it's preventable and avoidable. If you teach
these athletes how to apply the right protocols to prevent
those common injuries, it creates a better athlete. It creates
a more injury resistant athlete. It creates an athlete that
can access power and force more efficiently when you protect
the joint systems first.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
Chad Gray with me. Jointstrong dot com is the website
where you can learn more and follow up on some
of the things. And we're we talked about in the
break this is shotgun time. We'll go. We'll go with
slugs the next time we visit and get a little
more specific on some items. What would you say to parents,
because it is the time of year, the kids are
back in school, kids are back playing sports, whether it's
(19:24):
recreational sports or competitive sports, some more serious than others,
but sports or sports, they put stresses on joints in
the body. What would you say to moms and dads out.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
There, Yeah, we have to rethink how we are training
and skilling up and preparing our kids to enter athletics.
You know, the high schools and middle schools just don't
have access access to a lot of resources, So you
need to kind of take control and oversee and kind
(19:53):
of manage some of what's happening to your kids. As
I mentioned earlier in the segment, mobile has to be
the first thing we look at. We have to look
at range emotion, in range movement of all the key
joint systems to make sure that's the foundation of how
we start training our kids. If I can get them
to move well first, if I can access all of
(20:16):
the range emotion at all the key joint systems they're
going to be using in their sport first, then lay
strength on top of that.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
Second.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
I've got a really great foundation to prevent common injuries
from happening, to keep them in sport longer, to keep
them performing at their highest possible level longer, and to
let them eventually escalate to that next level if that's
where they want to go.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
When you say strength, are you talking literally appropriate age,
appropriate weight training.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
Yes, I'm talking about not dropping them right into the
Olympic lifting room on day one and trying to teach
them how to do a clean and jerk or a
squat or deadlifts and things like that. No, get them
to move well first, put them out on the floor. Second,
and teach them how to manage their own body weight first.
You know, how can I handle body weight type exercises?
(21:04):
How can I do plyometric type exercises? How can I
do those functional things that really equate to much better
strength and power than you access or get in the
Olympic room.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Are are young men and we know they're made different,
but are they skeletonally speaking different?
Speaker 2 (21:21):
Do you do?
Speaker 1 (21:22):
You have to approach end range of motion differently for
a young man versus a young woman.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
No exact same okay, exact same type of approach happens there.
Once again, look at the ability to move the joint
system through its full range of motion. Make sure that's
available first. And if you teach them how to consistently
utilize those in range movement protocols on top of their strength,
conditioning and development processes, then you have a well rounded,
(21:49):
injury resistant athlete that is capable of performing at their
highest level. We don't have that happening anywhere in athletics
right now. In the world that I know of, we
don't have this kind of hyper rests of stance and
move no pun intended towards getting athletes to the end
of their range emotion consistently before we put them on
(22:09):
the strength and conditioning floor intermediately or during the strength
and conditioning protocols. I need to interrupt those processes within
range movement and at the end of their strength and
conditioning process, I need to introduce them to those in
range movement protocols. We have to consistently be pushing the
joints to their endpoints so that we are getting to
the point where we're stopping these common injuries from happening.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
You have actual experience with you mentioned Olympic athletes, but
professional sports franchises. You're demonstrating this, You're proving this as
this is what works and keeps athletes playing sports and
doing so in a healthy manner.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
We're going in and training trainers, training teams, training coaches,
training staffs to understand how to implement these protocols. We've
created and designed a platform across town in our facility
over their Town Center Fitness in Southwood to introduce these
concepts to athletes and our programming out there. We're trying
to teach and educate all the people that are accessing
(23:11):
you know, these kids, these athletes at every platform, at
every level, how to apply these protocols so we can
stop this common pattern of injury from happening in sports
and athletics and keep our kids engaged so they can
reach the goals and the and the heights they want
to reach in their sport.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Kid comes home, they said they've they've got a sprained
ankle or a sprained wrist, or they tweak something in
their back. What's the first thing mom and dad ought
to do?
Speaker 3 (23:37):
If there's trauma involved.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
We do always recommend at least inn X ray so
we can just see and make sure there's nothing fractured
or broken. But after that you need to have the
triage and you need to start moving it. We've got
to start once again gaining movement back once a sprain
strainer injury happens. First step is always gain movement back,
then see what's left over second after that.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
So immobilization is not normally the proper thing.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
To do, not the thing to do anymore, and the
rest ice and elevation theory has been tossed out. The
window and is no longer viable now it doesn't.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
Have any science to support it.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
So now we ice temporarily only in the first eighteen
to twenty four hours, and after that we start movement.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
Nice.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
I love it when you come in here. Thanks for
making time, Thanks for having me, Chad Gray. It is
jointstrong dot com. And hopefully I would put it this way.
This is about just putting a comma on your injuries,
your stiffness, your pain. Don't put a period and say
well I gotta do this. Learn about your options and
(24:43):
learn about how to perhaps figure out how you can
almost become your own doctor and treat yourself by just
learning what to do. I think you're going to find
some help there. Jointstrong dot com
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